This article appears in our March/April issue – subscribe here. Japandroid’s singer/guitarist Brian King is on the phone from Vancouver, taking a rare and much deserved break from the road. The topic of exhaustion has come up a few times in the course of our conversation – in songwriting, in touring, in the limitations of [...]

There’s something in Jem Cohen’s voice that we just can’t seem to put our finger on. It’s a vibe halfway between total excitement and total relaxation, the median between mischievous and mystical. But then again, his band The Ettes has just gotten back to Nashville after a week of desert hijinks in Joshua Tree, California. [...]

When American Songwriter gets a hold of the Turbo Fruits, they’re hauling ass on the way to El Paso, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the Mexican border as possible. Border guards and customs check points aren’t exactly things that make a band of Turbo Fruits’ ilk – shaggy looking stoners with [...]

The view from first base is pretty clear: Andrew Combs was never meant to be a major league pitcher. It’s an unseasonably warm late-winter afternoon in East Nashville and Combs has just taken the mound. His team, which includes American Songwriter, members of his band and a cross-section of friends and acquaintances, is down by [...]

(Yes, yes, y’all: Yelawolf comes to SoundLand) If you were to ask the folks at Next BIG Nashville’s SoundLand, they would agree: This is the first time the festival has ever had a great hip hop show on the schedule. Not that there haven’t been great hip hop acts – Memphis’ Skewby and Huntsville, AL’s [...]

“I failed chorus in the tenth grade. I gotta look up that lady’s name and thank her in the record.” We’re at a bustling Nashville coffee shop, sitting down with Nikki Lane discussing her debut album Walk Of Shame, a reverb-drenched platter that’s half rock and roll snarl and half hard-country swagger. She’s barely touched [...]

“People have dug it so far. We actually get people dancing, which is pretty different. I was more used to … sometimes people would cry.” Experimental folk singer Paleo – or David Strackany as he’s known to  the government – is on the phone from the West Coast. He’s in the the midst of a [...]

Four reissues from the man who changed the way American music sounds.

“Things are starting to get weird.” Jessica Lea Mayfield, whose Nonesuch Records debut Tell Me is in stores now, is on the phone from her home in Ohio and we’re having a good laugh over her recent success. It’s beer o’clock on both ends of the phone, the last interview in a long week of [...]

“I despise comedy music, I gotta tell you.” This is pretty funny, especially coming from Jonny “Corndawg” Fritz, whose latest album Down On The Bikini Line (set for release this fall) happens to have some of the most whip-smart and hilarious lyrics to be put on tape in Nashville in a generation, maybe two. See, [...]

These boots were made for rocking.

photos by Joshua Black Wilkins Louisville, Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket are a bit of an enigma. In the twelve years since their debut album, The Tennessee Fire, they’ve amassed an enormous, diverse and devout following, garnered commercial and critical success and yet still managed to fly just below the radar of mainstream America. This may [...]