Author: Bob Fish

Album | The Trials of Cato – Hide And Hair

If ever you were going to look for the most unlikely array of instruments the combination of mandolin, bouzouki, and guitar would finish high on the list. Yet using these instruments along with a tenor banjo, The Trials of Cato…

Album | Fleet Foxes – First Collection 2006 – 2009

It’s hard to believe that the Fleet Foxes could have been The Pineapples. But that name had been taken by another band so Robin Pecknold decided on Fleet Foxes, thinking it was “evocative of some weird activity like fox hunting.”…

EP | boygenius – boygenius

Our culture talks about a boy genius, but girls (or women) don’t seem to get the same treatment. Women in music get treated differently simply because they are female. As Lucy Dacus notes, “I think it’s great that people are…

Album | Frankie Davies – Wherever I Go

Hailing from the Bailiwick of Jersey in the Channel Islands, Frankie Davies seems an unlikely candidate for country music dreams. Still, she grew up listening to country music and the hold it had on her never let go. Over the…

Album | Seth Lakeman – The Well Worn Path

Seth Lakeman has a lot to live up to. It’s not every violin player who gets a call from Robert Plant as he’s driving his daughter to school and thinks it’s a prank. Despite his initial disbelief he became a…

Album | Bert Jansch – Just A Simple Soul

Just A Simple Soul is more than just a collection of Bert Jansch’s solo work, it’s a testament to his talent as one of the great guitarists of all time (Rolling Stone Magazine dubbed him as one of the hundred…

Album | Laura Gibson – Goners

Laura Gibson’s fifth album, Goners, is largely about grief, not the sort of thing that immediately gets one tapping their toes. Yet from dealing with the loss of her father while only a teenager to wrestling with the idea of…

Album | Annie Oakley – Words We Mean

Twin sisters Sophia and Grace Babb have played music together for years. They especially needed an outlet for their emotions after their father’s suicide. Within a year’s time their friend and violinist, Nia Personette, who had also lost her father,…

Album | Phosphorescent – C’est La Vie

Five years can be a lifetime. Especially when you front a band like Phosphorescent. Yet for Matt Houck it went by in the blink of an eye. Along the way he got married, moved from New York to Nashville, had…

Album | JP Harris – Sometimes Dogs Bark At Nothing

Joshua Pless Harris seems to be the essence of a Kris Kristofferson song: “walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction.” Yet Harris has lived enough in 35 years for three men, leaving home at 14, hopping trains, working as a sheet…