A very few records exist that one can describe as “magical” – a very dangerous, double-edged attribute when it comes to music and art, as it can entail the deepest probing of the unconscious as well as the most kitsch,…
On her new album The Workingman’s Blues, Toronto-based singer/songwriter Kat Goldman has crafted a powerful statement on the reality so many of us face today. Essentially a song cycle based on her recent real-life experiences living in Boston, the 12-track…
With his debut solo album, Toronto-based singer/songwriter Dave Allen establishes himself as a bona fide roots music auteur, transporting us to a place that to our modern perceptions will seem uncomfortably foreign, or conversely, all too real. Listeners previously heard…
Happenstance is a powerful force. For Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan performingtogether at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2014, created a beautiful friendship. Since then they have toured the world and now, at last, recorded their first album…
If indeed there were ghosts writing music, or just listening to it, the ones behind I Was Hoping You’d Pass By Here would the subdued, contemplative, but also inquisitive type one can find in, say, the recent movie ‘A Ghost…
The pain was unbearable But I did not want it to end It had operatic grandeur It lit up Grand Central Station like Judgement Day Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept Almost everyone has some…
An Englishman with a fascination for Americana, Alexander Shields mines a haunting seam of shoegaze. Having worked with a larger ensemble on his last album, including members of Silver Jews, Lambchop and William Tyler, for Passover he’s recorded with childhood…
When you step into a venue just as an acapella duet of Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’ is starting up you know you’re in for a special kind of Wednesday night. Sweeping over the audience like a fragile…
Jim White is in his 60s these days but as an explorer of country music’s outer reaches age is certainly no albatross. Where lesser musical genres cast aside those grizzled and battered by time’s tide, in Jim’s world wisdom…
Christmas albums are a funny thing. They can be jubilant celebrations that only complement that particular artist’s canon (hello, A Christmas Gift for You), crazily self-indulgent yet somehow amazing side projects (hi Sufjan Stevens), or, sadly more often than not,…