Turnpike Troubadours Granada Theater Friday, May 25 Friday night, Oklahoma’s Turnpike Troubadours and El Paso quarter the Dirty River Boys turned in a ferocious one-two punch that floored not only the packed lower level of the Granada Theater, but proved the newest generation of country and roots music is solid,…
While there’s certainly an eclectic mix at this weekend’s third annual Homegrown Festival, you’ll want to keep an eye on Robert Ellis. The Houston musician has been kicking around for a couple of years, but his 2010 New West debut, Photographs, provided the lengthy-maned Ellis a national profile, and his…
Harmony is great. Singing is great too. People with beautiful vocal instruments are great. But the idea of grown men singing together in an a capella group doesn’t seem so great. It seems pretty off-putting, what with all the smiling and snapping that seem to be mandatory. Perhaps the names…
Country icon George Jones famously asked “Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes” back in 1985. For the most part, modern Top 40 country isn’t terribly interested in the footwear of elder greats, given the way radio playlists have tossed aside so many aging legends over the past 20 years or so…
Thanks to television and film adaptations, the phrase “Friday night lights” has become part of the pop-culture vernacular. Of course, before the movie and the successful series was the best-selling book from 1990, and before the book there was its author, Buzz Bissinger. In his latest book, Father’s Day, the…
In recent months, the North Texas country community has produced some solid albums, and future months will witness the release of anticipated records from Somebody’s Darling, Grant Jones and Ronnie Fauss. While vets like Eleven Hundred Springs, Tejas Brothers, the King Bucks, Nate Kipp and Mo Robson continue to release…
The Canadian’s sure know how to turn in some decent sketch comedy, eh? For the many American comedy fans who have missed it on PBS, The Red Green Show is a treasure trove waiting to be unlocked. Veteran actor Steve Smith, who plays the titular character, comes off as a…
The title of Dallas-area resident’s Jennifer Porter Kennard’s play, A Big Girl’s Guide To Love, wouldn’t have exactly been an appealing name had her production been a plain, old how-to book. Come on, do most of us, regardless of body mass, really need any help dealing with bad dates, nosy…
For almost as long as country music has lived as a genre, the argument about what makes a song, album, singer or group “country” has existed. Depending on who you ask, over time, and especially in the past couple of decades, country music has either splintered into dozens of wildly…
If honesty and authenticity is required for art to truly blossom, then Nicole Stewart’s Oral Fixation series of open-chested spoken-word performances from folks sharing personal, sad and humorous stories is indeed a fully formed rose. Operating off a single phrase, a handful of brave and entertaining participants take the stage…
Last year’s inaugural North Texas Beer Festival showed signs of an event with the right idea and a good heart, but still wasn’t quite sure how to hit one out of the park. The fest offered long lines for brew samples in a section of the Plano Centre that seemed…
Oh, good morrow, ye turkey leg and man with non-ironic leggings and non-ironic, odd beret-like cap upon his furry face! It’s that time of year again, Metroplexians! It’s time to run into that backed-up-out-of-nowhere traffic on Interstate 35 South near Ennis, where you eventually say to yourself, “Oh, crap, it’s…
It’s hard to gauge how influential an album truly is. The Meat Puppets’ 1984 LP, Meat Puppets II, is often cited by musicians as a seminal work, released during the halcyon days of SST. It’s a ragged masterwork of country and rockabilly-infused punk, which, at the time of its release,…
Percussionist Mickey Hart has devoted his life to rhythm. Whether performing as the drummer for the legendary Grateful Dead during two different stints totaling 15 years, or as the author of multiple books which discuss the origins of sound, rhythm and ultimately, music, Hart has kept busy. Mysterium Tremendum, Hart’s…
The largest accomplishment for Modern Family, the best sitcom to emerge on network television over the past few years, isn’t the fact that it’s racked up trophy after trophy for its genius. The most notable achievement is how the mock-doc style show has become the most consistently enjoyable half-hour on…
The Dallas international Film Festival has earned a respectable spot among American film fests. Recent years have seen stars old and new walk the red carpet to their premieres while the residents of the eastern section of the city have packed the theaters that host new documentaries, foreign features, shorts…
Brooklyn via Southern California band Delta Spirit have certainly spread their wings over the course of three studio albums. Managing to go from the lo-fi, alt-country stylings of their 2008 debut, Ode to Sunshine, to their new, shimmering, self-titled offering while still sounding very much like the band that banged…
So many got to know former Dallas Cowboys assistant coach Joe Avezzano as a hard-nosed, foul-mouthed, award-winning special-teams coach during his days roaming football sidelines, which began in 1968 and ended yesterday, after Avezzano died of an apparent heart attack while in Italy coaching the Seamen Milano of the Italian…
Wit and intelligence are a couple of characteristics that many claim to have, or at least wish they possessed. Novelist Christopher Moore seems to have been granted the shares of both prized traits that boorish dolts lack. Moore is promoting his latest work, Sacre Bleu, in which the death of…
Hah! Food trucks. Those’ll never take off. They’re just a fad that will be forgotten in a few weeks. C’mon, it’s not like any new ones are sprouting up or people have been lobbying the city to make laws more conducive for trucks selling high-quality food. If food trucks were…
Sitar virtuoso Anoushka Shankar, daughter of legendary sitar master Ravi Shankar and half-sister to North Texas’ Norah Jones, is an extraordinary talent who lets her inventive work introduce her vision. Shankar sees a wide, blank canvas from which to work, using regional and sonic traditions as mere suggested guidelines. Whether…
Carrie Rodriguez has lived in Austin and New York City over the past several years, but thanks to her many performances in the metroplex, we like to think of her as one of our own. Heaven must also claim her as one of its own, due to how many times…
