Bill Paynes Solo Feat

In 1969, a couple of California-based boys, Bill Payne and Lowell George, put together a band and began extolling the virtues of roots music. But what set Little Feat apart from everybody else was that Feat mixed everything together. Jazz, soul, funk, blues, and country all rubbed shoulders with one another, often in the same tune. Despite the eclectic mix, they still sounded southern in tone and often in content. On “Dixie Chicken,” a duplicitous Southern belle collects and discards men like beer cans. For “Oh Atlanta,” the boys sing the praises of the women of that city as well as the Georgia sun. “Strawberry Flats” visits Texas for “a hole to recline in.”

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Deer Tick Releases New Song From Upcoming Album – Listen Now

Deer Tick titled their upcoming fifth studio album Negativity for a reason. Frontman John McCauley penned Negativity in the midst of a tumultuous period in his personal life, during his father’s prison sentence and the implosion of his engagement to Nikki Darlin of Nashville band Those Darlins. From McCauley’s pain and anguish rose a collection of songs that promises to be his most personal and mature work to date.

The album, out September 24, opens with break-up anthem “The Rock.” This metaphor-riddled song starts out gently but quickly morphs into an impassioned, Muscle Shoals-esque ballad as McCauley fervently wails over a background of piano and horns.

Click here to listen to “The Rock.”

Track Review: John Mayer Gets Meta On “Paper Doll”

In what is certainly the most high-profile, soft-rock beef of recent years, John Mayer has finally shot-back with song at his younger former flame, Taylor Swift. It’s understandable if one were to have forgotten why Mayer might be pointing his pen at the country-pop darling, since it was all the way back in 2010 when she released her album Speak Now, and with it, the offending tune, “Dear John.” As was widely speculated upon its release, Swift is almost certainly singing about the well-known ladies man with whom she was romantically linked to for a small time.

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The Civil Wars Premiere Behind The Scenes Video of “The One That Got Away”

A short eight months ago, The Civil Wars were battling like it was 1863. For mysterious reasons that they politely called “internal discord and irreconcilable differences of ambition,” the duo canceled a good chunk of their world tour. Now they’re back in action, and boy, do they have some fresh material.

Today the band premiered a behind the scenes video of their studio recording of “The One That Got Away.” The footage captures quiet, intimate moments in the studio. They aren’t laughing or talking to each other; they don’t even touch. What it really shows is the beautiful tensions between the band members, and their drive to produce good music in spite of it. Just watch them look at each other as they both sing “Oh, I wish I’d never, ever seen your face.” I wonder what inspired that verse…

Click here to watch the video for “The One That Got Away.”

Daily Discovery: Kate Tucker, “Hangover”

ARTIST:  Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden

SONG:  Hangover

BIRTHDATE: We’re all children of the 80’s

BIRTHPLACE: East of the Mississippi

AMBITIONS: Currently 1 Record / 9 Films / 8 Filmmakers / 7 cities 

TURN-OFFS:  We don’t have a lot of those

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American Songwriter Live: Bob Schneider

Bob Schneider is a musical chameleon of sorts, with a body of work that careens from rock to rap to folk to funk.  Recently, the Austin, Texas-based artist dropped by American Songwriter and played “The Effect,” a track off his new album Burden Of Proof. The story behind the song involves a nose job, MySpace, and a New York City-burlesque club where Lindsay Lohan partied. In other words, vintage Schneider.

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Lyric of the Week: Nine Inch Nails, “Hurt”

On 1994’s Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral, Trent Reznor’s song “Hurt” came from a dark place that many of us, whether through the pain of addiction or just through life’s circumstances, will visit at some point in our lives. With lines like “I hurt myself today/to see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/the only thing that’s real,” Reznor’s song fit in perfectly with the title of the album, whether he initially meant for it to or not. “Hurt” was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Rock Song” in 1996.

But in 2002 the song took a different path when Johnny Cash covered it on American IV: The Man Comes Around, the final Cash album before his death. Cash recorded “Hurt,” and shot the award-winning video that accompanied it, only months before wife June Carter Cash’s death and then his own. The video montage chronicled the career of a man who suffered grievous loss and pain in his life, but managed to hang on to the very end with the power of his music and the love of his wife.

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Writer of the Week: Stephen Kellogg

To say that Stephen Kellogg, formerly of Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers, had a rough year in 2012 would be the ultimate understatement. 2012 saw Kellogg’s last show with the Sixers before the band’s indefinite hiatus, as well as the deaths of his mother-in-law and grandmother. These losses manifest themselves in the form of Kellogg’s newest solo endeavor Blunderstone Rookery, which drops June 18. We talked to Kellogg about life after the Sixers, his songwriting process, his musical influences and moving forward.

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Houndmouth: From The Hills Below The City

Located at the widest point of the Ohio River, New Albany – the northern neighbor of Louisville, which looms just across the water – is a town where traces of other places literally flow into the same basin. It’s a midwestern location with southern roots, a melting pot of big-city influence and small-town mentality. For some, a city like New Albany is depressing, a sad example of what happens when one town lives in the permanent shadow of its bigger, wealthier cousin next door. For residents like the four members of Houndmouth, though, it’s a ragtag muse, a soundtrack where the far-flung sounds of southern folk, urban soul, rust belt blues and heartland rock and roll mix.

Variety is the name of the game on Houndmouth’s debut LP, From The Hills Below The City. At its most basic level, this is a rambling, rootsy album, one that channels the earthy influence of Bob Dylan and the Band. Southern accents and coed harmonies are stacked onto a base of acoustic twang and electric fuzz. Southbound trains, sugar mamas and slow-moving towns fill the lyrics. Some songs lope; others blow the gates open at a full-speed gallop. You may not be able to hear the presence of trucker hats, flannel shirts and cowboy boots, but you know they’re there, cloaking the band in scruffy swirls of Americana atmospherics.

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The Olms: The Oms

Some three years since Pete Yorn released his decidedly lo-fi self-titled album – his fifth, but first time working with Frank Black as producer – he seems to have found a kindred spirit in fellow songwriter J.D. King. The pair initially met through mutual friends a few years back when King began dating Johnny’s Ramone’s widow, Linda. Although much less is known about King than Yorn, (he has only one self-released disc to his credit), he comes across like a curious trove of eccentricities with his mid-century digs and enthusiasm for old gear, odd instruments and 78 RPM vinyl – all the more funky since he’s not yet 30 years old.

But it’s over a mutual love of pop sounds originally harvested during the (first) British Invasion that the two have bonded for this musical endeavor. Mind you, The Olms isn’t startling or daring, but it succeeds more often than not with a breezy simplicity, reminding us of a pre-Prozac world when love was super-obsessive and ‘getting the girl’ was really all that mattered. A desire to break through our anti-depressive cultural numbness is actually the impetus for the catchy single, “Wanna Feel It,” which ends so abruptly you’ll jerk your head to make sure the power didn’t cut out.

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