Great Album: Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell – The Travelling Kind

“In the words of Willie Nelson, ‘The life I love is making music with my friends,’ and there’s no better friend for me to make music with than Rodney. I can’t wait to get out there on the road with him and play the songs from this new record.”
– Emmylou Harris

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell – The Travelling kind:

Two years after releasing 2013’s Old Yellow Moon, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell have collaborated again with The Traveling Kind, another album built around their easy but heartfelt creative interplay as both vocalists and songwriters. It’s even better than Old Yellow Moon. I saw them in Oslo last summer, just wonderful, and the songs are great live.

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Great Album: Turnpike Troubadours – Turnpike Troubadours

Turnpike Troubadours is an American Red Dirt group from Oklahoma composed of Evan Felker, R.C. Edwards, Kyle Nix, Ryan Engelman and Gabe Pearson.

They released their fourth album in 2015, their eponymous, Turnpike Troubadours. I’ve listened to it a lot the last two and a half months. This is great country-rock about loss, love and life. They sing “story songs” much like Springsteen, Zevon and Prine.

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Great Album: Fear and Saturday Night (Ryan Bingham)

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“It’s definitely easier to write than perform. But when you hear the stories from listeners of how they relate to a song or how it may have helped them through their own experience in some way – that’s what makes it worth it to me.”
~Ray Bingham (No Depression interview)

Seemingly at peace and no longer concerned with “rising star” status or meeting corporate expectations, the candor of Bingham on Bingham reveals an intimate portrait of love and hope on Fear and Saturday Night. More morning after than its title implies, Bingham’s rawness has been refined ever so slightly, his newfound reserve a therapeutic epiphany.
~Eric Risch (popmatters.com)

“Nobody Knows My Trouble” (Live in West Hollywood, CA):

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The 5 Best Music Films 2015

Love & Mercy
Director: Bill Pohlad

In the 1960s, Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson struggles with emerging psychosis as he attempts to craft his avant-garde pop masterpiece. In the 1980s, he is a broken, confused man under the 24-hour watch of shady therapist Dr. Eugene Landy.

And, yes, it feels like we’re in the studio with Brian Wilson!
love and mercy

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Dec 15: Bruce Springsteen at Winterland SF in 1978

bruce winterland

Bruce’s Winterland-78 concert is by many fans & “concert tape collectors” regarded as one of his best shows ever… It is indeed a cornerstone in any collection of concert bootlegs (regardless of artist). Number 2 on my list (Egil) of the best Springsteen’s concerts I’ve heard. It is now selling as a “semi official” release at amazon.co.uk.

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Dec 12: Bill Haley and his Comets recorded See You Later Alligator in 1955

See You Later, Alligator” is the title of an iconic rock and roll song of the 1950s written and first recorded by Robert Charles Guidry, known as Bobby Charles. The song was a Top Ten hit for Bill Haley and the Comets in 1956 in the U.S.

The most famous recording of the song was that created on December 12, 1955 by Bill Haley & His Comets at a recording session for Decca Records.[4] Unlike most of Haley’s recordings for Decca, which were created at the Pythian Temple studio in New York City, “Alligator” and its flip-side, “The Paper Boy (On Main Street U.S.A.)”, were recorded at the Decca Building in New York. The song was featured in Rock Around the Clock, a musical film Haley and the Comets began shooting in January 1956.

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