About The Dirty River Boys

It happened during an ordinary refueling stop for the Dirty River Boys, the band on its way from Austin to Tulsa to kick off a six date run. The van pulled up at a gas station and its occupants scattered, with Colton James hopping on his skateboard and heading over to a grocery store for a rotisserie chicken.

But the board hit an oil patch and went flying, and the bassist found himself not just down, but possibly out. “I see him at the van and he’s got a bone about to pop out of his shoulder, and our tour manager is on the phone,” recalls drummer Travis Stearns.

So the band retreated to Austin, where an ER doc told James he had a shattered collarbone and would need surgery. In the meantime, they outfitted him with a sling. For a moment the band contemplated scratching its upcoming six-date run, because for a stand-up bassist, a collarbone tends to be necessary equipment. “Every time I lifted my arms to play the bass I could just feel the bones crunching on each other,” he says.

But he didn’t want to force his bandmates to cancel shows. Why don’t I play the electric bass instead, he wondered, while sitting in a chair? Wouldn’t that work? The band agreed, and they were off again. “That was a long bumpy drive with a broken collarbone,” James wryly recalls. “Didn’t even stop to get any medication on the way—that was a bad idea. “ But that’s the Dirty River Boys ethos. Playing upwards of 200 dates a year, giving heartfelt, unrestrained performances, and winning over a loyal audience show- by-show, it takes a lot more than a few broken bones to stop them.

Perhaps that has a little something to do with the band’s hometown. El Paso, home of the “dirty river” known as the Rio Grande, is a place of schemers and strivers—not all of them on the right side of the law. Perhaps the quintessential American border town, the place locals call “El Chuco” is practically one city with its Mexican twin, Ciudad Juárez. Viewed from the air, only the path of the river delineates where one ends and the other begins.

It was against this backdrop that Nino Cooper, Marco Gutierrez and Travis Stearns came of age, playing music in various bands, dreaming of recording at Sonic Ranch—the mammoth residential studio just outside town—and hearing wild stories of drug wars and lawlessness from just a few miles away.

Fast forward a decade or so and Cooper had returned to El Paso from Southern California, where he’d abandoned a corporate career. Armed with an acoustic guitar and armload of originals and covers, he began playing anywhere that would have him, including restaurants and hotel lobbies. Stearns quickly jumped aboard to provide percussion, but venues weren’t crazy about a loud drum kit. So

Stearns dropped the kit and picked up the cajón, a simple, box-like instrument common south of the border. Marco Gutierrez, veteran of a number of local bands, soon rounded out the trio, and gigs in hotels and restaurants soon became bookings in El Paso’s handful of live-music clubs, which after awhile led to trips out of town. “There’s definitely a lot of talent in El Paso,” Cooper says. “But being in a band, it’s hard to get out of there because it’s a nine-hour drive to get anywhere.” Young, hungry and—literally—driven, the trio nonetheless buckled up for long van rides and soon began venturing to Austin, San Antonio, Tulsa and points beyond. Meanwhile a hard-driving roots-acoustic sound—which at the time, wouldn’t sound out of place on a playlist with the Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons—began getting battle tested over an endless string of shows and hundreds of broken cajón heads.

Along the way The Dirty River Boys notched a number of significant milestones, opening for legend Willie Nelson several times, and selling out the famed Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. Having left the El Paso restaurants far behind, the band continued to grow, adding stand-up bassist Colton James and functioning just a bit more like a conventional rock band, though one without the usual dynamic.

Indeed, The Dirty River Boys have an incredible number of strengths. All four members have a hand in the songwriting, and all four sing as well, while members often switch off instruments during shows. This isn’t just a vehicle for a songwriting frontman, with an interchangeable crew of instrumentalists bringing those ideas to life.

And so, after a pair of EPs and an album, “Science of Flight,” that served as a tour calling card, the time couldn’t be better for an anthemic, hook-laden declaration of intent, served up to an audience beyond DRB’s Texas diehards. And thanks to the golden-eared production assistance of Chris “Frenchie” Smith, that’s exactly what “The Dirty River Boys” is.

The record is both a cohesive statement and a dizzying testament to the band’s capabilities, as it shifts gears between genres with the skill of a long-haul trucker. There’s traditional, honky-tonk country (“Didn’t Make The Cut”), Flogging Molly- style Celtic rock (“Sailed Away”) and an all-out greasy road rocker (“Highway Love”) and you get the feeling the ’Boys are just getting warmed up.

No matter the genre, the band has a knack for imbuing every one of their songs with undeniable hooks, from the “whoah-ohs” that punctuate first single “Thought I’d Let You Know” to the power-chord riff that forms the foundation of El Paso scene-setter “Down By The River” (co-written with Ray Wylie Hubbard).

“It’s an anthem record,” Cooper says. “That’s what we were working for. We wanted to showcase our individuality, and all the vocals, and just capture the choruses and those chants.”

“We let all of our influences show,” Gutierrez adds. “So we really have trouble saying ‘this is rock’ or ‘this is country,’ or whatever. And we’re not Texas Country either, even though we get thrown in there. Americana is really what it is— because it’s a melting pot of music.”

This self-titled record—tracked at The Bubble in Austin and, yes, Sonic Ranch outside El Paso—was the first time the band had taken time off to record, rather than booking a few studio days between shows, and the effort paid off. “We just buckled down and focused,” Cooper recalls. “We didn’t want to cut any corners.”

And now, with its best record in hand, the band plans to venture much further afield from El Paso, and stay on the road. After all, with border checkpoints on every road out of town, leaving town can be a hassle.

Sometimes, in fact, more of a hassle than you might have expected. Not so long ago, the band found itself on the end of an “enhanced search,” with everyone asked to step out of the van while U.S. Customs and Border Protection brought a dog through it. “Then this guy pulls Travis out and we hear him just tearing into Travis,” recalls Gutierrez.

“Then the guy walks up to us and asks ‘which of you guys are from El Paso?’” Gutierrez continues. “We raise our hands, then we go to the side of the van. In a split-second he goes from mad dog to ‘El Paso Chuco,’ giving us the love, saying ‘Hey, are you the Dirty River Boys? I saw y’all at the State Line a few weeks ago. I’m sorry mijos, I was just doing my job.’ Just in a split second, the El Paso love.”

“He asked us for CDs, so we gave CDs to the Border Patrol agents and autographed them and everything,” Cooper adds, chuckling. “Now, every time we go through there, we say, yeah, y’all have a few of our CDs. We’re good.”

About Vandoliers

Vandoliers are the next wave of Texas music. The six-piece Dallas-Fort Worth group channels all that makes this vast state unique: tradition, modernity, audacity, grit, and—of course—size. Forever puts it all together for an enthralling ride down a fresh Lone Star highway.

Produced and recorded by Adam Hill (Low Cut Connie, The Bo-Keys, Deer Tick, Don Bryant, Zeshan B) at American Recording Studios in Memphis, TN, the band’s third album (and first with Bloodshot) Forever is a mix of youthful and defiant punk, rugged Red Dirt country, and vibrant Tejano. The full-length’s 10 songs blend emblematic rock ‘n’ roll with bold horns, violin, and a slather of twang reflecting where the band is from, where they’ve been and, eventually, where they’ll be headed. It’s regional and universal all the same.

“I wrote a series of songs about my life and gave it to the best musicians I know to flesh out,” says lead singer and guitarist Joshua Fleming. “I spent over a year writing by myself, with friends and mentors, and we spent just as long filling out arrangements and writing scores. We wrote horn and fiddle parts on a trio tour through the mountains of New Mexico, Wyoming and Montana.”

One of those mentors is fellow Dallas-Fort Worth musician Rhett Miller of Old 97’s. The influence and tutelage of Miller and his bandmates helped sharpen Vandoliers’ Texas-bred, roots-based punk rock.

“Before the band started diving into the new material, I sent Rhett a bunch of acoustic phone demos,” says Fleming. “Being the amazing person he is, he sent me back a 3,000-word email of advice that read like a master class in the art of songwriting. Beyond their influence musically, they’ve really taken us under their wing, letting us play shows with them and giving us all kinds of advice along the way.”

While tracking alongside the muddy path that country-punk bands like Old 97’s, Jason and the Scorchers, and the True Believers blazed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Vandoliers define their own style; no one else is upending the genre quite like them. There are familiar ingredients—Fleming’s raspy vocals, rousing sing-along choruses, and an infectious energy (like on the rippin’ “Sixteen Years”)—that lay down the foundation on Forever. But it’s the ancillary instrumentation that separates them from others. When they seamlessly inject punk rock with ‘60 and ‘70s country grime (“Tumbleweed”), old-timey fiddlin’ (“Miles and Miles”), Tex-Mex horn and violin (“Fallen Again”), and heartfelt balladry (“Cigarettes in the Rain”), a rich new sound emerges. References to the Texas Tornados, Social Distortion, Deer Tick, and Calexico can be made, but none fully capture the soul of the self-proclaimed “Converse cowboys.”

For a band that spends more than half the year on the road, “forever” is their credo of hope and determination—“VFFV” (Vandoliers Forever, Forever Vandoliers) is tattooed on the six members’ arms as an emblem of their solidarity and commitment to the collective, through good times and, more significantly, the tough ones. The album’s lyrics center on themes of dedication (“Sixteen Years”), being known as middle finger-throwing rabble rousers (“Troublemaker”), seizing adventure while traveling (“Nowhere Fast”), and addressing anxiety and depression (“Fallen Again”). When they return home from tour, broke and empty, they humbly look to their families for support (“Bottom Dollar Boy”), and unconditional love—despite their unconventional career paths—(“Tumbleweed”). Thus recharged, they can hit the road again, to spread the Vandoliers’ message with renewed fervor.

Formed in 2015, Vandoliers are Fleming, bassist Mark Moncrieff, drummer Guyton Sanders, fiddler Travis Curry, electric guitarist Dustin Fleming, and multi-instrumentalist Cory Graves. Their first two albums Ameri-Kinda (2016) and The Native (2017) were released on State Fair Records.

About JAIME WYATT

If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Neon Cross, the newest release from singer, songwriter and guitarist Jaime Wyatt, it’s that life, in all its inherent messiness, goes on. And through it all—good times and bad, triumph and trouble, dreaming and desperation—Wyatt continues, to borrow the title of one of her new songs, just L I V I N.
To be sure, there’s a whole lot of livin’ in the 11 tracks on Neon Cross, from the whisky-soaked honky tonks outlined in the heated and hungry title track, where Wyatt, with “pitiful perfume, dark glasses, gold liquor and alligator shoes,” plies her trade from the stage, to the mountains of pain, regret and loss baked into the slow-burning soul groove of “By Your Side,” which the artist says she wrote “after my dad died and my best friend overdosed, and I wasn’t able to show up for either of them because I was loaded,” to the stark solitude of “Sweet Mess,” where Wyatt, in the throes of a crumbling relationship, opines that “just like all the rest, I’ll be forgotten.”

About Jason Hawk Harris

Jason Hawk Harris hit rock bottom during the writing and recording of his debut full-length Love & the Dark. In the last few years, the Houston-born-and-raised, Los Angeles-based musician endured life-altering hardships—illness, death, familial strife, and addiction—yet from these trials, a luxuriant and confident vision of art country emerged.

With an unlikely background, Harris is a singer/guitarist/songwriter who walks his own line, one that touches on Lyle Lovett’s lyrical frankness, John Moreland’s punk cerebralism and Judee Sill’s mysticism and orchestral sensibility. There’s even the literary and sonic audacity of an early Steve Earle, an outlaw unafraid to embrace harmony.

Jason’s grandfather exposed him to country music at an early age, and his family celebrated holidays with group sing-alongs. In his teens, Harris began listening to punk, indie rock, and, notably, Queen. In some part inspired by the instrumental flair of Freddie Mercury & Co., he later took the educational plunge into classical composition and was eventually wait-listed for the master’s program at UCLA, when things took a turn.

While touring and performing in the indie folk band The Show Ponies, Jason started writing his own songs, intuitively returning to his country roots but incorporating his classical and rock ‘n’ roll performance skills. He released his first solo offering, the Formaldehyde, Tobacco and Tulips EP in 2017 and hit the road.

Meanwhile, his world fell apart: his mother died from complications of alcoholism; his father went bankrupt after being sued by the King of Morocco; his sister was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and gave birth to a premature son with cerebral palsy; and—subsequently—Jason got sidetracked by his own vices.

Love & the Dark is not THAT country narrative, though; that of surviving through pain. But it’s not NOT that either. This is his personal narrative on death, struggle, and addiction, of a life deconstructed and reassembled. From the opener, “The Smoke and the Stars,” it’s apparent this album will take you to compelling new places. An ache, a longing, claws its way out of the speakers, the gradual drone blossoming through without rigid genre designs. You can hear the essence of classical music in a long crescendo; you can feel his Houston upbringing in JHH’s soulful and humid inflection; you can sense his Los Angeles home in the sharp and risky dynamics. You can also hear the joy and exquisite desperation when he swings for the fences, belting “Maybe I was just waiting for you, to get through the grapevine, tear down that door, and let me live in those green eyes of yours.

On “Cussing at the Light,” the classic “drink-you-off-my-mind” trope has an updated countrypolitan vibe with its precise harmonies courtesy of Natalie Nicoles, and later a raucous teenage urgency rumbles through the punchy “I’m Afraid.” The buoyant roots-pop “Red Room Blues,” featuring vocals by folk/bluegrass maven Rachel Baiman, touches antecedents stretching from Jason Isbell to Nick Lowe.

In the dark balladry of “Phantom Limb” (also sung with Baiman), when he softly describes his mother’s funeral through keenly personal details, “I got this shirt. Smells like the viewing/ Formaldehyde, tobacco and tulips/ I’ve washed it ten times, and it won’t come out,” he takes us to the bottom with him.

While his music acknowledges mortality, pain, and hardship, it’s also Jason Hawk Harris’s way of working through it. Love & The Dark is a hypnotically convincing album; you can feel the unknown, but you need not fear it.

About the Old 97's

"Rock and roll's been very very good to me," Rhett Miller sings on "Longer Than You've Been Alive," an epic six-minute stream-of-consciousness meditation on his life in music. It's a rare moment of pulling back the curtain, on both the excesses and tedium of the world of a touring musician, and it's the perfect way to open the Old 97's 2014 album, 'Most Messed Up.'

"I wrote that song very quickly and didn’t rewrite one word of it," Miller explains. "It's sort of a thesis statement not just for this record, but for my life's work."

To say that rock and roll has been good to the Old 97's (guitarist/vocalist Miller, bassist/vocalist Murry Hammond, guitarist Ken Bethea, and drummer Philip Peeples) would be an understatement. The band emerged from Dallas twenty years ago at the forefront of a musical movement blending rootsy, country-influenced songwriting with punk rock energy and delivery. The New York Times has described their major label debut, 'Too Far To Care,' as "a cornerstone of the 'alternative country' movement…[that] leaned more toward the Clash than the Carter Family." They've released a slew of records since then, garnering praise from NPR and Billboard to SPIN and Rolling Stone, who hailed the band as "four Texans raised on the Beatles and Johnny Cash in equal measures, whose shiny melodies, and fatalistic character studies, do their forefathers proud." The band performed on television from Letterman to Austin City Limits and had their music appear in countless film and TV soundtracks (they appeared as themselves in the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Aniston movie 'The Break Up'). Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter that he put the band on a continuous loop on his iPod while writing the show's final scene.

'Most Messed Up' finds the Old 97's at their raucous, boozy best, all swagger and heart. Titles like "Wasted," "Intervention," "Wheels Off," "Let's Get Drunk And Get It On," and "Most Messed Up" hint at the kind of narrators Miller likes to inhabit, men who possess an appetite for indulgence and won't let a few bad decisions get in the way of a good story.

"A few people in my life said, 'You can't sing 'Let's get drunk and get it on,'" Miller remembers. "I said, 'What do you mean? I've been singing that sentiment for 20 years! I was just never so straightforward about it.'"

It was a trip to Music City that inspired Miller to throw away his inhibitions as songwriter and cut right to the heart of things.

"For me, this record really started in Nashville on a co-write session with John McElroy," he says. "I really admired his wheels off approach to songwriting, And I liked the idea he had for how he thought I should interact with my audience. He said, 'I think your fans want you to walk up to the mic and say fuck.' It was liberating." It reminded me that I don’t have to be too serious or too sincere or heartfelt. I just have to have fun and be honest. I felt like I kind of had free reign to go ahead and write these songs that were bawdier and more adult-themed."

The magic in Miller's songwriting lies in the depth that he lends his characters. Upon closer inspection, the hard partying and endless pursuit of a good time often reveals itself to be a band-aid covering up deeper wounds and emotional scars.

"There's a lot of darkness hidden in this record," he explains. "One of the big Old 97's tricks is when we write about something kind of dark and depressing, it works best when it's a fun sounding song. So it's not until the third or fourth listen that you realize the narrator of this song is a complete disaster."

If that description calls to mind The Replacements, it's no coincidence. Miller is a fan of the Minneapolis cult heroes, and now counts Tommy Stinson among his own friends and fans. Best known as bassist for the Mats and more recently Guns 'n' Roses, Stinson joined the Old 97's in the studio in Austin, Texas, to lay down electric guitar on ## tracks, elevating the sense of reckless musical abandon to new heights and lending the album an air of the Rolling Stones' double-guitar attack. It's a collaboration Miller never would have even imagined in 1994 when the band released their debut.

"We didn’t think we'd last until the year 1997," Miller laughs. "We thought the name would get a little weird when it became 1997, but we decided none of our bands had ever lasted that long, so let's not even worry about it. But as it all started to unfold, we realized we could maybe make a living doing this, and we were all really conscious of wanting to be a career band. It was way more important to us to maintain a really high level of quality, at the expense, perhaps, of having hit singles or fitting in with the trends of the time, and I'm glad we did that."

Twenty years on, it's safe to say rock and roll has indeed been very, very good to the Old 97's.

About Ruby Boots

At 14 years old, Ruby Boots—real name Bex Chilcott—left a conflicted home in Perth, Western Australia to do grueling work on pearling boats, and she hasn’t stopped migrating since. Her nomadic streak has taken her around the world, and eventually to Nashville, TN.

Don’t Talk About It charts this drifter’s odyssey, tattered passport in hand. Behind her commanding and versatile voice, sharp guitar playing, and adept songwriting, Ruby Boots confidently maneuvers past the whirlwinds life has tossed on her occasionally lost highway. It’s an album of hope, breakthrough, and handling the unknown challenges around the next bend.

The roads taken, the miles traveled and the voices heard during Ruby’s life’s trek resonate throughout Don’t Talk About It. Informed as much by the wide-open landscapes of her homeland as the intimate writing circles of Nashville, the album may range far and wide but always maintains a firm sense of place. Echoes of first wave UK power pop and jangly punk intersect with the every(wo)man indie and pop- inflected muscle of Best Coast. Classic rock touchstones from T. Rex to the girl group Wall of Sound to personal hero Tom Petty meld with a weary poet’s eye recalling Hope Sandoval.

On her Bloodshot Records debut, Ruby continues to map out a polished-yet-fearless, bare-knuckled self, previously hinted at on her last album, Solitude. In 2016, Ruby met with Lone Star State-bred studio wizards The Texas Gentlemen and the album’s eventual producer Beau Bedford. The group had stopped off in Nashville on their way to back Kris Kristofferson at Newport Folk Festival and a mutual admiration society quickly coalesced. The collective pulled a handful of songs from the 40 she had waiting and began recording at their Dallas-based studio Modern Electric Sound Recorders.

The album rips right open with “It’s So Cruel,” strutting through the door with dual harmonic, bawdy, fuzzed-out guitars, reminiscent of a glammy, ‘70s southern-rock-soaked Queens of the Stone Age. It all captures the meteoric emotional flares of an adulterous relationship destined to fail. The Gentlemen spell a Stetson-hat wearing Wrecking Crew as they lay down dusty gothic vibes in the Nikki Lane co-written “I’ll Make It Through,” building towards a crescendoing, persevering, bright chorus. (Lane also sings background vocals on the album’s title track.) On “Believe in Heaven,” doo-wop beats, dark choral echoes, and a plucked string section lead into ZZ Top full-bodied rawk riffage.

But the most defining of tones come through in spirit, when on the a capella “I Am A Woman” Ruby reaches towering vocal peaks, shredding raw, putting it all out there. The song could be a traditional spiritual, as she belts: “I am a believer / Standing strong by your side / I’m the hand to hold onto / When it’s too hard to try... I am a woman / Do you know what that means / You lay it all on the line / When you lay down with me.”

Of the song Chilcott says, “‘I Am a Woman’ was conjured up amid recent events where men have spoken about, and treated women’s bodies, the way no man, or woman, should. This kind of treatment toward another human being makes every nerve in my body scream. These kinds of incidents are so ingrained in our culture and are swept under the carpet at every turn—it needs to change. As tempting as it was to just write an angry tirade I wanted to respond with integrity, so I sat with my feelings and this song emerged as a celebration of women and womanhood, of our strength and our vulnerability, all we encompass and our inner beauty, countering ignorance and vulgarity with honesty and pride and without being exclusionary to any man or woman. My hope is that we come together on this long drawn out journey. The song is the backbone to the album for me.”

Don’t Talk About It smoulders with a fighting spirit and pulls influence and experience—both musically, emotionally, and beyond—from many pins in the map, but is 10 songs harbored in the singularity that is Ruby Boots.

About Federale

Federale is a seven-piece ensemble based in Portland, OR. Spearheaded by longtime Brian Jonestown Massacre bassist Collin Hegna, the band was conceived as an outlet to channel inspiration from ‘60s & ‘70s European soundtracks, particularly those from Italy made famous by the Spaghetti Western & Giallo genres.

As a mournful whistle carves through fevered melancholia, the first stirrings of No Justice‘s title track evoke the mean streets and rusted prairies of a blighted small folk roiling with palpable desperation. Embracing the enormous scope of orchestral cinematic production while subduing the bombast of electrified riffage, Collin Hegna has honed a taut, gleaming precision from his passion project’s signature sound. When his honeyed baritone waltzes with the operatic wizardry of bandmate Maria Karlin, the finely-etched lyrical depths fortify Federale’s cinematic sway.

Spare yet sumptuous, distilling the lean, gritty essence of grindhouse anomie and wielding orchestral flourishes of widescreen delicacy, No Justice feels like the defining statement of a band fully-realized – a sultry, restless stormcloud arising from the darkness at the edge of town to draw forth the fated reckoning.

About Daniel Markham

Daniel Markham has been writing compelling songs for over 20 years now. Ranging from the Alt. Country heavy hitters of his youth to the sprawling soundscapes in recent years, Markha has never been one to be held down by genres. Still, there was always a correlation between those albums that made it distinctly Daniel Markham. His 4th LP, Burnout, takes a match to all those amalgamations and torches all remnants of his past through a blistering set of 12 songs

About Houndmouth

In late 2011, Matt Myers, Zak Appleby and Shane Cody started playing music together in a historic home in New Albany, Indiana dubbed “The Green House.” Its rooms were adorned with relics from times past, so it was no surprise that songs such as “Penitentiary” bounced off the walls. Nostalgic sounds from their first album seemed to serve as a welcome escape for listeners from the relentless demands of the digital age. But if you asked any one of the guys, they were ‘just having fun.’

Houndmouth signed with legendary indie label Rough Trade Records in 2012. From The Hills Below The City landed them on several world-famous platforms such as fellow lovable Hoosier, David Letterman’s stage. When vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Matt Myers first spoke with big-name producer Dave Cobb prior to working together on their sophomore LP Little Neon Limelight, the two laughingly agreed to “not make another fucking boring Americana record.” A natural sounding album captured in a familiar fashion came together, except this time with a #1 adult alternative radio single in “Sedona.” “I never once thought of us as an Americana band,” says drummer Shane Cody. “The four of us were just a rock band, but some of us had Southern accents,” he laughs. Cue Golden Age, the third album featuring some of the band’s most innovative and experimental songs yet. Coining the term “retro future”, Houndmouth combined creative songwriting with avant-garde instrumentation like the synthesized roar of an actual black jaguar on the track “Black Jaguar”.

The band finds themselves recording and also touring their upcoming untitled fourth album expected to release in 2020. From their humble start, genre-defining hits, and experimentation, Houndmouth has and continues to make their impactful felt with the unique take on storytelling through music.

About Shannon Shaw

A garage rock diva whose music merges the sounds of doo wop and '60s rock with the bold attitude of indie and underground sounds, Shannon Shaw first gained an audience as the leader of the group Shannon & the Clams. Born and raised in Northern California, Shaw grew up on a musical diet of '50s and '60s oldies, and while studying art in the 2000s, she fell in with like-minded musicians to form Shannon & the Clams, rising through the indie rock underground on the strength of albums like 2013's Dreams in the Rat House and 2015's Gone by the Dawn. An alliance with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys led to him producing 2018's Onion, as well as Shaw's solo debut, a country-accented set titled Shannon in Nashville.

Shannon Shaw was born on May 21, 1983. She grew up in Napa, a community in Northern California, where her father was a firefighter and her mother worked at a psychiatric hospital. Shaw grew up in a Mormon household, where one of the few radio stations her parents approved of played nothing but oldies from the '50s and '60s. As a teenager, Shaw was a misfit who spent much of her time avoiding the jocks who enjoyed making her life difficult. When she was 15, Shaw's boyfriend gave her a bass guitar, a Danelectro with silver glitter finish, but she didn't take to it at first, and it wasn't until she was 25 that she gave the instrument a second chance, learning to play and write songs after a tumultuous breakup.

About Hunk Hunt

Around this time, Shaw was attending the California College of the Arts in the East Bay Area, where she met Cody Blanchard; they didn't get along well at first, but after watching a video project he'd made, Shaw decided she'd found a kindred spirit, and they struck up a friendship. Blanchard played guitar and shared Shaw's taste for vintage sounds, and before long they decided to form a band. Recruiting fellow CCA student Ian Amberson to play drums, the first lineup of Shannon & the Clams debuted in 2008. The following year, they released their debut EP, Hunk Hunt, and a full-length album, I Wanna Go Home, was dropped by Oakland-based indie 1-2-3-4 Go! Records before 2009 was out.

About Sleep Talk

Soon, Shaw was doing double duty, fronting Shannon & the Clams and playing bass in another Bay Area retro garage band, Hunx & His Punx. 1-2-3-4 Go! brought out the second Shannon & the Clams album, Sleep Talk, in 2011, and the group dropped a number of singles through 2012. Shannon & the Clams next struck a deal with the Sub Pop-distributed Hardly Art label, which released their third album, Dreams in the Rat House, in 2013, and in 2014 the band played a tour of Australia. By the time Hardly Art brought out 2015's Gone by the Dawn, the group had gone through some changes; Nate Mahan replaced Ian Amberson on drums, and they expanded to a quartet with the addition of Will Sprott on keyboards.

After learning that Shannon & the Clams' Australian tour happened in part because the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, a fan of the band, had recommended them to a festival promoter in the Antipodes, Shaw and Auerbach struck up a friendship, and Auerbach proved to be a valuable ally to the group. First, Auerbach signed Shannon & the Clams to his Easy Eye Sound label, and produced their fifth album, Onion, released in February 2018. Four months later, Easy Eye premiered Shaw's first solo album. Shannon in Nashville teamed Shaw with a studio band that included veteran session men Gene Chrisman and Bobby Wood, and saw her adding country and pop accents to her retro garage sound.

About The Cactus Blossoms

Blood Harmony. Whether it’s The Beach Boys, Bee Gees or First Aid Kit, that sibling vocal blend is the secret sauce in some of the most spine-tingling moments in popular music. The Cactus Blossoms – Minneapolis-based brothers Page Burkum and Jack Torrey – offer compelling evidence that this tradition is alive and well, with a deceptively unadorned musical approach that offers “creative turns of phrase, gorgeous harmonies, and an ageless sound” (NPR All Things Considered), not to mention spine tingles aplenty. Their 2016 debut You’re Dreaming, a stunning and transporting collection of original songs, earned high praise from Rolling Stone and Vice Noisey, tour stints with Kacey Musgraves and Lucius, and a perfectly cast performance on the third season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Now their unlikely rise continues with new album Easy Way, to be released on their own label Walkie Talkie Records.

While many bands would have been content to stick with the winning formula of their debut, the Blossoms refused to repeat themselves. If You’re Dreaming celebrated their vintage country and rock influences, Easy Way reveals a songwriting style that has changed, evolved, and gotten more modern. Dan Auerbach, another artist who knows from bedrock influences, co-wrote two songs on the album. “Dan’s love for songwriting was inspiring, just the kick in the pants we needed to start writing again after being on the road,” says Page.

The brothers’ decision to produce the new album themselves no doubt led to the new sound. “We wanted the freedom to experiment with our own weird ideas,” says Jack, “We used to joke that the working title album should be Expensive Demos.” As they crisscrossed the nation on tour, the brothers would stop through Alex Hall’s Reliable Recorders studio in Chicago to chase the new sound they were after. The result joins together what would otherwise be distant corners of the American songbook. Both the traditional twang of Chicago pedal steel guitarist Joel Paterson (Devil in a Woodpile, The Western Elstons) and the primal wail of free jazz saxophonist Michael Lewis (Bon Iver, Andrew Bird) are at home on the album. Just as they did with their debut, the brothers found a voice all their own.

About Blue Water Highway

Blue Water Highway comes from the working class, coastal town background that has informed the work of so many of rock’s greatest writers and artists. They take their name from the roadway that links their hometown of Lake Jackson, Texas to Galveston, where the cops, the teachers, the baristas and the chemical plant workers travel to work hard and to play hard, blowing off steam, dancing to their favorite bands. Blue Water Highway’s music is the soundtrack for their lives.

“Best Friend” is the first single from their upcoming album Heartbreak City, coming out on Blue Water Highway Records/Thirty Tigers on June 8th. With a hook that’s a mile wide, it chronicles the lives, loves and friendships that sustain us. Said lead singer Zack Kibodeaux, “We wrote this as a band, and we wanted to tap into that feeling of that special friendship where you know you can count on one another. Even though I wrote characters that are not the band members, our relationship definitely informed the writing of the lyrics.”

Blue Water Highway was started by two best friends from high school - Kibodeaux (lead vocals, guitar) and Greg Essington (guitar). They were later joined by Catherine Clark (keyboards), Jared Wilson (drums) and Kyle James Smith (bass). They will be touring relentlessly to support Heartbreak City, so look for them in a town near you soon.

About Black Belt Eagle Scout

My name is Katherine Paul and I am Black Belt Eagle Scout.

I grew up on the Swinomish Indian Reservation in NW Washington state, learning to play piano, guitar and drums in my adolescent years. The very first form of music that I can remember experiencing was the sound of my dad singing native chants to coo me to sleep as a baby. I grew up around powwows and the songs my grandfather and grandmother sang with my family in their drum group. This is what shapes how I create music: with passion and from the heart.

After the release of Mother of My Children, I felt awake and desperately wanted to put new music out into the world. I had no real intent behind At the Party With My Brown Friends except creating songs around what was going on in my life. In the past few years, the reciprocal love I experienced within friendships is what has been keeping me going.  A lot of what is in this album deals with love, desire and friendship.

The lead single, “At the Party,” starts off with a quintessential BBES guitar lick, heading into booming and abundant drums and vocals. The lines ‘How is it real? We will always sing’ came out of me one evening when I was crafting the song in my bedroom. Within my conscious self, there is always a sense of questioning the legitimacy of the world when you grow up on an Indian reservation. We are all at the party (the world), trying to navigate ourselves within a good or bad situation. I happen to be at the party with my brown friends- Indigenous, Black, POC who always have my back while we walk throughout this event called life.

I started writing “My Heart Dreams” the summer after I initially put out MOMC, writing the guitar chords in a friend’s apartment on Ohlone land. I had been in a transitional part of my life, leaving one love and wanting to find another so much so that I felt like my heart was dreaming about it along with my brain at night. I have an obsession with dreams, mainly because I cannot remember most of mine and often times that leaves me frustrated not knowing that part of myself. I would wake up and be overcome with anxiety about not knowing what had gone down in my brain so much so that I started feeling like my heart dreamt more than my mind, thus becoming the line, my heart dreams.

I wrote “Going To The Beach With Haley” one day when I was out on a coastal trip with my friend Haley Heynderickx. We loaded up her car with our blankets and instruments and drove straight to a beach where we sat and listened to the waves and young families with their babies on the beach. I had brought my mini casio keyboard that had an array of beats I used when writing songs. The beat that’s on the song just stuck there along with the main guitar part. Initially written on an old acoustic guitar my mom bought me, the song really transformed in the studio where I added drums and other melodies to create the song.

Throughout the course of my writing and playing around this record, most of these songs deal with relationships I have either with loved ones or friends. I think it low key has to do with my anthropology degree, but also the fact that writing and playing guitar in my bedroom just makes everything feel better for me. For the longest time, I wanted to convey my feelings around coming out to my family. It had been a good experience for me and while I know it is not always that way when kids decide to tell their family, I think that we can open our hearts more for that. I would watch youtube videos of moms being proud of their kids surrounding their sexuality and gender identity and I really wanted to raise my voice to say, ‘my family too!’ What started with trying to sound so literal in this song ended up turning into a song about how much I love my mom and how our connection is eternal. “You’re Me and I’m You” is about being one with your mother, since we all were a part of their bodies at one point. It’s me trying to explore who she is and who I am with my love for people.

About Motel Radio

Harmony is king in Motel Radio. The four piece, dual front man indie band from New Orleans builds silky, melodic guitar waves for their stacked vocals to surf across. Breezy yet intentional, pop-minded yet psychedelic; their tunes are as likely to stick with young songwriters as they are veteran deadheads.

In New Orleans, music wafts through the windows night and day. From the side- sticking second lines to the croons of the troubadours on Royal Street, Motel

Radio draws inspiration from the sounds of their home city while adding their own indie flair to the pot. The group spent the past year writing and recording their debut full-length Siesta Del Sol with producer, engineer, and neighbor Eric Heigle. They split time between Heigle’s studio (Wix Mix Productions) and their own home studio a block away to produce the dynamic 10 song LP, which will
release in July of 2019. The record will be accompanied by a five week summer tour supporting Austin-based indie band Summer Salt.
The album title “Siesta Del Sol “ was derived from a jukebox song the band heard at a bar in Marfa, TX during their first tour of the west coast. It was a nostalgic and defining moment for the group: four musicians who had started as college roommates simultaneously felt a cosmic emotion and awareness of what they’d been building together. They realized they were chasing something bigger than themselves as they continued their journey west.

Since their last release (Desert Surf Films EP 2016), the band has played festivals across the U.S. (New Orleans Jazz Fest, Firefly Festival, Voodoo, and SXSW to name a few), and opened for artists like Kurt Vile, Moon Taxi, Drive By Truckers, Dylan LeBlanc and Summer Salt.

About Broncho

Stick your head out the window and sniff the air: there’s a blizzard of badness brewing, and it’s not blowing over anytime soon. Sure, the political leaders, bullies, and other villains of various venoms are dominating the headlines, but these days the list of troublemakers extends well beyond the usual suspects.

From their home base in the Heartland, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s BRONCHO have a unique vantage point from which to survey the sins. Churning out thoughtful, nuanced rock and roll with an art school spirit and a punk rock heart since 2010, the band’s fourth album, Bad Behavior, finds them leaning into their strengths for their strongest effort yet. Following the catchy, playful vibe of previous albums Can’t Get Past the Lips(2011) and Just Enough Hip to BeWoman(2014), as well as the deliberate sonic intent of 2016’s sludgy, moodier art piece Double Vanity, the new record reveals BRONCHO’s fly-on-the-crumbling-wall vision of our moral climate, complete with a reenergized, accessible sound and the charmingly sardonic, smiling-while-sneering delivery of singer and bandleader Ryan Lindsey.

“It’s a reflection of the current world: everybody’s been acting badly over the last few years so we made a record about it,” Lindsey says. “There are multiple ways of portraying something as ‘bad,’ and there are moments of self-reflection throughout the record as though we could be talking about ourselves—but not necessarily. It’s observational, like we’re looking through muddy binoculars from a distance. It’s a blurry mirror image of the times from where we sit.”

Lindsey (vocals/guitar) and the band—Nathan Price (drums), Ben King (guitar), and Penny Pitchlynn (bass)—are a tight unit who have seen their songs featured at influential TV and radio and have toured the U.S. andEurope, including arenas with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, The Growlers, Portugal.The Man, and Cage The Elephant. In the gritty warehouse district of Downtown Tulsa they have carved out a physical place for themselves, an industrial blank space where BRONCHO can experiment with sounds, performance, visuals, and more. It’s where they recorded Bad Behavior with producer Chad Copelin in the first half of 2018, a controlled process that allowed them to work at their own pace and by their own standards, almost like a secret club.

Bad Behavior slinks and purrs with a sense of lascivious flirtation. Lindsey sings with a mischievous twinkle in his voice, peppering his verses with suggestive uh-ohs and ahhs and at times barely pushing out his words to the point of whispering. Lines like “You caught me in the weekend/You caught me with your boyfriend” (“Weekend”) and “I got a thing for your mother/I got a thing to teach your father” (“Family Values”) match the primal pulse of the songs’ moods and vibes, and their pop sensibilities create a world where T. Rex, Tom Petty, The Cars, and The Strokes collide. “Keep It in Line” chimes along to a driving, pepped-up beat and serves as both the album’s catchiest moment and its closest swerve toward ethical commentary, as Lindsey’s narrator demands to be reminded of his place in the world while attempting to submit to his misgivings. The result is less an act of penance and more of honest reproach, an ultimate judgment that is matched in its directness only by the following track, “Sandman,” an overt yearning for pleasure that Lindsey calls the band’s answer to The Chordettes classic “Mr. Sandman.”

The record is filled with references to religion, sin, drugs, vice, and scandal bubbling just under the surface. It’s a palette familiar to anyone who has ever turned on the evening news, which Lindsey admits was a huge influence on him. “Through the writing process I watched a lot of CNN, and man there’s a lot of bad behavior there,” he says. “Not to mention that there’s a company making money off of people watching their depiction of it all. From an entertainer’s standpoint I get what they’re doing, calling everything ‘breaking news’ and keeping people glued, but taking up that kind of space can’t be good for society. Although it’s pretty fun to watch.”

Can all this unsavory activity exist without taking sides? Lindsey holds tight to his role as a relayer and is comfortable with leaving it to the audience to cast their own lot. “We’re assuming that everybody is coming from a certain set of values, but ultimately that’s impossible,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who think a certain way about the world and aren’t as shocked by these things. Maybe we’re simply trying to start the conversation. The best news is just a report of what’s going on, without bias. This record is a non-biased, non-profit reporting on what’s going on in the world. Part of it’s an exploration in solving those problems, on a personal level and ultimately on a cultural level.”

Bad Behavior represents a picture of a band that have crushed their own commercial expectations and are doing what they want to do at their own pace. They’ve cleaned the slate and quietly made a return with urgent, bonafide pop songs. If you want to catch a whiff of Bad Behavior, simply stick your head out the window and breathe.

About Starcrawler

Starcrawler is an American rock band from Los Angeles, formed in 2015. The band consists of lead singer Arrow de Wilde, guitarist Henri Cash, bassist Tim Franco and drummer Austin Smith. They have released two studio albums, Starcrawler and Devour You.

Starcrawler lead singer Arrow de Wilde and guitarist Henri Cash both attended Los Angeles' Grand Arts High School. De Wilde is the daughter of photographer Autumn de Wilde and drummer Aaron Sperske.

About Seratones

Get Gone, the potent debut album by the Shreveport, Louisiana natives in Seratones, makes a strong case that this little-known corner of the state is fertile ground, musically speaking. A.J. Haynes (vocals), Connor Davis (guitar), Adam Davis (bass) and Jesse Gabriel (drums) serve up a combination of Southern musicality, garage rock ferocity, and general badassery.

Haynes’s powerful singing voice, first honed at Brownsville Baptist Church in Columbia, Louisiana at age 6, rings across every track. Davis’s bass and Gabriel’s playing propel every song with the grit, energy, and rawness of punk, the feeling of soul, and occasionally, a little jazz swing. The other Davis offers a clinic in guitar riffs, from swaggering blues to searing interstellar leads.

Recorded at Dial Back Sound studios in Mississippi, Get Gone is all live takes, a portrait of the Seratones in their element. Add the soul and swagger of a juke joint with the electricity coursing through a basement DIY show, and you’d begin to approach the experience of seeing this foursome live. The well-paced, multi-faceted set showcases a band dedicated to sonic exploration. “Don’t Need It,” which opens with a muscular swing and tight guitar lines, builds into a monster finish with a nasty corkscrew of a guitar line. “Sun,” a brawny thrasher, courses with huge, raw voltage riffs. “Chandelier,” a mid-tempo burner and vocal workout by Haynes, goes from croon to a crescendo that would shake any crystals hanging from the rafters.

Shared history in the city’s music scene brought the Seratones together a few years ago. All four had played together with one or another in various local punk bands, bonding through all-ages basement shows, gigs at skate parks and BBQ joints, and late nights listening to jazz and blues records. In a city of multiple genres, no fixed musical identity and a flood of cover bands, these adventurous musicians carved out their own path, personifying the do-it-yourself ethos. The group was quickly recognized after forming, winning the Louisiana Music Prize in 2013.

“Shreveport is always shifting its identity,” says Haynes. “You can do a lot of different things when it seems like every band is its own genre.”

Seratones’s music, created with collaborative songwriting and spontaneous creativity, is certainly their own, due perhaps in part to Shreveport’s unique sonic geography. The city sits at a nexus roughly equidistant from Memphis soul, Mississippi Delta Blues, and New Orleans jazz, with Texas swing located just over the nearby state border. The band’s sound draws from those touch points and more, ranging from Black Sabbath’s Paranoid to Kind of Blue. They’ll happily connect the dots between Ornette Coleman and Jello Biafra.

Seratones have different names for the amalgamation of styles found on their debut: Their own “expression of freedom,” music that’s “all about waking people up,” a safe space to feel what you want. However you choose to describe it, Get Gone is unexpected and unbowed, a head-snapping showcase of the twin pillars of Southern music, restlessness and resourcefulness.

by Patrick Sisson

About Ratboys

Upheaval and change are themes spread throughout the songs on Printer’s Devil, the latest Ratboys LP, out February 28, 2020 via Topshelf Records. But all the while, singer-songwriter Julia Steiner embraces moments of uncertainty as a necessary part of growing. Steiner recalls a David Byrne lyric, “I’m lost, but I’m not afraid” as inspiration for the transformative outlook, considering the line a personal mantra while writing Ratboys’ third full-length record. “There’s definitely a lot of uncertainty about what’s next, but I like to think that, in the midst of creating a lot of vulnerability for ourselves, we’re confident and becoming more self-assured.”

Steiner wrote the record with guitarist Dave Sagan while she was experiencing a dramatic shift in her own foundations, demoing out songs in her Louisville, Kentucky childhood home, which had just been sold and emptied out. “Demoing there was almost too intense,” Steiner says. “I kept writing in my journal that it feels like we shouldn’t be there. I don’t know if that feeling made its way directly into the lyrics, but to me the songs will always be connected to that sense of home and time passing.”

With years of touring under their belts, Steiner and Sagan have welcomed a newly consistent four-piece lineup, after years of shuffling through drummers. The band’s comfortable core -- which sees Steiner and Sagan backed by drummer Marcus Nuccio and bassist Sean Neumann -- is tangible across Printer’s Devil. What started as an acoustic duo has finally transformed into a full-scale indie-rock band with a clear identity. The rhythm section brings the band not only consistency, but a jolt in line with Steiner and Sagan’s growing sonic aspirations: Printer’s Devil was recorded live at Decade Music Studios in Chicago and was produced by the band and engineer Erik Rasmussen. Big-chorus power pop songs like “Alien with a Sleep Mask On” and “Anj” sound massive and larger than life, while the band’s dynamics beautifully thread together intimate folk songs like “A Vision” and devastating alt-country tracks like “Listening,” showcasing a rare range that invites listeners to imagine the band blowing out a 2,000-cap room or playing quietly next to you in the living room.

Building off their previous albums—AOID (2015) and GN (2017), which feature bright, youthful Americana narratives centered around soft vocal cadences and fluid, melodic lead guitars—Ratboys captures the bombastic, electrified fun of their live show in a bottle on Printer’s Devil and showcases their growing chemistry as a tight-knit group. Through all the change that fueled the record, Ratboys’ latest album Printer’s Devil finds a band that’s truly grown into itself and is just getting started.

About Panda Riot

Chicago's Panda Riot started when Brian Cook and Rebecca Scott began collaborating on soundtracks for short films. What started as atmospheric instrumentals soon transformed into full fledged dream pop songs. Now a four-piece with Cory Osborne on bass and José Alejandro Rodriguez on drums, their latest release, Infinity Maps, is a hallucinatory blend of pop, dance, and noise, filled with crashing guitars, candy sweet melodies, and break-beat inspired drums.