Review: Sturgill Simpson – A Sailor’s Guide to Earth

Craig Manning Apr 12, 2016

I’d go out on a limb and say that, lately, country music has been as healthy and vibrant as it has been in years. Whether thanks to buzz-boosting late night TV appearances for up-and-coming artists, extra interest from music publications, or some of the most intriguing CMA and ACM winner lists…ever, country music seems to be worming its way more and more into the consciousness of music listeners everywhere. Fewer people are taking the “I listen to everything but country” stance; more are slowly dipping their toes into the genre’s considerable depths.

Review: Butch Walker – Afraid of Ghosts

Craig Manning Apr 8, 2016

Sometimes, albums need to be made. Whether motivated by the break-up of a long relationship, the death of a loved one, or some other life-changing incident, there are certain records that aren’t just artistic choices for the musician making them, but artistic necessities. Butch Walker is no stranger to these kinds of records. He made one of them six years ago, after losing his home in a wildfire and getting a new perspective on the things that really mattered; he did it again two years ago, hurrying to finish a set of songs so that his father would hear them before he died. Both of those albums, the 2008 LP Sycamore Meadows and the 2013 EP Peachtree Battle dealt with heartbreaking situations, but turned them into life-affirming statements. The former is a reminder that material possession is never the most important thing in life, while the latter is a love letter to Butch’s father and the relationship the two shared; both are the kind of personal and intimate records artists don’t make anymore.

Review: Noah Gundersen – Carry the Ghost

Craig Manning Apr 4, 2016

Leading up to the release of Carry the Ghost, the second full-length album from Noah Gundersen, I was a little bit nervous. I loved Noah’s first LP, last year’s Ledges, so much that I couldn’t imagine the follow-up living up to my impossibly high expectations. If I had to pick a favorite record of the decade so far, Ledges would be it, so the thought of Gundersen making an album as good (or even better) was hardly something that I was even daring to hope for. Furthermore, the first track released from Carry the Ghost—the piano-led album opener “Slow Dancer”—showed that Noah was looking to flesh out his sound significantly on this record. Even on first listen, I really did love the song, but by the time an anguished electric guitar came ripping through the arrangement, I was worried that Carry the Ghost might fall victim to the pitfalls that singer/songwriters often encounter when they trade acoustic bedroom folk for lusher full-band textures. After all, we hadn’t heard a lick of electric guitar on Ledges.

Interview: Jason Isbell

Craig Manning Apr 3, 2016

I had a chance to chat on the phone with Americana star, Jason Isbell, about his album release, Something More Than Free. We talked about his philosophy on songwriting, the challenge of following up his magnum opus (2013’s Southeastern), the prospect of him becoming a father, his opinion on why women make better artists than men, the role producer Dave Cobb plays in creating his records, and the idea of blending fiction and non-fiction for songs that always strike a chord.

Interview: Matt Nathanson

Craig Manning Apr 2, 2016

I got to speak on the phone with the ever-amusing and ultra-talented Matt Nathanson. In our interview, Nathanson described the disjointed but ultimately satisfying nature of his brand new album, Show Me Your Fangs. We also discussed the unpredictable audience-request format of Nathanson’s current tour, how some of the best records have “great topography” instead of being thematically or musically cohesive, and how elements of hip-hop and R&B have slowly crept into Nathanson’s singer/songwriter-oriented music.

Interview: Brian Fallon

Craig Manning Apr 1, 2016

I recently had the chance to sit down and chat on the phone with the great Brian Fallon. The interview runs a range of topics, including the inspiration behind Fallon’s folk-heavy new solo album Painkillers (due March 11th), working with Butch Walker, the uncertain future of The Gaslight Anthem, favorite Springsteen songs, and the intriguing possibility of an Elsie: Part II.
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Review: Brian Fallon – Painkillers

Craig Manning Mar 11, 2016

There aren’t many people in music right now who are under more pressure than Brian Fallon. Labeled as the torchbearer of the classic rock tradition upon the release of 2008’s The ’59 Sound—the sophomore album from his Jersey-based quartet, The Gaslight Anthem—Fallon has spent the better part of his career not just having to live up to the quality of his own albums and songs, but to his idols as well. A lot of people got into Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Bob Dylan after hearing consistent references to each in Gaslight’s early music. In fact, Gaslight’s legacy got so entwined in the “inspired by Springsteen” narrative that fans started requesting Bruce songs at shows. Even Fallon’s side project, the Horrible Crowes, got whipped up in the Springsteen tornado, drawing at least a handful of parallels to Nebraska. Let’s be honest: figuring out a way to live up to an album as terrific as The ’59 Sound is hard enough. Doing it when everyone is comparing your stuff to albums like Born to Run and Damn the Torpedoes is just downright unfair.

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Review: Coldplay – A Head Full of Dreams

Craig Manning Dec 6, 2015

A year and a half ago, Coldplay released their best record. Let me stop you before you start trying to figure out how that warped timeline can get you back to 2008’s Viva la Vida or 2002’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. Sure, those records had big world-beating singles and a lot of ambition, but as an album, nothing in this band’s catalog touches Ghost Stories. A stark, spectral disc about a Chris Martin’s broken heart, Ghost Stories was great precisely because it played so against type for Coldplay. These guys were supposed to be stadium rockers! Where were the hooks? Where was the celebration? Where was the consummate hugeness that they’d been leveling up gradually for a decade? For most of their history, Coldplay have been a band about you and we, not a band about me. But on Ghost Stories, the key line was “Tell me you love me, if you don’t then lie.” It wasn’t a record that was meant for communal gatherings in stadiums or arenas; hell, it didn’t even sound like a record that was supposed to escape Chris Martin’s heartbroken, insomniac brain, so personal and intimate was the music within.

Craig Manning Nov 20, 2015

Here’s a monster of an unenviable task: following up an album that sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, spawned multiple ubiquitous singles, won a truckload of Grammys, spent 24 nonconsecutive weeks at number one, and was labeled by Billboard as “the Greatest Album of All Time”—whatever that means. Adele’s 21 was the kind of phenomenon that doesn’t happen in the music world anymore. Albums are obsolete for the average listener, right? Digital track sales are plummeting? Monoculture is dead? Adele defied every expectation and turned her sophomore album into a cultural sensation that was probably as close as our generation will ever get to having a Thriller. No wonder the British songstress took the better part of five years to drop the follow-up.

Unsurprisingly, 25 has arrived to endless comparisons to its predecessor—many of them unflattering. The reviews are mixed, and while the album will undoubtedly be a juggernaut that breaks sales records and single-handedly keeps the record business on life support for another few years, it’s already pretty clear that 25 is not going to have the legacy of adoration that its world-beating predecessor did.

Craig Manning Aug 25, 2015

Today (August 25th, 2015), Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run has officially been around for 40 years. It’s only had a huge influence on my life, though, for about seven. For a considerable amount of my personal musical growth, I was aware of “the Boss” and his work, but it didn’t really resonate with me on a personal level. Born to Run, along with Born in the USA, Greetings from Asbury Park, and The Rising, were among the first albums I ever put on my first iPod back in 2004, as I looted my parents’ CD collection looking for more tunes to stock my brand new 20 gigabyte device. But while I loved hearing the title track pop up on shuffle during runs, and while later songs like “My City in Ruins” always struck a chord with me, it took another four years for Born to Run to really become that album in my life.

Review: Jack’s Mannequin – Everything in Transit

Craig Manning Aug 23, 2015

It’s late April 2010, but the weather is so glorious outside that it feels like it’s already June. Rain was threatening earlier, but now, the sun is beating down overhead as I pack the final items into my car for the three-hour journey home. I’ve just finished my freshman year of college and closed out a great semester, and my roommate and I are saying our goodbyes in the parking lot of our dormitory, after having handed over the keys to the room we’d shared since September. It’s a bittersweet moment, but I’m happy to be headed home to the resort town where I grew up for some much needed vacation. I climb into the front seat of my ’98 Honda Civic, plug my iPod into the FM transmitter, and briefly debate which album to choose. I smile as my thumb finds Jack’s Mannequinʼs Everything in Transit — one of my favorite albums of all time, and a record that has been my definitive “summer soundtrack” since I first discovered it four years earlier. I press play and the sounds of “Holiday from Real” come coursing through my speakers. “Fuck yeah, we can live like this,” Andrew McMahon sings. I put on my aviators, shift the car into first gear, and drive. This is going to be the perfect summer, I think to myself as I pull away from my first year of college. I can feel it.

Review: Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People

Craig Manning Aug 15, 2015

Album sequencing is a tricky thing. When it works, sequencing should feel so natural that it becomes impossible to imagine the album in question being presented in any other way. Perfect sequencing can bring the themes of an album into clear and pointed relief, and can hide the flaws of an album’s weak songs while using the best ones as big peaking payoffs. In a way, the art of sequencing is as important for an album—and as difficult to master—as the art of songwriting itself. When track order is bad, it can push you into viewing an album less as cohesive artistic statement, and more as a collection of tracks. But when clear painstaking attention has been paid to finding the perfect sequencing, it can legitimately make an album.

Craig Manning Aug 11, 2015

Last week, I got the chance to spend a half hour chatting with Seattle-based folk singer/songwriter, Noah Gundersen. Fresh off the release of his 2014 debut album, Ledges, and already gearing up for the release of the follow-up, Carry the Ghost, Gundersen spoke candidly about the collaborative nature of his new album, about keeping the intimacy of his earlier music alive whilst moving into full-band territory, about exploring difficult subjects like religion and existentialism in his lyrics, and about why we’ll probably be hearing yet another new album from him sooner rather than later.

Review: Jason Isbell – Something More Than Free

Craig Manning Jul 17, 2015

Is Jason Isbell the best songwriter of his generation?

The former Drive-By Truckers member certainly made a case for the affirmative on Southeastern, his breakthrough solo LP from 2013. Southeastern was the kind of remarkable record that only grows in stature, importance, and personal impact over time. Written in the wake of Isbell getting sober and taking control of his life, Southeastern was at once both mournful and hopeful. Within those songs was a man with a suitcase full of doubts about himself, but also someone with the resilience to push forward and be better—at least with the helping hand of the person he loved most. “Home was a dream, one that I’d never seen, until you came along,” Isbell sang on “Cover Me Up,” Southeastern’s stirring mission statement, and the best song of the decade so far. He wrote it for Amanda Shires, the woman he married just months before Southeastern dropped, and the person he credits with saving him from the darkness.

Review: Kacey Musgraves – Pageant Material

Craig Manning Jun 23, 2015

Country music is ripe for a civil war.

Over the course of the last few years, Nashville has segmented into two very distinct groups. On one side of the industry, there are the people who are willing to play the game, to sacrifice the classic core of the country music genre—ostensibly, deep and unusual storytelling—in order to sell records. This group is where you will find the “bro country” collective, “artists” like Luke Bryan, the Florida Georgia Line, Blake Shelton, Toby Keith, Billy Currington, Darius Rucker, Jason Aldean, and pretty much every male singer on country radio. These guys write songs (or often, accept songs from other writers) that extoll the virtues of drinking, driving trucks, and objectifying women. Said songs are usually hollow, derivative, and overproduced, but boy, do they sell.