Hal Crowther gets around. The son of parents from the American South, Crowther was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1945. His father was a naval officer. After attending Williams College and Columbia University, Crowther began writing for Time magazine in 1967 at the age of 22. Since then, Crowther, who now calls Hillsborough home, […]
Grayson Haver Currin
Bio: Grayson Haver Currin was the music editor of INDY Week and the co-director of Hopscotch Music Festival.Twitter: http://twitter.com/currincy
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Beyond Brown
What a statement: “Hip hop saved my life.” It comes from a guy in Cup A Joe on Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, sipping from a massive porcelain cup full of chamomile tea. He’s towering, a tall black man with two dozen dreadlocks falling just at his back’s midline, angling over his shoulder as he leans […]
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Four in tow
I remember hearing Will Johnson for the first time in late October 2002, opening for ousted Wilco guitarist Jay Bennett and his longtime collaborator Edward Burch at Kings in Raleigh. He was fronting his four-piece Texas rock band Centro-matic, a rugged, doleful machine, moving slowly and deliberately. At that point, Centro-matic was good, but Johnson […]
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The Hold Steady’s revelation
“Woke up in the ’20s. There were flappers and fruits in white suits. It was right before the crash. We got thrashed throughout the ’30s, queuing up for soup and scabby sores. Then they sent us off to war.” That’s the sermon’s invocation, delivered by Craig Finn, the frontman of Brooklyn’s The Hold Steady. He […]
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in cosmic country crackle
It would be criminal to neglect this lyric, on an album called Songs about Women and Dying, from a band called GUTSHOT AND THIRSTY: “If I knew then what I know now, I would still be lonely.” What does this drone-tone hook sung in a death-toll, heart-broken song called “Heavy” mean? Is it attempted closure […]
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Shifting gears
When Patty Hurst Shifter played the release party for their first album, Beestinger Lullabies, in 2002, Skillet Gilmore–who previously told PHS guitarist Marc Smith that he would never be in another rock band again–was behind the drumkit, even though he didn’t play on the record. When the band takes the stage for a two-night release […]
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in multiple music
Schooner explain the compilation CD 3×4 like this: “three songs by four bands you already love.” The first part of that simple-as-simple-gets description is true, even if the second isn’t–yet. These are four bands to love, be it the doleful, glacial motion of Eric Roehrig’s acoustic ERIE CHOIR–“I invented the people and called them my […]
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in favorite sons
For a man that was half of the power grip in one of the most important bands in rock (and country) history, Jay Farrar is a catch-all for criticism. Sure, he hasn’t plowed the same experimental rock earth that former Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy has with Wilco, but he isn’t Rod Stewart, either. When […]
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TheirSpace
In the vernacular of the 47.3 million-member, Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace.com, Raleigh’s A Rooster for the Masses is a “friend whore.” That is, they’ve got more friends–4,139 and climbing–than they could ever remember. Damning epithets and all, they couldn’t be happier. “A band sees how many friends you have on there, and then they know if […]
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Now you tell me
I lived on the sixth floor of Lee Residence Hall for four years, less than 100 yards from the Bragaw Activity Room, a glass-walled lounge and meeting room in N.C. State’s Bragaw Hall. There’s an amphitheater between the two dorms, and the beginning of each school year usually brought some oversized temporary stage to its […]
