Grayson Haver Currin

1. PATTERSON HOOD Despite membership changes and an exhausting road schedule, the Drive-By Truckers have released a new album at least every two years since their 1998 debut. But co-leader Patterson Hood has never seemed much like the sort to be lost for words or, in this case, songs. In the same decade-plus, he’s issued […]

1. WKNC’S DOUBLE BARREL BENEFIT During the last decade, as WKNC has repositioned itself as one of the most ardent boosters of and outlets for music made in North Carolina, some of the Triangle’s most popular bands have played the station’s annual benefitMegafaun, The Mountain Goats, Polvo, Annuals and so on. Those appearances raised awareness […]

1. CHELSEA WOLFE The most recent album from California singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, Unknown Rooms, was a collection of acoustic numbers that she’d previously abandoned. But Wolfe isn’t only a coffeeshop chanteuse with a guitar, no matter how well that arrangement sometimes suits her. Rather, her 2011 breakthrough, Apokalypsis, found Wolfe draping her grey gauze of […]

1. OLIVER MTUKUDZI & THE BLACK SPIRITS The story of 60-year-old bandleader Oliver Mtukudzi is very much the story of Zimbabwe, a land that, at his birth, was under British control. A teenager when the country declared its independence and a musician several albums into his career when that decree was finally recognized, Mtukudzi emerged […]

1. TAR HEEL SOUND FEST Some free jazz, some distant drones, some modern composition, some indie rock, some folk meditations, some post-rock and some pure anger: The inaugural Tar Heel Sound Fest aims to put a little of everything (well, a little of the aforementioned niches) in three Chapel Hill rock clubs, with the aim […]

The Chris Hendricks Band plays the Lincoln Theatre Saturday, Jan. 5, at 8 p.m. The Kicks and Saints Apollo open. Tickets are $8–$10. Talking to Chapel Hill songwriter Chris Hendricksor, for that matter, listening to his bold, grandiose pop musicfeels like watching an athlete being interviewed on the air after a championship: He gushes about […]

1. DR. RALPH STANLEY & THE CLINCH MOUNTAIN BOYS In a promotional documentary for his 2011 gospel album A Mother’s Prayer, Ralph Stanley, now 85, handles the topic of his age with typical frankness: “As old as I am, I figured [that album] might be the last one I might be able to do. I […]

1. NNENNA FREELON & JOHN BROWN BIG BAND Last month, Grammy favorite and jazz singer Nnenna Freelon released Christmas, her simply titled collection of 10 holiday tunes recorded with the big band of bassist and Duke jazz director John Brown. Perhaps that suggests a staid record of pretty singing over austere arrangements of horn and […]