Heather and Tom LaGarde were being selfish when they returned to North Carolina eight years ago. With a toddler and an infant, they had grown weary of their apartment in New York’s Lower East Side, especially given the city’s new specter of terrorism. Their rent had been raised, too, and the corporate funds that had […]
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
Posted inMusic
The trend of reissues being treated as new releases could salvage our stunted attention
Ed Askew and Bill Callahan play Local 506 Friday, July 15, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13–$15. Here’s an exercise in how most every opinion can be validated by someone online: Type the sentence “music is timeless,” with quotes, into the search window of Google, press Enter and marvel at the nearly 400,000 results. Lots […]
Posted inMusic
Real Estate faces the difficult problem of what comes next
Real Estate plays with Dent May and Andrew Cedermark Monday, July 11, at Local 506. Tickets for the show are $9-$11. As much as I like their songs and their overall sound, I’d hate to be a member of the young New Jersey band Real Estate. In late 2009, the quartet followed a string of […]
Posted inNews
Neighborhood watch dogs
The choir of barks was instantly recognizable: Winston was home. During the first four months Tina and I have lived in our little brick ranch in Raleigh’s Longview neighborhood, we’ve wrestled with the decision of where to put Boris, the massive male pit bull who wandered into our yard about two weeks after we moved […]
Posted inMusic
Peter Holsapple talks the staying power of songs
Peter Holsapple begins his monthlong residency at Motorco Sunday, July 3, at 1 p.m. He’ll play a free solo show each Sunday at the same time. For a little over a year, the monthly online radio show Radio Free Song Club has incorporated new songs written on deadline by a dozen of America’s premier songwriters […]
Posted inMusic
The past, absence and future of free music in downtown Raleigh
The 59-mile drive from Rocky Mount west to Raleigh takes about an hour along the mostly flat and nondescript highway U.S. 64. It’s a trek that, for years, residents of the eastern North Carolina city of about 60,000 would regularly make for their entertainment, says Vanessa McCleary, Rocky Mount’s Downtown Development Manager. Eventually, Rocky Mountin […]
Posted inMusic
Simple’s self-titled third album
Simple releases its self-titled third album Saturday, June 18, at Nightlight. Ye Olde Shoppe and Minor Stars open the $5 show at 10 p.m. The first album by Chapel Hill trio Simple, 2008’s Songs From a Broken Hip, earned its name because songwriter and guitarist Chip Smoak penned the tunes therein while recovering from, as […]
Posted inMusic
Doug Paisley’s brilliant folk-rock needs to be rated
Doug Paisley plays The Pinhook Sunday, June 12, at 9 p.m. Shipwrecker and Phil Cook & His Feat open. Everyone has something they’d call underrated. It might be the best friend who’s awesome but can’t find a significant other who believes the same, or a beloved television show that gets canned after one season. Most […]
Posted inNews
Suburban cowboy
The road from Raleigh, where I live, to the farmland outside of Fuquay-Varina, where I was raised, cuts directly between the shopping centers and strip malls of Garner, the home of America’s new Idol, Scotty McCreery. Garner is a series of businesses connected mostly by blacktop, with a service station and a country buffet always […]
Posted inMusic
Locrian/ Horseback’s New Dominions
Collaborations can be tough: Oftentimes for bands, opening up a hermetic artistic space to include someone new is simply a pleasurable break from ritual, a chance to have an unexpected variable impact an old, familiar circuit. The product, then, might not matter as much as the process, meaning that what’s fun for the musicians to […]
