Engine 145 - A Roots Music Publication

Rosie Flores kicks out the jams on the opening lick of her energetic new album and never lets up until last note of the final track. One of the hardest working guitarists in roots music, Flores cranks up her Fender, her fingers nimbly flying over and around blues bars, country chords, and rock riffs. She delivers [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Rosie Flores — Working Girl’s Guitar"

One of the most respected songwriters in Nashville, Jim Lauderdale, is busy these days. The weekly host of popular Music City Roots at the Loveless Barn in Nashville, longtime Wednesday afternoon guest host on WSM radio, host with Buddy Miller—with whom he’s just released a new album—of the Buddy and Jim Radio Show on Sirius [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Jim Lauderdale — Carolina Moonrise"

In 2011, The First Lady of Rockabilly declared “The Party Ain’t Over” with her rollicking, Jack White-produced album of the same name. A year later Wanda Jackson returns to take care of some unfinished business on a sassy, brassy album, produced by Justin Townes Earle, that showcases Jackson’s growling, inspired versions of rock, blues, folk, [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Wanda Jackson — Unfinished Business"

Jerrod Niemann’s Free the Music is half the album that his major label debut release was. Specifically, the music half. Judge Jerrod and the Hung Jury infamously featured “humorous” skits in between the songs that grew tiresome after about three listens. This time around, the skits are gone, and all that’s left is a genre-bouncing [...]

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Lori McKenna doesn’t write so much as lay open a vein with each new lyric. It’s the reason A-list artists like Faith Hill, Keith Urban, and, on the bluegrass side, Alison Krauss, record her songs. New digital-only EP, Heart Shaped Bullet Hole, a follow up to last year’s excellent Lorraine, finds the Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter navigating [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Lori McKenna — Heart Shaped Bullet Hole"

Let’s just get this out of the way up front: Combining 16 stellar songs from one of music’s all-time best songwriters, adding on supremely talented artists such as Alison Krauss, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and George Strait, and putting traditional country torch-bearer Jamey Johnson at the helm leaves little room in an album review for [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Jamey Johnson — Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran"

One of the elder statesmen of bluegrass, Grammy-winning Skaggs delivers straight-forward bluegrass, Celtic-inflected tunes, mournful country ballads, and gospel-infused songs, even as he continues to experiment with new musical styles, illustrating his playfulness and his musical genius. “Music to My Ears,” the title track, sounds like an old-time hymn song, with Celtic fiddles skittering behind [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Ricky Skaggs — Music to My Ears"

Run, don’t walk, to your nearest record store to buy this album. From the time you drop the needle on the record’s first groove until the album’s final fiddle runs, you’ll be dancing, laughing, crying, and wonderstruck, but mostly, you’ll be swept away by the virtuosity and the creative genius of this tight and group [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: The Time Jumpers — The Time Jumpers"

In some way, Kathy Mattea has always been trying to get back home. Her songs have tracked restless journeys of yearning (“Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”) as well as lives buffeted by the storms of life (“Walk the Way the Wind Blows”) and tossed on the rough waters of loss and love (“Where’ve You [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Kathy Mattea — Calling Me Home"

With her 2010 debut, The Way I Remember It, Teea Goans quickly established herself as heir to country music royalty. On that album of covers of classic country songs, Goans demonstrated a canny ability to select the tunes that showed off her incredible vocal range, recalling Patty Loveless, Loretta Lynn, and Suzy Boggus, among others. [...]

Continue reading "Album Review: Teea Goans — That’s Just Me"