Engine 145 - A Roots Music Publication

A look at some new books, albums and a broadcast that look at where we’ve been to show us where we are: Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches and Encounters, edited by Jeff Burger. Those of us who interview and profile performers for articles concerning what they do sometimes get, and occasionally deserve, credit for pulling [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Spring Words and Music — History Worth Catching, Part 2"

I have two great loves in my life and they both make me miserable. When I was nine years old, Joe Carter hit a three-run homer off of Phillies pitcher Mitch Williams to win the 1993 World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was a gut-wrenching experience for a kid, and I remember hoping [...]

Continue reading "Touch ‘Em All: The Shared Sorrow of Country Music and Baseball"

The impossible to miss excitement this spring, within country music and in the wider pop music world, too, around the strong, risk-taking, breath-of-fresh-air releases from Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe raises anew some longstanding questions about the relative effects on music makers of being relatively unnoticed. Okay; neither of them were in fact music business [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Brave, Specific Country Women and Timid, Generic Men?"

I’ve been traveling through the intersection of Roots and Pop for, well, a long time now, but the artists who speed right through the yellow and red lights have never stopped grabbing my attention.  Are they doing that on purpose? By accident? Unaware there’s an intersection–even if it’s a backed-up, jammed up intersection? Or maybe [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Pop Artists Driving Close to Country"

Engine 145.com is an American roots music blog, and for all of our regular emphasis on country, Americana, bluegrass and occasional roots rock, it’s impossible to cover this arena without bringing up the blues. Without blues, all of those genres would have developed along a whole lot more one-note and delicate lines, if they’d been [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: The Not-Boring Blues"

Back a lifetime or two ago when I was an undergraduate at George Washington University in DC, I was a regular deejay on the campus radio station, with a show called “Heartbreak Hotel” that featured  roots rock, country music and what would have been called “Americana” if there’d been a term for it; this was [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Nashville’s Eddie; Nashville’s Jack"

Year’s end is all at once “make a list” time, “last chance to bring it up” time and “turn the page” time, so I thought I’d keep all of that in mind this column and point you towards some recent roots and country releases, reissues and re-visits in particular, that strike me as worthy of [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: Looking Forward, Looking Back"

Making year-end lists of best books is an exercise at once exciting and frustrating. Listing the best books of the year helps recall fondly those great books that revealed new information about an artist or his or her music or drives you to pick a again a book that you didn’t want to end the [...]

Continue reading "Best Music Books of 2012"

It happens every week. Every Wednesday, when I post my variation of “Gone Fishing” on my Facebook page, announcing I am M-I-A because I will be facedown in ABC’s primetime drama, Nashville, the comments start piling up. About how the writing sucks, the plot blows, but especially, how dreadful the music is. I laugh. I’m not watching the [...]

Continue reading "Haters Gonna Hate: The Incredible Danger of Knowing What You Know"

The power of music (and the secondary power of repeatedly talking and teaching a particular narrative about it), are such that for many, the Dust Bowl, some eighty years later, survives in memory mainly or solely as “the horrible experience Woody Guthrie sang about.” (For others, it’s what they saw or read in The Grapes [...]

Continue reading "Roots Watch: There’s More “Dust Bowl Music” Than Woody’s"