Mike Bookey

Deb Yager didn't start playing guitar until she was in her mid 30s, but you wouldn't know that by listening to the smartly crafted folk numbers on the six-song EP that she recorded in her former hometown of Austin, Texas. Yager has been in Bend for the past five years, playing music with her band Little Fish, which includes her husband, Bo Reynolds, while creating songs of her own on the side.

“This year's festival has a really bluesy feel to it,” says Sisters Folk Festival artistic director Brad Tisdel of the event's 15th anniversary lineup.
He's right. Sisters Folk has always strayed from pure folk music, but this year's festival, taking place this weekend throughout the city of Sisters, features a lineup that's as eclectic as ever. The fest is headlined by John Hammond, but still features folkies like Ray Wylie Hubbard and a parade of other singer songwriters. In the past few years, Tisdel has focused more and more on exposing fans to new artists who they otherwise might never encounter.

Westin Glass is the drummer for the Thermals and last week when he checked in from North Carolina where he was visiting family, he wanted to talk about friendships. More specifically, he wanted to talk about his relationship with his two band mates.

Mat Kearney, the pride of Eugene, Oregon, makes the sort of music that's perfect for doctors to make out to in hospitals. Not real doctors with their stethoscopes and decades of education and sleep-deprived, stress-laden minds, but rather television doctors. You know, the ones with the sort of good looks that make super models want to vomit more than they normally do and who trade sexual partners like Brian Cashman trades designated hitters.Of course, we're talking about Grey's Anatomy here, the television show that helped launch Kearney into the mainstream, exposing three of his songs, including the smash hit “Breathe In Breathe Out.”

The Quick & Easy Boys
Red Light Rabbit
PerCapita Records

Well, The Quick & Easy Boys have done the seemingly impossible – they've managed to make a largely funky record without coming off even the least bit corny. Those who've seen the Portland band live and wondered how the trio's energy-packed live show would translate to the recorded medium have a firm answer in Red Light Rabbit.

Robert Randolph has never really had a problem getting noticed. Musicians, critics and fans have been raving about him since he was a teenager, playing his pedal steel guitar only in church. While he received plenty of attention, he may have been considered more of a novelty than one of the most promising musicians of his generation.
Now, after going from church to bars to the jam band scene to mainstream popularity, Randolph seems to have truly hit his stride and settled into his own identity with his band's latest record, We Walk This Road, released earlier this summer. Produced by T Bone Burnett – who could be called the past decade's producer laureate of American roots music – the record finds Robert Randolph and the Family Band digging deep into the annals of folk and roots with covers of Blind Willie Johnson and Bob Dylan, as well as new takes on tracks from John Lennon and Prince. But the record also showcases, as it should, the fierce talent with which Randolph and his band are so equipped.