Sound Stories & Interviews

Breaking free from mass produced, big record label music means no more drinking the Kool-Aid of mainstream radio.
Since the 1940s, and as recently as 2007, radio stations have been losing credibility for their cozy relationships with record labels. For years, station owners and DJs have taken payouts from labels in exchange for playing artists, whether they were worthy of attention or not. The system, known as “Payola,” is technically illegal, but difficult to police.
Even so, the FCC has levied tens of millions of dollars in fines against both stations and labels. But the real losers are the people who tune in and get an earful of mass-produced music backed by the industry’s biggest labels.

South Carolina band Shovels and Rope just released their sophomore album O’ Be Joyful. It’s a calculating and impassioned offering of folk-country rock with a New Orleans twist.
The duo, made up of Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst, bring metaphors and storytelling imagery to life with hand claps, angry banjo plucking and gritty vocals draped in sincerity. It’s like they traveled down the Mississippi by riverboat, integrating bits and pieces of the waterway’s different musical influences into a Southern rock sound. At times you feel the influence of Big Easy jazz.

Sara Jackson-Holman, felt a bit like a nomad.  She was trying to write a second album among the Central Oregon ponderosa while flitting off to Portland any chance she got.
Eventually the Rose City proved too beguiling for the classically trained piano player who’s enjoyed great success recently, including having her single “Into the Blue” close out the last episode of season two of ABC’s Castle.
Last September, she made the move west. The decision was an attempt to take her career to the next level, and also to be among surroundings that had long roused her heart.

Echotone (2010)
Everyone knows about the popular SXSW music festival that happens every year in Austin, Texas. The city that spawned such iconic acts as Janis Joplin and Stevie Ray Vaughn is still at the center of modern music—but it’s changing. Echotone follows a handful of new bands trying to make a career happen amongst the shifting cityscape and economy of Austin. The movie features roots-rock upstart Black Joe Lewis, synth-pop singer Cari Palazzolo, and many more.

Whether writing political songs or party songs, Oakland reggae singer Michael Franti draws from a childhood that helped shape his world view.
“I was adopted,” said Franti in a recent phone interview. “My birth parents, for whatever reason, didn’t think they were able to raise me and gave me to another family.”
And according to Franti, that upbringing was critical in developing his connection to humanity.
“It gave me empathy for people who are different,” said Franti. “People who raise a child in a same-sex or mixed-race home, or speak a different language at home than they do at school. People who love who they chose to love.”

Listen to The Moondoggies’ second album Tidelands and you might think lead singer and songwriter Kevin Murphy is the quintessentially depressed, flannel-wearing Northwest folk rocker. The truth is, the short-lived dark period of Murphy’s life that produced the album was more an anomaly than a trend.
“It was a somber record out of a weird time,” said Murphy in a recent interview. “An album that reflected where we were at.”
Tidelands is a beautiful, albeit sad, folk-rock album in the vein of The Fleet Foxes or Crosby, Stills and Nash and you’ll hear several songs from the record when The Moondoggies play at McMenamin’s Old St. Francis Wednesday, Aug. 15.

Back in May of this year, California band Social Distortion came to Bend’s Domino Room. The lovely  alt-country rocker Lindi Ortega opened the show for the legendary punk band. Toward the end of her set, the diminutive Ortega belted out a surprising note and disintegrated the eardrums of most everyone near the speakers, including myself.
Even after that atom-splitting note from Ortega, I remained in the front row and let Social D further pound my tympanic membranes into a ringing mush. My eardrums took such a beating at that show, they required two days to recover.

For Dave Johnston, Yonder Mountain String Band’s banjo picker and vocalist, the peacocks are just one of the many draws to the Northwest String Summit.
For eleven consecutive years, YMSB members have frolicked with the peacocks and some of the world’s best new old-timey musicians at Horning’s Hideout in North Plains, the woodsy venue situated about 20 miles northwest of Portland.
And Johnston is psyched to do it again next weekend when his band will play three of the festival’s four nights. But it’s far from just a Yonder show, as 25 other bands join the quartet.

The news that Berkley-band Counting Crows would be coming to Bend’s Les Schwab Amphitheater took me back to a time in my life when I wasn’t so happy.
It’s not that I was fully depressed in 1993; I think it’s just that I knew there was the potential ahead of me for a life better than I was living. Basically, I didn’t like the high school I was going to and was having a hard time dealing with my fractured family. That is probably why Counting Crows’ debut album August and Everything After ended up in my bookshelf stereo on repeat.
It wasn’t even the album’s first hit single, “Mr. Jones,” that drew me in. It was songs like “’Round Here,” “Anna Begins” and “Rain King” that, at 16, helped me reflect on my short past and had me ready to leave my current surroundings.