At first glance, Aimee Mann’s return to the airwaves seems like the final scene in some topsy-turvy Hollywood movie. In the mid-’80s, she became an MTV darling as the platinum-blond frontwoman for ‘Til Tuesday. After falling from fave-face status, she beat a just-another-pretty-bass-player rap by releasing a pair of critically…

Nathan Hamilton, Tuesday, August 15, at Quixotes True Blue and Wednesday, August 16, at the Dark Horse Saloon in Boulder, is on a roll these days. The Austin-based singer-songwriter (and former leader of the late Sharecroppers) has just won the revered New Folk award at this years Kerrville Folk Festival…

These days, Rachael Lampa’s schedule is not typical of that of most fifteen-year-old kids from Monarch High School in Louisville, Colorado. Of course, when a battery of people have you pegged as the next big thing — not just for Colorado, but for the country and possibly beyond — your…

The members of Dark Star Orchestra might take issue with those who say you cannot bring the Dead back to life. For the past three years, this Chicago-based act has built a national following by resurrecting the music of the late Grateful Dead. Each night, the Orchestra repeats a particular…

Bradford Lee Folk, guitarist and lead vocalist of local bluegrass group Open Road, has just finished another shift at a dairy farm outside of Fort Collins, where he does the kind of hard work few Coloradans are willing to brave anymore. Now he’s settling in for a different sort of…

When the String Cheese Incident began six years ago in Telluride, it was a band with a plan. “From the very beginning,” says SCI bassist Keith Moseley, “we’ve looked at this as a long-term project, something we wanted to be doing ten or fifteen years down the road. And we…

When you hail from Oxford, Mississippi, and your band’s handle is “Kudzu Kings,” you’d better be damn good. The title is a volatile moniker given that kudzu — an invasive vine that covers millions of acres of Southern land — replaced cotton as the King of the South years ago…

For many people, just getting out of bed on a Sunday morning — never mind all of the people dragging their weary souls to church — is enough of an uplifting achievement. But for Madame Andrews, simply getting to church is a sinfully easy task compared to her weekly ritual…

James “T-Model” Ford is the baddest blues-playing murderer in the world, and he’ll tell you so. “I’m the best there is,” says Ford, who spent two of his younger years in prison for a murder he committed, in self-defense, as a young man. Today he’s killing time in his Greenville,…

On stage at the Eagles Lodge in Thornton, Halden Wofford and his mates in the Hi Beams (steel guitarist Bret Billings, multi-instrumentalist Kevin Yost and his wife, bassist Sandy Yost) are laying down a set of classic country music. The band anchors the far end of the lodge’s modest, low-ceilinged…

John Mooney doesn’t give a damn about blues “purity,” whatever that is. While many of his peers have stuck to just one brand of blue-hued music to the point of repetition, Mooney has spent the past thirty years deftly melding two disparate forms: straight-from-the-fields Delta blues and complex New Orleans…

Denver Turnverein Choir, Saturday, May 20, at the Denver Turnverein, 1570 Clarkson Street, sports a cultural heritage as rich as Denver itself. The outfit’s namesake building dates back to the early part of the twentieth century and serves as the cultural center for Denver’s German citizens and its Turners, a…

Ben Stevens has just driven from his home in Lyons, Colorado, to Denver for a taste of his favorite pizza. It’s a considerable effort, considering all the pizza joints he’s passed on the way to Famous Pizza on South Broadway. “You can’t get good pizza in Boulder,” says Stevens, an…

One listen to the Ranch Girls & Their Ragtime Wranglers might lead a listener to assume that the bandmembers are native students of Americana — heartland dwellers raised on cowboy movies and the Carter family. Western swing, ’40s-girl-group singing and rockabillied country are just a few of the styles that…

The white man or woman who plays the blues is often forced to confront a long-standing stereotype: the idea among blues-brained purists that only black artists can truly sing about pain, loss and heartbreak. Of course, music history begs to differ with this notion. Some of the most wrist-slitting blues…

It’s a crisp Friday afternoon at the Circle-A Ranch, the working-class home and headquarters of local twanglers Mr. Tree and the Wingnuts. Soapy Argyle, singer/songwriter/ guitarist for the act, sits on his back porch and sips chilly cans of Milwaukee’s Best with drummer Shawn 4-On (“You know, like ‘four on…

Four years ago BR5-49 was being hailed as the new Nashville guard, proof that country music’s fat cats had finally come to their senses. After gaining a rabid following as the house band at an unlikely venue on the fringe of Nashville’s music scene — a combination boot store/ saloon…

As musical tributes go, this new disc from Austin’s vaudevillian all-stars is a stone-cold smoker. Twelve of the recording’s thirteen tunes focus on the same verdant theme — marijuana — the apparent herb of choice for the Spanking gang. Such a heady theme might seem burned out if it were…

As gigs go, singing the national anthem at a sporting event is the ultimate dream and nightmare. The upside is the thrill of belting out the nation’s rallying cry to thousands of pumped-up countrymen and women, a rush no other gig can offer. The downside, of course, is the song…

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends Furnace Room Lullaby (Bloodshot) Maybe it’s a by-product of “artistic growth.” Maybe it’s just that some young women aren’t satisfied with only singin’ hard country music. Whatever the cause, Neko Case — whose The Virginian was arguably the ultimate female country recording of 1998 –…

Delta blues legend Robert Johnson gained his guitar licks — or so the story goes — by cutting a deal with the Devil. The arrangement brought him skills and a mythical rep that will live for generations, but at a costly price: chops from hell for an afterlife in hell…