(FOX 11) Richard Thompson is a singer songwriter who's been performing in the music business for more than 40 years. He's also been named one of the 20 best guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone magazine.

Thompson is performing Friday night at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater and talked beforehand with Good Day LA.

Richard opened up about his guitar influences and when steve put him to the test to play some of their stuff, you can see he passed with flying colors.

“Sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

—“Spin” by Tim O’Brien

One of the themes of O’Brien’s Vietnam “memoir”/short story collection The Things They Carried is that the book’s events might not have actually happened, or happened exactly as they’re written, but that this didn’t violate the “truth” of the stories. A far cry from the self-deluding “truthiness” popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert, O’Brien’s aim is to shine a light on the true essence of an experience, a life, or a death.

To some extent, this is what Patty Griffin accomplishes on American Kid. Griffin began writing the album shortly before her father’s impending death in 2009. She then put the songs away while she toured with Robert Plant and released 2010’s cover-dominated Downtown Church album. As she told Rolling Stone, “I didn’t feel like singing anything about my life, at all, after he died.” 

Read the full article at PopMatters.

Watch Wild Moccasins new music video for "Gag Reflections" below.

Watch Patty Griffin perform "Don't Let Me Die In Florida" on The Tonight Show w/ Jay Leno. (performance begins at the 37 min mark)

It’s been six years since folk singer and songwriter Patty Griffin last released an album of mostly original material. She returns with a wallop on “American Kid,” which Speakeasy premieres today in its entirety.

Most of the 12 songs on the album are about her father, a World War II veteran who returned home to live for a time in a Trappist monastery before becoming a high school science teacher and raising seven children.

“The bulk of the record was written at a time where I knew my father was passing away,” Griffin says in a video explaining the album.

Read the full article and stream the album at The Wall Street Journal.

Singer performs song from new LP 'The Low Highway'

When he's not acting or writing books, Steve Earle is recording albums like his latest with the Dukes and Duchesses, The Low Highway. He visited the Late Show With David Letterman last night to perform "Invisible," a song that built from a simple acoustic-guitar intro to include swells of pedal steel from Chris Masterson and mournful violin from Eleanor Masterson, his wife, while Earle sang yearning lyrics from the perspective of an overlooked population: the homeless and indigent.

Read the full article at Rolling Stone. 

Folk-rock couple take an imaginative spin through a paper world

Patty Griffin's dreamy, nostalgic video for "Ohio" artfully combines intriguing design with earnest folk music. Directed and designed by Roy Taylor, the video's backdrop is made entirely from cut paper and pulled from the history books.

"I wanted to portray the overwhelming desire to reunite with family and loved ones and the spirit of those who helped," Griffin tells Rolling Stone. "Visuals were inspired by historical images such as the false bottom wagon, the stairway from the banks of the Ohio River leading to a safe house of [the abolitionist] John Rankin and a lantern hoisted up a flagpole to signal that bounty hunters and their dogs were not in the area."

Read the full article and watch the video at Rolling Stone. 

Houston's Wild Moccasins have been hand-picked by Of Montreal to be the main support act on their Athens-based friends' three-week spring U.S. theater tour, New West Records announced Thursday.

The two indie-pop bands have developed a similar sound -- drawing on elements of psychedelic '60s pop and '80s New Wave, with some folk and R&B accents -- and a genuine comradeship over the past few years. The Moccasins have opened Of Montreal's past several Houston shows, as well as the hometown release of the Athens band's most recent album, Paralytic Stalks, last year.

Read the full article at Houston Press.