Americana renaissance man has new album due April 16th

Click to listen to Steve Earle's 'Calico County'

Americana's reigning renaissance man Steve Earle does not know how to slow down. Not only is he working on a memoir and a new novel, but his new album with the Dukes (and Duchesses), The Low Highway, is due April 16th on New West Records. Now you can take an exclusive first listen to album cut "Calico County," a barroom stomper about some rough and rowdy characters, whose story Earle tells in a voice as gritty and gnarly as the track's lead guitar riff.

For the past several years, a record deal has been shimmering on Max Gomez’s horizon like some thirsty man’s mirage. But, that is pure history now. Last year, Gomez, 25, signed on with Los Angeles-based independent recording label, New West Records and is now set to release his debut album titled, “Rule the World,” on Tuesday (Jan. 22).

Gomez opens the album with the title tune. Brilliantly crafted with careful flourishes to bring out the substance inherent in the words of his song, this rendition is a show-stopper, returning again and again to its simple heartbeat.

From there, Gomez keeps a steady pace walking towards “where the pavement ends and the trouble begins,” leaning heavily on his country, blues and folk roots.

Track by track, sure-footed and full of wonder, Gomez takes his listeners for a dusty ride through the landscapes he has traveled on his own. They are not unfamiliar places — the dismal desert of heartbreak, the mountain streams where dreams live. But Gomez does not take the usual route to get us there. He drops pretense to favor all the tender places that eventually turn a piece of grit into a pearl.

“It’s a bit surreal to me to have finished the record,” says Gomez. “I’ve dreamt about making a record since I was a kid.”

Singer-songwriter Max Gomez goes straight from Taos to the big leagues.

Once upon a time in New Mexico, there was boy who was born with golden ears. Whenever he heard great music, it became part of him, and it would shape his destiny in magical ways that would be revealed over time.

When the lad was four, his parents played John Prine’s The Missing Years, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 1992. It was the first music the boy liked well enough to learn to sing along with. Years later, he would befriend and make music with songwriter Keith Sykes, who had collaborated with Prine on two of the boy’s favorite songs from that very album.

When he was 13, an older brother brought home Eric Clapton and B.B. King’s Riding with the King, the Grammys’ Best Traditional Blues Album of 2001. Their version of “Key to the Highway” led the boy to discover his favorite blues singer, Big Bill Broonzy, a country-blues legend who had died 30 years before his birth. A dozen years later, Gary Briggs, who had managed Clapton for Warner Bros. at the time of that recording, would sign the boy—now a young man whose voice had ripened to a rich, warm, café mocha timbre, and who had learned to write songs and play guitar in the modes of his folk-blues masters—to his first record deal.

Read the full article at New Mexico Magazine.

For More information, visit The Attic Sessions.

On Wednesday, January 23, American Songwriter is pleased to present John McCauley of Deer Tick and Robert Ellis at Nashville’s The Stone Fox. We sent these questions for Robert Ellis in a bottle out to sea, and got back these answers.

What’s happening? We hear you are at sea? What’s been the best show so far on Cayamo?

I’m in San Juan today. This cruise has been badass so far. Seen a lot of good music and lost some money in the casino. I don’t want to not mention anyone so let’s just say there has been a ton of great music. Lots of my favorite songwriters are on this boat.

You recently moved to Nashville. What are some of the things you’re enjoying about the city? Restaurants, bars, locals, etc.?

“Rule the World,” Max Gomez (New West)

Max Gomez packs a complicated agenda into a seemingly humble package with his aptly titled “Rule the World,” due for release Jan. 22, though he likely has only a modest expectation of his listeners: Take what you will.

On the surface, the native of Taos., N.M., comes across as a straightforward singer-songwriter, playing his acoustic guitar and singing about love.

Yet his lyrics have tricky layers of darkness to them, and unlike the traditional unassuming vocals of his genre, Gomez barely suppresses some crooner tendencies in his delivery. Also, “Rule the World” stirs into the roots-tinged folk brew an improbable combination of pop hooks and bluesy grit.

The Great White North is one of the last places you might think of when speaking of country-tinged music, but musicians like Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans are well-versed in the sounds of the American South.

Corb Lund's roots run as deep as those of the plants on the southern Alberta farm where he grew up. After spending some time at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton studying guitar and bass, Lund toured the world as the bassist for metal outfit the Smalls. After that group disbanded in 2001, Lund spent the next few years writing music with the band that would come to be known as the Hurtin' Albertans: bassist Kurt Ciesla, drummer Brady Valgardson and multi-instrumentalist Grant Siemens.

“Buddy and Jim”

Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale are longtime pals and longtime pros, songwriters who have collaborated far and wide in the realm of handmade, twangy, tradition-conscious country and roots-rock: Nashville’s Americana wing. Mr. Miller, 60, is a first-rank guitarist and a producer for singers including Emmylou Harris and Robert Plant. Mr. Lauderdale, 55, is primarily a singer and songwriter who has written hits for George Strait and the Dixie Chicks and made albums with the venerable Ralph Stanley and the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Mr. Lauderdale is the longtime host for the Americana Music Awards, where Mr. Miller leads the house band. They host an “outlaw country” satellite radio program, “The Buddy and Jim Show,” and finally got around to making a duet album, “Buddy and Jim.”

They took the duet mandate seriously. “Buddy and Jim” puts two-part harmony singing at its core; through the album, in verses and choruses, Mr. Miller and Mr. Lauderdale rarely sing alone. Looking back to the Louvin Brothers and the Everly Brothers, as well as to Sam and Dave, they share close-harmony, near-parallel lines that dovetail the grain in their voices. It’s a genial male-bonding album, conscious of history but also relaxed; it’s far less metaphysical than the albums Mr. Miller makes with his wife, Julie Miller. She wrote two songs with the duo and lent them one of her own: the album’s standout, “It Hurts Me,” an old-fashioned country waltz about love gone cold.

Read the full article at The New York Times.

It’s no secret Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale run with the same crowd, a crowd comprised of some of the leading ambassadors of American roots music. They launched a satellite radio show together earlier this year, they’ve co-commanded the stage of the Americana Music Awards for a good while — Lauderdale as droll host and Miller as laconic band leader — and their fingerprints are all over each other’s discographies.