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I wasn’t going to write this piece. It’s exhausting enough right now (April 3, 2020) just trying to keep up as the world we knew three short weeks ago continues to spin wildly off its orbit, without attempting to grieve on the page for an artist whose work has given me decades of enjoyment, now dead at just 52 of COVID-19. This week has been one gut-punch after another. The trick of art, though—the kind that worms its way into people’s hearts and minds and lives, populating or punctuating moments both significant and insignificant—is that it grants a kind of…

Legend has it that Derek Trucks bought his first guitar for five dollars at a yard sale when he was nine years old. Struggling to get his small hands to form chords on a full-size guitar neck led him to learn using a slide. A genuine child prodigy, Trucks had his first paying gig at 11, and by the time he was 13 had played alongside no less than Buddy Guy. By age 15 he had started his own group, the Derek Trucks Band, and had begun sitting in with his uncle’s band—his uncle being Butch Trucks, longtime drummer for…

 I know you're tiredAnd you ain't sleeping wellUninspiredAnd likely mad as hellBut wherever you areI hope the high road leads you home again- Jason Isbell, “Hope The High Road”Hanging onto your idealism these days can feel like hard work. Every day there’s some piece of news that makes you shake your head, that feels almost designed to make you feel a little more cynical or a little more hopeless. And then along comes a guy like Jason Isbell—an Alabama-born singer-songwriter with a hell-raising past and barely half a dozen years of sobriety, singing artful, incisive songs about hope and connection…

Yeah, okay, fine, he wrote that song on the radio, the one that went “Ev-uh-ree-thing’s gonna be alright / Rock-a-bye” while extending “everything” to four distinctly enunciated syllables and most of an octave—but Shawn Mullins is and always has been so much more than that one magical earworm. By the time “Lullaby” and the album it sprang from, Soul’s Core, came out in 1998, Mullins had already been an active recording artist for nearly a decade, and he’s kept at it steadily ever since, building a repertoire of soulful Americana that reaches into blues, country, rock and pop in search…

The first three albums released by Last Charge Of The Light Horse, the vehicle for the songs and voice of Long Island singer-songwriter-guitarist Jean-Paul Vest, each won Indie and/or Album Of The Year awards from yours truly in the Daily Vault’s annual “Best Of” recaps. The January release of the group’s fourth full-length Race To The Sound thus immediately qualifies as an event. And it lives up to expectations; from narrating the creator’s eternal battle with self-doubt, to examining a particularly twisted relationship, to celebrating burdens suddenly lifted, Race To The Sound is filled with searing moments of insight described…

Legend has it that it took 100 takes in the studio before Tom Petty was satisfied that he and the Heartbreakers had done full justice to “Refugee,” the leadoff track on 1979’s Damn The Torpedoes. The song turned out to be their breakthrough, the single that lit a rocket under their until-then gradual transformation from regional up-and-comers into breakout national stars. I like to think that stubbornness wasn’t so much about perfectionism as a determination to get the most you can out of the materials you have to work with. That always seemed to be the Petty ethos, right down…