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One of my favorite t-shirts is one I’ve never actually encountered in the wild, though it’s described in Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland. It reads “Introverts unite! We’re here, we’re uncomfortable, and we want to go home.” I can relate to that, and so can Courtney Barnett. Since first gaining notice with her A Sea Of Split Peas double EP in 2013, Barnett has steadily built an audience for her witty, self-deprecating tunes, typically framed by her laconic vocals and dynamic guitar playing. Already something of a unicorn as a left-handed female Australian guitar ace / singer-songwriter, Barnett is also intensely shy.…

Time for a history lesson. Once upon a time nice people with guitars actually wrote songs with literary content. They told stories about specific events, fictional or real, that resonated with the artists. (There was another subgenre of music that involved portraits of people. We’ll get into that later.) Nowadays, I’m not sure we have any pop stars who can spell resonated. But I know, since you are a discerning music fan who is reading the Daily Vault instead of (*gag*) Pitchfork, that you want to broaden your musical horizons. You want to grow. You want to learn. You want…

Pete Mancini pays attention. This is something you would understand even if you never spoke with the Long Island singer-songwriter; it’s right there in every one of his detailed, nuanced, emotionally resonant songs. Like so many of the best creatives, he seems to soak up events around him like a sponge and transmute them into art—in his case, songs that carry on the rich storytelling tradition of Americana, while increasingly infusing it with the melodic pizzazz of power pop. Mancini’s new studio album Killing The Old Ways is his third as a solo artist, along with a live album and…

We all live inside a frame of reference, a body of perceptions and beliefs about how the world works and what our place in it looks like. The moments when that frame is rocked, even splintered, are among the most important along our life’s path; how we react to them determines whether we will continue stubbornly being the person we are today, or adapt and grow. By turns absorbing, insightful, lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny, Songs by Honeybird (Wampus, March 29) is a story that, like its author Peter McDade—son of the South, rock drummer, history professor—contains multitudes.On the surface the…

It’s funny the things you notice when you’re out in the audience at a rock show.I saw the Greg Kihn Band no less than nine times in their 1980-83 heyday, rising with them from small clubs to opening slots in college auditoriums and then headlining those same venues. Though the band consistently delivered its Buddy Holly-inspired power pop with abundant energy, it was apparent from the first show I caught that one of these things was not like the others. Frontman Kihn, Steve Wright (bass / harmony vocals), Dave Carpender (guitar), and Gary Phillips (keyboards / guitar) played hard and…

You won't have to look very far to find books and documentaries about the early days of the New York or Los Angeles punk scene. Cleveland, on other hand, despite being a hotbed of punk activity in the late '70s and early '80s, hasn't seen even a fraction of the attention of the aforementioned cities. Adele Bertei fills some of that void here with a brief memoir of her time in the underground rock circles of Cleveland, where Peter Laughner (Rocket From The Tombs, Pere Ubu) took her under his wing in an abstract mentor sort of way. The two…

The Daily Vault has played host to a wide variety of features over the past 25 years, from interviews and concert reviews to book and film reviews, our notorious opinion essays, and our expansive retrospectives and rankings columns. What follows is a somewhat representative but typically eclectic sampling of our favorite features from the past quarter century. Most are single pieces, though in the name of being true to the “favorite” label we’ve also included five features in their entirety: our retrospectives, Darren Paltrowitz’s long-running music news column “Keeping Up,” our rankings feature, “20 Albums That Influenced Me” from our…

These are 25 of the albums that mattered most, that influenced others, that left an indelible mark on our collective consciousness—25 albums for the ages, presented in chronological order:    Miles Davis – Kind Of Blueby Jason Warburg Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylanby Christopher Thelen James Brown – Live At The Apolloby Sean McCarthy The Beach Boys – Pet Soundsby Jeff Clutterbuck The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandby Jason Warburg The Kinks – The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Societyby David Bowling Jimi Hendrix – Are You Experienced?by David Bowling The Rolling Stones –…