Last week, DC swooned over the beautifully talented Laufey, who left the bow-filled crowd mesmerized. Having spent a few years of her childhood growing up in Washington, DC, she told her audience at The Anthem that her two back-to-back shows felt “almost like hometown shows.”
Her stunning vocals and melodic jazzy tunes truthfully encapsulated the entirety of the venue, and her personable nature swept the audience off their feet.
During Aaron Lee Tasjan’s recent set at DC9, he covered “Drunken Angel,” Lucinda Williams’s ode to the late Blaze Foley, as a duet with opening act Molly Martin. It was a fitting cover, as it paid tribute to another artist who, like Aaron, has been called “country,” even though she’s really not. (At least since the album “Drunken Angel” appeared on in 1998, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.)
Aaron has said, “”I can tell who’s been paying attention by the people who say I’m moving away from country music.” He was never making country music to begin with, even if he does look up to Lucinda (who I consider a heartland rocker) and Todd Snider (I’ll get back to you to when I figure out what exactly he does).
There’s no cutoff date for launching a career in music. Ben Carr has been recording and performing for about two decades, but he believes his is just getting started in earnest.
As the mastermind producer and multi-instrumentalist operating the playfully titled project CARRTOONS, Carr’s a testament to steadfastness and fortitude. He quietly put together an impressive list of credits working with a bevy of stars and now, with his own catalogue and a collection of striking videos to accompany it, has a growing hoard of his own followers. Many of them recently showed up for a performance at Songbyrd Music House in DC.
A Blacktop Mojo concert is like diving headfirst into a Southern rock-infused sonic tornado. The Palestine, Texas five-piece definitely know how to captivate an audience!
From the second they hit the first chord, the band exuded a raw intensity that instantly grabbed hold of the crowd’s attention in a recent opening set for Clutch at The National in Richmond, Virginia.
Clutch fans got to experience the band’s whirlwind of rock ‘n’ roll energy firsthand, and it left them exhilarated and craving more, on a recent night at The National in Richmond, Virginia.
Few musicians can enchant and regale a venue in the manner of Roberto Carlos Lange.
More commonly known by his performing and recording name, Helado Negro, the talented South Florida native is one of the rare songwriters who weaves two languages into his music, and he does so to dazzling effect, as seen in a recent turn at The Atlantis in DC.
Has society overused the word “trippy?” I feel like maybe it’s fallen out of fashion lately? But then how else to describe the recent performance of STRFKR at 9:30 Club as anything other than trippy? Well, it also was a feel good, lighthearted, and dance-inducing experience.
But mostly it was trippy.
Editor’s Note: Parklife DC contributor Casey Vock has been the staff photographer and writer for the Baltimore Old Time Festival the past three years. He was on hand this year for the fifth edition of the event, held at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Below is the event’s official announcement.
BALTIMORE, Md. — More than 1,500 people from 26 different states made their way to the fifth annual Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, bringing pickers, fiddlers, and players of all stringed instruments to rejoice along the waters of the Charm City’s Inner Harbor on April 19 and 20.
A convincing demonstration of the city’s thriving old time and roots music scene, the Old Time Festival saw attendance more than triple from 2023 as it packed the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) in the first year at its new location after four memorable years at Creative Alliance.
I recently lost a close friend who died suddenly. We had been friends for over 25 years, and I miss him and think about him every day, just as four-time Grammy Award®–winning record producer Larry Klein thinks about his friend, legendary singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who passed away in 2016. It is the emotion of that loss that fueled Larry’s musical directorship of the National Symphony Pops Orchestra’s performance of Here It Is: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen at the Kennedy Center on April 26-27.
The NSO performance drew its inspiration from an album of the same name which Larry produced for Blue Note Records and was released in 2022.
One of the many unique joys of experiencing live music is seeing a packed house utterly transfixed by what’s going on the stage. The British sextet Black Country, New Road took a completely new set of material to the Baltimore Soundstage Friday night and made those fortunate enough to be there come away feeling like they’d witnessed something special.
Black Country, New Road (BCNR) began in 2018 in Cambridgeshire, England, and released two full-length albums by 2022: the collection titled For the first time in 2021 and the critically acclaimed Ants From Up Here the following year. But in that short time, the band went through some pretty harrowing turns.
