Parklife DC today announces the best in DC concerts with our annual awards program, named for our mascot, DC’s own state bird — the Wood Thrush. Our Thrushie Awards salute bands, venues, and music festivals in line with our mission to review live music concerts.
Congratulations to the 2023 Thrushie Awards winners!
“There are two kinds of bands in our line of work,” Ashley McBryde told the crowd at Rams Head Live!, recently. “The ones that just go through the last few shows quickly, so they can just get it over with and go home. And then there’s bands that give everything they’ve got. And we are going to give you absolutely everything we’ve got before they kick us out of here.”
On “the 101st of 101 shows,” the Grammy and CMA award winning singer left it all on the stage in Baltimore.
Acclaimed psych indie rocker Karina Rykman released her debut album, Joyride, in August via AWAL. She then embarked on the Joyride Tour, which recently took her to DC for a show at The Atlantis with opener Coyote Island.
Steve Satzberg was there to photograph the show!
As fall ended in Washington, DC, with colder days, the pace of the live music concert schedule slowed with the approach of Christmas Day. But to the wonder of DC’s dancing denizens, New York post-punks Interpol brightened both our attitudes and our calendars considerably by announcing three late-year dates at 9:30 Club — all of which promptly sold out.
On the first of those three dates, Interpol frontman Paul Banks and company burst onto the stage with vigor and verve, clearly very pleased with the opportunity to combat the pending winter doldrums with a fine selection of tunes selected from each of the band’s seven studio albums.
Movie star Keanu Reeves plays bass, and he does so in an assiduous trio called Dogstar. He played very well, with determination and grit, in a recent performance the Howard Theatre in DC, where he said not a single word to the audience.
But that was okay. Keanu let frontman Bret Domrose be the frontman, and Reeves quietly yet magnetically allowed the music to carry him away while he played.
Introducing a cover of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” recently at Pearl Street Warehouse, Nashville singer-songwriter Gabe Lee acknowledged the late John Prine’s influence over musicians in his hometown. I wasn’t surprised: Listening to Gabe’s catalog, the similarities in his vocal style to Prine’s and the debt he owes him are clear.
Like Prine, Lee straddles the space between country, folk, and even a bit of rock ‘n’ roll. He described his album, Drink The River, released earlier this year, as a folk album, because “it’s about the people.” In that sense, he is very much a descendant of Prine, writing about the lives, loves, struggles, and successes of every day people.
Livingston Taylor and Karla Bonoff have been around for decades, making great music, but flying under the radar. But they truly have great songs to share, as they showed in their annual Home for the Holidays show recently at The Birchmere.
Livingston is the younger brother of James Taylor. It’s a little known fact that all three siblings in the family, including their sister Kate, are musicians. Now 73, he’s been playing music and writing songs for over 50 years, since he was 17.
Liv a fine acoustic guitar player in addition to writing terrific songs. In addition to recording music and performing, he also taught for many years at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, which makes sense, as he kind of looks like an academic. This is not a criticism! He’s very dapper.
Singer/songwriter Bryson Tiller recently put on a dark and moody performance at The Fillmore Silver Spring, marking his second sold-out show of the year at the shiny music venue.
I missed the March show, so being there for the second leg was a must.
On Nov. 10, Allison Russell woke up to a text from her friend Brandi Carlile. She learned that she had been nominated for four Grammy Awards: Best Americana Album, for this year’s The Returner; Best American Roots Song and Performance, for the song of the same title; and an additional Best American Roots Performance for “Eve Was Black.” (It’s great to have nominations, but having two in the same category could lead to vote-splitting and make her less likely to win.)
The Returner is Russell’s second solo album, coming two years after her debut, 2021’s Outside Child. That album received three Grammy nominations: Best Americana Album, and Best American Roots Song and Performance for “Nightflyer.” She also won Album of the Year from the Americana Music Association as well as the Juno Award, in her native Canada, for Roots Music Album of the Year.
Bluegrass is making its way to bigger stages and to more listeners than it ever has before, and no one deserves more credit for this escalation than Billy Strings.
The skillful flatpicker has in the matter of only a few years become a household name as he’s collected a Grammy, filled increasingly large venues, and unquestionably turned countless listeners on to a style of music that they might have never appreciated otherwise.
Billy and his band packed CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore on back-to-back evenings this past weekend, drawing thousands of fans to the storied, recently renovated downtown venue for what manifested as two monumental nights of revelry in the Charm City.
