Alt-country | Musicosity

Michelle Shocked

Michelle Shocked is a traveller, a troubadour, a 'picker-poet', as they say in Texas. As a young feminist, she left Texas to travel, Kerouac-style, and was caught up in Reagan-era grassroots politics. Her musical career was ignited by a bootleg recording made around a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire on a Sony walkman. Released in England as ‘The Texas Campfire Tapes’ without Shocked’s authority, its success abroad enticed Mercury Records to offer the newcomer a recording contract.

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Kurt Wagner & Cortney Tidwell present KORT

While Kurt Wagner’s role as bandleader in seminal soul/country/folk collective Lambchop sees him deal in multiple shades of deep-orange warmth, Cortney Tidwell’s solo career is often shaded by a kind of icy detachment; an engaging, beautiful coldness. At first glance they might not seem the most natural fit for an album of country takes from the 60s and 70s, but look a little deeper and Invariable Heartache makes perfect sense.

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Micah P. Hinson

Micah P. Hinson is a singer/songwriter from Abilene, Texas with a warm, husky voice. His music has an americana/alternative country slant, with hints of gospel and blues. Micah P. Hinson and the Gospel of Progress, his first real album, was produced in 2004 by The Earlies, Micah's friends, collaborators and sometimes tour buddies (where they play as his backing band). In 2005, his earlier 4-track recordings were produced and released properly as an album under the title The Baby & The Satellite. Micah has toured with and opened for artists such as Will Oldham, Iron & Wine, David Gray and Calexico.

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Raul Malo

A Floridian of Cuban descent, Raul Malo started playing bass guitar while in high school and was a member of a small band playing the high school dance circuit. That band was known alternately as The Boys, The Tom Boys, and The Basics with Malo sharing vocal duties with guitarist, Tommy Anthony. In 1990, he became the vocalist for the four-man band, The Mavericks, for whom he penned most of the songs.

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Jimmy Webb

Jimmy Webb (born August 15, 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma) is an idiosyncratic American popular music composer. Jimmy Webb is responsible for writing numerous popular and Top 10 hits sung by a disparate group of artists, including Glen Campbell ("Galveston"); Art Garfunkel ("All I Know"); Donna Summer and many others. Webb's father was a Baptist minister and a former Marine. His mother died when he was a teenager. His most popular songs were all composed when he was between 19 and 21 years of age.

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Jason Collett

The best songs don’t just tell a story set to music – they capture a moment, encapsulate a feeling and draw in the listener, in a way that’s at once singularly personal and completely universal. When Toronto singer-songwriter Jason Collett was mulling over titles for his new album, the by-turns effervescent and elegiac Here’s To Being Here, he stumbled across a line in an anthology of poetry by his friend Emily Haines’ (Metric) late father Paul, a well-known avant-garde jazz poet.

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The Audreys

The Audreys are an Australian five-piece blues/roots band who formed in Adelaide, South Australia in 2004. Their debut album, Between Last Night and Us saw them collect the 2006 ARIA Award for Best Blues & Roots Album. Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Taasha Coates says it took her and fellow songwriter/guitarist Tristan Goodall an age to get back to writing: “We were just a little Adelaide band that made an album, then suddenly we were touring constantly and playing on bigger and bigger stages.

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The Weight

The Weight is: 1) Country / Soul / Powerpop band from NYC - http://www.myspace.com/theweightnyc/
Members include: Joseph Plunket, Uncle Will Noland, Jay Ellis, Fletcher "Poor Boy" Johnson, and Johnny Carpenter 2) A Progressive rock band from Sweden consisting
Rikard Sjöblom (lead vocals, keyboards), Petter Diamant (drums), Robert Hansen (bass) and Mattias Finn (guitar).
They had released one album in 2005.

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The Yearlings

Roots/alt. country duo The Yearlings combine warm harmonies with delicate flat-picking and sparse country blues to create songs that are at once haunting and soothing. Hailing from Adelaide, The Yearlings have pushed new limits in Australia's Roots/Alt. country scene. Robyn Chalklen and Chris Parkinson have wasted no time in getting down to the business of making music since meeting at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in 2000. Their successful self-titled debut album (released on Reckless Records in 2003) was recorded live in 8 hours and long-listed for an ARIA nomination.

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Kinky Friedman

Richard S. "Kinky" Friedman (born October 31 or November 1, 1944) is an American singer, songwriter, novelist, humorist, politician and former columnist for Texas Monthly who styles himself in the mold of popular American satirists Will Rogers and Mark Twain. He was one of two independent candidates in the 2006 election for the office of Governor of Texas. Receiving 12.6% of the vote, Friedman placed fourth in the five-person race.

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