Megan Saunders and the rest of the members of The Driftless—Blair McLaughlin, Jeffrey Kissell and Rob Smith—love their band. “We have a good time with it,” says Saunders (mandolin, banjo, vocals). “I’ve been in bands off and on for a lot of my life and sometimes it can take a lot of work, but with this group there isn’t any of the ego or drama you tend to get. ... It’s fun.” Not only is this evident when speaking with Saunders, who will use some variation of this quote roughly half a dozen times during our interview, but you can sense it in their music, too.

Coming out of a cold winter with Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins

The title The Wilderness does a fine job of conveying the stark tone of the Canadian alt-folk/rock group Cowboy Junkies’ newest release, whose dominant themes are loss, loneliness and desperation. Much of the album’s somber feel can be chalked up to the state of confusion that the band’s guitarist and chief songwriter, Michael Timmins, recently found himself in as he grappled with relationship, family and aging issues.
As Timmins puts it, The Wilderness is about being at a point in life “where you look up, and you realize that you’re at a place of great beauty in some ways, but also a place which can be a little bit frightening. You’re a little bit lost: You never really expected to find yourself here, and you don’t really know where you are.”

Bryn Loosley is methodical when it comes to his music. “If you locked me in a room for two hours and told me I could come out after I’d written a song, I’d still be in there at the end of the two hours,” Loosley chuckles. This helps explain why his forthcoming release, Blood Year, is coming out five years after his last record, 2008’s The Wrecker. A full-time teacher, Loosley cannot write, record and tour as often as other musicians do, so sometimes he has to challenge himself.

“The heart of the ocean beats in mine,” The Gembrokers confess on the stripped-down track “Mountain Lion,” off their 2012 self-titled release. This notion—a tranquil, undulating heartbeat—permeates the trio’s sound. But unlike the sea, which has existed since the beginning of time, The Gembrokers came together just four and a half years ago, when Dorothy (guitar/banjo/autoharp/harmonica) saw two people—Chelsea (slide guitar/fiddle) and Amelia (guitar/banjo/accordion/fiddle) - playing music in a UC Santa Cruz meadow.

Inspiration comes natural to folk-soul strummer Sean Hayes

Looking back, Sean Hayes says he worked on the title track of his latest album, Before We Turn To Dust, for about eight years.
The lyric, "You may spend all of your money before you turn to dust, but you will never spend all of your love," had been bouncing around in his head for close to a decade, the singer-songwriter says. It would crop up in his mind from time to time, but Hayes never really knew what the line meant until his first son was born.

Stephanie Schneiderman’s music may be ever-changing, but her message remains constant

Whether she is performing with the Portland, Ore.-based indie pop-rock band Dirty Martini or going solo—as she will on Thursday at Don Quixote’s—Stephanie Schneiderman is constantly evolving as an artist.

“I’m always trying to do something that’s different for me, even if I can’t speak to it being different or not for anybody else,” Schneiderman says.

Thanks to Ona Stewart, guitarist and songwriter for Santa Cruz bluegrass/Americana band The Naked Bootleggers, you might have a secret life you don’t know about. “When I see somebody on the street, I always make up a story,” Stewart says with a chuckle. “My wife laughs at me because I’m constantly saying, ‘Look at that couple. They’ve only been together for a week.’ I just try to make things up in my head.”

The splendor of Spiritualized’s limitless space rock is in its relentless and familiar flow

Wow! It’s like you’re next door now,” Jason Pierce says, after a series of inaudible phone calls. Though the London-based frontman for Spiritualized is pleased that we’re finally able to connect, he claims, “I liked it when we couldn’t hear each other. There was so much room for error before.”

Larry Hosford has been making music since the 1960s, and the reason he keeps recording and performing after all these years is quite simple. “It’s easy to get into music, but I looked around one day and discovered that it’s very hard to get out,” Hosford says with a laugh. “So I’ve just kept on doing it.” Hosford has had one prolific career. He played for multiple Santa Cruz-area bands back in the ’60s and ’70s—most notably in the seminal band Snail—before going solo, recorded two albums for Leon Russell’s Shelter Records label in Los Angeles, got four songs to appear on Billboard’s country music charts, and even jammed once with Willie Nelson. But he does have one regret.

Antsy McClain and his Flamingoheads get national attention with PBS concert series

Antsy McClain is a Santa Cruz success story, which is all the more intriguing as McClain is a Nashville, Tenn. resident. For years now, McClain has been regaling Santa Cruz with musical tales of his life in a fictitious trailer park called Pine View Heights, and it looks like McClain might soon be able to afford a double-wide. His humorous, catchy songs, along with his band, The Trailer Park Troubadours, will be the center of one episode of a new PBS series entitled Sierra Stages, which will feature national music acts—including Tommy Emmanuel, Roy Rogers, Blame Sally, and more—performing in venues around Northern California.

For the members of bluegrass/folk band Steep Ravine, springboards are important. “Bluegrass is a springboard for our compositional ideas,” says violinist Jan Purat. “A lot of bluegrass bands play traditional bluegrass or learn a Bill Monroe mandolin solo and play it note for note. But with us, each player brings something special to the table when they’re soloing. We’re not intentionally trying to make these songs sound new, but that’s what pours out of us.”

Janis Ian: still a voice for the marginalized

As the 18^th-century writer Jonathan Swift once observed, “When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.” Gender bias aside, that statement rang especially true in the mid-’60s, when the racial tension of the times voiced itself through a 14-year-old folk singer/songwriter with a genius-level IQ. Sung from the perspective of a white girl being condemned for having a black boyfriend, Janis Ian’s song “Society’s Child” earned its precocious young composer numerous death threats. Strangers spit in her food at restaurants, tripped her at concerts and sent her copious amounts of hate mail, sometimes placing razor blades in the envelopes to make her cut her fingers. One especially enterprising dunce (or perhaps a confederacy of them) even burned down an Atlanta radio station for playing “Society’s Child.”