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.

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.”

Dream pop duo pays homage to the ’70s with pastoral imagery and matching jackets

On TLC’s ’90s anthem “Waterfalls” the fearless lady trio preaches, “Don’t go chasing waterfalls. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.”

But when it came to Widowspeak’s sophomore LP, Almanac, release in January, the Brooklyn, N.Y. dream pop duo made the bold decision to ignore that advice.

The band chose to feature a photograph of a waterfall on the cover, not solely for its beauty, but because it provides thematic and geographical context to the album, which was recorded in a 100-year-old barn in the Hudson River Valley in New York State.

Seattle-based production duo creates moody atmosphere with effected vocal samples

You take a sound—any sound—record it and then change its nature by a multiplicity of operations.”

So begins Summer’s Gone, the debut LP from Seattle-based electronic duo Odesza, with a distinguished-sounding gentleman explaining the basics of sound editing. “You record it at different speeds, you play it backwards, you add it to itself over and over again. You adjust filters, echoes, acoustic qualities. You combine segments of magnetic tape. By these means and many others you create sounds which no one has ever heard before.”

Seattle band, Pickwick, leaves its songs open to interpretation

Rarely does a band avoid putting an autobiographical slant on its music. But when it comes to Pickwick’s forthcoming release, Can’t Talk Medicine, due out on March 12, singer/songwriter Galen Disston and multi-instrumentalist Kory Kruckenberg are determined to keep their distance.

“Each of the songs on the record is about an idea, character, moment or story I heard about that seemed to be completely without context,” Disston says. “They seemed completely original to me. None of it is personal or autobiographical.”

‘Old soul’ singer Brad Mackeson rejects overproduction

These days, you aren’t going to surprise anyone in the world of indie rock by attempting to breathe new life into old folk chord progressions. A quick glance at some of this year’s biggest Grammy winners will tell you that.

But there is a reason that a generation of up-and-coming musicians have been dusting off old Bob Dylan records and finding a use for the harmonicas that were shelved during the ’80s and ’90s. Folk music resonates with people in a way other genres can’t.