Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's new release Best Troubador flips through the Merle Haggard songbook, landing on pages unmoored from their time and located anew. With such a prolific catalog of resplendent songs spanning a nearly fifty year career, Bonnie and the Bonafide United Musicians were tasked with undertaking the singular and unwavering creativity of such a figure. Best Troubador does just that, representing an earnest and faithful reworking of Haggard's great songs. Released on one of Merle's lesser known albums, 1996, "No Time to Cry"... (read more)

Faun Fables are back on the road--full of life with a renewed vibrancy, sparkling with the wonder and playfulness that the (now) family band is known for! Continuing their song-telling tradition, Faun Fables'  most recent album Born of the Sun is exploding with Dawn McCarthy's striking vocals, contrapuntal harmonies and breathy unison chants. And while all that is something to behold on record, it can be particularly striking in concert!

With summer vacation on the horizon, Dawn, Nils and the... (read more)

Introducing The Peacers! Since the release of a self-titled album in 2015, all new members (Shayde Sartin, Mike Shoun and Bo Moore) have reformed around Mike Donovan, and they've been gigging in and around SF consistently. In the spirit of (at least partial) reboot, the dudes have even added the aforementioned "The" to their name!

Introducing The Crimsmen (again, das reboot) brims like a bottomless sack of great tunes flecked with hazy shade and splashing watery sunshine on the back of... (read more)

Drag City is excited to announce the release of Fumio Miyashita's Live On The Boffomundo Show! Fumio was the leader of one of the most revered Japanese space rock outfits, The Far East Family Band. The Boffomundo Show was a public access television show focusing on progressive music which filmed in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Boffomundo producers Aaron Weiner and Ron Curtiss soon partnered with Tony Harrington of All Ears Records to create The All Ears Boffomundo... (read more)

Lush, ornate synthetic arrangements wash over with a sweltering and hushed finesse in Laetitia Sadier's brand new video for "The Woman With The Invisible Necklace"! The latest single from the just released Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble album, Find Me Finding You, "The Woman With The Invisible Necklace" exemplifies Laetitia's knack for producing seemingly effortless melody coupled with swift, poignant lyrical themes that take aim at political and interpersonal ideologies. The video, directed by Olia Eichenbaum, presents visuals reminiscent of propagandist films from the 20th century,... (read more)

Mark Fosson's been playing music for nearly 50 years now. Solo Guitar is the 5th album released under his name in all that time, which gives an insight into the nature of his music; when it is time for Mark to commit to something underneath his fingers, regardless of whether that is after two years, ten or twenty, that's what's right.

Sure, it makes for a funny career arc, but as far as the music that falls out of a guitar over... (read more)

Royal Trux have been flirting with the idea of expectation since their inception. For them, a touchdown was best achieved in reverse, via counter-intelligent means! Riding high off the announce of Platinum Tips + Ice Cream, Royal Trux's arsenal of the unexpected, the innovative and the calculated are flying in a million different directions. With one last stop in the states at the El Club in Detroit, the untamed Truxian brew will be fizzing and overflowing all the way across the pond to... (read more)

Two tracks culled from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's  Haggard-tribute Best Troubador sessions save a little for Tommy! Tommy Collins was the stage name for Leonard Sipes, whose presence on the Bakersfield scene and in the country charts during the 1950s was no doubt a major inspiration for Merle Haggard during his early years of apprenticeship. "Carolyn" tells the tale of Tommy's rise and fall and rise again in deft images; a plain-spoke and loving tribute to a hero of Merle's.

Tommy contributed... (read more)

Visually set in the austre backdrop of monochromatic black and white visuals, Bill MacKay's "Powder Mill Park"is, contrastingly, bright and full of life! Shot on site in MacKay's home state of Illinois, director Dan Mohr captures the serene and harmonious composure of euphonious guitar in his video for "Powder Mill Park," from Bill's freshly released album, Esker!   

The scenery for "Powder Mill Park" is wide and expansive, with room for Bill to stretch, stroll and breath-much like the song itself! Free of... (read more)

ADMINISTERING YOUR EPIDERMAL  

Is it 2018 yet? Back in March, we retired to our subcutaneous Ivory Bunker to sit out a) the First-Nation Winter (the hottest April in a thousand years, we're told) and b) the RSD Parade street closures. But then the dialup went and we lost track of the time and well....a few weeks back, we sent the Drag City honorary groundhog up to get us a scene report, and that lousy woodchucker never came back! So we're... (read more)