Lineup for Taste of Syracuse festival

The Post-Standard's website has a rundown of the artists (including yours truly) performing at the Emerging Artists stage on June 6--check it out here.

I'm looking forward to playing this great downtown festival and checking out many area bands...

RIP Utah Phillips

Just received the sad word that this great folksinger, storyteller, and rabble rouser left us over the weekend. Back in 1997, I had a memorable conversation with Phillips and Ani DiFranco about music and politics--the full story is included in my book Rock Troubadours. Phillips had just received a lifetime achievement award from Folk Alliance, and I loved this little fable he told onstage when accepting the honor. Later he retold it to me on the phone, as follows...

"The only problem with being made top folkie is the young ones--they come looking for you.

"I walked through the swinging doors of my local music store, my 1935 Gibson slung low on my hip. And there he was in the street, waiting for me: the kid. He plugged his Ovation guitar into his effects box, leveled it at me, and sprayed me with a burst of highly autobiographical, metaphorical verbiage. I flinched. Slowly I raised my 1935 Gibson and plugged him with the first two verses of 'Red River Valley.' He fell to the ground, stunned by the simplicity of an authorless folk song. I looked at him, lying there in a widening pool of angst. I slowly lowered my 1935 Gibson guitar and muttered under my breath, 'OK, who’s next?' as I turned and stalked into the postmodern deconstructionist night."

Utah, you will be missed.

Humming My Way Back Home now at Amazon MP3 shop

Downloads of the new solo record have landed at Amazon.

CDs and downloads are also available direct from me, and from CD Baby, iTunes, and other online stores.

KT Tunstall on discovering the loop pedal and writing "Black Horse and the Cherry Tree," 2007

From my interview with KT Tunstall, just published in Acoustic Guitar (read it here). This is the second in a run of three cover stories I've just done for the magazine (last month was Keller Williams, next up Bob Weir).

"It was after the first record was made. A few months before [the record was due out in the UK in 2004], I was going on a solo tour of coffee shops in Scotland. I'd just made this album and it sounded like a band, and I couldn’t face just going out with a guitar and being that girl in the coffee shop who sings about being dumped. I wanted to do something different. I'd seen this brilliant guy called Son of Dave, who beatboxes or uses a shaker or harmonica and then sings crazy old blues music. It was just brilliant what he did using this loop pedal. And then I saw Jim White, the American singer-songwriter, using it--sometimes with his voice and sometimes with his guitar but never together. My friend helped me work out how to put both of them through the same pedal, just by mixing them in a remote desk.

"I wrote 'Black Horse' while I was trying to learn how to use the pedal. Tom Waits was an early inspiration for me, and I used to listen to a lot of James Brown. I was really envious that these songs were over a constant groove, and singer-songwriter stuff was always reliant on constant chord movement. I really wanted to write a song over a groove that didn't change, and the pedal was obviously perfect for that."

New video: the Grateful Dead's "New Speedway Boogie"

Just sat down today and knocked this out. Can't seem to get enough of this song lately...