Tim Easton & The Freelan Barons "Burgundy Red"

My New Year’s resolutions are still in place. I have given up gluten and sugar (beware the white powder…) and laughingly came up with a colorful description: red meat, yellow liquor and black coffee. It hasn’t been hard to keep to this regime for me, and rest assured the yellow liquor is a sometime "thing," not an everyday occurrence. Red wine works too. The other part of my resolution is to dance every day. That is a fairly easy thing to accomplish, even if it’s with my iPod blaring with external speakers in the privacy of my living room. Fun.

You can dance to this song for sure. “Burgundy Red” is a throwback to the rock and roll of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. Tim Easton delivers the locomotion. He is a man on the move, no really! Tim Easton and his family just made the trek east, to the burgeoning music community of East Nashville, all the way from Joshua Tree in California. He will now be in striking distance for a visit to Folk Alliance in Memphis coming up in a few weeks,  before he heads to Europe for a quick tour. We had the pleasure of filming him, along with Alex Livingstone, Aaron Lee Tasjan, and Mark Stepro during our Spring Music Fog Marathon at Threadgill’s last March. BTW, you can help make this year’s Music Fog Marathon a reality by your contribution here. The song “Burgundy Red” came out on Tim’s CD Porcupine. Here is the Music Fog version with The Freelan Barons.

-Jessie Scott

The Fog Goes Kickstarter - You Can Help

Contribution LinkAll the cool kids are doing it these days. In these tough times, it has become the norm to go directly to the audience to fund projects. Today, Music Fog joins the ranks of the Kickstarter generation. We love what we do. Getting to shine a light on underdog artists has been our mission for the last three years. We are proud of what we have created, and honored that such amazing artists have shared their talent with us. The Americana genre, though not considered mainstream, might just have the highest per capita amount of genius, per virtual square foot of its landscape.

We really want to do another Music Fog Marathon at Threadgill’s WHQ this March in Austin. And we really need your help to do it this time around. We need to cover both travel expenses along with production and streaming costs. If you have enjoyed our videos, we ask that you contribute what you can here. We have several levels of participation, and every bit helps. If we are going to make our way down to Texas, time is of the essence. So is going viral. If you dig what we do, help us out, both with dollars and by spreading the word to other Americana or Music Fog fans. If we make the nut, expect us to be streaming from the back room at Threadgill’s, so even if you are not in Austin, you will be able to share in the fun. Here is our Kickstarter video. (mobile users click here to watch the video)

-Jessie Scott

Dave Alvin & The Guilty Ones "Black Rose of Texas"

I had the great pleasure of seeing Dave Alvin play again at Sam’s Burger Joint in San Antonio just before Christmas, and was once again struck by his humility, his soulfulness and his sheer talent. And by the way, that extends past his music, and includes the breaks in between the songs - erudite or heartfelt stories that he delivers with pinpoint accuracy, painting pictures with his words that take you there. You cheer him, learn music history from him, and sometimes mourn with him. Today’s song is one of those. After Dave’s best friend and band mate Chris Gaffney died in 2008, Dave put a project together in 2009 in which he was backed by the Guilty Women, instead of his Guilty Men.

Dave Alvin with Lisa Pankratz & Amy Farris.Today’s song is an homage by Dave Alvin to yet another band mate, Amy Farris, who was an amazing singer and fiddler, who was one of the Guilty Women.  She sadly, passed in 2009.  The song is called “Black Rose of Texas.”  I cried when Dave played it in San Antonio a month ago, both for his preamble to it and for the song itself. You can find it on Dave’s latest album Eleven Eleven.   And a note on that, there is an expanded version of the album coming in April, with nearly three hours of music and two previously unreleased bonus tracks, “Signal Hill” and “Never Trust A Woman.” Also there will be a live performance DVD, and a repackaging of the original full-length album. Today, the Music Fog version of “Black Rose Of Texas,” recorded during our Spring Marathon at Threadgill’s in Austin last year.

 - Jessie Scott

P.S. Dave is getting some love from the FX series Justified, as his song “Every Night About This Time” was featured last Tuesday on the season premiere.