Upon hearing from my friend Hemant that he was listening to a lot of Walter Trout, I rummaged in my hard drives and CD shelves to bring out my old copies of albums by one of the most fret-searing blues guitarists that I’ve heard. I hadn’t heard Trout in a long time. And what came up first was the two-disc live album from 2000, Live Trout, on which Trout plays with his band The Free Radicals (the band’s now just called Walter Trout). Read more

By the time you read this, South by South West, arguably the largest music festival held each year at Austin, Texas, will be winding down. Thirteen hundred odd bands would have performed at more than 90 venues. And festival-goers—I envy them all—would have discovered tons of new musicians, many of them obscure but many among them that are likely to make ripples in the coming months. For several years now, I have had a long-standing objective of making it to the festival and drowning in the non-stop gigs for four consecutive days. I haven’t managed to fulfill that objective yet. Sigh! Read more

I have never been to South By Southwest, the annual music, film and interactive conference and festival that is held at Austin, Texas and has become, at least for contemporary music, the biggest platform that artists have for showcasing their talent. Even if I had been able to make it to this year’s version of the four-day music extravaganza (between March 16 and 20), I’m not sure how many bands or musicians I would have been able to listen to—there were at least 2000 bands playing round-the-clock at over 80 venues and that doesn’t include the impromptu venues at street corners, balconies and every nook and corner of the university town that hosts the non-stop extravaganza each year in spring. Bands come from all over the world and straddle every conceivable genre. Read more

Ten years; nine studio albums; two live ones; a couple of collaborations; and a reputation for serving up live concerts that never disappoint. Yet this is a band that still remains below the radar. That’s what I like about the hard-working southern rockers from the US, Drive-By Truckers. That and the fact that this is a band that is unabashedly upfront about their red-neckish background – they are based in Athens (Georgia) but originally hail from Alabama. I also like the fact that they nearly always record their albums on retro analog tapes. And insist on vinyl releases. Read more

As I write this (and roughly a week before you read it), the mother of all music festivals is underway at Austin, Texas. It’s the South by South-West festival, commonly referred to as SXSW, and has been on for the past 23 years. In 1994, in addition to music, SXSW included film and interactive media conferences and has now become an important fixture on the world’s film festival circuit. But it is the music that is at the core of SXSW and what really excites me about this annual festival that happens in March. Read more

Years back when I used to complain about friends not returning my vinyls, cassettes or CDs, my father used to tell me about how in the 1950s, a friend of his would simply carry empty sacks once a year to the homes of people he’d lent books to in order to recover them. “I have come to take back all the books you have borrowed and never returned,” used to be his oft-used line. There were other, more unreliable, ways of recovering books once lent. My father himself would browse the roadside second-hand book stalls in Calcutta and often find copies of books that he had “lost” turn up there, complete with his name written on the title pages. Of course, he’d have to recover them for a price! Read more