Posts by Sheryl Hunter

It’s been a significant year for chamber-pop band Winterpills. The Western Massachusetts quintet recently marked their 20th anniversary with a remixed reissue of their debut album—complete with a pair of bonus tracks—and now they’ve returned with This Is How We Dance, their eighth album and first release in nine years. Across these 12 songs, the […]

The Universal Fire is Jeffrey Foucault’s first album of original material since 2018’s Blood Brothers. The Western Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter describes the album as a working wake to his longtime drummer and best friend Billy Conway, who passed away in December 2021. Before he teamed up with Foucault, Conway had made his mark in the music […]

Ten years ago, Lake Street Dive released its fourth album, “Bad Self Portraits,” which proved a game-changer for the jazzy pop quartet that met when they were students at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. The band first gained attention when a video of a street performance in which they played a jazzy […]

Ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro achieved prominence when a YouTube video of him playing George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” went viral and propelled the native of Hawaii to stardom. That was in 2006 and since then he has released numerous albums and toured the globe  (he’s huge in Japan),  and in the process has […]

Seth Glier isn’t the only songwriter to take pen to paper during the pandemic, but he may be one of the few to come away from the experience with a feeling of optimism. On “The Coronation,” the title track off his sixth album for MPress Records, he expresses his belief that we can now all […]

Matt Lorenz, the western Massachusetts-based musician who tours and records as the one-man band The Suitcase Junket, calls the music on his new album “The End Is New” ‘doom folk’, a fitting genre name for 2020 it there ever was one. “The End Is New” is Lorenz’s sixth album and first for the new Americana/roots […]

Don’t even try to tag a label onto the music of the Boston based band, Twisted Pine. The group’s bass player, Chris Sartori gave it a try and the best he could come up with was ‘neo-folk indie soul avant jazz jam grass-icana’  -a phrase he admitted doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. If you […]

Sitting on the lawn of a beautiful vineyard and listening to the smooth jazz-swing music of Rachael &Vilray was the perfect way to spend a hot summer afternoon, one made only better by the fact that the show was the first live music that many of us had experienced since the COVID-19  lockdown in early […]

Rufus Wainwright views his new album Unfollow the Rules as a bookend to his 1998 self-titled debut. That critically acclaimed album launched a career that found Wainwright veering from the pop world to cover Judy Garland, compose two operas and release a collection of Shakespeare sonnets. These musical detours alienated some fans, but the American-Canadian […]

Sarah Jarosz was hailed as a bluegrass prodigy long before she even graduated high school. It was her skills as a multi-instrumentalist that initially gained her attention but she has since gone on to achieve success as a singer-songwriter. The Texas native has released four solo albums, won three Grammy awards, and most recently garnered widespread […]

When a show is billed as “An Evening with David Rawlings,” you know that you are going to be treated to Americana at its most genuine. Rawlings is one of the most revered practitioners of the genre and his two hour plus show at Northampton’s Academy of Music on November 28th featured spirited bluegrass, raucous […]

Monday nights are rather quiet in Northampton, Massachusetts but not when Melissa Etheridge is in town.  “ I promise you are going to feel better when you leave here then you did when you showed up,”  she told the nearly sold-out crowd at Northampton’s  historic Academy of Music on April 24th.  And Etheridge made good […]

[rating=8.00] On his last release, 2013’s The Beast in Its Tracks, Josh Ritter was reeling from a recent divorce and all the conflicting emotions that went with it. But on his new album, Sermon on the Rocks, we find the Idaho-born singer-songwriter in a very different frame of mind. While The Beast in Its Tracks […]

[rating=8.00] Just when you thought that all the alt-folk bands had settled into a similar and comfortable sound, along comes Darlingside to shake things up. Birds Say is the band’s second full-length release and it is built around the quartet’s gorgeous vocals and innovative use of string instruments. On the 13 tracks here Darlingside continues […]

Love is Not Extinct” was the motto of the day when the Amourasaurus festival made its debut August 30th at the beautiful Look Park in Florence, Massachusetts. Curated by the jazzy pop band, Lake Street Dive( who chose the name based on a fictional character they created) in conjunction with their record label, Signature Sounds […]

[rating=8.00] A lot of contemporary pop musicians rely on overly clever lyrics and pulsating dance beats to get their point across, but that’s not the case with Western Massachusetts based singer- songwriter Seth Glier. Glier, who received  a Grammy nomination for his 2011 release “The Next Right Thing,” is more interested in connecting with his audience […]

Mumford & Sons deserve credit for taking a huge risk with their music, but we won’t know until the entire album is out whether that risk pays off.

[rating=8.00] Until fairly recently only fans of the Carolina Chocolate Drops knew that the group’s multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Rhiannon Giddens had one of the most amazing voices in the contemporary music world. That all started to change in 2013 when Giddens sent jaws dropping with her stand out performance at a star studded New York City concert […]

Most people are familiar with the actor Jeff Daniels. Daniels first came to prominence in the 1983 film,  Terms of Endearment and has been working steadily on stage and screen ever since. He’s coming off a particularly big year  having won an Emmy for his portrayal of Will McAvoy in the HBO series, The Newsroom […]

Chris Smither has played countless shows in his lengthy career, but none quite like this one at the Academy of Music in Northampton, Massachusetts. This show was a night of celebration as it honored the blues-influenced singer-songwriter’s recent 70th birthday and his 50-year career making music.  But that wasn’t all – this evening also kicked […]