58. Eat at every restaurant in Our State magazine’s 100 Foods To Eat In North Carolina’s 100 Counties. Chatham County. Foie gras at Fearrington House Restaurant. I’m not super into goose liver, but the meal as a whole was the best I’ve ever eaten. Plus a bonus carved root vegetable from Halloween. Fearrington’s pumpkins were awesome.
worth getting up for in october
Worth getting up for in October: a weekend with my sister and my mom, and my extended family, in Augusta; the hot-dipped pan fried chicken from Keaton’s BBQ in Rowan County; all five of my cousins’ children, only two of whom I had met; the new Head and the Heart record; seeing Jonny Rodgers play…
two sentence reviews of reasonably new albums i listened to in september & october
And by “in September” I mean “in the last four days of September because I was behind, epically, on podcasts, all month”, but October was A++ of new listening. Also: full length reviews of Ha Ha Tonka’s Lessons, Two Cow Garage’s The Death of The Self-Preservation Society, and The Julie Ruin’s Run Fast here, and The…
concert: j roddy walston & the business @ kings
J. Roddy Walston & the Business came out last night and proceeded to absolutely tear down the walls at Kings. The new album burns up live, and the old songs are so sing-along shout-along friendly that a crowd can’t help but pump their fists and jump up and down and possibly hug strangers. I like…
album review: mipso – dark holler pop
Bands from North Carolina with upright basses and banjos and mandolins draw, fairly or unfairly, comparisons to one of two bands, at first: the Avett Brothers, or Chatham County Line. Either the Avetts’ high energy stage show, or Chatham County Line’s cluster around a single microphone and close harmonies. Music writers can’t help themselves when…
release news: the bottle rockets reissue self-titled & the brooklyn side
Somewhere betwen my discovery of Bloodshot Records in 2002 (Neko Case, though she’d just left the label; Kelly Hogan; the Waco Brothers; Rex Hobert & the Misery Boys) and my current dig through Robbie Fulks and Scott H. Biram’s extensive back catalogs, I spent a lot of time trolling used CD bins at record stores…
preview: j roddy walston & the business @ kings
J. Roddy Walston & the Business rock. Sometimes that’s a cliche, and sometimes it’s the only way to describe what a band does. This band, fronted by the volatile and captivating Walston, rocks, and rocks hard. I had the pleasure of seeing them back in September in Chicago, and they had an incredibly diverse crowd —…
request for submissions: the first album i ever bought
Since people seem interested in this, here’s a template for submitting a piece on The First Album You Ever Bought! Email the piece — 200-300 words minimum, no maximum but do try to contain yourself to not, say, 10,000 words — to asdonkar AT gmail with the subject line The First Album I Ever Bought. Include…
saxapahaw oktober fest: sarah shook + gasoline stove
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any local bands that I didn’t already know … or at least local bands who weren’t composed of people I knew from other bands with new projects. So last night’s Oktoberfest in Saxapahaw was a lovely change, because I got to see a couple of well-respected country acts…
ep review / interview: animal parts – six arms to hold you
Toronto musician Joshua Cockerill — who performs solo and with a band as Animal Parts — came onto my radar about this time last year, when he played a couple of North Carolina shows with Scots Admiral Fallow and recently-visited Erin Rae and John Isaac Davey; he writes deeply intense and personal songs, often just accompanied…
brand new kind of photography 