Grant Alden

3 weeks ago | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

This is going to be about The Bottle Rockets, the other alt-country band from St. Louis, that graced the cover of the original magazine twice (even though the second time we all knew the futility of the gesture). But it’s going to take a while to get there. Because first we have to talk about clothes. I come from grunge. Flannel is not a costume. It’s what we wore — what I still wear — because it was cheap and it stayed warm when damp, and it lasted.

2 months ago | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

It began here, in the safety of the suburbs, black vinyl spinning in someone’s back room, George Harrison bragging on John Lennon during the bridge in the Beatles’ “For You Blue,” a minor track from 1970’s Let It Be“: “Elmore James got nothin’ on this, baby.”Elmore James was 45 when he died of a heart attack on May 24, 1963, while staying with his cousin Homesick James in Chicago, with his first tour of Europe weeks away.

Dec 26, 2024 | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

Near the bottom of my stack of indifferently folded black t-shirts rests a relic from 2003, a wry marker from the career of the late Nashville singer-songwriter David Olney. “David Olney’s World Tour of Nashville,” the back reads, listing six performances over six days. Those Music City shows, that t-shirt, some radio promotion and the usual good press notices were pretty much all the noise his eleventh (of twenty) solo studio releases made. Fame was not to be his curse.

Nov 7, 2024 | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

Twenty-five years ago Mary Gauthier was a singing chef — a novelty from Baton Rouge, who was trying to find her voice and hold on to her sobriety in deepest Boston — gambling there might be an audience willing to listen to an album of hard-won songs titled Drag Queens In Limousines. Now an established, celebrated songwriter, her second album has finally been pressed onto vinyl by the resurgent Kill Rock Stars label (riot grrrl, Elliott Smith, Decemberists).

Aug 22, 2024 | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

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