Grant Alden

1 month 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

Help us continue to keep our web content free and accessible to all – without paywalls or invasive pop-up ads. Your support is important because it helps us cover our costs so that we can continue bringing you the independent music journalism you know and trust. Please consider subscribing or donating to No Depression now. As one of the last resources dedicated to covering roots music and related stories, we need the support of our readers.

Apr 21, 2024 | nodepression.com | Grant Alden

Sometimes — this morning — one is given to suspect that we are little more than aggregations of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, stories that haunt and inform and seek temporarily to connect or distance us. Those are the best songs, in any event, the true stories, even if that singular, transitory truth is carried only by the whisper of a single phrase.