Jim Patterson

1 month ago | thebluegrasssituation.com | Jim Patterson |Justin Hiltner

The first key to All the Not So Gentle Reminders, the sixth album by singer-songwriter David Ramirez releasing on March 21, is “Maybe It Was All A Dream,” the moody, elegiac song that opens his first LP in five years. There are no lyrics to spell it out for the listener. It’s an instrumental, mostly a synthesizer riff over drums and a stately organ interspersed with a muffled, mysterious, and unintelligible voice. It’s more about mood – think Twin Peaks – than anything specific.

1 month ago | nashvillescene.com | Jim Patterson

In his preface to Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, Clay Risen states an intention to resist “drawing parallels between the past and the present.”In conversation, that resistance goes by the wayside quickly.

Nov 15, 2024 | thebluegrasssituation.com | Jim Patterson |Justin Hiltner

The music, sparse and spooky, sounds at the same time strangely universal and possibly from the last century, but as Jerron Paxton notes in his album title, Things Done Changed. The major difference on Paxton’s fifth album (including his 2021 duet set with Dennis Lichtman) is a big one. He wrote the songs. “It wasn’t a very difficult decision,” Paxton said. “I had always had a list of tunes to record of my own compositions.

Oct 16, 2024 | nashvillescene.com | Jim Patterson

Sorry, but there is no way to tell you about Alice Driver’s Life and Death of the American Worker without disgusting you. Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company By Alice Driver Atria/One Signal 272 pages, $28.99Here’s what Victor, a machine operator at Tyson Foods’ Chick-N-Quick plant in Rogers, Ark., has to say about the ingredients in chicken nuggets, according to the book: “Many times, the chicken is rotten,” Victor says.

Jul 31, 2024 | thebluegrasssituation.com | Jim Patterson |Justin Hiltner

Donovan Woods is not really the solid, secure man you might think you know through his thoughtful, deceptively soothing songs. But he’s working on it. “A lot of my songs are much more magnanimous than I am in real life,” said Wood, 43.