Michael Elliott

2 months ago | popmatters.com | Michael Elliott

Forever New West Lilly Hiatt is in love; she loves life and wants you to know it. Listening to Forever, her first album in four years, one can’t help but get swept along in her romantic bliss and the music’s hypnotic pulse. Produced and engineered by Hiatt‘s husband, Coley Hinson, who handles guitars, drums, bass, mandolin, keyboards, and backing vocals, Forever was recorded at the Mole Hill in Nashville and mixed by Paul Q. Kolderie, who’s worked with the likes of Pixies and Radiohead.

Jan 17, 2025 | michael-elliott.com | Michael Elliott

A Complete Unknown has thrust one of our greatest songwriters back to the forefront of pop culture. While 60 years ago, during the very era the new film chronicles, two students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ended up backstage at Raleigh’s Reynolds Coliseum with folk music’s power couple. Thomas Goldsmith got the scoop years later for Raleigh’s News and Observer. Read the 2018 account here.

Jan 14, 2025 | popmatters.com | Michael Elliott

Lilly Hiatt’s first album in four years, Forever, will be released on 31 January via New West. It’s awash in power pop flourishes, distorted guitar, psychedelic vocals, and Hiatt‘s always-insightful lyrics. The newest single, “Kwik-E-Mart”, is a prime example. “I wrote ‘Kwik-E-Mart’ after a Liz Phair show at the Ryman,” Hiatt explains. “I was messing around with Dropped D a lot on this record, so this song came out of that, written on electric.

Nov 20, 2024 | popmatters.com | Michael Elliott

In Session Stax / Craft Recordings As the story goes, Albert King was playing a residency at Antone’s in Austin, Texas, in the mid-1970s. Club owner Clifford Antone, a strong advocate for a young hot-shot guitarist from just outside of Dallas named Stevie Ray Vaughan, was trying to convince King to let the kid sit in with him.

Nov 19, 2024 | popmatters.com | Michael Elliott

Can't Steal My Fire: The Songs of David Olney New West On 18 January 2020, at the Florida Gulf Coast’s Annual 30A Songwriters Festival, David Olney paused in the middle of the third song of his set, apologized to the crowd, rested his chin on his chest, and died. It’s the type of romantic exit one of his most ardent admirers, Townes Van Zandt, would have loved to have pulled off.