Nashville, Tennessee’s Los Colognes will release their second full-length, Dos, on September 4th. The album follows their critically acclaimed 2013 debut, Working Together, and was recorded in the summer of 2014 at Bombshelter Studios in Nashville (Alabama Shakes, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Benjamin Booker).  Dos features Billy Bennett (MGMT, The Whigs, Drive-By Truckers) as engineer/mixer, was mastered by John Baldwin, and was self-produced by the band. About three seconds into opening track “Baby, You Can’t Have Both,” with its playful, dancing piano and guitar lines, Los Colognes announce the intention of Dos. Influences ranging from JJ Cale, the live Dead, and Dire Straits are all worn proudly, with its six members, and particularly the core songwriting duo of drummer Aaron “Mort” Mortenson and guitarist/vocalist Jay Rutherford, making jam music for fans of songwriters, classic rock for a younger generation. Los Colognes dates back some 15 years, to Chicago, where Mortenson, Rutherford, and bassist Gordon Persha began playing both together (and apart) in a series of “church bands, punk bands, high school bands, and any other kind of band,” learning the language of playing music with other people from a young age.  Mortenson and Rutherford eventually departed from Chicago to Nashville, in search of an atmosphere that supported spontaneous music creation, where oppressive weather and overpopulation wouldn’t make it difficult to get musicians in the same room on a regular basis. “Jay and I decided to make the move to Nashville in 2010 in search of like-minded musicians,” Mortenson says. “The fact that we are big JJ Cale fans played into it. We were intrigued by his history here, and Emmylou Harris’, and John Prine’s. We figured there had to be ghosts still floating around here, their stories, and maybe players from those sessions.” In Nashville, the rest of the band took shape, with keys player Micah Hulscher recruited in a piano boogie bar and Persha moving down from Chicago to join the group. The band’s history of playing in rotating bands proved useful as a number of Nashville singer-songwriters needed temporary backing bands for local gigs and tours, making Los Colognes “working musicians,” having graced the stage with the likes of Caitlin Rose, Nikki Lane, Kevin Gordon, Johnny Fritz and RayLand Baxter. With Rose, the band spent half of 2014 touring with her as both backing band and support, allowing them to showcase their original material to Rose’s dedicated audience.  2013’s debut LP, Working Together, saw success on a measured scale. “It was all this random shit that just kept happening,” Rutherford jokes. “Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 tweeted out that "Working Together" was his song of the day, which was hilarious, and six of the songs were featured in nationwide Starbucks shops multiple times a day for a year."  The band also played ACL and Hangout Fest, opened for The Head and the Heart in Los Angeles and garnered radio attention from Whisperin' Bob Harris at BBC Radio London and Greg Vandy at KEXP Radio in Seattle. With Dos, the band doesn’t shift gears away from the Cale and Prine songwriting they have idolized, but, rather, try to refine their skills, develop their sound, and further incorporate influences that include the live incarnation of the Grateful Dead. “We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel,” Mortenson says, “we are just trying to get really good at our version of it.” Still, the album does sound refreshing, and part of that is the retro sound and unabashed display of music that scoffs at ideas of trends or hipness. Instead, Los Colognes make music for the barrooms, for dusty music halls, and for the road. It isn’t a coincidence that song titles pull from these concepts, with “Backseat Driver,” “Drive Me Mad,” and “One Direction” reflective of their greater sound. Rounded out by second keyboardist Chuck Foster, whom the group describes as an encyclopedia of Southern rock, and Wojtek Krupka on guitar, Dos finds Los Colognes coming full-circle, “skirting the line of what a jam band has been and can be.” Whether sentimental on “Hard to Remember” and “One Direction” or mischievous on “Golden Dragon Hut” and “All That You Know,” moods on Dos are not fleeting, and strike universal reference points that satisfy on both casual and close listens. “So many jam bands I encountered in high school were just stoner rock,” Rutherford says, “but there weren’t any songs there, and the lyrics were garbage. Give me Dylan any day. But now, taking these sort of Cale-like arrangements and opening up the songs live, not playing the same eight songs the same way every night... it is just having fun and not necessarily jamming for the sake of jamming.” By putting songwriting at the forefront of their band, Los Colognes have put this philosophy into practice on Dos, making their upbeat anthem “Take It” almost self-referential when they sing “it takes a time or two… you better take it, before it takes you.” 

The music is a patchwork amalgam of influences, including: twangy Southern rock (they've opened for the Drive-By Truckers), reverb-soaked psychedelia reminiscent of early My Morning Jacket or fellow Athens residents Phosphorescent, soaring guitar solos à la Neil Young and Crazy Horse, rhythmic jangle from that other Athens band, REM, multi-part vocal harmonies (which every band ought to have, dammit), and, weaving through it all, lyrical slide guitar. - Vox.com

The Grateful Dead continue to have one of the most rabid and loyal followings of any band in history, and deservedly so: They wrote great songs, and they were excellent musicians and terrific improvisers who never played a tune the same way twice. Grateful Dead cover band The Stolen Faces deftly capture the spirit of the Dead, covering a wide variety of songs from the band’s expansive catalog and delivering them with the sort of energy and spontaneity that might have you thinking you’re standing in the Fillmore West in 1971. Led by bassist Christian Grizzard, the group features guitarist Jack Silverman and a rotating cast of some of Nashville’s top session and touring musicians, including Annie Sellick, Will Harrison, Jamie Rogan, John Wallum, Allen Thompson, Jon Loyd, Dave Coleman, Brian Kotzur, Ben Cameron, and Jeff Sturms, folks who have worked with George Strait, Billy Currington, Eddie Money, Alan Jackson, Jimmy Buffett, Lou Rawls, Love & Theft, Grayson Capps, Nell Carter, Johnny Hiland, Sonia Leigh … the list goes on and on. But despite their diverse musical backgrounds, the members of The Stolen Faces all share a love for the Dead, and for the freeform jamming and good vibes that music entails. The group puts a high premium on nailing the vocal harmonies, and has the instrumental firepower to take the extended jams into some seriously trippy sonic territory. In a short time, touring through Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, they’ve begun to establish a reputation as one of the Southeast’s most solid and rockin’ Dead bands.

Kevin Gordon’s voice is made from dust and red clay. And the songs on the Louisiana-born performer’s sweeping new album Gloryland are chiseled from the bedrock of life — the honest facts of rambling, needing, loving, soul-searching and experience. “I like the unfinished ending — the story that just continues when the song’s over,” says Gordon. “Life never sums itself up in three-and-a-half minutes, and a good song doesn’t need to do that either. But it should tell a story.” All 11 numbers on Gloryland have an elemental feel — proof that Gordon’s working at the peak of the songwriter’s craft. His characters, from the school kid narrating the coming-of-age yarn “Colfax/Step in Time” to the panhandler in “Trying To Get To Memphis” to the folk artist Pecolia Warner, the subject of his lovely duet with fellow Americana singer-songwriter Sarah Siskind, “Pecolia’s Star,” have a depth and personality that brings Gordon’s songs of the South into sharp focus, even if their essential questions about the mysteries of faith, truth and humanity hang in the air as he moves on to the next tale. It’s not just Gordon’s poetic vision and the raw character etched in his sinewy voice that gives his fifth studio album such remarkable substance. He and producer/multi-instrumentalist Joe McMahan have created a fresh, dynamic sonic approach for Gloryland that’s equally deep. McMahan built a low-end foundation around the gutty, gritty dialog that Gordon maintains with his vintage electric Gibson hollow body guitar that’s anchored by two full drums kits and buoyed by careful mixing. That keeps the spotlight focused keenly on Gordon’s spare, evocative singing and playing, and gives the songs an uncluttered feel that contributes to their sense of place. “I was skeptical at first, but as the album began to take shape that approach really allowed me to let the songs take their course,” Gordon says. “This time around I concentrated on narrative more, whereas on the last studio album, (2005’s O Come Look at the Burning), it was more about vibe and capturing the essence of something. For Gloryland, I wanted the stories to be literal. And if I can write a song that tells a literal, linear story and I can still feel myself getting emotional over what I’m writing about, then I know I’m getting somewhere.” Gordon’s own narrative begins in Monroe, Louisiana, where he “grew up the son of well-intentioned, but backsliding parents. I was a very confused young man.” Like many other children of the 1970s who fit that description, Gordon wrote poetry and discovered skate-boarding and punk rock despite being weaned on the region’s early rock, blues, honky-tonk and rockabilly sounds. He sang in a high school band whose repertoire was entirely Ramones and Sex Pistols covers. But his own fusion of words and music ignited after a girlfriend’s parents gave him a guitar and he discovered the more literate and worldly compositions of the influential Los Angeles roots- punk outfit X. In the late-’80s Gordon moved to Iowa City, where he studied poetry and graduated with a masters degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. At the same time, he became indoctrinated in the world of the working musician. Gordon graduated from blues jams to playing guitar in a regionally touring band led by Bo Ramsey, who went on to become a producer and guitarist for Greg Brown and Lucinda Williams. When Ramsey took a hiatus, Gordon began fronting his own group and writing his own songs, which he’s continued to do for more than 20 years. He moved to Tennessee in 1992, and four years later recorded the numbers that would become his first nationally distributed album, Cadillac Jack’s #1 Son, with producer Garry Tallent of the E Street Band, which was released in 1998 on Shanachie. Gordon also has his own connection to Lucinda Williams, who he befriended in Nashville. She sang on the track “Down To the Well,” which was the title of his 2000 album and one of the most popular cuts on the 6th annual Oxford American Southern Music Sampler. The song also appeared on No Depression’s What It Sounds Like compilation. “Many fans have discovered me because of that,” says Gordon. His songs have been cut by a host of artists. Keith Richards and Levon Helm performed Gordon’s and Gwil Owen’s “Deuce And A Quarter” with Scotty Moore on the former Elvis Presley guitarist’s 1996 solo album. New Orleans soul queen Irma Thomas recorded “Flowers” from O Come Look At the Burning on her Grammy-winning post-Katrina album After the Rain. Southside Johnny, Webb Wilder and Kate Campbell have also covered Gordon’s songs. And in 2009 Gordon issued his own live tracks, demos and rarities collection, Salvage & Drift Vol. 1, which examines his musical history in previously unreleased recordings from 1994 through that year. “When I write a song, I have nobody else in mind but myself,” Gordon says. “When I first started writing songs it seemed like absolute freedom for me — exactly the opposite of what I was experiencing in the Writers’ Workshop. Except for the year when I had a publishing contract and discovered writing by numbers was anathema to me, that’s what it’s been about ever since.” So it’s no wonder that occasionally Gordon follows his muse to unusual places. Gloryland’s “Black Dog” was inspired as much by his own middle-aged angst as by the rescued pit bill his family keeps. And in the title track he gets inside the heads of both a desperate evangelical and a bomb- strapped jihadist as he plumbs the religious undercurrents that flow through several of the disc’s tunes. “I tend to write about preachers and religion because they scared me so much as a kid,” he offers. “For a while, my mom and stepdad went to a charismatic church where people would ‘get the spirit’ and fall out on the floor. It was fascinating and horrifying, and I sometimes still don’t know what to make of it.” A more blithe spiritual theme underlies “Pecolia’s Star,” the duet with Siskind, a friend of Gordon’s who has written songs for Allison Krauss and Bon Iver. The lyrics are in the voice of the late Mississippi folk artist Pecolia Warner, who saw her captivating, colorful quilting as an extension of God’s positive influence on Earth. Not surprisingly, Gordon’s connection with Warner and, more broadly, the creative outsiders of the folk art world is significant. “For 15 years I’ve been obsessed with contemporary self-taught art to the point where I’ve opened a gallery in my house,” he explains. “But what’s really been inspiring about entering this world has been getting to know artists like Mose Tolliver and Jimmy Lee Sudduth. “These people started making art of their own volition,” Gordon continues. “They already worked long days at hard jobs, often in the fields, and there was no market for their art, no dealers at their doors (until they were discovered and exhibited). That really reinforced, for me, the basic reason why I write and perform my songs — which is because I feel like I have to.”

Guitarist/singer-songwriter Rich Mahan lives in Nashville, where he recorded his solo debut, Blame Bobby Bare in 2012.  He wrote his first song at six and decided to switch from piano to electric guitar in junior high after seeing girls go crazy for a local band playing Rainbow’s “Since You Been Gone” at a talent show. He grew up loving the blues (Freddie, Albert and B.B. King), garage rock (Chocolate Watch Band, The Action), and post-British invasion bands (The Jam and Secret Affair), but credits the Grateful Dead with opening his ears to all styles of music.  Mahan lived in California most of his life — moving up and down the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and the Bay Area — where he spent his time surfing, recording, gigging, and developing a deep love for Mexican food.  Over the years, he’s toured and recorded with several groups, playing roots rock with Avocado Sundae and co-founding the alt-country band Shurman, which was signed to Vanguard Records in 2004.  He moved to Nashville in 2010 to make music and join the city’s growing population of former Californios, or, as he says, Golden State Refugees.

"It’s rare that a song strikes so perfect a balance between foreboding and sensual, but Thayer Sarrano gets it just right on “Shaky,” the title track from her new album. The tune is a study in contrasts, pitting hard edges against the soft allure of suggestion as Sarrano wraps her whispery drawl around a flat, forceful rhythm while vaporous tendrils of steel guitar float past." - Paste Magazine "there is an aura of “southern gothic” via twangy guitars, deep woodsy echoes and a rhythm like cautiously trudging through those woods. But she also exudes a patina of the urban, opiatic tenor of ’90s gaze-girls like Opal or Mazzy Star." - CMJ "A siren of the cypress swamp, Athens, Georgia’s Thayer Sarrano beckons you into the darkness on the throbbing “Touch My Face.” Evoking the mystical side of Stevie Nicks, overdriven guitars guide the listener through meandering paths that follow Sarrano’s smoky coos to what one can only hope is a mystical communion.” - Bucketful of Nails "Thayer Sarrano is a force to be reckoned with in the ever-fertile Athens, Georgia scene, having worked as a touring and session musician with Cracker, Camper Van Beethoven, T. Hardy Morris, of Montreal, Dave Marr, Kuroma, and David Barbe, among numerous others. This haunting track is taken from her upcoming third album, Shaky, a tour de force of Gothic Americana...We love it."- Big Takeover ------------------------------------------ Thayer Sarrano is forging her own path into a southern- psych-dreamland, bottling up ghosts and bringing them to life through her ethereal desert rock hymns. The tones tremble and bend, layered in swirling atmospherics of a place that is melancholic and haunting, yet bursting with heavenly light. With her latest release, Shaky, The Athens, GA multi-instrumentalist sounds, more than ever, like where she is from. She grew up in a seminary/the swamp in southern, coastal Georgia. Classically trained as a child, awakened by Grunge in the 90s, with chanting forever in her subconscious, she had always written instrumental compositions and poetry. Songwriting came when she landed in the vibrant musical community of Athens, GA and began to collaborate with friends to form her own band, as well as establish herself as a studio/touring session player (Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, T. Hardy Morris, of Montreal, Dave Marr, David Barbe, many more). Debut album, King was released in 2009 dubbing her “The new Queen of Shoegaze” - Americana UK. The sparse and raw album was recorded live in her living room in one day. Her follow up LP, Lift Your Eyes to the Hills , (2012), enters more complex arrangements and features the single “The Bend,“ written for Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, leading to consistent European touring. The record was produced by Thayer and Hank Sullivant (Kuroma, MGMT), and was an independent release as a charitable campaign for Nuci’s Space’s teenage rock camp, “Camp Amped,” of which Thayer is passionately affiliated. “Featuring heavily spiritual themes, it could have collapsed under it’s own weight, but ‘Hill’s manages to maintain a startling lightness of being.“ -Flagpole Magazine. Now, with Shaky, we see Sarrano at her bravest and most vulnerable. Written in an unstable period of much loss, Shaky is still a record of grace and perseverance. The honest, painted lyrics weave the mystical with personal experiences. We start to believe these seemingly abstract visions are really happening, and in this other world we see pictures we can relate to. Pictures of dissolving relationships in “Crease”, "your memory unties my cells/ it breaks the line from your heart to mine…” Of the elusive in title track, "I trace your echo I follow your lead/ you’re shaky shaky but you settle me.” Of the search for something greater in “Glimpses,” “there’s a world at the same time as this one/it’s bright it trembles it glistens,” and of the beautiful ether in “Lost Art,” “their hands are open, call to the wild/ layer landscapes, breaking the sky/ I remember them from when I was a child/ it’s the same little image from inside my eyes…“  Dovetailing the thick twang of the country with the airy, echoing, spacious feeling of an empty church, Sarrano has carved out a pocket in which her otherworldly music has room to breathe. Or perhaps the pocket was already there and Sarrano stumbled upon it, becoming a vector for something deep and soulful and strange.