A.J. Croce

Amanda Shires began her career as a teenager playing fiddle with the Texas Playboys. Since then, she’s toured and recorded with John Prine, Billy Joe Shaver, Todd Snider, Justin Townes Earle, Shovels & Rope, and most recently her husband Jason Isbell. Along the way she’s made three solo albums, each serving to document a particular period in her life while improving on the perceptive qualities of the previous record. Shires is not an entertainer. She isn’t looking to help listeners escape their everyday lives or soundtrack celebrations. She isn’t reaching for celebrity, and she isn’t concerned with cultivating a personal brand. She is an artist in the true sense of the word, meaning she creates because she has a real need for the process of creating. That is not to say that the songs on her new album, My Piece Of Land, aren’t entertaining, but that quality is a by-product. The real intention here is to relate.

Singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann, guitarist Eric Johnson, bassist Matt Gentling, and drummer Mark Price formed Archers of Loaf in Chapel Hill, NC in 1991. Stalwarts of the 90’s indie scene, the band confidently combined off-kilter pop, punk and noise. Bachmann has kept busy since the Archers first hung it up in 1998, releasing records under his own name and as Crooked Fingers. But for fans who thought they’d never hear “Web In Front” live again, the band’s current string of reunion dates is a welcome surprise for 2011.

“Barton Carroll is the kind of songwriter that gets taken for granted. In a modestly fragile tenor, he relates real stories instead of impressionistic poetry or woe-is-me folk confessions, full of acute observations and complex emotional developments. It’s literary in the sense that he has a strong grasp of character and voice, not in the sense that he favors big words or clever turns of phrase.” – Pitchfork

Musicians often claim they are “giving themselves” to their listeners, but it’s rarely as true as on Ben Sollee’s fourth album, Half-Made Man, a revealing, deeply moving album that explores a man trying to figure himself out, just as we all are. Known for his thrilling cello-playing that incorporates new techniques to create a unique mix of folk, bluegrass, jazz and R&B, Sollee possesses rough-smooth-smoky vocal stylings and a knack for intricate arrangements that has brought about comparisons to Sufjan Stevens. Sollee shares himself completely with his audience, whether it be by personal lyrics, or his commitment to the environment. Sollee can often be found riding a bicycle to his concerts (cello strapped to the back), which have become legendary for their intimacy. Check out his current tour dates at bensollee.com.

The Blind Boys of Alabama are a gospel music group from Alabama that first formed at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Blind in 1939.

Although the Blind Boys of Alabama have been singing gospel music for more than five decades, it’s only recently that the group has had the benefit of a major record company behind them. Led by founding member Clarence Fountain, the rest of the group currently consists of Eric McKinney, George Scott, Caleb Butler, Johnny Field, Jimmy Carter, Joey Williams, Donald Dillion and Aubrey Blount.

From their inception in the 1930s, when all were boys, the group’s members turned their blindness into their chief selling point, and in fact, all members of the group except one are blind. They began singing when all were students at the Talladega Institute for the Deaf and Blind in Alabama, but didn’t begin recording until 1948. As a youth, Fountain heard the legendary Golden Gate Quartet on the radio; the early Five Blind Boys of Alabama took their musical cues from that group. The group began singing professionally as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers, and for years lived a day-to-day, dollar-to-dollar existence touring the South.

Since 1948, they’ve recorded for a variety of small record companies, and had gospel music hits in the 1950s with “Oh, Lord Stand By Me” and “I Can See Everybody’s Mother But I Can’t See Mine.” In 1950, after the death of one of their members, the group renamed themselves simply the Blind Boys of Alabama.