A packed car pointed west, and a travel-size instrument wedged between sleeping bags—this is how records get made when life is crowded and the need to create won’t wait. We sit down with Brian Russ of Hand Gestures to trace the long arc behind a self-titled album that sounds lived-in, melodic, and unforced.
Russ maps a route from college shows in Philadelphia to AmeriCorps on Pine Ridge, then into Brooklyn’s warehouse-show ecosystem, where CMJ weekends blurred into community and bands kept each other afloat. Along the way, he built Campers Rule Records—a micro-label with pragmatic ideals: small cassette runs, break-even math, and hands-on help that gets music over the line.
The mechanics matter. Voice memos from a cross-country drive became song kernels; late nights with an interface turned sketches into arrangements; a remote drummer locked in the pulse. Brian tracked guitars, bass, keys, and vocals himself, then sequenced the record for an arc that rewards close listening.
There’s life in the margins, too—two teachers, two kids, and a creative practice built one quiet hour at a time. We talk rebuilding a live band post-COVID, why the album title became the band’s name, and how to stay sane about press and reach. For anyone invested in DIY recording, Brooklyn indie circuits, sustainable labels, or the alchemy of turning notes into songs, this conversation offers a clear, hopeful blueprint.
“The music of [Dutch Interior] feels loose on purpose, and it’s held together by something intuitive, a shared language that doesn’t need translating.” — Rolling Stone, “Artist You Need to Know”
“There’s something about [Dutch Interior’s] music that can’t be copied – a sense of character, an evocative-ness of atmosphere.” — Clash
“It’s easy to get caught up in the fun [Dutch Interior] whips up.” — Pitchfork
“Rustic music that is romantic but not sickly, earnest without becoming cringe, and completely free of ego.” — The FADER
Stephen Stills wrote this classic 1967 Buffalo Springfield protest song in response to the 1966 Sunset Strip curfew riots. The timeless lyrics conveyed the generation gap and the efforts to oppress those who do not conform to societal norms. The tune became a universal anthem of human rights that expanded beyond eras, demographics, and specific movements. The tune’s continued relevance is highlighted by this recent reworking by Susan O’ Neill & Valerie June. The video also includes clips of protest movements over the years. All proceeds of the song go to Amnesty International. protest music
Italian singer-songwriter Marta Del Grandi returns with Dream Life, an album that bustles in a field of dreams, a multi-dimensional panoramic snapshot punctuated with serene disillusionment, that transcends musical boundaries as personal hopes and aspirations are cast against the vastness of the stars and beyond.
There’s a moment when a band stops trying to prove anything and starts trying to feel again. Porto is that moment for 54-40—a record less interested in declaring relevance than in reclaiming risk. Tracked live in Portugal, cut lean and close to the bone, it sounds like four musicians standing in a circle and daring the songs to blink first.
The story that trails Porto—tiny vintage amps, minimal overdubs, the hum of a Supro against a Gretsch—matters only insofar as it explains the album’s gravity. These songs don’t rush toward resolution. They settle. They hover. They let space do the heavy lifting. That patience feels deliberate, a quiet rebuke to an era that rewards immediacy over resonance.
At the center is Neil Osborne, whose voice has shifted from declaration to observation. The lyrics on Porto often arrive as fragments—sung before they’re written—leaving meaning porous by design. The Jungian framework Osborne has cited (shadow work, descent and return, Dante’s Virgil hovering at the edges) isn’t academic garnish; it’s structural. These songs hold contradiction without ranking it, beauty and ache sharing the same room.
Tracks like “Wail” and “Beautiful All of It” refuse the tidy release of a chorus that explains itself. They work by accumulation—repetition, restraint, the slow confidence of a band that trusts tension more than payoff. It’s the same instinct that once let “I Go Blind” slip sideways into anthem status: an openness that invites listeners to bring their own weather.
What Porto ultimately captures is a band choosing imperfection as method. The songs were road-tested, learned in rooms, sharpened by the kind of danger one gig can teach better than twenty rehearsals. Producer Warren Livesey keeps the frame tight, bottling the immediacy of four players committed to the take you can’t overthink.
Porto doesn’t sound like a comeback. It sounds like continuity rediscovered—longevity understood not as survival, but as tone control. In leaving space, 54-40 make room for us to step in, and the songs linger long after the last chord precisely because they refuse to tell us what to feel.
Sometimes a creative endeavour seems to take on a life of its own, with the artist merely acting as the conduit through which the art finds its way into the world. That was the case when 54-40 began to create its 16th studio album, Porto, with producer Warne Livesey. According to singer-guitarist Neil Osborne, everything just sort of clicked into place. “It seemed like it was writing itself, in terms of the whole making of the album,” Osborne recalls.“Everything was very quick and instant and immediate. And maybe that’s based on our experience of learning how to not overthink things, I don’t know, but it just seemed like there was a wind in our sails right from the get-go, from the lyrics to the music to getting Warne on-board to pre-production.”
"I Go Blind" was written and composed by Neil Osborne, Philip Comparelli, Brad Merritt, and Darryl Neudorf of the Canadian rock band 54-40.
The song enjoyed success not only once but twice: the first time as recorded and released by the band in 1986, and the second time a decade later when a cover by Hootie & The Blowfish unexpectedly became a Billboard Top 5 hit.
"I Go Blind" was performed by 54-40 at the legendary El Mocambo in Toronto, as part of the song's induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
A name can work like a north star. Jason P. Woodbury and the Nightbird Singing Quartet points straight toward songs built for company—melody-first, ensemble-minded, rooted in the desert but restless for elsewhere. We sit with Woodbury to trace the long arc from church songleading and clarinet rehearsals to record-store immersion, music journalism, and a self-titled album that wears its influences lightly and its confidence quietly.
He talks about the records that calibrated his ear at Zia Records—the open-sky ache of Big Star, the haunted intimacy of Chris Bell’s I Am the Cosmos, Neko Case’s nocturnal drama, Destroyer’s wry sprawl, and the cosmology of Lee Scratch Perry—and how those discoveries rewired his sense of arrangement and feel.
We dig into the making of the record itself: some songs arriving whole, others pieced together from Dropbox shards and rehearsal-room patience. The quartet’s chemistry lifts the material into focus—power-pop hooks catching pedal-steel glow, soul-informed details settling into an alt-Americana, desert-rock atmosphere that feels lived-in rather than posed.
Beyond the music, Woodbury explains why he launched Always Happening Records—to put this album out on his own terms and build a flexible home for future ideas, from tactile seven-inches to Bandcamp-first releases. It’s a conversation about time, trust, and the strange joy of hearing a band take a song somewhere you couldn’t have planned.
If you’re drawn to independent music made in community—records that breathe, shimmer, and tell you where they came from—this one’s for you. Spin it loud, pass it along to a Big Star or Calexico devotee, and tell us the album that first flipped your lid.
To me, this song is about anticipation. Aching for something, then waiting for something truly significant to happen. However, waiting in earnest, and not overhyping it or looking past the importance of fully living through the waiting, isn’t easy. Like Tom Petty said, ‘the waiting is the hardest part.’ Sometimes we build ourselves up only to let ourselves down. As a kid, you’re waiting in line for a ride at a carnival, or for a prize in the mail after 25 cereal box tops. What’s more fun — the anticipation or the payoff? Perhaps the waiting is an integral part of the overall experience.
I thought about different drugs and spiritual quests, all with that ‘kick in’ period. We’re sold versions of change that rarely deliver, but maybe that’s because humans are fueled by hope. On the other hand, the song is also about friendship — finding that one person to walk through the unknown with. You’re stronger together. And sometimes, it’s just yourself you’re waiting for to kick in. You already know what to do. If you can let yourself get there, you can break down walls and shake the whole town. The real kick in is believing in ourselves. fame mag
A melody looping in a hospital hallway. A chorus that took six years to learn its own name. Sitting down with Brad Barr, we talk about writing when life insists on co-author credit—kindness traded for drum lessons, heartbreak turned into breath, and a city that lets a voice arrive on its own time. From Providence to Montreal, Brad and Andrew built a shared language—first as The Slip, then as The Barr Brothers—rooted in groove, generosity, and patience.
The focus is Let It Hiss, their first record in eight years, and the clarity that came only after the songs could stand on their own. Jim James adds a spectral lift to “English Harbor.” Elizabeth Powell and Ariel Engle color the margins. KlĂ´ Pelgag reframes a verse in French, returning harmonies that feel like a second producer’s hand.
There’s tactile joy—cassettes, handheld recorders, chord voicings shared online—and a clear ethic: measure success by honesty, not algorithms. Ahead: Let It Hiss outtakes, North American and European dates, Sleeping Operator finally stirring, and Brad’s first vocal solo record as he learns which songs belong to which home.
Jason P. Woobury—the Phoenix based musician, writer, and podcaster—announces his new album, Jason P. Woodbury and the Night Bird Singing Quartet, out March 13 via his own Always Happening Records, and shares two singles, “When I Get Lonesome (Again)” and “Get To Meet Them.” With songs about aliens, family, God, worry and relief, water and the desert, the album veers from rocking to hushed, with a pop-forward sensibility that evokes an era when classic rock evolved into new wave and snuck onto soft-rock radio. In a voice reminiscent of artists like Lindsey Buckingham or even the Beach Boys’ various Wilsons, Woodbury spills out lyrics that split the difference between the self-aware screeds of Elvis Costello and the coiled spirituality of Van Morrison.
In addition to Woodbury on vocals, guitars, and sound design, Night Bird Singing features the titular quartet—producer Zachary Toporek on vocals, drums, percussion, guitars, and keys; Andrew Bates on electric and upright bass; Rick Heins on pedal steel, guitars, and effects; and Rob Kroehler on keys—as well as Joshua Wayne Hensley and Michelle Larios on background vocals.
