As dusk sets in over Charlottesville, young girls swing silver buckets to and fro in front of the Ix Art Park entrance on Monticello Avenue. Over dark clothes, they wear filmy white plastic leaf bags fashioned into skirts, tops and oversized hair bows that rustle as they dance. They’re called the Water Bearers, but their […]
On a recent Friday morning, Lifehouse’s 2005 hit “You and Me” played on WCNR 106.1 The Corner. When the song wrapped up, new midday host Kendall Stewart took to the mic, a hint of wistfulness in her cheery voice: “I’m feeling nostalgic this morning, like I want to put on a prom dress and slow […]
A few years ago, Bob Boilen, host of NPR Music’s “All Songs Considered,” turned his work desk into a concert venue. Today, he invites musicians from all over the world to play intimate sets of songs between the desk and bookshelves in the Tiny Desk concert series. The short sessions are filmed and later posted online […]
About seven years ago, Guion Pratt was living in County Meath, Ireland, working on a farm and writing poetry. He and a friend played songs —some of Pratt’s originals plus a few Bruce Springsteen tunes—as a guitar and saxophone duo in some area pubs. They called themselves Nettles, for the leafy, stinging plants they had […]
Last October, Warren Parker sat at his dining room table with a set of alphabet rubber stamps, a blue ink pad and a few dozen 7″ vinyl records with blank white labels laid out edge to edge. Letter by letter, he stamped the labels: Beams, A, WarHen. Once the ink dried, he flipped the records […]
The last time C-VILLE Weekly talked with Devon Sproule, she was jetting off to Germany with her husband, Paul Curreri, to pursue a musical life abroad. The couple recently returned to Charlottesville, and Sproule is feeling more adventurous than ever. “Everything that led away from Virginia felt necessary, and so did the coming home,” she […]
Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield released her second album, Cerulean Salt, in 2013 to high critical acclaim. Full of punk-edged folk songs that are at once quiet and powerful thanks to a stripped-down performance and sublime lyrics, the record was rated an 8.4 out of 10 and dubbed Best New Music by Pitchfork. It landed at No. […]
Take a look at The Anatomy of Frank’s song catalog and one thing is immediately clear: These guys are really into geography. The group named its debut album Pangaea, after a supercontinent, and its forthcoming second album, North America, includes songs with titles such as “Occupy Anchorage,” “Vancouver (for child astronauts)” and “A Bridge Over […]
As audio engineer for Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater, it’s Gary Green’s job to make musicians sound great. What many people don’t know is that Green is an accomplished musician in his own right. A virtuoso harmonica player, he won the Hohner-sponsored 1987 World Harmonica Championships, and by his own estimate has since played on recordings for […]
When it comes to making people laugh, comedian Kurt Braunohler goes big. Really big. He once hired a skywriter to scrawl “How do I land?” in the sky over Los Angeles. He has donned a tuxedo wetsuit and rode a Jet Ski down the Mississippi River, doing stand-up gigs along the way. Most recently, he […]