Two stories come out of Nashville. The first one is: The town is full of amazing singer-songwriters, and you can see one of them playing on any given night at any corner bar. The second goes like this: The stars of modern country aren’t those same singer-songwriters; they’re the good-looking young people who can put […]
When I sat down to think about the best concerts I saw in 2014, the only events that came to mind were disappointments. Don’t get me wrong. There were highlights. Joe Pug got intimate at the Southern. Shovels and Rope entranced the Jefferson. But by and large, the most highly anticipated events of the year […]
Going out on New Year’s Eve can feel like an obligation. You don’t want to be on your couch when the clock strikes midnight, so you grab a bar of soap, put on clothes that don’t have any holes and hand your money to whatever establishment has the least offensive-sounding, all-inclusive night out. We can’t […]
Jason Oliver wanted to make Devils Backbone a “brewer’s brewery.” That might seem like a terrible idea. Why would you want to run a brewery that appeals to such a small audience? But in the process of running a brewery that appeals to people like him, Oliver has unwittingly—or perhaps wittingly—turned DB into a place […]
James Wilson pulls out a copy of the new Sons of Bill record Love and Logic—on vinyl of course. “Do you have a record player? Listen to it straight through, sitting in the dark,” he said. Ha. Right. Good one. Should that be backwards or forwards? James, the Sons’ de facto frontman, is not laughing. […]
What line of work is Jason Burke in? “I’m an insurance man,” he said—without a trace of irony, without a hint of recognition that what he’d just said sounded like a line from a grainy black and white movin’ picture. Burke, in a vast landscape of Charlottesville insurance men, has pulled himself up (or burrowed […]
Do you want a handmade rug, or do want some commercially made rug? When Saul Barodofsky, co-owner of Sun Bow Trading just south of the Downtown Mall, asks you this, it’s less of a question and more of a command. A frequent lecturer at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and a 36-year veteran of […]
The closure of specialty seafood seller Anderson’s Carriage Food House last month probably didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’d been in the store over the past several years. It didn’t take an engineer to see the building was in a state of severe disrepair. But there were things you wanted to love about […]
I was stewing—not something on the stovetop, but because of the article I was reading. The title, “Getting Your Kids to eat (or at Least Try) Everything,” promised so much. The content provided so little. The author’s solution to getting kids to try new things was to do what he, a cook-book writer and cooking […]
Everything feels the same. You walk across the City Market parking lot. You spy the old black South Street sign on the building across the way. You open the door to the somewhat dreary anteroom next to South Street Brewery. You open the next door, this one to your trusty old neighborhood brewpub. Everything changes. […]