When guitarist and singer-songwriter David Rawlings put together his third album, Poor David’s Almanack, he created a story written in the timeless language of American folk. Blending electric and acoustic guitar with twangy vocals, the album took shape in Nashville, where Rawlings was joined by fellow musicians Gillian Welch, Willie Watson, Paul Kowert and Brittany […]
When guitarist and singer-songwriter David Rawlings put together his third album, Poor David’s Almanack, he created a story written in the timeless language of American folk. Blending electric and acoustic guitar with twangy vocals, the album took shape in Nashville, where Rawlings was joined by fellow musicians Gillian Welch, Willie Watson, Paul Kowert and Brittany […]
After releasing a number of songs as a national recording artist and working with Tyler Perry on Madea Goes to Jail, Chad Lawson Cooper turned to theater for a project that combines passion, education and an emotional quest for slavery reparation in Justice on Trial: Black Lives Matter Too. Cooper’s Broadway production company presents a […]
Sitting on a cushioned bench in the back room of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, Phil Green takes a drag from a hookah hose and exhales a stream of hazy smoke that hangs in the fading afternoon sunlight before recalling an early memory. In that memory, Green’s about 6 years old, riding around in their […]
Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri isn’t the only story about the blurred lines between doing the right thing and making a bad situation worse, but it’s the only one that matters. McDonagh has made a career of pitch-black satires that find the humor and humanity in characters who are experiencing genuine torment—the regret […]
Writer and performer Ann Randolph has lived an amazing life. In college, rather than paying to live in a dorm, she lived in the schizophrenic unit of a state mental hospital in exchange for writing plays with patients. She worked the graveyard shift at a homeless shelter for minimum wage for 10 years. And she […]
Standing at a waist-high, cork-topped work table in her West Main Street design studio, Kim “Kylla” Dylla measures an arm’s length of white thread and uses her teeth to snip it from the spool. She pinches a curved sewing needle between her silver-ringed forefinger and thumb and slides the thread through the needle’s narrow eye […]
Mavis Staples If All I Was Was Black (Anti-Records) I haven’t been checking out the Jeff Tweedy- Mavis Staples collaborations of the last few years—apparently, I have been a fool. If All I Was Was Black is a nearly-miraculous alchemy of Staples’ gospel-soul and everything Tweedy throws at her. The swampy opener “Little Bit” includes […]
Deirdra McAfee and BettyJoyce Nash first met 10 years ago as teacher and student (respectively) in a creative writing class in Richmond, where they both lived at the time. Nash, a journalist who had recently turned to fiction, was surprised when a gun turned up in a story she was writing. “My palms got sweaty, […]
First Fridays: December 1 “Every artist starts with something inside themselves that feels true to them,” says sculptor and installation artist Ivy Naté. “I’m not sure what came first for me…balancing chaos and order, or reinventing the obvious.” “I feel lucky that at times I am able to take some abstract shit in my head, interpret […]
Before you ask, yes, you will cry at Coco. No matter how many Pixar movies you’ve seen, no matter how much tolerance you’ve built up to their brand of touching sincerity, and no matter how far into this particular outing you get without shedding a tear, you will have a small puddle at the bottom […]