Two of UVA’s favorite crooners join forces for a rare, one-night-only show. Nathan Colberg graduated back in 2017, and his music career has quickly gained traction with beautiful, keyboard-driven tracks like “Charlottesville” (understandably, a local favorite), and his first full-length, Silo. Grant Frazier is a rising fourth-year, but he already has a 2016 album under […]
Two of UVA’s favorite crooners join forces for a rare, one-night-only show. Nathan Colberg graduated back in 2017, and his music career has quickly gained traction with beautiful, keyboard-driven tracks like “Charlottesville” (understandably, a local favorite), and his first full-length, Silo. Grant Frazier is a rising fourth-year, but he already has a 2016 album under […]
Nay Nichelle likes to write outside. There’s something inspirational about natural sunlight, she says, especially at sunrise and sunset, when the light changes quickly and just so. It’s hard to put the reason for the inspiration into words, she says, but those moments often lead to lyrics for the R&B and pop singer’s next song. […]
Overcoming injuries, battling “drinking issues” and months at a time on the road would change, possibly derail, most bands. But Sons of Bill put its collective heart on its sleeve and used these challenges to craft its newest album, Oh God Ma’am. Released in June, the record shows an increased maturity in the band’s sound, […]
Rob Cheatham is an ideal modern country artist—his twang echoes the sounds that currently dominate the genre, while his lyrics harken to the storytelling abilities of forebears like Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard and cover topics such as love, be it unrequited or shared, and hard drinking as a remedy for life’s ills. He shares […]
Though Will Thomas Reed is currently based in Nashville, where he’s paying his dues in the country music scene, his heart is here in his hometown of Charlottesville. For the release of his latest EP, To Whom It May Concern, Reed returns to celebrate with a release party and will surely bust out the fan-favorite […]
On his first day of college, Wes Swing rented a cello. There was something about the instrument that called to him. Perhaps it was the vocal quality, its aural proximity to the human voice; perhaps it was the instrument’s ability to express a particularly full range of emotion, with its deep, full lows and intense, […]
Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, the local high schooler found herself in a room […]
Unranked and surely incomplete, here’s an alphabetical list of what Charlottesville-area artists released this year. It’s longer than last year’s, and based on interviews and conversations with many of these artists, I suspect it’s because the past year hangs heavy in our hearts. And so, we have music to sustain us, whether we make it […]
Everyone knows at least one protest song. There’s Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which American Songwriter magazine says is “arguably more popular than our national anthem”; Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”; Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”; Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”; Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”; Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”; […]
Climbing into your mom’s minivan when you’d lied only slightly about your whereabouts for the evening, reeking of cigarettes and blaming it on your friends when it really was you who was smoking. Claiming you’d only been drinking Pepsi and then trying to figure out how to throw away the beer bottle caps you’d stuffed […]