A Voice Was Sounding, Vol. 5

My 2014 story, “Wild Life,” is being collected in a new book from This Land Press. A Voice Was Sounding, Volume 5 “highlights some of the most compelling work published in This Land magazine,” and it is an honor to be included among so many strong voices.

I will be speaking at the launch party on April 17th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This event marks the release of the anthology, as well as the debut of This Land’s new quarterly magazine. 

For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

“Mike Adams Brings Midwestern Sincerity to The Crown and Harp”

My interview with Mike Adams is up now over at D FrontRow, the official arts and culture blog of D Magazine. I sat down with Mike in anticipation of his upcoming show in Dallas to talk songwriting, hustling in the age of social media, and the occasional meatball in the pecan pie of life.

“It’s like, if life is a big old pecan pie but the guy who made it stuck a meatball or a sardine in there every once in a while, just for a prank. It’s awful, and you don’t want it to happen to you, but it is pretty funny, you know?”

[Read the full interview at D FrontRow.]

“Charlie, Last Name Wilson Is One of R&B's Most Improbable Comeback Albums”

My latest for Oxford Karma is a profile on one of my all-time favorite artists, the unsinkable Charlie Wilson. Here, I reflect on Wilson’s legacy as a musical innovator and take a close look at his 2005 R&B masterpiece, Charlie, Last Name Wilson.

“This album shouldn’t work. The thing shouldn’t hang together so seamlessly. A soft-spoken, 53-year-old preacher’s son from Oklahoma, whose last hit single was released in 1982, shouldn’t still have this sort of fire in his voice. He shouldn’t be able to rebound from those strung-out years on the street with such poise, bouncing back into the pop arena as if he had never left it in the first place. This record shouldn’t be so compulsively playable, so delicious, 10 years after the fact.”

[Read the full article at Oxford Karma.]

“OKC Multimedia Artist Eli Casiano Explores Cultural Identity with Vibrant Pop Surrealism”

My feature story on multimedia artist Eli Casiano is up now at Oxford Karma. Casiano’s art grapples with notions of identity and belonging as a brown face in a white space.

“I remember wanting to wear what I thought were ‘white people’ clothes — Tommy Hilfiger, or whatever,” he said. “I wanted to eat what they ate. It was a crazy jealousy I had towards [white] kids. And to them, I was always ‘not that kind of Mexican,’ if that makes sense. ‘White-Mexican.’ I didn’t talk with an accent, and my parents didn’t work at the egg farm or saddle shop.”

[Read the full feature at Oxford Karma.]

2014 in Music:D FrontRow Critics Look Back

I’m very happy to be included in D FrontRow’s ongoing year-in-review feature. Here I take a look back at my favorite records and events from 2014. (While I kept it mostly local to Dallas/Denton, I managed to sneek in a shoutout to Bloomington, Indiana power pop darling Mike Adams.) Find out what I and the other critics at DFW’s best arts and culture blog thought of the year that was at the link below.

2014 in Review Part IV: FrontRow Critics on Music