Nashville Scene

Two-time Grammy award winner Jim Lauderdale is a multi-talented performer and songwriter, with successes in both country and bluegrass music. His roots stem from the Carolinas, yet his career has taken him all over the United States and abroad, making him an international recording artist with an ever-growing fan base. He has hosted the Americana Music Awards for the past seven years and won their first Artist of the Year and Song of the Year awards. He is among Nashville's "A" list of songwriters, with songs recorded by artists such as Patty Loveless, Dixie Chicks, Mark Chestnut, Vince Gill and George Strait. He also contributed several songs to the successful soundtrack of the film, "Pure Country." His songs continue to strike a chord with a new generation of artists including Gary Allan and Blake Shelton.

Jim's musical influences include the legendary Dr. Ralph Stanley and George Jones. These influences and his unique sense of melody and lyric help forge a sound that is truly his own. As a performer his credits include production, writing and collaborating on albums such as, "Wait 'Til Spring" with Donna the Buffalo, "Headed for the Hills” with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, "I Feel Like Singing Today" and the Grammy winning “Lost in the Lonesome Pines” with Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys.

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Burlap and opals. Moonshine and macrobiotics. Shaken and soothed. How Suzanne Santo (vocals/banjo/violin) and Ben Jaffe (vocals/guitar) managed to reconcile not just polemics, but seemingly opposed realities for their sexually tinged, bruised knee honeysuckle take on roots music has to be heard to be understood.

Yet somehow the young 20-somethings figured out that it’s the extremes that define the middle, whether embracing the big mistakes in the bluesy smoulder “Glad I Done What I Did,” embracing the romantic doubt that is the low slung gospel of “Don’t Know How,” or the euphoric romp-age of “Let’s Get Wrecked” that embraces the arc debauchery completely. This is the sound of coming not of age, but awareness; and digging into what it means to be alive permeates throughout honeyhoney’s October 24th release of Billy Jack on Lost Highway Records.

“The album is made of a lot of stories, a lot of lives,” Santo picks up. “We’re very different, but those differences are what makes it. I’ve had a lot of different times in my personal life that kinda leveled me as a person. That’s why this record is the way it is. It’s made of guts: what’s happening on the inside, the notion of us being really independent, being on our own. That’s a big reality.”

With fiddles threading the melodies, big acoustic guitar sounds and banjos plinking as percussively as melodically, there is an old world feel to honeyhoney that is as fresh and right now as it is tube radios and old lace.

And it is the disparity of how the two came up and came together that informs honeyhoney with their singularity of sound. Meandering through unique paths, converging in Los Angeles where everyone is chasing something, and finally recognizing the chemistry they shared is no mean feat.

Evoking California’s hippie Dust Bowl fringe, equal parts Okie squalor and Pacific shimmer, there is a strong pull of Woody Guthrie-esque folk, vintage Buffalo Springfield, glints of Gram Parsons and bits of Bonnie Raitt’s early blues, Rickie Lee Jones reality and Bakerfsfield Saturday nights. Not country, not folk, not rock, it is a hybrid that defies exact definition.

Still "Billy Jack" pumps with the thump of hearts on fire, levels with the pang of real instruments played like someone means it.

"If we want anything from these songs," adds Jaffe, "it’s to bring people into this music, to engage them.”

Engage them they will. With the three-month long “Ten Buck Tour” with Joshua James kicking off on September 21st in Albuquerque, honeyhoney is ready to bring their new songs to the people who inspire them the most: their friends, peers and fans.

On the brink of truly coming into their own, they are ready for whatever the music brings…

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Rod Picott is the songs he sings. Since before Woody Guthrie songwriters have soaked their public image in sepia tones singing about the working life but Picott bears the scars of actually living that blue collar life. Rod Picott's songs are inhabited by sheetrock hangers, drinkers, circus hands, boxers and working girls and he sings about his characters with intimacy. Listening to a Rod Picott album you can smell the gasoline on a mechanics hands and the perfume of lovers in dark corners. The son of a welder and former Marine, Picott grew up in the small mill town of South Berwick, Maine. His father's record collection spanned Ray Charles to John Philip Sousa and James Brown. His is older brother introduced him to the punk poetry of Lou Reed and Patti Smith. The tall, wiry framed Picott made his living as a sheetrock worker from high school until he released his first cd, Tiger Tom Dixon's Blues, in 2001. He tours the U.S. in a Jeep Cherokee with a current odometer reading of 244,300 miles and annually in Europe and the U.K. playing 120 plus shows yearly. Picott is lauded for his narrative and melodic songwriting, passionate delivery and darkly humorous onstage storytelling. Rod Picott is currently touring in support of his most recent album, Welding Burns.

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With the release of their seventh album Black Cat Oil in 2012, Delta Moon expands upon the sound that has sold thousands of records and allowed them to play for thousands of fans worldwide over the past several years. And with a live show second-to-none, the dual slide guitars of Delta Moon carry the listener deep into the heart of the American South, where sinuous Mississippi blues meets the gritty backwoods twang of Appalachia and winds around a rock-steady beat like kudzu on a barbwire fence. Net Rhythms calls it "Music as it should be - raw and honest." We call it Blues-Infused American Roots.

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Performing music has been a way of life for Barry Waldrep from the time he was a young boy growing up in the small town of Wedowee, Ala. The multi-talented instrumentalist began playing guitar and mandolin when he was only six years old. He was heavily influenced by his dad, James, an accomplished Bluegrass guitarist, who handed Barry his first guitar. By the time he was eight, he had also learned to play the banjo and joined his dad onstage playing at festivals throughout the South. While touring on the Bluegrass circuit, he met and performed with Bluegrass legend Bill Monroe, known as the Father of Bluegrass. During his teenage years, Waldrep was drawn to the sounds of Southern Rock and his musical taste began to be influenced by Lynyrd Skynard, The Allman Brothers and the Charlie Daniel’s Band. This led Barry to combine his Bluegrass roots with the high performance sounds of Southern Rock fusing the two together creating a unique musical style all his own. A sound that fans began to take note of when he started performing with Telluride, a Birmingham Alabama based band. After that Barry Co-founded the band Rollin' in the Hay, which was together for 16 years, and very popular on the jam band circuit. It was during that time that Waldrep struck up a friendship with Zac Brown while the two were performing many times in the same town. Like so many others who watched Waldrep perform for the first time, Brown was “blown away” by Barry’s talent and the intensity that he plays guitar. Brown calls Waldrep one of the finest pickers he knows. At the invitation of Brown, Waldrep joined The Zac Brown Band for a summer tour in 2008 and the Breaking Southern Ground Tour in 2009-2010, and followed with touring with ACM’s 2010 Best New Duo Joey & Rory. Waldrep is currently working on a CD featuring a blend of bluegrass, country, jazzgrass, southern rock, and americana. Since going out on his own as a solo artist, Waldrep has displayed his wide variety of musical talent performing and recording with various artists at venues large and small, including the Grand Ole’ Opry, Music City Root's and Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium. Waldrep has recorded seven albums with Rollin’ in the Hay, three solo albums, and has worked with CMH records in Los Angeles to produce over 21 Bluegrass tribute albums including Tim McGraw, Widespread Panic, Phish, and The Black Crowes. He also co-wrote and recorded with Lynam guitarist Jacob Burton to produce the CD Six Ways ’Til Sunday. Recent projects include performing on The Zac Brown Band CD/DVD, Pass The Jar, released 2010, Joey & Rory's "Album #2" released 2010 and recording with Randy Travis on the new "25th Anniversary Celebration, released June 2011. His newest project The Band of Brothers & Sisters "LIVE IN ATLANTA" was released November 2011. Waldrep tours and records with many as a side man, in addition to performing with his own band, and also heads up his most recent project The Band of Brothers & Sisters.

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Derek Hoke has crafted a collection of equally endearing and infectious songs for his long awaited sophomore release – Waiting All Night. Out August 21, 2012 on Electric Western / Thirty Tigers, Waiting All Night picks up right where Hoke left off with his first release Goodbye Rock N Roll. There is a significant difference here though. If Goodbye Rock N Roll was slow crafted, simmered in Hoke’s brain on low, and came to life on a lazy saw dust floor one night in town, then Waiting All Night was born under the lights on stage. It’s clear that Hoke and his band have been affected by the past years of playing week after week. Nashville has a way of doing that to a singer. A way of molding a voice around the lingering smoke and whiskey hanging in the air night after night. And first and foremost, Derek Hoke is a singer. The songs, even the ballads, reach out and yearn for a late night in a dark room. It’s the same feeling you get when you leave the house at 2am to catch last call…because if you don’t you might miss something. You might miss the steel guitar or meandering piano solos and telecaster riffs. Well, get out of the house, because you won’t want to miss a tune on Waiting All Night.

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