Austin 360
It’s a mantra that’s been passed from musicians and venue owners to mayors and senators over the course of the coronavirus pandemic: Live music venues were among the first to close and will be among the last to reopen. So, 13 months in, just where are we in that re-emergence?
Many of Austin’s top music destinations remain shuttered for now: iconic South Austin haunts the Continental Club and Saxon Pub, to Red River anchors the Mohawk and Cheer Up Charlies, to Congress Avenue jazz joint the Elephant Room, to University of Texas campus haven Cactus Cafe. Larger rooms such as ACL Live and the Paramount Theatre recently began presenting a handful of limited-capacity shows.
With her new album,
The Waylon Sessions, the prolific and wide-ranging
Shannon McNally set out to revisit the songs and spirit of Waylon Jennings, a legend with whom she’s always had an ongoing fascination. “I have always loved his defiantly existential but immediately accessible common man’s music and how it boogies,” says McNally. But her collection of tunes ended up being not so much a tribute as it is a recontextualization; a nuanced, feminine rendering of a catalog long considered a bastion of hetero-masculinity.
That’s not to say McNally has a softer, gentler take on Jennings’ songs in fact, just the opposite. Over and over again, she manages to locate a smoldering intensity, a searing hurt buried deep within the music’s deceptively simple poetry, and she hones in on it with surgical precision on this new album, which features special guests like Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson. “The world has changed a lot since these songs
Rolling Stone Watch Ray Wylie Hubbard Make Long-Awaited ‘Austin City Limits’ Debut
Hubbard performs “Rock Gods,” a heartbreaking song about the moment he heard Tom Petty had died
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Since emerging from the Texas outlaw scene in the early Seventies, Ray Wylie Hubbard has written some of the genre’s smartest, funniest and most overlooked classics. A favorite of Jerry Jeff Walker and Eric Church, Hubbard explores everything from his wild past to his deep knowledge of Christianity, Buddhism ,and Native American religions. “I read about this stuff and it just kinda shows up,” he told
Rolling Stone in 2017. “But I still enjoy being a smartass.”
In October, outlaw country icon Ray Wylie Hubbard made his
Austin City Limits headlining debut, and on Saturday (Jan. 23), fans will get to see the performance during a new episode of the long-running television program. Ahead of the episode s premiere, however, Hubbard s performance of his classic song Snake Farm is premiering exclusively on The Boot. Snake Farm comes early in Hubbard s nine-song
ACL set. The title track of his 2006 album sits between Rabbit, another
Snake Farm track, and Drunken Poet s Dream, a Hayes Carll co-write that both artists recorded in the late 2000s. Desperate Man, which Hubbard co-wrote with Eric Church for the latter s 2018 album of the same name, comes near the end of the set.