With COVID cases continuing their three-month decline, vaccines flowing and artists with a year of material ready to perform, the coming months are shaping up to be great times to attend live music in Tucson. Of course, many local venues are not quite ready to host indoor concerts. Those with patios are utilizing their outdoor spaces, and even indoor-only venues are finding unique ways to get music to the masses or prep audiences for when the time is right. The Fox Theatre is collaborating with the Downtown Tucson Partnership to bring back live music, but this isn t a traditional indoor concert series, because the music may very well come to you. Troubadour Thursdays takes place throughout April, and serves as a downtown patio tour, where local musicians will move throughout downtown and perform to multiple restaurants and open areas. Each week features a different style of music, and all of the travelling troubadours are local.
Advertisement: The Memphis song is just like full-on extreme, excessive party mode, yet it s all in reference to recollecting life before the character was arrested and forced to do hard labor on a chain gang, Burns said. It s just great hearing the difference between those versions and it s great to see a bunch of locals get together and show their love and support for Al.
As two of Tucson s most internationally known musicians, Burns and Foul have crossed paths numerous times since the 1990s. The Calexico balladeer said he was instantly a fan of Foul s style and music when they first met years ago at the long-defunct Grill s fabled Red Room.
As folk singer David Huckfelt neared completion on his second solo album in March 2020, the year s chaos was hardly hinted at but change had already greeted him in the form of his newborn son. As if he needed additional inspiration (Huckfelt already had an extensive catalog with his folk rock band The Pines, and had previously served as Artist-In-Residence at Isle Royale National Park on Lake Superior), the year would lead to his new album Room Enough, Time Enough being his most spirited work to date. Though Huckfelt lives in Minneapolis, he maintains a strong connection to the Tucson music scene. Most of Room Enough, Time Enough was initially recorded in early 2020 at Tucson s Dust & Stone Recording Studios with a large roster of local musicians: XIXA s Gabriel Sullivan, folk singer Billy Sedlmayr, Giant Sand founder Howe Gelb, blues player Tom Walbank and more. Huckfelt returned to Minneapolis as COVID hit, and he decided to flesh out the record by sending tracks to all
The debut release from Tucson electronic duo Glacier.WAV is equally paradoxical and practical. Written in the desert, but featuring icy imagery and cool synths, the self-titled album fuses environmental concepts and personal anxiety: climate change, government failure, pandemic isolation and romantic deficiency. It’s a singular album, looking both forward and back, but capturing that dizziness of the modern era. Even the natural imagery is formed from synthetic tones. Composed by Frank Anzaldua and sung by Jaime J. Soto, the album combines pop hooks and electronic atmospheres, but stretches far beyond the central style of synthwave a genre of electronic music taking influence from the keyboards and aesthetics of the 80s, which also combines elements of synthpop, disco and ambient. The whole style is well-represented in the album s cover art, an isolated figure standing on a cool blue backdrop beneath the moon, all warped by an analog tape haze.
On their debut album, Homecoming, the Keith Robinson Band aimed to create a record that was true to Southern Arizona but avoided sounding local. In many ways they succeeded. While never straying far from a folk/rock template, much of the album s singularity can be attributed to frontman Keith Robinson s lyrics jumping between genre conventions and more abstract themes and hell, even a mellotron made its way in between the acoustic guitars and desert imagery.
The album opens with Lost In Space, a rock song much in the borderlands vein, with fuzzy guitars and driving drums. However, it avoids sounding too familiar thanks to Robinson s philosophical background: studying Nietzsche and Heidegger at Fuller Seminary.