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California Honeydrops
California Honeydrops
The Honeydrops have come a long way since guitarist and trumpeter Lech Wierzynkski and drummer Ben Malament started busking in an Oakland subway station, but the band has stayed true to that organic, street-level feel. Listening to Lech sing, it can be a surprise that he was born in Warsaw, Poland, and raised by Polish political refugees. He learned his vocal stylings from contraband American recordings of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and Louis Armstrong, and later at Oberlin College and on the club circuit in Oakland, California. With the additions of Johnny Bones on tenor sax and clarinet, Lorenzo Loera on keyboards, and Beau Bradbury on bass, they’ve built a powerful full-band sound to support Wierzynski’s vocals. More like parties than traditional concerts, their shows feature extensive off-stage jamming and crowd interaction. “The whole point is to erase the boundaries between the crowd and us,” Wierzynski says. “We don’t make setlists. We want requests. We want crowd involvement, to make people become a part of the whole thing by dancing along, singing, picking the songs and generally coming out of their shells.”

The Wood Brothers
The Wood Brothers are an American roots band consisting of brothers Chris and Oliver Wood, as well as multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix. Their music is a combination of folk, gospel, blues and jazz. Wikipedia
The Wood Brothers’ sixth outing, ‘One Drop of Truth,’ dives headfirst into a deep wellspring of sounds, styles and influences. Whereas their previous outings have often followed a conceptual and sonic through-line, here the long-standing trio featuring brothers Oliver and Chris Wood along with Jano Rix treat each song as if it were its own short film. The plaintive, country-folk of the album’s opening track “River Takes The Town” gives way to the The Band-esque Americana soul of “Happiness Jones.”
They have several new recordings since and continue to create wonderful music and tour the country.
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Jerry Douglas
THE JERRY DOUGLAS BAND
Dobro master and 14-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas is to the resonator guitar what Jimi Hendrix was to the electric guitar: elevating, transforming, and reinventing the instrument in countless ways. In addition to being widely recognized as the foremost master of the Dobro, Jerry Douglas is a freewheeling, forward-thinking recording artist whose output incorporates elements of bluegrass, country, rock, jazz, blues and Celtic into his distinctive musical vision. Called “dobro’s matchless contemporary master,” by The New York Times, fourteen-time Grammy winner Jerry Douglas is one of the most innovative recording artists in music, both as a solo artist and member of groundbreaking bands including J.D. Crowe & the New South, the Country Gentlemen, Boone Creek, the Grammy-winning The Earls of Leicester, and Strength In Numbers. Douglas’ distinctive sound graces more than 1500 albums, including discs released by Garth Brooks, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Elvis Costello, Earl Scruggs, and Ray Charles, among many others. Since 1998, he’s been a key member of “Alison Krauss and Union Station featuring Jerry Douglas”, touring extensively and co-producing and playing on a series of platinum albums. He has produced albums for Krauss, the Del McCoury Band, Maura O’Connell, and Jesse Winchester and is is co-Music Director of the acclaimed BBC TV series Transatlantic Sessions, and his latest solo album Traveler features guest appearances by such notable friends as Paul Simon, Mumford & Sons, and Eric Clapton, among others. (from NPR)
Don Winslow


Don Winslow
An author with an impact and a message – see Don Winslow Films
April 2022 – The start of a new trilogy – City on Fire
April 2023 – City of Dreams
“Epic, ambitious, majestic, City on Fire is The Godfather for our generation.” – Adrian McKinty, New York Times bestselling author of The Chain
Two criminal empires together control all of New England.
Until a beautiful woman comes between the Irish and the Italians, launching a war that will see them kill each other, destroy an alliance, and set a city on fire.
Danny Ryan yearns for a more “legit” life and a place in the sun. But as the bloody conflict stacks body on body and brother turns against brother, Danny has to rise above himself. To save the friends he loves like family and the family he has sworn to protect, he becomes a leader, a ruthless strategist, and a master of a treacherous game in which the winners live and the losers die.
From the gritty streets of Providence to the glittering screens of Hollywood to the golden casinos of Las Vegas, two rival crime families ignite a war that will leave only one standing. The winner will forge a dynasty.
Exploring the classic themes of loyalty, betrayal, and honor, City on Fire is a contemporary masterpiece in the tradition of The Godfather, Casino, and Goodfellas—a thrilling saga from Don Winslow, “America’s greatest living crime writer” (Jon Land, Providence Journal).
A most unusual review – #BooksWithWallace
2020 release, “Broken.”
In six intense short novels connected by the themes of crime, corruption, vengeance, justice, loss, betrayal, guilt and redemption, Broken is #1 international bestseller Don Winslow at his nerve-shattering, heart-stopping, heartbreaking best. In Broken, he creates a world of high-level thieves and low-life crooks, obsessed cops struggling with life on and off the job, private detectives, dope dealers, bounty hunters and fugitives, the lost souls driving without headlights through the dark night on the American criminal highway.
With his trademark blend of insight, humanity, humor, action and the highest level of literary craftsmanship, Winslow delivers a collection of tales that will become classics of crime fiction.
The Trilogy
Of all the blows delivered by Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy, none may be as devastating as the timing of “The Border,” its stunner of a conclusion. Though Winslow cannot have engineered all of this 14 years ago when he started this series, his sweeping new novel concerns subjects that put it right on the culture’s front burner: the Mexican-American border, the handling of migrant children, the opioid crisis and some barely fictionalized claims about how foreign money has bought influence at the highest level of the U.S. government.
The book’s title, “The Border,” refers to both physical and moral barriers. Winslow is well aware that both that and its cover image, which depicts a razor-wire-topped wall spreading across a desert landscape, are politically loaded. “Loaded phrases, like loaded guns, are more interesting, aren’t they?” Winslow said to Entertainment Weekly in September. As for the book’s depiction of fiercely partisan American politics, including its treatment of characters who are unmistakable versions of the current president and his son-in-law: “I know this book is going to make some people angry. I can live with that.”
Even though the first installment of this trilogy was named “The Power of the Dog,” after a biblical intimation of evil (“Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog,” Psalms 22:20), it only hinted at the magnitude and ferocity of what was to come. That opening novel now looks like the series’ relatively innocent prologue — and it is as blade-sharp, violent, pulse-quickening and reportorially shocking as the pinnacle of some lesser series might be.
“The Power of the Dog” is, in brief, about the first decades that bind the destinies of Art Keller, a Vietnam veteran and later D.E.A. agent, and Adán Barrera, a young Mexican who will go on to achieve the most dizzying heights of power. The book begins in a burning Mexican poppy field in 1975 (“Only in hell, Art Keller thinks, do flowers bloom fire”) and leaves Keller among more poppies in 2004. Many unspeakable acts happen in between, melding the personal with the political (Iran-contra). It is all rendered unputdownable by Winslow’s unrivaled skill at his game.

Willie Porter
Willy Porter is a contemporary American rock musician and singer-songwriter from Mequon, Wisconsin. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In April
Willy Porter Biography
by Richard Skelly – from Allmusic.com
Like Greg Brown, John Hammond, Leo Kottke, Stephen Fearing, Richard Shindell, Kelly Joe Phelps, and so many others, Willy Porter is often at his strongest as a solo act. He does work with a band periodically, but given the economics of touring in recent years, he seems to perform more frequently accompanying himself with guitar and mandolin. Porter honed his chops the natural way, busking across Europe and playing every little coffee house and dive bar on both sides of the Mississippi. He’s a veteran performer who takes his audiences with him on the journey. He elicits a rare kind of communication between artist and audience, mostly because he’s able to read his audiences so well.
Porter was raised near Milwaukee, and his first big breaks were playing theater-sized shows there and in Madison. As could be expected from someone from this part of the country, there’s an element of blues in Porter’s singing and songwriting and in most of his live shows, although he’s best thought of as a contemporary singer/songwriter, straight out of the world of folk music. He began playing viola, a notoriously difficult instrument to master, in his youth, but found he lacked the discipline for classical music as a career path. He had a revelation in his teens when he found Leo Kottke’s album, “6 & 12 String Guitar.” Kottke‘s playing opened up new vistas for Porter, who began playing guitar after dropping his viola studies.
As the occasion or tour dictates, you can catch Porter solo or with a backing band of veterans from Wisconsin.
Eilen Jewell
From: Bernard Zuel – Music Journalist
FULL DISCLOSURE: WHY THE RULES HAVE CHANGED FOR EILEN JEWELL
MAYBE IT’S THE MIDWEST UPBRINGING of politeness and reserve that lay behind it. Maybe it’s the natural defence of someone who already was out and exposed as an artist in a corner of Americana that values the personal as much as the historical. Whatever it might be with Eilen Jewell, in about 13 years of interviewing her, she has always shown herself adept at talking about her songs and her life in a way that deflected personal revelations.
It’s not that she didn’t answer questions, but those answers made the generalities of her characters the focal point and gave just enough to let us see how she’d build relationships to them but not be defined by them. It was politely done of course, and was not without things to chew on given a sharp intelligence and an eye on American culture whether it was her love of Loretta Lyn and Howlin’ Wolf, the pay gap between the sexes, or political resistance as something of a progressive island in a state that’s anything but.
Well, things have changed with the coming record, Get Behind The Wheel. Not only has Jewell written an album that came out of the Covid-era breakup of her marriage to long-time drummer, co-manager, and co-parent, Jason Beek, and some deaths in her wider family, but she has been talking openly, frankly, about her circumstances.
It’s hard to imagine that was a comfortable transition, not least because growing up in Idaho you kept your business to yourself, but you have to wonder if it has been dragged out of her, or did she feel it was inevitable and stopped fighting.
“It is really new for me to talk about anything having to do with my personal life,” the Boise-based Jewell says. “But this time around it seemed like it would be wrong to not discuss it because this album is so, so directly influenced by everything that I’ve gone through in the past couple of years. I just feel like I would be lying if I said ‘oh, I don’t know, it’s just about people and things’ [she laughs].
“Also the pandemic taught me that that there’s something really important about sharing parts of ourselves. That’s what sharing my music is [and] I guess it dawned on me this actually could be a good thing for me, it could open me up to my fans and there’s a chance there could be some cathartic sharing on both sides.”
There probably won’t be any problems getting her fans to share their thoughts next month when she will spend several weeks in Australia (heaven knows we’re not a quiet bunch), but when you put these things out like Jewell is now doing, not only are you exposing yourself but you are setting the agenda for how things are interpreted. And this is before even considering that Beek is still playing in her band and will be on the tour.
How people interpret your songs and your album, and inevitably yourself, will be shaped by these revelations and explanations. Is that a good thing? Was it even planned?
“The label was saying you’ve got to figure out how to talk about this new album, so I was like, yeah, shoot, I’ve gotta decide how much do I want to disclose? How much do I want to set the stage for these songs?,” she says. “Because, yeah, in the past I’ve not done that and thought that the songs should stand on their own and people can interpret them how they want. People are still free to interpret them however, obviously, but this album really did occur at a particular point in time for me. It was a disaster of a moment in my life this album was born out of, beyond anything else I’ve ever experienced, and I felt this album deserved an exception to my normal rule.” It was time? At 43, maybe it’s as simple as that.
“I guess I do want to talk about this stuff, this stuff being the pandemic, the divorce that came out of that, or coincided with it, and then family losses, people near and dear to me – not even Covid-related, but just one after another,” Jewell says. “For the first time in my life it feels cathartic to talk about what was going on behind the scenes. I don’t think it’s necessary information to appreciate the album, but there’s a few Neil Young albums where I gleaned he was going through a particular thing in his life and then read later that in fact, yes that’s happening, and something about that makes me appreciate the album just a little bit more. I have a sense of who he is more.”
From a long low base of knowledge about the album so far – it’s not yet available to media, let alone the public, though we will hear some songs from it at her March shows – a title like Get Behind The Wheel suggests maybe taking control of her life, or at least setting the direction. How did she handle this resetting and reclaiming of control?
“It’s really been a mixed bag,” she confesses. “I think when I wrote that song – the song that contains that phrase ‘get behind the wheel’ is called Alive – I felt so inspired to take control and have agency, it was all very new. I was like, well, so much is crashing down around me but this is an opportunity to just up inside my life in a really authentic way. And that’s still present, but I’m also realising that it’s much harder than it sounds, and sometimes [she laughs ruefully] it’s awful.” No one would blame her for looking away.
“There’s part of me that would just love to drift around and say ‘I don’t know, someone else take the wheel: I’m getting tired already’,” says Jewell. “But I was guilty of some of that for many years, going with the flow with my career, and my personal life too … being cooperative, and they really comes at a cost eventually. You can’t keep whittling your life away like that. Eventually you realise that your heart is not fully in it, and there’s always a reckoning with that.” When she looks at who she was, even three years ago, and who she is now, how does she judge that person?
“I … think … that … person … was … somewhat,” she says slowly, before a long pause. “Somewhat overeager to find distractions. The old me really didn’t want to look at life just as it is. The old me was always kind of looking into the future, thinking about how things will be better or should be better, or the past. The here and now was something that I tended to avoid. “But all we really have is the here and now. The past is gone and the future is a fantasy.”
Lisa Jewell
From: goodreads.com
LISA JEWELL was born in London in 1968.
Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was the best- selling debut novel of 1999. Since then she has written another twenty novels, most recently a number of dark psychological thrillers, including The Girls, Then She Was Gone, The Family Upstairs and The Night She Disappeared. Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. She lives in north London with her husband, two teenage daughters and the best dog in the world.
From: Publishers Weekly
Lisa Jewell Raced Through Writing Her Latest Novel
“I love to write thrillers about creeps and coercive controllers, and about letting the wrong person in,” Lisa Jewell says via Zoom from the sun-dappled bedroom of her London home, which is packed with books and looks out onto a leafy communal garden. “You can literally wake up one morning, meet someone, and let them into your life, and that can be enough to destroy everything. With thrillers, there’s so much to play with. So many emotions to investigate, so many secrets to uncover.”
Jewell’s novels, which include romantic and family dramas and psychological thrillers, can feel like hornets’ nests pulsing with secrets. The 54-year-old has written 21 page-turners that have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide over the past 30 years and been translated into 29 languages, according to her publisher, Atria. Her next, None of This Is True, out in August, follows a successful podcaster in search of her next project who meets an odd, mousy woman at a restaurant and, at the woman’s suggestion, agrees to interview her for her podcast. The podcaster then discovers that behind the woman’s meek facade is a dangerous character with control issues—who may be trying to dismantle the podcaster’s life.
t took Jewell five months to write None of This Is True—it’s the fastest she’s ever written a novel. “There’s something terrifying about working that quickly,” she says. “I felt slightly out of control.” The idea for the book came to her last January while she was out walking her dog. “I saw a man sitting at the window, working on his laptop, minding his own business, and couldn’t get rid of this feeling that there was something dark going on, that there was some dysfunctional atmosphere there. I wanted to focus on this stranger and find out what could be happening behind him. The front door is a huge thing for a writer. To breach that door and see how people behave when nobody’s watching, that’s fundamental to writing.”
Jonny Geller, Jewell’s agent at Curtis Brown, praises Jewell for her ability to get into the heads of her characters and build rich worlds around them. “Lisa understands that characters come first and that you sort out your plot twists after,” Geller says. “She doesn’t plan out her books. I’ve thought, there’s no way you’re not planning those twists—but she doesn’t. She’s at the peak of her craft, and she’s always hungry for new stories.”
Born in North London, Jewell was a painfully shy kid—nothing like the confident author fans meet at book events today. “I had pigeon toes and a terrible blushing problem,” she recalls. “I would turn this brilliant red at the suggestion that anyone was about to talk to me. I could never just throw myself into anything. My mother says I was always on the edge looking in.”
As a young woman Jewell was “desperate to settle down” and feel grown up. After earning a diploma in fashion communication and promotion from Epsom School of Art & Design (“I had no clue what I was doing and where I was going,” she says), she married an emotionally abusive man. “He love-bombed me and proposed after three months, and the minute I agreed to spend my life with him the abuse started,” she continues. “He threw out my photos and diaries. He told me I was bad at sex. I wasn’t allowed a front door key. He chose what we were going to eat and watch. There’s no sunshine when you’re living like that. I’m still confused by how I let it happen.”
When that toxic marriage ended after five years, in 1996, Jewell set out to reinvent herself. She began dating her current husband—they’ve been together for over two decades and share two daughters—and, after getting laid off from her job as a secretary, started working on a novel at the suggestion of a friend who promised to buy her dinner if she could write three chapters. That novel became Ralph’s Party, a rom-com released in 1999 after Bridget Jones’s Diary ushered in the chick lit age. “It was the right book at the right time,” Jewell says. “London publishers wanted to snap up as many young female writers as they could. Had there not been that zeitgeisty thing going on, I might have missed my moment.”
As Jewell’s readership expanded in the 2000s, she began to focus less on romance and more on the dark sides of human nature—and she used her first marriage as source material. “I’m constantly drawn back to writing about coercive controllers,” she reveals. “My first marriage was probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to me—in the bleakest, most gothic way imaginable. It’s character building for a writer.”
“Lisa’s stories come from a place deep within her,” says Atria publisher Libby McGuire. “They come from an interest in exploring women, men, and control. She’s a number one bestseller and her profile is building, and that’s what I find most heartening. She’s on the cusp of being that big brand-name author that so many strive to become.”
Sophie Kinsella, author of the bestselling Shopaholic series, has been friends with Jewell for more than 20 years and chats with her often about life and work. “Lisa’s writing has changed over the years,” Kinsella says. “I love the thrillers she writes now. Lisa knows exactly how to play the reader, what details to drop in and when, and she creates such compelling characters that you want to follow their stories, whatever happens. I’m so proud of her.”
When Jewell isn’t writing, she’s spending time with friends and family, especially her daughters, who bring her boundless joy. “I love living with teenage girls,” Jewell muses. “I love their sass and potty mouths. I love their mess and wet towels. I love driving them places and fixing meals. I like looking after teenagers in a way I never liked looking after children. I’m not a fan of babies. Toddlers do my brain in. Whereas with teenagers, I’m in my element.”
Clearly Jewell has hit her stride—as a parent and a novelist. “I’ve found myself in a position where, by any reasonable measure, I’m comfortable now and could actually stop writing,” she says. “Truly it’s nothing to do with money. I just have to do something with these feelings I get, where people jump out of the street and get in my head, or I see a house and want to walk into it and find out who lives there. I need to use these weird things and make something out of them. With every book I publish, it seems like an extreme privilege. I’m not sure what the secret is. I’m just following my instincts.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
A version of this article appeared in the 07/03/2023 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Stranger Danger
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Mary Chapin Carpenter
Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958 in Princeton, New Jersey) is a highly successful country music singer, guitarist, and songwriter. According to Songfacts, Carpenter had a fairly privileged upper middle class upbringing. Her father was at least partly responsible for her embarking on a musical career. The song “House of Cards” was inspired by the divorce of her parents when she was sixteen.
One of her most widely known singles is “Passionate Kisses” (written by fellow singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams), a song with a rock flavor musically and lyrics listing simple desires such as “a comfortable bed”, “food to fill me up”, and “time to think”. Another big hit was “Down at the Twist and Shout“, which she performed in January 1997 at Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans.
A number of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s songs speak to women, urging them on through hard times or troubled relationships. In “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her“, co-composed by Carpenter and Don Schlitz, the singer makes the case for strength and self-respect. Another common theme in her music is that of taking life at your own pace, rather than rampant goal-driven materialism, such as “The Long Way Home” from her 2001 album Time*Sex*Love, which pokes fun at a man who “retire(s) at thirty to his big-ass house next to the putting green.” The album has a relatively different feel musically, incorporating elaborate orchestra melodies, but with her characteristic lyrical depth.
Her album Between Here and Gone, was released in 2004.
Carpenter’s 2007 album, The Calling, on Rounder Records’ rock/pop imprint Zoë, features commentary about contemporary politics, a reaction to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on a track entitled “Houston,” and an incendiary track entitled “On with the Song“, dedicated to the Dixie Chicks, and addressing the visceral reaction to the trio. In less than three months after its release, The Calling sold more than 100,000 copies in the US.
Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards and is the only artist to have won four consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Female Country Vocal Performance, which she received from 1992 to 1995. On October 7, 2012, Carpenter was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Carpenter is a fifth cousin of the late singer and humanitarian Harry Chapin, along with his brothers Tom Chapin and Steve Chapin.

John Jennings

Collaborator
John Jennings
R.I.P.
Editor Note: The wonderful video of Down at the Twist and Shout was filmed at the Spanish Ballroom, Glen Echo Park, Glen Echo, Md. Take note of both John Jennings and Pete Kennedy on guitar and the wonderful BeauSoleil. Also special because I was there.
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