Scary Pockets
An Incredible Cover Band From The LA Music Scene
Scary Pockets are a dynamic funk band formed from the LA music scene (Los Angeles, USA). The band consists of Ryan Lerman and Jack Conte who are joined by a continuously rotating line up of quality musicians to form Scary Pockets.
Ryan Lerman spent his twenties touring as a bassist for the American singer-songwriter, Ben Folds. He also has performed as a guitarist for Micheal Bublé and as a musical director for John Legend. A very impressive back catalog of performance history. The other half of Scary Pockets, Jack Conte, is an American musician, singer-songwriter, disc jockey, entrepreneur, and filmmaker. When these two talented individuals mix their skills together, along with some of the best session musicians from the LA music scene, the results are phenomenal.
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Kathleen Edwards
For decades, Kathleen Edwards has been a cornerstone of North American roots music.
Since making her debut with 2002’s Failer, she’s spent the 21st century occupying the grey area between genres, swirling together her own mix of alt-country, folk, and heartland rock & roll. It’s a sound that has earned its creator more than a half-dozen Juno nominations, as well as Top 40 success on both sides of the Canadian/American border. Now in her third decade as an artist, Kathleen Edwards has done more than carry the torch of songwriting heroes like Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Lucinda Williams — she’s opened the door for others, too, inspiring a new generation of artists who, like her, blur the boundaries between genre and generation.
A native of Ottawa, Ontario, Edwards was still in her early 20s when she released the critically-acclaimed Failer. The album’s warm, woozy sound — crystallized on radio hits like “Six O’Clock News” — quickly turned her into one of the era’s alt-country heroes. From the very start, though, Edwards’ music seemed to exist somewhere out of time, resisting categorization even as Failer received a Juno nomination for “Roots & Traditional Album of the Year.”
“No one knew what to call my type of music back then,” she says of those early years. “The Americana genre didn’t exist yet, so they couldn’t categorize me. I just made the kind of music I wanted to make.”
Edwards continued blazing her own trail with follow-up albums like Back to Me and Asking for Flowers. By the time Voyageur arrived in 2012, Americana very much did exist as a genre, and Edwards found herself riding a newfound commercial peak. The album reached Number 2 on the Canadian Albums Chart and Number 3 on Billboard’s Folk Albums chart. Even so, a busy decade on the road had left her exhausted. After touring in support of Voyageur’s release, Edwards left the music business altogether and moved to suburban Ontario, where she opened a coffee shop called — defiantly — “Quitters.”
“Before I turned 30, I toured the world and put out nearly four records, performed on TV, and had an incredible run,” she says of her first 10 years in the spotlight. “What’s interesting is that I walked away from all of it, too — and when I came back, I felt better than the person who put out Failer.”
By the late 2010s, Edwards felt recharged and revitalized. When a phone call arrived from Maren Morris, who was looking for songwriting partners for a new project, Edwards jumped at the chance to collaborate. The two musicians co-wrote “Good Woman,” which appeared on Morris’ Grammy-nominated album Girl in 2019. Back home in Canada, Edwards continued to write new material, eventually partnering with producer Ian Fitchuk for the album Total Freedom. Released in 2020, the album expanded her sound and her audience, boosted by two hit songs — “Options Open” and “Hard on Everyone” — that both reached the Top 30 on the Triple A chart in America. Total Freedom didn’t just mark her return to the music industry. It was a rebirth, too.
What’s next? New music, of course. She and Grammy-winner Jim Scott co-produced and released an album called Covers, which pays homage to some of her songwriting heroes – Tom Petty, REM, John Prine, Bruce Springsteen, et al. Edwards remains a fan of “ripping guitar riffs and good songs,” and she’s combining both into a follow-up album co-produced by Grammy-winners Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson that will showcase her legacy as well as her evolution.
She maintains a presence on the road, too, playing her own gigs one minute and sharing shows with her heroes — including Willie Nelson, John Fogerty, and Bob Dylan — the next.
“The amount of things I’ve gone through might make someone else quit…but quitting doesn’t quite do it for me,” she says. “I can’t help but want to write great songs, connect with people, and see what’s ahead. I don’t love looking behind, even though it’s one of the ways we can see what we’ve done, so I’m looking forward.” from High Road Touring bio
In keeping with her love of dogs and the great photo used on this post…give a listen to “Who Rescued Who”
2025 – new record out now “Billionaire”
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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.
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Luke Brindley
Luke Brindley
“The rambling acoustic environment of New Morning—era Dylan and the smokiness of early Townes Van Zandt…his own compelling musical voice.” – Acoustic Guitar
In his own words…
I’ve been obsessed with writing songs and the guitar for as long as I can remember. I married young, am an adoptive parent, and the son of a preacher man. I toured a lot for years and put out a few records as Luke Brindley, Brindley Brothers, and Native Run. I spent a lot of time in Nashville writing with some of the top writers in the business. I never quite fit into (or cared about) “the business”. I grew up in New Jersey but live outside of Washington, DC. Along with my brothers, I run Jammin Java in Vienna, VA – one of the Top 100 Clubs In The World and Union Stage in Washington, DC
The songs have a definite focus on the lyrics and hopefully offer a kind of deeper perspective. I tend to gravitate toward the larger worldview questions such as, Why are we here? What are we supposed to be doing? What does it mean to know another person? To love someone?
