The Jayhawks
The Jayhawks
One of the most enduring and beloved groups of the last thirty years, The Jayhawks first emerged from Minneapolis in the mid-1980’s, though their commercial and critical breakthrough didn’t arrive until the release of their 1992 masterpiece, Hollywood Town Hall. Over the ensuing decades, the band would go on to record a series of highly influential albums and tour the world countless times over, sharing stages with everyone from Bob Dylan and Tom Petty to Lucinda Williams and Wilco along the way. Following an extended hiatus in the mid-2000’s, Louris and his long-time bandmates—bassist Marc Perlman, drummer Tim O’Reagan, and keyboardist Karen Grotberg—returned to the studio, most recently releasing the acclaimed Paging Mr. Proust and Back Roads and Abandoned Motels in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
The 11th Jayhawks studio album XOXO was released on July 10, 2020 through Sham/Thirty Tigers. Recorded in late 2019 at Pachyderm and Flowers Studios in Minnesota, XOXO represents a bold step forward. For the first time, all four members contribute writing and lead vocal duties. XOXO is the most diverse and wide-ranging in the group’s storied history. Rather than marking a sonic departure, though, the collection signals a sharpening of focus for the band, an elevation in understanding of who they are and what they do best. In classic Jayhawks fashion, the songs here mix the influence of American roots music with British invasion and jangly power-pop, but there’s a newfound vitality at play, as well, an invigoration of confidence and energy that could only come with the injection of fresh blood. The result is an album that, much like the band’s lush harmonies, brings multiple distinctive voices together into a singular whole, a collection that, ironically enough, finds unity in individuality and identity in reinvention.
Bradley Denton
Bradley Denton
Bradley Clayton Denton is an American science fiction author. He has also written other types of fiction, such as the black comedy of his novel Blackburn, about a sympathetic serial killer. He was born in Towanda, Kansas, and attended the University of Kansas at Lawrence and graduated with degrees in astronomy (B.A.) and English (M.A.).
An all time favorite of Roaming the Arts is Denton’s 1993 classic:
Read Kirkus Review of Blackburn
Link above is to Goodreads site while the BradleyDenton.net site is being reimagined.
Lucinda Williams
Three-time Grammy Award winner, Lucinda Williams has been carving her own path for more than three decades now. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Williams had been imbued with a “culturally rich, economically poor” worldview. Several years of playing the hardscrabble clubs gave her a solid enough footing to record a self-titled album that would become a touchstone for the embryonic Americana movement – helping launch a thousand musical ships along the way.
While not a huge commercial success at the time Lucinda Williams (aka, the Rough Trade album) retained a cult reputation, and finally got the reception it deserved upon its reissue in 2014. Jim Farber of New York’s Daily News hailed the reissue by saying “Listening again proves it to be that rarest of beasts: a perfect work. There’s not a chord, lyric, beat or inflection that doesn’t pull at the heart or make it soar.”
For much of the next decade, Williams moved around the country, stopping in Austin, Los Angeles, Nashville, and turning out work that won immense respect within the industry (winning a Grammy for Mary Chapin Carpenter’s version of “Passionate Kisses”) and a gradually growing cult audience. While her recorded output was sparse for a time, the work that emerged was invariably hailed for its indelible impressionism — like 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which notched her first Grammy as a performer.
The past decade brought further development, both musically and personally, evidenced on albums like West (2007), which All Music Guide called “flawless…destined to become a classic” and Blessed (2011), which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “a dynamic, human, album, one that’s easy to fall in love with.” Those albums retained much of Williams’ trademark melancholy and southern Gothic starkness, but also exuded more rays of light and hope. This all lead to the 2014 release of Williams’ first double studio album Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone. The album received overwhelming praise from the media and fans, thus proving that Williams’ songwriting is as strong and important as it has ever been.
William Kent Krueger
William Kent Krueger
Location-Minnesota
His novel This Tender Land is a Roaming the Arts favorite of 2020.
His Cork O’Connor series continued in 2022 with Fox Creek and his latest stand-alone in 2023, The River We Remember.
StarVista Live – Sandy Beaches Cruise/Big Easy Cruise
Delbert McClinton and an amazing lineup every year. Big time fun on the water.
Delbert, Marcia Ball, The Mavericks, Teresa James, Big Joe Maher, Shinyribs, Band of Heathens, Lee Roy Parnell, and more for the January 2024
The Big Easy Cruise features sailing to New Orleans from Ft. Lauderdale, FL with a Mexico stop on the way back.
2023 Artists include Little Feat, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Tab Benoit, Samantha Fish, and many many more.
For the full cruise lineup at StarVista.
Jason Pinter
Jason Pinter
is the bestselling author of Hide Away, the first Rachel Marin novel, as well as five novels in his Henry Parker thriller series and the standalone novel The Castle, which have over one million copies in print worldwide and have been published in over a dozen countries, the Middle Grade adventure novel Zeke Bartholomew: SuperSpy, and the children’s picture book Miracle. He has been nominated for the Thriller Award, Strand Critics Award, Barry Award, RT Reviewers Choice Award, Shamus Award and CrimeSpree Award. Two of his books—The Fury and The Darkness—were chosen as Indie Next selections, and The Mark, The Stolen and The Fury, were named to The Strand’s Best Books of the Year list. The Mark and The Stolen both appeared on the ‘Heatseekers’ bestseller list in The Bookseller (UK). The Mark was optioned to be a feature film.
