Plenty going on this week's dead tree edition of the Nashville Scene. Jennifer O'Connor's latest, Here With Me, may seem sad, but she didn't mean to fool you. (Playing Tuesday, 10th at The End w/Hale... Continue reading "Jennifer O'Connor, Otis Gibbs, Basement Bash and More: Inside This Week's Music Section" >

I'd been hearing about this album for a while before I was actually able to get my hands on it. Knowing that the album had been available overseas for a month plus before arriving here in the states, I was pretty excited about getting it by the time it was available on Jan. 20. While Grandpa Walked A Picket Line is Otis's fifth album, it's my first exposure to the man from Wanamaker, Indiana. I was totally loving his weathered vocals from the moment he started singing, but it was the song "Preacher Steve" that sealed the deal [...]
Otis Gibbs est un troubadour parti de Wanamaker, Indiana, et adoubé par Billy Bragg, ce qui en matière de folk protestataire est à n'en pas douter une consécration. Son dernier album en date, Grandpa Walked a Picketline, chronique l'Amérique d'en bas, celle dont on ne parle pas dans les JT du soir, celle qui peut-être frémit d'espoir depuis l'investiture hier d'un certain Barack O. Otis Gibbs
To the Romans, XL means number 40. To consumers, XL means a clothing size, and potentially a diet. To Radiohead, The Raconteurs, and Beck, XL, or more specifically, XL Recordings, means home. To us, XL is just our latest Friday Mixtape, and a good one at that. As always, below you will find the week's best mix of singles, covers, and remixes, along with mp3s from a few artists you might want to check out! NEW Singles: "Demon Eyes" by The Answer "Stumble Out [...]
This is it. First, today Barack Obama was inaugurated as our 44th president. And there's the biggest list of new releases – and a lot of them highly anticipated – thus far this year. There're new ones from Animal Collective , A.C. Newman , and Robert Pollard 's first (of probably many under almost as many monikers) of the year. Here are The Wheel's Still In Spin 's suggested new releases. [...]

Today, a two-fer. First, Otis Gibbs, a country folk singer similar to Phil Ochs, Merle Haggard, and Billy Bragg, makes truly American music—the kind you'd expect to hear on an unscreened porch during a long buggy summer. But Gibbs is a cut above the average troubadour, in that the tales he tells have a weathered authenticity accentuated by a voice that's perfect for the genre. There's also a welcome but unexpected humorous, optimistic quality to his songs—a sense that the folks he sings about are real, human, and deserve our love. Gibbs' his latest record, Grandpa [...]

Otis Gibbs lives the country music version of a modern day Beat Generation. He's less about rejecting mainstream American for drug experimentation, eastern spirituality and sexual exploits and more about discovering the America that you don't see on the news or in pop culture and then documenting it in photographs and songs to tell the stories. The end result are albums for the downtrodden like his upcoming release, Grandpa Walked The Picket Line . Otis was introduced to me through an email from Adrian at the blog, I Pick My Nose . He thought Otis's sound [...]

(Otis Gibbs is also an excellent photographer, visit his website for more of the same) Otis Gibbs is one of the best things to come out of Indiana (and don't give me John Cougar Mellencamp or Margot and the Nuclear So and So's). His brand of protest song is a lost and dying art. In fact there are only a handful of modern singer-songwriters crafting such songs (Billy Bragg, Steve Earle and Neil Young come to mind). Otis' new record is officially released in early 2009 but since it's been quietly put [...]

Joe from Each Note Secure Otis Gibbs, and Me at the 2006 Midwest Music Summit Originally uploaded by eachnotesecure . When I sat and listened to Otis Gibbs at The Jazz Kitchen on Friday night, I began to feel like all of my cares had been wiped completely away. It seemed like Otis had been down all of the roads the world-weary among us feared to trudge and reflected his experience through his songwriting in ways only those with names [...]