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Rearrange some Steel Cranes songs, add a little fiddle and steel guitar, and you’d have some no-nonsense, woman-done-wrong country music. “I write a lot of our songs on my acoustic and they often initially have a country feel to them,” says Steel Cranes vocalist and guitarist Tracy Shapiro. “We usually butcher things once Amanda [Shukle] is on drums and I switch to my electric,” she jokes. Continue reading
Darcy DuRuz and her all-women circus are up to some powerful magic. They’ve had a heady mix of enchantment and empowerment bubbling for some time, and plan to unleash the magic of Girl Circus’ Witches at the Wildish Theater Oct. 4-5. Girl Circus is a thoughtful blend of professional circus arts performers and novice apprentices. The circus was born in 2001 when DuRuz noticed a lack of female performers at the Oregon Country Fair (OCF). Continue reading
The frontline of the fight for civil rights isn’t only in the courtroom or marching down the street, but on stage from Alaska to New York City to Eugene. Interdisciplinary performance artist Ryan Conarro visits the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art this week to perform his latest work, this hour forward, a multi-media production reflecting the changing state of marriage rights. “It’s a piece exploring family, love, marriage, identity and the gay rights movement,” Conarro tells EW. Continue reading
Four historical narratives, Russian fatalism and strong ties to his family’s pioneering and Native American heritage drive Howard W. Robertson’s newest work, Peculiar Pioneer. He and several other local writers will be reading from their recent work Sunday, Sept. 28, at the inaugural Lane Writer’s Reading Series event. Continue reading
At once uplifting and infuriating, Alive Inside is a new documentary that can’t help but tell two stories at once. On the one hand, this film is about Dan Cohen, a former social worker who some three years ago began bringing iPods loaded with music into nursing homes, where “patients” with dementia were suddenly awakened by the simple act of hearing the songs that once brought them joy. Continue reading
K Records recording artists The Shivas nod toward vintage psyche and garage rock, but Jared Molyneux says his band isn’t merely a nostalgia act. “We sound like a band that listens to a lot of garage music from the ’60s,” Molyneux says. “The sound and feeling of that style of music must have had a profound effect on us, as our music obviously resembles it,” he adds, referencing The Velvet Underground and The 13th Floor Elevators as well as artists like Sam Cooke, James Brown and Leadbelly. Continue reading
Among guitarists, if not across the wide world, Dave Rawlings is recognized as a stylist of the highest order, a folk traditionalist who is also a supreme innovator. For evidence of what this man can do with his 1935 arch-top Epiphone, witness “Revelator,” the first track on 2001’s Time (The Revelator) by singer and songwriter Gillian Welch, with whom Rawlings frequently collaborates. Continue reading
When it comes to indie rap, few MCs boast the candid storytelling of Brother Ali. Continue reading
Just as the arrival of shorter, cooler days signal autumn, the arrival of some big names, at least in the little world of classical music, tells us that the 2014-15 classical music season is underway. The Sept. 28 Eugene Symphony concert featuring the legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman playing Beethoven’s majestic Violin Concerto offers a chance to see one of the last of the really big-name classical soloists (there’s Yo Yo Ma and not many others left) who can fill up a venue as cavernous as the Hult Center on reputation alone. Continue reading