For nearly fifteen years Corb Lund and The Hurtin’ Albertans have taken their brand of country music from the Canadian Prairies of their homeland to America’s heartland, steadily building a growing fan base one show at a time. With the release of Cabin Fever in 2012, Lund achieved the commercial success to go along with the critical acclaim that he had been receiving for years. The album debuted at the top of the Canadian Billboard Chart, overtaking pop stars Justin Bieber and One Direction.
"I just do my own thing, sometimes I get help from the industry and sometimes I don’t. The way I’ve set my career up, I’m gonna do what I do regardless, but it’s whatever. If they want to get on board they can."
Nineteen ninety-four will go down as one of the most eventful years in music history, a year full of landmark releases where little-known bands would sell millions of albums and enjoy critical as well as commercial success. One of the albums released that year, The Toadies’ platinum-selling album Rubberneck has just been re-released on Kirtland Records, in a remastered edition with five bonus tracks.
"I don’t like most of the music I hear on the radio but that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of good music coming out you just have to dig for it."
My introduction to Clay McLeod Chapman was memorable. It started with walking into a room with eight or nine other people. We were a group of young writers starting a series of classes on the craft. All of us had been chosen to have our plays produced for a festival showcasing young writing and acting talents.
On Tax Day, April 15th, Drunk Monkeys will host the world premiere of the short film Panhandle Jim, written and directed by Texas filmmaker Scott Honea. Honea’s previous work, Believe You Me, was featured at several film festivals and has received distribution through Hulu. For his follow-up production, Honea chose a stripped-down story and format. Panhandle Jim, which was shot on Super 8 film, follows one character as he skirts the edges of a breakdown. That character is played with daring intensity by Frank Mosley (Upstream Color).
Wasting away my life on Tumblr means running into a lot of art. It can be someone’s fan art of their ideal relationship from their favorite show. It can also be something striving to make clear an insightful, unapologetic social perspective. Then again, it can be something that makes absolutely no sense, not even to the person who drew/wrote it. You run into all kinds of things, and you’re never at a loss for ingenious and unreal.
If I Had Wings These Windmills Would be Dead is the latest collection of flash fiction pieces from New York writer, musician, and self-described “hippy” Chuck Howe. The collection is an autobiographical collage, following Chuck’s own journey through childhood into his adult years. We’ve previously featured an excerpt, “The Burning of Nag Champa”, here on the site, and now we present an interview with Chuck himself, as he chats with Matthew Guerruckey about his inspirations, his early writing, and what lies ahead.
I rented American Splendor, the film biography of Cleveland writer and file clerk Harvey Pekar, because it was one of the few promising titles left at the video store on a Friday night. I was still hopeful of the possibility that I had stumbled upon something that was going to be worth a damn. I liked Paul Giamatti, in the few things I had seen him in at that point, and the story of a “flunky file clerk” becoming an influential figure in underground comics sounded like there was more than enough promise.
"Lemme put it this way. When I started out, I thought it was for the everyman. And even we got really good reviews, it didn’t sell too well. But, when the movie came out, it was real successful, and it surprised the hell out of me."