Theresa Andersson "Hold On To Me"

If you happen to be in New Orleans this weekend, here is the hot tip. The French Quarter Music Festival is free to the public in Jackson Square, with music and oh yeah – there is lots of food, so come hungry. There are carts from some of the finest restaurants in NOLA. You know I am usually ALL OVER the music, which I will get to in a minute, but ya gotta check out the food! I recommend just walking around and chasing the aromas wafting your way before you commit to anything. There are so many choices, and there is going to have to be some mighty serious decisions made! Now to the music, it will make you dance in place, and you know everyone else will be shaking to it too! Click-through for the music schedules on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

Now, if you are indeed lucky enough to be in New Orleans, I want you to promise to go see Theresa Andersson. She is playing on the Abita Beer Stage at Woldenberg Riverfront Park at 2:15 on Sunday. She is a simply incredible live performer, and to see her in her adopted city of New Orleans, has to be an extra special treat. Today’s video was filmed during Mardi Gras a couple of months ago, and features Theresa marching with the Krewe of Muses. The song is "Hold On To Me," and is on the upcoming album Street Parade, which will come out on April 24th.

- Jessie Scott

James McMurtry "We Can't Make It Here"

My mother didn’t need to have a job, my father was able to support our family with just one salary. That is SO last century! Do you remember those days? Things are so different for so many people now, with two people working, sometimes needing to have two jobs to make ends meet. As I drive around the country, I see boarded up factories decaying along the rivers and train tracks bearing silent witness to degenerating buildings along their right of ways. They use to bring goods to the nation from every corner of the country. And I have to say, how do we remain a first world country when we don’t manufacture what we need?

When the song “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” by James McMurtry first came out in 2005 on the Childish Things CD, we were unaware of the chaos that would befall the financial world just a few years later in 2008. Upon the album’s release, Stephen King commented, "...this may be the best American protest song since (Bob Dylan's) Masters of War." I still believe that poets take the temperature of a society, and shine it back at us with white hot truth, warts and all. So you know, we were totally honored by James McMurtry’s appearance at the Spring Music Fog Marathon at Threadgill’s WHQ last month. And we were super stoked that he laid a solo version down of “We Can’t Make It Here.”

- Jessie Scott

New Country Rehab "Back In Time"

A long time ago, I wanted to do a documentary on a road that runs from Delaware up to the Canadian border, US-9. I was taken with how the landscape changed along the way, from the interior farmland of Delaware, on a ferry across Delaware Bay from Lewes, DE to Cape May, NJ. Up through the New Jersey beaches into the full blown urban experience of New York. Suburban, then the exurbs and into deep and beautiful countryside, paralleling the Hudson River for a good portion of its 315 mile stretch, but US-9 keeps going. It’s path reaches past the Catskill Mountains, into the Adirondacks, to where the Hudson River officially begins at Henderson Lake in Newcomb, New York. But 9 keeps going, ultimately ending in a cul-de-sac near the Canadian border. The story is of the architecture, of the commonality which is pushed at a different pace by the amount of people congregated along its points: New York City, Albany, Lake Placid, Saratoga Springs, to the hamlet of Champlain. In essence, you can take a road like that back in time, to how the land looked, and to how our communities started when we sparsely populated this land.

I think there are a lot of people lately who yearn to go back to more carefree days, to an easier time. I like my music harkening back to then, as the band New Country Rehab presents it. They are taking a trip down from Canada, heading to Old Settlers Music Festival making pit stops for gigs along the way. They start tonight at The Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, and make their way down to Texas and then head back up north. NCR have been gathering rave reviews wherever they go. We had the pleasure of filming them at the Music Fog Fall Marathon last October in Nashville, during Americana Fest. Here are John Showman, James Robertson, Ben Whiteley, and Roman Tome' with the Music Fog recording of an unreleased tune, “Back In Time.”

- Jessie Scott