VMP Magazine

Many country songwriters chronicle a search for something bigger, a need to escape from their small towns in order to make it in Nashville or spread out into wide open spaces. It’s been a different journey for Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson, who, on their first album as the duo Plains, make music that wanders homeward. Both of these artists come from the South — Crutchfield, who also makes music as Waxahatchee, hails from Birmingham, Alabama; Williamson is an Austin, Texas native. Both musicians also cut their teeth in indie rock for the majority of the last decade. But by 2020, they found themselves in similar spots on their new records, Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud and Wiliamson’s Sorceress, leaning toward the Americana, folk and country music they rebelled against in their youths. “If you only knew how hard I was trying to suppress that Southern accent for so long,” Crutchfield told the New York Times. 

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is Brijean’s new EP, Angelo.

Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with. This week’s album is the self-titled third record from MUNA, the band’s debut on Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records.

Over the course of his nearly three-decade long career, Andrew Bird has formed a creative process around live performance. Like a comedian trying out new jokes on a crowd, he has often experimented with improvisation and half-finished songs on stage, just to see how they feel with an audience. “It wasn’t that I really wanted anyone’s specific feedback,” Bird said from home in Los Angeles. “Just the sense of some sort of dialogue that was outside of my head is important.”

Photo by Jack Bool

Only one song on Feelings, the first full-length album from dance duo Brijean, was written during the pandemic. It’s called “Paradise.” “The antithesis of reality,” Brijean Murphy, the vocalist, percussionist and mastermind behind the project said, and laughed. “It was just a daydream.”

Although there was nothing about those early weeks of the pandemic that screamed “paradise” to Murphy and her co-producer, fellow musician and partner Doug Stuart, Stuart remembers that the track came from a sense of calm. “Even though, obviously, so much was happening in the world that was overwhelming, there was an element of tranquility,” he said. “I think maybe that was the place that the daydream was allowed to come out of.”

It’s the first scheduled day of Chicano Batman’s tour to promote their fourth album, Invisible People, but guitarist Carlos Arevalo and his bandmates — vocalist/keyboardist Bardo Martinez, bassist Eduardo Arenas, and drummer Gabriel Villa — are quarantined in their homes in and around Los Angeles. Instead of performing in Santa Fe and preparing for Coachella in a couple of weeks, the musicians are brainstorming how to connect with their fans at home through Instagram Live, performing DJ sets and setting up instrumental tutorials. On this day, Arevalo plays records from the Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, and Debarge before holding an interview with Teri Gender Bender of Le Butcherettes, the Mexican punk band who are supposed to be touring with Chicano Batman. “Even though there's this physical distancing, I feel connected more than ever,” Arevalo says. “This is a battle that it doesn't matter what you look like, where you come from, where you live. It doesn't care about any of that. It's just like humans against it.”