Eric Church’s third album, Chief, was released last July. The North Carolina–born country singer had previously scored a couple of Top Ten hits, but he wasn’t exactly making major waves.

Not so long ago, Dare Dukes was just another part–time musician and frustrated novelist living in a crummy flat on the Lower East Side of New York.

Forget ABBA for a minute, OK? There’s much more to Swedish music than Bjorn, Benny and the girls.

Constantly on the move, both physically and creatively, Kylesa is home for the holidays for what’s become the band’s one consistent annual break in a grueling – but fun – schedule of playing to metal fans all over the world.

In rock ‘n’ roll, as in life, the only constant is change. The Chicago–based band Styx has followed an extraordinarily complex evolutionary road. Founded in the early 1970s by singer/pianist Dennis DeYoung and lead guitarist James “JY” Young, both of them songwriters with big visions (and big egos), Styx landed on a winning formula when the two mainstays learned to play to one another’s strengths (DeYoung as a balladeer with a taste for the theatrical, ...

ONE OF THE most prolific and restlessly creative musicians of the modern era, composer and pianist Bob James was a cornerstone of the “smooth jazz” movement in the late 1970s and into the ‘80s. He’s got a roomful of gold albums and Grammys for his collaborations with the likes of David Sanborn, Earl Klugh, Grover Washington Jr. and the all–star group Fourplay, which he co–founded in 1991 and still records and tours with to this day.

Hard to believe, but Liz Callaway, Broadway and cabaret singing star, used to suffer from crippling shyness and stage fright.

There aren’t many bands, in Savannah, the Lowcountry or otherwise, who can create such a mighty wallop using just three people.

“The road goes on forever,” Gregg Allman sang in one of his most famous songs, the one about evading the soul–snatching midnight rider.

If there’s one thing KidSyc hopes you take away from his music, it’s this: To thine own self be true.

Many songwriters would give their left arm for a half–dozen enduring tunes  – lyrics that provoke the imagination, massage the spirit and leave an indelible impression. Such things are second nature to Texan Guy Clark, whose 40–year catalog spans an astonishing range of sensitivity, perception and humor, musical poetry of such substance and emotive depth that even this 30–track tribute album hardly scratches the surface.

SINCERELY, IRIS The Great Unknown One of the most interesting of Savannah's newest crop of acoustic artists, Sincerely, Iris makes music that gleefully gallops across easy categorization. These songs veer from spacey, modal musing to hyperdrive rock to highly melodic and structured pop, each with a lyrical knife's edge that puts them into that fabulously rich and never specific singer/songwriter territory. Still, the most primal joy of The Great Unknown is in the fabric of ...

How popular music has changed. When Paul McCartney released the McCartney II album, in the summer of 1980, it was reviewed as the weakest and most self-indulgent record he'd ever made.

The touring version of Iron & Wine is a three-ring circus, an 11-piece band with drums, percussion, a synthesizer, two backup singers and a muscular three-man horn section.

It was a bittersweet goodbye at the final performance of the 2011 Music Festival, a later-than-usual 10:30 p.m. performance by funk legend Maceo Parker. There might have been more time spent looking back on the highs and lows of the last 17 days, but it's a good thing there wasn't because the crowd was there to dance.

THE BOXCARS At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 4 Randy Wood Guitars, 1304 E. Highway 80, Bloomingdale. $25 This is truly a bluegrass supergroup, began by fiddler and banjo player Ron Stewart, a longtime veteran of J.D. Crowe’s New South (a band that also included Boxcars bassist Harold Nixon). Stewart founded this-here band with mandolin maestro Adam Steffey, who’d spent eight fame and fortune-filled years as part of Alison Krauss and Union Station (from Every Time ...

THE ROYAL NOISE At 10 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26 Huc-a-Poos, 1213 U.S. 80, Tybee Island; At 10 p.m. Friday, Jan. 27 Live Wire Music Hall, 307 W. River St. With Wormsleow and Sincerely, Iris; At 10:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 28 Congress Street Social Club, 411 W. Congress St. It's a three-day jazz/funk weekend as the recently-from-Savannah Royal Noise celebrates its first CD release, Keep on Moving. This'll take a bit of explaining: Founding guitarist Johan ...

YARN With Dangermuffin At 9 p.m. Friday, Jan. 20 Live Wire Music Hall, 307 W. River St. $8 Blake Christiana grew up in Schenectady, N.Y. with a hippie dad who exposed his son to the acoustic, country-flavored tunes of mid-period Grateful Dead, as well as Jerry Garcia's bluegrass offshoot, Old & in the Way. Making his way through the years, Christiana - who's 36 now - grew fond of Willie Nelson, which, naturally, led him ...

LOUIS LOGIC With Camcutta, Bathsh3ba At 10 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 14 Wormhole Bar, 2307 Bull St. Ticket info at wormholebar.com Get to know the new Lou! This quote from underground emcee Louis Logic sums up his philosophy quite nicely: "I'm making music that I think is totally innovative and high quality," the New York rapper says. "To me, this is an exciting time for hip hop music because people are getting bored of the old ...

OLD FRIENDS RETURN You know 'em, you love 'em: Live Wire Music Hall's got the Ragbirds Wednesday, Jan 4; this is that eclectic Afro/Celtic/folk/reggae band from Michigan that travels in a van powered by waste vegetable oil. Fronted as always by the amazing singer, songwriter and violinist Erin Zindle, they've just this week issued their fourth full-length album, Travelin' Machine ... A couple of good ones at the Jinx this week: Our  pal B.J. Barham, ...

Make your home in Savannah for long enough and it’s almost frighteningly easy to wake up one morning and realize you have inadvertently come to take the inherent beauty of much of the city for granted.

One of the coolest “gets” by this year’s Savannah Music Festival must surely be Saturday night’s exceedingly rare chance to catch the genre-hopping master banjoist Béla Fleck joined by four of the most revered traditional African musicians alive today for an evening of multi-cultural string and percussion music.

ASO & The Marcus Roberts Trio  *** In one of the most curious (and curiously depressing) developments of this year’s SMF, this closing day performance by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Robert Spano has failed to generate the same level of interest and anticipation as the group’s two previous annual appearances at the Festival. Word on the street has it that this high-profile event (the only SMF show to take place ...

When most people think of a "composer," they think of a dead European dude with a powdered wig. Texas-born, Yale-educated, 41-year-old Christopher Theofanidis is none of those, but he is one of the most prolific young composers in America today.

To the best of my knowledge, Rob Gibson has never played a lick of music on any stage in Savannah. 

An acoustic show with singer/songwriters Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt has been added to the Savannah Music Festival lineup. Tickets, $35-$65, go on sale Friday for the March 24 concert in the Trustees Theater.

September Drive–By Truckers. Patterson Hood and his crew of hard–rocking southern songsters have a long–awaited date in the Trustees Theater Sept. 8. Savannah Philharmonic Orchestra. Re: the date, the season opener consists almost entirely of music by American composers. Sept. 11, Lucas Theatre. Darius Rucker. Don’t call him Hootie, folks, because the Big Blowfish has established a lucrative second career as a country singer.  Sept. 16, Johnny Mercer Theatre. Mountain Heart. One of the finest ...

Prince Rama The members of Animal Collective were so taken with Prince Rama's hypnotic, trippy, spiritually-cued psychedelia, they signed the Brooklyn trio to their Paw Tracks label. Michael Collins and sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson started making music together while living in Alachua, Florida - it's just a few miles north of Gainesville, which is decidedly Bohemian-heavy, and contains the largest concentration of Hare Krishna devotees in the country. Such was their thing. The threesome ...

Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Certainly there are a few things about 2010 that some of us would like to put behind us. However, the party’s the thing, and as we go out with the auld, we also come in with the new, and there’s myriad opportunities for celebrating the calendar switch in the Hostess City.

My mind was totally, terminally blown at last year's Savannah Music Festival performance by Bela Fleck and his African guest musicians. The depth of mastery and feeling shown by those African masters was so profound, so beyond Western norms, so unlike anything else I'd ever heard, that other forms of music seem to pale in comparison for me now.