Devil In A Woodpile

Check out THIS article in the huge industry mouthpiece BILLBOARD on Nora O'Connor. She talks about recording with Jeff Tweedy and Mavis Staples for an upcoming record, touring with Jakob Dylan and where she's been the past few years.

HERE is a video of Nora and Kelly Hogan singing with a "nice-smelling" Jakob Dylan on the Craig Ferguson show.  If you look carefully in the background you'll see Jon Rauhouse on pedal steel and Tom Ray on bass hiding behind their comically large beards.

Division Street, Devil in a Woodpile's second CD, has been out of print for sometime now.  But our Canadian distributor found some mouldering in the back of their warehouse and sent them back to us (boooo Canada for not digging the Devil the way we do).

Anywho, that means we've got  a precious few back in our greasy mitts and have put it back up for sale.  Grab 'em while you can.

Division Street is just a cool-ass record with songs like "Wrong Woman" and "Big Boat" and features the fiddle playing of a before-he-was-famous Andrew Bird.

Usually, when we get bits and pieces of news or interesting tidbits, we try and weave them together and present them to you as a thematic whole.  After much mulling, we could find no way to do that, so we thought the very LACK of a theme would be the theme.  Thus, three totally unrelated bits of news for your time-wasting pleasure as we slink towards the three day weekend:

--ASCAP posted a great little "Audio Portrait" of Graham Parker. He talks about the songwriting process, what he looks for in a perfect pop song, how he balances the dark with the cheery, PLUS you get to hear segments of several of his new songs from his lastest album Imaginary Television.  Have a listen HERE

--When Devil in a Woodpile broke up, we were (and remain) very sad.  However, washboardist/harpist Rick Sherry's new band Sanctified Grumblers have picked up the slack some.  In addition to reviving the Tuesday night gigs at the Hideout, HERE's a video of their song "Stump Grinder"---it'll put some lead in your pencil.  We'll see you Tuesdays...

--Finally, we've been running this madhouse known as Bloodshot for 15 years now, working longs hours for low pay faced with the constant vicissitudes that beset small independents like us.  So, you'll have to excuse us if we get a little miffed when interlopers and dilettantes muscle in on our territory.   When we got the news that ELLEN FRICKING DEGENERES has started her own label, well, part of us wanted to rail against the heavens at all the easy publicity she's getting and part of us wanted to go all Virginia Woolfe and put rocks in our pockets and wade into Lake Michigan.  Maybe then we could get the wider world to pay attention.

Enjoy your long weekend and remember: only YOU can prevent such madness...

See the Devil EVERY TUESDAY for FREE at Chicago's fave down home watering hole THE HIDEOUT. It's loose, it's legendary and they've been doing every week for, like, a billion years. The way this music is MEANT to be heard.