Ian McLagan, along with singer/guitarist Steve Marriott, bass player Ronnie Lane, and drummer Kenney Jones, was a member of the British pop/rock band the Small Faces, joining in November 1965, six months after the group’s formation. Before then, he had been a member of Boz & the Boz People, among other groups. McLagan’s first recorded work with the Small Faces was their third single, “Sha La La La Lee,” which peaked in the U.K. Top Ten in March 1966. A teenybopper success at first, the band eventually gained greater critical standing by adopting a more psychedelic style. Over the next two years, they scored further Top Ten British hits with “Hey Girl,” “All or Nothing” (which hit number one), “My Mind’s Eye,” “Itchycoo Park” (which introduced them to American listeners, hitting the U.S. Top 40), “Tin Soldier,” and “Lazy Sunday,” and among their albums, Small Faces reached the Top Ten and Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake hit number one.

In March 1969, Marriott quit to form Humble Pie. Three months later, McLagan, Lane, and Jones combined with singer Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood, formerly of the Jeff Beck Group, to form the Faces. This group developed a reputation for its freewheeling performances, but it was overshadowed by Stewart’s solo career, which took off in the fall of 1971 with his hit “Maggie May.” Nevertheless, the Faces also had considerable commercial success, reaching the U.K. Top Ten with the singles “Stay with Me,” “Cindy Incidentally,” and “Pool Hall Richard”/”I Wish It Would Rain,” and the albums A Nod Is as Good as a Wink…to a Blind Horse, Ooh La La (which hit number one), and Coast to Coast: Overture and Beginners. But in 1975, Stewart quit, while Wood joined the Rolling Stones, and the Faces broke up.

Ian McLagan has appeared on works with Jackson Browne, Joe Cocker, Bob Dylan, Melissa Etheridge, Bonnie Raitt, the Rolling Stones, and Bruce Springsteen, among many others.

- edited from an original article by William Ruhlmann (all music guide)

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Hooker Jr. was exposed to the blues as some children are exposed to a parent who practices carpentry, bricklaying or farming. The son of the blues legend, John Lee Hooker, naturally developed a curiosity and appetite for his father’s livelihood. Hooker Jr. performed on Detroit’s WJBK radio at the tender age of eight years old and toured with his father throughout his teens. Exposed to blues greats such as, Jimmie Reed, Washboard Willie, and Boogie Woogie Red, little Hooker Jr. would eventually perform his talents at prestigious venues such as Detroit’s, Fox Theatre and other upscale Motown clubs in the shadow of his father. By the time little Hooker Jr. turned eighteen, he was a recording artist performing with his father, most notably on John Lee Hooker’s, Live at Soledad Prison (ABC Records) release.

John Lee Hooker Jr. plays The Walnut Room, Denver on August 10, with dragondeer. Doors at 8pm. Purchase tickets in advance (click the image above), and make sure you don’t miss this extraordinary talent play his only night in Denver.

June 15, we celebrate the release of the new CD from Widow’s Bane, titled “Don’t Be Afraid, It’s Only Death” w/ Raven & The Writing Desk and Bonnie & The Beard.

Dan Bern is best known for his prolific songwriting and electric live persona. He has released eighteen albums and built a loyal following based on prodigious touring and output of songs in all forms. In 2012, Bern released two new studio recordings showcasing the American roots music that has made Bern one of the most compelling singer/songwriters of his generation: “Drifter,” a vagabond’s journey through Bern’s musical universe featuring a duet with Emmylou Harris, and “Doubleheader,” an 18-song tribute to baseball culled from close to 30 years of songwriting and recorded at Bob Weir’s TRI Studios in Marin County. Both CDs feature longtime collaborators Common Rotation with whom Bern has also released two live recordings.

Since 2007, Bern has also focused his talent and sharp wit on writing songs for movies and other projects. He composed over a dozen songs for the Jake Kasdan/Judd Apatow spoof-biopic “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” and composed songs included in Apatow’s “Get Him to the Greek,” starring Russell Brand. Bern’s song “One Dance” was also included in Kasdan’s first film “Zero Effect” starring Bill Pullman, Ben Stiller, and Ryan O’Neal.

Bern wrote “Swing Set,” a duet with Emmylou Harris, for the off Broadway production of “Family Week” directed by Jonathan Demme and wrote the title song for Demme’s documentary “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains.” In 2007, his album “Breathe” won Best Folk/Singer-Songwriter at the Sixth Annual Independent Music Awards. He has toured with Marshall Crenshaw, Ani DiFranco, and John C. Reilly’s country-infused band and in 2011 he contributed original songs for the television series Hellcats.

A talented and eclectic creator, he wrote a song with Hunter S. Thompson, gave Wilt Chamberlain tennis lessons, and released “2 feet Tall,” an album of songs for very young kids. He also wrote and illustrated “Cleaver the Gronk” (2012) and the novel “Quitting Science” (2004) under the pen name Cunliffe Merriwether. Bern lives with his wife and daughter in Los Angeles.

Paul Kelly’s remarkable new 11-song album “Spring and Fall” — his 19th studio album and first collection of new material in five years — ranks with the seminal Australian singer-songwriter’s most memorable and resonant work, demonstrating why he’s virtually a national hero in his home country and one of the most celebrated songwriters on the planet.

“Spring and Fall” arrives November 6 on the heels of an extended period of retrospective activity, during which Kelly celebrated his extensive body of work with the release of the career-spanning 40-song compilation “Songs From the South (Volumes 1 & 2)” and the eight-CD, 105-song live box set “The A-Z Recordings.” In addition, there is an ongoing catalog re-issue campaign underway for his original (non-A&M) albums, most of which have long been out of print, or were never released in North America. He also wrote a book, a well-received “mongrel memoir” titled “How To Make Gravy,” the audio book version featured readings from Kelly as well as a bonus disc of readings from some of Australia’s greatest actors, including Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Judy Davis and Hugh Jackman. His entire catalog has been re-mastered and re-released through his own label, Gawd Aggie Recordings, distributed by CEN/RED Distribution in the U.S.

In a career that’s spanned more than 30 years, Kelly has released a steady stream of albums showcasing his emotionally vivid, musically expansive songwriting and his uncanny ability to distill a novel’s worth of narrative and character detail into an effortlessly melodic pop tune.

Amanda Palmer has stated that “His songwriting is up there with the greats… the bittersweet and hard-core honesty of his lyrics is the sort of thing you’ll only see once in a lifetime if you’re lucky”, while Neil Finn of Crowded House asserts, “There is something unique and powerful about the way Kelly mixes up everyday detail with the big issues of life, death, love and struggle — not a trace of pretense or fakery in there.” Australian alt-country diva Kasey Chambers says, “If I was only allowed to listen to one artist for the rest of my life, I would choose Paul Kelly.”

The qualities that have made Paul Kelly an inspiration to his fans and peers are prominent throughout “Spring and Fall,” which ranks with the artist’s finest work in terms of melodic craft, verbal eloquence and emotional insight, with evocatively spare arrangements that set the ideal tone for such thematically related new Kelly compositions as “When A Woman Loves A Man”, “New Found Year”, “Someone New” and “Time and Tide.”

“‘Spring and Fall’ is a song cycle,” Kelly explains. “It’s been five years since I made a record, and perhaps the experience of writing a book during that time made me attuned to the idea of developing a close-knit structure for the next album I did. I knew I didn’t just want to put out a collection of songs that were loosely related to each other.

“I know that people are listening to music more and more now in a grazing kind of way, picking a song here and a song there, and that spurred me on to try and make a record that would take a stand on behalf of the album,” he continues. “I’m a music grazer myself, but there is still a deep satisfaction in encountering a set of songs that unfolds from start to finish and demands to be heard in its entirety. So “Spring and Fall” has an arc suggested by its title. There are multiple viewpoints, with links from song to song, and each song contains the seed of the song that follows. They are all love songs and the album is a love story.”

Kelly, accompanied by noted Australian producer/multi-instrumentalist J. Walker from Machine Translations and Paul’s frequent tour guitarist (and nephew) Dan Kelly, recorded most of the album in an isolated country hall in the hills of the remote rural region of South Gippsland in Victoria, Australia in the dead of a turbulent winter, with violent storms, floods, power failures and mild earthquakes regularly threatening to throw the project into turmoil. Despite the threats from nature, the pieces ultimately fell into place, with the sessions emphasizing the immediacy of the live, up-close performances and stark, stripped-down arrangements, with the sounds of the wind and the rain occasionally getting into the microphones. The result is one of the most effortlessly compelling albums of Kelly’s storied career.

“Dan and I have worked a lot as a duo over the last five years, and a sound has developed between us — intimate yet spacious — that we wanted to retain in the studio,” Kelly explains. “In line with keeping the story paramount was the desire to make the songs as concise as possible. Our philosophy was to try and make them work with as little instrumentation as possible. We mostly achieved what we set out to do. The songs stayed short and the story kept moving. No song is over four minutes long and three of them came in under three, which for some reason tickles me a lot. Sub-three-minute songs are all I want to write from now on!”

While he’s best known in America for such acclaimed albums as “Gossip,” “Under the Sun,” “So Much Water So Close to Home,” “Comedy,” “Wanted Man” and “Deeper Water,” Paul Kelly’s prolific body of work incorporates a wide array of departures, collaborations and side projects. He’s recorded as a member of the studio supergroup Stardust Five, branched out stylistically to record an album with the Australian bluegrass combo Uncle Bill and created experimental dub-reggae as part of the techno-groove ensemble Professor Ratbaggy. His interest in aboriginal issues has led him to collaborate with aboriginal songwriter Archie Roach and the multicultural group Yothu Yindi.

He also provided award-winning musical scores for the films “Lantana,” “One Night the Moon” and “Jindabyne”; and wrote songs for, and acted in, the Australian stage play “Funerals and Circuses.” He’s written songs for several other Australian artists, and was the inspiration for the tribute album “Women at the Well,” on which 14 female performers interpreted Kelly compositions. He’s published four volumes of his song lyrics, and written pieces for the prestigious Australian magazine The Monthly. Kelly was recently the focus of an all-star tribute concert in Melbourne honoring his 30th anniversary as a recording artist, and in 2012 was the subject of the feature-length documentary “Paul Kelly: Stories of Me” (which will be released on DVD in North America in Sept. of 2013).

Beyond the copious tributes and accolades, it’s Paul Kelly’s songs, and his knack for performing them with maximum conviction, that makes him a world-class creative force, and “Spring and Fall” ranks with his most powerful work. After more than three decades of music-making, his work remains every bit as adventurous and inspired as ever.

When your dad is one of the founding fathers of outlaw country and a major musical legend, at some point, you realize resistance is futile: Even if you don’t seek a career in music, eventually, it’s gonna seek you. Born into a family of music and entertainment, Paula Nelson started playing piano and singing at the age of seven. She drew early influences from singers like Jesse Colter and Rita Coolidge, whose bluesy, supple vocal style provided one of Paula’s earliest templates as she found her own voice. Texas Monthly has called that voice “torchy,” and the Los Angeles Times praised, “There’s no missing the unforced power of Paula’s singing.” Paula and her band have been playing together since the sumer of 2004, touring all over the US including a featured performance at Farm Aid ’07 and two European tours. Paula says, “The chemistry between this band and I is magic both on stage and off. I feel truly blessed to be in the company of these amazing musicians.”

(click the image for tickets!)