It took me a week to get my brain back from Pickathon, which seems a good place to start. I thought maybe I’d left it back in the barn or deep in the woods, or wherever I’d left my voice recorder. But alas, it had merely been blown out of my head and was dangling behind me like a tail. Nice image, eh? It’s all pulled back in and zipped tight now, and I’m happy to report it’s still filled with images from Pendarvis Farm.

For example, there was the best-of-the-weekend set from John Doe & the Sadies Saturday night in the barn. I already alluded to this in my wrap-up of Day Two. But now, a week later, with some perspective and a little rest between me and that performance, I can confidently say it stole the show. Close behind it was Thao with the Get Down Stay Down earlier the same night on the side stage. Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers delivered a number of remarkable performances throughout the weekend, including Crain’s solo turn …

Day Two at Pickathon began with Justin Townes Earle and Samantha Crain sharing the workshop stage, talking about songwriting. It was an interesting juxtaposition of styles and experience—Earle, the son of one of the roots world’s favorite singer-songwriters, has been onstage since he was 15 (he’s 27 now) and is a consummate entertainer with music in his bones. Crain, on the other hand, didn’t even pick up guitar until college (she’s 22 now) and admitted, “I still don’t know if this is what I want to do for a living…I could be a welder next month.” Despite their disparate styles and experiences, though, the two songwriters’ personalities played well off one another and their ideas about their approaches to songwriting were enlightening and entertaining.

It’s hard not to love a set where the cover tunes are from the Carter Family and Radiohead. Indeed, that pretty much sums up the myriad influences presented at this festival. A day prior, someone had asked John Doe what he thinks about “popular music” being thought of as a style, while the …

It was an early Friday morning after a late Thursday night which landed me in a cab to the train station. Three and a half hours on the train, an hour or two tooling around Portland, 30ish minutes on the Max, 25 on the EcoShuttle, and I had finally arrived at Pendarvis Farm. I could tell, like we all could tell, because the elaborate shade structure that looks like vanilla salt water taffy pulled in a thousand directions was spotted atop a distant hill by someone in the shuttle. “There it is,” he said in a voice loud enough we knew he was talking to all of us. “There’s Pickathon.”

The first person I saw after walking through the gate was John Doe. Though his career spans several decades and even more extraordinary songs, I’ve come to Doe through the Sadies—the Canadian band who join him on his latest album, and with whom he’s playing several sets this weekend. It felt like an omen to have Doe (sort of) welcome me to the farm, so I made a …

Indigo Girls’ annual stop at Woodland Park Zoo has, it may be fair to say, become a local tradition. Regardless of how recently they’ve released an album, the duo has reached a point in their career where they have literally hundreds of songs to pull from for their annual 90-minute sets. While they almost always close with either “Closer to Fine” or “Galileo” (this time, the former closed the main set, the latter the three-song encore), what happens aside from that is anyone’s guess.

Any band which lasts 20 years will go through its ups and downs, will write songs that feel like they’re pulling in opposite directions at times. No doubt there have been some records where Emily Saliers’ propensity for navel gazing does little more than balance Amy Ray’s affinity for rocking out. Their latest effort, however, strikes a more solid balance. It’s now clear - both on record and onstage - Indigo Girls are not just adept at their instruments and nailing their often tortured observational tunes, it’s the harmonies which drive it all home.

In an interview earlier …

It’s been twenty-one years since Cowboy Junkies lept ahead of their time to release Trinity Sessions - their second album, granted, but the one which undoubtedly solidified the mark they were making on modern music. It’s hard to imagine many new-formed bands sticking together for so long these days, but then the Junkies are three-fifths family, and their synergy as a group is strong. The band with whom they’ve been touring this summer - Son Volt - has been around nearly as long (they made their debut in ‘95, after the now-famous dissolution of Uncle Tupelo). Together, the two groups have been making their way around the country as one of this summer’s finest double-bookings (at least as far as roots fans are concerned). Last night, they made a stop at Seattle Zoo, with the Junkies on first.

It’s hard for me to watch Margo Timmins onstage. Having seen her band a handful of times, I always get the feeling she still wrestles with a bit of stage fright. Her movements, in direct contrast to the power and …

It was a little bit too good to be true—four of the best singer-songwriters in modern acoustic/roots/folk/country music (Shawn Colvin, Buddy Miller, Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin, seated in that order) onstage together, lending their voices to each other’s exquisite compositions, filling in guitar solos, bounding off each other’s inspiration. It took half the 90-minute show to settle into the fact that this was how it was going to be. It was just going to be that good. All night. Period.

Emmylou, the eldest and most stylistically versatile of the bunch, led the night off, before handing things off to her friends and collaborators. They went down the line, from Colvin to Griffin and back again, each taking a turn at the vocals. Each had at least one moment which brought the crowd to utter silence. For Harris it was “Boy From Tupelo” (which she introduced as “misery with a beat”). Colvin’s was “I Don’t Know Why.” For Miller it was “Gasoline and Matches,” which saw Griffin filling in on the harmonies Miller’s wife Julie recorded for their recent release …

I acclimate so quickly to my environs, it’s almost hard to believe just 24 hours ago I was making my way down the short path from Cave B toward Sasquatch. In those 24 hours, I saw performances from Loch Lomond, Heartless Bastards, the Pica Beats, Deerhoof, Grizzly Bear, Horse Feathers, Santigold, Blitzen Trapper, the Dutchess and the Duke, and Fleet Foxes. I took a few minutes to inhale the extraordinary beauty of the festival’s natural backdrop, chatted with artists and industry folks, drank some beer, ate some food, cursed the hot sun as I walked up and down and up again the remarkably steep hill between the main stage and the Yeti, sweat my ass off, napped in the grass, and sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic through Cle Ellum as Sound’s own Erin Resso cursed other drivers (lovingly, natch) and braved the Mighty 90 to get us all home safe and sound.

I’ve survived my fair share of music festivals through the years, have lived to tell of late night jam sessions and impromptu fiddle parties, have slept …

This didn’t happen to me, but it bears repeating. Yesterday in front of the Sound booth tent came a fat-tummied, drunk-swaggering gentleman. He stumbled about, no doubt bumping into passersby, when he spotted a denim shorts-wearing hipster with long, wavy bleached blonde hair under a trucker cap, bare-chested under a dark leather jacket. The gentleman said to the hipster, “Dude, you look like Van Halen,” to which the dude replied, “Hey man, I’m livin’ it.”

When you consider the crowd for Day Two of Sasquatch, this scene pretty much sums it all up. Frat boys with bare chests, chicks in bikinis, sandal-wearing hippies and beer-bellied swaggerers dominated the grounds, where little roots music worth mentioning took place. With few fiddles and banjos on the schedule, I resorted to palatable indie rock, kicking my day off with remarkably impressive Portland-based dance-rock quartet Hockey. If not for the Avett Brothers later on the main stage, Hockey may have been the highlight of the whole day. They’re young and enthusiastic, strutting and dancing about the stage, grooving themselves into an …

(The press trailer at Sasquatch is situated diagonally behind the Yeti stage where, currently, just to set the scene for you, someone is blasting really awful loud rock-rap music. I’m starting with that because, coming to you with 12 hours of music and wide open, heavy sun still draping my brain from yesterday, and being only one cup of coffee into what’s going to have to be a three-coffee day, the rock-rap may affect the insight of this review. I’m going to proceed into my overview of roots and vaguely roots-related Sasquatch day-one performances, with “Everywhere I go, bitches always know…” pumping around the air in our tight little trailer.)

I kicked off my first Sasquatch with Vince Mira. The local teenager broke in the main stage with his remarkably Cash-ish cover of “Big River,” before leaning heavily into a string of new originals. With Johnny Bird joining the band for a spell on accordion, Mira introduced a slow-growing crowd to tunes from an album he said he’ll release later this year. The disc will come on the …

It’s a big week in the folk/roots/country/whatever-I-write-about world, as we’re celebrating the birthdays of Willie Nelson (turned 76 yesterday) and Pete Seeger (90 on Sunday). And so it was that I bussed out to Ballard last night to join others like me at Conor Byrne to kick off the festivities with a tribute to the younger of the two.

Nelson has had his hands in country, gospel, folk, and rock music for decades. His songs have been recorded by everyone from Patsy Cline to the Dixie Chicks to Yonder Mountain String Band, and he’s delivered exceptional performances of songs other people popularized first (Roy Acuff, Townes Van Zandt, Ray Charles). The rules of this tribute night were fairly loose as a result, with some folks sticking strictly to Willie-penned numbers, while others pulled out great songs by other artists which Willie has famously covered. Moe Provencher, for example, delivered a terrific, slow and thoughtful rendition of “Georgia on My Mind.”

It’s a funny thing to see bands for the first time when they’re covering other people’s …