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California’s Pennywise has been playing its brand of working man’s punk for nearly 20 years now, and the members show little sign of slowing down.

Even after the 1996 suicide of original member Jim Thirsk, the band soldiered on, releasing a new effort every two years and continuing to embrace the punk ethos of defiant liberalism--along with a refreshing DIY mentality. Bassist Randy Bradbury took some time to talk to DC9 about the band’s newest CD (Reason to Believe, available via free download from MySpace records when you add Textango as a friend) and how the band plans to stay hard into its third decade.

So does the fact that 600,000 people have downloaded the new CD from MySpace validate your band’s continued relevancy?

Having the CD available for free is really a new frontier. We are riding the wave of the new frontier. Within days, we hit half a million downloads. For us, the top priority has always been to get people to hear our songs, so we’ve taken the smallest advance that we ever have just to achieve that goal. We’re the first band to totally give away our record for free [Editor's note: These guys might beg to differ]. We were joking around saying that we should have made it multiple choice: Pay this much if you’re just a little bit of a fan all the way down to the biggest fan ever paying what they thought it was worth.

You’ve been playing in the band for twelve years and came on right after the death of Jason Thirsk. How difficult was it to simply keep the band going?

Midnight Drifter, the debut album from Fort Worth’s Whiskey Folk Ramblers, will be available for the first time at their CD release party Saturday at Lola’s in their home city. While they won’t be selling copies until then, you can get a taste of what it will sound like tonight when the acoustic folk / traditional country / bluegrass / klezmer / gypsy combo performs at The Cavern in Dallas.

The Ramblers album has 11 songs, plus an Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western-soundtrack-inspired intro and outro. The band covers Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man” and two traditional songs, “Die Easy” and “Great Grandson.” Lead singer Tyler Rougeux is especially excited about “Great Grandson,” a song his grandfather taught him when he was a kid.

We talked to Rougeux about Whiskey Folk Ramblers' evolution and the frustrations of capturing the band’s live sound on record.

Tell me about recording the new album.

We tried to do it ourselves and it didn’t work out right. We tried to do it again kind of by ourselves, and just didn’t get the sound we wanted; so we finally went into the studio (Panhandle House in Denton). We knocked the whole thing out in a week.

Folksinger, big-band shouter and born-again gospel vocalist Michelle Shocked returns to her hometown of Dallas tomorrow for the first time in seemingly forever.

Spanning nearly 25 years, Shocked‘s career has been a roller coaster ride of changing genres and confounding expectations. After having just stepped out of a Los Angeles recording studio, the politically astute Ms. Shocked took quite a bit of time to speak with DC9 about her leftist leanings, her mistakenly being labeled a lesbian and her recent conversion to Christianity.

Being born into a Fundamental Mormon household, you must have an interesting perspective on the recent goings on in Eldorado.
I remember being raised Mormon and people asking me about polygamy. The standard answer was that was a long time ago. We always knew that there was kind of this break-off group that still practiced polygamy somewhere. Polygamy has always been something that Mormons feel gets misrepresented in the media. I don’t know why the authorities went in now. I mean, how long has that thing been there? It’s not like that they just started. The timing of it confuses me. It’s like sex scandals or cult news that always breaks in order to distract us from other news headlines. But thinking about Mormons, can you imagine how awful it would have been if Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee for president?

Jake Shimabukuro is something of a marvel. He doesn't play a traditional instrument (he plays the ukulele), and he doesn't sing (all his songs are instrumental). And yet he's been able to make a name for himself in the music world.

It helps that he's something of a genius when it comes to playing the ukulele. You'd be hard-pressed to find another artist anywhere else in the world who can do what he does with that tiny guitar-like instrument. Watching him perform is jaw-dropping--his hand whips back and forth across his ukulele's strings in a legitimate blur.

We caught up with Jake on the phone earlier this week to talk about his rise to fame and how he's coping with it.

I first heard about you through a friend who, when you toured through the town I was living in, asked me if I’d heard of this "ukulele whiz kid, Jake Shimabukuro." I’m guessing that’s a pretty common story?

Yeah, it’s always been a word of mouth thing. I had a couple videos on Youtube that really helped out, too. It’s all been a great experience, and I’m really grateful for it all.

Not too long ago I finally caught you perform when you played “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. And, after your performance, Conan had some really flattering words for you, calling it, I think, one of the impressive things he’s ever had on his show. What was that like?

Oh, I was super nervous backstage, right before going on.

Really?

Known for its unique fusion of emo, classic rock, hardcore and progressive metal, Chiodos inhabit a realm all its own. Hailing from the small town of Davison, Mich., the sextet’s recently released sophomore effort, Bone Palace Ballet, debuted at No. 5 on Billboard’s Top 200. Chiodos’ meteoric rise is especially noteworthy as the band is not supported by a major label. Fronted by high-pitched singer Craig Owens, the band has shared the stage with the likes of Coheed and Cambria, Incubus and Linkin Park, all while honing its epic brand of post hardcore. Keyboardist Bradley Bell took some time from preparing for Chiodos’ upcoming tour to discuss the band’s distinctive vision. (Plus, we've got the band's new single at the end of this item. Scroll to check it out.)

Michigan has had quite a history of producing bands that stick out from the crowd, such as The Stooges and the MC5. Is there something in the water?

I think it’s the Midwest angst that comes out of all of us due to the extremely depressing weather. We are all from a suburb of Flint, and the area has a history of depression.

Does having six guys in the band ever create problems with personal space?

Sometimes that’s the fun part about it, working with the situation you have and making the most of it. I think when we are closer together, it gets more intense that way and we have a lot more energy for some reason. It’s much better than being dispersed across a huge stage where there is no communication.

Songs like “Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered” are more than a mouthful. Why are the titles so lengthy?

There’s no good reason for it other than to mix things up and add a little variety in the redundant genre that we are in. Sometimes, it’s just random things that we say and then we go, “there’s a song title.”

Rhett Miller wanted to talk today -- with, yup, a clarification regarding his recent comments to Billboard, to which we paid some attention earlier this week. Because, see, Rhett doesn't want anyone thinking 2004's Old 97's album Drag It Up wasn't up to snuff because "I took a total step back," as he's quoted as saying. Not at all. Because, see, that wasn't the case, he insists. That's not what he said. That's not what he meant.

What Rhett says he was trying to do was discuss, at some length, how hard it was making Old 97's albums after he'd begun releasing solo albums. (Drag It Up came two years after Rhett's first solo release, The Instigator.) Quite simply, in '04 he was having difficulty discerning where Solo Rhett began and Old 97's Rhett ended, and how to divide his attention and his material. Only, the quotes read like, well, the last 97's record wasn't any good because he didn't participate like he shouda. Which bums him out. Because, yeah, he knows "the whole thing was my fault." Still ...

"I just shouldn't offer subtle, nuanced musings about the inner workings of a band with fucking Billboard," he says today. "It was just me thinking out loud about the process of making those that record, which was difficult, and making the new one [Blame It on Gravity], which we all love, and I don't need to do that with Billboard. I was just trying to say I didn't bring my A game the last time around, and I did for this record."

Ethereal psych-rock band The Orange is experiencing a wicked state of euphoria these days. After three years of exploring its musical purpose, the Dallas group has finally reached a blissful peak with the release of its new EP, A Sonic Collection of Short Stories from La La Land, and upcoming New York tour dates. The Orange will celebrate this accomplishment with an extravaganza of music and “surprises” tonight at the Curtain Club. (Get a taste of the new album at the end of this post.)

Scott Tucker and Aaron Berkes are guiding The Orange’s journey and have come full-circle from their adolescent days of sneaking into Deep Ellum venues to watch their favorite bands. Creating music together for more than half their lives, Tucker and Berkes possess a distinguished bond anchored not only by their shared musical vision, but also by an innocent curiosity to explore the full potential of their creative bursts.

After a touch-and-go experience in the much grimier version of themselves, Special Edword, the friends stripped themselves bare (literally, according to tales of Tucker’s late night cemetery crusades) and began the reconstruction that lead them to this moment.

Surrounded by shiny, vintage rock equipment and headless mannequins, we sat in The Orange’s Arlington practice space to dig a little deeper into the orphic energy of the 25 year-old bandmates.

One of the more popular links being sent around in the aftermath of SXSW 2008 sends you to a story written by a man named Paul Ford. Ford is not a music critic -- he's an editor at Harper's, and he blogs for themorningnews.org (no relation to the Dallas Morning News, so far as we can tell) -- and he didn't even attend the festival in Austin this year.

He did, however, critique the sounds of 763 of the 1,600-plus bands who played the fest, simply by downloading and listening to the torrent file that contained every song uploaded to the official South by Southwest web site.

The result? This fantastic read, in which Ford gives six-word reviews and a star rating (out of five) for every band he listens to. He also notes a few trends he finds along the way.

Want some DFWd examples from his piece? OK, let's hit both ends of the spectrum. On Big Red Rooster's "How U Like That," Ford writes: "Yes--sounds like swollen infected cock." He gives the track just one star.

For Black Tie Dynasty's "Tender," he writes: "Shamelessly attractive 1980s electropop production. A-ha!" Five stars.

Agree with those opinions or not, you've got to admire how comprehensive this list is. After the jump, an interview our compatriots in Houston scored with the man behind the piece.
-- Pete Freedman

Quiet Life is an up and coming alt-country quartet hailing from Connecticut. Act Natural, the band’s stellar debut, came out a few weeks ago and features an intriguing mix of Wilco and the Black Crowes. The group stops at Club Dada tonight on its way to SXSW. Quiet Life’s main singer/songwriter Sean Spellman took some time before a show in New Orleans to chat with DC-9.

What do a bunch of guys from Connecticut know about roots music?

Not much. That’s what we’re trying to learn. That’s why we’re going on tour. Actually, this type of music is what my brother and I grew up listening to. My dad always had Springsteen on and Creedence and I was being educated without even knowing it. I owe a lot to my Dad. The first show he took me to was Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

Do you worry that people might see the name Quiet Life and think you guys are some kind of new age act?

That’s funny because I was at the bank the other day and when I told the teller I was in a band called Quiet Life, she asked if we played folk music. I told her our music had some folk qualities to it, but we also play loud stuff. My brother actually got the name from a song by The Jealous Sound. Actually, I am kind of reluctant to tell people where we got the name, 'cause that’s not a band we really want to be associated with. I mean, they are a good band, but that was the kind of music we listened to at a certain time in our lives. It was either Quiet Life or the Dirty Birds.

Who is cooler: Jeff Tweedy or Chris Robinson?

As some of you know, this blog takes its name from the Flatlanders song “Dallas.” Legendary Texas singer/songwriter Joe Ely has probably performed the song a million times by now (though it was actually penned by bandmate and fellow Lubbock maverick Jimmie Dale Gilmore). We had the pleasure of talking to Ely in advance of his show tonight at Fort Worth’s Bass Hall, where he’ll no doubt perform many of the songs featured on his new album, Live Cactus! -- a duo set recorded with longtime accordion player Joel Guzman at Austin’s legendary Cactus Café and the first of three Ely records set for release this year.

Let’s talk about Joel Guzman, the accordion player that joins you on your new album, Live Cactus! What do you think he brings to your material as a sideman?

I feel like I’m the luckiest person on earth just to be able to work with him. He really made me look at songs in a whole different light. And then when we started recording together, I realized that I had always loved that sound. When I was about 10 years old, my daddy had a used clothing store in downtown Lubbock. ... On the weekends there’d be 50,000 migrant workers from Mexico in downtown Lubbock, and, of course, they would bring their music with them. And so the sound of the accordion, and the sound of music from across the border, really put me in a whole different place. When I started with Joel it reminded me of that period of my life when everything was kind of magical…

Like many of your Lubbock peers you’re somewhat of a Renaissance man. Could you tell us about your other creative outlets, like your visual art and your book, Bonfire of Roadmaps?

All of those, for me, come from the same place. When I left home I had a guitar, and in my guitar case I had a sketchbook and in my back pocket I had a little notebook. I told myself I was gonna write everything down whether it made any sense to anybody or not. That whole Bonfire of Roadmaps book was never meant to be read. I just wrote it as notes to myself going up and down the road. And I didn’t have a camera, so I drew pictures of places and people and everything. And then when I’d get home I would sort out all those pictures and scribbles and they started turning into songs.

Some people look at songwriting as a way to get girls or a way to be popular in your town or something, but I’ve always looked as it as just a way of keeping a journal of your life. And each song is a little part of it. Now I can look back over my life and see all the different little pictures that the songs remind me of…

Since our music blog is called DC-9 At Night, I have to ask what the future holds for the Flatlanders.

The Chicago-based band The Redwalls is currently touring the country in support of its self-titled album, which was release last October. With a sound that evokes British bands past and present and a look that does the same, The Redwalls are another in a long line of American acts that have tried to bring the sounds of the old country to our hemisphere. Are they having any luck? We caught up with Redwalls vocalist/guitarist Andrew Langer over the phone last week to get an answer for that and a few other questions.

How’s the tour going so far?
It’s going pretty good, you know? In some parts we do good and in certain parts, we’re working our way, trying to do good there. But it’s been fun.

If someone's never seen you live before, what can they expect from your live show?
We’re pretty much straight up rock and roll. A lot of people say we’re better live than on the records. [Laughs.]

Yeah? How do you feel about that?
It’s a different interpretation. It’s fine with me.

Well, what’s that an influence of, the better live sound? Did you guys start of performing right away when you got together?
Yeah, pretty much. When we started, we were playing in the clubs and bars of Chicago for like the first three or four years of being in existence. So, we kinda had to learn to deal with hecklers. We’d usually play at 1 or 2 in the morning after the headliner was already done. It kind of paved our way to this point.

Had any better luck with the hecklers of late?

Langdon Jones, the smartass, hipper-than-you frontman/guitarist for local rockers Fracas, is just happy to have a band. After eight years spent toiling with false starts, personnel problems and learning how to write songs, Jones has finally assembled a seemingly secure lineup that includes bassist Nick Upperman and drummer Matt Chappel. The trio recently released Dallas Suburbia, the second Fracas disc. (The first, Different Like Everyone Else, came out in 2003 and featured a different cast of characters.) Mixing punk, pop and witty rock a la Ween, Fracas gleefully pokes fun at the Dallas lifestyle and mass-market consumerism in general. We recently spoke with Fracas and, democratic to a fault, Jones insisted that the interview questions be divvied up equally among each member of the band.

Is humor in music a lost art?

Matt: No, but I think humor in high quality music is a lost/rare art. A band like Tenacious D comes to mind. They obviously have funny lyrics, yet the musicianship is high quality. Funny lyrics and serious rock kind of seem rare to me these days when musicians take themselves way too seriously.

What have you got against the Dallas suburbs?

Langdon: I have several things against what goes on in the suburbs. I’ve come to the conclusion that the wealthy suburban lifestyle stunts the spiritual and intellectual growth of many a suburban housewife. Many, but not all, of these women just paint their nails, shop, work out at Larry North, gossip on the phone, go to church at Lake Pointe to help their husband with business networking and tote their kids to an extracurricular activity here and there. Then they point their Mexican laborers around to do the housework. Are these atrocities of the soul legal? Sure, but it’s also legal to make fun of them and that’s where I come in.

Does the band cause a fracas when they play? How many times have you’ve been asked that?

Murry Hammond has been part of the Dallas music scene for far more than 20 years. Stints in the Sleepy Heroes and the unheralded Peyote Cowboys preceded his more high-profile days as bassist for the Old 97’s. Hammond’s first solo CD comes out February 22, and Hammond is playing the Pine Knot Music Co-op in Nacogdoches that evening as part of the venue’s Seventh Anniversary Celebration. Hammond took some time to discuss his solo effort and what the future will bring to one of Dallas’ most renowned groups.

Rhett Miller has made two solo efforts and probably is working on another. What took you so long to release one?

Until a few years ago, I was unsure just what I wanted to say, to be honest. I knew what I thought about and felt all the time – death and religion, history and war, good versus evil, homesickness, my restless spirit, etc. But it wasn’t until I began doing music at our church that I started to sense what could be done. I had keys to the building, so every Wednesday I’d go up there and set up the PA and just play for hours. It was a time of real discovery, especially with all these old gospel and hard-times songs, and I’d also work on my own song pieces. There’s something about working in a church. My pieces and the gospel stuff began to smear all over each other, and I wrote and wrote and wrote and basically found my voice, as they say.

My solo record I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I’m On My Way is mastered as of this week. My intention during recording was to record two records at once. So I’m also about a third the way through an all gospel recording. It’s full of all the spooky and moody experimentation that I’ve long messed around with when I’ve been by myself at church. My goal is to make the first truly listenable all-gospel record in alt-country.

Old 97’s guitarist Ken Bethea was quoted recently as saying the new 97’s disc is going to be the best one since Two Far to Care. Why do you think that so many folks hold that release in such high esteem? And by returning to a more traditional alt-country sound, are you saying that the pop experimentation of Satellite Rides and Fight Songs was an error in judgment?

People will always like Too Far to Care because it was a singular moment when our punchiest sonics combined with a rare pile of songs. That’s pretty much it. All our planets lined up on that one. Ken references that record because – and this is at the risk of jinxing it – we feel like the planets have again lined up. We have a rare pile of songs, and the performances and sound are very, very satisfying. I’m afraid to say too much. And there is no return to our alt-country past, rather, this record has just the sort of experimentation and stylistic stretching of Fight Songs and Satellite Rides, and really may be our biggest stretch yet. But, of course, it still sounds exactly like us.

What was it like when you were on Elektra? At that time, you guys appeared on Leno, Letterman, etc. What happened, and is it better to be on a smaller label?

We pleased the indie fans and the country lovers with our last couple video Q&As. So, it's only fair for us to give our rock crowd a little something. Our videographer Jonathan Finley met up with the four guys in Peacemaker earlier this month to give us a glimpse of the band's live show and a bit of insight into the group. Enough of my talking. Just watch it. -- Chelsea Ide

Steve Poltz is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter currently based in San Diego. Perhaps best know for co-writing “You Were Meant for Me,” the No. 1 hit for Jewel (and having a brief fling with her), Poltz’s songs are filled with satirical lyrics and simple melodies that often endear themselves to the crowds on the coffee house circuit. His most recent effort, Traveling, might well be his best yet, featuring such signature smart-ass numbers as “What Would Ghandi Do” and “Serve Me My Food.” Poltz took some time during his on-going tour to speak about his music, his life and whatever else came to his warped mind.

On a scale of one to 10, how hot is Jewel?

Hotter than the scalding water Glen Close used to boil the bunny in Fatal Attraction. Hotter than the blood in Bill Belichick’s veins when Eli Manning completed “the pass.” Hotter than a Catholic priest at Boy Scout meeting. Hotter than the shotgun Dick Cheney used to shoot that guy in the face with. You get the idea. She goes to 11 just like the amps in Spinal Tap.

Your solo work has a sarcastic bent. Do you think the average listener can pick up on your dry humor?

No, but they can pick up my laundry, cook me a hot meal.

What happened while you were on Mercury Records?