Alt-country

Jimmy Webb (born August 15, 1946 in Elk City, Oklahoma) is an idiosyncratic American popular music composer. Jimmy Webb is responsible for writing numerous popular and Top 10 hits sung by a disparate group of artists, including Glen Campbell ("Galveston"); Art Garfunkel ("All I Know"); Donna Summer and many others. Webb's father was a Baptist minister and a former Marine. His mother died when he was a teenager. His most popular songs were all composed when he was between 19 and 21 years of age.

Reared among the Pentecostal pines of Oregon, Rachel Harrington has been doing things in the wrong order for quite some time. She'd had extensive radio play before performing her live show, and she was opening for Grammy winners and nominees before releasing her first record. Now, hot on the heels of her critically acclaimed 2007 debut, The Bootlegger's Daughter, Rachel presents CITY OF REFUGE. Her backing band on the recording is TIM O'BRIEN (fiddle), Mike Grigoni (dobro), Zak Borden (mandolin), and Jon Hamar (upright), with Holly O'Reilly and Pieta Brown on backing vocals.

"Sea chanteys filtered through bluegrass and late-twentieth century singer-songwritery, performed by the crew of a ghost ship sailing in a sea of ennui, the passengers of which have been sentenced to a manner of solitary confinement that is in many ways self-enforced. Instrumentation of upright bass, acoustic guitar, banjo, clarinet, violin, and cello. Often one or two voices and sometimes many. Songs by Mark Mandeville, the lone survivor of the most calamitous of shipwrecks.

"One-man band Konrad Wert grew up in a Mennonite family, raised by preacher father and a piano player mother, which accounts for both the baptized-in-fire-soul and musical versatility heard in his gritty Old World music. Wert's mix of blues and vintage folk howls with a sense of explosive freedom and latent rage-not unlike an Amish kid emerging from the wilderness to discover America -that instills his simple guitar/fiddle/stomp-box arrangements with unusual passion.