Grant Alden's Page

Back when ND was a print magazine and it was my job to try to sort through the hundreds of CDs which came my way each month so as to find the next Whiskeytown, I used to have days when I'd listen to fragments of things I'd never heard of. I could clear a shelf of 100 CDs in a good afternoon, probably finding one thing really worth finding in all that, and spending a few minutes with another goodly handful of artists whose work I was casually familiar with… Continue

The announced mission of the duo formed by Jamie Dailey and Darren Vincent (yes, Rhonda's brother) was to keep alive the storied tradition of the brother duos who at one point formed the backbone of country music: the Monroes, the Delmores, the Louvins (and the Stanleys, and the McReynolds, and the Blue Sky Boys, and...).

Their fourth long player in two years, Dailey & Vincent Sing the Statler Brothers, appears not on their principal label (Rounder), but in one of those side deals th… Continue

doomed to fail, because I suck at such things.

But.

This is what I'm supposed to do.

I'm supposed to tell y'all that my radio debut happens on WMKY this weekend, 8 pm Saturday and Sunday nights (all times are EST, for those of you who somehow don't know exactly where I live and in what time zone it happens to fall...). Up against the Super Bowl. Timing, they say, is everything. (Though, in fairness, the guy who scheduled this didn't know there was a football game. Or says he didn't.)

This is… Continue

Note: I wrote this a few days and posted it at dailykos, where I waste a certain small amount of time and have virtually no audience, the meritocracy being what it is. I realize that many here to not share my politics, and that even more of you don't come here to talk politics. Fine. Skip this one.

But the magazine I once edited was a political statement of its own kind, and I am a political person. And I'm a writer, which means I write about the things which engage me. So as long as I'm to… Continue

Apparently Aunt Karol died toward the end of New Year’s Eve, though I didn’t hear for at least ten days and even then my big brother didn’t know how to spell her name.

It wasn’t a surprise, for we knew she was in hospice, and she was 95, about the average lifespan for her side of the family. Karol was youngest of thirteen (born in ten years with one set of twins), and her first husband – so family lore has it — passed along a venereal disease which kept her from bearing children. Maybe that’s w… Continue