Nick Curran’s last solo-album Player! garnered the Austin-based blues singer/guitarist the 2004 W.C. Handy Award for Best New Artist Debut. Although quite a distinction for a former rockabilly kid from Portland, rather than follow up the accolade with another album of raw, high-energy old-school rockin’ blues, Curran joined The Fabulous Thunderbirds and recorded the band’s 2005 album Painted On. He then spent the next five years playing in a number of projects including the punk-influenced band Deguello with fellow T-Bird bassist Ronnie James Weber. This month, Curran returns to his solo-work with Reform School Girl – a fiery, rock & roll album that finds Curran back in the studio with longtime producer/musician Billy Horton.

AMG’s Matt Collar spoke with Curran last week about his career, his new album, his recent diagnosis with tongue cancer and whether to call him blues, rock or punk.

AMG: What are you up to right now?

Nick Curran: Hanging around the house taking it easy.

AMG: Reform School Girl has a similar vintage vibe to your last four albums. I know you’ve worked a lot with Billy Horton (The Horton Brothers, The Hot Club of Cowtown, Miss Lauren Marie) in the past. Was this a similar approach to your other albums?

Nick Curran: It was, and it was definitely more pieced together. I actually played drums on it myself and we actually wrote some of the songs while we were in there. So it was kind of like more of a process than usual, but it was really good to be able to do it that way. But it was the same studio and me and Billy work great together and always come up with great ideas and bounce them off each other.

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2009 was a busy year for Meaghan Smith. The songwriter toured with k.d. lang, recorded an album, joined Lilith Fair’s 2010 lineup, earned comparisons to Norah Jones, and spent several months promoting her folk-jazz debut, The Cricket’s Orchestra. When the holidays came along, however, she decided to reward herself with something different: a few days at home.

Old habits die hard. Before her homestay was up, Smith had begun working again: jotting down ideas for new songs, painting, and scheduling tour dates for the new year. She also found time to talk to AMG about The Cricket’s Orchestra and her plans for 2010.

All Music Guide: You’re a painter as well as a musician. Are the two related?

Meaghan Smith: They are. When I go on tour, I have my normal merchandise for sale – usually CDs and t-shirts – but I’ve also been selling paintings at each show. They’re really small oil paintings, maybe 3 inches by 3 inches, and they feature different characters like robots or animals wearing clothes. I’ve been traveling with my own miniature art show, basically. I sold them last year and ran through my entire stock, so I’m taking some time right now to stock up again.

AMG: When did you realize you could combine the two?

MS: My manager asked if there was anything else I’d like to be selling at the shows, any unique item that the fans might like. I thought I might try to do little paintings, so I bought 10 frames, painted 10 pictures, and sold them all at one show. I realized that it’s a special thing to go to a person’s show and buy an original piece of art that they’ve done themselves.

AMG: You’ve also animated some of your own music videos.

MS: I have. We’re actually shooting a video in four days for the song “Heartbroken,” but there won’t be any animation this time. I did the storyline and came up with the video treatment.

AMG: Tell me about working with Greg Kurstin and T-Bone Burnett during the Cricket Orchestra sessions.

MS: I did most of it with Les Cooper, but Greg and T-Bone did one track each. They’re kinda opposites in a way. T-Bone has a crew of people he works with all of the time, and Greg works completely by himself in a little studio. He likes to record digitally, while T-Bone does everything to tape. Greg uses samples and T-Bone doesn’t. I got to experience opposite ends of the spectrum with them, and both of the songs that came out of it are just as good as the other. I like working with different producers; I’ll probably work with someone different on each album I make.

AMG: Your husband, Jason Mingo, is part of your touring band. Have you worked with him on any new music?

MS: We did “Heartbroken” together, not that the song’s lyrics say anything about our relationship! That was the first time I’d co-written with anybody. Most of the time, though, I need to be totally alone in a room, completely devoid of any sign of human life. I have to let everything go and just throw out any idea that pops into my head, regardless of what it may be. A lot of the time, I’ll throw something out and think it’s the dumbest thing ever, but at least no one else heard it.

AMG: I saw recently that you’re going to be touring with Lilith Fair this year.

MS: I have the same manager as Sarah McLachlan and I’ve done a few concerts with her. She’s amazing and I look up to her a lot, not to mention the other amazing artists on the bill. We’ll be doing the Chicago and Minneapolis shows. Can’t wait.

AMG: Apart from that, what else is on the horizon for you?

MS: There’s a bunch of touring in the works. I’ve been asked to start writing for my next record, too, so I’ve been writing down some ideas here and there. More videos, more appearances, and more songs… Just keeping busy as always.

Assorted German, French, and Dutch news outlets are reporting the passing of Willy DeVille, one of America’s true outsider rock & roll poets, at the age of 55. We will have an in-depth post from Allmusic’s Thom Jurek early next week. In the meantime, here is a feature and interview, written by Jurek, we published in May 2006, just after DeVille had released his Live in the Lowlands DVD. It was one of his last U.S. interviews — if not the last.

On a rainy, noisy New York City afternoon, rock & roll singer and perennial romantic troubadour Willy DeVille is screaming at garbage trucks out in the street beneath him: “Shut up, you noisy motherf*ckers! I’m tryin’ to do an interview here!” The sounds of chaos are everywhere around him, a Chihuahua’s yapping full bore, people are coming and going; he holds two conversations simultaneously besides the one we’re having. He’s exhaling cigarette smoke wearily yet he’s animated: “So where were we?” he says in a slightly raspy vocal register that’s not far from the one he uses on-stage, the place where he holds court and mesmerizes European crowds by the thousands; here, outside of New York and New Orleans, in the hundreds — if he’s lucky. The stage is DeVille’s kingdom — he is one of the sharpest dressers in rock & roll history, and had the refined Little Richard look long before Prince. He’s regal in pointed Italian shoes, stovepipe trousers, silk, blouse-like shirts or all colors, with scarves, hats, and canes for props, like a riverboat gambler from the last century or looking like a pirate thief from the docks of European fiction and movies. Yet he can sing like a street-corner balladeer without ever stretching it.

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Ed Harcourt recorded his previous album, The Beautiful Lie, during his final days as a bachelor. Three years later, the British songwriter is a happy husband and proud father, two titles that have wielded considerable influence on his writing.

“Whenever I get free time at home, I immediately get on the piano or pick up the guitar,” Harcourt explains from England, several days before he’s scheduled to fly to Seattle to begin work on a new album. “It’s sort of a race against time. But I’m working every day, maniacally writing three or four songs a week. I’ll have to choose the right songs for the album later, which is a painful process. It keeps me awake at night.”

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Underground DJ, producer, and remixer extraordinaire Ruckus Roboticus released his playful debut Playing with Scratches nationally last month. A masterful collage of samples, the album (like his similarly-themed last CD-R mix, Music Machine) fuses children’s music with hip-hop in a cornucopia of ‘70s TV themes, underground funk, hip-hop, and random rarities. Boasting an impressive vinyl collection with thousands of off-the-beaten-path records, he was kind enough to take some time away from his turntables this week to show AMG some of his most treasured finds.

Ruckus Roboticus discusses his secret stash after this break:

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When she isn’t renting minivans and breaking laptops in American Express commercials, singer/songwriter Nicole Atkins busies herself with a mix of melancholic lyrics and Roy Orbison-styled croons. The Jersey native originally pursued work as a visual artist, having relocated to North Carolina in the late ’90s to study illustration at UNC. After befriending the young Avett Brothers and forming her own alt-country act (the short-lived Los Parasols), Atkins began gravitating toward a genre she now describes as “pop-noir.” Equally reminiscent of the sunny sounds of Brill Building songs and the rainy-day atmosphere of old, black and white detective films, the “pop-noir” sound eventually landed Atkins a contract with Columbia Records. Although she’s currently on tour in support of her debut album, Neptune City, Atkins took a few minutes to talk with Allmusic about her addiction to bagels, the decor in Rick Rubin’s office, and her former gig as a singing Teletubby.

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“This whole project for us, myself, Boris (Netsvetaev), and Kieran (Hebden), was a UNITY thing,” says truly legendary — and largely underground jazz drummer Steve Reid by phone from Switzerland. “Yeah, there’s a ton of factionalism going on out there: in politics, religion, and in corporate aesthetic culture. But that’s just what we hear about, where the noise is coming from on TV and in newspapers. Underneath it, there are people from all sorts of different cultures, disciplines, and musical genres intersecting and collaborating more than ever before. This is what’s really going on, and people are cutting out the middle man — the major labels and the official controllers of culture — and simply going to one another, using the internet and other means — like word of mouth — to let people know what’s up and that they’re open. Very few of the great musicians out there ever got to record on the majors; most were on independents or made their living playing out on the road.

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Patterson Hood is a busy man. The de facto leader of the Drive-By Truckers spent 2007 in a flurry of activity, bouncing between various recording studios (where he produced a solo album by ex-bandmate Jason Isbell, collaborated with soul arist Bettye LaVette, and recorded the Drive-By Truckers’ seventh studio effort) and the road (where the Truckers premiered new material as part of “The Dirt Underneath” tour). The Drive-By Truckers are now planning to travel the world in support of Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, meaning that Hood won’t find much rest in 2008. Nevertheless, the Southern singer/songwriter found a few free moments to talk with AMG about the album, the music, and the Truckers’ soon-to-be terrible teens.

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