Here’s a sentence that’s going to sound like Mad Libs, but is somehow actually true: On the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line’s second Christmas album, right tackle Lane Johnson sings lead vocals on a cover of Willie Nelson’s 1963 hit “Pretty Paper,” along with singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, who plays music under the name Waxahatchee. Give it a listen below, and then let’s check in back here.  Okay, so, to be certain, there isn’t a great reason for this record to exist. There is no shortage of Christmas songs to listen to each year, and the odds that any would turn out to be essent ..read more

WHO: Pedal steel guitar player Noah Faulkner.WHAT: This teenager inserts a country twang into eighties (and beyond) covers for his dog, Kara, and nearly 40,000 Instagram followers.WHY IT’S SO GREAT: A staple of midcentury country and pop music, pedal steel guitar adds the texture to your dad’s favorite songs—from the twang of Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend” to the beloved backdrop of Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”—but it’s hard to think of an artist born after 1960 who plays it. That may be part of why fifteen-year-old Noah Faulkner, who goes by @pedalsteelnoah on Instagram, has amassed a major ..read more

In the early nineties Mickey Guyton was a young girl living in the small town of Crawford, a short walk from George W. and Laura Bush’s ranch. One summer evening, she attended a Texas Rangers game, where LeAnn Rimes, who was about the same age, performed the National Anthem. Guyton was so inspired that she declared that she, too, wanted to sing country music.Today the forty-year-old Guyton is a genuine country star. Over the past five years, she has released a Top 50 album, received four Grammy nominations, recorded a critically praised duet with Kane Brown, cohosted an Academy of Country Musi ..read more

The first time indie rock icons the Mountain Goats played in Texas, the band’s founder and singer-songwriter, John Darnielle, didn’t really know what to expect. Darnielle was born in Indiana and raised in California, and the band’s first Texas show, in Austin in 1996, wasn’t a great fit for a then-unknown two-piece group. “We played a show in a gigantic, cavernous room, that we could not fill at all. We were pretty small potatoes at the time,” Darnielle said from his home in Durham, North Carolina, the day after returning from a rather more successful string of Texas shows. “I think maybe thir ..read more

The Texas Rangers are back in the World Series for the first time since 2011 and the third time in franchise history, and with their return to national prominence comes—improbably—a similar revival for one of the more maligned rock bands of the late nineties. Somehow, Creed has returned. The band’s biggest and most enduring hit, the stadium-rock fist-pumper “Higher,” has, during the Rangers’ pennant run, found the sweet spot on the spectrum between anthem and meme among Rangers fans and players. The average age of the Rangers’ roster is just a smidge over thirty, meaning that most of the ..read more

Right from the start of Texas Wild, it’s clear that the musicians involved in this compilation album wanted to do something different. A minute into the opening track, tejano great Augie Meyers’s “(Hey Baby) Que Paso,” Houston rappers Fat Tony and Paul Wall break from a soulful chant of the song’s bilingual chorus into hip-hop rhymes that build upon Meyers’s original lyrics. This ain’t your grandfather’s Texas music, y’all.The eleven-song collection features Texas musicians covering well-known songs by Lone Star songwriters—but you’ve never heard these tunes quite like this. And that’s largely ..read more

TV SHOWLawmen: Bass Reeves Paramount +, November 5 Bass Reeves’s legendary exploits have led many to speculate that he was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger. Although that’s probably not true, Reeves’s story is made for the screen. More than a century after his death, he was depicted briefly in the 2019 HBO miniseries Watchmen, then more fully in 2022’s Netflix movie The Harder They Fall, in which he was portrayed with intimidating swagger by Delroy Lindo. Lawmen: Bass Reeves, a miniseries dedicated to telling his story, or at least his legend, stars David Oyelowo as Reeves and was ..read more

We already know that our state is replete with musical talent, but whenever the first two weekends of October roll around, Austin City Limits is a reminder of just how many musicians, from the up-and-coming to the legendary, get their start in Texas. This year the locals on the lineup make country, cumbia, electronica, R&B, and genres in between. Make time in your festival schedule for our favorites—luckily there’s no overlap, so you can catch them all.Tanya Tucker (Saturday, October 7, 5 p.m.)The native Texan, who graces the cover of our October issue, returned to the spotlight after a de ..read more

We know you’ve already planned your music lineup for Austin City Limits 2023, which kicks off this weekend and closes out the next. Whether you’re camping out at the Honda stage to catch country-pop legend Shania Twain or popping in early to see perennial favorite the Barton Hills Choir, you’ve got your three-day schedule down to a T.But have you prepared your food lineup? A major part of festival fun is all the treats you’ll get to try—plus, you’ll need breaks between sets to relax and fuel up for the next hour of dancing and meandering.In case you’re not as snack-obsessed as we are, we’ve de ..read more

On either side of a door in Sean “Lou” Lewis’s Lockhart home, there are built-in shelves stuffed with hundreds of VHS tapes, like an Ishtar Gate to a long-forgotten Blockbuster. Tucked behind the opening is Rattlesnake Milk’s recording studio: a creamy room draped in sarape and Navajo-inspired fabrics, with makeshift sound-isolating barriers strewn throughout. Cowboy hats and a sand painting adorn a white fireplace, while smaller tchotchkes glitter in the periphery above the equipment wires. Here, guitarist and vocalist Lewis, lead guitarist Andrew Chavez, bassist Eric Pawlak, and drummer Core ..read more