Glen Phillips | Courtesy Rob Shanahan

Glen Phillips plays a solo show at Kirk Avenue Music Hall on Friday, April 5. Here, we talk about the upcoming Toad the Wet Sprocket album, about the sliced nerve that nearly ended Phillips’ guitar playing career and about the two songs we’re streaming here, “Greer Zollar” and “Eden,” from his recent record, “Coyote Sessions.”

Phillips is at least partly responsible for a run of Toad The Wet Sprocket hits including “Walk On The Ocean” and “All I Want.” But the band broke up years ago for the reason bands often do — the players couldn’t get along. But as the years have gone by, and reunion shows have run the gamut from stressful to enjoyable, the band found that “getting along is the new normal,” Phillips said.

But he has plenty of non-Toad output, too, including Mutual Admiration Society (with Nickel Creeks’ Sean and Sara Watkins and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones) and WPA (also with Sean Watkins and others). He said his show at Kirk Avenue will include music from all those periods.

Read more and get show details on the cover of Thursday’s Inside Out.

Hunter Hayes | Courtesy Juan Pont Lezica

Country guitar hotshot, singer, multi-instrumentalist and hit songwriter Hunter Hayes is just 21 years old. But the recent Grammy nominee is no overnight success.

Hayes, who opens for Carrie Underwood tonight at Roanoke Civic Center, has been playing music with big stars since he was a pre-schooler.

At age 4, he joined Hank Williams Jr. onstage for a version of “Jambalaya,” a song that Williams’ father had made famous. The little fellow was confident and grooving, nailing his accordion part and drawing onstage praise from Williams Jr.

He doesn’t remember much about it, aside from go-cart racing with his father on the festival grounds and seeing all the buses backstage.

“It is funny to look back, because I don’t remember it,” he said, laughing. “Looking at baby pictures is one thing. Watching videos of yourself on YouTube, [nearly] 20 years after, is kind of freaky.”

Read the full story on Saturday in The Roanoke Times Extra section.

Ben Tyree (left) and Stephanie Rooker | Courtesy Stephanie Rooker

Radford native Stephanie Rooker, a jazz, soul, hip-hop and R&B singer and songwriter, plays Kirk Avenue Music Hall on Friday with her husband, guitarist Ben Tyree, accompanying her. Rooker, who lives in New York City these days, has workshop gigs, too. At 6 p.m. today, she is at the Music Lab at Jefferson Center for “Heart/Beats & Blood/Lines — Sounds of Hip-Hop.” On Wednesday, she hits the June Bug Center in Floyd for her “Voice Journey” Workshop.

Embedding podcasts is still a work-in-progress with our new website. As I have limited space on soundcloud, I’ve posted this podcast to archive.org, which doesn’t allow me to embed in WordPress. So here’s the link until things get better. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATED 11:19 a.m. 3.21.13: We’re live with soundcloud pro till we get our in-house embedding problem solved.

Southern Culture on the Skids | scots.com

As Roanokers, we sometimes lose perspective on our city. We’re here all the time. We take cool things for granted, or we don’t even know they exist. We tend to get mad at some of the new stuff and denigrate some of the old.

So it’s at least interesting to know what folks from other places think of the Noke. With Southern Culture on the Skids, an indie rock institution that returns to town on Saturday for a show at Growler’s American Grill, we can can get a multi-faceted perspective.

After all, two of the three core members — drummer Dave Hartman and bassist/singer Mary Huff — grew up here but have lived in the Chapel Hill, N.C., area for many years. Frontman/guitarist/songwriter Rick Miller has never lived here but has visited many times.

Here is what each member of the band has to say about their favorite things in Roanoke. It’s fun! Get show details via our Top Tickets page and read more — with cool photos — in Saturday’s Extra section.

Moreland & Arbuckle | Courtesy Gavin Peters

Coming up in the Wichita, Kansas, area, guitarist Aaron Moreland and harmonica player/singer Dustin Arbuckle were rare characters — young guys who were deeply into Mississippi Delta blues playing. Fortunately, the two came together at an open mic jam in Wichita in 2001.  It was instant chemistry for the pair, Arbuckle said in a phone call last week.

Their act, Moreland & Arbuckle, comes to the Rives Theatre, Martinsville, on Saturday. Get show details in Top Tickets, at music.roanoke.com. But if you come, don’t expect to get a relentless dose of that old-school Delta stuff. The guys love it, but they love hard rock, country, soul. They find space in their music from both Fred McDowell and Led Zeppelin.

“I don’t know that it was necessarily something that we tried all that hard to do,” Arbuckle said. “You realize at some point, well, you just can’t keep doing the exact same thing over and over again. But it really did happen pretty organically.”

The onetime duo is a trio now, with a pounding drummer and a recent record, “Just A Dream.” On this podcast with Arbuckle, we stream three tunes from that disc — “Brown Bomber,” “Purgatory” and “White Lightnin.’” The latter is a Steve Cropper song and the recording features Cropper. Hear Arbuckle talk about that connection and  more on the stream.

Flannel Church | Courtesy Margaret Willard

Duane Trucks, who brings the band Flannel Church to Growler’s American Grill on March 6, has quite a pedigree. (Go to Top Tickets at music.roanoke.com on to get show details.)

His oldest brother is guitar god Derek Trucks (Tedeschi Trucks Band), and his uncle is Butch Trucks, drummer for the Allman Brothers Band. From the time Duane Trucks was a child, he had big drumming influences. One of his brother’s early gigs was with Col. Bruce Hampton and the Fiji Mariners, and through Hampton, Duane was exposed to such drummers as Jeff “Apt. Q-258″ Sipe and Tyler “The Falcon” Greenwell” (now one of the drummers in Tedeschi Trucks Band). He got to hang out plenty with Derek Trucks Band’s longtime drummer, Yonrico Scott, too.

Growing up, the Trucks boys’ father would spin Allman Brothers albums and play bootleg tapes of band rehearsals. Duane Trucks didn’t realize it at the time, but he would wind up sounding like his Uncle Butch.

“I didn’t even realize it until I went out and started playing and hearing the first recording of myself playing live or seeing the first video that I ever say of myself playing, [and] I was like, oh my God, I sound like Butch,” Duane Trucks said in a Feb. 13 interview. “How does that happen?”

Read more »

Sami The Great | Courtesy Golightly Media

Roanoke College graduate Sami “The Great” Akbari returns to the valley with an original idea for a show. Akbari’s The Great Animation Tour — which hits Kirk Avenue Music Hall on March 5 — features animation inspired by her music and synced up to prerecorded, reimagined versions of her tunes, to which she’ll sing and play along. On this podcast, Akbari said, “It’s going to be quite the experience, I think, for the listeners and the onlookers.”

Streaming music: “Candyland.”

Check the Top Tickets page at music.roanoke.com for show info.

Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers | Courtesy ID

Onstage banter is a big part of bluegrass music tradition. Some of it is corn pone. Some of it is downright funny. Some of it is just awful. Steep Canyon Rangers used to do a lot of it — until the band started touring with comedian-turned-actor-turned-Renaissance-man Steve Martin. Martin, a serious banjo player and songwriter, can still crack up crowds from stages.

“We used to try to be funny in between songs and have jokes,” Steep Canyon Rangers lead singer and guitarist Woody Platt, 35, said. “And after working with Steve and seeing how you do it correctly and how you can really be funny in a unique way, we’ve gone out on our tours and just kind of backed off all the jokes.”

Martin and the Rangers join forces on Sunday night at Virginia Tech’s Burruss Auditorium. Get show details in Top Tickets at music.roanoke.com. And read the full story with Platt on Friday at music.roanoke.com.

facebook.com/Ripejive | Courtesy Roger Gupta

So, there has been good news and bad news on the Blacksburg music front over the past week or so. The bad news was that HopeHop has split up for good, with “EZ” Eddie McClain and the band parting ways. Though solo stuff from McClain is forthcoming, I always liked that project a lot — sort of like a Southwest Virginia version of The Roots.

But the good news is that most of the guys in that act are playing as Ripejive, which is closer in format to Lettuce and Soulive. Guitarist Chad Florstedt, keyboardist Aaron Noe, drummer George Penn Jr. and bassist Nick Kalen  are well familiar with one another’s playing, so the band is sounding tight from jump.

Here for yourself, via live audio recorded at Blacksburg’s Sycamore Deli on Feb. 8. Will “Crossthreaded” Kesler, aka @StarCityTaper, gets credit for the recording.

Expect good things from these cats in the near future, including a free show March 14 at Martin’s Downtown. By the way, That1Guy plays the night before, and The Legendary JC’s play the night after, so Martin’s is likely the hang for a lot of folks that week.

The Campbell Brothers, from left: Darick Campbell, Phil Campbell, Chuck Campbell | Courtesy Jefferson Center

Where “Sacred Steel” guitar music is concerned, it all begins with the groove.

Steel guitar, played in a funky, bluesy, vocal style that is almost nothing like country music, gets the spotlight. But practically everyone who comes to that instrument starts out playing drums on Sundays at House of God Church Keith Dominion congregations.

The Campbell Brothers, who play Jefferson Center on Friday night, are a solid example. Pedal steel player Chuck Campbell, 55, started out on drums, even playing the church’s national convocation one year. His lap steel-playing brother, Darick, 46, was the most talented drummer in the family, according to brother Phil Campbell, 50, the band’s guitarist.

“The value of starting out on drums, it gives you that rhythmic foundation that says, you know, everything builds from there,” Phil Campbell said by phone on Monday from the band’s home base in the Rochester, N.Y., area. “I think that’s one of the things that helps make our music be so vibrant and something that truly can be improvised around, because you have that solid rhythmic foundation to build on that allows you to explore and do different things with the music.”

Read more at roanoke.com.

Streaming music: “Frammin’” and “No Mo’ One Mo’”.