Independent's Day Radio

Chihana acquired her affinity for traditional blues and rock music from her parents' music collection - which would be pretty orthodox if it weren't for the fact that she grew up in Japan. She's a rare bird to be sure, but her fans don't listen to her solely because of the curiosity factor of being a young Japanese woman playing a traditionally western style of music - it's because she's good at doing so...

Jason Scott is a songwriter who has built his growing career in music into a cottage industry, with a full schedule and an entire network of musicians based in his native Oklahoma and surrounding states. Some of the gigs are wedding gigs, sure, but don't let that fool you. Scott is no Murph and the Magictones. He's a very talented young artist with a perfectly-tuned ear for narrative detail...

Leslie Stevens has one of those voices - it's a perfectly engaging throwback to Patsy Cline and the golden age of Nashville's musical matriarchy. It's the kind of voice that sounds good singing anything, and she's a natural with a melody. But the thing that keeps people coming back to Stevens is her songwriting. In conversation, when she's not giving a quick-witted running comedic commentary of the world we all share, Stevens can be almost quiet...

Sam Marine played in bands in his native Gainesville, Florida and New York City before landing Los Angeles a few years back. His brand-new Big Dark City EP is Marine's third release, and on it he has perfected his particular brand of muscular, country-tinged rock and roll. Call it Americana if you wish, but the genre has always overlapped the straight-ahead, cranked-amp jangle of the classic rockers...

Davey and the Midnights are a band. Sure, Davey Allen's name is featured front and center - and for good reason. His tight vibrato tenor and accessible songs are the focal point of the ensemble. But the Midnights are a band like Tom Petty's Heartbreakers or Bruce Springsteen's E. Street Band. Something special happens when they get together and settle into a groove. And although their music is billed as a sort of countrified rock, there certainly is a pocket to what they do...

David Raven, Billy Watts and Taras Prodaniuk make their living making other people sound good. Their collective credits include albums and tours with Bruce Springsteen, Norah Jones, Dwight Yoakam, Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, June Carter Cash, Lucinda Williams, Mike Ness, Dixie Chicks, Richard Thompson, Jim Lauderdale, Peter Himmelman, Buck Owens, T-Bone Burnett and countless others. They're journeymen in top form, they're still on the journey, and they've been friends for decades...

Musicians make music for all manner of reasons, and Los Angeles' Double Naught Spy Car is what happens when four ace players get together to make music for themselves. To hear them doing their thing, one might think that the band has an identity crisis. Disparate styles crash against one another like an iceberg and an ocean liner - and the delicious challenge is watching the whole thing stay afloat...

Suzanne Santo and Ben Jaffe have been making music as HoneyHoney since 2006, and they have three albums and incalculable touring miles under their belt. After over ten years of grinding it out side by side and making honest headway in the music business, the duo decided to get a little breathing room. Both Jaffe and Santo have things to say on their own, and Santo's stellar new Ruby Red is the first of these releases...

Ben Bostick's gritty baritone is reminiscent of Eddie Vedder fronting a Bakersfield roadhouse house band, and his songs run the gamut from heartfelt, aching ballads to uptempo ruminations on rural bravado and youthful sexual escapades. But Bostick is no bumpkin or bro country pretty boy; he grew up in the Carolina boondocks and studied English at New York University - and it is that juxtaposition of backwoods guilelessness and urban polish that has refined his lyrical approach to songwriting...

Sometimes, when people set off down a path in life, the universe presents an alternate path. And sometimes, that alternate path turns out to be better suited for the person anyway. As a youngster, Ronan Chris Murphy dreamed of being a rock star, but as soon as he started playing in bands, he also found himself tinkering with nascent home recording technology - which at the time consisted largely of tabletop analog cassette multi-track recorders. Bands need demos, after all...