Winner – Laura Stevenson – This is a personal winner for rock nyc. I am sure that you and I both agree Laura’s new album Wheel is pretty awesome, though I preferred the 2011 Sit Resist and kinda neglected it. That might have something to do with me catching Laura’s gig at Mercury Lounge in 2011 but not getting around to see her again in 2013. My loss because listening to Wheel again now, this is very song rock-pop, like singer songwriter with a backbone. Anyway, she was back on my radar because I am attending the Don Giovanni yearly showcase (if there isn’t a snowstorm like last year) in February 2014, and Laura is a headliner. Anything else? Yes, actually, she sang with Dan Campbell on the Wonder Years’ “The Devil In My Bloodstream” and that’s why she is here. rock nyc has been hankering for a sit down with The Wonder Years for a year now and after another rejection (you’d think we’d get the message, right?) I thought I’d contact my friend Joe Steinhardt and ask him if he’d ask Laura, who records for Joe’s Don Giovanni Records, whether she’d ask Dan for us. And she did. We didn’t get it because, well, I guess because they were rehearsing but, to be brutally honest, I assume rock nyc simply isn’t big enough. But at least we have friends like Joseph, and good guys like Laura, to help us. More important than a 100 interviews.
Loser – The Coen Brothers – Dave Van Ronk’s first wife Terri Thal has gone on the record as saying the Coen’s depiction of the Village of 1961 was wrong. She told “Vulture”: “The Coens’ dismal depiction of 1961 Greenwich Village and its players couldn’t be further from the truth. The performers reflect absolutely nobody I knew in the folk-music world,“The world that they live in is a depressing, unhappy place, and we lived in a fun, musically vibrant, intellectually interesting world. People were competitive only in the sense that they were trying to be heard — they weren’t out to score above anybody else.”