On his 2007 solo debut, Down the Road, Ernie Hendrickson tried to make everything perfect.
"Literally, by the time I was finished with that record, I was familiar with every single note on every single song," the Chicago-based Hendrickson said in a phone interview this week.
But the unintended consequence of sweating over every element of the album was that it became something he could never replicate in front of an audience. "If you listen to that record closely ... you can really sort of hear how it would be impossible for people to play what goes on those songs in a live setting," he said.
And not being able to reproduce a song in a concert is a refusal to acknowledge a critical aspect of a musician's life. (For an emerging roots singer/songwriter such as Hendrickson, it's actually a refusal to acknowledge the main source of his livelihood: shows.) "A song is a song," he said, "and it still has to be performed."
Hendrickson will play a show January 21 at the Redstone Room, where his shift in thinking should be clear. He used to bring a looper to his solo shows - trying to build as full a sound as possible, but often at the expense of a connection with the audience. "You're up there and you're getting a lot of blank stares if you don't engage an audience," he said.
If you listen to the self-titled second album by Whitey Morgan & the 78's and think the band makes outlaw country sound easy, Morgan probably wouldn't object.
When I 
Monte Montgomery's guitar-playing is so distinctive, dexterous, and seemingly ingrained that it sounds like he might have had the instrument in his cradle. So it's surprising that he could have just as easily played the trumpet.
Todd Green, the latest guest in Quad City Arts' Visiting Artist series, began his professional career as a guitarist. Yet the musician knows that whenever he performs at one of his many school engagements, the guitar is perhaps the last instrument the kids will be interested in.
