A Talk with J.D. Souther

One of the architects of the famed California country-rock sound, J.D. Souther is at his home outside of Nashville, where he's lived for more than a decade, offering to send me his most recent CD of jazz tunes, "Tenderness," so I'm all caught up.

"People don't know it, but Nashville has some incredibly strong jazz musicians," he says. "We went in and played it old-style, live, and I was in the same room as the band with the vocals. So everyone is really listening to each other, which is totally different from what I'm used to."

The 74-year-old Souther, a Songwriters Hall of Fame member and occasional TV actor ("Thirtysomething," "Nashville"), talked with me about his days of flying with the Eagles, how he keeps it fresh onstage, his return to jazz, and why it took four people to compose "Heartache Tonight."

The interview is at the Richmond Magazine website. Read it right here.

And for more on the music of J.D. Souther, go here.

(Photo by the mighty Jeremy Cowart!)

Metal Health: Into the Void

The new documentary, Metal Health: Out of the Pit, details the struggles that contemporary heavy metal musicians have in dealing with depression and other mental health issues.

Director Bruce Moore, a former music engineer who has become something of a heavy metal lifestyle chronicler, produced “Metal Health: Out of the Pit” at his home studio. He says that he first started thinking about depression and its effects on musicians after the 2017 suicide deaths of Linkin Park's Chester Bennington and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell. A year later, a friend of Moore's, Jill Janus, singer for the band Huntress, took her life. “I realized that metal artists are suffering, too.”

The film features 17 singers, musicians, journalists and fans talking about their battles with depression and how they've learned to cope with tragedy. Adorned in piercings and leather, affiliated with outfits that have names like While Heaven Wept, Fall and Resist, Exmortus, and Exhumed, they confess their personal — as opposed to theatrical — dark thoughts.

Moore also produces a regular podcast and YouTube show, "Brutally Delicious," which showcases hard rockers in the kitchen, cooking their favorite meals. He's also directed several documentaries on heavy metal, including "Metal Missionaries" -- about the polar opposite worlds of Christian metal and Satanic rock -- and "Women of Metal."

My feature article about Moore and his new documentary can be found at the Richmond Magazine website. Read "Into the Void" by going here.

For more on Metal Health: Out of the Box, and to watch episodes of "Brutally Delicious," take yourself here.

(Photo of Patrick Donovan of Toy Called God courtesy Bruce Moore)

Bourbon and Beef: Ragged Branch Craft Distillery

It was the best hamburger I ever ate... and the bourbon wasn't bad either.

For Savor Virginia Magazine, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon at the Ragged Branch Craft Distillery in scenic south Ivy, near Charlottesville. I came for the bourbon and stayed for the burgers and hospitality.

Here, on the 92-acre Ragged Mountain Farm, Alex Toomy and his team grow and grind their own grain; malt, mash and distill it; and finally age and bottle Ragged Branch label bourbon. They also feed the bourbon mash to their cattle, and damned if it doesn't produce the tenderest beef you've ever encountered.

Go to the Savor Virginia website and read my feature article on Ragged Branch, and learn how the late bourbon master David Pickerell helped Toomy launch the brand.  The link is here. 

And for more on Ragged Branch Craft Distillery, go right here.

(Photo of Bootlegger courtesy of Ragged Branch Craft Distillery)

Talking to the Trees: The Chesterfield Arboretum

In all of Virginia, there are nine accredited arboretums — botanical gardens of trees — listed in the official Morton Registry. Some of them you might figure, like Colonial Williamsburg and Richmond's Hollywood cemetery, but the newest one is in a strange place indeed. It's at the Chesterfield County government complex.

For the groundskeepers at this massive, multi-huilding campus, obtaining this official designation isn't  just about showing off all of the trees they've planted around the complex in recent years. "It was also to have some protection of the trees here from future construction,” says horticulturalist Lisa Ferrel, who led the initiative to turn the park into a tree sanctuary.

Read my feature article on this new venture -- which involves something called "Tree Diapers" -- by going to the Richmond Magazine website and clicking this spot. 

For more on the Chesterfield Arboretum, you can go here.

(Photo of Horticulture Shop Supervisor Tom Tuttle with horticulturalists Lisa Ferrel and Doug White by the mighty Jay Paul)

One School, One Book: Everybody Reads

The nonprofit family literacy organization Read to Them, with its “One School, One Book” program, enables entire schools — or districts or cities — of elementary school students and parents to read and explore the same book. The idea has grown in 20 years from a modest, one-parent initiative at Richmond’s Fox Elementary to a network of more than 3,000 schools nationwide.

Finding the right book for readers of multiple grades can be a challenge, founder and executive director Bruce Coffey admits. “Can you read it aloud to a first-grader, who may not be able to read it themselves, but [is it] still stimulating enough for a fourth or fifth grader who can read it themselves at home? Can you explore it at school?”

My feature article on Read to Them, and their incredible success in getting kids (and parents) to read together,  is now online at the Richmond Magazine website. You can read it right here.

And for more on Read to Them, go here.

(Photo by the mighty Garnette Ransone!)

Covering the Business

You've find my byline in Virginia Business Magazine these days. Look for it.

The monthly Virginia Business bills itself as "the only publication dedicated to covering economic activity in every sector and every region of the state," and is an independently-owned venture. So far, VB's editors have kept me busy with all kinds of interesting features and shorts -- like my recent interview with Julie Timm (pictured), the CEO of the Greater Richmond Transit Company [GRTC]

I've also covered The Virginia Talent Accelerator Program, the different ways Virginia companies team-build, Virginia Tech's expansion to its new Innovation Center, Shenandoah University's investment in Esports, and the Richmond golf-gaming showdown pitting TopGolf against Drive Shack.

Read 'em all at the Virginia Business website by going right here.

(Photo: GRTC)