Fifteen Minutes of Fame: An Independent Artist Music Review Blog

Originally Published on April 4th, 2025 About the Artist Rock and roll derives from a plethora of places. It can be angry. It can be liberating. It can be political, philosophical, psychological, or romantic. It can be therapeutic, revolutionary, or it can be about revelation. It can be progressive, it can be nostalgic, and it can most definitely be sexy.  ExWife  choose to not define themselves because they recognize this. They simply perform and leave the defining to their audience. Their mission: bringing “their version of 90’s rock to 2025.” They describe themselves as “when you hear that tone and you get a silly feeling in your insides, like the first time you see tits or ass.” I mean, who doesn’t like that feeling? ExWife, out of Oregon in the Pacific North West, are Alexandria Bonanno, Nicolas Kauffmann, Josh Mahurin-Chavez, and Kadin Monegan. They’ve been compared to artists like  Tori Amos ,  PJ Harvey , and  The Breeders . Personally, I hear a mix betw...

Originally Published on April 4th, 2025 About the Artist Ok, I’m rolling up my sleeves for this one. There is SO MUCH I want to discuss… Nashville, Tennessee. Known as the music capital of the world, Music City, USA, and so on. It is a Beacon for musicians. It is Mecca. It is a major step in the journey for so many musicians who are chasing their dreams.  That i s just the first major step.  The rest of the steps are bigger, more challenging, and just when you thought you’ve got your feet on them, you learn that they can crumble and collapse beneath you the moment you step onto them. Musicians pour into the city every single year. Every big fish in every little pond swims to Nashville and try their fins out in this gargantuan ocean of a town, full of sharks, squalls, and treacherous currents. They get a studio apartment they can barely afford, they start writing, start networking online, they make their ways to songwriter’s nights, live stream showcases, and livestream when t...

Originally Published on April 2nd, 2025 About the Artist There is something indescribably incredible about being in a band that just clicks. In the mid-late 2000’s, I was in a band in Nashville called Next Year’s Best that had a fleeting moment that would eventually fizzle. This story isn’t about them though.  After Next Year’s Best flamed, the drummer and I started another band in one last attempt to make it. Our bass player was a guy I had played with before and, to this day, is the best bass player I’ve heard play. We also got a new lead guitar player named Jake. Personality-wise, Jake and I were oil and water. We clashed, we got on each other’s nerves, we disagreed about everything. But the minute our drummer counted us in, we discovered that we shared a brain musically. He would noodle around on a song and 15 minutes later I would write a song. I lived for those moments in rehearsals when I would hear something vocally or on the guitar mid-song and I would make the change and ...

Originally Published March 31st, 2025 I recognize that I often sound like a broken record. Fifteen Minutes of Fame has been founded on the principles of having integrity with their objectivity and yet it would seem like I hardly ever criticize. My reviews are overwhelmingly “positive” or “optimistic” with regards to the artists I write about. Every recap is “this is one of my favorite months,” so on and so forth. This would be a problem if it wasn’t true. I am coming across more and more artists who exhibit so much potential every single month. I am receiving feedback from so many readers and individuals willing to participate in the FMOF culture that it’s breathtaking. The mantra is slowly starting to catch on. We are building the community we dreamed of.  Now, just because I report it in an article or review doesn’t mean it is going to happen. There is quite a bit of research that goes into most of my articles, but these are my opinions. They may be derived from fact but it may b...

Originally Published on March 28th, 2025 The Legacy of Folk Music About a week ago, I got a message from somebody asking if Fifteen Minutes of Fame had a classic rock playlist. I explained how our playlists were general. The gentleman then asked if one of his songs could be considered. That he was an artist from Paris, France. He explained that he’s “not seeing fifteen minutes of fame,” but wanted his music to be considered anyway.  I started listening. Something immediately stuck out to me. This wasn’t classic rock music. Maybe it could be associated with it in some ways, but I wasn’t hearing hard rock so much as I was hearing folk music. It was an instrumental song, but it was folk. I went to the next song; folk, roots, and maybe a dash of bluegrass. I wrote back. “I have a very ignorant question, I apologize. Is folk music prominent in France?” He kindly responded that he didn’t see much of a folk scene there.  I’ve always considered folk music and roots music to be a less ...

Originally Published March 26th, 2025 About the Artist It’s funny how some things stick with us; resonate with us. I’ve had a lot of influential people in my life with regards to music. One of them is one of my college professors, Lynn Peterson. Mr. Peterson is the kind of guy that you might look right past if you saw him in a crowd. He’s soft spoken, not very tall, and maybe his most remarkable feature might have been his glasses, which were about as thick as the bottom of a glass soda bottle. Yet, he is one of the most memorable people in my life. One thing I’ll remember him saying is, “Nobody will be as influential in music as  The Beatles  were (this was said back in 2002). He then said the thing that prompted the thought exercise. “One person came close:  Trent Reznor  of  Nine Inch Nails .”  Not that significant of a comment, really, if you look at it on the surface. But if you analyze what he said, damn. He’s right. Rock music changed composition of ...