Fifteen Minutes of Fame: An Independent Artist Music Review Blog

Originally Published on April 4th, 2025 About the Artist It was 2012 when Adam Kidd founded the band  Fragile Creatures . Kidd, Tom Ally, Aaron Neville, and drummer James Crump have since been crafting their sound and finding that perfect blend of Indie Rock that pulls influence from older sounds, styles, and progressions. Out of Brighton, this group met and became friends in secondary school. Eventually forming the group that would be Fragile Creatures. Their first publicly available work is the Two-Side single of  Dear Michael/She Makes Me Nervous , which released on June 11, 2012. Their first EP,  Fragile Creatures EP , released on August 31st, 2024. At 4 songs and 13 minutes, and showcased their potential with the  title track  which is a piano and organ-driving, uptempo, bright and melodic song and  Sunshine , which exhibits a unique emphasis on staccatos and syncopation rhythmic techniques that subtly sound like a ska influence. In 2017, they would re...

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 ...