This audio preview produced by the festival gets you ready for the upcoming Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival. It features clips from Peter Case, Carrie Rodriguez and The Belleville Outfit (pictured). Stay tuned for more podcasts after the event.

Sample two tunes by most of the artists performing at the upcoming Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival .

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Here's a festival I've been wanting to attend the last two years, and now I'm on the fence for the upcoming Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival. It's on October 18-19 in the high Mojave desert, and once again it presents a great lineup of rootsy, mostly acoustic jam bands along with some very fine individual folk-roots voices.

In my book, Peter Case is among the finest songwriters of his generation, as was demonstrated by the recently released all-star tribute album of other artists playing his songs. He is also a compelling performer when he pays tribute to great bluesmen of the past Mississippi John Hurt and Sleepy John Estes. I fell hard for Carrie Rodriguez when she was paired with Chip Taylor a few years back, and I'd love to see her solo act. Among jamgrass outfits, South Austin Jug Band and Trampled By Turtles are two of the best. Plus there's Dusty Rhodes & The River Band, The Devil Makes Three, Elephant Revival, Hillstomp, The Belleville Outfit, The Stairwell Sisters, Nathan and plenty more—too much fun.  Read more »

A thrilling account of the 2008 Projekt Revolution Tour, told by a frozen lemonade vendor.

Over this summer, I've started to moonlight as a vendor for a concessions firm operating at the Shoreline Amphitheater and Concord Pavilion concert venues, located in Mountain View and Concord, California, respectively. I had two main reasons for initially taking the job: 1), I'm kind of an introvert, and I felt that I need to be forced in to the sort of potentially ugly face-to-face interaction that comes with hawking candy and soda to a diverse body of concertgoers, and 2), the position would simply give me more experience with observing the birth, life and death of a concert, experience that I need drastically more of despite my de facto claims of expertise as a contributor to Festival Preview.

I arrived to start vending at the festival at about 1:30, right as Armor for Sleep, the first band on the tour's side Revolution stage, kicked off their set. As I slowly got into my rhythm of making Statue of Liberty poses with my can of frozen lemonade (kind of like sorbet, except less fruity and more sugary), quickly jerking my head through a quick panoramic motion to scan for potential buyers, and shouting "Froooozin Leminaeeeyd!!", Armor's set and that of Hawthorne Heights started to meld into one two-hour marathon of anticlimactic emo dirge. The vocals of Ben Jorgensen and J.T. Woodruff, the frontmen of Armor and Hawthorne respectively, couldn't give their bands' songs lift like they do on record because those songs depend so heavily on a level of precision in sound engineering that's simply impossible to achieve in a live setting.  Read more »

Southern California's other desert festival, three weeks after Coachella, is Joshua Tree Music Festival, which holds its sixth annual festival May 16-18 at the Joshua Tree Lake Campground in Joshua Tree CA. The festival added three more acts to its lineup, which includes Ivan Neville's Dumpstaphunk, Ghostland Observatory, JJ Grey and MOFRO, Zilla and lot more.

Early bird ticketing expires midnight March 22. Visit the festival web site for full information. The same producer hosts the Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival in October.

Here's a video that gives you a flavor of the May festival.

The already appealing lineup at the Joshua Tree Roots Music Festival, Oct. 20-21 in Joshua Tree CA, just got tastier with the addition of Martha Scanlan and Reverend Peyton's Big Damn Band. The lineup also features Hot Buttered Rum, The Avett Brothers, Uncle Earl, The Greencards, Dan Bern, Jake Shimabukuro, South Austin Jug Band and Carolina Chocolate Drops.

This is just the second time out for a festival that bills its as a rootsicana newgrassy folkadelic high-desert camping experience.

By Kathryn Vercillo

With Coachella coming to a close, many music fans are turning their eyes away from the heat of the Southern California desert. Well, don’t do it! At least not yet anyway, because Joshua Tree Music Festival is just a few short weeks away and it provides a great excuse for packing up the sunscreen and staying in SoCal. Located just an hour north of Coachella, this annual music festival may not draw in quite the same big names but it’s got a lot of good music and plenty of good times to keep the desert festival scene going just a little bit longer.

Joshua Tree Music Festival brings an international music vibe to the laidback attitude of the California desert. Just a few of the countries represented at this event are Venezuela (by Los Amigos Invisibles, Australia (by Ganga Giri), and Japan (by Meltone). California artists aren’t lacking for representation either though with artists from the area including the beats of Heavyweight Dub Champion, the female funk of Hunkamama, and the Spanish-influenced sound of Omar Torrez.

Joshua Tree Music Festival runs from May 18th – May 20th and has much more happening throughout the weekend than just the two alternating stages of music. Lakeside camping, hooping and looping classes, didgeridoo lessons and more should make this all-ages festival a fun place for families from all sorts of divergent backgrounds. Sure, the California sun is getting hot and it’s almost time to start thinking about festivals in other parts of the world. But only almost; Joshua Tree is the place to wind down the spring festivals and get ready for summer!

Having been a fan of The Greencards for several years now, I was excited to see them showcasing their new album "Viridian" at Wintergrass. I caught one set at the festival's ballroom stage ("our first dance venue," said bass/vocalist Carol Young) and I sat in at their workshop, titled "Stretching the Boundaries."

After the workshop, I had a chance to sit down with mandolinist Kym Warner for an interview. I asked him what was new on the album.

"More and more it is about the lyric and the vocal," he said. "Instrumentally, we try to add the texture around that as opposed to just feeding in a bunch of flashy licks."

Indeed, after the exuberance that marked their earlier outings, many of the songs on "Viridian" seem almost restrained. The effect is to give greater prominence to Young's soft, haunting vocals, which evoke comparisons to Alison Krause and Patty Griffin. With harmonies and occasional lead vocals from Warner and fiddler Eamon McLoughlin, the sound projects a growing maturity of a band coming into its own.

[Photos: Carol Young (top) and Kym Warner (bottom) on the Wintergrass Ballroom stage.]

"Viridian," from the Latin for "green," is not the name of a song on the record, just a play on the 'Cards favorite color. Since its release a few weeks ago, it has gained lots of airplay and is ranked near the top of the Americana charts.

One departure with this record, Warner said, was the use of a co-producer, Doug Lancio, guitarist and producer for Patty Griffin, a performer the Greencards much admire. The two previous records were self-produced.

"We wanted someone who would push us into areas we might not have gone otherwise but still sounds like the Greencards," Warner said.

To emphasize the richer tone, McLoughlin supplements his outstanding fiddle work with mellow turns on viola and cello. There is also a growing emphasis on guitar accompaniment. On the record, guitar great Bryan Sutton takes most of the six-string work (with additional contributions by Lancio and friend-of-the-band Jed Hughes). The record also includes subtle percussion of most of the tracks.

A spectrum of styles
The new material covers a wide swath of styes, from the straight-ahead bluegrass of "Lonesome Side of Town," which sounds more authentically home-grown than you'd imagine possible from two Aussies and a Brit, to the slow, mournful "Su Prabaht," built on a Hindi riff finger-picked on McLoughlin's fiddle, to the beautiful ballad "All the Way From Italy," the story of Warner's immigrant grandfather's journey from the old country to Australia.

With the variety of styles, the Greencard's musical style is difficult to pinpoint, and Warner is reluctant to put a label on it. "I feel comfortable in the folk scene, and there are elements of what we do that are bluegrass. I think the best description is that we are a 'contemporary acoustic folk band'," he said.

"We made the record about 10 months ago and have been touring since but not playing the songs live. So this is really our first tour featuring the new material," he said.

While the core band is a trio, it usually performs with a guitarist sitting in. On the current tour At Wintergrass, the guitar seat is filled by Andy Falco, an in-demand session player from Nashville who has most recently been a regular with Alecia Nugent. "It's not easy to find someone who is equally at home with the ballads we do and the bluegrass playing and the rhythmic thing. Andy is really good at covering the spectrum," he said.

Since people like Sutton and Pat Flynn have toured with them in the past, I wondered if a guitarist might be added as a permanent member at some point. "Well, we started as a trio and it is the three of us that write and arrange, so that is our identity," Warner said.

Another aspect of their identity is as foreigners playing an American style of music, a contradiction hinted at in the name Greencards. "You always draw on where you are from, and that is a big part of the reason we sound the way we do," he said.

Festival favorites
Though the Greencards have had a lot of success the last three years on the festival circuit, this was their first Wintergrass.

"We really didn't know what to expect with it being indoors and in a hotel. It is kind of like IBMA, though much broader in musical styles," he said. "We've always had a great reception in the Northwest, and that has been true this weekend as well."

He said that festivals are rewarding both for the exposure and the opportunity to hear and play with other bands. As an example, at the workshop, up-and-coming instrumental star Sarah Jarosz, a friend of the band since its start in Austin, sat in to swap mandolin riffs with Warner on the Alison Krause song "Another Night."

Festival audiences will have plenty of opportunities to experience The Greencards featuring the new "Viridian" material. Among the band's 2007 festival stops are Strawberry Park, Wakarusa, Grass Valley, Grey Fox, Rockygrass, Sisters, Winfield and Joshua Tree.  Read more »