GO Music Awards: Editor's Picks

Because some things are just too random to let the fans vote on...

Best Lyrics

Jeremy Larson, Jeremy Larson
Larson’s self-titled full-length isn’t filled with lyrical prose to change our perspective on life. It’s in the simplicity of painting a romantic or heartbreaking setting that makes his lyrics memorably relatable. Instead of lines that leave us wondering how he thought of something so clever, he writes lyrics we can understand exactly.

Best Under-the-Radar Album

And Yes… Our Thoughts Were Elsewhere, Starrfadu
We can’t help but opine on this spin, the best local album of 2007 you’ve probably never heard. SSLYBY’s Pershing is both too new and too ubiquitous to earn this nod. Listen to And Yes… without getting a painfully beautiful song stuck in your head. ’Tis impossible.

Hottest Male Performer

Philip Dickey, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin
John Robert Cardwell may be the de facto frontman for Yeltsin, but Philip is the band’s energetic heart and soul. And the ladies love him—you really have no idea. Shy and polite sells, as long as you can rock a guitar or a drum set.

Hottest Female Performer

Cindy Woolf
Our December, 2007 “Women Who Rock” issue was one of our best eye-candy efforts, we must admit; there are a number of easy-on-the-eyes female musicians in Springfield. But none of them mesmerize us more than Cindy Woolf, she of the impossibly high and warbly vocal range and rootsy charm. There may be more conventional sex symbols out there, but who needs convention?

Saddest Breakup

Playing With Matches
These guys were a fixture on the local music scene for several years, but their gigs have dwindled of late and, apparently, so have their dreams. We’ll always remember their wild shows (hard drinking, throwing panty bouquets to the ladies, etc.). You say they’re a could-have-been. We say they were.

Best Event Band

Sequel Dose
If you don’t mind a little belt-buckle cigarette lighting, Sequel Dose is the band to book for a ready-to-groove party with a pulse. Tim Broadbent and the boys are loud, raucous and proud of it—and they’ll play pretty much anything as long as it was published before the first Bush administration.

Best Jazz Group

Arzo Tureaud Quartet
Arzo returned to Springfield about a year ago, and his jazz groups have been playing all over town ever since. No one is doing more to promote jazz to a generation that only thinks of it as an NBA team. Keep it up, Arzo.

Best Nice Guy Musician

Eddie Gumucio
Eddie has carved out a niche hosting open mic nights and doing solo shows, but that’s just the half of it. Eddie is the driving force behind Border’s annual Queen City Shout series (which is free), and is never shy about singing for a cause, as evidenced by his gratis appearance at a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society fundraiser last fall.

Show of the Year

Yo La Tengo, Randy Bacon Studio and Gallery
Most Gallery Sounds concerts are gets, but Justin Woods and Randy Bacon outdid themselves with this show, which featured a hard-to-book, relatively mainstream band with the utmost indie cred.

Best Music Blog

The Four/Four (thedrosh.wordpress.com)
Okay, so it’s super-new, but The Four/Four, run by ex-GO staffers Chris DeRosier and Scott Perket, is a much-needed source of devoted music coverage, especially with Mike Brothers doing PR and our own blog meandering here and there. Morawk’s message board is a nice resource, but its regulars are more prone to tangential rants than suits our taste (a sentence likely to inspire a tangential rant or two).

Best Rope-a-Dope

Yeltsin’s all-covers opening for So Many Dynamos
Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin doesn’t open for much of anyone these days, so when SSLYBY played second fiddle to non-local act So Many Dynamos at the Ballroom in March (during the ramp-up to Pershing’s release), rather than overexpose its soon-to-be-released material, the band sang nothing but cover songs (which it does very well). The move amused regulars but hacked off more than a few SSLBY-Johnny-Come-Latelys. We’re rolling.

Best Breakthrough

Cornbelt Chorus
It’s not often that a band can come onto the scene insisting its own importance, and everyone buys it. Cornbelt Chorus came out swinging with the chops and songwriting to back it up, scoring more music scene buzz this past year than any new local act.

Best Reunion

Ozark Mountain Daredevils
The Ozark Mountain Daredevils are the Godfathers of the Springfield music scene, credited with influencing, directly or indirectly, everyone from Big Smith to The Whitest Light. So when the original group got back together for two sold-out concerts at the Gillioz last May it was nothing less than the musical event of the year, no matter your age.

Biggest Blow to the Music Scene

Losing the Bar Next Door as a real indie music venue
We’re happy that downtown gained a fun Irish pub, but the closing of the erstwhile South Avenue ended a run of rootsiness that, for all intents and purposes, started the downtown bar-music renaissance in the ‘90s. Fortunately, the slack has been at least partially picked up (read on).

Best Venue Emergence

Patton Alley Pub
Call this a re-emergence. When Erik Zackrison expanded his Pub, live shows no longer became an overtly loud conversation-stopper but a welcome addition to the local music scene. Speakeasy and Cindy Woolf play weekly.