The largest music store in Texas — by its own count, though nobody has stepped up to argue — doesn’t sit in Austin, and it doesn’t sit in Deep Ellum. It sits on the service road of Highway 360 in Grand Prairie, in an unassuming building between Dallas and Fort Worth, and it holds more than a quarter million pieces of recorded music. Forever Young Records has spent four decades becoming a store collectors fly in for, and most of North Texas still drives right past it.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
This is one of those weekends where Dallas stacks everything on top of itself. Father’s Day, Juneteenth, the World Cup still running, a free block party in the Arts District, and a music calendar that goes from Randy Rogers to Killswitch Engage to the Dallas Symphony in a single Friday night. Pick your lane and go.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
by Cassidy Everett
Some weekends are made for catching up on chores. This is not one of them.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Walk through Bishop Arts on any given weekend and you’ll land in something Amy Cowan and Jason Roberts built. That’s been true for almost twenty years. Between them they’ve opened five concepts within a few blocks of each other in North Oak Cliff, organized the neighborhood’s two biggest street festivals, and done more to put Bishop Arts on the map than any developer or marketing campaign ever managed.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Walk into The Free Man on a Tuesday night and you might not immediately understand what you are looking at. There is a band in one room and a different band in the other room. Someone is eating crawfish at the bar. The owner is probably behind a drum kit somewhere. The gumbo smells like it has been going since this morning, because it has. This is Deep Ellum, but it is also kind of New Orleans, and that is entirely on purpose.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Violetta Valéry is the emotional center of La Traviata, and one of opera’s most human characters. At first glance she seems to have everything: wealth, beauty, and a glamorous social life in Paris. But Violetta is also a courtesan—admired in public, judged in private—and she understands that the world she lives in offers comfort without respect. On top of that, she is quietly dying of tuberculosis, a fact that gives her story a constant sense of urgency.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Ruins in Deep Ellum is a place that doesn’t stray far from its purpose: tacos, cocktails, and a space to disappear into for a while. The menu centers on tacos rooted in Mexican tradition but twisted just enough to keep things interesting. There’s no attempt here to be a pan-Latin fusion spot or a comfort-food haven—Ruins keeps its offerings tight, deliberate, and built for flavor.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
At the heart of La bohème is Rodolfo, a young poet with more imagination than money and more feeling than sense. He isn’t written as a grand hero. He’s impulsive, idealistic, occasionally selfish, and deeply in love. That combination makes him feel real—and it’s why he remains one of opera’s essential tenor roles.
Continue reading
