Billy Joe Shaver is one of those Texas music legends with a life story that sounds like country and western fantasy. His father abandoned the family before he was born, he lost 2 fingers in a sawmill accident, he lost his mother and wife to cancer and his son to drug overdose within a single year, and he suffered a heart attack on stage. But, Shaver has long channeled his pain into his music. For over 25 years, he's been a working musician and songwriter, and he's had tracks recorded by people ranging from Elvis to David Allan Coe to Waylon Jennings to Bob Dylan. His music is classic country of the finest quality, the sort that circulates as blue collar poetry and makes grown men weep into their beers.

Billy Joe Shaver
Austin, TX
Latest Release: Everybody's Brother, out next month
Sunday the 16th, 6:30 p.m., Austin Ventures Stage

Singer-songwriter Fionn Regan has the vocal strength to sound earnest without sounding whiny -- an admirable quality if ever there were one. The effect is thoroughly charming and calls to mind bits of Belle and Sebastian and Loudon Wainwright III. Regan's songs would fit right into the soundtracks of Wes Anderson's films. Listening to the album gives the impression that, at any moment, Bill Murray is going to walk into the room and say something droll, or stare meaningfully off into the distance.

Fionn Regan
Wicklow, Ireland
Latest Release: The End of History, 2007
Sunday the 16th, 12:50 p.m., Austin Ventures Stage