BoDeans

“I’ve always thought of the BoDeans as a truly American band,” says Kurt Neumann, the founder, primary writer and frontman of the veteran Milwaukee-based group. “We were blue-collar kids straight out of the heartland—how could we be anything else? ‘Roots rock’ was a label I fought when I was younger, but I came to realize that if by ‘roots’ you meant blues, rock, country and soul all slammed together into one sound, then I’d say yes—that is the sound of American-made music.”