Will Kimbrough wasn’t planning to go on spring break, but when the pandemic hit and his tour was canceled, he spent his downtime writing some new songs about the days in which we’re living. On Spring Break Kimbrough evokes the […]
A cross between a hysterical lunatic and a road-weary sage, Jim White really lets loose on the electrifying Misfit’s Jubilee, the latest installment in his ongoing quest to make sense of reality in all its dazzling weirdness. “This circle of […]
The latest project from The Mountain Goats, Getting into Knives, features some of the band’s most sophisticated soundscapes and evocative lyrical forays to date, the sequence additionally benefiting from the sensitive production approaches of Matt Ross-Spang, who engineered The Mountain […]
Lera Lynn reaches out and grabs you with the first lines of “Are You Listening?”, the opening track on her newest release, On My Own. From its very first bars, the project is an intimate and direct conversation between artist […]
Shemekia Copeland doesn’t need any amplification. As anyone who’s seen her live can attest, her message comes across loud and clear, lyrically and sonically. She can fill a room with her voice without raising it, and raise the roof when […]
In the opening pages of his new book, How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy writes, humbly, “Songs, to me, are much more like individual thoughts than other works of art are. They’re hard to hold on to — airlike and […]
“We are living through an age of grief; grieving our lives, routines and families at the hand of a pandemic,” writes William Prince in a statement on his website. “Through my adjustment, I found myself singing songs that made me […]
“Pretty Polly” with a chugging rhythm that hints at krautrock? Roots music never fails to surprise. Vermont native Sam Amidon continues an experimental approach to his craft on his latest, a self-titled LP for Nonesuch. Over nine takes on traditional […]
“In another space and time / California’s not burning / and the seas don’t rise,” Laura Veirs sings on her new solo album My Echo, her 11th. “I’ll meet you there and I / will remember the day / that […]
On her sophomore album, Woman in Color, Raye Zaragoza confronts her audience with powerful, strident protest songs — the kind of direct, timeless lyrics that everyone with a guitar has been reaching for since November 2016. Few have succeeded, and […]
