Yarn’s latest, Born, Blessed, Grateful & Alive, opens with grand, sweeping blues rock and an imperative: get off that screen and join the party. The music, the message to “Turn Off the News,” neither are all that radical, but that’s […]
Charlie Overbey has had a fistful of labels hung on him over his career: Cowpunker, rocker, outlaw countryman, Americanan, and even hatmaker. But Overbey opens his latest, In Good Company, with “Punk Rock Spy,” containing his own descriptor: “The punk […]
For the last two decades, American Aquarium frontman BJ Barham has seemingly willed his band to survive. Armed with an incisive pen and a love for Whiskeytown and Drive-by Truckers on one hand and Springsteen and Petty on the other, […]
Boy Golden makes weightless music in heavy times. “Untitled,” the closing track of his new album, For Eden, documents the weightlessness of youth: of drinking in the same three bars, serving drinks for a living, playing local shows, looking forward […]
She may have borrowed the album title, Borned in Ya, from an old interview with Ralph Stanley, but it couldn’t be better suited to anyone than Melissa Carper. Quite literally, she’s got the bona fides. Carper was raised on the […]
Sturgill Simpson says he intended to release five albums under his own name, and then record as someone else. (He’s already put out seven, but never mind.) So now he’s become Johnny Blue Skies, whose “debut” longplayer, Passage du Desir, […]
Billy Strings had to throw a tantrum to get his first real guitar. Exposed to dad and friends jamming in the kitchen of the family trailer from the vantage point of his high chair, Strings was gifted a toy guitar […]
“Road’s been too rough to walk alone” Cassandra Lewis admits on “Too Much,” the opening track of her major-label debut, Lost in a Dream. And what a life it’s been, beginning with a driftless childhood that found her regional fame […]
To be the steward for stories and songs of eras past is a responsibility Jake Xerxes Fussell does not take lightly. He has, for at least a decade, shaped himself into a prolific conduit of archival folk songs, lovingly collaged […]
On her fourth full-length album, The Only Moment, Maya de Vitry exhibits a sense of self-awareness in her lyrics and in arrangements that complement her vocals. The songs, all written or co-written by de Vitry, strike a balance between a […]
