When Ronnie Baker Brooks says that blues is in his DNA, it’s not an idle claim or a marketing ploy. His Grammy-nominated and Blues Hall of Famer dad Lonnie schooled him in the Chicago blues tradition. Lonnie took him on […]
With the shattering strike of a snare, Oh Brother comes to life and so, too, does the latest iteration of Dawes. For the first time in nearly a decade, it’s just brothers Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith leading the charge. The […]
Michelle Malone has been the life of the party for decades, and on her new album, Southern Comfort, she demonstrates why. A good party is fun, but a great party is a much deeper experience – it’s not about barely […]
In literature, Acadia is an idyllic place filled with plenty. Acadia is a fitting title, then, for the new album from Yasmin Williams. On this, her third album – her first for Nonesuch Records – the multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer […]
When Long-Island-native-turned-Nashville-resident Mindy Smith first arrived on the music scene in the early 2000s, it was a moment of possibility in the Americana world. The buzzy hype of late 1990s alt-country had swelled over and made inroads across indie, rock, […]
In 2022, Thee Sacred Souls made a splash with its eponymous debut. That record was an enticing mix of Chicano soul, doo wop and Impressions-esque R&B. This week, the vocal trio is back with its follow-up, entitled Got a Story […]
“You’ve been so hard on yourself / It’s time to let things soften,” murmurs Julian Taylor on “Weighing Down,” the haunting leadoff track on his new album, Pathways. A veteran singer-songwriter with more than two decades’ experience, this soft-spoken Canadian […]
On the high-octane Highway Prayers, multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Billy Strings flies down bluegrass straightaways, careening around curves with blind speed. These songs pay tribute to the backroads and byways Strings barreled down in his youth, and some of them pay tribute […]
Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) have worked nothing less than a miracle on symbiont, out Friday on Smithsonian Folkways. The album continues the work of Blount’s Afro-futurist climate change epic The New Faith (2022) and Obomsawin’s portentous […]
Randall Bramblett is a dreamcatcher of sorts. He captures images from the airy vaults where they recline, waiting to be downloaded by sensitive souls like him. Of course, translating them into a musical format requires some shapeshifting, so he blends […]
