As singer-songwriters who began their careers in the 1960s go, Joni Mitchell is one of the more mythologized. Numerous books have been published about her, granted, but they typically follow the traditional biography route, as though examining and re-examining […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaitlin Butts is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for June 2024. Look for more on Butts and her new album, Roadrunner! (out June 28 on Soundly Music), all month long. The great state of Oklahoma has long […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaia Kater is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for May 2024. Look for more about her and her new album, Strange Medicine (out May 17 on Free Dirt Records), all month long. There’s a video clip of […]
In one particularly memorable shot from I Am a Noise, the new documentary about singer-songwriter Joan Baez’s life and career, things go quiet. The landscape is stark. The light is fading. There appears to be vast emptiness in every direction. […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: “The New Normal” is an occasional series of stories that look into how the coronavirus has affected artists, listeners, and the music business. In early March, as COVID-19 was causing havoc in Washington state, a choir got together […]
The 11th annual 30A Songwriters Festival wrapped on Monday, after five days and nights of a diverse array of songwriter-centered music, spread across 36 venues along a scenic highway on Florida’s panhandle. Though 30A does the big-stage-in-a-field thing that many […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt of a story from No Depression’s Fall 2016 print issue, “Speak Up!”, about a pre-Broadway production of the musical Hadestown. The Broadway version, adapted from singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera, won eight Tony Awards […]
In 1947, Pete Seeger sat in a room with Zilphia Horton and learned to sing a song she was calling “We Will Overcome.” She sang it in a long, slow, freeform, heart-driven alto — what their mutual friend Woody Guthrie […]
Music can feel like magic sometimes. Even if we’re not listening closely, it can stir something deep inside of us. But when we engage with it, we realize, almost in our bones, that music is a survival tactic. As social […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from a story in our Appalachia-themed journal from Spring 2018. You can read the whole story — and much more — in that issue, available here. And please consider supporting No Depression with a […]
