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, […]
There was a homespun quality to Boat Songs, the 2022 album that won Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman an unexpected avalanche of critical praise and hype. That time around, Lenderman came across as a natural-yet-iconoclastic Gen Z update to the […]
It’s been a long, tumultuous seven years since Ben Sollee released his 2017 chamber-bluegrass self-titled album, Ben Sollee & the Kentucky Native. Now the father of three, Sollee kept himself busy with soundtrack scores (LAND from director Robin Wright and […]
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, […]
Because of the combination of his abundant skill, emotional vulnerability, earnest reverence for his artistic predecessors, and generally self-effacing style, it’s tempting to ignore, or at least downplay, the essential Gen Z bro-ness at the heart of Zach Bryan’s songcraft. […]
Because of the combination of his abundant skill, emotional vulnerability, earnest reverence for his artistic predecessors, and generally self-effacing style, it’s tempting to ignore, or at least downplay, the essential Gen Z bro-ness at the heart of Zach Bryan’s songcraft. […]
“Milonga Accidental,” the song that won singer-songwriter Alisa Amador the 2022 NPR Tiny Desk Contest and is the closing track on her fantastic debut album, Multitudes, encapsulates both the self-evident promise — and breathtaking vulnerability — that makes her music […]
For an artist like singer-songwriter Sam Beam, who has operated under the stage name Iron & Wine since 2002, there’s always a maddening and mystifying distance between his short-hand persona (bearded, honey-hushed singing folkie) and his actual recording output (varied, […]
What counts as “classic country” music today is very much an eye-of-the-beholder sort of thing, but for a great many people, artists like Vincent Neil Emerson truly fit the bill. An Indigenous American with Choctaw-Apache lineage, Emerson is steeped in […]
One of the many up-and-coming artists who saw their momentum dashed by the pandemic, singer-songwriter Jason Hawk Harris’ 2019 debut Love & The Dark quickly began garnering him some heady critical acclaim and word-of-mouth buzz despite the pandemic (ND review). […]
