The Wood Brothers
The Wood Brothers | Puff of Smoke:
“Every day is a puff of smoke
A little cloud of heartbreak and hope
Maybe it’s God’s little practical joke
And if you’re lucky he stops by
And you take a little ride”
If you’re searching for insights into the state of the human condition in 2025, look no further than Puff of Smoke (Honey Jar/Thirty Tigers), the highly-anticipated ninth album of original music from Grammy-nominated progressive Americana trio The Wood Brothers.
Less a literal soundtrack to uncertain times or a roadmap showing how to live through them, Puff of Smoke posits a happily contrarian outlook: Life can turn on a dime, and all we truly have is the moment at hand. And that’s perfectly fine. “We're not in control,” says guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Oliver Wood, “and that can be good news.”
Between the poetic observations of Oliver and his brother, bassist and vocalist Chris Wood — with percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix completing the trio — Puff of Smoke is an 11-song collection brimming with joy in the face of challenges, delivering lyrical wisdom with the winking subtlety of John Prine and the musical hive mind of a seasoned group with two decades of shared experiences.
Fans who have hopped aboard at waypoints along the journey that began with their now classic 2006 debut Ways Not to Lose already know to expect a new drop from The Wood Brothers will bring inventive songwriting, a grounded lyrical wit, and an adventurous sweep of sonic avenues. Unpredictability is part of the listening experience.
“This album is a little bit schizophrenic and eclectic, and it goes in a few different directions,” says Oliver.
“There's a lot to unpack musically in this band, and it's been this evolutionary process over the years and on each record,” Chris continues. “Over time, the diversity of things we can do has all become part of our language.”
Largely recorded at The Studio Nashville, a creative space in the Sylvan Heights neighborhood that has become an essential companion to the band’s evolution, Puff of Smoke distills the trio’s curious musical minds, voracious appetite for the creative process, and love of spontaneity.
“When you're writing or performing, the hope is that your subconscious handles everything and your conscious, thinking, judging mind gets out of the way,” Chris says. “Because yoursubconscious is the most true, authentic piece of you. You're not judging yourself when your subconscious is speaking. That's how the best art comes about.”
Always looking to find new sounds to express in their music, the album’s opening track “Witness” dives deeper than ever into the pan-American songbook for inspiration, garnishing its groove with blasts of back-alley New Orleans brass. On “The Trick,” Jano found the song’s signature sound, an overdriven synth that sounds like it could be Clavinet, but is actually a Fender Rhodes pushed through distortion and octave pedals. He also manipulated an analog synth to conjure the underwater-calliope sounds on “Above All Others.” To perform the piano’s centerpiece melody on “Pray God Listens,” he played keys with one hand while reaching inside the piano with his other hand to mute the strings.
“What's really fun about making a record with this band is that we actually have no idea how we're going to arrange a song, or what instruments we're going to play, when we get to a recording session,” says Chris, whose years as a member of Medeski, Martin and Wood primed him for the ego-stripped musical collaborations that are a hallmark of The Wood Brothers. “That's why first takes are often the best. You don't have any ideas about the song yet.”
With only a general idea of the song structures — often limited to lyrics and basic chords — their improvisational recording process yielded plenty of first-take gold. The loose, front-stoop feel of “Slow Rise (To the Middle)” and “You Choose Me” are genuine; the final versions that made the album were actually the first times the trio played them together in full. As the band was working out the arrangements for the Cachito-Cuban groove of “Pray God Listens,” with all its Tom Waits whimsy, and the rolling, brass-accented “Witness,” co-producer Brook Sutton liked what he heard so much, he simply brought the microphones to them, not wanting to disturb any piece of the puzzle.
The group also finds inspiration in a shared focus on meditation and mindfulness. “Ways not to go crazy, basically,” Oliver admits. “Songs like ‘The Trick’ and even ‘Puff of Smoke’ and ‘Witness’ are very much about mindfulness,” he says. “‘The trick is not to give a damn’ — so, that’s detachment — or, ‘I'm just a witness’ — I'm just watching things happen. I'm not gonna be my feelings. I'm gonna watch 'em float by.
“Even a song like ‘Pray God Listens,’ which is a little bit humorous and cynical, ultimately it's a song of compassion and humility,” Oliver says. “It's meant to be light, but it's ambiguous enough that you can draw your own conclusion. You can take the cynicism part and the humor, or you can go a little deeper and find the compassion.”
Puff of Smoke is a reminder that life is both precious and precarious — a sentiment underscored by our current geopolitical moment and the unpredictable nature of life itself — and The Wood Brothers invite you to join the ride.
“Creativity is a winding road, not a straight path,” Jano says, before adding the essential caveat at the heart of the group’s ethos: “If you’re open to it.”
The Beths
The Beths know the futility of straight lines. This existential vertigo serves as the primary theme on the New Zealand indie heroes’ fourth album Straight Line Was A Lie (their first for new label ANTI-). The Beths posit that the only way round is through; That even after going through difficult, transformative experiences, you can still feel as though you've ended up in the same place. It's a bewildering thing, realising that life and personal growth are cyclical and continual. That a chapter doesn’t always end with peace and acceptance. That the approach is simply continuing to try, to show up. “Linear progression is an illusion,” lead singer and songwriter Elizabeth Stokes says of the album. “What life really is is maintenance. And finding meaning in the maintenance.”
The path from The Beths’ critically celebrated and year-end-list-topping 2022 LP Expert In A Dying Field to Straight Line Was A Lie, written in Los Angeles and recorded in the band’s hometown of Auckland, was also anything but straightforward. For the first time, Stokes was struggling to write new songs beyond fragments she’d recorded on her phone. She’d recently started taking an SSRI, which on one hand made her feel like she could “fix” everything broken in her life, from her mental and physical health to fraught family dynamics. At the same time, writing wasn’t coming as easily as it had before. “I was kind of dealing with a new brain, and I feel like I write very instinctually,” she says. “It was kind of like my instincts were just a little different, they weren't as panicky.”
Stokes and her longtime Beths bandmate, guitarist, and creative partner Jonathan Pearce responded by breaking down the typical Beths writing process. For inspiration, they read Stephen King’s On Writing, How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and Working by Robert A. Caro. Liz broke out a Remington typewriter (a birthday gift from Beths bassist Benjamin Sinclair) every morning for a month, writing 10 pages’ worth of material — mostly streams of consciousness. The resulting stack of paper was the primary fodder for an extended writing retreat to Los Angeles between tours, where Stokes and Pearce also leaned heavily into LA’s singular creative atmosphere, went to shows, watched Criterion classics from Kurosawa, and listened to Drive-By Truckers, The Go-Go’s, and Olivia Rodrigo. Opening themselves up to a wave of creative input, plus Stokes’ free-flowing writing routine, proved therapeutic. “Writing so much down forced me to look at stuff that I didn't want to look at,” Stokes says. “In the past, in my memories. Things I normally don't like to think about or I'm scared to revisit, I’m putting them down on paper and thinking about them, addressing them.”
Since Stokes, Pearce, and Sinclair started playing together (Tristan Deck joined in 2019), the four-piece have steadily risen through the indie-rock ranks, opening for household name acts like Pixies, The Breeders, The Postal Service, and Death Cab For Cutie; and they’ve garnered significant praise from pop and indie-adjacent heroes like Phoebe Bridgers, not to mention tastemaking outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. Over the last six years, The Beths have appeared at major international festivals, from Coachella to Primavera Sound to Newport Folk Festival and Bonnaroo, and Expert In A Dying Field has earned millions of global streams since its release in 2022.
Already a celebrated lyricist, Stokes has long impressed fans and critics with wryly knowing song titles like “Future Me Hates Me” and “Expert In A Dying Field” — catchy, instant-classic turns of phrase that capture the personal and ladder up to the universal. But Stokes’ intentional deconstruction and rebuild of her relationship to writing has resulted in a total renewal. Her songwriting has achieved startling new depths of insight and vulnerability, making Straight Line Was A Lie the most sharply observant, truthful, and poetic Beths project to date.
It’s immediately clear how far inward Stokes looked on the stripped-down, intensely personal “Mother Pray For Me.” Over plaintive finger-picked guitar, Stokes’ voice is childlike in its wistful plea for connection. “I cried the whole time writing it,” Stokes says. “It's not really about her, it's about me — what I hope our relationship is, what I think it is, what it maybe actually is, and what I can or can't expect out of it.” Reckoning with the lives your parents have led, and their mortality as they shift from guardians to full human beings, is bracing. The song is so moving because few people can look this in the eyes until there is no choice. How do you see your parent as someone who did their best, when it might not have felt like enough?
Cementing the album’s aharmonic theme is a loopy analog clock design by Lily Paris West, who also provided the artwork for 2022’s Expert In A Dying Field. West’s “wonky clock” plays right into The Beths’ notion of nonlinear progression and the machine-like ways in which bodies work (or don’t, as in Stokes’ case, amidst physical and mental health struggles). “The clock is always back in the same place, it's kind of a broken machine as well,” Stokes says. “The body and brain are these complex, complicated machines, ever-changing. Even when functioning in a less-than-optimal state, they're still amazing. But I’m still prone to completely dismiss that and see only the worst.”
Meanwhile, fans who have followed The Beths’ since their 2018 debut Future Me Hates Me will fall in love at first listen with the band’s latest title track. A clear-eyed, hook-stacked mission statement for The Beths’ new chapter, “Straight Line Was A Lie” is a Flying Nun-shaped instant anthem with a punchy, Salad Boys-inspired sing-along chorus about non-linear progression: I thought I was getting better/ But I’m back to where I started/ And the straight line was a circle/ Yeah, the straight line was a lie. In many ways it is the album’s thesis, with each consecutive song building a case for the idea that life’s casual disappointments are something we might not overcome, but hopefully won’t succumb to either. Scars may not heal, and lives (or ecological sites like Oakley Creek from “Mosquitoes”) may not be fully rebuilt. In a world of absolutes, Stokes is interested in the particulars of life. “We were right in the middle of writing the album, and I was metabolizing everything," Stokes says of the album’s title track. "I had held onto this idea that I was making progress in my life and that I was going to be able to fix everything. Like, this is great. Things have been really dark, but I’m getting help and I can keep working and then I'll be in this good place. And it just felt like this rude awakening. It's not like everything went really terrible, but it just wasn't the reality.”
While Stokes felt a huge relief from taking an SSRI, she articulates the emotional trade offs on “No Joy,” which thunders in with Deck’s vigorous percussion and drops another classic Beths soundbite: Thisyear’s gonna kill me/ Gonna kill me. Ironically, though, the stress Stokes sings about can’t touch her, thanks to her pharmaceutical regimen. "It's about anhedonia, which, paradoxically, was present both in the worst bouts of depression, and then also when I was feeling pretty numb after a year on my SSRI,” Stokes says. “It wasn't that I was sad, I was feeling pretty good. It was just that I didn't like the things that I liked. I wasn't getting joy from them. It's a pretty literal song.”
Stokes takes a more abstract approach to health and healing on the cheery “Metal,” where she grapples with dueling diagnoses of Grave’s and Thyroid Eye Disease and finds inspiration from Ed Yong’s book on animal senses, An Immense World. “Metal” finds The Beths at their peak, with its effortless meld of upbeat, sugar-rushing jangle-rock underpinning layers of pensive anxiety and optimism. “I was having all of these coexisting thoughts — feeling like my body's like a machine that's breaking down but feeling really incredulous that it exists at all,” she says. “I was like, the human body is amazing. Life is amazing, and yet...”
LUCIUS
Known for their engaging live performances and spell-binding harmonies, Grammy-nominated indie-pop band Lucius are a mesmerizing experience of mirrored kinship and honesty. In 2025, the band released their fourth studio album, Lucius, which Rolling Stone called “the best album of their career.” Lucius' most personal and purposeful album to date explores relationships, motherhood, and life’s complexities with a unique vulnerability only made possible due to the familial nature of the band. The New Yorker praises, "The band’s new self-titled album reaches the pinnacle of a vibrant, harmonic enterprise," while Paste describes their sound as "girl-group revivalism, cosmic pop, and a kind of bicoastal harmonizing that once echoed through western canyons."
Lucius' self-titled record follows an impressive history of critically acclaimed full-length projects. Their debut, Wildewoman, introduced their signature dual lead vocals and retro charm. It was widely praised for the album’s throwback sound with NPR declaring it "perfect, magnetic pop music" Meanwhile, The Guardian called lead singers Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig's voices “powerful … melding beautifully in harmony.” With the release of Good Grief in 2016, Lucius traded some of their folk roots for polished synth-pop. The band’s acclaimed 2022 record, Second Nature, marked a striking return, and was produced by Brandi Carlile and Dave Cobb. Released to overwhelming acclaim, the Los Angeles Times praised, “dazzling…Second Nature mines an ’80s-pop sound with lush synths and sleek disco grooves under the women’s laser-guided vocals,” while Relix proclaimed, “stunning…a 10-song, smart-pop masterpiece.”
Throughout their acclaimed career, Lucius has performed on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, BBC’s Later! with Jools Holland, PBS' "Austin City Limits” and “The Kelly Clarkson Show”. Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe are some of the most sought-after collaborators in popular music due to their “otherworldly” vocals (Los Angeles Times). The duo have recorded and performed with many artists including Joni Mitchell, Mumford and Sons, The National, Harry Styles, Ringo Starr, Ozzy Osborne, Sheryl Crow, and Brandi Carlile including appearances on the Grammy stage and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” Lucius are Laessig, Wolfe, and Peter Lalish.
big freedia
Recognized as the larger-than-life ambassador of New Orleans Bounce music, Big Freedia is a nationally acclaimed hip-hop artist, TV personality, and cultural icon. The Queen of Bounce made waves with her electrifying feature on Beyoncé’s Grammy-winning hit, “Break My Soul” (2022), cementing her influence in mainstream music.
Beyond her three critically acclaimed EPs—‘3rd Ward Bounce’ (2018), ‘Louder’ (2020), and ‘Big Diva Energy’ (2021)—as well as full length, ‘Central City’ (2023), Big Freedia has been featured on some of the most iconic tracks in recent music history. She lent her signature sound to Beyoncé’s “Formation”, Drake’s “Nice for What”, and even covered “Judas” for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way The Tenth Anniversary album in 2021.
This month, Big Freedia builds on her musical legacy with the release of two powerful new singles — ‘Take My Hand’ and ‘Sunday Best’ featuring Tamar Braxton — offering a stirring preview of her highly anticipated gospel project, set for release on July 18, 2025.
Big Freedia’s ascension in the music industry was chronicled over six seasons in the highly rated reality show, ‘Big Freedia Bounces Back’ from 2011-2016 on Fuse TV. A brand new series, ‘Big Freedia Means Business,’ chronicling Freedia’s triumphs in music, business and life debuted in 2023 on Fuse TV.
Big Freedia is known for her infectious energy and personality. In 2019, she was the official host for the Met Gala IG Live Stream Red Carpet event and a host of 2021's Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve TV celebration. Known by her fans as the “Queen Diva,” Big Freedia is a loud and proud advocate for racial and gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights.
In 2021, Big Freedia was honored as one of Ebony’s Power 100 and she has appeared on Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, NPR, The Breakfast Club, The Problem with Jon Stewart, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Real. Her critically acclaimed 2015 memoir, God Save the Queen Diva (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster) was released in paperback in 2020.
squirrel Nut Zippers
Sparked by the flames of 1920s jazz, klezmer, and vaudeville, the Squirrel Nut Zippers blazed onto the music scene in the mid-1990s at a time when big band music was having a resurgence and the doors were wide open for curious leader Jimbo Mathus and his caustic crew of rollicking, ragtime musicians.
Formed in 1993 by Mathus (vocals, guitar, trombone) in 1993 in the Chapel Hill area of North Carolina with former vocalist and banjo player Katherine Whalen, the eclectic group of diverse local artists quickly gelled and wove together a tapestry of sounds comprising elements of early jazz, blues and southern roots, that are still evident today. The Zippers quickly made their live debut in Chapel Hill and thanks to their truly unique and original music and energetic, almost carnival-like stage performances, they developed a large fan base throughout the South within just a few months.
This momentum continued to gain speed and between 1995 and 2005, the Squirrel Nut Zippers sold more than three million albums. Their watershed album, Hot (Certified Platinum, 1996), was recorded in the heat of New Orleans, fueled by a smoldering mix of booze and a youthful hunger to unlock the secrets of old-world jazz. Perennial Favorites (1998) followed Hot’s success, peaking at #18 on the Billboard T op 200 and was certified Gold the month after its release, as well as their iconic holiday record Christmas Caravan, which was released that same year and debuted at #12 on the Billboard Holiday Albums Chart.
The band’s next chart-topping album would come a decade later, after the group took a hiatus and changed its lineup with Mathus serving as the only original member. Beasts Of Burgundy (2018) debuted at #4 on the Billboard Jazz Albums Chart proving that the Zippers were back and that with Mathus at the helm, that the band was continuing to explore its own musical universe, evolving all the while.
Today, the Zippers continue to tour, performing over three decades of their music to sold outaudiences across the country. In addition to their career-retrospective shows, they also perform their wildly popular “Christmas Caravan Tour,” featuring the best of Christmas past, including songs from their Christmas Caravan and Mardi Gras for Christmas albums, and the “Jazz From The Back ‘O Town” show, which offers a glimpse into the songs that inspired the band from the birthplace of jazz – otherwise known as New Orleans’ “Back ‘O Town.”
For more than 30 years, the Squirrel Nut Zippers have proven that their truly unique and originalsound has not only stood the test of time but also that no other artist of this generation has embraced and synthesized such eclectic influences in such a seamless, authentic manner.
THE STEEL WHEELS
The Steel Wheels by The Steel Wheels - July, 2025
20 years is a long time to spend doing anything at all. It’s an age for any group of people to sustain a collective effort. For a band on the road, 20 years can be more than a lifetime. Yet, after 2 decades of making music together in living rooms, listening rooms, clubs, theaters, and festival stages, The Steel Wheels are still growing, still pushing, still at it, and they’re marking the occasion with the release of their 9th studio album, “The Steel Wheels”.
Following the release of “Sideways” in 2024, their 3rd record with producer Sam Kassirer at his Great North Sound Society studio in interior Maine, the band felt it was time for a change of scene. As the group began to select songs for a new album, they also had to find an answer to the question of where they would get down to the work of record-making. They didn’t know that answer was going to knock on their back door.
At the band’s 2024 Red Wing Roots festival, held each summer near the group’s home base of Harrisonburg, VA, banjo player and songwriter Trent Wagler spied producer and engineer D. James Goodwin (Goose, Bonny Light Horseman, I’m With Her) in the crowd and later reached out to learn what he was doing so far from his home turf of New York. It happened that Goodwin, who mixed the band’s 2019 album “Over The Trees”, had just pulled up stakes for the Shenandoah Valley and was setting up a new studio on the band’s doorstep. Several months and one video call later, Wagler, fiddler Eric Brubaker, multi-instrumentalist Jay Lapp, drummer/ percussionist Kevin Garcia, and bass player Jeremy Darrow gathered in the new space, The Isokon, snug against the snowy Virginia winter, to begin recording their next album.
The process that Goodwin cultivated was fluid and swift. Demo listening in the morning flowed into tracking the whole band live in one room. The session was punctuated by peals of laughter and occasional tears as the group kept themselves in the moment, leaning in to every emotion andembracing that vulnerability. As they worked, the music took shape in the moment, right in front of the microphones, each participant listening and responding as the songs flickered to life. By dinner time the songs of the day were complete and talk moved to the next day’s work.
The album that resulted from this process captures the multifaceted band in full-flight, pivoting effortlessly between the folk rock band they’ve grown into over 20 years, and the harmony-centric acoustic ensemble that they’ve been since the beginning.The band puts their impressive range on display throughout “The Steel Wheels”; energy, insight, and humor, balance with tender, highly personal moments of masterful restraint and expression as the album unfolds. As ever, the band challenges themselves to find new ways through the music, using space and, at moments, reinventing their approach to the string band format.
As usual, Wagler’s keen lyrics provide insight by posing big questions. At first blush “Easy” sounds like the song of the summer, but a deeper listen asks the audience to consider whether it’s worth the cost to have the world waiting for us on the other side of our screens. “Everything is easy”, but is it really?
Beyond our glowing devices “Go Back” studies the complexity of our relationships and the time we spend with those close to us. It’s easy to say that we must take the bad with the good, it’s a challenge to seek to understand how our joy and sadness are entwined; that they are not opposing feelings, but sibling emotions.
“Keep On Dancing” offers the listener a greater challenge; to take a step back from distraction and our self-imposed tasks, to look beyond the static of the day, and to see the beauty all around us. The song gently implores us to take a breath and be still so that we can glimpse the things that are actually important.
The Steel Wheels have kept their stride for longer than most bands survive. After 20 years hard at work “The Steel Wheels” is an album of creative maturity with a restless sense of adventure. Here’s to 20 more.
Shadowgrass
When their instrumental prowess earned them a vast following on social media, childhood friends turned all-star act Shadowgrass found sudden success. But as a young band, the expectations that went along with a large audience proved daunting. “We felt a lot of pressure to make something uniquely us, because we had such a big following, and we felt that they deserved more than what we had given them as of yet.” explains the band. The group dug deep into their own musicality, and tried to block out the noise for their sophomore release All That Will (release date: Oct 4, 2024). “It turned out that dropping those self-imposed expectations and just writing/making music for our own enjoyment was the key to finding our collective voice and making a record we are all proud of.”
Shadowgrass began in 2014 when Clay Russell (Banjo), Luke Morris (Mandolin), Kyser George (Guitar) were jamming at the Grayson County Fiddler’s Convention in Elk Creek, VA. Sometime before their first real show, the name Shadowgrass was suggested simply because they thought it sounded “cool”. Kyser, Clay, and Luke were 9, 13, and 14 years old at the time. Now in their early twenties, their influences and listening habits have changed drastically, but the group has always grown in the same direction musically. They have welcomed fiddle player Madison Morris, who also lends vocals and songwriting prowess, and bass player Evan Campfield. Luke and Madison trade off lead vocals, and harmonies seamlessly with one another. Their commitment to and keen interest in songwriting brings additional dimensions to the band, allowing the group to appeal to listeners outside of the expected jam-band community.
As a very young band that has already been playing together for a decade, Shadowgrass has a unique bond. “We’ve grown up together and have watched each other evolve into the people we are today”, they say. “It sounds cliche but we definitely act more like siblings than bandmates”. On All That Will, the group explores themes of anxiety and uncertainty, and questioning the people they want to become. Luckily, they’ve had each other to sharethese experiences with, and it seems that their companionship has only pushed their artistic and musical abilities to new heights.
S.G. Goodman
S.G. Goodman returns from the Western Kentucky bottomland with her latest full-length album, Planting by the Signs, Available June 20, 2025 on her very own Slough Water Records via Thirty Tigers. Composed of songs inspired by love, loss, reconciliation, and the aforementioned ancient practice. Eleven tracks highlighted by the critically-acclaimed and award-winning artist’s singular voice and her penchant for juxtaposing vulnerable folk music with punchy rock ‘n roll, replete with chiming guitars, ethereal atmospherics, and her DIY ethos. Goodman provides a timely reminder that the only way forward is together, and that we must always take into account humanity’s dependence on and responsibility to the natural world.
Back in the early hours of 2023, Goodman told her late friend Mike Harmon and his wife Therese that she wanted to base her next album around the concept of planting by the signs, which she had heard about growing up, and recently rediscovered while reading a volume of Foxfire. She remembered general points from her rural southern childhood - how planting a garden, or weaning a baby, or getting a haircut are best timed in accordance with the cycle of the moon. A concept diametrically opposed to the tech-obsessed, profit margin-driven mania swirling around her. Through exploring themes related to planting by the signs, Goodman hoped to help herself and others reconcile this jarring disconnect, as well to pass along the story of the practice to her nieces and nephews - the latter being a role she took very seriously.
But it wasn’t an easy path to writing Planting by the Signs or to the recording studio. 2023 saw the passing of her beloved dog, Howard, as well as the tragic death of Harmon, a father figure and mentor. Mike was mentioned in Goodman’s song, “Red Bird Morning” on Old Time Feeling, her debut. Her band used to practice in the quonset hut behind his house. He would check on her house while she toured. Often, Goodman would call him for advice from the road. A few days before he died, he advised her about putting chains on her van during a snow storm. He once drove that same van from Boston to Chicago so the band could play a one-off in the middle of a tour. He was a rock for Goodman, and a rock star in his own right.
Harmon’s death led to Goodman reconciling with her longtime collaborator and guitarist, Matthew Rowan, who had become estranged from her following a year of grueling live shows in 2021. Rowan and Goodman had met in their early 20s while at college in the Murray, KY, indie rock scene, and eventually began playing music together. His idiosyncratic guitar work became an essential part of her production. He wrote most of the guitar parts on her first two records, and their creative relationship stretched for nearly 10 years. But life on the road isn’t for all, one thing led to another, and Rowan decided to step away. After Harmon passed, Matt was one of the first people Goodman called. From there they began to mend their relationship, and eventually, once she started working on her new album, S.G. asked Rowan to be her co-producer. The album would not exist in its current form without their reconciliation.
With over 150 performances on the books in ‘23, including headlining sold out tours and opening for the likes of Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell from Red Rocks to the Grand Ole’ Opry, there was also little time for songwriting, much less recording. As she sings on “Fire Sign,” S.G. was working like “the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass everyday.” So, after a restful, somewhat celebratory winter in the beginning months of 2024, she began writing and demo-ing a new album, eventually Drew Vandenberg, who also co-produced and engineered Teeth Marks, to join he and Rowan as co-producers.
Finally, after nearly three years of promoting her critically-acclaimed and award winning album, Teeth Marks, with a touring schedule that would make the most seasoned road-dog wince, Goodman decamped to the Nutt House in Sheffield, AL, in the fall of 2024. Alongside co-producer Drew Vandenberg, Rowan, and a cast of musical characters, Goodman tracked what is by no exaggeration her best record to date. With songs like “Fire Sign,” “Satellite,” “Snapping Turtle,” “Michael Told Me,” “Heaven” and “I’m In Love,” Planting by the Signs finds Goodman exploring this old story and other themes in the only way she knows; with a fresh musical and lyrical perspective, vivid, incisive detail, and a heaping dose of empathy and compassion.
James McMurtry
A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence.
As varied as they are, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at our house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback, and that was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.”
The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing. Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’t mentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinationswere the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.”
Soon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all my records happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could write about and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different this time was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s third album, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirty years.” During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin, McMurtry observed firsthand Dixon’s grasp of digital recording technology as well as his instinctual approach to tracking. “What Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He can hear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t have him, I have to do three takes and then go in and listen to them. Listening to those three takes can take about 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial, because it can cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session, because you only have so many hours in the day and only so much energy.
Working with McMurtry’s trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, Daren Hess on drums, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to create something that sounds spontaneous, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them. They were open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents, such as the cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album. It’s an opioid blues: testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope. “We were playing a benefit for Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall there in Austin, and we thought it’d be good if we played one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio, and it sounded good. The drums were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it.”
“Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy, the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeks after our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo, then we added drums and bass later on. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I was thinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deep within his own life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs came from, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking, How do you do this? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band werehaving such a good time, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to do with my life.”
Once the album was mixed, mastered, and sequenced, McMurtry recalled a rough pencil sketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it might make a good cover. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I asked my mom and my stepdad, and finally I asked my stepmom, Faye, who said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.” The Merry Prankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to visit Larry McMurtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit, the one documented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young, but I do remember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I remembered it and thought it would be the perfect art, but I had to go back through the storage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.”
It's a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or where the songs will take him. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically, fear of irrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record, you don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”
HUNTER MeTTS
In an era of fast content and endless sensory overload, Hunter Metts believes in the beauty of following your own chosen timeline. Born into a family with a deep reverence for music, the Nashville native got his start composing songs on his grandmother’s upright piano as a little kid, later learning guitar and slowly dreaming up his spellbinding form of indie-folk. Since the breakout success of his 2024 viral hit “Weathervane,” the singer/songwriter/producer has embarked on a steady rise that’s included touring North America as support for multi-platinum hitmaker James Bay and launching his own debut headline run in fall 2025. On his new EP A Crater Wide, Metts shares the boldest manifestation yet of his one-of-a-kind artistry: a selection of songs both emotionally intimate and sonically vast, instantly drawing the audience into his sublimely enchanted world.
Raised on bluegrass and gospel and heavily inspired by Americana artists like Ben Howard and Gregory Alan Isakov, Metts immersed himself in songwriting at a young age but initially held back from diving headfirst into a music career. “Both my parents moved to Nashville from small Southern towns to try to make it in music, but it never really panned out for them,” he explains. “I’d seen how that affected my family financially, so right after high school I went to a trade school for coding.” After graduating, Metts worked full-time for several years while devoting his off-hours to penning songs and self-recording with friends. “I have so many good memories of my friends coming over and setting up microphones in strange places to try to get cool reverb or whatever,” he recalls. “We were just making everything for fun, but it felt completely true to who I am as a songwriter.” With his debut single “The River” released in 2021, Metts quit his day job in 2023 to focus solely on music and delivered his debut EP Monochrome in 2024. Within months of the EP’s arrival, he returned with “Weathervane”—a hauntingly lovely track that landed on nearly every viral chart across the globe, introducing listeners all over the planet to his poetic songcraft and soul-stirring vocals.
Released via Position Music/Interscope Records, A Crater Wide finds Metts co-producing alongside Andrew Berlin (a producer/engineer/multi-instrumentalist whose credits include Gregory Alan Isakov and Rise Against) and recording at the legendary Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado. In bringing the EP to life, Metts and Berlin enlisted a stacked lineup of guest musicians (on pedal steel guitar, viola, fiddle, banjo, piano, upright bass, drums, harmonium, and more), imbuing each song with a sonic depth that’s nothing short of mesmerizing. “Early on in the process I decided I didn’t want to make any choices based off what’s cool to me right now; I wanted to create something more timeless and pure,” says Metts, who plays acoustic guitar and mandolin on A Crater Wide. “The way that Andrew and I worked together felt very organic: nothing was ever forced or rushed, and we took all the time we needed to make the best art possible.”
Deeply informed by his lifelong love of wandering in nature, A Crater Wide opens on the sweetly drifting rhythms of “Telescope Lovers” —a warm and wistful track that channels a majestic sense of wonder. “I wanted that song to feel like you’re driving off into the middle of nowhere and seeing something beautiful for the first time,” says Metts, noting that he and Berlin achieved its spacious sound by recording at a church next door to the studio. Co-written with Henry Brill (Phantogram, Joy Oladokun), “Blue Ridge Run” embodies a glorious intensity in its full-hearted homage to the Appalachian landscape, ultimately building to a free-flowing instrumental at the bridge. “I’m really proud of the moments where we let the music express what needs to be said, instead of filling up all the space with words,” Metts points out. One of several exquisitely tender love songs on A Crater Wide, “Center Of The Universe” takes the form of a stark but captivating portrait of once-in-a-lifetime romance (from the chorus: “They say love can move a mountain/I think ours can move two or three”). And on “Heavy, Heavy Love,” Metts offers up a harmony-laced, brightly swaying track that perfectly encapsulates the EP’s undercurrent of joy. “So many folk songs are about heartbreak, but that doesn’t ring true for me at this point in my life,” says Metts. “There are a lot of happy moments in these songs, and I like that we’re creating a space for those more hopeful or positive feelings.”
As he reflects on the making of a crater wide and his overall journey to date, Metts reveals that musicand the natural world have long formed a powerful alliance in his mind. “When I look back on the music I first fell in love with, whether it was Novo Amor and Tom Waits or whoever else, so much of it is tied to the memories I made while listening to that music on trips to the mountains as a teenager,” he says. “Being out in nature has always been really inspiring and grounding for me, and it’s always made me feel so free. From the first song of mine that I ever produced, I’ve tried to capture that sense of freedom—I want to make people feel like they can go wherever they want and do whatever they feel like and remind them that there’s so much life to live out there.”
Cat Clyde
Down Rounder possesses an intimate and personal feel, transporting the listener to the recording studio as she performs these hair-raising tunes with confidence and passion. It’s a strong step forward as a songwriter and musician, as well as an immensely satisfying record for anyone looking to connect the loose threads between themselves and the outside world.
Work on Clyde’s follow-up to 2019’s spellbinding Hunters Trance began in her Quebec home studio in 2020, with plans to self-produce the record with her partner Strummer Jasson, in their cabin residence—recording was unexpectedly halted after an encroaching mold issue upended plans entirely. “It was difficult,” she recalls, “We were trudging forward, and it all fell apart. It was disappointing.” After moving out and returning back home, Clyde got in touch with producer Tony Berg. As the pair went through the finished material, they stripped back the songs once more, carefully digging into the details of everything. “I really learned a lot and enjoyed the experience,” Clyde recalls. “He gave me a lot of new tools and inspiration to connect more deeply to my songwriting and guitar playing.”
Berg’s schedule lined up with only a week’s notice in Los Angeles’ famed Sound City studios to lay down the entirety of Down Rounder in six days flat. “The musicians he brought in were really in tune with me right away,” she explains. “I feel I’ve really grown in my writing, and after struggling with collaboration in the past it felt good to really create with others while maintaining my own clear vision. I wanted these songs to have a live feel, because it was about capturing a moment to me.” Indeed, the record sounds both lively and lived-in, with Clyde’s malleable singing voice—spanning an appealing twang to a lovely, plaintive croon and anywhere in between—espousing an essential connection between our spiritual center and the natural world that surrounds us.
“Connecting with the natural environment around me inspired a lot of these songs, and sonically I feel like this record is very grounded as a result,” Clyde says while talking about the album’s thematic bend. “I wanted these songs to sound raw and rough, but also placed-together in a way that created—asimple beauty, like the changing seasons or a setting sun.” Keeping that bucolic perspective also drove the decision to include “I Feel It” and “The Gloom,” two songs whose recordings date back to the early Quebec sessions: “I wanted to still have that isolated perspective somewhere in the album, and those recordings still came together within the larger whole, too.”
The result is an album that stands as a crown jewel in a career that already includes millions of monthly streams across multiple platforms and placements on over 40 Spotify editorial playlists. On the expansive first single “Mystic Light,” Clyde takes on existential matters over chiming bells and an open-hearted melodic structure. “It’s a song about wanting to understand my journey and purpose,” she explains while talking about the song. “I’m exploring feelings of adriftness, asking for the mystery or magic of life to show her face so I can remember what it’s all for.”
Featuring lyrics that address the feeling of overstimulation and being emotionally overwhelmed, the bare and haunting second single “I Feel It” also marks the first time Clyde has played piano on recording. “I felt a bit nervous about playing the piano because I don’t see myself as a very strong player,” she states regarding the decision, “but it felt like it was just what the song needed.” And the driving third single “Papa Took My Totems” finds Clyde reflecting on the ravaging effects of colonialism, the state of the environment, and masculine-dominated society at large. “There’s a lot of sacredness that’s being destroyed in the world, and that’s difficult to deal with sometimes,” she explains. “Totems, to me, feel like places and things that are important and real, to witness the destruction of things like that is devastating”.
Over the breezy sway of the opening track and final single “Everywhere I Go,” Clyde ruminates on “letting go of things no longer needed, while keeping hold of things you hold true.” And Down Rounder indeed sounds like the work of someone who’s found themselves artistically and holistically, while extending a hand to any listener who wants to follow Clyde on her singular and thrilling path. But it’s also represents a bold leap forward for her as an artist, cementing her place on the map as a nourishing and essential voice in today’s musical landscape.
Folk Bitch Trio
Melbourne/Naarm-based Folk Bitch Trio deliver a point of view as undeniable as their songs and voices. Here is a fresh, young band pulling from traditional forms: in their vocals, in their themes, in their songs’ compositional structures. The so-called “trad” isn’t hidden; the harmonies are rich and timeless. But what makes Folk Bitch Trio exciting is they’re unafraid to get a little scuffed up, to be funny, to take risks, to subvert the genre’s expectations and pull it into the present. The result is lively, layered and beautiful; thoughtful and playful in the right places; serious, but never humorless.
Folk Bitch Trio formed five years ago, and its members – Gracie Sinclair (she/her), Jeanie Pilkington (she/her) and Heide Peverelle (they/them) – have been largely inseparable since. “We have three individual voices,” they say, “but the story we tell is unified because our hearts are very melded.” Theirmusic comes from the deep connection and collaboration that evolves between the three of them, encapsulating the growing pains they felt as people and a band in their early adult lives, touching on, as Heide says, “loss, fear, sex, rage, elation but most importantly love and laughs.”
The band showcase this during returning single “The Actor”, their first release for new label Jagjaguwar (Angel Olsen, Bon Iver, Sharon Van Etten). It’s a song about “falling hard and fast and breaking down quick too”, they explain, through lyrics that “flow down from affectionate details you notice about someonewhen falling in love, fighting and fucking, and ultimately the demise of a relationship at your partner’s solo theatre play”. There’s honest, confessional storytelling delivered via their signature resplendent three-part vocals, laced with humour and in-jokes of shared experiences.
Etran de L'Aïr
Etran de L’Aïr (or “stars of the Aïr region”) welcomes you to Agadez, the capital city of Saharan rock. Playing for over 25 years, Etran has emerged as stars of the local wedding circuit. Beloved for their dynamic repertoire of hypnotic solos and sun schlazed melodies, Etran stakes out a place for Agadez guitar music. Playing a sound that invokes the desert metropolis, “Agadez” celebrates the sounds of all the dynamism of a hometown wedding.
Etran is a family band composed of brothers and cousins, all born and raised in the small neighborhood of Abalane, just in the shadow of the grand mosque. Sons of nomadic families that settled here in the 1970s fleeing the droughts, they all grew up in Agadez. The band was formed in 1995 when current band leader Moussa “Abindi” Ibra was only 9 years old. “We only had one acoustic guitar,” he explains, “and for percussion, we hit a calabash with a sandal.” Over the decades, the band painstakingly pieced together gear to form their band and built an audience by playing everywhere, for everyone. “It was difficult. We would walk to gigs by foot, lugging all our equipment, carrying a small PA and guitars on our backs, 25 kilometers into the bush, to play for free…there’s nowhere in Agadez we haven’t played.”
From the days of the Trans-Saharan caravan in the 14th century to a modern-day stopover for Europe-bound migrants, Agadez is a city that stands at the crossroads, where people and ideas come together. Understandably, it’s here where one of the most ambitious Tuareg guitar has taken hold. Agadez’s style is the fastest, with frenetic electric guitar solos, staccato crash of full drum kits, and flamboyant dancing guitarists. Agadez is the place where artists come to cut their teeth in a lucrative and competitive winner-take-all scene. Guitar bands are an integral part of the social fabric, playing in weddings, baptisms, and political rallies, as well as the occasional concert.
Whereas other Tuareg guitarists look to Western rock, Etran de L’Aïr play in a pan-African style that is emblematic of their hometown, citing a myriad of cultural influences, from Northern Malian blues, Hausa bar bands, to Congolese Soukous. It’s perhaps this quality that makes them so beloved in Agadez. “We play for the Tuareg, the Toubou, the Zarma, the Hausa,” Abindi explains. “When you invite us, we come and play.” Their music is rooted in celebration, and invokes the exuberance of an Agadez wedding, with an overwhelming abundance of guitars, as simultaneous solos playfully pass over one another with a restrained precision, forceful yet never overindulgent.
Recorded at home in Agadez with a mobile studio, their eponymous album stays close to the band’s roots. Over a handful of takes, in a rapid-fire recording session, “Agadez” retains all the energy of a party. Their message too is always close to home. Tchingolene (“Tradition”) recalls the nomad camps, with a modern take on traditional takamba rhythms transposed to guitars. The dreamy ballad Toubouk Ine Chihoussay (“The Flower of Beauty”) dives into call and response lyrics, and solos that dance effortlessly over the frets. On other tracks like Imouwizla (“Migrants”), Etran addresses immigration with the driving march parallels the nomads’ plight with travelers crossing the desert for Europe. Yet even at its most serious, Etran’s music is engaged and dynamic, reminding us that music can transmit a message while lighting up a celebration. This is music for dancing, after all.
Palmyra
After the gig in Charlottesville finally ended, Mānoa Bell and Teddy Chipouras found their third band member, Sasha Landon, outside, sitting beside a shipping container and sobbing. The three new friends had formed Palmyra two years earlier, due in part to convenience and circumstance; they were the three people in a shared songwriting class at James Madison University who seemed to take making music—and making a life of it, too—most seriously. They’d moved in together during the pandemic, written and rehearsed most every morning, and played a few early shows online. As that fever broke, though, they fully committed, hitting the road as often and hard as possible and steadily earning homegrown attention along the East Coast.
The night’s sound in Charlottesville had been rough, sure, but the set had mostly been fine. In that moment, though, Landon became overwhelmed not only by the newly unmoored life of a hard-touring and magnetizing trio but also the cocktail of chemicals pinballing through their brain, the result of a recent bipolar diagnosis and early attempts to manage it. Bell and Chipouras sat there with Landon, offering whatever support they needed. This was neither the first nor last time for such resolve. There was that time Teddy wondered if this lifestyle was worth it while playing for 10 strangers who didn’t care at all in a Myrtle Beach wings dive, the time Sasha and Teddy rushed out from a Buffalo soundcheck to hold Mānoa in an alley after he learned his roommate had taken her own life back home. There are dozens of these stories—tales where three people learned how to be real and vulnerable with one another and, in turn, their audience, the tales that make Palmyra.
These moments of struggle, solidarity, and self-growth frame Restless, Palmyra’s debut album for Oh Boy Records and an unqualified ringer for anyone who loves the space where the roar of indie rock collides with raw folk music. Supported by a cadre of collaborators befriended on the road, Palmyra renders these songs about growing up and accepting oneself with alternating affability and aggression, these changing moods suited to changing circumstances and days. The tender yearning of “Buffalo,” written the day after that aforementioned phone call. The shout-out-loud catharsis of “Restless,” a mighty reckoning with extended adolescence. The sing-song sweetness of “Dishes,” a curious ode to domestic acceptance: This is a coming-of-age record for these uncanny times, every song another compelling document of reckoning with the places and shapes in which we’ve foundourselves.
During the last three years, Palmyra—for now, a trio with upright bass, electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin or the mandocello, and lots of banjo—have cut a series of EPs and singles, often on the cheap and on the fly. When they realized the time had come to concentrate on a proper album, they recognized that they had a good problem: There were simply too many songs. Bell, Chipouras, and Landon are, after all, all songwriters, and Palmyra’s tunes take shape when one member brings a draft to the rest of the band to finish.
So at a house on a Virginia lake, they played nearly all of their stuff for Jake Cochran, a drummer and confidant they had tapped to help produce their debut. Cochran would play along, not only adding drums to these songs (often for the first time) but offering his suggestions as a listener. They picked the material by instinct: What felt most poignant and powerful in the moment, especially when pushed beyond the bounds of a trio?
That instinctual feeling radiates through Restless, which manages to feel both produced and primal, as if you’ve wandered into the studio to find Palmyra breathlessly barreling through the best of its catalogue. The centerpiece is “Shape I’m In,” a mind map Landon wrote as they began to navigate their bipolar diagnosis. Every verse includes a new apology—their face, their demeanor, their tone, Landon is sorry about it all. But as the song builds to a climax fit for vintage Bright Eyes, it becomes clear that it is also Landon’s call for acceptance, to be taken not as an error but simply as they are. It is a song of oneself, a proclamation meant to be yelled through gritted teeth.
Played for the first time alongside the Virginia lake, “No Receipt” is an incisive contemplation of our passing days and of the way worrying about our perceived faults keeps us from self-fulfillment. It is impossible not to catch a glimpse of yourself here, whether you’re the one forever running out of money or squandering your time staring into the yawning void of a cell phone. Maybe you’ll see yourself in the nervy and sharp “Palm Readers,” too, where mixed moments of feeling lonely or overwhelmed, self-deprecating or overconfident offer an honest topography of emotional existence. Above a rippling organ line, “Arizona” is a country-soul wonder about days of discovery and preemptive nostalgia for what we’ve encountered but left behind in the perpetual quest to get somewhere else.
And then there’s the closer, “Carolina Wren,” the last song to be written for Restless and mostly presented here in its demo form from the lake house. Penned by Landon in a moment of “feeling OK after a long period of not feeling OK,” it is an exquisite hymn to the prospect of being forever new while holding onto the people and things that have given us value and meaning. Restless is so often a record about coming of age; “Carolina Wren” is a beautiful glimpse into what it’s like to get there, at least for a moment.
Palmyra straddles at least two musical worlds. They are, on one hand, a band from the South that plays traditional instruments and indeed once lived in the old-time locus of Floyd, Virginia. Comparisons to and a kinship with The Avett Brothers and even Old Crow Medicine Show are inevitable. On the other hand, Palmyra writes about suicide, gender dysphoria and identity, and an epidemic of financial survival in songs that flirt with soul, post-rock, and even emo; the South, too, is the place of My Morning Jacket, Band of Horses, Cat Power, and, now, Palmyra.
Where they fall on this divide doesn’t really matter. The 10 tracks of Restless are compulsive and immediate, true-to-life testimonials from three very good songwriters figuring out existence in real-time in verse. These are songs to be sung or shouted out loud, to be coveted as anthems as we try to make our own way from whatever shape we’re in toward whatever shape we hope to become.
Widowspeak
Today, Widowspeak announce their sixth studio album, The Jacket, to be released March 11 via Captured Tracks. Along with the announcement, the duo (singer-songwriter Molly Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas) share a propulsive, spirited song about shifting perspectives in increasingly complicated situations. In the music video directed by OTIUM, Hamilton croons “learned to love the ropes when you were caught, see they could be braided a better way and sinking into nothing – you learn to stay” fittingly in front of bulls being wrangled at a rodeo.
Quote from Widowspeak on “Everything is Simple”– At the beginning of something (a relationship, a project, a job, a newplace) you have this very pure feeling toward it. Everything feels less complicated because you’re oriented wholly toward that potential. It’s undefined, and that makes it easier to understand, because you can’t see the problems yet. As time goes on, you learn more, you experience more, and you see where the limitations exist: not even necessarily ones imposed upon you, but where you draw your own lines. Maybe you can’t see what was holding you back until it’s in the past, and by then others’ perspectives contradict your own. Everyone is constructing their own versions of reality. The song was originally going to feed into the drama of the imaginary band, but it’s about our own band too. I was thinking about how I’m an inherently unreliable narrator about my own life, and at the same time maybe there are no “true” stories.
Director quote: The concept is centered around the idea of trying, knowing that even if things turn out differently than you intend, the very act itself is what you are striving to achieve. After coming off of a Fall 2021 US tour with Turnover, the duo have also announced a US headline tour this spring, as well as select dates with Clairo in Florida and Georgia (see below). Tickets on sale Friday January 7.
The Jacket started out with loose strings of a concept, a story about a fictional band: A chain-stitcher working in the satin district of an unnamed city, a neighborhood of storefront tailors devoted to elaborate costumery for country-western, art rock, ye-ye cover bands that populate the street’s bars after dark. The narrator joins one such outfit, “Le Tex” and feels a sense of belonging and momentum, movement beyond what was previously a stable, predictable life. A relationship with a bandmate materializes. Eventually, the group start to write originals. They generate goodwill and momentum, and venture out on the open road seeking new opportunities beyond what the satin district can offer. But the vibrational energy that got things moving is the same that shakes the whole thing apart: the relationship, and the band, disintegrate upon finally reaching their destination, the end of the road. The chain-stitcher heads back to the city, settling back into the rhythm of work, old standards and a familiar place.
The story is self-referential on purpose: it speaks to the absurdity of ego, codependency and shared visions even as it celebrates them. The Jacket finds Widowspeak navigating these contradictions, and although its ten tracks now trace a more abstract arc than the campier initial concept, strands of that earlier narrative remain: “stitches in satin”, American cities after dark, glimpses of the open road, dark bars, and backstages where things get left behind. The resulting album is a wizened meditation on performance and past lives from a band who’ve seen their fair share, hitting their stride now over a decade in.
Written in the months before and after the release of their critically acclaimed 2020 album Plum, The Jacket feels like a full-circle moment for the duo. Thematically, it considers Plum’s broader questions about the values ascribed to one’s time and labor through the more refined lens of performance and music-making. This is due in part to the band’s recent return to New York City, the site of their own origin story, where they recorded The Jacket at the Diamond Mine with co-producer andnoted Daptone Records affiliate Homer Steinweiss. In addition to Hamilton and Thomas on guitars, the album features founding drummer Michael Stasiak, as well as J.D. Sumner on bass, and piano and keyboard contributions from Michael Hess.
Sonically, The Jacket finds the band at their usual and best: the album breathes deeply, balancing moments of open lushness with a straightforward, Velvets-y approach. Dynamics shift seamlessly between gentle, drifting ballads and twangy jams, built up from layered guitars, dusty percussion and ambling bass lines. Elsewhere: whimsical flutes, choral textures, and basement organs. Thomas’s guitar playing is as lyrical and emotive as it’s ever been, and Hamilton’s voice: comfortable and effortless. This seamless dynamic is amplified perfectly in the mix by Chris Coady (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Beach House).
The band still wears the same perennial influences on its sleeve: cornerstones like Yo La Tengo, Neil Young, Cowboy Junkies, Cat Power, and Richard and Linda Thompson. They expertly pepper in slow-core, dream-pop, pacific northwest indie, and outlaw country, resulting in a 60s-meets-90s aesthetic. But the duo also wield their own aesthetic feedback loop as a tool of its own, a way to better tell multi-layered stories in their own RIYL language. This sense of sonic nostalgia adds another layer to lyrics that reflect on old selves, invented and true.
The Jacket is a present and comfortable record, imbued with a sense of collective pause and the ease of a band at the top of their game. For all its familiar textures, it still feels entirely fresh within that canon: proudly a guitar record, a rock record, a songwriter’s record. A Widowspeak record.
driftwood
Music has guided Driftwood to hallowed ground many times since its founding members, Joe Kollar and Dan Forsyth, started making music as high schoolers in Joe's parents' basement. Whether the Upstate New York folk rock group—which today also includes violinist Claire Byrne, bassist Joey Arcuri, and drummer Sam Fishman—are converting new fans on a hardscrabble tour across the country or playing to a devoted crowd at hero Levon Helm’s Woodstock barn, the band’s shapeshifting approach to folk music continues to break new ground. And yet in many ways Driftwood's latest work, the transformative December Last Call, finds the group coming home.
Recorded in that very same basement where the Driftwood dream began, December Last Call lyrically reflects on the recent past, musing on the ways the group grew up, together and apart, through curveballs like new parenthood or pandemic shutdowns. But sonically, the band’s sixth album looks confidently to the future, experimenting with new sounds while staying true to the bluegrass roots that built them. Across the album’s nine tracks, the band often leans into hard-rocking electric guitars and driving percussion: On “Every Which Way But Loose,” we get a foot-tapping beat and a sweeping chorus, and on “Up All Night Blues,” the band shines with an ambling, sing-along-able reflection on the challenges of new motherhood. But other tracks, like standout closer “Stardust,” take a simpler route, allowing bare-bones vocals and acoustic instrumentals to underpin a deeper emotional message.
One of Driftwood’s biggest differentiators—and perhaps its biggest strength—is the sheer breadth of talent in its lineup, with Claire, Joe, and Dan all contributing as songwriters and vocalists. This creative push-pull, where each selects songs to share with the group and record together, bakes vulnerability and collaborative spirit into every recording. “It's at the heart of what we do,” says Dan. “Everybody has a strong love for songs, for songwriting, and we each appreciate everybody else and the way that they contribute to that.”
While 2019’s acclaimed Tree of Shade tapped Simon Felice as producer, the band opted to self-produce this latest effort, leaning into their creative impulses and striving to capture their distinctive live energy. Figuring out how to channel that on-stage intensity into a recording has actually, in many ways, been a lesson in restraint. “When I look back at the things we were writing and playing, oh, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago, they were really arranged: a lot of you do this here, we're going to do this there, we're going to break down, we're going to do a big build,” Claire explains. “These days, it's more like, ‘Let's play the song and just see what happens.’”
This approach makes all the more sense when you consider Driftwood’s live shows, which operate not only as effervescent, twang-studded musical parties, but also as reunions for their throng of devoted listeners—folks who have started to feel less like fans and more like something bigger. “They're supporters. They're friends,” explains Joe. “It's crazy how much love we've got and how many wild situations on the road we've gotten out of because of those people.” Many of them are quite literally invested in the band’s future: December Last Call was a crowd-funded effort, and it wasn’t the band’s first. It’s as if every listener, ticketbuyer, album backer, and general band evangelist is in on Driftwood’s biggest secret: this whole band thing has endured for nearly two decades because it offers a kind of community you can’t get just anywhere.
“Driftwood is basically a beautiful friendship that happens to play music together,” says Joe. “I know it's rare. I know I'm lucky to know these people and lean on them and go through these massive life changes together.” For Driftwood, each song is like a journal entry: cathartic to create, yes, but capable of unlocking new lessons—and when shared—forging new bonds. “We're communal, right? Humans need to be connected,” Joe says. “And we get to have this special thing.”
Anna Tivel
Anna Tivel ‘Animal Poem’ Album Bio —
high up silver howling bird / looking down to see the world / spinning out into the vast forever / flying is a faithful dance / animals suspended at the place where understanding touches vapor
Here we are. Mysterious humanity unfolding. Animal nature howling. How do we learn what it means? Maybe being here is a story told by all of us at once, a constant reaching for language, an impossible telling of something inherently indescribable. Animal Poem is a meditation on the attempt. How do we talk about destiny from the balcony of a nation in decline? How does our attention shape the way we touch the natural world? In the face of endless avarice and cruelty, how do we talk about the realness of love?
Recorded live in a circle with some of my dearest friends, Animal Poem was made in conversation. We wanted to be together in the room, to listen and respond in real time without the separation of walls and headphones. I met Sam Weber the summer before and resonated deeply with his musicality and his reasons. We sat around on porches swapping tunes and I asked if he would help me make something that felt as unadorned and free. He donned hats seamlessly – co-producer, engineer, musician – setting mics and checking levels before returning to curl around his guitar and disappear into each song. Everyone in the studio made it feel so open, made it easy to forget technology and permanence and just play, messy and alive. It’s this vital mess that moves me when I listen now – ghost notes in the high register of the piano, melodic guitar and bass lines briefly interwoven, earthy cymbals breathing, my dog barking. We came back to add saxophone, strings, vocal harmonies, and a few other tastes, but most of what you hear is just people sitting together in a small room, listening and talking with tenderness and abandon.
The songs were written on long drives across the country, airplanes, walks through my neighborhood, nights spent lying on the roof. Every album is a snapshot, a momentary study of the way a mind reaches for understanding. I can feel myself reaching in these songs, for whatever is right beyond my grasp. Mortality and connection. Suffering and meaning. People lead the narratives, come into orbit, spin away again – an exhausted mother at a freeway exit, an aging neighbor surrounded by a growing pile of newspapers, the unsung heroes of a midwest uprising, two lovers looking at the sky.
It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed. What good are poems when affordable housing isscarce, the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms? I think about being here. How brief it is. How incomplete our understanding. I think about history. All the worlds we’ve created and broken. Revolution and renaissance. Hope and humility. Everyone here is living a creative life – teachers and parents, kids and convenience store clerks. We’re all tasting this wild existence, finding ways to express how much it hurts and moves us. This work is my own small addition to that communal story. The water we swim in. The way our attention molds our truths. Humanity is unfolding as we describe it. We’ll never get it right, but the attempt is everything.
sorry and i’m listening / is a poem that’s always been / beautiful enough to kill the darkness / you can be someone who loves or you can be somebody else / i tell you kid the first one is the hardest
***
Animal Poem will be Tivel's seventh studio full-length of all new, original material. It follows 2024’s Living Thing, which was named the #1 album of 2024 by Folk Alley and gained praise from KEXP for expanding the sounds of her previous work: "A beautiful collection of melodic folk-rock. Living Thing finds Tivel building upon her brand of folk music with richly layered guitar, violin, field recordings, keys and programmed loops with a pop sensibility to accompany her excellent storytelling."
Tivel’s widely acclaimed 2022 album Outsiders received multiple Best of the Year accolades from NPR Music, including "Best Roots Music of 2022," "Best Songs of 2022" (for single "Black Umbrella"), "Ann Powers' Top Album of 2022," and "Bob Boilen's Favorite Music of 2022." Upon release, Ann Powers said on-air, "She's one of my absolute favorite songwriters living right now and I think this is her best record yet...Her writing on this record is at the level Paul Simon was at when he wrote 'The Boxer' and 'American Tune.'" Outsiders was also named among Brooklyn Vegan's "15 Great Folk Albums from 2022" and Aquarium Drunkard's 2022 Year in Review. Roots music journal No Depression praised, "Tivel has many strengths and no flaws. She's one of the finest storytellers modern folk music has to offer, with lyrics so literary that it's tempting to think of her as a poet with an exceptional gift for playing guitar and singing." The album led to her NPR Tiny Desk debut on May 22, 2023.
Tivel’s breakout fourth album The Question was deemed "One Of The Most Ambitious Folk Records Of 2019” by NPR Music. She first began garnering critical attention throughout the U.S. and UK with 2017's Small Believer, after establishing herself withinthe Pacific Northwest folk scene with 2016's Heroes Waking Up and her 2014 debut, Before Machines.
Seth Mulder & Midnight Run
Seth Mulder & Midnight Run was born in the holler of Tennessee’s first legal moonshine distillery, where the spirit of tradition still runs strong. Since forming in 2018, the band has been on a mission to blend the roots of traditional bluegrass with the energy of modern performance, crafting a sound that is both deeply authentic and refreshingly original.
With genuine songwriting, tasteful arrangements, and a knack for breathing new life into forgotten covers, the band combines elements of bluegrass, classic country, and folk music in a way that resonates with both traditionalists and new audiences alike.
Their debut studio album, Traveling Kind (2020), laid the foundation for what would become a breakout sound. That momentum continued with In Dreams I Go Back (2022), released on Mountain Fever Records, featuring fan favorites like “One More Night” and “My, My, My”—the latter named S.P.B.G.M.A.’s 2023 Song of the Year.
In 2024, the band signed with the iconic Rebel Records, launching a new era marked by their upcoming release Coming On Strong, out May 16, 2025. The project’s early singles—“Gilgarry’s Glen,” “Heartbreak Break Express,” the heartfelt “Looking Past the Pain (The Cowboy Song),” and their electrifying take on “Johnny B. Goode”—have earned acclaim for their powerful delivery and timeless spirit.
Their high-energy live shows have taken them across the U.S., Canada, and Europe, earning them a reputation as one of the most exciting young acts on the bluegrass circuit today. The current lineup—Seth Mulder (mandolin), Tyler Griffith (bass), Mason Wright (fiddle), Anthony Howell (guitar), and Carter Lester (banjo)—creates a powerhouse of music and a stage show you don’t want to miss.
“In a day and age where authenticity is everything, Seth Mulder & Midnight Run are the real deal.”
FUST
Fust — the Durham, North Carolina-based band — announce their new album, Big Ugly, out March 7th via Dear Life Records. Big Ugly arrives after the release of 2024’s Songs of the Rail––“one of the best alt-country compilations…in a long, long time” (Paste) –– and 2023’s standout Genevieve, which unassumingly introduced new listeners to Fust’s unmistakable blend of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) with a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork).
Big Ugly finds Fust taking its “gutsy, blue-collar Americana” (New Commute) further than it has before. Songwriter Aaron Dowdy pushes his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, telling stories of Southern life teeming with utopian possibility that arises uniquely from the contradictions for which the south is infamously known. In this way, it is a record that could easily be filed on the record shelf alongside lyric-forward indie or Southern rock, as well as on the bookshelf amongst the throngs of Southern literature hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness. Big Ugly is also Fust––above all a group of close friends––uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, emboldened to deliver both their most intimate songwriting and biggest sound to date.
While perhaps “few voices can write a song quite like Aaron Dowdy” (Paste), it is clear upon listening that Big Ugly is an album of fully recognizable voices. One hears in the music the years of interplay between Avery Sullivan (Sluice) on Drums, Justin Morris (Sluice, Weirs) on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning (Sluice, Weirs) on bass and vocals, Frank Meadows on piano, John Wallace (Colamo) on guitar and vocals, and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on fiddle and vocals. Big Ugly is also the second collaboration with the Asheville-based engineer Alex Farrar, recorded together throughout the summer of 2024 at Drop of Sun Studio. And with the help of many friends including Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes), Big Ugly is exactly what one feels it to be: a huge group of people gathered together, stumbling upon songs amidst long days and even longer nights.
Brother Wallace
A true force of nature, Brother Wallace was born to make music that ignites pure joy, even in the darkest of moments. Since getting his start playing piano in church at 11-years-old, the Georgia-bred artist has followed his lifelong passion down an extraordinary path that spans from sharing the stage with gospel legend Kirk Franklin to performing at historic venues like Madison Square Garden. Over the past few years, he’s teamed up with The Heavy guitarist Dan Taylor in dreaming up a body of work built on his high-octane brand of soul music and true-to-life storytelling—all while continuing his longtime job as a K-12 music teacher. Newly signed to ATO Records, Wallace is now set to make his debut with Electric Love: a one-of-a-kind album revealing the life-affirming impact of his powerhouse vocals and timeless yet daring artistry.
Produced and co-written by Taylor and recorded at Real World Studios in England (the famed facility founded by pop luminary Peter Gabriel), Electric Love makes for a formidable introduction to Wallace—a preternaturally talented musician who grew up in the rural town of West Point, started singing in church as a small child, and began his formal training in piano at just six-years-old. After a chance meeting with The Heavy over a decade ago, he forged a particularly strong musical bond with Taylor, then joined him in a multi-year-long process of working on songs remotely and exploring their most audacious musical impulses. “At first we weren’t even thinking about creating an album,” says Wallace. “We were just having a good time making music together, and at some point we realized we had all these songs that felt like they should be properly recorded.”
Struck by the sheer potency of Wallace’s songwriting—as well as the clarity of his artistic vision—Taylor enlisted The Heavy bassist Spencer Page and drummer Chris Ellul in a series of sessions aimed at harnessing that thrilling vitality in recorded form. “I remember him sending me a song early on and I just burst into tears—I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and what it could become,” says Taylor. “When we got into the studio I was conscious of trying to capture something as in-the-moment as possible, and I was amazed at how he could smash the vocal out. The pace was just relentless.” In assemblingthe 13-song album, Wallace showed the full expanse of his transcendent musicality and mined inspiration from a dynamic mix of influences (e.g., Sam Cooke, Little Richard, Southern soul icon Johnnie Taylor)—ultimately infusing an exhilarating energy into Electric Love’s deeply poignant tales of heartache and desperation and hard-won redemption.
In a perfect snapshot of the LP’s unbridled emotionality and fantastically gritty sound, Electric Love opens on its rhapsodic lead single “Who’s That.” With its groove-driven fusion of R&B and uptempo soul, the immensely catchy track unfolds in hard-hitting drums, swaggering horns, and hypnotic guitar riffs as Wallace inhabits the role of an unwitting character who’s caught his woman out on the town with another man. “I wanted to tell the story of a heartbreak without making it a sad song,” says Wallace. “The stance it’s taking is more like, ‘I’m all right, I’m not hurt—I caught you and now I’m moving on.’ There’s something almost triumphant about it.”
Another exultant moment on Electric Love, the album’s title track arrives as a dance-ready anthem for shaking off negativity in a world of constant chaos. Equal parts playful, revelatory, and gloriously cathartic, the Motown-esque number surges forward with an unstoppable momentum fueled by Wallace’s singular prowess as a piano player. “It’s a real game-changer when you’ve got someone with a left hand that’s holding down the bottom end like that,” Taylor points out. “You can feel where the rhythm fits and how the song can move, almost like he’s driving the band from his left hand. I’d never worked with a pianist like that before in my life.”
One of the more introspective tracks on Electric Love, “Gone With The Wind” brings Wallace’s sublime vocals to a lived-in reflection on protecting your peace of mind. “I started writing that song when I was driving home from work one day, feeling like I needed to let the world go and take some time out for myself,” he explains. Opening on a rollicking piano riff, “Gone With The Wind” hums with a soul-soothing sweetness thanks partly to its heavenly background harmonies, supplied by a group of young vocalists from Wallace’s hometown. “I’d trained them as singers back home, and when they added their parts to the song it felt like they were carrying me away as they were singing,” he says. “It was like a beautiful journey that I didn’t want to end.”
While Electric Love radiates a wildly irrepressible spirit, Wallace never shies away from delving into the more difficult aspects of the human condition. On “You’re The Man,” the album takes on a moody ferocity as he offers up an unflinching but compassionate portrait of tragic hubris. “That song comes from someone I know personally getting caught up in a treacherous life and thinking they could somehow escape the consequences—but then of course they ended up in trouble,” he says. Meanwhile, on “No God In This Town,” Wallace delivers a sorrowful slow-burner penned by Taylor after a harrowing experience on tour. “The last time we were playing in San Francisco I got completely lost and ended up finding a homeless man who’d died in the street,” he recalls. “I can’t even describe the feeling that it gave me, but over time it became a song about searching for some kind of answer and finally realizing you’re never going to find it where you are now.”
Although Electric Love often explodes with a larger-than-life sound, a number of songs lean toward an elegant minimalism that illuminates the exquisite force of Wallace’s vocal work (case in point: “Any Day Now,” a quietly stunning track on which he’s solely accompanied by strings and sparse guitar tones). “It’s so easy nowadays to add layers and layers and make everything as enormous as possible, just because there’s the technology available to do that,” says Taylor. “But when you’ve got a voice like his, I think the best approach is to let everything else be in service of it.” Not only an innately gifted singer, Wallace has devoted much of his life to honing the supreme vocal command and phenomenal range showcased on Electric Love. To that end, he landed the role of director for his church’s 100-member choir at 14-years-old, and soon began composing original songs for the choir to sing. After studying psychology in college, he carved out a distinct career at the intersection of music and education, serving as band director and choral director for a number of schools while releasing a series of gospel albums. As he immersed himself in the making of Electric Love, Wallace tapped into his gospel roots as well as his eclectic musical upbringing. “I grew up listening to a lot of R&B, blues, gospel, a little bit of pop,” he says. “My older brother was sort of my musical guru, and he was constantly playing me records by artists like Prince and Parliament-Funkadelic—definitely a lot deeper than what most kids my age were listening to.”
Closing out with the full-tilt celebration of “Let’s Get Together,” Electric Love endlessly spotlights the radical open-heartedness at the core of Wallace’s artistry—an element closely tied to his mission of helping others to reconnect with their humanity. “From what I’ve observed from the people around me, especially through working with kids, I know how easy it can be to cut yourself off from feeling anything,” he says. “We’ve become so accustomed to looking at the world through the lens of Instagram or TikTok or whatever else, and it’s made it so we don’t have to actually experience real life. The main thing I wanted to do with this album was tell stories that resonate with people on a deep level, to be as real and authentic as possible, and to always let the music lead the way.”
the cody sisters
The Cody Sisters band is the very heart of contemporary acoustic Folk and Bluegrass in Colorado, the United States, and the UK. Their propulsive instrumental solos and warm harmonies combine to grip the listener. Along with bass player Will Pavilonis, sisters Megan (guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Maddie (guitar, banjo, vocals) have forged a new sound that has no equivalent match in the acoustic world today.
In May of 2023, The Cody Sisters released their self-titled EP marking a new beginning for the band. It is their first release since parting ways with their former image of “young girls in a family band” and it portrays a sense of maturity and musical understanding that reveals a new dimension to their artistic expression. They set out to explore new sounds and styles while still holding true to their Bluegrass roots, and they have done just that. This new music is an invitation to connect, to feel, and to journey together through original lyrics and captivating instrumental arrangements.
With their brand-new Archipelago, The Cody Sisters contineu to refine and explore a sound that is original, exhilarating, and heartwarming all at the same time. With strong ties to traditional American acoustic music, they continue to stun their audiences both in the U.S. and abroad.
jordan tice
Jordan Tice is a musical seeker of the most dedicated sort. Growing up in Annapolis Maryland, as a teenage rocker and student of jazz and music composition at Towson University, he has become among the most innovative acoustic guitarists of the modern age. Surrounded by a family of bluegrass musicians and opening for American music luminaries such as David Bromberg and Tony Rice at an early age, Tice found his musical center, one which he now channels into a refreshing approach to songcraft. Speaking to the components that fuel the progressivism intrinsic to some of his closest heroes, Jordan says, “Artists like John Hartford or Norman Blake chose to look beyond the idiomatic elements of the music and tap into where those things came from. They learned from literal examples, but they were working more off abstractions that they absorbed into their own work, creating something entirely new.”
Listening to the breadth of Jordan’s discography, which includes seven projects as a solo artist and four as a founding member of the preeminent string band, Hawktail (formerly Haas Kowert Tice), one will hear these sorts of abstractions at play in his own work. Equally virtuosic as a flatpicker and fingerstylist, and with a casual vocal style, Tice conjures ingredients from seemingly far-flung worlds with ease that have earned him glowing press from such outlets as NPR Music and American Songwriter and taken him to stages such as the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and the Ryman Auditorium (among many many others). His performances call upon the repertories of American and British Isles folk, bluegrass, blues and more pop-oriented songs, and though his earlier releases are instrumental in focus, he has been carefully honing his craft as a singer-songwriter in his most recent work. This includes his Motivational Speakeasy (produced by Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids) and Badlettsville, projects which make it easy to confuse his originals for timeworn chestnuts. Having occupied the roles of guitar ace, sideman, songwriter and student of American music for the better part of his life, Jordan’s songs are enriching for all manner of listeners, from guitar fanatics to more casual fans of Americana music; bending form and tradition through his singular approach, he delivers performances that are not weighted by any one area of his prowess, allowing listeners to join his world of candor, wit and ineffable facility with comfort.
Jordan’s compositions run the gamut from decadent, instrumental ragtime numbers (“Bachelorette Party”), poetic and homespun folk songs in the early-Dylan tradition (“Bad Little Idea”), and well-oiled ensemble pieces that showcase the raucous dance origins of vernacular music (Hawktail’s music). Marrying instrumental precision with the modesty of bedrock music, Hawktail is a convenient centerpiece for displaying the wide range of moods and sounds he can call upon with the help of his distinguished and longstanding collaborators, Brittany Haas and Paul Kowert. Over the last decade, this unit has found themselves across the United States many times, overseas, and in collaboration with acts such as Aoife O’Donovan and Swedish confidantes, Väsen. Though they may cast a wide net when viewed together, all these outlets suggest an impressively unified path of expression, one with a goalpost of integrity and congruence.
As a side musician, Jordan has worked with a great number of disparate artists, including Andrew Marlin (Watchhouse), Steve Martin, Aoife O’Donovan, David Rawlings, Tony Trischka, Väsen, and Yola. While unmistakably himself in these situations, Tice expertly sublimates his familiar touchstones, affording an approach to ensemble playing that is highly uncommon among solo artists, calling to mind such iconoclasts as David Bromberg and Clarence White. Like these figures of previous generations, Jordan can see pathways across genre markers, using the language of his musical upbringing in a way that only suggests the disposition of an earnest fan and lifelong student of music.
On his newest project, Badlettsville, Tice brings together an all-star ensemble of acoustic musicians to realize his take on several of his favorite covers and originals that, while staples of his live show, never made it on to a previous release. The EP begins with his acoustic treatment of Bob Dylan’s, “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” featuring impressionistic lyrics flowing over a trancelike backdrop of guitar, fiddle, bass and bongoes. The second track, “Mean Old World,” is an anthemic folk original reflecting on the inevitable change life brings, featuring lush harmonies from Aoife O’Donovan and Andrew Marlin. The collection ends with two duets featuring Hawktail bandmate, bassist Paul Kowert: the jaunty instrumental, “Badlettsville,” and a jazzy, whimsical romp through Randy Newman’s “Dayton, Ohio- 1903.”
The seamless combination of covers and originals further cements Tice’s reputation as a bold and inventive voice in folk music with his eye on an earnest prize: generating a body of work that stands up to the test of time.
ric robertson
Ric Robertson crafts the kind of music that doesn’t beg for your attention — it quietly earns it. One note, one image, one breath at a time. He’s a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist — but mostly, he’s just trying to make sense of the absurd beauty in being alive.
These days, Robertson is mostly out on the road solo, carving out his own odd little orbit, hauling a real upright piano from town to town — a heavy, creaky companion that makes every show a little less predictable and a lot more alive. It’s an old-school, seat-of-the-pants kind of operation: no playback, no safety net, just songs, stories, and a whole-hearted belief that the good stuff doesn’t need a middleman.
Raised in the American South but never easy to pin down, the music floats somewhere between timeless folk wisdom and psychedelic backroom vaudeville. A strange, beautiful blend, he has a gift for turning personal detours into universal truths, and turning heartbreak, hilarity, and hallucination into something you can hum along to.
Robertson has lent his voice, songs, and musical curiosity to projects with artists like Lucius, The Wood Brothers, and Sierra Ferrell, but it’s in his solo work where his vision comes fully alive and his voice shines most true. His latest album, Choices and Chains, is a crooked little odyssey of transformation- following the technicolor psychamericana on his breakout album “Carolina Child”.
Quietly radical, unabashedly grassroots, and fiercely human, you may find Ric Robertson somewhere past the edge of the map — alone on a small stage, an upright piano, a spellbound crowd, and a kind of music that cuts through the noise and reminds you why any of this matters at all. There’s a tenderness here, and a little madness too. But mostly there’s honesty — the kind you don’t come across every day, and the kind that sticks with you long after the music fades out.
Shelby Means
Born in the bluegrass of Kentucky and raised on Wyoming’s high plains, Shelby Means is one of the foremost bassists in bluegrass, with nearly two decades of experience in bluegrass, folk, rock, Americana, and country outfits. Now based in Charleston, SC, Means spent a dozen years in Nashville, TN. During that time she performed most notably as a member of the GRAMMY®-nominated all-women bluegrass band Della Mae. She later joined Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway on bass and vocals, earning her first GRAMMY® win for their 2023 album, City of Gold.
Means is a driving player with a deep pocket, a singular stage presence, and a magnetic, centered approach to the upright bass. Beyond her work on the instrument, she’s also an accomplished songwriter and a heartfelt vocalist whose voice is rooted in tradition while authentically her own. With her debut solo music Means invites listeners to experience the same soulful presence and adventurous spirit she has built her career on. Her singing and playing has been heard across the country and around the world, from NPR’s airwaves, the Grand Ole Opry, Bonnaroo, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and Newport Folk to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Kazakhstan, Australia, and beyond.
Golden Shoals
Golden Shoals is a fiddle and guitar duo with a "rousing old-time-style music that’s fueled by acerbic modern-day wit” (-No Depression Magazine). They are no strangers to traditional music, having placed in contests including Clifftop (3rd place 2023, 4th place 2022), Mount Airy, The Grand Masters Fiddlers Championship and Galax. Often switching instruments between fiddle, two guitars, and banjo, their original songs have been compared to Gillian Welch, with the added edge of instrumental prowess informed by energetic old time and bluegrass recordings.
Initially brought together by a mutual love of American folk music, Golden Shoals' sound has expanded to include country, Americana, Indie and Experimental influences, allowing them to move more freely beyond genre boundaries with their songwriting while still emanating a deep understanding of Old-Time and Bluegrass music. Ever inspired by the enduring spirit of traditional Appalachian mountain music, their songwriting comes across as simple, honest, and fresh to the ears. The listener can expect the polished technique of conservatory training, in tandem with the grit, drive, and soul of musicians like Roscoe Holcomb or Ola Belle Reed.
tanasi
Tanasi crafts a rich, world-inspired mountain sound, blending the soulful echoes of roots artists from across the globe into music that feels both timeless and deeply personal. Tanasi leans into the music they have learned through their travels, collaborating with musicians from around the world and refracting global sounds through their Appalachian lens, bringing it home. Their songs find their way into the very depths of your heart, resonating with an undeniable warmth and authenticity. Tanasi is a collaboration of celebrated Asheville, NC musicians, featuring the tight sister-like harmonies of MerleFest-winningsongwriter Anya Hinkle and Mary Lucey (Biscuit Burners, Uncle Earl) with the inimitable dobro musings of Billy Cardine, known worldwide for his distinctive voice on all things slide about whom Jerry Douglas says, "I couldn’t pick a better example of what the possibilities are with the instrument.”
Members of Tanasi have toured the world over, from Japan and India, Nepal to Bali, throughout Europe, Hawai’i and across the US and Canada, at festivals such as Bonnaroo, Rockygrass, and Merlefest and on stages such as The Ryman Auditorium, The Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall. Tanasi's worldgrass sound is a vibrant celebration of music’s power to unite, transcending cultural boundaries to reveal the shared rhythms of our humanity. With every note, they remind us that what connects us is far greater than what sets us apart. They will be releasing their debut album in the summer of 2025.
colby T. Helms &
The virginia creepers
At the bottom of the Southwest Virginia foothills half-a-mile from the nearest neighbor, 21-year-old Colby T. Helms resides in an “underground house” built by his late father on land his family has owned for generations. Colby first dreamed of making music his life at age 12, when a group of Blue Ridge Mountain old-time and bluegrass players performed songs like The Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ “Standing On The Rock” and the gospel classic “A Beautiful Life” at his father’s funeral in Boones Mill, VA.
To make his dream a reality, he taught himself guitar, banjo, and mandolin by watching local performers and YouTube videos. On the day he turned 16, he bought his first car, a stick-shift Jeep Wrangler, and hit the road to play anywhere people would have him. A veteran performer in the Blue Ridge/Appalachian Mountains region by age 18, Colby wrote the songs that would become his upcoming semi-autobiographical concept album, ‘Tales of Misfortune’ , as a senior in high school. The album delves into the beginning of his story - starting off as a dream and ending with the passing and remembrance of his father.
“Higher Ground” is about the choices he has made to realize his dream of becoming a touring musician - and their cost. “Mountain Brandy” brings the listener back to Colby’s home at the bottom of the Blue Ridge Mountains and sets the tone for the rest of the album. “Smoke and Flames” chronicles his experience as a fledgling musician, honing hiscraft and searching for validation while still in high school. Album closer "Daddy's Pocket Knife" cuts the deepest. A true story that also serves as a metaphor for Colby's own artistic journey, it reminds us that some things lost can be found. Colby T. Helms will release his debut album on Photo Finish Records in January 2024. He is managed by Dolphus Ramseur and booked by Paul Lohr and John Everhart of New Frontier Touring.
john doyle
Name many of the most notable recordings and/or performers in Irish music and it's a fair bet that John Doyle had something to do with them. Liz Carroll; Eileen Ivers; Karan Casey; Solas; Michael Black; Mary Black; the trio of McCusker, McGoldrick and Doyle; The Teetotalers (Martin Hayes, Kevin Crawford, John Doyle); and now Usher's Island (Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny, Mike McGoldrick, Paddy Glackin and John Doyle) - a vertible who's who of the greatest names in Irish music. These are just a very few of the stellar artists for whom John Doyle's signature guitar sound, singing or songwriting is essential.
From a musical family in Dublin, John’s influences include well known English folk singers Nic Jones, Martin Carthy, Richard Thompson, and The Watersons; Scottish singers Dick Gaughan and John Martin; and fellow Irishmen Paul Brady and Al O’Donnell as well as his father, Sean Doyle - probably the biggest influence of all. John went on the road as a pro at 16 with the group Chanting House which he formed with Susan McKeown and which eventually included such great players as Seamus Egan, Eileen Ivers, & Donogh Hennessy. John went on to form the highly acclaimed super group, Solas, with Seamus Egan, John Williams, Karan Casey and Winifred Horan which took the folk and Celtic music worlds by storm, in no small part due to John’s powerhouse rhythmic guitar style and innovative arrangements. As a member of Solas, John performed to sold out audiences nationally and internationally as well as appearing on many national TV and radio programs: NBC’s The Today Show, various programs for National Public Radio and Public Radio International, A Prairie Home Companion, Mountain Stage, E-Town and World Cafe as part of that critically acclaimed group, he also received three NAIRD awards and a Grammy nomination for the band’s self-titled first recording.
After leaving Solas, John has gone on to perform and tour with other greats in the Folk, Celtic and Bluegrass worlds - as music director for folk icon Joan Baez, guitarist for Mary Chapin Carpenter, Eileen Ivers, Tim O’Brien (John was included on Tim’s 2006 Grammy-award winning CD, Fiddler’s Green), Linda Thompson, Kate Rusby, Cathie Ryan, Cherish the Ladies, and many others. He has appeared on soundtracks for the feature film, The Brothers McMullan, Soldier, PBS’s Out of Ireland and also composed the music for the film Uncle Robert’s Footsteps and the play Down the Flats as well as performing on countless recordings as guitarist and/or singer for other notable artists such as Kate Rusby, Linda Thompson, Tim O’Brien, Alison Brown, Seamus Egan, Eileen Ivers, Mick Moloney, Cathal McConnell, Karan Casey and so many others (check out the discography page for a full list). John is a featured regular for many years in the hugely popular BBC Scotland "Transatlantic Sessions" regularly broadcast in Ireland and at the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow having performedthere with Americana greats Jerry Douglas, Tim O'Brien, Rodney Crowell, Sara Watkins, Kathy Mattea, and many others.
There are few artists more respected in the genre or more in demand in the studio, as songwriter, as performer. A few recent highlights listed below:
2009, St. Patrick's Day - Performed as duo of Liz Carroll/John Doyle for President Obama, the full U.S Congress, Vice-President Biden, and then Taoiseach Brian Cowan
2010 - Received Grammy Nomination for "Best Traditional World Album" for "Double Play", Liz Carroll and John Doyle
2008-2010 - Toured with Joan Baez as her Music Director/guitarist/singer
2014-- Guitarist with Mary Chapin Carpenter
In recent years, John has focused primarily on writing songs based on the varied experiences of Irish emmigrants - his great grandfather on the torpedoed S.S. Arabic in 1915; famine victims on the coffin ships to Quebec; Confederate and Union Irish fighting against one another at Fredericksburg; an Irishman's journey through the First World War. In reviews, these songs on Doyle's 2012 release, "Shadow and Light" have been said "to be destined to be classics in the Irish folk music songbook. His talents as songwriter are rare and exquisite."
ramona & The Holy SMokes
Based in Central Virginia and with family roots in South Texas, Ramona and the Holy Smokes represent a new generation of honky tonk music. With powerful female vocals that cover an emotional range from determined to comic to vulnerable, and a talented backing band steeped in classic country and western styles of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the band’s repertoire includes lush emotional ballads, quintessential two-step dance numbers, gritty country-rockers, and a unique blend of honky tonk and traditional Mexican styles that the group describes as “Mexi-tonk.” Drawing on the Mexican-American heritage of lead singer and songwriter Ramona Martinez, recognized by Wide Open Country as one of the "15 Latino Artists Shaping Country Music, "Ramona and the Holy Smokes are simultaneously rooted in the traditional sounds of country music but unafraid of pushing boundaries and highlighting the connections across border cultures. Their self-titled debut LP offers the group the opportunity to explore this diversity of sounds, leaning into an authenticity and resiliency in songs that chart life’s ups and downs from the perspective of a female voice seeking to maintain a sensitivity and sense of wonder in a twenty-first century world filled with emotional highs and lows.
Formed in 2022, Ramona and the Holy Smokes have seen their star rise in the region and beyond. The band–which includes Kyle Kilduff (electric guitar), Brooks Hefner (pedal steel), Jay Ouypron (bass), and Porter Bralley (drums)–had built a rapport playing together before joining Ramona, and in their time together have brought their talents to Ramona’s songs and song ideas, shaping and arranging these for a signature honky tonk sound. The band has performed regularly in the region, appearing at several Americana festivals including Red Wing Roots (2024), Rooster Walk (2025), and Bristol Rhythm & Roots (2025), and has opened for touring artists like Margo Cilker, Colby Acuff, Willi Carlisle, Redd Volkaert, Joshua Hedley, Donna the Buffalo, and Kashus Culpepper.
After recording a 7” single in 2023 and a four-song EP in 2024, Ramona and the Holy Smokes were ready to draw on a large catalog of original material for their first full-length album, which they recorded over the winter of 2024-25 at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, Virginia. Produced by Kai Crowe-Getty and guitarist Kyle Kilduff and engineered by Alex De Jong, the album features guest musicians Blake Baines on harmony vocals, Colby Pegg-Joplin on fiddle, Jeffrey Miller on piano, Matty Metcalfe on accordion, and Antonio Romero on strings. Ultimately, these recordings are anchored by Ramona’s inspired songwriting, much of which she credits to the “honky tonk angels” who help generate her songideas. The album is dominated by themes of heartache and struggle, of what it means to get stuck in unhealthy situations and to yearn for ways to escape them, and of balancing the need for love and companionship with the need for independence and creative freedom.
At the center of the album is the question of desire and fantasy, dreaming about making it out of the circumstances–financial, emotional, psychological–that are holding you back. The album’s opening track, “Gonna Be Mine,” is a cheeky song that rides the fine edge between authentic longing and satire, with crisp guitar and steel parts that support a satirical vision of having “a white Pekingese” and “drinking Chardonnay.” The high-octane anthem “Drunk After Work,” an outlaw country-rocker with blistering honky tonk solos and an exhilarating crowd favorite at live shows, describes what it means to cope, self-medicate, and dream about making it out of a dead end job: “Someday I’ll leave this life behind/but I just don’t know when.” Ramona had about $45 to her name when she wrote “Down and Out,” which opens with a zany riff before the lyrics paint a darkly humorous picture of what it means to be a struggling artist trying to maintain integrity. The lyrics invite Jesus to the gambling table, a last-ditch effort (with a nod to the band’s “holy” name) of “going all in.”
Another group of songs on the album chart the emotional turmoil of relationships and breakups. The infectious “This Little Heart” features a mid-century sound with a nod to western swing. Written by Ramona ten years before the band got together, this song has evolved from a vision dependent on unrealistic fantasies about relationships into a more empowering breakup song. The dark and ethereal “Even in My Dreams,” the last song written for the album, features a dreamy arrangement that came together in the studio. It is a nod to the kind of melancholy crossover ballads that might appear in a David Lynch film, and its themes–of what it means when even dreams go sour and fantasies turn out to disappoint you–make it the darkest song on the band’s album. The two-step number “1000 Little Heartbreaks” leans into the motif of heartache and suffering. Inspired by both her honky tonk angels and Patsy Cline, Ramona’s lyrics describe a love gone wrong, but one that is nearly impossible to leave. The song “Esta Herida” (which translates to “This Wound”) expands these themes of romantic heartbreak and represents the band’s unique “Mexi-tonk” sound in an up-tempo bilingual fashion. With an arrangement inspired by Norteño music and bands like the Texas Tornadoes and lyrics co-written by Ramona andher friend Laura Davila, the song does not shy away from the violent melodrama of classic mariachi and other Mexican music: “I’m bleeding to death,” she sings in Spanish, “because you are no longer here.” Equally dramatic, the song “Somedays, Sometimes”--which the band describes as “the saddest song in our catalog”--details an emotionally abusive relationship, with the verses showing the fleeting promise of happiness and the chorus puncturing this illusion and asking if it’s worth trying to save. With a lush arrangement inspired by the country-pop ballads of Judy Collins and Patsy Cline, “Somedays, Sometimes” draws on themes of how and when to settle and how it might be possible to get unstuck from emotionally damaging situations.
While much of the album focuses on disappointment, heartache, and struggle, each side of the LP ends with a note of defiance, a breakup song that offers the possibility for something better. The sardonic “Goodbye & Good Riddance” is a confident and cutting farewell to a bad relationship, as much a breakthrough song as it is a breakup song. The stripped down arrangement gives this the feel of an old Hank Williams or Kitty Wells tune. And the song’s confident rejection of a terrible partner (“you think you’re a cowboy, but you’re just a clown”) places it in a long line of country recordings depicting female empowerment and the successful escape from toxic relationships, from Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn to Carrie Underwood and The Chicks. Finally, the closing track “Trouble” is a sassy, uptempo number that channels Loretta Lynn at her most empowered in its bold rejection of a partner that is simply too much trouble to be bothered with. Having been gaslighted and blamed for the problems in their relationship, Ramona asks sarcastically, “you think that this trouble is coming from you…?” The song’s upbeat interplay between the guitar, pedal steel, and fiddle propels the themes of freedom from heartache–and trouble–that enable the album to end with the possibility of emerging more powerful and defiant from our heartbreaks and our struggles.
Ramona and the Holy Smokes continue to perform and write new music, building off of this promising debut album. Seeking a sound that is simultaneously vintage and timeless, they have made believers out of many skeptical audiences by emphasizing an emotional honesty and enduring, organic sound. "While we are heavily inspired by twentieth-century country music,” Ramona notes, “there is definitely something modern about our sound. I don't know if I can pinpoint exactly what it is, but what I do know is that even those who claim to not likecountry music can connect with us. Perhaps that's because country music, done right, is sincere. And I think everyone can connect with music that's sincere."
erin lunsford
Erin Lunsford is an award-winning singer/songwriter from Fincastle, VA, and based in Richmond, VA. Her compositions include self-styled guitar, banjo, and keyboard melodies. She is best known as the frontwoman, lead vocalist, and lyricist of the touring indie-pop/soul band Erin & The Wildfire. Her vocals have been described as soulful, expressive, and powerful, and her effortless versatility has been compared to Chris Stapleton, Eva Cassidy, and Susan Tedeschi. In 2024, Lunsford was a semi-finalist in the Songwriters Guild of America Country Song Contest for her song “Rhinestones.”
Lunsford released four dynamic singles in 2025 that have defined her vibrant, story-teller, Americana sound. She plans to release a full length album in Summer 2026 and share a few more singles leading up to the full record. On her first single this past year, "Watch Out For Deer", Lunsford shares a bittersweet story about the Southern farewell, “be safe and watch out for deer,” while crooning about the comfort of returning home and the pain of driving away. She paints a nostalgic picture of tearful nighttime drives from her home place, accompanied by a soaring vocal melody and a sparkling clawhammer banjo. Her second single, “Last I Heard”, is a “meticulously crafted emotional time capsule, a shimmering letter of closure written with the wisdom of hindsight and the lingering ache of a past wound. It’s a gut-punch of a breakup song that is at once dreamy and devastating, a testament to Lunsford’s profound talent for turning personal pain into universal art.” - Country Music New Int.
Then with her 3rd single of the summer, Lunsford addresses food insecurity and thescarcity mindset in her Appalachian community care anthem, “Strawberries.” She toured central Virginia and raised over $16,000 for local food pantries. “The [Strawberries] tour reflects Lunsford’s approach to using her platform for mutual aid. By connecting her music directly to fundraising efforts, she’s demonstrating how artists can embed community care into their work – turning release celebrations into opportunities for collective support…This model of artist-led community organizing shows how music can serve as both creative expression and social infrastructure in our region,” - Richmond Grid.
Lunsford’s final single for 2025, "Crossing Belvidere”, [weaves] delicate instrumentation and evocative vocals, and reshapes personal misfortune into universal reflection, offering a sense of forward momentum despite life’s obstacles. Vocally, Lunsford is emotionally brilliant as ever, moving prudently from somber tones in the opening to soaring frenzy in the song’s worldly bridge and then finally to poised conviction in its final chorus, capturing the emotions of a whirlwind day all under three minutes. - The Auricular
Erin Lunsford is an award-winning singer/songwriter from Fincastle, VA, and based in Richmond, VA. Her compositions include self-styled guitar, banjo, and keyboard melodies. She is best known as the frontwoman, lead vocalist, and lyricist of the touringindie-pop/soul band Erin & The Wildfire. Her vocals have been described as soulful, expressive, and powerful, and her effortless versatility has been compared to Chris Stapleton, Eva Cassidy, and Susan Tedeschi. In 2024, Lunsford was a semi-finalist in the Songwriters Guild of America Country Song Contest for her song “Rhinestones.”
The follow-up to 2020’s "The Damsel," Lunsford’s new album will feature the nostalgia of sweet tea and front porch rocking chairs alongside the experience of a young woman living in 2025 America. Drawing inspiration from Dolly Parton, Kacey Musgraves, and Gillian Welch, Lunsford writes of her belief in equality for all, career milestones, unresolved heartbreaks, and family roots. She incorporates family traditions into her new album through the artwork and lyrics, which feature cross-stitch, embroidery, and crochet designs. The Southwest Virginia-raised musician’s second full-length album blends these stories into an interwoven form of folk and Americana, spun together by her clever lyricism and expressive guitar and banjo playing.
NPR Music has featured three of Lunsford’s Tiny Desk Entries, praising her “impressive, expressive voice and some serious guitar chops” in one entry, and her “mesmerizing voice and fantastic vocal technique” in another. Rolling Stone Country named Lunsford one of the "10 Best Things We Saw at FloydFest 2019." Her most recent album, "The Damsel," premiered exclusively in American Songwriter in 2020, and in 2022, Style Weekly wrote a feature on Erin & The Wildfire's latest album, "Touchy Feely," describing her vocal versatility as “a voice that can go anywhere and do anything.” She was an Artist At Large and the lead vocalist in Roosterwalk's 2023 House Band. Lunsford’s original song "Rhinestones" was a semi-finalist for the 2024 Songwriters Guild of America Country Award.
Erin & The Wildfire has performed at high-profile festivals, including Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion, FloydFest, and Hulaween, as well as NPR’s Mountain Stage. They have provided direct support for Sammy Rae & The Friends, Butcher Brown, and The Dip. Lunsford has opened for Maggie Rose,Begonia, Bruce Hornsby, Darrell Scott, Carbon Leaf, and more, and has performed with Keller Williams, Leftover Salmon, and the Grammy-award-winning newgrass band The Infamous Stringdusters.
Danny Knicely &
The melichenko family
Multi-instrumentalist Danny Knicely, originally from the Shenandoah Valley, has used his roots in old-time and bluegrass to explore various types of music from around the world. He has shared his music and collaborated with musicians in over a dozen countries spanning four continents, including U.S. State Department tours in Tunisia, Morocco, Russia, and Cabo Verde. For this year’s annual collaborative showcase, he presents The Melichenko Family, a virtuosic trio from Ukraine. The Melichenko Family features accordionist and professor of Ukrainian Folk music Sergiy Melichenko; his son Vladyslav, who plays accordion and guitar; and daughter Anastasia, who plays violin. Each member has won many awards nationally and internationally for their musical expertise. The Melichenkos, originally from Rivne, Ukraine, fled Belarus in early 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now make their home in the Shenandoah Valley. They will be joined by multi-genre singer/violinist Julia Kwolyk, a second-generation Ukrainian American, and versatile upright bassist Neil Knicely. Expect an extravaganza of dynamic, fast-paced Bluegrass, Ukrainian Folk, and original music!