The term legend is an overused description, but in Dale Watson’s case, it’s a perfect fit. Originally cutting his teeth on Houston’s honky tonk circuit and releasing his debut album Cheatin’ Heart Attack in 1995, he’s become an icon of outlaw country music and one of its hardest-working stars. 300 shows a year are not uncommon, along with an average of an album every 12 months. At age 63, Unwanted is his latest release and long-time fans will not be disappointed.
Things kick off with the rollicking ‘Willie Waylon and Whiskey’ a tribute to two of his biggest influences which even manages to slip in a riff from Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’. Backed by the Lonestars with contributions from his wife Celine Lee, who shares vocals on…
Category: americana
Ringo Starr’s debut outing with T Bone Burnett, 2025’s Look Up, was a creative triumph, so the pair haven’t messed much with the formula on this swift follow-up. Returning are Molly Tuttle – duetting with Starr on three of the 10 tracks, including Robert Plant/Alison Krauss-styled opener ‘Returning Without Tears’ – and Billy Strings for the Everly Brothers-fashioned harmonies of ‘My Baby Don’t Want Nothing’.
Sheryl Crow pops up on the title track (which comes with Ringo’s meditation-informed spoken-word section: “Don’t be attacked by your thoughts… let them come in, let them go”) while St. Vincent cameos on ‘Choose Love’, a reworking of a previously-released 2005 Ringo song now given mid-’60s R&B swing and…
…DIX describe themselves as a roots band with a folky heart and a generous dose of melancholic americana. The band was formed by childhood friends from the Dutch region of Land van Maas en Waal: Erik van Oijen (vocals, guitar, mandolin), Johnny Ariëns (bass), Bart Versteegh (drums, accordion), and guitar virtuoso Ray van Haalen (guitar, banjo). Having been formed around 25 years ago, it took a while before their debut album, Sayonara (2010), appeared. This was followed by For Love (2013).
The foundations for this, their third album, were recorded back in 2019. However, circumstances, including the COVID pandemic and the passing of producer and close band friend Louis Bos, delayed its completion. The band states…
Cosmic American Music is the debut of Tabasco Birds, an eight-piece from North Texas. Six of the eight members attended Dallas Art High School, and all are now students at the University of North Texas. They say that they “channel the Cosmic American sound of Gram Parsons”, and you can see what they mean, but actually their music is livelier, more varied and rougher around the edges than Parsons’. This is a good thing, as the contributions from the eight members on different instruments mean that there is originality and freshness to their work.
They are closer to the rural, almost hillbilly country of Noahjohn. As you listen, you can imagine the songs being played to an appreciative audience, having great fun dancing in a barn…
Recorded at the Rockbonden Studio in the snow-covered forests of Sweden, Norway’s Ole Kirkeng stands trial under the Cowboy Lie Detector Machine. Kirkeng was a touring member of Courtney Marie Andres’ band, and has performed alongside Molly Tuttle, Bonny Light Horseman and S.G Goodman. The album is produced by Kirkeng with input from Dominic Billett and Bendik Brænne. It is lyrically clever, heartfelt and at times laugh-out-loud funny.
The first single released from the set, ‘Bare Minimum’, sets the tone. Initially, it feels like you have walked into the middle of something you shouldn’t have, and you are wrong for finding it amusing. Kirkeng is giving relationship advice in reverse. The lilting pedal steel…
Souled American return after thirty years with a work of immediate relevance. Arriving just in time, with decency roundly mocked, as dissent spells career disaster and algorithms isolate us into units of convenience, Sanctions dares explore roots and traditions in both sound and consequence, revealing a band that has lost members but gained gravity. Acclaimed by Jeff Tweedy, The Jayhawks, John Darnielle, and Counting Crows, Souled American here elevate their unique style of ambient Americana into a life-altering experience full of feeling and drama, like some ink-stamped elegy fresh off the printing presses of Walt Whitman. Written, performed, and produced by founding members Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff, the album marks…
For years, Cactus Lee has quietly built a singular body of work, playing honky-tonks around Austin while releasing records at a steady, self-driven pace.
Lee’s Dream, his second album for Western Vinyl, feels like the natural distillation of that journey-written on the road, refined at home, and shaped by the push and pull between devotion to music and devotion to family. Conceived during a monthlong solo tour through the Midwest and South, the songs began as sketches written in vans and motel rooms, sparked in part by a visit to Guy Clark’s reconstructed basement at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Returning home to personal upheaval, Kevin Dehan turned inward, writing songs…
The Pacific north-west of the USA has been called home by many giants of the blues, rock, and grunge scenes, but alongside these, there’s long been a fertile seam of indie folk and alt-country music. Fleet Foxes and Brandi Carlile hail from Seattle, and from Portland, there’s The Delines, The Decemberists and The Dandy Warhols, while in recent years you might spot Jerry Joseph or Patterson Hood in the local deli. Vegans and cyclists are welcome in this city, proud of its reputation for being weird. Some twenty years ago, this attracted several musicians from Anchorage, Alaska, who each separately found their way to Oregon before coming together as The Builders and The Butchers in 2005.
With the ramshackle acoustic folk-rock sound…
Staying positive is an incredibly difficult skill to maintain. With all the negativity and palpable tension thickening the air, stirring up a fog so dense we sometimes forget to look at our fellow humans and share a smile, being the one to break the mold and share a technology-free moment with someone, or anything, is a scary undertaking. It is much easier to fall victim to the downtrodden nature that seems to plague the world around us, and thankfully, Scott Kinnebrew has never been fond of the easy route. The road-tested veteran and member of the beloved country rock outfit Truth and Salvage Co has always brought a complexity to his art that is both welcoming and compelling. On the other hand, his solo work under the moniker Sounding Arrow is getting…
To an outsider, Ashley Monroe is a Nashville success story. As she wrote in her Instagram post heralding the release of her latest record, Dear Nashville, during the past 23 years, she has released six solo albums, released four more with Pistol Annies, co-wrote two songs that went to number one on country radio, and has been nominated for Grammy Awards three times. She’s accomplished much more than the typical singer-songwriter looking for glory in Music City.
However, Monroe is not happy with the way she’s been treated by the town. Dear Nashville is a concept record about her professional experiences. The eight songs tell her story as a love letter. She begins with the diatribe “I Hate Nashville” and ends with “Quittin’”, but neither title…
Although Brown Horse are soaked up to their collective armpits in various signifiers of a very recognisably American musical lexicon (pedal steels and the lure of the road leading out of town feature prominently here), the Norwich quartet (accompanied by drummer Ben Rodwell and backing singer Neve Cariad) achieve an identifiably British take on various alt. country/Americana staples on the startlingly assured, often viscerally raw Total Dive.
With all four members sharing the songwriting duties equally, the ten songs on Total Dive venture from grizzled, petrol-fumed bar room boogie (the title track, with the track’s energised gallop deliciously at odds with the downbeat dead-end vibes of the lyrics) to desolate…
Leah Blevins begins her new album with the title track, “All Dressed Up”. She ends the record (presumably) naked with the cut “Centerfold”. One could see the eight tracks in the middle as a sort of striptease. Blevins sings her first-person confessional songs as she sheds layers of self-deception in search of her authentic self.
Blevins is serious but not afraid to be funny in her vulnerability. Despite her resolute concerns, she can’t help but smirk at her own failures and smile at her successes. The Kentucky-born singer-songwriter addresses the Lord as “Hey God” and wryly asks, “Do You really love me like they say You do?” On “Tequila Mockingbird”, she puns off the title, which refers to a type of alcohol, her Southern roots (“To Kill a Mockingbird”),…
At the end of 2024, Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish shared their first artistic reactions to the loss of their granddaughter Bebe King, at Southport with a select group of supporters in the media. The two songs, ‘Sally Sparkles’ and ‘The Empty Swing’, hinted at a new direction for the duo who make up My Darling Clementine.
“The events of summer 2024 not only changed the music they were making and the songs they were writing, it also altered their outlook on life. Recognising that everyone’s grief is individual, even that of a husband and wife, Michael and Lou needed to channel their suffering via their own individual creativity and in their own way, rather than in collaboration as My Darling Clementine, so they worked on two solo albums.”
Good As True, the 12th studio album from Yonder Mountain String Band, leans into a warm, expressive sound – bluegrass shaped with an indie edge, rock undertones, and a hint of country. Recorded live in the studio, its eight original tracks trace romantic, personal, and societal relationships and the work it takes to stay connected.
The lead single “Brand New Heartache” pairs rock-driven verses with a bluegrass-lifted chorus as it follows the fallout of a breakup and the uneasy hope of starting again, while “Blind” opens with a striking instrumental riff that lingers long after the song ends, while its lyrics confront regret, mental health struggles, and the pull to become something better. “Long Ride” delivers a sharp, sarcastic look at life in a touring band…
Charley Crockett has always been a prolific artist, stretching the limits of his imaginative approach to country, which toes the line between tradition and the lofty. Recently, though, the long-standing troubadour has been releasing distinct, genre-altering releases, starting with 2025’s Lonesome Drifter and Dollar a Day, which arrived a few short months later. These two subsequent releases, both co-produced by the iconic Shooter Jennings, build the story Crockett is calling “The Sagebrush Trilogy.” Now, the time has arrived for Crockett to close this chapter of his storied career with Age of the Ram, the third and final installment of his Jennings-assisted trilogy.
Each of these albums that make up The Sagebrush Trilogy has had a specific sound…
The Østfold county is dubbed by some as Norway’s Mississippi, as the country’s longest river, the Glomma, flows through its densely populated lowland area on its way to the Oslo Fjord. A fitting backdrop for americana four-piece Norma, whose debut album Country Catering pays reference to older legends like Poco and the Grateful Dead, as well as combining influences from more recent bands like Wilco. Produced by Simen Følstad Nilsen, who also contributes pedal steel, it’s a melodic meander down a path of floating melodies and chiming guitars.
The opener, Rabbit Feet, is typical of Norma’s approach: an understated driving beat accompanied by dreamy vocals that burst into life in the mid-section. The band was raised on…
At the age of sixty-eight, Jim Lauderdale is in top form, his voice as good as ever. The iconic songwriter, now a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, is showing no signs of slowing down, and in his own words: “I feel like I’m writing and recording more than ever, and that’s such a favourite thing of mine”. After featuring on Dallas Burrow’s The Way the West Was Won last year, Lauderdale is back with a record of his own, Country Super Hits Volume 2.
For those unfamiliar with his Country Super Hits Volume 1, released back in 2006, despite its title, it’s not a compilation of old hits, but rather a studio LP featuring a batch of songs that were new at the time. In the same way, with Volume 2, you are treated to thirteen fresh songs ready…
Includes 2 brand-new songs: “When You’re with Him” and “Before I Hung Your Picture On the Wall”.
Since the death of Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell has assumed the crown as the King of Country Music, at least the Americana side of the genre. The 75-year-old former son-in-law of the Man in Black has a complete record of accomplishments and achievements as a singer, songwriter, and producer. Earlier this year, Willie Nelson put out a full-length album, Oh What a Beautiful World, which featured 12 songs written or co-written by Crowell over the past 50 years. What could top that? Well, Crowell’s not about to retire. He’s just released his 20th studio record, Airline Highway.
The new record reveals Crowell is still the master of diamonds and dirt, as he labeled his…
Before his career as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist took off, Luke Winslow-King spent several years supporting himself as a busker, both in the United States and Europe. Part of making a living playing on the streets is playing what people want to hear; maybe singing “Brown Eyed Girl” for the fifth time that day isn’t your favorite thing in the world, but if the guy with ten bucks in his hand wants to hear it, that’s what you play. Winslow-King has gone through plenty of changes since those days, and as he’s evolved from his early days playing traditional blues with a soulful accent, he’s opened himself to other sounds, and 2026’s Coast of Light is the work of a different Luke Winslow-King. While tracks like “Don’t Worry Your Mind,” “Shoot from the Hip” and…
For Sassparilla frontman and songwriter Kevin Blackwell, there is one lyric in particular on the band’s eight studio album, Honey, I’m Using Again, that feels especially truthful to where he is at this stage of his life: “Despite all my kicking / My protesting / I’ll be damned that I got old,” he bemoans on ‘I’ll Be Damned’, but inevitability of ageing is just one of the honest looks at the human experience explored on the LP. As its title suggests, addiction is also covered, along with homelessness and death. These are subjects that could feel like a chore to listen to, but with the band’s mix of punk and americana, they make for a fresh batch of invigorating, short, sharp life lessons with a Southern gothic flavour to them.
‘When I Get Off This Mountain’, heavy with…