For over 20 years now, Pokey LaFarge has been delivering his version of retro-Americana. That journey continues with Rent Money, a collection of eleven tracks preoccupied with the almighty dollar. LaFarge follows up the more expansive Rhumba Country with this slightly scaled-back effort. Once again working with producer Elliot Bergman (Wild Belle, LA LOM, Natalie Bergman), LaFarge’s sound incorporates light blues, jazz, easy reggae, folk, country, and rock and roll, all in a minimalist manner. While LaFarge’s music may look back to the mid-20th century, his lyrics address modern monetary worries and timeless love.
The album opens with a shuffling tune titled “The Thing,” displaying sweet backing vocals from Addie Hamilton, who pops up a few times…
Category: country
The Rolling Stones have a new album, Foreign Tongues, out, much to their fans’ delight. Audiences have long craved the raw blues-rock sound of Mick Jagger’s vocals, Keith Richards’ slashing riffs, and the band’s pugnacious attitude. Critical reception to the new record has been mixed, but there is ample desire for such unvarnished manly sounds. As evidenced by the reviews, fans of the new Stones record weren’t looking for a return to the courtly baroque pop of “Lady Jane” or “As Tears Go By”. They wanted the loud, aggressive energy of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Tumbling Dice”.
This style is historically categorized as “cock rock” because of its emphasis on masculinity and performative sexuality. Fans of that kind…
With the release of his first-ever live album, Daniel Donato is experiencing a genuine full-circle moment. What began as a fledgling music career busking around his hometown of Nashville, TN, Donato quickly found his footing as a regular performer among the litany of legendary Music City venues. Most notably, Donato became a fixture at Robert’s Western World, an intimate space that abuts Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium, where the prodigious guitarist honed his generational musical talent over the course of nearly 500 performances and spent countless hours after those shows dreamily staring up at the Mother Church of Country Music.
Fast forward to August 22, 2025, exactly ten years to the date of his final show at Robert’s,…
For singer-songwriter Alicia Blue, Waylon Jennings isn’t so much an influence as someone she calls “a creative angel summoning her from another realm”, so to have his son, Shooter Jennings, describe her as “As rare as they come” must feel like quite the accolade.
Perhaps even more special is the fact that upon hearing the demos of the songs for her debut album Country Desire, he jumped at the chance to work as her producer, not even the fact that she had no label or budget to back her up dampening his enthusiasm: “I’m not worried about that,” Jennings said, brushing it aside like a minor inconvenience. “You’re going to have a big career.”
The steady build of Run Me Ragged opens the album, and Blue’s tone is sharp, but…
Devyn Brinsfield is one of those characters with a backstory that you would dismiss as being unbelievable if you didn’t know better. Still employed as a school bus driver and groundsman, in his spare time he has developed quite a talent for invigorating the Bakersfield sound, while stretching the limits of that label to include honky tonk, sad country tunes, rollicking hoedowns, but also the odd blues lick and even the odd naughty word. Bring on the revolution!
His career has received a significant boost after two songs were picked up and featured in the Paramount+ series Dutton Ranch, and for this his second album, he recorded in the Basement in the historic Woolworth’s building in downtown Bakersfield.
Cover bands abound within contemporary music circles, both on stage and in the studio. But a chosen artist’s interpretation of the songs and music of another rarely matches (and never exceeds) the authenticity of spirit displayed by Christian Parker and those kindred spirits with whom he has been collaborating in recent years on the esteemed canon of that iconic American band, The Byrds.
Over the course of four albums now — the most outstanding of which is Change Is Now: A Tribute to The Byrds (2024) — Parker and company have pored through the catalog of the group from the start in 1965 to the finish in 1973. In so doing, the collective has begun to delve into that body of work created by the late Gram Parsons,…
…the deluxe edition includes two previously unreleased demos from Coe’s earliest Nashville recording sessions with Shelby Singleton.
Though Texas Moon wasn’t released until 1977 on Shelby Singleton’s Plantation label, it was actually recorded in 1973, then sold to Columbia with David Allan Coe’s contract. Needless to say, the recording and production budgets were considerably smaller than they were at the latter label. Well-known for its notorious cover photo, the set’s real merit is that it displays Coe’s ability as an interpretive singer, though on a few tracks he tries too hard. He wrote only two of the set’s ten songs — one of which, “Mary Magdeline,” (sic) is considered a classic. Texas Moon is lean, almost raw. Highlights include Coe’s readings of…
One of the most intriguing features of being an 80 year-old singer/songwriter still composing songs is the acquisition of a lifetime of experience for material. That, among other aspects, makes Texas troubadour Ray Wylie Hubbard’s new album, Reel 2 Reel 4 Real so entrancing.
The Texas veteran outlaw musician, best known for penning the infamous “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother,” popularized by Jerry Jeff Walker, has been a respected cult figure in the genre since the mid-70s. He has cranked out over 20 albums of gruff, no-frills, music racking up an impressive list of high-profile fans. Many such as Ringo Starr, Chris Robinson, Larkin Poe, Willie Nelson and Steve Earle assisted on two previous Co-Starring albums for a major label.
Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. He is 45 years old. And he never does anything by halves.
When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register. When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age.
That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated…
Six years between albums, Nashville’s Elizabeth Cook returns with her latest LP, continuing her streak of writing pretension-free outsider country/Americana music populated by society’s outcasts and the overlooked.
Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded with Cook’s live band, Great Television mines both her personal experiences and a cast of colorful characters to create an album that is both introspective and a reflection of society.
The album takes its title from a line in the somber opening track, “Sunset Promenade” (“Turns out hurricanes are great television/Turns out all the things in my head are a prison”). The song, complete with a swell of strings, serves as the ideal prelude to what’s to follow,…
…Waylon Payne released his first album, The Drifter, in 2004, yet it took 16 years for the second one, Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me to appear. Now 6 years on, we have, in Payne’s own words, “the third instalment”. As Payne offered in a recent interview with Americana UK, “That’s what I’ve been joking about. I kind of loosely call it Volume Three in a ‘Life Well Lived’ series”. He likes to tell stories, and it’s clear that the album provides a continuation of the stories told in his previous records.
Payne is very much from the country ‘outlaw’ tradition. His mother was GRAMMY® Award-winning country singer Sammi Smith, and his father was a longtime member of Willie Nelson’s band, guitarist Jody Payne. He was named…
Alternate Routes is Reckless Kelly’s reclamation project: re-recordings of fan favorites they no longer owned, inspired by artists like Taylor Swift and John Fogerty who fought similar battles over their masters.
“These songs are your memories, your years on the road, your life’s work,” says Cody Braun. Rather than recreate the originals, the band captured how the songs have naturally evolved through decades of live performance — tracked in just three days at Arlyn Studios in Austin.
…With one exception, all the songs here come from Under the Table and Above the Sun (2003), Wicked Twisted Road (2005), and Bulletproof (2008), with a heavy emphasis on the latter two. (The one exception is their song…
Elaine Palmer grew up in an old watermill within an isolated village in rural North Yorkshire, spending much of her life travelling back and forth to family in Phoenix, Arizona. From an early age she immersed herself in music and started writing songs influenced by her surroundings both in the UK and USA, developing a repertoire which blended alt-country, Americana, folk and country rock. Elaine’s distinctive rich and expressive vocal style is characterised by her slightly husky tones, bluesy edge and the strong emotional depth which she carries through in every song she writes and performs. All of these qualities were on full display in Elaine’s most recent album Half Moon Rising which was recorded in San Diego in 2024.
Now Elaine Palmer releases her new album,…
A dozen records into his career, Canadian country musician Corb Lund has decided to look back. His latest, Dark Horses, finds Lund stripping down some of his favorite songs from across his expansive catalog and presenting them with little more than his voice and an acoustic guitar. The result is a beautiful reintroduction to these songs, a mix of classics and often-overlooked gems laid out in their rawest form yet.
The album is sequenced chronologically, with Lund going back to 1995 for the opening song, “Untitled Waltz.” While he’s generally not one to overproduce his songs, drenching them in effects and a slew of additional instruments, there is still a stark difference between the originals and how they’re presented here. “No Roads Here,”…
Recorded in Nashville with producer Steven Wood and featuring a veritable who’s who of premier Nashville studio musicians, The Country Side of Paul Carrack Vol 2 features cover versions of 10 classic Country hits.
Paul says: “I’ve always wanted to make a country album, and I’m now very pleased to be coming with the second edition. A lot of people detect the influences of soul in my music, but I’ve always loved country as well. Growing up, I was hungry for any kind of music, but I would listen to people like Chet Atkins, The Everly Brothers, Hank Williams and I particularly loved Ray Charles, who is predominantly known for his soul and jazz stuff, but could also sing great country.
I have an older brother, John and one Christmas…
Scarborough-based Phil Hooley is the founder of the alt-country band The Woolgatherers. Everything We’ll Never Need is his third solo album after Provenance (2023) and Songs from the Back Room (2021). He is on vocals and guitar, but has teamed up with a number of top Nashville session players. It is a slight surprise to learn that he is a Yorkshire lad, because this album very much has an American feel. It is laid-back americana with a very nice brew of country, soul, and blues that reminds you of Dave Alvin and Rodney Crowell.
Having said that, the first track, ‘Cowboy Dreaming’, has more than a whiff of the English band Dire Straits, with slide guitar picking to give it a country feel. It is a weird tale of a city-dweller going out to the Wild West to become…