Given that Grey DeLisle keeps herself quite busy doing voice animation, it’s always a pleasure when she finds time to record a new album, especially one as rewarding as Don’t Turn Around. It’s a smart, fun, and vibrant record where she effortlessly cruises through several styles, unified by her wonderfully flexible voice and trademark incisiveness about love, loss, and heartbreak. While DeLisle has already proven herself to be a songwriter and vocalist of note, the bar is raised by some fabulous production and arrangements that make every track shine.
Original production was handled by the late Andy Paley, and his touch is everywhere, from the soaring, sun-dappled harmonies on Drive Around to the big melodic hooks on Disneyland.
Category: country
It’s Lyal Strickland’s unpolished voice that makes the first impression. Immediately, it’s clear he is not your dressed-up singer-songwriter making a slick record. His songs come from the soil that he tills as a part-time farmer, from the babble of small-town drinking holes, from the sweat and pain of hard work, life’s defeats, and hard-earned small victories. His gutsy songs earn him the title Shooter of Truth, and this is Strickland’s return to recording after a ten-year absence.
Strickland pulls no punches, admitting he has inseparable relationships with depression and alcohol. Yet, he’s affectionate to loved ones, putting their importance above all else. His priorities are ultimately in the right place; he just takes plenty of detours to cope with farming and…
…includes three brand-new songs.
Those who have heard the two albums from Sons of Fathers, Paul Cauthen’s previous under-the-radar outfit, may not be surprised by the power and grit of the singer-songwriter’s voice. But the rest will be immediately transfixed by his vocals when we push play on his solo debut.
As soon as Cauthen starts singing “I’m still drivin’, when’s this break gonna come,” in a baritone that recalls a combination of Waylon Jennings, later day Guy Clark and the Maverick’s Raul Malo, you know you’re in for a dose of the unadulterated “outlaw country” that artists such as those took to the people, if not always the bank. Despite an erratic recording schedule that encompassed multiple musicians and audio engineers…
JP Harris has always understood that old songs are not relics or something to be appreciated from afar. They are passed down from one generation to another by people who alter them simply by singing them. On Shaving A Dead Man, Harris approaches traditional American material with that understanding intact, stripping away the distance that can accumulate around songs that have survived for decades or centuries. ‘Shaving A Dead Man’ is intimate without sounding delicate and is steeped in tradition without reconstructing the past. With Harris on lead vocals and banjo and Chance McCoy contributing fiddle and vocal harmony, the record places two musicians in close conversation with a musical heritage that has endured because of its ability…
There are few duos in modern Country music as consistently adventurous as Brothers Osborne. Bound by blood, a lifetime of playing music together and a shared working-class upbringing in Deale, Maryland, John and TJ Osborne have spent more than a decade establishing themselves as one of Nashville’s most distinctive acts.
Their music has always occupied an exciting space between Country, southern rock, blues and soul, with John’s formidable guitar playing providing the perfect counterpoint to TJ’s unmistakable, expressive vocals. On Watertown, they bring those ingredients back to the place where their story began, delivering a record that feels both like a homecoming and another step forward.
Named in reference to their…
…The deluxe version of Appalachia includes 6 live tracks recorded at a sold-out show in April 2026 at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.
When it was time to record her new album — the follow-up to 2021’s excellent American Siren — country-folk singer-songwriter Emily Scott Robinson chose to do so at Dreamland Recording Studios, housed in a 130-year-old church sanctuary hidden in the trees outside of Kingston, New York. But the setting and the spiritual center of her work can be found hundreds of miles to the southwest of that location: “Oh, my heart for Appalachia/ Oh, my heart for these blue hills,” Robinson sings in “Appalachia,” the album’s bluegrass-y title track. “Oh, my heart forever captured, beating still.”
On her previous album, 2024’s Evolution, Sheryl Crow set out to make a 21st-century statement about her career and the state of the world for her first album since turning 60 in 2022. It was also her first release since COVID-19 and the announcement that 2019’s country-rock Threads would be her final album. It became her first album not to chart on the Billboard 200.
Rebounding with her 12th LP, Pick You Up, Crow returns to a more comfortable environment. Originally intended to be a six-song EP, the project expanded to album length with an additional track, “Freedom Bus,” that continues the discussion about the U.S. and its relation to the rest of the world in 2026: “If all you can come up with is hate / Then turn around and march…
Pop music is a game where reinvention is a vital part of the process in the 21st century, and Orville Peck knows that as well as anyone. Transforming himself from a talented but unknown Canadian indie rocker to a bigger-than-life gay cowboy icon with a voice and a swagger as big as all outdoors was no small accomplishment, and as strong as his work has been (especially 2019’s Pony and 2022’s Bronco), the albums were about a character he created as much as the man who actually created them. 2026’s Mule represents a significant change for Peck, as he’s opted to give us a look at the man literally and figuratively behind the mask. He was hardly the first artist to discover fame is harder work than expected, and he found himself struggling with drug and alcohol…
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…
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…
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,…

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.