Category: americana


Pilcrowe – These Badlands (2025)

Filed Under: americana, rock by exy — 1 Comment
October 29, 2025

The second album from Pilcrowe, by their own admission, is not a concept album, but rather a three-act play. Drawing inspiration from the rugged beauty of their home state of Arizona, it provides an exploration of struggle and perseverance amid desolate times.
The first single, ‘North Rim’, takes us to an isolated part of the Grand Canyon to witness incremental change on an inhospitable landscape. Storytelling is the major strength on show here; the title track is a personal reflection on moving to new realities: “It’s funny how one day you wake up and don’t feel like anyone anymore.”
The Dust Bowl era of the 1930s is explored on three tracks: ‘Black Sunday’ recalling one of the period’s darkest days, ‘New Deal Dirt’…

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Alison Brown & Steve Martin – Safe, Sensible and Sane (2025)

Filed Under: americana, bluegrass, folk by exy — 1 Comment
October 28, 2025

Banjoists Steve Martin and Alison Brown have called up a boatload of friends to guest on their album. The list includes Jackson Browne, Vince Gill, the Indigo Girls, Tim O’Brien, Jason Mraz, and Della Mae. They open with a banjo duet, ‘Friend of Mine,’ which has a timeless quality to it. The instruments sparkle, and they mesh together so that in places it sounds like a single player.
From there, the album quickly goes off piste with songs like the Bossa Nova-influenced ‘Michael’, which features Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. ‘Dear Time’ with Jackson Browne and Jeff Hanna highlights Martin’s comment that “with the banjo, there are so many styles you can work with, but Alison and I both have an ear for its more melodic, melancholy aspect.”

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Jerry Leger – Waves of Desire (2025)

Filed Under: americana, folk-rock by exy — 1 Comment
October 25, 2025

…Born and raised in Toronto’s East End, singer-songwriter Jerry Leger has built up a remarkable body of work over the last two decades, culminating in fourteen studio albums that have seen collaborations with americana icons such as Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins and Grammy winner Mark Howard.
Earlier this year, Leger released a solo album entitled Lucky Streak: Latent Lounge, Live from the Hanger, produced by Timmins at his studio, ‘The Hanger’ in Toronto, where he revisited a selection of his back catalogue and gave them a more modern feel. This time around, he is reunited with his band and, taking advantage of a short break whilst touring Europe, stopped off at Cologne’s historic Maarweg Studio to…

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Trond Kallevåg – Minnesota (2025)

Filed Under: americana, jazz by exy — 1 Comment
October 24, 2025

With Minnesota, guitarist and composer Trond Kallevåg deepens his image-rich sound – a warm, wistful universe where the atmosphere of Norway’s rugged west coast drifts seamlessly into the wide horizons of the American Midwest.
Drawing inspiration from traditional music, jazz, ambient folk, emigration stories, and rare photographs unearthed during an artist residency on the unique and remote island of Træna in Northern Norway , Kallevåg weaves a sound world rooted in the Norwegian Coast – yet forever gazing westward.
Minnesota marks Kallevåg’s fourth album on the acclaimed Hubro label, following Bedehus & Hawaii (2019), Fengselsfugl (2021), and Amerikabåten (2023). As on his previous…

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Brandi Carlile – Returning to Myself (2025)

Filed Under: americana, folk-rock by exy — 2 Comments
October 23, 2025

After seven years of unprecedented success following 2018’s By the Way, I Forgive You, 2021’s In These Silent Days, her recent collaborations with Elton John, Joni Mitchell and increasing mainstream recognition — Brandi Carlile draws a line in the sand, returning with an album that feels like an extended conversation with mortality, love, and the fundamental human need for connection.
Returning to Myself finds the singer-songwriter at her most philosophically engaged, wrestling with the finite nature of existence while celebrating the messy beauty of interdependence. The title track establishes the album’s central paradox immediately. Despite its name suggesting solitary introspection, Carlile hints at co-dependency and togetherness.

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Ethan Setiawan – Encyclopedia Mandolinnica (2025)

Filed Under: bluegrass, folk by exy — 1 Comment
October 21, 2025

Mandolinist Ethan Setiawan’s latest album, Encyclopedia Mandolinnica, showcases the Indiana-born, Berklee School of Music graduate’s virtuosic skills in a series of duos and trios with colleagues, mentors and masters.
The 11-track recording kicks off with Setiawan trading riffs with mighty mandolinist Mike Marshall on a swinging fandango titled ‘Victoria’.
‘Blazing Star’ pairs Setiawan with Jacob Jolliff (Joy Kills Sorrow, Yonder Mountain String Band) in a showcase for the astonishingly deft, quick-fingered facility of today’s mandolin maestros.
On ‘Brothers and Sisters’, renowned classical mandolinist Caterina Lichtenberg (who also happens to be Marshall’s wife) joins Setiawan on a brilliantly composed and meticulously…

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Dillon Warnek – As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 1 Comment
October 21, 2025

As the Neighbors Tried to Sleep begins with a real swagger. ‘Pistol and a List of Demands’ opens with great energy: piano and guitar with a pulsing beat lead the way in a romanticised tale of a renegade on the run. Dillon Warnek casts himself as a man living large, ready for a big payday or a bloody end. “There’s enough dynamite in my pockets/To blow you all through the roof” sings Warnek with a confident drawl which, apart from the obvious Freudian interpretation, sets the scene of a man willing to take on the law. There’s real defiance in the song too, “The judges want to lock me up/And throw away the key/It drives them crazy knowing I’m freer/Than they’ll ever be”. But there’s a desperation behind the bravado, “It’d probably look like the goddamn Alamo…

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Tim Grimm – Bones of Trees (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 1 Comment
October 21, 2025

…Bones of Trees is Tim Grimm’s 13th album, and it is a beautifully crafted collection of personal, historical and political songs.
The album’s title is taken from the mysterious imagery, the song setting out the album’s underlying themes of wood and how the past influences the present. ‘Getting Older’ relates the lives of three men and the way we spend our limited time on earth. The Celtic-fused ‘Mists of Enninstymon’ touches on past emigration, Grimm joined by Glasgow’s Paul McKenna on vocals and the pipes of Dougie Pincock. ‘Hunting Shack’ is built on a great Johnny Cash rhythm, and Sergio Webb’s dobro helps him cover Susan Werner’s ‘Barbed Wire Boys’. Both tracks reflect on a distant rural Midwest. There’s a good-natured,…

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Ruen Brothers – Awooo (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 1 Comment
October 17, 2025

Ruen Brothers strip their sound down to its twangy, haunted core on 2025’s Awooo. The duo’s fourth album and first since moving from their native England to their adopted home of Louisville, Kentucky, Awooo finds the brothers (singer, guitarist Henry Stansall and guitarist, multi-instrumentalist Rupert Stansall) pared down to their essentials. Consequently, the album shares little with its predecessor, 2023’s Ten Paces. Where that album found them blending their vintage ’50s- and ’60s-inspired rock with hooky pop elements, Awooo is all spare folk and country; a shadowy evocation of the long winter in which it was recorded. What connects all the duo’s work is a sharp self-awareness and wry, post-modern sense of humor. It’s an arch sensibility…

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Holly Golightly – Look Like Trouble (2025)

Filed Under: alt-country, blues, indie-rock by exy — 1 Comment
October 17, 2025

Holly Golightly took a long break after her 2018 record Do the Get Along and when she returned in 2025 with Look Like Trouble, she did she with the same crack band backing her up, the same mix of songs that swung easily from low-down blues to waltzing country and all points in between, and most importantly, the same attitude and charm she has always displayed. By the time the record came out she’d been doing this for a fair spell, but one would never know it. Both she and the band sound fully committed, playing with tightly wound restraint, and the guitars have some serious bite especially during the solos that threaten to blow out speaker cones. Golightly sings of revenge, putting people in their place, sorting out romantic ills, and the ups and downs of…

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The Bones of J.R. Jones – Radio Waves (Deluxe) (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 4 Comments
October 17, 2025

…includes the original 11 tracks from ‘Radio Waves’, along with additional material like demos, alternate versions, B-sides, and live recordings.
Jonathon Linaberry grew up obsessed by the radio. Like many of a certain vintage, he recalls waiting by the radio, finger poised, ready to record onto that good old, hopelessly flawed yet memorable, nonetheless, cassette tape. On his 6th album under the guise of The Bones of J.R. Jones, the aptly titled Radio Waves, Linaberry draws on that fondly remembered era for inspiration with songs steeped in the sounds and stories of his own coming of age.
Linaberry explains, “A lot of these songs started on a drum machine, which was very intentional. I wanted to focus on simplicity, on stripping tracks back to their most essential elements…

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Todd Snider – HIGH, LONESOME AND THEN SOME (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 1 Comment
October 16, 2025

The newest album from Todd Snider finds a broken man breathily singing sparse numbers as High, Lonesome and Then Some feels less like an album title and more like Snider’s perpetual state of mind over these nine tracks.
Known for his humor and insightful songwriting, Snider scales it all back, delivering generalities via gravelly dirt road blues that at times feel like demo offerings or first takes. Working with producers Aaron Lee Tasjan, Robbie Crowell, and Joe Bisirri, the exasperated Snider employs a band (Tasjan on second electric guitar, Sterling Finlay on electric bass, and Robbie Crowell on drums) but mostly regulates them to minimalist support or sitting on the sidelines.
Snider tries on an uninspired, less musically…

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VA – It’s All Her Fault: A Tribute to Cindy Walker (2025)

Filed Under: country, tribute by exy — 1 Comment
October 15, 2025

Songwriter Cindy Walker’s name is well-known to country music fans. Her songs have charted more than 400 times, recorded by icons such as Ray Charles, Bob Wills, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley. Willie Nelson released an entire album devoted to Walker’s work: (You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker) back in 2006. She has been celebrated for her ability to capture emotional moments in everyday situations that define our lives, such as meeting an old lover, aging gracefully, and dreaming of a better future.
Grey DeLisle, a longtime admirer of Cindy Walker, is best known for her voice acting work, but she’s also a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter. With her own deep roots in music, DeLisle recognizes the significance of Walker’s legacy as…

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Alice Di Micele – Reverse the Flow (2025)

Filed Under: americana, folk-rock by exy — 1 Comment
October 15, 2025

Well, unless you are an aficionado, it would not be surprising if you had never heard of Alice di Micele. Reverse the Flow is her 18th album in a career going back nearly 40 years. Di Micele, who lives in Oregon, appears not to have particularly sought commercial success and her touring schedule has hardly touched these shores, yet her fan base has developed over the years based on her fine songwriting and her exceptional voice, a five-octave instrument that adds emotion and variety to many of her songs. She is typically categorised as folk/americana, predicated on her lyrical themes (anti-establishment, nature, the modern world, LGBTQ etc) but her vocal styling is so diverse that it is often wrapped in jazz or blues instrumentation, always empathetically surrounded…

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Will Rainier – Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em (2025)

Filed Under: americana by exy — 1 Comment
October 15, 2025

Without wishing to venture into the dodgy world of American stereotyping, particularly at this moment in its history, it may be fair to say that hanging around in bars is a popular pastime for many. Seattle-based Will Rainier happily adds himself to that number, but for him, a long-established singer-songwriter well known in his locale, this labour of love is also homework —a source of inspiration for his music.
For his third solo album, Smoke ‘Em If You Got ’Em, Rainier taps into this bottomless well of human existence to write about these strange and (sometimes) wonderful creatures. Some are real, others imagined, but Rainier paints these pictures with a sympathetic gaze accompanied by a dizzying range of instrumental…

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Larkin Poe – Bloom + An Acoustic Companion, Vol. II (2025)

Filed Under: americana, rock by exy — 1 Comment
October 11, 2025

Following up their 2024 Grammy-winning Blood Harmony, the southern rock/blues/roots sister duo Larkin Poe brings us, Bloom, with all songs a collaboration between Megan and Rebecca Lowell and their co-producer Tyler Bryant.
The duo, backed again by their touring bassist and drummer, Tarka Layman and Caleb Crosby, respectively, have Bryant (bass, electric guitar, 12-string guitar), Michael Webb (B3), and Eleonore Denig (strings) joining them in the studio. It’s an album about celebrating individuality, standing tall amidst the noise, and being true to oneself rather than bending to expectations. For this high-energy band that burns up stages, the lyrics are often secondary, but the duo strives to put more emphasis on…

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