This may be Willie Nelson’s 79th solo studio album, and his 156th in all, but despite such prodigious and prolific writing, the Red Headed Stranger is still a minimalist in his 93rd year. Case in point: Dream Chaser’s 10 tracks clock in at half an hour, and they’re each as astute, funny and affecting as ever.
Title song and album opener “Dream Chaser” lasoos Bobby Tomberlin into the very well-oiled Cannon-Nelson writing team, for a sweet bout of lossless reflection, while “Fly Away”, penned by Cannon and Bobby Whitlock, is a sweet, spare heart-breaker. The more intimate, gravelly vocal of “We’d Make a Good Movie”, with it’s sad, witty chorus – classic Willie – sits well with his guitar Trigger’s grace notes, and his punctuations and runs throughout the whole set are as deft and as…
Category: americana
Steep Canyon Rangers arrive at a moment of renewal and reaffirmation with Next Act, their 15th studio album. The record represents a conscious tightening of focus: a return to the bluegrass foundations that first bound the band together, approached with the confidence and emotional range earned through years of collective evolution. It is an affirmation that bluegrass still contains endless expressive possibility. Next Act finds the Rangers sounding deeply at home in their own musical language, drawing strength from tradition while continuing to write new chapters within it.
Formed in North Carolina and shaped equally by the Appalachian Mountains and the Piedmont, Steep Canyon Rangers have long occupied a singular space in American roots music.
The Deslondes are a five-piece group from New Orleans, Louisiana. The band splits up songwriting and lead vocal duties among its five members, continuing its democratic ethos and musical versatility.
Now, with their latest record, Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1, the band continues to build on their inventive take on New Orleans country and R&B by covering some of their favorite songs that have inspired their sound and love of music. Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 finds the band covering select songs from artist such as Swamp Dogg, Johnny Cash, Pat Reedy and Hurricane Smith but Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 is the sound of a band that understands the history of American music, while embracing their own contemporary approach.
Since his last record, Ben Chapman got married and had a kid, so his perspective as a songwriter has naturally pivoted to his new role in the world. And while his music is still rooted in an inspired mix of country guitar picking and honky-tonk funk, lyrically, Feet On Fire travels into new territory for Chapman as he searches for stability after a life lived on the road. That new direction is laid out on the opening track, “Everything’s Different,” with an organ leading the way before Chapman’s deep, distinctive Southern drawl kicks in.
“Out in the Country” is a laid-back, delicately strummed ode to carefree living outside the city that would have fit nicely alongside any of the tracks on his first two records. Lyrically, it’s not treading any new ground,…
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner. On his second album, Birds of Paradise, the Florida-born, Louisiana-based songwriter is accompanied by MJ Lenderman on drums, occasional guitar, and backing vocals, which helps Dollbaum’s rootsy, heartland rock feel part of a larger conversation in modern indie music, and his lyrics about “rambling through the pines” and “driving through the early morning” help it fit squarely into our most immediate associations with Americana as a genre and aesthetic.
Formed in Brooklyn at the end of 2006, but now based in North Carolina, Yarn tend to lean towards the southern rock element of americana. The band started with a weekly Monday night residency at Kenny’s Castaways on Bleecker Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, a place that previously hosted up-and-coming local acts such as Patti Smith, the New York Dolls, and Bruce Springsteen.
Although it has changed at times during the band’s 20-year existence, Yarn’s line-up is, band founding member, songwriter, lead vocalist and guitarist Blake Christiana (also co-producer), a rhythm section of bass player Rick Bugel and Robert Bonhomme on drums and, completing the line-up is Andy Thomas on lead guitar and vocals.
Saturday Night Sermon was recorded at…
Mountain of Youth – the moniker for Hunter Morris’ latest project – mines a slew of classic influences from ‘90s lo-fi rock to folk and Americana on his debut, making for a mix that manages to sound musically nostalgic but with enough of a contemporary feel that it’s not wasting time wallowing in the past.
That doesn’t necessarily pertain to the characters that populate Nowhere, NW, though. “Atomic Days” opens the album with whistling and a steady 4/4 drum beat, before Morris jumps in with lyrics about an aging couple cycling through thoughts of “what if” looking at where they are in life right now. And while the song could just as easily have been a ballad, Morris’ decision to opt for a mid-tempo rock vibe creates a far more…
“I got a feelin’ this party’s just about to begin” sings Americana singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham in his world-weary, gravelly voice as a fiddle saws behind him chased by rocking piano chords. And on this, his sixth studio platter, there’s plenty of raw, tough, country rocking to back up that exhortation. Bingham emerged from semi-obscurity to practically household name status when in 2009 he provided the Oscar, Golden Globe and Critic’s Choice winning “The Weary Kind” tune for the critically acclaimed film Crazy Heart. That trifecta is pretty far in the rearview mirror these days, but Bingham never stopped working, delivering gutsy, unvarnished albums (now on his own Axster/Bingham imprint) overflowing with soulful sounds mixed into country, folk, rock…
Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…
Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…
49 Winchester the six-piece outfit from southwest Virginia release Change of Plans. The record features 10 tracks, nine of which were written by Gibson, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist. The title is apt for a band that, were it not for the blend of folk, soul, and country that define 49 Winchester, would be unrecognizable from the group that recorded Leavin’ This Holler.
“Each record we’ve made has been a distinct chapter in our life,” Gibson tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve felt it kind of level up, up, and up. I think that this jump is more drastic than it has ever been from album to album. The big, overarching theme of this record is how much our lives have changed since we started this band. We’ve got families. We’re getting married.
Cowboy Junkies release Open to Beauty, a transparent yellow 3-LP and 2 CD collection of songs from their 21st century albums to date. This ‘Best Of’ set revisits selected tracks from albums Open, One Soul Now, Early 21st Century Blues, At The End of Paths Taken, Renmin Park, Demons, Sing In My Meadow, The Wilderness, All That Reckoning, Songs of the Recollection, and Such Ferocious Beauty.
Speaking about the new collection, Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins said: “We are now 25 years into this century, the beginning of which saw us leave the world of major labels and return to making music as an independent band. We figured this was as good a time as any to look back, reassess, and reflect on the music…
It’s no knock on SUSS’s excellent music to admire the strategy behind their success. Their first savvy move was to embrace the kind of pat labeling that many artists try to avoid. Self-branding as “ambient country,” they made the tradition of diffusing American roots music through a new-age filter sound sexy and modern and algorithmic. They played to the playlists and got results, and were branded as pioneers in the process.
SUSS expanded their brand under the rubric Across the Horizon, which consists of a podcast; a compilation series featuring fellow travelers like Mark Nelson of Pan American, William Tyler, Marisa Anderson, and Chuck Johnson; and now a revolving all-star jam at the Big Ears Festival, a booking that’d be a feather in any upscale…
Jobi Riccio knows that while a quiet heart-to-heart can solve many problems, sometimes the heart needs a giant, all-caps billboard, especially when the world around that massive sign gets louder by the day. As each new track on her new album Face the Feeling (Yep Roc Records) unveils, Riccio faces another inescapable emotion as if it were a billboard screaming into view as she hurtles down the highway. And rather than turn away from their challenge, Riccio faces those uncomfortable moments with the thrill of self-discovery, reveling in growth and change as facts of life.
Throughout Face the Feeling, Riccio finds masterful balance between extremes, indulging in the light and the dark, the subtle and the direct, the ecstatic highs and the mournful lows.
“Look out for one another, watch your drinks, respect each other.” It seems simple, but in such fraught times Emily Nenni is keeping an eye on her people. In her world, the dancefloor is a sacred space where everyone is welcome. The Nashville-based Californian has been releasing music since 2018, filtering the present through the honky-tonk of yesteryear. Movin’ Shoes is her fourth album and second collaboration with producer John James Tourville (the Deslondes) who also helmed her 2024 standout Drive & Cry.
Like that album, Movin’ Shoes has a vintage flavor and the type of classy live arrangements that were de rigueur in the studio system of the ’60s and ’70s, but are now the domain of niche specialists. Too often, artists miss the point…
Fifty years after leaving Oklahoma to chase a dream in Nashville, Vince Gill delivers one of the most personal and rewarding projects of his career with the 50 Years From Home series. Rather than simply revisiting past glories, Gill uses this ambitious sequence of EPs to reflect on memory, aging, friendship, heartbreak, faith, and the long emotional road that comes with a lifetime in music.
Spread across multiple releases, the series feels less like a conventional album rollout and more like an ongoing musical autobiography. Each EP carries its own mood and identity while remaining connected through Gill’s unmistakable warmth, elegant songwriting, and deeply human storytelling. The production stays understated throughout, allowing the emotional…
After a twenty-year spell away from the genre, Canadian Rae Spoon returns to their formative years with Assigned Country Singer at Birth, their thirteenth album.
Born in Calgary in 1981, the non-binary singer and writer wrote their first song as a twelve-year-old, basing it on the religion they had grown up with but subsequently finding a strong connection with country music. This dissipated as Rae Spoon became compromised and threatened by issues of gender, race and sexuality within that genre, but they tackle these in the first song written for the new record, ‘Country Music Breaks My Heart’: “Well we fit and we fit just fine / And we’re just singing to stay alive / Cause there’s more of us than them / We’re the ones they say just don’t fit in.”
…Born in Montana, Kiki Cavazos ran away at 16 to Alaska before heading south to Mexico. Yet this has nothing to do with how she sings of a fate wherein facts have no face and pathos is all there is.
We’re believing Cavazos’ role as a troubadour due to her performance — not her story. Granted, Cavazos has traveled the country like a Guthrie protégé and thus is “authentic”. Yet authenticity is not verisimilitude; this is to say Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a middle-class New Yorker born to Lithuanian Jewish parents, who made you fall for his cowpoke drawl and accoutrements. Put differently, it is through Cavazos’ performances that her past is illuminated.
Therefore, the biography of the artist would fall apart without conviction—in fact, what…
Josiah Leming, the man who goes by the stage moniker of Josiah and the Bonnevilles, has been honing his craft since a young age: he learnt to play the piano at eight and wrote his first song aged 13, but it was only with 2023’s Endurance that it felt like people started to sit up and take notice of him. That recognition led to a sold-out tour and his Grand Ole Opry debut in 2024, then came the signing to the prestigious Rounder Records, which is releasing his follow-up album, As Is. There was no shortage of material for the album, as the final 10 tracks were honed down from almost 100 that he had written with impressive collaborators like Natalie Hemby and Joel Little.
“I’ve been staying out / And off the internet / Working on the bike / I ain’t finished yet,”…
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and trauma, even as those tears contain within themselves the faint light of redemption and hope.
The album opens with the prowling, growling rocker “Rattlesnake Preacher,” full of screaming lead guitars, squealing fiddles, and McBryde’s soaring vocals. The song captures perfectly the defiant tone of a fundamentalist preacher whose message about the love of Jesus is cloaked in a narrow hellfire and damnation vision of salvation. The echoing psychedelic…