Forty years on, The Jayhawks remain true to their trusted sound. Their lush and patented three-part harmonies and thoughtful, imagery-filled lyrics never go out of style. Their 12th studio album, Sanctuary Park, is a balm for these times. They capture the innocence of teenage years, reflecting from the perspective of adulthood. The opening track, “Keeping Our Heads Above Water,” begins with the line, “under the football lights,” immediately putting the listener in a nostalgic frame of mind. Yet, the upbeat music obscures the theme of resignation heard at the end, “taking all that you have to believe again.” The album’s most riveting track, “Hands on the Wheel,” begins this way in a cappella harmonies, ‘We’ll steal your daddy’s car/Roll down the window…
Category: americana
In his excellent Rough Guide to Country Music, Kurt Wolff devotes a chapter to the Nashville Sound. In his introduction, he charts its emergence back in the late 1950s as: “Goodbye fiddle leads, hayseed routines and nasal voices; hello string sections, background choruses and smooth sophisticated singing. This country-pop blend – or countrypolitan, as it came to be known – worked like a charm, as far as record sales and radio listenership were concerned”.
And he goes on to point out that, despite the scorn from some purists, this gave rise to many beautiful recordings from the likes of Don Gibson and Patsy Cline, and later, Charlie Rich, and even George Jones and Merle Haggard.
It is not an insult, therefore, to see the latest…
…The deluxe edition introduces 2 previously unreleased studio tracks rescued from the original sessions, newly mixed by Stephen Mougin.
On their second effort for Ricky Skaggs’ Ceili label, Del McCoury and his band, the reigning kings of bluegrass (even if Ralph Stanley is the Pope) turn in a another solid, haunting, and even completely astonishing set that features everything from tunes about haunted train rides, biker outlaws who remain focused on their quest unto death, a Richard Thompson tune (“1952 Vincent Black Lightning”), and a blues tune supposedly gleaned from listening to Frank Sinatra, as well as more traditional bluegrass stompers about being high and lonesome, grief, lost love, and hanging out at the barnyard. Right, that sentence was…
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.
Kate Waters knows a thing or two about the healing power of music.
The Texas-based singer-songwriter is a trained music therapist, and her ability to create meaningful songs using an economy of words, but never of emotions, is clearly evident on her aptly titled sophomore release, Some Comfort. The self-produced album features eleven wonderful songs of emotionally charged songwriting that are rooted in resilience and hope, elevated by some splendid melodies and musicianship.
It’s a sturdy collection of songs written over a twenty-year period that, as Waters notes, traces her “journey through different loves, heartbreaks and hopes”. It certainly speaks to her skill as a songwriter and musician that the songs…
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…
Now well into his sixth decade, Michael McDermott keeps on producing records of quality from his home city of Chicago. The eagerly awaited Flowers from the Graveyard features eleven songs written by the artist and played by a well-honed band of collaborators that includes his wife, Heather Lynne Horton, and most of the team who played on his 2022 dual-release Lighthouse On the Shore and East Jesus.
The songs bear many of the hallmarks of a McDermott album and it bristles with opening chords that grab the attention and hold it until the very end. Choruses have an anthemic quality that sounds easy to create but probably isn’t and the overall sense is of a band hitting the open road with a couple of gas stops along…
…Almost a decade ago, when the Minnesota-born Brennan Wedl was a college student living in Boston, she shared vocal duties with bandmates Lea Jaffe and Otto Klammer as a member of the short-lived queercore outfit Dazey and the Scouts, whose 2017 EP Maggot found a new cult fanbase on TikTok in the early 2021. A lot has happened since Dazey and the Scouts amicably disbanded — according to Wedl, they still maintain a “pretty active” group chat. Wedl grew up, moved to Nashville, signed to ANTI-. She amassed a star-studded crew of collaborators, including labelmates MJ Lenderman and Katie Crutchfield, sought-after alt-country and indie rock producer Brad Cook, and grunge revivalist Lindsey Jordan, all of whom have contributed to Wedl’s debut.
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,…
Alex Dupree’s Talking to the Dog arrives with the unassuming confidence of a record that trusts language, melody, and lived-in performance to carry equal philosophical weight. The album’s guiding phrase, drawn from Hank Williams’ quip that writing a song is “just talking to the dog,” becomes less a playful anecdote and more a working theory of communication itself. In Dupree’s hands, that idea stretches beyond its homespun origins into something expansive: songwriting as a form of address that may or may not be understood but insists on being spoken anyway.
“New Meaning” opens and sets the tone with understated assurance. Dupree’s voice moves through a warm arrangement shaped by Aaron Stern on bass and Stephen Patterson on…