…Remastered from the original tapes, this album includes four outtakes rescued from damaged session tapes.
By 1977, Bluegrass was arriving at a crossroads. Questions about whether to stay in a strict acoustic framework or to push the boundaries and include non-traditional instruments like drums, pedal steel, and electric instruments. This is where the short-lived group Boone Creek took up the mantle of experimentation and laid the foundation for what would become “Newgrass.”
Featuring future giants Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, Wes Golding, and Terry Baucom, Boone Creek was willing to push further than many of their contemporaries. Listening to it today, it is easy to hear the seeds of ideas that would…
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It is true that the number of artists covering that currently popular ground between Americana and pop/rock. Yet the key there is how distinctive their music is – whether they separate themselves from the rest and whether they come up with enough individual elements to separate themselves from the rest. A hard task that gets even harder if you go the independent (self-releasing) way.
Lynn Blakey was not a name that gained a great deal of traction commercially but she was an influential figure in the indie rock and alt-country scene in her home state of North Carolina where she DJ’d on college radio in the early ’80s; this was before forming Oh Ok in Athens Georgia with Michel Stipe’s sister Lynda (driven by the inspiration of seeing REM at a small local gig). She collaborated with others such as guitarist Mitch Easter in The Royal Opposition and guitarist Michael Chumbris in Glory Fountain, but her most well-known group experience was with Tres Chicas, a band formed in the late ’90s in Raleigh, NC, with Blakey, Caitlin Cary (from Whiskeytown) and Tonya Lamm (from Hazeldine). The group sang together for a few years before releasing Sweetwater in…
10 years ago, Madrid native 
The title of Willow Avalon’s new album, Pink Pocket Pistol, suggests she wants to have it both ways. She has a soft, feminine side as indicated by the color and small size of her gun.
Celebrating 25 years, 
Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Margo Price release a protest mixtape, 
The late singer-songwriter revisits his roots on this 2010 set-his first unedited concert recording-from the Chicago venue where he got his start as a young musician.
After almost a decade away from releasing new albums, Tift Merritt returns with a collection of songs that feels both intimate and expansive. What has remained is Merrit’s timeless approach to music: her work feels like it could have been released in any of the last six decades; songs are cleverly crafted with instrumentation used to help frame Merrit’s voice, which remains full of beauty, clarity and power. Thematically, Sugar looks for meaning in the quieter places of life: conversations, acts of care, domestic labour, memory, kindness and the difficulty of remaining open-hearted in a world that often rewards the opposite. Across eleven songs, Merritt repeatedly returns to the idea that what sustains us is rarely what attracts the most attention.
Thanks to steady gigging around his adopted hometown of Chicago, paired with a beautiful, hypnotic voice, Andrew Sa has been dubbed Chicago’s premier queer country crooner. His debut, American Rough, may just make that title national. With a voice that seems to channel Roy Orbison, you can also hear traces of everyone from Chris Isaak to the late Raul Malo in Sa’s swooning vocals. American Rough is a romantic’s record, delivering songs about falling in love and all of the emotions tied to it, vacillating from euphoria to sadness, all set against a beautiful folk-country soundscape.
For more than a decade, 
Each American Aquarium album is best viewed as a slice of BJ Barham’s life. The frontman writes in the moment, and his music is a distillation of the world as he sees it, and the life he has carved for himself along with his wife, Rachael, and their 8-year-old-daughter, Pearl, in the increasingly-suburbanized Wendell, NC, a half hour east of Raleigh. In the two years since the last Aquarium record, as he wrote and recorded what became New Ways to Lose, Barham has been thriving.
Whether some genres or sub-genres are supposed to go together or not is often a moot point, and in more cases or not, depends on whether a band or an artist have the ability and inventiveness to be able to make a musical combination that actually works.
Kristina Stykos is a songwriter, musician, recording engineer and producer who has been a torchbearer for the music of the Green Mountain State since the ’80s. Her Pepperbox Studio is tucked away off-grid and off the beaten track at the base of Mount Abraham in Lincoln, Vermont. Stykos has released six albums under her own name, along with a collaboration with the recently deceased Montanan pianist and composer Philip Aaberg. Her Thunder Ridge Records roster, whilst not full of household names, has showcased the skills of many talented Vermonters. Stykos is also one half of The Cousins Project, the other being Steve Mayone. Up until twenty years ago, they were unaware of each other’s existence. All that changed when Stykos attended a Bow Thayer and…