Five decades into a career that has seen Ed Snodderly as a songwriter, performer, actor, and owner of the legendary Down Home club in East Tennessee, comes perhaps his most personal release to date. ES Pearl Presents Baggage Flies Free not only continues the family name; his grandma was Pearlie Bell, his mom Willie Pearl, but offers a glimpse into his life in East Tennessee. Surrounded by a stellar cast that includes Tim O’Brien, Amythyst Kiah, Verlon Thompson and Brother Boy Eugene Wolf, the mainly acoustic songs still have a contemporary feel thanks to some pin-sharp production.
The opener, ‘Coming Down This Road’, picks up pace as it travels, leading into the melodic ‘Willow Green’, which sees Snodderly admiring…
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The colorful combination of names on this collaboration is indicative of the vibrant music they create together. Americana singer/songwriter 
When 
Trever M. Keith, frontman for the Southern California pop-punk band Face to Face, has released an homage to country music, We Drank from a Poisoned Well. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.
Matt Jones and The Bobs formed way back in 2011 while they were studying at Radford University, all sharing a love of americana, roots, and classic rock. Their debut album Brother’s Hymn was released in 2014 to much local acclaim. It highlighted all the issues about growing up in small-town Southwest Virginia from the view of young men of a certain age. However, despite paying their dues, as with many college bands, they broke up in 2015 to concentrate on other pursuits.
…featuring newly unearthed bonus tracks and unheard demos.
…Remastered from the original tapes, this album includes four outtakes rescued from damaged session tapes.
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.