Brent Cobb is pulling the curtain back on the songwriting that has defined his career on his new acoustic album Live a Song, Write a Memory, Vol. 1.
Recorded at Capricorn Studios, the self-produced album captures every performance live and in a single take, and spans songs from across his catalog, including selections from the Grammy-nominated Shine on Rainy Day, fan favorites from Providence Canyon and No Place Left to Leave, and cuts made famous by other artists. Songs like “Come Home Soon” and “Country Bound” revisit defining moments in Cobb’s journey, while outside cuts like “Tailgate Blues” recorded by Luke Bryan and “Bar, Guitar and a Honky Tonk Crowd” by Whiskey Myers are brought back to the writer’s chair where they began.
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Old Crow Medicine Show release their new record 
Last year, the Red Clay Strays found themselves fully embraced by the country-music establishment, winning the CMA Award for Vocal Group of the Year. Chalk up their Nashville acceptance to the band’s Mobile, Alabama, roots, maybe, or the Southern drawl of chiseled lead singer Brandon Coleman. But on Grateful, the Strays’ third album, they reveal themselves to be not country’s next great group, but a bona fide rock & roll band. And a God-fearing one at that.
The ninth studio album from the alt-rock/folk outfit 
There’s nothing more country than rebelling against country music. Willie Nelson did it. Waylon Jennings did it. And today’s country music is so easy to hate, whether it’s the AI artists flooding the genre, or a new song from Luke Bryan so brain-numbingly awful it gives you an ice cream headache. Still, bitching about country music doesn’t make you a country music outlaw like Nelson or Jennings. What makes you an outlaw is actually doing something about it. For Nashville country singer 
Words from Holy Gardens was already a very emotionally wrought record, featuring as it does Chip Taylor’s home recordings of his responses to aging and in particular to the death of his wife Joan, after more than sixty years of marriage. That already heavy atmosphere surrounding these new songs has become even more laden with emotional impact with the passing of Chip Taylor himself. It’s a combination of events that makes a traditional critical response to the music presented something of an irrelevance. This is a final statement of love, and a final musical statement as well. The recordings couldn’t be more intimate, as Taylor explained the process: “While I was taking care of her (and she was caring for me), I was often sitting at home with my guitar. I play…
On her latest effort, Villain Era, 
Telecaster twang-master 
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.
Steep Canyon Rangers arrive at a moment of renewal and reaffirmation with 
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.
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.
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, 
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.