Americana artist Jenny Reynolds understands what it is like to have too much time on one’s hands yet not enough time to get the things that really need to be done. She will sit aimlessly and listen to the rain on one cut, then bemoan having to wait for the next. That situation resembles what often goes on in our own lives. The particulars may be different, but the paradoxical psychic pain is the same. We want to be able to be still and simultaneously keep on moving, which causes anxiety. Reynold’s lyrics wryly address our existential challenges with a nod to love as the redeemer.
The 11 story songs on Willow & Stone keep things simple. It is mostly with Reynold’s on acoustic guitar (sometimes electric), accompanied by small combos of instrumentalists on…
Category: folk
If every picture tells a story, then perhaps the album cover for The Hanging Stars‘ latest release, Just a Day, is perhaps something of a statement of intent because it features a simple photo of the four current band members standing against a dusty cornflower blue backdrop.
A line-up change at the end of 2024 resulted in a more stripped down version of the band with a quartet of Richard Olson (vocals and guitar), Patrick Ralla (guitar), Paul Milne (bass) and Paulie Cobra (drums) – this being his last recording before a prolonged sabbatical, his live replacement for live tours being Charlie Salvidge who has played previously with the bands TOY, Proper Ornaments, and Great Silkie.
Their sixth proper release in ten years – their…
Tucker Zimmerman‘s final studio album, Dream Me a Dream was completed in 2025 as a collaboration between Zimmerman and Big Potato’s own producer Nick Holton, and was due to be announced when news came of the deaths of Tucker and his wife Marie-Claire at their Liège home. After careful consideration, the label decided to go ahead. “Well, because that’s what Tucker was expecting,” they wrote.
…At 84, Zimmerman was not young, and had decades of sporadically released, underheard music behind him, starting with his Tony Visconti-produced 1968 debut, Ten Songs (which David Bowie listed in Vanity Fair in 2003 as an all-time favourite). Zimmerman’s career never flew but he released some superb singer-songwriter…
It’s always good to see young guitarists coming through and flying the flag for acoustic instrumental music. Miami-based 21-year-old instrumentalist Conor Moore spent time studying jazz but has seemingly found his nook in the American primitive style guitar genre.
Chamber Music is very much a solo effort and has been recorded with the minimum of fuss and frills; there is a pleasing simplicity to this approach, and it leaves Conor nowhere to hide. Thankfully, he’s good for it, with a pretty solid technique and plenty of creativity. That’s not to say the performances are perfect; the rhythm wavers here and there, and Conor is clearly still carving out his own style, but it’s all charming stuff. The cover of Ali Farka Touré’s and Toumani Diabaté’s…
…Alex Amen, at 26 years old, appears like a fresh-faced 1970s James Taylor. He is described by his record label ATO as “an artist untethered from time and place”. Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, he moved to California to attend film school, before dropping out to join a commune. He then spent three and a half years on Vashon, an island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, living an outdoorsy, back-to-nature lifestyle that weighs heavily in his music. As he absorbed his environment and honed his musical skills, he released his first batch of solo recordings, The Zorthian Tapes, in 2024. He now lives between Texas, California and New York, and Sun of Amen is his first full-length album.
‘Diamonds’, the first track, is described as…
On their seventh studio album, These Are the Days That Turn in to Years, Pharis & Jason Romero, following 2022’s Tell ‘Em You Were Gold, channel four years of living, touring, parenting, and banjo-building into their most open-hearted set yet. Tracked in their riverside Horsefly barn, the album feels lived-in and luminous, rich with the stories and small revelations that define their world. This time around, the music launches with a thick bass spine that is impossible not to tap your foot to, as ‘Big Time World’ dances the album into life with an amiable fiddle swing for decorative delight, giving the sense of song being sung with skips, sways and carefree abandonment. ‘Last Cal’l is bedded into a swampy, muddy banjo texture. That bass and fiddle are essential once more on…
A superstar of Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture and the mastermind of the popular band Pharaoh’s Daughter, Basya Schechter returns with her greatest work yet, a gorgeous and sensual musical setting of the Biblical “Song of Songs.” Sung in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Arabic, Spanish, and French, Basya has put her heart and soul into this project and it is evident in every song, solo, and arrangement. Eighteen years in the making, this is a towering achievement by one of the most passionate, sincere, and creative musicians in Jewish music today. Songs of Desire is an utter delight!“
Pharaoh’s Daughter is a genre-bending “world folk-rock” 8 piece ensemble led by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Basya Schechter. Formed in 1995, the band merges Hasidic chants…
The polarizing songs of contemporary troubadour Jesse Welles have always been stubbornly present and blunt. His prolific nature has seen the release of many loose singles and celebrated LPs, landing Welles Grammy nods and placing him amongst some of the more talked-about figures in modern folk. At a time when folk music, in a popular sense, was beginning to sound formulaic, Welles’s scorching political takes and dedication to the mysterious songwriters that came before him quickly separated him from a burgeoning scene. Not that Welles’s music is some innovative leap, but it has become the center point of controversy within folk music for some years now, and the artist seems hellbent on getting his point across, uploading acoustic vignettes to…
The imagery New Mexico banjoist Johnny Bell throws up on his first fully composed solo banjo album, Mountain States, is often along the lines of slow-moving, sun-scorched skylines, or a scorpion in a desert with its tail quivering. There is an element of unease and an underlying gravity running through this music that is a far cry from a more ambient style of country banjo music, like that of Andrew Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure, for example; something also reflected in the album artwork in which Daniel McCoy Jr. (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi) renders New Mexico’s Diablo Canyon in surreal, psychedelic colour, a landscape at once familiar and alien.
A chunk of this is down to co-producer Andrew Weathers’ direction and decision to mic…
…Originally shelved by his label in 2001, this 21-track record has finally seen an official release.
The Suicide Handbook is Ryan Adams’ most elusive and mythic recordings. The album is a raw and intimate collection of songs that captures the songwriter at his most unguarded. Recorded at the beginning of his solo career and long circulating only through bootlegs, the album has earned a legendary status among die-hard fans and fans of the Americana genre alike for its stark stripped-back beauty.
Acoustic arrangements and hushed, late-night vocals, these songs feel like private confessions set to tape. Adams leans into themes of heartbreak, isolation, and emotional vulnerability, delivering recordings that are as fragile…
…In addition to a new remaster of the original album, this edition includes 13 previously unissued bonus tracks including demos, alternate takes, and outtakes from the album sessions.
After The Beau Brummels dissolved in 1968 following their swan song, Bradley’s Barn, it was doubtful that we’d ever hear from the band again, despite their individual and collective brilliance. The group did somehow reunite in 1975, however, for this fine and somewhat understated album. The band’s weaving of folk, country, and pop stylings hadn’t really changed that much from their prime in the mid- to late ’60s.
Ron Elliot has several superb songs on here, notably “Tennessee Walker” and the excellent album closer, “Today by Day,” which is sung by…
Heretics & Heritage is the fourth album from Leeds-based Lewis Pugh, combining both bluegrass and traditional folk/roots influences. Pugh himself plays banjo, guitar, snare drum and double bass, in addition to lead vocals, and all but two songs are self-penned.
The album lineup includes two members of north-east bluegrass band The Often Herd, in Evan Davies on mandolin, and Niles Krieger on fiddle. The opening track, ‘Big Stone Lifter’, is an up-tempo bluegrass number, with pedal steel courtesy of Stephen Hicken Jr., an addition to the usual bluegrass lineup including the aforesaid mandolin, fiddle and banjo. Indeed, the pedal steel is a very effective addition to the sonic mix, providing a unifying thread through much of the album.
Ramshackle Swedish folk, medieval jam sessions, home-spun hymns recorded straight to tape, and albums named after revolutionary communist bands: The world of Gustaf Dicksson’s musical project Blod may seem unbearably esoteric. But a little context helps; Dicksson is a spiritual descendant of Swedish Progg movement of the 1960s and ’70s — not to be confused with prog rock, it was a left-wing, anti-commercial music movement that encompassed a wide range of styles, from psych-rock bands to nationally beloved singer-songwriters. Blod is indebted to the mossier, more experimental ends of the movement, including bands like Träd, Gräs & Stenar. This is the anti-capitalist, DIY heritage which Discreet Music — the record store and label…
Sunflower is the debut album of German/British artist Paul Holland. It features a number of very enjoyable characteristics, from West Coast soft rock to out-and-out folk, via some quite interesting world music. Above all, it has a very relaxed and personal feel to it, making it the perfect sound for relaxing in the sunshine.
It opens with a rocky number, ‘Clouds of Haze’, which jogs along very nicely indeed, with a live feel about it. The track explores the on/off nature of some relationships and certainly encourages the listener to explore the rest of the album, which tends to mellow out as it goes along.
It’s followed by a slower, jazzier track, ‘Feels Right’, which undoubtedly highlights his ability as an astute, talented songwriter.
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.
From the start of her career, Jackie De Shannon was a great singer, with a strong instrument and a fine sense of how to invest her performances with emotion and nuance. However, DeShannon has said more than once that Liberty, the label that she was signed to through the 1960s, was more interested in her as a songwriter than a performer (she’d already penned a hit for Brenda Lee, “Alone With You”). So it was a real paradox that when she recorded her first LP in 1963, Liberty insisted that she record a set of covers rather than her own material. (The album included three tracks by Bob Dylan, only months after the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, though the label turned down her suggestion to cut a full album of his work.) DeShannon’s debut was…
Bella White blends rustic country melodies with thoughtful introspection on her hypnotic third album, 2026’s A Sign in the Weather. Recorded in the Canadian-born singer’s adopted home of New Orleans, the album finds White backed by her producer/guitarist/percussionist Ross Farbe with a core rhythm section of drummer Sam Gelband and bassist Gina Leslie. Also contributing at various times are fiddle player Patrick M’Gonigle, pedal steel guitarist Nicholai Shveitser, pianist Duncan Troast, guitarist Nick Corson, and singer Maddy Kirgo. Perhaps even more than on 2023’s Among Other Things, here White captures an intimate and homespun vibe. While that might be a nice side effect of having recorded the album at a friend’s historic shotgun-style house,…
Originally from Northern California, singer and songwriter Haylie Davis dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles in 2019 to focus on music. Her affection for lyricists like Gram Parsons and Joni Mitchell as well as the soft, warm sounds of ’70s singer/songwriters and the Laurel Canyon movement soon resulted in collaborations with acts like Drugdealer, Sylvie, and Sam Burton under the solo moniker Lady Apple Tree. She eventually left that persona behind and used her own name to record her solo debut album with associates including Burton. The resulting Wandering Star was tracked partly at Los Angeles’ famed Valentine Recording Studios (Bing Crosby, the Beach Boys, Lana Del Rey) and partly at Love Magnet, the Highland Park garage studio of…
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…
Leeroy Stagger, born and raised in rural Vancouver Island before moving to southern Alberta, is a prolific artist. Pilgrimage is his thirteenth studio album, having started with Beautiful South in 2005. It is a departure from his previous work, which could be broadly described as electric guitar-based pop, although, of course, this doesn’t fully do it justice. Many of his earlier songs feature Beatles-style melodies, but slide and steel guitar are also heard at times, and there is enough of a twang to firmly place it in the americana camp. However, Stagger’s first bands played punk, with him citing The Clash as an influence, and you also hear rough-edged rock’n’roll on some tracks.
2024’s 3 AM Revelations reminds you strongly of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Stagger…