This week, states that most people never imagined could ever turn blue did just that, as part of a massive Democratic sweep in the midterm elections. Most people, that is, except for the residents actually living in them. Texas, Kansas, Iowa, possibly even Mississippi. No place is a monolith, and our country is a rich, vibrant, and diverse place in every corner, where real people rarely line up with the stereotypes we thrust upon them. They may not all be Instagram-glamorous, but they believe in meaningful work, family (chosen, born or both), and a good joke. They love hard, they struggle, and they get shit done.
That’s who Willi Carlisle, the Kansas-born and Arkansas-residing country songwriter, is singing about on his new Tyler Childers-produced…
Category: folk
Of the many elements Blair Dunlop has got right with What Still Survives, the award-winning British singer songwriters sixth full-length album, is the backbone of the sound. Bob Dylan was trying to describe something like this back in 1966 when he settled, aptly, on the phrase ‘wild mercury’. I cannot hope to improve upon that description. Still, I will, all the same, say that, aided by Ian Grimble on production duties, the combination of acoustic and electric guitars, drums and bass, with frequent embellishments by Hammond organ, pedal steel and violins, pretty much lays out a musical toolkit that can conjure the widest possible range of emotional responses. Blair has put himself and his latest batch of original songs, mostly written solo with the odd co-credit to…
The templates and aesthetic he draws from on his third album are about as old as the concept of popular music itself, channelling the canyons around Los Angeles, top pickers in 1960s Nashville studios, and smoke-filled Greenwich Village folk clubs. Assisted on some tracks by co-producer Jonathan Wilson, who knows a thing or two himself about reviving the glory days of West Coast swoon, the LA-based Palestinian–American musician reaches for new levels of emotional resonance with an authority that instantly shuts down claims of derivative recycling.
Granted, we’ve been here before: Burton’s deceptively simple songs are ultimately folk songs, occasionally tinged with country, at times channelled through classic rock…
While Jonathan Something (aka Jonathan Searles) has not gone full Nashville on his latest effort, One More Lonesome Cowboy Song, there is no mistaking the cosmic country influences spread across the record.
Beyond the cowboy-centric title and album art, his latest draws on folks like Gram Parsons and features impressive acoustic guitar fingerpicking throughout the seven songs. There have been elements of the genre in his past music, but One More Lonesome Cowboy Song is a complete musical departure from his last record, which was steeped in ’80s pop synthesizers, as well as other dives into garage rock and sample-heavy soul.
This record opens on “Country Rose,” sounding a bit like Harry Nilsson wielding an acoustic…
The Felice Brothers is celebrated in the album Felice County Fair, a tribute album exploring and reimagining the band’s back catalogue, released via Free Flight Records/Sun Mountain Records. “A couple of years ago, a friend and advocate of the band named Brandy Schultz called us with a vision to create a tribute record to our band and wanted to ask for our blessing,” comments Ian Felice in a note to fans. “Brandy is a uniquely powerful force of nature who usually has the ingredients to make margaritas in a cooler in her car. It’s two years later now, and somehow, by her sheer will and the devotion of many wonderful musicians and producers, her vision has become a reality. The fact that so many artists have contributed to this project simply out of a love for our music…
…The deluxe version of Appalachia includes 6 live tracks recorded at a sold-out show in April 2026 at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.
When it was time to record her new album — the follow-up to 2021’s excellent American Siren — country-folk singer-songwriter Emily Scott Robinson chose to do so at Dreamland Recording Studios, housed in a 130-year-old church sanctuary hidden in the trees outside of Kingston, New York. But the setting and the spiritual center of her work can be found hundreds of miles to the southwest of that location: “Oh, my heart for Appalachia/ Oh, my heart for these blue hills,” Robinson sings in “Appalachia,” the album’s bluegrass-y title track. “Oh, my heart forever captured, beating still.”
Brighton folk-rockers Levellers have been one of Britain’s most enduring and best-loved bands for nearly 40 years. And part of that incredible success has been built on the timeless anthems that comprised their platinum-selling, second album Levelling the Land, which celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2026.
Recorded at Ridge Farm studios in Surrey over the summer of 1991, it was produced by Al Scott, who was charged with translating the band’s incendiary live performances into something more refined within the recording environment. Featuring the huge hit singles ‘One Way’, ‘15 Years’ and ‘Far From Home’, Levelling The Land redefined the UK’s musical landscape providing the soundtrack for a society fed up with the twin…
…includes eight previously unheard demo recordings captured solo by Shelley on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in late 2014 before the formal album sessions.
The third solo outing from the spell-casting Kentucky songstress, Over and Even is a breezy, lyrically bold, sonically beautiful soft barrage of bucolic country-folk that evokes Linda Thompson, Joni Mitchell, Vashti Bunyan, and Hem. It would be easy to peg Joan Shelley and crafty six-string co-conspirator Nathan Salsburg as the Bluegrass State’s answer to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, but they lack that duos’ trad-folk stridency and penchant for dust bowl pageantry, and their particular brand of mountain music feels much more rooted in the immigrant-rich…
If you were asked to vote in a poll of the most activist artists in modern popular music or were minded to vote in a poll of the best singer-songwriters or greatest guitarists, it is most likely that you would leave off the name Bruce Cockburn, the Canadian from Ottawa who has flown largely under the radar, despite having possibly been the most awarded singer in Canadian music; many Juno awards for his albums, honorary doctorates from several universities, lifetime achievement awards and a member of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. As an acoustic fingerpicking guitarist, he is almost without peer, as anyone who has listened to his instrumental albums Speechless in 2005 and Crowing Ignites in 2019, or who has seen him perform live, can attest.
Dave Alvin, singer, songwriter, guitarist, producer, author, has touched so many forms of American music that it can be daunting to peg one’s favorite part of his career. Even today, with his psychedelic jam band The Third Mind, he is exploring jazz and early ’60s folk music. Yet the pure Americana audience likely gravitates to his mid-’90s period, when he released two straightforward acoustic folk albums and a third that was close to the same. The first, King of California (1994), a mix of covers and originals, shocked many who had long since labeled Alvin a ferocious rocker.
Four years later came Blackjack David, arguably when Alvin really found his vocal and songwriting chops. In 2000, he won a Grammy for traditional folk songs, Public Domain…
It’s hard to believe that Minneapolis-based blues-roots artist Charlie Parr has now released 20 albums. Parr has risen from a regional treasure influenced by Minneapolis blues greats Dave Ray, “Spider” John Koerner, and Willie Murphy to national and international status, buoyed by his signing to Smithsonian Folkways, one of the most selective imprints, six years ago.
First hailed for his blues-roots fingerpicking guitar, Parr has long since become a fully fledged troubadour with a world-weary voice, a champion of the downtrodden, perhaps best realized on this new folk opera, Rooming House. Parr plays his custom nine-string resonator guitar alongside drummer Dave King (from the recently disbanded The Bad Plus).
It doesn’t seem two years since the last Richard Thompson album – but the man who flew furthest from Fairport Convention while Sandy Denny sadly fell to earth, still turns out quality fare. And this is his best for some while.
He’s still working his way through a Covid backlog of songs and, having then invested in a home studio, now supplies detailed demos to his band, the core of which remains bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome. Engineer James Frazee, who’s worked with Thompson’s son Teddy, earns a co-production credit, though whether this heralds a lengthy Mitchell Froom-like partnership remains to be seen.
A brass section is employed at intervals, evoking memories of I Want to See the Bright…
There are albums that demand your attention and others that seem to invite you to fall into them. Kingfisher, the new album from Northumbrian folk duo The Brothers Gillespie, belongs firmly in the latter category.
Brothers James and Sam Gillespie have created a collection of songs built around acoustic instruments, close harmonies and recurring images of rivers, woods, birds and changing seasons. The result is music that often feels almost meditative: less a collection of individual songs than a place to spend some time.
That atmosphere is established immediately on ‘The Worlds Unfold’. Rolling, plucked guitar sits beneath slightly ethereal harmonies before fiddle and the soft crash of a cymbal gradually…
Jonathan Personne is the solo alias of Jonathan Robert, a Montreal-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and frontman for Sub Pop band Corridor. His fifth album under the alias is a lovely sweet of dreamy psych-pop with Jonathan largely singing in French atop his warm, lush, welcoming arrangements.
Corridor bandleader Jonathan Personne’s solo record Nouveau Monde was one of the must-hear Canadian albums from 2025, and now he’s back with even more new material — Répertoire arrives via Bonsound. Marking his fifth album in seven years, Personne blends dreamy pop with yacht rock textures as he reflects on the highs and lows of being a professional musician and his ever-evolving relationship with music.
Given that Jake Blount’s first EP, Reparations, came out less than ten years ago, his career has been quite the journey. Those early records – Reparations and 2020’s full-length debut Spider Tales saw him re-establish the historical links between old-time music and black, indigenous and queer American culture, mostly through fiddle and banjo tunes – by turns stark and rousing – and haunting traditional songs. Songs like his deeply-felt rendition of ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ and a raucous instrumental re-imagining of ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ saw him feted by the press in the world of American roots music and beyond. His next two albums – The New Faith (2022) and Symbiont (a 2024 collaboration with Mali Obomsawin) – represented a left turn into…
Singer, songwriter, humanitarian, activist, poet, philosopher, artist… as the music legend Labi Siffre prepares to release his first album of new music in 28 years, Demon are making his stellar catalogue available again as vinyl reissues and 3CD sets.
1972-1973 brings together Labi’s third and fourth studio albums – ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’, the follow-up ‘For The Children’ plus a bonus disc of B-sides and rarities originally featured on the now-deleted ’My Song’ box set from 2020. It comes in Deluxe 7”-sized packaging with a reversable front sleeve. ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’ from 1972 is traditionally seen as the album that propelled Labi into the limelight with the UK Top 20 hit ‘It Must Be Love’ – covered to memorable effect by Madness in 1982 where it reached No. 4 in the singles chart.
Released as an exclusive covermount CD with the November 2026 issue of MOJO magazine, The Gold Rush: Neil Young Covered brings together 15 interpretations of songs by one of the most distinctive and influential figures in rock music. A songwriter whose work spans folk, country, hard-edged rock and deeply personal acoustic balladry, Neil Young has spent more than five decades creating music that continues to resonate across generations. This collection celebrates the enduring power of his songwriting through the voices and musical visions of other artists.
Covering Neil Young is no easy task. His songs are often defined by their apparent simplicity, yet beneath their melodies lie emotional subtleties, restless arrangements…
Anytime is a good time for a new John Prine album. Found Dogs was released initially in April in a limited edition run of 2,000 LPs for Record Store Day. ‘Found Dogs’ celebrates the 30th anniversary of Prine’s ‘Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings’ and includes alternate takes, demos, and five unheard original songs gathered from recording sessions from that time.
This album opens with an alternate version of “Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody,” a swaying, New Orleans shuffle riding atop striding boogie-woogie piano with Prine’s growling baritone testifying to a live-and-let-live philosophy inherent in the rock and roll life. Circling fingerpicking lie beneath Prine’s tender vocals on the spacious and atmospheric “All the Way with You (Acoustic Version).”