Sidling up to a posthumous album can be a tricky task, especially if it’s from an artist who’s close to your heart. The temptation to view things through a lens tinted by their passing is tough to resist. But Broken Homes and Gardens, the record completed just weeks before Michael Hurley’s death, could have come from any point in his discography — the last link in the hitherto unbroken chain the maverick troubadour began forging more than 60 years ago.
Hurley — who passed away in April 2025 at age 83 — first found his feet on downtown New York City’s ‘60s underground scene, alongside boundary-bludgeoning outliers like The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs. He spent the ensuing decades quietly becoming the quintessential cult…
Category: folk
…this expanded edition features five previously unreleased demos and alternate takes, along with the never-before-heard track “Hey Ah Nothin’”.
The other bonus material: alternate versions of “Ain’t Hurting Nobody” and “Quit Hollerin at Me,” acoustic versions of “All the Way with You” and “Humidity Built the Snowman,” and a demo version of “Lake Marie.”
John Prine‘s follow-up to his comeback album, The Missing Years, is more of the same in terms of freeing up Prine’s idiosyncratic muse and marrying the result to Howie Epstein’s top-flight production sound. Fans of the early Prine may find that sound over-produced, but the songs never get lost, and with Prine’s typically humorous, off-center view of the world (song titles include…
Tomboy is singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Maia Sharp’s tenth solo album.
The album is a celebration of the true self, personal, and mostly uplifting, rather than mired in the depths of introspection. There’s a rhythmic thread running through the album, with percussion a prominent element on most tracks.
Sharp plays all kinds of guitars, keyboards, and even soprano saxophone, yet this is the first time she’s worked with synths, an OP-1 mini synth that adds new textures to her sound.
As usual, these are well-crafted songs, written from the perspective of a single woman, now four or five years removed from a two-decade marriage, themes of which she explored on her 2021 Mercy Rising and 2023’s…
The young Neal Casal pictured on the front cover of No One Above You (The Early Years 1991-1998) and throughout its companion piece book is not the hirsute countenance of his days with The Chris Robinson Brotherhood or Circles Around the Sun. But there is nevertheless an air of familiarity in the music of the album and the photographic images in its companion piece, evoking the late lamented Casal’s work throughout his career.
The baker’s dozen tracks of this anthology consist of covers juxtaposed with original material that, taken together, bespeak honest acknowledgement of roots, purposely executed as the means to transcend them. For instance, the threads of continuity within Casal’s subsequent work for Ryan Adams’ Cardinals and…
1. Friendship – Betty Ford
2. Case Oats – Bitter Root Lake
3. Eve Adams – Death Valley Forever
4. Horsebath – Hard to Love
5. Souled American – Sorry State
6. Eli Winter – Black Iris On a Burning Quilt
7. Slow Motion Cowboys – Invisible Stars
8. Anna Tivel – Airplane to Nowhere
9. Wednesday – Pick Up That Knife
10. Shrunken Elvis – An Old Outlet
11. Julianna Riolino – Seed
12. Florry – Big Something
13. Sally Anne Morgan – Eye Is the First
14. Jeffrey Martin – Edge of Lost
15. Joseph Decosimo – Glory in the Meetinghouse
London-based vocalist Tereza Catarov’s remarkable debut album Koren was born from video calls with her grandmother, a folk singer who preserves hundreds of traditional songs in her memory. When her grandmother shared a notebook of lyrics left by her own mother and sang some pieces, including personal compositions, Catarov was moved to record these voices and stories. Inspired, she travelled to Romania to capture her grandmother’s voice for the album, ensuring this living treasure’s presence in the project.
Koren masterfully intertwines Romanian and Bulgarian heritage with contemporary jazz, honouring women’s intergenerational struggles through intricate arrangements which envelope Catarov’s intensely powerful vocals, often…
Born in Augusta, Georgia, in the late 1940s to Polish-Lithuanian immigrants, Daniel Antopolsky may have been a lost immortal, but he is not lost now, and he may become an immortal.
AUK readers may already know the story of the friend of Townes van Zandt, who was the first person to hear ‘Pancho and Lefty‘ as it was being written, who saved van Zandt’s life following a drug overdose and who subsequently left the music scene in the ’70s, travelled the world and settled down on a farm near Bordeaux after meeting his soon-to-be wife, French medical student Sylvia Kirsch. This followed his startling re-emergence in 2015, when his debut album, Sweet Lovin’ Music, was released at the age of 67.
And now comes Ballad of the Stable Boy,…
Pittsburgh-based songwriter André Costello released his first album in 2011, and in the intervening years, has clocked up a significant catalogue of music.
Falling into the bracket of indie folk and rock, he has an understated vocal style, half-whispered and half-sung. It provides a gentle, sinuous way of encouraging his music into the subconscious.
Rocky Mountain Low (subtle nod to John Denver, there) is Costello’s latest release, and it feels like he has worked hard on a record that encapsulates the best of his vision. The audiophiles among you will be pleased to note it was recorded to tape, and certainly the sound is rich, warm and natural, and also pleasingly uncluttered. Crafted over six years with producer Anthony LaMarca,…
Rocío Márquez is an established singer, experimentalist and PhD graduate intent on refracting flamenco through a 21st-century lens. Steeped in over three decades worth of performing, recording and reframing the genre, she flounces, skirts swishing, along a fine line between respecting tradition and innovating in ways that have flamenco purists pausing mid-palmas. An electric guitar wig out? A spot of Shakespearian word play? “¿Y por que no?”, figures Márquez, whose clutch of albums include the acclaimed Firmamento (2017), Visto en el Jueves (2019), and Tercer Cielo (2022) – she has also worked on film soundtracks and collaborated with Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler and famed Spanish musician Kiko Veneno.
Ryan Adams marks 25 years of his breakthrough solo debut with a reimagined take on ‘Heartbreaker’. Featuring eleven newly recorded versions of songs from the original 2000 album. With subtle string arrangements and a renewed emotional depth, these reworkings revisit the ache and vulnerability that made the original so enduring.
As Whiskeytown finally ground to a halt in the wake of an astonishing number of personal changes following Faithless Street (coupled with record company problems that kept their final album, Pneumonia, from reaching stores until two years after it was recorded), Ryan Adams ducked into a Nashville studio for two weeks of sessions with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
…On the Road to Findout: Greatest Hits marks Cat Stevens’s first career-spanning compilation, containing tracks across the last six decades. It contains material from his 1967 debut, Matthew & Son (including “I Love My Dog”), and extends all the way to 2023’s King of a Land.
It’s the first time an album will feature both the cream of his work as one of the top British folk songwriters in the ’60s and ’70s, as well as music from his return to popular song styles after decades out of the business following a major spiritual journey.
…The man born Steven Demetre Georgiou in London had an impressive career as one of the more thoughtful and contemplative songwriters of his age, earning critical and commercial…
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…the legendary singer-songwriter’s Archives series continues with its first themed compilation, appropriately entitled Joni’s Jazz. These 61 selections draw from nearly every core album in the Mitchell discography with just a couple of exceptions (Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon) and reflect the breadth of the artist’s immersion into the jazz idiom in all its many varied forms.
Last year, in her liner notes to Archives Volume 4 (1976-1980), Mitchell teased, “People ask me my favorite of my albums, it’s going to be Joni’s Jazz.” It’s not difficult to see why; many of her greatest songs and performances can be found among these 61 tracks. What’s clear, too, is that Mitchell is keen to disrupt conventional notions of…
Hangover Terrace is the 18th album of pure beauty from Canadian Ron Sexsmith. For those unfamiliar with Sexsmith, he is surely one of Canada’s most accomplished singer-songwriters, and Canada is a country that gave us Neil Young, Rufus Wainwright and Joni Mitchel. He has performed with the likes of Chris Martin, been heralded by Elton John and Elvis Costello and had his songs covered by the likes of Rod Stewart, Michael Bublé, K.D. Lang, Emmylou Harris and Feist. How he has eluded huge commercial success is one of the vagaries of the music business, but thankfully for us he hasn’t given up.
Talking about Hangover Terrace, Sexsmith says “One day my band and I were travelling to the London Palladium and we passed…
Meet Hekate, a vocal trio that have already cast a spell over audiences with their chilling and thrilling brew of the powers of darkness mixed with traditional Norwegian dance tunes and songs. At the heart of their music is slåttetralling, a vocal-improvisation tradition perfect for this cauldron of Norwegian tunes infused with spine-tingling sounds from the dark edges.
It’s Hekate’s solid grounding in traditions based on foot-tapping dances such as springar and springleik, fiddle tunes and fragments of ancient psalms, together with their mesmerising vocal qualities, that makes the trio’s vocal improvisations so convincing. They lure us on to an other-worldly dancefloor powered by Hekate (the goddess) herself as she guards the moon…
…featuring live cuts and an alternate version of the song “One to Fall” called… “One to Fall (Again)”.
Willie Watson has always operated on the periphery. Even in the making of his own story. First, he was harmonizing on early versions of “Wagon Wheel” in high school, as a founding member of Old Crow Medicine Show. After he left the band in 2011, he drifted into various projects with The Watkins Family and David Rawlings and Gilian Welch. He even showed up in the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, both on-screen and on the film’s soundtrack, singing “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings.”
As a solo artist, he’s released two albums, both produced by Rawlings and both titled Folk Singer. Comprised of traditional songs and…
Listening to the powerful and joyous declaration that is Billionaire it is almost impossible to believe that Kathleen Edwards ever doubted her peerless station in the American firmament. Edwards ‘break’ from music between 2014 and 2020 is well documented, as are the issues that presaged it. Part of which coalesced around the “pressures of other people’s expectations” and worries about her audience “…no one cares. I’m just not good enough. The only reason I sold two hundred tickets is because Bon Iver fans are coming to see if Justin might show up” (she was in a relationship with Vernon at the time).
These days, thankfully, Edwards is much kinder to herself, viewing her earlier work with a relaxed detachment “… I might check in on…
Listening to Fade Away Blue, Pete Droge’s emotionally stirring latest effort, it’s hard to believe this is the same songwriter who perfectly captured 1990s snark and cynicism with the witty earworm, “If You Don’t Love Me (I’ll Kill Myself)”.
Fade Away Blue, his first solo release in almost 20 years, is an emotionally heavy album, spurred on by Droge’s efforts to reconnect with his birth mother. Sixteen years ago, he started his search only to find an obituary for her. Across 10 songs, the delicately beautiful record soundtracks Droge dealing with the news, but also discovering his surviving relatives, an appreciation for his adoptive parents, coping with his adoptive father’s passing, and his adoptive mother’s declining health, all while contending with a mysterious illness of his own.
“Waiting: More Recordings 1968-1976 can be thought of as a before-and-after follow-up to the Tompkins Square release, Partly On Time: Recordings 1968-1970. For that record we stuck with the mono recordings my high school friend Carter Redd and I made at WDCR radio in Hanover NH in those years.
When Tompkins Square brought up the idea of doing a follow up collection we turned to some even earlier material, five songs Carter and I previously made that were kindred in spirit but more primitively recorded. There had been one more WDCR era song which there wasn’t room for before, and there were two other recordings I made a few years later including one I did with another friend, Bob Stein. All of these were…
Like many great songwriters, Dean Johnson’s voice is universal, even if he’s only writing about what he knows. His music, rooted in country and Americana, sounds uncoupled from any one time or place, even if he’s a Seattleite through and through. On I Hope We Can Still Be Friends, Johnson’s second LP and first for storied indie label Saddle Creek, he’s drawing from the same well as writers like John Prine or Tom Waits, filtering the light of daily life through the grimy windows of a barroom. (In Johnson’s case, it’s the Wallingford tavern he tended for over a decade, absorbing the plights of boozers drowning their sorrows.) Everything is framed through the wreckage of unrequited love: depression (“Painted Smile”), rampant consumption habits (“Carol”), the sinister bliss…
“Alex plays bloody wonderfully,” said the late great John Renbourn, of Pentangle fame, and here’s a new set that proves how right he was.
Alex Roberts is no newcomer – he’s been playing for over two decades and released a dozen albums – so it’s perhaps surprising that he’s not even better known. He’s both a folk revivalist and a singer-songwriter whose work invites comparison with the guitar greats and singer-songwriters of the ’60s folk revival.
The traditional tracks include ‘John Barleycorn’, here treated to a brave, atmospheric and epic new treatment, showing off both his layered guitar work and no-nonsense rough-hewn vocals.
He succeeds equally well on a brooding version of another much-covered song,..