Category: folk


This legendary solo performance, originally captured for broadcast on the King Biscuit Flower Hour, stands as a testament to David Crosby’s indomitable spirit and unparalleled artistry. Emerging from a dark chapter following his time in prison, Crosby delivers a profoundly moving and musically rich experience that resonates deeply with fans. Blending his soulful solo work with timeless CSNY classics, this concert not only marks his triumphant return but also chronicles his journey from the brink of despair to a resurgence of creative brilliance. It’s a rare and unforgettable glimpse into the heart of a true music legend.
The album captures a concert from 1989, marking a period of Crosby’s creative resurgence after a difficult time.

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In 2021, Emily Frantz and Andrew Martin released their exquisite, self-titled, debut album, appearing as Watchhouse, after more than a decade of making music as Mandolin Orange. On their new album, Rituals, the duo weave their rich vocals through crystal clear layers of instrumentation, producing in the mosaic of their music the swirling patterns of familiar rituals that shape and sustain life and love. Like such rituals, Watchhouse’s emotionally resonant intimate songs brings deep comfort.
Slowly circling notes of Marlin’s electric tenor guitar introduce “Shape,” introducing the song’s melodic line that’s picked up by fiddles, piano and Frantz’s and Marlin’s vocals. The swirling instrumental variations on the song’s sonic theme evoke the eternal recurrence of the same…

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Born in Birmingham and now based on the Isle of Wight, Paul Armfield is both a folk-persuasion singer-songwriter and the owner of a small bookshop in Cowes.
His knowingly titled album, Between the Covers, subtitled 9 Songs for Bibliophiles, combines his two passions with a mix of originals and covers about books and reading. He’s accompanied by jazz musicians Uwe Schenk on keys, drummer Tortsen Krill, violinist Mari Person and Max Braun (also producer) and Jo Ambros contributing guitars and organ on different tracks.
It’s one of the four covers that turn the first page, a rhythmically shuffling, vocally echoing, muted piano, skittering drums and distorted tremolo guitar take on Willie Dixon’s blues…

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Following on from the Second Language’s label recent re-emergence out of semi-hibernation, with The Declining Winter’s still-sublime Last April, comes a return-within-a-return from visual artist and onetime pastoral-psych legend Mark Fry. Having previously brought 2011’s baroque-tinged I Lived in the Trees (with backing assistance from The A. Lords) and 2014’s soothingly lush South Wind, Clear Sky to the 2L catalogue, after a decade or so’s gap arrives the meta-anointed Not On the Radar.
Although a long-time coming, this is far from being a laboured long-player. Recorded in loose yet finessed fashion in his Normandy painting studio, with integral multi-instrumentalist input from returning accomplices…

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The CD contains ten covers of 78-era songs by artists such as Luther Dickinson, Eden & John’s East River String Band w/ R.Crumb, William Tyler, Muireann Bradley, Gwenifer Raymond, Michael Hurley and more. Eight of the ten songs were recorded specifically for the project.
We’ve had vinyl, CD, and cassettes all making a “comeback.” So are 78s the next format we’ll all be hankering after. It feels unlikely simply on the grounds of breakability alone. But 78s refuse to go quietly. In the 1960s the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band built a career on recycling the stranger corners of 1920s and 30s Jazz and Dance Band tunes. In 2015 some of these were compiled in a CD ‘Songs the Bonzo Dog Band Taught Us.’ A quick visit to Bandcamp finds that there have…

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1. Jimmy Reed – Big Boss Man
2. Johnny Cash & The Tennessee Two – Big River
3. The Crickets – Not Fade Away
4. The Olympics – Good Lovin’
5. Bobby Bland – Turn On Your Love Light
6. Tampa Red – It Hurts Me Too
7. Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys – You Win Again
8. Mississippi Sheiks – Sitting On Top of the World
9. Tossi Aaron – I Know You Rider
10. Obray Ramsey – Rain And Snow
11. Judy Collins – Me And My Uncle
12. Cannon’s Jug Stompers – Viola Lee Blues
13. Elizabeth Cotten – Going Down the Road…
14. Marty Robbins – El Paso
15. Jesse Fuller – Beat It On Down the Line

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A lot of tribute/cover albums can often leave you a little underwhelmed and wondering if the artist is just going through the motions or has run out of ideas. Positively Folk Street is most definitely not one of those albums.
You can feel the sincerity and gratitude that Steve Knightley has put into these twelve songs. Six are Bob Dylan covers, and the others are traditional songs that have been sung over the years by numerous artists, but most notably influenced by Martin Carthy.
The songs have been stripped back to Knightley’s distinctive voice and guitar with a little occasional harmonica and cuatro. It has a distinctive busking quality, which from someone…

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Somewhere in the ‘60s, the folk movement and the psychedelic rock scene intersected and a new sound emerged combining mellow acoustic sounds with further-out ideas that broke from folk traditions. This psychedelic folk-rock sound was wide-ranging, from the more straightforward sounds of bands like Fairport Convention and early Jethro Tull to the acid-tripping bliss of communal groups like the Incredible String Band.
The Magic Forest is the second entry in a series of compilations that began with 2022’s Deep in the Woods, again collecting artifacts of enchanted, pastoral psychedelic folk from between 1968 and 1975. Cherry Red’s anthologies generally intersperse obscure acts among the better known artists of the genre or topic they’re focused on,…

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Joku Raja Rakkaudesakin (‘Even Love Should Have Its Limits’) – a phrase the Finnish folk duo of violinist Kukka Lehto and keyboardist Tero Pennanen, aka Pauanne, took as their starting point to musically explore the meaning, history and boundaries of love, in all its shades from light to dark.
Featuring an impressive array of guest musicians, this album is far more robust and wide-ranging than you might expect, from the thumping folk rock of ‘Pelkkä Persevä Neitsyt’ to the beautifully orchestrated soundscape of ‘Älä Mene Heilani Heikolle Jäälle’. The wonderful ‘Karjala’ is a highlight – a rattling, delightfully off-kilter number which seemingly transitions from future-folk dance to shimmering vintage pop.

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Whilst working as a contract sheep shearer across the hill farms of Wales, Tom Jenkins wrote poems inspired by the stories of his fellow workers and the harsh realities of Wales’ industrial and agricultural heritage. Mixing English and Welsh languages, Jenkins has crafted these poems into the collection of 10 songs that make up When the Coal Dust Settled.
‘Wrth I’r llwch go setlo’ kicks off the album with a delicate acoustic arrangement mixing samples of miners’ wives recalling the dark truths about working in the mines with Jenkins’ lilting voice singing the album’s title track in Welsh. Jenkin’s lyricism stands out in the anthemic, upbeat “Built these towns on the crumbs of a breadline” is a sweeping, angry song about…

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Travellers’ songs sung in Scots are the focus of Josie Vallely, a gutsy, Glasgow-based artist performing as Quinie (pronounced “q-why-nee”; “young woman” in the Doric dialect), whose third album acknowledges ancestors watching over her. It includes traditional singers Lizzie Higgins, Jeannie Robertson and Sheila Stewart, whose rawness drones, speaks and soars over these 11 varied tracks, mixing tunes from fiddles, Gaelic sean-nós singing, and canntaireachd (the vocal mimicry of pipe music).
Quinie collected these songs from people using a method that fits the album’s strange, rustic mood: she rode her horse, Maisie, across Argyll (“you pay attention to all your senses, have different conversations with people and connect…

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When she was a child and he a young father, Marc Ribot’s daughter drew a map of a city in deep, rich, vivid blue. When he praised her blue map, she corrected him: It’s not a blue map, but a map of a blue city. That distinction stuck with him and eventually inspired a curious song called “Map of a Blue City.”
Map of a Blue City ruminates on what it means to be lost — the confusion and fear, of course, but also the excitement of so many undreamt-of possibilities. Its history is an odd map of its own, full of false starts, blind alleys, dead ends, and one inconceivable tragedy, all leading to what may be his definitive statement as an instrumentalist, as a songwriter, and even as a singer. While it’s not a singer-songwriter album, it is…

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Suzanne Vega returns with Flying With Angels, her first new studio album in eleven years, produced by longtime collaborator Gerry Leonard. This limited edition deluxe CD bookpack presents the album in an elegant hardbound format, featuring a 36-page booklet filled with exclusive photographs, artwork, and in-depth insights into the creative process behind the music. Included is a bonus 6-track CD of Suzanne’s original demos, offering a rare glimpse into the early stages of songwriting and arrangement for Flying With Angels.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega returns with her first full album of new songs in over a decade. Flying With Angels marks her long-awaited studio comeback-an emotionally rich, lyrically sharp collection produced by longtime…

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On first listen, Safe Travels immediately makes a good impression. It’s an immensely well-crafted follow-up to their 2021 album, Hunter. For those well acquainted with Hunter, that first listen reveals a comforting familiarity, starting with the same style of rustic packaging for the CD, complete with Christina’s hand-printed illustrations, no plastic to be found here. Musically, the couple’s spine-tingling vocal harmonies again overlie arrangements that exploit their expertise on an impressive range of instruments. These two strands combine in a sound that, while familiar, rapidly delivers unexpected treats. Instrument-wise, only the cello, played by Alex on Hunter, doesn’t get a repeat outing. However, its absence is very much offset by John Parker‘s super-sensitive…

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Somewhere in his native South Carolina, the Oregon-based Cuchulain — who makes music under that mononym — met his someone special. Still fresh-faced and young, they stayed up late all summer, getting wasted to college radio: “Rolled in the grass in late July / we watched the dance of the fireflies,” Cuchulain sings over beach music bounce in “King Road,” continuing: “stuck our toes in among the reeds / August came and you led me.”
On his new album Window Seat, each song marks something warm from Cuchulain’s life, like a summer falling in love, a long and happy marriage, love of a child, and a good dog.
This folk-rocker is very specific in his songwriting, which can be risky. A good song strikes a delicate balance between the specific…

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Gold Dust rides a shambling psychedelic vibe in this third full-length, fully realizing the blend of folky jangle, twanging Americana and all-out guitar-spiraling freakery only hinted at in previous albums. The long, multi-parted “An Early Translation of a Later Work” juxtaposes stinging banjo cadences and soaring pop choruses, bass-bumping vamps and airy swirls of vocal counterpoints, as it rolls like a rainbow colored tide for over six minutes.
With his last album, The Late Great Gold Dust, Gold Dust’s Western Mass punker turned cosmic folk artist Stephen Pierce seemed to be trying to turn an ordinary guitar into a sitar, mining a western instrument for the slippery half tones of the psychedelic mainstay. Here in an ambitious…

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“Banjo, harp, drums…what the hell is that?” Those words, spoken by drummer Antonio Sanchez at a concert played by himself, banjoist Béla Fleck, and harpist Edmar Castañeda, the men who made BEATrio, this international group’s debut album. Fleck played with both men previously: He met the Mexican jazz drummer at a tribute to Hindustani percussionist Alla Rakha, and then they played together as a duo in Mexico opening for Dave Matthews. Fleck and the Colombian harpist played a duo in Riverside Park, and performed similarly at 2019’s Big Ears Festival.
After the jams with Sanchez offered real possibility, they reached out to Castañeda and formed a trio. The musicians wrote and improvised together, and in September 2024,…

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…In 2012, Alasdair Roberts and singer Màiri Morrison, who mostly sings in Gaelic, made Urstan, which celebrated a variety of Celtic songcraft. The collaboration went well, but since they’re both busy folk, a follow-up didn’t happen until a third party intervened. Enter Pete Johnston, a Toronto-based jazz bassist and ethnomusicology lecturer. He invited the pair to join him in Nova Scotia, where he grew up, to record some songs that had survived the journey from Scotland to Canada and then a few centuries of isolation.
Sometimes, folk tunes endure because they’re in some way relatable in the present; other times, they last because they connect people to things they’ve lost. Both are true of the 10 songs selected for Remembered in Exile: Songs and Ballads…

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