Cowboy Junkies release Open to Beauty, a transparent yellow 3-LP and 2 CD collection of songs from their 21st century albums to date. This ‘Best Of’ set revisits selected tracks from albums Open, One Soul Now, Early 21st Century Blues, At The End of Paths Taken, Renmin Park, Demons, Sing In My Meadow, The Wilderness, All That Reckoning, Songs of the Recollection, and Such Ferocious Beauty.
Speaking about the new collection, Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins said: “We are now 25 years into this century, the beginning of which saw us leave the world of major labels and return to making music as an independent band. We figured this was as good a time as any to look back, reassess, and reflect on the music…
Category: folk
Taking the title to musical heart (the album cover pointedly having him sporting different looks), after two albums mining country, reunited with producer David Mansfield who contributes, among other things, guitars, pedal steel, lap steel, celesta and Ondes martenot, alongside drummer Charley Drayton, bassist Tony Scherr and keyboard player Andy Burton, Teddy Thompson’s latest album, Never Be the Same, digs back into rockier seams for his first album of original material since 2020 and, with influences ranging from Crowded House and The Beatles to his father Richard Thompson, songs exploring love, change and the passage of time.
With John Grant on synthesizers, there are, though, still country ballad traces to album opener ‘Come Back’ with its major chords and…
Fiddle player Rowan Piggott and banjoist Joe Danks first hit the scene as Old Spot in 2023, with their fifteen-track self-titled debut album. A duo of excellent musical ability and a love for American Old-time music, their sound combines strong traditional songs and tunes with a modern, spacious approach. Old Spot (II) continues exploring these traditions and fine-tunes; there is a discernible difference in the sound, with a suggestion of minimalism around some songs and a precise nature to the playing.
The former is evident on the traditional tune ‘Tom Dooley’, a beautifully played banjo piece with delicate swirls of five-string violin winding around the core melody and vocal. Joe’s clear singing is ideal for the song, with…
Following years of IVF and an on-stage miscarriage during a 2023 tour (she finished her set), Abigail Lapell was pregnant with her first child when she booked studio time to make her new album, Shadow Child. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the songs on Toronto singer-songwriter’s new album pivot around the theme of motherhood, with nine of the songs representing a month of gestation – her son was born in November 2024. The album features several special guests, embraces moments of joy and loss and addresses issues such as reproductive health.
Opening with a tolling bell and, inevitably featuring whistling, ‘Whistle Song (One in a Million)’ is a dreamily strummed bluesy musing on loss, mortality, resilience, hope and new…
Yorkshire-based folksinger/guitarist Chris Brain’s fourth coming album, Red Sun Rising, replaces the wide optimism of last year’s New Light with a sense of knowing, yet still manages to focus on the brightness of life and the idea of new beginnings and freshness with the rising of the sun.
As the record develops, the feeling of natural repetition through the guitar arrangements comes through, with additional instruments adding points of difference and flourishes of colour throughout. Take the lovely ‘Kinds of Kindness’: Chris is an accomplished fingerpicker with a solid technique reminiscent of stalwarts like Burt Jansch and Nick Drake, and here his piece is a tightly picked refrain that combines played notes with harmonics, giving the guitar sound a complex yet…
Back To The Garden (A Tribute To Joni Mitchell), the excellent free CD accompanying the June 2026 issue of MOJO Magazine, is less a conventional tribute album and more a lovingly curated journey through the many worlds of Joni Mitchell. Bringing together artists from folk, jazz, soul, indie rock and Americana, the collection celebrates not only Mitchell’s songwriting genius, but also the remarkable flexibility of her compositions.
What makes the compilation so engaging is its refusal to play safe. Rather than simply recreating familiar classics, the artists reinterpret them with personality and emotional depth. Roberta Flack brings warmth and elegance, while Fleet Foxes add a dreamy, atmospheric quality that perfectly suits Mitchell’s introspective writing.
…Born in Montana, Kiki Cavazos ran away at 16 to Alaska before heading south to Mexico. Yet this has nothing to do with how she sings of a fate wherein facts have no face and pathos is all there is.
We’re believing Cavazos’ role as a troubadour due to her performance — not her story. Granted, Cavazos has traveled the country like a Guthrie protégé and thus is “authentic”. Yet authenticity is not verisimilitude; this is to say Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a middle-class New Yorker born to Lithuanian Jewish parents, who made you fall for his cowpoke drawl and accoutrements. Put differently, it is through Cavazos’ performances that her past is illuminated.
Therefore, the biography of the artist would fall apart without conviction—in fact, what…
Whitehorse have returned to their folk-rock roots on their latest full-length record, All I Want Is All of It. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClellan recorded the album in a 19th-century farmhouse to capture the mood of past spirits in the ancient place.
Of course, only a New World denizen would consider a place built 200 years ago old. Its semi-rural setting on the other side of the tracks offers a haunting aural landscape. The musicians said the location functioned as the creative inspiration behind the new disc.
Whitehorse‘s 11 songs are purposely experimental and vary in style and tone. They range from the primitive rawness of a demo (“Lighthouse”) recorded on McClellan’s iPhone…
1. Marisa Anderson – Rop Koh
2. Ed O’Brien – Blue Morpho
3. The Sleeves – Empty Thoughts
4. Tamikrest – Imanin
5. Thomas Dollbaum – Pulverize
6. Blood Sucking Maniacs – Family Tree/Heartbeat (Lucky Marlo Allen)
7. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – Like Swimwear (part two)
8. The Lemon Twigs – 2 Or 3
9. Kevin Morby – Badlands
10. Brown Spirits – Bakelite Dashboard
11. Aldous Harding – Venus in the Zinnia
12. Angélique Kidjo – Big Heart
13. Hiss Golden Messenger – I’m People
14. Suss – Sunset IV
15. Hurray for the Riff Raff – Pa’Lante (Live)
Of all the artists that emerged from the freak folk/New Weird America boom of the early noughties, Colorado-born Josephine Foster is one of the most enduring, and certainly one of the most interesting. Besides the obvious – her startling voice, opera trained but as wild as the hills – constant reinvention and inspired collaboration have been the hallmarks of her continued success.
She has tackled folk, country, desert psych, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and 19th-century German Lieder, and has teamed up with David Pajo and Andy Bar (as The Children’s Hour) and Jason Ajemian (as Born Heller). In recent years, her most fruitful collaboration has been with guitarist Victor Herrero, with whom she formed the band Mendrugo.
Maisy Owen, a Nashville native, has been surrounded by music and the art of songcraft just about all her life. First came the viola at age nine, then guitar where she embraced fingerpicking, soaking in influences from Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Mazzy Star and David Olney. Maisy’s unique sound, musical truth and stirring vocals inhabit Dark On a Sunny Day, her debut album, produced by Robin Eaton (known for his work with Jill Sobule and co-writer of “I Kissed a Girl”)
…Lead single, ‘My Youth Is All for You’, is a perfect opening track. Delicate finger-picked folk guitar and Owen’s lilting, crooning, whispering vocal immediately invite you into her world. “I cannot bear the weight of your affection / I cannot walk with all these shadows behind me”.
The poet and artist Barbara Guest, an original member of the New York school of poetry, ended her final collection, The Red Gaze (2005), with the following words by Theodor Adorno: ‘In each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before.’ It’s a quote so pertinent to how we view human creativity today that it seems almost like a manifesto in miniature. Of course, when he wrote those words, Adorno wasn’t thinking of artificial intelligence, at least not in the way we know it, but nonetheless, it seems like a succinct argument for the human over the machine. When a human being makes a work of art, they put something new into the world, something that may draw from a wealth of influences but, at its best, ignites those influences with a creative spark.
Deluxe double LP reissue of The Head And The Heart’s debut album. Featuring the original album remastered on the first LP, plus seven bonus tracks on the second LP. The bonus tracks are a combination of previously unreleased demos and live tracks, plus one live track available for the first time physically, and one previously unreleased studio track. The Head and the Heart is the self-titled debut album from Seattle folk-rock band The Head and the Heart, originally self-released in 2010 before being picked up and re-issued by Sub Pop in 2011. Built around harmonious vocals, piano, violin, and folk-rock instrumentation, the album captures themes of connection, wanderlust, and introspection across tracks like “Lost in My Mind,” “Down in the Valley,” and “Rivers and Roads.”
Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People is the aural equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, goes down easy, is simple at the core, and hits many of the right spots. The title alone suggests a universality, the common rhythms of life, the pendulum of emotions, and connection. As you likely know, Hiss Golden Messenger is the moniker for North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor. Taylor penned these songs in a farmhouse on the edge of a bay in California, at his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, and in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taylor was searching for inspiration, an elusive kind of magic, but instead found himself writing about running toward and away from things, about realistic expectations and slivers of hope in these trying times,…
1. Caroline Polachek – Look at Me Now
2. Mike Polizze – Cheewawa
3. Royal Trux – Waterpark
4. King Kong – Scooba Dooba Diver
5. Steve Gunn – The Handshake
6. Red Red Meat – Gorshin
7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Krumville
8. The Halo Benders – Virginia Reel Around the Fountain
9. Jessica Pratt – World On a String
10. Kim Gordon – Dirty Tech
11. Viktor Vaughn – Vaudeville Villain
12. Stress Eater – Giving Back to the Universe
13. Sun Ra – Trying to Put the Blame On Me (Live)
14. Sunburned Hand of the Man – Nimbus
15. Kurt Vile – Constant Repeat
Having previously cast themselves as 19th-century American vagrants, Anglo-American duo Ben Parker and David Berkeley, aka Sons of Town Hall (named for a ’90s “junk raft” built by octogenarian nomad Poppa Neutrino to cross the Atlantic), present a new concept and fictional world on Of Ghosts and Gods. Here, Victorian-era explorers Josiah Chester Jones (Berkeley) and George Ulysses Brown (Parker) travel the world on a self-built, mythical raft. They are joined, musically at least, by Jordan Katz, variously on trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone and tuba, David Felberg, Elizabeth Young, Kimberly Fredenburgh and Dana Winogradhorns on strings, percussionist Mathias Kunzli, woodwinds by Elizabeth VanArsdel, Kevin Vigneau and Jesse Tatum, with Will Robertson…
The most important inventions of the 8th century are often considered to be agricultural (horse shoes and collars, the heavy plough) or military (certain types of Viking sword and Native American arrowhead). While some of these things may have been revolutionary in their own way, this narrative plays down the advances that were being made in the social sphere, the arts, and, in particular, the realm of music. Depictions found on Pictish decorated stones suggest that thirteen hundred years ago, people in what is now Scotland were playing a harp-like instrument. That instrument became known as the clàrsach.
The striking thing about the clàrsach – other than its long history – is its potency as a political symbol. Both the Irish and Scottish forms of…
Kahan surprise dropped The Great Divide: The Last of the Bugs – an extended version of the new album, featuring four new tracks and bringing the track list to a massive 21 songs.
Instead of tacking the new songs at the end of the album, Kahan decided to sprinkle them throughout. “Lighthouse” is the first of the new songs, landing at No. 5 on the tracklist, sandwiched in between the already released “Downfall” and “Paid Time Off.” The next track added is “Staying Still,” which comes after “Paid Time Off” and before the album’s titular track. The final two new songs, “A Few of Our Own” and “Orbiter” land much further down the album at No. 19 and No. 20, respectively.
The Great Divide serves as the follow-up to Kahan’s breakthrough hit album…
Insomnia and Seven Steps to Grace, is U.S. Poet Laureate and musician Joy Harjo’s debut for Smithsonian Folkways. In the album’s liner booklet, she relates her initial inspiration for assembling music with poetry: Her mother sitting at the kitchen table writing songs on an Underwood typewriter. Her mom was “inspired by the poetry she heard in the two-room schoolhouse that she attended in rural Arkansas and the music she heard in Tulsa dance halls and on the radio.” She is this album’s Muse; Harjo offers tribute in a version of her mother’s song “My Guy,” that was discovered by Harjo’s sister. This recording was produced and arranged by bassist/ vocalist Esperanza Spalding. Harjo’s saxophones and flutes, are also accompanied by guitarist…
Peter Case at McCabes: My Life to Live is not the usual career retrospective of a veteran artist. Granted, the former leader of the Plimsouls spans his canon here, but in doing so over the course of the seventy-one-plus duration of this twenty-two cut sequence, he plays, sings, and speaks with a tangible sense of rediscovery.
Not coincidentally, there’s also a palpable sense of pride arising from the reimaginings of songs like “I Shook His Hand” off Case’s eponymous solo debut. Recorded over two nights at his home-away-from-home venue in Santa Monica, CA, the performance bristles with energy because Peter’s self-penned songs, much like the traditional “Flying Crow Blues,” have aged so well over time.
And not only does the artist seem to know…