Live and Acoustic presents Trey Anastasio at his most stripped-back and introspective, capturing a series of performances from his sold-out 2025 Spring Acoustic Tour. Produced by Vance Powell and featuring longtime collaborator Jeff Tanski on keyboards, the album offers a focused and intimate listening experience.
Spanning 22 songs drawn from across Anastasio’s four-decade career, Live and Acoustic highlights the strength of his songwriting in its purest form. Without the expansive arrangements often associated with his work, the songs are allowed to breathe, revealing their melodic core and emotional depth. Fan favorites such as “Stash,” “Waste,” “Divided Sky,” and “Pebbles and Marbles” take on a new dimension in this setting…
Category: folk
The Gathering, originally released in 2007, returns in an expanded edition that reaffirms the lasting significance of Marianne Segal’s long-awaited comeback. This reissue not only revisits the album but also casts new light on a work that already proved her artistic voice remained as compelling as ever after decades away from the spotlight.
Best known for her work with cult ‘70s outfit Jade, Segal used The Gathering to reconnect with the spirit of that era while subtly updating it for a more contemporary audience. In this expanded form, the album’s depth and craftsmanship become even more apparent, offering listeners a fuller picture of her creative vision.
The record moves effortlessly between traditional folk balladry, roots…
Horrorful Heights marks a formidable new chapter in The Bevis Frond’s deep and storied catalogue, showcasing the enduring creativity of songwriter, guitarist and frontman Nick Saloman as he moves into yet another decade of recording. Long established as one of the most distinctive voices in British underground rock, Saloman continues to refine the band’s signature blend of melodic psychedelia, wiry guitar epics and sharp, emotionally attuned songwriting. Horrorful Heights offers one of the most approachable entry points to the band’s world in years: a record that gathers their core strengths into a cohesive, vivid set.
Recorded with long-time drummer Dave Pearce and guitarist Paul Simmons, alongside new bassist Louis Wiggett, the album moves…
…Love These Days by Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Karen Dahlstrom is a strong collection of songs rooted in contemporary folk, with dalliances into country, blues and even jazz. You wouldn’t be remiss if you were wondering why you hadn’t heard of Dahlstrom until now. To be fair, she is a bit of a late bloomer, but having spent some time as a member of the americana trio Bobtown, Dahlstrom returns with her first proper solo record. Brimming with beguiling songs that could only have been penned by someone with the life experiences to do them justice, it’s a discerning, mature worldview of life and love.
The charming opener ‘Can’t Help Myself’ asserts itself immediately with an irresistible guitar and bass groove, punctuated with subtle…
Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke from unheard tapes recorded in the ’70s, Echo Park is a snapshot of Los Angeles life from helium-voiced mainstay Tommy Peltier that foreshadows the blue-eyed soul that would emerge just a few years later.
Now 90 years old, Peltier is still playing relatively regularly for a nonagenarian, but he cut his teeth as a jazzman – he’d never really intended to make pop music.
Born in New Orleans, Peltier relocated to Los Angeles as a teen and quickly established himself on the jazz circuit, playing cornet in his band the Jazz Corps and even recording an album with Roland Kirk. But it wasn’t to be; Peltier suffered an injury in 1970 that ended his horn playing career so he retrained as a singer-songwriter…
…the reissue features 20 tracks, including a bonus 7″ with the previously unreleased song “House” and a new remix of “Playboy of the Western World” by Dirick Cummins. The tracks were newly restored from original 1/4” tape reels and mastered by Josh Bonati.
Third Man Records is re-issuing Connie Converse’s only known collection of songs on vinyl and CD so that a new generation can learn her story and sounds. How Sad, How Lovely is an atmospheric collection of folk songs that contain a lingering sense of what could have been.
Her backstory is fascinating as she began recording these intimate songs in 1949 on reel-to-reel, pre-dating the NYC folk scene with inward-looking tunes that struggle against…
Throughout his career José González has been a pacifying voice, delivering quiet, organically-made records that emphasize patience and humanity. He’s not particularly prolific, though when they arrive his albums tend to hit their mark — consistency, both in tone and quality, is one of his hallmarks. González rarely employs more than one or two guitars and the occasional second harmony, nor does he need to. His gentle, though commanding tenor and deft fingerpicked arrangements are enough to fill the rooms he creates. Understated as they are, his songs are also not without weight and his fifth album, Against the Dying of the Light, is his heaviest to date. It’s posed as a more outward-focused sequel to 2021’s Local Valley, his meditative fourth…
Since debuting as a bandleader in 2020, Nashville studio ace Spencer Cullum has continued to steer his music further and further from the country world where he makes his living. A seasoned pedal steel player will always have a job in Music City, but the first two albums in his Coin Collection trilogy revealed a more adventurous palette steeped in ’60s psychedelia and folk-rock from both sides of the Atlantic.
In 2025, he teamed up with Nashville outsiders Rich Ruth and Sean Thompsonto form Shrunken Elvis, a sleek amalgam of ambient post-rock and jazz fusion that further emphasized his range as a musician. On his third and final record of the Coin Collection trilogy, Cullum presents a quieter, more pastoral style that heavily favors…
1. The Black Crowes – Cruel Streak
2. Snail Mail – My Maker
3. Andrew Wasylyk – Private Symphony #2
4. Courtney Barnett – Mantis
5. Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Rowan Tree
6. Flea – Traffic Lights (feat. Thom Yorke)
7. Bruce Hornsby – Indigo Park
8. Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam
9. Ellie O’Neill – Anna with the Silver Arrow
10. The Long Ryders – Stand a Little Further in…
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Hey Little
12. Memorials – Dropped Down the Well
13. Charlotte Cornfield – Lost Leader
14. Billy Fuller – Rummer
15. The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone
1. The Studio 68! & Dani Turner – Funky People
2. The Delines – The Meter Keeps Ticking
3. Altin Gun – Öldürme Beni
4. Bill Callahan – Stepping Out for Air
5. Marielle V Jakobsons – Everything Lost Remains
6. Ulrika Spacek – Picto
7. Iron & Wine – In Your Ocean
8. Cardinals – I Like You
9. Crooked Fingers – Haunted (feat. Sharon Van Etten)
10. KMRU – With Trees Where We Can See
11. Hen Ogledd – Clara
12. The Wave Pictures – The House Painted Blue
13. Buck Meek – Ring of Fire
14. Clémentine March – Lucie
15. Isabel Pine – Fables
William Crighton’s Colonial Drift plays as a slow journey across landscape, memory and time. The album moves in three clear movements, threaded together by fragments of radio chatter, environmental sound and drifting noise, creating the sense of travelling through a country where past and present sit side by side.
Crighton has built a reputation for expansive, story-driven songwriting shaped by landscape and history, particularly across albums such as Water and Dust. Here he works with a close-knit group of collaborators. Luke Davison’s drums and Corey McCormick’s bass provide a steady foundation, while electric guitars from CJ Stranger and Jeff Lang add texture and edge. Subtle synthesiser and environmental sound deepen the atmosphere…
Intensely expressive free-verse vocal laments over sliding violins, hammered santouri, guitar, and oud – the hybrid sounds of the Mediterranean in the early 20th century.
“Aman Aman” cry the singers on these recordings, their voices preserved on 78rpm discs cut between 1911-1935. The phrase roughly translates to “mercy,” a call of despair, but also one of joy and admiration. On many of these sides, that full range of emotion is transmitted at once.
Some of these artists are legends, others lost to time. Nearly half are female vocalists, a big part of the Cafe Aman tradition but not as well represented on contemporary releases. All were affected by conflicts leading up to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1923, and the forced…
Conceived under eclipsed skies, Path of Totality, the new album from The Montvales, unites the vast American diaspora into one collective and cosmic tapestry. Inspired by the long tradition of radical country and folk artists, longtime friends Sally Buice and Molly Rochelson use their passion for literature and storytelling to craft an album that reckons with the current global fever pitch.
The album’s 12 introspective, thematically and sonically layered tracks chart a transformative pilgrimage through an inextricably connected world. A woman desperate to save her community from a gas pipeline in “Plains of Ohio,” a devout grandmother traveling across the world to Yugoslavia in search of the Virgin Mary in “Our Lady,” and a trouble-making Bible College…
For Sassparilla frontman and songwriter Kevin Blackwell, there is one lyric in particular on the band’s eight studio album, Honey, I’m Using Again, that feels especially truthful to where he is at this stage of his life: “Despite all my kicking / My protesting / I’ll be damned that I got old,” he bemoans on ‘I’ll Be Damned’, but inevitability of ageing is just one of the honest looks at the human experience explored on the LP. As its title suggests, addiction is also covered, along with homelessness and death. These are subjects that could feel like a chore to listen to, but with the band’s mix of punk and americana, they make for a fresh batch of invigorating, short, sharp life lessons with a Southern gothic flavour to them.
‘When I Get Off This Mountain’, heavy with…
Danny George Wilson follows up the Danny & The Champions of the World album, You Are Not a Stranger Here, with a collection of introspective, powerful songs. The cosmic landscapes of You Are Not a Stranger Here give way to something more plaintive, rawer and earthier. It may or may not have been Wilson’s intention, but the two albums make wonderful companion pieces. Arcade seems to find Wilson at a crossroads: it feels retrospective and nostalgic, but, like Janus, also seems to look forward – although sometimes it feels as if Wilson is stumbling towards the future.
If Arcade finds Wilson in a moment of transition lyrically, this is not the case musically. Wilson has, for a long time, been a brilliant songwriter, singer and master performer. There is now…
The latest from the Nashville-based duo Paper Wings will reward fans who embraced their signature amalgamation of literate folk with bluegrass, as well as their lyrical willingness to explore the territory beneath the thin veil of decency people and societies present. On Mountains on the Moon, though, the prevailing themes are longing and abiding resilience through individual strength. A stern sense of self-reliance and clear-eyed hope may be the most political statement of the album – songwriting partners Emily Mann and Wila Frank have plumbed depths both personal and universal before. Here, they seek defiance through resolve and eschew despair in favour of cautious optimism.
The opener, ‘Fumbling’ alliteratively asks…
Digging even deeper into a personal archive of home-recorded tapes from another time, If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes is the third volume of previously unreleased songs from the already obscure Georgia singer/songwriter Robert Lester Folsom. In the mid-’70s, when Folsom was just out of his teens, he self-released the studio album Music and Dreams. For decades, the psychedelic soft rock of Music and Dreams served as Folsom’s only public output, and its combination of quality, mystery, and rarity eventually made it a collector’s item. Folsom’s archive of demos, unreleased solo tracks, and tunes made with friends on his reel-to-reel four-track has proved just as interesting as the strange moods of Music and Dreams, and If You…
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
Lynn Miles may not yet be among your ‘top ten Canadian songwriters’, but A Bouquet of Black Flowers may be about to change that. With three Canadian Folk Music English Songwriter of the Year Awards and a JUNO Award for Roots & Traditional Album of the Year: Solo under her belt, Miles’ music, whilst not unsung, is deserving of wider recognition. In 2008, she began re-recording selected songs from her back catalogue with voice and guitar, or piano accompaniment. The resulting four volumes of Black Flowers albums were released over the next six years. Fifteen of the forty songs from that series were picked and remastered for A Bouquet of Black Flowers. This summation of a recording career approaching its 40th anniversary is a fitting introduction for anyone…
…features five brand-new additions: four acoustic “live off the floor” versions recorded with guitarist BJ Baartmans and a new single co-written and recorded with Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland of the band Whitehorse.
Memories often seem to gravitate around specific songs, which stick in your mind as some of the defining pieces of a particular time or place.
They hide in the recesses of your brain, awaiting the next time you’ll listen to that particular song again, and everything will come flooding back. Music defines different periods of your life, but it can also help you better understand them.
That is, if, like Suzie Ungerleider, you’re lucky enough to have the talent (and courage) to translate your experiences into music.