Slowly coming into view over the past two years through a succession of intriguingly diverse singles that stylistically ranged from doo-wop to ’70s troubadour balladeering, Tyler Ballgame gradually revealed himself, through both his songs and videos, to be a magnetic presence with an octave-vaulting voice.
His backstory proves to be equally compelling and unusual, involving stasis, depression and subsequent epiphany. During the pandemic, close to hitting 30, Tyler Perry was stuck living in his mother’s basement in New England, his early musical promise having led him to Berklee College of Music and then to flunk his course due to marijuana indulgence and poor attendance. After a period of singing in covers bands…
Category: folk
Stafell Sbâr Sain (Sain’s Spare Room) is a vibrant showcase of Welsh folk at its most diverse and inventive. Released on limited-run vinyl by Sain, Wales’ oldest independent label, this compilation brings together 12 tracks that weave a strong traditional thread while embracing bold contemporary sounds.
Long-established names like Bob Delyn, Lleuwen Steffan and Gwilym Bowen Rhys share space with fresh voices such as Irfan Rais, a Singaporean who learned Welsh during his studies, a testament to the genre’s growing global reach. The album balances reworkings of classics, like Georgia Ruth’s delicate take on ‘Blodau’r Flwyddyn’, with striking originals such as Lleuwen’s ‘Haleliwia Newydd’. Folk royalty is represented by newcomers…
There are some notable firsts for UK singer/songwriter/guitarist Laurence Jones’ On My Own. It’s not only his debut on the blues-rocking artist’s own, recently established label (Ron Records), but the only instance in his eight title catalog recorded entirely in solo acoustic mode. It’s also his most personal statement.
Most of these changes to the once fully plugged-in, some might say over-amped, and roaring attack Jones typically favored are integral to continuing his career dealing with Crohn’s disease. It’s an ailment he has suffered from for years and has become a spokesman for. According to his notes, the physical toll of leading a band and constant touring was not something he could continue due to the illness sapping his energy.
Toad the Wet Sprocket has issued some intriguing anthologies over the years, including P.S. (A Toad Retrospective) and In Light Syrup, but it’s arguable that none are so fascinating as Rings: The Acoustic Sessions.
Anyone surprised by the appearance of this unorthodox album hasn’t been following the band closely over the years. Originally emerging in the late ’80s and achieving some measurable success in the next decade before its dissolution, the quartet subsequently regrouped frequently over the ensuing years on both the stage and the studio. A formal reunion in 2010 only reaffirmed the DIY idiosyncrasies the quartet worked so assiduously to establish at the outset of their existence, first independently, then on Columbia Records.
Bob Lind has a mighty back catalogue. He recorded his first album nearly 60 years ago; he’s been recording almost consistently ever since, and his songs have been covered by over 200 artists, including Glen Campbell, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton, Eric Clapton, Nancy Sinatra and The Four Tops. In recent years, he’s found a musician who really does get Lind musically and spiritually. Producer Jamie Hoover has worked with Lind on the last three of his albums and continues this work on the latest. Joining Lind and Hoover on the album is professor, composer, sideman and session musician George Wurzbach, as well as overdub engineer Brad Gagne at Sentient Sound Studios in North Miami. Between the four of them, they swapped various elements of…
“You put words to the song/I’ll keep singing after you’re gone” is a phrase that acknowledges the ephemeral fragility of life and art, while also tracing a continuing thread that links generation after generation of creativity. Songwriters may pass, musicians may lay down their instruments, but the force of human connection through music flows onward, disheveled and lovely through the years and decades and centuries.
A band of Irish brothers threads the needle between spare, contemporary songwriting and reeling traditional stomps. The two, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn, alternate ruminative confessionals and Celtic barn-raisers, their songs etched with melancholy but also lit up from inside with the joy of communal music making.
Veteran troubadour Steve Poltz is the epitome of one who doesn’t take himself too seriously. It’s so refreshing. He describes his approach to making a record as “chaos, caffeine, and accidental poetry – art colliding with microphones and commerce in a glorious mess.” Inevitably, the resulting music makes us laugh, and, oddly, raises a few serious thoughts. Poltz has one of the happiest demeanors of any songwriter. Yet, Poltz is not to be underestimated. His observations on life’s details ring with sarcasm and underlying truth.
We find those qualities on his 14th solo album, JoyRide, recorded in East Nashville, and featuring co-writing with greats such as Gary Nicholson and Jim Lauderdale. Many of the tracks had the backing of Emmylou Harris’s Red Dirt Boys,…
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.”
The song is both an ode to that magical, mountainous region in the eastern United States and a celebration of resilience,…
Back in 2021, Tom Paxton and John McCutcheon had stopped touring because of the pandemic, but their ideas for new songs kept flowing. So, the two decided to meet every Monday afternoons at 2pm via Zoom for songwriting sessions. Before long, they had enough songs for an album, and they released Together in 2023. After Together appeared, they continued swapping songs and making music, and when they took stock, they found they had plenty of material for another album, Together Again.
…To dive into their collective pasts would take a book, but suffice it to say that Paxton has recorded or appeared on more than 70 albums starting in 1964, and written thousands of songs which are largely staples of the folk tradition…
Guitars on Life is a duo offering by acoustic guitarists Jack West and Walter Strauss. Both are Californians. The recording was released in tandem with Essential Curvature, a compilation from West’s folk-jazz band who released five excellent albums between 1996 and 2003. He developed a solo style that allows him to play his trademark eight-string acoustic, slide guitars, bass, and percussion — simultaneously, which he does here. Strauss is best known for his global folk work with Malian musicians including kora masters Mamadou Diabate, Sidiki Diabate, and kamale ngoni great Mamadou Sidibe, among others. He’s also worked with multi-instrumentalist Joe Craven, Cuban violinist Tanmy Moreno, Scottish fiddler Jonny Hardie of the Old Blind Dogs,…
Essential Curvature is a double-length compilation drawn from five albums by Bay Area folk-jazz-world fusion outfit Curvature, guitarist Jack West‘s acoustic band that existed between 1996 and 2003. Their discography includes Continuum (1996), Big Comet Headed for Earth (1998), As We Know It (1999), Big Ideas (2001), and Around About Now (2003). Otá Records signed West for Guitars On Life with guitarist Walter Strauss, to be released alongside the new disc. It contains cuts from each of their releases. The sequencing of these 16 cuts is glorious; it is structured along an aesthetic of flow rather than chronology.
The set opener is the killer title track from Big Ideas. It’s performed by West, bassist Scott Amendola, marimbist/percussionist…
…The expanded digital album includes 11 bonus tracks in total: the three songs from the 2007 ‘End Like This’ EP, four previously unreleased outtakes, and four demos.
Makers is Rocky Votolato’s fourth album, appearing fittingly in line after 2003’s Suicide Medicine, but with a worn resilience all its own. It finds Votolato sounding older and weathered, more content than jaded, and there’s a modest quality to his steady voice that projects words as both sincere and comforting.
Some songs are country-tinged — with touches of harmonica, pedal steel, violin, and piano supporting the focal acoustic guitar — but it’s more that they simply evoke images of rural dirt roads, long walks and quiet autumn nights at home…
Johnny Delaware describes his latest record as a nomadic affair.
“I recorded it in studios in Mexico and the United States and in hotel rooms all across Latin America, and if you listen closely, you can hear bits and pieces of all those places and the people I met along the way. They’re all a part of me now.” As a result, Para Llevar is a swirl of indie rock, Americana and psychedelic folk making for a dreamy, atmospheric listen.
The co-founder of the South Carolina-based Susto, Delaware’s solo work is not a big step away from that band’s work, despite being a little more subdued. Para Llevar opens on “Jungle Full Of Ghosts,” a slightly ominous track inspired by the rain in Mexico and a little help from…
…includes the original album and nine bonus tracks: seven previously unreleased tracks plus a 2025 remaster of “City of Refuge” and a 2025 mix of “Memphis Shakedown.”
The problem with flirting with old music styles in the digital speedway of the 21st century is the curse of revivalism, a tendency to reduce contemporary stresses and pressures to a perceived better time in the safe and distant past when things were simpler, clearer, and, well, more pure. But of course it’s always now — it’s never then or when — and musical revivalism can suffer from a kind of strictly enforced and ultimately empty artifice. A facsimile is still a facsimile — it can never, by definition, be the thing itself.
This is the dilemma for the Carolina Chocolate…
Justin Townes Earle, the deeply talented but sadly troubled folk/Americana musician, succumbed to an accidental overdose just over five years ago. Yet within the span of just weeks, an authorized biography — What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome — has been released, and musician Sammy Brue is issuing an album largely drawn from Earle’s journals. Aptly titled The Journals and released with the blessing of Earle’s widow, the record stands as both a work of sadness and a celebration of Earle’s remarkable gift as a songwriter.
The striking opening track, “Lonely Mornings,” sets the tone of the record early on with a stripped-down sound – little more than an acoustic guitar and vocals, putting the lyrics at…
There are few musical outfits whose music creates such a warm glow as instrumental super-trio Leveret. Accordionist Andy Cutting, concertina player (who also recorded this album), Rob Harbron, and violinist Sam Sweeney are at the top of the pile in each of their departments, and their work as Leveret has been consistently excellent through six albums and eleven years.
For Lost Measures, the band unearthed several old tunes and melodies that had lain dormant for many years and combined them with originals from Andy and Rob to result in eleven pieces of beautiful music showcasing the strengths of these musicians, both as individuals and as one of the best instrumental groups operating.
One of the most rewarding aspects of…
The Midnight Ache is John Blek’s follow-up to last year’s rawly honest Cheer Up. It seems the more albums he releases, the musically mellower he gets. His tenth studio album is a lo-fi, laid-back affair adorned with cello (Moritz Brümmer), viola (Filip Sommer) and piano (Brian Casey), evoking the likes of Beck (circa Sea Change), Ron Sexsmith and Elliot Smith. The songs are rooted in themes of home, as reflected in the album cover featuring pressed flowers from his garden, and were mostly self-produced in a studio Blek built with his own hands. While not wholly a dark night of the soul implied in the title (the name he gave those sleepless insomniac hours lying in bed, overwhelmed by everything that was going on), those shadows do hover.
One of the best West Coast folk-rock/psychedelic bands, Love may have also been the first widely acclaimed cult/underground group. During their brief heyday they drew from Byrds-ish folk-rock, Stones-ish hard rock, blues, jazz, flamenco, and even light orchestral pop to create a heady stew of their own.
Love’s The Complete Elektra Albums includes the definitive selection of Arthur Lee and company’s inimitable work. In addition to newly remastered versions of 1966’s Love and Da Capo and the landmark Forever Changes (1967), this box also includes the CD debut of Lee’s original mix for 1969’s Four Sail plus a disc of single sides and rarities that appeared on a series of early ’00s CD reissues of these albums.
Charlie Bruber started out slowly, building a name for himself in Minneapolis music circles (and elsewhere) primarily as a multi-instrumentalist and engineer. As is often the case, there is always an extra personal drive there to do your own music, in most cases as a singer-songwriter, whatever the results may be, for better or for worse.
Judging by Prized Burden, Bruber’s second solo outing and luckily for both him and all the listeners that venture into it, better is the direction he is moving in as a solo artist. No, Brugber is definitely not sticking to what is considered the ‘standard’ singer-songwriter formulas, although the album has that slow-building, often languorous feel.
The difference lies in the fact that Bruber has the ability to build his songs…
Patience and elegance permeate Laura Baird’s work, both as a solo performer and half of The Baird Sisters, with sister Meg. Laura’s last album proper was the wonderful I Wish I Were a Sparrow (2017), and some of the songs of Under Blue have been around since 2012, written during initial recordings for Sparrow. Says Laura on her craft: “Taking your time, letting things go, and letting something bloom before you go into the next thing is something I learned from Meg.”
Both artists have a talent for performing very deliberate music, where each note feels right and nothing is superfluous; this was immediately evident on Sparrow and is here as well. Although Under Blue began life early, it became an album focused on the process of grief,…