What would be experimental folk exactly? As with any other genre, it would approximately mean that you as an artist are not taking the usual routes associated with such a genre, and it could be anything from bringing in elements from elsewhere, to not so usual performance, lyrics and anything else that might be considered ordinary.
You can get practically all of that on Bird or Snake, the second album by Chicago-based singer songwriter Emma Hospelhorn, who operates under the moniker of Em Spel. It is more or less all there – jazzy song structures, classical flutes, found sounds, subtle electronics, and lyrics that go into deeper subjects.
Hospelhorn wrote the songs and produced them herself, with additional production by…
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After more than a decade of relative silence, 
…There’s a moment on 
Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney are music lifers, married parents of two who have been the core of the band Big Harp essentially since they met two decades ago. As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Drootin committed to the DIY scene early, joining bands as a bassist before she could drive and bailing on high school with only a year left in order to tour. After Senseney met Drootin on the road in 2007, they accidentally moved to California together, got married, had their first kid, and then started Big Harp. They are lifers, and lifers make it work.
Only a year on from the release of their self-titled debut album, supergroup Butler, Blake & Grant have released the follow up, Murmurs, via 355 Recordings. The record sees the trio – Bernard Butler (Suede, McAlmont & Butler), Norman Blake (Teenage Fanclub) and James Grant (Love and Money) – reimagining songs from their respective back catalogues.
Following the two-person effort 
Throughout his career 
Otracami, the project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer Camila Ortiz, releases her album 
…‘Death is real, someone’s there and then they’re not, and it’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art,’ sang Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum on ‘Real Death’, one of a whole, heartbreaking album of songs recorded in the wake of his partner’s death from cancer. Personal grief is by its nature individual. We can never know exactly what someone else is feeling, even when they express themselves with eloquence or with complete rawness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain something from the experience. Elverum made art – eloquent and raw – whether he wanted to or not, and the same could be said for 
There’s something transformational about the music of 
If you think that covering the songs of others is easy by just picking up your instruments and microphones, than you are quite mistaken.
One of the defining characteristics of 
Good to great singer-songwriters seem to be creeping up on us daily (again!) — artists obviously seem to have a greater need to try and express their personal sensibilities and whatnot as much as they did in the early ‘70s.
Wake by singer/songwriter 
The themes that weave through Mud Blood Bone, the fourth record from Canada’s 
The Vancouver-based musician