Benny Sings embraces home and family on his sweetly intimate 2026 album, 22 Durnham Dew. Named after a recently renovated house where he has settled with his wife and children, 22 Durnham Dew finds Dutch singer, songwriter, producer Tim van Berkestijn (aka Benny Sings) in a good place, drawing inspiration from his home-life while still digging into the lyrical and dancey, ’70s-style pop his fans love. There’s a relaxed vibe to the album, even as Sings digs into his influences.
The opening “You Love Me” in particular grabs your attention with its Commodores-inspired R&B groove. Similarly evocative, the title track brings to mind the kind of warm, singalong style Paul McCartney mastered on his solo work in the ’70s. Equally compelling, cuts…
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At what point does a song stop being a song? Strip away the beat, harmony and narrative; leave behind a voice, a melody, a few repeated words, the hiss of a phone recording. 
It might be a touch of hyperbole to say the world wasn’t ready for Swiss pianist 
The East LA retro-soul mavens, 
It started with Jerry Garcia. More specifically, on a tribute show to the deceased Grateful Dead icon with a band playing his songs accompanied by a full orchestra.
Fingerstyle guitar master and folk musician Martin Simpson has never released an album that’s less than top-drawer and meticulously put together, which is why he’s one of the most respected figures on the traditional scene, but his latest album, Some Kind of Jubilee, feels extra special. A double album spanning one hundred minutes, this 16-song feast marks a milestone in Martin’s career: a full half-century since his debut, Golden Vanity, dropped on the Trailer label in 1976. To celebrate, Martin has gathered a select elite of musicians, including bass mainstay Ben Nicholls, lapsteel whiz Greg Leisz, guitarists Louis Campbell and Zak Hobbs and cellist Liz Hanks.
Americana/folk musician 
There is a long tradition of mainly Christian spirituality associated with the tidal island of Lindisfarne, long enough for it to be known by some as Holy Island.
San Francisco-based blues singer, songwriter, and chromatic harmonica player Big Harp George/George Bisharat returns with his sixth album, No Shortcuts. Like his last two albums, 2023’s Cut My Spirit Loose and 2024’s Cooking with Gas, he features players from the Greaseland gang, including guitarist Kid Andersen, Joe Kyle on bass, drummer Derrick D’Mar Martin, Chris Burns on keys, along with a bevy of horn players and vocalists, and The Morgan Brothers (James and Dwayne). Tenor saxophonist Doug Rowan, baritone saxophonist Aaron Linton, and trombonist Mike Rinta also play on all tracks. The credits list 20 musicians and vocalists.
For almost a decade now, South London artist 
Anna Atkins, the 19th century botanist and photographer whose Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions is widely regarded as the first photographic book, made her images by placing algae directly onto paper coated with a light-sensitive solution. Where the plant blocked the ultraviolet light, the paper remained white. Everywhere else, it turned the deep Prussian blue that gives the process its name. At the center of each image, the algae’s fronds produced their own negative.
This is an intriguingly hard-to-pin-down debut from London’s 
Whatever’s in the water in Ireland right now needs to be studied. 
For their fifth album, Here Lies Love / Sawdust to Stardust, Lawrence Rothman has brought an ‘A‘ list of collaborators, including Madi Diaz, Amanda Shires, Katie Pruitt, Jason Isbell and Jillian Jaqueline. Written and recorded in Biarritz, France, and Nashville, Tennessee, and produced and mixed entirely by Rothman himself, the album leans to the darker side of Americana in its tone, with rich, deep vocals from Rothman, reminiscent of Nick Cage, and arrangements at times in Hannah Aldridge/southern gothic mould.
Not only outside the music industry but within its margins (much less frequently at its very core), there are those for whom music is one of several activities to pursue. It’s a question not only related to the increasing difficulty of living off music without a head start, but also to personal circumstances and lifestyle choices.