Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

I hear the train a’coming, opens Kate Prascher’s new album. Whether it’s a line of  foreboding or one of anticipation, she leaves up to the listener. The rhythm kicks up like a storm. Heading home? Or far from it? On her sophomore offering, co-produced by Diana Walsh (Amanda Shires, Jason Isbell, Wild Rivers), Prascher draws the line between one place and another—one life and another—gossamer thin. It’s a strange train, she sings, repeating, It’s a strange train.

Prascher was raised in Memphis, a childhood spent amidst the haphazard heart of blues music and the haunted spirit of Southern storytelling. “Where I’m from, it’s expected for the people in your life who’ve passed to show up again, one way or another” she shares. No Depression once described Prascher as “a mesmerizing singer whose traditional-sounding tunes upend any feeling of comfort with lyrics that cut deep, giving her keenly observed tales an uneasy edge.” That eerie elegance illuminates her new album; it’s an openness to the mysteries of existence, and to whatever awaits us beyond. Prascher spins it into a spell on album standout, “They Will Fall Down.” Time is coming fast / When the stars won’t last / They will fall down / Scatter around / La da di da. Performed as a waltz, the song is an embodiment of Prascher’s willingness to dance with the unknown, her voice ringing with its own unearthly sparkle. She keeps her head held skyward on “Retrograde,” a lullaby for any phase of struggle, astronomical or otherwise. Fire it’s burning with chills / You wander far as it spills / If the stars come piercing / When mercury’s done reversing / But oh, return.  

Elsewhere, Prascher attends to the earthbound, as on the album’s title track “Sunday Afternoon” about an undeniably human instinct—to hide. “It’s about those moments in life when you’re failing yourself, maybe others too,” Prascher shares. “When you can’t seem to step away from something that’s not good for you, and you don’t want to confront the person who knows you best, the person who’s going to ask the hard questions.” Her lyrics are plainspoken and heartrendingly recognizable: I didn’t feel like coming Sunday afternoon / I didn’t feel like coming down to you. Resigned and vulnerable, she invites a listener to glimpse her pain—and perhaps in doing so, see their own. 

When Prascher was eighteen, she moved from Memphis to New York City, and discovered a vibrant bluegrass community across the boroughs. Up until that point, her relationship to music-making had been regimented—music lessons, vocal training, theater. The loose, democratic nature of jamming appealed. “I immediately knew I had to find a way in.” Prascher took mandolin lessons from Michael Daves (Nonesuch Records) who’s known for his work with Chris Thile and Steve Martin, and frequented open sessions across the scene’s essential venues like the Jalopy, Sunny’s, and Mona’s. She reveled in the community’s sense of freedom, of safety to try new things—“it all felt really alive”—and began to discover her own sound. It’s an evocative blend—the classic country soprano of Allison Krauss; the dark, dusty Americana of Gillian Welch; the bright melodicism of Madison Cunningham. Prascher released her debut full-length ‘Shake The Dust’ in 2024, drawing critical praise from tastemakers at Bandcamp, Atwood Magazine, and Glide Magazine among others. 

 Prascher wrote about half the songs on ‘Sunday Afternoon’ while she was living in Brooklyn—the rest, after she’d left. “I’m interested in how environment informs identity,” she shares. “Leaving New York was a reckoning for me. I moved there out of ambition. If I left, could I still consider myself ambitious?” Now based upstate, she’s grateful for the opportunity to answer that question. “My life is less about chasing one thing, and more about grounded rituals, the practices of work and creation. I can hear myself more clearly. I know what I want to say.”  

‘Shake The Dust’ rattled with tumult, a work of internal momentum. ‘Sunday Afternoon’ is also full of motion, but forward—assured and stable. In her observations of transience—across physical, spiritual, and celestial planes—Prascher offers comfort, her crystalline vocals hanging in the air like fog. “I don’t find a connection to the other side sinister at all,” Prascher says. “It’s strange, of course. But it’s joyful.” 

Jubilee / Jubilee / Jubilee / Jubilee.

Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

Alela Diane is keenly aware of time passing, the unrelenting flow of seasons, the flower’s fleeting bloom—but what she cares about most deeply, is now. Don’t forget to go outside / To feel the wind / To breathe the cold air / The winter branches in these bones / Know when to bloom / Know when to bear, she sings on album standout “In My Own Time.” More than a decade into one of contemporary folk’s most quietly extraordinary careers, and emerging from her own kind of artistic winter, Alela returns rich with fruit.   

The Portland songwriter’s seventh full-length album, ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ came as the consequence of intuition, coincidence, and community. “I came to the end of a season last year,” Alela shares. “My daughters had grown a bit. I no longer had babies waking me in the middle of the night. I could hear myself think again.” More and more, those thoughts circled music. 

On the first of April that year, Michael Hurley, folk legend and indispensable presence in the Portland music scene, died at the age of eighty-three. “I was absolutely gutted,” says Alela, who didn’t just revere Hurley but knew him well. “I had a conversation with a friend who is a florist, and she talked about how spring is the most beautiful time to pass. How all the flowers are blooming and the light returns, how it’s a better time to grieve when rebirth is all around.” Alela wrote album track “Spring Is A Fine Time To Die” in response, a plucky homage to her dear friend, a whistling work of playful wit fit to honor his catalogue: Magnolia, Tulip, and Daphne, too / Flesh is temporary but your songs will carry on forever. Alela performed in a tribute show for Hurley, and in that collective mourning, found solace and inspiration. “It was an epiphany to realize how much I missed my community. I felt very clear about what I wanted in that moment—I want to be alive. I want to see live music. I want to play it.”

She enlisted her pal Peter Lalish, of the band Lucius, to give her guitar lessons. She invited Anna Tivel for tea. “It felt imperative to connect with artists I respected and get reacquainted with my own town.” Though she’d taken the solo route on her last handful of releases, Alela was interested in a new way forward. Plucking away in the attic of her Victorian home from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, she found new songs flickering in the dusty light—and a desire to play them with people. 

Some weekend around that same time, Alela was meant to take a weekend out of town with her family. “The day we were leaving, I felt strongly, inexplicably pulled to stay—to dedicate free time to music whatever way I could.” She hugged her daughters goodbye, browsed local showlistings, and stepped out her front door. At Clay Street Studios that night, Alela met Danny Austin-Manning—a drummer on the bill, a quick new friend, and the nearly-instant conduit to the album’s creation. “We met and it all started clicking into place.” Alela invited him to play a show with her the following week. In the throes of immediate rapport, she told him she didn’t have a studio in mind for her next steps, but she did have an attic. “Danny was like, ‘I know a guy who could make that work.’” 

And so, Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel) carried truckloads of gear up three flights of stairs to co-produce ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’. Along with Sebastian Owens on bass and Maggie the cat prowling over pre-amps and snuggling up in guitar cases, the band recorded fifteen songs in less than five days—all live. “No click tracks, no tricks, no fuss,” says Alela. “The wildest thing about making this record—it just came really easily. There wasn’t any second-guessing. Why isn’t this landing? Why aren’t my vocals working? I think that’s a testament to finding the right people.” Tivel contributed backing vocals and violin. Lalish added guitar. Fellow Pacific Northwesterners Kati Claborn and Luke Ydstie of Blind Pilot and AC Sapphire provided overdubs of all kinds. Alela’s vision for uninhibited music and revived, creative kinship thrust her into a new season.

The songs of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ range from lulling to raw to cinematic, with Alela’s mellifluous voice a lively and affecting instrument throughout. As the album opens, “California” traces her down the coast to her hometown of Nevada City—a wistful blur of the memories that made her, a pursuit of identity in the external world, and in the past. “Galloping” follows like a fever dream. Written while bed-ridden with sickness, it’s a pressure storm within the walls of Alela’s own mind, a collage of findings from the internal present. Evocative, expansive songs set in perfect juxtaposition, they introduce the endless self-discovery this album celebrates. 

“Piss, Coffee, Blood or Wine?” offers more raucous Americana. The title refers to an indiscernible puddle forming next to a man slumped over the sidewalk, an image Alela posits as the poster for suffering in the US and beyond. It's a protest romp, percussion intensifying with acute, political rage: In this land, our only home / They line their pockets with our souls / Men holding guns, and hiding money / Always at the church on Sunday. 

Alela almost always writes from personal experience, her lyrics sparkling vulnerable, as on “Dusty Roses,” “Wide Open Spaces,” and perhaps most palpably, “To Be Kind.” Written from a mother to a child in a phase of ugly temperament, the song billows into a stunning and familiar image of human intimacy. Sparse strings and delicate piano underlie the tender plea—I need you to be kind / to me—as well as the promise—Even when you’re screaming, mad / I love you.

“I tend to go dark when I write,” Alela says. “But there was a deliberate intention this time to hold onto the light.” To face pain without getting lost in it requires a particular strength—one Alela has honed over a lifetime of songwriting. Her lustrous discography has gathered major critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork, The Guardian, Under The Radar, and plenty more. UNCUT counted her work in their ambitious, ‘50 best singer-songwriter albums’ roundup—a canon comprising John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Paul Simon—characterizing her skill as “insanely beautiful, with the strength and delicacy of spider silk.” Consequence echoed that significance, declaring, “Hers is a timeless sound, that of a wayfaring troubadour, which only seems to come a few times a generation.” 

Alela’s latest collection closes with two haunting odes to the finite nature of life, Fragile As A Flame” and “Endless Waltz.” The latter is Alela’s love letter to her grandparents. “It’s beautiful and bittersweet to watch them waltz toward the unknown. All the while, the birds keep flying along on the wind, and the piles of paper collect dust on our desks.” This veneration for the inevitable, a submission to moving forward, is the ultimate wisdom of ‘Who’s Keeping Time?’ “Everything in perpetual motion,” Alela says. “We’re all just passing through.”

Artist Bio by Maddie Corbin

“I hope my music can unlock emotions in people,” says Luke Armstrong, whose alternative pop radiates with kinetic urgency, certain to shift something in anyone with a beating heart. On his forthcoming EP ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ infectious rhythms and buoyant melodies lift whipsmart, emotionally turbulent lyrics in a vibrant span of sonic inspirations—from Frank Ocean to David Bowie to The 1975. Recorded with GRAMMY-nominated producer Daniel James (Hayley Williams, David Byrne, Wild Cub, Efterklang), it’s an effervescent collection as likely to evoke tears as it is dancing. “I like that contradiction between dark and light, struggle and joy,” says Armstrong. “It’s true to life.”  

Armstrong was born and raised in Beirut. The son of American academics and missionaries, he grew up speaking English and Arabic, navigating questions about his own identity—sexual, religious, and political—from a very young age. “I was an intense child,” he says, half-laughing. “Music has always helped me process that intensity.” He recalls a home video in which his father is playing guitar, while Armstrong, not quite three years old, dances with unabashed passion, belting as many words as he knew at the top of his little lungs. When his older brother started taking music lessons a few years later, Armstrong begged to do the same. By age six, he was learning classical piano and teaching himself guitar, labors of love he continued through adolescence. 

“I’d come home from school with a big frown about something, and my mom would ask ‘Luke, what’s wrong?’ I wouldn’t say anything, I’d just sit down at the piano and bang it out. Melodies came out unconsciously—like a prayer, or a really raw journal entry.” 

The EP’s title track examines some of those early internal conflicts. “Even as a kid, I felt viscerally aware of the performance of masculinity,” says Armstrong. “The resistance to vulnerability—‘boys will be boys’—I couldn’t always relate.” Long before he’d fully embraced his own queerness, Armstrong could see that his own sensitivity set him apart. With the standout song, he transforms what once felt like a misalignment with the world around him into a celebratory groove of self-actualization: Boys don’t cry / I don’t really know how to fake it though / so take me home. 

Armstrong’s early influences ran the gamut—from the steady Christian rock you might expect to hear in a pastor’s household, to the darker moods of metal and alternative you might not, to the bright, sparkling, and refreshingly inarticulate thrill of electronica and house music, which Armstrong considers life-changing. “I was around twelve when my brother and his friends got into DJing. I’d set up the living room with gear if they were coming over. Just imagine a little kid with cables snaking all around him, waiting for someone to come make beats with him.” 

Armstrong left Beirut to play college basketball in Southern California, and through the commitments of school and sports, continued producing and writing. “I’m still an intense person,” he says. “I still need music.” That call to create escalated when he connected with Daniel James, whose highly qualified interest was more than encouragement; it was a cosmic dare to do it fully. “Every time music comes back up in my life, it feels even more powerful,” says Armstrong. “Why not just chase it all the way?” He made his post-grad pilgrimage to Los Angeles and dug in—living in an apartment infested with mold among other things, working as a waiter/security guard/Uber Eats driver, and writing music every day.  

There’s a colorful spontaneity to Armstrong’s craft, likely owed to his instinctual, stream-of-consciousness approach. “Back Back” vibrates with an athletic verbosity, a palpitating freestyle written in the wake of a breakup, a sleepless night, and a long drive. The melody oscillates with relatable mania, but finds grounding in Armstrong’s precocity: Holy growing / We feed the fire and fold them / They take our work and withholding / So I’m rolling for the coping. Says Armstrong, “I kept asking myself, ‘What can I really learn from this? How can I take the experience with me?’”

Amstrong wrote “2000” from a fictional perspective living in the title year, detaching himself from Western life to illuminate—and perhaps scrutinize—its reckless nature: Put it all on credit / You’ll be fine don’t fucking sweat it. The song’s urgent, unrelenting rhythm feels enthralling and imminently doomed, a bit like life in America, as Armstrong artfully collages images of cultural chaos: Picket line screaming saying ‘check the word says!’ / I’ve been checked out, couldn’t get that abortion / Picking out my feed, gotta pick up my food stamps / Working all the way to the weekend.

Both “Heavenbound” and “Little Wins” (the latter co-written with Julian Cruz, known for his work with Dominic Fike) address the heartrending violence and volatility in Armstrong’s home country. The former unfolds over zagging, ‘80s-esque guitars with the tenderness of a letter to a lost love: I can’t leave you / Cause I need you / Even if you never needed me. It’s Beirut that Armstrong’s grieving, as well as his place in it. I know you know that I can make my own hell / But heaven always ends up on fire / And I know you know me better than I know my own self / I make my own hell. 

He wrote the latter in response to Israel’s intensifying bombings in Beirut in 2024. “I was stuck in LA traffic, talking on the phone with a friend in Lebanon,” says Armstrong. “Every time a bomb hit, his door would shake. How do you make sense of it? Me here. Him there.” It was at this same time that wildfires in California were raging to a historic level. “How do you keep going?” With “Little Wins,” he strings together tiny moments of survival—I’m stuck in the noise / But I’m calling the boys—positing their sum as the point of existence. Is it even a life / If you never arrive / at the little wins? 

Armstrong doesn’t hide from the darkness. “There’s an opportunity to face fear with art, to surrender to what scares you, process it, and come through.” He confronts the shadows and from within them, sheds light, searches for light, even makes the light himself, driven by a bold determination to keep moving forward. And his songs do just that—propulsive bangers compelled by sociocultural undercurrents, steered with the compassionate wisdom of a global citizen, flowing into exaltation. “I want to be honest about human suffering, and to make a statement about what a better world can look like.”

Album Bio By Maddie Corbin

Where is my love? Cat Clyde howls, opening her new album ‘Mud Blood Bone’ with abandon. Can’t find my love? It’s not the somber lament of a longing woman, but a feral eruption, the roar of an animal on the edge. Her voice crumples with dismay, a swampy croon over romping keys. I got a hole in my chest  / I can’t take the emptiness / Where is my love? It’s the essential question of ‘Mud Blood Bone,’ a void eleven frenetic songs sizzle to fill. 

The Canadian songwriter’s fourth full-length and first release with Concord Records finds her at a point of personal evolution. “I wrote these songs at the end of a big cycle,” she shares. “Love was not present in my life and I didn’t know where to find it or how to get it back.” Essential to the search, Clyde discovered, was relinquishing old notions. “In the past, I felt like love chained me, controlled me, put me in a cage.” 

Clyde looked to her Métis indigenous roots and invoked a deep reverence for nature to redefine it, which she expresses through her intentional rendition of Marty Robbins’ hit, “My Love.” My love is the valley / The breeze is its sigh / My love is the mountains / That reaches to the sky. The lyrics resonated with her search for something truer, and far more glorious, than the experiences of her past. The wail of the coyote / The flight of the dove / It’s all creation / And that’s what I love. 

Clyde found solace in the natural world’s cyclicality, the inescapability of time. “Life is constantly moving forward,” she says. “And though I was writing about my past, I was also writing to my future self.” She celebrates this on “Another Time.” I walked a ragged mile / Found myself at your door / But that old road keeps calling me / To walk a thousand more. Clyde relishes the duality of every moment—the presence of joy, made urgent by certainty that it will end, or the weight of grief, softened by knowledge that it will pass. “Everything becomes a ripple in time,” she says. “Real love is a beam that echoes through all times, all spaces, and all realms.” 

Throughout eleven tracks, Clyde’s personal experiences radiate relatable. On “Man’s World,” she tackles the agonizing limitations of patriarchal society over feverish, bluesy guitars. Her raucous and revelatory anthem confronts the inherent dangers—both physical and emotional—of occupying a female body. By “Night Eyes,” she arrives at a satisfying self-liberation, and with due drama. What begins as a soulful ballad builds until it bursts, irresistibly cinematic as she proclaims at the top of her range: Build a fire in the caves of me / But know I’ll never be / A slave again for love. 

“Press Down,” co-written with Courtney Marie Andrews, solidifies that sentiment; it’s an epiphany and an emotional unshackling in one. “I hadn’t done too many writing sessions previously, and really enjoyed my time with Courtney,” says Clyde. “I brought the song in, unfinished and in pieces, and we sat on the floor in her lovely home with tea. It was beautiful to dig into it with her, and to discover the song contained answers to questions I had been avoiding, truths I didn’t want to look at.” Clyde grapples with the weight of an oppressive love through the track, eventually finding the strength to rise above it: If someday you find me / And time has untied me / I’ll be moving like a mountain / Only the sky can press down.  

Produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman) and recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, Clyde’s new collection exists in a sonic overlap; the rockabilly grit of contemporaries like Sierra Ferrell, The Deslondes, or Nick Shoulders, meets the vulnerable, folk rock volatility of Big Thief or Angel Olsen. “Drew was the perfect person to help me assemble the players and bring this collection to life,” says Clyde. “Everyone brought their own unique gift to the studio. I create from a place of instinct, and once we all locked in, it felt easy, and we were able to capture the songs live.” Liam Duncan of Boy Golden was another integral collaborator. “He was there from day one demos to the album’s finalization,” Clyde explains, “as a great friend, musician, and anchor to the original sentiment of each song.”

Clyde’s foundational relationship with music began through a vent in the floor. “I’d lift the rug up to hear my grandfather playing his fiddle along to cassette tapes in the basement.” This was in North Ontario at summertime family gatherings, the best of which would culminate in impromptu family jam sessions. “I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t singing.” After a fleeting, childhood stint with the piano, Clyde took on the guitar around age thirteen. “When I discovered Blues music—well—that changed my life.” The riffs of Lead Belly and Robert Johnson were too complicated for her small, preteen hands to master, but they inspired Clyde to write her own songs. She busked through adolescence, joined a punk band called Shit Bats in college, and recorded her first album in a friend’s basement before she graduated. Four full-lengths later, Clyde’s voice vibrates with that ferocious confidence of one who’s been doing this her whole life.

‘Mud Blood Bone’ exudes a nomadic independence. Clyde penned some of the songs in her 1973 Boler trailer, parked temporarily on a farm in Ontario, others on a narrow boat in England, and the rest in transit from one festival to another, letting lyrics stream freely from a jetlagged dream state. “Constantly being on the move, having to navigate new environments, it forces me to be present, and to confront my own feelings,” Clyde says. “You can’t hide behind comforts. You have to know exactly who you are, and what you want.” 

The result is uninhibited, raw, pure; it’s the sound of personal truth discovered in real time. Clyde is cracked wide open and what spills out—equal parts despair, invocation, discovery, and celebration—is the love she went looking for. “When I listen to this album, I know that my power belongs to me. Love lives inside of me. I can always find it.” 

Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

Tell me angel of death / Do you understand yet? / I’m not the one who should’ve seen / I don’t believe in anything. Thin Lear, begetter of elegant melancholia, opens his sophomore album with a bridge falling and a brother’s death. What’s the reason for me seeing? / What’s the reason for anything? / Tell me angel, if you will / Do you think of me still? This tossing of hands to the sky, a dizzied surrender to the absurdity of existence, drives every song that follows.

Matt Longo grew up writing short stories; that narrative instinct pervades his music. He tends towards tragedies—some true, some imagined, and some stuck in between. “I’ve always gravitated to bizarre tales to access my own grief and pain,” says Longo. From “The Mothman” event of 1960s West Virginia which inspired “Silver Bridge,” to the “Mad Gasser” mass  hysteria of 1940s Illinois that backdrops “Mattoon,” Longo collects peculiar lore and studies it for insights into humanity. He pairs odd plots with placating melodies, his voice as pure and holy as a bell. The effect is uncanny—lyrics like a nightmare delivered through a lullaby. “I need something supernatural to wrestle with, just to understand my own earthly troubles,” he says. “I write to access a feeling and get past it.” Longo may summon the ghosts to dispel them, but Thin Lear’s music remains vibrantly haunted, full of eerie figures loping along, human or otherwise, hoping to heal.  

Influenced on a fundamental level by the likes of David Bowie and Karen Dalton, Longo builds a kind of sonic bridge between the two—his emotive folk pop aches and articulates from a strange, starry place. Cultic, mysterious, magical. He recorded Many Disappeared with Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell, John Prine) in Memphis with players including Ken Coomer (Wilco), Will Sexton (Alexa Rose), Rick Steff (Lucero), and Dave Smith (Al Green, Kris Kristofferson, Cat Power) among others. “These were guys I grew up listening to,” Longo says. “It was an honor to be in the same room.” He sought out Ross-Spang specifically for the lively bigness he brings to any record. “Walking in there the first day, people were emotional, and I knew I was on the right track.” 

Longo’s grandfather passed away just before he began writing the album. “He was a loving but enigmatic kind of guy,” Longo says. “The world felt less interesting after he left it.” Dreams followed—vivid interactions with his lost loved one every night. “I wondered if I was making it all up to make myself feel better.” He grapples with as much on “The Haunt,” a gentle, piano-driven track that wonders, Have I gone crazy since you died? / ‘Cause my heart was almost breaking / From this world and all its taking / Is it only me alone and telling lies? Self-described as secular, Longo follows his fascination with the otherworldly beyond the infrastructure of any religion. “Without it, how do you begin to deal with the total weirdness that accompanies loss?” It’s an unpredictable investigation he leads throughout the album, an observer as humble, open, and astonished as any.

In the same time period, Longo and his partner were weighing the choice to have a child. “I felt like there was still so much I needed to fix about myself before I could have this thing I wanted, a family.” He lamented his tendency to self-isolate, his inclination toward loneliness. “How useful is this guy in the context of a family?” 

On album standout “A Cherished Man,” that loneliness manifests in three, distinctly curious characters. Andy drinks himself into public humiliation on a nightly basis; Annie pokes strangers with pins on crowded urban buses; Charlie consumes gargantuan sums of corks, stones, and live animals for performance. It’s a work of masterful poetry, and a poignant testament to the lengths humans will go in pursuit of connection. “I see myself in all of them,” Longo confesses. “They’re looking for love, they’re just not sure how to broker it.” With a delicate wail of despair—almost as though pricked—he sings: They say, you’re only whole / You’re only true / Long as someone dreams of you / And if you’re just set up to fall / You find a way to feel at all. It’s heartrending and conciliatory at once; Longo goes to the freak show, and sees only humans. 

Longo draws from the peculiar happenings of his own life too. “Witness” recounts one of his earliest childhood memories, an unfortunate one. “My friend and I came across a dying cat on the road. My friend was nonchalant. I was utterly horrified.” The song rolls and bounces, nearly jubilant, percussively indifferent to death, as life often is. There we stood, two children at this summer tomb / Heard its final sputtered gasp as flowers bloomed. Longo says, “The incident is still a touchpoint for me, every time I come upon the same powerless feeling, whether it be the loss of a loved one or the general anxiety that the veil between this world and the next is quite thin.” In his wise worldview, everything is gossamer, and so, everything is precious. 

For an album rich with human anguish, Many Disappeared proves an unexpected salve. Moving through disaster, loss, depression, and disillusionment, Longo is awake to the hurt, neither minimizing nor aggrandizing, but addressing—and dressing—the wound. “The album isn’t just a reckoning with grief but a confrontation with the inevitable,” he shares. A chilling endeavor he manages, uncannily, to make warm. 

Artist Bio by Maddie Corbin

A few summers ago, on a sweltering August day, Alexa Rose found herself chasing a particularly disheveled-looking cloud. “Like a bruise,” she recalls, “a swirl of black and red and yellow, the angriest looking sky I’ve ever seen.” This was somewhere in the Midwest, in between towns on tour. She sat in a parking lot, marveling, until the cloud broke open and poured the rain and resolved itself into a glorious, weeping mess of a sunset. 

“Why are we drawn to such a thing, as the weather alert on our phone advises us to seek shelter?” Rose asks. “Are we just looking for ourselves, longing to take the lid off our own darkness, to find the mercy of softer colors waiting?” Her third studio album, ‘Atmosphere’ explores that question, attending to the symbiosis of joy and grief, terror and hope, heaviness and lightness in our daily lives.

Rose recorded the album at Betty’s, a studio created by Sylvan Esso nestled in the North Carolina woods. Shortly after the session, Hurricane Helene hit the western part of the state, washing away lives and landscapes in the hometowns of half the band. The storm’s wake, eerie and desolate and decisive, cast a new light upon the record. “I related to the music in a different way,” says Rose. “I had just moved into a new place after losing access to my house, and felt a little tossed around the way everyone did. The experience deepened my love for my home and my belief in the resilience of the land and communities in Appalachia.” Rose spent the harsh winter to follow revisiting the album and re-recording certain songs in her cabin outside Asheville, replacing studio shimmer with intimate sparsity, a deliberate bareness to better express her feeling at the time. “Stripping the songs down felt truer: nothing to hide behind anymore, but believing the roots are strong enough to hold.”

Rose has spent her life in small Appalachian towns. On album standout “Lilacs,” she pays heartfelt homage to a backroad that winds through the hills of Alleghany County, Virginia, land that once belonged to her family. She shares, “There’s an old black and white photo of my grandmother as a girl along this road, holding a pint glass of milk in her hand, dirt on her knees.” Rose’s voice comes through pure and piercing as golden light over a gravel path, illuminating a heartbreaking wistfulness for a home one’s never known. “The farm and all the land was sold long before I was born, but in the springtime when the lilacs are in bloom, I imagine my great great grandmother planting them. I always cut a few and place them in a mason jar. Did you know lilacs can live for over a hundred years? I think it’s so lovely that you can plant something that can long outlive you, and I wonder if that very thought ever crossed her mind, as she clipped blossoms for her own bedside table a hundred years ago.”

Rose embraces the pangs and pleasures of every place, reveling and wrestling with what it means to belong. She wrote “Anywhere, OH” on tour, about a town she stopped in for coffee. “I was only there for half an hour passing through, but I felt homesick when I left. I remember the way the colors of houses and old oaks poked out from the fog, a line of kids dressed up for Halloween, waiting to go into some church party.” The song has an autumnal moan, evoking the visceral melancholy of seasons changing, when a shift in the air sets a thousand different memories alight. “There’s a bittersweetness in making small talk with the person behind the coffee counter, who assumes you know about whatever local news is going on—and you just nod along, knowing you’ll likely never stop there again.” That sense—of simultaneous wonder and mourning—pervades ‘Atmosphere,’ a spiritual tension that builds until it precipitates, offering listeners their own catharsis. 

Rose’s collaborators comprise a masterclass of unrelenting, sonic emotion. Produced by Ryan Gustafson of The Dead Tongues and mixed by Grammy-winning Matt Ross Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price, John Prine), ‘Atmosphere’ features pedal steel from Mat Davidson (Twain, Big Thief), percussion from Dom Billet (Dr. Dog, The Weather Station), bass from Jeff Ratner (Langhorne Slim), cello from  Hilary James (Matt Pond PA, Esmé Patterson), banjo from Helena Rose (Holler Choir), and truly haunting harmonies from Josh Oliver (Watchhouse, Tyler Childers). Once praised by NPR as “the soul child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton,” here Rose dwells between the shimmering falsetto of Alison Krauss and the supernatural tone of Adrianne Lenker, classic and modern at once.

“This album is all about tenderness,” Rose says. “It’s about going out on a limb to feel the full swirl of what life throws at you.” Each song has a companion: one for feeling at home and one for when you’re completely lost, one for grieving the violent nature of the world and one for the gentler, kinder days. Ten songs flow like a gradient, centered around the idea that our experiences move through us like storms, and if we don’t hide from them, we can watch the skies unfold beautifully.

Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

The title of Sam Burchfield’s latest album, Nature Speaks, is both a statement of belief and an instruction: to listen carefully, to feel the world move through you, and to heed its loving nudge.

Recorded in just five days at Studio 1093 in Athens, Georgia with co-producers and collaborators Ryan Plumley and Jason Kingsland (Delta Spirit, Youth Lagoon, Deerhunter), the upcoming album is Burchfield’s most stripped-down and spirit-forward to date. 

“Just before we recorded, I was in New York City on tour,” Burchfield shares. “My wife was at home, pregnant with our second child. I was taking a walk through Washington Square Park, feeling this hyper-vivid awareness of the beauty of the city, and at the same time, this intense pain of being away from my family.” In that moment, a man sitting at a public space piano began playing the song Burchfield’s partner walked down the aisle to at their wedding. Coincidence or cosmic wink, it stirred Burchfield’s soul. “It felt like walking through a portal.”

For Burchfield, like many of us, it took a moment of poignant distance to illuminate his place of utmost belonging—back in the Blue Ridge Mountains, among his family. And with that radical clarity came a revitalized artistic confidence, a turning point in accepting and trusting his own musical intuition, the intuition from which Nature Speaks beautifully emerges.

Burchfield grew up in serene Seneca, South Carolina. His instinct to write was there from the start, his itch to share was unrelenting. He spent his childhood setting speakers up in parking lots and coffee shops, playing with whomever would join him on “stage” to whomever would listen. At college in Athens, Georgia, he found the scene he’d been trying to create for himself. Opportunities emerged in rapid succession. Burchfield won a songwriting competition, recorded his first EP, and found himself suddenly entangled in sparkly offerings from network television and major labels, chances that ultimately felt more like a detour than a dream come true. 

“It was honestly insane,” says Burchfield. “Things felt a little out of my control. I had to really lean on people I respected, whose wisdom I trusted—teachers, friends, family.” Burchfield recognized early on the indispensability of creative autonomy, and the sources of support that kept him grounded. “My community gave me the courage to walk away from paths that didn’t feel right.”

He’s been building a catalog since 2014—originals, concept works, and live recordings. “I think there are like, four or five albums out there at this point?” Burchfield questions, endearingly unprecious. He is as sincere and unassuming as his guitar-playing—earthy and affectingly to-the-point. “Truthfully, it’s been a long journey toward artistic identity. I’ve learned a lot about living into yourself, discovering who you are by simply being.” Nature Speaks is no doubt Burchfield’s best offering to date, largely due to that resonant sense of self. 

The album came together during a momentous new phase of fatherhood. “There is always something to sacrifice in the present in order to create a future,” Burchfield says. “And in many ways, I used music to parent myself through all the changes.” Burchfield impulsively penned and tracked the stunning album closer “Morning Light” at home, around three o’clock in the morning. The song softly buzzes with the white noise of a sleeping household, a lullaby of its own kind. “I was writing a message of comfort to myself when I needed it,” he says. His vocals are hushed and heavy with the weight of profound transformation, a soothing surrender to the life that lay ahead. 

The theme of commitment glitters throughout Nature Speaks. Standout single “Stay (Betty Blue)” is a tender and arresting tune of devotion, a vow of stability against wavering mental health and the general fragility of life. Burchfield wrote it for his wife—a musician, painter and poet—on their anniversary. “You don’t know what you’re going to have to confront when you enter a relationship. We all have different battles to fight.” In his sandy, evocative vocals, he makes the colorful promises that account for real love: And if you get lost on the other side, I’ll plant roses in your mind / If you go mad and hurt yourself, I can lick your wounds until you're well. 

Burchfield’s sixth release is a source of sacred calm in an overwhelming world, a generous invitation into a rooted life: a family’s unconditional love, a hometown’s soothing mountainscape, a sturdy salvation in knowing who you are. “Capturing and connecting with humanity is why I make music,” says Burchfield. “This album is more human than anything I’ve done before.”

Artist Bio by Maddie Corbin

“When I realized I’d been wrong to doubt Willie Nelson, that’s when music really started to make sense.”  

Brooklyn-based musician Karen Dahlstrom grew up singing in show choirs and Jazz ensembles, a popular soloist earnestly emulating Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald. “I enjoyed performance, but I also knew my limitations. You have to have a certain focus on technique in order to go really far.” She accepted what she considered her constraints and stopped singing for the better part of her twenties. Today, listening to Dahlstrom’s incisive, unflinching lyrics, delivered straight to the heart with a husky, insurgent depth, it’s hard to imagine pesky technique was ever the point.  

Around age thirty, at a turning point in her life, Dahstrom’s relationship to music began to change. Visiting a friend in San Francisco, she scavenged Amoeba Records for vinyl and perhaps even a rejuvenated sense of self. “I didn’t even know what music I liked anymore.” She was surprised to find herself drawn to artists whose music didn’t rely on any complex arrangement—Townes Van Zandt, Lyle Lovett, The Stanley Brothers, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard, Jean Ritchie—folksters palpably at ease alone with their instruments. “Three chords and the truth suddenly seemed like enough. Plenty, even.” She opted for High Lonesome over high brow, sentiment over skill. “The kicker was discovering Gillian Welch,” she says. “Other singers had made me want to perform, but she made me want to write.” In her third decade, Dahlstrom picked up the guitar. 

Back in Brooklyn, Dahlstrom began sitting in on sessions at Jalopy and Sunny's in Red Hook. “You can’t help but learn from other people,” she says, wistfully recollecting a time akin to a freshman year. She answered a Craigslist ad for a rhythm guitar-player who could sing harmonies, and soon enough, joined the all-female Americana trio Bobtown. The band released four acclaimed albums from 2010 to 2019; Dahlstrom’s late-blooming love of folk didn’t just endure, it flourished. 

For her fortieth birthday, Dahlstrom decided to record her own solo music for the first time. “The songs I loved most all comprised tales of Appalachia. I wanted to think about where I’m from—Idaho—and tell those stories.” Dahlstrom dug into the pioneering history of the Northwest and unearthed the lore of her own family, along the way honing her lyrical voice into a sharp, penetrating tool. The Gem State EP and its follow-up, No Man's Land EP, ushered Dahlstrom into the songwriting communities of Folk Alliance, Miles of Music, Kerrville where Dahlstrom has been a two-time New Folk Finalist, Sad Songs Summer Camp hosted by The Milk Carton Kids.

Kenneth Pattengale, of the famed folk duo, features on a standout track of Dahlstrom’s upcoming debut album, a song that spurred his instantaneous interest in her writing. “You never know what’s going to resonate with people,” she says, staunchly modest. “Last of My Line” grapples with the existential question of what it means to have children, or rather, what it means to not. “I never really thought about kids—I just assumed I’d have them someday. But as the years went on, biology and circumstance made the decision for me.” Dahlstrom’s lyrics are tender and poignant, her mood gracious and matter-of-fact. Things don’t go how you plan it / You play the cards you were handed / But I’ll make the best of my time / I’m the last of my line. It’s a potent indication of her signature strength, an ability to rend hearts with plain honesty. “I wrote the song I needed that I couldn’t find. I hope it finds the people who need it too.”

Love These Days emerges less like a debut than the sage, self-assured offering of a legacy artist. The album feels lived-in, like an old house, weathered nooks full of patinated personal artifacts. Dahlstrom guides a listener through, shining soft light onto dark shadows—anxiety, disconnection, regret, grief—creating the visibility that heals. “My songs are often resigned. I’m not looking for solutions, but simply acknowledging struggles.” Dahlstrom lost her mother in 2020. She wrote album standout “If I’d Known You” about sifting through boxes of belongings that told a different story than the one she knew about the woman she called mom: Notebooks and the novels that you read / Postcards of places you never went / And I wondered if I could’ve been your friend / If I’d known you. Untangling her own sense of complicated regret, Dahlstrom is candid—bravely so. That generous vulnerability courses through Love These Days, making it the kind of album that’s not just a window into a songwriter’s experience, but a living companion to one's own. 

Now in her fifties, Dahlstrom isn’t interested in concealing pain or imperfections, lyrically or sonically. “Mistakes are allowed. The only time I fail is when I don’t emotionally drop in fully.” It’s her first time self-producing as a solo artist; she’s cognizant of the confidence it requires to hold that ethos on her own. “I have to trust my own taste above all, which is an empowering thing to do.” It’s also a profound practice in knowing herself—discovering where she’s headed, while honoring where she’s been. Love These Days’ title track emerged from Dahlstrom’s desire to unearth her jazz roots and tie them to the folk music she makes now. “My parents played Willie Nelson constantly when I was a kid—I didn’t get it. But looking back, I realize when I started in jazz, I already knew so many American songbook standards because of the ‘Stardust’ album,” Dahlstrom says, amused. “Willie turned out to be the musical nexus. And my parents got the last laugh.”

“Sometimes it takes four or five tries to realize something just isn't working,” says Kassi Valazza. “I wrote this after my thirteenth try.” She’s referring to the song “Roll On” specifically, but the stagnating pull of repeating patterns—and the brutalizing work of breaking them—inform every song on her new album From Newman Street. “In songwriting and in life, you can’t keep expecting the same thing to work every time.”

Valazza grew up between Prescott and Phoenix, Arizona. She penned her first song at age ten but in those early efforts to perform, found herself halted by stage fright of a clinical level. “I’ve gone to therapy for it,” she says, half-laughing. She didn’t stop writing music but she let less paralyzing means of expression lead the way, eventually enrolling in arts school for painting, an illustrative instinct that inevitably reveals itself in her vivid songwriting. It wasn’t until she relocated to the Pacific Northwest as an adult that Valazza picked back up the proverbial—and actual—guitar.

“Zach Bryson was kind of like the honky tonk ambassador of Portland when I got there,” Valazza says. “He was so welcoming and encouraging.” She discovered an inspiring, supportive artistic community, a less rigid relationship with musical output, and then—vocal nodules. “It was actually kind of the best thing that could have happened, because I learned about the crossover of physical and mental that takes place in performance.” Recovery entailed recognizing the reflexive functions of the voice in response to anxiety; as is the case throughout the human body, stress reactions can be damaging. “Because I suddenly understood what was happening with my voice, I could handle it, wield it. I felt more confident.” Valazza recorded an album with Bryson in an old-house-turned-studio. It was an informal, friendly endeavor, though not at all small. “I think probably thirty people contributed,” she says. “I listen back to that album and I think ‘this was me learning how to do this.’ I can hear that moment in time.” 

Valazza’s debut Dear Dead Days fused the Southwest’s rustic romance with the Pacific Northwest’s rocky realism and garnered Valazza a cult following. She landed a deal with Fluff & Gravy, a label known for launching earthy, emerging treasures like Anna Tivel and Margo Cilker, and toured with folk favorites including Melissa Carper and Riddy Arman. Her sophomore album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing followed, a glimmering set of sonic talismans among Ann Powers’ Favorite Songs of 2023 for NPR and Bandcamp’s Best Country Music of 2023, with praise from KEXP, Uncut, MOJO, and Brooklyn Vegan to boot.

By the time Valazza was ready to record her third album, she had spent a decade in Portland—and that, she realized, was enough. “As someone with anxiety, I always want to know what’s going to happen,” she says. “But knowing can be limiting. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, that’s growth. That’s what this album’s about, really.” 

On “Weight of the Wheel,” a weepy slide guitar underscores Valazza’s listless lament: All things look the same / From the pillow on my bed / I’m stressed out I’m far away / There’s dizzy dancing in my head. The song sounds like urgency, grief, surrender, and embrace—all at once. It’s feeling like some kind of fight to outgrow / The way I fear slowing down before I’m old. By 2022, that dizzy demise of cyclical living had set Valazza still—in a basement apartment there in Portland. “You’re going to be a different person after every album,” she says. “And you have to keep moving forward.” 

Sights set on Nashville, Valazza landed in New Orleans. “It wasn’t the plan. I spent three months there between tours, and it just kind of happened.” The bright newness of The Big Easy illuminated fresh inspirations and unexpected love. But it also cast a stark light on Valazza’s sense of self; in a new place, you can see more clearly what you want to be, as well as what you haven’t been. “I discovered the less likeable parts of myself in that time,” Valazza says. Album standout “Your Heart’s a Tin Box” encapsulates precisely this, with a cynical-yet-sunny likeness to Joni Mitchell and lyrical acuity: I moved down to New Orleans / Thinking love would reappear / But people tell you everything / but what you wanna hear / You relied on fixated company / Now you’re drowning in your ego’s gluttony. The patterns of her Portland life had stalled Valazza. It wasn’t the city’s fault so much as the natural consequence of complacency, the stagnance that comes with too much of the same. Valazza knew she was due for a personal evolution, and when faced with those innate, bristling pangs of change, could soothe herself with that certainty.

The track sequence on From Newman Street is audibly intentional—from a deep lull and dull itch, to a barbed clash with cognitive dissonance, to humble submission, and an ultimate, open-armed acceptance of new life. Poetically enough, half the songs on the upcoming album were written in Portland, the other half in New Orleans. Valazza returned to her former hometown to record with Matt Thomson at Echo Echo Studios, and titled the release From Newman Street in tribute to an apartment she lived in deeply and left with heavy heart. The album is as much a fond farewell as it is a fervent step forward. 

Valazza made the official move to New Orleans in February of 2024. “Coming from placid, wintry Portland straight into Mardi Gras—I would not recommend it.” She recalls the time with humor, grace, and sensitivity for her past self, qualities that shine through the album. “I’ve always been a believer that music is only good if it’s really raw, really honest—probably coming from a place of hurt,” Valazza admits. “But I’m trying to embrace chaos these days, and bring a little more light into my life.” 

Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

“Maybe the person you currently are can’t survive something,” says Lilly Bechtel. “But a new person could. So, you become that person.” 

Bechtel, the songwriter and vocalist behind the indie recording project Night Teacher, is an impassioned proponent of personal evolution. The title of her sophomore record, Year of the Snake, refers to the Chinese Zodiac of 2025—a time for transformation. The album is a glowing invitation to grow, an illumination of the animal motivations that compel us forward, and a reminder to hold grace and space for the process.  

Be a better human / not to lose it / I'm about to do it, Bechtel sings on the opening track “Never Better.” The melodically zagging standout seeks balance between making healthy self-improvements and treating oneself like a perpetual renovation project—an equilibrium as tricky as the song’s shifting tempo, and one Bechtel has made her life’s work. Lilly Bechtel is a trauma-informed teacher—of yoga, breathwork, meditation, and poetry. 

“I get a lot of comfort and clarity from remembering that humans are also animals,” Bechtel says. “The primary, oldest parts of our brains are far more concerned with safety and survival than we may realize, or be able to articulate.” She’s focused on how those ancestral mechanisms manifest in the body. By attending to what she calls the “subterranean, preverbal, somatic intelligence whispering to us all the time,” Bechtel creates a space for healing that doesn’t require one’s pain to pass through verbality, and has done so in women's correctional facilities, veterans hospitals, rehabs, nursing homes, and Kindergarten classrooms. “It’s not always possible to make sense of trauma with language. But you don’t have to put words to your story in order to feel seen, or held, or safe.” She’s speaking from personal experience. 

Bechtel grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, nicknamed “Birdie” by her family for an inclination to narrate every passing moment with song. “I had this natural desire, but at the same time, I didn’t want anyone to hear me.” She recalls an instance in which she asked her mom and brother to sit in the living room while she performed from a stairwell on the other side of the wall. “Or maybe I wanted to be heard, just not seen.” That conflict between an instinct to express and a fear of exposure has long played a part in Bechtel’s artistic experience. Around age fourteen, she and her brother debuted their own band at a local coffeehouse series. She remembers taking the stage as an intoxicating—and somewhat twisted—sensation. “I felt very distrustful of being someone else’s entertainment.” She threw herself into writing, though almost entirely in secret. “I had thought of art as the ultimate embodiment of raw, vulnerable truth. But performance is a different thing. You can perform against reality,” she says. “It’s a dangerous thing to realize.” 

It was also around this age that Bechtel, as she puts it, “went to war” with her body. Expelled from high school for behavioral issues, she spent much of her adolescence in isolated, therapeutic settings and treatment centers, confronting eating disorders and substance abuse. “It was hard to make sense of time, or how one event played into the next.” In a formative span that often felt dizzyingly disjointed, Bechtel held onto music as companion and catharsis. She started burning mixed CDs for friends on the other side, collaging covers for each one. “The practice of piecing together fragments felt parallel to my life—and it helped. I could let experiences be messy, pile them into one, and make sense of it all later. I’d find meaning someday, but I had to be open to disorientation first.”

Bechtel got sober and attended BARD college for Literature and Sociology, while independently studying yoga and the neurobiology of traumatic stress. She made her way back to music, circling communities of songwriters in New York City and Barcelona after college. In Spain, she felt unexpectedly connected to musicians whose first language wasn’t English. “If words fail, you have to rely on other elements to communicate—space, melody, texture.” Her interest in the power of nonverbal expression deepened. Though when Bechtel returned to her hometown of Charlottesville, she wasn’t quite comfortable considering herself a songwriter yet. 

She said as much to producer Matt Wyatt, whom she met through mutual friends at a literary event. “He had asked if I found it difficult to share vulnerable material,” Bechtel recalls. “I said something quippy back like, ‘No, it’s not hard, because I don’t do that.’ But Matt’s not the kind who’s satisfied with short-form retorts, so we ended up in a long, wonderful conversation about the psychology of stage fright.” Wyatt’s rare, earnest curiosity moved Bechtel. She largely credits his encouragement for her decision to record her debut album, which the duo released as Night Teacher in 2020. To Bechtel’s incisive lyrics and jagged guitars, Wyatt adds lush atmosphere. The result is a gritty, propulsive, and off-kilter sonic world, with eclectic comparisons spanning Margaret Glaspy, Thom Yorke, Cate Le Bon. For Bechtel, Night Teacher’s debut album had an effect like exposure therapy, thrusting her into the role of an artist with the repeating force that forbids self-doubt. She delved into finding her audience, performing the music live—until she couldn’t; the pandemic took hold. 

In the hardships that followed—family challenges, a breakup, a relapse after twelve years of sobriety, all intensified by the isolation of Covid—Bechtel found solace in the songwriting practice she’d established. “I kept asking myself, ‘Can I survive this?’” During that time, while on a walk, she came across snakeskin—a stunning encasement, intact, emptied and left behind. She relished it as a talisman, revering the symbolism but more so, the practical severity it elicited: “If snakes don’t shed their skin, they die.” On album track “Ecdysis,” Bechtel references the molting process, spinning poetic tension between the animal necessity and human volition involved in making change: If you can’t survive it / become somebody different.

The songs of Night Teacher arrive like notes slipped under the door or winks across the table, little hints of solidarity that acknowledge a struggle, without demanding explanation or solution. “Healing doesn’t have to be linear,” says Bechtel. “It’s usually not.” The moniker nods to her preferred professional setting—evening hours, dim light, cushions on floors—but more poignantly, to the nature of the lesson. Trauma hides inside us, under the dark covers of confusion, distraction, discomfort. But as Bechtel puts it, “Pain can be a teacher. It can have some really important things to tell you—if you’re willing to listen.” 

Album Bio by Maddie Corbin

Elly Kace’s voice is a complex instrument. Hushed and spectral; swelling and shiny and muscular; rattling with static-electricity intensity; whirring like bare branches in a wicked storm; resolving into a crystalline cure. Its capacity is seemingly boundless. Its core quality is, above all, alive.

“I’ve been singing longer than I’ve been speaking,” Kace says, quietly cheerful. 

By age six, Kace performed in her first professional choir. While childhood classmates did their imagining with magic wands, Kace waved a conductor’s baton, her musical aspirations preceding puberty. She pursued opportunities in voice, musical theater, and recording, completing her first full-length album during her senior year of high school—with the help of Garageband. Kace enrolled at DePaul University in Chicago to study Operatic Vocal Performance, a conservatory-style endeavor requiring intense commitment. “Opera is the kind of thing that, if you want to do it well, you can’t do much of anything else.” Her diligence secured more than a degree. Kace embarked upon a vibrant career in opera, performing across the globe and at esteemed cultural institutions such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, culminating in a pivotal European audition tour. In Milan, Kace found herself on the cusp of a professional and personal peak. That was January of 2020.

“I had to leave before the lockdown,” Kace says, the tone of her voice falling with the memory’s lingering weight. She returned to New York on the first of March. Uncertainty mounted—about what she’d left behind, and about what she was coming home to. Public performance, the focus of Kace’s life up to that point, had just become unsafe.  

For plentiful reasons, Kace began meditating. She had been an avid yogi since she was a teenager—“Opera is athletic work,” she says, “You have to stay in shape”—but she hadn’t so deeply explored the mental elements of her practice. The general purpose of meditation is to quiet the mind, but cerebral silence can beget a visceral sound. Kace began experiencing instinctual vocal expressions, involuntary incantations that she recalls felt “strange and unnerving and really, really good.” Her relationship to her voice had historically been a matter of control, a training as rigid as one undergoes to operate a particular tool. The skills she’d acquired were measured and specific and diametrically opposed to improvisation. “It was just happening, sounds coming from nowhere,” she says. “I started letting my voice do what it wanted to do, instead of what I told it to do.” While fellow quarantiners sought out sourdough starters and puppy dogs, Kace acquired a harmonium and many singing bowls.  

Kace fondly refers to her first album as an “experiment.” She says, “I’d only ever been in opera. The idea of making music I could play in, say, a bar, felt wild.” She released ‘Nothing I see means anything’ in 2021, and from then, her urge to write only intensified. In that time, Kace endured the deaths of several loved ones, and her approach to sound evolved into a form of not only expression, but of grieving and healing too. “It became a way to connect with those I had lost,” she says. Just one year after her debut, Kace released ‘Object Permanence,’ a stunning, sonic transcendence of realms. 

Kace approached her third album with burgeoning confidence and a welcome, new certainty that she was doing what she was meant to do. As studios and venues cautiously reopened, Kace could finally engage a flesh-and-blood music community. She speaks of the band that came together, Macie Stewart (FINOM), Darian Donovan Thomas (Arooj Aftab), Will Miller (Resavoir), Lia Kohl, Aaron Edgcomb (CLAK), as well as her co-producer Ziyad Asrar (Whitney), with a reverent gratitude. “Making music that’s so different from what I studied for so many years—it’s hard, really hard,” Kace confesses. “But it is so satisfying.” 

‘The Seventh Gate’ is an extension of ‘Object Permanence.’ While that album delved boldly into the dark depths of the spiritual world, ‘The Seventh Gate’ steps into the light. Kace is audibly more comfortable with the music she’s making as well as those meditative conversations with the other side that inspire it.

The album opens with “Lisianthuses,” titled in reference to Kace’s favorite flower, a species that is notoriously difficult to grow. “I have always been told I was a handful, and have spent much of my life trying to be less so,” Kace explains. “I have realized the things that make me a handful are the things that connect me to my higher self. I am working to become more and more of a handful each day, and when I need reminding I buy myself some lisianthuses to gaze at.” It’s through this radical declaration of self-love that Kace can fully embrace her distinct mysticism, a cosmic openness that colors every song.  

Truths unfold on “Moon,” an eerie and enthralling confrontation with mortality. Kace illuminates the temporariness of existence with a radiant severity. Like a fairy godmother in a graveyard, she sends her tense melody spinning. She says, “Everything changes on the physical plane, everyone leaves, and ultimately our bodies all die. There is a sacred humility in recognizing our physical limits and the vast space of what we don’t know beyond the things we can sense.” For the sickening fear of endings, Kace prescribes the medicine of life itself.   

Two songs on the album, “Even With The Light On” and “Pink Sky” came to Kace simultaneously in the middle of the night. “I found myself waking at three in the morning, sensing the explosive presence of a former love who’d passed,” she explains. “No matter the spells I cast, the lights I keep lit, some souls are tethered to my existence.” In both songs, Kace offers a tender but adamant farewell, gracious and intentional about honoring her own needs, taking care to move forward.  This profound balance underlies the entirety of ‘The Seventh Gate,’ the willingness to acknowledge the mysteries that surround us, and the courage to do so with agency. 

“I want people to feel safe,” Kace says. “To be themselves. To have had all the connections that they’ve had. It’s okay. To live from vulnerability. To be open to the unknown.”

The story of Sisyphus and his unceasing duty to roll a boulder uphill is well-known. What the story symbolizes, an unending endeavor in vain, is likewise familiar, perhaps even intrinsic to the human condition. What goes less acknowledged, even as the term “Sisyphean” flows freely through pop culture and everyday conversations, is the actual wisdom that story is intended to impart: Find splendor in the pursuit, find meaning in the suffering, find beauty in the struggle—regardless of whether or not your boulder rolls back down the hill.  

Jared Dustin Griffin took the hint. His sophomore album ‘The Perseverance of Sisyphus’ draws upon two decades of commitment to making music, as well as the untethered and at times precarious lifestyle that required. It’s a look back at a long journey with allegedly little to show for it—exempting, of course, a nourished soul, a passion fulfilled, and a life honestly lived. The album opens with “I am the Cavalry,” a poetic retrospect and ode to the power of recognizing one’s own sacrifices and moving forward with grace: Onward through the valley ahead / The shadows shed light where the river bends / I carry the sick and I bury the dead / And make peace with my suffering.

Growing up in San Francisco, Griffin’s desire to write songs took hold in his late teens with the discovery of Neil Young and The Who. He developed an obsession so intense he nearly flunked out of high school, helplessly hypnotized by the spin of a portable CD player. “I’d skip class and sit on the beach with my headphones on, listening to 'Tommy’ or 'Quadrophenia,’” says Griffin. He made it through and enrolled in college, only to drop out on four separate occasions, the ultimate departure largely due to a wholly consuming love for Bob Dylan. “I wanted to be a songwriter,” Griffin says. “I couldn’t think about, or pretend to think about, anything else.”  

Over the course of a year, Griffin taught himself to play guitar and to sing, the latter of which he admits didn’t come easy. “I didn’t know my own voice yet,” he says, his endearing humility ever-at-play. “It wasn’t until I heard Tom Waits, and really, Howlin’ Wolf, that I realized you could sing with a voice like mine, that I didn’t need to change anything about it like I’d been trying to do.” Griffin has the kind of gravelly, reverberating baritone that is in itself evocative, an elegant melancholy tucked into every rasp. “I was twenty-five when I finally learned to embrace the roughness.” 

He spent his twenties in motion—playing in rock bands; sleeping on couches, floors, benches; battling alcoholism and addiction; assuming all volatility as the requisite toll for a life dedicated to art. “Relationships, physical comfort, emotional stability, financial wellbeing—the dream can take everything from you,” says Griffin. “I guess I always had the choice to stop, but it never felt like an option. Not a real option.” In his early thirties, he came very close. He was living in Tulsa, in a van repeatedly broken into, and hadn’t written a song in a year. “I was looking around and seeing everyone who I’d come up with give in to different lives.” He moved back to the Bay area and took on day jobs, entertaining the notion of a more stable direction. As the pressure lifted, the songs came out—in floods. “I wrote a couple hundred songs over the next few years, and they were my best to date.” It was also in this phase that Griffin met his staunchly supportive producer, Brian Brinkerhoff. Recalling it all, Griffin’s voice rounds out with confidence, a fervent faith in perseverance. “It took me fifteen years to write lyrics that I’m really, truly proud of.” 

The songs of ‘Sisyphus’ dwell in the sacred shadows of Leonard Cohen and Townes Van Zandt, gritty but reverent, rugged but vulnerable. When asked as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up, Griffin declared “ghostbuster” with adamancy. “Not just for a fleeting moment either,” he clarifies. “For at least five years of my childhood, that was the plan.” He laughs recalling this, but in his ardently fought-for vocation of songwriting, he’s not far off. Griffin’s lyrics often linger on death and its companion spiritual world. The album feels spectral, ancient, even biblical at times. His lyrics lean theological—summoning the angels, the devil, the blood of lamb—but Griffin’s devoutness pertains to the inherently holy experience of man. As in standout song “Shook,” he illuminates the unrelenting rigor of simply being alive: It's never really gone / The things that we’ve been through / Life has shook me just like it will shake you.

Album centerpiece “Bags of Bones” is a masterwork of emotional intensity, written as, in Griffin’s own words, “a portrait of relentless drive, a body rattling in pursuit of perfection, and the cost of giving everything to the muse.” The song evolves from the wiry weep of a solitary fiddle into a cinematic chorus of human anguish. You said we’re born just to die here / So the little I do / The little I don’t / It won’t mind us. There’s an ache to the sentiment, to the futility of one’s search for meaning. But as Griffin’s honeyed bellow echoes and grows, joined by soulful harmonies, sublime piano flourishes, and rapturous strings, there’s also a sense of relief—even celebration. What begins as a lament ends as an anthem, an exhilarated embrace of mortality, of the arbitrariness of existence. 

Griffin’s music is visceral—in its lows and its highs. “Turn Me Loose” is a proper Bluegrass romp, driven by frenetic fiddles and mandolin. “Howl at the Moon” arrives in the latter half just when a listener needs it, a bright and jangly dance break in the freedom darkness provides. “It’s a song meant to shake the dust from the album’s journey—” Griffin says, “—a reminder that sometimes the only way to cope with the weight of the world is to let loose and howl.” 

Something between a nomad and a vagabond, Griffin has called a list of cities home— Reno, New York, London, Tulsa, Edinburgh, and Portland to name a few. He is currently based in Topeka, though he doesn’t know for how long. He feels neither regret nor reluctance about the transient life he’s lived—the strife has made his character all the more dogged, his artistry all the more storied. “I’m as grateful for the bad songs, the tough gigs, the hard nights, as I am for any of it,” he says. “The artistic pursuit is just that—a pursuit.” For Griffin, the boulder isn’t the problem. It’s the point.

Evan Westfall is a Columbus-based musician best known as a founding member of CAAMP—the globally beloved folk trio that has amassed over 1 billion streams, landed several #1s at AAA radio, sold out arenas and amphitheaters, and performed on CBS Saturday Morning, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Renowned for their earthy, joyful, exuberance, the members of CAAMP hold tightly to their Ohio roots—in the way they approach songwriting, and in the way they live their lives. 

On Westfall’s upcoming solo album of instrumentals, he carries that Midwestern ethos forward. The songs are largely inspired by seasons, as well as what it takes to endure—and embrace—each shift. “I’m in a new phase of life,” he says. “I’ve been looking back at all of the memories that have gotten me to where I am now.” Newly married and settled not far from where he grew up, he lets an introspective gratitude guide his days, as well as his music. “I am who I am because of where I live. And I can not thank Ohio enough for that.”

The multi-instrumentalist’s first solo offering—Is This Our Exit?— is a work of deft, dynamic, and undeniably evocative playing. Westfall credits changes in his personal life with a refreshed approach to the guitar. “I think the responsibility of being a good partner, and the feeling of being at home, changed the way I wanted to play.” He explored open tunings and fingerstyle, at times on guitars with only five strings. Produced by Dan Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz of the band TOLEDO, the album sparkles with inventive musical interpretations of universal human emotions. 

Focus track “SISDM” is a perfect example. The song refers to an essay by the Columbus poet Hanif Abdurraqib about the transition from summer to fall, which resonated with Westfall. “You feel the extremes of each season,” he says. “When the city and surrounding farms shake hands and brace for another beautiful, brutal winter.” The song is an unconventional EBEF# BD# tuning, which Westfall discovered by accident. The effect is wistful and transcendent—the sound of nature transforming, and humanity surrendering with grace. When asked, Westfall considers the most dismal phase of Ohio’s winter landscape as more than an inevitability, but a necessity for growth. “A lot of it’s pretty, and some of it’s ugly. You have to work hard and dig deep to find the beauty during the ugly. That’s what gives us our character.”

Is This Our Exit? will be released January 24th, 2025.

According to modern science, more than ninety percent of the universe is composed of dark matter. That is, mass we can neither see nor understand. Though—we’re trying. We’re always trying. As Asheville songwriter Julia Sanders’ forthcoming album, titled in reference to this ubiquitous phenomenon, opens:  This girl’s been asking why since she was just a kid. 

“Is it a force like gravity that we don’t yet know how to measure?” Sanders wonders. “Is it the Divine? The Qi? And if we’re all connected by some invisible glue we know nothing about, how are any of us worrying about a follow-up email or whether that person likes us back?” It’s a good albeit overwhelming point, the kind of incomprehensible truth just as likely to ruin us as it is to set us free. Rather than let mystery paralyze her, Sanders channeled her all-consuming awe into music, eleven songs dedicated to questions—Is there any such thing as true contentment? What happens when we die? What’s the point of this life?—usually easier left unasked. “With this album, I stopped focusing on what I wanted to write about, and thought about what I didn’t want to write about.” Sanders says. “And why didn’t I want to write about it.” 

At the time Sanders began, challenging notions swirled around her. She’d entered a new phase of motherhood, every day shaped by the endlessly evolving adventure it is to raise a human being. Meanwhile, her own mother, with whom relations had been historically strained, was nearing the end of her life. Album standout “Star Stickers” illuminates these circular complexities of the human experience with stunning grace: Seems like I was just a girl / Now I have one of my own / So I’ll stay a little longer / Because I know how it feels alone. The song came to Sanders while she was readying her daughter for sleep one night. “Watching the yellow-green glow of star stickers on my daughter's ceiling, I felt like I was time traveling—to my own childhood bedroom, needing my mother to be different than she could be, then back to this room, trying hard to be a different kind of mother for my own children, and then to the future, where nothing is known except that none of this lasts.”

Throughout the record, Sanders brings this bold, generous vulnerability from her inner world to the outer, masterfully bridging gaps between the two. She approached “Unsatisfiable” as an examination of her struggle with depression, questioning her own capacity for contentment. It begins as a relatable lament in the vein of ‘What’s wrong with me?’— a witty reckoning with personal impossibilities: I want to be loud / But I don’t want to shout / I miss my friends / But I hate going out / Don’t want to grow old / But I want to be wise / I want to know the plan / But I want the surprise. But as the song goes on, Sanders—crucially—notices the obstacles beyond her control. She shifts from self-blame to a confrontation of Capitalism, and the systemic flaws that doom us all: Pursuit of happiness / It was there at the start / Like it's something you chase / Instead of something you are.

“Body” boasts a similarly astute evolution. Sanders started the song as a lullaby for her young son, a devoted ode to the gift of having acted as his physical home, and to the power of a parent to provide animal comfort with their very heartbeat, voice, embrace: My body is a home / It made you it saves you / it’s all you’ve never known. She holds the vessel as divine—and tightly, in spite of an anti-aging industry that posits the body as a meat sack set to expire, its onslaught of preservation potions and death-defying salves for sale: My body is a phase / It wanes and it waxes / In silver as we age. By the last verse, the song thunders—a chant, even protest. “Roe was overturned while I was writing this one,” Sanders says. “And attacks on the Trans community had become daily occurrences.” Her mediation on the body—as maternal, mortal, and political—ranges from reverence to rage. My body is my own / You men in your courts / With the hatred in your bones / Tell us what to do / And we will pull you from your thrones.

The daughter of a painter and a sculptor, Sanders knew the power of creativity from a young age. She learned to play the violin around age five. In middle school, she picked up the guitar and never put it down again. Though, the idea of making music in a professional capacity seemed elusive to Sanders, if not alien—“I thought of it like this mysterious thing that happened in secret studios, on a different planet”— until, in her twenties, she moved to New Orleans. Neighbors like Sam Doores of The Deslondes and Alynda Segarra of Hurray For The Riff Raff brought the process back down to earth. “I’d see these people play their songs around the fire, or in bars, and it all immediately seemed so much more organic.” Amidst the supportive voices of an artist community, Sanders quieted the one inside herself that had told her not to try.  

In 2016, Sanders made the move to Asheville. North Carolina offered a spacious quietude, a mountainous hush, where she says, “it was easier to hear myself.” She released her first full-length On the Line in 2018, followed by Morning Star in 2022. Though all along, Sanders kept her NOLA community closely involved, many of whom made their own migrations to the Land of the Sky. For her third album, she enlisted longtime collaborator John James Tourville to produce, and artists like close friend Esther Rose, Julie Odell, and Erica Lewis of Tuba Skinny to feature. There’s a fit rawness to the forthcoming collection, an off-kilter grit reminiscent of The Velvet Underground and Mazzy Star. Sanders’ melodious vocals draw quick comparison to Natalie Merchant, lithe and lilting and occasionally bent with twang. She opts for a textured imperfection in the recordings, a form of sonic solidarity with the roughness of her subject matter. 

“The album takes on really difficult questions,” Sanders says. “But the point isn’t to answer them. It’s to surrender. To the unknown. To the invisible magic that—hey, turns out—makes up most of our world.” 

New York songwriter Meir Levine is driven by two powers: melody, and the sheer force of will. 

Levine’s “musical education” began before he could say those words. His father was a professional singer, and while Mr. Levine played more than a hundred gigs each year, Meir paid close attention—not only to his dad but to every player on every stage. “By age seven, I had been taught the difference between a tactful guitarist, and one who’s doing too much,” he says. “I have a deep, attentive reverence for musicians.” It’s a relevant expertise, and evident throughout his debut album, Long & Lonely Highway, to be released June 6th, 2025. 

Meir recruited a top shelf cohort of instrumentalists to record with him at Dreamland in upstate New York, including Will Graefe (Okkervill River, Benjamin Lazar Davis, Maya Hawke), Mike Robinson (Zach Bryan, Sarah Jarosz, Iris Dement), Chris Parker (Jade Bird, Halsey), Jordan Rose (Maggie Rogers, Theo Katzman) and Jeremy McDonald (Louis Cato, Mason Jar Music). “The benefit of having really fantastic players is that you can keep things open, bust apart any inhibitions, let the songs change in real time to become their ultimate versions.” The consequence of this competence set free is a satisfying balance of evocative looseness and lustrous polish—raw feelings expressed to beautiful effect. And those feelings are mostly coming from Meir. “If I’m the heart, my producer Andrew Freedman (Henry Jamison, Michael Mayo) is the brain.” Levine notes that he and Freedman are “fundamentally different creatures,” cherishing their ability to come at a single song from opposite directions. He calls engineer D. James Goodwin (Bob Weir, Bonny Light Horseman, Kevin Morby) the “senior sonic supervisor” of the operation, with a wistful admiration. “In the studio, our motto is Best Idea Wins. We endeavored to make something people will still love decades from now. You never know, but just trying, with these guys—what a freaking thrill.”

Meir has another motto in the studio: “W.W.T.P.D.”—that is —“What would Tom Petty do?” He laughs confessing this, but if you take one swift glance at Meir’s left shoulder, you’ll know he means it. The iconic image of a guitar-pierced heart is tattooed there, ribbons bearing his rock n’ roll hero’s name flaring out from either side. “Tom Petty—he’s the guiding light.” There’s a rollicking ease and cheeky air to Meir’s music that many will consider Petty-esque, but he resists coming too close to the perimeters of impersonation. “I’m a nostalgic guy, but my goal isn’t to recreate anything. It’d be foolish to try.” His spirited, catchy folk rock falls more naturally among the modern likes of Hiss Golden Messenger, Dawes, even Noah Kahan in moments. It’s moving, memorable, and palpably sincere.

“All the music I’ve ever loved, I’ve loved for the melody,” Meir says. He remembers the day in middle school that he handed over his iPod classic to a friend’s older brother as “life-changing.” Twelve years old in a world where vast collections of music had to be effortfully sought out, he awed at the thousands of songs he could suddenly hold in his hand. “I don’t think I stopped listening for a full year.” Reflecting on those wildly ranging formative discoveries, from Jackson Browne’s earthy balladry to Breaking Benjamin’s brash rock, from Little Feat’s Californian groove to The Meters’ ziggy New Orleans funk, Levine astutely spies a common thread few can see. “These are songs that immediately make you want to sing them.”

Levine loved music ferociously, and he played it avidly, but he didn’t pursue it until it was almost too late. “I was on track to become a lawyer—you know, until I wasn’t.” He passed the LSAT and enrolled in school before promptly fleeing the scene. “It shouldn’t have been surprising,” he said. “The dream wasn’t new—I’d always wanted to play music. What was new was my willingness to try.” He spent the bulk of his twenties playing in garage bands to middling success, until Covid impressed upon him a useful solitude. “It was an inflection point for me, like so many others. I was asking myself: What do I really care about? What do I want to do with my life? Who do I want to be?” 

These are the relatable questions Long & Lonely Highway asks—Said I was running from nothing / I was running from something—and in the answers Levine finds, lives that sheer force of will. “I made a conscious decision—to go as hard as I possibly could, for as long as I possibly could.” Thirty-years-old, he radiates the warm calm of someone who knows themselves, and moreso, of an artist who knows what they’re doing. His disposition determined but softly humble, he reminds us, as well as himself, “You’re responsible for the person you become.”

It’s human nature to look back, and to try—in whatever haphazard fashion—to make sense of that which has gone by. For Joshua Lee Turner and Allison Young, it’s a question not only of what should be relinquished, but also what might be worth taking with you.

Sonically, the pair are intimately acquainted with the past; their collective background spans extensive knowledge of Jazz and Classical, a twinkling affinity for Golden Age musicals, nostalgia for the big bands of the ‘40s, reverence for the politically charged singer-songwriters of the ‘60s, and a warmth toward the dewy indie rock of the early 2010s. To the eye, these wildly diverse influences are tough to conceive as a singular musical sensibility. But to the ear, The Bygones have no issue, binding eclectic contexts into luminous indie folk, equal parts emotional poignancy and pop pleasure. 

Allison grew up in an Appalachian pocket of Tennessee—“I’m basically from Dollywood,” she says— the mountain-making, moonshine-swigging sounds of Bluegrass and Americana coloring the soundscape. In the house, her parents opted for Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra. Her mother played piano, which Allison took up at age three. “And then I got into musical theater when I was eleven. My mother had me audition for the part of Annie, if you can believe it,” she says, her red curls bouncing. Meanwhile, Josh was in the Midwest, ingesting the Jazz and Classical selection of his own parents, singing Gregorian chants in a Catholic church (his first job), and teaching himself guitar—“like every other thirteen-year-old boy,” he jokes. For him, instruments were language enough, no lyrics necessary. He found profound satisfaction in the complex art of interpretation, performing instrumentals and covers which he shared on YouTube. 

Josh was invited to play in a Simon & Garfunkel tribute tour around the same time that Allison was uploading her own version of “Scarborough Fair” to social media. Coincidence became a connection point, and the pair began following each other online. Josh was living in New York City, but on the day his tour came through Nashville, they planned to meet and record together, just as soon as Allison finished her interview for a job in music publishing. On such separate paths, neither anticipated this impromptu session would become the way forward.

The duo’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” gathered massive enthusiasm online as well as the fervent demand of one UK promoter that they tour overseas. They accepted the invitation and rushed to record an EP to have something—anything—to play for audiences, audiences which sold out venues and applauded The (yet-to-be-named) Bygones with standing ovations before they even strummed a note. “It didn’t make any sense,” Josh says. “We weren’t a band yet.” But to see The Bygones live is to comprehend the hype. Allison’s stylish, luminescent presence and vocal finesse, Josh’s astonishing technical aptitude, and the palpable joy in their onstage dynamic create a live show experience that demands multiple encores. 

The circumstances which bore The Bygones seem supernatural; rather than a band asking the world to listen, the world asked these two musicians to be a band. But there is nothing more palpably natural than the love these two artists have for music. It is an effervescent force, intrinsic to their conceptions of self. Josh says, “Music is like a hole in the ground, and as a child I was given a tiny shovel to dig, and the further I dig, the more interesting and rewarding it becomes. It’s endless.” Allison adds, “There’s nothing more wonderful than when a song resonates with someone, and you know you’ve made one person in this world feel a little less alone.”

In 2023, the duo began working on their debut album. The thirteen tracks encompassing The Bygones revolve around relationships—romantic, platonic, and familial—and the marvelously varied facets of each. On the upbeat and edgy “Stars Turn Cold,” love sizzles and fades to a frustrating end. On the infectious and zagging “Waste A Day,” love is the resplendent, ultimate source of contentment. Allison grapples with the failure of a loved one to see her for who she is on “If You Wanted To,” her beautifully bare vocal as delicate as a flower petal, lilting with fragility. Josh assumes the weight of his partner’s suffering on “Asteroid Day,” his intricate guitar arrangement emanating the tensions and tendernesses that come with sharing life. Each track is a fearlessly frank take on a different corner of companionship, and in this sense, The Bygones is a collection of love songs to love itself.

There’s an invigorating light across The Bygones’ philosophy—about music, and about life. Josh says, “There’s goodness in every decade of music. And there’s goodness in every season of life. For us, it’s about finding what’s golden in the past and bringing that forward.” He adds, laughing gently “We’re both very earnest people, and very optimistic.” 

In the case of these Bygones, it’s an easy delight to let them be.

“I wrote through all of it,” says musician Erisy Watt in referring to the changes 2023 held for her, “the anticipation, the upheaval, and the aftermath.” In a short span, Erisy entered a new decade, lost a loved one, saw the end of a relationship, flew halfway around the world to work in remote regions of Thailand and Indonesia, returned home, packed up her life in Portland, and moved to Los Angeles. “Showing up at my desk with pen, paper, and guitar each morning in the midst of navigating such uneven terrain allowed me to process and feel more grounded.”

Hailed by No Depression as “what contemporary folk sounds like at its peak,” Erisy’s music often harkens comparisons to 60s singer-songwriters. But on her third album, ‘not either or but everything,’ she shakes the sound loose from the tenets of decade or genre. From the cosmos to the kitchen sink, lyrically, Erisy’s art is in connection, and on this new offering she hones an even deeper acuity for tracing the through line, peering through both telescope and microscope in search of the common threads. 

Beyond the lyrics, Erisy remarks, “I started feeling an opening up with the guitar, putting a finger somewhere at random on the fretboard, building a chord around it, and from there, allowing a song to come through. I was faced with all this empty space to fill, which felt scary but also gave me the opportunity to explore my edges, and in turn, be more open and expressive.”

Erisy connected with Luke Temple (Adrianne Lenker, Hand Habits) in the first week she moved to Los Angeles at a nude figure drawing night that he was hosting weekly. Having met him earlier in the year on another project, they reconnected and made a plan, resulting in a collaboration that Erisy describes as “a total dream and absolute joy.” Recording live over five days at drummer Kosta Galanopoulos’s home studio in Long Beach, along with Will Graefe on guitar, Erisy found freedom in a new cohort and fresh philosophy. She says, “Luke moves quickly but doesn’t rush. He gives care and attention without being too precious. We’d scrap things and try again. We’d goof off, and we’d go deep. It felt easy, electric, expansive.” Additional engineering by Riley Geare and mastering by Heba Kadry (Björk, Sufjan Stevens)provided the finishing touches. The result is an album ranging from earthy to cosmic, strikingly spare to deliciously textured, contemplative to outright playful.

In addition to her current base in Los Angeles and past residences in Nashville and Portland, Erisy has the right to call global remote wilderness home. She works in environmental science and much of her career takes place on the other side of the world. “My life can feel very patchy sometimes with the work I do in Asia, but through song, I’m learning to connect dots that otherwise might not seem obvious.” The album track “Sandhill Crane” is a stunning illustration of such, as she draws on her experience working in Muslim villages along the coast of Indonesia soundtracked by the call to prayer coming from the mosques, and in the plains of central Florida seeing and hearing sandhill cranes for the first time. She sings:

Oh how to explain it, the words fall short, 

No sound from my mouth, will sum up the worth

 Of the sandhill crane, the hard rain on the roof

Or the call to prayer, but you’re looking for proof

And it’s all there in the wings

The flight, the fall, the landing

The magic, the tragedy

Not either or, but everything

Erisy’s profession informs the song “Rachel” as well, inspired by Rachel Carson, a writer and biologist, who represents the bridge between worlds Erisy so often crosses in her own life. “I imagined us walking together on the beach and her teaching me about the animals of the intertidal,” Erisy says. “All the special adaptations they have to thrive, all the shit they have to deal with—from drowning to drying out, to getting eaten by both land and ocean predators, this toggling between worlds and what lessons we can take from that.” Throughout the album, Erisy leans into the profound perspective the natural world provides. Top to bottom, ‘not either or but everything’ glimmers with the tenacious mystique of evolution—personal and universal. 

Posing the abstract with the concrete, her songs speak to both the miraculous and mundane, the obvious and oblique, the magic and tragedy.“They helped bring clarity,” says Erisy. “They brought certain things to the surface, certain voices to the foreground, shed light on shadows, and in part taught me it’s okay to be sad, to not have the answers, to feel lots of things at once, and to be lots of things at once.” The album ‘not either or but everything’ will be released October 4 via First City Artists.

Coco—the project of Maia Friedman, Oliver Hill, and Dan Molad—began as an experiment of sorts; three friends writing songs for nothing other than the ritual of doing so. “There’s a mutual admiration and trust among us,” they share. “It allows a ‘first thought best thought’ mentality.” Their vast and varied individual creative histories—notably with Dirty Projectors, Lucius, and Pavo Pavo—inform an illustrious, collective sensibility for songcraft. 

Coco released their first three singles anonymously, spurred by a curiosity in releasing art without context or expectation; an audience emerged in response. In this sense, it’s as though the music created Coco rather than the other way around. Their self-titled debut gathered acclaim from tastemakers at NPR, BBC, SiriusXM, and Spotify, praised as “gorgeous, warmly wistful… a balmy, liberating groove” (Gorilla Vs. Bear), “bold, striking, but emphatically subdued, the dreamy pop aspect seem to be filtered in from another dimension,” (CLASH), “unerringly intimate” (The Line of Best Fit), and “just heaven” (BBC). Coco headlined packed rooms in New York City, Los Angeles, and London, made their festival debut at End of the Road, and supported Kevin Morby on a national tour. They went on to release a steady stream of singles, including the raucous, angular rocker "Rough Water," the Bacharach-esque ballad "Death in the Family," and the post-apocalyptic campfire song "Omen," among others.

Coco’s highly anticipated sophomore release—starkly titled ‘2’—will be released March 1, 2024 on First City Artists. It’s less a separate installment than a seamless continuation, a sonic sequel, a deeper delve into the colorful moods of Coco. Coco’s debut album was donned with a blurred portrait of Maia, Oliver, and Dan in an underwater tangle, bodies indiscernible. But on the cover of ‘2,’ these figures come into focus, posed on a hillside in bright, hyperreal color. While a thick white border suspends them in negative space, the image becomes clearer, as Coco gradually crystallizes. 

Since the last album, life has flown wildly forward for the members of Coco—Oliver getting married, Dan getting engaged, Maia giving birth to her first child. “When we started, we were all either single or in old relationships, living in different places, with different haircuts, priorities and perspectives,” the band shares. “Though it's only been a few years, the band has seen us through fundamental transformations in each of our lives, which we are fortunate enough to process together.” Amidst shifting currents, the practice of collaborative music-making has remained a profound and grounding constant.

The band gathered for periods of time in Richmond, Virgina, working with Adrian Olsen (Lucy Dacus, Fruit Bats, Bedouine) at Montrose Recording, and in Joshua Tree, California, self-producing in an informal desert setting.  Each member a writer, player, and artist in their individual right, Coco embraced a freedom in fluidity—swapping seats, instruments, and vocal parts however intuition compelled. 

On opener “Any Other Way” Coco meditates on change from a widescreen perspective: The leaf and the body, each in their time, turns on a schedule, turns on a dime. Maia lays a lush bed of shoegaze guitars; Dan's builds ecstasy from downtempo drums; Oliver stirs a current of hypnotically looping basslines. The song is a stunning microcosm of this band's specific genius: carving space for each musical personality to shine, without the shadows of excess or distraction.

The album moves through moods with sublime subtlety: the dusky electronica of "Moodrings," the bossa-tinged "For George," and the jangly 60's pop of "Mythological Man," for which the band self-directed a madcap music video starring Maia in the title role. Closer "Do This Right" invites listeners onto a patient wavelength, begging a lover to drop arms: Release the fangs and the venom, remove the silk and the denim.

‘2’ arrives sensuous and spellike, as Maia, Oliver, and Dan continue their sacred practice—arriving to each other empty-handed and open-hearted, finding power in three equal parts. The result is pure and formidable music, songs that emerge with an elegant, egalitarian honesty and encompass a world of emotion.

Garrett Owen’s music has the raw, rustic twang of a Texan, but his origin story is not that of your typical cowboy troubadour. The son of career missionaries, Owen spent his childhood in Tanzania and Kenya, his adolescence in South Louisiana, before coming of age in Ecuador. Asked about the most palpable effect of such eclectic settings, he cites not the musical, but the psychological. “I think it made me a really open person,” Owen shares. “I’ve seen a lot. And I have a really hard time with rules.” On Owen’s upcoming third album ‘Memoriam,’ this much is obvious—and celebrated.

Owen’s song structures dip, twist, and burst with a twister-like thrill. He can shift from tender, taletelling balladeering into a wholly rock and roll torrent and back, without losing the emotional plot. “Growing up, I was very opposed to learning—I broke a lot of toys.” But what once might have been considered a behavioral hindrance is now a benefit to listeners. Owen’s dynamic song structures and the indisputable technical capacity required to pull them off make for an unabashed adventure of an album. 

Owen started at age fourteen with an affinity for the delectable angst of heavy metal. “I was always going to be a guitar head,” he says. In time, he shifted focus to the classics—Jim Croce, Jackson Brown, James Taylor—and in college, started to explore Jazz. Though that didn’t last long. “I got into Jazz to try and communicate that sad beauty Chet Baker and Bill Evans do so well, but I pretty quickly got tired of the excess and intricacies, slobbering notes all over each other.” Owen discovered he could apply the picking patterns of his gritter influences—Doc Watson, Elliott Smith—to Jazz structures, and create a fuller, more modern and emotional kind of folk music, a sound that felt truer to his way of moving through the world. To embrace Owen’s music is to embrace the unexpected; you never know what’s coming next.

This truth resonates through the life circumstances which bore the album as well. Owen wrote much of it while taking care of his grandmother over the last four years, as she gradually regressed into Alzheimer’s and eventually passed. “She was the most interesting woman. She always had the coolest art, and a potpourri that filled her home in a way I’ll never forget. I always told everyone, ‘My Japanese grandmother is my favorite person in the world.’” Having emigrated as a young woman, Owen’s grandmother carried stories of tribulation, resilience, and gratitude which he folded into his worldview. “Toward the end, she’d go out into the yard and collect branches and leaves, and put them in small bowls of water, believing she could bring them back to life,” he shares. “In a way, she was fighting her own death.” Owen references this moving display on “Rosemary and Thieves,” singing, She used to keep / Such a beautiful garden / But now she just waters the weeds / Rosemary and thieves. He embraces the vital beauty of remembering what was, while mourning what’s been taken.

Loss permeates ‘Memoriam,’ and Owen handles it with a stark honesty that sways from affectingly reverent to cathartically comedic. He laments more than one failed romance and—as in the case of the spellbinding album opener—with an intense, poetic wistfulness: Just let me remain / A spot on your brain / A beautiful stain. He shares, “Making music is therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. It feels good to do, but that doesn’t mean you’re better now.” That self-awareness is essential to his lyricism. Owen is a man cracked open—diligently mining his own human pain and presenting the findings, a generous offering in which listeners can see themselves. “I have a musical comrade who often says to me, ‘We’re all miracles, Garrett—don’t forget.’ It’s hard to hold onto that, when at times, I feel like all I’m doing is watching stuff die. But I definitely feel, more than ever, that life is precious.” 

Garrett Owen’s third full-length album ‘Memoriam’ will be released November 1, 2024.

How do you explain the coincidences 

When each day is mostly dream? 

(“Flicker”)

Pearla’s music radiates with indiscriminate awe. Whether it’s the befuddling depths of nature or the profoundly strange spark of a dreaming mind—she takes it all as equal magic. Her debut album is populated by eccentric creatures and quixotic scenes, her takes on mortality, intimacy, and personal freeness glowing with an air of mystique. Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is a world unto itself.

On her 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities, Pearla posed existential questions like outlines in a coloring book, and scribbled in attempts at answers through off-kilter indie pop and a bewildered spirit. But on her highly anticipated full-length, arriving three contemplative years later, Pearla submits to the brilliance in not knowing. On Oh Glistening Onion…’s heart-stopping centerpiece “Effort,” she wails with wistful power atop strings arranged by Spacebomb’s Trey Pollard: I don’t know why it takes so much effort to feel good these days. The moving rumination transcends need for reasoning and comes alive with vibrant uncertainty. Pearla’s vocals float free from the clutch of confusion and resolve into an ethereal acceptance: I am spent. It’s this submission to mystery, to the inexplicable fluidity of living, that places Pearla at peace within its wild current. 

Pearla is Nicole Rodriguez, a Brooklyn-based artist whose personal curiosities include finger puppets, writing songs with children, Virginia Woolf’s prose, and consulting the I Ching. She makes music the same way she moves through the world: mystified. On “Strong,” she tells the true story of someone stealing her credit card as she stood in a flower shop fully entranced by the beauty of a dove. Pearla takes the incident’s hint into her perpetual assessment of the world around her: Is it better to be pragmatic, or awed? Is giving oneself over to beauty the danger, or the point? 

She ponders on in “Ming The Clam,” its pulsing tempo and electronic touches a sonic contrast as Pearla begins to contradict herself. She considers Ming—an ocean clam and the oldest individual animal ever discovered, who died in research—not an inspiration but a lesson to be learned. Pearla’s lyrics are vivid, peculiar, and compelling as she examines examination, and its potential costs. Romance, a sense of belonging, an elderly sea creature: Just how many questions does it take to kill the thing?

Pearla’s music is a rich blend, rooted in the folk canon of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell, embracing the darker quirks of a Connie Converse, Bjork, or Will Oldham, and pulsating with the emotional palpability of an Angel Olsen or Sharon Van Etten. Her recording process glitters with detail. Sentiment precedes every sound; she and her longtime collaborator/co-producer Tyler Postiglione craft melodies, structures, and experimental noises not to carry the lyrics, but to emphasize their meaning. On “Unglow The,” Pearla engages her feverish imagination to grapple with the oddity of death. She equates a mountain’s immensity with a body in a casket (all those things you can’t wrap your mind around) in an attempt to fathom the unfathomable. The song’s production sparkles chaotically as it builds into a psychedelic cacophony of shrieking horns and dissonant synths, conveying her internal unrest.

Oh Glistening Onion… artfully sways between the natural and the surreal. On the rollicking “About Hunger, About Love,” Pearla suffers “a new kind of lonesome” and summons nature’s omniscience: Nobody told the woodpecker to knock all day for bugs / So what should I know? What do I do for love? On the darkly explosive “The Place With No Weather,” she wills herself free from earthly limitations into a bodiless projection, stable and indifferent. Her voice escapes its visceral vessel and reaches core-shaking peaks as she distantly echoes: You stole my universe. On “Funny In Dreams,” she lifts off into stream-of-conscious light and puts forth some of her best questions—What’s the opposite of a star anyway? / Are there places in the sky that are softer than others? This ability to flow from grounded to fantastical, raucous to lulling, heavy to outright free, underscores the vast extent of Pearla’s emotional range.  

Rodriguez’s moniker is an homage to her grandfather’s surname, Pearl. He was a musician and a source of artistic inspiration in her childhood, and though he passed when she was seven, Rodriguez considers music their living link. This tenderness toward the interconnectivity of souls shines throughout Oh Glistening Onion: “Flicker,” a raw but gentle reflection on the slow warmth of a human spirit, graciously nods to life’s finite twinkle (‘Cause every light’s got a goodbye coming). Pearla’s relationship with the unknown is wobbly and sublime, a comfort in its honesty, an offering.

Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is due February 10, 2023, on Spacebomb Records. Parts of the album were recorded at Thump Recording in Brooklyn and Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, but the bulk of its creation took place in Pearla’s home. It was written by Nicole Rodriguez, co-produced with Postiglione, with strings and horns arranged by Pollard, and mastered by Sarah Register. When asked about the album title, Pearla offers: “It’s always been the title. I think it means, you don’t have to peel back every layer before you go to sleep.”

One day I woke up and realized I was in a song 

And I am just a feather and I don’t have to be “strong”

And I won’t ever find the answers ‘til I realize nothing’s wrong

It’s just a back and forth of circumstance colliding, repeating, and dying.

(“The Mysterious Bubble Of The Turkey Swamp”)

“If someone asked me to tell them who I am, I’d give them this record,” shares Lila Blue— mindfully resolved, radiantly composed, only twenty-three years old. 

Throughout their fourth full-length Sweet Pea, Lila comes of age amidst formidable conditions, cherishing music as the ultimate conduit for doing so. “You cannot have rebirth without decomposition and decay,” Lila shares. “Grief and growth sit side by side, and I am occupying both.” Titled after Lila’s childhood nickname and birth flower, as well as the spirit invoked over eleven dynamically evocative songs, the album is a spring unto itself.

Lila Blue’s relationship with music began at The Lake Lucille Chekhov Project in upstate New York, where a community of artists inhabit unconventional spaces to conceive and perform new works every summer. “It was like they were making the emotions inside my body into a sound,” they share. Lila, age nine at the time, had already been a fervent reader and originator of poetry—their school teacher known to secretly submit their work for publication—but it was at Lake Lucille that they wrote their first song. Inspired by Patti Smith’s memoir ‘Just Kids,’ a copy of which they’d naughtily burgled from their mother’s collection, the song explored a complex notion—that love could be lost in one form, and remain in another. Lila was just nine years old. “Yeah, I was a little young for all that,” they confess, playfully. 

By age ten, Lila had developed an aptitude for “sleep writing,” waking with fully and unconsciously formed songs in their mind. “I think my love for words was finding a new way to present itself,” Lila says. They explored instruments—piano, guitar, and ukulele—but never felt all that compelled by the classical forms of theory. For Lila, instruments were less a conquest than a vessel. “I actually hated knowing how it worked,” they explain. “It’s always been about the words, about putting emotions in a song and getting to leave them there.” 

Lila never returned to formal music lessons. Their resistance to the demystification of process remains—to benefit. Lila’s music vibrates with a heart-over-head rawness, the feeling unfettered by any pesky, cognitive obstacles and consequently, consuming. On the lead single “There Is A Drought,” Lila quite literally growls, a vocalist beaming from the balance of musical prowess, visceral instinct, and a spiritual willingness—to listen most closely to the grumbles of one’s own soul. “I’ve developed a kind of feral language around music,” Lila confesses. “I’m so grateful for the musicians I work with, who can translate what I’m trying to convey.” 

Nashville producer Jordan Hamlin—whose venerable credits include Lucy Wainwright, Indigo Girls, and KT Tunstall among others—produced Lila’s forthcoming album. The pair’s bond began with genre compatibility and a shared, geekish passion for Greek mythology, but evolved into something creatively profound. “Jordan has a deep reverence for what it means to hold space for another artist,” Lila shares. “She coaxed a candor out of me I’m not sure I would have otherwise accessed.”

Candor is power throughout Sweet Pea.

————————

TW: sexual assault

————————

“Psychologists have said that during trauma, time suspends. I’d say the same can be true of music,” Lila shares. They are a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and through songs including “How Could I” and “I Met The Devil,” they outline the ferocious, tenacious, and beautifully imperfect pursuit of healing. “I was grieving my body I never got to meet, and then grieving that body again.”  

In healing the relationship to their physical form, Lila also embraced its splendor—identifying as nonbinary and queer. “‘Sweet Pea’ was the first song I’d written about my own sexual agency,” they share. “Coming from a place of recovery as a closeted child performer, it became a full blown anthem to queer pleasure.” Songs like “Changeling” and “Lovely Day” similarly honor this wondrous development—from an unconscious, captive knowledge of self, to the unabashed celebration of all its complicated beauty. 

Lila says, “I felt like I'd been writing to an ‘other,’ without realizing that ‘other’ is the person I wanted to become. I’ve been actualizing my own healing, manifesting the person I am today.”

Lila Blue’s music simmers, reveals, writhes, explodes, and revives. Spanning influences from Fiona Apple to Minnie Ripperton to Ani DiFranco, Sweet Pea is a sonic tonic as rich as the sensations of humanhood it so honestly explores. “I want for listeners…” Lila pauses, their tone compassionate and precocious, “to be exactly where they’re at. To feel exactly what they feel.” 

As a child raised in New Jersey, Charlie Hill found an identity in music, learning to play guitar at age eleven and clinging to the instrument the way one might a diary or confidant, a source of reflection and guidance. Now twenty-nine, he holds just as tightly to the artform’s answers. He writes songs to understand himself and to further that self, a committed continuation of self-actualization. After all, coming of age is not a singular, finite event.  

Hill’s creative process begins in what he calls “someplace between the physical and conscious,” a supernatural spark and the willingness to fan it into flames. “I think of music as a translation of what’s happening inside, so I never try to force it into a specific direction or shape,” he shares. “I’ll often pick up the guitar and start playing as if it’s a song that already exists. I’ll improvise all the way through, let the song write itself, let lyrics unfurl over instinct.” The result is an audible vulnerability, a ragged honesty utterly personal, a candor that hooks into your heart like a raw truth from a dear friend.

Vulnerability is a prevalent theme for Hill present day. He formerly performed under the moniker Chazzy Lake, and when asked about the decision to tie his real name to the recordings, responds with a tone of liberated submission. “I make music to slough off shame, to embrace the self, to make listeners know it’s okay to feel,” he says. “Using my real name just feels right.” In all artistic choices as of late, Hill is reaching for authenticity: openly embracing new collaborators, relocating from Burlington to Nashville, stripping back performances to their feeling bones. He’s willing to thin the veil down to nearly nothing.  

Hill’s musical endeavors have been boldly exploratory—from disco punk to ‘80s New Age—but he’s found a sonic home amidst a folk-rooted sound. It’s evident as ever on new album Chuck Pond—titled in playful homage to a self’s varied versions—out April 7, produced by Benny Yurco. The album ranges from a rattling buoyancy reminiscent of Dr. Dog to a ground-out balladry a la Townes Van Zandt.  

“I wanted to embody the emotional side of the human experience, and country music has this beautiful humility to it.” Hill lived in Burlington, followed by a stint in Brooklyn, before moving to his current base in Nashville, where he began incorporating elements like the tic-tac bass, low register vocals, and pedal steel into the new music. Classic and bellowing intonations suit his voice, which can gristle thick and evocative one moment, and glisten delicate and dewy the next. 

The album opens with “50/50,” its acapella entrance immediate and arresting. In his approach to a love song, Hill opts for the magnetism of a spare, heartfelt summon: Come with me / Be my partner, my fifty fifty / Lean on me and I’ll lean on you / Never letting you fall. His bright surge of desire soon vibrates unstable, the melody bending ominously, nearing despair. It’s an affecting portrait of desire—its cursed capacity to waver from brazen to brittle, unpermitted. 

An assumable disciple of Steinbeck or Didion, Hill is driven by the bite of bare language. He deliberately weighs each word, demanding less attention for what’s said than for what goes artfully unsaid. On “Dive In,” he strikes upon the stark, dark nature of depression without wasting a syllable: I don’t wanna wake up again today / I'd rather sleep until I’m brand new. According to Hill, the song is “about the urge to jump from the inside out, to escape the psychic cage of personal and societal expectation, to become the person you’ve always wanted to be.” His power isn’t so much in the heady sentiment as it is in the skill to deliver it with visceral palpability, to bring the internal to the external, the brain to the body. 

Hill pays due attention to disconnection and the consuming apathy it can invoke—in particular, on “Give Two Fucks,” “What Am I For,” and “Up All Night”—understated theme songs for an unnameable itch so customary of one’s late twenties. He navigates a relatable obstacle course—disassembling knotty relationships, combating the grass-is-greener mentality of modern culture, unlearning capitalism’s limits on what a life should look like, validating himself by trial and error. 

“My personal experience with my own mind is a whole world, usually I’m overthinking everything,” Charlie shares. “The process has been a journey to reconcile what I feel with what’s really happening—to properly bind perception and reality.”

Chuck Pond is a generous peek into private mental processing. Hill’s songs aren’t conclusive, prescriptive, or even all that descriptive. They’re outbursts, pure and refreshingly imperfect, little invitations into the psyche of another, waking up each day, making their way through the world.

The calla lily flower is named for the Greek word meaning beautiful. Eclectic myths and symbolisms surround the calla lily, but if you were to ask The Brother Brothers about a personal relation to their new album’s namesake, they’d likely leave it there: Beautiful. Similarly, if you were to ask the identical twins what their new album is about, they’d presumably smirk and reply with droll simplicity: What all albums are about. Life.

This magnetic humility is the band’s custom, and beyond its amusing appeal, the core of their music. It is, in fact, The Brother Brothers’ humble, intuitive, and exact capture of Life that just so happens to be Beautiful. This is evident as ever in their second full-length offering.

The Brother Brothers are David and Adam Moss, identical twins born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, formerly based in Brooklyn, New York, but ultimately and profoundly shaped by indiscriminate rambling. They are the kind of people who have a story about everything, and moreso, one you might genuinely like to hear. Plopped atop virtuosic musicianship and enlivened by true blood harmonies, these stories come of an encompassing quality, stories one listens to time and time again, and eventually, holds as their own.

The Brother Brothers’ songs are of neither grandeur nor tragedy, nor lore nor trend, but of outright humanity. They address nothing topical and everything timeless: living, loving, aging, changing, traveling, learning, yearning, discovering, dreaming, winning, losing, dying — what it is to candidly exist. Crafted with precision, poignancy, and palpable heart, these tales are as easily projected to an amphitheatre of fans as they are exchanged in aisle eight of the grocery store, as resonant to cosmopolitan professionals as to musing bohemians, as familiar and beloved to an internet of strangers as to a campfire of friends.

These are songs of personhood transcending.

The perspective that binds them is two-fold. The Brother Brothers’ songwriting incites an exquisite sense of transience — life in neverending motion, if you will — as well as a deft capacity to pause, focus in upon, and cherish the beauty in banality. This duality is the crux of Calla Lily, an artful alternation between moving and stopping, experiencing and appreciating.

By no accident is the album opener a quintessential ode to touring, the highly specific way in which The Brother Brothers lived their daily life up until the global pandemic halted it all. The Moss brothers wrote “On The Road Again” before the world shut down, and serendipitously so. True to their knack for knowing what they have, the band encapsulated all that was lost before they knew they’d lose it. They bottled the bewildering breadth of existing town to town in a tumbling melody imbued with longing — for the salve of forward motion, for a diasporic musician family scattered across continents, for blessed abandon. It’s the tingles of homesickness reversed, a wistful celebration of ambling onward.

Then comes the eponymous “The Calla Lily Song,” in which David contemplates an indescribably special moment — a time at which one can do nothing but breathe deeply, held by the sensation that something essential though utterly unnameable is taking place. He delicately entangles two affections, singing to both a lover and New York City with equivalent levels of tenderness. The Moss brothers' vocals linger on details with buttery warmth, intimating how unambiguously they hold these small yet immensely remarkable moments.

Even the band’s most morose numbers glint with comfort. On both “Sorrow,” arguably the most somber of Calla Lily’s ten tracks, and “Waiting For A Star To Fall,” a lightly melancholic request for luck, the suffering feels collective. The Brother Brothers know that their pain is your pain — and that the human condition would be incomplete without it.

The Brother Brothers’ astute, evocative music has earned an international audience, enthused nods from tastemakers including NPR, Billboard and Rolling Stone Country among others, support runs for acclaimed artists including I’m With Her, Lake Street Dive, Big Thief and Shakey Graves, coveted performance slots at Edmonton Folk Festival, Nelsonville Music Festival, FreshGrass Music Festival and beyond. More notable to Calla Lily, is the warm sincerity The Brother Brothers have carried through these experiences — an earnesty that provides David and Adam Moss the precocity of friendship, artistry and peace.

Time stretches slow like the skin on your hand

Placing for picking the moments they stand out

Walking in circles we go through the turnstiles

Over and over again

Calla Lily was produced and mixed by Grammy-nominated Ryan Hadlock (The Lumineers, Brandi Carlile, Vance Joy) at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington and mastered by Grammy-nominated Phillip Shaw Bova (Andy Shauf, Father John Misty). The album will be released April 16, 2021 on Compass Records.

Trophy: (tro·phy /ˈtrōfē/) noun. a cup or other decorative object awarded as a prize for a victory or success.

Kate Davis picked up a violin at age five, a bass at age thirteen. She entered the Portland Youth Philharmonic before puberty, the Grammy Jazz Ensemble before adolescence. By the time she graduated high school, Kate won the Presidential Scholar in the Arts Award and a full ride to the Manhattan School of Music. By the time she graduated college, ASCAP's Robert Allen Award and slots at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. As a young adult, the virtuoso claimed enthusiastic endorsements from NPR, MTV, PBS and BBC as well as coveted invitations to the stage from Herbie Hancock, Ben Folds, Alison Krauss, Jeff Goldblum and the like. Most recently, she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s hit single “Seventeen” and contributed to the soundtrack for blockbuster ‘Five Feet Apart.’

Yet, Kate Davis considers her debut indie rock album her hardest-earned accolade to date.

Kate grew up as a jazz darling, but she grew into something significantly more dynamic. Days spent practicing and performing became nights spent writing — cathartic indie rock — music simultaneously informed by and rebutting of her training. Forbidden chord progressions emerged like diary entries, documents of an internal reaction to routine. Time intended for technique slipped into secret listening sessions of Beach House, Elliot Smith and TV On The Radio. In the same bright, arresting croon that ignited her youthful stardom, Davis created confessionals.

Now 28 and audibly matured, Kate is prepared to properly share the artifacts from her late night craft, a full length reaction to ritual required of perfection, an outburst from the pedestal. Throughout twelve tumultuous tracks, she poetically reflects upon the intricacies of what it is to live, ruminating on topics too close to her heart — identity, self-worth, loss. Trophy will be released November 8, 2019 on Solitaire Recordings.

In album opener “Daisy,” Kate confronts the death of her father with an ode as enthralling as it is devastating. Lyrically, she blends the hard work of questioning with the intuitive work of honoring, thoughtfully satisfying a desire to respect her deceased parent as well as herself. Melodically, she offers a lightness almost grotesque in contrast to the words it lifts. The process is uncomfortable, enveloping and beautiful — much like grief giving way to acceptance.

Oh seed

Pick your poison

While you’re down there in the ground

Father, father

What do I do when you

Are not around

And I feel like giving out

And crashing down to the ground

Backbone is battered as any

But show me my roots

Kate delves fearlessly into the aimless dread of early adulthood in songs like “Dirty Teenager,” an infectious romp refreshingly reminiscent of the early aughts and “rbbts,” a slow-burning anthem of need. The latter is named after a now-closed restaurant in Soho, which Kate frequented during a manic time in her life. She considered the establishment a safe haven then, but retroactively reduces it to metaphor — a healthless attempt to make comfort where it doesn’t belong. With ominous nonchalance, she articulates a despair for stability over growth.

Nothing lasts forever

you can’t ever hold on too tight

The skin will slip away

and in no time

we’ll see the light

Kate’s nuanced perspectives and inventive lyricism triumph in tracks like “Open Heart,” a danceable dirge that equates heartbreak to sterile surgery and “Salome,” a biblical rendering of interpersonal dilemma. Few writers so snugly meld the personal with the literary without compromising one moment of emotion.

now you’re upright

victorious and

barefoot with my head

in your hands

I warned you of the

evening’s malevolent

moon

she's taken total

control over you

Kate lets vulnerability lead on “I Like Myself,” a delicately penned love letter to self. With a sobering level of sincerity, she recognizes her reliance upon others’ approval and the vicious toll it takes on self-esteem. She delivers her poignant epiphany with the tenderness of tone one might use when speaking to a mirror. Humility marks the standout song and echoes throughout the remainder of her debut.

I finally love myself

Cause she loves me

And since I think the

world of her

And she of me

I’m exactly who and

where I want to be

Kate’s observations are at once wise and inquisitive, treating confusion and conclusion with equal care, serving simultaneously as stories and studies. The songwriting resembles psychology — and hers alone. In deliberate escape from former record deals, partnerships and influences, the album was intentionally and exclusively created in accordance with her individual vision. Kate recorded it at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, with producer and friend Tim Bright.

Trophy — is exactly that — a shining culmination of personal lessons learned, an award acquired from the task of existing.

Night Pass is Pure Bathing Culture’s first original album since 2015 and a radiant demonstration of time dutifully spent between releases. The album opens with an anthem of renewal, “Thin Growing Thing” — an intentional choice according to Sarah, who says, “We can’t imagine a better lyric from the album to introduce a listener to what we are trying to say here. Love is something that has the potential to bond us all and where it’s absent we should strive to create it.” This is Pure Bathing Culture’s constant, the conviction that carries them from past to present. To seeds in the soil, Sarah sings:

lift for love and live for something

lift for love and live through something

llft for love and live through something else

Night Pass emerged from emotional tumult. The band had lost their label and their team in quick succession, causing them to turn inwards during the creation of this record—the duo’s spirit of resilience beats like a heart through ten powerful tracks, persistence exploding into songs like “Devotion,” a danceable canticle in praise of partnership.

darling devotion

it puts stars in the jewels

and darling devotion

it’s all we can do

Finding opportunity in the unknown, Pure Bathing Culture called upon friend and producer Tucker Martine (REM, My Morning Jacket, Neko Case and Spoon) to join their journey. His studio, became an oasis, a place of healing and of progress. This darker incandescence of collaborative survival gleams through “Moonrise,” “Remember” and “Joyous Lake,” the last of which provided Night Pass its title. “It’s our favorite song on the record,” Daniel and Sarah confess in agreement. “It’s a meditation on patience and not giving up.”

the joyous won’t be jealous of

the heavens up above

in stream lit skies mysterious

above the joyous lake

Musically, Pure Bathing Culture emanate an expertise in sounds supernatural and ethereal. Sarah ignites lines with a voice like sorcery, injecting each note with palpable energy. Daniel embraces his instruments as companions. He explains, “I don’t plan, I just think of each part as a different person. I'll name them, think of the clothes they're wearing, where they're from ... This helps me feel like we’re creating our own world.” His method is evident in “Ad Victoriam,” where sounds interact like living, loving bodies, and in “All Night,” where Sarah’s voice seems to twirl each melodic layer as if by hand.

dark nights and blackest dreams

when nothing’s ever as it seems

and you are all alone

and what’s left in between

If Night Pass clarifies only one thing, it’s that over the course of their Richard Swift-produced debut EP and the two beloved studio albums that followed, Sarah Versprille and Daniel Hindman have done more than establish a musical identity; they’ve honed a sonic virtue. The album is a shining exhalation, beaming with electric intimacy and propelling Pure Bathing Culture into due triumph. The album closes with “Violet A Voyager,” a softly resolving song that Daniel and Sarah always knew would come last, the first glimpse of violet on the horizon after the black of night.

What dreams give back again

at night beneath the waves

as violet finds its way above the moonlight shade