Earlier this year, on 30 March, Riley Basford died by suicide. To Christian Parker, he was a family friends’ 15 year-old stepson. ‘Last Glance’ is the artist’s beautiful tribute to the young man and his family. Replete with gorgeous mandolin,…
Neil Young has always felt at his best when he’s playing rough and ready, and his best foils have always been Crazy Horse. Together they have created some of the most deceptively simple music, raw rock that captures a moment…
This is a remarkable and beautiful album — charming, moving, heartfelt, and absolutely of the moment. I first heard it properly on a long layover in Vegas, killing time in one of those hybrid lounges tucked beside a sweeps coins…
Akin to her Appalachian contemporaries, folkie Heather Sarona sews her roots from the mountainside. The singer-songwriter grew up surrounded by folk and bluegrass music in the Uwharrie Mountains of North Carolina. Americana runs intrinsically through her veins, informing her warm, rootsy songwriting and multi-instrumentalist abilities—Sarona plays guitar in a way that recalls Saratoga greats, plus banjo and uke. Her debut LP, Head Above Water, invokes all of these elements into a cozy, inhabitable folk soundscape that recalls the likes of Gillian Welch and Watchhouse.
Everything changes over time. That’s certainly true for Sea Wolf’s Through a Dark Wood. Some of the pain has passed and now songs that didn’t make sense when the album was released in March of 2020 resonate differently. Eighteen months have…
Capturing magic in a bottle is hard, doing it twice is almost impossible. But that’s what Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have done with Raise the Roof. The first notes of ‘Quattro (World Drifts In)’ suggest that while it has taken…
Devin Hoff first heard Anne Briggs’ music about ten years ago, and that moment changed his life, leading him to spend thousands of hours listening to Briggs and eventually recording Voices from the Empty Moor (Songs of Anne Briggs). Striking a chord…
Matt Dorrien peeks into the kaleidoscope that is life on his latest, ‘Baby, Will You Come Back Home?’ Its accompanying music video is wonderfully dry in its depiction of a man in need of a change. Dorien states that this…
One of the few things that truly helped me through the first few months of the original lockdown all that time ago was Mr. Alec Bowman’s debut album I Used to be Sad but Then I Forgot – an album…
Charissa Hoffman has spent the last ten years on the edge of breaking into the public conscience. From punk rock house shows to bluegrass festivals and rock clubs, the sixth generation musician and first ukulele principal to be accepted to Berklee…