Jarrod Dickenson’s Big Talk will instantly demand your attention from the opening track, “Buckle Under Pressure.”
James Houlahan once again teams with Fernando Perdomo, Danny Frankel and Scarlet Rivera on his sixth studio album Beyond the Borders, with songs that range from perseverance to edgy stories to hopeful beginnings
Angela Easterling and her musical and life partner, Brandon Turner, deliver a rich album of eleven originals that run the gamut from parenthood to gun violence to gender identity, and by covering Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” immigration issues as well.
Judy Collins released her 29th album, Spellbound, a record entirely all her own compositions. She may be the goddess of interpreting songs by Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan, but when it comes to her own words, she is at her brightest.
Anthony D’Amato’s first proper solo album in six years is a rumination on life, love, death, race, and more as the artist fuses probing lyrics with lots of instrumentation in indie-folk-rock style.
The middle ground between iconic singer-songwriters like John Prine and “tell it like it is” wordsmiths in the realm of Jay Farrr and Steve Earle, lies the melodically insightful world
If singer/songwriter Andrew Duhon hasn’t shown up on your playlists yet, make a point of adding him now. His three full-length albums and one EP are full of so many
Like Coachella and Bonnaroo, the Austin City Limits Festival (ACL) has solidified its status in the upper echelon of festivals in that each year it practically sells out before releasing
Natalie Merchant recently broke a seven-year silence with her rapturous, albeit lengthy, double album Leave Your Sleep. The offering was met by many fans with resistance, and at some level ambivalence. It had been almost ten years since a fully Natalie Merchant-penned album, so while she wasn’t digging up and reviving older folk songs (as was done on 2003’s The House Carpenter’s Daughter), Leave Your Sleep is comprised of 26 songs whose lyrics come from 19th and 20th Century poetry, all dealing with or written by children.
With the recent boom of female singer-songwriters in the past few years, there is reason to believe that there is room for all the talent in the world, even if you’re not the second coming of Lucinda Williams—you don’t have to write the next Car Wheels on a Gravel Road to make a decent living. But, the truth is simple for McCarley: if her first offering, Love, Save the Empty, gives us any hint about what is to come, it’s that her musical pulse is not to be denied.
