The dire straits of independent country music and why success seems so far away.

On his latest album, Memories and Empties, Colter Wall wears a new hide.

The Western Tragedy comes alive like a voice from the wilderness. Kenny Feidler takes us through his latest raucous introspection.

As Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace closes, a new sound of Bakersfield stands strong.

Kristina Murray on closed-door prayers and down South dirty stuff.

Getting Gigs With Stephen Musselman.

Kristina takes us through her latest album, Little Blue

Noeline Hofmann, the 21-year-old singer-songwriter who grew up in the Alberta Badlands, is experiencing a near meteoric rise thanks in part to her masterful meditations on rural living.

A music mecca helping drive today’s country music boom

In between raising kids and cattle, Kellen has become a central character in the growing Wyoming country music scene.

Teddy & The Rough Riders are having a year. They won the 2024 Ameripolitan Awards Honky Tonk Band of the Year in the Spring. Summer was spent putting that award to proof on the road, backing up Emily Nenni across the U.S. and Europe. September brought their first official AmericanaFest showcase—just one of the nine gigs they’re part of in six days. Then some big dates with Nenni and Orville Peck before a month of headlining dates leading up to the new album drop in October.

The title of Eliza Thorn’s debut album, Somebody New, says it all. The 26-year-old from Connecticut has burst onto the Nashville Honky Tonk scene, and her record is introducing her blend of bluesy, soulful country music to new audiences.

The birdsong is largely a utilitarian phenomenon, serving to spread vital messages amongst the fluent. Yet, birds also appear to sing for the sake of singing. In the early dawn chorus especially, songbirds chirp and squeal and whistle and bark for the joyous cause of being alive one more day. Hannah Juanita can relate.

After the completion of his book The Lost Cowboy, Zielke wanted to pay homage to the deep musical traditions of folks in ranching and agriculture.

Much of today’s dazzling revival of modern traditional country and folk music has been led by women artists who cast off outdated prescriptions to seize the moment and tell new stories.

On his new record, Back Home, Quimby dedicates the entire album to his New England roots. He paints vivid pictures of life there, unpacks the many ways it has changed, and the ways it hasn’t. By casting his studied eye across the region, gone long enough to see it clearly, Quimby finds it, and brings it to life in ways that have largely proved elusive in this medium.

Wall’s songs about cowboy work, or the cowboy mindset, or life in lonesome places, are knowing. For his fans who’ve never broken a horse or busted the sod, Wall’s music is a window into an exotic world. For his fellow ranch workers who flock to his shows, it is a mirror.

Tod won’t be placed in a category and is unwilling to depart from what drives his projects forward. He’s more than the darkness or the honky tonk bangers of this new album. 

In name, Valley of Heart’s Delight, refers to the Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley, where Cilker was born, the fifth generation in her family to do so….

Walking in Bluhm’s backyard is like walking through the microcosm of her mind, a gorgeous swirl of music, horses, and the outdoors. An equestrian and a well-respected artist originally from Northern California, Bluhm came to Nashville nearly a decade ago after a divorce and, in turn, the dissolution of her band, Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers.

“I had been obsessively watching Field of Dreams,” he said, to the point that his wife asked him what was going on. “I went to work the Sunday after that week of watching the movie, and I saw the Zach Bryan email. I just had this weird feeling something good was going to happen.”

Country, folk, Americana, country rock, cosmic country, psyche country, ambient country…on and on. We sat down with Mikaela Davis and Jeffrey Silverstein to talk about finding one’s way through the nomenclature to a career.

After paying each of the four other band members an equal split of the gig fees and merch sales, after covering tour expenses like food, travel and lodging, reimbursing the record label for vinyl LPs sold along the way, paying her booking agent, and something she must be forgetting, it ain’t much. As she will tell you from the stage, she’s broke. She’ll also tell you she’s very lucky. Reconciling the two on the daily is the challenge. It’s hard to buy gas with a song.

Letting go of fear can be a revolutionary act. For folksinger Kaia Kater, it was essential. Releasing herself from the perfunctory need to please everyone, Kater wrote her first solo album in six years, Strange Medicine, as a salve first and foremost for herself.

Trinidad has its own roots music of course. Calypso originated there in the mid-1800s before spreading out to the Caribbean and beyond. In the 1970s, its popularity lagging, Lord Shorty…

Written over a two-month period as he wound his way across the United States on the back of a tour bus, the resulting songs feel like a series of twelve connected snapshots that reveal something essential about America.

“I wanted to be a better vocalist, better songwriter, better band leader,” she says. “And all that takes practice.” Practice, putting in the work, is a theme that comes up often in conversations with her. Her willingness to take a chance on herself comes from knowing her own work ethic.

The group is made up of Kelly Willis, a ‘90s country music sweetheart and Texas songwriter great; Melissa Carper, the Nebraskan with an enthralling bygone voice dubbed “Hillbille Holiday” (a moniker given by Chris Scruggs); and Brennen Leigh a masterful songwriter, vocalist, and instrumentalist who the late Guy Clark proclaimed, “plays guitar like a motherfucker.”

When Sierra Ferrell performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live in January, making her national television debut, Kimmel, a Boston native, pronounced her last name in a way that sounded like the word feral.

This is Carlisle at his purest. Carlisle’s music demands connection. Enlivened by the intimacy inherent in the room’s close quarters, he transforms this tiny gathering into the perfect audience, by…

An authentic storytelling experience only enhances the experience for a fan — making them believe fully in the illusionary relationship they’ve developed with the artist. It’s visceral and it’s what brought me to Oklahoma City in the middle of winter. 

Forgive Cobb if the South is on his mind. His sixth studio album, Southern Star, released September 22, features sketches of rural Southern living and nostalgic moments from his home.

However, the glitz and glamour — regardless of realities — seem antithetical to country music’s near-religious dedication to the perception of authenticity. And this is especially true of those just…

Today’s artists have both a greater freedom and burden to find the authentic West. No one is succeeding at that task better than Colter Wall.

Summer Dean probably shouldn’t be here, out on tour to support the upcoming release of her new album, The Biggest Life, produced by country music icon Bruce Robison. In the small Texas town where Dean grew up, young girls with professional aspirations aimed at the bank, courthouse, or classroom. Her mother was a teacher, and Summer followed in her mama’s footsteps, earning an education degree and teaching elementary school for 10 years. On a familiar and predictable trajectory, gravity’s rainbow should have done the rest.