Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart arrives like the sound of a songwriter stepping out of the dim room and into the bandstand without giving up the bruises that got him there. Released March 27, 2026, the record was cut live to tape in Nashville with his touring band and produced again by Sadler Vaden, which matters because these songs are still built on Farley’s plainspoken honesty, but they now hit with more lift, more room, and more faith in momentum. For the “Then,” Son Volt’s Trace from 1995 makes the most sense. Not because Farley sounds like Jay Farrar in some copycat way, but because Trace helped define how alt-country could carry working-class weariness, road-dusted poetics, and rock-band force in the same frame.
Readers’ Pick: Drayton Farley – A Heavy Duty Heart
You picked Drayton Farley – A Heavy Duty Heart as your favorite new release for the week of March 27, 2026.
Heart – a Premiere from Charlie Marie
Photo credit Courtney Denelle Rhode Island doesn’t typically come to mind as country music country, but Charlie Marie has never needed geography on her side. Her voice does the work — warm, commanding, and woven from the same thread as Kitty Wells, Tammy Wynette, and Emmylou Harris. After her last album in 2021, she did […]
Jonny Fritz on Music Business Economics and Living By the Rider
Country singer Jonny Fritz talks about how Mercedes Sprinters have evolved over the years, shares the advice he got early in his career, and how he learned that confusing an audience was almost better than pleasing them.
Monday Morning Video – Jon Dee Graham (1959 – 2026)
Jon Dee Graham, who passed away last Friday, was a paradox — gruff exterior, heart of gold. I’m pretty sure he liked it that way. He sang about the broken and the struggling, but he always managed to find a glimmer of hope somewhere in the story. The gruffness of his voice and his guitar […]
Now & Then: Hurray For The Riff Raff’s Live Forever and the reach of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Live Forever is a live album, but it also feels like a check-in from the road, a way of hearing Hurray For The Riff Raff’s songs in a shared space. Alynda Segarra has long written with one foot in folk tradition and the other in a tougher, more restless world, where memory, loss, survival, and movement blur together. That makes Car Wheels on a Gravel Road a useful earlier marker, not because the records sound alike in every respect, but because Lucinda Williams showed how roots music could carry intimate detail, regional texture, and emotional wear without losing its bite.
Readers’ Pick: Hurray For The Riff Raff – Live Forever
You picked Hurray For The Riff Raff – Live Forever as your favorite new release for the week of March 20, 2026.
Joe Troop & The Truth Machine – Joe Troop & The Truth Machine
Joe Troop is a poly-polyglot. He speaks several languages, notably English, Spanish and Japanese but also Arabic and French. He plays many instruments, most frequently banjo and fiddle. He also mastered, among other things, the Moroccan kamancheh and the Japanese shamisen. His musical style favors folk music from around the world, from bluegrass (U.S.) to […]
John Gorka: Quiet Songs, Lasting Echoes
For more than four decades, John Gorka has occupied a distinctive place in American folk music: a songwriter whose work unfolds quietly but lingers deeply. His songs favor careful observation over spectacle, humor alongside gravity, and melodies that invite listeners closer rather than overwhelm them. It is a career built less on flash than on […]
Drayton Farley – A Heavy Duty Heart
It was just a few years ago that Drayton Farley was recording songs in his bedroom. His new release, A Heavy Duty Heart, boldly announces that though they were recent those days are long in the rearview. Like his previous album, the project was produced by Sadler Vaden, guitarist for Jason Isbell and the 400 […]