Photo: Jacob Blinkentaff For Dale Watson, music started at home, not on a stage. It came from the next room, early in the morning, when his father picked up a guitar. “I would wake up to my dad playing,” Watson says. That introduction opened the door to a lifetime of listening. Records spun by George […]
Jennie Arnau on Sentimental Things and Touring in Hazel the Honda
Singer-songwriter Jennie Arnau talks about her favorite day job, the best payment found in playing music, and the lie that fear can be debilitating.
Kalyn Fay on Alliteration and Working as a Museum Curator
Oklahoma-based singer-songwriter Kalyn Fay talks about being gentle in spirit and song and offers some tax season advice.
Monday Morning Video – Tom Petty “You Got Lucky”
I have to admit that I was long jaded by the original video for Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky” as it had little, if anything, to do with the song. Once I got past that, however, the song became a fave among faves within the Petty catalog. The song is, at its core, a pointed […]
Now & Then: Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart and the reach of Trace
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.