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 […]
SXSW 2026: The Sounds, Part 3
NAKIA Austin’s Nakia was a favorite SXSW discovery from nearly 20 years ago. I caught two sets towards the close of SXSW – a fitting way to round out the week. The Wednesday afternoon set at C-Boys, in particular, brought me right back to that first encounter — the voice, the energy, the songs, all […]
SXSW 2026: The Sounds, Part 2
LOS LOBOS It doesn’t get much better than Los Lobos. Seriously. They’ve shared more than 50 years of great music and performances with the world, and they ain’t done yet. Their introduction at the NPR day stage spoke volumes: “Whoever your favorite band is, their favorite band is Los Lobos.” They were even brought back […]
SXSW 2026: The Sounds, Part 1
JON DEE GRAHAM AND WILLIAM HARRIES GRAHAM News broke last Friday night that Jon Dee Graham had passed away that morning. What was already a SXSW performance highlight suddenly felt like something more. Jon Dee had battled serious health issues for years, making his reflection on the experience and performance of “I Can See Clearly […]
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.
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 […]
Sam Lewis – Everything’s Fine
Is everything OK? Everything’s fine. Uh-oh. Your interpretive skills are just about to be put to the test. That kind of verbal misdirection became an anchor point for Nashville’s Sam Lewis’ 7th studio album, Everything’s Fine. It can be equally true and false at the same time, like when you’re having a bad day but […]
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 […]