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 […]
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 […]
Rick Vito – Slidemaster
If you’re like me, and you love some slide guitar, commsummate musician and sideman Rick Vito has an offering for you. Vito, who was a member of Fleetwood Mac from 1987 until 1991, and who toured or sat in on recordings with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, John Mayall, John Fogerty, Bob Seger (Vito played […]
The Montvales on Rehearsal Space Interlopers and How They Financed Their 2nd Album
Cincinnati-based duo the Montvales talk about touring survival mechanisms, investing in one’s relationship with creativity, and the time that they were billed as a French-Appalachian folk group.
Monday Morning Video – Taylor Hollingsworth
Birmingham guitarist and singer-songwriter Taylor Hollingsworth has built a devoted following through his solo work and as a member of Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, earning acclaim for his cosmic fingerpicking and distinctive “folk-art-punk-blues” style. We caught Hollingsworth for the first time last year at a rocking solo show in Brooklyn, and we’ve […]