A day before the Moore tornado ripped its way through central Oklahoma, John Fullbright was scheduled to play a gig in Norman, just 10 miles to the south. The show wound up getting canceled due to severe weather, and Fullbright — a lifelong Oklahoma resident who sings about the state on his Grammy-nominated debut, From [...]

Ellie Goulding at the Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, TN May 20, 2013 “I know this venue is supposed to be seated, but I like having people near me.” With that, Ellie Goulding defied the Ryman Auditorium’s ushers and stage managers — the same people who’d been spending the first third of her set rushing from aisle [...]

Festival Yearbook: Hangout Music Festival 2013 Since nothing says “summer” more than a trip to the beach, we called up staff writer Andrew Leahey and asked him to head south, stopping only when he hit Gulf Shores, Alabama. The assignment? Attend the Hangout Music Festival, the world’s first major music fest held on a beach, [...]

While Crooked Still takes a break from the road, bandleader Aoife O’Donovan is shifting her attention back towards her solo career. Fossils is the singer’s full-length debut, a collection of folk, bluegrass, and old-timey songs produced by the same man who brought us Tift Merritt’s Traveling Alone and the Decemberists’ The King is Dead. “I [...]

A breakup album with a happy ending, Melissa Ferrick’s newest release takes us through the messy end of one relationship and into the early stages of another. Ferrick, a member of the same ‘90s alt-rock scene that spawned Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, embraces her inner folkie this time around, layering the new songs with [...]

Red Tail Ring may sound like a southern folk duo, but the Michigan natives take inspiration from their home, too, rolling the state’s lush summers and long, melancholy winters into a rootsy, acoustic sound that’s lonely one minute and lovely the next. On “Katy Came Breezing,” they trade harmonies over fingerplucked guitar and understated fiddle. [...]

The Baptist Generals explore a common theme — love — on their sophomore album, Jackleg Devotional To The Heart. Don’t expect a collection of gooey ballads and Celine Dion-worthy show-stoppers, though. It took ten long years for the rootsy, lo-fi rock band to record Jackleg, and you can hear that deliberation in the album’s noisy [...]

The members of Last Good Tooth first bonded over a shared love of the Black Keys… but the band’s off-kilter, Appalachian-influenced music owes more to indie-folk than indie-rock. Formed at the Rhode Island School of Design, the band takes a look at higher education — sort of — on “Look What I Made,” a track [...]

After logging several years in Norah Jones’ backup band — and performing alongside Jones in the pair’s country-gal side project, Puss N Boots — Sasha Dobson is going solo. On her new record, Aquarius, she leaves her jazz and country roots behind, working with collaborator Joel Hamilton (producer of BlakRoc’s self-titled debut; engineer of Sparklehorse’s [...]

It took an entire album of scrapped tunes and 1,150-mile move from Denver to Nashville for The Rouge, a four-piece rock band with folk roots, to find their sound. For Blurry, the guys teamed up with Adam Landry and Justin Collins — the production team behind Deer Tick’s Divine Providence – and emerged with a [...]

Before forming their own band, Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent paid the bills as session musicians, lending their fleet-fingered solos and high-lonesome harmonies to albums by bluegrass icons like Ricky Skaggs. On Brothers of the Highway, their fifth album as a duo, the two prove that they’re more than capable of occupying the spotlight on [...]