Artist: Sterling Drake Hometown: Philipsburg, Montana Latest Album: The Shape I'm In (out May 2, 2025 via Calusa Music/Missing Piece Records) Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): “Sterl Haggard” If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be? Roots country and folk music have a way of bringing people…

Artist: Countercurrent (Brian Lindsay and Alex Sturbaum) Hometown: Olympia, Washington Latest Album: Flow (released March 3, 2025) Which artist has influenced you the most – and how? It's a three-way tie for me between Great Big Sea (gateway drug into trad music, consummate performers, wonderful harmonies), early Solas (dazzling musicianship, tight arrangements, and an unmistakable guitar…

Tommy Emmanuel is in his happy place: spending a Thursday afternoon at Nashville’s Gruhn Guitars in anticipation of recording a new solo album. “I’m here getting a new pickup system featured in one of my guitars, buying strings, hanging out with the guys, and getting a little Gruhn mojo from the shop,” he says. “The…

Playlists are the new Mixtape – and who doesn’t love a good Mixtape? With the release of my brand new album, The Sound of Muscle Shoals, recorded at legendary FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, I thought it would be cool to highlight not only a few of the most important – albeit ubiquitous –…

The first key to All the Not So Gentle Reminders, the sixth album by singer-songwriter David Ramirez releasing on March 21, is “Maybe It Was All a Dream,” the moody, elegiac song that opens his first LP in five years. There are no lyrics to spell it out for the listener. It’s an instrumental, mostly…