Life is weird. In the words of Dan Reeder, “What the fuck is that about?”
Everyone tells me I seem mellow and laid back – and I am. That said, if anyone were to take one step into my head, they’d be bombarded with a maelstrom of wonderings about death, intrusive thoughts, forgotten location of keys and wallets, constant attempts (mostly failures) at descriptive alliteration, wildly sweeping feeling of love, wildly sweeping feelings of grief – and constant hunger. All of which eventually spin back around to complete peace and acceptance.
Music tends to get me back to that point. These songs bring peace to my ’90s-fuzzy-porn-like mess of a mind by reminding me (in one way or another) that it’s somewhat preposterous that we exist at all. A lot of these tracks are attached to personal moments in my own timeline, but hope they bring you peace too. – Tony Kamel
“Deep Breath” – Riley Downing
“Take a deep breath, it’ll be alright…”
I love this guy’s tunes. He has a poignant way of presenting life’s weirdness. Also as a recent yogi, it’s a good reminder to come back to my breath.
“Monster Truck” – Ramsay Midwood
“You don’t like it, you can kiss my ass. ‘Cause I drive a monster truck…”
This record, Shootout at the OK Chinese Restaurant, is funny, odd, and just a fantastic timeless reflection on the insanity we’ll always exist inside. Is he celebrating or making fun of these people? I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s funny.
“People Talkin’” – Hurray for the Riff Raff
“People, they’re trying to tear us apart…”
Alynda Segarra is a national treasure. This record just blows my mind and has been a staple for me for a long time. It reminds me that I’m old now and I’m glad to be.
“Sue” – Tony Kamel
“If you’re livin’ and breathing, and doing that right, you ought to be lovin’ with all of your might…”
The second verse of this tune holds the keystone to my upcoming record, We’re All Gonna Live. Obviously, our relationships with other people define much of our lives. Sue was a wonderful person. I miss her dearly.
“Waxing and Waning” – Melissa Carper
“Waxing and waning, wishing and waiting…”
Melissa is one of the best writers and singers out there. Her retro voice puts me at ease.
“Don’t Tell the Boys” – Petey USA
“Lets talk about how childhood trauma guides our actions as adults…”
This tune reminds me of me and my old buddies. I’m lucky to have them. We’ve been friends for 30+ years and we can be ourselves and tell each other anything without fear or judgment – something I treasure deeply.
“Louie” – Arcy Drive
“Baby remember, this is our December…”
I just love this song and it’s reminiscent of ’90s alternative rock Weezer era. It makes me happy to see Gen Z-ers throwing down with a rockin’ live band like this. It feels cyclical.
“Problem Solver” – Slimdan
“Maybe I should be someone who listens and not try to fix it/ … You don’t want a problem solver…”
This is a beautiful love song about being a typical dude and doing typical dude things like I tend to do in my marriage. I’ve come a long way though… so has this guy.
“Joyful” – Kelley Mickwee
“The beauty of life is the movement of change…”
Kelley rocks and this album rocks. That’s all.
“The Illinois River Song” – The Brother Brothers
“I proclaim the Illinois River gonna swallow me up whole and not a soul will know that I am missing…”
I’m a sucker for a good river/life metaphor. The melodies that weave in and out of this tune are infectious. It could be about anything and I’d love it.
“Everything Is Everything” – Cappadonna
“Everything that you see ain’t reality, they’re just illusions…”
Hip-hop on a bluegrass website? Duh. Can always count on a member of the Wu-Tang Clan to remind you that we might live in a simulation.
“They’ll Never Keep Us Down” – Hazel Dickens
“We won’t be bought, we won’t be sold…”
Just because everything is uncontrollable bullshit doesn’t mean we don’t fight. This tune speaks for itself. Bless Hazel Dickens.
“Born a Worm” – Dan Reeder
“Born a worm, spins a cocoon, goes to sleep, wakes up a butterfly. What the fuck is that about?”
I do not know, Dan. None of us do. I implore everyone reading this to listen to Dan Reeder’s songs.
“We’re All Gonna Live” – Tony Kamel
Yes we are.
I’m tired of talking about myself. Y’all can figure it out. Love you.
In country and roots music, authenticity is treated like the most valuable currency of all. Maybe that’s because the genre has always been caught between the fiction that this music is frozen in amber and the reality that it has always borrowed liberally from current musical trends in order to have commercial value. The earliest popular country music was an amalgamation of regional music from rural white artists, music stolen wholesale from Black and Indigenous artists, and plenty of nods to prevailing pop (i.e., urban or non-rural) trends – looking back at the places young laborers and listeners that had been drawn to cities came from, and the exciting present and future they found themselves in once they arrived.
Can anyone or anything truly be considered “authentic” in America, a country whose identity is built on masking fundamental historical truths?
While artists like Zach Bryan are hailed for their “authenticity,” the vast majority of the current class of mainstream country and Americana artists grew up in suburbs, in postmodern America, in the internet age, and are graduates of major colleges – like Nashville’s Belmont University or Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Their experiences are also authentic, of course, to each individual artist – just as Bryan’s initial motel room demos are electrifying for the soul he brought to them. But these origins bring up questions around how country and Americana construct “authentic” narratives, especially to market roots music.
Still, it’s noticeable that certain types of creators are automatically considered “authentic” country artists – and they often match the complexion of the first generations of country singers, when “race records” and “hillbilly music” were originally split and whose most famous individuals wore cowboy cosplay on stage.
We want to tip you off to some real Good Country music: Music that portrays life in its complexity and a deep appreciation for one’s roots, whether they lie in the Bronx, rural Arkansas, or anywhere else on this rich blue marble we live on. Because authenticity in country doesn’t necessarily equate to rurality, to back roads and red dirt and farm trucks; real country music is real not because it’s built to be “authentic,” but because it’s honest.
Hurray For the Riff Raff
Hurray For the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra is from a little bit of everywhere, but the Bronx is where they grew up and the punk houses of the Lower East Side raised them. Between their jazz artist father and picking up a guitar as they rode the rails, Segarra’s approach to folk music began with a traditional bent and has since exhaled into an expansive approach, as with their astonishing 2022 album Life on Earth. Their upcoming album The Past Is Still Alive finds Segarra focusing more on twang, but their philosophical core has always remained the same: breathing life into unspoken pain and empowering people that society would like us to forget.
Amythyst Kiah
Amythyst Kiah’s music is a powerful force. Inspired by the blues and old time music, Kiah uses her art to prop the furnace doors open to make way for blasts of grief and abandonment. Kiah grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and picked up the guitar while attending an arts magnet school. She fell in love with old time music at East Tennessee State University and never looked back.
I first saw Kiah in 2016 at Karen Pittelman’s Queer Country Quarterly, her first show in NYC. Karen introduced her by remarking, “trust me, she’s going to be famous.” When Kiah belted her powerful alto, we all knew we were in the midst of greatness. Kiah’s most recent work on Wary + Strange (2021) takes us in a more experimental direction, but her exploration of alienation – like a toy in her hands – informs her music no matter what she’s plugging into her pedalboard. Kiah’s “Black Myself,” originally recorded with supergroup Our Native Daughters, fiercely proclaims her love for herself and her ancestors.
Willi Carlisle
Willi Carlisle has seen a thing or two in his travels across the lower 48. Carlisle cut his teeth musically in DIY and punk rock, but his search for queer role models and love for poetry drew him to New York City. With disgust for the elitism of the poetry scene there – and their mockery of his roots in the Midwest – Carlisle went searching for a life of words in folk music.
Carlisle has a knack for painting complex portraits of down-and-out characters, refusing to be drawn into simple narratives of left and right, red and blue. His stunning “When the Pills Wear Off” from the upcoming Critterland demonstrates Carlisle’s ability to turn the personal into the political – and back into the personal again. This is not the blind invective of JD Vance, but the realization that only empathy can build bridges between people who think they have nothing in common.
ISMAY (née Avery Hellman) has spent their whole life around folk and bluegrass music – their grandfather is one of the founders of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. As a contestant on Apple TV+’s short-lived My Kind of Country competition series, ISMAY is very much a representative of roots music’s vanguard. With their sparse arrangements and winsome vocals, ISMAY’s music feels like deconstructed folk music. They understand the core elements of the sound thanks to a lifetime immersed in it, and they create something wholly unique from its constituent parts, as we hear on “Point Reyes.” There, ISMAY’s contemplative vocals are orbited by a gauzy cloud of pedal steel and gentle finger-picking. ISMAY’s upcoming album Desert Pavement speaks to their sense of place: all of their music is enamored by nature. “Golden Palomino” illustrates ISMAY’s love for their rural California upbringing, guiding us to realize how much our natural and inner worlds inform each other.
Buffalo Nichols
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more devastating songwriter or guitar player than Buffalo Nichols. Nichols, like many teenagers before him, picked up a guitar and played his way through the hip-hop and hardcore scenes in his Milwaukee hometown. He found himself drawn to blues music as he began to dig into his mother’s collection and connect with Cream City’s West African community. Nichols and musical partner Joanna Rose made a mark on the Americana scene with their duo Nickel and Rose, shining a harsh light on the ignorance on full display in the community’s supposedly liberal refuge on the song “Americana.”
With his most recent solo album The Fatalist, Nichols brings all of his experience to bear on a remarkable collection of songs that combine elements of all of his musical loves. On his rendition of the classic “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond,” Nichols’ guitar becomes an extension of his own body with lightning-fast licks. Buttressed by electronic drum samples and a haze of synths, Nichols shows that music is at its most vital when it is rooted in the past and embraces the future.
Ally Free
Ally Free is one to keep your eye on in 2024. They write in their bio that they see music as the universal language that can bring people together, and that’s clear on their versatile 2019 album Rise. From the nu metal-inspired chugging of “Fool’s Gold” to the craftsman’s approach to “Fast Train,” Free isn’t embarrassed to draw from any inspiration to make a damn good song. Free’s rich alto gives their music depth: from their performances, it’s clear that this is someone who has lived a lot of life. Free is one of the newest members of the Black Opry and has taken a few steps out of their Huntsville, AL hometown to playing more shows around Nashville. Here’s hoping that means the rest of us get to hear more from this remarkable performer soon.
William Prince
William Prince’s voice carries a warm, earthy timbre that is wholly unique. Prince grew up on Peguis First Nation (in what is now Canada) and is well-versed in the travails of people living under oppression. But that experience is translated into patience and warmth, a gentle perseverance that can only come from a keen observer. Prince’s stark breakout album Reliever (2020) has given way to the warm Stand in the Joy (2023), which details the travails and victories we most often find in daily life. “Tanqueray” is a gorgeous example of Prince’s dynamic, a story of two improbable lovers finally coming together to make it work.
Sabine McCalla
Sabine McCalla is readying for a breakout 2024. McCalla’s music is steeped in the sounds of New Orleans, which she has made her home. McCalla has performed with others, but her performance on Offbeat Magazine’s OnBeat Session from September 2023 shows us she’s ready to step out on her own. For now, we have her 2018 EP Folk, which sports arresting songs that feel timeless. Maybe it’s the gentle groove in her music that feels like the stately flow of the Mississippi River – discordant with the immediacy of her lyrics that protest violence and oppression, as demonstrated by “I Went to the Levee.”
Margo Cilker
Look – Margo Cilker is literally a cowboy, okay?? Isn’t that what you imagine when someone mentions “country music” and “authenticity” in the same breath? But Cilker’s music glorifies a life of searching, not a mythologized America of white picket fences, so you can also picture the quintessential Nashville executive saying, “We like cowboys, but no, not like that.”
Cilker’s latest album, critical darling Valley of Heart’s Delight, is nostalgic for her family orchard in California’s Santa Clara Valley – but not without a heavy dose of reality. “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me” caution the listener not to become too attached to any one place – and the cost of leaving it behind. Cilker’s impassioned “With The Middle” cuts to the core of her work – a weighing of the contrasts between pleasure and pain and yearning to find common ground between the two.
Brittany Howard
Brittany Howard transcends pretty much everything – except the act of exploration with wild abandon. Having gained notoriety as the lead singer of the retro soul band the Alabama Shakes, Howard seemingly will not rest until she’s drawn with every musical crayon in the box. In her recent interview with NPR’s Jewly Hight, Howard cracks that she grew up in a trailer and would still be perfectly content to be working the land somewhere. But her music has led her elsewhere, perhaps everywhere. Howard has teased a few songs off her upcoming album, What Now, with the title track featuring hooky grooves and propulsive energy, but it’s “Red Flags” that astounds with its jarring drum loop, woozy vocals, and disorienting production that demonstrates how much mastery Howard has gained in her craft as an artist and storyteller.
Samantha Crain
Few artists in the last decade have shown the same growth and versatility as Samantha Crain. A part of the rich Tulsa music scene that has given us John Moreland, John Calvin Abney, and M Lockwood Porter, Crain follows a road all her own. Under Branch & Thorn & Tree (2015) found Crain exploring the pride and trauma of her Choctaw heritage through folk-inspired music. In 2017, Crain broke her own mold with the quirky indie-pop album You Had Me at Goodbye (2017.) Since her 2020 album, A Small Death, Crain has been playing in the spaces in between, utilizing woodwinds, pedal steel, pianos, and guitar to create a woozy soundscape as her spacious, gravelly voice helps us stay anchored in the real.
Nick Shoulders
Nick Shoulders rounds up the list with his commanding All Bad. While Shoulders’ music leans traditional sonically, it’s anything but. The Fayetteville, Arkansas singer begins his album with phaser blasts and a menacing invitation to a “conversation,” and that conversation is explicitly about all the “country” stylings that deserve to be thrown in the trash heap – and the many, many qualities we need to hold on to and claim for ourselves: grit, honesty, love, and togetherness. “Won’t Fence Us In” and “Appreciate’cha” speak to this theme most clearly, but the way Shoulders approaches the classic country canon with loving irreverence reminds us that we never have to be weighed down by tradition.
Alynda Segarra, creative and frontperson extraordinaire of Hurray for the Riff Raff, has announced a brand new album for the Americana/indie folk-rock group that they have spearheaded for now more than 15 years. The Past Is Still Alive (out February 23, 2024 on Nonesuch Records) was heralded last week with a new music video – watch above. “Alibi” showcases a tender, more subdued, and more country-fied sound following the anger and passion of 2022’s LIFE ON EARTH. Segarra has always made their home directly in American roots music, even while they and their ensemble have played most often in its fringes and margins. The Past Is Still Alive feels a bit like a return to the bread-and-butter genre aesthetics that first launched HFTRR into the upper, superlative reaches of indie Americana.
The Past Is Still Alive also showcases Segarra’s incredible talent for processing and displaying all of the beautiful and hideous facets of grief and loss – this time, losses and griefs much more personal than those highlighted on recent albums and songs.
“The Past Is Still Alive is an album grappling with time, memory, love and loss, recorded in Durham, NC a month after losing my father,” Segarra explains via press release. “‘Alibi’ is a plea, a last ditch effort to get through to someone you already know you’re gonna lose. It’s a song to myself, to my father, almost fooling myself because I know what’s done is done. But it feels good to beg. A reckoning with time and memory. The song is exhausted with loving someone so much it hurts. Addiction separates us. With memories of the Lower East Side in the early 2000s of my childhood, mixed with imagery of the endless West that calls to artists and wanderers.”
Even with subject matter as heart-stopping and human as this, it’s difficult to anticipate this new album with anything other than excitement. Segarra is a master of transparent vulnerability, painting and evoking with their queerness, their identity, their cultural background in ways that complicate internalized narratives and stereotypes – while also contextualizing all of these intellectual explorations in a down-to-earth, everyday fashion. That The Past Is Still Alive will engage this sort of exploration within country, Americana, and string band sounds – however experimental or mainstream or “normative” or genre-blending – adds up perfectly.
Sam Doores cut his teeth as a Bay Area-born teen troubadour busking around the U.S. before he got his first real break with a steady gig at an Irish pub in New Orleans. In that same city he co-created some of the last decade’s most arresting socially-conscious anthems with Hurray for the Riff Raff and made sparkling folk- and country-derived excursions with his own band, the Deslondes.
And now he’s got his first solo album, Sam Doores, recorded primarily in Berlin and filled with echoes of everything from Tin Pan Alley to the Mississippi hill country, from French Quarter jazz to California psychedelic-folk-rock.
So, let’s talk about Cambodian rock ’n’ roll. “Cambodian Rock n’ Roll” is, in fact, the title of one of the songs on the album.
“No one’s asked me about that!” he says, excitedly, on the phone from New Orleans, where he’s lived now for 14 years. “Do you know the compilation, Cambodian Rocks?”
It’s a 1996 collection of recordings made by a wealth of artists in Cambodia who embraced American surf, garage-rock and psychedelic styles and gave them scintillating Southeast Asian twists, before the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, in which many of those performers were killed or imprisoned.
“A friend played it for me one time on a road trip and I fell in love with the style and sound,” he says, adding that he then watched Never Forget, a documentary about that time. “So heartbreaking, and after watching it the music hits on a deeper level.”
Now to be clear, the song doesn’t sound like Cambodian rock ’n’ roll, but rather is a “tip of the cap” to it, in a somber reminiscence about listening to it with the friend who introduced him to that music. The songs on Sam Doores aren’t tinged with that tragedy, yet there is a wistful, muted melancholy and sadness throughout. “There’s some darkness, for sure,” he says.
Well, there’s going to be. It’s a breakup record, after all, largely coming from the end of a long-term relationship. The album explores various shades of that darkness, of unsettling loss and longing. There’s often light shining through, with residual and resurgent hope and joy. To some extent it all comes together, brutally, midway through the album with the song “Had a Dream,” born out of two losses that happened in his life over the four years in which the material on the album came together.
“That came to me when I knew I was losing someone who had been one of the closest people in my whole life, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get that person back,” he says. “And a friend of mine was dying. It’s about eventual letting go. For a long time I thought my friend was going to pull through, beat his sickness, and I thought I was not going to lose my love. Both ended up getting lost. I wrote about that time. Wanted the music to have the frantic, desperate feeling on the verses, but also the melancholy of the choruses.”
The sensibilities tie together seemingly disparate emotions, and disparate musical tones. On one end is the upbeat, generous and genuine “Wish You Well,” one of several songs featuring members of Tuba Skinny, a leader of a vibrant wave of young bands enlivening traditional New Orleans jazz. On the other, the very downcast acoustic guitar “Red Leaf Rag,” evoking a “dark dream world” that he says really should have been called a “drag” rather than a “rag,” or maybe a “dirge.” It’s all no less a factor on songs occupying the middle ground, including “Other Side of Town,” co-written with and featuring lead vocals of Doores’ longtime musical partner, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s dynamic leader, Alynda Segarra.
They also tie together, or perhaps are tied together by, the two cities in which the songs were shaped: New Orleans and Berlin. In many ways the album is the story of his 14 years in the former, having arrived when he was just 19.
“I was hitchhiking on my way [here] when Hurricane Katrina hit [in August 2005] and ended up in Austin for a while” he says. “Met some New Orleans musicians who had relocated there and they talked me into coming to JazzFest in 2006. I felt like I’d left the country. By far the most exciting place I’d been. Been to Havana, Cuba, once before. My high school jazz band went there. Reminded me more of that than anywhere. Was just going to be here one weekend.”
New Orleans has a way of changing people’s plans. That first day he stumbled upon an unannounced small-stage set by Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint warming up for their later big-stage show, and later saw the incredibly powerful performance in which Bruce Springsteen debuted his folky, New Orleans-esque Seeger Sessions Band, a show that had tens of thousands in the devastated city shedding tears of both sorrow and hope — and turned Doores from a Bruce doubter to a fan. He also had his first encounter with the colorful, beaded-and-feathered Mardi Gras Indian troupes, and he was smitten with it all.
“It totally felt like the beginning of the rest of my life that day,” he says.
Having spent all of his money, he went to busk on Bourbon Street, the owner of the now-gone Kelly’s Irish pub saw him and hired him for a regular gig. “He said, ‘Want to try your luck on a real stage?’” Doores says. “I thought, ‘Wow! Playing inside?’”
Soon he met Segarra and formed a musical partnership that evolved into Hurray for the Riff Raff. As that band took off, he launched the Deslondes (named after the street on which he was living) as a second creative outlet. Through it all, the love and loss captured in Sam Doores took place.
It was in Berlin that he found the environment in which he could shape that into the album; that took place over the course of four years in a studio built by producer Anders Christopherson.
“I actually didn’t know Anders until we started recording,” he says. “He wrote me and Alynda one time out of the blue. Had heard a record of a band we were in together, Sundown Songs. Wrote and said if you are ever coming through Berlin I’d love to record you.”
Not long after, as it happened, the Deslondes were doing the band’s first European tour, so he arranged to spend a week in Berlin and by the end of that time he determined to make a full record there, though it would have to be done in four different stretches over several years. Christopherson put together a “house” band to bring Doores’ ideas to life, primarily himself and a Spanish keyboardist named, yes, Carlos Santana. A lot of experimentation happened with combinations of instruments — vibes, autoharp, an electronic “disc” organ, glockenspiel, and so on. And realizing Doores’ long-standing ambition, strings were added to some songs in arrangements by Manon Parent.
Somehow, it all works as an integrated whole.
“I think there are some core instruments we tended to use in the arrangements that sonically thread the record together,” he says. “In terms of influences, a lot of different tones. Some old New Orleans R&B, some of the opposite — psychedelic folk experimental soundtrack music.”
In some places it might remind of the “vintage” touches associated with such figures as Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks. Doores loves those comparisons, then observes, “We listened to a lot of Nina Simone and early reggae — a lot of Upsetters, early Studio One stuff, early Wailers. Anders has an incredible record collection. Wherever we weren’t recording, we were in his kitchen listening to that stuff. We didn’t do any straight up reggae, but it influenced us in some ways, the bass lines and the organ.”
That was just part of the musical and personal oasis he found there, a space that let him find the full expression for his New Orleans stories. The importance of that is so profound that he wrote an instrumental impression of that environment, “Tempelhofer Dawn,” a gentle, muted, nostalgic waltz — and ultimately chose it to open the album, to serve as a curtain-raiser on the song cycle that follows.
“Tempelhofer is the name of the street the studio is on,” he says. “A lot of moments after late nights going out, or early mornings waking up, I spent a lot of time there with the birds or children playing and that gave a feeling that matched the song.”
He recorded it live in studio, with himself on piano joined by Santana on organ and Parent and Mia Bodet on violins. “It’s a nice way to ease into the record,” he says.
In many ways, given the breakup at the heart of the album, it sounds like both a beginning and an ending.
“It felt like the first track,” he says. “Or the last track.”
Kacey Musgraves’ dominance during Sunday’s 61st Annual Grammy Awards has certainly solidified her place as country music’s newest queer icon. She offered simply stunning, near-perfect performances during the primetime broadcast and took home four trophies: Best Country Solo Performance, Best Country Song, Best Country Album, and one of the most prestigious awards of the night, Album of the Year. So-called “Gay Twitter” devolved into a tizzy as the show unfolded through the afternoon and evening with Musgraves decidedly at the top.
Said Album of the Year, Golden Hour, saw a critical mass of LGBTQ+ fans embracing Musgraves’ music, but her relationship to the broader gay community has been percolating since her debut album, especially given its overt “Follow Your Arrow” message. All combined, her eye for gratuitous-yet-effortless glamour, her acid-steeped, anime-meets-California-meets-trailer park aesthetics, and her singular, pop-influenced countrypolitan sounds are gay country manna from heaven. And it’s not just in the music. This year, she made an appearance as a guest judge on VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars and she routinely advocates for LGBTQ+ fans and their causes on her social media feeds.
To be sure, Musgraves fits the diva-idolized-by-gays criteria impeccably, but there’s a certain passive erasure that can occur when fans consciously or subconsciously become myopic in their praise of and infatuation with straight, cisgendered, female artists. It’s true that Musgraves has played an important role in expanding country music’s borders — musically, socially, and otherwise — but at the same time a burgeoning community of LGBTQ+ writers, artists, musicians, and creators are carving out their own space within country, Americana, folk, and even bluegrass and old-time.
This writer would never go so far as to suggest that one ought not squeal with delight at Musgraves’ fierce-as-fuck costumes, her tear-jerking solo performance of “Rainbow,” or her impossibly long and flowy Cher-callback, bump-it wig. Rather, if you love Kacey Musgraves and Golden Hour — because queer identities can be seen and reflected within her work, because she opens the door to the idea that country isn’t a forbidding place for these identities, and/or because she’s unabashed and unapologetic in her pursuit of these goals — you’re going to love these eleven badass, talented, inspirational, openly queer roots musicians, too.
Time to get stanning:
Brandi Carlile
After last night’s show this name should no longer need mentioning or introduction, as Carlile and her twin collaborators, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, absolutely brought down the Staples Center with one of the most moving performances of the night, the soaring, galvanizing, overtly queer, and now Grammy-winning masterpiece, “The Joke.” Carlile is openly gay, married, a mother of two daughters, and a tireless voice for representation and progress in Americana and its offshoot genres. If “The Joke” resonates with you (i.e. if it makes you sob uncontrollably, as it does this writer), check out “That Wasn’t Me,” “Hurricane,” and, of course, “The Story.”
Mary Gauthier
Gauthier’s latest, Rifles & Rosary Beads, was nominated for Best Folk Album this year and though it didn’t take home the prize, the album has received universal acclaim for its message of hope, empathy, and visibility for members of our armed services and the struggles they face during and after their service. Gauthier collaborated with veterans of the military in writing all of the record’s heart wrenching, honest, raw songs — which might seem counterintuitive given gays’ historically tenuous relationship with the military writ large. But Gauthier’s own life story, and the trials she’s faced, make her the perfect writer to prioritize empathy above all else in these songs.
Don’t sleep on the rest of her discography, though. The simple profundity of her writing is consistently awe-inspiring. Check out “Mercy Now” after you’ve given Rifles & Rosary Beads a listen.
Karen & the Sorrows
Jewish New York City native Karen Pittelman may seem like an unlikely frontwoman of a country band, especially when you factor in her past punk and queercore experiences, but it turns out she grew up bathed in the country compilation albums her father produced and sold for a living. Her voice recalls country mavens of bygone eras — it’s delicate yet powerful, with a pin-up girl quality that’s as subversive as it is natural. Also check out “Take Me for a Ride,” a Pittelman original that plays like a trad-country, queer version of Sam Hunt’s smash hit, “Body Like a Back Road,” but without the cheese.
Little Bandit
All of the hollerin’, barn-burning, hell-raising country soul of your favorite outlaw country rockers, but with lacy gay edges, Little Bandit (AKA Alex Caress, et. al.) is as honky-tonk as it gets. It’s a beautiful balancing act, presenting as an impossibly big-voiced, piano-smashing, charismatic frontman while singing male pronouns without hesitation. He leans into a beautifully paradoxical queerness that equally embraces diamonds, Waffle House allusions, platform shoes, and plain ol drinkin’. If you like it — and you will — check out “Diamonds,” too.
Sarah Shook & the Disarmers
Outspoken outlaws in a crop of alt-country artists who align with that eponymous country movement of the 70s, Sarah Shook & the Disarmers are a road-dogging band that would seemingly fit that mold, excepting Shook’s deliberate efforts to challenge the inherent heteronormativity of country music at every turn. For Shook it’s not necessarily about having a political message, as she put it in a 2018 interview with BGS, “I feel like doing what I’m doing — touring relentlessly, putting out records, and being unapologetically myself — is a very powerful and political maneuver as well… I’ve never been concerned about that because I feel it’s important to be honest and forthright as a human being, and as an artist and certainly lyrically as well.”
Indigo Girls
Both Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — the two halves that make up the absolutely iconic Indigo Girls — have released solo albums in the past year, both of which draw heavily on folk, Americana, and country influences. This should be no surprise to even the most casual IG fans. Banjos, mandolins, ukuleles, and so many other hallmarks of roots music have been integral to the Indigo Girls’ sound all along. But the songwriting, devastating and personal and oh so very real, is the real takeaway from both projects.
kd lang
This list might as well not exist if it excluded kd lang. Before her crossover to more mainstream genre designations, kd pretty much originated the role of badass queer making unimpeachably trad country music that refused to shy away from its queer touchpoints. Just take a look at this video! “Honky Tonk Angels,” sung with Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, Kitty Wells, and finally, kd in all of her butch, gender-bending, binary-eschewing glory — complete with a Minnie Pearl cameo! Country has always been (more than) a little queer, y’all.
Lavender Country
A man well, well ahead of his time, Patrick Haggerty (AKA Lavender Country), released his debut, self-titled album in 1973. It was a groundbreaking work, but the world, let alone the country music community and its commercial machine, were not ready for it. A Seattle DJ was fired for playing “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears” on the airwaves, only one thousand copies of the album were printed, and the band was relegated to performing exclusively at LGBTQ+ events and programs. But, despite being largely shut out of the industry, Haggerty and Lavender Country never ceased. In 2018, at the age of 74, Haggerty took part in AmericanaFest’s very first queer-focused showcase.
Amythyst Kiah
Amythyst Kiah’s booming, captivating voice, and her haunting, Southern gothic approach to Americana, bluegrass, and old-time set her apart from almost anyone else on the scene at this moment. Her reimagination of Dolly Parton’s magnum opus, “Jolene,” is a perfect example of how she carefully turns tradition on its ear. Based in East Tennessee herself, she draws on the rich musical heritage of the region, adding her own spin, creating space to allow herself to soar. And there’s plenty more soaring in her future, as she has opened shows for artists such as Rhiannon Giddens and Indigo Girls across the country and in Europe, and her collaboration album with Giddens, Allison Russell (Birds of Chicago), and Leyla McCalla, Songs of Our Native Daughters, is set to drop February 22.
Alynda Segarra
Singer/songwriter, activist, and Hurray for the Riff Raff frontwoman Alynda Segarra entrances with The Navigator, a concept project that focuses on the life and times of a fictitious Puerto Rican youth living in New York City. Themes of immigration, identity politics, displacement, disenfranchisement, and capitalistic overreach are threaded throughout the album, which offers its songs as tableaus of this girl’s — Navita’s — reality. It’s a stunning reminder that the intricacies and nuances that define us, and by doing so, separate us, are not so difficult for us to overcome with empathy and understanding. “Pa’lante!” (which translates to “forward!”) is the album’s battle cry, a song that turns utter despondency, grief, and a sore lack of humanity into a glimmer of hope.
Trixie Mattel
While almost all other drag queens who delve into the music scene release dance tracks, rap albums, or similar club-ready jams, Trixie Mattel (AKA Brian Firkus) draws upon her rural Wisconsin roots on two folk-adjacent, country-ish albums, Two Birds and One Stone. (Get it?) This isn’t just an opportunist attempt to punch up Trixie’s Dolly Parton-esque, country barbie aesthetic, she’s really got the chops. Not only is she a talented humorous-while-poignant songwriter, her technical skills on guitar and autoharp (yes, autoharp) are precisely honed to showcase her original music. This is no gimmick — though the Doves in Flight Gibson guitar and the custom, pink d’Aigle autoharp are jaw-droppingly perfect additions to Trixie’s lookbook.
While listeners typically associate the “Americana” moniker with blues, country, bluegrass, jazz, and the roots and offshoots thereof, Latin-influenced music should have equal right to inclusion under that umbrella. It’s also no secret that Americana is a majority-white industry with a majority-white audience. Sure, Latin music and Latinx artists are often included, but we believe they aren’t getting their due. Before you quip, “that ain’t Bluegrass,” listen through each of our favorite Latinx folk artists of the moment and try not to tap your toe and/or feel a tear well up.
Gaby Moreno — “La Malagueña”
Native to Guatemala, but currently based in Los Angeles, Gaby Moreno has collected a trove of Latin Grammys, won top prize at the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, and was even nominated for an Emmy. Her recordings shift seamlessly between English and Spanish — often mid-song — without alienating listeners of either language. You may recognize her music from appearances on Prairie Home Companion or from her tours with Punch Brothers, Ani DiFranco, or Calexico. “La Malagueña” translates roughly to “The Charming Woman of Malaga” and tells the story of love for a beautiful woman who is as innocent as a rose.
Carla Morrison — “Eres Tú”
An expert in love songs and the dramatic, soaring balladry of Latin folk and pop, Carla Morrison is a songwriting, singing powerhouse. Her record, Déjenme Llorar, won two Latin Grammys and was certified gold in Mexico. Her most recent project, Amor Supremo, was nominated for the Best Latin Rock, Urban, or Alternative Album Grammy and won another Latin Grammy, as well. She has more than 180 million YouTube views and, though she is so clearly beloved, she’s sorely underrated north of the border. She’s emotive, transfixing, and boldly vulnerable. While her music feels and sounds like pop (with indie tinges), it isn’t overly saccharine or pandering. The traces of Latin folk and roots are undeniable, lending what she creates to the ears of people who typically eschew anything even remotely commercial. What can we say? We’re fans.
Las Cafeteras — “If I Was President”
Natives of Los Angeles and children of immigrants, Las Cafeteras weave threads of rock, punk, hip hop, and traditional Latin folk together with the diverse sounds and cultures of their neighborhoods and communities in L.A. Their instrumentation is just as varied as their influences: jaranas and requintos (small, nylon-stringed guitars), marimbol (like a thumb piano, but larger, more percussive, and played with all of one’s fingers), cajón (the now popular all-in-one drum kit that also acts as the drummer’s seat), tarima (a platform used for dancing in the percussive Zapateado style), and quijada (a donkey’s lower jawbone, played as a percussion instrument.) However outlandish the instrumentation may appear, do not be daunted. The music is an accessible blend of energy, excitement, and authenticity. Their recently released single, “If I Was President,” celebrates their identities while challenging the current administration’s deplorable immigration policies.
Alynda Segarra
Alynda Segarra is the lead singer and driving creative force of Hurray for the Riff Raff. They challenge the precepts and aesthetics of Americana with a singular blend of influences: New Orleans jazz and cajun, Spanish and Caribbean rhythms, Southern roots and folk, and rock ‘n’ roll. Her voice is gentle but passionate, persuasive, sassy, unassuming, and raw. On Hurray for the Riff Raff’s most recent album, The Navigator, they tell the story of Navita Milagros Negrón, a fictitious character who is something of an analog for Segarra and her experiences growing up in Puerto Rican-American communities in the Bronx. “Rican Beach” drops listeners directly into her childhood, detailing gentrification, appropriation, and the insatiable appetite of capitalism with a rollicking Latin feel beneath the dialogue between her vocal and apocalyptic electric guitar.
Lindi Ortega — “‘Til the Goin’ Gets Gone”
Lindi Ortega’s sound is straight-ahead and manicured without sacrificing personality. The instrumentation and production register as Nashville-familiar, but aren’t stale or overtly corporate. She’s seen success in her home country, Canada, where she’s received multiple Juno Award nominations. In the U.S., she’s played just about every late night TV show and has performed on the Grand Ole Opry, too. Just trust us with this. Hit play, listen a little, and before you know it, you will have listened through a whole album and loved every second. It’s easy, but it’s good.
Rabbit and Lorenzo — “Huapango”
Our friends at Spring Fed Records (the label arm of Middle Tennessee State University’s Center for Popular Music) just released Old School Polkas del Ghost Town by Ramon “Rabbit” Sanchez and Lorenzo Martinez. The record is a collection of conjunto music: a unique, Texas-based tradition that began when German immigrants brought button accordions and polkas to south Texas and Northern Mexico in the late 1800s. It remains a regional specialty of Texas, where Rabbit and Lorenzo are revered for their duets on accordion and bajo sexto (a bass, 12-string, guitar-like instrument.) Old School Polkas includes relics of conjunto’s German heritage (such as mazurkas, schottisches, waltzes, and redovas) and you’ll find traces of bolero, country and western, and mariachi influences throughout. It’s an excellent musical example of the American “melting pot” phenomenon. Accordion and bajo sexto might just be Texas and Mexico’s answer to fiddle and banjo.
Carrie Rodriguez — “La Última Vez”
A singer/songwriter based in Austin, Texas, Carrie Rodriguez doesn’t call her music Americana, but “Ameri-chicana.” If puns don’t win you over immediately, her maternally comforting, deliciously mournful, and dramatically soaring voice will. Her songwriting style and subject matter capture her chicana identity, pulling from traditional Texan themes, Mexican Ranchera, and country and western. She ties these all together singing in English, Spanish, and “Spanglish,” sometimes all in one song. Though she grew up playing classical violin, she studied traditional fiddle at Berklee College of Music — and if you go down a Carrie Rodriguez rabbit hole on YouTube, you’ll see her pick up a tenor guitar from time to time. too.
Davíd Garza — “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds”
Also Austin-based, Davíd Garza is a singer, songwriter, and visual artist whose music falls into the indie rock category, but with a Latin foundation laid well beneath the surface. His list of credits is lengthy and diverse. He’s toured with Fiona Apple, performed with Nickel Creek, collaborated with Gaby Moreno (see above), and this list would proceed indefinitely if we did not arbitrarily cut it short here. In this beautifully captured short film, he plays and sings a rootsy tribute to the Southwest, noodling on his guitar in the picturesque desert and singing “Tumblin’ Tumbleweeds” to the Marfa sunset.
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