WATCH: The Lowlies, “Simple Reminder” (feat. Sara Watkins)

Artist: The Lowlies
Hometown: Delevan, New York
Song: “Simple Reminder” (feat. Sara Watkins)
Album: The Lowlies
Release Date: October 6, 2023
Label: Airloom

In Their Words: “Maybe the most hope-filled tune I’ve written. There’s something simple and obvious, but somehow deep and mysterious about how uplifting a springtime morning with birds singing hits me every year. And I used those images to portray the new life I felt actually one day in the dead of winter, a season of depression and addiction. A friend called me out of the blue from across the hemisphere to tell me hi and say my work was inspiring him that day. He doesn’t know it, but that call somehow sparked a springtime in my life. It was the simplest thing, but also the truer thing… more true than the thoughts swirling in my head.” – Caleb Spaulding


Photo Credit: Brian and Christina Shaw

5 Videos to Welcome You to the World of Orville Peck

For the past few years, Orville Peck has graced our ears – and our screens – with a western drama that’s uniquely his. Not only do his impressive vocals and gauzy soundscapes – complete with mysterious electric and steel guitar – take the listener to a dreamy wonderland somewhere between the throwback sounds of pop music from days gone by and classic country from the likes of Patsy Cline, but the accompanying music videos – and his identity always hidden by his signature mask – have created a universe and perpetuated an aesthetic that has broken into the mainstream. Western fringe and cowboy hats seem to be everywhere these days, and while this millennium’s “yeehaw” culture was certainly brought to the masses by Lil Nas X, Orville Peck has carried it on with leather, rhinestones, and chaps – and a dramatic, distinctly countrypolitan sound.

His videos seem to transport us into a fever dream, each one a unique world all its own, but still grounded firmly in our familiar reality, and floating along the airwaves of the now-familiar, surreal world of Orville Peck. From a hazy daydream at the Chicken Ranch brothel in Reno, to chilly, isolating mountain landscapes, blossoming hope despite the consuming grasp of nostalgia, and the Daytona sands, here are five of our favorite examples that construct Orville Peck’s cinematic universe, in both song and scene:

“Dead of Night” (Pony)


“No Glory in the West” (Show Pony)


“Summertime” (Show Pony)


“The Curse of the Blackened Eye” (Bronco)


“Daytona Sand” (Bronco)


BONUS: “Legends Never Die” with Shania Twain (Show Pony)


Listen to our Essential Orville Peck playlist celebrating our Artist of the Month here.

WATCH: Band of Horses, “Crutch”

Artist: Band of Horses
Hometown: Charleston, South Carolina
Song: “Crutch”
Album: Things Are Great
Release Date: January 21, 2022
Label: BMG

In Their Words: “I think like a lot of my songs, ‘Crutch’ starts with something from my real life. Obviously ‘Crutch’ means some of the things that I was dependent on. My relationship for one. I think I wanted to say, ‘I’ve got a crush on you,’ and I thought it was funny how relationships also feel like crutches. I feel like everybody has had a time when nothing goes right and you still have to carry on. I think that feeling hits you in this song even if you don’t know what the specifics are.” — Ben Bridwell, Band of Horses


Photo credit: Stevie and Sarah Gee

WATCH: Leon Creek, “Call It A Day”

Artist: Leon Creek
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “Call It A Day”
Album: Far From Broken
Release Date: September 21, 2021

In Their Words: “An element of grain is a part of the Leon Creek records, so working with the photographer and videographer Chase Hart, who only shoots on film and Super 8, has been a great fit for us. We were excited by the Super 8 footage Chase got during our first shoot in Santa Barbara, so we wanted to round out the video with some clips from L.A., where we met and started making music together. Bobby Womack’s BW Goes C&W was an inspiration in making our record, so we aspired to have an element of ’70s country western sprinkled throughout the video. Enter Chicago-based editor and animator Jordan Rundle. Jordan added animation and moving graphics, along with some analog visual effects to his final cut of ‘Call It a Day.'” — Leon Creek (Chris Pierce, Matthew Stevens, and Erik Janson)


Photo courtesy of Tell All Your Friends PR

WATCH: Olivia Ellen Lloyd, “Loose Cannon”

Artist: Olivia Ellen Lloyd
Hometown: Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Song: “Loose Cannon”
Album: Loose Cannon
Release Date: February 26, 2021
Label: via Brooklyn Basement Records

In Their Words: “I started to write this song when I was feeling very lost. I was very briefly a flight attendant right out of college and it immediately didn’t pan out. I spent my first year of non-college adulthood moving around every few months and unable to lock down a solid job. After that, I immediately settled down with my ex-husband and lived a very externally ordered life. But it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing — I just felt like a failure at 23 years old. I wasn’t adventuring or creating or writing music, but everyone was complementing me on how ‘together’ I was. This song is about how it doesn’t matter if you’re put together or not. If you’re not living a life you want you’re probably not going to be particularly happy.” — Olivia Ellen Lloyd


Photo credit: Light Found Photography

WATCH: Moira Smiley, “Days of War” (Feat. Sam Amidon and Seamus Egan)

Artist: Moira Smiley
Hometown: New Haven, Vermont
Song: “Days of War” (feat. Sam Amidon and Seamus Egan)
Album: In Our Voices
Release Date: February 19, 2021
Label: Moira Smiley Music

In Their Words: “As I write these words for the Bluegrass Situation, I’m traveling for the first time in nine months. I’m seeing the birds-eye view that ‘Days of War’ imagines… and it’s extraordinary to see this beautiful earth today. I’m flying to my beloved California to work with Tune-Yards and write some new music. ‘I fly because I must carry on.’ ‘Days of War’ is one of three banjo-driven tracks on my new album, In Our Voices. This album returns me to my a cappella, collaborative roots and kicks up a lot of percussive dust while bowing deeply to American folk music.

“Seamus Egan (Solas, Seamus Egan Project) and I wrote the core of this song after yet another shockwave of white supremacist hate hurt more people in 2017. It evolved into this form when my old friend and fellow Vermonter, Sam Amidon, said ‘yes!’ to singing the ‘human’ voice so I could converse with him as ‘the bird’ who flies and sings in spite of all. The bird is also the voice of our inner resilience — our artistic and humanistic gifts that carry us through times of upheaval and violence.” — Moira Smiley


Photo credit: Alexandra Defurio Photography

WATCH: Sideline, “Just a Guy in a Bar”

Artist: Sideline
Hometown: Raleigh, North Carolina
Song: “Just a Guy in a Bar”
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “In both recording and performing this song, we knew needed something special in terms of visual representation. The story speaks for itself, but capturing the emotion and weight of the story required more than just musically performing it on camera. We put our heads together and found a way to play the whole story out, piece by piece. It was a lot of fun working with actors and professionally creative minds that knew exactly what to do to suck the viewer in. It gives an already strong, deep song so much more dimension.” — Skip Cherryholmes


Photo credit: Mountain Home Music Company

WATCH: Margo Price, “Hey Child”

Artist: Margo Price
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Hey Child”
Album: That’s How Rumors Get Started
Label: Loma Vista Recordings

In Their Words: “‘Hey Child’ was a song that was written back in 2012 not long after my husband Jeremy and I lost our son Ezra. We were playing shows with our rock and roll band Buffalo Clover and occupying most of the bars in East Nashville. We had begun hanging with a rowdy group of degenerate musician friends and partying harder than The Rolling Stones… The song was about how many of our talented friends were drinking and partying their talents away, but after a few years had passed, we realized it was just as much about us as our friends. I had retired it when the band broke up but Sturgill Simpson resurrected it when he asked me if I would re-record it for That’s How Rumors Get Started.” — Margo Price


Photo credit: Bobbi Rich

In This Protest Song, Sheryl Crow Suggests a “Woman in the White House”

Have you been missing a good protest song in your life? Sheryl Crow is here to save the day. In August, three months prior to the presidential election, Crow released a music video for a reimagined and rearranged rendition of her song, “Woman in the White House.” The track is grittier than when she originally recorded it as a 2012 B-side and has a more of a blue-collar, down-to-business attitude about it.

Meanwhile, its music video is wrought with images of protesters of today juxtaposed with images from years past. As a result, it paints a stark contrast between the grainy black-and-white footage from women’s suffrage protesters of the early 20th century and the crystal-clear images of modern protests against sexism, racism, and inequality. Images of picket signs run across the screen proving that there are many changes still to make, one hundred years on from early suffrage movement. Watching the video now instills a sense that a fresh perspective is what our great country deserves, and maybe, as Crow suggests, “a little female common sense” is just the thing we need down on Pennsylvania Avenue.


Photo credit: Dove Shore

WATCH: The Burnt Pines, “Diamonds”

Artist: The Burnt Pines
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts, USA and Lisbon, Portugal
Song: “Diamonds”
Album: The Burnt Pines
Release Date: January 22, 2021
Label: Adraela Records

In Their Words: “This song offers a bit of a different twist on a typical love song, in that it’s told from the perspective of a faithful and committed partner, in a complicated and difficult relationship, as many relationships are. It’s an aching love song. Through the twists and turns and uncertainties of his relationship with his partner, and dealing with her indecision between wanting both a mutual commitment and a certain freedom that she imagines outside the relationship, he keeps returning to his intense and poignant feelings in the song’s chorus: ‘I bleed apart. Torment in the colorful rain. Diamonds, oh diamonds, I don’t mind getting old for you, babe.’ Love often isn’t easy.” — Aaron Flanders, The Burnt Pines


Photo credit: Rui Major, The Burnt Pines