Tag: Willi Carlisle

BGS Class of 2024: Our Year-End Favorites

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Each year, when we begin the process of curating our year-end round-ups with our BGS and Good Country contributors, our prompt is never about superlatives or true “best of year” selections. We don’t strive to craft these lists based on “shoulds” – what record should be considered the best of the year? What should a list of the best bluegrass, old-time, Americana, and folk music include?

We perhaps couldn’t be less interested in such a list. Are they entertaining to read? Oh, yes. There’s almost no better year-end pastime than quickly scrolling through a “best of” list to find if you agree or disagree, or if your favorite album is included, or if your obvious choice is another’s glaring omission. But the beauty of music – especially these more traditional and folkway-adjacent forms – isn’t objectivity; it’s the intricately personal, particular, and subjective that’s hardest to capture.

Still, each year, as fall transitions to winter, we try our best to capture just that. In 2024, we tasked our BGS contributors with collecting their most favorite, most impactful, most resonant, and most persistent albums, songs, and performances. A quick Google search will reveal dozens of collections of the “most important” music of the year, but rather than wading into that very crowded space we hope our BGS Class of 2024 reflects the most ethereal, intangible, and fantastic music we encountered this year.

As such, our Class of 2024 has ended up with a lovely variety of albums and songs spanning the entire, expansive American roots music scene. You’ll hear picks like troubadours Willi Carlisle and Amythyst Kiah, there are straight-ahead grassers like Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, and Brenna MacMillan, and we’ve got buzzworthy acts like MJ Lenderman and Katie Gavin represented here, too. It’s not all bluegrass – it’s not any one thing, really! – but we hope you’ll find plenty to love and, hopefully, much exemplary roots music you might not have found anywhere else.

Scroll to find a playlist version of our BGS Class of 2024 below, plus stay tuned for more year-end collections coming your way, including our favorite musical moments, 2024 Good Country, our music book picks for the year, and more. – Justin Hiltner, editor, BGS and Good Country 

Willi Carlisle, Critterland

I didn’t catch on to Willi Carlisle until this year, which might be because he’s only just beginning to garner more broad commercial success – or, if I’m being honest, it could be because I mistakenly assumed he was just another white guy with an acoustic guitar and a microphone. But I was wrong.

Carlisle is a rare storyteller, a poet, an openly queer man from the South, and one of the most meticulous folk songwriters releasing music right now. This year, he dropped his third full-length album, Critterland, underlining his status as all of the above and proving he can masterfully weave old-time, country, folk, and honky-tonk influences into a cohesive style all his own. Whether he’s singing about spiritual existentialism, rural queer experiences, or his many meandering journeys across the U.S., Carlisle’s lyricism is captivating, rich, and alive. If you haven’t already listened to Critterland, don’t let the year roll over without doing it. – Dana Yewbank

Jake Xerxes Fussell, When I Am Called

Jake Xerxes Fussell’s version of the work song “Gone to Hilo” on his 2024 album, When I Am Called, is gorgeous. It reveals part of how he revitalizes and contextualizes new folk songs. Fussell is a man of great learning, but he wears it loosely and with pleasure. “Hilo,” the song, has a number of versions – some are about Hawaii and some are about Peru (a town called Ihru). Some are about a sailor named Tommy, others are about someone named Johnny. Usually it’s Johnny in Hawaii and Tommy in Peru; Elijah Wald’s 2024 book about Muddy Waters suggests that it might not be Hilo or Ihru, but “the Hollow,” and could originate from the vernacular of enslaved people.

Fussell, playing live in Toronto, didn’t interpolate the Hollow, but in a perfect three minutes, traded lines and verses, sometimes about one place, sometimes about the other, in a delicate blending of received wisdom. The smartest and most moving moment highlighting what it means to make music that I heard this year. – Steacy Easton

Katie Gavin, What A Relief

For years now I’ve been making an incredibly silly joke about how “MUNA are my favorite bluegrass band.” With her first solo album, the group’s lead singer and central songwriter, Katie Gavin, brings their resplendent and queer musical universe decidedly into our roots music realms. Producer Tony Berg (Nickel Creek, Molly Tuttle, Amythyst Kiah, Andrew Bird) in the control room and Sara & Sean Watkins as session players are just two of the inputs that make What A Relief delightfully folky, fiddley, and string band-infused. MUNA’s acoustic set at the iconic Newport Folk Festival this summer – and Gavin’s totally solo, side stage Newport performance of much of this material – further solidified the dancey, club-ready group as a true folk ensemble.

At first it was a joke, but I don’t think it’s a joke anymore! Like all of Gavin’s work, these songs are both fun and gutting, poignant while light and convivial. What A Relief is a standout for 2024. – Justin Hiltner

Liv Greene, Deep Feeler

Liv Greene is a huge cry baby – and a liar. She even comes right out and admits it on the first line of her new album Deep Feeler:

“I’m aware I’m a liar. Always lying to myself about my expectations/ I’m aware I’m a crier, and I know. All this crying doesn’t help the situation…”

Greene, who is the Deep Feeler in question, has grown tremendously on her sophomore album. She’s become one of the most promising young artists to create songs that tap right into the center of your heart. This is enormously true on her 2024 album through songs like “Wild Geese,” “Flowers,” and “Made it Mine Too.” She attributes that growth to honestly writing about being queer for the first time. Deep Feeler crawls in and stays with you. Who knew honesty could feel this good? – Cindy Howes

Brittany Haas & Lena Jonsson, The Snake

On their second duo album of fiddle tunes (their first, self-titled collab dropped in 2015), Brittany Haas of Nashville and Lena Jonsson of Stockholm went even deeper into what’s possible in the blending of their native countries’ fiddle traditions. This time, they leaned far more on the Swedish end of the collaboration, emphasizing harmony over chord progressions, exploring the possibilities inherent in “second voice” dueting. They also tried their hand at writing a suite in the style of J.S. Bach – no small feat. The result is an utter delight for music geeks and casual fans alike, as folks can appreciate the languid lines and danceable moments they weave together throughout. – Kim Ruehl

Humbird, Right On

I remember where I was the first time I heard Siri Undlin sing, “There is an old barn on a ghost farm / Hollowed out and filled with stars…” the opening couplet of Humbird’s take-no-prisoners roots rocker “Cornfields and Roadkill.” I will reluctantly admit to some initial resentment that a songwriter who wasn’t me had written a song of such poetic efficiency and political potency. Undlin’s songwriting shines throughout the nine tracks of 2024’s Right On: the quiet earnestness of “Quickest Way” would have been at home on an early Kacey Musgraves album, and “Song for the Seeds” lays out both practical and spiritual methods for liberation, Farmer’s Almanac-style. But the palpable chemistry between musicians playing in a room together is the star of the show here. Humbird is an essential band to listen to as we watch the American empire crumble in real time. – Lizzie No

Katelyn Ingardia, “Silence”

This year, Katelyn Ingardia’s “Silence” got me feeling some type of way. I don’t know what they injected into this song, but I’m quite literally addicted to it. Bad day? I’m playing “Silence.” In a long line for coffee? I’m playing “Silence.” Cooking up girl dinner? I’m playing “Silence.” I scream a little on the inside every time I hear the fiddle kickoff.

The timbre of the song is so nostalgic of an early Union Station or Sierra Hull record, but Ingardia’s performance sets herself apart as something completely fresh and original. The writing, delivery, and production are all impeccable and her voice is like honey. And if all that wasn’t enough for ya, Ingardia just dropped her debut record, entitled Getaway. Some of my favorite tracks are “Lost Love” and “Talk to Me.” Y’all keep an eye on this gal as she continues to blossom into her career so we can all say we were here at the beginning. – Bluegrass Barbie

Cris Jacobs, One of These Days

Within the rock and jam realms, the name Cris Jacobs has been well-regarded and sought-out for many years, especially with his early project The Bridge, a vastly popular Baltimore-based rock ‘n’ soul ensemble up and down the Eastern Seaboard in the early 2000s, only to disband in 2011.

But, for the guitar wizard himself, it was Jacobs’ 2024 release, One of These Days, that really catapulted him into the national scene, especially in the Americana, bluegrass, and folk arenas. Produced by Jerry Douglas and featuring the Infamous Stringdusters as its backing band, the album includes appearances by Billy Strings, Lee Ann Womack, Sam Bush, and Lindsay Lou. At its core, One of These Days circles back to Jacobs’ early bluegrass, folk, and blues influences. But, more so, the record finally tells the rest of the world what a lot of us have already known for some time now – Cris Jacobs is one hell of a talented singer, songwriter, and musician. – Garret K. Woodward

Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, I Built A World

The longtime fiddler for Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway shows off captivating songwriting alongside her impeccable playing skills and impressive vocals on I Built A World, her first album in nearly four years. Featuring the likes of Tuttle, Sam Bush, Dierks Bentley, Brit Taylor, and her husband Jason Carter, the 11-song adventure from Keith-Hynes – up for Best Bluegrass Album at the 67th Annual GRAMMYs – follows her journey from being homeschooled to making a living as an independent musician on her own terms.

Standouts range from the frenetic, longing “Will You Ever Be Mine” to the waltz-like, Dobro-heavy “The Last Whippoorwill,” proving that Keith-Hynes is poised to be a power player in bluegrass and country music for years to come. – Matt Wickstrom

Amythyst Kiah, Still + Bright

The sparkling singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah sought a different direction this year for her third solo LP. She’d previously shown her ability to deliver emotionally powerful, socially relevant, and poignant material. But she wanted her music to reflect other aspects of her personality in her latest work, both her warm and humorous side, plus her interest in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. All these things are nicely balanced in Still + Bright, with Butch Walker’s production touches incorporating unexpected musical contributions like nifty pedal steel licks or fuzztone guitar riffs, plus Kiah’s own supportive and inspired banjo colorations and edgy lead vocals.

It was a tour de force that was even more impressive in live performance, and Kiah got rave reviews throughout her tour that included highly appreciative responses from the crowds who saw her performances during Americanafest in Nashville. In addition, Kiah’s been part of Our Native Daughters (an all-women-of-color supergroup also featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, and Allison Russell). She extended her collaborative outreach on Still + Bright, working with such co-writers and features as punk legend Tim Armstrong, Sadler Vaden (a guitarist-vocalist for Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit), former Pentatonix member Avi Kaplan, and Sean McConnell (a singer-songwriter who’s also written with Brittney Spencer and Bethany Cosentino). All this reveals a dynamic artist willing to continue exploring new areas, while making some of the year’s most intriguing and exciting music. – Ron Wynn

AJ Lee & Blue Summit, City of Glass

In case you have any doubts about the absolute magnitude of AJ Lee & Blue Summit, I will personally fund your one-way ticket to this transparent metropolis. City of Glass presents precisely what its title suggests – an entire ecosphere generated from its contents. The 12 tracks on this album cultivate a moving array of sensibilities, from tender love ballads to humorous narratives to honeyed poetics to grade-A yodeling. Brimming with multi-hyphenate talents, AJ Lee, Sullivan Tuttle, and Scott Gates all contribute lead vocals and songwriting credits to the compilation. Jan Purat’s fiddling serves as a raconteur, always perfectly delivering each narrative. Tuttle’s sister, Molly, even makes the trip from her City of Gold to join in for a tune. All in all, this album is a wondrous sonic journey that anyone would be remiss not to make! – Oriana Mack

MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

From Hurricane Helene-ravaged Asheville, North Carolina, singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman has always been more than solid in the field of twangy indie-rock. Nevertheless, he took a quantum leap forward this year with the spectacular Manning Fireworks album, especially the song that falls in the exact middle of the track list. “She’s Leaving You” is the heart of Manning Fireworks, with verses that sketch out a tawdry Las Vegas hookup. But the part that resonates is the chorus, sung by Lenderman in a raw voice that falls somewhere between deadpan and shellshocked: “It falls apart, we all got work to do/ It gets dark, we all got work to do…” Lenderman repeats the line a half-dozen times and you would, too. If ever a chorus summed up the exhausted anguish of a moment in time, it’s this one. – David Menconi

Brenna MacMillan, Dear Life

Bluegrass, as an industry, operates about a decade behind the curve. As such, it feels more than remarkable when you find a straight-ahead bluegrass artist who’s not only on the cutting edge, but may be the actual blade. Brenna MacMillan’s debut solo album, Dear Life, displays all of the ways this picker, songwriter, singer, content creator, and online personality is pushing the trad envelope and establishing new models for success in the genre. Bluegrass has always felt like a direct-to-consumer business, but never with this level of intention – or with such ease on new media and social media.

Dear Life is a gorgeous collection, filled with MacMillan’s Nashville community and several legends, too – like Ronnie McCoury, Peter Rowan, and Sarah Jarosz. It’s down-the-middle bluegrass, but it’s entirely fresh and unique, with engaging songwriting and often surprising contours and melodies. There are many exciting things about MacMillan’s artistry, but the music is the most entrancing of all. – Justin Hiltner

Andrew Marlin, Phthalo Blue

This quietly-released full-length instrumental album from Watchhouse’s Andrew Marlin was far and away the record I found myself returning to over and over again in 2024.

The name Phthalo Blue refers to the family of blue and green pigments most often used in painting (I had to look this up). At first I wondered why Andrew might choose a title so obscure and hard to pronounce, but the more time I spent digging into both the music and the color family, the more they took me to the same calming, centered place.

I have loved all of Andrew’s non-Watchhouse endeavors over the last few years – from his multiple 2021 releases to Mighty Poplar to his recent release, Wild Rose of Morning with Jordan Tice and Christian Sedelmyer. Hopefully he continues to deliver more of this prolific, purely creative output, seemingly unfettered by commercial expectations; simultaneously reverential to the instrumental traditions it pulls from and inherently perfect for our modern age. – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs

Middle Sattre, Tendencies

Middle Sattre are part of a movement of queer artists brewing down in Austin. Their brand of indie folk is as devastating as it is finely crafted. Tendencies is a painful autobiographical work, presenting vignettes of growing up queer and Mormon. The collective navigate these stories with care and delicate musicianship, building a portrait of sorrow – and a determination to survive. This kind of documentation, of people who stay true to themselves no matter the cost, are essential now more than ever. There is a deep and serious artistry in Tendencies, haunting, beautiful, and impossible to forget. – Rachel Cholst

Aoife O’Donovan, All My Friends

It was difficult to imagine what would follow Aoife O’Donovan’s Age of Apathy, her reflection on living through the pandemic. However, with All My Friends, O’Donovan shows how well her creativity and artistic style can thrive in new musical and lyrical territory. I love how this album includes guest artist, orchestral, and choral collaboration, making the music itself feel as grand and complex as the album’s themes: the women’s suffrage movement and one of its leading figures, Carrie Chapman Catt. O’Donovan’s wordplay is as sharp as ever and she doesn’t shy away from historical details or present-day truths, whether celebratory or sobering. The production and arrangements do everything possible to complement and enhance the impact of the songs, even if that means turning everything down to let the implications of O’Donovan’s words sink in. Be prepared to feel so much, but then want to start it all over again. – Kira Grunenberg

Katie Pruitt, Mantras

Katie Pruitt possesses a voice for the ages. In 2020, the powerhouse made an incredible splash with her debut album, Expectations, a raw and cosmic set that drowned out all others. Her songwriting pen proved to be as potent and razor-sharp as her vocal cords. Four years later, Pruitt still defines the soul-crushing Americana genre on her own terms. With Mantras, she expands her musical sensibilities and stretches her creative muscles in impressive ways. Such moments as “Jealous of the Boys” and “Blood Related” serve as needle-prick moments of sheer vulnerability, woven together with her signature mountain-rattling peaks (“All My Friends”). Pruitt pieces together a tattered photo book, one that gives a glimpse into her very soul. – Bee Delores

Photo Credit: Amythyst Kiah by Photography by Kevin & King; Katie Gavin by Alexa Viscius; Bronwyn Keith-Hynes by Alexa King Stone.

MIXTAPE: Melanie MacLaren’s Love & Loss Playlist

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Welcome to my Mixtape of loss and love! I hope you don’t need it right now, but if you do, it’s here to bring you a little comfort. When I was making it, I started out trying to make the most devastating playlist I could make, but then halfway through I decided to make something I’d actually enjoy listening to. Something that mimics the way we process loss and love– yes, there’s a lot of time spent in really dark places, but there’s also so much humor in the face of everything and a lot of reluctant joy, showing its light despite our best efforts to draw the curtains and hide.

That dialogue between loss and joy is at the heart of my EP, Bloodlust, which just came out on October 24. I wrote this project coming out of a period of life that was marred by grief, death, and illness, so naturally I had a lot of heavy stuff on my mind, but I felt this overwhelming need to write some of the most upbeat and energetic songs I’ve ever written.

Sometimes it helps to grieve and sulk and sometimes you want to just roll down the windows and feel your pain casually, communally, and maybe even with the last laugh. I think there’s room on this Mixtape to do both. – Melanie MacLaren

“Wayside/Back in Time” – Gillian Welch

We like to think of a loss as these finite events, but sometimes it’s a long, steady process, the passing of time and dissolution of relationships, a slow decline of health. Loss can sometimes simply be the progression of time, and Gillian Welch’s writing is so timeless, too, that it strengthens that feeling – she could be singing from any time about any time, as long as it’s gone.

“Change” – Big Thief

Thinking of loss as simply “change” is really difficult, but at its core that’s what it is.

“Flirted With You All My Life” – Vic Chesnutt

This song is wild. I remember the first time someone played this for me on a road trip, I was smiling thinking, “Oh man, he really likes me,” and then that guitar comes in and the lyrics change tone completely and you realize the whole song is about death. It’s a funny phenomenon. You can feel the sky darkening at that moment. But then you listen to the song again with all that in mind and you still feel happy in the first half of the song. I think that’s part of the beauty of it too– knowing the ending and still being receptive to joy.

“beachball” – Dan Reeder

This is a 90-second song about a beachball that makes me bawl my eyes out. I love Dan Reeder.

“Buffalo” – Hurray for the Riff Raff

I have a soft spot for songs that talk about animals (I guess that’s why I wrote a song about Laika for my EP). I think we can talk about them in a way that we’re afraid to talk about ourselves. Their fear is our fear, but it’s hard for us to think of it that way. Asking if the love we share with each other as humans will last forever or if it will go extinct the way that some animals have, at our hands, feels really bold.

“Bloodlust” – Melanie MacLaren

This is the title track off my new EP. This whole project is me trying to make peace with the constant cycles of loss and love we all inevitably experience in our lives. They’re natural like the seasons, but they still feel so overwhelming and unnatural. It was also my attempt to experience moments of joy while not shutting out my grief and anger.

“Random Rules” – Silver Jews

Love and loss are so incredibly random that it would be funny if it didn’t matter so much to us. I always laugh a little at the first line and feel really nonchalant in a dumb way. It sounds like wearing sunglasses inside to me. But then, by the second verse, I’m fully feeling my feelings and replaying every little thing that’s gone wrong between me and every person I’ve ever cared about.

“New Partner” – Palace Music

I like to listen to this song when I’m driving alone and see who I picture in the passenger seat beside me. It changes a lot. That’s probably a good thing.

“I’ve Got a Darkness” – Mick Flannery

Mick Flannery writes the best songs. This song is such a devastating portrait of generational pain and an ode to the fact that we can feel the effects of loss and love that we’ve never experienced in our own lifetime. We carry so much with us that we’re not even aware of.

“Lake Charles” – Lucinda Williams

I love how the verses are just memories, snapshots of life, and all questions and talk of death is reserved for the chorus. It’s such a beautiful homage that way, letting someone still be alive in the song and just describing things as they were, but then still asking those bigger questions because you can’t help but ask when you’ve lost someone you love. You just hope they’re ok.

“The Arrangements” – Willi Carlisle

I love the line, “It’s still sad when bad love dies.” Amazing album with lots of songs about animals.

“Whatever Happened to Us” – Loudon Wainwright III

I love how blunt this song is and how it relies on humor in the face of loss. I heard it for the first time this summer, after I had recorded my song “Get It Back.” I immediately resonated with its matter-of-fact nature. I also love the wordplay in it; I think having fun with language is a way we as humans maintain a little bit of control of the narrative of things we don’t really have much actual agency over.

“Donut Seam” – Adrianne Lenker

There’s so much off this album that could be on this playlist. I almost went with “Sadness as a Gift,” but I really loved the way this song intertwines a dying love with the feeling that the world is dying. Even if that isn’t literal, it often feels literal. The harmony on “what it means to walk that line” makes me feel human.

“Days of the Years” – The Felice Brothers

I love how loss is naturally integrated with the mundane and the beautiful: “These are the days, of the years, of my life.” What else is there?

“Don’t Let Us Get Sick” Solo Acoustic – Warren Zevon

The simplicity of this song is so overwhelming, especially from a writer who can obviously complicate things lyrically and musically when he wants to. He just stays in this sort of The Muppet Christmas Carol arena (compliment!) and it’s so effective, because what he’s asking for is so simple. It sounds like a child’s prayer.

Photo Credit: Blaire Beamer

The Best Bluegrass Albums of 2024 (So Far)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s seven months into the year and music and media outlets are looking back while looking forward, pondering and collating all of the incredible music that’s been released in 2024… so far. From Beyoncé to Zach Bryan to “brat summer,” there’s certainly been no shortage of seismic album drops – and in our bluegrass corner of the roots music world, the same holds true.

So far this year, there have been stellar releases by the biggest names in the genre, like Béla Fleck, Billy Strings, Tony Trischka, Laurie Lewis, and the Del McCoury Band. Country singer-songwriter Brit Taylor and roots-soul legend Swamp Dogg both released bluegrass titles this year as well, demonstrating how the age-old tradition of various styles and sounds cross-pollinating with bluegrass continues in the present day.

Supergroups like Sister Sadie, Greensky Bluegrass, and Gangstagrass have all unleashed critically-acclaimed projects in 2024, too, while newcomers like Wyatt Ellis and Jack McKeon impressed with records that sound mature and fully-realized for debut releases. And of course there’s plenty yet to come, as anticipation builds for long-awaited albums from bluegrass stalwarts and heroes like Jerry Douglas – who was just unveiled as a 2024 Bluegrass Hall of Fame inductee – and Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, who recently announced a new project, Woodland, their tenth studio album and first release in four years.

No matter how you cut it, 2024 has been a banner year for superlative bluegrass albums – and there is still so much more to come! Take a minute to amble through our favorite bluegrass releases of the year so far (in approximate chronological order), plus a few honorable mentions that pull heavily from bluegrass traditions and inspirations, and we’ll set the table for the albums we can’t wait to arrive later this year, too.

Cary Morin, Innocent Allies

A jaw-dropping acoustic guitarist who toggles between flatpicking, fingerstyle, blues, and many other styles, Cary Morin released a gorgeous visual art-inspired album earlier this year entitled Innocent Allies. The entire project oozes images of the West done up in bluegrass textures and tones, especially so in Morin’s rendition of “Whiskey Before Breakfast.” Read our feature on the album here.

Sister Sadie, No Fear

For a band that boasts alumni like Dale Ann Bradley and Tina Adair, it’s saying quite a lot to make the statement that this may be the best lineup of Sister Sadie yet. Their latest offering, No Fear, brings striking Nashville vibes together with a dash of the Chicks and features collaborations with country stars like Cam and Ashley McBryde. It’s no surprise this supergroup and their newest album are all over this year’s IBMA Awards nominations. Read our March Cover Story on No Fear here.

Wyatt Ellis, Happy Valley

A mere 15 years old, mandolin picker Wyatt Ellis certainly deserves the “bluegrass prodigy” designation he often receives, but dare not sell this young virtuoso short with such a moniker. There’s musicality, touch, and taste evident across his debut album, Happy Valley, well beyond his teenaged years. That’s just part of the reason behind why he’s able to attract such notable collaborators and guests as Marty Stuart, Sierra Hull, Mike Compton, and more. Keep an eye on this one, ‘cause there’s no telling just how far he will go in music, but it’s sure to be way up there!

Brit Taylor, Kentucky Bluegrassed

Pulling a page out of the bluegrass playbook of the ‘60s through ‘90s, country singer-songwriter Brit Taylor demonstrates the inseparable interconnectedness of country and bluegrass with Kentucky Bluegrassed, a reimagination of her 2023 country album, Kentucky Blue, played by a cracking bluegrass band. There are touches of Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, and so many more through the project. It certainly reminds of those eras, in which bluegrass artists and bands were just as likely to identify simply as “country” as they were “bluegrass.” The lines between these genres used to be much more blurry; we’re happy to see folks like Taylor – and many others – smear, complicate, and dirty up those genre demarcations once again. Kentucky Bluegrassed is a “don’t miss” album that may not be on every diehard grasser’s radar.

Missy Raines & Allegheny, Highlander

Missy Raines never left bluegrass, but Highlander feels like something of a return by this trophied and exalted bassist, singer, and songwriter after her last few more experimental and Americana-geared outings. This is her first recording with her “new” backing band, Allegheny, who have performed with her now for a handful of years. It’s a rollicking, up-tempo, dynamo of an album, but it’s never one note or stolid – or trying to pander to digital radio. There are calm moments, songs that will bring a tear to your eye, and political tones, too, all bolstering the tightness of the band and the trad-tastic, meta-mash energy herein. “Who Needs a Mine,” the stand out track in a superlative song sequence, will most likely go down in history as one of the best issues-oriented bluegrass songs ever written. Every bit as biting and timely as Hazel Dickens, Jean Ritchie, and so many other activist artists from the regions Raines grew up in. Read our recent feature interview here.

Béla Fleck, Rhapsody in Blue

The most traditional aspect of Béla Fleck’s music-making across his lifelong career is his constant and effortless innovation. As a community, we lose sight so easily of the fact that every first generation bluegrass star was an innovator, so many consummate musicians just “making it up as they go along.” Referring to Fleck’s Rhapsody in Blue as “making it up as he goes along” might raise an eyebrow at first, but one of the most fascinating threads throughout Fleck’s countless albums is his ability to ground whatever musical vocabulary he chooses within the traditions, styles, and physicality of bluegrass banjo. He doesn’t so much care what “does” or “doesn’t” fit on the banjo, he follows his whims, fancies, and inspirations and always makes it work. Perhaps only he could do so with Gerswhin! (And we are so glad that he did.)

Kyle Tuttle, Labor of Lust

Banjo player Kyle Tuttle released his second studio album, Labor of Lust, in February. You may know him from Molly Tuttle’s band, Golden Highway, or from his ubiquitous presence in jamgrass scenes over the past decade or so. The new album demonstrates his particular approach to newgrass, jamgrass, and engaging and exciting improvisational picking. His voice on the instrument is indelible. A modernist banjo player with endless panache, a strong sense of humor, and buckets of stamina and drive. We spoke to Tuttle about the project earlier this year.

Barnstar!, Furious Kindness

New Englander and Northeastern-based bluegrassers will be more than familiar with this raucous outfit, but the national bluegrass scene may need to be put onto the singular sounds of Barnstar! Made up of Mark Erelli, Zachariah Hickman, Charlie Rose, and Taylor and Jake Armerding, Barnstar! started as a side project for these in-demand musicians and songwriters and quickly blossomed into a chaotic, bombastic, and hilarious group that can just as easily go earnest, emotive, and touching. Furious Kindness is another selection here that you may not have yet encountered – and we’re here to rectify that. Need more? We hosted Erelli and Hickman on Basic Folk to chat about the project.

Cris Jacobs, One of These Days

If your first introduction to Cris Jacobs was the above song – “Poor Davey,” featuring Billy Strings – fed to you by the algorithm or a roots DJ or found via the “appears on” section of Strings’ streaming profiles, you certainly aren’t alone. A well-known musician in alt-country, rock and roll, and the often nebulous regions between these genres, Americana, and bluegrass, Jacobs may read as a newcomer in bluegrass, but his Jerry Douglas-produced album, One of These Days, is anything but a one-off or novelty project or ‘grassy interloping. This is deep and broad bluegrass that feels straight ahead and genre-expansive at the same time, drawing on guests like Lindsay Lou, the McCrary Sisters, Sam Bush, and more. The Strings track may be what first grabs you, but this album deserves a deep dive follow-up, immediately.

Greensky Bluegrass, The Iceland Sessions (featuring Holly Bowling)

An EP we loved so much it just had to be included on our Best Bluegrass Albums list. Pianist and keys player Holly Bowling joins illustrious jamgrass group Greensky Bluegrass to revive the often latent, near extinct, and severely underrated tradition of bluegrass piano. Over four tracks recorded in remote northern Iceland in 2023, the band and Bowling have curated a vibe that hinges on the present, focusing in on the exact moments in time wherein they captured these sounds and songs. It’s why we love jamgrass to begin with, right? The way the music calls all of us to be grounded in the present. That’s the exact spirit in which these recordings were made and the translation of that intention is more than just successful, it’s deeply resonant.

Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, I Built A World

Fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes has found her voice – literally and figuratively. While her last studio release, Fiddler’s Pastime (2020), was more instrumental-focused, her latest project, I Built A World, finds her stepping up to the vocal mic with confidence. Her voice is strong and well-practiced while homey and down to earth, too. The song selections are bold, her collaborators are glitzy and first-rate, but each feature, guest, and musician serves the track they’re on and the album as a whole first and foremost. Keith-Hynes has certainly found her groove and her creative community, and we’re all reaping the benefits of her commitment to challenging herself and looking ahead to the future. We recently chatted with Bronwyn and her pal Brenna MacMillan about their respective solo projects – check it out here.

Swamp Dogg, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St

When the initial announcement of Swamp Dogg’s latest album, Blackgrass, reached the BGS team, electricity and excitement shot through our ranks. Here’s a project that speaks deeply to one of our highest-priority missions in bluegrass: to showcase the multi-ethnic, melting pot, diverse roots of our favorite genre of music. Bluegrass has never been a music for white folks only, no matter how prevalent that narrative is today, and this legendary multi-hyphenate musician, creator, and producer, Swamp Dogg, demonstrates that fact part and parcel over the course of this impeccable collection of music – with a backing band that includes many of the best pickers around today. There are countless remarkable aspects of this album, too many to include in this simple blurb, so head to Lizzie No’s feature on the project to learn more about why this project is purposefully rebellious and revolutionary.

Laurie Lewis, TREES

California bluegrass keystone Laurie Lewis was just announced as one recipient of this year’s IBMA Distinguished Achievement Awards. For decades she has been a center of gravity around which the California and West Coast bluegrass scenes orbit, like a perseverant mother tree from which so many young shoots and saplings have sprung. Her brand new album, TREES, draws upon her wellspring of through-hiking and naturalist knowledge to encounter, process, and challenge so many modern day realities – health issues, the ever-quickening climate crisis, personal and professional life hurdles, and much more. The result is touching, emotional, encouraging, and inspiring, wrapped in traditional bluegrass trappings that feel more in service to the songs than to legalistic genre criteria. Lewis is one of the best to ever make bluegrass and TREES is one of the best releases in her lauded and superlative catalog. We recently published our exclusive interview, which you won’t want to miss.

Tony Trischka, Earl Jam

One of the greatest banjo players today, our current Artist of the Month Tony Trischka has made a career trailblazing on melodic-style three-finger banjo, writing, composing, and recording music that only he could’ve made. For his latest album, Earl Jam, though, he instead leans on the timeless bluegrass task of emulating the greats – namely, Earl Scruggs. The track list is pulled from recordings of casual, at-home jam sessions between Earl, John Hartford, and others, and with his all-star band and fabulous guests, Trischka reiterates Earl’s idiosyncratic playing from these previously unheard recordings. It’s a fascinating context in which to rediscover the limitless intricacies behind Trischka’s playing and the way he synthesizes others’ influences into his own musical vocabulary. Whether stepping into the role – or, shall we say, roll – of Scruggs or making modern banjo compositions out on his own creative limbs, Tony Trischka makes it look effortless and executes everything he does at the highest level. Don’t miss our Artist of the Month feature and our discography deep dive.

Gangstagrass, The Blackest Thing on the Menu

With a band as incisive and forward-looking as Gangstagrass, there will always be countless reasons naysayers will attempt to use to disqualify their music as “bluegrass.” But when viewing this now 15-year-old group through an objective lens, you can see many more bluegrass qualities than not. Innovation (the oldest bluegrass tradition), improvisation, virtuosity, conversational lyrics, a blending of styles, genres, and textures, and the bringing together of creators and inspirations from a variety of backgrounds – that all sounds like bluegrass to us! Gangstagrass’s latest opus, The Blackest Thing on the Menu, finds the critically-acclaimed group at their strongest yet, with a Jerry Douglas track feature (“The Only Way Out is Through”) and plenty of hip-hop-meets-bluegrass excellence. In the present, folks may errantly write off this band as a novelty or an aberration, but in the future we will all view Gangstagrass as they have always been: one of the firsts in the quickly-developing tradition of roots hip-hop, rap string bands, and postmodern bluegrass re-interpreters.

Jack McKeon, Talking to Strangers

In the vein of country songwriters with bluegrass careers – or bluegrass songwriters with country careers (think Shawn Camp, Tom T. Hall, John Prine, Darrell Scott) – Jack McKeon’s debut album, Talking To Strangers, isn’t just bluegrass, but it certainly tracks as first class ‘grassy, down home, front porch music. These thoughtful, introspective lyrics are perfectly set, to a straight ahead bluegrass band like Ashby Frank, Justin Moses, Christian Sedelmeyer, and Vickie Vaughn. McKeon is inaugurating his catalog of recorded works demonstrating that his songs and his voice can be shapeshifters, at home on Music Row and on bluegrass stages and radio, both.

The Del McCoury Band, Songs of Love and Life

Del McCoury is one of the most-awarded personalities in the history of bluegrass and it’s truly no wonder why. He’s spent his entire life honing the family trade: the highest quality bluegrass around. At 85 years-old, every album, concert, performance, and festival we enjoy from Del and the boys is a gift that we’re determined to cherish and savor. His latest full length album, Songs of Love and Life, is sure to be shortlisted for the highest honors handed out by the Grammys and IBMA. This particular track, “Only the Lonely,” is a Roy Orbison cover that showcases Del’s lifelong penchant for not worrying about what is or isn’t bluegrass and instead doing his utmost to serve the song – hence the tasty, honky-tonkin’ bluegrass piano. (Bluegrass piano? Twice in one list??) The record includes a few more charming covers, plenty of brand new tracks, and a Molly Tuttle feature, too.

Brandon Godman, I Heard the Morgan Bell

A killer fiddler from Kentucky who’s performed with Laurie Lewis, Dale Ann Bradley, Jon Pardi, and many, many more, Brandon Godman recently released his first studio album as a solo artist since he was a teenager. Based in San Francisco, Godman is a touring fiddler turned luthier who remains an expert in so many musical styles from his home turf in northern Kentucky. From contest fiddling to western swing to pop country to bluegrass breakdowns and transatlantic hornpipes, Godman’s playing has grit, drive, and aggression, sure, but what stands out the most on I Heard the Morgan Bell, his album of all original compositions, is his emotional range, lyricism, and heartfelt tenderness. Throw in guests like Darol Anger, Patrick Sauber, Sam Reider, and more and you’ve got what will end up being one of the best fiddle-centric albums of this decade.

Tray Wellington, Detour to the Moon

Carrying the banjo innovation banner for millennial cuspers and Gen Z, Tray Wellington is anything but a traditional bluegrass banjo player – and that fact alone is what will always land him in the “solidly bluegrass” camp, by our reckoning. Like fellow listees Trischka, Tuttle, and Fleck, Wellington has found a voice of his very own on the five-string banjo and in recent years his musical offerings – which were already top-notch – have become exponentially more fascinating, fun, and entrancing as a result. His new EP, Detour to the Moon, includes seemingly through-composed, instrumental new acoustic music a la Punch Brothers alongside more straightforward original banjo tunes and a Kid Cudi cover that may just be the best bluegrass cover of a non-bluegrass hit in recent memory. Watching the excited recognition of “Pursuit of Happiness” ripple through the audience at a bluegrass festival while Tray Wellington Band is on stage kicking off the number will certainly never get old.

Billy Strings, Billy Strings Live Vol. 1

The People’s Bluegrass President, Billy Strings, is out with his first live album, Billy Strings Live Vol. 1. No one is doing it like Billy; selling out arenas, coliseums, and gigantic amphitheaters with what’s actually just a five-piece bluegrass band will always be remarkable and noteworthy. Plus, the way he and his team bring his audience into the creative process, feeding their insatiable appetites for content, for music, for four-hour-long tribute shows, is not simply to sell tickets, fill seats, and move product. Strings, at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day, is just a big ol’ bluegrass and guitar nerd. We love that about him. There’s almost no one else in the history of this music from whom we’d tolerate a 13 minute track. (By the way, that’s not the longest runtime on the album!) Keep doing it like only you do it, Billy, and we’ll all stick with you the whole entire way.

AJ Lee & Blue Summit, City of Glass

The last time we had a bluegrass artist take off on our website and socials like AJ Lee & Blue Summit are taking off now, it was Billy Strings playing “Meet Me at the Creek.” We’ve been following this Santa Cruz, California-based string band – featuring AJ Lee, Jan Purat, Scott Gates, and Sully Tuttle – for years, so it’s no surprise to us that the greater bluegrass audience is catching onto the special sound and style of Blue Summit and their brand new album, City of Glass. This is pointedly Californian bluegrass, meaning it is effortlessly traditional and organically inventive and generative. High lonesome harmonies and fiery pickin’ skills combine with soul, groove, emotion, and thoughtful writing. There are country moments, there are barn burners, but overall, it’s clear this young band have hit their stride and know who they are. We aren’t here to tell you the best of the best, per se, but if we were City of Glass would be at the very top.

Interested in those viral moments we mentioned? Check out our hugely popular interview from earlier this month here and the band’s rendition of “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive” that’s still doing mega numbers here.

Andrew Marlin, Phthalo Blue

Andrew Marlin, how dare you surprise release this divine album!? (Seriously, thank you, it was indeed a wonderful surprise.) Out last week with hardly more fanfare than a handful of social media posts, Marlin’s brand new collection, Phthalo Blue, has already charmed its way onto our “Best So Far” list. Featuring Stephanie Coleman, Allison de Groot, Clint Mullican, Josh Oliver, and Nat Smith, this is the perfect kind of bluegrass to put on while you work, tidy the house, or tend to your garden. You’ll find the healing effects herein don’t just come from rabbit tobacco.

Near-Bluegrass Honorable Mentions

Whatever you think about our list so far – and whether or not the albums on it qualify as bluegrass to you – here are just a handful of albums we would have regretted not including, but may have more tangential relationships to the genre than their fellows in this piece. Still, each of these fine records has obvious bluegrass bones, however subtle or overt they may be.

Willi Carlisle, Critterland

Many an old-time troubadour/poet such as Willi Carlisle has been a bluegrass musician, but perhaps Carlisle himself wouldn’t identify in that way. Still, there’s bluegrass throughout the critters and characters on this critically-acclaimed album, Critterland. We did a feature on the project, read that here.

Sierra Ferrell, Trail of Flowers

Her new album is markedly post-genre, but those in the know are already well aware that Sierra Ferrell came up through bluegrass circles. From her patinaed West Virginia voice – that brings Hazel Dickens to mind – to her cutting fiddle bowings, wherever she may roam musically, Ferrell will always have a home in bluegrass.

Rachel Sumner, Heartless Things

Rachel Sumner (formerly of Twisted Pine) is decidedly bluegrass, but somehow that seems too simplistic an umbrella for the nuanced music she creates and the special tones she strikes. She infuses so much of the Northeastern bluegrass, folk, Celtic, and jazz scenes and their respective vocabularies into her songs – they may not be exactly bluegrass, but they certainly don’t fall entirely outside that umbrella, either.

Zach Top, Cold Beer & Country Music

Now, this ain’t no bluegrass album – it’s Good Country, that’s for sure – but there’s a bluegrass story embedded within Zach Top’s hugely popular debut, Cold Beer & Country Music, that we’re determined to tell. Once a winner of SPBGMA’s band contest, Top grew up idolizing Tony Rice and Keith Whitley and playing in a bluegrass family band on the weekends. You can see bluegrass touches throughout this mainstream country record, just like when Ricky Skaggs, Whitley, the Osborne Brothers, and more targeted country radio with their songs and sound. Our Good Country feature interview explores all the ways bluegrass filters into his music.

Kaia Kater, Strange Medicine

Kaia Kater is another genre expander who hasn’t ever quite made bluegrass music, but has never been too far from that sonic space, either. She pulls more readily from indie and old-time and folk traditions, but her new album, Strange Medicine, feels like she’s developed an entirely new thing, where genre is a third space, something liminal, or purposefully transitional. Perhaps the most bluegrass thing about this stunning collection is groove, an ever present character through these gorgeous and intricate songs. Kater was our Artist of the Month in May.

Anticipated Albums Still to Come This Year

There’s plenty more where all that came from! Here are just a few of the as yet unreleased recordings we’re sure will be on our “Best Of” lists when we reach the end of the year. It’s not as far off as you think! Luckily, we’ll have a stellar soundtrack to get us there.

Alison Brown, Simple Pleasures (reissue) – available August 9

Rhonda Vincent, Destinations And Fun Places – available August 9

Bella White, Five For Silver – available August 16

Po’ Ramblin’ Boys, Wanderers Like Me – available August 16

Dan Tyminski, Whiskey Drinking Man – available August 16

Fruition, How to Make Mistakes – available August 23

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Woodland – available August 23

Caleb Caudle, Sweet Critters – available August 30

Various Artists, Bluegrass Sings Paxton – available August 30

Willie Watson, Willie Watson – available September 13

Jerry Douglas, The Set – available September 20

Twisted Pine, Love Your Mind – available October 18

Brenna MacMillan, Title TBA – release date TBA

BGS Staff also contributed to and assisted curating this list. 

Adeem the Artist’s ‘Anniversary’ is a Complex, Deeply Moving Homecoming

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In the press release for their 2024 album Anniversary, Adeem the Artist, the non-binary, self-described “cast iron pansexual” singer-songwriter, mentions that the album is queer country – as a genre, not simply as music made by queer people, but as a whole new thing. They also mention recording and creating with their child, their partner, and their tour manager, in a week off from touring in semi-rural Texas. The album is a deeply moving, hauntingly specific, and profoundly sophisticated look at the interweavings of family and a (literally) hostile landscape.

This is queer country – queer as a sexuality and gender and musical identity, but also as an indication of being a little askew, not really fitting plumb, as a political and personal identity. Here, a genre, Adeem notes, is a way of working against expectations or histories:

“Country music is important to me, because it’s so much tied into the dirt of where I grew up. It feels like a place I can comfortably speak from, in the authority of my testimony as a Southerner and a child of Confederates. That’s my responsibility, my calling. That’s why I’m making country records right now. It’s where I need to be, to be processing the things I’m processing.”

One of the ways of keeping safe in this landscape, while acknowledging and trying to make amends, is to move inwards, to lean on the “cast iron” of “cast iron pansexual.” This album moves from the outside – a world that is toxic and violent – toward one that is domestic. In the coruscating rock breakdown of “Plot of Land,” with its minute-long, Tom Petty quoting coda, Adeem sings:

And the politicians cast their lies like street craps,
And they sweep up every time
So baby I’m gonna find us a plot of land
With a little home to put a family in …

The plot of land is a long term plan, but there are moments in this record where you can see possibilities – of a loving home, of a rock and roll life, of a genderqueer Southern utopia, of the perfect dive bar meetup – falling out of an ambitious set of recordings. The too muchness of the album can be understood given it was made in a week, in a hostile place.

Adeem talks about how they made “Nightmare” in Texas, incorporating all the elements in their surroundings including “Isley’s laughter [their daughter], Kyle’s gentle presence [their tour manager], Hannah’s bouncing energy [their wife] as she pitche[d] hymns we could reference irreverently. That week away from the internet and the news cycle was a little insulation bubble that gave us so much room to breathe and feel safe. I don’t think this song could’ve been delivered with a different midwife.”

The midwife analogy is especially relevant to understanding some of these songs, particularly “Carry You Down,” where Adeem writes gorgeously about having and raising babies. The song is so gentle, so respectful of the autonomy of the child, but also filled with the details of domestic life that have become rare in country lately. In an album about adult pleasures and pains, it is a rest song, about carrying a child down the stairs when they ask to be carried, even if that interrupts “chorin’,” doing dishes or work in the garden.

If “Carry You Down” is a waltz, then “The Socialite Blues” is a romp about “staying up to the break of dawn/ making out of tune songs with you” – another kind of domestic, with “out of tune” its own kind of queerness. These songs have a sweetness, a refuge from harm, a way to escape not outside, but within.

The invocation of “out of tune songs” is a euphemism, but there are spaces on the album where Adeem is explicit about desire, as explicit as a country song has ever been, like in “Nancy,” which expresses exactly how difficult it is to fuck while on pharmaceuticals; or “One Night Stand,” about relationships that happen between last call and sunrise, but whose memory might, out of mercy and grace, stay on for “a lifetime of nights with him;” or “Part and Parcel,” where they sing, in gentle but urgent tones:

Take it all apart, it’s part & parcel
I came here with a strange and honest feeling
Chase all of these contradicting versions
Childhood perversions, & dreams that never steered
Let them drive a little while so that I can disappear

Those “contradicting versions” include being a child from the South, so the history here is not only personal, but social and political. There is a cluster of artists working out the history of the South right now – Justin Hiltner’s “1992,” Miko Marks’ Race Records, Willi Carlisle’s recitations of the failures of Appalachian and rural drug work, the entire career of Jake Xerxes Fussell, all of the ancestor work in Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. It might seem like Adeem’s work is personal, but all of this historical work flows from the personal to the corporate, an understanding of history that includes both last week and last century, trauma and joy twisting into a complex homecoming.

Homecoming for Adeem also includes the history of Knoxville, Tennessee; on the album’s last song “White Mule, Black Man,” they begin by asking if it’s too much to do one more, but after the end of the track, it’s clear that nothing could be more proper. Here, Adeem telling stories of the South, from Confederation onward, means taking racial politics seriously.

In almost exactly three minutes, they tell the story of a white mob rioting after a foiled lynching, the eventual coverup of that lynching, and the layers of myth-making and storytelling to prevent the truth from being revealed. Moving from talking to singing, somewhere between Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is” and Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” the story in this final song laments, “But if the Tennessee River runs red with blood/ ‘Til the city runs white again/ Well, a white mule’s curse means more round here/ Than the last words muttered by murdered Black men.”

Adeem has been blunt like this before, tearing down the charnel houses of violent American racism and its myths, and this song is a deepening and extending of that practice. By ending the album on this note of violence, not as a lecture but as a moral accounting, that history work is ensuring that everyone is seen and known, their family is known, and the origins of their family’s prosperity is known.

Such knowledge is the necessary, sometimes haunting, sometimes delightful, attraction of Adeem as a person and “the Artist” – earning that sobriquet.

Photo Credit: Hannah Bingham

Watch Willi Carlisle’s Brand New Video for “When the Pills Wear Off”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On an auspicious Leap Day and the final day of February we want to bid adieu to our Artist of the Month, Willi Carlisle – and as it happens, he’s dropped a brand new music video as if to celebrate the occasion. Shot by Mike Vanata of the hugely popular series Western AF, the performance is tender and haunted, finding redemption – as his entire new album, Critterland, does – in the dark shadows under which so many marginalized and oppressed people and their stories are willfully hidden by our society. He sings:

“Oh I lost friends to heroin
Plenty more to loving them
Strung out on the highway like we couldn’t read the signs
Now that I am older 
And burn a little colder
I know how to read between the lines…”

Carlisle doesn’t just know how to read between the lines, he knows how to locate and place entire universes in their gray, amorphous no-man’s-lands – territories all too familiar to the kind of folks who have faced the social and political issues he sings about. Critterland is a gorgeous, cattywampus, hodge-podge of songs, subjects, and stories, pinned together with whimsy and Carlisle’s poetic way of viewing the world. As BGS contributor Steacy Easton put it in their Artist of the Month feature on Carlisle and Critterland, “Carlisle is at his best when limning complex networks of historical figures, news, what is called ‘traditional music,’ contemporary poetics, and the natural world. He is a lyric poet, in the most classical sense.”

On “When the Pills Where Off,” those skills are on full display. Carlisle takes a well-worn country music trope – the genre’s everlasting relationship to substances and their abuse and misuse – and grounds it not only in reality, but in the working class, in the very real, embodied human beings whom he references throughout the song’s lyrics. This is not a song venerating or valorizing drugs as a signifier of authenticity, of “outlaw” country, of legitimacy, whether artifice or genuine. It decries the titular pills, but more than that, it decries the society and culture that requires them.

Carlisle’s music is complicated, nuanced, and resplendent. It offers as deep an intellectual reckoning as its listeners are willing to engage in. Still, there’s an ease to Critterland and its songs. No matter how powerful or indelible these songs’ stories or messages are, they are each, first and foremost, excellent, singable, lovable songs. That they offer so much insight and so much heart, wrapped up in intelligence, subversiveness, and thoughtfulness is simply a bonus.

Photo Credit: Madison Hurley

Missy Raines & Allegheny’s ‘Highlander’ is Effortlessly Bluegrass

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Missy Raines is one of the winningest musicians in the 30+ year history of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual awards. She’s a 10-time recipient of the Bass Player of the Year trophy and has taken home a couple of Collaborative Recording of the Year and Instrumental Recording of the Year awards, too. She’s been an omnipresent creative in bluegrass, in Nashville, and in American roots music as a whole for the majority of her life. Even so, many are heralding her new album, Highlander, made with her new band, Allegheny, as a “return to bluegrass.” The thing is, Raines never left.

It’s true that she spent more than a handful of years touring with an experimental, new acoustic-inflected string band, The New Hip, intentionally devoting more than a decade to highlighting her songwriting, her role as front person, and her smoky, patina-ed alto. Throughout that time, no matter how far afield the music may have explored beyond the stone walls and steel bars of bluegrass, Raines always had both feet firmly planted in the genre. While fronting and touring the New Hip, she remained a mainstay at bluegrass and acoustic camps across the country, founded and performed with several bluegrass and old-time supergroups, and “moonlit” as a bassist-for-hire for a laundry list of notable bluegrass, country, and Nashville stars.

So, however exciting it may be – and, it is truly, very exciting – that Raines and Allegheny have intentionally guided her sound back to traditional, straight ahead, mash-tastic bluegrass for her new album, Highlander, it’s important to remind Raines’ audience, the new initiates and diehards alike, that whatever music may emanate from the strings of her upright bass or from her tender and expressive voice, she has always been and will always be bluegrass. And effortlessly so. Highlander isn’t so much a return to the genre as it is a reminder that Missy Raines’ goal in music, first and foremost, is to make great bluegrass music for great bluegrass folks – her kind of folks.

This is your first album with the new band and I wanted to talk about how your creative process and how your collaboration process looks nowadays. I sense a lot of changes in how you’ve approached making music as an ensemble, but I wonder how it has felt to you, on the inside of the sonic and lineup shift from the last album to this new lineup, with Missy Raines & Allegheny?

Missy Raines: The collaboration process we have within this band, Allegheny, and for this album is the collaboration process that I’ve always dreamed of and wanted to have in a band setting. You know, I wanted to have my own band for years and years and then, after I waited a really long time, when I finally did do it in like 2009, I had in my mind that it would be like this, that it would be this collaborative thing and I’d have people who were invested. The short story is that I have that now, and that’s the beauty of it.

In the past, I did have elements of that, for sure. There were definitely folks who came into the different configurations that I had who were invested and collaborative. [That] was definitely there, but I will say, to have a moment in time when you have actually like five people sitting in the room and they’re all equally invested – that is pretty magical.

So yeah, the process for this record was very different than for Royal Traveller, because on Royal Traveller I didn’t really have a band when I started that recording. I was sort of ending the New Hip and I knew that that record wasn’t going to have the sound that the New Hip had, it was going to be very mixed, in terms of styles. There were all these different guests on every single song and there was no one solid backing band, because I actually wasn’t touring at the time. All of the main decisions and stuff were basically made by me and [producer] Alison Brown.

I think part of why this album feels so strongly like a band album is not just because of the Missy Raines & Allegheny rebrand, but also because you’ve been playing with this lineup – Ben Garnett, Eli Gilbert, Ellie Hakanson, and Tristan Scroggins – now for several years. This project feels like it was made by a band. And I think part of that feeling comes from you having worked together for as long as you did before you made the album.

I think it does. I don’t know if it also has anything to do with the fact that me, just by default– yes I’m the leader, but I’m also a bass player and my tendency and my way of thinking about any band is I come into it as a support player, because that’s what I’ve done all my life. This came up the other day online, because we’re getting lots of really great reviews from the record. Like one reviewer called my “backing” band “magnificent.” They are magnificent, but I don’t think of them as a backing band. I told them that and of course, Tristan said, “Well, that’s what we are.” And I was like, “No!” I still don’t think of [the band] that way. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m maybe still a little uncomfortable being out front, or it’s a combination of things.

It’s also just been this bass player mentality that – not that bass players can’t be out front, it’s just like, “No, we’re making this stuff together. We’re making this together.” And so I don’t see it as me standing up there doing something and they’re backing me up. I feel that if I’m not playing with them and they’re not playing with me, then we have nothing.

What was the process like as you sat down with this sequence of songs and were imagining who you wanted to have guest on the album? How did you navigate that with your producer, Alison Brown? This is a stout lineup of special guests appearing with you and Allegheny.

The only thing I knew in the very beginning, before I even talked to Alison about making the record, was that I wanted to do “These Ole Blues” with Danny Paisley. [Laughs] That was already in my head. I had this vision, I heard Loretta Lynn’s version of it and then I also knew that I wanted to change it a bit to make it more bluegrass. And it came out exactly the way I was hoping. I wanted to sing it with Danny Paisley. That was an easy one. Well, all of them were easy, because when we sat down we just listened, thought about the song, and thought who would be the right singer. And, who would also represent what it was that I was trying to say with this record.

Like, Dudley Connell on “Ghost Of A Love.” Of course, he’s playing with the Seldom Scene these days – he’s just so good that he can do anything. And no one loves the Seldom Scene more than me, but what I was looking for was Johnson Mountain Boys Dudley. [The Seldom Scene] was one of the big inspirations to this band, but so were the Johnson Mountain Boys and nobody captures that better than Dudley.

And I did want to say something about Laurie Lewis, too.

I wanted to ask you about “I Would Be a Blackbird,” the track that features Laurie, so yes, please, let’s definitely get into that!

So, Nathan Bell, he’s a friend, a great songwriter, and he wrote “American Crow” [from 2013’s New Frontier]. He wrote “I Would Be a Blackbird.” He’s written several songs with bird themes, but this song, he actually sent to me literally years ago and I loved it, but I couldn’t make it happen before, because it just didn’t fit whatever I was doing at the time. But it found its way to this band and it felt right.

Then again, when we thought about who I should sing with it, I thought of Laurie Lewis and it was perfect. I also really wanted Laurie to be part of this record because she was so much a part of Royal Traveller, she wrote “Swept Away” and it was like the star of that album. Laurie said to me, “You need to record ‘Swept Away,’ you should do that! It would be a great song for you.” So that felt extra special, that she thought of me for that.

When I was just starting out to play, when I was a teenager and stuff, I didn’t really know much about her music, because at that time I was such an east coaster and she was such a west coaster. I didn’t really know much about what was going on out there. But then soon after that, when I started hearing more of her music, got to meet her, and heard Love Chooses You, that was one of the first moments that I had in my mind that made me go, “Oh, you know… I would like to do something like this on my own someday.”

And then she became a really dear friend! Anyway, it was just really important to have her on this record.

I wanted to ask you about “Who Needs A Mine?” Not only because of Kathy Mattea joining you on that track, but also because of your ties to West Virginia and the very ideas behind Highlander. When I first heard you play that song probably a year and a half ago now, I think my jaw hit the floor. It’s such a perfect song and it’s so clearly in this tradition of women songwriters from West Virginia, from Central Appalachia, and the Mid-Atlantic who use folk songs and folk lyrics as a vehicle to speak truth to power. For me, it’s the focal point of the record. I think it’s one of the best socially aware and politically aware bluegrass songs that’s ever been written, in my humble opinion.

Wow. Well, your humble opinion means a lot over here. So, thank you.

I definitely thought of Kathy immediately, because of the West Virginia part, but also because she has championed this drug crisis for a long time. Her own life has been affected by it, personally, with family members. She speaks openly about that and has done a lot of really great things. That resonated with me.

One of the really extra special things that happened the day that Alison brought us together in the studio, I walked in and [Kathy] was there and she looked at me and she said, “I really, really love this song.”

I felt the sincerity in her voice. Like she said, it is really, really meaningful and powerful. I was just overwhelmed with that. Then she also said, “And it’s really nice to hear another alto singer!” [Laughs] I thought, “Well, that’s cool that you would even put me in the same breath as you.” I’ve always been drawn to singers like her, with the range of her voice and stuff. It seemed like a very natural fit for the song.

And as for me wanting to write it, I’ve been thinking about this song for probably the last five, six years or maybe a little bit more. I tried to write this song on my own, right from the beginning, but I realized that I was just way too close to it and I needed to have some perspective. I still wanted to have a bit of control over it, because I knew what I wanted from it. But I realized I also needed somebody to give me some perspective. So, I thought of who I knew that I would like to write with and who would get it and come from that same place, and I very wisely chose Randy Barrett. He was absolutely perfect to help me write that.

Of course, you know I cited Hazel, because she’s such a hero and my ties to West Virginia will be forever. I honestly don’t ever see myself living back there ever again, but on the other hand, I will always cherish all the things precious from my early life there. This issue is just so incredibly important to me and the reasons it happened – that people can Google, as to why this is such a horrific and atrocious thing. And it wasn’t just by accident, [opioid marketing] was actually targeted.

I’m glad you bring up Hazel. I think she is such an important touch point for this song. And I also think of Jean Ritchie, but there’s also this current moment happening where songwriters and roots musicians from rural places are taking up similar issues in their music. I’m thinking of Dori Freeman’s “Soup Beans Milk and Bread,” of Willi Carlisle’s “When the Pills Wear Off.” I think that there’s this really important moment of songwriters telling stories about these regions that are critical and that are seeking justice and a better future, but are also approaching it from love.

There’s something really interesting about “Who Needs A Mine?” because it feels like there’s some sarcasm and sass in it, but I still sense that the song is very, very loving – even in the way that there’s bitterness and anger in it. Do you see that too?

I love that you bring that up, because I was just sitting here thinking that I grew up listening to Hazel and hearing her songs, mostly about poverty and about mining and black lung and all of the travesties that came with the mining industry. While I knew that was part of my state’s history, it really wasn’t part of my own story, because my family weren’t miners. They were farmers and they were railroad men, but they weren’t actually miners.

The part of West Virginia where I grew up had more strip mining than it did deep coal mining. And so there was some level of understanding for me, but at the same time, I was fascinated. When I was a teenager, I used to read all the stories about the mines and unionization – and Mother Jones. I was really into that. And again, one of the reasons that I loved Hazel is because she championed all of that so much. At the same time, it wasn’t my story. When I started becoming emotionally involved with what was happening in the world today, seeing the West Virginia that I knew and the devastation when I go back home to see my family. I hear the stories about the drug infestation and all that. I see the poverty and see the children and all those things. Then I started getting angry and started getting upset about it. I realized this is my story. This is my time. This is what’s happening now. We all thought that the mines were going to be the worst thing that ever happened to us, but we at least kind of lived through that.
And in many ways, we triumphed through that. But now, this is more powerful – a pill that makes you feel like nothing, a pill that takes you out of reality is way more powerful than anything else.

I love the joke going around regarding this lineup of your band being “Mashy Raines.” I think it’s hilarious.

[Laughs] Thank you.

I think it’s interesting, because it seems like people use that joke to note how trad this band sounds, because you’ve spent a lot of time dabbling on the fringes of bluegrass. So it’s notable that you’re making bluegrass straight down the middle with this lineup. I think part of why it works so well is because you’re using this really trad aesthetic with such emotionally intelligent songs.

That is exactly what I was trying to go for, to have this hopefully artistically and intellectually interesting subject matter on top of really traditional sounds and aesthetic. That’s the most fun in the world to do, and hopefully you get some messages across without folks even knowing it.

I understand why some people might think this is new for me or something, the mashing thing, but we, of course, know that it’s not. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but it’s just that a lot of the mashy stuff or the real traditional stuff I started out with. I was doing it back then, you know, when not everything that anyone ever did was recorded and put online. There’s so much of that in my history that only the people who were there will remember. When I finally did start to make records and stuff, either on my own or with other people, yeah, it tended to be a lot more explorative, for sure. I had already played a lifetime of traditional bluegrass before I even made my first album.

The New Hip was bluegrass, but I never tried to make it be bluegrass. I just knew that I was bluegrass and I was a bluegrass bass player and I was playing this other kind of music. The entire time, I was thinking of all of it as a bluegrass bass player. In my mind, I never left bluegrass, but I do understand how it was perceived that way by some.

When Highlander started coming out, I started seeing the stuff being written and they were using this “return to bluegrass” thing. I fought it a little bit, at first. But now I’m like, “It’s okay, because you’re right.” This is unique. This band and this sound, it is unique. In that regard, it is a definite return to something that I haven’t done for a long time – with a specific sound that we have now. It’s exactly what I was looking for, but because of the people involved, it’s better than I ever imagined it could be.

Photo Credit: Natia Cinco

Folk Alliance International Brings Musical Alchemy to Kansas City

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

From February 21 to 25 the global folk music community will descend on Kansas City for Folk Alliance International’s 36th annual conference. This year, the event’s theme is Alchemy: A Transformative Force, as the non-profit organization puts it: “Showcasing the power of music to provide the change needed in the world.”

“The power of alchemy can manifest, for example, when an artist processes their individual pain into words and vibrations that connect and comfort listeners,” FAI continued via press release. “The alchemy theme invites us to lean into processes of discovery and experimentation and to think about how we nurture the sparks of creativity that light fires of change…”

Over five days at the Westin Kansas City at Crown Center the conference will feature a variety of panels, keynote addresses, networking events, education, and – of course – limitless music. Between official and private showcases there will be reportedly more than 2,000 performances by folk musicians from across the genre spectrum. This year, there will also be a handful of summits held during the conference including a wellness summit, a legal summit, The Black American Music Summit, and the Indigenous Music Summit. The event’s keynote speakers include Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul and Mary), singer/composer and Grammy-winner Lucy Kalantari, and David Israelite (President and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association).

BGS will be on hand for FAI 2024, as well! With our friends from Good Folk we’ll be hosting “The Good Room” (#717 at the Westin) featuring three nights of music celebrating Good Folk, BGS, and Good Country. See artists and performers like Nat Myers, Willi Carlisle, Kyshona, AJ Lee & Blue Summit, Humbird, and many more Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the conference. (Full schedule below.)

To prepare for the big week, we want to share a few events, artists, showcases, and highlights we’ve got on our schedule for next week’s Folk Alliance International in Kansas City. You can still register for the conference and join us as we celebrate and learn from folk music alchemy!

The International Folk Music Awards

On Wednesday, February 21, the opening day of the conference, the International Folk Music Awards will be handed out in an evening ceremony. Based on members’ votes, the organization will hand out awards for Album of the Year, Artist of the Year, and Song of the Year, as well as a handful of Spirit of Folk awards, several Lifetime Achievement honors, and inductions into the Folk Radio Hall of Fame. Plus, FAI hands out three very special, activism- and impact-geared recognitions as well: the Rising Tide Award (recipient Sara Curruchich), the People’s Voice Award (recipient Alynda Segarra), and the Clearwater Award (recipient LEAF Global Arts Festival).

Not attending FAI or able to make the IFMAs on Wednesday night? Do not worry! Like years prior, you will be able to stream the awards via Folk Alliance’s YouTube Channel.

The Indigenous Music Summit

For the first time since FAI 2020, the Indigenous Music Summit will return to the conference for an Indigenous Community Gathering. It’s something of a precursor of the organization’s banner 2024 event, to be held in what’s now called Toronto at the beginning of June. Though the gathering on Friday at Folk Alliance 2024 is open only to Indigenous delegates, there will be an IMS showcase also on Friday from 11:30pm to 2:30am in the Pershing Place ballroom that’s open to all attendees. Be sure to catch showcase performances by Mikhail Laxton, Ila Barker, Nimkii and the Niniis, Andrina Turenne, Olivia Komahcheet, and Shauit.

The Good Room

Good Folk LA, BGS, and Good Country combine to bring you three evenings of excellent roots music in room 717 at the Westin Kansas City at Crown Center. See the full schedule for our private showcase above. The first night, programmed in partnership with Abby Litman of Good Folk LA, will feature Humbird, Hannah Connolly, and many more. Our BGS geared night will include bluegrass (AJ Lee & Blue Summit), country (Mary Bragg), blues (Nat Myers), and so many more styles and sounds. The final night, celebrating our new brand and email newsletter Good Country, will culminate with a rowdy and fun Hootenanny Jam, preceded by our current Artist of the Month Willi Carlisle, Kaïa Kater, Malachi Graham, and more.

We hope you’ll stop by room 717 while you’re at Folk Alliance to say hey, have a beer or seltzer, and enjoy some first class folk, bluegrass, country, and beyond.

Keynote Addresses

Folk Alliance always boasts a jaw-dropping slate of keynote addresses – as well as panels, discussions, affinity groups, and more. This year’s conference will continue that excellent track record with keynote addresses and conversations that feature five-time Grammy Award-winner Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary; two-time Grammy Award-winner and Latin Grammy nominee, Lucy Kalantari; and President and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), David Israelite.

Hear Stookey in conversation with Deana McCloud on Thursday, February 22 at 2:00pm, as the pair chat about “Alchemy Through the Years.” Folk Alliance had this to say about the session in their official schedule: “Noel Paul Stookey has been altering both the musical and ethical landscape of this country and the world for decades – both as the ‘Paul’ of the legendary Peter, Paul and Mary and as an independent musician who passionately believes in bringing the spiritual into the practice of daily life.”

David Israelite will speak on the Value and Creativity of Creators on Friday, February 23 at 3:30pm, “[speaking] on the value to society of creativity and creators, addressing the needs of those benefiting from the use of music to support and respect the contributions of the folks making music.” The event description continues: “The importance of staying vigilant in the protection of our cultural contribution and providing for sustainability is key. We can’t allow for a ‘scorched earth policy’ that has become of the approach of certain music users because songwriters and music publishers, many of which are small businesses, need certainty and reliability on knowing what their income is and will be, in order to keep creating and providing society with the impactful alchemic process that it advances in communities globally.”

Finally on Saturday at 10:30am, Lucy Kalantari will speak on “Producing Alchemy” with Austin-based musician and activist SaulPaul facilitating the conversation. “Lucy Kalintari [will speak] on transforming creativity while helping artists transform stories and sounds. Explore the alchemy of an idea transmitted to an audience. She will [be] discussing the alchemy of collaboration, when artists work within a genre to push its conventions, and when artists cross ‘genres’ to collaborate.”

If you’re ready for an alchemical week, these Folk Alliance keynote speakers will equip you for getting the most out of this year’s conference, programming, and theme. Find a current schedule of conference events, panels, and sessions here.

Showcases, Showcases, Showcases!


Folk Alliance proudly advertises their conference as gathering more than 2,000 showcases under one roof and, in the pantheon of music festivals, conferences, and the like they certainly stand out in the quality and efficacy of their showcases. Whether official or private, there are truly countless opportunities to hear the most buzzed about newcomers, true living legends, and newly discovered talents, too. Besides our own lineup for our private showcase in room 717 (see the schedule above), here are a few official and private showcasing artists we’re excited to catch at Folk Alliance.

See the full list of showcasing artists and schedule of performances here.

Liv Greene

We love Liv Greene’s music, especially this almost four-year-old number, and are really looking forward to their upcoming, yet-to-be-announced album. We’re hoping to catch some of that new material during Folk Alliance, so when you encounter this heartfelt, poetic songwriter during the conference, keep your ears open for new songs – we hear they are coming. (Read more about Liv in a recent Out Now interview.)

ISMAY

ISMAY’s pastoral, Northern California country is effortlessly raw and real – they did make it onto our “Three Chords and… Authenticity” Good Country playlist, after all. We’re excited to hear some of their just released album, Desert Pavement, at their Folk Alliance showcases as well as catching the screening of their new film, Finding Lucinda, on Friday at 3:30pm. Our own managing editor, Justin Hiltner, will lead the Q&A following the screening of the film, which tells a story of Lucinda’s remarkable path as a legendary artist through the eyes of ISMAY (AKA Avery Hellman.)

Mikhail Laxton

From Australia via Ottawa, soul-folk singer-songwriter Mikhail Laxton is a don’t miss showcase artist at this year’s conference. We already mentioned his set as part of the Indigenous Music Summit showcase, but he’s posted his full FAI schedule for addition to your day planner, as well.

Nat Myers

Have you heard modern bluesman Nat Myers’ music? This PBS News Hour episode is the perfect introduction to this Easy Eye Sound recording artist. (That’s Dan Auerbach’s label, by the way.) Myers’ brand of timeless, gristly, warm, and charming blues will be on perfect display in the halls of Folk Alliance, for sure.

Rainbow Girls

Fresh off their brand new album release late last year, folk-rock trio Rainbow Girls will be ready to welcome you to whatever in Kansas City. They’re a chosen family band that’s as charming as they are biting, sharp musicians and songwriters. Check out Rachel Baiman’s interview with the group ahead of their FAI appearances.

Viv & Riley

Viv & Riley are true old-time musicians, but their songs are always forward-looking, too. They’ve been a notable old-time, bluegrassy, string band duo for more than a few years, but we recently featured them on our column One to Watch because, well – you oughta be keeping an eye on ’em! Do so at Folk Alliance, you’ll thank us. Want more? We had them on Basic Folk recently, too!

Willie Watson

Our old pal Willie Watson will be at FAI this year!? Sign us up!! How is this iconic session nearly 10 years old, already? Good memories with Watson, for sure, and we’re just about ready to make some new ones in Kansas City.

Willi Carlisle Is a Lyric Poet In the Most Classical Sense

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first time I saw Willi Carlisle was in Buffalo, New York, in the tiny basement of an old protestant church that Ani DiFranco bought. There couldn’t have been more than thirty or so people there – a queer couple or two holding hands, a mom and a dad plus their kid, a cluster of 20-year-olds too hip for their own good. I see twenty or so shows a year – neighborhood guitar pulls, little club gigs, shows in big theaters, and every so often an arena. Willi was world class, one of the best I’ve seen. He told stories in between the songs, tracing an anti-Vietnam song well into the 17th century, or talking about Mexican ballads and the power of the concertina, or about how a hometown story is both archetypal and plain, universal and contained to a very specific time and place.

As the Buffalo concert suggested, Carlisle is at his best when limning complex networks of historical figures, news, what is called “traditional music,” contemporary poetics, and the natural world. He is a lyric poet, in the most classical sense.

This fact could be seen especially in a track from his new album Critterland, “Two-Headed Lamb.” It’s an adaptation of a Laura Gilpin poem, which Carlisle translates and extends. I’ve always thought that the poem was a bit too glib, a bit too self-assured of its own moral ending.

Carlisle talks about the whole cycle of growth, how it is not a singular freak birth in a generic field, but how the freakish quality of a two-headed calf and the weirdness of that birth functions within a cycle: The farmer who finds it, persimmons growing out of season, a coyote picking at the corpse of a ewe, even “robins singing in an old growth tree.” As a creator, the song becomes an act of interpretation – a poem becomes a song, a song not quite a cover, a critique of a poem that might not work, but the working of the poem depends on an audience.

When asked about the poem, Carlisle responds:

As I explored Gilpin’s poem with friends and strangers, it’s been no surprise that “Two-Headed Calf” seems well-known in both rural and trans communities and their significant cross-section. And why not? It’s a poem about a creature too beautiful for this world, [whose] magisterial dimorphism and tragic death conjures real-world magic. Someone born feeling as if they have no gender, two genders, the wrong gender, might feel this magic themselves. So would someone who’s pulled an ailing calf from the womb of their beloved milk cow with a rope or their bare hands.

That’s a generous reading, a reading done in community – one that expands what an audience could mean, one that is as cyclical and as wide as open as could be. It’s generous to Gilpin, as well.

This whole act of semi-translation also explains the concept of Critterland, which Carlisle describes in our wide ranging conversation as a place where “…we have to dismantle the house, make something different. I think what we inherit (our bodies, songs, tools, houses) makes us the living proof of the suffering of our forebears. We’ve got their noses, their colonial holdings, their drinking problems.”

In a culture, we take and hold onto what is useful for us and the results of that taking we try to build more carefully.

In the list of animals that Willi names in the title track – “Yeah, the sparrow on the wing taught mе to find you/ And the opossum knows his own mind more than I do” – there is hope in being able to craft houses and buildings like the scuttling of everyday creatures. If the possum and the sparrow can (and may I add, the racoon, the crow, the squirrel, every city or country creature) then we can, too. Which is why the best of Carlisle’s songs are ones which mention small spaces – a mother singing “In the Sweet By and By” in the kitchen, or the devastating song “The Arrangements,” with its complex, sometimes compassionate, sometimes ruthless processing of a father who drank too much and loved too little, or in “The Great Depression,” a verse that limns Carlisle’s ancestors:

From the needle-prickin’ mothers who were never taught to read
To the barefoot hungry soldiers that enlisted at 16
Oh in my dumb debasement, I still find great relief
That on the lam and on the dole they counted themselves free…

Those are local examples, small, and there is some argument within them. Like some great folk singers, Carlisle’s sense of local spaces, his skill at deep readings of landscape, is a primary example of his excellence. I think of him as an Arkansas singer, but he has to earn a living – part of that possum life. Carlisle travels constantly, touring half the year or more to make enough money to be somewhere he feels home.

He explains it thusly: “One of the hard facts about touring so hard is that I haven’t really lived in Arkansas for more than a few months a year in six or seven years now. Hell, currently I’m living in southwest Missouri, just over the border. I don’t feel excluded from my life back home, usually, when I’m on tour. “

It’s another network, a cycle of creation, and intimacy. In a song called “Higher Lonesome,” is there something monastic there? Setting up lonely feelings to a higher power? Is he quoting the 1950s Texas technicolor film? Is it a song about drinking?

It’s all of those things and none of those things. He mentions his community and where they are in the world:

…By the time the ride is over, I’m sure I’ll ask to ride again
See the snowfall in Wyoming, strung out on Johno’s coke
Keep a mailbox in Nebraska, so I know the Lord knows
She can write a letter once a year and say that we’re still close
I can put my cents on Benjamin hear the songs he wrote…

The privacy of this song marks the depth and complexity of another, the last work on the record “The Money Grows On Trees.” It’s a 10-minute recitation, a story told in intense, Appalachian Gothic detail, about corruption and a young drug dealer gone wrong.

If any texts could be considered lonely, even in the midst of Carlisle’s careful noting of connections, these are. For example, when in another song, he sings to a “Jaybird” – another of those scuttering creatures, that eats off what is left. He says to the jaybird, that “he’s doing just fine, his head is a wreck and his chest is on fire.” This line, with neither denial nor irony, is a kind of Beckettian notice about continuing on despite the ongoing, struggling moments.

The whole album speaks of a (dis)regulation of feelings, slipping into the natural ebbs and flows of the titular Critterland so the work can continue. In the album, and in his live shows, a cobbling together happens as a kind of hope, but a hard-won kind.

Or, to give Carlisle the last word:

I don’t believe in despair – it would make me hate things, and I cannot bear to do that. So, alas, that means the only other option is the hard one: hope. Here in the first world we have unimaginable resources and power, so much more than we need. We could, realistically, reduce climate change, enshrine human dignity, end global poverty, and celebrate untold freedoms in our lifetimes. Why wouldn’t we? I’m naive, surely. Maybe I’m an idiot, and maybe I’m just obsessed with getting “what’s mine.” Music is a business, after all.

The work is the thing – to pay the mortgage, to tell stories that need to be told, to adapt stories that have been forgotten, to cry or laugh, to mourn, to change people’s minds politically, to seduce or to be seduced.

Carlisle’s practice, in an aching two-step, does this with tradition. There’s a reason why he’s a square dance caller, and there’s a reason why, for him, the dance goes on.

Photo Credit: Jackie Clarkson

Three Chords and… Authenticity?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

(Editor’s Note: Sign up here to receive Good Country issues when they launch, direct to your email inbox via Substack.)

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.

(Editor’s Note: Willi Carlisle is BGS’s February 2024 Artist of the Month.)

ISMAY

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.

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Photo Credit: Margo Cilker by Jen Borst.

Moving & Returning

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

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I bet in the next few years, an expert taxonomist will come by and tell us exactly what country music is – and that this definition will create endless arguments. In the last few months, this argument about what exactly country music is has been growing louder. Jason Isbell has been fucking around with Nashville for decades, playing the field between rock, country, southern rock, country rock, and classic country. (He has recently said that he considers himself a rock singer). Adeem the Artist, the infamous cast iron pansexual, says that they are a folk singer. Willi Carlisle, a folk up-and-comer, has released Critterland, a certainly country album. On the other hand, Maren Morris released two singles last fall which were about burning Nashville to the ground, yet they’re perhaps the most country songs of her career – in terms of how she tells stories, how the bridges work, her vocal tones, and even some of the instrumentation. It seems lately, country is both everything and nothing.

Amanda Fields’ 2023 project deepens this ongoing problem. The album, What, When and Without, is a complex artifact of her own wrestling with genre, history, and biography. It slides into that complex sorting of genre and feeling that is key to Nashville right now. Fields calls this a country album – lushly produced, thick with strings, and dense with vocals, reminding one of an updated countrypolitan record – but sorting out what that means comes with a history of playing and listening.

Fields has a reputation on the bluegrass circuit, often an insular genre with an insistence on a certain kind of purity. She recognized how those questions of purity often don’t pay the bills, and her first major recordings were on a series of bluegrass cover records, called Pickin’ On – recorded by prominent bluegrass studio musicians, there are dozens of them, the artists covered include the expected (Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash), the unusual (Blink 182), to the fully flummoxing (Modest Mouse). Though Fields did not play on all of these records, she talks about them as an integral understanding of herself as part of a musical team: “When I look back on my experience within the ‘genres’ I’ve taken part in, I think about the groups of people I worked with… When I worked on Pickin’ On, I got that gig because of who I was hanging out with and playing music with at the time. I sang ‘gospel’ when I was growing up, because that was the community within my proximity.”

Proximity is a complex question for Fields. She has close ties to the bluegrass community, and there is something intriguing about the idea that genre is a social category – one about who one is near, or what the audience and the performer agrees to participate in. Yet there is a kind of roving that occurs here too; for Fields, roving is both a history of moving around geographically and, as she says here, moving from music that she considers bluegrass or gospel or country.

Fields moved around a lot as a child. Though she was born in Appalachia and currently lives in suburban Nashville (right next to Loretta Lynn’s old house), the line between these two legendary destinations was not direct.

Asking Fields about these roots – expecting a standard line in response – she honestly describes the complexity of her raising: “I’m originally from the mountains and it was my anchor growing up, but my dad moved us around a lot. He was one of those people who felt there was more to life than what was available to us living in that area, so he took job opportunities that carried us away from the mountains. I didn’t like that, because I was always longing to be ‘home’ with the rest of our family. I lived for summers and holidays when I got to be in Virginia and East Tennessee. Playing and listening to country and bluegrass music was my way to experience home when I couldn’t be there physically.”

This moving and returning is a common note for country musicians. Listening to her talk about the juxtaposition of moving, returning, being forced to leave, and finally finding home in an idea more than a place, I am reminded of Tanya Tucker or Merle Haggard. Tucker’s early childhood had a father who moved her from Arizona to Las Vegas to finally Nashville, chasing an acting and singing career. She broke out as a singer who fused a desire for rock and for country. It is similar to Haggard’s talk of moving – to California with his family as a consequence of economic disenfranchisement – and spending the rest of his career chasing economic stability. That idea was perhaps best written about in his tragic ballad “Kern River,” with its opening line, “I grew up in an oil town, but my gusher never came in.” (A Fields original from well before What, When and Without, “Brandywine,” strikes a similar note.)

This connection to Tucker, Haggard, and other classic country singers suggests that Fields landed not necessarily in a place, but as she says, in a music which has tight connections to place. What, When and Without, a classic country album, is infused with this kind of nostalgic listening.

Asked about her relationship to figures like Loretta Lynn or Haggard, she answers carefully: “Most of the music that really stirs my soul is older. I listen to all my friends’ new music and I’m always hunting something fresh to connect with, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m usually listening to the same stuff I’ve always loved. I’m talking Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty just about everyday. Classic country is what excites me (especially when I discover something I haven’t heard) and those familiar sounds and voices help me regulate my body’s nervous system.”

The album, rooted in those sounds, contains a deep knowledge of genre. Its ability to move between old school country, bluegrass chops, and deep, modern desire is one of its strengths. Figuring out how to sound both modern and historical is something Fields achieves with some skill. If her commitment to genre has a loose, rootless quality – or at least one which floats and lands depending on aesthetic or social need – then how she considers time has a similar quality.

Maybe her early commitment to bluegrass, a genre who remembers more than it forgets, and faces backwards as much as it faces forwards, and which was complicated by how hungry those covers were, suggests one way of bridging eras. But, her recent work, crafting contemporary studio craft with the careful polish of Studio A aesthetics is another. Asking her about memory and nostalgia, she again answers carefully: “One thing that was very intentional with the album was the pace. I think that going slowly is nostalgic in a way, because society and industry move so fast nowadays. I usually walk slowly and I talk slowly compared to most of my peers. My body responds to tempo and dynamics and I wanted to invite the album’s listeners to slow down with me.”

The slowness of the album can be heard in how she starts many of the tracks. There is often an instrumental intro where one waits a significant time for the vocals to be introduced and on occasion there are gaps, where her vocals recede and the band takes over – though the band itself is also quiet. There is a quality, listening to the work, of a kind of courtly two-step, the band asking Fields to dance, and vice versa.

The very first song, “What A Fool,” begins with brushed drums, and has a quite lovely open-ended moment where the pedal steel becomes central. On “I Love You Today,” the old-fashioned cheating song, heartbreak is introduced via an elegant, western swing sound, not outside of Lovett at his best. The last song, “Without You,” plays drums as solid and regular as a heartbeat. It’s another heartbreak song.

The pedal steel is crafted by Russ Pahl, who has been playing for decades. He has been nominated by the Academy of Country Music for his work on the steel guitar three times and for specialty instrument once, between 2004 and 2021. Before that, aside from being an in-demand studio musician, he was part of legendary Great Plains, another band who was excellent at moving between genres, across time, and throughout modes.

Talking to Fields about Pahl, she noted how good he was at not only playing, but matching vibes in the studio: “He came across very quiet and contemplative in the studio and I think he ‘got’ the vibe right away. After a song or two, he said, ‘…this ain’t Zip A dee Doo Dah.’ And it wasn’t. It was an album created in the midst of global pandemic [and] a time of great suffering for society and for myself personally.”

What, When and Without sounds like Fields has had some rough times, even outside of the lockdowns (regardless of how dense the record sounds, there is a yearning in the vocals that have a certain lockdown edge); but there is also an irony in this loneliness. Megan McCormick, who co-wrote on and produced the record and plays in Fields’ band, shows great intimacy throughout the project – there is a reason for this, McCormick and Fields are personal as well as professional partners. They sound good together, and the track where McCormick sings backing vocals, “Moving Mountains,” is the highest energy, most open of the entire record. It’s a great love song – but it’s a love song which calls to Mother Maybelle Carter as an avatar of country music, as a figure outside of space and time, which can tell the narrator how to love after years of heartbreak.

When asked about McCormick, Fields is still a little coy, but her commitment to their lives and sounds is made clear: “She really has a special gift and believing in her as a producer, as well as trusting her intuitions and abilities, has allowed me to grow as an artist. She’s my toughest critic, because that’s what I’ve asked of her. She’s also my constant cheerleader. We thrive when we get to travel together and both enjoy that feeling of being untethered that you get when you’re on the road.”

One can hear some of the untethered quality in Fields’ work, the road as untethering as much as time or genre, but the closeness that she has with McCormick is another kind of tethering, be it a consensual one.

Throughout the album, there is a quality of choosing which traditions are valuable, which are worth keeping, and which ones might have outlived their usefulness. When she talks about her childhood as a Pentecostal, she says: “I am very spiritual, still, and that energy I saw in church growing up is no different than the energy I feel when I’m composing music or playing music with other people with whom I am ‘tuned in.’”

She is definitely tuned with McCormick, their close contribution seen in how they work together – the harmonies without necessarily the negative consequences of some of that church life. She continues: “Those are universal aspects of the human experience that transcend dogma, class, and denomination and that’s what I carry on and value from my experience in church.”

One can see the universal quality in Fields’ work, and it contains interesting juxtapositions. A rootlessness across genre or time, which lands on something contemporary sounding; or a heartbreak record which rests on multiple commitments to one person; or even a religious tradition which widens and deepens.

Maybe we don’t need that taxonomy. An audience knows what a country record is.

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Photo Credit: John Brown