On his striking, sparsely produced solo album Lighthouse, the Southern California legend declares his love for New York City.

Kayla Cohen brings an airy but mysterious psych-folk feel to the fore, and this fanciful account of alfresco domesticity certainly feels like a slice of vintage Laurel Canyon balladry.

The Dead brings together the blues, the Bible and a dramatic tale of passion and power in an electrifying, unreleased performance.

This record is the sound of a rock 'n' roll legend facing his place on the planet head-on, and doing his best to figure it all out as he goes along.

On this gentle chamber-folk track, the indie singer-songwriter communes with nature and the avian world. (A SxSW Week pick.)

"I wanted some of the chords to just hang in the air, glimmering like stars," says guitarist/composer Chris Forsyth of "Harmonious Dance," a graceful instrumental from The Rarity of Experience, his latest outing with his Solar Motel Band. Though the album presents the song in a ...

Sometimes silence speaks loudest. That certainly seems to be the case with "Bed Down" from Penny & Sparrow's Let a Lover Drown You. Like most of the other songs on the Austin folk-rock duo's third album (and Thirty Tigers debut), "Bed Down" is delivered with the most sparse ...

Trains are such an essential part of American mythology that they have their own dedicated wing in the gilded palace that is this country's roots music tradition. In that wing is a room where John Doe's "Get on Board," the opening song from his new album, The Westerner, will ...

On "Ain't No Grave," a track from his new solo album, the singer-guitarist Luther Dickinson stares death right in the face, quite literally. The song's opening words are "I looked death dead in the eye as he passed me by." But the frontman for the North ...

"I could drop dead in the middle of this conversation," says Graham Nash. "But on the other hand so could you, no matter how old you are," he adds with mordant evenhandedness. Don't worry, the folk-rock elder statesman who's been one-third of Crosby, Stills & Nash ...

Bambi Davidson isn't the stage-name of a legendary '70s stripper, but the moniker of a largely forgotten German group that in 2015 released a follow-up album a full decade and a half after its debut. That album's title track, "Brunswick," is more immersive experience than song — indicative of ...

It's happened to most of us at one time or another — having our holidays hijacked by trusting our fates to the whims of Mother Nature and the vagaries of air traffic. It wasn't until celebrated songsmith Nick Lowe's 2013 curio, "Christmas at the Airport," that someone expressed ...

It is said that there are more sheep and deer on the remote Scottish island of Jura than there are people. Improbably enough though, there is a recording studio.

The island where George Orwell holed up in a farmhouse to pen 1984 played host to West Yorkshire's folk-punk stalwarts,

Jim Lauderdale is a notoriously eclectic songsmith who's been incorporating soul influences into his Americana sound since his 1991 debut, Planet of Love. On his latest release, Soul Searching, Lauderdale dives headfirst into classic R&B, with the first half of the two-volume double-album recorded in Memphis. Tracked at ...

Son Little's self-titled debut album is nu-soul, not neo-soul, and the distinction is drastic. Little doesn't strive to reproduce his influences; he recombines them into something new. The record opens with "I'm Gone," on which an overdubbed choir of multiple Son Littles delivers an existential message from what sounds ...

"Cosmic Richard" is a quietly lambent, beach-at-twilight kind of tune to help usher in autumn. Buried at the tail end of The Island, a collaboration between guitarist Chris Forsyth and electronic composer Koen Holtkamp, it offers just the right blend of bittersweet bemusement and low-key luminescence for the task.

With ...

On Legerdemain, Duncan Sheik makes the opposite of roots music. That's not to say that the sound he's crafted here lacks any obvious forebears — everything from his well-known love for Nick Drake to the affection for synth-pop Sheik documented on his Covers '80s album can be divined ...

Digging into a musician's early, unreleased material is a little like looking at a loved one's old family photos—if you're lucky, you gain a greater understanding of the person in the pictures. Such is the case of Iron & Wine fans that explore Sam Beam's Archive Series of DIY ...

It's too soon to tell whether Outskirts Of Love is the end of a trilogy or simply the next chapter in an ongoing saga. All we know for sure is that it's the third album to find Shemekia Copeland extending her definition of modern blues to include a sort ...