Corbie Hill

The Lowest Pair’s Always as Young as We’ll Ever Be opens like a flower unfolding. Gentle drones whisper behind banjo and acoustic guitar as “Give it All Away” starts. “By now I wonder how the seasons always seem to take us by surprise,” Kendl Winter and Palmer T.

In “Let’s Get Lost,” off his latest album The Journals, singer/songwriter Sammy Brue sings about a man who has never taken a chance. Over the languid swing of his unaccompanied guitar he describes the man’s gray, unenviable existence. In the song–and in life–Brue, a professional

In “Sister’s Heart,” Abigail Dowd tells what is likely a story of indigenous North Carolinians hiding and surviving, holding onto their culture and family ties despite four centuries of colonization. “Sisterland of the longleaf pine / hold our brothers where the canebrakes hide,” she sings over twilit blues. In her

“The air is hot, the crowd is stout / when the young man learns that luck’s his only friend.” “Tiger’s Mouth,” the spaghetti westernized closing track from the newly-released posthumous Luke Bell collection The King is Back, presents a motorcycle daredevil on the lip of a dangerous stunt. Recorded

Josh Fortenbery is like any of us. He’s just trying to get by. The Alaska songwriter’s second album, Tidy Memorial opens with “Heaven’s Above,” a song set in the daily spiritual crush of this fucked-up era. “It’s not like I can’t see what’s wrong,