Corbie Hill

“Heels” is a tale of insomnia, told patiently; until it’s not. Maddy Simpson and Mairead Guy of Sweet Petunia sing of lying awake all night, desperate for sleep and yet wary of recurring nightmares. In the end, “the stars, they fade. The streets start shining / Above the trees, the

Jeremy Ivey’s “Walk With Me” rides slow on ambling cowboy chords, all at once cinematic and intimate. Its sound is more western than most of Ivey’s new Its Shape Will Reveal Itself. Tape wobble distorts Ivey’s voice as he sings of modern confusion. It fits the moment–

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