Corbie Hill

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

“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