Erin Lyndal Martin

“Someone once said to me if you want to write about the war, write about the soldier,” says singer-songwriter Amy Speace from her Nashville home. On Speace’s eighth solo album, Me and the Ghost of Charlemagne, she writes about all kinds of soldiers and therefore all kinds of wars.

Ever since Mariee Sioux released her 2007 debut album, Faces in the Rocks, people have been telling the 34-year-old singer-songwriter how much her music has helped them reconnect with lost parts of themselves. Sioux inherited the musicianship of her Polish-Hungarian father and the animism of her Indigenous mother. With a

Over the past 20 years, Josh Ritter’s vivid imagery and expansive song topics have established him as a singular voice in songwriting — a reputation cemented by substantial experimentation and collaboration. His 2011 novel, Bright’s Passage, and visual art (including the cover art for 2017’s Gathering) attest to

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2016/Roots & Branches issue of No Depression in print. Subscribe now for just $6 per month and never miss another issue. * * There are many ways to tell the story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe, but all angles converge on

“Her poems exist in the context of eternity,” Angela Ball wrote of the Russian writer Anna Akhmatova in the New York Times (September 15, 1997). One might say the same about Iris DeMent’s songs. Like Akhmatova, DeMent has addressed controversial subject matters in unflinching stories of personal witness. And,