Kyle Petersen

Sam Amidon has spent most of his career carefully deconstructing and reimagining (mostly) traditional folk songs. He always keeps one foot rooted to the folk scene of the 1970s, which his parents were a part of, while the other foot dances coyly with experimental, jazz fusion, and indie rock collaborators.

When Long-Island-native-turned-Nashville-resident Mindy Smith first arrived on the music scene in the early 2000s, it was a moment of possibility in the Americana world. The buzzy hype of late 1990s alt-country had swelled over and made inroads across indie, rock, and country commercial spaces. It wasn’t hard to imagine

There was a homespun quality to Boat Songs, the 2022 album that won Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman an unexpected avalanche of critical praise and hype. That time around, Lenderman came across as a natural-yet-iconoclastic Gen Z update to the slacker grunge and alt-country cool kids of the 1990s. Fortunately,

It’s been a long, tumultuous seven years since Ben Sollee released his 2017 chamber-bluegrass self-titled album, Ben Sollee & the Kentucky Native. Now the father of three, Sollee kept himself busy with soundtrack scores (LAND from director Robin Wright and John Slattery’s Maggie Moore(s), among others) and

For the last two decades, American Aquarium frontman BJ Barham has seemingly willed his band to survive. Armed with an incisive pen and a love for Whiskeytown and Drive-by Truckers on one hand and Springsteen and Petty on the other, he gradually steered the rotating cast of his outfit from

Because of the combination of his abundant skill, emotional vulnerability, earnest reverence for his artistic predecessors, and generally self-effacing style, it’s tempting to ignore, or at least downplay, the essential Gen Z bro-ness at the heart of Zach Bryan’s songcraft. But it is, to paraphrase the words of