Kyle Petersen

“I wanted my version to sound like a drag queen in a horny vaudeville act. I think we nailed it.” That’s what Willi Carlisle writes about his cover of “Crying These Cocksucking Tears,” a tune by Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country (the band that made the first widely-released “gay

Nathan Salsburg, one of the leading lights of fingerstyle acoustic guitar, has long built his reputation on a kind of understated mastery of old-timey folk and traditional American music. While related to the American Primitive guitar movement, his music in both his solo career and as an able sideman for

Chatham Rabbits is another in a long line of husband-and-wife folk duos that stretches back to at least The Carter Family, but, more than most, the music the couple makes seems tied to their life partnership as much as their musical one. That’s not to say that Sarah and

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,