Kyle Petersen

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

“Milonga Accidental,” the song that won singer-songwriter Alisa Amador the 2022 NPR Tiny Desk Contest and is the closing track on her fantastic debut album, Multitudes, encapsulates both the self-evident promise — and breathtaking vulnerability — that makes her music so entrancing. “When I look to the water, when I look to

For an artist like singer-songwriter Sam Beam, who has operated under the stage name Iron & Wine since 2002, there’s always a maddening and mystifying distance between his short-hand persona (bearded, honey-hushed singing folkie) and his actual recording output (varied, layered, experimental, near-cinematic). Beam actually played into that persona

What counts as “classic country” music today is very much an eye-of-the-beholder sort of thing, but for a great many people, artists like Vincent Neil Emerson truly fit the bill. An Indigenous American with Choctaw-Apache lineage, Emerson is steeped in the Lone Star State singer-songwriter tradition. You can feel the

One of the many up-and-coming artists who saw their momentum dashed by the pandemic, singer-songwriter Jason Hawk Harris’ 2019 debut Love & The Dark quickly began garnering him some heady critical acclaim and word-of-mouth buzz despite the pandemic (ND review). A twangy, immediately entrancing Texas singer with classical music training