Maeri Ferguson

Like so many artists, JD Clayton went to Nashville to make his music dreams come true. But it was his Arkansas roots that ultimately helped him home in on his sound: no-frills and anchored by his true-blue twang. On his debut full-length album, Long Way From Home, Clayton’s warm,

“It’s who you become in the end,” Isabel Olive sings on “Miranda,” from Ancestral Home, her latest collection of songs under the moniker Half Gringa. Across five tracks, Olive is a seeker of selfhood, carving identity from passed-down stories, truths and lore from the past, and, of course, ancestors.

EDITOR’S NOTE: As the end of the year approaches, we’re taking a look back at albums we weren't able to review when they first came out. Cerulean was released in June via Soundly Music. Though what Ken Yates was going through while writing his fourth album,

It was in the intimate moments of recording herself in pandemic isolation that Cornelia Murr crafted Corridor, the follow-up EP to her 2018 debut, Lake Tear of the Clouds. Self-recording and producing might be a daunting task, but it seems to have given Murr permission to expand and experiment. Corridor

There are a million things that could get in the way of finishing an album, and the courage it takes to do so cannot be overstated. When Caitlin Rose’s first new album in nearly a decade was derailed in early 2020 for obvious reasons, it could have been taken

Rayland Baxter was the only person who could harness the multitude of sonic pleasures on his latest, self-produced release If I Were a Butterfly. The predictably unpredictable Baxter holed up alone in an old rubber band factory in Kentucky for a year to work on Butterfly, studying the sights and