Maeri Ferguson

What happens when you take the synth out of your favorite pop banger, the warm crinkle of an iconic vocal from a soulful lover’s plea, or the sass out of a disco country kiss-off? The thing with cover songs is that if you’re removing the thing that made

For an artist to appeal to masses and remain true to themselves, to nurture their weirdness and still find a sizable audience that embraces it, is a rarity in country music. Call it the Sturgill Simpson effect. Or better yet, call it the Tyler Childers effect. Amid the overwrought and

“Here is the thing / That I’ve known from the start,” sings Patty Griffin on “Back at the Start,” the simmering opening track of her new record Crown of Roses. “You might lose everything / Spend years in the dark but / It isn't the end / We're just

After more than a decade of leading his band Promise of the Real, Lukas Nelson is going solo with the more personal writing that emerges on his official debut, American Romance. A collection of love songs to the roads that raised him as a young adult constantly on tour, and

The oxytocin-induced delirium of an early romance; the blurred line between dreams and memories; the surreal, blink-and-you-miss-it flicker of heat lightning in a dark, distant sky. There is mysticism in the everyday—being in love, planting a garden, reuniting with an old friend as you grieve another. On her third

That all-consuming magic of escapism that happens in a darkened movie theater? Ken Yates harnessed it with his 2022 album Cerulean, and with its aptly named follow-up Total Cinema, he’s bottled it. Cerulean—an engrossing and deeply emotional album that captured the grief and anxiety of a nearly post-pandemic