Rachel Cholst

On her sophomore album, Woman in Color, Raye Zaragoza confronts her audience with powerful, strident protest songs — the kind of direct, timeless lyrics that everyone with a guitar has been reaching for since November 2016. Few have succeeded, and Zaragoza is at the head of the class. Woman in Color,

On her solo debut, Fiddler's Pastime, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, fiddler for modern bluegrassers Mile Twelve, flexes both her fiddling and songwriting muscles. Original songs like “Open Water” and “Hendersonville Hop” pair seamlessly with “The Minstrel Boy” and John Hartford’s “Natchez Whistle.” Fiddler’s Pastime is agile and lighthearted,

If there’s one lesson to take away from Arlo McKinley’s Die Midwestern, it’s the importance of getting back to basics. Musically, the 40-year-old’s solo debut — released on the late John Prine’s Oh Boy label and championed by Prine himself — is the kind of barroom meat-and-potatoes

Think old-time songs are old-fashioned? In this age of political malaise, systemic injustice, a health catastrophe, and economic uncertainty, old-time’s sounds and themes can feel alarmingly relevant, especially when brought up to date in the able hands of Golden Shoals. The duo of musical partners Amy Alvey and Mark

Daniel Donato’s journey to A Young Man’s Country started with rocking out via video game Guitar Hero and quickly shifted to playing the real thing on the streets of Nashville and then joining the house band at the legendary Robert’s Western World at the age of 16.

What if I told you it’s possible to distill years of therapy and self-actualization into a single album? You might laugh, but I have good news: Maya de Vitry’s sophomore solo album How to Break a Fall does all that and more. While there wasn’t any doubt