Rachel Cholst

What a year to meditate on feeling like you’re on the outside of things! With her buttery voice, K.C. Jones takes a break from her band Feufollet’s Cajun French music to deliver a powerful album about life on the fringes: The Queen of the In Between. While

With Morgan Wade’s debut, Reckless, we may be seeing a pivot in outlaw country. Ten years after the debut of Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup,” men singing rollicking tunes about women, weed, and wine on the radio are hardly transgressive. On Reckless, produced by Sadler Vaden and Paul

Chris Pierce’s American Silence is one of those albums that truly feels like a lifetime in the making. Pierce tends to play soul music, and has risen to prominence recently with his song “We Can Always Come Back to This” that was featured on the TV series This Is

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