FRESH TRACK: Kassi Valazza – 'Smile'
“Sometimes love doesn’t work out. And when that happens you can stay at your best friend’s house for two weeks while she follows you around with an 8 mm camera wearing your sad clown makeup and painting your sad clown figurines. New Mexico is a haunted paradise filled
ALBUM REVIEW: Pop Production Overpowers Rhiannon Giddens’ ‘You’re the One’
Anyone with more than a passing interest in modern roots music will be familiar with Rhiannon Giddens. For those who aren’t, the fact that she numbers among only four artists to have performed at both the Newport Folk Festival and Newport Jazz should tell you much about her eclectic
ALBUM REVIEW: Movement Fuels Taylor Ashton’s Songwriting on ‘Stranger to the Feeling’
For Taylor Ashton, who spent much of his teens and early 20s touring Canada before moving to Brooklyn and busking there in 2015, home is on the road. His newest offering, Stranger to the Feeling, was recorded over the course of a 4,000-mile road trip across the length and
THROUGH THE LENS: Traditional Music Rings Out in West Virginia
Being no stranger to traditional music in West Virginia (my first article for ND, in 2009, was about the Morris Family Old Time Music Festival), each year I attend the Appalachian String Band Music Festival, better known simply as Clifftop. This year I also visited the second annual Hammons Family
ALBUM REVIEW: Gregory Alan Isakov Lets Sounds Swirl on ‘Appaloosa Bones’
“I set out to make a folky, small lo-fi rock ’n’ roll record,” Gregory Alan Isakov says in a press release of his approach to Appaloosa Bones, his sixth studio album. That the result is an atmospheric soundscape layered like clouds gathering before a storm suggests he changed his mind
BONUS TRACKS: Mourning Musical Losses, Celebrating 'Southeastern,' and More
It’s been a tough string of losses in the music community lately, from bluegrass icons Bobby Osborne and Jesse McReynolds, bluegrass innovator Roger Sprung, and beloved pop singer Sinéad O’Connor last month to The Band’s Robbie Robertson this week. Also this week we lost the folksinger Rodriguez,