Editor's Note: Jude Brothers, whose new LP titled Dogwood Maiden Voyage is due out September 25 via Gar Hole Records, is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for September 2026. Stay tuned all month for more about this Ozarks singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.
Jude Brothers needs the natural world to make music. In fact, the musk and quiet of the woods are so integral to the Arkansas-based folk musician’s being, that Brothers’ voice diminishes — their range shrinks, vocal cords constrict — when they’re absent too long.
“I don't have answers for anything in this life, but when I go lay down in the moss or when I go walk and try to make my footfalls as quietly as possible through an oak grove…I feel that all of the parts of me have a place and everything belongs,” they say. “I go to the woods or I go to the mountains or I go to the ocean or wherever those really profound places in nature are, and I fill my cup and I resource and I think about everything; I talk to all the gods that will listen to me; and then I come back out, and that is what is fuel for my voice.”
Brothers’ music has always been tethered to the natural world, but especially their latest album, Dogwood Maiden Voyage (due out September 25 via Gar Hole Records), invites reverence and patience for spaces and forces bigger than one single human being. A kaleidoscope of imagery of trees, birds, and flowers accompanies the album’s intense, raw grappling with what it means to belong.
