Listen to my favorite tracks off each album on my Spotify or Tidal playlists! Updated weekly with all the best new country, Americana, and whatever else I feel like — this is music like your life depends on it.
My resolution is to make Adobe & Teardrops a weekly blog! I spent the first half of the year in grad school and an intense internship, so I still have a lot to catch up on from 2023 and you will see some of those albums on my weekly playlists. That being said, of the albums I was able to dig into this year, here’s my top 10.
10. Karen Jonas — The Restless
Karen Jonas embraces and celebrates her sensuality in a refreshingly frank manner — she’s not coy or an attempt to build a shocking persona, just a statement of fact that her desires are a matter of fact and need to be taken seriously. At the risk of spilling even more ink about women in country and Americana, I think there’s a lot to be said about how women (especially cis and straight — not to make assumptions about Jonas) address sex in their writing. When a song like Ashley McBryde’s “One Night Standards” can generate much pearl-clutching in the year of our lord 2020 AD, songs like Jonas’ “Lay Me Down” and “Paris Breeze” feel downright revolutionary.
[Read the full review here.]
9. Jason Hawk Harris — Thin Places
Every so often, you listen to an album the whole way through and are left breathless. The artist has laid it all out, baring their soul, giving you a new perspective on your own life. Surely, this is their height. If you’re reading this, you know this is the high we all search for whenever we crack open a new CD, drop the needle on an LP, or hit “play.” For Jason Hawk Harris, Thin Places is surely the album of his life.
[Read the full review here.]
8. Jolie Holland — Haunted Mountain
Haunted Mountain is awash with what can only be described as a velvety blackness. There is something comforting and familiar even as the album is daring, grasping at outer space and yearning to go Beyond anything we can do on our own — only as a collective.
[Read my full review on Rainbow Rodeo.]
7. Nick Shoulders — All Bad
In a year that has seen just about every facet of the “culture war” flame its way across the commercial country music world while industry insiders drop their jaws in dismay, All Bad transforms those questions into conversation.
In short, this shit needs to burn down.
Shoulders takes on the same grievances as a certain viral singer, but adds actual substance and context. Country music is a part of many people’s culture and exemplifies many people’s pride in their roots. Country music can be a tool of outspoken resistance against the powerful. Country music is powerful to bring people together. Country music needs to have substance and offend the mighty — not the downtrodden — to do just that.
[Read my full review on No Depression]
6. Margo Price — Strays
When this album came out last year, it was such a thrill. I felt Margo Price’s last album feel a bit flat, but Strays revels in the thrill of reinvention. As the backstory became clear — Price took a psilocybin mushroom trip and found herself on a different axis — the rejuvenation on Strays becomes visceral. Here, Price owns her life and her art in such a way that the listener can’t help but feel empowered.
5. Buffalo Nichols — The Fatalist
Each song feels distinct and self-contained, a mini-universe of its own. What’s notable, of course, is Nichols’ playing. “You’re Gonna Need Somebody On Your Bond” features spiraling acoustic picking that almost feels like a sitar. Layered with sounds and samples as Nichols lays his heart bare, with the guitar crying right alongside him. On “Love Is All,” the whooping guitar loop makes it seem as if the instrument is an extension of Nichols’ body. We also find Nichols weaving drum and banjo samples throughout the album, locating blues music in contemporary musical language.
[Read the full review here.]
4. Joan Osborne — Nobody Owns You
Nobody Owns You, Joan Osborne’s latest, is on my shortlist for best album of the year. It’s a shame that this album was released against so many other heavyweights — it really deserved more notice. Songs like “I Should Have Danced More” and the title track bear a prophetic urgency, exhorting us to take more notice of life and appreciate it while we have it. There’s levity here: “Tower of Joy” and “Great American Cities” give us space to absorb that beauty we too often fail to appreciate. Osborne’s muscular songwriting will bowl you over: this is the work of an artist who knows exactly what she’s doing because she’s done it for so long — and she knows she’s good at what she does.
[Read the full review here.]
3. Allison Russell — The Returner
llison Russell’s second solo LP The Returner is one of those precious albums with which we get to inhabit another person’s self, unabashed and uninhibited, with all the pain and joy therein.
[Read my full review at the Nashville Scene.]
2. Jessye DeSilva — Renovations
Strident, vulnerable, thoughtful, or joyful, DeSilva uses Renovations not just to consider how to rebuild themselves from the ground up, but asks us how to do the same for ourselves and everywhere else: how to build a life that we can fit in, and the ones we deserve.
[Read my full review on Rainbow Rodeo.]
1. Jason Isbell — Weathervanes
Save some talent for the rest of us, Jason. Jeeze.
You can check out tracks by these artists and more on the Adobe & Teardrops playlist — on Spotify or Tidal.