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.
Eliza Hardy Jones — Pickpocket
Eliza Hardy Jones pushes the envelope of folk rock on Pickpocket. The album finds Hardy Jones coming to terms with grief, birth, and all the change that happens between. Seamlessly interweaving acoustic guitars, string arrangements, and digital elements, Pickpocket is an album for the 2020s: a quest to find where we stand between the organic and the technological, the pain and the beauty of life and striving for that middle place comfortable between those axes.
Jon Snodgrass + Buddies — Barge at Will
Jon Snodgrass knows how to write a damn song and on Barge at Will, he reminds you in case you forgot. Barge at Will is a celebration of the life Snodgrass has carved out for himself: maybe not as hangdog as his early output, certainly the striving melancholy that characterizes all of his music. Here, Snodgrass reflects on a life of songs and disappointments — and some triumphs as well. “Crunching the Numbers” is an exuberant flip on the typical tour song: Snodgrass writes about planning his tour around Colorado Rockies games. (And if being a Rockies fan isn’t an exercise in relentless optimism, I don’t know what is.) Barge at Will is worn at the edges, but it’s also a reminder of what truly matters — toughing it out, and doing it on your own terms.
Leyla McCalla — Sun Without The Heat
Leyla McCalla demonstrates her profound mastery of her craft on Sun Without The Heat. The album turns grief and loneliness into something lovely and languorous. McCalla weaves the vintage jazz of her adopted New Orleans with the pulsating rhythms of Haitian music and finds all the spaces in, around, and between the continuity of these traditions. Sun Without Heat is danceable (catch the free jazz outro to the gutting “Tree”) and free, the kind of album you put on while drinking something cold on your porch. But scratch the surface and McCalla portrays herself as adrift, not aimless. Sun Without the Heat is deceptive in this way, asking us to consider what lies underneath the surface of the people around us, and ensuring that they are not floating all on their own.
Ben Trickey — The Radon Recordings Vol. 1
Ben Trickey is not one to miss an opportunity to create something spooky out of everyday American life. The Radon Recordings are a worthy addition to Trickey’s discography, a six-song gander into Trickey’s world of forlorn souls and time that can never be regained. “Illuminated” perhaps best captures Trickey’s themes, with his interpolation of “You Are My Sunshine” with his narrative of a crush on a small-town waitress providing comfort, hope, and despair all in one improbable blow.
[“Illuminated”]
Creature Comfort — The Honeymoon EP
Creature Comfort recorded this EP as a wedding gift to lead singer Jessey Clark’s wife, Lorie. (Full disclosure: Lorie was my editor at Wide Open Country and The Boot.) The Honeymoon EP is, unsurprisingly, as warm and intimate as music gets. Creature Comfort excels at layering their shimmery indie rock with strings and irresistible hooks, building to an introspective brand of power pop. The opener, “All I Ever Wanted,” is a comforting embrace of all that’s past and all that’s to come. The band’s cover of “If Not For You” is as catchy as it gets.
You can check out tracks by these artists and more on the Adobe & Teardrops playlist — on Spotify or Tidal.