Listen to my favorite tracks off each album on my Spotify playlist! Updated weekly with all the best new country, Americana, and whatever else I feel like — this is music like your life depends on it.
Mike Montrey Band — Love, Time & Mortality
Mike Montrey Band delivers what they promise on Love, Time & Mortality. As we discussed in our interview, Montrey wanted to use this album to focus on the things that matter. With a voice born for skatepunk, Montrey’s Americana stylings and soulful croon deliver serious heft on weighty topics. However, there’s a faint sense of salt breeze in the air that keeps Love, Time & Mortality from getting too heavy. Even as Montrey sings about the inevitability of death, the band’s optimism and acceptance gives us a reason to smile. Taking stock of what we have and appreciating it is such a simple truth, and the easy joy of Mike Montrey Band makes it finally seem like one that’s easy to grasp.
Tanner Porter — One Was Gleaming
Even if you’re a good swimmer, you won’t escape the pull of Tanner Porter’s intoxicating new album One Was Gleaming. I know genres are a frustrating thing to artists, but I’d say this lands somewhere in the art rock/chamber pop world. It doesn’t matter, though. Porter’s creativity is a force of nature, whether she’s admiring the strength of a fellow traveler in the title track, questioning her own anxiety on “Overthinker,” or bestowing the tenderest birthday wish upon a young loved one (“For Amy, On Her Thirteenth Birthday”), Porter commands our attention. These are songs imbued with nothing less than life itself, and Porter demands us to pay attention rather than float through our precious existence.
Marley Hale — By My Own Ways
With By My Own Ways, Marley Hale fires off an opening shot. Hale has been slogging it out in the honky-tonks of Brooklyn, part of an exciting post-COVID wave of artists helping to revive our country scene. (We do have one. It’s great. This EP is just one example.) Hale’s voice is enchanting, buttery-smooth and timeless, but modern in its unflinching honesty. Hale has an obvious reverence for tradition in her music, but she’s not cosplaying. Her sincerity demonstrates that she lives and breathes this music — and “Drunk On You,” the rare sincere country love song, is evidence of that.
The Singer and the Songwriter — Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future
Inspired by a mystical sign in an abandoned Nevada storefront, The Singer & The Songwriter meditate on the many threads of faith that hold our lives together. Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future asks us to hold true in the face of racism, homophobia, predatory capitalism — and just the plain old rejection that comes from being an artist. The album is punctuated by charming instrumental interludes that evoke each of the the strange portents on the sign.
Savannah Brister — Fix It
Savannah Brister does Memphis proud with her EP Fix It. The former contestant from The Voice amply illustrates the chops that got her on the show in this sampler of soul, funk, gospel, and folk. Fix It begins with some effortlessly cool acoustic soul before transitioning into gospel ballads (some secular, some not.) No matter which register Brister is singing in, there’s a purity to her voice and an obvious love of singing that’s easy to get behind.
You can check out tracks by these artists and more on the Adobe & Teardrops playlist — on Spotify.