*“Excited for you to sit back and experience *Golden Hour* in a whole new, sonically revolutionized way,” Kacey Musgraves tells Apple Music. “You’re going to hear how I wanted you to hear it in my head. Every layer. Every nuance. Surrounding you.”* Since emerging in 2013 as a slyly progressive lyricist, Kacey Musgraves has slipped radical ideas into traditional arrangements palatable enough for Nashville\'s old guard and prudently changed country music\'s narrative. On *Golden Hour*, she continues to broaden the genre\'s horizons by deftly incorporating unfamiliar sounds—Bee Gees-inspired disco flourish (“High Horse”), pulsating drums, and synth-pop shimmer (“Velvet Elvis”)—into songs that could still shine on country radio. Those details are taken to a whole new level in Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos. Most endearing, perhaps, is “Oh, What a World,” her free-spirited ode to the magic of humankind that was written in the glow of an acid trip. It’s all so graceful and low-key that even the toughest country purists will find themselves swaying along.
After two concept albums and a string of roles in Hollywood blockbusters, one of music’s fiercest visionaries sheds her alter egos and steps out as herself. Buckle up: Human Monáe wields twice the power of any sci-fi character. In this confessional, far-reaching triumph, she dreams of a world in which love wins (“Pynk\") and women of color have agency (“Django Jane”). Featuring guest appearances from Brian Wilson, Grimes, and Pharrell—and bearing the clear influence of Prince, Monae’s late mentor—*Dirty Computer* is as uncompromising and mighty as it is graceful and fun. “I’m the venom and the antidote,” she wails in “I Like That,” a song about embracing these very contradictions. “Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”
Nashville-based singer-songwriter and violinist Amanda Shires’ take on Americana is heavy on poetry and introspection. With a breathy, earnest yowl that recalls a young Dolly Parton, Shires sounds commanding on the hurts-to-love-you opener “Parking Lot Pirouette” and the playful Southern rocker “Break Out the Champagne,” while producer David Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton) shines up her more vulnerable side on “Mirror Mirror.” But the closer, “Wasn’t I Paying Attention?”, cuts the deepest: It’s a poignant song about addiction, made especially haunting by the fact that she helped her husband and collaborator Jason Isbell overcome his own related struggles.
Track Listing Parking Lot Pirouette Swimmer Leave It Alone Charms Eve's Daughter Break Out the Champagne Take on the Dark White Feather Mirror, Mirror Wasn't I Paying Attention?
You can do a lot of living in 70-plus years, and fortunately, country-folk great John Prine has been documenting what he sees for over 50 of them. The album title is redolent of its mood, approaching the twilight years with a sense of wonder and humor. “Knocking on Your Screen Door” counts the blessings of being humble, and “Caravan of Fools” is a not-so-disguised jab at political incompetence. His well-sharpened wit cuts deep across these 10 songs. “Crazy Bone” reminds us all to stay weird, and “When I Get to Heaven” describes a rollicking afterlife after-party: “I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock ‘n’ roll band/Check into a swell hotel/Ain’t the afterlife grand?”
Coming just weeks after the release of his memoir, *Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)*, Jeff Tweedy’s proper solo debut, *WARM*, can’t help but feel a little confessional. Musically, the 11 songs don’t seem markedly different from his 20-plus years leading Wilco, but chronicling his family’s history and his struggles with addiction in the book forced changes in the writing style of an artist whose most acclaimed album opens with the line “I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue.” “My mind has always been inclined to pick out little details and paint around the edges of a scene, so I had to force myself to find the core of the story and paint a picture more clearly,” Tweedy tells Apple Music. “And then I felt like I had to stay in that mindset to write lyrics.” Like the newly minted storyteller he is, he takes us through *WARM* track by track. **Bombs Above** “A person I was in rehab with said this thing to me about suffering. But it kind of predates me really digging in in earnest on the book, so that kind of shoots my theory to shit.” **Some Birds** “This is me trying to be more direct about feeling helpless and not knowing what to do with my anger these days. I hope it doesn’t come off as cynical though. It’s a pretty dark period, but it’s worth the effort to care and to believe. I hope that’s the part of the record that comes through the most.” **Don’t Forget** “That song maybe set the tone and laid the groundwork for this more direct approach and has the most direct connection to the book. Early on, the lyrics to that song were more oblique.” **How Hard It Is for a Desert To Die** “The things we think of as the most severe and unforgiving environments still have a rich, deep life to them. And some of the worst experiences I’ve had have given my life the most shape and I’ve learned the most from. I think that’s what this is about.” **Let’s Go Rain** “I was playing solo acoustic shows and wanted to play some new material. And almost every night, I could get people to sing along with this song they’d never heard. So, if you’re looking for affirmation, that’s pretty great.” **From Far Away** “The drums seem so disjointed and unrelated to the song, but it somehow still all holds together. And the lyrics are about the same thing: We all feel pretty separate and different from each other, but the further you zoom out, the more it all holds together.” **I Know What It’s Like** “I just didn’t know of another song that used that phrase. It seems almost too obvious, but it’s exactly what I want to say to people who are going through something. At the same time, it’s testing the limits of empathy—nobody really ever knows what somebody else is going through.” **Having Been Is No Way To Be** “Peter Ivers had a TV show in the ’80s called *New Wave Theatre* and was murdered. He had a fascinating career—he wrote that song ‘In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)’ from *Eraserhead*, he was a harmonica virtuoso and played with Muddy Waters. This started off as me trying to fit a whole bunch of that into a song and then giving up and just making it about myself. That’s more like most of my songs—skirting around the edges of something until something else appears.” **The Red Brick and Warm (When the Sun Has Died)** “These two songs are both reactions to the same set of circumstances. The first is a more violent reaction and, in my opinion, an unsustainable one. And the second is the way I truly feel: There is an innate hope that it’s not worth my effort to kill.” **How Will I Find You?** “I never know where to put longer songs on an album, except either first or last. I was trying to imagine what someone like my father, who believed in an afterlife, would be thinking while looking for my mom, who died before him. If there’s really something like a Heaven the way that most people picture it, this seemed like a really sad and lonely thought.”
“Certain lyrical flowers sprout up with regularity across the ten song-yards that are this record. A son who has lost a father sings to his wife, his sons, that father. There are apologies, and mirror-twins; threats to enemies (‘I’d love to take you down / and leave you there’) and entreaties (‘Let’s go rain again!’) and dreamy challenges (‘I wonder how much freedom we can dream’) and ornery morphings of language that serve a simple function: they make the listener love language again.” – George Saunders, Liner Notes for Jeff Tweedy’s WARM Warm is a solo album of all new material, produced and recorded entirely by Jeff at Chicago’s now legendary studio, The Loft (with help from some of his usual collaborators – Spencer Tweedy, Glenn Kotche and Tom Schick). WARM follows the acoustic retrospective release, Together at Last (2017), and Wilco’s 2016 album, Schmilco.
Nowhere on his sixth album does Eric Church directly address either of the two most tumultuous events that occurred during its making, but their presence is felt. Exasperation over the politicized aftermath of the shooting at the Church-headlined Route 91 festival imbues opener “The Snake,” casting the current national divide as intractable and poisonous. Bookending that is slow-burn closer “Drowning Man,” lamenting the dire prospects of an average American worker caught in the middle of that divide. In between, Church\'s life-affirming relief over successful emergency surgery to remove a deadly blood clot can be heard in the joyous survivor\'s boogie of “Hangin\' Around,” the opposites-attract waltz “Heart Like a Wheel,” and the “Sympathy for the Devil”-nudging title track (“Fortune teller told me/\'No more last chances, you got no future at all\'/Oh, but I ain\'t listenin\'”). No one would blame Church if he wanted to use either of these experiences to grandstand a little, but he is canny enough to understand the power of what isn\'t said.
Joshua Hedley is one of the latest country acts signed to Jack White\'s Third Man Records, after the quietly successful Margo Price. Like Price, Hedley seems to have been plucked out of an imaginary past, where countrypolitan sheen meets an outsider\'s edge. With *Mr. Jukebox*, his debut album for the label, he\'s just as convincing singing heartbroken honky-tonk on \"Counting All My Tears\" or venturing into borderline-psychedelic cowboy territory on \"Weird Thought Thinker.\" Tying it all together is a touching cover of the \'40s Disney standard \"When You Wish Upon a Star,\" which recalls Willie Nelson at his tenderest.
"This album is going to bewitch and enlighten the nation."- Ann Powers, NPR Erin Rae, whose genre-fusing mix of traditional folk, indie-rock, and 1960s psych-rock production has landed her collaborations with artists like Margo Price and Andrew Combs – not to mention critical attention from the world’s top music media, including Rolling Stone, NPR, and the BBC -- is finally stepping out into the spotlight with Putting On Airs. A forthcoming NPR World Café session and a busy tour schedule, including spring support dates with the Mountain Goats and Margo Price, and an appearance at End Of The Road Festival in the UK, shows Erin Rae’s star is on the rise on both sides of the Atlantic.
If the recipe for the singer-songwriter tradition has started to feel staid—one part confession, two parts guitar—Nashville-based Ruston Kelly instead mixes a much more complex cocktail on *Dying Star*, detailing not just his scars, but the ugly ways he got them: “Blackout” confesses his penchant for over-imbibing, while the vocoder-heavy “Son of a Highway Daughter” details his ladykiller ways. Those subjects have been well covered by other country singers, but Kelly’s weathered voice and interest in electro-pop, punk, and even emo showcase a man wrestling with toxic masculinity so he can uncover what’s underneath that palimpsest.
Listing their priorities on breezy road-trip jam “Weed, Whiskey and Willie,” the Nashville-based brothers make it clear they have few troubles. “Don’t take my smoke, my jug of brown liquor or my country music,” they plead, casually. It’s a vibe that surrounds each hazy track on a positively horizontal second album. You’ll hum in time to the billowing choruses of “Shoot Me Straight,” toe-tap to twin guitars on “Tequila Again,” and sway gently to “A Little Bit Trouble.”
After exhilarating dips into guitar rock and country, Carlile returns to her sweet spot: tear-jerking Americana that shows off her crackling croon. It’s her sixth album and her most moving, with vulnerable outsider anthems rooted in healing and hope. There are ballads about addiction (“Sugartooth”), suicide (“Fulton County Jane Doe”), heartbreak (“Every Time I Hear That Song”), and starting over (“Harder to Forgive”), but underneath the hard truths is plenty of optimism. In “The Joke,” a song for kids who don’t fit traditional roles, she offers a light at the end of the tunnel: “I’ve been to the movies/I’ve seen how it ends/And the joke’s on them.”
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and Saskatchewan-born singer-songwriter Colter Wall learned the feeling well after spending so much time on the road. “Wherever I wander, wherever I stray/The rustle of the wheat fields starts calling my name,” he sings on “Plain to See Plainsman,” his rich baritone echoing the song’s strolling bassline. His sophomore album spins that homesickness into tribute. Produced by Nashville’s Dave Cobb, and featuring harmonica from Willie Nelson’s longtime collaborator Mickey Raphael and pedal steel guitar from Lloyd Green, *Songs of the Plains* situates the Canadian troubadour alongside Southern brethren like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and Chris Stapleton. As Wall tells it, Western isn’t a direction so much as a state of mind.
Blues harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite reunites with gifted multi-instrumentalist Ben Harper for this warmly candid collection of songs following their GRAMMY®-winning 2013 album *Get Up!*. Over 10 originals—plus three live tracks—the septuagenarian bluesman and the acclaimed roots, reggae and Americana guitarist explore the timeless themes that have driven the blues since its birth, from the rootsy scorcher “Movin’ On” to the soul-drenched, heartbreaking ballad “Nothing at All”. The title track offers searing commentary over Harper’s low-slung steel guitar and Musselwhite’s eloquent harp.
On “Hurt Feelings,” the second song from his fifth studio album, *Swimming*, Mac Miller raps, “I paid the cost to see apostrophes, that means it’s mine/Keep to myself, taking my time.” The Pittsburgh-born MC has always been clever; on *Swimming*, he\'s also direct—particularly about the distance he’s kept from the public eye following a high-profile breakup and other troubles. But this isn\'t a breakup album; Miller says *Swimming* is a more complete picture of his life. “I\'m just talking about things that I\'m proud of myself for, things I\'m afraid of, or things that are just thoughts and emotions,” he told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “And I\'m like, \'Why is this interesting?\'” That same curiosity is freeing for Miller, who leans further into the singing he displayed on *The Divine Feminine*. Production-wise, he’s riding ultra-funky basslines courtesy of Thundercat and an altogether jazzy and danceable set overseen by producer Jon Brion (Kanye West, Fiona Apple).