PopMatters' 25 Best Americana Albums of 2020

“It just so happens that the most honest place in my life is to come from a place where Tanya exists,” The War and Treaty’s Michael Trotter tells Apple Music of the way that he and Tanya Blount-Trotter, partners in life and music, shape their performing identity around their relationship. “What everyone gets to see is the makings of that.” The two had each weathered plenty individually—in her case, the ups and downs of a mainstream R&B record deal, and in his, PTSD-generating military service in Iraq—before coming together. They realized that their breakthrough Buddy Miller-produced 2018 album *Healing Tide* placed their dedication to optimism front and center. They wanted their full-length follow-up, *Hearts Town*, to also convey the strain required to cling to love and emotional openness. Blount-Trotter points to the uncommon intimacy of their approach: “He does share the entire process with me, from the inception of the songs all the way down to the studio. Even though I\'m not the writer on the song, I\'m just as emotionally invested in the interpretation.” She was the one who insisted that he had the detailed vision, down to vocal arrangements and instrumental parts, to take the lead in producing the album, which gains a sense of drama from elements of musical theater, arena rock, gospel, and soul. “When you look at the way Tanya and I\'s love life is lived,” says Trotter, “it has the power of that gospel fire. It has the hope and the soulful promise of soul music. It has the gut-wrenching story of country. It has the loud and unforgiving spirit of rock.” See how these manifest themselves in each song on *Hearts Town* below. **Yearning** Michael Trotter: “I wanted the voices to be the story, and I wanted the music to be those little interrupting moments in a relationship that\'s going so right. Then all of a sudden you see some things that are creeping in from the past. It takes all of that tension from the past. It\'s built up and finally you just explode and say, ‘I\'m ready.’” **Beautiful (feat. Jason Isbell)** MT: “This was a song that was paying homage, honestly, to the passing of my wife\'s mother. I\'ll never forget watching her give her last breath, and it really tripped me out because I had never seen something more beautiful than her passing. I remember how I got this idea is because I was listening to Jason Isbell\'s song about the woman who has cancer, ‘Elephant.’ I\'d been wanting to do a song with him. When he was in the studio with us, he turned his amp all the way up, and he said, ‘People don\'t allow me to do this, Michael. I\'ve been waiting to scream \[on guitar\].’ And there he goes.” **Five More Minutes** MT: “The song was written like a rejoicing, like saying, ‘Wow, I made it through an ordeal.’ I really was exhausted. I was tired of failing. I had given up. I was sitting on my stairs in Albion, Michigan, in a home we were threatened to be kicked out of because we had no money. I just thought that the only financial relief my family could get right now is going to be through some insurance money. I\'m not ashamed of that moment. I\'m not afraid to say that that\'s exactly what it was, because I\'m standing for people who struggle with thoughts of suicide, as well as people who have died by suicide. I watched Tanya get down on her knees and grab me by my face. I remember her words: ‘I know that you\'re ready to do this, but I need just five more minutes to love you. If you could just give me five more minutes, I promise you I\'ll make those five minutes matter. Come on, stay with me.’ I had to make up my mind right there.” **Hearts Town** MT: “We wanted to show some honest, sincere, and true moments of desperation, true moments, to show the world that, but we still drive on. That\'s the persevering spirit of the American people and of the human race, period. We find a way, don\'t we? We find a way to dig deep, and to get in our guts and say, ‘There\'s the hope. There\'s the resilient spirit of our ancestry.’ And we do it, and we rise to every occasion.” **Jubilee** MT: “This song is just another one of those songs where we\'re taking our real-life situation and making it relatable to everyone.” **Hey Pretty Moon** MT: “It definitely had the intentions of Ray Charles\' ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ I remember writing this song in Iraq. I remember just going through some different questions in my mind, how when the storm happens, you barely see the sun. But in the evening, if a storm happens, the moon is never hidden. It\'s always there, that light. I just wanted to write a song to the moon: ‘Hey, pretty moon, so bright and fair.’ When I look at it, of course, it\'s the sappy part of The War and Treaty. When I start looking at my Tanya, I know her story. I know it\'s not easy sometimes, but this lady\'s light stays shining in every situation.” Tanya Blount-Trotter: “When you think about someone who has PTSD and has to fight through, it\'s not an external illness that you can see. You can\'t see all of the mental stress, the strain that it takes to get out of the bed, or to just stay sane through all of this and COVID. That song to me, when I look at him, is like, ‘How are you able to get up?’ To be able to watch and experience someone go through life with grace is a beautiful thing.” **Jealousy** TBT: “Early on, we talked about that we wanted to have the kind of relationship where there was no jealousy, where you want to be with the one that wants to be with you. You have people who are unable to even get to love because they\'d be competing with one another. Because the message is so heavy, I think Michael approached it from more of a light vibe with the song, musically. Sometimes people digest a hard message, they don\'t even know they\'re getting it, but they\'re dancing to it.” **Liquid Lies** MT: “It\'s actually about when you\'re leaving a sour situation, then all of a sudden the person wants to give you the emotions you wanted that person to have in the relationship. They start crying: ‘Please don\'t go! I love you!’ And you realize that those tears are just liquid lies. The production on it, we definitely wanted it to feel like a long conversation. And by the time the conversation is over, it\'s a relief.” **Lonely in My Grief** MT: “It was very difficult to watch Mr. George Floyd\'s life leave his body from under the knee of one of the officers. Very difficult to see the beautiful face of Breonna Taylor come up and not think, ‘Is this one of my cousins or sisters?’ And to realize that, when you read the story, she\'s coming up because she\'s dead. Very difficult to watch a young Black male, Ahmaud Arbery, running in a neighborhood up the street, and to see him lose his life. The plea is for people who we know love us and don\'t look like us, but we see them sitting in that silence, saying, ‘It\'s such a terrible thing that happened. It\'s so sad.’ No, it\'s got to be more than sad. It\'s the outrage of white people, the ‘I cannot stand by and just watch this.’ That\'s what ‘Lonely in My Grief’ is: Will you just stand by while you\'re watching your Black brother and your Black sister, and leave these folks lonely in their grief? I don\'t need you to stand up for me as an ally. I need you to be crying out and shouting out and yelling out because it\'s happening to our people. This is a threat to our democracy, not just the democracy of African Americans. This is a threat to our freedoms and our social justice, not just Black people.” **Little Boy Blue** TBT: “I love the feel of the song. It\'s one of my favorites to sing off the new album. Michael told me that when he was younger they used to call him Blue, because he was of a darker skin color. He\'s always been my sweet man Blue, but ‘boy’ just sings a little bit better than ‘man.’” **Hustlin\' (feat. Jerry Douglas and Chris Etheridge)** TBT: “Jerry Douglas, he\'s a legend. Talented is such an understatement for what he and Chris are, and the touch that they added to the record. You sit Jerry in the studio, and there\'s a freedom in having musicians come in and they just know what to do. You can say, ‘Here\'s the feel,’ and they find their way in the song, and actually take what you\'ve given them and expound on it. They added their genius to the record.” **Take Me In** MT: “Dr. King said something very powerful in one of his speeches: ‘I can\'t wait to see the day where children aren\'t judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ In this song, those are the things we\'re calling out, the contents of the character. My skin color may be different than yours. Take me in. I might be overweight. Take me in. I might not have the money you have or the bank account that you have or financial stability that you have, or my neighborhood might not be as safe as yours, or I might not have clean streets like you might have. But take me in. And that\'s the gospel right there. That\'s the good news. The good news is that we\'re not so far gone that we still can\'t grab each other and say, ‘I love you regardless.’ We wanted to end this record with that hope and that question of ‘will you take me in?’ We wanted it to have the feeling of salvation.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

Buy merch at rayezaragoza.com/shop

One night in the mid-1970s, Neil Young invited some musician friends to join him at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood for a small listening party. He had not one but two finished LPs to share: *Homegrown* and *Tonight’s the Night*, which, since it happened to be on the same reel, was simply an added bonus. But in hearing them back to back that evening, Young had a change of heart. Written in the wake of his relationship with actor Carrie Snodgress, *Homegrown* was so personal and intense that it frightened him. He chose to release *Tonight’s the Night* in June 1975 instead, leaving most of *Homegrown* to sit in his vault for nearly five decades, unheard—a lost classic he described to his father as “great songs I can live without.” Released now as part of his ongoing Archives project, *Homegrown* sounds like a troubled extension to the folk and country rock of 1972’s *Harvest*, the best-selling album that year. For a listener, it’s a thrilling juxtaposition: one of the decade’s brightest (and most enigmatic) stars at the height of his powers creatively, while also at his most vulnerable personally. Much of what’s here is previously unreleased—the crunchy title track and “Star of Bethlehem” appeared on side two of 1977’s *American Stars ’N Bars*, “Little Wing” on 1980’s *Hawks & Doves*—but all of it still feels cathartic, alive with regret. The album opens with a goodbye, “Separate Ways” speaking directly to Snodgress and making devastating reference to their son Zeke (“Sharin’ our little boy/Who grew from joy back then”) above a mournful tangle of acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and harmonica. “Vacancy” offers anger and “Try” glimmers of optimism as well as vocal contributions from Emmylou Harris. Recorded as an acoustic duet with The Band’s Robbie Robertson before a CSNY show at Wembley, “White Line” is a highlight that Young would electrify later on with Crazy Horse for 1990’s *Ragged Glory*. “You were my raft and I let you slide,” Young sings, his voice weary. “It seemed like a long, easy ride/I was adrift on a river of pride.”

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

Drive-By Truckers’ 13th studio album arrives with little notice, announced just a few days before release—but for fans of Patterson Hood’s long-running Southern rock band, the of-the-moment topicality of these nine songs is anything but surprising. DBTs’ second album of 2020 finds the quintet turning their searing, soulful songwriting towards civil unrest and our fractured collective psyche, throwing in a rip-roaring cover of the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away” for good measure. Twenty-five years in, Drive-By Truckers have lost none of their Southern-fried bite, continuing to proudly sound like no one except themselves.

Written as an examination of personal relationships, the new album by The Northern Belle is aptly titled We Wither, We Bloom. The Norwegian septet is among the pioneers of the nordicana scene that has been gaining momentum in the US the last few years. Fronted by prolific singer-songwriter Stine Andreassen (also of folk quartet Silver Lining) and armed with pedal steel, slide guitar, lush harmonies, a string quartet and their secret weapon, the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, The Northern Belle have developed their own unique brew of pop-oriented americana and folk music. Imagine Fleetwood Mac fronted by Jenny Lewis in a country mood. Brimming with melodic tunes and clever lyrics, We Wither We Bloom is the band's third studio album, albeit the first to be released internationally. Having made the difficult decision to quit her day job to pursue music, Andreassen and The Northern Belle received widespread praise and a Spellemann nomination (Norwegian Grammy) for the 2018 album Blinding Blue Neon. In the spring of 2019, Andreassen traveled to Nashville for three months to write the follow-up. The welcoming and thriving music scene found east of the Cumberland River sparked a creative songwriting spell that resulted in this inspired collection of tracks. The distance from home allowed for new views on friends, family, love, loss and homesickness, resulting in the band's most personal album to date. The songs vary in tempo and style, from the melodic rocker “Gemini” to the string-laden “Born to Be a Mother”. “Remember It” is a fiery tell-off to a horrible ex (“I wanna hurt you and remember it”), “Tailor Made” is a tribute to the band’s Nudie suit-wearing heroes of the past, while “Late Bloomer” in a way sums up the album title – a song about taking time before daring to pursue music. “I’ve struggled with the feeling of not being good enough, being labeled because I’m a woman and that I should have had kids already and that the clock is ticking. I’ve destroyed friendships and made new ones, but I’m left with feeling stronger than before because I’ve confronted the things that hurt in my songs,” says Andreassen, who has written the bulk of the album with a few contributions from local Nashville songwriters. Constantly evolving as a band, The Northern Belle’s sound in 2020 is inspired by contemporary acts such as Erin Rae, Kacey Musgraves, Phoebe Bridgers and Marit Larsen, as well as legends such The Beach Boys, The Byrds and Glen Campbell. All resulting in a record that pays tribute to its inspirations while also showing true originality.

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

The 11th Jayhawks studio album XOXO was released July 10, 2020 on Sham/Thirty Tigers. Recorded in late 2019 at Pachyderm and Flowers Studios in Minnesota, XOXO represents a bold step forward. For the first time, all four members contribute writing and lead vocal duties. XOXO is the most diverse and wide-ranging in the group’s storied history. Rather than marking a sonic departure, though, the collection signals a sharpening of focus for the band, an elevation in understanding of who they are and what they do best. In classic Jayhawks fashion, the songs here mix the influence of American roots music with British invasion and jangly power-pop, but there’s a newfound vitality at play, as well, an invigoration of confidence and energy that could only come with the injection of fresh blood. The result is an album that, much like the band’s lush harmonies, brings multiple distinctive voices together into a singular whole, a collection that, ironically enough, finds unity in individuality and identity in reinvention.

Margo Price began writing this album in the middle of touring her last, and says it was a master class in multitasking. “I wrote in Ubers, airports, airplanes, green rooms, hotel rooms, you name it,” she tells Apple Music. “Then, when it was halfway done, I found out I was pregnant. That changed my headspace a bit.” Actually, of all the life forces that had begun to transform her songwriting–fame, motherhood, the loss of a child in 2010, and the demands of touring that put a strain on her marriage–sobriety was the most powerful, she says. It crystallized connections between her past and future (“Gone to Stay” began as a letter to her son Judah but blossomed into a broader meditation about the things parents leave to their children) and led her from introspective outlaw country into glamorous, dazzling classic rock. If the floral veil, curly calligraphy, jangly instrumentation, and *Rumours* hat tip didn’t give it away, Stevie Nicks is a major influence on the album, which was coaxed along by executive producer Sturgill Simpson. “I grew up listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac, and like most girls, I idolized Stevie,” she says. “But I haven’t seen a lot of people occupying that space since, you know? Classic rock ’n’ roll heartbreakers. When I decided to make this album with Sturgill, that’s what we set out to do.” Here, Price tells the stories behind all ten tracks. **That\'s How Rumors Get Started** “I first heard the phrase from my guitar player, Jamie Davis. We were partying on the bus and someone said something gossipy. And he said, ‘Watch what you say, that\'s how rumors get started.’ I immediately wrote it down. I knew it was going to be the album title before I even wrote the song. Everybody has ideas about who they think the song is about, and I definitely wrote it with a couple of people in mind, but the great thing is that it can be about anybody. For me, a lot changed when I became successful. Friendships were compromised and challenged, it became hard to tell what people’s motivations were, there was a lot of jealousy and competitiveness. It can be very lonely. Over time, you learn to keep your mouth shut. You learn how rumors get started.” **Letting Me Down** “\[Price’s husband\] Jeremy \[Ivey\] and I co-wrote this song together after we’d both written to high school friends that we’d become estranged from. It was a really therapeutic exercise, writing to someone from my past, and put me back in touch with feelings I’d forgotten about, like when you’re living in a small town and just want to escape but feel stuck. It’s taken on new meaning during the pandemic—it talks about loneliness, isolation, unemployment, poverty, workers who need to make ends meet, the struggle that small towns face right now. It all hits close to home for me.” **Twinkle Twinkle** “We had played this really terrible beer festival in Florida. There weren\'t that many people, it was really disorganized, and we didn\'t have a very good show. Afterwards, I found Marty Stuart in his trailer tuning all of his guitars, which I thought was pretty spectacular. I was like, ‘You don\'t have a tech that does this for you?’ And he said, ‘You don\'t need no tech if you do it right!’ And then he asked me, ‘Your band\'s been on the road a lot lately, do you hate each other yet?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, we don\'t hate each other, but our marriages are falling apart and our health is deteriorating. But other than that, we\'re good.’ He smiled really big and just said, ‘You wanted to be a star. Twinkle, twinkle.’ It became this running joke when we were on the road and something went wrong, like a canceled flight that forced us to sleep in the airport all night. We\'d turn to each other and go, ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’ My husband brought the guitar riff to me and it had such a cool, gritty vibe. We were going for Neil Young meets Led Zeppelin, but it definitely came out a little more Led Zeppelin.” **Stone Me** “This song has a few different layers to it. When I was out on the road a lot and my husband and I were having trouble adjusting to it, I wrote the first verse with him in mind and sent it to him in a text message. He took it and put a melody behind it, and I was like, ‘Dude, did you just co-write a song that was supposed to be about you?’ I was also, separately, thinking about these two bloggers who have taken a lot of time to dissect my career. They judge everything that I do, and they’re just so certain they know where I\'m coming from. It was really therapeutic to write. My husband threw me the title. I think he was envisioning more of a stoner anthem, but I used it in the biblical sense of, like, those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Because yeah, I’ve learned that once you get put up on the pedestal, you\'re there to be knocked down.” **Hey Child** “My husband and I first wrote this song back in 2012, and it used to be our closer when we played with my band Buffalo Clover. We wrote it when we were hanging out with this wild group of friends. Everybody was treating us like we were rock stars, but we were the furthest thing from it. We were out on the road, drinking too much, taking a lot of drugs, and I just felt like there was this recklessness going on. Jeremy and I wrote the verses to some of our friends, but I also think we were writing it to ourselves. I had totally forgotten about the song until Sturgill convinced me to rerecord it, and then we added the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir on background vocals, which took it to a whole other place.” **Heartless Mind** “This song turned out completely different from how I initially envisioned it. I thought it was going to have a heartbreaker, guitar-driven vibe, but once we got the synths, it became more of a Blondie track. This is the only song that James Gadson didn\'t play drums on, my drummer Dillon \[Napier\] did, and he knocked it out of the park. And then later, when we were doing overdubs, David Ferguson–who co-produced this with Sturgill and I–laid down a drum machine that basically doubled the snare. So really, this is my first song with electronic drums, and I love it.” **What Happened to Our Love?** “I wasn’t expecting to record this song, but my husband loved it and encouraged me to bring it into the studio. It wound up becoming this whole thing that I never knew it could become. Once I figured out how to go into my upper register at the end, with the Nashville Friends Choir on background vocals, it entered this psychedelic Pink Floyd territory that I never expected. I was reading a lot of Leonard Cohen at the time—especially his book *The Flame* that came out posthumously—and I was influenced by the way that he writes, using the push and pull of opposites. I wrote it partially about my own marriage, as well as some of the other relationships I was seeing at the time that were struggling to stay together.” **Gone to Stay** “I knew that I needed to write a song for my son Judah. Somebody told me that at a show a long time ago—they said, ‘You\'ve written a song for the son you lost, you need to write a song for your son that\'s still here with you.’ We wanted to do a ‘Forever Young’ or something—wisdom that you can pass on to your kids and that can stand in for you when you can’t be there there—in my case, when I\'m on the road. But it became something bigger; it’s a letter with advice about protecting the earth and leaving something positive behind. I loved that I got pregnant in the middle of writing it and it turned into something for both of my children. There’s a line that says, ‘You can’t turn money back into time,’ and I think anybody can relate to that, whether they have children or not. All the things we do for work, all the things we miss. That line\'s been resonating with me throughout this quarantine. Because as hard as it is, I\'m finally just here enjoying my time.” **Prisoner of the Highway** “This was written on an airplane tray table while I was headed to California to play the Hollywood Bowl. I was opening for Willie Nelson during his Outlaw Music Festival and had just found out that I was pregnant. I hadn\'t told anybody yet because I was still grappling with the fact that I was going to miss things in my child’s life all over again. There’s a Townes Van Zandt quote that goes something like, \'I knew that if I wanted to do this music thing, I was going to have to sacrifice everything—financial stability, a family, friends.\' I have so much respect for him, because that’s dedication to your art, but it can still feel really selfish to chase your dreams. I think about all of my friends\' weddings that I missed, school events, funerals—all to chase the next perfect line in a song.” **I\'d Die for You** “This is my favorite song on the album lyrically. I\'ve been in Nashville 17 years and have seen so many things change, seen so many communities and local businesses just disappear because of gentrification. So that’s a theme here, as is racism, health care, and poverty. I always insist on telling people that this isn’t a political record, because I don’t want them getting stuck on thinking that I\'m pushing my agenda onto them. To me, this is a humanitarian song. It’s about the struggle of American life. This country is so divided that it’s ironic we\'re called the United States. But when I look at the majority of people in this country, no matter if they\'re blue or red, everybody wants a lot of the same things: a safe place to raise a kid, food on the table, shelter over your head. This song is Jeremy and I reassuring each other and our families that despite all the chaos around us, we can hold on to each other.”

On July 10th, Margo Price will release That’s How Rumors Get Started, an album of ten new, original songs that commit her sky-high and scorching rock-and-roll show to record for the very first time. Produced by longtime friend Sturgill Simpson (co-produced by Margo and David Ferguson), the LP marks Price’s debut for Loma Vista Recordings, and whether she’s singing of motherhood or the mythologies of stardom, Nashville gentrification or the national healthcare crisis, relationships or growing pains, she’s crafted a collection of music that invites people to listen closer than ever before. Margo primarily cut That’s How Rumors Get Started at Los Angeles’ EastWest Studios (Pet Sounds, “9 to 5”). Tracking occurred over several days while she was pregnant with daughter Ramona. “They’re both a creation process,” she says. “And I was being really good to my body and my mind during that time. I had a lot of clarity from sobriety.” While Margo Price continued to collaborate on most of the songwriting with her husband Jeremy Ivey, she recorded with an historic band assembled by Sturgill, and including guitarist Matt Sweeney (Adele, Iggy Pop), bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer), drummer James Gadson (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye), and keyboardist Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers). Background vocals were added by Simpson on “Letting Me Down,” and the Nashville Friends Gospel Choir, who raise the arrangements of “Hey Child” and “What Happened To Our Love?” to some of the album’s most soaring heights. Margo Price and her steady touring band - Kevin Black (bass), Jamie Davis (guitar), Micah Hulsher (keys), and Dillon Napier (drums) - will perform songs from That’s How Rumors Get Started at dozens of shows with Chris Stapleton and The Head & The Heart this spring and summer, in addition to festival appearances and more to be announced soon. Find all dates here and below. That’s How Rumors Get Started follows Margo’s 2017 album All American Made, which was named the #1 Country/Americana album of the year by Rolling Stone, and one of the top albums of the decade by Esquire, Pitchfork and Billboard, among others. In its wake, Margo sold out three nights at The Ryman Auditorium, earned her first Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, and much more.

Since Bruce Springsteen last released an album with the E Street Band—*High Hopes*, 2014’s collection of re-recorded outtakes and covers—he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his past. He followed his 2016 memoir *Born to Run* the next year with a one-man Broadway show in which he reimagined his songs as part of an intimate narrative about his own life and career. And while his 20th LP was recorded completely live with the band in a four-day sprint—for the first time since 1984’s *Born in the USA*—the songs themselves bear the deliberation and weight of an artist who knows he’s running out of time to do things like this. “The impetus for a lot of the material was the loss of my good friend George Theiss,” Springsteen tells Apple Music. “When he passed away, it left me as the only remaining living member of the first band that I had, which was a very strange thought, and it gave rise to most of the material. There\'s aging and loss of people as time goes by, and that\'s a part of what the record is. And then at the same time, you\'re sort of celebrating the fact that the band goes on and we carry their spirits with us.” That combination of wistfulness and joy—propelled by the full force of an E Street Band that’s been playing together in some form for nearly 50 years, minus two departed founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici—drives “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts” most explicitly, but imbues the entire project. Though this may have been recorded live and fast, nothing sounds ragged or rambunctious; the efficiency owes to the shorthand of a unit that knows each other’s moves before they make them. While most of the songs were written recently, “Song for Orphans,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “Janey Needs a Shooter” date back to the early ’70s, only adding to the feeling of loose ends being tied. And it’s not lost on Springsteen after this long period of reflection that this album fits into a larger story that he’s been telling for most of his life. “If you wanted to find a body of work that expressed what it was like to be an American, say from 1970 to now, in the post-industrial period of the United States—I\'d be a place you could go and get some information on that,” he says. “And so in that sense, I always try to speak to my times in the way that I best could.” Here he digs deeper into just a few of the highlights from *Letter to You*. **One Minute You’re Here** “It\'s unusual to start a record with its quietest song. The record really starts with \'Letter to You,\' but there\'s this little preface that lets you know what the record is going to encompass. The record starts with \'One Minute You\'re Here\' and then ends with \'I\'ll See You in My Dreams,\' which are both songs about mortality and death. It was just sort of a little tip of the hat to where the record was going to go and a little slightly connected to \[2019\'s\] *Western Stars*. It was a little transitional piece of music.” **Last Man Standing** “That particular song was directly due to George\'s passing and me finding out that out of that group of people, I\'m kind of here on my own, honoring the guys that I learned my craft with between the ages of 14 and 17 or 18. Those were some of the deepest learning years of my life—learning how to be onstage, learning how to write, learning how to front the band, learning how to put together a show, learning how to play for all different kinds of audiences at fireman\'s fairs, at union halls, at CYO \[Catholic Youth Organization\] dances, and just really honing your craft.” **Janey Needs a Shooter** and **If I Was the Priest** and **Song for Orphans** “We were working on a lot of stuff that I have in the vault to put out again at some time, and I went through almost a whole record of pre-*Greetings From Asbury Park* music that was all acoustic, and these songs were inside them. The guys came in and I said, ‘Okay. Today we\'re going to record songs that are 50 years old, and we\'re going to see what happens.\' The modern band playing those ideas that I had as a 22-year-old—and for some reason it just fit on the record, because the record skips through time. It starts with me thinking about when I was 14 and 15, and then it moves into the present. So those songs added a little touchstone for that certain period of time. I went back and I found a voice that really fit them, and they\'re a nice addition to the record.” **House of a Thousand Guitars** “Every piece of music has its demands—what tone in my voice is going to feel right for this particular piece of music—and you try to meet it in the middle. That\'s one of my favorite songs on the record; I\'m not exactly sure why yet. It\'s at the center of the record and it speaks to this world that the band and I have attempted to create with its values, its ideas, its codes, since we started. And it collects all of that into one piece of music, into this imaginary house of a thousand guitars.” **The Power of Prayer** “I grew up Catholic, and that was enough to turn me off from religion forever. And I realized as I grew older that you can run away from your religion, but you can\'t really run away from your faith. And so I carried a lot of the language with me, which I use and write with quite often—\'Promised Land\' or \'House of a Thousand Guitars\' and \'The Power of Prayer\' on this record. Those little three-minute records and the 180-second character studies that came through pop music were like these little meditations and little prayers for me. And that\'s what I turned them into. And my faith came in and filled those songs, and gave them a spiritual dimension. It\'s an essential part of your life.” **I’ll See You in My Dreams** “I remember a lot of my dreams and I always have. But that song was basically about those that pass away don\'t ever really leave us. They visit me in my dreams several times a year. Clarence will come up a couple times in a year. Or I\'ll see Danny. They just show up in very absurd, sometimes in abstract ways in the middle of strange stories. But they\'re there, and it\'s actually a lovely thing to revisit with them in that way. The pain slips away, the love remains, and they live in that love and walk alongside you and your ancestors and your life companions as a part of your spirit. So the song is basically about that: \'Hey. I\'m not going to see you at the next session, but I\'ll see you in my dreams.\'”