Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.
The musician born Josh Tillman chose the title for his sixth album in a decidedly Father John Misty kind of way: He found the Sanskrit word in a novel by Bruce Wagner, who shares with the musician a certain impish LA mysticism. Mahāśmaśāna translates to “great cremation ground,” so it’s no surprise to find the singer-songwriter in “what’s it all mean?” mode, trawling tragicomic corners of the American Southwest in search of answers about life, death, and humanity. After trying his hand at big-band jazz on 2022’s *Chloë and the Next 20th Century*, Tillman returns to the big, sweeping ’70s-style pop rock that’s earned him a place among his generation’s most intriguing songwriters. He channels Leonard Cohen’s *Death of a Ladies’ Man* on the sprawling title track, whose swooning orchestration and ambitious lyrics take stock of, well, everything. “She Cleans Up” tells a rollicking tale involving female aliens, high-dollar kimonos, and rabbits with guns, and on dystopian power ballad “Screamland,” he offers an all-American refrain: “Stay young/Get numb/Keep dreaming.”
When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”
Justin Vernon was just a few years removed from self-releasing his now legendary debut—2007’s *For Emma, Forever Ago*, recorded in wintry solitude—when he won an actual Grammy Award for its more polished follow-up in 2012. He’d become famous enough to watch his backstory become a punchline and his likeness parodied by Justin Timberlake on *Saturday Night Live*. (Timberlake would attempt to borrow the same mystique for his 2018 album, *Man of the Woods*.) You can understand why Vernon would want to change the subject for a time. For nearly a decade, he’s obscured some part of himself, hidden behind symbols and numbers, bandannas and bandmates, vocoders and vast collages of bleep and bloop—not to mention a still astonishing list of celebrity collaborators to whom he’s been more than happy to cede the limelight, Taylor Swift chief among them. The three-song *SABLE,* EP is immediately notable because it finds Vernon running it back, returning to the sound and feel that launched his career, singing in the first person. It’s a deliberate move away from the maximalist collage of 2019’s *i, i*. “When I made this song, I was feeling a lot of guilt,” he told an Eras Tour audience of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium in 2022, before playing “S P E Y S I D E,” a song that sounds here as though it could have been lifted from the *For Emma* sessions—just him and his guitar and his hurt, his falsetto slicing through a layer of strings. “I know that I can’t make good,” he sings. “How I wish I could.” On “AWARDS SEASON,” all you hear for its first and final minutes is Vernon’s voice amid a mist of ambient synth. There is nowhere to hide. “What was pain now’s gained,” he sings. “You know what is great? Nothing stays the same.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when things felt relatively simple for Beatrice Laus: She’d write and record songs in her London bedroom, she’d post them online, the world would come to her or it wouldn’t. But it did—very much so. To such an extent and at such a dizzying clip that, still 23 and just two albums into her career, the Up Next alum found herself taking a meeting with Rick Rubin—part mystic, part producer, part institution. “I think we just wanted to meet each other,” she tells Apple Music. “The entire meeting was about life and just catching up. It was almost like a therapy session. I think at the end I was like, ‘Oh, I’ve been making some songs. Do you want to hear them?’” Those songs became part of *This Is How Tomorrow Moves*, a lush and supremely confident third full-length that Laus would go on to record with Rubin at Shangri-La, his legendary studio in Malibu—a long way from said London bedroom. It’s an album about self-realization and growing up, written in the aftermath of a breakup, as Laus—fully online and in the public eye, on tour and away from home—came to terms with a life that had become unrecognizable to her. “I really needed music to help me understand what my brain was going through,” she says. “I just had so much to say. I didn’t really think about the way it sounded. You know when you really badly need to go to the toilet? That’s what it felt like: I really badly needed to write a song.” At Shangri-La, Rubin encouraged Laus to see and hear what she’d written in its simplest and clearest emotional terms. Though she still takes plenty of inspiration from a wide swath of ’90s alt-rock and pop (“Post,” the Incubus-like “Take a Bite”), she is equally at home here at the center of a spare piano ballad (“Girl Song”) as she is amid the fanfare of an incandescent indie-folk cut (“Ever Seen”). It’s the sound of an artist finding clarity and herself, an artist leveling up. “I think being in a space like Shangri-La, and knowing that you’re making this record with Rick, it definitely kind of kicks you,” she says. “Like, ‘All right, it’s time to shine.’” Read on as Laus takes us inside a few highlights from the album. **“Girl Song”** “I think you can argue that ‘Girl Song,’ out of all the songs on the record, is the most tragic. I wrote it because I’m still trying to figure that one out, just in terms of growing up and loving myself and the way I look and physical appearance and all that mumbo jumbo. But it sits at number six, just because I just felt like it was perfect. It had to be perfectly in the middle of the record because it didn’t suit the beginning or the end. It was just how I felt at that moment.” **“Beaches”** “I wrote ‘Beaches’ because of how terrified I was getting into this. I am the sort of person that values feeling comfortable and loyalty and trusting people around me, not changing a lot of things. But I would’ve been an idiot if I had said no \[to Rubin\]. I remember my boyfriend being like, ‘Are you crazy? You have to go.’ I’m so used to making music back at home, not in a massive, fancy place.” **“The Man Who Left Too Soon”** “I actually wrote it in LA, in my hotel room. I’ve never really experienced death in family. I always wondered how that felt like. My current boyfriend, unfortunately, lost his dad around his twenties; I really got to see how that would feel like and how that would affect someone. I wanted to write about it so I can understand what that would mean to other people and what that would mean to him and what that would mean to me.” **“This Is How It Went”** “It makes me so anxious: A very intense thing happened to me, and I needed to write about it. I have to say all this shit.”
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn\'t really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they\'re very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.” In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s *Ghosteen*, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be. Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, *Wild God* finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marveling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don\'t matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. *Wild God* is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.” It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake,” a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it\'s just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band\'s influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We\'re not taking it too seriously in a way, although it\'s a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.” There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy,” the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn\'t necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it\'s these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record\'s full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.” While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, *Wild God* shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there\'s one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that \[wife\] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that\'s why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it\'s just full of life and it\'s full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.” Read on as Cave takes us inside a few highlights from the album: **“Wild God”** “I was actually going to call the record *Joy*, but chose *Wild God* in the end because I thought the word ‘joy’ may be misunderstood in a way. ‘Wild God’ is just two pieces of music chopped together—an edit. That song didn\'t really work quite right. So we thought, ‘Well, let\'s get someone else to mix it.’ And me and Warren thought about that for a while. I personally really loved the sound of \[producer Dave Fridmann’s work with\] MGMT, and The Flaming Lips, stuff—it had this immediacy about it that I really liked. So we went to Buffalo with the recordings and Dave did a song each day, disappeared into the control room and mixed it without inviting us in. It was the strangest thing. And then he emerges from the studio and says, ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’ When we came in it sounded so different. We were shocked. And then after we played it again, we heard that he traded in all the intricacies and stateliness of The Bad Seeds for just pure unambiguous emotion.” **“Frogs”** “Improvising and ad-libbing is still very much the way we go about making music. ‘Frogs’ is essentially a song that I had some words to, but I just walked in and started singing over the top of this piece of music that we\'d constructed without any real understanding of the song itself. There\'s no formal construction—it just keeps going, very randomly. There\'s a sort of freedom and mystery to that stuff that I find really compelling. I sang it as a guide, but listening to it back was like, ‘Wow, I don\'t know how to go and repeat that in any way, but it feels like it\'s talking about something way beyond what the song initially had to offer.’” **“Joy”** “‘Joy’ is a wholly improvised one-take without me having any real understanding of what Warren is doing musically. It’s written in that same questing way of first takes. I\'m just singing stuff over a kind of chord pattern that he\'s got. I sort of intuit it in some way that it’s a blues form to it, so I’m attempting to sing a blues vocal over the top, rhyming in a blues tradition.” **“Final Rescue Attempt”** “That was a song that we weren\'t putting on the record. It was a late addition, just hanging around. And I think Dave Fridmann actually said, ‘Look, I\'ve mixed this song. It doesn\'t seem to be on the record. What the fuck?’ It feels a little different in a way to me. But it\'s a very beautiful song, very beautiful. And I guess it was just so simple in its way, or at least the first verse literally describes the situation that I think is actually in the book, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*, where Susie decided to come back to me after eight months or so, and rode back to my house where I was living, on a bicycle. It’s a depiction of that scene, so maybe I shied away from it for that reason. I don\'t know. But I\'m really glad.” **“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”** “That song is an attempt to encapsulate what Anita Lane was like, and we all loved her very much and were all shocked to the core by her death. In her early days when we were together, she was this bright, shiny, happy, laughing, flaming thing, and we were the dark, drug-addicted men that circled around her. And I wanted to just write a song that had that. She was a laughing creature, and I wanted to work out a way of expressing that. It\'s such a beautifully innocent song in a way.”
“How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” That eternally unquantifiable question defines Sophie Allison’s fourth album as Soccer Mommy, a record marked by loss and grief. *Evergreen* marks a perspective shift from Allison’s 2022 album *Sometimes, Forever*. “When I started writing songs for this album, I was very clearly in a completely different headspace and wanted to write something that felt more intimate and up front, and not kind of shrouded by having all this fun making it,” Allison tells Apple Music. “The feelings that I was expressing on this album were a lot about loss and grief, because that’s what I was going through at the time—a lot of changes. It was scary and different, and everything felt kind of sudden. So I was just grappling with all of that.” The result is a richly melodic work that, with the production touch of Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Belle and Sebastian), feels cavernous in its scope while retaining intimacy. There are moments when Allison cranks up the volume and rips into the riffage—witness the chunky chords on “Driver,” or the shape-shifting guitar lines that stretch across “Salt in Wound”—but elsewhere Allison achieves a magic trick of making nuanced, close-to-the-vest songwriting sound one million miles wide. The closing title track is draped in stretches of strings not unlike generational counterpart beabadoobee’s work, while on “M” she laments, “I hear your voice in all my favorite songs.” It’s a raw admission on an album full of them.
When she emerged from obscurity as a 19-year-old vagabond turned overnight SoundCloud star, Halsey was something of a cipher: You knew her voice (one of the 2010s’ prime examples of “cursive singing”), but very little else. “I think there is a little bit of a grand narrative about me that’s like, ‘I don’t know what she looks like. I couldn’t recognize her on the street because she looks different every time I see her,’” the singer tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.” In one sense, the lead single from her fifth studio album shows she’s as hard to pin down as ever: For one, she was beginning with “The End.” An unplugged folk ballad co-produced by Alex G and Michael Uzowuru, the song shed light on recent health scares she’d been keeping under wraps. But *The Great Impersonator* is vulnerable in a new way, using the concept of homage as a lens through which to write—hence the series of photos Halsey released leading up to the album’s release in which she posed as David Bowie, Aaliyah, Kate Bush, and more. “As I get older, I love to write about myself, but I find it boring to talk about myself,” she says. “So these reinventions give me these little means of escapism—not in the sense of running away, but just telling the story in a different way.” Themes of identity, mortality, and legacy snake through the album’s 18 tracks, which channel ’70s folk, ’80s power ballads, ’90s alt-rock, and 2000s pop before arriving at the decade in which Halsey herself emerged. At times she reels at her own temporary nature; elsewhere, she craves depersonalization: “I think that I should try to kill my ego/’Cause if I don’t, my ego might kill me,” she yelps on the PJ Harvey-inspired “Ego.” “Hometown” is an ode to Dolly Parton, though it’s Springsteen-esque (“Glory Days” in particular) in its depiction of faded American dreams. And on “Lucky,” she riffs on the Britney Spears hit of the same name, one of the great pop ballads on fame’s diminishing returns. “I turned 20 as *BADLANDS* came out, and I’m turning 30 as this record comes out,” Halsey says, tracing the arc of her career. “I had this 10-year plan, but I didn’t really have anything beyond that. I hadn’t really thought about what was going to happen.” And though she may not know where life will take her in the next 10 years, she’s focused on appreciating the journey rather than racing towards the finish line. “I used to look at the way that SZA or Frank \[Ocean\] make records like, ‘Gosh, I could never spend two or three years on an album. I’m so impulsive and impatient and I just want to get it done,’” she says. “Then I spent a long time writing this record and I understood for the first time—oh, the making is the best part.”
Faye Webster’s fifth album marks the point of full immersion when it comes to the Atlanta songwriting prodigy’s sly, shifting aesthetic. The tones are richer and deeper; the arrangements expand and breathe like massive lungs; her voice layers over itself and ripples, decadent and deeply felt. Webster’s genre-blending approach may have been slightly overstated in the past—a result of her early association with Atlanta’s rascally, defunct hip-hop crew Awful Records—but her sonic playfulness has never been more fully realized than it is on on *Underdressed at the Symphony*. Slinky, flute-dotted R&B is situated up against sumptuous country pop and grungy flips on ’50s sock-hop rock music; longtime friend and rap chameleon Lil Yachty pops up on “Lego Ring” as the pair switch off from a Weezer-esque chug to spacey, astral psych-rock. Lyrically, *Underdressed at the Symphony*—which was written and recorded coming off of a breakup—carries Webster’s now-trademarked mixture of emotional intimacy and straightforward humor. She finds potency in simple sentiments (“Thinking About You,” “He Loves Me Yeah!”), and on the sparse hyperpop “Feeling Good Today,” she details the small pleasures that come with moving through one’s daily existence. “I used to be self-conscious/Well, really, I still am/I’m just better at figuring out why,” Webster ruminates over the lush guitars of “Wanna Quit All the Time,” one of several songs that feature Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is music that’s as mesmerizing as it is disarmingly personal, and *Underdressed at the Symphony* represents an artist who, similar to cosmic kin Cass McCombs, seems increasingly intent on proving she really can do anything.
“My Saturn has returned,” the cosmic country singer-songwriter proclaimed to announce her fifth album (apologies to *A Very Kacey Christmas*), *Deeper Well*. If you’re reading this, odds are you know what that means: About every 30 years, the sixth planet from the sun comes back to the place in the sky where it was when you were born, and with it, ostensibly, comes growth. At 35, the chill princess of rule-breaking country/pop/what-have-you has caught up with Saturn and taken its lessons to heart. OUT: energy vampires, self-sabotaging habits, surface-level conversations. IN: jade stones, moon baths, long dinners with friends, listening closely to the whispered messages of the cosmos. (As for the wake-and-bake sessions she mentions on the title track—out, but wistfully so.) Musgraves followed her 2018 breakthrough album, the gently trippy *Golden Hour*, with 2021’s *star-crossed*, a divorce album billed as a “tragedy in three parts,” where electronic flourishes added to the drama. On *Deeper Well*, the songwriter’s feet are firmly planted on the ground, reflected in its warm, wooden, organic instrumentation—fingerpicked acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel. Here, Musgraves turns to nature for the answers to her ever-probing questions. “Heart of the Woods,” a campfire sing-along inspired by mycologist Paul Stamets and his *Fantastic Fungi* documentary, looks to mushroom networks beneath the forest floor for lessons on connectivity. And on “Cardinal,” a gorgeous ode to her late friend and mentor John Prine in the paisley mode of The Mamas & The Papas, potential dispatches from the beyond arrive as a bird outside her window in the morning. As Musgraves’ trust in herself and the universe deepens, so do her songwriting chops. On “Dinner With Friends,” a gratitude journal entry given the cosmic country treatment, she honors her roots in perfectly sly Musgravian fashion: “My home state of Texas, the sky there, the horses and dogs, but none of their laws.” And on the simple, searching “The Architect,” she condenses the big mysteries of human nature into one elegant, good-natured question: “Can I pray it away, am I shapeable clay/Or is this as good as it gets?”
In the 313 days after Zach Bryan released his self-titled fourth album, he scored his first No. 1 single alongside Kacey Musgraves and headlined no fewer than 58 arenas, stadiums, and festivals, further cementing his legend as a self-made megastar whose ascendance looks, at least from the outside, like it’s skipped all the hard parts. And then, on the 314th day, he released *The Great American Bar Scene*, a 19-track follow-up that dispenses with any questions about his ability to remain almost laughably prolific as he’s learning how to adjust to it all in real time. Like its immediate predecessor, *The Great American Bar Scene* opens with a spoken-word soliloquy about good fortune and good morals that burnishes the Oklahoman’s earnest, everybro cred, serving as a mission statement of sorts for the 18 songs that follow—and, really, for Bryan’s whole deal. At only 28, he is a master of nostalgia, bathing the libertine spirit of past generations and 2021 in the same sepia light. Bryan’s grappling with his recent past isn’t just subtext; it’s in the songs. In “Northern Thunder,” a wistful slow-burn ballad characteristic of the album’s overall vibe, he’s still processing a mix of homesickness and shock: “And please don’t ask me how these last years went/Mama, I made a million dollars on accident/I was supposed to die a military man/Chest out too far with a drink in my hand/But I’ve got folks who like hearing me rhyme/I think of thunder under metal roofs all the time.” “Like Ida” reaffirms his aversion to the Music City machine, even if the feeling isn’t mutual: “When you make it to Nashville you can tell from one hat tilt/That shit just ain’t my scene/I like out-of-tune guitars and taking jokes too far/And my bartenders extra damn mean.” *This* is Bryan’s great American bar scene: less shout-along rave-ups exhorting you to go out and get drunk than evocative meditations on your inalienable right, and frequent need, to go out and get drunk. The title track is a barroom serenade that name-checks Springsteen’s spare, pitch-black *Nebraska* track “State Trooper”; “Sandpaper” pays off the reference with an appearance by Springsteen himself that plays like a heartland-rock *Looper*—a weathered elder meeting a younger version of himself who already has seen so much. (It also sounds more than a little like “I’m On Fire.”) And for all of Bryan’s humility, he’s self-aware enough to lean into the romance of his origin story and underdog status, numbers be damned—he is nothing if not an elite storyteller.
Noah Kahan’s third album, October 2022’s *Stick Season*, was never meant to be a full-length project. Kahan was looking to take a break from the more polished, pop-leaning writing sessions he’d been doing and found himself gravitating towards the music of his childhood. Bon Iver and James Blake were the soundtrack of his long, snowy winters in Vermont, and the term “stick season” refers to the time between autumnal splendor and the season’s first snowfall. For some, this period, with its changing leaves and trick-or-treating in New England, is idyllic. According to Kahan, it’s “super depressing”—but it was also super inspiring. “It wasn\'t until I wrote the song ‘Stick Season’ after a session that I realized I was making an album,” Kahan shared with Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “I looked back at the rest of the tunes, and they all fit this theme about home and about isolation. Once I had three or four songs that I thought could make up an album, telling the rest of the story became very natural, and a really focused experience. I was really happy to have that narrative through line figured out early on. Those things were present before I finished, which was really nice and helpful to guide the whole process.” Winters in New England are famously brutal. The sun vanishes, the temperatures plummet, and the world slows to a crawl. Kahan is deeply familiar with this cycle of transition and rebirth, but it wasn’t until much later that he realized how deeply he was impacted by the changing of the seasons. “Every year growing up, my entire family would really, really dread winter coming,” Kahan explains. “I had the worst times in my childhood, in my life, in the wintertime. It was always something that was foreboding, and stick season, in that time between the stunning autumn in Vermont and New Hampshire, became this cold, gray, empty place.” Those experiences are the narrative thread of *Stick Season*, which unfolds as equal parts eulogy and exhumation—a layer-by-layer cataloging of childhood memories, heartbreak, and resentments toward the claustrophobia of small-town living. “When I was living at home in Vermont after high school, I was super, super lonely, obviously, but also just kind of socially not developed,” he says. “And then I thought, ‘Man, I\'m alone, and that\'s why I\'m feeling all these terrible things.’ I moved to New York City and I felt just as alone there as I had in Vermont. I realized that what was going on was a lot of internal things that I needed to work out, a lot of problems that I had to work on in therapy, and also discover through writing some of the songs about this stuff. Finally, when I started singing about being alone and being out in Vermont, I felt like I could come to terms with some of those things.”
Gracie Abrams may be fresh off her teenage years, but she’s old enough to know risk and reward belong together. Since she began releasing music in 2019, the singer-songwriter has homed in on emotional leaps of faith, her tremulous vocals expertly evoking the tear-splattered diary scribbles a great young love inspires. On her stripped-down new record *The Secret of Us*, Abrams takes stock of every crush and contradiction that led her to this chapter, reflecting the glow of formative past romances through soft prisms of pop, folk, and indie rock. Anyone who missed her coveted stint as an opener on the Eras Tour will welcome Taylor Swift’s feature on “us.,” a soaring centerpiece addressed to an older partner Abrams can’t be sure ever took her seriously. She isn’t afraid to face the anxiety around her own legitimacy, or face it alone—Swift is the only feature across these 13 tracks. But between the cathartic power chords of “Tough Love,” the twinkling balladry of “I Love You, I’m Sorry,” and the delicate simplicity of “Free Now,” the real secret to Abrams’ success shines through in her craftsmanship: She’s as serious as it gets.
On Mustafa’s 2024 debut album, the Sudanese Canadian songwriter moves from topic to topic with the deft narrative craft of a seasoned wordsmith. “Dunya,” which translates from Arabic to “the world in all its flaws,” perfectly encapsulates Mustafa’s approach to songwriting: It\'s raw and unfiltered but totally in awe of the planet on which we find ourselves. On opener “Name of God,” Mustafa surrounds himself with little outside of an acoustic guitar melody, letting his powerful voice carry the song’s emotional heft. He blends the personal and universal on the song, asking, “Whose Lord are you naming/When you start to break things?” Elsewhere, on the percussive “Old Life,” he looks back with mixed feelings on a relationship long in the rearview. He croons, “I\'m not yours/But there\'s a part of your life that is mine.” All we are, Mustafa asserts, is the experiences we have.
Woodland Studios is the cultural anchor of East Nashville’s Five Points, a bustling district of restaurants, bars, and vintage shops that some consider the heart of the greater artistic enclave found east of downtown Music City. Woodland is the home studio of musical and life partners David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, as well as the headquarters for the duo’s Acony Records. Nearly destroyed by the deadly March 2020 tornadoes that devastated much of Nashville (the pair actually rushed out mid-storm to rescue master recordings), Woodland is still standing, though only after substantial repairs. That close call inspired Welch and Rawlings to celebrate their musical home with this album, which also notably bears both artists’ names. (The pair has a tendency to alternate album billing for their always-collaborative projects, like Rawlings’ credit for 2017’s *Poor David’s Almanack* and Welch’s for 2011’s celebrated *The Harrow & The Harvest*.) Accordingly, *Woodland* is as crackling and alive an album as the pair has made, leaning into the warmth of its homey origins and the ease of the duo’s fruitful and supportive creative partnership. Production is lusher and more complex, though never distractingly so—as always, the pair’s ultimate reverence is for songcraft, as heard on the evocatively titled opening track “Empty Trainload of Sky,” which could hint at the awestruck horror wrought by a tornado, or “The Day the Mississippi Died,” a clever bit of social commentary that also breaks the fourth wall (“I’m thinking that this melody has lasted long enough/The subject’s entertaining but the rhymes are pretty rough”). Other highlights include “Hashtag,” which avoids hollow social media commentary in favor of acknowledging the plight of artists whose names only become media fodder in death, and closer “Howdy Howdy,” a sweet encapsulation of the pair’s unbreakable connection.
Lizzy McAlpine’s third full-length began as a classic breakup album—which is to say, “tunnel vision,” she tells Apple Music. “Everything was about that.” It wasn’t until she wrote the runaway hit “Older” that she realized what the project was *really* about: personal growth, trusting your instincts, seeing the bigger picture. “That song recontextualized everything,” she said. “Suddenly I saw what those three years had really been for.” *Older* is a portrait of an artist in her early twenties, falling out of love and stepping into her power. Creating it required her to get out of her comfort zone. After making the tough decision to part ways with her producer, she surrounded herself with a full band, re-recorded most of the songs, and assembled a project that confronts a breakup’s gray areas (on “Drunk, Running,” she wonders if she’s partly to blame for an ex’s struggles with sobriety). McAlpine ordered the songs on the album to trace the arc of the relationship, culminating in four tracks that illustrate the perspective she gained. Read on to discover the story behind each song. **“The Elevator”** “When I decided to remake the album with a band, I knew I wanted it to have a proper, cool intro. This song was the first one we recorded together. We didn’t even have a drummer yet. But it felt right. And it was proof of concept, like, ‘OK, we’re going to be able to do this.’” **“Come Down Soon”** “This was one of the first songs that I wrote for the album in 2021. It’s gone through a lot of different iterations, and only when I brought it to the band did it begin to make sense. Prior to that, we were just putting pieces together one by one, and it wasn’t working. Finally, I realized this music needs a band behind it. A collective force.” **“Like It Tends To Do”** “This was the first song I wrote for this project, back when I was finishing up *five seconds flat*. Immediately it was my favorite song I’d ever written. It felt like some of my best songwriting. I knew it deserved its own place on a different project.” **“Movie Star”** “I wrote this with my friend Olivia Barton who opened for me on my last tour. We initially had a wild outro that was full of electric guitars and big drums. But when we got into the studio with the band, we realized that ‘Elevator’ had a similar arc and sound. So we cut the whole outro out of this one and now it’s just a short, simple little song. I think it’s so much better this way.” **“All Falls Down”** “I wrote this one when I was on tour, which is weird. I never write songs on the road because I hate touring, so I’m usually pretty miserable and uninspired. But I guess this was different because I was writing it about *that feeling*. Originally, it was slow and ballad-y because that’s what the lyrics feel like, but it evolved into this fun, upbeat number. I love that juxtaposition.” **“Staying”** “This was supposed to be a really short interlude, and it had this outro section that I had written that my old producer suggested we cut. But later, when I took it to the band and they jammed on it, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m actually going to add the outro back in. I think it could be cool.’ And now it’s my favorite part of the song. I’m so glad I decided to do that, and that I didn’t let that producer’s opinion sway me.” **“I Guess”** “Most of the time, in my revisions with the band, we were taking a lot of stuff out. It didn’t feel like the original recordings had enough space, had room to breathe. This one was sort of the opposite. It had a lot we wanted to keep—strings, drums, horns. Instead, we just layered in some additional elements—guitar, piano, and bass chords—to try to make it cooler.” **“Drunk, Running”** “I wrote this song after I was out of the relationship \[that this album is about\] and pretty far removed from it. I went out with my friends one night and my ex was there; we were at a bar and he was ignoring me and just looked really miserable. I was like, ‘Damn, this is hard to watch.’ This song is about that experience, and our time together before that. I ordered the tracks in a very specific way to carry you from the beginning of the relationship into the second half, where things start to devolve and get really toxic. ‘Drunk, Running’ is the beginning of that toxic chapter. The bridge is kind of like, ‘Oh God, what if I did this to you? What if I made you this way? I’m so sorry for staying when I should have left.’ It’s me realizing my part that I played.” **“Broken Glass”** “I played this one on my last tour. The original version was done. I love this song so much and think it fits perfectly in this spot on the album. It’s just really dark.” **“You Forced Me To”** “I wrote this song during a recording session when I stepped outside to take a break. I went home that night and recorded it on my laptop, and that’s what you hear. We didn’t re-record anything. When I went to the band and I played them this demo, they were like, ‘That’s it. We don’t need to do anything.’ And Mason \[Stoops\] in particular—he’s our guitar player, and kind of the leader of the band—he was adamant about me being the only person credited.” **“Older”** “This song changed everything for me. I had the first verse and chorus written in a voice memo that I’d kind of forgotten about because my first producer thought it might be too Disney. But when I played it for Mason and Taylor \[Mackall\], they were immediately like, ‘No, this is amazing.’ The only issue was that I didn’t know how to finish it, since by the time we revisited it, I was so far removed from the intensity of that breakup. They suggested I write about where I am now. Doing that tied the whole song together for me, and cemented the album’s entire concept. It unlocked everything. We finished the song in 20 minutes, did three takes, used the third one, and never looked back.” **“Better Than This”** “I knew I wanted to update this song from the original version, so the band and I did a bunch of live takes. That was generally our process throughout. We’d do a bunch of live takes, pick one, and then pepper stuff on top of it. I loved that the core of the album was live recordings—everyone huddled in a room. It felt like that was the only way to approach this project, and this song in particular.” **“March”** “This song is about my dad, who passed away in 2020. Every 13th track on all of my albums is about him. He passed away on the 13th of March, and my first album came out on the 13th, and there were 13 tracks, and the 13th track was about him. I didn’t really plan that, but it created a tradition. I don’t really write about my dad with anyone because it’s just really heavy and personal, but I wrote this song with \[songwriter/composer\] Ethan \[Gruska\] who made me feel safe and open. Recording it was amazing. It feels so warm when the band comes in. It’s a hug for your ears.” **“Vortex”** “This song was supposed to be the title of the album for so long, but again, it felt like tunnel vision. This album is, ultimately, about so much more than a breakup. But I still thought it was a perfect way to end the project. I love that the lyrics are forward-facing and hopeful, like, ‘Someday I will be strong enough to say no to you,’ or ‘Someday I’ll be strong enough to let this go.’ The gist is: I may not be there yet, but I know I will be.”
Callahan comes alive in Chicago, with Jim White, Matt Kinsey and special guests Nick Mazzarella, Pascal Kerong'A, Nathaniel Ballinger and Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams & Lisa Alvarado. Why, Bill? “Songs tend to mutate after they've been recorded. These songs were mutating faster than usual. Like whatever happened to Bruce Banner in the lab – I knew these songs were about to get superpowers… this change needed to be documented.”
