Karen Pittelman returns to her roots on Guaranteed Broken Heart: gothic summonings and Jewish country music. Pittelman, the frontwoman for Karen & the Sorrows, has been a leading light in the queer country movement. Her long-standing concert series, the Gay Ole Opry has created a network of queer country and roots artists across the world. Capitalizing on their presence at this year’s AmericanaFest, Pittelman used the opportunity to launch the Country Music Against White Supremacy initiative.
Sara Melson’s graceful, buoyant folk-pop has always tackled life’s heavier stuff, and somewhere between their doe-eyed vulnerability and steely-eyed resolve, her songs seems to lighten the load of whatever baggage you’re toting.
The inevitability of change is the topic on the table in her new single, “Same River.” Here, the songwriter cribs from Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who wrote: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” Says Melson: “By the time you’ve lived long enough, you understand that the only constant in life, truly, is change. I was sitting in the back seat of the car, my parents in the front, and it hit me — that they would be gone one day, and how I’ve been behind them in that back seat over the course of what feels like so many different lifetimes. Right in that moment — I don’t even know what they were talking about up there — my dad turned to my mom and said, ‘Yeah, well, you know… You’ll never step into the same river twice’. That was one of those light bulb moments for me as a songwriter.”
Nashville powerhouse Michelle Brooke makes a bold move with her new song “Storm,” premiering today. Her voice dazzles in the light of gospel and soul music, and while the production certainly crescendos to mirror her own journey out of a broken relationship, there is stunning vulnerability embedded in the lyrics. READ MORE…
Nashville powerhouse Michelle Brooke makes a bold move with her new song “Storm,” premiering today. Her voice dazzles in the light of gospel and soul music, and while the production certainly crescendos to mirror her own journey out of a broken relationship, there is stunning vulnerability embedded in the lyrics.
Nashville singer-songwriter John Salaway returns with a new album, Americana Dreams on 25 October. The latest cut issued from that set, “The Beauty That Surrounds Us” recalls Stephen Stills’ early, high yield of dazzling folk and British masters such as John Martyn. The song reminds us that there’s something heartwarming about the human voice, an electric guitar, and a damn fine set of lyrics.
Nikki & The Phantom Caller’s namesake Nikki Speake wrote future album cut “They’ve Never Walked Through Shadows” about cryptozoological creatures and battlefield legends from her hometown of Dadeville, Ala., providing her band with an excuse to release a spooky music video just in time for Halloween.
Speake’s family fables come from an area known as Booger Hollow (Booger as in ghost, Hollow pronounced “holler,” like Loretta Lynn says it).
“We were told that the Pig Man haunted the woods, and my older cousins used to scare me to death by saying they could hear his high-pitched squeals at night!,” Speake says. “It’s also only a few miles from the Horseshoe Bend National Park, where Andrew Jackson killed the last of the Red Stick Creeks; ending the Creek War, which resulted in Alabama becoming a state in 1819. So, it has a bit of a sad and supernatural history, and in many ways is a place that time has forgotten.”