There is a Jewish mystical tradition that at any given moment there are 36 truly righteous people living among us. They are called the lamed-vavniks, from the Hebrew letters that represent the number 36. (And 36 itself is twice 18, the number associated with chai, life.)

The best part of the story is that we don’t know who they are. They may not even know themselves. They do not seek fame or notoriety; in fact, any hint that someone is seeking publicity is probably enough to conclude that they are not one of the 36. And when one of the 36 dies, another righteous person immediately takes their place.

Which would seem to rule out Dolly Parton.

It would be silly to claim that Parton did not attract attention to herself. She was, very deliberately, the character of Dolly Parton: overdressed, over-coiffed and over the top in almost every imaginable way—including in talent. She once—OK, very often—said that it cost a lot of money to look that cheap.

But underneath all of that was something much quieter.

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I write about music, and I could happily make the case for Dolly Parton based on the songs alone. For almost anyone else, writing “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “I Will Always Love You” and a couple dozen other classics would be more than enough for the first line of the obituary.

And the songs themselves tell us something about her. “Coat of Many Colors” takes poverty and turns it into a story about dignity and love. The narrator of “Jolene,” faced with the woman who might take away the man she loves, responds not with hatred but with a remarkably vulnerable plea. “I Will Always Love You” somehow makes leaving someone an act of generosity.

Parton had an extraordinary ability to see people clearly, especially ordinary people, and to give them their dignity. That was part of her art.

It was also part of the way she lived.

How many times over the past 20 or 30 years have I heard about some tragedy and then learned that Dolly Parton was helping to address it? And how many times have I heard about something wonderful and only later discovered that she was behind it?

During COVID, I remember learning that her philanthropy had helped fund the research that led to the Moderna vaccine and thinking, of course it did. Of course Dolly Parton was part of this, too.

When wildfires devastated her home region of East Tennessee in 2016, her My People Fund put money directly into the hands of families who had lost their homes.

And then there is the Imagination Library.

Parton started the program in 1995 because her father had never learned to read or write. It began by sending a free book every month to young children in her home county in Tennessee. It eventually grew into an international program that has given away hundreds of millions of books.

For all her flamboyance, there was remarkably little “look at me” in the way Dolly Parton gave away her money. Again and again, the point seemed to be what the money could do, not making sure everyone knew whose money it was.

And here is where the story becomes unexpectedly Jewish.

In 2005, Jewish philanthropist Harold Grinspoon heard Parton talking on the radio about the Imagination Library. Grinspoon was thinking about how to build Jewish literacy and connection. As he listened, an idea took shape: What if Jewish families received Jewish children’s books in the same way?

“We should create a Jewish version of Imagination Library,” he told his daughter-in-law.

That idea became PJ Library.

Think about the journey of that mitzvah. A girl grows up poor in the mountains of Tennessee with a father who cannot read. She becomes one of the most famous entertainers in the world and uses some of what she has earned to put books into children’s homes. A Jewish philanthropist hears about it on the radio and borrows the idea. Today Jewish children around the world receive Jewish books because Dolly Parton once decided that other children should have something her father never did.

I hope Parton will be remembered for those good deeds—those mitzvot—at least as much as for the music.

And what an extraordinary thing that is to say.

Because the music mattered, too. Her creativity brought joy, comfort, and beauty to millions of people. That, too, is a very real gift to the world.

Maybe the lamed-vavnik tradition isn’t really about identifying the 36. In fact, trying to identify them rather misses the point. Maybe it is about reminding the rest of us what a righteous life can look like: using whatever gifts we have to add a little more joy, dignity, knowledge and kindness to the world.

Dolly Parton’s gifts happened to include a once-in-a-generation ability to write a song, a voice you could recognize in three notes, a wicked sense of humor, a great deal of money—and an enormous blond wig.

Was Dolly Parton one of the 36?

I have no idea.

But Jewish tradition says that when one of the 36 dies, another immediately takes their place.

After all, one of the 36 might even turn out to be a girl from the Tennessee hills in a homemade coat of many colors.

We cannot know who will take her place. But that gives each of us something to aspire to.

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A new Blaze Foley album came out last week, no mean feat for a songwriter who died in 1989.

Sittin’ With Blaze: A Tribute to Blaze Foley brings together artists from across generations to interpret the revered Texas songwriter’s work, including Lucy Dacus, John Moreland, Phosphorescent and Joshua Ray Walker, alongside Lucinda Williams.

I have always had a soft spot for tribute albums. This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark, Enjoy Every Sandwich: The Songs of Warren Zevon and Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne are among my favorites. Some tribute albums are terrific. Some are uneven. Some feel like everybody involved showed up because somebody they could not say “no” to asked them to. But the best of them remind us of something that can get lost amid everything else we talk about when we talk about music—the voice, the production, the performance, the personality, the mythology.

It’s about the fucking songs.

Foley’s biography can easily overwhelm his music. He knocked around the Austin songwriting scene, where he became a friend and running mate of Townes Van Zandt. He drank hard, lived rough and cultivated—or at least acquired—a reputation as an eccentric and an outlaw, the kind of character who generated stories almost as quickly as he wrote songs. When he recorded two nights at the Austin Outhouse in late 1988 for a live cassette, he planned to donate part of the proceeds to a homeless shelter. He was shot and killed before the planned release party, at 39; for years afterward, the only way to buy Foley’s music was from his friend Lost John Casner, who sold copies from the trunk of his car around Austin. It’s a life that practically begs to become legend.

But Foley’s songs lived on. Merle Haggard recorded “If I Could Only Fly.” John Prine recorded “Clay Pigeons.” Lyle Lovett recorded “Election Day.” Other singers carried Foley’s songs to audiences he never reached, including listeners who had no idea who wrote them.

Now it is happening again. Sittin’ With Blaze reaches back to Foley’s fabled mid-1970s “tree house” recordings, spare early demos recorded in Georgia and later released as Sittin’ by the Road. The new album puts those songs in the hands of more than a dozen contemporary artists.

I came to Sittin’ With Blaze knowing many of the singers. I left wanting to hear more from Dylan Earl, Angela Autumn and a few others I wasn’t aware of. That’s the fun of a tribute album: discovery can run in either direction. You can come for the songwriter and discover the singers, or come for the singers and discover the songwriter.

Phosphorescent opens Sittin’ With Blaze with “If I Could Only Fly”; Lucinda Williams closes it with the same song. The album gives us two very different, and very compelling, readings of one of Foley’s best-known songs. The voices change. The arrangements change. The audiences change. The song doesn’t—or, more accurately, it does. Each singer finds something the others don’t. That’s the peculiar pleasure of a great tribute album.

There are more ways than ever to preserve a musical legacy. Classic albums are remastered and repackaged. Deluxe editions give us demos and alternate takes. Documentaries tell us how records were made. Anniversary tours bring beloved albums back to the stage. All of that preserves recordings. Songs are different; they need somebody to sing them.

John Moreland, with Lydia Loveless, makes Foley’s “Faded Love and Memories” sound like a John Moreland song. And that’s a high compliment. A great song can absorb the person singing it without surrendering the person who wrote it. The Guy Clark tribute offers one example after another. Kris Kristofferson turns “Hemingway’s Whiskey” into something haunting, while Patty Griffin gives “The Cape” an almost ethereal quality. Neither sounds like Clark’s recording. Both sound completely authentic.

A different voice can reveal something in a song we hadn’t heard before. A familiar lyric suddenly lands harder. A song we thought was funny turns out to be devastating. Something that sounded confessional becomes universal.

Sometimes the interpretation doesn’t work. Tribute albums tend to be uneven because interpretation involves risk. Let 15 musicians loose in a songwriter’s catalog and some will illuminate it, some will merely perform it, and somebody will almost certainly make you reach for the skip button.

Like the best tribute albums, Sittin’ With Blaze touches all the bases. It introduced me to artists I didn’t know, made me hear familiar songs differently, and sent me back to Foley’s own recordings. Thirty-seven years after his death, a group of artists went back to those old tree-house tapes and found songs they wanted to sing. That’s not mere preservation. It’s a celebration of still-living songs.

You can find the music here: https://lostartrecords.bandcamp.com/

For much of the last decade, River Shook made country-rock that felt like it had been kicked down a flight of stairs and come up swinging. As the frontperson for Sarah Shook & the Disarmers, they wrote songs of bad decisions, worse relationships, and the stubborn will to keep moving. The band’s fourth and final album, 2024’s Revelations, was perhaps its strongest: taut, hard-edged, and powered by a band that knew exactly how much danger to leave in the room.

Shook’s self-titled solo debut, River Shook, arrives two years after Revelations and almost exactly a year after the Disarmers’ final show. It does not try to recreate that band’s sound. The edges are softer, the tempos more deliberate, and the prevailing mood is one of someone looking back before deciding where to go next.

Recorded in the rural North Carolina home Shook shares with guitarist and partner Blake Tallent, the album was made by partners building a new working life after the end of a long-running band. Tallent plays most of the instruments, with Taylor Swan adding pedal steel and banjo. Shook is releasing the record on their newly launched Blackberry River Records, making the new independence more than a matter of billing.

Shook’s voice is the record’s main attraction. There is something of mid-career Lucinda Williams in its grain and authority—not imitation, but the sound of a singer marked by experience rather than smoothed out by it. Shook’s phrasing is leaner and more impatient than Williams’s, and some of the punk edge that animated the Disarmers remains. Even when a song settles into an easy groove, Shook can make the lyric underneath it feel uneasy.

That is especially true on “Beater Car,” the album’s most affecting song. It addresses the painful distance between a parent’s hopes and means, and Shook sings it without asking for forgiveness. “Free at Last” begins with the simple promise, “I will be free at last,” while “Country Angel” offers some of the motion and pleasure longtime listeners may be hoping for—even as Shook warns, “You can’t tie a feeling down.” “Lost Without Your Love” makes room for an outlaw story; “Blue Vervain” and “Running to Georgia” allow for affection without suggesting that love wipes away the past.

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In an important sense, River Shook is a recovery album. Recovery supplies the record’s governing perspective: an honest accounting of damage done, damage survived, and the tentative work of building something better. It has an emotional kinship with Mary Gauthier’s The Foundling, another record that looks directly at inherited hurt while refusing both self-pity and easy redemption.

The songs also keep returning to time: a son’s graduation, the price of years on the road, the end of a band, and the realization that stability may be possible. Shook is not interested in nostalgia. They are asking what it means to recognize the costs of escape and ambition—and whether there is still time to repair what can be repaired and enjoy what has been found.

The album’s restraint gives it much of its character, but it is also its limitation. Shook and Tallent favor polished, patient arrangements, and several songs stay at much the same emotional and musical temperature when they seem to call for a harder push. The writing remains intelligent and often moving, but the album does not always generate the voltage its best ideas deserve.

Shook is supporting River Shook on tour with a mix of full-band headline dates and a run of duo shows opening for the Old 97’s. The full-band shows are a useful reminder that the record’s restraint is a choice, not necessarily a retreat from the live-wire country-rock that made the Disarmers so compelling. Tour dates are here.

River Shook is a promising start to a new phase: a record of reflection, recovery, and hard-won hope from a singer who remains hard to mistake for anyone else.

River Shook is out now on Blackberry River Records.

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What happens to angry young men when they grow older?

That’s the question at the heart of New Ways to Lose, the new album from American Aquarium.

Artists who survive long enough eventually confront that question. Few have a compelling answer.

American Aquarium founder, frontman and principal songwriter BJ Barham does.

For two decades, Barham has found songs in broken people and broken places, dreams that don’t quite work out and towns that never got the factory back.

More than a decade sober, Barham is married, raising a daughter in Wendell, North Carolina. He runs his own label and still packs record orders on his dining room table. Last year, concerned about the future of his adopted hometown, he didn’t just write songs about it. He ran for town council.

Having something worth protecting has made Barham a more urgent songwriter.

The album opens with “Dollar General,” where Barham surveys a town that’s slowly disappearing. When he sings, “It ain’t left vs. right, it’s bottom vs. top,” he’s less interested in ideology than community. The song isn’t looking for villains nearly as much as it’s mourning what has been lost—and insisting that it’s still worth fighting for.

The best songwriters don’t spend their careers repeating themselves. Nor do they abandon the qualities that made them worth hearing in the first place. Bruce Springsteen, Lucinda Williams and Chrissie Hynde have all continued to evolve while staying true to themselves. Their music has grown richer because life has given them more to write about. Barham is beginning to occupy that same territory.

New Ways to Lose refuses to confuse seriousness with solemnity. The songs wrestle with economic decline, grief, family and memory, but producer Shooter Jennings never lets the record collapse under that weight. The guitars still roar. The rhythm section rolls. Jennings understands that songs about loss don’t have to sound like defeat.

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Not every song is turned up to 11.

“Can’t Into Could” trades outrage for resilience. “4×60” looks back with affection rather than nostalgia, recalling a younger North Carolina without pretending it was somehow better. It has some of John Hiatt’s observational warmth. Barham isn’t yet Hiatt’s equal as a craftsman (who is?), but he increasingly finds the extraordinary in ordinary lives.

“Favorite Hello,” Barham’s heartbreaking farewell to the family dog, sneaks up on you. One minute you’re tapping the steering wheel. The next you’re wondering why your eyes suddenly aren’t quite dry.

In “Just Like You,” Barham imagines his daughter trying to know the grandmother she’ll never meet. When he sings, “I wish she could get to know more than just your name,” it’s a simple line that carries the weight of generations.

The heart of the album is “Out There in the Dark.”

“I used to think the world was out to get me / ’Til I started shouldering the blame.”

That’s perspective, not surrender.

“I refuse to sit back idly / Mindlessly playing the cards we’re dealt.”

Those two lines say a lot about BJ Barham.

That conviction also explains why American Aquarium is one of the best live bands in Americana.

I’ve left John Moreland concerts deeply moved but emotionally exhausted. I’ve never left an American Aquarium show that way. Barham is having too much fun. So is his band. He doesn’t ask audiences to admire his convictions from a distance. He invites them to sing them back at full volume. The result isn’t escapism. It’s community.

The closing “Bad Habits” looks back over the life Barham has built—not just a career, but a family, a hometown and a community. It ends with the line that quietly unlocks the entire album:

“You gotta find the things in life worth bleeding for.”

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A Feather in the Wind

Mostly about music; mostly Americana. But also things Jewish, political, cultural.

By Mark Pelavin

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“I did not have singing ‘In Spite of Ourselves’ and dancing with Emmylou Harris on my bingo card.”

Texas singer-songwriter Hayes Carll’s remark drew a laugh from the crowd at Wolf Trap, but it also captured the spirit of A Songwriters Tribute to John Prine. The June 9 concert gathered an extraordinary collection of performers to celebrate one of America’s most beloved songwriters.

Yet what emerged over the course of nearly three hours was something more than a tribute concert. It was a portrait of the community that Prine’s songs continue to inspire and the family that has worked to nurture it.

Wolf Trap was the perfect setting. Prine first appeared there in 1972 and returned nineteen times over the decades that followed. Many of the evening’s performers shared their own history with the venue. Throughout the night, artists spoke of Wolf Trap with the affection usually reserved for old friends, reinforcing the sense that this was less a concert stop than a gathering place.

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The evening’s structure was central to its success. Rather than asking performers simply to cover Prine songs, most paired one or more Prine compositions with songs of their own. The result was less a tribute concert than a conversation among songwriters. Again and again throughout the concert, artists demonstrated not only what they had learned from Prine, but how they had carried those lessons into their own work.

That was true right from the start when Jobi Riccio, whose songs would feel perfectly at home on a shelf alongside Prine’s records, took the stage. Her own “The Ridge,” built around the refrain “The more love you show me / The more I seem to need to be alone,” explored solitude and longing with the same kind of emotional complexity that characterized so much of Prine’s best work.

Nashville Singer-Songwriter Fancy Hagood followed with a playful rendition of “I Just Want to Dance With You” before turning to his own “To the Moon.” The straightforward love song could easily become saccharine in less capable hands, but Hagood found emotional honesty without excessive sentimentality—a balancing act that John Prine himself often managed with remarkable ease.

Allison Russell, greeted with one of the evening’s loudest ovations, observed that “John could make you feel five emotions all at the same time.” She proved her point with a stirring rendition of “Everything Is Cool.” Russell—accompanied by her husband, guitarist JT Nero and joined by the members of I’m With Her as a powerful chorus—floated gracefully through her own “Really Real,” built around the question, “Who’s gonna be your shelter from the storm?”

No performers better embodied the concert’s collaborative spirit than the members of I’m With Her—Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan. Appearing first without the house band, they relied only on fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and the distinctive vocal blend that has become their signature for a gorgeous version of “Bruised Orange.” There is a special alchemy when those voices come together, and their obvious enjoyment in making music together was contagious. Joined later by Prine’s band for “Wild and Clear and Blue,” which they described as being inspired by Prine and Nanci Griffith, they sang of hearing Prine perform “Paradise” as a child and of a voice that still runs “like the Brazos” through them. The song felt less like a tribute than a continuation of the musical conversation Prine helped inspire.

Lucius delivered one of the concert’s musical highlights with a haunting rendition of “Hello in There.” The song felt as though it had been waiting for the voices of Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig all along. Their harmonies illuminated both the loneliness and tenderness at the song’s core, while Fats Kaplin’s pedal steel added another layer of emotional depth. Joined by the members of I’m With Her for “Dusty Trails,” they demonstrated how easily the show moved between tribute and collaboration.

The concert’s more established artists proved equally compelling.

Accompanied by Kaplin’s mandolin, Patty Griffin brought “I Remember Everything” to life with a performance that was melancholy but never sad. Rather than emphasizing the song’s grief, she revealed its personality, humor, and hard-earned wisdom. She followed with her own “Love Throw a Line,” transforming the amphitheater into something closer to a listening room.

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Margo Price opened with a sharp, snarky rendition of “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” Once heard primarily as satire, its references to a “dirty little war” landed differently in 2026. Price followed it with her as-yet-unreleased “Screw You and the Horse You Rode In On” before closing with a slow, almost stately reading of “Angel From Montgomery.” More than fifty years after Prine wrote it, a song that can sometimes feel overly familiar instead emerged as startlingly vital, earning the concert’s first standing ovation.

Prine’s longtime band, led by guitarist and music director Jason Wilber, connected performers, songs, and generations of artists. Multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin shone throughout the concert, moving between pedal steel and mandolin and contributing to many of the night’s strongest performances. These were not simply backing musicians. They were Prine’s musicians, his partners, the people who had spent years bringing his songs to life onstage. Their presence gave the concert an authenticity and continuity every bit as important as their musicianship.

Texas singer-songwriter Hayes Carll returned to the stage for a joyous rendition of “Illegal Smile,” recalling that it was the song he performed at his first open mic. Joined by Price and a crowd eager to sing along, Carll turned the performance into one of the show’s most exuberant moments. He later offered his own “Beaumont,” a powerful reminder that he belongs on this stage not only as an admirer of great songwriting, but as a practitioner of it. Carll also offered perhaps the concert’s most concise description of Prine’s work, praising the “humanity and grace” found in his songs.

Emmylou Harris spent much of the evening contributing to duets and ensemble performances rather than claiming the spotlight for herself. Nothing says loneliness like a pedal steel guitar, and Fats Kaplin’s playing provided the perfect accompaniment to a beautiful rendition of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” Built around Harris’ voice and one of Prine’s most enduring melodies, the performance showcased Prine’s gift for expressing complicated emotions in language that sounds deceptively simple. Harris later closed her set with her own “Red Dirt Girl,” a reminder that icons are icons for a reason.

CBS News’ John Dickerson was a surprise addition to the bill. He spoke movingly about Prine’s songwriting before offering a dramatic recitation of “Mexican Home.” Stripped of melody and presented as spoken word, the song still held the audience’s attention from beginning to end. Lines such as “Mama dear, your boy is here / Far across the sea” demonstrated Prine’s remarkable ability to hold seemingly contradictory ideas in tension. The performance served as a reminder that his songs draw much of their power from what they leave unsaid.

The concert’s most personal moments belonged to Tommy Prine. Introducing “Far From Me” as his favorite of his father’s songs, he noted that John had written it as a teenager. Tommy followed with his own “Ships in the Harbor,” a graceful tribute that included the line, “I guess he was passing through, and I am too.”

That sense of community extends beyond the stage. Fiona Prine and son Jack spoke briefly about the work of the Hello In There Foundation, which supports community organizations across the country. Fiona described its mission as helping “the quiet people who need a hand,” while Jack spoke about reaching out to the fan community as an important way of keeping his father’s memory alive—a mission reflected in more than $1.4 million in grants to over 100 organizations.

For the finale, the entire cast returned to the stage. Introducing “Paradise,” Tommy Prine noted that only one song ever concluded a John Prine show. By the time dozens of voices joined together on the chorus, the choice felt as welcome as it was inevitable.

Some songwriters create works so closely tied to their own voices that other performers can only imitate them. Prine’s greatest songs seem to work differently. They remain unmistakably his, yet somehow make room for other artists to bring their own experiences, personalities, and perspectives to the material. That quality was evident throughout the concert, from Lucius and Emmylou Harris to Tommy Prine and the newest generation of songwriters on the bill. Six years after his death, the songs continue not only to endure, but to build the kind of community on display throughout the concert.

Additional information about the Hello in There Foundation, including how to support it’s vital work, is available on its website.

Like many music fans, I read the New York Times’ recent list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters (gift link). Interesting? Absolutely. Definitive? Not even close.

The response I found most valuable came from music critic and Substacker Geoffrey Himes. Himes listens far more broadly than I do, but we often respond to the same artists, so I was curious to see who made his list of the 100 best living American songwriters that I didn’t know.

The Times list generated plenty of commentary, including:

• The 30 Greatest Living Songwriters According to The New York Times — And What This List Really Says About Modern Music

• Arguing with the NYT’s Songwriter List and Other Pointless Traditions

• The “30 Great Living American Songwriter” Debacle

But Himes’ list sent me down a different rabbit hole. While I recognized most of the names, there were several artists and songwriters I knew little or nothing about, including:

• Richmond Fontaine

• Willy Vlautin (also of The Delines)

• Kevin Gordon

• The Bottle Rockets

• Oliver Wood (The Wood Brothers)

• Colin Meloy (The Decemberists)

• Gregory Porter

So I created a Spotify playlist with four or five representative songs from each and have spent much of the past week listening.

The experience has been a reminder of one of the great joys of being a music fan: discovering artists who have been hiding in plain sight for years. The biggest revelation so far may be Willy Vlautin, whose songs combine vivid storytelling, empathy, and a powerful sense of place in ways that immediately grabbed me. I’ve also found myself returning repeatedly to Kevin Gordon and The Bottle Rockets.

If you’d like to listen along, here’s the playlist:

I’m curious:

Which songwriter on Himes’ list do you think deserves far more attention than they receive? And if you’ve spent time with Vlautin, Gordon, Oliver Wood, or any of the others, where should I go next?

And if you listen to the playlist, let me know which artist grabs you most.

There’s something tricky about live albums by artists as emotionally direct as Hurray for the Riff Raff, the long-running musical project of songwriter . The studio records already feel lived-in, intimate, almost conversational. So a live set has to do more than simply recreate the songs onstage. It has to reveal something new: greater urgency, deeper connection, unexpected looseness, or some sense that the songs only fully come alive in a room full of people.

Live Forever does exactly that.

More than a document of a tour, Live Forever sharpens the larger ideas that have come to define Segarra’s recent work. History hangs over these songs not as backdrop, but as active force.

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The Clash’s Joe Strummer once said that “the future is unwritten.” Segarra has spent the past few years making the opposite case: the past is still alive. Not as nostalgia, but as lived reality — history persisting through labor, migration, identity, grief, and community. By performing The Past Is Still Alive in full on Live Forever, Hurray for the Riff Raff turns that idea into something larger than a song cycle. The material begins to feel cumulative and deeply shared, without ever losing the intimacy at the center of Segarra’s writing.

Songs like “Rhododendron” gain a ragged, almost euphoric energy here, while “Pa’lante” arrives less as a familiar encore than collective affirmation. The performances rarely feel polished in the traditional live-album sense; instead, they feel alive, flexible, and emotionally exposed.

Live Forever was recorded at Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, one of the country’s most storied homes for traditional and contemporary folk music. Segarra’s songwriting remains deeply rooted in folk traditions, but the musicians surrounding them are not folk purists at all. The current lineup, featuring guitarist Parker Grogan, bassist and vocalist Nnamdi, drummer Marcus Drake, and multi-instrumentalist Sen Morimoto, emerges from Chicago’s DIY and experimental scenes, bringing punk energy, jazz textures, indie-rock looseness, and genre fluidity into songs that resist easy categorization. Recorded at one of America’s most storied folk institutions, Live Forever quietly argues for an expansive definition of folk music itself — one broad enough to include punk ethics, indie-rock textures, jazz phrasing, and the collaborative spirit of Chicago’s independent music community.

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That openness has always been central to Hurray for the Riff Raff. Segarra has spent more than a decade building one of the most distinctive catalogs orbiting contemporary Americana, blending folk storytelling, punk ethics, indie-rock experimentation, and socially engaged songwriting into music that rarely sits comfortably inside any single genre. Segarra’s lineage includes folk storytellers and Americana traditionalists, but the deeper spirit may come from artists like Strummer — musicians who treated songs not as museum pieces, but as living tools for resistance, solidarity, and connection.

At times, Segarra’s songwriting recalls early R.E.M., with lyrics that feel emotionally and politically charged even when their precise meanings remain elusive. Her songs operate less as linear narratives than as accumulations of image, memory, movement, and feeling. In a live setting, that ambiguity becomes a strength rather than an obstacle, allowing listeners to inhabit the songs emotionally before fully understanding them intellectually.

That openness extends beyond the stage. Segarra cultivates an unusually direct relationship with listeners through touring, activism, and a Substack presence that feels more conversational than promotional. Live Forever carries that same ethos. Rather than presenting the performances as polished artifacts, the album documents a moment of genuine connection between songs, band, audience, and scene.

However expansive the arrangements become, Segarra’s voice remains the gravitational center of the music. There is both grit and tenderness in the delivery, a quality that makes even the most impressionistic lyrics feel emotionally immediate and fully inhabited. Much of the album’s emotional power ultimately comes from that voice itself: weathered but warm, capable of sounding simultaneously intimate and anthemic. Even at their most abstract, the songs feel emotionally trustworthy because Segarra sings them with such complete conviction.

Live Forever captures more than a performance. It gives us a singular artist, a powerful band, and a remarkable set of songs still revealing new emotional and communal depths in front of an audience.

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A Feather in the Wind

Mostly about music; mostly Americana. But also things Jewish, political, cultural.

By Mark Pelavin

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Drayton Farley’s A Heavy Duty Heart captures the moment when a promising songwriter stops sounding like “one to watch” and starts sounding like an artist with a clear, confident point of view. The Alabama songwriter has always written with emotional plainspokenness and blue-collar detail, but this record broadens the frame without sanding down the rough edges that made him compelling in the first place.

What’s changed most is Farley’s confidence. On earlier records, especially A Hard Up Life and parts of Twenty on High, he often sounded like a man trying to survive the emotional weather. On A Heavy Duty Heart, he sounds more willing to stand still inside it. These songs aren’t about dramatic transformation so much as endurance — learning how to carry love, doubt, responsibility, and exhaustion all at once.

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That tension runs through “It’s Called Doubt,” one of the album’s strongest tracks. Farley sings, “Some days faith feels thinner than the smoke inside my lungs,” capturing the heart of the record: not hopelessness, but uncertainty carried day after day. The song never reaches for a grand revelation. Instead, it settles into the harder truth that persistence itself is a form of grace.

“Turn Around” may be the album’s emotional center, with Farley singing, “I keep looking for a road that don’t run back through me.” It’s a classic Farley line — plainspoken, but quietly devastating. The arrangement builds with heartland-rock momentum, but the song resists neat resolutions.

It’s striking how much warmer this album feels than its predecessors. Tracks like “I’ll Hold You” and “I Need Your Love” could easily slip into sentimentality, but Farley’s writing remains grounded enough to keep them from floating away. On “I’ll Hold You,” he promises, “When your hands shake, mine will too,” avoiding grand declarations in favor of something smaller and more believable.

Musically, A Heavy Duty Heart is very much a band record. Recorded live to tape with his touring band and produced by Sadler Vaden, the album has more muscle than Farley’s earlier work, but more patience as well. Vaden’s production gives the songs width and momentum without sanding away their humanity. The guitars swell and recede around the songs, while the rhythm section drives the album’s controlled composure.

The record leans into full-band Americana rock without losing the intimacy that made Farley’s early acoustic material resonate. You can hear echoes of Jason Isbell, John Moreland, and Lucero, but Farley’s voice — weary, stubborn, direct, and inviting — is what makes A Heavy Duty Heart compelling.

If there’s a criticism, it’s that the album occasionally settles into a mid-tempo emotional sameness. Farley consistently resists melodrama, but there are moments when you wish he would either lean harder into the ache of these songs or let the band truly explode. The emotional palette is rich, but intentionally narrow.

A Heavy Duty Heart succeeds because it understands something many Americana records merely gesture toward: adulthood is not revelation, but accumulation. Responsibilities, doubts, love, and damage all build over time, and Farley writes from inside that reality with unusual clarity and compassion. What makes the album linger is Farley’s remarkable ability to capture emotions people struggle to articulate for themselves. His best lines arrive without fanfare, conversational but precise, allowing small details and passing observations to carry enormous emotional weight. The result is Drayton Farley’s strongest and most fully realized record to date.

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Find more information here: https://draytonfarley.com/about

Enjoy our previous coverage here: REVIEW: Drayton Farley “Twenty On High”

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Patterson Hood and John Moreland at Ram’s Head On Stage, Annapolis, MD

March 15, 2026

Patterson Hood and John Moreland write very different kinds of songs. Hood looks outward, telling stories about the world around him, while Moreland looks inward, tracing the quiet fault lines of his own life. Sunday’s double-bill at Ram’s Head On Stage in Annapolis demonstrated what they share: a poet’s instinct for the right word, and songs that belong unmistakably to their own voices.

The stage was almost bare. Two guitars leaned against their stands, a single microphone between them, and a music stand off to the side. Nothing more. The setting made clear what the evening would rely on: songs, voices, and the quiet attention of the audience.

Patterson Hood opened the show playing acoustic versions of songs drawn from across his career with Drive-By Truckers and from his recent solo work. Stripped of the band’s usual roar, the songs took on a different shape, their storytelling sitting squarely at the center. Four of the fourteen songs Hood played came from his 2025 solo album Exploding Trees and Airplane Screams. Others reached further back into the Drive-By Truckers catalog, including “My Sweet Annette” and “Scott’s Sister,” both songs that feel almost like Southern short stories drawn from Hood’s Alabama upbringing.

That sense of narrative runs through much of Hood’s writing. His characters often wrestle with the weight of their choices and the passage of time. The tension surfaces in songs like “Lookout Mountain,” with its haunting line about wondering who will end up with his records, and in the recurring sense that someone, somewhere, will eventually have to answer for those mistakes.

The humor in Hood’s songs can be just as sharp. Introducing “Uncle Disney,” he joked that it was his first attempt at writing a children’s song — though the refrain about “when they thaw out Uncle Disney” makes clear that Hood’s imagination rarely travels in gentle directions. Late in the set, 2004’s “Putting People on the Moon” brought the room to a boil. Strumming his battered Harmony Supertone H610 “Melody Ranch” Gene Autry Round-Up with passion, the song’s working-class frustration still resonates. The anger Hood has said he felt about the country’s political divisions sounds even more timely today:

They can put a man on the moon And I’m stuck in Muscle Shoals just barely scraping by.

By the time Hood closed with “The Living Bubba,” one thing was clear: playing solo and acoustic does not necessarily mean a gentle performance. He sang:

I keep living just to bend that note in two And I can’t die now ’cause I got another show.

The emotional temperature shifted immediately when John Moreland took the stage. Hood had played a vintage Harmony guitar whose rough edge matched his gravelly storytelling; Moreland’s Martin HD-28 delivered a warmer, fuller tone that carried the quiet gravity and profound sadness of his songs.

There are sad songs. And then there are John Moreland songs.

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Moreland delivered songs built from spare arrangements and melodies that unfold slowly but decisively. On the surface they share the same sound, yet each charts its own emotional landscape. He opened with “Hang Me in the Tulsa County Sky.” The song’s opening line — “My heart is heavy from the everlasting hurt” — set the mood for his set: melodic, beautifully sung, and almost unbearably sad.

Moreland’s arrangements are simple but carefully shaped. While many solo performers lean heavily on harmonica when playing acoustic guitar, Moreland used it sparingly. In “Latchkey Kid,” for example, the harmonica felt less like accompaniment than a second voice entering the conversation.

Many of Moreland’s songs grapple with the uneasy feeling of not quite belonging anywhere. In “Blacklist,” he searches for “the place where I fit,” while later in the set “Visitor” returns to the same idea with the quietly devastating line, “Everywhere I go, I am a visitor.”

Unlike Hood, Moreland offered almost no explanation for his songs. “I don’t know what any of these songs are about,” he told the audience with a shrug. “If I did, I’d tell you. Everything I know is in the songs.” And that’s how they are presented — without framing or explanation, leaving listeners to find their own way inside them.

The set closed with one of his best-known songs, “You Don’t Care for Me Enough to Cry,” a fitting, and memorable, final note.

For all their differences, Hood and Moreland have this in common: their songs feel inseparable from the people who wrote them. Hood’s storytelling leans on the conversational cadence with which he delivers it, while Moreland’s plainspoken lines draw their power from the weary gravity of his voice. Hood’s songs map the world around him; Moreland’s explore the landscape within. Different directions, to be sure, but both rooted in the deeply personal songwriting at the heart of great Americana. And both men, on this night, still bending the note, still telling the story.

https://www.johnmoreland.net/

https://pattersonhood.com/

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A Feather in the Wind

Mostly about music; mostly Americana. But also things Jewish, political, cultural.

By Mark Pelavin

.

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Angry young men get the headlines. But underestimate an angry old man at your peril.

Earlier this week, Annapolis favorite Ray Weaver returned from Denmark for a special “One Night, One Room” show at the Rams Head On Stage, built around what he called “songs for those who still have hope.”

It was State of the Union night down Route 50 in Washington, D.C. Before playing a note, Weaver addressed the room: “Ladies and gentlemen, the state of our union is complicated. And tender. Tonight’s show — songs of conscience — is for those looking for honesty and determined to speak their hearts. Because it’s not about where we are now… it’s about who we want to be.”

The evening opened with members of the Songbird Collective — Madisun Baily, Laura Brino, and Meg Murray — three women, three guitars, each taking a turn at her own original songs. The contrasts were striking: Brino’s voice clear and pure, Baily’s more rugged and earthy. The set was enthusiastically received by an eager room. It was a gentle beginning. What followed was not.

He opened with the unflinching “Say His Name,” originally written in tribute to George Floyd and now expanded to name Alex Pretti and Renee Good — underscoring that the roll call continues. Accompanied only by Todd Kamens on trumpet, there was nothing to soften the words:

“Say his name, say his name
Make it viral, make it burn
…
If we all stay silent, then we’re all to blame”

The sound widened as Weaver was joined by an all-star band of Annapolis musicians: Herbie Wheatley on saxophone and flute, John Vengrouskie on guitar, Mike Vinson on bass, Pete Kaster on drums, Drea Lynn on vocals, and Cecilia Weller on violin.

“The Blood Is Never on Their Hands,” propelled by a piercing violin line from Cecilia Weller and a powerful backing vocal from Drea Lynn, took aim at those who issue commands from a safe remove:

“They never live with the consequences
The blood is never on their hands”

“In Case They’re Gone” focused on immigrant families preparing for possible arrest and deportation. “Haunted Road,” about violence against Indigenous women in Canada, was equally unsparing. These were direct songs — focused, powerful, and memorable — at times closer to reporting than to his usual storytelling.

At the end of the set, Weaver mashed Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” with his own “Resist,” linking one era of protest to another. It wasn’t nostalgia. It was alignment.

By the time he sang the closing lines of “Resist”:

“You tweeted 49,000 words today, 49,000 lies
…
I know the cost of freedom
I resist”

the crowd was fully engaged.

Weaver was playing to a home crowd. These were longtime supporters and neighbors who came expecting — and wanting — to hear these songs. Someone wandering in off the street might have bristled at the directness. Inside the room, the message landed as affirmation.

Weaver made no effort to moderate his message. He sang the songs as written and let the chips fall where they might.

For the encore, Weaver closed with the Youngbloods’ “Get Together.” Baily, Murray, and Brino came back onstage, joining him as the entire room stood and sang:

“You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand”

Twice in one evening, Weaver reached back half a century — demonstrating that today’s arguments are far from new.

Not everything in the set was political. Weaver is a gifted writer of love songs — “She Is My Shelter” was warm and unforced — and a vivid chronicler of youth and place, heard in “Grandma’s Farm,” “Naptown Saturday Night,” and “Chesapeake Son.” But shifting between personal memory and political urgency sometimes diluted the cumulative force. Grouped together, the protest songs might have hit even harder.

Weaver’s conviction never wavered. His anger isn’t flashy. It’s grounded and deliberate. In a room gathered for songs of conscience, he delivered what he promised. The evening felt less like nostalgia and more like resolve — shared, sung, and unmistakable.

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“It’s a funny thing about humility,” songwriter T-Bone Burnett once wrote. “As soon as you know you’re being humble, you’re no longer humble.”

The same is true for authenticity. Essential to great roots music, it works best when it’s felt rather than announced—like hot sauce in a pot of gumbo.

It Runs Deep, the debut album from East Tennessee’s Garrett Boys, never sounds like a pose. There isn’t an inauthentic note on the record.

That confidence comes from songs grounded in lived history. The Garrett Boys—brothers Stephen and Russell Garrett, joined by Stephen’s son Carter—are rooted in Overton County, Tennessee, on land their family has worked for generations. They call it simply “the Land,” and it serves as both the literal setting and emotional center for much of It Runs Deep: music shaped by family memory, hard labor, faith, loss, and the persistent pull of home.

I’ve been anticipating this release since seeing the Garrett Boys perform at the 2025 Annapolis Songwriters Festival. They struck a balance that isn’t easy to pull off: taking the music seriously without taking themselves too seriously. At one point they paused mid-set to check in for a Southwest Airlines flight the next morning—a moment most of the audience could relate to. That same combination of commitment and ease carries over to It Runs Deep, where the focus remains firmly on the songs and the stories they’re telling.

The heart of the album is the title track, which lays out the Garrett Boys’ worldview with uncommon clarity and restraint. Built around creeks, red mud, fishing holes, and a family tree stretching back generations, the song understands heritage not as nostalgia but as responsibility. It moves easily between tenderness and threat—between a grandfather’s gift of a first guitar and an older generation’s readiness to defend what mattered—without tipping into melodrama. Like the best communal storytelling, it isn’t really about one person at all, but about how land, memory, and family shape identity over time.

Those roots don’t come without weight, and It Runs Deep is clear-eyed about the costs of staying, leaving, or trying to do both at once. On “Back Home,” ambition gives way to reckoning: “Sometimes the nights turn into days and I can’t sleep / I stare at a ceiling wondering why,” before the truth settles in—“it’s a long, long, long way back home.” “God Forsaken Town” confronts economic precarity with similar restraint, capturing the grind of loyalty unrewarded—“Ten years at sixty hours a week / has turned these hands to stone”—and the exhaustion of “just trying to make a livin’ in this God forsaken town.” These songs don’t romanticize hardship or rush toward redemption; they sit with the tension and let it speak.

The album’s most harrowing moment arrives with “Pond Ridge,” a song that shows just how far the Garrett Boys are willing to go as storytellers. What begins as uneasy wandering—“I wasn’t lookin’ for trouble, I wasn’t lookin’ for nothin’”—darkens as the narrator admits he has “seen things I wish I hadn’t” and is “pretty sure I did, that night / up on Pond Ridge.” The song culminates in an act of brutal violence, rendered without commentary or melodrama, only the devastating finality of “they had to be together forever / the only way that they knew how.” It’s a reminder that the histories these songs draw from include cruelty as well as belonging—and that honesty about place requires facing both.

Elsewhere, It Runs Deep turns toward endurance, but never the kind that comes wrapped in easy answers. On “Who I Am,” identity is something arrived at slowly and with cost, shaped by “sacrifice and that ain’t cheap” and the knowledge that “there’s a price to be paid for anything.” “Me and This Land” sharpens that tension further, as memory and inheritance are tested by economic reality—“For six generations this deed has held our name,” before landing on the quiet devastation of “there’s an auction sign out by the road.” Even moments of defiance carry weight rather than swagger: in “Back to Akron,” the refusal to return feels less like rebellion than exhaustion, a wish to trade factory lines for something that still feels human. Resilience here isn’t celebrated or sentimentalized; it’s simply what remains when the choices narrow.

Taken together, these songs recall the spirit of The Band. Like their best work, the Garrett Boys’ songs feel communal rather than confessional, shaped by shared history, moral complexity, and the slow accumulation of place. The difference is that this music doesn’t imagine the rural South from a distance; it grows directly out of it. On It Runs Deep, heritage isn’t mythology or mood-setting. It’s the ground beneath the songs, uneven and enduring, holding everything in place.

It Runs Deep is a remarkable debut—confident, grounded, and fully realized. The Garrett Boys don’t ask listeners to admire their authenticity, or even to notice it at all. They simply tell these stories—plainly, patiently, and with respect for where they come from—and trust that the songs will carry what needs to be said. In roots music, that kind of confidence is rare. Here, it feels not just natural, but fully earned.

Find more details here on their website:

https://garrettboys.com

My wife says I listen to depressing music. She’s not wrong. Next time she reminds me of that, I’ll put on The Nude Party’s Look Who’s Back — nine songs that dare you not to smile.

In a moment when much of the Americana scene leans inward — often beautifully so — The Nude Party offer something different: a record built on velocity, volume, and guitars. This isn’t an album chasing gravitas. It’s a band in a room — amps warm, drums cracking, everyone leaning into the downbeat.

That looseness is intentional. The band drove out to Joshua Tree mid-tour and cut the album in five fast days with Montreal-based singer-songwriter-producer Michael Rault. He keeps the performances immediate — guitars bite, the rhythm section rolls. Nothing feels labored. The guitars stack. The choruses land.

That drive isn’t accidental. The band hasn’t changed: Patton Magee (vocals, guitars, harmonica), Shaun Couture (vocals, guitars), Connor Mikita (drums), Alec Castillo (bass), Zachary Merrill (keys), Austin Brose (percussion), and Jon “Catfish” Delorme (pedal steel, dobro). Guest harmonies from Pearl Charles and Lady Apple Tree on “Sweetheart of the Radio” add another layer without softening the edge.

Earlier records leaned into Stonesy twang; here, The Nude Party add a dose of English pub-rock flavor — think Rockpile with more guitars. Pedal steel remains in the mix, but the dominant mood is bar-band exuberance. Tight without being tidy. Swaggering without being self-serious.

The title track struts from the first bar. Its refrain — “Look who’s back again” — is aimed at a fairweather friend but delivered with a wink. “Walk That Walk” is the album’s mission statement: glammy, riff-heavy, built around a chorus that feels less like advice than a dare. The band locks into a stomp built to fill rooms, not playlists.

“Sweetheart of the Radio” leans into cosmic country, pedal steel shimmering beneath road-worn harmonies. “Honey for the Barflies” rides a swampy groove, communal and a little ragged at the edges, its chorus built for raised glasses and shouted backing vocals. Even the quieter moments don’t linger. The album keeps moving.

It’s worth remembering that The Nude Party didn’t arrive as revivalists chasing a trend. The band formed at Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, cutting their teeth on basement shows before grinding through DIY tours and eventually signing to New West Records. Their 2018 self-titled debut and 2020’s Midnight Manor sharpened their garage-rock instincts, while 2023’s Rides On leaned further into country and groove. Over more than a decade together, they’ve built a catalog that blurs garage rock, country twang, swagger, and roots groove.

That blurring is part of what makes today’s Americana scene exciting. The lines between rock, country, and roots music rarely hold, and The Nude Party thrive in that overlap. They’re not confessional singer-songwriters, nor are they strict traditionalists. They sit closer to a lineage that understood Americana as electricity as much as authenticity: The Rolling Stones chasing American blues, The Flying Burrito Brothers plugging in honky-tonk, early Wilco when bar-band looseness mattered as much as structure.

Are the lyrics always revelatory? No. But that’s not the point. This is a band that thrives on chemistry — seven players who have spent more than a decade living, touring, and working alongside one another. That shared muscle memory shows. They lock in. They surge. They know exactly how far to stretch before snapping back into the groove.

The closer, “Juarez,” lets the dust settle, shifting into blues-country storytelling without slowing down. It’s a reminder that beneath the party atmosphere there’s structure — hooks that stick, arrangements that breathe, and just enough twang to keep one boot planted in the roots tradition.

Look Who’s Back doesn’t pretend to reinvent anything. It doesn’t need to. In a crowded Americana scene often defined by introspection, The Nude Party deliver something simple and necessary: a reminder that rock and roll — fast, loud, communal — still belongs inside the tent. Sometimes the most honest move isn’t to dig deeper.

It’s to turn up.

Find more details here on their website: https://www.thenudepartymusic.com

A Feather in the Wind

Mostly about music; mostly Americana. But also things Jewish, political, cultural.

By Mark Pelavin

.

Jay Buchanan has built his reputation on force. As the lead vocalist of Rival Sons, he’s long been associated with volume, swagger, and forward motion. Weapons of Beauty, his solo debut, moves in the opposite direction — and the result is a record that feels powerful in entirely different ways.

It’s an album that trusts voice, phrasing, and emotional weight more than volume or bravado.

Rival Sons’ music is loud, kinetic, and unapologetically physical blues-rock. In that setting, Buchanan’s voice is propulsive, driving songs forward with urgency and conviction. That history matters because it shapes what a Buchanan solo record was expected to be — which is precisely why this one feels like a reset rather than a reprise.

Weapons of Beauty is preoccupied with endurance, the quieter work of staying present through loss, doubt, and uncertainty. These songs are about reckoning, not redemption. They’re attentive to the cost of survival and to the fragile grace of choosing to continue. Even at its most intimate, the record resists confession, favoring hard-earned perspective over self-exposure — a worldview summed up neatly in Buchanan’s repeated hope “to make it right,” even when certainty remains out of reach.

Weapons of Beauty places Buchanan comfortably among contemporary Americana artists who value restraint and emotional power over volume. These songs share DNA with writers like Gillian Welch and Neko Case, artists who trust precision, control, and emotional honesty to do the work. Buchanan favors patience over momentum, letting songs unfold without adornment and treating grief, faith, and endurance as things to be lived with rather than dramatized.

“Caroline” functions as an emotional and thematic anchor for Weapons of Beauty. Set against spare, unhurried accompaniment, the song frames grief not as rupture but as something carried forward, day after day. Buchanan writes with a novelist’s eye for how loss settles into daily life — nights that bleed into mornings, a life reshaped around absence rather than closure. The central image is quietly devastating: “my hands make the shape of yours in mine / and they refuse to hold onto something new,” a line that captures devotion without sentimentality. Even the song’s darker turns — vengeance imagined, faith tested — arrive without theatrics, as thoughts a person lives with rather than acts they perform.

Where “Caroline” dwells in private loss, “True Black” turns that grief outward, asking what remains when mourning hardens into taking stock. The song carries the same emotional weight but redirects it toward questions of responsibility — how a life is measured, what damage lingers, and whether repair is still possible. Grief here isn’t something to be survived so much as something that reshapes the speaker’s sense of obligation, pushing the album outward, toward a broader meditation on cost, consequence, and the hope, however tentative, of making things right.

That sense of focus is no accident. Weapons of Beauty was written during a period of self-imposed isolation, much of it conceived in an underground bunker in the Mojave Desert, and recorded in a stripped-down, largely live studio setting that favors feel over finish. Buchanan lets phrasing, silence, and emotional pacing do the work, producing songs that feel fully realized without ever feeling overworked.

The supporting musicians reinforce that focus, as does Buchanan’s choice of producer. Buchanan works with producer Dave Cobb, whose work with artists like Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell has helped define the modern Americana landscape, alongside J.D. Simo on guitar, Brian Allen on bass, Chris Powell on drums, Leroy Powell on pedal steel, and Philip Towns on keys. The playing throughout favors texture over ornament and patience over push, while Cobb’s production keeps everything exposed and unvarnished. Nothing competes for attention; everything serves the song.

Buchanan’s reading of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” arrives with the emotional weight of a closing statement, even though it isn’t the album’s final track. Sung without ornament or irony, it feels less like reinterpretation than acknowledgement — an affirmation of love as persistence rather than romance.

Although the Cohen cover feels like a natural stopping point, the title track that follows it pushes back against closure. “Weapons of Beauty” asserts intention, framing art not as escape but as a way of staying engaged — songs and words as tools for survival. “Give me the songs to sing in the fight,” Buchanan insists, recasting creativity as resolve rather than release. After an album spent sitting with grief and uncertainty, the final offering isn’t comfort so much as commitment.

Weapons of Beauty succeeds because it chooses focus over scale. This isn’t a solo debut designed to declare independence or stretch outward, but one that narrows its frame and deepens its attention. Rather than expanding on the power and reach of Rival Sons, Buchanan pares things back, trusting restraint, patience, and emotional clarity to carry the weight. The authority he finds there is quieter and harder won, but it feels durable. This feels like the right way for him to begin.

A Feather in the Wind

Mostly about music; mostly Americana. But also things Jewish, political, cultural.

By Mark Pelavin

.

On Appalachia, Emily Scott Robinson’s clear voice rings out with grace, passion, and power. Both as a singer and as a songwriter, she has rarely sounded more grounded, making this album feel less like an artist getting better over time and more like someone working at a new, higher level.

That assurance comes into focus immediately on “Hymn for the Unholy,” the album’s opening track. Robinson sets aside her usual guitar accompaniment and sings alone over a bare organ, her phrasing loose and unmetered, as if feeling her way into the song in real time. The music follows rather than leads, gradually layering percussion and bowed strings. The effect is intimate and disarming, less a performance than an act of discovery.

Robinson respects life’s uncertainties, writing about plans abandoned, faith unsettled, and the humility of recognizing how little control we actually have. “There’s so much we have no hand in, but look how hard we try,” she sings in “Hymn for the Unholy,” a line that doubles as a mission statement for the album. The comfort here comes not from certainty, but from the work itself, from the idea that not knowing what comes next can bring freedom rather than signal failure. That perspective feels shaped by a childhood she has described as “soaked in Southern music and church,” where belief and doubt often sit side by side rather than cancel each other out.

That sense of openness is not an accident. Appalachia was recorded over five days at Dreamland Recording Studios in upstate New York, a former church whose creaking floors and vaulted ceilings still carry the hush of a sacred space. Robinson has a true partner in her producer, Josh Kaufman, a member of Bonny Light Horseman whose production work has also shaped records by Josh Ritter, Craig Finn, and Bob Weir. Together, Robinson and Kaufman favor feel over finish, allowing songs to unfold at their own pace. Silence becomes part of the arrangement, and the studio’s natural acoustics lend the music patience and presence rather than polish.

That sense of companionship deepens on “Time Traveler,” one of the album’s most devastating and generous songs. Written about Robinson’s grandmother as dementia loosened her grip on the present, the song treats memory not as something lost but rearranged. Robinson resists sentimentality, observing instead how time collapses—how joy, trauma, and tenderness coexist when chronology no longer holds. “There’s a darkness in our DNA, some fraying strand,” she sings, before extending the song’s quiet grace: “So if you wanna fly away sometimes, I understand.” The melody moves gently forward without forcing resolution, allowing the song’s emotional complexity to land with full force.

Appalachia is the work of a mature songwriter hitting her stride. Robinson’s earlier albums—particularly Traveling Mercies and American Siren—established her as a writer of uncommon clarity and emotional intelligence. Those records leaned more squarely into contemporary Americana songwriting. On Appalachia, that skill set remains, but it has been absorbed into something older and steadier. The songs feel less concerned with making a point than with being useful.

Musically, Appalachia reaches further back than most contemporary Americana records. Robinson draws from older Appalachian and Anglo-American folk traditions—songs shaped by use rather than authorship, built to be carried forward rather than claimed. Her writing recalls the moral steadiness and communal purpose associated with Jean Ritchie, the Kentucky-born singer who carried Appalachian ballads and hymns into the modern folk revival, and Hazel Dickens, where melody serves memory and endurance more than self-expression. That lineage continues into the present in the quieter, tradition-minded work of Rhiannon Giddens.

That ethic is reinforced by the album’s collaborators. Alongside Kaufman’s restrained, intuitive production, fiddler and cellist Duncan Wickel provides much of the album’s quiet motion. Harmonies from Lizzy Ross add warmth and intimacy, while a duet with John Paul White, best known as one half of the Civil Wars, brings a weathered gravity that suits the album’s themes of endurance and love marked by time. Released on Oh Boy Records, the label founded by John Prine and now run by his widow, Fiona Prine, Appalachia fits comfortably within a tradition that values humanity over spectacle.

All of that care comes into focus on “Appalachia,” the album’s title track and quiet center. Written in response to the devastation Hurricane Helene brought to Western North Carolina, the song resists both anger and false reassurance. Robinson frames catastrophe through the lens that defines the album as a whole: what matters is not what can be controlled, but how people show up for one another when control is lost. “Appalachia” understands place not as scenery but as responsibility. Robinson treats the region less as an idea than as a web of lives bound together by weather, history, and care, where endurance is measured in small, ordinary acts rather than moments of heroism. “We’ll dance with sorrow, tuck the children in,” she sings, grounding disaster not in spectacle but in the daily work of staying present.

Appalachia doesn’t reach for catharsis or spectacle. It trusts quieter virtues: attention, patience, and care. These steady songs feel at home in the same places they were shaped by—rooms where people gather, listen, and keep going.

There’s a profound irony in Warren Zevon’s work: a songwriter fixated on mortality who left behind songs that continue to outlive him. More than twenty years after his death, Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album, suggests why that may be.

For an artist who never had much commercial success, Zevon is having a moment. Over the past year, he has been welcomed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, celebrated at a high-profile tribute concert in Los Angeles, and now honored on Keep Me in Your Heart, a new multi-artist tribute album drawing from across his catalog. The attention—especially his recognition by the Hall—feels overdue, a reminder that Zevon’s reputation has always rested less on sales or radio play than on the durability of the songs themselves.

Tribute albums are, by definition, a mixed bag. They invite comparison with definitive originals and often struggle to justify their own existence. Zevon’s songs, in particular, resist reinvention; their bite, humor, and emotional precision can make lesser versions feel unnecessary. He could sketch a whole moral universe in a single couplet or deploy gallows humor with a shrug, reducing catastrophe to logistics. Keep Me in Your Heart is no exception: some performances land as respectful but redundant, offering little that Zevon himself didn’t already say better. But two things ultimately distinguish this collection from the usual tribute-album clutter.

First, the songs themselves. Zevon’s catalog proves remarkably resilient under scrutiny. The album balances familiar touchstones—“Excitable Boy,” “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”—with deeper cuts and late-period material, including songs later gathered on posthumous releases like Preludes and Reconsider Me: The Love Songs. Even when an interpretation falters, the writing remains unmistakable: concise, unsentimental, and alert to human weakness without pretending to rise above it.

Second, when the album works, it works exceptionally well. Veteran New York rocker and songwriter Willie Nile’s take on “Mutineer” is among the record’s clear highlights, delivering the song with grit and conviction rather than reverence. Jimmy Webb’s reading of “Desperados Under the Eaves” offers a different kind of authority. One of the great American songwriters, Webb approaches the song with restraint and clarity, trusting its architecture rather than trying to embellish it. He doesn’t modernize or dramatize; he lets the song reveal itself.

Keep Me in Your Heart also benefits from a strong sense of place. Released by Long Island–based Paradiddle Records, the album draws heavily from that region’s music community. Many of the contributors are working musicians rather than marquee names, and that proves to be a strength. These performances often feel less like formal tributes than like songs passed along—learned in clubs, reimagined on small stages, and carried forward because they speak to something essential.

That spirit animates much of the record. Pete Mancini & the Hillside Airmen find the quiet ache at the center of “Accidentally Like a Martyr.” Jack Licitra brings piano-led tenderness to “Tenderness on the Block.” Claudia Jacobs gives “Empty-Hearted Town” room to breathe, letting its loneliness linger rather than resolve. Elsewhere, artists dig into Zevon’s lesser-known songs, drawing attention to material that rewards curiosity rather than comfort.

Warren Zevon fits more comfortably in the Americana lineage than in the Laurel Canyon scene he’s often associated with. He drew on the plainspoken storytelling and moral ambiguity of writers like John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark, favoring songs built around flawed characters, bad decisions, and hard-earned clarity rather than confession or uplift. Where Prine often softened his observations with warmth and humor, Zevon sharpened his, leaning into gallows wit and emotional abrasion. That kinship mattered: his work became a benchmark for later writers like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, and even Bob Dylan, who cited Zevon by name and carried his songs onto the stage. His legacy isn’t a sound so much as a stance: trust the song, respect the listener, and don’t flinch.

Keep Me in Your Heart doesn’t pretend to be definitive, and it doesn’t need to be. What it offers instead is something more convincing: evidence that Warren Zevon’s songs—by turns funny, bitter, tender, and unsparing—are still being sung, still being tested, and still proving that they have a life of their own.

You can find the music here: https://paradiddlerecords.com/keep-me-in-your-heart-the-songs-of-warren-zevon

Lucinda Williams is pissed off.

And now she’s given us World’s Gone Wrong, the protest album I have been waiting for, a set of songs that speak plainly and forcefully to the dark moment we are living through without hedging or nostalgia.

Political songs are notoriously hard to pull off. Too often they slide into sermonizing, or substitute slogans for insight. Powerful lyrics are frequently undercut by cautious, bloodless music. Here, Williams avoids every one of those traps. These songs don’t merely argue — they move. They rock. They roll. Guitars snarl and grind, refusing restraint.

I didn’t expect an album this forceful to arrive as the sixteenth release by a 72-year-old stroke survivor who now has difficulty walking onstage — though her voice, unmistakably, remains fully intact.

There is a tradition in American folk music of imagining that songs might be enough — that music could heal what politics breaks, or restore what power corrodes. Williams has never shared that illusion. What she offers instead is something tougher and more honest: witness sharpened into accusation. The songs on World’s Gone Wrong do not promise salvation. They insist on clarity. And call for action.

World’s Gone Wrong opens with its thesis statement in plain language and working-class detail. The title track sketches a couple doing their best to get by — selling cars, working shifts, worrying about rent, trying to sort truth from lies — and finds its refrain not in outrage but endurance: “Come on baby, we gotta be strong.” It’s a song about collapse seen from the kitchen table, not the podium. Comfort comes not from denial, but from connection — turning off the news, putting on some Miles, dancing barefoot across the floor.

From there, Williams sharpens her edge. “Something’s Gotta Give” builds its case through repetition and pressure, its metaphors blunt and elemental: too much rain, too much strain, too much pain. The song gathers force like a storm that’s been a long time coming. “How Much Did You Get for Your Soul?” goes further, framing corruption not as abstraction but as transaction — a deal willingly taken, with consequences that can’t be explained away.

Crucially, the album refuses to remain in a single emotional register. “Low Life” offers temporary escape — jukebox blues, cheap drinks, Slim Harpo on repeat — not as denial, but as survival. Protest music that never breathes eventually collapses under its own weight; Williams understands the necessity of pleasure, even refuge, amid the wreckage.

That sense of endurance is reinforced by the album’s collaborators, whose voices extend the argument rather than dilute it. When Mavis Staples joins Williams on Bob Marley’s “So Much Trouble in the World,” it feels less like a feature than a conversation across generations — two women shaped by different eras, united by the same unresolved struggle. Staples brings the gravity of gospel and the civil rights movement into direct dialogue with Williams’ hard-earned clarity, grounding the song’s warnings in lived history rather than abstraction. On “We’ve Come Too Far to Turn Around,” Norah Jones adds a quieter resolve, her voice reinforcing the song’s weary determination without softening its message. And Brittney Spencer threads contemporary urgency through the harmonies, linking Williams’ voice to a younger generation navigating its own version of the same storms. What unites these performances is not style or era, but perspective: women bearing witness, refusing erasure, and insisting that survival itself can be an act of resistance.

The album’s moral center may be “Black Tears,” which links the present moment to a much longer American history — deferred dreams, burning churches, blood in the river. The song refuses resolution, returning again and again to images of grief and endurance, asking what has been learned, and what still hasn’t been.

Williams has pushed into explicitly political territory before, most notably on Good Souls Better Angels, but World’s Gone Wrong is the first time she has made the moment we’re living in the album’s central concern.

Recent Americana protest albums have often approached politics at an angle, filtering outrage through autobiography or historical framing. Margo Price’s Strays confronts power, gender, and freedom through personal liberation; Jason Isbell’s Reunions wrestles with civic responsibility through self-examination; Tyler Childers’ Long Violent History frames protest as historical reckoning. Those records matter, and they’ve expanded what political songwriting in Americana can sound like. World’s Gone Wrong does not keep its distance. Williams speaks directly, without allegory or remove, trusting plain language and hard-earned authority. This is protest music without illusions — furious, clear-eyed, and built to last.

World’s Gone Wrong was produced by Ray Kennedy and Tom Overby, both longtime collaborators of Williams. Overby, Williams’ husband and closest creative partner in recent years, has co-written and co-produced much of her late-career work, while Kennedy has helped shape the raw, guitar-forward sound of several recent albums. Backed by a core band featuring Brady Blade on drums, David Sutton on bass, and the interlocking guitars of Doug Pettibone and Marc Ford, the record favors urgency over polish — a production approach that suits its anger and intent.

Taken as a whole, World’s Gone Wrong isn’t just timely — it’s formidable. It stands among the strongest albums of Williams’ career, and one of the most uncompromising protest records of recent years.

What drives World’s Gone Wrong isn’t outrage alone, but exhaustion — the kind that comes from knowing better and seeing the same harm repeated anyway. Williams’ anger doesn’t seek release; it seeks reckoning. These songs don’t ask for hope. They demand attention. And in that demand, they find their staying power.

Americana music—and folk music more broadly—is as much about inheritance as it is about originality. What gets handed down, what endures, and what still feels worth singing matter.

On I Was Born, But…, David Huckfelt leans fully into that idea, offering fifteen songs he didn’t write but somehow owns. These songs—from Bob Dylan, George Jones, Warren Zevon, Keith Secola, and others—are presented not as tribute, but as something meant to be carried forward.

What Huckfelt’s choices here have in common isn’t a particular sound so much as a shared toughness. These are survival songs—songs meant to be sung through trouble rather than simply about it. That thread runs from Dylan’s slow, watchful unrest to George Jones’ hard-earned resignation, from Zevon’s battered humor to Secola’s clear-eyed resolve. Huckfelt treats them less like heirlooms than like tools—songs that still know how to be useful when you need them.

That mindset shapes how the record sounds. I Was Born, But… was recorded largely live, and it carries the feeling of people in a room listening to one another. Huckfelt doesn’t force his voice forward or try to stamp the songs with personality. Instead, he lets them open up at their own pace, settling into “Changing of the Guards” (Dylan) or “The Race Is On” (George Jones) as if feeling out where the center of gravity really is. The band follows suit—pedal steel, harmonica, rhythm section moving easily, without fuss or flash.

That attentiveness is built into the way the record was made. Recorded full band, live, over two days at Dust & Stone Studios in Tucson and produced by Gabriel Sullivan, the sessions ran without rehearsals or lyric sheets. The core band—anchored by former Bob Dylan drummer Winston Watson—plays with the confidence of musicians who know how to listen as well as play. Connor “Catfish” Gallaher’s pedal steel and dobro, Thøger Lund’s bass, and Sullivan’s shifting presence on baritone guitar, synths, and percussion give the songs room to breathe rather than dressing them up. Appearances by harmonica player Tom Walbank and singer Billy Sedlmayr add texture without breaking the spell. Nothing here feels rushed or precious—the performances sound allowed to arrive fully formed.

That approach matters most with songs as familiar as Dylan’s and Zevon’s, which can buckle under too much intention. Even when Huckfelt turns to songwriters whose work has been covered endlessly, he avoids the obvious entry points. His Dylan and Zevon selections aren’t greatest-hits gestures, but songs that still carry some risk—less familiar, less resolved, and therefore more open to interpretation. Huckfelt’s “Changing of the Guards” avoids turning the song into a statement, letting it stay unsettled and alive. Zevon’s “Stop Rainin’ Lord,” meanwhile, sheds its usual edge and lands as something closer to a plainspoken plea. In both cases, Huckfelt sidesteps reverence and ends up somewhere more grounded.

Just as important, the album doesn’t stop with the obvious songwriters. Songs by Pieta Brown and Howe Gelb sit comfortably alongside the giants, not as curiosities, but as equals. One of the pleasures of a record like this is being led toward artists you may not know well—or may not know at all—and Huckfelt clearly values that kind of listening. Inheritance here isn’t about narrowing the circle; it’s about widening it.

That widening instinct shows up again when Huckfelt turns to Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” Rather than leaning into swagger or spectacle, he treats the song as something closer to ritual—rhythmic, communal, and elemental. Placed alongside folk standards and singer-songwriter confessionals, it reinforces the album’s larger claim: inheritance belongs to whatever songs still hold up when passed hand to hand.

That perspective isn’t accidental. Huckfelt has long operated at the porous edge between authorship and interpretation, treating folk music less as a genre than as a way of working. He has written that covering songs is “a way to show deference and respect to the lineage of bold souls who blazed the trail you now pass upon,” adding that it requires “a little homework on your own unimportance as the hero of your own tale.” That sensibility runs quietly through I Was Born, But…, which feels less like a detour from original songwriting than a natural extension of it—an album grounded in attention rather than assertion.

Across the record, Huckfelt lets the songs move at their own pace, giving them room to breathe rather than pressing for effect. “Changing of the Guards” carries a sense of forward motion without urgency, while Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” is slowed until its emotional center comes into focus. Elsewhere, J.J. Cale’s “Any Way the Wind Blows” and Tom Petty’s “Two Gunslingers” settle into an easy, lived-in groove. The throughline isn’t style so much as approach: Huckfelt never seems interested in improving a song, only in standing inside it long enough to hear what it still has to say.

Records like I Was Born, But… matter because they push back against the idea that everything has to announce itself as new. In a musical culture that often rewards novelty for its own sake, Huckfelt reminds us that some songs endure simply because they keep meeting us where we are. This album doesn’t argue for the past. It argues for listening—and for carrying forward what still holds up.

Find the album and more information on his website.

The album was produced by Gabriel Sullivan and David Huckfelt with additional production by Jeremy Ylvisaker; engineered by Gabriel Sullivan and Brian Joseph with additional recording by J.T. Bates; and mixed by Adam Krinsky with additional mixing by Brain Joseph. It was mastered by Huntley Miller.

Musicians on the album are David Huckfelt on vocals and acoustic guitar; Winston Watson on drums and percussion; Catfish Gallaher on pedal steel, electric guitar, and dobro; Thoger Tetens Lund on upright and electric bass; Gabriel Sullivan on baritone guitar, synthesizers, and percussion; Tom Walbank on harmonica and vocals; and Billy Sedlmayr on vocals and spiritual advice. Additional musicians on the album are Jeremy Ylvisaker on electric guitars and backing vocals; and J.T. Bates on drums, percussion, electronic percussion, and piano.

Jonathan Bernstein What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome

Fathers and sons. It’s always fathers and sons.

But in What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome, his carefully researched and sensitively written biography of Justin Townes Earle, author Jonathan Bernstein is careful not to make Justin’s lineage the whole story. Bernstein acknowledges inheritance without letting it become destiny.

Justin Townes Earle emerged in the late 2000s as one of Americana’s most searching songwriters, blending folk, blues, and country traditions with a sharply contemporary attention to class, place, and moral consequence. His father, Steve Earle, appears throughout the book largely in outline—present as context rather than narrator—not because Bernstein avoids him, but because Steve declined to be interviewed. The effect is that the story unfolds not as confrontation or reckoning, but as lived experience, shaped by proximity, silence, and expectation.

Bernstein gives us a portrait of an artist who was often lonely in the midst of visibility—touring, recording, surrounded by people—and who found his most consistent solace in a small number of places that recur throughout the book. One of them, the Chicken Shack, is described by Bernstein as “a one-room cabin packed with guitars, hand-rolled cigarettes, and blues records.” It was a clubhouse, a shared creative shelter, a place where music, conversation, and companionship overlapped without pretense. Bernstein returns to the Chicken Shack repeatedly as a refuge—one of the few places where Justin could belong without performing. Alongside it sits the act of making music itself. Justin’s songs, in this telling, were not expressions of torment so much as temporary shelters from it.

That understanding shapes the book’s greatest strength. Unlike many music biographies that drift toward pathology or spectacle, Bernstein keeps the music front and center. He writes as a Justin Townes Earle fan—openly and unapologetically—and remains one even as the journey grows rough. Addiction is present and unsparing, but it is never allowed to eclipse the work. Music here is not the byproduct of suffering; it is the thing that made survival, however brief or incomplete, possible.

Bernstein’s book matters because Justin Townes Earle mattered—quietly but decisively—to the shape of modern Americana. He occupied a space that few of his peers managed to hold for long: rooted in traditional forms but emotionally contemporary, literate without being precious, political without grandstanding. His songs bridged generations, speaking fluently to listeners steeped in folk and country history while offering younger artists a model for how vulnerability, craft, and restraint could coexist. Long before “Americana” hardened into brand or circuit, Justin’s work suggested another path—one where songs were intimate without being insular, socially aware without being didactic, and disciplined enough to reward close listening.

Bernstein’s approach as a biographer is central to why this portrait holds. He comes to the project as a fan, but also as a careful listener, more interested in understanding how a life unfolded than in imposing a thesis upon it. His reporting is deep and patient—drawing on interviews with nearly everyone who shared Justin’s orbit—yet his tone remains restrained. He resists both mythmaking and moral verdicts, allowing contradictions to stand rather than forcing them into narrative resolution. The result is a book that feels guided by empathy but anchored in rigor.

In contrast to other biographies of musicians who died tragically young—such as Charles R. Cross’s book about Kurt Cobain, Heavier Than Heaven—Bernstein’s biography resists explanation and closure, choosing instead to remain with the songs and the unfinished life around them.

That restraint is especially evident in Bernstein’s treatment of the 2017 arrest that forced Justin’s addiction into public view. The episode is neither sensationalized nor framed as a redemptive turning point. Instead, Bernstein presents it as evidence of how narrow the margin had already become between the life Justin was trying to build and the one he was barely holding together—a moment that exposed the limits of discipline, acclaim, and good intentions.

Throughout, Bernstein emphasizes that Justin kept returning to the work itself—writing, recording, collaborating—not as proof of resilience or recovery, but as evidence of where Justin continued to locate meaning. As Bernstein writes, “Justin kept writing through it all. It was what he understood to be his purpose, how he derived self-worth and meaning, what he cared about the most. No matter where he was—pacing backstage, plopped on an 11th Street bar stool, sobering up in his cramped apartment, crunched together in the back of a van on the road—Justin continued to write.” Writing is not salvation here; it is orientation, the one practice that still made sense when so much else did not.

There is a temptation in stories like this to frame loss as destiny or addiction as explanation. What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome resists both. It insists instead on returning to the songs—to what they offered, what they carried, and what they made briefly possible. That insistence does not lessen the tragedy of Justin Townes Earle’s death. It deepens it, by reminding us how much was built, carefully and honestly, before it all came apart—and why his music still rings true.

You can find the book here: https://lyon.ecampus.com/what-do-you-do-when-youre-lonesome/bk/9780306833274

Since the release of his debut album, Nation of Heat, in 2009, Pug has earned a reputation as a songwriter who wrestles openly with faith, responsibility, and failure. In recent years, that same sensibility has extended beyond the stage through his Working Songwriter podcast and personal newsletter, where he reflects on craft and the realities of making a life in music.

That sensibility was evident from the opening song. Pug began with “Treasury of Prayers,” from his most recent albums, 2024 album Sketch of a Promised Departure. It was an almost devotional choice that immediately set the tone. The song is structured as prayer, but not the reassuring kind — more examination than affirmation. It unfolds as a litany of requests, mixing aspiration with self-knowledge. “That faithful’s not a word that I cannot define,” he sang, before adding, more practically, “And if that’s too much to ask, that my hangovers are brief.” The prayers are earnest but imperfect, grounded in the gap between who the singer wants to be and who he is.

As the song widened, so did its scope. Pug prayed for children who could “recognize beauty” and “recognize a liar,” and who might someday “work to build cathedrals they won’t live to pray inside of” — faith measured in responsibility rather than reward. Near the end, the song turned personal and vivid: “That it feels just like a memory when my father calls me home / Like I’m racing under streetlights back to dinner on the stove.” It felt less like nostalgia than arrival — the sense that a long moral and spiritual search had finally found its shape.

“Hymn #35,” from Nation of Heat (Revisited), followed. Even when he writes songs titled like prayers, Pug refuses easy absolution. “I have done wrong, I will do wrong / There’s nothing wrong with doing wrong,” he sang, before undercutting certainty again: “I am faith, I am belief / Except for when I’m not.” Faith and doubt sat side by side, unresolved and unapologetic.

From the same recent period came “No Place a Good Man Can Hide,” a song Pug has described as his response to the maxim “no good deed goes unpunished.” “When every revolution is sponsored by the state,” he sang, “there’s no bravery in bayonets and tearin’ down the gates.” The line from “I Take My Father’s Drugs” landed even harder: “If you see me with a rifle / Don’t ask me what it’s for / I fight my father’s war.” In a catalog defined by moral reckoning, few moments feel blunt.

Between songs, Pug’s dry humor surfaced — a release valve that kept the evening from mistaking seriousness for sanctimony. He joked about the oddness of making a living singing folk songs in 2026, especially given his upbringing. Raised by hippies, he said, rebellion came with complications — a tension between inheritance and independence that runs quietly through much of his work.

Pug’s songwriting places him in conversation with writers who treat faith not as reassurance but as material. There are echoes here of Josh Ritter, in the willingness to engage biblical language as moral framework, and of Jason Isbell, in the attention paid to consequence and accountability. But where others resolve or dramatize belief, Pug tends to leave it exposed, something to be tested rather than settled.

Older songs drew audible recognition. “How Good Are You” opened with one of Pug’s best lines — “I was born into a circus / But I ran off to join a home” — before offering its quiet warning: “If you shut up with what you’ve chosen / You’ll hear something choosing you.” From 2012’s Deep Dark Wells, he reminded the audience, “As long as you’re not finished, you can start all over again,” a line that sounded both forgiving and demanding.

One of the night’s lighter moments came with “I Don’t Work in a Bank,” a wry, John Prine– or Todd Snider–adjacent song delivered deadpan. “You don’t get to taste the top shelf / When your bottom line is blank,” he sang, before landing the refrain.

“Chesapeake,” an older song he said he rarely plays, felt especially grounded in place. Driving over the Bay Bridge on his way to Easton, he said, the song felt right. “Forget all the things my soul does seek,” he sang. “I guess the moment is best when the moment is brief.”

Late in the set, Pug broke up his own run of solemn originals by covering John Prine’s “Sam Stone,” introducing one of the saddest songs ever written. “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” he sang, the line landing with the same quiet devastation it always does.

By the time Pug sang, “I’ve come to test the timber of my heart,” late in the set, the point had already been made. His songs resist easy comfort, insisting instead on attention, reflection, and moral reckoning. In the attentive quiet of the Stoltz Listening Room, that insistence felt like a fair exchange.

In What We Can Know, Ian McEwan conjures a world that hasn’t ended, exactly, but has outlived its own coherence. Civilization persists, thinner and more tentative. The seas have risen, archives have vanished and England has splintered into an archipelago. Yet the survivors remain disarmingly civil. They read poetry, debate the nuances of a long-ago dinner conversation and stroll through their ruined but beautiful world. It’s a very British dystopia—measured, melancholy and devastatingly polite.

Set in 2119, the novel unfolds in the aftermath of “the Derangement,” McEwan’s term for the climate and nuclear disasters that reshaped the planet. Civilization has retreated inland; knowledge is fragmentary; universities now study “the literature of the inundation.” The protagonist, Thomas Metcalfe, is a professor of literature—not a soldier or revolutionary—who becomes obsessed with reconstructing a lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” composed at a dinner party in 2014. A “corona” is a chain of linked sonnets—each beginning with the final line of the previous, the circle closing with the first line repeated at the end. It’s a form built on return and precision, an apt emblem for a novel that moves in quiet loops of memory and consequence. Around that mystery, McEwan builds a web of relationships: a marriage marked by affection and secrecy, friendships haunted by betrayal and loyalty and a fragile network of scholars trying to hold onto one another—and to meaning itself—as the past slips away.

Metcalfe’s search for “A Corona for Vivien” becomes a symbol for everything civilization has lost: art, memory, intimacy, certainty. The premise sounds fantastical, but McEwan treats it with characteristic precision. He withholds as much as he reveals. Details emerge sideways—through asides, memories and the quiet ellipses in conversation. McEwan offers little direct exposition. The “Derangement,” the lost years and even the contours of Thomas’s marriage are pieced together from context rather than explicitly stated. McEwan trusts his readers to listen for what isn’t said, and the result is a novel that feels discovered rather than told.

Readers familiar with McEwan’s work will recognize the voice immediately. What We Can Know isn’t a radical departure so much as a culmination of his long engagement with the limits of knowledge. From Atonement to Saturday, his novels have centered on rationalists—scientists, doctors, writers—trying to impose reason on moral chaos. Here, that failure becomes global. The ideals of reason and progress persist, but only as ruins—subjects for study rather than sources of faith.

Metcalfe, like so many of McEwan’s narrators, is both interpreter and witness: he studies the past obsessively but can never quite grasp it. His academic detachment is a survival mechanism, a way of keeping chaos at bay. “We remember,” he says, “because we cannot forgive.” That tension between intellect and emotion runs through every connection in the novel. McEwan writes with the intimacy of a domestic novelist—his attention to how couples speak past one another, how friendship becomes duty, how love hardens into habit. Even in this fragmented future, it’s relationships, not ideas, that give the book its pulse. The same reticence that shapes his storytelling—his refusal to explain too much—also defines his characters. They live, and love, in the gaps between what can be known and what must be guessed.

What We Can Know reads like Atonement rewritten for the age of climate reckoning—the same collision of reason and guilt, transposed from the personal to the planetary.

Fifteen years ago, McEwan gave us Solar, a bitterly funny satire about a self-absorbed Nobel physicist whose personal excesses mirrored humanity’s indifference to climate change. It was a comedy of denial—clever, cynical, and contemptuous. What We Can Know is the requiem to that farce. The laughter is gone; the crisis has happened; irony has curdled into sorrow.

In Solar, talk distracts us from disaster. In What We Can Know, talk is all that’s left. The same fascination with intellect remains, but the moral stance has shifted from ridicule to compassion. The human connections that sometimes seemed secondary in his earlier novels come to the center. The conversations between Thomas and his wife, Elise, carry the emotional weight of survival itself. What McEwan ultimately mourns isn’t just knowledge—it’s closeness, the possibility of truly knowing another person.

Most dystopian fiction dramatizes control—Orwell’s totalitarianism, Atwood’s theocracy, Huxley’s narcotic comfort. McEwan’s future is different: not a nightmare of oppression, but a quiet, pastoral afterlife. Nature has reclaimed the ruins; civilization persists in seminar rooms and surviving pubs. The horror is not brutality but loss. This is the future as archive, the end of the world as a research topic.

That restraint—the polite apocalypse—is what makes the novel so distinctly British. McEwan’s characters carry on with their manners intact. They apologize, footnote and contextualize even as the tides erase their coastlines. The civility that once defined British culture has outlived its purpose, becoming a kind of pathology. Denial, here, is just good breeding by another name.

The setting often borders on the bucolic: flooded valleys glint in sunlight; wildflowers overtake abandoned roads. McEwan’s prose lingers on the landscape’s melancholy beauty, turning devastation into pastoral reflection. The result is a bucolic apocalypse—a world greened by regret. Where J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World imagined fevered decay, McEwan offers elegy: less delirium than memorial service.

As climate fiction, What We Can Know stands apart from the urgency of Atwood or the technocratic sprawl of Kim Stanley Robinson. The emergency has already passed. The novel inhabits the long tail of catastrophe—what happens when the crisis becomes the background hum of ordinary life. McEwan’s England is not fighting to survive; it’s learning to live with its own extinction.

If Solar treated climate change as moral farce, What We Can Know turns it into emotional archaeology. The story’s future scholars excavate our moment as if it were classical antiquity, half myth, half data. But McEwan is less interested in what they find than in how they care for one another while they search. The tenderness between these characters—their arguments, their loyalties, their quiet need to connect—becomes its own fragile form of hope. Knowledge endures; meaning doesn’t, but affection sometimes does.

Writing with the clarity and restraint of experience, McEwan remains lucid, skeptical, and deeply humane. If Solar was the comedy of denial, What We Can Know is its elegy. The shift from satire to lament mirrors our own trajectory—from ironic detachment to exhausted recognition. At its heart, though, this is a love story—about what endures between people when everything else has failed.

The novel is constructed as tightly as the corona at its center, its ideas and emotions looping back with deliberate precision until the circle closes. McEwan’s composure isn’t detachment but design; every restraint, every silence, every return feels precisely placed. His authorial control mirrors the poem’s rigid architecture. The author’s achievement is not prophetic rage but tonal precision—the poise of a writer who understands that the most frightening thing about catastrophe is how ordinary it feels when it finally arrives.