Album of the Week

Mike D—Thank You [2026]

★★★

Mike D begins his first album since the demise of the Beastie Boys in 2012 by declaring it’s time to “Switch Up.” He both does and does not take those words to heart on Thank You, an album he made with his sons Skyler and Davis Diamond, who run their own band called Very Nice Person. The skittering, stuttering glitch rhythms don’t recall the loping looped funk of the Beasties but they’re not a million miles removed from either Mike D’s scattered remixes over the years, plus he retains an omnivorous appetite for sounds and styles. Thank You is littered with glitchy sounds that wouldn’t be found on a Beastie Boys album yet they don’t seem precisely fresh; they feel connected to the late 2000s and 2010s, when he retreated from the spotlight in the wake of Adam Yauch’s illness and subsequent death. He’s pasting these sounds like the grizzled crate-digger he is and part of the appeal of Thank You is how it’s evident that Mike D is finally ready to find a creative path on which he can fumble forward. Credit surely belongs to Very Nice Person, whose presence gives Mike D the kind of familial support he had in the Beasties, allowing him to stumble and fall as he regains his stride. This is still very much a solo affair, filled with self-doubts and self-affirmations and pointedly lacking the communal call-and-response that was a signature of the Beasties. It also lacks distinct melodic and rhythmic hooks, an absence that’s almost easy to not notice underneath the album’s bustling clamor. While it would’ve been nice to have individual cuts leap out of the speakers, it’s still engaging to hear a sixty-year-old Mike D acting his age without succumbing to stuffy maturity.

Billy Strings—So Much for Goodbyes [2026]

★★★

The way you can tell Billy Strings belongs to the jam scene is how So Much for Goodbyes sprawls, never quite taking pacing into account. His second album for

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Earlier this decade, Dolly Parton participated in the first SXSW after lockdown, which I covered for Rolling Stone back in 2022. She was there pushing Run, Rose, Run, a collaboration with James Patterson—they wrote a novel together, she composed a companion soundtrack and had designs on turning it all into a movie—accompanied by NFTs that were part of the “Dollyverse,” the singer’s venture into the brave new world of Web3.

The Dollyverse didn’t have the legs of Dollywood, the theme park she established in the Great Smoky Mountains back in 1986—four years later, it appears to have vanished in the ether—but both indicate how thoroughly she embraced every aspect of show business, adhering to old stage traditions while chasing the current fad. Nobody held the NFTs against Dolly, maybe because they were lost in a wave of merch that also included Kendra Scott jewelry, specialized Duncan Hines cake mixes, and cast-iron skillets emblazoned with the slogan “Jolene Please Don’t Take My Pan.” All these purchasable accoutrements were part and parcel with Parton, a singer whose signature quip once was “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Dolly never acted ashamed of her side hustles, whether it was hawking perfume and wine on the Home Shopping Network or offering an exclusive edition of her 2008 album Backwoods Barbie through Cracker Barrel.

Showbiz was as embedded in her DNA as bluegrass. She paid her dues as the duet partner of Porter Wagoner, a practitioner of gaudy Music City melodrama who passed along his fondness of mawkish melodrama to Dolly. Parton spent her earliest years as his on-camera foil on The Porter Wagoner Show, sharpening the charisma that made her a fixture on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and countless variety shows—ephemera that nevertheless shaped her public persona, where her costumes, wig, and heavy makeup deliberately deflected her inherent wit and compassion.

Whether she was hamming it up with Miss Piggy or trying to get Sylvester Stallone to crack a smile, Dolly Parton became so good at playing the part of Dolly Parton that her records almost became incidental to her stardom. Music surely remained at the foundation of her fame. She remained a powerful singer, making complicated phrases seem easy, until her later years, and retained widespread recognition as a songwriter. Despite this, her new records broke through the clatter only when she had a good gimmick—she rallied for her last album, when her star-studded “rock” album Rockstar album debuted at three—and her vast catalog is often reduced to a handful of songs: “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “Here You Come Again,” “9 to 5” and “Islands in the Stream,” a Bee Gees song given to her and Kenny Rogers that became a karaoke staple.

Those six songs divide fairly evenly into country and pop tunes, although “I Will Always Love You” became part of the popular lexicon through Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover and “Jolene” was elevated into the canon in the 2000s, some time after the White Stripes put their version on the flipside of their early single “Hello Operator.” That leaves “Coat of Many Colors,” a loose autobiography released in 1971, not long after “Joshua” gave Parton her first number one hit on the country charts. By that point, she’d established herself as a perceptive songwriter: “In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)” depicted poverty with clear eyes, the haunting “Down from Dover” has the depth of a novella. Her skills flourished in the early ‘70s, as she carved out a lane separate from Wagoner, delivering downhome sentiment from a modern perspective. These records are her richest, with the music played by RCA’s studio pros feeling as vivid as her songs.

But, at her heart, Parton was a performer, one who realized country couldn’t hold her anymore, so she went pop in 1978, making an overt soft rock record with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s “Here You Come Again” and appearing had a large audience lying in wait residing just outside of that she Became so big that country couldn’t hold her anymore, so she went pop in 1978, releasing “Here You Come Again” and appearing as a bunny on the cover of Playboy. Her crossover success helped shift country radio toward soft-focus country-pop, while keeping her in the mainstream with modest hits and TV appearances. Her comic ease in 9 to 5, the 1980 blockbuster that made her a movie star, confirmed Parton’s position as an all-around entertainer, capable of satisfying audiences of every stripe.

Her willingness to please all punters still surfaced in later years, when she found space for Kid Rock on Rockstar, not long after he was chanting “Let’s Go Brandon” on his terrible Bad Reputation LP. It usually manifested in albums that were designed as all-purpose entertainments, records that glided by on her charisma and were too accomplished to be bad, although they were often so polished, they seemed dull. Dolly adapted to the times, cutting oldies collections and Christmas records when it suited the market, and releasing For Love and Country on a label founded by Lawrence Welk months after 9/11. And every so often, she reconnected to her Appalachian roots, making albums that were among her most memorable. It happened when she teamed with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt to make Trio in 1987. It happened when she hired Ricky Skaggs to produce White Limozeen in 1989. It happened again at the turn of the century, when she made three bluegrass albums for Sugar Hill, a streak started with the Grammy-winning The Grass is Blue. Part of the fun of keeping up with Dolly’s records over the years is that these comebacks happened at unpredictable moments, so they were always worth a listen. If she happened to deliver a record like Run, Rose, Run, there was some fun in that too, because only Dolly Parton could’ve created a country concept album with James Patterson then sell it with NFTs. That tacky chutzpah is something to mourn as much as the music itself.

Selected Discography

Dolly’s body of work can be difficult to parse. Not only did she record albums regularly since 1967, her discography is cluttered with collections, many of which are cut-rate. None of them take into account her full career, so there’s still an opening for a career-spanning box set although licensing and marketing realities make that unlikely.

The Fairest of Them All [1969] The best of her ‘60s LPs, featuring “Down from Dover.”

Coat of Many Colors [1971]

My Tennessee Mountain Home [1973] A concept album about her upbringing steeped heavily in bluegrass.

Jolene [1974]

The Bargain Store [1975] This week, I think this might be the best of her ‘70s LPs.

New Harvest…First Gathering [1977] The first break from Wagoner that signals the start of a brand new day with its lead single “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.”

Here You Come Again [1977] Appealingly slick soft-rock marred by the horrifying “Me and Little Andy.”

Heartbreaker [1978]

9 to 5 and Odd Jobs [1980] Her movie star turn was accompanied by a concept album about work, which somehow found a way to balance Woody Guthrie and Mike Post

Trio [1987]

White Limozeen [1989]

Hungry Again [1998] As the title suggests, this is where Parton started to re-engage with the process of making records again.

The Grass is Blue [1999]

Little Sparrow [2001]

Mission Chapel Memories 1971-1975 [Raven] [2001]

The late, lamented Australian reissue label Raven offered a deep portrait of Dolly’s early ‘70s peak

The Essential Dolly Parton [Legacy] A double-disc released by Legacy in 2005 remains the current standard bearer for Dolly hits collections.

Dolly [2009] The only multi-disc box set that attempted a deep, detailed look at her career, pairing her RCA and Columbia Recordings.

Just Between You and Me: The Complete Recordings 1967-1976 [2014]

One of Bear Family’s signature mammoth box sets, this features everything Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner recorded for RCA, a body of work that’s surprisingly consistent and compelling.

Weezer—Weezer (Gold Album) [2026]

★★★★

Having long ago cycled through most of the primary colors, Weezer settles on a Gold schematic for their sixth eponymous album, which happens to be their first full-length record in half a decade. The band entered hiatus after spending 2022 delivering a conceptual EP every time seasons changed, an interesting project that may have misjudged the attention span of audiences recovering from a pandemic.

Grand artistic ambitions fall by the wayside on The Gold Album which, like so many albums named Weezer albums before it, functions as a bit of a reset for the quartet—a signal that the alt-rockers are ready to get “Back to the Shack.”

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Brandon Flowers—THRASHER [2026]

★★★★

It was somewhere around the time Brandon Flowers sang that “I could’ve been born in Bangladesh, but I wasn’t, I was born here” that I fell for THRASHER, the album where the Killers frontman refashions himself as a country crooner. The lyric is patently ridiculous and sincere, a blend that’s turned out to be the specialty of Flowers: underneath all the glitz, he means it, man.

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I think it’s fair to say that without Dave Marsh, the trailblazing rock critic who died this past week at the age of 76, there wouldn’t have been an All Music Guide. It’s not that he encouraged or mentored our original editorial team; it’s that the whole project served as something of a corrective to the attitude he cultivated in The Rolling Stone Record Guide.

I had spent years poring over The New Rolling Stone Record Guide—the 1983 update with the blue cover, not the 1979 original painted in red (I didn’t find a copy of that until years later)—absorbing its style and opinions before the inception of All Music Guide in late 1991. There are several reasons my uncle Michael started AMG, including his disbelief that I purchased a copy of John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman when there were other, better Coltrane albums out there, but an instigating factor was his frustration at how the book didn’t draw distinctions between albums within a discography. I remember him specifically griping about the ABBA entry, another one of those columns of two-star records punctuated with a three-star hits comp, which wasn’t written by Marsh but sure followed his editorial edict: an entire body of work dismissed in a pithy paragraph.

All Music Guide was designed to provide an arc within a discography—all the peaks and valleys were relative to a specific artist—and to get into the granular details of individual albums. It was a welcome, maybe necessary, shift and the rise of the internet allowed many AMG writers to get into the weeds of an artist’s work. This was all fun and games until it came time to condense a Deep Purple entry from ten or so pages to maybe two, as I had to do the last time we ever published a printed All Music Guide to Rock. Moments like that made me appreciate the ability to succinctly summarize an unwieldy body of work, which Marsh and his writers often did in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide.

Alongside those canonical entries, The Blue Book has dozens of dismissals of musicians who are now forgotten. I opened my copy at random and discovered Marsh’s sentence-long review of Chris Montan’s Any Minute Now: “Writer/singer so slick and tasteful you’ll want to strangle him before you’ve heard a full side.” The wonders of technology mean that it’s now possible to head to YouTube and check out Montan, an artist who never saw a domestic CD reissue of his lone album, and discover that Marsh’s assessment was on the money. Flipping through The Blue Book, it’s a bit of a wonder how much space is devoted to artists and albums that have fallen by the wayside. Although I share Chuck Eddy’s suspicion that Marsh may not have listened to all of the records he dismissed—in his remembrance, Chuck cites the Nazareth entry, where Marsh claims the band’s “biggest claim to fame is a 1975 hit, ‘Love Hurts,’ which bears not a smattering of resemblance to the great Everly Brothers song of the same name,” when it is in fact a cover—part of the appeal of the book is how the greats rub shoulders with ephemera. That’s what popular music is: there are glimmers of brilliance amidst the trash and sometimes the trash glitters, too.

Marsh harbored catholic tastes but he wasn’t particularly interested in cheap thrills. In The Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, he draws a distinction between Aerosmith and their forefathers the Rolling Stones: “Understood in the seventies as a second-rate imitation of the Stones, with a first-rate guitarist offsetting a third-rate front man, Aerosmith may have been somebody’s legit high school faves but there was little danger of mistaking them for artists. Their ambitions didn’t encompass any such thing; they were out for quick, disposable kicks and if you liked them, they delivered.”

He preferred his kicks to have substance and he was adept at arguing why, say, “Nobody But Me” by the Human Beinz, had lasting power. This skill combined with his voracious musical appetites, creates the illusion that The Heart of Rock and Soul covered every conceivable strain of pop, rock, or soul, which it does not. Marsh was blunt about his dislikes and blind spots. In the book’s introduction, he notes, “Progressive rock sounds desiccated to me because it’s so thoroughly divorced from the taproot of rock and roll: rhythm and blues.” That credo could explain his disdain for anything explicitly arty, yet he still fell under the spell of Roxy Music and Peter Gabriel, finding room for no less than three 45s from the former Genesis frontman in his list of 1001 singles.

The length of The Heart of Rock and Soul allows Marsh to indulge in such contradictions but, more importantly, it gives him space to offer context and create unexpected connections between genres and eras. All the canonical artists of the early rock era are here—the Beatles don’t make the Top Ten, but the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin all do—yet it doesn’t feel fussy or staid because Marsh also devotes space to disco, country and hip-hop, adding worthy B-sides and flops alongside cult classics and oldies staples. He also extends the timeline to the brink of his deadline: the last single here is Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s “It Takes Two,” which was released in 1988, months before the book’s 1989 publication.

I read The Heart of Rock & Soul as much as The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, maybe more, but it wasn’t until adulthood that it influenced my critical approach more than The Blue Book. The essential lesson I learned from The Heart is that great records can be found anywhere. They can be buried in the past or cut within the last year. They could be inescapable upon their release or only find an audience years later. This omnivorous ideal powered me and my colleagues at All Music Guide as we built the repository of album reviews and artist biographies that became known as the Allmusic database. Marsh might have felt some kind of kinship with this Michigan crew because he did write for AMG at one point in the 2000s. I can’t recall the particulars outside of his long friendship with Thom Jurek. I do know that he contributed some gospel reviews, plus this cutrate Joe Tex comp that he reviewed for some unknown reason.

I also know that Marsh remains a critic I regularly read. Whenever I’m revisiting an older artist or record, I’ll haul out The New Rolling Stone Record Guide and The Heart of Rock & Soul along with Christgau’s Record Guide because they help me develop my own original thoughts, which is all we can ever ask of a critic.

The Strokes—Reality Awaits [2026]

★★★

Reality Awaits is a particularly cheeky title for an album immersed in the conscious artificiality of the age of AI. There’s a slight air of illusion to the entire enterprise, from its queasy cowboy cover art to the fathomless layers of Autotune slathered on the voice of Julian Casablancas.
Truth be told, there’s always been a trace of uncanny valley in the Strokes, a suggestion that the band isn’t quite what they seem. At the outset of their stardom, this uneasiness was often dismissed as a byproduct of the band’s posh pedigree, how they were rich boys slumming as downtown degenerates.

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Jack White—Frozen Charlotte [2026]

★★★★

All fire and flash, Frozen Charlotte finds Jack White continuing what he started with No Name two years ago. He’s no longer putting on airs, neither aiming for the middlebrow respectability of Blunderbuss nor immersing himself in the proggy pretension that bogged down Boarding House Reach and enlivened Fear of the Dawn/Entering Heaven Alive. He’s returned to his old White Stripes stomping ground, cranking up the amplifiers and daring his rhythm section to keep pace.

Frozen Charlotte may be cut from the same cloth as No Name, but it hangs differently on White’s bones. It’s a harder, nastier affair, teeming with accusations and recriminations. White crows to a lover “You’ll Never Fix Me,” a sentiment echoed

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Madonna—Confessions II [2026]

★★★★

Sequels always seemed anathema to Madonna, an artist whose dedication to forward motion finally pushed her outside the mainstream sometime after the release of Confessions on a Dancefloor in 2005. It’s not that she became too adventurous for the pop charts. Rather, her finger simply slipped off the pulse of the zeitgeist, leaving her adrift right at the moment that pop music grew amorphous.

Pop music isn’t much of a consideration on Confessions II. Strung together as a megamix, the album erases distinctions between songs with the same ease it blurs the signifiers of classic disco, house and techno.

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The Rolling Stones—Foreign Tongues [2026]

★★★★

Foreign Tongues is the loosest Rolling Stones album since Dirty Work, the album they released 40 years ago, when it wasn’t unusual for the Stones to knock out a new record every two or three years. They lost that sense of urgency after Steel Wheels, a record that helped establish a reliable mega-circuit for ‘60s survivors, a place where albums functioned as handsome addendums to international tours.

Currently, the Stones aren’t slated to hit the road in support of Foreign Tongues, a decision that can’t help but seem like a tacit acknowledgement of the difficulties of mounting an international tour in a year when the two remaining founding members both turn 83. It’s also hard not to notice that Keith Richards is a diminished presence on Foreign Tongues, finally rolling up to the mic on “Some of Us,” just as the album enters the home stretch. Keith’s guitar does get space to strike and saunter, providing a suitably gnarly fanfare on “Rough and Twisted,” the opening cut that suggests the album may kick a little bit harder than it ultimately does.

“Rough and Twisted” does sound harder and nastier than anything on Hackney Diamonds, the 2023 album that roused the Stones out of years of studio slumber. There, classic rock whisperer Andrew Watt performed his usual production trick of letting a band act as a pastiche of themselves, evoking memories of old times without indulging in period-specific nostalgia. Foreign Tongues switches the script somewhat: instead of blurring the boundaries between the past and the present, the Stones view their old tropes from a fresh, new angle. They’ll haul out a rocker, then switch gears for an R&B number propelled by Mick Jagger’s falsetto (”Jealous Lover”). They ramble through the backwoods country bars of “Ringing Hollow,” then slide into the disco pulse of “Never Wanna Lose You.”

All of these styles are familiar, having some antecedent somewhere in their extensive catalog, but what’s striking about Foreign Tongues is how it reveals the secret to the band’s longevity: the Stones adapt to the times, adopting the fashion of an era while still sounding like themselves. Watt produces the album how albums are made now: it’s bright and airy, a clean machine constructed with computerized studio trickery. Whether it’s Steve Jordan’s brawny drums or the soothing swagger of Keith and Ronnie Wood, there’s a precision in the rhythms that’s unusual for a Stones record yet right in line with how albums are made in 2026.

Not everything on Foreign Tongues is quite so polished: an acoustic version of Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah” was captured live in the studio, a sharp reading of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” smartly keeps the groove lithe and deep and “Hit Me in the Head,” built upon the last completed drum track from Charlie Watts, has a discernable swing to its hard attack. Still, the heart of the record finds the Stones treating the distinctive strut of their guitarist as merely one element in a bustling music. The riffs provide the foundation for a track instead of being the reason for its existence. This change in tactic makes Jagger the undeniable focus of the mix: he provides the attitude, melody and humor, acting as the center of the gravity for the rest of the musicians.

Jagger is unusually engaged throughout Foreign Tongues, taking swift jabs at authoritarians and spiritually bankrupt billionaires (it’s quite rich to hear him sing “Life’s too short for just making money, show me how to spend it, honey”) that places the album as thoroughly in the now as Watt’s pristine production. Unlike on, say, Bridges to Babylon, it never feels like Mick is chasing the charts, yet there’s a pop sensibility animating much of the album. “In the Stars” has a crystalline chorus that lingers in the subconscious, “Mr. Charm” has the goofiest hook on a Stones song since the days of Emotional Rescue, while “Covered in You” has its taut guitar riff countered by a loping bassline from Paul McCartney. Jagger handles these changes with gusto, as if he’s pouring all his energy into the studio because he knows there’s a real possibility the Stones may not hit the stage again.

It’s also possible that the Stones may not enter the studio again, too. The clock keeps ticking. There are many reasons why it may be hard to rally the troops for another record, which is why Foreign Tongues is so welcome: it’s not haunted by either the future or the past, instead finding the Stones living entirely in the moment.

I have added links to my reviews of the albums. Most of them link to a previous newsletter; some of these are paywalled, your support is always appreciated. Some of them will lead to Pitchfork (the work I do at MOJO is largely targeted to the magazine). There are a handful of titles that I’m aiming to write up—those are mainly on the Reissues list, which tend to take me a little bit longer than new records.

If the top few are a little predictable, well, they’re the ones that have lingered in my mind the most, so they’re the ones I’ve come back to often.

2026 Albums

1. Ella Langley—Dandelion

2. Johnny Blue Skies & the Dark Clouds—Mutiny After Midnight

3. Charley Crockett—Clovis

4. The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis—Deface the Currency

5. Ratboys—Singin’ to an Empty Chair

6. Julia Cumming—Julia

7. King Tuff—MOO

8. Paul McCartney—The Boys of Dungeon Lane

9. Olivia Rodrigo—you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

10. The Paranoid Style—Known Associates

11. Marisa Anderson—The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music

12. Courtney Barnett—Creature of Habit

13. Flea—Honora

14. Kacey Musgraves—Middle of Nowhere

15. Luke Combs—The Way I Am

16. Charley Crockett—Age of the Ram

17. Willie Nelson—Dream Chaser

18. Kip Moore—Reason to Believe

19. Megan Moroney—Cloud 9

20. Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs—Mission of Mercy

21. Ringo Starr—Long Long Road

22. Kurt Vile—Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me

23. Buck Meek—The Mirror

24. Julian Lage—Scenes from Above

25. Gorillaz—The Mountain

26. The Lemon Twigs—Look for Your Mind!

27. Violet Grohl—Be Sweet to Me

28. Ashley McBryde—Wild

29. Aubrey Sellers—Attachment Theory

30. Midland—Stages

31. Dry Cleaning—Secret Love

32. They Might Be Giants—The World is to Dig

33. Sam Morrow—Southern Boogie

34. Joe Jackson—Hope and Fury

35. Squeeze—Trixies

36. Lucinda Williams—World’s Gone Wrong

37. The Black Crowes—A Pound of Feathers

38. Bill Callahan—My Days of 58

39. The Twilight Sad—It’s the Long Goodbye

40. Snail Mail—Ricochet

41. Ryan Beatty—Sweet Fortune

42. Old Crow Medicine Show—Union Made

43. Courtney Marie Andrews—Valentine

44. Crooked Fingers—Swet Deth

45. Ashley Monroe—Dear Nashville

46. The James Hunter Six—Off the Fence

47. Charli xcx—Wuthering Heights

48. Bruce Hornsby—Indigo Park

49. Caleb Caudle—Heavy Thrill

50. The Greenberry Woods—It’s All Good, Sugar…

2026 REISSUES

1. Ween—Bring Out the Foos 1996

2. The Necessaries—Completely Necessary (Anthology 1978-1982)

3. Clifton Chenier—The King of Zydeco

4. David Forman—Who You Been Talking To

5. Little Feat—Little Feat [Deluxe Edition]

6. Don Williams—Epilogue: The Cellar Tapes

7. The Lovin’ Spoonful—What a Day for a Daydream: The Complete Recordings

8. Cream—Wheels of Fire [Super Deluxe]

9. Talking Heads—Tentative Decisions: Demos & Live

10. The Beach Boys—We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years

11. Ty Segall & the Muggers—“Live” “At” “The” “BBC”

12. Power Station—Power Station

13. Johnny Cougar—American Dream: The Mainman Recordings 1976-1977

14. Miles Davis—The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965

15. Velocity Girl—Simpatico! [Remastered and Expanded]

Album of the Week:

Olivia Rodrigo—you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love [2026]

★★★★

All those allusions to the Cure on the singles leading up to the release of you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love were no coincidence. Olivia Rodrigo spends a good portion of her third album in a sustained funk, her melancholy creeping into the moments where the tempo quickens. Where her first two albums were bifurcated between ballads and barbed punk-pop, things get a bit blurry here. Rodrigo heightens the tension by building the drama on “Stupid Song” and “Purple,” occasionally stripping her arrangements so she’s presented in an unsettlingly precise closeup, as on the hushed “Honeybee.” The escalated theatricality feels very goth, even if the album itself rarely lingers in the shadows. When Rodrigo enlists Robert Smith himself for a duet, she places him on “What’s Wrong with Me,” a tune whose bright melody pulls the song out of its purported depression. These flashes of light help you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love play as a pop album, albeit one that’s swiftly leaving the adolescent realm. Rodrigo seems itching to leave juvenilia behind, following her head more than her heart, tempering the temptation to follow her bad ideas wherever they may lead. Her concentration on craft means you seem pretty sad feels layered but controlled, purposefully lacking the tart pop that gave Guts its kick. She’ll still curse, she can’t conquer her petty instincts, but she’ll polish the big jangle of “U+Me=<3” so it feels like a pre-Nirvana college-rock hit and give a “Maggots for Brains” a gleam that suits the heyday of MTV. Only the relentless neon synths of “Expectations” connect with the sense of abandon that fueled Rodrigo’s boldest hits, its pulsating presence both a welcome jolt of energy and a yardstick for her artistic maturation: she can still hit her hooks hard, she just chooses not to.

Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs—Mission of Mercy [2026]

★★★★

It feels like Mission of Mercy is where Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs hit their stride, all by not doing much of anything at all. The former Heartbreaker no longer seems concerned by his vocal resemblance to Tom Petty, nor does he seem to want to do much more than deliver a killer little rock’n’roll record,

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Album of the Week

Willie Nelson—Dream Chaser [2026]

★★★★

By the official Texas Monthly tally, Dream Chaser is the 156th album Willie Nelson has released in his lifetime. I’d wager Willie and family have several dozen completed records tucked away in the vault, waiting for the day when Nelson is no longer able to make new music. That day is still somewhere over the horizon, so Willie is doing what he always does: he’s moving forward, cutting records with his longtime partner Buddy Cannon, playing concerts when he can. He spent last year singing the songs of his friends—he made a handsome tribute to Rodney Crowell and a killer salute to Merle Haggard—which means it’s time for a collection largely devoted to originals. Nelson co-wrote six of the ten songs on Dream Chaser, working constantly with his longtime collaborator Buddy Cannon and sometimes with other authors, too. One of those co-writers is Bob Dylan, who comes aboard for “I Can’t Read Your Mind,” a lazy ballad that opens with “I don’t know how to read your mind/The letters are too small,” a casually clever couplet that feels like it’s been around for ages. Most of the songs on Dream Chaser sound like they’ve been kicking around for a while, an impression enhanced by the album concluding with an elegant rendition of Peanut Montgomery’s “Developing My PIctures,” cut many, many years ago by George Jones for Musicor. They also sound familiar because Willie and his band don’t stretch themselves as much as lay back, enjoying their own easy roll. There’s a comfort in their chemistry and in the sturdiness of the songs: there may be no unexpected twists in the rollicking “After All” or the lovely “We’d Make a Good Movie,” but the satisfaction comes from the songs hitting their marks with precision. Nelson marvels at his ability to still write new tunes, singing on the title track how a song came to him in a flash last night, leading him to “wonder if there’ll be another, then another comes around.” Another song comes around, leading to another album, then the cycle starts once again. One day, this circle will be broken. The knowledge of that inevitably, which Nelson never mentions outright, lends a bit of a poignancy to Dream Chaser: it may be just another good Willie Nelson album but it’s a wonder that he’s still making them at the age of 93.

Kurt Vile—Philadelphia’s been good to me [2026]

★★★★

My mind tends to wander when it comes to Kurt Vile, the self-appointed torchbearer for indie slackerdom. Not that he’s ever intended to grab a listener’s attention. Vile prefers to drift, getting lost within his own shaggy riffs, as he shrugs punchlines and spins out guitar lines that last too long to coalesce into a solo.

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Paul McCartney—The Boys of Dungeon Lane

★★★★

Paul McCartney introduced The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his twentieth solo album, with “Days We Left Behind,” a wistful glance back at his formative years in Liverpool. The choice of lead single intentionally framed its accompanying album as a memoir, a notable shift from an artist so obsessed with the ever-present now that he titled an album NEW when he was 71 years old

McCartney is now thirteen years older than he was when he released the spangly NEW, which now feels like a relic from a peculiar era. Back in 2013, he still yearned to be part of the pop mainstream despite his advancing age, teaming up with four separate young producers in hopes of one more Top Ten hit. The hushed “Days We Left Behind” announced that he left all that gleam and gloss behind. The acoustic arrangement left no place for McCartney to hide, letting his tender vocal quiver be the focus of attention. That fragility is evident throughout The Boys of Dungeon Lane, where McCartney chooses to write songs that accommodate his diminished range rather than disguising his years.
It’s a move that meshes with the album’s stated concept of McCartney wandering through his back pages. There is a reflective undercurrent flowing through The Boys of Dungeon Lane, one that surfaces in the unadorned “Down South,” a clear-eyed account of his early days with George Harrison, and on “Salesman Saint,” a minor-key waltz that plays upon the story of his parents’ marriage. Even with a wailing big band decorating the latter, these are understated moments, unlike the jubilant nostalgia of “Home to Us,” a duet with Ringo Starr designed to get by on charm.

Despite these forthright snippets of autobiography, McCartney isn’t particularly interested in recounting his past in detail. These songs are but one thread on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, interwoven with love songs, character sketches, and trips from on high. All these are familiar themes, as are the song forms. He stitches together full-throated rockers, incandescent pop, romantic flights, music hall ditties, and plaintive folk, decorating each with layered harmonies and the odd art-rock flourish, making sure to shift the tempo whenever momentum threatens to lag.

The construction of the record camouflages the familiarity of the components, particularly upon the first few listens of The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The album opens gently, with McCartney speak-singing the verse of “As You Lie There” over a plucked acoustic, lulling the listener with its gentle sway before crashing into a screamed chorus. This left-field hook is the only sucker punch on the album, arriving early enough to indicate the record won’t quite follow the expected path. That’s often true. “Mountain Top” collapses into a concentrated psychedelic coda, and the middle eight of “Never Know” percolates with interlaced harmonies, eccentric choices that are balanced by the precision of the propulsive “Lost Horizon” and candy-coated “Ripples on a Pond.” When McCartney strips away this modern finery for old-timey ballroom pop, he offers two variations on the same essential story: he rallies on “Life Can Be Hard,” trying his best to believe that love can carry through the times when there’s no food in the larder, then flipping the script for “Momma Gets By,” illustrating a scenario where a wife has to carry the household with no contribution from her layabout husband.

“Momma Gets By” concludes the album on a haunting, bittersweet note, providing a fitting bookend to “As You Lie There,” a song where a crush curdles into a consuming obsession. In both cases, McCartney is delivering something that’s explicitly the opposite of what The Boys of Dungeon Lane seemed to promise. They’re character sketches that let McCartney explore complex feelings, an ambiguity that also surfaces on “Days We Left Behind,” which concludes on a note of acceptance: “nothing stays the same/And no one needs to cry.” That’s a sentiment that suits McCartney, who has always felt the pull of the past as he looked forward to the future. He’s the one who pushed the Beatles into art-rock, and he’s also the one who yearned for the group to get back into dingy clubs. These two instincts fuel The Boys of Dungeon Lane, an album whose blend of sepia-stained memories and vibrant present feels authentically and satisfyingly McCartney.

Album of the Week

Courtney Barnett—Creature of Habit [2026]

★★★★

Courtney Barnett drifted away from the barbed Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit shortly after its release, trading its cathartic roar for self-soothing strums. A decade’s worth of running in circles—which amounted to two solo albums, plus a cloying collaboration with Kurt Vile—makes the sudden lurch forward of Creature of Habit feel especially bracing. Barnett isn’t returning the lean noise of Sometimes I Sit, preferring a primary palette that allows her to paint with texture and tempo, coloring with light and shade. The bright, open production gives Creature of Habit a welcoming feel. Barnett doesn’t seem happier so much as a cloud has been lifted, revealing the lithe melodic sense and pungent insights lying within her songs.

Ashley Monroe—Dear Nashville [2026]

★★★

Nashville never has given Ashley Monroe much of a reason to love the Music City. Her initial deal with a major didn’t go particularly well, the two records she released in the immediate wake of Pistol Annies struggled to get airplay,

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Dennis Locorriere (1949-2026)

Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show specialized in mess, as any band that would call an album Sloppy Seconds would. They had two names, dropping “the Medicine Show” when they needed a boost, and they had two distinct frontmen, each representing a different side of their personality. Ray Sawyer, the sleazo with the eye-patch, embodied their early years, when they were dirtbag conduits for the greasy tunes of Shel Silverstein. Dennis Locorriere, who died this past weekend at the age of 76, provided a smooth counterpoint, crooning sentimental Silverstein ballads and navigating a left-turn into polyester disco with ease.

The two would go their separate ways in the 1980s, long after the hits dried up, yet they somehow co-existed for about ten years, creating a body of work that feels like a condensed cultural history of the Me Decade. They started the ‘70s freaking at the freakers ball, then ended it seducing divorcees on the dancefloor, a gulf in aesthetic connected by love of hedonism. This was a band that loved to live in the moment, thinking not a whit about the future.

Being so in the present meant Dr. Hook littered their albums with tacky signifiers of a bygone age. Their records are colored in burnt gold and avocado green, decorated in shag carpet and wood paneling, filled with stale beer and skunk weed. Any given LP has something to offend. Songs sung in a Speedy Gonzalez accent, smirking double entendres, odes to groupies and grass, stoner humor that curdled over the years into dad jokes.

A fair chunk of this sensibility stemmed from their alliance with Silverstein, as Floating World Records’ forthcoming double-disc set Sings the Songs of Silverstein Plus makes clear. It pairs all the Silverstein songs the group cut on their first three records, including the entirety of Sloppy Seconds, with Silverstein’s Boy Named Sue (And His Other Country Songs) and Freakin’ at the Freakers Ball, a record that remains outlandish. Dr. Hook delivered Silverstein’s songs better than the songwriter, thanks to the joyousness of the band and how Sawyer’s sandpaper rasp grated against Locorriere’s croon. It reached an apotheosis on Bankrupt, an absurd slice of pothead funk where they can barely conceal their glee in getting away with their nonsense. The references on “I Got Stoned and I Missed It” and “Everybody’s Makin’ It Big But Me” date but not the delivery.

After Bankrupt, Locorriere slowly emerged to the forefront, thanks in part to his straight-forward lead on their cover of Sam Cooke’s “Only Sixteen” giving them their biggest hit since “The Cover of the Rolling Stone” brought them to the cover of the Rolling Stone. The band soon matched his easy touch, shellacking their shaggy hair so they shamelessly pander to the disco hordes on “Sharing the Night Together,” “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman” and “Sexy Eyes,” a trio of Top Ten hits that gave them a second act that granted the group permanent status on the oldies circuit well into the 21st Century.

Locorriere retained the rights to the Dr. Hook name after the group split in the mid-’80s, licensing it to Sawyer for years and years. He also toured on his own under some permutation of the Dr. Hook name, right up til their 50th anniversary tour at the start of this decade. Time has had its way with their records. They seem gaudier with each passing year and, from a certain angle, they can still seem glorious too.

Dr. Hook (and the Medicine Show) Selected Discography

Doctor Hook [1972]

★★★

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The Lemon Twigs—Look For Your Mind! [2026]

★★★

I don’t particularly trust my affection for the Lemon Twigs. The duo of Brian and Michael D’Addario, here back for the first time on wax by their live band featuring bassist Danny Ayala and drummer Reza Martin, draw deeply from the sacred pop texts of the 1960s, placing a particular emphasis on the brief window where the Beach Boys seemed cool—a period that lasted roughly from “Fun, Fun, Fun” through “California Girls.” All their hooks and jangle are processed through an Instagram retro filter so Look For Your Mind! sounds not like a dollar-bin surf-garage LP but the kind of post-bubblegum AM-pop that could’ve doubled as the soundtrack for Sid & Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. It’s power pop without any heft, even though the record benefits from being cut with a full band; it’s not loud, but it is lively. The D’Addario’s dedication to period detail does give Look For Your Mind! an uncanny authenticity, sounding for all the world as if a long-lost album from the Paley Brothers has finally surfaced. As fun as that is, what nags at me is that after the record is done, I have no recollection of its specific songs, only memories of basking in a sunbeam for 40 minutes. Maybe that’s enough.

Ashley McBryde—Wild [2026]

★★★★

Wild comes roaring out of the gate, sounding so loud and confident that it’s easy to not recognize that it essentially is a sobriety album. Ashley McBryde spends most of the album reckoning with the ravages of alcoholism, taking an inventory and drafting a plan for the present.

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Charley Crockett—Clovis [2026]

★★★★

I can’t say whether Charley Crockett is burning bridges with Clovis, an LP issued on his newly-minted imprint $10 Cowboy, but I sure suspect that Island Records isn’t crazy that it appears a mere three weeks after he closed out his “Sagebrush Trilogy” with their release of Age of the Ram.
Major labels tend to not like to have their investment undercut by mavericks who only listen to the muse, which is precisely how Crockett portrayed himself in an Instagram post: “You can drop a fuckin’ record whenever the fuck you want. And what’s more important to me is dropping all this really good art right now.”
Crockett’s framing echoes that of Prince, who complained in the 1990s that Warner wouldn’t allow him to release records at his desired clip. Where Warner balked at a record a year from Prince, Island issued three Crockett LPs within the span of 13 months, a pace that’s not much faster than the two-a-year that he’s maintained ever since signing a deal with the Americana indie Thirty Tigers in 2018. It’s a rate that positions him as the country Robert Pollard.

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Album of the Week

Kacey Musgraves—Middle of Nowhere [2026]

★★★★

Call Middle of Nowhere Kacey Musgraves’ return to country, if you must. It’s her first release on Lost Highway, the Americana imprint recently revived by Interscope Records, a label affiliation that carries some weight. Musgraves also emphasizes songs over concept this time around, a framing that didn’t quite apply to either Star-Crossed or Deeper Well,

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I was fortunate enough to be one of the “experts” solicited by The New York Times to contribute a ballot to the publication’s list of The 30 Greatest Living American Songwriters, the results of which were published today.

The “living” qualifier in the description carries a bunch of weight. Take a glance at the selected individual ballots from a handful of contributors (mainly musicians) and you’ll discover asterisks scattered through the selections: those are the songwriters who died since the project started last year.

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, who were among the anchors on my own personal ballot, died within days of each other in June 2025, a couple of months after I submitted my selections. Others died too: D’Angelo, cited by Justin Vernon; Tom Lehrer, who naturally headed “Weird Al” Yankovic’s list; plus Alan Bergman and Billy Steinberg, who both made Desmond Child’s ballot, right alongside Paul Stanley and Jon Bon Jovi & Richie Sambora, two musicians who’ve written with Child in the past.

Child isn’t the only canvassed songwriter to flaunt a personal connection. Aimee Mann nods to her husband Michael Penn and collaborator Ted Leo, while Jeff Tweedy names himself as one of the best living songwriters in America. Such biases are only right and natural: these are subjective lists, shaped by taste and temperament.

Looking back on my ballot, I certainly see that I fell prey to both mood and memory. I missed some of my favorite songwriters. I overlooked Gamble & Huff, which is a grievous error on my part. Carl Wilson’s ballot includes Bobby Braddock, who now seems like an obvious choice to me. I blanked on Miranda Lambert, who wrote many of my favorite songs of the past 15 years and who has just expanded her songbook with this year’s smash, Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.”

Any of these would make my list if I was submitting it today, taking the place of Dwight Yoakam, whose presence reflects the fact that I was listening to a lot of Dwight Yoakam at this point last year. His inclusion also demonstrates how I attempt to balance my ballot. Once I’ve filled out the obvious choices, I try to represent different eras, styles, and genres. It’s a fool’s errand but it can be fun.

Of the “obvious choices” that didn’t make the cut, I felt like John Fogerty was a slam-dunk, since his songs already feel like standards. I’m also surprised that Randy Newman didn’t make the grade. He’s been a fixture on these kinds of lists for so long that I feel a little bit of a wistful pang in his absence, since it signals that the generations are shifting. Plus, you do need to make sure that a list like this doesn’t contain only Boomers: that’s boring to read.

I can find it a little difficult to discern which contemporary writers should make a Greatest Songwriters list, only because it takes time for a songbook to build and I do think there needs to be some depth and range in a songbook. Of the songwriters that made the list, I will gripe about Lana Del Rey, who I ran out of patience with a long time ago, and complain about Diane Warren, who has written a lot of songs, very few of them that could be classified as “good.”

Anyway, here’s what I submitted to The NYTimes last year, along with a list of also-rans. I’m sure I missed many of my favorite songwriters here but so it goes.

My New York Times Greatest Living American Songwriters Ballot

1. Bob Dylan

2. Smokey Robinson

3. Paul Simon

4. Randy Newman

5. Willie Nelson

6. Carole King

7. John Fogerty

8. R.E.M. (Peter Buck/Bill Berry/Mike Mills/Michael Stipe)

9. Bruce Springsteen

10. Tom Waits (and Kathleen Brennan)

11. Stevie Wonder

12. Mike Stoller

13. Donald Fagen

14. Sly Stone

15. Brian Wilson

16. Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham

17. Dolly Parton

18. Stephen Malkmus

19. Jimmy Webb

20. Billy Joel

21. Public Enemy (The Bomb Squad)

22. Todd Rundgren

23. Neil Diamond

24. Lindsey Buckingham

25. Dwight Yoakam

My Also-Rans

• Jack White

• Rodney Crowell

• Mike Campbell

• Taylor Swift

• John Hiatt

• Lyle Lovett

• Kendrick Lamar

• Jackson Browne

• Aimee Mann

• Paul Westerberg

• Al Green

• Jeff Tweedy

• Shane McNally

• Marshall Crenshaw

• Steve Earle

• Fiona Apple

• John Sebastian

• Chrissie Hynde

• Chris Stamey/Peter Holsapple

• Daryl Hall

• Bob Seger