Evan Westfall is a Columbus-based musician best known as a founding member of CAAMP—the globally beloved folk trio that has amassed over 1 billion streams, landed several #1s at AAA radio, sold out arenas and amphitheaters, and performed on CBS Saturday Morning, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Renowned for their earthy, joyful, exuberance, the members of CAAMP hold tightly to their Ohio roots—in the way they approach songwriting, and in the way they live their lives. 

On Westfall’s upcoming solo album of instrumentals, he carries that Midwestern ethos forward. The songs are largely inspired by seasons, as well as what it takes to endure—and embrace—each shift. “I’m in a new phase of life,” he says. “I’ve been looking back at all of the memories that have gotten me to where I am now.” Newly married and settled not far from where he grew up, he lets an introspective gratitude guide his days, as well as his music. “I am who I am because of where I live. And I can not thank Ohio enough for that.”

The multi-instrumentalist’s first solo offering—Is This Our Exit?— is a work of deft, dynamic, and undeniably evocative playing. Westfall credits changes in his personal life with a refreshed approach to the guitar. “I think the responsibility of being a good partner, and the feeling of being at home, changed the way I wanted to play.” He explored open tunings and fingerstyle, at times on guitars with only five strings. Produced by Dan Alvarez and Jordan Dunn-Pilz of the band TOLEDO, the album sparkles with inventive musical interpretations of universal human emotions. 

Focus track “SISDM” is a perfect example. The song refers to an essay by the Columbus poet Hanif Abdurraqib about the transition from summer to fall, which resonated with Westfall. “You feel the extremes of each season,” he says. “When the city and surrounding farms shake hands and brace for another beautiful, brutal winter.” The song is an unconventional EBEF# BD# tuning, which Westfall discovered by accident. The effect is wistful and transcendent—the sound of nature transforming, and humanity surrendering with grace. When asked, Westfall considers the most dismal phase of Ohio’s winter landscape as more than an inevitability, but a necessity for growth. “A lot of it’s pretty, and some of it’s ugly. You have to work hard and dig deep to find the beauty during the ugly. That’s what gives us our character.”

Is This Our Exit? will be released January 24th, 2025.

“Sometimes it takes four or five tries to realize something just isn't working,” says Kassi Valazza. “I wrote this after my thirteenth try.” She’s referring to the song “Roll On” specifically, but the stagnating pull of repeating patterns—and the brutalizing work of breaking them—inform every song on her new album From Newman Street. “In songwriting and in life, you can’t keep expecting the same thing to work every time.”

Valazza grew up between Prescott and Phoenix, Arizona. She penned her first song at age ten but in those early efforts to perform, found herself halted by stage fright of a clinical level. “I’ve gone to therapy for it,” she says, half-laughing. She didn’t stop writing music but she let less paralyzing means of expression lead the way, eventually enrolling in arts school for painting, an illustrative instinct that inevitably reveals itself in her vivid songwriting. It wasn’t until she relocated to the Pacific Northwest as an adult that Valazza picked back up the proverbial—and actual—guitar.

“Zach Bryson was kind of like the honky tonk ambassador of Portland when I got there,” Valazza says. “He was so welcoming and encouraging.” She discovered an inspiring, supportive artistic community, a less rigid relationship with musical output, and then—vocal nodules. “It was actually kind of the best thing that could have happened, because I learned about the crossover of physical and mental that takes place in performance.” Recovery entailed recognizing the reflexive functions of the voice in response to anxiety; as is the case throughout the human body, stress reactions can be damaging. “Because I suddenly understood what was happening with my voice, I could handle it, wield it. I felt more confident.” Valazza recorded an album with Bryson in an old-house-turned-studio. It was an informal, friendly endeavor, though not at all small. “I think probably thirty people contributed,” she says. “I listen back to that album and I think ‘this was me learning how to do this.’ I can hear that moment in time.” 

Valazza’s debut Dear Dead Days fused the Southwest’s rustic romance with the Pacific Northwest’s rocky realism and garnered Valazza a cult following. She landed a deal with Fluff & Gravy, a label known for launching earthy, emerging treasures like Anna Tivel and Margo Cilker, and toured with folk favorites including Melissa Carper and Riddy Arman. Her sophomore album Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing followed, a glimmering set of sonic talismans among Ann Powers’ Favorite Songs of 2023 for NPR and Bandcamp’s Best Country Music of 2023, with praise from KEXP, Uncut, MOJO, and Brooklyn Vegan to boot.

By the time Valazza was ready to record her third album, she had spent a decade in Portland—and that, she realized, was enough. “As someone with anxiety, I always want to know what’s going to happen,” she says. “But knowing can be limiting. Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable, that’s growth. That’s what this album’s about, really.” 

On “Weight of the Wheel,” a weepy slide guitar underscores Valazza’s listless lament: All things look the same / From the pillow on my bed / I’m stressed out I’m far away / There’s dizzy dancing in my head. The song sounds like urgency, grief, surrender, and embrace—all at once. It’s feeling like some kind of fight to outgrow / The way I fear slowing down before I’m old. By 2022, that dizzy demise of cyclical living had set Valazza still—in a basement apartment there in Portland. “You’re going to be a different person after every album,” she says. “And you have to keep moving forward.” 

Sights set on Nashville, Valazza landed in New Orleans. “It wasn’t the plan. I spent three months there between tours, and it just kind of happened.” The bright newness of The Big Easy illuminated fresh inspirations and unexpected love. But it also cast a stark light on Valazza’s sense of self; in a new place, you can see more clearly what you want to be, as well as what you haven’t been. “I discovered the less likeable parts of myself in that time,” Valazza says. Album standout “Your Heart’s a Tin Box” encapsulates precisely this, with a cynical-yet-sunny likeness to Joni Mitchell and lyrical acuity: I moved down to New Orleans / Thinking love would reappear / But people tell you everything / but what you wanna hear / You relied on fixated company / Now you’re drowning in your ego’s gluttony. The patterns of her Portland life had stalled Valazza. It wasn’t the city’s fault so much as the natural consequence of complacency, the stagnance that comes with too much of the same. Valazza knew she was due for a personal evolution, and when faced with those innate, bristling pangs of change, could soothe herself with that certainty.

The track sequence on From Newman Street is audibly intentional—from a deep lull and dull itch, to a barbed clash with cognitive dissonance, to humble submission, and an ultimate, open-armed acceptance of new life. Poetically enough, half the songs on the upcoming album were written in Portland, the other half in New Orleans. Valazza returned to her former hometown to record with Matt Thomson at Echo Echo Studios, and titled the release From Newman Street in tribute to an apartment she lived in deeply and left with heavy heart. The album is as much a fond farewell as it is a fervent step forward. 

Valazza made the official move to New Orleans in February of 2024. “Coming from placid, wintry Portland straight into Mardi Gras—I would not recommend it.” She recalls the time with humor, grace, and sensitivity for her past self, qualities that shine through the album. “I’ve always been a believer that music is only good if it’s really raw, really honest—probably coming from a place of hurt,” Valazza admits. “But I’m trying to embrace chaos these days, and bring a little more light into my life.” 

It’s human nature to look back, and to try—in whatever haphazard fashion—to make sense of that which has gone by. For Joshua Lee Turner and Allison Young, it’s a question not only of what should be relinquished, but also what might be worth taking with you.

Sonically, the pair are intimately acquainted with the past; their collective background spans extensive knowledge of Jazz and Classical, a twinkling affinity for Golden Age musicals, nostalgia for the big bands of the ‘40s, reverence for the politically charged singer-songwriters of the ‘60s, and a warmth toward the dewy indie rock of the early 2010s. To the eye, these wildly diverse influences are tough to conceive as a singular musical sensibility. But to the ear, The Bygones have no issue, binding eclectic contexts into luminous indie folk, equal parts emotional poignancy and pop pleasure. 

Allison grew up in an Appalachian pocket of Tennessee—“I’m basically from Dollywood,” she says— the mountain-making, moonshine-swigging sounds of Bluegrass and Americana coloring the soundscape. In the house, her parents opted for Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles, Electric Light Orchestra. Her mother played piano, which Allison took up at age three. “And then I got into musical theater when I was eleven. My mother had me audition for the part of Annie, if you can believe it,” she says, her red curls bouncing. Meanwhile, Josh was in the Midwest, ingesting the Jazz and Classical selection of his own parents, singing Gregorian chants in a Catholic church (his first job), and teaching himself guitar—“like every other thirteen-year-old boy,” he jokes. For him, instruments were language enough, no lyrics necessary. He found profound satisfaction in the complex art of interpretation, performing instrumentals and covers which he shared on YouTube. 

Josh was invited to play in a Simon & Garfunkel tribute tour around the same time that Allison was uploading her own version of “Scarborough Fair” to social media. Coincidence became a connection point, and the pair began following each other online. Josh was living in New York City, but on the day his tour came through Nashville, they planned to meet and record together, just as soon as Allison finished her interview for a job in music publishing. On such separate paths, neither anticipated this impromptu session would become the way forward.

The duo’s cover of Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” gathered massive enthusiasm online as well as the fervent demand of one UK promoter that they tour overseas. They accepted the invitation and rushed to record an EP to have something—anything—to play for audiences, audiences which sold out venues and applauded The (yet-to-be-named) Bygones with standing ovations before they even strummed a note. “It didn’t make any sense,” Josh says. “We weren’t a band yet.” But to see The Bygones live is to comprehend the hype. Allison’s stylish, luminescent presence and vocal finesse, Josh’s astonishing technical aptitude, and the palpable joy in their onstage dynamic create a live show experience that demands multiple encores. 

The circumstances which bore The Bygones seem supernatural; rather than a band asking the world to listen, the world asked these two musicians to be a band. But there is nothing more palpably natural than the love these two artists have for music. It is an effervescent force, intrinsic to their conceptions of self. Josh says, “Music is like a hole in the ground, and as a child I was given a tiny shovel to dig, and the further I dig, the more interesting and rewarding it becomes. It’s endless.” Allison adds, “There’s nothing more wonderful than when a song resonates with someone, and you know you’ve made one person in this world feel a little less alone.”

In 2023, the duo began working on their debut album. The thirteen tracks encompassing The Bygones revolve around relationships—romantic, platonic, and familial—and the marvelously varied facets of each. On the upbeat and edgy “Stars Turn Cold,” love sizzles and fades to a frustrating end. On the infectious and zagging “Waste A Day,” love is the resplendent, ultimate source of contentment. Allison grapples with the failure of a loved one to see her for who she is on “If You Wanted To,” her beautifully bare vocal as delicate as a flower petal, lilting with fragility. Josh assumes the weight of his partner’s suffering on “Asteroid Day,” his intricate guitar arrangement emanating the tensions and tendernesses that come with sharing life. Each track is a fearlessly frank take on a different corner of companionship, and in this sense, The Bygones is a collection of love songs to love itself.

There’s an invigorating light across The Bygones’ philosophy—about music, and about life. Josh says, “There’s goodness in every decade of music. And there’s goodness in every season of life. For us, it’s about finding what’s golden in the past and bringing that forward.” He adds, laughing gently “We’re both very earnest people, and very optimistic.” 

In the case of these Bygones, it’s an easy delight to let them be.

“I wrote through all of it,” says musician Erisy Watt in referring to the changes 2023 held for her, “the anticipation, the upheaval, and the aftermath.” In a short span, Erisy entered a new decade, lost a loved one, saw the end of a relationship, flew halfway around the world to work in remote regions of Thailand and Indonesia, returned home, packed up her life in Portland, and moved to Los Angeles. “Showing up at my desk with pen, paper, and guitar each morning in the midst of navigating such uneven terrain allowed me to process and feel more grounded.”

Hailed by No Depression as “what contemporary folk sounds like at its peak,” Erisy’s music often harkens comparisons to 60s singer-songwriters. But on her third album, ‘not either or but everything,’ she shakes the sound loose from the tenets of decade or genre. From the cosmos to the kitchen sink, lyrically, Erisy’s art is in connection, and on this new offering she hones an even deeper acuity for tracing the through line, peering through both telescope and microscope in search of the common threads. 

Beyond the lyrics, Erisy remarks, “I started feeling an opening up with the guitar, putting a finger somewhere at random on the fretboard, building a chord around it, and from there, allowing a song to come through. I was faced with all this empty space to fill, which felt scary but also gave me the opportunity to explore my edges, and in turn, be more open and expressive.”

Erisy connected with Luke Temple (Adrianne Lenker, Hand Habits) in the first week she moved to Los Angeles at a nude figure drawing night that he was hosting weekly. Having met him earlier in the year on another project, they reconnected and made a plan, resulting in a collaboration that Erisy describes as “a total dream and absolute joy.” Recording live over five days at drummer Kosta Galanopoulos’s home studio in Long Beach, along with Will Graefe on guitar, Erisy found freedom in a new cohort and fresh philosophy. She says, “Luke moves quickly but doesn’t rush. He gives care and attention without being too precious. We’d scrap things and try again. We’d goof off, and we’d go deep. It felt easy, electric, expansive.” Additional engineering by Riley Geare and mastering by Heba Kadry (Björk, Sufjan Stevens)provided the finishing touches. The result is an album ranging from earthy to cosmic, strikingly spare to deliciously textured, contemplative to outright playful.

In addition to her current base in Los Angeles and past residences in Nashville and Portland, Erisy has the right to call global remote wilderness home. She works in environmental science and much of her career takes place on the other side of the world. “My life can feel very patchy sometimes with the work I do in Asia, but through song, I’m learning to connect dots that otherwise might not seem obvious.” The album track “Sandhill Crane” is a stunning illustration of such, as she draws on her experience working in Muslim villages along the coast of Indonesia soundtracked by the call to prayer coming from the mosques, and in the plains of central Florida seeing and hearing sandhill cranes for the first time. She sings:

Oh how to explain it, the words fall short, 

No sound from my mouth, will sum up the worth

 Of the sandhill crane, the hard rain on the roof

Or the call to prayer, but you’re looking for proof

And it’s all there in the wings

The flight, the fall, the landing

The magic, the tragedy

Not either or, but everything

Erisy’s profession informs the song “Rachel” as well, inspired by Rachel Carson, a writer and biologist, who represents the bridge between worlds Erisy so often crosses in her own life. “I imagined us walking together on the beach and her teaching me about the animals of the intertidal,” Erisy says. “All the special adaptations they have to thrive, all the shit they have to deal with—from drowning to drying out, to getting eaten by both land and ocean predators, this toggling between worlds and what lessons we can take from that.” Throughout the album, Erisy leans into the profound perspective the natural world provides. Top to bottom, ‘not either or but everything’ glimmers with the tenacious mystique of evolution—personal and universal. 

Posing the abstract with the concrete, her songs speak to both the miraculous and mundane, the obvious and oblique, the magic and tragedy.“They helped bring clarity,” says Erisy. “They brought certain things to the surface, certain voices to the foreground, shed light on shadows, and in part taught me it’s okay to be sad, to not have the answers, to feel lots of things at once, and to be lots of things at once.” The album ‘not either or but everything’ will be released October 4 via First City Artists.

Coco—the project of Maia Friedman, Oliver Hill, and Dan Molad—began as an experiment of sorts; three friends writing songs for nothing other than the ritual of doing so. “There’s a mutual admiration and trust among us,” they share. “It allows a ‘first thought best thought’ mentality.” Their vast and varied individual creative histories—notably with Dirty Projectors, Lucius, and Pavo Pavo—inform an illustrious, collective sensibility for songcraft. 

Coco released their first three singles anonymously, spurred by a curiosity in releasing art without context or expectation; an audience emerged in response. In this sense, it’s as though the music created Coco rather than the other way around. Their self-titled debut gathered acclaim from tastemakers at NPR, BBC, SiriusXM, and Spotify, praised as “gorgeous, warmly wistful… a balmy, liberating groove” (Gorilla Vs. Bear), “bold, striking, but emphatically subdued, the dreamy pop aspect seem to be filtered in from another dimension,” (CLASH), “unerringly intimate” (The Line of Best Fit), and “just heaven” (BBC). Coco headlined packed rooms in New York City, Los Angeles, and London, made their festival debut at End of the Road, and supported Kevin Morby on a national tour. They went on to release a steady stream of singles, including the raucous, angular rocker "Rough Water," the Bacharach-esque ballad "Death in the Family," and the post-apocalyptic campfire song "Omen," among others.

Coco’s highly anticipated sophomore release—starkly titled ‘2’—will be released March 1, 2024 on First City Artists. It’s less a separate installment than a seamless continuation, a sonic sequel, a deeper delve into the colorful moods of Coco. Coco’s debut album was donned with a blurred portrait of Maia, Oliver, and Dan in an underwater tangle, bodies indiscernible. But on the cover of ‘2,’ these figures come into focus, posed on a hillside in bright, hyperreal color. While a thick white border suspends them in negative space, the image becomes clearer, as Coco gradually crystallizes. 

Since the last album, life has flown wildly forward for the members of Coco—Oliver getting married, Dan getting engaged, Maia giving birth to her first child. “When we started, we were all either single or in old relationships, living in different places, with different haircuts, priorities and perspectives,” the band shares. “Though it's only been a few years, the band has seen us through fundamental transformations in each of our lives, which we are fortunate enough to process together.” Amidst shifting currents, the practice of collaborative music-making has remained a profound and grounding constant.

The band gathered for periods of time in Richmond, Virgina, working with Adrian Olsen (Lucy Dacus, Fruit Bats, Bedouine) at Montrose Recording, and in Joshua Tree, California, self-producing in an informal desert setting.  Each member a writer, player, and artist in their individual right, Coco embraced a freedom in fluidity—swapping seats, instruments, and vocal parts however intuition compelled. 

On opener “Any Other Way” Coco meditates on change from a widescreen perspective: The leaf and the body, each in their time, turns on a schedule, turns on a dime. Maia lays a lush bed of shoegaze guitars; Dan's builds ecstasy from downtempo drums; Oliver stirs a current of hypnotically looping basslines. The song is a stunning microcosm of this band's specific genius: carving space for each musical personality to shine, without the shadows of excess or distraction.

The album moves through moods with sublime subtlety: the dusky electronica of "Moodrings," the bossa-tinged "For George," and the jangly 60's pop of "Mythological Man," for which the band self-directed a madcap music video starring Maia in the title role. Closer "Do This Right" invites listeners onto a patient wavelength, begging a lover to drop arms: Release the fangs and the venom, remove the silk and the denim.

‘2’ arrives sensuous and spellike, as Maia, Oliver, and Dan continue their sacred practice—arriving to each other empty-handed and open-hearted, finding power in three equal parts. The result is pure and formidable music, songs that emerge with an elegant, egalitarian honesty and encompass a world of emotion.

Garrett Owen’s music has the raw, rustic twang of a Texan, but his origin story is not that of your typical cowboy troubadour. The son of career missionaries, Owen spent his childhood in Tanzania and Kenya, his adolescence in South Louisiana, before coming of age in Ecuador. Asked about the most palpable effect of such eclectic settings, he cites not the musical, but the psychological. “I think it made me a really open person,” Owen shares. “I’ve seen a lot. And I have a really hard time with rules.” On Owen’s upcoming third album ‘Memoriam,’ this much is obvious—and celebrated.

Owen’s song structures dip, twist, and burst with a twister-like thrill. He can shift from tender, taletelling balladeering into a wholly rock and roll torrent and back, without losing the emotional plot. “Growing up, I was very opposed to learning—I broke a lot of toys.” But what once might have been considered a behavioral hindrance is now a benefit to listeners. Owen’s dynamic song structures and the indisputable technical capacity required to pull them off make for an unabashed adventure of an album. 

Owen started at age fourteen with an affinity for the delectable angst of heavy metal. “I was always going to be a guitar head,” he says. In time, he shifted focus to the classics—Jim Croce, Jackson Brown, James Taylor—and in college, started to explore Jazz. Though that didn’t last long. “I got into Jazz to try and communicate that sad beauty Chet Baker and Bill Evans do so well, but I pretty quickly got tired of the excess and intricacies, slobbering notes all over each other.” Owen discovered he could apply the picking patterns of his gritter influences—Doc Watson, Elliott Smith—to Jazz structures, and create a fuller, more modern and emotional kind of folk music, a sound that felt truer to his way of moving through the world. To embrace Owen’s music is to embrace the unexpected; you never know what’s coming next.

This truth resonates through the life circumstances which bore the album as well. Owen wrote much of it while taking care of his grandmother over the last four years, as she gradually regressed into Alzheimer’s and eventually passed. “She was the most interesting woman. She always had the coolest art, and a potpourri that filled her home in a way I’ll never forget. I always told everyone, ‘My Japanese grandmother is my favorite person in the world.’” Having emigrated as a young woman, Owen’s grandmother carried stories of tribulation, resilience, and gratitude which he folded into his worldview. “Toward the end, she’d go out into the yard and collect branches and leaves, and put them in small bowls of water, believing she could bring them back to life,” he shares. “In a way, she was fighting her own death.” Owen references this moving display on “Rosemary and Thieves,” singing, She used to keep / Such a beautiful garden / But now she just waters the weeds / Rosemary and thieves. He embraces the vital beauty of remembering what was, while mourning what’s been taken.

Loss permeates ‘Memoriam,’ and Owen handles it with a stark honesty that sways from affectingly reverent to cathartically comedic. He laments more than one failed romance and—as in the case of the spellbinding album opener—with an intense, poetic wistfulness: Just let me remain / A spot on your brain / A beautiful stain. He shares, “Making music is therapeutic, but it’s not therapy. It feels good to do, but that doesn’t mean you’re better now.” That self-awareness is essential to his lyricism. Owen is a man cracked open—diligently mining his own human pain and presenting the findings, a generous offering in which listeners can see themselves. “I have a musical comrade who often says to me, ‘We’re all miracles, Garrett—don’t forget.’ It’s hard to hold onto that, when at times, I feel like all I’m doing is watching stuff die. But I definitely feel, more than ever, that life is precious.” 

Garrett Owen’s third full-length album ‘Memoriam’ will be released November 1, 2024.

How do you explain the coincidences 

When each day is mostly dream? 

(“Flicker”)

Pearla’s music radiates with indiscriminate awe. Whether it’s the befuddling depths of nature or the profoundly strange spark of a dreaming mind—she takes it all as equal magic. Her debut album is populated by eccentric creatures and quixotic scenes, her takes on mortality, intimacy, and personal freeness glowing with an air of mystique. Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is a world unto itself.

On her 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities, Pearla posed existential questions like outlines in a coloring book, and scribbled in attempts at answers through off-kilter indie pop and a bewildered spirit. But on her highly anticipated full-length, arriving three contemplative years later, Pearla submits to the brilliance in not knowing. On Oh Glistening Onion…’s heart-stopping centerpiece “Effort,” she wails with wistful power atop strings arranged by Spacebomb’s Trey Pollard: I don’t know why it takes so much effort to feel good these days. The moving rumination transcends need for reasoning and comes alive with vibrant uncertainty. Pearla’s vocals float free from the clutch of confusion and resolve into an ethereal acceptance: I am spent. It’s this submission to mystery, to the inexplicable fluidity of living, that places Pearla at peace within its wild current. 

Pearla is Nicole Rodriguez, a Brooklyn-based artist whose personal curiosities include finger puppets, writing songs with children, Virginia Woolf’s prose, and consulting the I Ching. She makes music the same way she moves through the world: mystified. On “Strong,” she tells the true story of someone stealing her credit card as she stood in a flower shop fully entranced by the beauty of a dove. Pearla takes the incident’s hint into her perpetual assessment of the world around her: Is it better to be pragmatic, or awed? Is giving oneself over to beauty the danger, or the point? 

She ponders on in “Ming The Clam,” its pulsing tempo and electronic touches a sonic contrast as Pearla begins to contradict herself. She considers Ming—an ocean clam and the oldest individual animal ever discovered, who died in research—not an inspiration but a lesson to be learned. Pearla’s lyrics are vivid, peculiar, and compelling as she examines examination, and its potential costs. Romance, a sense of belonging, an elderly sea creature: Just how many questions does it take to kill the thing?

Pearla’s music is a rich blend, rooted in the folk canon of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell, embracing the darker quirks of a Connie Converse, Bjork, or Will Oldham, and pulsating with the emotional palpability of an Angel Olsen or Sharon Van Etten. Her recording process glitters with detail. Sentiment precedes every sound; she and her longtime collaborator/co-producer Tyler Postiglione craft melodies, structures, and experimental noises not to carry the lyrics, but to emphasize their meaning. On “Unglow The,” Pearla engages her feverish imagination to grapple with the oddity of death. She equates a mountain’s immensity with a body in a casket (all those things you can’t wrap your mind around) in an attempt to fathom the unfathomable. The song’s production sparkles chaotically as it builds into a psychedelic cacophony of shrieking horns and dissonant synths, conveying her internal unrest.

Oh Glistening Onion… artfully sways between the natural and the surreal. On the rollicking “About Hunger, About Love,” Pearla suffers “a new kind of lonesome” and summons nature’s omniscience: Nobody told the woodpecker to knock all day for bugs / So what should I know? What do I do for love? On the darkly explosive “The Place With No Weather,” she wills herself free from earthly limitations into a bodiless projection, stable and indifferent. Her voice escapes its visceral vessel and reaches core-shaking peaks as she distantly echoes: You stole my universe. On “Funny In Dreams,” she lifts off into stream-of-conscious light and puts forth some of her best questions—What’s the opposite of a star anyway? / Are there places in the sky that are softer than others? This ability to flow from grounded to fantastical, raucous to lulling, heavy to outright free, underscores the vast extent of Pearla’s emotional range.  

Rodriguez’s moniker is an homage to her grandfather’s surname, Pearl. He was a musician and a source of artistic inspiration in her childhood, and though he passed when she was seven, Rodriguez considers music their living link. This tenderness toward the interconnectivity of souls shines throughout Oh Glistening Onion: “Flicker,” a raw but gentle reflection on the slow warmth of a human spirit, graciously nods to life’s finite twinkle (‘Cause every light’s got a goodbye coming). Pearla’s relationship with the unknown is wobbly and sublime, a comfort in its honesty, an offering.

Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is due February 10, 2023, on Spacebomb Records. Parts of the album were recorded at Thump Recording in Brooklyn and Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, but the bulk of its creation took place in Pearla’s home. It was written by Nicole Rodriguez, co-produced with Postiglione, with strings and horns arranged by Pollard, and mastered by Sarah Register. When asked about the album title, Pearla offers: “It’s always been the title. I think it means, you don’t have to peel back every layer before you go to sleep.”

One day I woke up and realized I was in a song 

And I am just a feather and I don’t have to be “strong”

And I won’t ever find the answers ‘til I realize nothing’s wrong

It’s just a back and forth of circumstance colliding, repeating, and dying.

(“The Mysterious Bubble Of The Turkey Swamp”)

“If someone asked me to tell them who I am, I’d give them this record,” shares Lila Blue— mindfully resolved, radiantly composed, only twenty-three years old. 

Throughout their fourth full-length Sweet Pea, Lila comes of age amidst formidable conditions, cherishing music as the ultimate conduit for doing so. “You cannot have rebirth without decomposition and decay,” Lila shares. “Grief and growth sit side by side, and I am occupying both.” Titled after Lila’s childhood nickname and birth flower, as well as the spirit invoked over eleven dynamically evocative songs, the album is a spring unto itself.

Lila Blue’s relationship with music began at The Lake Lucille Chekhov Project in upstate New York, where a community of artists inhabit unconventional spaces to conceive and perform new works every summer. “It was like they were making the emotions inside my body into a sound,” they share. Lila, age nine at the time, had already been a fervent reader and originator of poetry—their school teacher known to secretly submit their work for publication—but it was at Lake Lucille that they wrote their first song. Inspired by Patti Smith’s memoir ‘Just Kids,’ a copy of which they’d naughtily burgled from their mother’s collection, the song explored a complex notion—that love could be lost in one form, and remain in another. Lila was just nine years old. “Yeah, I was a little young for all that,” they confess, playfully. 

By age ten, Lila had developed an aptitude for “sleep writing,” waking with fully and unconsciously formed songs in their mind. “I think my love for words was finding a new way to present itself,” Lila says. They explored instruments—piano, guitar, and ukulele—but never felt all that compelled by the classical forms of theory. For Lila, instruments were less a conquest than a vessel. “I actually hated knowing how it worked,” they explain. “It’s always been about the words, about putting emotions in a song and getting to leave them there.” 

Lila never returned to formal music lessons. Their resistance to the demystification of process remains—to benefit. Lila’s music vibrates with a heart-over-head rawness, the feeling unfettered by any pesky, cognitive obstacles and consequently, consuming. On the lead single “There Is A Drought,” Lila quite literally growls, a vocalist beaming from the balance of musical prowess, visceral instinct, and a spiritual willingness—to listen most closely to the grumbles of one’s own soul. “I’ve developed a kind of feral language around music,” Lila confesses. “I’m so grateful for the musicians I work with, who can translate what I’m trying to convey.” 

Nashville producer Jordan Hamlin—whose venerable credits include Lucy Wainwright, Indigo Girls, and KT Tunstall among others—produced Lila’s forthcoming album. The pair’s bond began with genre compatibility and a shared, geekish passion for Greek mythology, but evolved into something creatively profound. “Jordan has a deep reverence for what it means to hold space for another artist,” Lila shares. “She coaxed a candor out of me I’m not sure I would have otherwise accessed.”

Candor is power throughout Sweet Pea.

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TW: sexual assault

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“Psychologists have said that during trauma, time suspends. I’d say the same can be true of music,” Lila shares. They are a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and through songs including “How Could I” and “I Met The Devil,” they outline the ferocious, tenacious, and beautifully imperfect pursuit of healing. “I was grieving my body I never got to meet, and then grieving that body again.”  

In healing the relationship to their physical form, Lila also embraced its splendor—identifying as nonbinary and queer. “‘Sweet Pea’ was the first song I’d written about my own sexual agency,” they share. “Coming from a place of recovery as a closeted child performer, it became a full blown anthem to queer pleasure.” Songs like “Changeling” and “Lovely Day” similarly honor this wondrous development—from an unconscious, captive knowledge of self, to the unabashed celebration of all its complicated beauty. 

Lila says, “I felt like I'd been writing to an ‘other,’ without realizing that ‘other’ is the person I wanted to become. I’ve been actualizing my own healing, manifesting the person I am today.”

Lila Blue’s music simmers, reveals, writhes, explodes, and revives. Spanning influences from Fiona Apple to Minnie Ripperton to Ani DiFranco, Sweet Pea is a sonic tonic as rich as the sensations of humanhood it so honestly explores. “I want for listeners…” Lila pauses, their tone compassionate and precocious, “to be exactly where they’re at. To feel exactly what they feel.” 

As a child raised in New Jersey, Charlie Hill found an identity in music, learning to play guitar at age eleven and clinging to the instrument the way one might a diary or confidant, a source of reflection and guidance. Now twenty-nine, he holds just as tightly to the artform’s answers. He writes songs to understand himself and to further that self, a committed continuation of self-actualization. After all, coming of age is not a singular, finite event.  

Hill’s creative process begins in what he calls “someplace between the physical and conscious,” a supernatural spark and the willingness to fan it into flames. “I think of music as a translation of what’s happening inside, so I never try to force it into a specific direction or shape,” he shares. “I’ll often pick up the guitar and start playing as if it’s a song that already exists. I’ll improvise all the way through, let the song write itself, let lyrics unfurl over instinct.” The result is an audible vulnerability, a ragged honesty utterly personal, a candor that hooks into your heart like a raw truth from a dear friend.

Vulnerability is a prevalent theme for Hill present day. He formerly performed under the moniker Chazzy Lake, and when asked about the decision to tie his real name to the recordings, responds with a tone of liberated submission. “I make music to slough off shame, to embrace the self, to make listeners know it’s okay to feel,” he says. “Using my real name just feels right.” In all artistic choices as of late, Hill is reaching for authenticity: openly embracing new collaborators, relocating from Burlington to Nashville, stripping back performances to their feeling bones. He’s willing to thin the veil down to nearly nothing.  

Hill’s musical endeavors have been boldly exploratory—from disco punk to ‘80s New Age—but he’s found a sonic home amidst a folk-rooted sound. It’s evident as ever on new album Chuck Pond—titled in playful homage to a self’s varied versions—out April 7, produced by Benny Yurco. The album ranges from a rattling buoyancy reminiscent of Dr. Dog to a ground-out balladry a la Townes Van Zandt.  

“I wanted to embody the emotional side of the human experience, and country music has this beautiful humility to it.” Hill lived in Burlington, followed by a stint in Brooklyn, before moving to his current base in Nashville, where he began incorporating elements like the tic-tac bass, low register vocals, and pedal steel into the new music. Classic and bellowing intonations suit his voice, which can gristle thick and evocative one moment, and glisten delicate and dewy the next. 

The album opens with “50/50,” its acapella entrance immediate and arresting. In his approach to a love song, Hill opts for the magnetism of a spare, heartfelt summon: Come with me / Be my partner, my fifty fifty / Lean on me and I’ll lean on you / Never letting you fall. His bright surge of desire soon vibrates unstable, the melody bending ominously, nearing despair. It’s an affecting portrait of desire—its cursed capacity to waver from brazen to brittle, unpermitted. 

An assumable disciple of Steinbeck or Didion, Hill is driven by the bite of bare language. He deliberately weighs each word, demanding less attention for what’s said than for what goes artfully unsaid. On “Dive In,” he strikes upon the stark, dark nature of depression without wasting a syllable: I don’t wanna wake up again today / I'd rather sleep until I’m brand new. According to Hill, the song is “about the urge to jump from the inside out, to escape the psychic cage of personal and societal expectation, to become the person you’ve always wanted to be.” His power isn’t so much in the heady sentiment as it is in the skill to deliver it with visceral palpability, to bring the internal to the external, the brain to the body. 

Hill pays due attention to disconnection and the consuming apathy it can invoke—in particular, on “Give Two Fucks,” “What Am I For,” and “Up All Night”—understated theme songs for an unnameable itch so customary of one’s late twenties. He navigates a relatable obstacle course—disassembling knotty relationships, combating the grass-is-greener mentality of modern culture, unlearning capitalism’s limits on what a life should look like, validating himself by trial and error. 

“My personal experience with my own mind is a whole world, usually I’m overthinking everything,” Charlie shares. “The process has been a journey to reconcile what I feel with what’s really happening—to properly bind perception and reality.”

Chuck Pond is a generous peek into private mental processing. Hill’s songs aren’t conclusive, prescriptive, or even all that descriptive. They’re outbursts, pure and refreshingly imperfect, little invitations into the psyche of another, waking up each day, making their way through the world.

The calla lily flower is named for the Greek word meaning beautiful. Eclectic myths and symbolisms surround the calla lily, but if you were to ask The Brother Brothers about a personal relation to their new album’s namesake, they’d likely leave it there: Beautiful. Similarly, if you were to ask the identical twins what their new album is about, they’d presumably smirk and reply with droll simplicity: What all albums are about. Life.  

This magnetic humility is the band’s custom, and beyond its amusing appeal, the core of their music. It is, in fact, The Brother Brothers’ humble, intuitive, and exact capture of Life that just so happens to be Beautiful. This is evident as ever in their second full-length offering. 

The Brother Brothers are David and Adam Moss, identical twins born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, formerly based in Brooklyn, New York, but ultimately and profoundly shaped by indiscriminate rambling. They are the kind of people who have a story about everything, and moreso, one you might genuinely like to hear. Plopped atop virtuosic musicianship and enlivened by true blood harmonies, these stories come of an encompassing quality, stories one listens to time and time again, and eventually, holds as their own.  

The Brother Brothers’ songs are of neither grandeur nor tragedy, nor lore nor trend, but of outright humanity. They address nothing topical and everything timeless: living, loving, aging, changing, traveling, learning, yearning, discovering, dreaming, winning, losing, dying — what it is to candidly exist. Crafted with precision, poignancy, and palpable heart, these tales are as easily projected to an amphitheatre of fans as they are exchanged in aisle eight of the grocery store, as resonant to cosmopolitan professionals as to musing bohemians, as familiar and beloved to an internet of strangers as to a campfire of friends.  

 These are songs of personhood transcending.  

The perspective that binds them is two-fold. The Brother Brothers’ songwriting incites an exquisite sense of transience — life in neverending motion, if you will — as well as a deft capacity to pause, focus in upon, and cherish the beauty in banality. This duality is the crux of Calla Lily, an artful alternation between moving and stopping, experiencing and appreciating.   

By no accident is the album opener a quintessential ode to touring, the highly specific way in which The Brother Brothers lived their daily life up until the global pandemic halted it all. The Moss brothers wrote “On The Road Again” before the world shut down, and serendipitously so. True to their knack for knowing what they have, the band encapsulated all that was lost before they knew they’d lose it. They bottled the bewildering breadth of existing town to town in a tumbling melody imbued with longing — for the salve of forward motion, for a diasporic musician family scattered across continents, for blessed abandon. It’s the tingles of homesickness reversed, a wistful celebration of ambling onward.  

Then comes the eponymous “The Calla Lily Song,” in which David contemplates an indescribably special moment — a time at which one can do nothing but breathe deeply, held by the sensation that something essential though utterly unnameable is taking place. He delicately entangles two affections, singing to both a lover and New York City with equivalent levels of tenderness. The Moss brothers' vocals linger on details with buttery warmth, intimating how unambiguously they hold these small yet immensely remarkable moments.  

Even the band’s most morose numbers glint with comfort. On both “Sorrow,” arguably the most somber of Calla Lily’s ten tracks, and “Waiting For A Star To Fall,” a lightly melancholic request for luck, the suffering feels collective. The Brother Brothers know that their pain is your pain — and that the human condition would be incomplete without it.  

The Brother Brothers’ astute, evocative music has earned an international audience, enthused nods from tastemakers including NPR, Billboard and Rolling Stone Country among others, support runs for acclaimed artists including I’m With Her, Lake Street Dive, Big Thief and Shakey Graves, coveted performance slots at Edmonton Folk Festival, Nelsonville Music Festival, FreshGrass Music Festival and beyond. More notable to Calla Lily, is the warm sincerity The Brother Brothers have carried through these experiences — an earnesty that provides David and Adam Moss the precocity of friendship, artistry and peace. 

Time stretches slow like the skin on your hand  

Placing for picking the moments they stand out  

Walking in circles we go through the turnstiles  

Over and over again 

Calla Lily was produced and mixed by Grammy-nominated Ryan Hadlock (The Lumineers, Brandi Carlile, Vance Joy) at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington and mastered by Grammy-nominated Phillip Shaw Bova (Andy Shauf, Father John Misty). The album will be released April 16, 2021 on Compass Records. 

Trophy: (tro·phy /ˈtrōfē/) noun. a cup or other decorative object awarded as a prize for a victory or success. 

Kate Davis picked up a violin at age five, a bass at age thirteen. She entered the Portland Youth Philharmonic before puberty, the Grammy Jazz Ensemble before adolescence. By the time she graduated high school, Kate won the Presidential Scholar in the Arts Award and a full ride to the Manhattan School of Music. By the time she graduated college, ASCAP's Robert Allen Award and slots at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. As a young adult, the virtuoso claimed enthusiastic endorsements from NPR, MTV, PBS and BBC as well as coveted invitations to the stage from Herbie Hancock, Ben Folds, Alison Krauss, Jeff Goldblum and the like. Most recently, she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s hit single “Seventeen” and contributed to the soundtrack for blockbuster ‘Five Feet Apart.’ 

Yet, Kate Davis considers her debut indie rock album her hardest-earned accolade to date.   

Kate grew up as a jazz darling, but she grew into something significantly more dynamic. Days spent practicing and performing became nights spent writing — cathartic indie rock — music simultaneously informed by and rebutting of her training. Forbidden chord progressions emerged like diary entries, documents of an internal reaction to routine. Time intended for technique slipped into secret listening sessions of Beach House, Elliot Smith and TV On The Radio. In the same bright, arresting croon that ignited her youthful stardom, Davis created confessionals.  

 Now 28 and audibly matured, Kate is prepared to properly share the artifacts from her late night craft, a full length reaction to ritual required of perfection, an outburst from the pedestal. Throughout twelve tumultuous tracks, she poetically reflects upon the intricacies of what it is to live, ruminating on topics too close to her heart — identity, self-worth, loss. Trophy will be released November 8, 2019 on Solitaire Recordings.   

In album opener “Daisy,” Kate confronts the death of her father with an ode as enthralling as it is devastating. Lyrically, she blends the hard work of questioning with the intuitive work of honoring, thoughtfully satisfying a desire to respect her deceased parent as well as herself. Melodically, she offers a lightness almost grotesque in contrast to the words it lifts. The process is uncomfortable, enveloping and beautiful — much like grief giving way to acceptance.  

Oh seed 

Pick your poison 

While you’re down there in the ground 

Father, father 

What do I do when you 

Are not around 

And I feel like giving out 

And crashing down to the ground 

Backbone is battered as any 

But show me my roots 

 Kate delves fearlessly into the aimless dread of early adulthood in songs like “Dirty Teenager,” an infectious romp refreshingly reminiscent of the early aughts and “rbbts,” a slow-burning anthem of need. The latter is named after a now-closed restaurant in Soho, which Kate frequented during a manic time in her life. She considered the establishment a safe haven then, but retroactively reduces it to metaphor — a healthless attempt to make comfort where it doesn’t belong. With ominous nonchalance, she articulates a despair for stability over growth. 

Nothing lasts forever  

you can’t ever hold on too tight 

The skin will slip away  

and in no time  

we’ll see the light 

Kate’s nuanced perspectives and inventive lyricism triumph in tracks like “Open Heart,” a danceable dirge that equates heartbreak to sterile surgery and “Salome,” a biblical rendering of interpersonal dilemma. Few writers so snugly meld the personal with the literary without compromising one moment of emotion.  

now you’re upright 

victorious and 

barefoot with my head 

in your hands 

I warned you of the 

evening’s malevolent 

moon 

she's taken total 

control over you 

Kate lets vulnerability lead on “I Like Myself,” a delicately penned love letter to self. With a sobering level of sincerity, she recognizes her reliance upon others’ approval and the vicious toll it takes on self-esteem. She delivers her poignant epiphany with the tenderness of tone one might use when speaking to a mirror. Humility marks the standout song and echoes throughout the remainder of her debut.  

I finally love myself 

Cause she loves me  

And since I think the 

world of her 

And she of me 

I’m exactly who and 

where I want to be 

Kate’s observations are at once wise and inquisitive, treating confusion and conclusion with equal care, serving simultaneously as stories and studies. The songwriting resembles psychology — and hers alone. In deliberate escape from former record deals, partnerships and influences, the album was intentionally and exclusively created in accordance with her individual vision. Kate recorded it at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, with producer and friend Tim Bright.  

Trophy — is exactly that — a shining culmination of personal lessons learned, an award acquired from the task of existing.  

Night Pass is Pure Bathing Culture’s first original album since 2015 and a radiant demonstration of time dutifully spent between releases. The album opens with an anthem of renewal, “Thin Growing Thing” — an intentional choice according to Sarah, who says, “We can’t imagine a better lyric from the album to introduce a listener to what we are trying to say here. Love is something that has the potential to bond us all and where it’s absent we should strive to create it.” This is Pure Bathing Culture’s constant, the conviction that carries them from past to present. To seeds in the soil, Sarah sings:

lift for love and live for something 

lift for love and live through something 

llft for love and live through something else

Night Pass emerged from emotional tumult. The band had lost their label and their team in quick succession, causing them to turn inwards during the creation of this record—the duo’s spirit of resilience beats like a heart through ten powerful tracks, persistence exploding into songs like “Devotion,” a danceable canticle in praise of partnership. 

darling devotion

it puts stars in the jewels

and darling devotion

it’s all we can do

Finding opportunity in the unknown, Pure Bathing Culture called upon friend and producer Tucker Martine (REM, My Morning Jacket, Neko Case and Spoon) to join their journey. His studio, became an oasis, a place of healing and of progress. This darker incandescence of collaborative survival gleams through “Moonrise,” “Remember” and “Joyous Lake,” the last of which provided Night Pass its title. “It’s our favorite song on the record,” Daniel and Sarah confess in agreement. “It’s a meditation on patience and not giving up.”

the joyous won’t be jealous of

the heavens up above

in stream lit skies mysterious

above the joyous lake

Musically, Pure Bathing Culture emanate an expertise in sounds supernatural and ethereal. Sarah ignites lines with a voice like sorcery, injecting each note with palpable energy. Daniel embraces his instruments as companions. He explains, “I don’t plan, I just think of each part as a different person. I'll name them, think of the clothes they're wearing, where they're from ... This helps me feel like we’re creating our own world.” His method is evident in “Ad Victoriam,” where sounds interact like living, loving bodies, and in “All Night,” where Sarah’s voice seems to twirl each melodic layer as if by hand. 

dark nights and blackest dreams

when nothing’s ever as it seems

and you are all alone

and what’s left in between

If Night Pass clarifies only one thing, it’s that over the course of their Richard Swift-produced debut EP and the two beloved studio albums that followed, Sarah Versprille and Daniel Hindman have done more than establish a musical identity; they’ve honed a sonic virtue. The album is a shining exhalation, beaming with electric intimacy and propelling Pure Bathing Culture into due triumph. The album closes with “Violet A Voyager,” a softly resolving song that Daniel and Sarah always knew would come last, the first glimpse of violet on the horizon after the black of night.

What dreams give back again

at night beneath the waves

as violet finds its way above the moonlight shade