Bee Delores

“I guess I’m growing up,” Thomas Rhett, now 31, observes with an essential cut on his new record, Country Again (Side A).

Last winter, Billy Strings scooped up his first Grammy Award for Home, crowned Best Bluegrass Album—beating out Danny Barnes, Thomm Jutz, Steep Canyon Rangers, and a John Hartford fiddle project. Now, he readies the much-anticipated follow-up. Renewal, his second for Rounder Records, arrives September 24, and Strings anchors the release with lead single “Fire Line,” […]

Mackenzie Scott was hungry to go bigger and bolder. Her fifth studio record, Thirstier, out today (July 30), revitalizes the singer-songwriter, known professionally as TORRES. “I was picturing big rooms and amphitheaters and trying to manifest myself in them,” she says. “I was trying to set up my own big stage ─ maybe if the […]

There’s no denying the connective tissues running between last year’s Welcome to the Hard Times, released in the height of Covid and social unrest, and the forthcoming Music City USA. From the prickly “Honest Fight” and the downtrodden “The World Just Broke My Heart” to “This Foolish Game,” containing some of his bluesiest wails, Charley […]

When Leann Rimes first received the demo for “Blue,” now one of the most iconic songs in the country music pantheon, her father threw it in the trash. “I was a very defiant child and sometimes that served me well,” says the country star. “When my dad left one time after he threw [it] in […]

Following his 2019 EP, Sobville (Episode I), Ian Johnson wanted to write Episode II and III─ but when he stepped back, he soon realized it felt more like an album. Nonfiction, a volatile pop/punk elixir, produced by John Feldmann, emerged from deep reveries, as he began taking stock of his life and finding himself needing […]

Don’t wanna dance in your backbeat / Just wanna land on my two feet, vows Leah Haywood (going by simply Haywood for her stage persona). In the aftermath of heartbreak, the singer-songwriter shakes loose of the past with a celebratory musical blowout─while also juggling feelings of loneliness and regret. Don’t leave / I didn’t mean […]

While making the new Satsang record, Drew McManus kept asking himself: what would Tom Petty do? “Well, he would turn his Telecaster up to seven and play it like an acoustic guitar,” the singer-songwriter muses, with a hearty chuckle. McManus wanted to make a rock ‘n roll record, in the vein of Petty’s Damn the […]

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A child of an alcoholic, Lera Lynn found clarity for the first time in a very long time. Tucked away in the weathered pages of her new record, On My Own ─ an album conceived and recorded all by herself, a creative experiment also born from the fact women rarely engineer and produce records ─ […]

“Never tell this woman she should know her place,” sings Laura Bell Bundy. The accomplished singer, songwriter, and actor doesn’t mince her lyrics. Over a boogie-woogie Andrews Sisters twirl, Bundy confronts gender bias and a history of sexism with the force of a two-ton anvil. “Get It Girl, You Go!” (pre-save) retools 1950s and ‘60s […]

Michael Franti has just spent the last hour and a half reading The Lion King and singing songs with his son Taj and wife Sara. It was a morning like any other: family time, music, and reflection. Zoom’ing from his yoga retreat in Bali, at which he and his family have been locked in quarantine, […]

Ashley McBryde was madder than a hornet. When her brother Clay took his own life in the summer of 2018, she was left holding a ragged bag of emotions. She felt anger, more than anything, and it wasn’t until six months later that she began to understand why she felt that way. Videos by American […]

Mandy Moore radiates warmth, hope, joy. Videos by American Songwriter Even over the phone, she speaks emphatically about life and her work, as she turns attention unflinchingly away from a traumatic past and eyes a bright future. Her seventh studio album, Silver Landings, her first in 11 years, spins with a folk-rock sensibility, a style […]