Mon Rovîa “Bloodline” Janjay Lowe has lived the kind of life that most of us have only seen in Oscar-bait movies (and not the kind where everyone plays fancy dress-up – the messy ones). The singer-songwriter, who goes by Mon Rovîa as a tribute to his native Liberia, was adopted out of that war-ravaged nation […]
Greg Freeman at Globe Hall in Denver I’ve written a lot – some might say a little too much – about indie country this year. What I’ve called “the slightly disheveled city cousin to Americana’s country mouse” has provided some of the best songwriting in both the indie and country spheres in 2025. But there’s […]
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45 RPM (Reasons to Purchase Music) for 2025 Musically, 2025 stands out for two reasons – 1) the indie country boom and 2) being backloaded as hell. Eight of my top albums came out in the second half of the year, and four of them (plus several of my top songs) could comfortably be categorized […]
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Dove Ellis Blizzard Seems like just about every year lately, we music writer types, come December, are ready to put the finishing touches on our year-end lists and close up shop until January 2nd or so, but one spectacular late-year release manages to make revisions necessary (personally, Adeem the Artist in 2022 and Zach Russell […]
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Melissa Carper A Very Carper Christmas Putting together a Christmas album (a good one), particularly with new material, is a difficult needle to thread. Ideally, it needs to be original without being too divergent, sentimental but not sappy, and emotive but not treacly. And, even though she was initially hesitant to take on the project, […]
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Laney Jones and the Spirits I’d like to have you believe that music criticism involves some sort of innate ability to divine, seemingly out of thin air, the next notable band. Trade secret – just as often, it’s seeing the right series of words near the top of a press release that generate some intrigue. […]
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Courtney Hartman With You There are any number of happenings that could have derailed the completion of Courtney Hartman’s latest album, With You. The Wisconsin-by-way-of-Colorado singer-songwriter and her husband experienced home renovation woes, crises both medical and financial (which required money saved for recording sessions to be spent on life’s essentials) and, biggest of all, […]
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Luke Bell The King is Back I hate to admit that I didn’t know much about Luke Bell when he was still with us. The Kentucky-born, Wyoming-raised country singer-songwriter lived for just 32 years before disappearing in Arizona and dying as a result of bipolar disorder. That’s the sad part of his short life. Before […]
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Mavis Staples Sad and Beautiful World I feel like, even if we don’t always deserve Mavis Staples, we need her. She’s been singing for over seven decades, traveled as a performer during the Jim Crow era and helped soundtrack the Civil Rights movement, and has now become an elder stateswoman in rock, soul and gospel. […]
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Greensky Bluegrass XXV Buried in the Southeast at the turn of this century, I missed out on the beginning of the bluegrass revival. While the string band aspect may have resonated with some of my native-born neighbors, the “progressive” part probably scared ‘em off. While I was residing in what should’ve been a hillbilly music […]
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