I know year end best of lists aren’t for everyone (and it’s been such a tough year!), but I sure love them! I’m working on two of my own right now, so figured it was a good time to send along a reminder about the albums we’ve been promoting this year. Happy to send downloads for any of these if you’d like, just let me know! What music from 2022 are you the most excited about?
THE PINE HEARTS - Lost Love Songs
It’s not many artists that can say that they’ve written songs in Antarctica, but for Joey Capoccia of Olympia, Washington Americana band The Pine Hearts, the South Pole was just another place to stop and look for inspiration. Working as a carpenter for the National Science Foundation, Capoccia holed up in the South Pole Station’s greenhouse to write the song “Wouldn’t You Know” on The Pine Hearts’ new album, Lost Love Songs, coming February 18, 2022. Traveling and songwriting are two constants in his life, with other songs written while playing with friends on Kauai, or traveling through California’s wine country, or rolling around in Nashville.
JESPER LINDELL - Twilights
Swedish Americana singer Jesper Lindell’s second album, Twilights (coming March 18, 2022), is a creative tour de force, a compelling mix of blue-eyed soul and down-to-earth classic rock, a timeless sound coming anew from Scandinavia. During two years of setbacks – weathering label issues, a pandemic, cancelled tours, and a kidney disease to boot – Jesper and his band had little else to do but write and record music. The result is a remarkable new album recorded in their own studio in Brunnsvik, outside of Ludvika, Sweden. As the cherry on top, the album has three luminous guest singers: Swedish singer Klara Söderberg, one half of sister-duo First Aid Kit; French rockstar Theo Lawrence; and American singer Amy Helm, daughter of The Band’s Levon Helm. Though Twilights is inspired by legends like The Band and Van Morrison, the point has never been to copy or even imitate, but to listen and learn. To emulate an attitude, more than anything, and to follow their example in the creative process.
ALLISON DE GROOT & TATIANA HARGREAVES - Hurricane Clarice
Traditional music is not static; it shifts with the times, uncovering new meanings in old words, new ways of talking about the communal pathways that led us to where we are today. For master musicians Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, traditional stringband music is a way to interpret our uncertain times, to draw artistic inspiration and power from the sources of meaning in their lives. History, family, literature, live performance, and environmental instability all manifest in the sounds, feelings, and sensations that permeate their new album, Hurricane Clarice (coming March 25 from Free Dirt Records). Recording last year in the midst of a global pandemic and during an unprecedented heat wave that saw the city of Portland, Oregon burning under 120 degree heat, these two master musicians found themselves turning to their own communities, to their families, to bring that support into the music. In fact, it was producer Phil Cook (Megafaun, Hiss Golden Messenger) who suggested the two weave their own family histories into the project by including audio recordings of each of their own grandmothers. The album became a direct infusion of centuries of matrilineal folk wisdom, a fiery breath of apocalyptic grandmother energy.
JUSTIN GOLDEN - Hard Times and a Woman
Blues isn’t just twelve bars and a hard luck story. On his debut record, Hard Times and a Woman (coming April 15, 2022), guitarist and songwriter Justin Golden showcases the full breadth of the genre and its downstream influences, everything from country blues to Americana, soul, indie roots and beyond. Golden was raised on the Virginia coast and is steeped in the distinctive, fingerpicked Piedmont blues of the central part of the state. He’s studied country blues and can name any number of influences from Blind Boy Fuller to Taj Mahal, but his key inspirations have always come from the indie guitar realm, specifically friends like Phil Cook and Jo Roddy Walston, with a little Hiss Golden Messenger, Daniel Norgren, and Bon Iver mixed in and maybe a hint of James Taylor. On his sparkling debut, Justin Golden arrives fully formed as a guitarist and a songwriter. It’s not just that he can move so fluidly between musical genres, it’s that he understands that the blues underpins nearly every American genre, and he hears the blues wherever he goes.
LILY HENLEY - Oras Dezaoradas
When singer, fiddler, songwriter, and composer Lily Henley set out to make an album of Sephardic Jewish ballads set to new melodies, she was looking for her own way to interpret a tradition that she saw as critically endangered. With Oras Dezaoradas, to be released on May 6, 2022 on Lior Éditions, Henley wanted to highlight the Ladino language, a threatened tongue that fuses old Spanish with Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish elements and is spoken by less than 100,000 people in the world today. What she didn’t expect was to find herself directly connected to centuries of women spread across a forced global diaspora. Expelled from Spain on penalty of death by the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century, Sephardic Jews kept their culture alive as they moved throughout North Africa and the Ottoman empire. These old ballads, some dating back to the expulsion, carry the hopes and dreams, the daily worries, and existential thoughts of the Sephardic people. In setting these songs to newly composed melodies, Henley brings new life to the words of these songs and to the independent female characters in them and directly inserts herself into the tradition in a transformative way, including writing three original Ladino songs of her own.
MAMA'S BROKE - Narrow Line
Canadian folk duo Mama’s Broke have spent the past eight years in a near-constant state of transience, pounding the transatlantic tour trail. They've brought their dark, fiery folk-without-borders sound to major festivals and DIY punk houses alike, absorbing traditions from their maritime home in Eastern Canada all the way to Ireland and Indonesia. Nowhere is the duo's art-in-motion approach more apparent than on their long-awaited sophomore record Narrow Line (coming May 13, 2022 on Free Dirt Records); it's the sound of nowhere in particular, yet woven with a rich synthesis of influences that knows no borders. The eleven songs on Narrow Line burrow deeply, with close harmony duets, commanding vocals, and poignant contemplations on cycles of life, including birth and death. Tinges of Americana stand side-by-side with the ghosts of Eastern European fiddle tunes and ancient a cappella ballad singing, melding into an unusually accessible dark-folk sound. A careful listen of Narrow Line invokes an ephemeral sense of place—whether real or imagined—inviting us to take comfort in the infinite possibilities of life, whether or not we ever choose to settle down.
THE SLOCAN RAMBLERS - Up the Hill and Through the Fog
Bluegrass music is nothing short of catharsis for The Slocan Ramblers. On their new album Up the Hill and Through the Fog (coming June 10, 2022), the all-star Canadian roots ensemble channels the past two years of loss into a surprisingly joyous collection of twelve songs intended to uplift and help make sense of the world. Though the past few years have brought the group accolades–their 2019 album was nominated for a Juno Award and the band earned the Momentum Band of the Year Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2020–that same momentum was abruptly halted by the pandemic’s brutal impact on live music. Over the next year, bandmates Adrian Gross and Darryl Poulsen both lost close family members and their bassist decided to step back to spend more time at home. They channeled these tumultuous changes into some of their most honest and direct compositions yet. This is roots music without pretension, art powerful enough to cut through the fog of the past two years and chart a more hopeful course forward.
HACKENSAW BOYS - Hackensaw Boys
Roots music shapeshifters Hackensaw Boys make a triumphant return with their new self-titled album due out in June. Known for their energetic live shows, the band have been operating as a sort of musical collective for over two decades now, carving a songline that traverses all genres of American roots music. They’ve toured nearly constantly, playing festivals all over the world, sharing stages with the likes of De La Soul and Cheap Trick, and even working as Charlie Louvin’s touring band. Through it all they’ve adapted their sound, as well as their lineup, to serve their songs with a workman-like ethic. It was during the recording and release of their last EP A Fireproof House Of Sunshine (Free Dirt Records) that Sickmen realized he was doing his best work. This motivated him to “stay out of his own way” during the making of their new self-titled album, a free-wheeling romp through roots music that includes hardcore roots instrumentals, country rug-cutters, and folk rock gems. Hackensaw Boys is chock full of classic, catchy Hackensaw sounds while achieving a new level of unapologetic honesty and vulnerability via Sickmen’s well-honed, salt-of-the-earth songwriting.
PETER ROWAN - Calling You From My Mountain
For over six decades, GRAMMY-award winning artist Peter Rowan has been at the forefront of acoustic American music, inspiring generations of new musicians and working creatively with the roots of bluegrass, newgrass, Americana, country rock, jazz, even reggae, Hawaiian, and Tejano music. A relentlessly curious, brilliant songwriter, Rowan’s had the kind of career that would give him ample opportunity to kick back and rest on his laurels now, but his new album, Calling You From My Mountain (coming June 24 on Rebel Records), shows that Rowan’s voice is as vital as ever, fueled by the history of our great traditions and excited for their future. Guest spots on the album from friends like Billy Strings, Shawn Camp, Molly Tuttle, Lindsay Lou, and Mark Howard, not to mention Rowan’s multi-generational band, show that Rowan’s inspiration transcends age. Throughout, the music sounds like Rowan himself, a modern day California dharma bum, a man as nourished by a metaphysical interest in the mysteries of the physical universe as he is by the intricacies of handcrafted music making.
WILLI CARLISLE - Peculiar, Missouri
Willi Carlisle is a poet and a folk singer for the people. Like his hero Utah Phillips, Carlisle's extraordinary gift for turning a phrase isn't about high falutin' pontificatin'; it's about looking out for one another and connecting through our shared human condition. On his anticipated second album, the magnum opus Peculiar, Missouri (coming July 15, 2022 on Free Dirt Records), Carlisle makes the case across twelve epic tracks that love truly can conquer all. Born and raised on the Midwestern plains, Carlisle is a product of the punk to folk music pipeline that’s long fueled frustrated young men looking to resist. After falling for the rich ballads and tunes of the Ozarks, where he now lives, he began examining the full spectrum of American musical history. Though Carlisle's poetic words evoke the mystical American storytelling of Whitman, Sandburg, and e e cummings, ultimately this is bonafide populist folk music in the tradition of cowboys, frontier fiddlers, and tall-tale tellers. Carlisle recognizes that the only thing holding us back from greatness is each other. With Peculiar, Missouri, he brings us one step closer to breaking down our divides.
MARTHA SPENCER - Wonderland
If you reach Appalachian singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Martha Spencer, it’ll be from the top of her mountain in Virginia, likely when she’s out walking in the woods. Spencer grew up nestled into hills as old as time. Raised in mountain music (she grew up in the famed Whitetop Mountain Band, which dates back to the 1940s), Spencer channels the old sounds, but she can just as easily create new sounds from her worldly travels. Half of the songs on her new album, Wonderland, coming September 2, 2022, are newly written, showcasing songwriting influences from classic icons like Dolly Parton and Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard to modern underground Nashville songwriters like Lillie Mae. On Wonderland, new songs rub shoulders with traditional songs; universal ideas, themes, and tropes fluidly passing back and forth. In Spencer’s hands, the songs shine with a humble beating heart, speaking the truths of her small mountain community, while telling the stories of the music and the people she grew up with, the kind of people who put “rags over riches, joy over judgment, love over all,” in her words.
THE HOOTEN HALLERS - Back In Business Again
For the past fifteen years, The Hooten Hallers have been crisscrossing the country as inveterate road warriors, bringing their peculiar vision of Americana–a fiery rock and roll fever dream birthed in Missouri’s fertile musical heartland. They’ve put so many miles into the road that they’ve burned through multiple tour vans and left twisted metal and frayed rubber strewn across the road behind them. With their aptly named new album, Back In Business Again, the trio roar back on to the international stage with ten incendiary new original songs drawn from their many travels and inspired by the hardships that all touring musicians have faced throughout a seemingly never-ending pandemic. There’s hope in these new songs, but tinges of madness too. It’s Morphine meets ZZ Top along St. Louis’ Mississippi waterfront. Produced by bassist Dominic Davis (Jack White, Greensky Bluegrass), Back In Business Again takes a match to The Hooten Hallers’ fuse and explodes the renegade power trio to the edge and back again, one vigorous, swinging, perfectly peculiar song at a time.
MALI OBOMSAWIN - Sweet Tooth
A suite for Indigenous resistance, the new album from Wabanaki bassist, composer, and songwriter Mali Obomsawin flies in the face of Western tropes that insist Indigenous cultures are monolithic, trapped in time. Instead, Obomsawin highlights centuries of clever adaptation and resistance that have fueled the art and culture of Wabanaki people. Written as a compositional suite, the album Sweet Tooth, coming October 28, 2022 on Out of Your Head Records, blends Wabanaki stories and songs passed down in Obomsawin’s own family with tunes addressing contemporary Indigenous life, colonization, continuity, love and rage. In three movements, Obomsawin’s powerful compositions honor the Indigenous ability to shape great art from the harshest fires of colonialism. The compositions reveal threads that bind together blues, jazz, hymns, folk songs, and Native cultures, and foreground the breadth and continuity of Indigenous contributions to these genres. Sweet Tooth is a celebration of Indigenous innovation, and an ingeniously envisioned debut for this composer-bandleader.
KELLEY HUNT - Winter Soulstice
Recorded in Kansas City with all-star players Hunt’s unique, soulful arrangements of holiday standards she grew up singing and new music on themes of peace and unity plus a generous helping of KC vibe set this album apart from the usual holiday fare. A multi-dimensional artist, an elite pianist and vocalist, and a crafty and unique songwriter, both lyrically and melodically, Kansas City’s Kelley Hunt has shepherded a vision for American music through six albums and over 25 years of music making. That's what makes her latest project something of a curiosity: Winter Soulstice (coming November 4, 2022 on 88 Records), her first holiday album. Why would a high-caliber songwriter choose to release an album comprising mostly covers of holiday standards that have been covered already by hundreds of other artists? “I've wanted to do a holiday album for years and have had fans ask for one for a long time,” Hunt explains. “But I wanted to do it when I could conceptually do something that was really my own.” After several listens to the 10 tracks on Winter Soulstice, a few things become clear. One, her heart was in it 100 percent. And, two, she has, conceptually, imprinted each song with sounds and traits that are hers alone and that separate the album from other, typical paint-by-number holiday albums that are destined to become background music to holiday parties and tree trimmings.
DAVIS CAUSEY & JAY SMITH - Pickin' On Christmas
Davis Causey is an Athens-bred musician who has had a 60-year long career so far that has taken him everywhere from playing with Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson to writing music for Bonnie Raitt and the “Carny” movie soundtrack. Davis’s first release on Strolling Bones Records is Pickin’ on Christmas and includes a beautiful collection of instrumental Christmas classics and one original produced by Davis and Jay Smith and features musicians Randall Bramblett, and Jeff Reilly. “This project came about in 1998 as a limited run of 100 CDs to be given as Christmas presents from Jay and myself to friends, relatives, etc. It was so special to me to collaborate with Jay on this project. He was one of the nicest and most talented musicians I’ve had the privilege of playing with! Unfortunately, Jay passed soon after we finished recording Pickin’ On Christmas. I’m so thankful we have these recordings to keep his spirit and great playing alive for others to appreciate and enjoy! So with great love and affection, I dedicate this recording to Jay - love you brother.”
Photo Credits:
(1) Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves,
(2) Lily Henley,
(3) Mama’s Broke,
(4) The Slocan Ramblers,
(5) Hackensaw Boys
(6) Peter Rowan,
(7) Willi Carlisle,
(8) Mali Obomsawin,
(9) Kelley Hunt ,
(10) Davis Causey
(unknown/website).
