Martin Anderson

oul, blues, and R&B singer Danielle Nicole first got the spark of music from seeing Etta James perform, back when she was a child. You can hear Etta's influence in her work, no question! This is her fourth full-length album, releasing Friday, August 28th on Forty Below Records. It features collaborations with guitarist Brandon Miller, keyboardist Jim Pugh, and Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars.

The music world is reeling from the tragic death last Wednesday of Glen Hansard, star of the 2007 film Once and member of The Frames, The Swell

Texas songwriter Waylon Payne has released his third album, the follow-up to 2021's Blue Eyes, The Harlot, The Queer, The Pusher & Me . Collaborators

With a career that spans 40 years through folk, roots rock, Americana, and country blues, Michelle Malone is no doubt an underground legend in the fabric of Georgia music. Collaborators have included the Indigo Girls, Gregg Allman, and Chuck Leavell, just to name a few. Guitar World said Malone is “equal parts badass guitar slinger and sweet songstress, with masterful lyrical introspection.” She returns to Studio B on Friday afternoon, before playing Oskar Blues Brewery in Brevard that evening, and AVL Sounds Fest on Saturday.

The music world is reeling from the tragic death last Wednesday of Glen Hansard, star of the 2007 film Once and member of The Frames, The Swell Season, and

Introducing a (relatively) new singer/songwriter out of Philadelphia, who has won awards these past few years from the likes of American Songwriter, Songwriter Serenade, and the John Lennon Songwriting contests. She has been the opening act for Carsie Blanton, who says she's “One of my favorite young songwriters, out there sticking it to the patriarchy with gorgeous, singable, perfectly crafted confections of song.” This debut studio album of hers will be released on August 28 th

John Darnielle and company have this follow-up to the album they released last November, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan . But he says this one started life as Grunges, a sequel to their 2017 LP Goths . “These songs are loosely about the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is to say they're about the accumulation of days, each one a little further back than the next, sometimes miraculously seeming clearer as they recede and sometimes blurring into unrecognizable shapes which are sometimes pleasant and sometimes troubling.” John Congleton produced this new one, recording the band at Sear Sound in Manhattan. Darnielle is joined in by bandmates Matt Douglas and Jon Wurster; Peter Hughes left in 2024, after 30 years. Additional players on the album include bassist and French horn player Rob Jost, harpist Mikaela Davis, and assorted backing vocalists.

Musicians and producer Adrian Younge has recorded modern Afrobeat classics with Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor through Jazz Is Dead, and on this latest collection on his Linear Labs record label, Younge asks a new question: what would a Ghanaian producer in '76 have made if he set out to create an American disco record for his hometown? The result is a relentless, hypnotic patchwork of Afrobeat, funk, and disco recorded to tape, built for the DJ of any era.

One of the bands that really helps to define Asheville's great music scene is this collective of Charles Humphrey III on bass, Mark Schimick on mandolin (and most lead vocals), Sam Wharton on guitar, Gabe Epstein on banjo, and James Schlender on fiddle. They're back with their 7 th album, recorded at Asheville's Echo Mountain Studios. Charles has mostly co-written these new tunes with the likes of Darren Nicholson, Thomm Jutz, Tommy Maher, and Nick Dauphinais among others, plus there's a nearly ten-minute Allman Brothers jam to wrap it up. They live up to their band name absolutely, with some area gigs over the next few weeks in addition to cross-country treks. If they live up their their album's name, you can't really tell from listening.

New research suggests that sci-fi's most popularly-depicted method of interfacing with AI may actually produce worse results than even badly-typed prompts. From HAL to Deep Thought, from C3P0 to Wall-E, the idealized for...