New Kyle Andrews Video
Trampled By Turtles - New Video
Josh Abbott Band: "She's Like Texas"
New Charlie Mars video - "Like a Bird, Like A Plane"
Those Darlins release new video
Bobby Bare Jr., A Storm - A Tree - My Mother's Head
Thirty Tigers
In 2008 a storm brought a tree down on the Bare family home, with Bobby Bare Jr’s Mother inside. Within a year, and after two broken vertebrae, his Mother and the family home recovered. Naturally, her good, loving, songwriting son, got a song out of the tragedy as well as the title to his 6th solo album, A Storm - A Tree – My Mother’s Head. For this record, Bobby Bare, Jr. again enlisted the help of Tom Blankenship, Patrick Hallahan and Carl Broemel (all of My Morning Jacket). [artist site]
Kyle Andrews, KANGAROO
Elephant Lady Records
Real Blasty, Kyle's last LP, incorporated all the strengths critics lauded in Kyle's previous work but pushed his sound in a new direction. Darker and more aggressive songs found balance in upbeat, danceable tracks like "Sushi" and polished ballads. Andrews proved his acoustic-pop sensibilities were just as comfortable in big, electronic-laden club surroundings. Now, with the KANGAROO EP, he's returning to his bright, sunny pop. As always, it's catchy, with a measured dose of synths and beats, but it belies a sweetness that endears Kyle to anyone who gives it a listen. "Sushi" appears again as a half-tempo remix, and "You Always Make Me Smile" (recently featured in a series of Holiday Inn commercials) proves Andrews is still intent on making us happy. [artist site]
Cory Morrow, Brand New Me
APEX Music
An Austin legend, by way of Lubbock and his native Houston, Cory Morrow has been a consistent fixture on the Texas Country scene – establishing himself as a pioneer of the growth of the Lone Star State’s brand of Country music in the past decade. Now married and actively touring with a new band, with a renewed outlook on his life and career, Cory is set to release the latest volume of Red Dirt poetry in his musical tapestry. [artist site]
Rob Baird, Blue Eyed Angels
Carnival Records
On his debut, the 23-year-old Memphis-born, Austin-based songwriter brings influences like Chris Knight and Tom Petty to bear, crafting songs that have caught the attention of publishers, producers, and new fans all over Texas. [artist site]
Shannon Whitworth, Water Bound
Thirty Tigers
Waters run deep in Shannon Whitworth’s soul. A daughter of South Carolina’s low country, it’s to the water that she returns when she needs respite from the wearisome world. So it’s understandable the theme of water surfaces in her songs so often; these are women who run, women who hope, women who love the wrong man, and when true love is present, women who return. They are Water Bound. [artist site]
Leslie Stevens and the Badgers, Roomful of Smoke
Lyricland
Leslie Stevens may just be the sweetheart of the rodeo. Not your traditional rodeo, mind you: this one’s a traveling road show, a displaced menagerie of vintage country rock, Laurel Canyon folk and haunted gypsy jazz. [artist site]
Frontier Ruckus, Deadmalls & Nightfalls
Ramseur Records
By way of an untiring circuit of national touring, a reputation of singing to fans long afterhours amid back-alleys and dumpsters, and a gorgeous indie-folk sophomore release, the youthful and apparently boundless energy of indie folk quartet Frontier Ruckus has never seemed more undeniably vigorous. [artist site]
Paul Thorn, Pimps & Preachers
Perpetual Obscurity
Among those who value originality, inspiration, eccentricity, and character – as well as talent that hovers somewhere on the outskirts of genius, the story of Paul Thorn is already familiar. Now, Thorn reveals another layer of his fascinating history on the album Pimps & Preachers, addressing that subject on the title cut and in the intriguing "family portrait" he painted for the cover, which highlights his daddy the preacher and his uncle the pimp. [artist site]
Nora Jane Struthers, Nora Jane Struthers
Blue Pig Music
Featuring Tim O-Brien, Stuart Duncan, Rob Ickes and many other acoustic superstars, this debut album from Nora Jane Struthers is a classic Americana story-telling album, and a sign of good things to come from this young singer-songwriter. [artist site]
Samantha Crain, You (Understood)
Ramseur Records
Anais Nin said, “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” That suggestion was the muse impelling the conception of Samantha Crain’s second LP, You (Understood). Each song on this album rests on a juncture with a person, a real person, and it recounts a particular episode of life with that person. [artist site]
Kaiser Cartel, Secret Transit
Daniel Records
Kaiser Cartel is a low-fi, song-driven, harmony-heavy Brooklyn-based duo. Their new album, Secret Transit finds them expanding their palate of sounds and evolving further as songwriters. [artist site]
Farewell Drifters, Yellow Tag Mondays
Heart Squeeze Records
With their shimmering harmonies, gently propulsive acoustic instrumentation, and disarmingly honest songwriting, The Farewell Drifters have arrived at an engaging, inventive musical hybrid all their own. Since first setting out over four years ago, the young quintet have casually but clearly defied any preconceptions and limitations of their lineup (two acoustic guitars, mandolin, fiddle, upright bass), and Yellow Tag Mondays marks their national debut. [artist site]
Darrell Scott, A Crooked Road
Full Light Records
Acclaimed songwriter Darrell Scott did not set out to record a double album; that is just what happened along the crooked road. The accomplished singer-songwriter penned each of the twenty-one songs on A Crooked Road, his eighth solo album, and, adding to the very special nature of this release, Scott played all of the instruments heard on the record: guitar, mandolin, lap steel, keyboard, drums, bass, harp and cello. [artist site]
Beth Nielsen Chapman, Back To Love
BNC Records
Over the course of 11 stunning new compositions, Back To Love brings the acclaimed, Nashville-based singer/songwriter full circle, back to the soul-deep songwriting style that made her famous and provided big hits for herself and covers by an impressive and eclectic group of artists including Faith Hill, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Trisha Yearwood, Neil Diamond, Patty Griffin and Emmylou Harris, to name but a few... [artist site]
Jennifer Knapp, Letting Go
Graylin Records
Grammy nominated Jennifer Knapp returns to music and the US from a seven year hiatus with a new album, Letting Go. Recorded in Nashville, Letting Go was produced by Paul Moak (Mat Kearney, Martha Wainwright, Amy Grant) and features ten folk-rock songs showcasing her astonishing straightforwardness and honesty. [artist site]
Elizabeth Cook, Welder
Thirty One Tigers
No matter what its apologists may claim, country music enjoys no special access to the truth because it uses three chords. Like any other form of popular music, country works best when it uncovers and delivers new information about the world — which isn't necessarily the same thing as telling the truth. On her brilliant new full-length Welder, Nashville's Elizabeth Cook has fashioned a compassionate, funny overview of what the form can do with its three chords and its obsession with family, time, fame and distance. If much of modern country is musically lazy and positively dishonest, Welder reveals Cook as a poet of everyday life who doesn't shrink from the world's hard, sad realities. [artist site]
Jim Lauderdale, Patchwork River
Thirty Tigers
Patchwork can refer to a collection of incongruous pieces, parts not necessarily united into a whole. But sometimes, in the hands of great craftsmen and women, those parts merge into a thing of beauty and warmth. Patchwork River weaves together the lyrical mastery of Robert Hunter (Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan) and the songcraft of Grammy Award-winning artist Jim Lauderdale into something greater than the sum of its considerable parts: Introducing... Patchwork River [artist site]
Sam Quinn, The Fake that Sunk a Thousand Ships
Ramseur Records
Sam Quinn (the everybodyfields) is stepping out in front with some new tunes, fresh faces and maybe even a new pair of brown pants. In an effort to keep the the good times rolling in a gleefully depressing way, Sam Quinn brings you his latest album: The Fake that Sunk a Thousand Ships. [artist site]
Jason Boland, High In The Rockies
APEX Nashville
The Texas hero releases a new live album on 4/20, recorded at Steamboat Springs to fever pitch crowds. [artist site]
Trampled By Turtles, Palomino
Banjodad Records
With four self-released albums to their credit and a word-of-mouth reputation that draws legions of diehard fans to their must-see-to-believe live shows, northern roots music hybrid Trampled by Turtles have a sound that s a bracing hybrid of classic American songwriting, bluegrass and folk. This is forceful acoustic music from the land of ice and snow of dark winters, isolation and numbing cold delivered at breakneck pace with the fervor of religion. [artist site]
Carrie Rodriguez , Love & Circumstance
9th Opus
With Love & Circumstance Carrie Rodriguez demonstrates (if you weren't already convinced by her spectacular sophomore album, She Ain't Me) that she has fully matured into a confident and commanding solo artist, in spite of (or perhaps, because of) the fact that the new album consists entirely of covers. Like Emmylou Harris with her 1995 masterpiece, Wrecking Ball, Carrie mines and polishes gems of other songwriters, delivering them in her own unique style. [artist site]
Legendary Shack Shakers, Agridustrial
Colonel Knowledge Records
Agridustrial is the statement of an American band fighting back against a society gone mad with greed and the usurpation of basic human dignities. The southern ethos is set on high, as the band explores the stories and values of those that have trod the path from our agrarian past, as testimony to those that will have to live it again. [artist site]
Great American Taxi, Reckless Habits
Great American Taxi Records
In the past five years, Great American Taxi, fronted by Leftover Salmon’s Vince Herman, has become one of the best-known headliners on the jam band circuit, their uninhibited sound a swinging concoction of swampy blues, progressive bluegrass, funky New Orleans strut, Southern boogie, honky tonk, gospel and good old fashioned rock ’n’ roll. That loose, anything-can-happen feel is the hallmark of Reckless Habits, the band’s second album. [artist site]
Joe Pug, Messenger
Lightning Rod Records
After runs with Steve Earle, M. Ward and Josh Ritter, Pug has taken to the studio and recorded his sophomore release, solidifying his spot among the finest songwriters of his generation. [artist site]
