As the rest of country music seems to be following Jon Pardi’s lead, Jon Pardi himself seems to be staying static, if not heading in the other direction ever so slightly.
This time around, Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives offer a take on ’60’s instrumental surf and Ennio Morricone Western soundtrack inspired sounds. The result is often breathtaking to behold.
What the Turnpike Troubadours have proven over time is that good songs endure, and better songs grow even better over time. There’s no mistaking it. The Turnpike Troubadours are now legends.
If you’re looking for relief or reparations from the ills of life, you can reach for alcohol or other intoxicants to inoculate you from life‘s fickle and sometimes debilitating moods, or you can reach for the music of The Wilder Blue.
Sturgill Simpson (or Johnny Blue Skies) capped off a cold, but action packed weekend in Texas at the Two Step Inn Festival just north of Austin. It was a truncated, but inspired and untethered festival set.
Good music never goes out of style. People’s tastes do. Then when they wisen up and the music of the day turns so cacophonous they can’t stomach it anymore, they come back to the stuff that’s always been good.
Acting as if proximity to you or anyone else is irrelevant, and money is no object, what are some of the best experiences you can have listening to music in America?
Matt Daniel is one of those artists clearly touched (or cursed) by the need to perform country music to unburden his soul, but blessed with immense talent to write and express it.
“Arcadia” might not be the best album to introduce your friends to the power of bluegrass, but it might be the ideal specimen to introduce them to the beauty of it.
Ready to explore her country noir impulses in full force, she intermixes country songs with more indie rock treatments in an album that is eclectic and explorative, and always forthright and engaging in the writing.
The song deserves credit for the emotional-laden arrangement and the attempt to go deeper than 12 oz. But ultimately “Cold Beer Can” is a formulaic beer track for radio.
They call themselves a rock and roll band, but they’re bursting with country blues, Southern textures, and even some straight up country songs that will fit right in with your sensibilities.
If you need any further illustration of the creative explosion that Jesse Welles has been the catalyst and accelerant for over the last year or so, appreciate that he just released a 63-song album.
On “The Last Kings of Babylon,” Jason Boland tries to summarize the last 25 or so years in music, from the personal and the professional, to the sacred and the profane.
We didn’t really know what to expect from the Grand Ole Opry’s 100th Anniversary celebration on NBC Wednesday night (3-19). We hoped it would be a cavalcade of actual country stars singing actual country music.
You don’t enjoy SXSW—the annual musical gathering in Austin, Texas every mid March. You endure it. You survive it. Here are Saving Country Music’s biggest takeaways from SXSW 2025.
“The Giver” is fundamentally a pop song, though with a very strong and prominent fiddle part, which is so pronounced in the song, it truly does pull it into the realm of country, or at least, country pop.
“Lonesome Drifter” gives you another good haul of original Charley Crockett songs that are immediately entertaining, and that endear you ever further to the man and the mythos.
Writing and recording divorce records in the era of non-disclosure agreements has to make for a difficult task. But if there’s any wordsmith out there in the world capable of navigating those hurdles, it’s probably Jason Isbell.
By mining his deepest emotions of love, devotion, and thankfulness, Justin Wells composes songs that resonate deeply with anyone who finds themselves in similar circumstances, and those who aspire to.
The Devil Makes Three is blue collar music for a bleak world bifurcated between the have’s and have not’s. It’s never pretty. It’s a feral, tattooed, and pierced. But it’s nonetheless inspiring from its dogged persistence.
It very well could be that the son of Hank Williams Jr., and the grandson of Hank Williams will be responsible for releasing the worst song in the entire pantheon of what anyone could ever construe as “country music” in 2025.
It’s the intimate nature of the approach to “Lonely Mountain Town” that brings the emotion of the songs to the surface, and centers the attention of the audience upon the story.
It’s a thing of beauty how the gentle but powerful musings of Juliet McConkey overwhelm your emotional faculties in disarming waves, awakening feelings often left dormant in the passing of everyday life.