In 2026, the Grammy Awards have brought back the “Best Contemporary Folk Album” category that was eliminated in 2012, while also founding a new “Best Traditional Folk Album” category.
Sam Barber is a contemporary folk artist who has so much more similar in style, sound and approach to the music of Zach Bryan, Noah Kahan, Joshua Slone, and other massive artists that have been dominating charts.
Singer/songwriter Benjamin Tod has been mixing it up more and more in the country music space lately, specifically calling out the cucks in the industry that didn’t spend a second paying dues.
It seems strange to think that a song that Tyler Childers never even really properly recorded or released would go on to become an American country music standard, and one of the most beloved from his catalog.
Similar to Zach Bryan, it’s hard to understate how massive Sam Barber has become. That’s not all that’s similar about Zach Bryan. You listen to ‘Restless Mind,’ and you could easily be convinced it’s a Zach Bryan album.
The rise of the independent country megafestival with support from ’90s country stars has been one of the biggest illustrations for how significant, sustainable, and broad-based the resurgence of roots in country music has been.
It nears the realm of impossibility to put enough emphasis on how monumentally important the seismic shifts occurring in the music business at the moment are, and how they’re reverberating throughout every sector of the industry.