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Five Voices, One Country – Rose Wollman’s “Becoming America” explores identity, belonging and the many different stories that make up American life

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There are certain ideas that become so familiar that we stop questioning them. The American Dream. The melting pot. The land of the free. They are phrases that have travelled around the world, becoming part of the mythology of a country that has always presented itself as a place where anyone can build a better life.

But what happens when those ideals meet the reality of people’s lives?

That is the question at the heart of Rose Wollman’s new album, Becoming America, and it is a question the music approaches not through speeches or political arguments, but through individual voices, histories and experiences.

George Collins Finds Shelter From the Storm in Latest Single “Safe Harbor”

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There is something rather wonderful about old songs refusing to stay dead. Not the ones that should have remained firmly buried beneath several decades of accumulated embarrassment, naturally, but those occasional compositions that somehow survive the passage of time, the changing musical landscape and the inevitable critical reassessment of your younger self.

George Collins has been rummaging through the archives and, fortunately for us, he has found one worth rescuing in “Safe Harbor,” a song originally written when he was just 23 and now given a thoroughly revitalised new life.

Harley DiNardo Captures the Wild Spirit of the Catskills in New Single “Catskill Park”

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Some places leave a mark on us that is difficult to explain. They become associated with particular moments in our lives, the people we were when we first discovered them, and the feelings that return whenever we find ourselves back in familiar surroundings.

For American singer-songwriter Harley DiNardo, the Catskills in upstate New York have become one of those places, offering a welcome contrast to the relentless movement of modern life. His new single, “Catskill Park”, draws on that connection, turning the landscape into the starting point for a song about belonging, self-discovery and the freedom that comes from occasionally losing your way.

The Sound of Lives Remembered – Rose Wollman’s “Alabanza” finds the Human Story Inside One of The Defining Tragedies of Modern History

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If you wanted any further proof that music can preserve the things history so often reduces to dates, statistics and headlines, you find it in Rose Wollman and her powerful new work “Alabanza”. Written by Mexican composer Francisco Cortés-Álvarez, with Maria Brea on soprano and Dror Baitel on piano, it takes Martín Espada’s Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 and transforms it into something both deeply human and musically compelling, a piece about ordinary lives caught within extraordinary history.

“Definite” and “The Eyes Are All You Know” – Two Sides of The Free States Latest Record “Love and Death”

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There are few things humans enjoy more than trying to work things out. We measure, compare, analyse, second-guess, revisit, overthink and then, having exhausted every possible avenue of rational thought, occasionally realise that we probably knew the answer all along. Love is good at exposing this little flaw in our programming. We can turn something instinctive into an intellectual exercise and then wonder why it no longer feels quite as simple as it did before we started thinking about it.

This seems to be one of the many things Shaun Lyons is interested in, although thankfully he is considerably more interested in turning those ideas into music.

Brooks John Martin Gets Happily Lost in ‘Do’

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There are songs that seem to arrive with their shoelaces tied neatly together, marching from verse to chorus and back again with a reassuring sense of direction. Then there are songs like Brooks John Martin’s “Do”, which appears to have taken a wrong turning somewhere, discovered something rather interesting down the road and decided to stay there for a while. It is a strange, funny, surprisingly joyful little universe, built from shifting moods, surreal associations and the kind of logic that makes perfect sense when you stop trying to make sense of it.

‘Do’ is the first single and video from Martin’s forthcoming album War All The Time, and it finds the Florida artist exploring the emotional territory between breakdowns, breakthroughs and all the peculiar places in between. Martin describes the song as “non-linear Lewis Carroll nonsense”, which is probably a more useful description than anything involving the phrase ‘traditional songwriting structure’. There is a stream-of-consciousness quality to the way the track moves, with ideas and feelings appearing, disappearing and colliding rather than lining up obediently to tell us a story.

Looking Up From “The World From My Bed” with Winchester 7 & The Runners

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There is something wonderfully strange about “The World From My Bed”. On the surface, Winchester 7 & The Runners have created a song about the modern habit of staying in bed with a phone, a book and the entire world seemingly available through a screen. Yet beneath its laid-back premise sits a much bigger question: what happens when having access to more information than ever before doesn’t necessarily mean understanding the world around us?

The song began with a conversation about how young people consume news and current affairs, particularly through platforms such as TikTok. Rather than turning that observation into another predictable complaint about how everything was supposedly better in the past, Winchester 7 took a more thoughtful route. After all, older forms of media had their own capacity for misinformation, exaggeration and collective panic.

Rediscovering Blind Boone – The Extraordinary Story Behind Kansas City’s Most Ambitious Musical

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Some albums arrive with a story attached to them. Others are almost entirely story. Blind Boone: The Musical sits somewhere between the two, taking the remarkable life of John William “Blind” Boone and transforming it into an ambitious song cycle that reaches across ragtime, blues, jazz, funk, rock and musical theatre. Its as much about resurrecting a forgotten musical legacy as it is in telling a compelling story.

John William Boone was born in 1864 in a Union Army camp near Miami, Missouri, the son of an escaped enslaved woman and a Union Army bugler. At only six months old, his eyes were removed during an operation intended to save his life. Yet blindness proved no barrier to an extraordinary musical career. Boone would become a celebrated concert pianist, performing across America from 1880 until 1927 at a time when segregation and institutional racism made the world of concert performance extraordinarily difficult to navigate for African American musicians.

Scribe’s “Five Alive” – Finding Freedom on the Other Side

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There is something wonderfully unfashionable about a great power trio. No layers of studio excess to hide behind, no sprawling cast of musicians to dilute the chemistry. Just bass, guitar, drums and three players who have to make every note count.

Northern California’s Scribe understand the challenge, but they also seem to relish it. Their music brings together the muscularity of progressive rock, the immediacy of indie and an eclectic musical vocabulary that stretches from Rush and The Police to jazz, folk, R&B and classical music. On Five Alive, all of that experience is put in the service of something joyful.

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As the collective attention span shrinks, Eddie Canyon finds himself searching for meaning within the noise. Reaching into and around his Arkansas roots, Eddie carves a distinctively southern Hip Hop undercurrent in his exploratory approach to music. Weaving tales of battling addiction, thoughts on spirituality, and irreverent social commentary into his lyrics, Eddie aims to intrigue his audience at the least, and at most, leave them with a liberating degree of thoughtfulness. In his own words: “The Matrix is real, but there’s a way out.” Support on Spotify or Bandcamp.