Genre: Folk

Tommy Prine’s debut album “This Far South” coming June 23, 2023 is not only a long awaited introduction but a testimony to Prine’s 20’s and the loss, love, and growth that has defined them. Co-produced by close friend and kindred musical spirit, Ruston Kelly, and beloved Nashville engineer and producer, Gena Johnson, the album is rich and dynamic from cathartic jams to nostalgic storytelling.

The son of late songwriting legend, John Prine, Tommy Prine grew up in Nashville surrounded by music, art and writing. As a child, he thought all parents were musicians, as his father “going to work” meant performing shows for adoring fans and writing songs. Tommy learned to play guitar by watching his father play, copying the ways his fingers moved and inadvertently developing his own singular style. Summers in Ireland lent their own inspiration, as did 10 straight years camping at Bonnaroo. Prine’s musical tastes grew to become decidedly eclectic, spanning John Mayer, Outkast, Bon Iver, the Strokes and more.

It wasn’t until Prine reached his mid-twenties, though, that he considered a career of his own in music and began to share with others the songs he wrote in private. His songs were quickly met with excitement and enthusiasm, which sonically brings together a colorful patchwork of musical influences and lyrically explores existential questions and emotional experiences.

The album’s title track, “This Far South,” marks a turning point in Prine’s life as he found himself struggling to escape a dark, aimless period. He ultimately found the courage to act on choices that would see him to the other, brighter, side.

“There were several years where I felt without purpose, spent all my time partying, and just existing. I found myself at a fork in the road and chose the better path, and in that moment, I swore I would never be This Far South again.”

Grief is a major throughline of Prine’s current work. In 2017, Prine lost his best friend to an overdose.

“Since then, I have lost some more friends and have others who are still navigating the ups and downs of struggles with drug abuse.”

His song, “Letter To My Brother,” was written as a message to the friends he’s lost, those in Recovery, and to friends who are still struggling.

He still grapples with the passing of his father in April of 2020. “The world lost one of the greatest songwriters of all time, but I lost my dad.” Prine bears the loss of his father and the memories he carries for others on the track, “By The Way.”

“The comment I get the most is how much I look like him, and sometimes it makes me feel like I’m a sad reminder to those who loved him.”

While navigating that loss has been difficult, he’s found solace in connecting through music with others who have lost loved ones.

“When I’m playing certain songs, I can literally look out in the crowd and tell who else has lost their dad,” he says. “I can immediately tell which people have experienced, specifically, losing their father. They’ll come up and tell me afterwards, and I’ll be like, ‘Yeah, like, I figured that this conversation was going to happen,’ because I could see their reaction. It’s been really powerful to see real-deal evidence that grief is a shared experience, and that suffering is a shared experience between humans.”

Prine capped off 2022 with his first solo tour across the United States. He was heavily involved with You Got Gold, an event series in Nashville honoring the life and songs of John Prine, and performed at AmericanaFest as an official showcasing artist. He also debuted two original songs, “Ships in the Harbor” and “Turning Stones.”

“Ships in the Harbor” is a tender meditation on impermanence and change, with Prine communicating the universal experience of loss through poetic observations of the seemingly mundane. The song found its way onto a series of editorial playlists including Spotify’s Fresh Folk playlist and Amazon’s Fresh Folk & Ameriana playlist. It was also praised by a number of outlets including Billboard, Garden & Gun, and Saving Country Music who wrote, “With one song, Tommy Prine has already accomplished what many musicians and songwriters work their entire careers to accomplish, which is to make such an indelible emotional connection with an audience.”

This year, alongside his own runs of headline shows, Prine opened for Tyler Childers on his “Send In The Hounds Tour” in London. He was also named one of Amazon Music’s 2023 Breakthrough Artists to Watch.

“I feel like I’ve learned more about myself in the last year and a half than I ever have in my life,” Prine says. “And I think that speaks a lot to doing something that I’m passionate about. I love and respect the craft. Just hitting the road and doing what so many people before me have done and will continue to do, it’s really resonated with me. I think it’s transformed me into the person that I am meant to be.”

Jeffrey Martin

“Dogs in the Daylight is as close to a masterpiece as a folk album by an emerging singer-songwriter can get.” — No Depression

Portland, Oregon’s Jeffrey Martin is a minister’s son who can build a house with his bare hands and holds a master’s degree in English. He worked his way through school as a carpenter, then, following graduation, spent four years teaching high school.

It was during that time that his career as a songwriter came into bloom. Struggling to strike a balance between his increasingly rigorous Northwest/West Coast touring and his efforts to get teenagers to love words as much as he did, Martin found himself in the tricky position of having to choose between his two passions.

Much to the delight of his fans, music won the day. Now, with three intensely lyric-driven albums under his belt, two of which were released on the Portland indie-label, Fluff & Gravy Records, Martin has developed a loyal and growing audience, both domestically and abroad. Prior to the halting effects that a global pandemic placed on his ability to do so, Martin kept a restless touring schedule. It’s taken him on several laps around the U.S. and Europe and landed him on stages with luminaries from the genre including Courtney Marie Andrews, Joe Pug, Gregory Alan Isakov, Jeffrey Foucault, Sean Hayes, Peter Mulvey, Amanda Shires, Colter Wall, Ruth Moody, Caitlin Canty, and others.

Jeffrey Martin writes music that probes the depths of the human experience and doesn’t shy away from its darkest corners. His songs can feel like short stories from literary giants like Steinbeck, Burroughs, or Cormac McCarthy and possess a raw intensity that comes from seeing his subjects up close. All the struggle, hurt, strife, and heartbreak that comes from living in this world are laid bare and unvarnished, yet somehow, Martin manages to mine and make space for what beauty remains.

Presently, Jeffrey Martin is writing for his fourth full-length album at a deliberative pace and making plans to enter the studio to record this winter. He’s recently signed with Tommy Alexander of the Wassermann Agency and has returned to the road for an extended 52-date tour of the US and Canada. An extensive summer tour originally planned for 2020 is now scheduled for 2022 and will include stops in the U.K., Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Ireland.

Anna Tivel

Imagine the very first man on the moon, watching the earth rising up / Out of the darkness cerulean blue, water and thunder and dust

Oregon-based songwriter Anna Tivel’s newest album Outsiders starts with a lens so wide that we have left the planet to look back from a great distance at the turmoil and beauty of our shared humanity. From there, the lens pulls close and unfolds in a gripping collection of stories so often ignored. Tivel’s flawed and honest characters move through a landscape of hurt and loss, of small triumph and big love. In 11 songs full of recognition, veracity and hope, Tivel’s watchful and empathetic eye details the undeniable ache of living.

Outsiders, look up / The night is dark but brilliant and it turns out we are not so different

Recorded almost entirely live to tape in Rock Island, IL with producer and multi-instrumentalist Shane Leonard and engineer Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), the album is a truly collaborative exploration. Tivel gathered the same vibrant group of friends from her acclaimed record, The Question, which NPR heralded as “one of the most ambitious folk records of 2019.”

“We holed up together in a little house a few miles from the studio,” she says, “walked there every day to sink deep into the music. No one had heard the songs beforehand, and I would play each one sitting on the floor trying to convey the gut feeling. Then we’d face each other in a circle and feel our way through, working to find the heart of each song in a few takes. Shane brings this layer of uninhibited magic to every session, setting the stage for everyone to listen deep and react with open doors. He gives himself as fully to sonic atmosphere as I do to words and I have a great amount of trust in his vision and admiration for the care he takes with the world of each song.”

The constraints of analog recording fostered a rawness and immediacy in the final tracks. The arrangements on Outsiders are spacious and full of intrigue, drawing you into the cinema of Tivel’s lyrics. The title track opens the album with a meditation on the first moon landing. “I wrote it sitting on the floor in front of the TV between fragments of an Apollo 11 documentary,” she recalls. “The news was feeling especially dark, full of pain and distorted truths, and watching all that incredible footage of human hope and achievement hit me so hard. For just that one moment in the great upheaval of the times, everyone paused together to witness something new and full of wonder.”

The second track “Black Umbrella” is a winding story that follows a small-town robbery and a bystander who tries to help only to fall under the weight of misconception and old, broken systems. “It’s a song about all the ways we fail to really see each other,” Tivel shares, “about poverty and desperation, race and power, history, opportunity, and otherness.”

While writing the album in 2019-20, Tivel found herself circling back again and again to this idea of otherness. “The deep division and ugly rhetoric being amplified–especially in the US–seeped into everything I wrote. I kept wanting to explore this feeling of being unseen, profoundly lonely and disconnected, and how it affects our perception of the world and our place in it,” she says. “Outsiders is an album about looking more deeply into ourselves and each other, really trying to see and examine the internal and external forces that keep us from connecting in real ways and the forces that draw us together.”

Throughout her work, Tivel has emphasized storytelling and this album is no exception, building on the strength of her ability to observe and reflect with a clear-eyed empathy. Inspired by authors from Steinbeck to Morrison, Didion to Dubus, she imbues her songs with attentive detail and a dreamlike quality that leaves the ordinary feeling both palpable and poetic. “Tivel’s characters are common but unforgettable,” NPR’s Ann Powers writes, “Her images linger, and become populated with the energy of the real.”

Outsiders was released by Mama Bird Recording Co. on August 19th, 2022.

Hundreds of thousands of miles away, the endless expanse of a dream / Pausing the burning of cities to say we are beautiful when we believe

Water Street Jacks is an Americana, folk-rock band out of Sauk Prairie, Wisconsin. Educators by day, the band grew out of getting together to play for students at a staff variety show at Sauk Prairie Middle School where Ted Harter (lead vocals and rhythm guitar) is the principal and Hans Fester (drums, harmonica, vocals) is a Physical Education Teacher. Along the way Ted and Hans picked up two Sauk Prairie High School staff members: Vocal Music Teacher, Matt Brennan (keys, vocals) and School Counselor, Owen Murphy (mandolin, vocals). They began to play in earnest in 2016 for local events and at their home pub, The Woodshed Ale House. Since that time Water Street Jacks have toured extensively in southeast Wisconsin playing large events such as Summerfest and Isenroo Music Festival, legendary music bars such as the Come Back In and Up North Bar along with headlining Madison’s most beloved music venue, the iconic High Noon Saloon.

All of the members have strong musical backgrounds. Harter grew up playing trombone, singing and acting at Wabeno High School and milking cows to late 80’s/early 90’s country on the radio in his family’s dairy barn. Fester was a drummer and front man in punk bands in the late 80’s like Drop Forge and Skip Tracer out of Milwaukee. Murphy formed the bluegrass group Old Farm Dog with a lifelong friend a few years ago which was recognized in 2015 as Madison Area Music Awards Country/Bluegrass Performer of the Year. Brennan, a Sauk Prairie native, studied music at Drake University and has taken over a storied music program as the Vocal Music Teacher at Sauk Prairie High School; his musicals, show choirs and vocal soloists routinely win competitions across Southern Wisconsin as well as in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota. Recently, the band added bassist Hanjun Kim to the band.

While their musical roots are different, they share a love for the Americana, folk and alt-country music that has a foundation laid by artists like John Prine, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen and has recently made a resurgence thanks to groups like The Avett Brothers, Mumford and Sons, The Head and the Heart, The Lumineers, and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Since 2017, the band has collaborated to write and play over a dozen original songs along with the unique covers they play. Restless Heart and Adalie (Murphy), River and Someday (Fester), and Where to Stay and Heart of the Wilderness (Harter) all pull together the musical backgrounds, tastes, and life experiences of this fun group of guys. Water Street Jacks prides itself on killer four-part harmonies, devilish good looks, and a fresh perspective on Americana music that is sure to please the most diverse audiences!

The Trouble Notes’ music is an eclectic fusion of genre across the entirety of the musical spectrum, creating a sound that is truly unique to its own. – Rob Underwood, BBC Radio Lincolnshire

Sitting somewhere between world folk, modern classical, and tribal dance music, The Trouble Notes have traveled their way across continents in search of musical influences. Travel across oceans and time with the soulful melodies of Bennet’s violin and Carola’s voice as your body pulses with the explosive energy from Florian’s guitar. Worldly percussion rhythms transport the audience across genres with an uplifting spirit for which The Trouble Notes have become world-renowned.

Their new show “More Violins, Less Violence” is packed with songs from their 2nd Studio album “Liberty Awaits”. Their repertoire brings the traditions of Europe and the Americas together and carries a message of Unity in Diversity. It includes songs like “Grand Masquerade” and “Never Dream Alone” that have featured in videos amassing millions of views worldwide.

Art and music must be a force for healing in this world. Help us support children affected by Violence. 1 dollar of every ticket and 1 dollar of every More Violins, Less Violence Shirt will be donated to Save the Children’s initiative “Stop War on Children” helping children affected by violence and war crimes.