Artist Category: Americana | Page 10

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light

Bookish bite. Sharp harmonies. Songs about saints, scientists, and stubborn women.

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light are a Boston-based string band making music that blends folk tradition with feminist storytelling, poetic detail, and just enough grit. At the center is Sumner’s songwriting—rooted in history, myth, and personal reckoning—carried by close harmonies, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and fiddle. The trio features Kat Wallace on fiddle and vocals and Mike Siegel on upright bass and vocals, whose playing brings both tension and tenderness to the sound.

Their sound is spare and intimate, sometimes eerie, sometimes sweet, always intentional. They call it Femericana—sharp-edged Americana with a splash of feminine rage.

Sumner has performed at the Library of Congress, where five of her original songs are now archived, and was a 2024 winner of the Kerrville New Folk competition. Her song “Radium Girls (Curie Eleison)” struck a nerve—streamed over 300,000 times and picked up by dancers, theater directors, and deep listeners who saw themselves in its story. It’s been tattooed on arms, sung in audition rooms, and carried into classrooms and protests. The kind of song people hold onto.

Rachel Sumner & Traveling Light has toured coast to coast, bringing their spellbinding live show to listening rooms, libraries, farms, and festivals across the country. They’ve appeared at Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, Earl Scruggs Festival, IBMA, and legendary folk listening rooms like Caffé Lena and Club Passim, where their shows have become a staple of the Boston folk scene.

Their latest release, The Traveling Light Sessions, reimagines Sumner’s studio album Heartless Things—recorded live around one microphone with no overdubs. Just the way they play it.

Noah Derksen

An American-citizen born and raised in the heart of the Canadian prairies while maturing on the west coast of British Columbia, Noah Derksen writes with the groundedness of harsh Manitoba winters mixed with the optimism of British Columbia’s coastline. He has toured the width of Canada and the United States, performing at renowned festivals and venues such as the National Arts Centre (Ottawa, ON), Northwest Folklife Festival (Seattle, WA), and the Winnipeg Folk Festival (Winnipeg, MB).

In fall 2019 Noah will be releasing his third full-length album entitled America, Dreaming produced by Winnipeg’s Juno-award winning producer Murray Pulver (The Bros. Landreth, Doc Walker).

Mouths of Babes

With more than a dozen albums and over a thousand shows between them, Ty Greenstein and Ingrid Elizabeth are no strangers to the contemporary folk-Americana music scene. For years, their respective bands Girlyman and Coyote Grace captivated thousands of loyal fans as they crisscrossed the country, rocked festival main stages, and toured with the likes of Indigo Girls and Dar Williams. Now they have distilled the best of the songwriting, musicianship, and humor of their previous groups into the power duo Mouths of Babes.

World Brand New, the stunning self-produced follow-up to Mouths of Babes’ award-winning full-length debut Brighter in the Dark, is a Folk/Americana album in the old-fashioned sense: an album with an arc, meant to be listened to on good headphones with no distractions. With ten songs that range from stuck-in-your-head catchy to cinematic, the duo takes you on the Hero’s Journey hinted at in the cover art. The album can be read as an inner journey, a relationship coming full circle, or a national reckoning—and is meant as all of these.

Onstage, Ty makes a quiet impression as a gifted lyricist, talented multi-instrumentalist, and magnetic presence. Ingrid, a natural performer, easily commands audiences with her larger-than-life sassiness and professional dancer’s grace.

Eavesdrop

Hailing from the Northeast, these Pioneer Valley MA natives provide a sound all their own; a perfect combination of soulful vocals, intricate harmonies, contagious melodies and moving rhythm. Originating as a trio, friends Kara Rose Wolf, Kerrie T. Bowden and Laura Marie Picchi maintain their vocal roots and continue to shape their sound through writing and collaborative instrumentation.

Eavesdrop’s debut EP, The Afterglow, showcased the trio’s vocally charged acoustic, folk, soul roots. With their latest release, Tides, the band has expanded into a six piece ensemble incorporating some of the valley’s finest musicians. Co-produced by Alan Evans and Ross Bellenoit, Tides is the band’s first full length album. It brings the listener on a ride alongside the three songbirds, taking a deeper look into the life events that fostered their creativity.

Dan Bern

Bern may be best known for his masterpieces “Jerusalem,” “Marilyn,” and “Tiger Woods,” but he has also released 25 albums and eps, and played thousands of shows across North America and Europe. He is a captivating live performer with a loyal, multi-generational following. Ani DiFranco, an early supporter of Bern’s, took him on tour with her and produced his second album, Fifty Eggs. Bern has written original songs for the films Walk Hard—The Dewey Cox Story and Get Him to the Greek, as well as the 15-song soundtrack for Everett Ruess, Wilderness Song, a documentary produced by Jonathan Demme.

Bern hosts a podcast—10,000 Crappy Songs—a radio drama of a songwriter-turned-detective. He also runs the 24/7 internet radio station, Radio Free Bernsteinn. Also a visual artist, Bern’s paintings are on display at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum and the Bob Feller Museum. Bern is the author of several books, including his latest, Encounters, a collection of poetry based on Bern’s chance meetings of such figures as Jimmy Carter, Bruce Springsteen, Hunter S. Thompson and Wilt Chamberlin.

Spotted Tiger

Spotted Tiger formed around the songwriting of Laurence Scudder & Erik White. Drawing on shared musical influences the band has shaped a unique sound from the ground up. Join them for an evening full of new material & arrangements exploring the inner workings of their songs. This show will be different than any other Spotted Tiger show thus far.

Mink’s Miracle Medicine

A broken-down van ranks pretty high on the list of worst-case scenarios for touring musicians. When it happened to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia band Mink’s Miracle Medicine, though, it ended up being an important turning point for how they approach making music.

Comprising Melissa Wright and Daniel Zezeski, Mink’s Miracle Medicine are preparing to release Pyramid Theories, a new album the two began writing after their van broke down in Pittsburgh and they found themselves stranded for several days. That unintentional break gave Wright and Zezeski time to contemplate their shared musical philosophy, and they ultimately realized that they needed to make music for themselves, rather than trying to appease anyone else. When they got home, Wright immediately began writing what would become Pyramid Theories.

Pyramid Theories follows the duo’s 2017 debut album House of Candles. House of Candles was released to critical acclaim, premiering alongside a rave review on Noisey, which called the LP “a solid record that really establishes Wright and Zezeski not just as talented and articulate, but smart enough to be willingly vulnerable in a genre that doesn’t tend to reward legitimate emotions.”

Jeffrey & Aaron Halford

It’s nearly impossible to describe this artist’s musicality in a few limiting words. Jeffrey Halford, Americana singer/songwriter, establishes a special connection with fans through his soulful fusion of folk, rock, country and blues. Jeffrey Halford and his band the Healers continue their tour nationwide and internationally in support of their recent record ‘West Towards South’ which was released through Floating Records.

Atmospheric, funky, rustic, and raw this is narrative Americana at its finest; poetic story songs delivered with the voice of authenticity, sitting atop a moody bed of dirty slide guitars, organic drums, and swampy bass. Subtle touches of violin, piano, and lap steel adorn a song cycle that chronicles the westbound adventures of two mythic brothers in an equally mythic America. Jeffrey with co-writer Don Zimmer and Adam Rossi (band member, co-producer) created a genuine Americana concept album that is simultaneously devoid of pretension, and richly authentic. The album already received acclaim by Rolling Stone, LA Music Critic, Middle Tennessee Music and many others.

Over the last 25 years, Jeffrey Halford and the Healers have played shows with some of music’s most acclaimed artists and songwriters, as well as Halford’s influences, such as Taj Mahal, Los Lobos, George Thorogood, Gregg Allman, Etta James, John Hammond, and Texas Greats Augie Meyers, Guy Clark and Robert Earl Keen.

Stillhouse Junkies

A crowd-thrilling trio from the hills of Colorado, Stillhouse Junkies share the kind of strangely charmed chemistry that elevates both artist and audience alike. Since forming in 2017, the Durango-bred band have offered up a hypnotic and high-energy form of roots music anchored in the free-flowing interplay among the three lifelong musicians (Fred Kosak on guitar and mandolin, Cody Tinnin on upright bass, Alissa Wolf on fiddle). While they’ve gained major traction in the bluegrass world in recent years — including winning the IBMA Momentum Band of the Year award in 2021—Stillhouse Junkies ultimately inhabit a genre – blurring and subtly inventive sound informed by everything from blues to classical to Texas swing. When matched with their nuanced songcraft and soul-stirring harmonies, the result is a one-of-a-kind musical experience that immediately transports the listener into a more enchanted state of mind.

Mindy Smith

A good rule of thumb when going to a Mindy Smith concert, bring a hanky, a tissue or an extra sleeve. Your tear ducts don’t know the difference between laughing tears and crying tears and you’ll likely be doing both. “Humor is how I compensate for singing so many sad tunes back to back,” says Smith.

Mindy Smith is a Long Island-born, Nashville based singer-songwriter with a clear and honest passion for Americana, jazz, pop, rock, blues, and folk and is a self-proclaimed music genre mutt.

She first created a buzz in the music world in 2003 charming fans with her rendition of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” for the tribute album ‘Just Because I’m a Woman: Songs of Dolly Parton.’ In 2004, Mindy solidified her place and won critical acclaim with her own debut album, ‘One Moment More’ which was re-issued on vinyl for the first time in 2019, to commemorate its 15th Anniversary.

She has since released four additional full-length studio albums, a Christmas EP, and numerous singles.

Her original songs have been recorded and released by the likes of Alison Krauss, Lee Ann Womack, Faith Hill and many more. Mindy has performed alongside the likes of Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, John Prine, and Mary Chapin Carpenter and was most recently the featured vocalist on Kenny Chesney’s charting single, “Better Boat”.