Artist Category: Folk

Jesse Terry

Jesse Terry’s seventh album, When We Wander, is the first he wrote since becoming a parent. So it’s no surprise the family theme courses through many of its 12 songs. His music career has been a family project ever since he became a full-time touring artist a decade ago.

That was right around the time when Jesse met his wife Jess working on a cruise ship in the South Pacific. “As soon as we got back to the states, I proposed to her at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe in July 2010 and we packed up the car for the first tour right after that. We’ve been touring together full-time ever since.” Now with two-year-old Lily added to the clan, family is more important than ever to him, including the parental urge to love and protect. “If I were the moon, I’d light all of your back roads,” he sings in “If I Were The Moon”: “You wouldn’t need no headlights / I’d always be full.”

The life of a touring family inspired the album’s title track. “When we wander, when we wander / Don’t it feel like we’re finally found.” But in the face of the pandemic, he has found that “wandering is not just a literal thing. We’ve followed our hearts with so many decisions in 2020-2021, and have found that there are many ways to wander and be free and brave.”

One of those ways has been going virtual. He says that his livestream concerts have “become the highlight of my week and the thing that sustains us emotionally and financially. And an amazing community has sprung up from these concerts.”

The stage had been Jesse’s home for a decade. He plays around 150 shows a year, from Bonnaroo to the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the 30A Songwriters Festival to AmericanaFest. When the pandemic canceled concerts and delayed the album’s release, he pivoted to performing online and found a strong new connection to his fans, who had helped fund his albums all along. “My musical tribe has always been there for me,” he says with gratitude.

Though recorded in 2019, the songs off the new album click with fans online too. He and his band recorded When We Wander live in the studio, a first for his career. “I wanted to try that Jason Isbell, Chris Stapleton, Neil Young approach to live recording, prioritizing emotion and raw performances over perfection. I loved that experience.” Recorded live, the album resonates especially with the intimacy and community spirit of the online shows.

He also wrote all the music and lyrics this time, instead of working with collaborators, and took a very personal approach, including a look back. “In Spite of You” recalls his stay in a residential facility for behavior modification that traumatized him as a young teenager: “The sermons that you sold me all were fakes.”

Yet he emerged to earn a degree from Berklee College of Music, net a five-year staff writer gig on Nashville’s Music Row penning material for major TV networks, and win prestigious songwriting awards. And then to become the singer-songwriter his countless fans know today, who (in the words of Music News Nashville) “bring[s] to mind iconic artist/poets like Paul Simon and Jackson Browne… [with] a performance that touches the heart like only a whisper can.”

Joe Jencks

Joe Jencks is a 22-year veteran of the international folk circuit, an award-winning songwriter, and celebrated vocalist based in Chicago.

Merging conservatory training with his Irish roots and working-class upbringing, Joe delivers engaged musical narratives filled with heart, soul, groove and grit. Having penned several #1 Folksongs including the ever-relevant Lady of The Harbor, Jencks is also co-founder of the harmony trio, Brother Sun. From Festivals like Falcon Ridge, Kerrville, Mariposa, and Old Songs, to venues like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, Jencks has enthralled diverse audiences with his approachable style. Jencks is noted for his unique merging of musical beauty, social consciousness, and spiritual exploration. Blending well-crafted instrumentals and vivid songwriting, He serves it all up with a lyric baritone voice that has the edgy richness of a good sea-salt caramel.

The Young’uns

Teesside trio The Young’uns have always had the human touch. In the space of little more than a decade – and just five years after giving up their day jobs – they have become one of UK folk music’s hottest properties and best- loved acts.

Stockton Folk Club’s star graduates clinched the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ‘Best Group’ title two years running (2015 and 2016) and the last years have seen them spreading the net, taking their unique act and instant audience rapport to Canada, America and Australia. With their strong songs, spellbinding harmonies and rapid fire humour, they have achieved one of the trickiest balancing acts – an ability to truly ‘make them laugh and make them cry’, while cutting straight to the heart of some of our most topical issues.

In 2017, they unveiled their fourth studio album Strangers – playing their strongest suit to date. Bold, profound and resonant it showcased the growing talents of Sean Cooney, fast becoming one of folk’s finest songwriters. Together with Michael Hughes and David Eagle, Cooney has come up with a collection of folk songs for our time, all sensitively arranged by the 30- something trio – looking back at wartime heroes here, offering a news report for the 21st century there, turning the spotlight on injustice and ultimately celebrating the indomitable human spirit.

In 2018, Strangers was crowned ‘Best Album’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In the same year, The Young’uns produced and presented a new and unique piece of modern folk theatre. The Ballad Of Johnny Longstaff is the story of one man’s adventure from begging on the streets in the north of England to fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, taking in The Hunger Marches and The Cable Street Riots. With their trademark harmony, honesty and humour the Teesside trio bring together 16 specially composed songs, spoken word, striking imagery and the real recorded voice of Johnny himself.

Lone Piñon

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots. With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The Norte has long been a crossroads of cultures, and centuries of intersecting histories, trade routes, migrations, and cultural movements have endowed the region with an expansive and rich musical heritage that weaves together Spanish, Mexican, Indigenous, European immigrant, Anglo-American, and Afro-American musical influences. The oldest strands of this tradition have survived in continuity, renewed by each new generation’s contribution to core style and repertoire that has been passed from musician to musician, in some cases over many centuries. Though rapid cultural change since the ‘50s has led to these sounds becoming scarce in their home territory, they never fully disappeared–thanks to the elders and past generations that lovingly and tenaciously carried them forward, renewing the voice of their musical ancestors at each step into changing circumstances.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

The musical landscape of Northern New Mexico bears the record of interconnecting musical movements that cross state, national, generational, and ethnic borders. Lone Piñon’s active and recorded repertoire reflects that complexity, and has included a wide range of regionally-relevant material (Western swing, conjunto, New Mexican Spanish and Mexican ranchera, Central Mexican son regional, country, onda chicana, etc.) around the core New Mexican violin and accordion-driven polkas, cunas, inditas, valses, and chotes learned from elders.

Jolie Holland

Over the span of her career, Jolie Holland has knotted together a century of American song—jazz, blues, soul, rock and roll—into some stew that is impossible to categorize with any conventional critical terminology.

This is her burden and her gift, to know all of these American songs of the last ten decades in her head and her heart, and to have to wrestle with their legacy. She dives straight to the pathos of a song the way the very greatest singers, singers like Mavis Staples, or Al Green, or Skip James, or Tom Waits do. Upon first encounter her songs seem challenging, perhaps unsettling at times, but as so many poets and rockers have shown us (from Dante Alighieri to William Blake to Sylvia Plath to Patti Smith to Nick Cave to Mark E. Smith) that’s where the beauty lies. As evident on her first recordings, Holland apparently has no fear of the truth, and there is no emotional core that she cannot reach in song.

Which brings us to Wine Dark Sea. Astute listeners to Holland’s work can recognize how her writing over the years has deepened, matured, become the songwriting of a wise, worldly adult, not just of a rambler across the American latitudes, but to understand this is still no preparation for the sonic assault, the unprecedented confidence and merciless brilliance of Wine Dark Sea which yokes the New York underground to American song in a way that has rarely been attempted since White Light/White Heat by the Velvet Underground.

Jolie Holland has a Desperation to tell Now. And she has called on deep, dark forces to get there. It’s always a pleasure to hear a musician come to a new precipice in her output, where great skills and great courage are required to rise to the occasion. Wine Dark Sea is the album of a lifetime, with a lifetime of work in it.

Wallis Bird

It may sound like something out of Spinal Tap that Irish artist Wallis Bird lost all the fingers on one hand in a bizarre lawnmower accident as a baby, but it’s no exaggeration. Though most of her fingers were saved through surgery, one was lost for good. Happily it didn’t stop her picking up a guitar as a child, flipping it upside down to strum with her damaged hand, and carrying on as if nothing had ever happened.

Today she’s a veritable virtuoso on the instrument, and with a chuckle she describes that fateful ‘Lawnmower Incident’ as having given her “her mojo”. That mojo carried her to record deals with Island Records and Columbia Records, several high profile awards and nominations, tours across the world with the likes of Rodrigo y Gabriela, Billy Bragg and Emiliana Torrini, and invitations to open shows for Gossip, Frightened Rabbit, and many others. The two-time Meteor award winner (Ireland’s national music prize) and two-time Irish Choice Prize nominee (equivalent of UK’s Mercury Awards) was born into a large family in Wexford, Ireland. She cut her teeth as a teenager playing cover gigs in pubs and learning to deal with drunken hecklers by way of cheeky comebacks and good-natured ripostes. Moving to Germany in 2005, she self-released the single Blossoms in the Street which spent twenty weeks in the airplay charts. It grabbed the attention of Island Records who signed her almost on the spot. Her debut album hit the Top 5 UK digital album charts and she continued to chart in various European countries with her subsequent albums.

Wallis has toured constantly, headlining over 800 shows in the past ten years. Over 30,000 people attended her last album release tour alone. Well known across Europe for her live performances, her 2016-2017 tour for the album ‘Home’, was expanded to include Australia and Japan for the first time. On the Australian leg of the tour, Wallis gained a new fan in cult artist Amanda Palmer, who tweeted repeatedly to her million-plus followers to go and catch a show. Palmer subsequently invited Wallis on stage for a duet during one of her festival appearances, and Wallis reciprocated by having Palmer sing at one of her own headlining shows. In 2018, Wallis embarked on a month-long tour of Canada, her first time in the country, tearing it up at multiple folk festivals including Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver, and coming home with a raft of new fans.

Joia Mukherjee

Joia Mukherjee is a healer, a singer and a late-career songwriter! She has sung with people in more than a dozen countries, often while working as a physician and Chief Medical Officer of the nonprofit Partners in Health. Joia believes music is the Balm in Gilead.

Miriam Elhajli

Miriam Elhajli is a folk singer, composer-improviser, and musicologist whose work is influenced by the rich musical traditions of her heritage. Elhajli lives in New York City where she performs & works as a researcher at The Association for Cultural Equity founded by Alan Lomax. Moving in the intersection of the vibrant avant-garde and the folkloric communities of Brooklyn, she has collaborated with musicians such as Mali Obomsawin, Adam O’Farrill, Jason Lindner, and Chris Dingman. Elhajli has released four records on her label Numina Records, a label she founded to aid in the documentation of traditional women’s music in the Maghreb and beyond. Numina is set to release Moroccan chaabi ensemble, Bnat El Houariyat’s in June of this year.
“Eclectic, with a soaring voice” – New York Music Daily

“A haunting voice” – The New York Times

Grant-Lee Phillips

“I’m drawing on the urgency of the moment,” reflects Grant-Lee Phillips. “The things that eat away in the late hours…”

That urgency inspired the headlong rush of his new album Widdershins – in which Grant-Lee Phillips invests the insight, nuance, and wit that has distinguished his songcraft over the past three decades. Exploring folk, alternative, pop and Americana, Phillips’ band Grant Lee Buffalo was a seminal ‘90s mainstay. Even in the wake of disbanding in ’99, albums like Fuzzy and Mighty Joe Moon remain enigmatic treasures, that new generations are drawn to. So much so, that Grant Lee Buffalo embarked on a string of reunion dates in 2011. The group signed a deal with Chrysalis/Blue Rain Coat in 2018 and a major reissue of the catalogue is currently underway.

As for Phillips, his career has constantly evolved, diving into deeper adventurous waters with each project. Being a songwriter and a multi-instrumentalist, he’s embraced the freedom of being his own producer.

Something he could never expect occurred in 2001 when Phillips was approached about a role on a newly burgeoning TV show called The Gilmore Girls. Acting wouldn’t curb Phillips’ consistent output however. Mobilize, Virginia Creeper, Nineteeneighties, Strangelet and Little Moon would follow – each a document of his life in that moment. On his 2012 release Walking in the Green Corn he drew from his Native American heritage. A year later Phillips relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville, marking a new creative chapter, inspiring The Narrows. The release of Widdershins in 2018 brings the current count to nine solo albums and four with Grant Lee Buffalo.