What happens when you finally just stand still and listen to what’s inside?

In the great pause of 2020, Mike Green took a good, long listen to an insistent bell ringing inside his head. Songs he knew were there—some since the 1970s—needed to be unlocked. Not only did he revive some of this material, he experienced a surge of creativity giving birth to several dozen new songs. With three successful decades as a booking agent, Mike suddenly added “singer/songwriter” to his resume. Many of these songs will land on Mike’s debut collection, Listening for the Bell. Mike’s expressive melodies, engaging lyrics, and creative guitar work give depth to a broad scope of topics. His songs are inherently optimistic, often touched with wry humor, leaving space for listeners to make the songs uniquely their own.

Though newly re-entering the ranks of touring performers, Mike has been an integral part of the folk community for thirty-plus years from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a booking agent, he has fostered careers and absorbed the music of top-tier artists from Tom Paxton to Ani DiFranco. Connecting with legendary venues literally from coast to coast – Club Passim, The Old Town School of Folk Music, The Ark, Freight & Salvage, and scores in between – Mike continues to represent touring artists including John McCutcheon, Carrie Newcomer, David Wilcox, and others.

Mike grew up in West Orange, New Jersey and has played music all his life. In his early years, he played the trumpet in the school band and at arts camp, but he had to give up the instrument when he got braces on his teeth. Mike then picked up the guitar and never looked back. He played ragtime, blues, and dabbled in political songwriting during a couple of years of touring in the late 1970s. “I don’t think I was awful, but I wasn’t that good,” Mike reflects. “And I went out of my way to be outrageous.” Since then, his influences have been shaped by an array of artists including Jesse Winchester, The Who, and Utah Phillips—all of whom seeped into his widely eclectic style.

At the encouragement of Carrie Newcomer and others, Mike stepped up to the challenge of crafting his own work, writing songs that were inspired by his own life and personal growth. They offer sharp social statements, frank admissions, a soft touch on time at home, poignant reflections on the paths we all follow to get to where we are, and a pragmatic philosophy for keeping our eyes on what unfolds next. Mike’s songs pose some challenging questions, offering no pat answers, yet opening the door to let in hope.

Mike’s muse kept nudging him forward. The bell demanded to be heard. And so, here comes a fresh songwriter who faces the extraordinary and the ordinary, listening for and answering that persistent bell that calls all of us.

A singer-songwriter born and raised in a small town in New Jersey, Dom was heavily influenced by the radio. He learned how to play piano at five, taught himself to sing at ten, and later, the guitar at fourteen. Throughout his childhood, he was never afraid to speak his mind; he was always the first dog to burst in the room and bark. His talent was noticeable, but it was never truly utilized in any beneficial way, and others would jeer at him for it. It took him until high school to realize that he needed to tone it down a little, and so he began to shelter his emotions.

At fifteen, Dom penned his first song, and hasn’t looked back. In 2019, he was accepted into Berklee College of Music, focusing on songwriting and production, while also honing his skills in business and performing. During this time, he worked with high-caliber musicians, performed live, and even spent five months in Spain sharing his passion across the pond. He kept his original music hidden from everyone, until he finally drew back the curtains in 2021, with his first single “Best Decision”. This collaboration with LA producer MXZ was cut short after a couple sessions, which meant that it was back to the drawing board. Dom De Paz’s debut EP is set to release in early 2024, with the first single coming out next summer. In the meantime, keep your eye out for him writing songs for other favorite artists!

Noah G. Fowler is a songwriter and guitarist now based in Nashville, Tennessee. Drawing influences from his past in Canadian maritime Fiddle jams, smoky Pennsylvania mountain dive bars, underground Allston basement shows, and his present – learning from Nashville’s honky tonk living legends – his sound is a diverse and rich composite of many roots music traditions.

Growing up as a woman, you’re constantly told that your wedding will be the happiest day of your life. It’s the ultimate marker of your youth and allure, the moment you’ve achieved stability and have proven that – thank god – you’re desirable to a man. But as many of us know, if it’s lasting happiness, fulfillment, and understanding that you really want, it’s usually wiser to bet on yourself.
Raye Zaragoza’s Hold That Spirit is an album rooted in this realization. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter has always made political folk music that is informed by her identity as a woman of mixed Indigenous, Asian and Latina heritage. She gained recognition in 2016 with “In The River,” which was written to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. When she performed a Tiny Desk Concert at NPR, she spoke and sang about making live music more economically accessible. And, she currently writes the music for Netflix’s Spirit Rangers, a show featuring an all Native American writers room and cast.

As she approached 30 last year, Zaragoza started thinking specifically about the expectations placed on women as they age: what they should have achieved in their careers, the nuclear families they are expected to pursue and nurture, the way that beauty standards and ageism collude to make it more and more difficult to be seen. 29 was also the year Zaragoza got engaged and, soon after,, ended her relationship. After the engagement ended, she used what would have been her wedding budget to fund part of the production of her new album. As much as it was a practical decision, it was also one rife with symbolism: Zaragoza was investing in herself.

There’s an enduring sense of agency to these songs, which pull from buoyant indie pop like Japanese Breakfast and contemplative folk like Joni Mitchell. On tracks like the soaring pop opener “Joy Revolution,” which was a collaboration with fellow LA-based activist-artist MILCK, Zaragoza acknowledges that a big part of achieving happiness is choosing to be happy rather than waiting for your life to be perfect or feeling like you have to earn comfort and ease. She uses this album to claim joy that has always rightfully been hers and to actively mold herself into her own role model. As she says on galloping country track “Sweetheart,” “I don’t want to be a woman, crying on the floor at night. I don’t want to keep on searching for the day I feel alright.”
A feminist undercurrent unifies these songs. Meditative folk ballad “Strong Woman” was written as a commission for a friend’s daughter, but also more broadly celebrates a world led and built by women. “Not A Monster” candidly addresses Zaragoza’s eating disorder. And “Garden” grapples with all the unfair expectations placed on women as they age. Zaragoza also worked with exclusively female collaborators on the project, a rarity in an industry where less than 5% of production/engineering credits go to women. She feels that working with women allowed her the emotional safety to fully process the pain of her breakup and to make honest art about her life.

“It’s easy for me to be vulnerable with a female collaborator even the first time I meet her,” she says. “A lot of these sessions were 3 hours of us talking and therapizing before we started writing. This album is so much about what it feels like to be a woman leaving the “prime of your 20s” and processing what it means to get older, which is something which men don’t experience in the same way.”

She also felt like the songwriting process was communal, less a process of telling her specific story than one of finding ways to connect with her collaborators and share stories that resonated with all of them. For example, she worked with fellow songwriter of Indigenous heritage Hayley McLean on “Still Here,” a track about owning her culture as a woman of Akimel O’otham descent and acknowledging how Indigenous people exist in all facets of society. “The Native community in LA has been a huge part of my life since I moved here at 14,” she says. “Indigenous artists aren’t played on the radio or given space in mainstream publications enough, so I do what I can to be as proud as I can and pave the way for other artists too.” She hopes the sense of community she fostered while writing these songs shines through and, in turn, helps listeners feel less alone.

Hold That Spirit is a nuanced, complicated album because it is rooted in Zaragoza’s specific hardships, from her anxiety to her fraught relationship with work to her heartbreak, but it also looks outward and finds solace in people who have a shared understanding of those experiences. By leaning on those who make her feel seen and supported as she ventured into the world alone, she was able to remain defiantly optimistic, and inspire us all to do the same, too.

New York based songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Daphne Gale weaves elements of jazz, folk, and neo-soul into a refreshing sound. Her voice is smoky yet pure, rich yet bright, and her eclectic writing style is the result of a unique musical background. The daughter of the widely celebrated, Paris-based concert pianist Alan Gampel, Daphne grew up seeped in classical music and began taking piano lessons at the age of five. Already inspired to write her own music, Daphne took to the guitar in the following years, learning samba, bass nova, and other styles with indelible influence on her musical style. A vocal major at New York City’s prestigious LaGuardia High School for Music, Art, and Performing Arts, Daphne trained as a classical vocalist while cultivating her songwriting in the New Music Ensemble, a workshop-based composing lab.

Daphne has been awarded National Singer-Songwriter Finalist by the Young Arts Foundation (2015), Young Artist award winner by the Songwriters Association of Washington (2017), and admitted to the 2018 Johnny Mercer Foundation’s Songwriters Project at Northwestern University. Daphne currently studies jazz performance and composition at Wesleyan University with distinguished pianist and composer Noah Baerman. Along with her studies, Daphne has been involved with Green Street Center’s Music Mentor program, the Lullaby Project in Middletown, the Massillon Conservatoire in Paris, Resonant Motion, Inc and other music projects. With a belief in music’s power to effect positive change, Daphne continues to write, perform, and search for new ways to connect people through music.

Daphne has just released her debut album as singer-songwriter, Eventide, on Resonant Motion Records.