In February 2023, 31-year-old Brittany Ann Tranbaugh (pronounced TRAN-baw) finally quit her office job to pursue a full-time music career. Though she began writing songs and playing gigs as a teenager, multiple bouts of creative and mental health struggles—culminating in a several years-long hiatus from music altogether in her mid-to-late 20s—prevented her from ever taking the full leap. Everything changed in 2021 when her longtime friend Jackson Emmer called her up and implored her to come out to Colorado and record her backlog of original songs with him. Tranbaugh hit the road and spent a week with Emmer in his home studio, resulting in Quarter Life Crisis Haircut, her comeback EP released in April 2022. Bouncing between witty sarcasm and heartbreaking vulnerability, the songs tackled a wide range of topics including her sixth grade queer awakening, an awkward run-in with an old acquaintance, and the impossibility of true folk music authenticity in our modern age. Listening back to the finished product, she began to feel the flickers of confidence again.

Tranbaugh’s music became even more powerful when she reunited with bassist Joe Plowman and guitarist Kevin Brosky, two old friends from her Temple University house show scene days. Plowman introduced drummer Adam Shumski, and the group instantly re-energized Tranbaugh’s musical instincts, with old songs gaining new life and new songs blossoming with lush arrangements. The supercharged group hit the Philly music scene and established themselves as local favorites, garnering praise from WXPN and drawing enthusiastic crowds.

In July 2022, Tranbaugh’s queer Americana heartbreaker “Kiss You” was awarded Song of the Year in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, which came with a $20,000 cash prize. She used the money to fly her band out to Los Angeles to record five songs with Grammy-winning producer Tyler Chester (Madison Cunningham, Margaret Glaspy, Watkins Family Hour), which proved to be a life-affirming trip. In March 2023, Tranbaugh released the first song from this new batch, the exuberant long-distance-relationship anthem “Can’t Wait No Rush.” Listeners can expect three more singles this summer and a full EP, entitled Comets, in the fall. The new songs showcase Tranbaugh in her new era: energetic, self-assured, surrounded by her beloved musical community, and more commanding as a vocalist and writer than ever before.

The Coronation is Grammy® Nominee Seth Glier’s 6th album on MPress Records, following Birds (2017), If I Could Change One Thing (2015), Things I Should Let You Know (2013), The Next Right Thing (2011), and The Trouble With People (2009). An acclaimed singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, he is the winner of five Independent Music Awards. His music has taken him around the world, including to China where he participated in a U.S. State Department-sponsored cultural diplomacy tour as international ambassador.

He has shared stages with a diverse list of artists including Ani DiFranco, James Taylor, Lisa Marie Presley, Martin Sexton, Ronnie Spector, Marc Cohn and more, and recorded a duet with American Idol alum Crystal Bowersox. A tireless activist, Seth has worked with The Parkland Project, ChildFund International, Rock The Vote, and has also been a TEDx Speaker.

Prateek (pruh – TEEK) has been described as “Not just any guy with a guitar…” by The Boston Globe and perhaps that’s the best introduction to his music besides actually listening to it. The Boston-based artist recorded his debut EP, “Walking in My Sleep,” with only his guitar and two microphones in an attempt to emulate Bob Dylan’s early work. Since then, Prateek’s music has evolved to incorporate gritty electric guitars, silvery backing vocals, and lush strings, all draped around his own soulful, powerful voice. Prateek has been a Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Finalist and has been nominated for Singer-Songwriter of the Year at both the New England Music Awards and the Boston Music Awards. His music has been played on radio stations including Sirius XM, 98.9 WERS, and 92.5 The River. His latest single, “Diamonds,” is available wherever digital music is sold or streamed.

“The first 20 years is just to see if you like it or not,” Jerry Lopez, an iconic surfer, joked about the sport and lifestyle of surfing. Joe Kaplow has always admired and glorified that type of Jedi-like dedication. After 20 years, Kaplow is pretty sure he likes making music.

Up until now it was easy for California based songwriter Joe Kaplow to be pushed along. At eight he was getting screamed at by Uncle Jim for playing out of time. A few years later found him passing almost every single after school evening getting stoned and jamming with his band in Bondar’s basement. Years later again he was studying music at college and having to sink or swim in the sea of talent crowding Boston streets and finally, for the past 5 years, plugging his amp into the outlet of American music heritage, driving around and playing shows in bars, clubs, and coffee shops while figuring out along the way that CDs are lame and that booking pitches should be concise. It was almost like there wasn’t time to stop and think.

Recently, it seems like all he does is think. When all the momentum, all the plans, all the validation, all the adventure, and all the money just stop; when the pushing stops, one may find themselves asking, “Why am I doing this?” An underdog without an over-dog is just a dog.Kaplow describes music as his “currency for life. We all have something, or a few things that we do, we work at, we commit to and that’s how we pay for our time here. It’s like life is a Ferris wheel at the county fair. You can’t just ride all night. Every 4 times around you have to stop at the bottom and pay for another half hour or whatever.”

When faced with the question, “Why am I doing this?” Kaplow answered, “because this is how I feel best paying for my time.”

The title of his second full length album, Sending Money and Stems, is not just a reference to life currency, but also a description of how the album came to be. “Normally I would have flown up to Portland and sat in the room with Mike (Coykendall) as he mixed, but because of covid I had to email him stems (raw audio files) and we would go back and forth a few times until we got it right. When one song was done, I’d text him and be like ‘Ok man, next song coming up; sending money and stems!'”

The new album fills in the holes of Time Spent In Between. It’s more band oriented, more groove based, more uptempo, more hifi, and more happy go lucky than his previous work. “Yeah, Time Spent In Between was a heavy record…”

There’s always new challenges for a working musician. For Joe and almost everyone else, the new challenge is promoting an album release without touring. Thank God for the internet? But Joe Kaplow will figure it out, just like he figured out figure-8 mic placement or how to use index pages on Squarespace. He’ll keep figuring things out because that’s how you keep going. He’s pretty sure he likes making music. He wants to ride the Ferris wheel all night.

On a small corner lot in southeast Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Martin holed up through the winter recording his quietly potent new album Thank God We Left The Garden. Long nights bled into mornings in the tiny shack he built in the backyard, eight feet by ten feet. What began as demos meant for a later visit to a proper studio became the album itself, spare and intimate and true. Recorded live and alone around two microphones, Jeffrey often held his breath to wait for the low diesel hum of a truck to pass one block over on the busy thoroughfare. During the coldest nights, he timed recording between the clicks of the oil coil heater cycling on and off.

Martin’s fourth full length album, Thank God We Left The Garden comes out on Portland’s beloved Fluff and Gravy Records Nov __. He produced and engineered it himself, recalling, “There was a magic quality to the sounds I was getting in the shack with these two cheap microphones, some lucky recipe of time and place that allowed my voice and the way I play guitar and the shape of these new songs to come together with the kind of honesty I was craving.”

So much has happened in the world since the release of his previous album One Go Around (heralded by No Depression as ‘the poetry of America’), and Jeffrey has filled the time doggedly, but happily, touring the US and Europe, watching it all unfold in a stream of small town conversations and city sprawl. In a moment where depth is so often traded for the instantaneous, where tech billionaires are building rockets to escape the planet, where the dead-eyed stare of artificial intelligence is promising to existentially upend our world, and where divisiveness in our culture is breeding delusional levels of certainty, Jeffrey Martin’s new record feels like a hopeful and fully human antidote.

The sounds feel warm, close, and refreshingly real, all held up by the richness and rare candor of Jeffrey’s voice. Production is restrained mostly to his guitar and vocals, with flashes of classical guitar for a tumbling wash of melody and low end color. Martin’s voice sits high above everything, reaching into new melodic territory that goes beyond his earlier work. “I feel like I’ve only just learned how to sing,” Martin said. “Like I’ve been chasing this record since my very first recordings. I wanted to really see what I could do, just my guitar and my voice and little else. I don’t think it was conscious. I think maybe it was a reaction to the pace of life these days. The churning news and entertainment and politics and violence of it all. I needed to know that even in this day and age, just a few simple ingredients still hold up.”

Beloved Portland-based guitarist Jon Neufeld added electric guitar to three tracks. Sticking to the same less-ismore approach, his playing skillfully and subtly elevates the lyrical intention. Neufeld’s touch is best displayed on Red Station Wagon, a searing story about one man’s transformation from a narrow-minded bigot into a person who feels deep remorse for the ugliness of his youth. In his transformation he discovers the clarity of empathy and compassion. The devastating and redemptive four minute song contains the emotional arch of an entire film, and each turn is beautifully punctuated by Neufeld’s guitar. In addition to his guitar work, Neufeld mixed and mastered the album, and was such a crucial part of the final feel of the record that Martin also credited him as a producer.

No less lyrically weighty than his previous work, Thank God We Left The Garden holds a new kindness and easy solace that feels timeless and full of generosity. The title is a paradoxical nod to Martin’s own spiritual conclusions, a theme that is subtly woven throughout the album. The son of a pastor, he touches on his religious upbringing then carries us well beyond his past where the weight of his deepest questions are free to unfold.

This is an album that craves your full attention, best experienced as a whole. Each song further illuminates the scene until you find yourself resting in the strangely comforting tangle of aliveness and meaning (and full spectrum of being alive./what it means to be alive.). At its core Thank God We Left The Garden is an album made of questions, humble and nuanced, a reverent celebration of the asking.

Whether singing about his own internal landscape, telling a story of someone else’s, or reflecting on the elusive relationship between scarcity and contentment, Martin’s writing never pushes the listener away, never points a finger. He sings of things we can all pin a memory on, holding the rough shorn gem of human experience up to the light.

Jiro Dueñez is a Boston-based songwriter from San Diego, California.  His roots stem from old folk and country tunes his father would play him as a kid. Through the years, Jiro’s style has developed into an introspective & personal work that is constantly growing. His source of inspiration draws from conversations and time spent with people, both in passing and long-term. In 2021, Jiro released an EP, titled ‘A Little Blue’ which debuted his efforts as a self-produced songwriter. The work consists of four songs written over the course of four months, each one diving into a different emotion Jiro wished to explore.

His more recent music is an ode to the harsh realities and lessons learned about what it takes to grow as a person. Far from an expert on the subject, Jiro wishes to be able to translate events in his and other’s lives that he doesn’t quite understand yet. His songs serve as a platform where he can contemplate subjects matters carefully and thoughtfully

Joe Vann’s new record is a literal and spiritual homecoming. The singer-songwriter’s debut solo LP, Found In The Smoke, is an intimate rummage through his past: it weds the freewheeling experimental aesthetics of his beloved indie band, From Indian Lakes, with the music traditions on which he was reared while growing up in a trailer on an acreage in rural northern California. The result is an emo-meets-outlaw Americana love letter—like Justin Vernon and Townes Van Zandt locked in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada for months—with phosphorescent synths, hushed vocals, and hardy guitar work.