Singer-songwriter Roger Street Freidman is 54, a husband and a father of two, and about to release his masterwork, Shoot The Moon. It’s a full-emotional spectrum collection of vivacious and reflective vignettes from real life that recalls the pop-rock singer-songwriter tradition of Jackson Browne, Marc Cohn, Randy Newman, Colin Hay, Bruce Hornsby, and Mark Knopfler. Few artists make albums like this today. In an age of irony, few songwriters are this brave in their vulnerability, and possess Friedman’s gift for penning hook-laden, emotionally resonant, pop-rock.

“When my dad passed away in 2004 it really hit me that this was not a dress rehearsal.  When you turn 50, you start to hear about or lose people that are your own age. It gives me the sense that I’ve got a lot of work to do,” shares the Sea Cliff, New York-based artist.

Friedman has garnered acclaim for his debut, The Waiting Sky. Champions for the album include No Depression, American Songwriter, Relix Magazine, MSN, The Alternate Route, Elmore Magazine and the New York Daily News. Friedman supported the effort with local gigs and regional touring, interspersed with opening slots for such venerated artists as Los Lobos and The Blind Boys of Alabama.

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 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.

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.

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.

“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.