RECENT ARTICLES

Bob Boilen works to bring music to the masses.

Whether on the weekly NPR program All Songs Considered or via his Tiny Desk Concert series, Boilen has jumpstarted the careers of countless acts, like Tank and the Bangas and Fantastic Negrito. He’s also showcased myriad songs to listeners who, like him, are constantly in search of what’s new, fresh and interesting in the sonic world.

Boilen doesn’t just reside on the media side of the music business. He’s also a songwriter, composer, and artist, himself, who creates textured, sometimes somber tracks that swirl and hover in a listener’s ear. Songs that display a lifetime of music appreciation as well as a hope to chisel out something surprising for music lovers to sample. To wit, Boilen’s latest solo offering is a new six-track, nearly 30-minute album he released on Bandcamp on January 14. Titled Brick Walls & Blue Skies, the project is as much a product of a lifetime of listening to songs as it is a call-and-response between Boilen and his favorite engineering software. 

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Legendary 86-year-old musician Buddy Guy wants to keep the blues alive. It’s been his mission his entire life to honor and participate in the significant musical style. Even before he could put words to the cause, he was constructing makeshift instruments out of wires.

“There are very few old blues cats hanging around,” he tells American Songwriter. “Every little bit helps.” As a kid, he was born so deep in the Louisiana countryside that his modest home didn’t have running water or electricity. In the summers, it would get excruciatingly hot. But there was no air conditioning. His mother put up screens in the windows to keep air flowing in and the mosquitos out. At one point, though, she noticed the bugs getting inside the house. She checked the windows and saw the screens had been fiddled with, stripped of their wires. Why? Because the young burgeoning musician had taken the wires out to make his own makeshift guitar. That’s the tradition from which Guy comes and the type of foundation that makes his newest album, The Blues Don’t Lie, which he dropped last year.

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Michael Bublé remembers being young. At five years old, he went into his bedroom and put an album on his Fisher Price record player and felt a strong sense of independence. Even before then, he says, he felt a “unique relationship” with music. He felt that it “spoke” to him. As a young person, it seemed to offer a singular guiding tone. It felt emotional and sentimental. Integral to every part of his body and being. He knew it would be part of his future. So, when his parents started to send away for little records in the mail and a young Bublé began to listen to them on his own, a sense of self began to form. He was listening to music that he chose, music that moved him. It was very empowering, even to the boy he was at the time. Now, Bublé is a well-known artist, one who releases acclaimed records, both seasonal and solo. His most recent achievement is a Grammy nomination for his 2022 LP, Higher. 

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For the multi-skilled artist and performer Vanessa Williams, music was always the art form that fused and combined her multiple talents. But her creative journey began with her supportive parents, both of whom were music teachers, themselves. Her parents also sang together in the local Westchester Baroque Choir. There, they would bring baby Williams to rehearsals and set her up in a playpen. As the story goes, at one of those rehearsals, all the adults looked around at one another, thinking the organ key had stuck as a note continued to ring out. But they soon realized it was just the young Williams imitating what she’d heard with her voice.

As she got older, Williams would retreat to her bedroom while her parents practiced, and she’d watch Disney or Wild Kingdom. She later played piano and French horn and her brother played the oboe and baritone saxophone. The two weren’t allowed to quit playing instruments until, at least after they’d graduated high school. Until then, it was the orchestra and the marching band. But it’s this foundation that has helped to lead Williams to her extraordinary, diverse entertainment career—one that continues with her forthcoming string of shows at the 54 Below Diamond Series stage in New York City. For the performances, Williams will play six intimate concerts from December 13-18, including her many hits, her work on Broadway, and personal storytelling.

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Atlanta-based musician-lawyer-entrepreneur Gabriella Logan—aka Guitar Gabby—has an engine that’s always humming. This is doubly interesting since Gabby used to build and break apart cars in her youth. The artist, who founded the growing musical collective known as The TxLips Band, works as an advocate, teacher, consultant, and more, striving to empower communities and grow collaborative possibilities wherever she travels.

If Midas turned everything he touched into gold, Gabby turns what she engages with into another avenue on the creative roadmap. Gabby works, connects, and builds. Her latest achievements include partnerships with Netflix for acting and music roles in films like The Harder They Fall and Wendell and Wild (the main character’s look was also based, in part, on Gabby). For Gabby, there’s always more on the horizon.

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Country star Mickey Guyton doesn’t want the moment to pass. In fact, she doesn’t want it to be a moment, at all. Equality and representation—these aren’t fads. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. And Guyton is focused on—and is watching—how the country world, specifically, approaches the dearth of Black and brown faces in the genre. With the social progress made in 2020 and subsequent years in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd, there has been an increased awareness from mainstream music gatekeepers to ensure equal opportunity for those who traditionally have not been afforded those opportunities that many white male artists have enjoyed in the past. But as 2020 becomes 2022 and beyond, it might be easy to fall back into old norms. Guyton prays this won’t be the case. In a way, she’s the Patron Saint of Representation in today’s country world. Guyton, who had doors slammed in her face, jokes made at her expense in her budding career has, more recently, had the last laugh. But breaking through wasn’t easy. It’s an emotional, powerful story, which she details on the new Audible Original series, Origins.

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Harry Connick Jr. didn’t waste any time. When the New Orleans-born songwriter and performer found out about the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing global lockdown in 2020, he got to work. Thankfully for the award-winning artist who has sold millions of albums, he has his own home studio. It was there that he began playing, recording, and honing tracks for his upcoming Christmas album, Make It Merry, which was announced Friday (November 18) and is set to drop later this month on November 26, exclusively via Apple Music. Connick Jr. is also set to undertake a holiday tour, beginning November 18.

When the world shut down two years ago, the legendary artist fired up his studio equipment and recorded the vast majority of each track, one by one, laying down his own versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” “Jingle Bells,” and more with his signature cozy croon.

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Even from his early days, David Portner, the de facto frontman for the acclaimed Baltimore-born experimental pop group Animal Collective, felt music was “like a different world.” It was something that presented a portal into something new, a dichotomous realm where he could absorb sounds solo, or with others around, engaging in the experience inwardly or outwardly. It has also provided Portner a way of life, a way to pay bills and a means to a massive creative output.

From the beginning, he was looking to participate in songs. He asked his parents for piano lessons at three years old. He also received records from older siblings that provided their own specific windows into new things. Today, these various pathways continue, both stretching and colliding in the artist’s orbit as well as in his own mind as he creates music that at times bounces and bashes, and at others smoothens and mollifies. Animal Collective, which released its latest LP, Time Skiffs, earlier this year, more recently released music for the score of a new film, The Inspection. But for Portner, each of these works marks another step forward in his constant artistic journey.

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