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Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos is the embodiment of the phrase the one who is “not busy being born is busy dying.” Seemingly every second of the day, compounded weekly, monthly, yearly, Mendoza Ramos is learning, growing, changing. It’s an organic process that mirrors their very entry into songwriting.

When they were 18 years old, Mendoza Ramos would play a friend’s guitar at their house. There, Mendoza Ramos learned a few chords and a few strumming patterns. Suddenly a life that included music as much as air or water now had a fresh avenue to travel toward expression. For Mendoza Ramos, who was born to Mexican parents who played music in the house endlessly, music is as much an extension of time and space as it is a product of work. And it’s with this backdrop that their new album, Lucha, with their band, Y La Bamba, finds listeners on Friday (April 28). The record is as lush and complex as its creator. A prism of seemingly disparate sound beams that coalesce into a churning galaxy.  

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To know guitar player, songwriter, and performer Malina Moye is to know her positive torrent of energy. Truly, the expression “lightning in a bottle” fits Moye aptly. Born into a musical family, the left-handed Moye got her first guitar at 9 years old and flipped it over and upside down so she could play it comfortably. At 12 years old, she started a family band with her siblings. Her bass-playing father and singing mother taught her what to look for when seeing other artists on stage or when parsing their writing. 

Santana, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, and Mozart were all early influences. But with all that, Moye knew that one day she wanted to find who she was as a solo artist. So, she moved to Los Angeles with just $20 in her pocket. She slept in her car and hunted pennies to have enough for sandwiches. But she made it through. Today, she’s a Billboard chart-topping artist and a killer national anthem player ahead of Minnesota Vikings football games. And Moye’s latest accomplishment is her new album, Dirty, which dropped officially on March 17. 

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When Leslie Feist was five-years-old, there was a rule at the dinner table. Her mom laid down the law. No singing during meals! Otherwise, the future four-time Grammy nominee wouldn’t stop humming around the house, so her mom had to institute the dinnertime directive.

Feist’s singing got to be so common that her brother would hide little cassette recorders around their home because she would sing stream-of-consciousness melodies so often. Then he would “torture” her by playing it all back. But her ambition paid off. She started choir when she was six, even going to an elementary school that focused on it. That prepared her for perhaps the most serendipitous moment of her early career. Feist, whose newest album, Multitudes, arrives Friday (April 14), says she began going to punk shows and one day in high school a few girls approached her about it. They’d seen her at the gigs. So, they offered her the chance to sing in their band. 

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It’s impossible to take your eyes off Ashlie Amber.

The rising country star with the magnetic smile and the “’fro-hawk” hairstyle was recently on the debut episode of the new Apple TV+ television series, My Kind of Country. The show, which is produced by Reese Witherspoon and Kacey Musgraves, features hosts Mickey Guyton, Jimmie Allen and Orville Peck in search of the best country artists from around the globe. On it, Amber was quickly complemented for her signature look by Guyton, who also underscored what Amber brings to a song, vocally.

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Every day, Macklemore (the Seattle-born rapper and businessman Ben Haggerty) wakes up knowing he will grapple with the realities of addiction. But he wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world, he says. Addiction is a disease. It’s the only one, Macklemore notes, that you can pretend you don’t have. Even those who work hard on curtailing their addictive personalities—giving up alcohol or some other mind-altering vice, let’s say—can weaken, forget how just one beer or one cigarette (or worse) can tip the scales toward demise. This is what Macklemore grapples with daily, like millions of others around the globe. It’s his cross. But it’s also his salvation. For Macklemore, his compulsive tendencies made him who he is, for better or worse, and, in that way, they create the lens that allows him to see and discover who he is acutely. To view himself clearly—not by over-indulging in any drug (not anymore, at least), but by providing an unflinching truth and way to know himself. This and much more comprise the subject matter of Macklemore’s new album, Ben, which is out March 3. 

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