#americana

#americana

For Emmylou Harris, it's no cliche to say that every song is a story. The country legend has spent 50 years roaming between folk, bluegrass, rock'n'roll and Americana, curating her own songbook of deeply humanitarian music. On this first stop of her European farewell tour, she says goodbye to Scottish fans as part of the Celtic Connections festival, offering up a suitably career-spanning set-list accompanied by memories of Gram Parsons, Nanci Griffith, Bill Monroe, Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson, to name just a few.

At an expansive 80 minutes, With Heaven on Top unfolds as a musical odyssey: from Kansas City to Chicago, Colorado to California, bull-riding in Oklahoma to running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Sometimes Bryan's nervous mind leaps between locations in a single breath. In "Skin," he sings, "Are you walking 'round Tribeca with him?/ Can you still feel that Wisconsin wind from that late October?" His mind stays restless, even on the rare occasions that his body holds still.

Bay Area musicians Steve Wyreman (Grammy-winning songwriter) and guitarist Evanne Barcenas co-lead Effie Zilch & Friends. The duo claims influences ranging from Bob Dylan to Jimi Hendrix to Jefferson Airplane to Memphis legends the Staple Singers. Beyond music, they draw inspiration from visual art (Maxfield Parrish), poetry (Walt Whitman), and classical music (Maurice Ravel). Effie Zilch's latest release, the EP, follows three previous long players, all since 2022.

Vocalist and songwriter Ren Geisick was the 2010 recipient of an Ella Fitzgerald Scholarship. That same year, Downbeat Magazine named her Outstanding Undergraduate Jazz Vocalist. Reisick completed her studies and released her debut album, Ren, Love Song in 2017. Her second album, The Place I Planned to Go was released in June 2025. But for this City Lights Theater show-celebrating its 11 th year-Reisick and her band get into the holiday spirit with an assortment of classic holiday music, blending traditional melodies with updated, contemporary arrangements that bring together jazz, Americana and blues.

Enviable collaborations with the likes of Elton John and Joni Mitchell have inspired and elevated Brandi Carlile's musical profile in the last several years. And at this point, the multi-Grammy award winner could easily coast along via the connections she's made, putting out more duets and tributes, or songwriting for superstars and legends, like her work with Tanya Tucker. But that'd be too easy.

A new band for fans of headstrong, tender Americana, Alabama twins Katie and Allison Crutchfield (of Waxahatchee and Swearin' respectively) are in a new band together for the first time since scrappy, beloved PS Eliot retired in 2011. Backed by indie guitar star MJ Lenderman and storied alt-rock producer Brad Cook, Snocaps is a family record in more ways than one: the four have a tangled history of making music together, giving this one-off collection the lived-in feel of a band five albums deep.

Gap is tapping into its timeless Americana roots once again-this time with a distinctly modern twist. The brand has reignited its collaboration with the National Basketball Association ( NBA) for a new Fall 2024 collection that captures the shared cultural impact of two icons: one born from classic American casualwear, the other from global sports and style influence. Together, they've created a capsule that blends nostalgia, authenticity, and effortless cool, just in time for the season's shift.

Atlanta-based painter Alic Brock has developed a practice that merges digital manipulation with painterly precision. Brock creates compositions that explore spaces between waking and dreaming, recognition and estrangement. Each work begins as a collage of both found and personal imagery that is intentionally altered and translated to canvas using airbrush acrylics. Fragments of Americana, cultural icons, and private memory mingle in peculiar scenarios where narrative and meaning surface only in retrospect.

His 2025 debut album, "The Select" - its title nods to the Parisian brasserie from Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" - puts bluesy guitar riffs against low-slung soul-rock grooves, as in the twangy "Let 'Em Talk" and the waltz-time "Ends of the Earth," which has been streamed more than 70 million times on Spotify and is slowly moving up the country radio chart.