J.J. Cale should hopefully need no introduction to For Folk’s Sake readers. The legendary Oklahoman musician and songwriter, who died almost 6 years ago, has had songs covered by many artists including Johnny Cash, Beck and, most famously, Eric Clapton.…
Gentle graces. There is something essentially soft and tender about Carrie Tree’s latest record, The Canoe. Underneath the placid exterior are musical depths one doesn’t always associate with folk music, instruments like balafon, ronroco, ngoni, and jarana. Allow the music…
Daniel Norgren is an anomaly. If you close your eyes and listen to a song like ‘Let Love Run The Game’, you’d almost swear it was The Band, but with an unidentifiable vocalist. The music choogles along, sounding like something…
Life gets messy and Field Medic embraces the mess in all its rambunctious, unruly glory. Recorded digitally, fade into the dawn sounds nothing like your standard digital album, largely because Kevin Patrick Sullivan decided to record each song in a…
Ten years since Nick Hemming, Christian Hardy and co arrived with their award-nominated debut album The Sleeper, their fifth offering represents a rebuilding of sorts. The ending of songwriter Hemming’s relationship with Leisure Society flautist Helen Whitaker, and the folding…
Hong Kong-based singer-songwriter Todd Warner Moore is at it again with the release of a new full-length album just around the corner. Entitled Love & Change, Moore expands his sound with an Americana tinge to his primarily acoustically-driven gamut of…
It must be a big deal for songwriters – often solitary by nature – to land on a partner, or muse, who can push them to new peaks. Damien Jurado’s collaboration with Richard Swift began to bear fruit over a…
From the start, folk music has been harboring a rebellious spirit; it’s a key part in an artist’s unfettered ability to bear the truth. To that degree, Y. Dan Rubinstein is a genuine folkster, unmoved by outside denominators when taking…
Lovely and strange is the perfect way to describe Wild Sight, the debut album from Swimming Bell. Enthralling vocals layered one upon another combine with simple instrumentation, treated to create otherworldly blends unlike virtually anything else. Katie Schottland, who records…
Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman has the kind of curriculum vitae that most writers would kill for. Scribe for Rolling Stone, author of On The Road With Bob Dylan, co-writer of memoirs for Howard Stern, Anthony Kleidis, and Mike Tyson, lyricist for…