Los Angeles-based husband and wife country duo Neon Moon (Noelle and Josh Bohannon) find a classic sound on “Darlin’,” a song about longing to recapture the flame on a new relationship. The steel-laden love song sounds timeless—and for good reason. READ MORE
Americana band Andrew Weiss and Friends navigate an unbalanced relationship on the jangly “This Might Hurt a Little” from their forthcoming album The Golden Age of Love & Chemistry (out March 27).
Weiss says the song came about while listening to The Beatles’ covers of Carl Perkins songs. The upbeat song finds freedom in letting go of a one-sided love story.
North Carolina-based flatpicking guitarist and troubadour Alan Barnosky builds on the name he made for himself off the 2017 album Old Freight with the Jan. 17 release of his Lonesome Road EP.
Today, Wide Open Country premieres EP title track “Lonesome Road,” an adventurous bluegrass tune accompanied by Barnosky’s hospitable, high-country vocals.
Brooklyn-based band Low Tide (Eli Oberman, Courtney Robbins and Fen Ikner) contemplate loss and the passage of time on the sweeping, powerful “Who fans the Flames,” the latest release from their debut album The Alchemist (out on October 25).
Songwriter Eli Oberman says “Who Fans the Flames” was inspired by a Jewish tradition.
“When thinking about how to write a fire song, I was really drawn to the idea of writing about fire not as a raging powerful force (which is how I usually tend to think of it), but instead as a single, fragile flame that needs to be sheltered and protected,” Oberman tells Wide Open Country. “Imagining that led me to connect the imagery to my Jewishness, thinking about how we light yahrzeit candles in remembrance of lost loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths. The sense that a flame is being used to almost collapse time in the song was really resonant with me.”
Nikki & The Phantom Caller’s namesake Nikki Speake wrote future album cut “They’ve Never Walked Through Shadows” about cryptozoological creatures and battlefield legends from her hometown of Dadeville, Ala., providing her band with an excuse to release a spooky music video just in time for Halloween.
Speake’s family fables come from an area known as Booger Hollow (Booger as in ghost, Hollow pronounced “holler,” like Loretta Lynn says it).
“We were told that the Pig Man haunted the woods, and my older cousins used to scare me to death by saying they could hear his high-pitched squeals at night!,” Speake says. “It’s also only a few miles from the Horseshoe Bend National Park, where Andrew Jackson killed the last of the Red Stick Creeks; ending the Creek War, which resulted in Alabama becoming a state in 1819. So, it has a bit of a sad and supernatural history, and in many ways is a place that time has forgotten.”
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Sara Melson acknowledges that change is the only constant in life on the gorgeous and pensive “Same River,” the latest release from her forthcoming EP Wild & Precious Life (out Oct. 11).
The singer and actor, who’s appeared in The Wonder Years, Grey’s Anatomy, Frasier and more, says the dreamy song was inspired by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and a day spent with her parents…