At any given time, you’re likely to find Jim Lauderdale making music, whether he’s laying down a new track in the studio or working through a spontaneous melody at his home in Nashville. And if he’s not actively crafting new music, he’s certainly thinking about it. “It's a constant challenge to try to keep making better and better records, write better and better songs. I still always feel like I'm a developing artist,” he says. This may be a surprising sentiment from a man who’s won two Grammys, released 34 full-length albums, and taken home the Americana Music Association’s coveted Wagonmaster Award. But forthcoming album Game Changer is convincing evidence that the North Carolina native is only continuing to hone his craft. Operating under his own label, Sky Crunch Records, for the first time since 2016, Lauderdale recorded Game Changer at the renowned Blackbird Studios in Nashville, co-producing the release with Jay Weaver and pulling from songs he’d written over the last several years. “There's a mixture on this record of uplifting songs and, at the same time, songs of heartbreak and despair—because that's part of life as well,” he says. “In the country song world especially, that's always been part of it. That’s real life.” Lauderdale would know: He’s been a vital part of the country music ecosystem since 1991, when he released his debut album and began penning songs for an impressively long roster of country music greats. “When I was a teenager wanting to be a bluegrass banjo player, I never would have imagined that I would get to work with people like Ralph Stanley, Robert Hunter, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and John Oates ,” he muses. “Getting to work with them inspires me greatly to this day, and I know it always will.” ,” he muses. “Getting to work with them inspires me greatly to this day, and I know it always will.” From rollicking guitar riffs on “That Kind of Life (That Kind of Day)” to the slow, sweet harmonies of “I’ll Keep My Heart Open For You,” Game Changer shows off Lauderdale’s ingenuity as a singer, songwriter, and producer—while reestablishing him as one of Americana’s most steadfast champions. "Country music is constantly evolving, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for steel guitar and a Telecaster," he says. "I have done my job on this record if people who love classic country feel like they can put it on, or have it in their collection, and it would fit right in." Respecting the past doesn’t mean he’s not breaking new ground. “We’re All We’ve Got,” a co-write with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris, offers a timely message about healing torn relationships at home and across the world. And “Friends Again,” a grinning number about rekindling a friendship, is fresh and forward-looking. At every turn, Lauderdale’s collaborative spirit and genuine love for the creative process reveal themselves in thoughtful, well-crafted songs sure to stand the test of time. "When everything works right, it's just magical to be able to hear them back," he says. "You feel, at least for those three-and-a-half minutes, like life makes sense.”

Grand Ole Opry member Mandy Barnett, one of Nashville’s enduring musical treasures who has showcased her mesmerizing voice on stages across the globe, started singing at five years-old. She has been singing since.  Barnett’s style is rooted in the classic country and pop crooning of iconic singers and timeless sounds. She delves into a song with a keen interpretative sense, getting right down to its emotional core and rendering a powerhouse performance through her “pipes of steel” (Los Angeles Times). As one record executive put it, “Mandy Barnett is a song’s best friend.” Barnett first gained national prominence as the original star of one of the first “jukebox” musicals, Always...Patsy Cline at Nashville's famed Ryman Auditorium. Barnett, as Cline, performs on the original cast soundtrack album and is the only actress to have played the role on the historic Ryman stage where Cline’s legend began. The Ryman shows sold out nightly and received rave reviews, and Barnett has wowed critics and audiences ever since with her concerts and recordings. Barnett’s critically lauded albums include I’ve Got a Right to Cry, named the “Top Country Album” by Rolling Stone in the year of its release and produced by renowned Nashville Sound pioneer Owen Bradley, who also produced Cline’s most loved chart-toppers (as well as producing Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, and k.d. lang). And Rolling Stone continued to honor this landmark album, placing it in 2019 on two of its “best of” lists of seminal classic country works. With a string of acclaimed country albums, such as her self-titled Warner Bros. debut, her Christmas celebration Winter Wonderland, the Cline-inspired Sweet Dreams, and I Can’t Stop Loving You: The Songs of Don Gibson (a tribute to her friend, the late Country Music Hall of Fame member), there’s no doubt Barnett has mastered that genre and holds it dear to her heart. But Barnett is not one to be musically boxed in. Her 2018 Strange Conversation album, an Americana blend of roots, pop, and R&B tunes, includes a duet with John Hiatt and a soulful rendition of Neil Sedaka’s My World Keeps Slipping Away, which Sedaka himself sent to Barnett to record. AllMusic hails Strange Conversation as the “richest record of her career: surprising, lively, and deeply felt,” and The Philadelphia Inquirer, which listed Strange Conversation among the best country/roots albums of 2018, notes that Barnett “takes a disparate collection of pop, soul, and rock numbers and makes a riveting personal statement.” As further testament to her diversity, Barnett sang on the SpongeBob SquarePants album The Best Day Ever (sharing the spotlight with the likes of Brian Wilson, Tommy Ramone, and Flaco Jimenez) and often incorporates a Great American Songbook standard or two into her live shows. When asked about her favorite composer, Barnett’s as likely to cite Cole Porter or George Gershwin as she is Willie Nelson or Dolly Parton. In fact, along the lines of highlighting Barnett’s range, her 2020 A Nashville Songbook, an album of reimagined, multi-generational pop and country gems produced by Fred Mollin (producer of Johnny Mathis, Kris Kristofferson, Jimmy Webb, etc.), was inspired by Barnett’s popular “Nashville Songbook” concert. Every Star Above, Barnett’s most recent album (also produced by Mollin), celebrates and reworks selections from Billie Holiday’s Lady In Satin, with original arrangements by the late legend Sammy Nestico. Variety magazine named Every Star Above one of the best albums of 2021. Barnett is equally as comfortable on the Grand Ole Opry and stages with symphony orchestras, having recently performed solo concerts with the Nashville Symphony, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast highlighting her “Nashville Songbook” repertoire. Barnett made her New York City cabaret debut at Feinstein’s/54 Below in 2019 with an acoustic version of her “Nashville Songbook.” Barnett’s music has been featured in many major film and television soundtracks (most recently, in The CW Network’s series “The Flash”), including projects starring Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Martin Sheen, Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Sigourney Weaver, Ellen Burstyn, Bill Paxton, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Besides soundtrack work, Barnett often contributes tracks to other types of musical compilations, and she has appeared on “The Tonight Show,” “The Late Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” PBS’s “Sessions at West 54th,” PBS’s “Bluegrass Underground,” and numerous other programs. In 2020, Barnett came full circle with her East Tennessee roots. She joined a select group of music luminaries running the gamut from Johnny Cash to Taylor Swift in being honored by the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development with a Tennessee Music Pathways marker. Erected in Barnett’s hometown, Crossville, the historic marker celebrates Barnett’s contributions in making Tennessee the “Soundtrack of America.”  Barnett is the host of Sundays with Mandy on SiriusXM’s Willie’s Roadhouse, airing every Sunday from 12:00–4:00 pm EST, where she curates classic country and roots music while sharing personal stories and musical insights. Among the many publications praising Barnett's talents, the Chicago Tribune calls Barnett “a torch singer in the grandest sense of the word.” Time, People, Billboard, Rolling Stone, and other major media have likewise extolled Barnett’s world-class vocals, “natural musicality” (People), “big, silky, expressive voice” (Billboard), and “vocal finesse” (New York Times). USA Today calls Barnett one of Nashville’s “finest classic country and torch singers,” while the Austin Chronicle notes that “when people start talking about Mandy Barnett, eventually the word ‘amazing’ gets used.”

 Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member. Songs: Unanswered Prayers, The Thunder Rolls - Garth Brooks, Small Town Saturday Night - Hal Ketchum

t all starts with a low tremolo guitar, resonating and rumbling in a way that pulls at unspoken places. Deep in your core, you know without words, this is a song – indeed, an album – that’s about loss, desolation, realizing what life is made of and the fact that even you know it just keeps coming. If Matraca Berg has made a name for herself, it’s been for the gorgeous honesty she brings to longing, desire, survival and sometimes even fighting back. Certainly, “If I Had Wings,” the smoldering opener of Berg’s The Dreaming Fields, finds its heroine grappling with the notion, “Mama said call the preacher, I just called the law/ We all knew sooner or later, it was gonna’ be him of me…”   “It wasn’t about me, obviously,” allows the Hall of Fame songwriter a tinge sadly. “But being from the South, working class deep Southern roots – between that and the work I’ve done with Magdalene House and the stories you hear there… It puts a whole other spin on what you know. “There are really very few women that I don’t see a part of myself in, no matter what they do, what their station of life. We all as women share things; you tend to know each other, have recognition on a cellular level, which defies words. You don’t even have to talk about it, you just know… and that’s the glue that holds us together.” Matraca Berg has served as a cartographer for the hills and valleys of women’s souls, doubts, loves and sorrows for her whole life. It is how she earned her first #1 at 18 and Grammy nomination at 22. That emotional transparency can be heard all over The Dreaming Fields: in the terror of fading beauty that is “Silver & Glass,” the memories and loss that permeates “Racing The Angels,” the lost way of life that grounds the title track, even the world weary traveler seeing the commonalities in “A Cold Rainy Morning in London in June.” The Dreaming Fields is rumination on loss. In many ways, it’s also an elegy – for her grandparents’ Wisconsin dairy farm, the innocence that has no chance in our modern world, certainly the wildly creative hippie community that once was the silent cornerstone of Nashville’s Music Row. “It’s about good-bye, and it’s about grief. I’m one of the few people who was born and raised here,” the willowy brown-haired woman offers. “I grew up around Hall of Fame songwriters – Harlan Howard, Dave Purvey, Red Lane were around our house. It felt like they were my family, and those hallways and all that laughter and picking was my home. “My last Grammy nomination was for Gretchen Wilson’s ‘I Don’t Feel Like Loving You Today’,” she continues quietly. “Which was me picking up where Harlan Howard left off. He was like a favorite uncle, and the way he wrote was just so… heartbreakingly good! Classic country songs, real simple and unadorned and perfect – and I didn’t want that to forget that. “I never thought that greatness, that classic country would get washed away in the mainstream… but it became more of an industry, more about writing with someone because of the manager or publishing company – clocking in and out almost, which is everything the Nashville I grew up on wasn’t! “I felt a lot of grief from that… I never thought I’d land in the margins and wouldn’t understand what was going on. That wasn’t the Nashville that I knew; I might as well have been in L.A. because I felt as far away. Certainly the redemption delivered by the river in “Oh, Cumberland,” a bittersweet song that first appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Vol 3, is endemic of the more bucolic nature of middle Tennessee that Berg longed for. “Part of that was a friend of mine who’d moved to L.A. who lost and lonely… I wrote it as much for her, as for me… because you can’t help but miss the essence of where you’re from. Even if you’re called somewhere else, I think Tennessee girls yearn for that comfort which is that kind of country.” Comfort is often in short supply, though none is more tortured than mother whose child is off fighting a war that makes no sense – and seemingly has no end. “People were writing all these patriotic songs,” says the woman whose music has been covered by Linda Ronstadt, Reba McEntire and Dusty Springfield. “And I was in a writing appointment thinking about all the people who aren’t about kicking someone’s ass, but rather are scared to death for people they love. “The mother in ‘South of Heaven’… She’s terrified for her child sent overseas in a war he wasn’t really equipped for, but now is in the middle of it. The helplessness, the bravery… So many people suffer it, and no one realizes. I wanted those mothers to be seen.” “Holy water, tears of pain can not wash away the stain “God, You gave your only son, but You are not the only one…” And so the inequity gets measured. Not because Berg wishes to be strident, but more because she wants to create a world where the unheard register, too. It is the commonality of the unnoticed mass in a world of look-at-me! Larger than life divas that brought Matraca Berg – whose last album Sunday Morning to Saturday Night was heralded as one of the Top 10 Albums in any genre of 1997 by TIME, People, Entertainment Weekly and USA Today – back to the table as an artist. “My first audience was 10,000 people opening for Clint Black – and that creates a pressure,” confesses the bookish songstress. “You get into this thing of thinking it’s about being a blazing vocalist, and I put a lot of pressure on myself. But it was never who I was or what I wanted to be… and that only made my stage fright worse, which got in the way of everything else.” Everything except the writing. And the more Matraca Berg, the more she was drawn to telling stories – and in those stories, there emerged a certain resilience that wasn’t a big pop-driven euphoria or tear-jerking sentimentality. But for the woman who’d captured the aging beautician of “Alice in the Looking Glass,” the forlorn girl who left home for a boy and a life she’d forsaken now missed “If I Were An Angel” or the widow knowing her life is mostly gone “Back When We Were Beautiful” understands the moments of falter, the fear of not being enough. “When I dropped out after my label folded, I went home and I wrote, which is what I was born to do,” she says flatly. “The more I wrote, the more my voice emerged, songs I could sing as a songwriter/artist. The songs I was most drawn to –were not obvious for mainstream radio. But I felt deeply they deserved attention, some air. They should live somewhere other than the basement of my publishing company…” As her perspective shifted, it seemed that Berg’s aesthetics returned to her roots in a profound way. “I found myself listening to Harvest, Blue, Pieces of the Sky was a big one – all records I was drawn to as a kid listening to my older cousins’ music. There were no rules, only feels back then: Neil Young could have the London Symphony on a song, then a steal guitar and then a great rock band. “When I came back to them, I was stunned by the production. Or rather the lack of. Emmy’s ‘Boulder To Birmingham’ is the kind of recording I think we all aspire to, but seldom realize. It is essential and bare – and you just get lost in it.   “Certainly for me, I realized I wanted the songs to be heard, not the production – I actually took songs off the record because there was too much stuff. And it’s funny the less there was, the bigger it sounded.” Berg realized she was onto something when after her sessions the often-jaded studio musicians would email her asking for copies of what they had played. Players like Richard Bennett and Greg Morrow – both whom have spent time on the road with Mark Knopfler – wanted copies of the emotionally vulnerable, completely bare recordings.

Rising country star Belle Frantz is making her mark on country music with her traditional style and throwback to classic country music. The 21-year-old is a native of Greenwood Springs, Mississippi but has been making waves in Nashville for the past year.

Listen to Jonell Mosser just once in concert and you’ll be an instant believer. She sings with all-out passion and heart. No frills. No games. Just a soulful intensity that makes you realize you’re in the presence of the real thing, not some manufactured, corporate-approved diva of the sort littering the landscape these days.  By STEVE MORSE, former staff writer at the Boston Globe for nearly 30 years, who has also written for Billboard and served on the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jonell is as honest as they come, both in her personal life and in her music. Her voice is stunning in its raw power, scope, and ability to take you places where you’ve never been. In addition to her four official album releases, she will be releasing a new album this year.   Jonell's Music Journey Past Jonell started singing at a young age, rising to do jazz standards in piano bars in her childhood home of Louisville. Her dad, a retired Air Force Master Sargent, had died of a heart attack when she was 3, so she was brought up by her mother, Joy, who loved jazz. “I listened to all the big band stuff,” Jonell recalls. “I loved Rosemary Clooney, Nat King Cole and Billie Holiday. She bought me 45s and albums from the time I was 5 or 6. Later on, my brother had great records by Jethro Tull, Al Green and Dobie Gray.” And what about Janis Joplin, to whom she has been compared? “I didn’t like her at first. Janis seemed unattainable. And on the other side, Aretha Franklin seemed unattainable. So I was drawn more to men’s voices, like when I heard Otis Redding for the first time. And James Taylor, of course. I adored him and Jackson Browne and Dan Fogelberg. And then I found Lowell George and Little Feat.” She also loved Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt {whom she first met in Bowling Green around 1978 or ’79} and her debut album was a 1996 compilation of Townes covers called “Around Townes.” Solo Projects Her second album was “So Like Joy” in 2000, a smart, sophisticated batch of songs that Jonell wrote with John Hall (of Orleans fame) and Johanna Hall. They have been major believers in her. The disc included the high-arcing ballad “Do You Love Me” and the stylish title track, about letting go of regret. It is a connoisseur’s record. Next up was “Enough Rope,” a 2001 album that Allmusic.com proclaimed had “enough class, muscle and tough grace to stand out from the pack.” Then a lull followed as Jonell turned to raising her sons, before her “powerful “Trust Yourself” CD came out. The title track was a Dylan song given new heft by Jonell, while other stand outs were three co-writes with the Halls, and a sax-laced soul version of Harlan Howard’s “The Chokin’ Kind.” And perhaps the most intriguing project she’s been involved with in the last few years or so is being one of the Freedom Singers, who perform under the auspices of the First Amendment Center headed by former USA Today editor Ken Paulson. They feature songs that were once banned or censored, such as George M. Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Rag” (later changed to “Grand Old Flag”) and the controversial Billie Holiday tune, “Strange Fruit. ”It adds up to a highly unique career with no end in sight. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in this business, but I feel successful as a human being,” says Jonell. I play and sing every day” “I’ve gotten to sing with Mavis Staples. I’ve gotten to sing with Levon Helm, and with Sam Moore, Bruce Cockburn, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson. I’ve gotten to meet and play music with so many great people, most of whom I feel I can call my friends” “That means everything to me” Now it could be Jonell’s moment to grab the spotlight. “I feel a tidal wave coming,” she says hopefully. “I just don’t want to get buried by it. I want to ride it.

At just 18, Hadlie Jo is proving that age is merely a number as she emerges as one of country music’s most authentic and exciting new voices. Hailing from Texas and a recent honors graduate from South Plains College, the rising singer-songwriter has already carved out a reputation for heartfelt, unfiltered storytelling. She earned a degree in Commercial Music with a vocal major at the alma mater of Lee Ann Womack and other notable artists. Her songwriting talent has quickly earned her a seat at the table with some of Nashville’s most respected and legendary writers, a testament to her craft, drive, and unmistakable voice.