On Saturday mornings in a small bedroom in East Tennessee, ten-year-old Jill Andrews would slide Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation into her tape deck, jump up onto the bed, knot her t- shirt at the waist, and start jamming. She sang in front of the mirror, played all the invisible instruments, and wondered over and over about a future that would take her beyond the checkerboard lawns and fresh blacktop of the suburbs. She wasn’t left wondering for long. Just a few years later, Andrews was on tour, singing, writing, and playing with one the nation’s fastest rising Americana groups. From her years in the everybodyfields, to her critically acclaimed solo career, to her latest collaboration, Hush Kids, which she co-founded with Nashville songwriter and producer, Peter Groenwald, Andrews has delivered irresistibly melodic, genre-bending music for nearly two decades. Anchored by frank songwriting but continuously and unapologetically evolving, Andrews’ tape deck currently hosts a range of influences from Joni Mitchell to Diana Ross to Wilco to contemporaries, Brandi Carlile and Phoebe Bridgers. The result is bold, infectious, introspective music that has served as the backdrop to some of America’s most beloved television series including Grey’s Anatomy, This Is Us, Nashville, and Wynnona Earp, to which she composed the theme. Modern Age, her latest release, is an unironic return to that small pink bedroom in East Tennessee, a meditation on childhood and changing times, growing up and looking back. In moments, the epitome of 90s pop perfection with airy synths and shimmering vocals and in others, pared down and heart wrenchingly intimate, Modern Age is dripping in reverence for a simpler time, when the world was as big as your high school, when love was waiting by the phone, when we wondered about the future instead of lived in it. With addictive hooks that evoke Susannah Hoffs and Kate Bush, Modern Age is at once a time capsule of and a love letter to the places we all began.

The last ten years have been a rollercoaster of deep despair and amazing opportunities that somehow present themselves at the last possible second,” says Eef Barzelay. “During that time, the band bottomed out, I lost my house, and I had to declare bankruptcy. The only way to survive was to try to transcend myself, to find some kind of deeper, spiritual relationship with life. Once I committed to that, all these little miracles started happening.” Forever Just Beyond, Barzelay’s stunning new album under the Clem Snide moniker, may just be the most miraculous of them all. Produced by Scott Avett, the record is a work of exquisite beauty and profound questioning, a reckoning with faith and reality that rushes headlong into the unknown and the unknowable. The songs here grapple with hope and depression, identity and perception, God and the afterlife, humanizing thorny existential issues and delivering them with the intimate, understated air of a late-night conversation between old friends. Avett’s production is similarly warm and inviting, and the careful, spacious arrangement of gentle guitars and spare percussion carves a wide path for Barzelay’s insightful lyrics and idiosyncratic delivery. “I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration...” — SCOTT AVETT “I look up to Eef with total respect and admiration,” says Avett, “and I hope to survive like he survives: with total love for the new and the unknown. Eef’s a crooner and an indie darling by sound and a mystic sage by depth. That’s not common, but it’s beautiful.” Named for a William S. Borroughs character, Clem Snide first emerged from Boston as a three-piece in the early 1990’s, and the group would go on to become a cult and critical favorite, picking up high profile fans from Bon Iver to Ben Folds over the course of three decades and more than a dozen studio albums. NPR highlighted the Israeli-born Barzelay as “the most underrated songwriter in the business today, with a sneakily firm grasp on poignancy and humor,” while Rolling Stone hailed his songwriting as “soulful and incisive,” and The New Yorker praised his music’s “soothing melodies and candid wit.” Barzelay currently resides in Nashville, TN.