Becca Mancari is a traveler. She's lived everywhere — Staten Island, Florida, Zimbabwe, Virginia, India, Pennsylvania — and she's collected plenty of tales along the way, spinning the sounds and stories of the modern world into songs that mix the organic stomp of American roots music with the approach and attitude of raw rock & roll.  This is personal music, performed by a storyteller who's lived and loved. Born in Staten Island to an Italian-Irish preacher and a Puerto Rican mother, Becca spent her childhood moving around the East Coast. It's no surprise, then, that she found herself drawn to a group of train hoppers in central Virginia, where she relocated as a teenager to attend college. Surrounded by fellow travelers, Becca began to make music — not the kind of music she made during her earlier years, when she sang in her father's church — but music for front porches, for bonfires, for slow dances and road trips, and train rides and new romances. The sound was inspired by everything from Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited to Neil Young'sHarvest Moon, not to mention the Appalachian folk music that her Virginia friends played. It was bold and broad, and it sounded like Becca Mancari.  After college, Becca continued her travels, eventually winding up in the musical hotbed of Nashville, Tennessee. There, she continues writing songs that blur the lines between genres, sharing shows with artists like Hurray For The Riff Raff and Natalie Prass along the way. She jumps from the acoustic desert-rock of "Golden" to the ramshackle root sounds of "Summertime Mama," showing off the full range of her music. Produced by Adam Landry and Justin Collins (Deer Tick, Middle Brother, Diamond Rugs, Lilly Hiatt) and recorded with members of her touring band, the music is a snapshot from a musician who's still on the move, constantly writing songs about the people she's met and the impression they leave.The recordings aren't perfect, and Becca likes that. Because life isn't perfect.  "Things that are perfect tend to sound flatlined," she explains. "There's no 'human' there. I like to hear the person when I listen to songs. And I hope people can hear me.”

"I think the first thing I heard from the record was ‘Separate Ways’ and it immediately reminded me of the best parts of what I liked about Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind.  It took me back a bit to think that there wasn't a wider audience that had heard it yet, and I wanted to figure out a way to change that."  It’s high praise to be compared to the gentleman who arguably invented the job description for every songwriter that came after him, especially on a debut record. But Don Dilego, who is releasing Carl Anderson's LP Risk of Loss on Velvet Elk Records, is onto something.  Carl Anderson, a young singer and songwriter from Virginia, has a rare authenticity, a quality that manages to be both self-assured and yet decidedly free from pretension-- a subtle confidence and humility that puts him in step with an older stock of songwriter.  It’s a voice that manages to be both virtuosic and yet free from airs; never outshining the simplicity in his words;  words that never outshine the song.  And like all great songs, they always seem to dictate the motions of our hearts before our heads have time to figure out exactly what they're about.   Carl Anderson's story reads like the stuff of legend.  It’s almost too perfect-- like a page torn from the annals of the American Songbook, or the unread script of a made-for-TV special on what we want our artists to look like. Carl was born in rural Wolftown, Virginia to a father who was a part time folk singer and full-time wanderer.  Known simply as "Virginia Slim" to his fellow travelers in the "hobo circuit", Carl's father had been riding trains across the country singing and working dead end jobs since leaving home at 10 years old.  Though Carl was raised on the fidelity of a single mother that gave everything to her family, he still carries with him vague memories of his father as a charming man with a beautiful melancholic tenor that Carl's mother would come to recognize in her own son.  He was a man with obvious gifts, but with a darkness inside of him that only those who were closest to him were able to see.  It was a darkness that wrecked his family, and left him unable to cope with a life that wasn't in a constant state of unrest.  Carl’s only distinct memories are of his mother gathering his brother and sister to leave the house in the dark of night when he was only 6 years old-- fleeing a situation that had become too painful to bear.   When Carl hit his teenage years and found himself unequivocally drawn back to the same vocation of a father he barely knew, it must have been both enchanting as well as terrifying.   As Carl sings on Different Darkness: “We're not that different / same wanderlust, met with a different darkness / I can see his face in mine.”  While the story itself might seem a like a vignette of songwriting folklore, for those who have to live with it, the pain is all too real.   The fact that Carl Anderson inherited a rare gift is clear, but what every artist can never know is the reality of whether that gift is going to save him or destroy him. The whole vocation is an act of faith that it’s worth the risk.  It’s this tension at the heart of Risk of Loss, not simply the story, that gives this particular collection of songs an unmistakable authenticity that hits you as a listener long before the depth of meaning sinks in.  The substance and source of the melancholy and yearning that runs throughout the record remains deceptively elusive.  It’s sometimes unclear precisely who the singer is addressing-- a former lover, a father he barely knew, or even God-- but this is precisely what makes Risk of Loss as purely compelling and universal as some of the best in a long tradition of American songwriting.  It’s the sort of authenticity that can't be cheaply bought like the archaic instruments and anachronistic outfits that plague the genre.  Carl is finally doing what every great writer does-- he is writing to discover who he is.   A young man who was born to sing.    

harrison writes songs and resides in nashville, tennessee. one can find a plethora of his hazed musings on soundcloud and band camp. he doesn't know how to write his own bio. check here for updates

Within the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Sandy Hook, KY, came Nashville rising singer/songwriter Leah Blevins. With hints of Emmylou Harris and Stevie Nicks, Leah’s country, bluesy style is expressed and felt through song as she relentlessly captivates music listeners with her haunting voice and touching lyrics.

Megan McCormick is a Nashville, TN-based guitarist, songwriter, producer, and engineer. She’sperformed with Jenny Lewis, Connor Oberst, Haerts and produced music by Ryan Culwell andAubrie Sellers and Cruz Contreras. McCormick is an in-demand and inventive musician, lendingsupport to a variety of performers and songwriters. She has started releasing new music on herown, beginning with 2020’s “Human Condition.” Shehas an album in the final stages ofproduction, with plans to release a flow of new music. “Upside Down and Backwards” is thelatest single.

“I reached some plains so vast, that I did not find their limit anywhere I went . . . with no more land marks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . . there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”—Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, 1541  Ryan Culwell grew up in a forgotten place. His songs were forged in the great void that is the panhandle of Texas—The Great In-Between, a land so desolate that few even thought to settle there until oil was discovered beneath the emptiness. And the solitude of the plains comes pouring out of him when he opens his mouth to sing. Like an approaching dust storm, Culwell’s songs whisper and howl and embed the dirt of the flatlands deep into your skin.  Growing up in the middle of all that flatness seems to have amplified Culwell’s soul; his songs shine forth like the stars in West Texas on a clear night. Culwell spent most his life among the company of roughneck oilfield men in a small town near the epicenter of the Dust Bowl. “My dad and brother have always worked the kind of jobs that required them to wake up at three in the morning to fix whatever went wrong, even if the wind was blowing sixty miles per hour and it was five degrees. People think I exaggerate this kind of work ethic, and they damn sure think I exaggerate the weather in the panhandle.”  Like an oil rigger drilling for crude, Culwell’s songs penetrate deep into the essence of the Great Plains. In “Darkness” he sings: “Wind ain’t blown here in days, it’s strange and lonely/  the only sound is some old men in the diner talkin bout rain/ but that’s only hearsay/ don’t believe we’ll see no rain/ then again I seen stranger things/ like a whole world that’s flat.”  Despite hailing from a place that ignores the presence of the outside world, Culwell has become something of a searcher, an intellectual nomad. Amid his tales of oilfields and honky- tonks, he’s likely to quote the poet Geoffrey Hill (“Can Absence be a god, or have we made an idol of our emptiness?”) or the French mystic Simone Weil: “We must be rooted in the absence of a place. We must take the feeling of being home into exile.”  It was only when Culwell went into exile in Nashville that he truly got in touch with the “absence of place” that is his home. Ryan Culwell is no rhinestoned Texas troubadour—he counts Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, and Woody Guthrie as influences. In fact, Culwell hails from the same stretch of prairie where Guthrie spent his most formative years, and like Guthrie, he has emerged as a poet of the plains. Of the legendary songwriter from Pampa Culwell says: “Guthrie was defined by the whole experience [of the Dust Bowl in the Texas Panhandle] but expressed that identity in leaving. We hear a lot about the trail of people leaving. We know the sound of exodus, but what does it sound like to stay?”  At the age of thirty-one, after moving from Amarillo Texas to Music City, Culwell began playing what he calls “bigger” songs. But he heard the flatlands calling to him, and he found himself writing secret songs about his roots on the open plains—songs about “what it sounds like to stay,” thought he hadn’t. Soon enough, these were the only tunes anyone wanted to hear. These songs became Flatlands, Culwell’s debut album from Lightning Rod Records (Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Billy Joe Shaver, James McMurtry).  On the opening track of the record, “Amarillo,” Ryan comes out swinging: “What am I gonna do with this? Just walk around waving two white fists?/ Am I throwing punches or singing  songs?/ Have I been here for way too long?” The song is a paean to those who choose to live their whole lives in a place where “most people won’t even stay the night.” Songs like this have garnered Culwell almost prophet-like status among the disaffected youth of the Llano Estacado. But his songs are not regional. The high plains are Solitude Amplified; we have all, at one time or another, felt the kind of epic absence that Culwell spins so effortlessly into song.  Listening to these songs about the empty plains, we also encounter something unexpected: hope. In many ways, Flatlands is an optimistic record, like a lighted window seen from many miles away. On the eponymous track Culwell sings: “The earth can break a man/ But I will take my stand/ I’ll climb my mountains/ Out in the Flatlands.” And on “I Will Come For You” when he cajoles, “Let’s head on out to the front porch/ And wait for the cold to come,” an almost giddy joy can be heard behind his lonesome Texas drawl.  The tenderness on this record will surprise listeners who first encounter Culwell’s weather-beaten resolve. But this, too, comes from Culwell’s dualistic relationship with his home. Like many from West Texas, he loves this land and he hates it. He’s not unlike Tom Joad: tough, but gentle. But tough. A Culwell song brings to mind an old sharecropper who limps into the town diner on a Sunday morning. The man’s weary face commands respect, but his limp puts you at ease somehow.  While Culwell is poised to take American music halls by storm with these “secret” songs, he remains humble: a man devoted to his wife and daughters and enthralled by the art of songcraft. “I don't want to tell the world that I’ve worked harder than other artists. I probably haven’t. But I have kept my head in the game long enough to write a couple of decent songs. It’s not really different than the farmers who stuck it out in years of drought or just pushed their necks out when the wind blew all their topsoil away.”