Dan Knobler is a Grammy-nominated producer, recording engineer, mixer, and guitarist. He produced the Americana Music Association’s 2022 Album of The Year, Outside Child by Allison Russell, and has produced albums for Lake Street Dive, Bahamas, Rodney Crowell, Erin Rae, Gaby Moreno, Ruth Moody, Caroline Spence, Kelsey Waldon, Rachael & Vilray, Maya de Vitry, and many more. Records he produced have been featured and reviewed by the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard, NPR, and Barack Obama’s yearly “Best of” list. Dan is a native New Yorker and a graduate of the Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU. He gigs as a guitarist for a variety of artists in Nashville, has monthly shows with Good Wishes & Co. at The Late Great & Brown’s Diner, and is a regular member of Neely’s Band for Rocky Tonk Thursdays at The Inglewood VFW. He served as the music director and guitarist for Allison Russell’s Once & Future Sounds at Newport Folk 2021 and the Guy Clark Celebration at The Ryman in 2016. As a co-founder of Mason Jar Music in Brooklyn, NY, he worked from 2010 to 2015 creating audio & video projects for a wide range of artists & clients including: Feist, Big Thief, The Wood Brothers, Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn, Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer, My Brightest Diamond, Tift Merritt, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, Freshgrass Festival @ MASS MoCA, and The Food Network. In 2012, Mason Jar Music was named one of the "Most Innovative Music Companies" by Fast Company, and their work was featured on NPR's Morning Edition, TIME, Paste, Billboard, and The Village Voice.

Hailed by everyone from NPR (who hosted Combs for an acclaimed Tiny Desk performance in 2023) to Rolling Stone (who deemed him "a pop perfectionist"), Combs has built his career with a chameleonic sound that explores subtlety, nuance, and the grey area between folk, country, and classic pop. The exploration continues with Dream Pictures, an album that finds its creator embracing atmospheric textures and heady, homegrown experimentation. The album opens with "Fly In My Wine" — an instrumental sound collage laced with upright piano, buzzing pedal steel, and field-recorded audio from a visit to Richard Serra's installation at the Bilbao Guggenheim — and closes with the title track, where Combs' voice leaps into a gorgeous falsetto during every chorus. Between those two bookends is a record that's astral one moment and delicately earthbound the next, grounded in genuine song craft and a willingness to get weird.

Born and raised in Nashville Tennessee, Harvard graduate Caroline Randall Williams is an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, and cookbook author as well as an activist, public intellectual, performance artist, and scholar. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in the Fall of 2019 as a Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society while she continues to work and speak to the places where art, business, and scholarship intersect, moving people closer to their best lives and corporations closer to their ideal identities. She has spoken in twenty states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and West Virginia, in venues that range from as small as a classroom in a neighborhood school to as large as the Superdome mainstage during Essence Fest. To every speaking engagement Caroline brings a fierce intelligence, disarming charm, a touch of glamour, and a depth of lived experience that belies her thirty-two years. She has taught in two of the poorest states in the union — Mississippi and West Virginia — and she has been educated at two of the richest universities on the globe — Harvard and Oxford. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe, Garden and Gun, Essence and the New York Times.

In the six years since she signed to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, Kelsey Waldon has earned wide praise for her “self-penned compositions [with] the patina of authenticity” (Rolling Stone). On her new album, Every Ghost, she confronts addiction, grief, generational trauma, and even herself — and comes through it stronger and at peace. “There’s a lot of hard-earned healing on this record,” Waldon says of the nine-song project, recorded at Southern Grooves studio in Memphis with her band, The Muleskinners. As she sings in the record’s title track and first song, “Ghost of Myself,” she’s put in the work not only to better herself and leave behind bad habits, but also to learn to love her past selves. Doing so wasn’t easy, Waldon admits. “It took time and experience,” she says, adding that she can now find compassion for her younger self. “I think you’ve gotta respect her,” Waldon says, “because she was trying as hard as she could for where she was at, and she was doing a damn good job.” Compassion is a throughline on Every Ghost, whether it’s for Waldon herself, for the person in the throes of addiction in “Falling Down,” or for a suffering world in “Nursery Rhyme.” The people in Waldon’s songs aren’t irredeemable — they’re struggling. “You’ve got to have compassion; you gotta stay humble and have gratitude,” Waldon says. However, she’s learned that you also can’t let people take advantage of an empathetic heart. “Comanche” — which Waldon jokes is her very own truck song — finds Waldon grappling with the loss of a loved one, not to death but to boundaries she’s set for her own good. Waldon owns a 1988 Jeep Comanche, and driving it serves as a kind of therapy for her. “I love the whole aspect of when design mattered,” she says, “and owning your car was an expression of yourself.” “Comanche” is deeply personal, but Waldon’s most introspective reflections bookend My Ghost. Its penultimate song, “My Kin,” extends the idea of loving yourself in spite of yourself beyond the choices she’s made and the circumstances she’s put herself in, to reckon with both the good and the bad that come from her family tree. Those traits, Waldon concludes, make her who she is. “As the song says, ‘I’m the best and worst of my kin,’ and I love that for myself,” says Waldon, who was born and raised in a hunting lodge at the end of a dead-end road in the rural, unincorporated community of Monkey’s Eyebrow, Ky. “And I’m also at a point where I’m willing to break these cycles, I’m willing to grow, I’m willing to evolve.” Among those best parts of her lineage is Waldon’s grandmother, who died in June 2024. “She was a remarkable woman. The women in my family have been rocks, and they’ve all been colorful and full of character,” Waldon says. “Her garden and her yard, that might have been one of the things she took the most pride in,” Waldon adds, recalling how her granny would often stop to dig up roadside flowers, then transplant them into her yard. A display of tiger lilies, some of which now grow in Waldon’s yard in Tennessee, was a particular point of pride. “Transplanting is such a tradition — it can teach you a lot,” Waldon says. “Life goes on, beauty can grow from anywhere, and as long as a person is remembered, they’re never gone.” Waldon honors her granny with the song “Tiger Lilies.” She didn’t want an over-the-top sentimental song, so she instead leaned into the idea of traditions as a way to remember loved ones. “I’m sure Granny would love it,” Waldon says. Every Ghost concludes with a Hazel Dickens cover, “Ramblin’ Woman.” Waldon covered two Dickens songs on 2024’s There’s Always a Song and had added “Ramblin’ Woman” to their live sets as well. While Waldon didn’t originally intend to include their cover on this album, it served as “a sonic star” during the recording process and has a message Waldon feels is still relevant decades after Dickens wrote it. “Hazel was ahead of her time,” Waldon says. “Our existence is more than just what society expects of us. We’re more than just somebody’s girlfriend or wife or mother, and those are all beautiful things, but we can have our own independence, and we don’t have to do it for anybody else. We’re beautiful, magical, and powerful creatures.” That’s certainly how Waldon sees herself after completing Every Ghost. “It feels like there’s a spirit of fearlessness throughout this album,” Waldon says, “and I’m really proud of that.” Waldon’s fearlessness is among the reasons she landed at Oh Boy Records in 2019, as the independent label’s first new signee in 15 years. It’s attracted fans to her headline tours and her festival sets, and prompted artists including Tyler Childers, Charley Crockett, Robert Earl Keen, Margo Price, and Lucinda Williams to invite her on tour. It helped earn her both the title of “Kentucky Colonel” — an honor recognizing goodwill ambassadors of Kentucky’s culture and traditions — and a spot in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s annual American Currents exhibit in 2024. “True outlaw shit is sticking to your guns, and I feel like I’m doing that,” Waldon says. “I’m not saying I’m unbreakable, but I feel almost unbreakable. I’ve already hurt the worst that I could and lived to tell the story. We can be thankful for our ghosts."