Equal parts classic songwriter and modern-day storyteller, Gabe Lee has built his own bridge between country, folk and rock. Lee has been collecting stories for years, both onstage and off. "I used to bartend," says the Nashville-based songwriter, "which means I was also a cheap therapist for whomever happened to be sitting on the barstool. Whether they were there to celebrate or drink away their problems, I heard about whatever they were going through. It was my job to have that face-to-face interaction—that connection. Being a full-time musician isn't much different."

With critically-acclaimed albums like 2019's farmland, 2020's Honky-Tonk Hell, and 2022's The Hometown Kid, Lee created that connection by delivering his own stories to an ever-growing audience. His fourth record, Drink the River, takes a different approach. This time, Lee isn't offering listeners a peek into his internal world; he's holding up a mirror to reflect their own.

Storytelling has been an anchor of Lee's music since the very beginning. Raised by Taiwanese parents in Nashville, TN, he left home during his teenage years and headed to Indiana, where he obtained college degrees in literature and journalism. Lee launched his career as a genre-bending musician after returning to Tennessee, quickly progressing from dive bar gigs to high-profile opening slots (including shows with Jason Isbell, Los Lobos, Molly Tuttle, and other artists who, like him, blurred the lines between roots-rock, country, and other forms of American folk music) to his own headlining shows. Throughout it all, he drew upon the narrative skills he'd sharpened as a student. If albums like Honky-Tonk Hell and The Hometown Kid often unfolded like autobiographical entries from his road journal, then Drink the River shows an even broader range of his storytelling abilities. Lee isn't just writing songs about himself; he's writing songs about all of us. And maybe, in doing so, he can bring us a little closer together

Raised amongst the pavement and pop radio of Los Angeles, Natalie Del Carmen creates her own musical geography with Pastures. It's the sound of a modern-day folksinger narrowing her focus and expanding her reach, funneling the wide-ranging sounds that appeared on her debut album — 2023's critically-acclaimed Bloodline — into a sharp, singular version of American roots music. 

Pastures doesn't sound like the work of a Gen Z songwriter with metropolitan roots. Instead, its songs are poised and pastoral, filled with acoustic instruments — including the 1930s banjo she inherited from her grandfather — that evoke a landscape far more remote than Southern California. Some songwriters make music that reflects their surroundings, but Del Carmen takes a different path, turning herself into a musical world-builder. At just 24 years old, she's chased down an Americana sound of her own making. 

"I've heard stories about people growing up in small towns, wanting to move to a big city," she says. "That's not me. I love living in a city, but I also feel connected to a traditional country sound and a small-town lifestyle. I crave both." With Pastures, she builds a bridge between those two contrasts. Songs like the wistful, waltzing "Plans Upon Plans" and the nostalgic "Leanne" make no apologies for their countrified arrangements, but their lyrics tell a more universal story, capturing the zeitgeist of 20something life in all its charmed and contradictory glory. Like her musical heroes — from Brandi Carlile to Gregory Alan Isakov to The Lumineers — Del Carmen embraces her folksy roots without abandoning a wider audience, delivering coming-of-age songs that transcend genre and generation. After all, navigating the twists and turns of early adulthood is hard work, wherever you live. Pastures ornaments — but never overwhelms — the songs that Del Carmen wrote back home in Los Angeles, dreaming up a world with less freeways, more fiddle, and green pastureland stretching into the distance. 

"To me, a pasture sounds like an open place where you can go anywhere," she says. "Sometimes, that's the most freeing thing… but other times, it can be an open invitation for doubt. Sometimes, it can be easy to write about love, because it's so accessible. But I try to write about things that are harder to talk about, like failing, or trying to live up to society's expectations, or grief, or the pressure to amount. With Pastures, I'm letting myself be free to make the music I want to make… and I'm letting myself do it on my timeline."

With Pastures, Natalie Del Carmen joins the ranks of Kat Hasty, Maggie Antone, Noeline Hoffman, Ken Pomeroy, and other empowered artists bringing a female perspective — and a youthful outlook — to the Americana space.