Folk & Bluegrass

Brandi Carlile is a singer-songwriter who has cited influences as various as Elton John, Patsy Cline, and Queen's Freddie Mercury. Carlile has been releasing albums for the past 10 years, and Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says her new one, called The Firewatcher's Daughter, is her best yet.

The singer-songwriter usually follows in the story-song tradition of his forebears Townes Van Zant and Guy Clark. But in Happy Prisoner he brings enthusiastic curiosity to covers of bluegrass greats.

Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says Dylan both infuses the songs with his personality, while also allowing them to be heard anew.

During a hiatus, some tapes surfaced of new songs Bob Dylan had been writing: the Basement Tapes. These songs have been collected in a box set.

Blake Mills has done a lot in his 28 years. As a guitarist, he has accompanied singers including Lucinda Williams, Neil Diamond, Kid Rock, and Lana Del Ray. He's produced songs for acts such as Fiona Apple and Alabama Shakes. His new album, his second, is called Heigh Ho, and Fresh Air critic Ken Tucker says it's notable for the diversity of its sound.

In 1986, a bomb planted by the Peruvian terrorist group Shining Path exploded in the luggage rack above Sam Baker. Somehow, during his long recovery, songs focused on empathy started coming to him.

Olsen has often been called a folk singer, but Ken Tucker says her new album — her first with a backing band — takes her music into an unclassifiable realm.

Seeger believed songs were a way of binding people to a cause. He talks about fellow folk music icon Woody Guthrie and jumping railroad cars in an archival interview from 1985.

Todd Snider, Widespread Panic's Dave Schools and Duane Trucks perform in a new band that specializes in covering working-class songs.

You could look at Rosewoman's New YorUba band as reuniting cousins who've drifted apart: jazz and folkloric Cuban music with its own family ties to the slave coast of West Africa.

Inside Llewyn Davis -- starring Oscar Isaac and a disobedient cat -- is the latest from the filmmaking duo. The brothers talk with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about their writing process ("It's mostly napping") and the cult status of their 1998 film The Big Lebowski ("How do you explain that? I have no idea."

Brothers Joel and Ethan Coen continue to mine American pop culture in their latest film. It's 1961 in Greenwich Village, and a homeless folk singer is trying desperately to break out. Critic David Edelstein says the overarching tone of the film is snotty, condescending, and cruel.

Dave Van Ronk's autobiography inspired Joel and Ethan Coen's new movie about a '60s folksinger. Though he died in 2002, a new anthology ought to help give Van Ronk a long-needed boost.

The singer-songwriter's new album sounds like a collection of songs that could have been sung a hundred years ago, or written and recorded just a few weeks ago. She's joined on the album by her ex-husband, Richard Thompson, and their three children.

On Three Chords and the Truth, bluegrass musician James King picks from the canon of country music to rearrange its songs as bluegrass. On The Bluegrass Album, country star Alan Jackson has recorded his first collection of bluegrass music — some classics, some originals.

Can the highly publicized band turn its hype into hits? Ken Tucker wants to join the fan club.

June can sing a duel with the Devil, even as her voice tells you she knows she's already triumphed.

The singer-songwriter has said, as he was writing his new album Still Fighting the War, that "a theme of perseverance through hard times revealed itself." Rock critic Ken Tucker says the record is no downer and that Cleaves finds complex sentiments and wittily phrased ideas in many of his new songs.

Cash spent half a century in the limelight as a country singer turned American icon. Between 1958, when he first recorded for Columbia, until 1986, when it didn't renew his contract, he recorded more than 50 singles and 60 albums for the label.

The singer-songwriter often writes songs about his complex relationships with women. On his new Electric, Thompson is still coming to terms with the sources of his frustrations which out to give him material for many years to come.