Hear the Best New Folk Music with Fresh Cuts Friday
Discover the Best New Music of the Week!
We’ve pulled together some of the best new music we’ve heard lately — and you can hear it all on Fresh Cuts, my weekly radio hour. Tune in every Friday at 2pm ET / 11am PT on Folk Alley’s 24/7 stream — available on our website, mobile app, or your smart speaker too.
Prefer to listen on your own time? Just click on the Fresh Cuts stream whenever it works for you.
In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at some exciting new music that’s caught our ears this week!
Portland’s Anna Tivel recently shared the title track of her new album (out 8/29) Animal Poem. She says about the song: “This is a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other. We map our understanding in ever changing narrative, both painful and profound, live inside the worlds we spin.”
Jeffrey Martin, “Edge of Lost”
Jeffrey’s new song is an integral part of the indie film, No Place To Grow Old, which aims to shine a light on an ever growing crisis – aging and homelessness. Jeffrey describes his inspiration for the track: “This song was written from the imagined perspective of someone who has experienced homelessness. It was inspired by the interviews from the No Place to Grow Old documentary which focused on a few 55+ people in Portland, Oregon who were either currently homeless or right on the edge. Each person discussed the invisibility of being homeless. The heavy loneliness of living out in the open in a city, while at the same time becoming a ghost to the passersby. I tried to capture the chasm between the housed and unhoused, and how the psychological burden of that divide is a very difficult thing to hold as people try to navigate their way out of homelessness.”
Prine’s latest EP Love Circle (out 8/20), features the song “Purple Paint,” a moving reflection on partnership, devotion, and the quiet strength that carries artists through both the chaos and beauty of a life in music. Prine stated, “My wife is the real reason I am who I am today, if not for her unwavering support and guidance I would have never taken the leap. Here’s to making me paint my bathroom purple, and for showing me that things can be built in a day that last forever.”
Kathleen Edwards returns with her new album Billionaire (out 8/22) with the song “Pine.” Of the track, Edwards shares, “On the 2-day drive from Ottawa to Nashville, a line popped in my head, ‘when we go our separate ways, the thought of you stays.’ By the time I arrived in Nashville I had written ‘Pine’ and it was the first track we put down for this album. Friends who can’t be lovers. A classic country song. At first the arrangement made me feel incredibly bare and exposed, but I now love the spare production, Jason’s super dry electric solo makes me feel like Dusty.”
More! this week on FreshCuts!
Fruit Bats – “Creature from The Wild”
Grant-Lee Phillips – “She Knows Me”
James McMurtry – “The Color of Night”
Maria Muldaur – “Funny Feathers”
Margo Price – “Don’t Wake Me Up” (feat. Jesse Welles)
Molly Tuttle – “That’s Gonna Leave A Mark” (acoustic)
Nick Drake – “Strange Face” (1st Sound Techniques Session, March 1968)
Sister Sadie – “Let the Circle Be Broken”
Tyler Childers – “Oneida”
