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David Ramirez

David Ramirez took a little time to get back to himself, and now he’s dead set on making music for himself—for the sake of the music, and nothing else.

“I love all the records I’ve made in the past,” says Ramirez. “But in making them, there was always the thought in the back of my mind of where and what it could get me. I made both creative and business decisions with a goal in mind; a goal that often never came. This time it was all about just the joy of making it, about having fun with it.”

The Austin, TX-based singer-songwriter—whose career has seen six full-length studio albums, three EPs, countless collaborations, and an illustrious supergroup project in Glorietta—spent a season of rest away from his focus on writing songs. In the wake of the end of a long relationship, he wanted to prioritize processing his grief as a human, not as an artist bleeding onto the page.

“The last thing I wanted was to write a heartbreak record. So I stopped writing altogether, and I just waited until I saw my heart start coming back to life. I wanted the next thing to be hopeful and sweet and beautiful—a testament to music and my love for it.”

Ramirez’s new record, All the Not So Gentle Reminders, is exactly what he was waiting for. The 12-song album is an expansive succession of dreamlike songs that indeed tell his stories—but more than anything, lean into the possibilities of the trip that music can take us on. “I’ve been a songwriter for a long time. I love words and stories. But this was about music. I wanted the long musical intros and outros [as heard on “Dirty Martini,” “Twin Sized Beds,” “A Bigger World,” and “Dreams Come True”] to contribute to the stories and be a part of them.”

The lead track, “Maybe It Was All a Dream,” sets this theme of the ethereal and dreamy from the outset. It’s a three-and-a-half-minute musical tour de force—at first, a simple synth line over a subdued drum machine, that eventually morphs into a grandiose rollick of organ, drum rolls, and electric guitars. All the while, staticky, broken voices repeat the almost-haunting coda that gives the record its name. In the end, this “dream” is interrupted and punctuated by a recording of Ramirez’s own mother saying, “David… David… it’s time to get up.”

In “Deja Voodoo,” Ramirez questions his own memory, wondering if he remembers his life as it really was, or if even the past itself is a dream colored by time and distance. He sings, “Maybe it was in another life. Maybe it was just a dream. Was it a memory passed down from another? A cosmic sunflare? Or just deja vu?” It’s easy to wonder whether the not-so-gentle reminders are themselves facts, or just figments of our imagination— something to be trusted or something to move on from and reclaim our lives.

The songs for the album were written during a writing getaway David went on for two weeks, where he holed up at Standard Deluxe—a music venue and art space in the tiny 100-person town of Waverly, Alabama. His goal was to get out of the noise of Austin for a while, to be alone, to get back to writing with the “uninterrupted silence [he had] been missing.”

All the Not So Gentle Reminders was recorded at Spectra Studios in Cedar Park, TX just outside of Austin, engineered by Charlie Kramsky at the helm. He tapped local staples as the house musicians for the sessions, including Barbara Frigiere, Jeff Olson, James Westley Essary, and Christopher Boosahda (who also helped to produce the album alongside Ramirez). And in the spirit of the exuberance and joy of the recording, he also called upon a handful of friends to contribute and sing background vocals throughout the album.

“It made sense to bring in this group as we were so tight musically and relationally from touring together the last few years. Like all my albums before this I never want to repeat what I’ve previously made. This was no exception. I brought in Boosahda to co-produce because I had never tried my hand at the captain’s wheel, and I wanted someone experienced and with a different musical background than me to bring some extra shine.”

Throughout the album, David tackles memory and dreams, fleeting romance, the possibility of something better ahead, and his own deep appreciation for music and his place in making it. The fact that he considered giving it up altogether—a decision he thankfully didn’t follow through with—All the Not So Gentle Reminders only serves to be that much more impactful as a testament to music and its power.

Most pointedly in “Music Man,” he recalls his own turning point as a boy, listening on a Walkman his father gave him… a fateful turn that led him to where he is today. “So take a look at me now. I’m quite the music man. Take a look at the crowd. We’re all here for the music, man. It’s the music, man.” On what is his most ambitious, lush, and exuberant record to date, David is leaning in full-hearted to who he knows he is at his core—and not letting anything else stand in his way.

“I will always be me. I’ve seen enough of the business to know that chasing its praises will only land me in a world of disappointment and self-doubt. I’m wholly back in my chi and, fingers crossed, have the strength to stay.”

Pony Bradshaw

On his new album North Georgia Rounder, Pony Bradshaw leads the listener on an exploration of the woods, rivers, and mountains of Appalachia, more specifically, the area for which the album is named and he’s called home for the past 15 years. “It’s got its hooks in me,” Bradshaw says of North Georgia, and it shows, with songs that quickly establish a setting, much like the one he initiated with the album’s predecessor, Calico Jim. The sonic excursion includes stops along the Conasauga River, visits to the holler, and a few diversions—nearby Knoxville plays a supporting role, as do Louisiana and Arkansas. It’s an impressionistic journey of introspection and connection all at once.

Will Stewart’s tastefully-understated guitar leads and Philippe Bronchtein’s atmospheric pedal steel provide the perfect backdrop for Bradshaw’s impassioned vocals in lead-off track “Foxfire Wine.” Its swampy, bluesy intro makes way for an interesting amalgamation of Sturgill Simpson and The Grateful Dead, serving as the perfect aperitif for “a hell of a heaven and a hell of a show.” From that point on till the album wraps with the aptly titled “Notes on a River Town,” not only do you see and hear North Georgia, you even smell and taste it.

Take, for example, “Safe in the Arms of Vernacular,” a pensive, melancholy track that delights all the senses and is reminiscent of Ray Lamontagne’s mellow side. When Bradshaw sings of the “bonafide gas mask” his Dad brought back from Desert Storm and describes the Saudi Arabian sand as turning to “glass sharp as a sultan’s sword,” one can almost see it. As quickly as it sets the ever-vivid stage, the track shifts its focus to a waitress downtown. “Draped in Bedouin gown, smoking Kent cigarettes in the underground” in an attempt to “escape all those voices,” she naturally drinks white wine—”Riesling room temp from a coffee cup,” to be exact.

A voracious reader, Bradshaw credits his talent for expressing such rich details in his songs not so much to other songwriters but instead to books, fiction, short stories, essays, and literary criticism. With such colorful descriptions as “teeth stained red with Lebanese wine, long hair … in sweeps of oil blacker than a cypress pool,” one might assume he bases the subjects of his songs on real-life people he interacts with in North Georgia; instead, Bradshaw describes them as “nameless characters” compiled from “fragments” he’s collected, pieces that usually start with just a line or two. These fragments all add up to a remarkably cohesive 10-song collection, despite Bradshaw being a self-professed admirer of (and writer of) the non-sequitur. This is thanks in no small part to his own masterful vocal delivery and the expert musicianship of his backing band, one that includes the aforementioned Stewart and Bronchtein with Robert Green on bass, Ryan Moore on drums, and Jenna Mobley on fiddle.

“I really enjoy records that are actual records of time,” he explains. With this in mind, Bradshaw looked to create an album that relied less on innovation and experimentation, aspiring to capture the songs’ live spirit. He and his band did just that, making North Georgia Rounder—vocals, overdubs, and all—in just five days at Jason Weinheimer’s Fellowship Hall Sound in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had also tracked Calico Jim in 2020.

“Me and balance … we’ve never really worked out,” he confesses, acknowledging the irony of his quest for order and structure despite having chosen a path that is often chaotic. But as he sings in the moody yet catchy “Holler Rose,” “you’ve got to be willing to play the long game.” “If it’s worth it, there’s a beauty in suffering,” he explains. “It’s taken me a long time to realize that, but I’m thankful for all those terrible decisions I’ve made.”

“Every day, I wrestle with the moral consequences of being a touring musician,” he adds. “I’m always finding ways to make it okay to be doing this. I feel irresponsible sometimes,” he professes, “because I basically make my living off the goodwill of others and chance. So I’m always trying to battle those two things.”

“The poet soon stops experimenting and innovating and starts his life’s work,” Bradshaw expounds, citing a quote from one of his favorite writers, Wendell Berry. A single album as a life’s work may seem like a grand, overambitious aspiration. But for Pony Bradshaw, North Georgia Rounder is just that – a life’s work, one that, as he describes it, is a culmination of “sweat and work and joy and pain and anger and patience and restraint.”

 

Ryan Culwell

Walk around throwing punches everywhere and you’ll earn yourself an almighty ass whooping. Keep your hands in your pockets all day, though, and you’ll start to feel like you’ve already whooped your own. It’s a paradox that Ryan Culwell finds himself wrestling with frequently on his extraordinary new album, Run Like A Bull. Recorded with longtime collaborator Neilson Hubbard (Mary Gauthier, Kim Richey), the collection is raw and magnetic, cutting close to the bone as it searches for a middle ground between release and restraint, recklessness and responsibility. Culwell faces down his own worst instincts here, grappling with weighty, existential notions the way Flannery O’Connor might, conjuring up images of alternating beauty and brutality set against a distinctly American backdrop. “We all laugh when a young calf struggles to his feet,” Culwell sings in his gritty rasp. “When an old bull falls down on his ass I guess it ain’t so sweet.”

Born and raised in the Texas panhandle, Culwell earned widespread acclaim with his first two albums, 2015’s Flatlands and 2018’s The Last American, which prompted Rolling Stone to hail his writing as both “gorgeous and bleak” and NPR to rave that his songs “wring grace from plain and often dark details.” The music earned Culwell dates with Patty Griffin, Billy Joe Shaver, Hayes Carll, Patrick Sweany, and Ashley Monroe among others, alongside a full calendar of his own headline shows around the country and millions of streams across platforms.