Sam Barber

Now that Sam Barber has your attention, he’s looking forward to holding onto it a while. “I love making anything that can affect someone emotionally,” Barber says. The 21-year old singer-songwriter from Southeast Missouri has already seen his career begin on a meteoric rise, and his upcoming debut album, Restless Mind, is set to send him into orbit. The accompanying Restless Mind Tour in fall 2024, which features Barber’s Ryman Auditorium debut and showcase slots at the Giddy Up Festival and GoldenSky Festival, will introduce tens of thousands of new fans to Barber’s energetic and emotional live show as well. Recorded in Nashville and in Barber’s bedroom in Montana during breaks in his hectic 2024 touring schedule, Restless Mind will feature music that dates to the first songs Barber ever wrote. “It sums up my whole music career, and everything I’ve done,” he says of the record. The album ranges from stripped-down acoustic to fill-the-room melodies, so he tapped multiple producers, including Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan’s American Heartbreak as well as Barber’s 2023 EP, Million Eyes) to create the album, as Barber wanted to bring multiple perspectives to his sound. The first single off of Restless Mind is “Better Year,” which Barber is set to release on August 23. “It’s kind of about my life,” Barber says, “leaving home and struggling at the start, like anybody does. And I’m just hoping that next year’s a better year, that it’s all going to be worth it.” But it is the album’s title track that Barber holds dearest to his heart and believes fans will feel the same way. “‘Restless Mind’ is my personal favorite song. It means the most to me. It’s a very raw song, and I just love the absolute world out of it,” Barber says. “As soon as I found it, I knew that I wanted it to be the album title.” Barber grew up in a town of 200 people, on a 400-acre farm, surrounded by a supportive family and grandparents in the next house over from his. His youth was spent playing baseball, football, basketball, or hunting and fishing. He recalls a ton of Steel Drivers and early Chris Stapleton being played around the house. Eventually, an old Gibson guitar in his parents’ home struck Barber’s fancy. “My great-grandpa used to play guitar, and my parents kept it in the house like a showpiece,” Barber says. “One day when they weren’t home, I just thought, ‘It would be fun to play guitar.’ So, I just picked it up with no clue how to play it, started strumming, trying my hardest at it.” Not long after, his mother caught him singing in the living room, and she told him it wasn’t half bad. Barber took that as a compliment and decided to give music a go. While enrolled in a technical college, a friend suggested he post some music to TikTok. Barber caught on: “After like a month, one video just took off. Playing for a living was never even a possible thing in my mind, I was just doing it for fun.” He began releasing original music in 2022, including “Straight and Narrow,” a bedroom recording of a song he’d written when he was just 16. A powerful acoustic track about overcoming life’s countless hurdles, “Straight and Narrow” proved an RIAA PLATINUM-certified sensation, reaching #1 on viral charts worldwide while landing on such multi-format Billboard charts as “Hot Rock Songs,” “Hot Rock & Alternative Songs,” and “Hot Country Songs.” “It’s done everything for my career. It’s the whole reason that I’m here,” Barber says of the song. In the three years since, a lot has happened. He just missed the cut for the 20th season of American Idol in early 2022. He made his live debut in June 2023 at The Basement in Nashville — which sold out. Three months later, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut. In between, he played at Bruce Springsteen’s BST Hyde Park series. Million Eyes followed in October 2023, and Barber found himself in nearly every conversation about Country music’s next big thing. “In my mind, people still don’t know who I am,” he says. “It’s still weird when people walk up to me and go, ‘Oh, you’re Sam Barber!’ I still don’t think about myself like that.” For now, he’s just enjoying the ride and the thrill of sharing his music with fans. “I’m looking forward to meeting more fans, and pushing my career,” Barber says of his tour plans. “Playing live is one of the coolest things. It’s a feeling you can’t really replicate or explain, but being on stage with a crowd screaming back to you your own music is a feeling that will definitely never get old. “I’m getting better every show. So that means that every person who comes to a show right now, is going to get my best show.”

Ryan Adams

The Warning

The Warning draw strength and power from a lifetime of sisterhood and music. The Mexico-born sister trio—Daniela “Dany” [guitar, lead vocals, piano], Paulina “Pau” [drums, vocals, piano], and Alejandra “Ale” Villarreal [bass, piano, backing vocals]—have logged thousands of miles on the road, generated hundreds of millions of streams, and left countless fans in awe. All of this tireless work and dedication has shaped and sharpened their sound with knifepoint precision, arming alternative anthems with universally catchy hooks and an uncompromising hard rock kick. The girls have devoted themselves to a shared dream since their childhood in Monterrey, Mexico. They initially made waves with a string of independent releases, paving the way for their acclaimed 2022 full-length offering ERROR. Between performing alongside Muse, Foo Fighters, Guns N’ Roses, Royal Blood, The Pretty Reckless, Three Days Grace and Imagine Dragons, the band ignited MTV’s Extended Play Stage at the 2023 MTV VMAs. Representative of their cultural impact, Pepsi even notably chose them as the face of Pepsi Black in Mexico. Moreover, they emerged as the rare force who could comfortably appear in features by Vanity Fair, People, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour as well as on Metallica’s star-studded Blacklist compilation—placing their cover of “Enter Sandman” [with Alessia Cara] shoulder-to-shoulder with contributions from Ghost, St. Vincent, Chris Stapleton, IDLES and Weezer. The Warning embraced their destiny on their 2024 full-length album, Keep Me Fed [LAVA/Republic Records]. The album was introduced by singles  “MORE,” “S!CK” “Hell You Call A Dream”, “Qué Más Quieres”,  “Automatic Sun”, and “Burnout”. In 2024 they continued their global impact with nominations and performances at the Latin GRAMMYs for “Best Rock Song” and MTV’s EMAs for “Push Artist.” The Warning was also nominated for “Push Performance” at MTV’s VMAs and performed on France’s Taratata.

The Head And The Heart

2023 has been a whirlwind of a year for The Head And The Heart. The acclaimed Seattle band sold out the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre for the seventh time, co-headlined a tour with The Revivalists and Father John Misty, and announced their own boutique two-day music festival in Napa, CA, Down in The Valley. They have gone on to play festivals including Pilgrimage Music & Culture Festival, Tampa Pig Jig and more this year.   In 2022, the band released their fifth studio album Every Shade of Blue. The album was produced by GRAMMY-award winning songwriter, producer and engineer Jesse Shatkin (Sia, Pink, The Shins, Tegan and Sara) except for album tracks “Shadows”, “Don’t Show Your Weakness” and “Love We Make” which were produced by Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Wet), and “Paradigm”, produced by John Hill and Sammy Witte (Florence + The Machine, Portugal The Man, Cage The Elephant), and mastered by Emily Lazar and Chris Allgood at The Lodge, NY. Initially self-released in 2011, The Head And The Heart’s self-titled breakout debut produced instant classics including “Rivers and Roads,” “Down In The Valley” and “Lost In My Mind” (#1 at AAA) and is now Certified Gold. 2013’s Let’s Be Still and 2016’s Signs of Light, settled into Billboard’s Top 10 albums chart, with Signs of Light securing the #1 position on Rock Album Charts, securing the band’s first #1 at Alternative position with “All We Ever Knew” and also held the #1 spot at AAA for nine straight weeks. The band’s fourth full-length album, Living Mirage, was released to critical praise in 2019. “Missed Connection” which secured the #1 position on the Alternative Chart and #1 at Mediabase and BDS alternative charts, already having achieved #1 on the AAA chart. The album’s breakout track, “Honeybee”, became a fan favorite with 153M+ total global streams and 1M+ global weekly streams. They have appeared in Cameron Crowe’s Roadies, with music featured in countless other commercials, films and TV, among them Corona, Silver Linings Playbook and more. The band has established their status as a touring powerhouse, having landed prime time mainstage slots at Coachella, Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. In total, the band has performed 15 times on national television including appearances on Ellen, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Austin City Limits and more. Every Shade of Blue is the band’s fifth studio album.  

Lucy Dacus

Home Video: a Foreword   There are a thousand truisms about home and childhood, none of them true but all of them honest. It’s natural to want to tidy those earliest memories into a story so palatable and simple that you never have to read again. A home video promises to give your memories back with a certificate of fact— but the footage isn’t the feeling. Who is just out of frame? What does the soft focus obscure? How did the recording itself change the scene?   Some scrutinize the past and some never look back and Lucy Dacus, a lifelong writer and close reader, has long been the former sort. “The past doesn’t change,” Dacus said on a video call during that interminable winter of video calls. “Even if a memory is of a time I didn’t feel safe, there’s safety in looking at it, in its stability.”   This new gift from Dacus, Home Video, her third album, was built on an interrogation of her coming-of-age years in Richmond, Virginia. Many songs start the way a memoir might—“In the summer of ’07 I was sure I’d go to heaven, but I was hedging my bets at VBS”—and all of them have the compassion, humor, and honesty of the best autobiographical writing. Most importantly and mysteriously, this album displays Dacus’s ability to use the personal as portal into the universal. “I can’t hide behind generalizations or fiction anymore,” Dacus says, though talking about these songs, she admits, makes her ache.   While there’s a nostalgic tint to much of Dacus’s work, the obliquely told stories in past songs are depicted here with greater specificity. Triple Dog Dare recounts young, queer love complicated and forbidden by religion. The toxic relationship depicted in Partner in Crime is filled with pining, deceit, and meeting curfew. (“My heart’s on my sleeve/ it’s embarrassing/ the pulpy thing, beating.”) Christine is an elegiac ballad about a close friend vanishing into an inhibiting relationship.   As is often the case with Dacus, these songs are a study in contrast. In Hot & Heavy, she sings powerfully about blushing and diffidence, while the song Thumbs contains an elegant fantasy about the brutal murder of a close friend’s no-good father. After performing Thumbs during the nearly nonstop tours for her first two albums, it quickly became a white whale to Dacus fans, who have been counting the days until its release just as we’ve all awaited the end of this endless quarantine.   While all that touring made Lucy long to re-root in her hometown, her sudden acclaim filled Richmond with funhouse distortions of herself. People she didn’t know were looking at her like they knew her better than she knew herself. Strangers showed up at her front door. “You used to be so sweet,” she sings on the opening track, “now you're a firecracker on a crowded street.” That truism, both true and false—you can’t go home again—seemed to taunt her at the very time she needed home the most.   In August 2019, after too much touring then a month of silence, it was time to go back to Trace Horse Studio in Nashville—Jacob Blizard, Collin Pastore, and Jake Finch, her loyal friends and collaborators were at her side again. Dacus’s boygenius bandmates, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker sang a loving chorus on Please Stay and Going Going Gone while each recorded solo songs during the same session. Dacus’s resulting record—full of arrhythmic heartbeat percussion and backgrounds of water-warped pipe organ— was mixed by Shawn Everett and mastered by Bob Ludwig.   Loyal Dacus listeners may notice that the melodies here are lower and more contained, at times feeling as intimate as a whisper. The vulnerability of these songs, so often about the intense places where different sorts of love meet and warp, required this approach. “When you told me ‘bout your first time, a soccer player at the senior high,” she sings in Cartwheel, “I felt my body crumple to the floor. Betrayal like I’d never felt before.” Yet in Partner in Crime, Dacus marries content and form in a strikingly different way, using uncharacteristic Autotune in a song about duplicity and soft coercion.   That Home Video arrives at the end of this locked down, fearful era seems as preordained as the messages within. “I don’t necessarily think that I’m supposed to understand the songs just because I made them,” Dacus says into a screen, “I feel like there’s this person who has been in me my whole life and I’m doing my best to represent them.” After more than a year of being homebound, in a time when screens and video calls were sometimes our only form of contact, looking backward was a natural habit for many. If we haven’t learned it already, this album is a gorgeous example of the transformative power of vulnerability. Dacus’s voice, both audible and on the page, has a healer’s power to soothe and ground and reckon.     —Catherine Lacey, February 2021, Chicago, IL