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It’s woman-fronted acts for New Tunes at 2 this week as we kick off International Women’s Month! Based out of Asheville, Fancy and the Gentlemen brings an eclectic mix of honky tonk, blues, southern gothic, rock, and string quartet roots together. This new album features Fancy Marie, Craig Kellberg, Alex Travers, and other Asheville area musicians, and was recorded at Echo Mountain Studios last November. They have an album release show on April 16th at Jack of the Wood. Fancy and the Gentlemen won Best Country/Americana Band in Mountain Express's "Best of WNC” last year!

Our “New Tunes at 2”/International Women’s Month kickoff continues today with this new one from the artist described as “a Lucinda Williams sandwich with a Tom Petty, Aimee Mann bun.” After years spent honing her craft in Boston and Seattle, Amelia White settled in East Nashville, and established herself as “The Queen of the East Nashville underground”. This new one was produced by Kim Richey, and addresses the challenges of finding and keeping love in a profession that requires being on the road so often.

During the pandemic, Dawn Landes found herself homebound, leafing through a songbook she’d picked up years before at a used bookshop. The Liberated Woman’s Songbook was published in 1971 at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Dawn’s album version leads us through a history of women’s activism from 1830 through the 1970s. Among the stories highlighted are those of Ella May Wiggins, a union organizer murdered in Gastonia during the 1929 Loray Mill Strike, in the song “Mill Mothers Lament (1929).” “The Housewife’s Lament (1866)” was discovered in the diary of Mrs. Sarah A Price who wrote, “Life is a toil, love is a trouble.” The album features guest artists including Emily Frantz (Watchhouse, formerly Mandolin Orange) on fiddle and vocals on “Bread and Roses (1912),” and vocal performances by Charly Lowry, Rissi Palmer, and Lizzy Ross (Violet Bell). “We’re suddenly back in 1971 all over again,” said Landes, “I know we’re in for a long fight and it helps to find solidarity where you can. …There’s something remarkable about walking around the grocery store in 2024 humming something from the 1800s that feels like it was written yesterday. It’s inspiring during today’s hard times, these women struggled, resisted, endured, and triumphed.” Check out these rebirthed songs, on the eve of International Women’s Day!

Psychedelic Afro-Funk and Voodoo Soul from this Los Angeles band, on a blazing hot album that came out last month. Jamie Allensworth, Terin Ector, and Mermans “Mofaya” Mosengo trade lead vocals, weaving through assorted instrumental sonic voyages of multiple rhythms, layers, and moods. Produced by Sergio Rio (Neal Francis, Say She She), it’s named after a fire-breathing female monster from Greek mythology with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.. To quote their promotional bio, “Orgone’s newest LP feels like a sustained hypnagogic hallucination – the place between waking and sleep where reality is fluid and anything feels possible.”

Aoife O’Donovan, of the trio I’m With Her, has the first single from her forthcoming album (out 3/22) called “All My Friends”, telling the story of early 20th Century suffragette leader Carrie Chapman Catt. Ani DiFranco says her new single “is a direct descendent of the book The Family Roe by Joshua Prager. This finely researched and grippingly told work chronicles the unfolding of events surrounding the 1972 Supreme Court decision Roe V. Wade. Prager lets you way behind the curtain to meet all the characters involved, including the adult child of Norma McCorvey (aka Jane Roe), born and adopted-off in the course of her mother’s quest for the right to a legal abortion.” DiFranco has also recently published a memoir and a children’s book, and is currently starring as ‘Persephone’ in the Tony and Grammy Award-winning Best Musical, “Hadestown”. Fellow Kentuckians Kelsey Waldon & S.G. Goodman have collaborated for the first time with this Hazel & Alice classic, on a Waldon album coming out May 10th called “There’s Always a Song.” The album pays tribute to other classics that have helped shape who Waldon is today, and why she wanted to make music in the first place.

Like Yonder Mountain String Band (who’ll be live in Studio B this Friday), Trampled By Turtles, and other ‘NCW favorites, the Kitchen Dwellers are bridging bluegrass music with various other influences, and an impressive number of new fans. This new one just debuted at #1 on the Billboard Bluegrass Chart! It’s based on Dante’s “The Divine Comedy”, and shows that the classic poem “continues to inspire people and artists some 700 years after it was written because the questions that it poses still don’t have answers. We are all still looking for meaning” (Live For Live Music). The Kitchen Dwellers play Oskar Blues Brewery in Brevard on April 27th.

Imagine that sweet, warm sound of Norah Jones recordings, with a psychedelic garage-soul sound this time. Fuzz guitars and other retro-60s sounds sync up wonderfully with Norah’s piano and voice here. “The reason I called the album Visions is because a lot of the ideas came in the middle of the night or in that moment right before sleep.” says Jones. “We did most of the songs in the same way where I was at the piano or on guitar and Leon was playing drums and we were just jamming on stuff. I like the rawness between me and Leon (Michels, the producer), the way it sounds kind of garage-y but also kind of soulful, because that's where he's coming from, but also not overly perfected.”

After 8 years of not corresponding with each other at all, over disagreements that neither can really pinpoint as the cause of their chasm, brothers Chris and Rich Robinson have buried the hatchet, and made their first album as a band in 15 years. Despite keeping busy with various projects, they still considered working together again someday, if only subconsciously: “I was always still writing for Chris… every song I write I still think about how he will sing the chorus and about giving him a platform to sing over,” guitarist Rich says. “It’s hardwired in there.” Their love of classic blues and Muscle Shoals soul, British folk and Southern rock shows loud and clear once again on this new one. Perhaps that brotherly connection can be heard, too.

“Queen Bee”, “Lovin’ In My Baby’s Eyes”, “Corrina”, and other Taj classics are on this great one recorded last year in Leon Russell’s former studio and office for his label Shelter Records. Backing him up are his long-time quartet—bassist Bill Rich, drummer Kester Smith, and guitarist/Hawaiian lap steel player Bobby Ingano—augmented by dobro player Rob Ickes and guitarist and vocalist Trey Hensley.

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra, they/them) reveals profound reflections and personal stories on their new record, The Past Is Still Alive, out now on Nonesuch Records. Produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee), and recorded in Durham, NC just a month after the passing of Alynda Segarra’s father, The Past Is Still Alive grapples with time, memory, love and loss – more of an inward-looking album than their previous ones. But just as Louise Erdrich has done of late with Native Americans, Lonnie Holley with African-Americans, and Julie Otsuka with Asian-Americans, Segarra expands the scope of American stories here, stretching a long-safeguarded circle to encompass outsiders forever on the fringes. Song settings range from piñon fires near the pueblos of New Mexico’s high desert, to all-night escapades in New Orleans (one of Segarra’s homes).