by Steven Miller

Sydney Irving’s Unfashioned Creatures is a songwriter’s album through and through. This collection blends Americana rock, pop-rock punch, and folk-rooted storytelling into a set of tracks that are musically purposeful and catchy. Irving’s greatest strength is her ability to shape each song from the inside out by letting singing, arrangement, and lyrical direction work together to create a clear, satisfying emotional flow. The result is a record that feels tied together by a writer who knows how to build a song that moves.

As an opening statement, “You Can’t Forget About Me” wastes no [...]

by Steven Miller

Brad Mehldau has always walked the borders between musical worlds. On Ride Into the Sun, he threads genres into a single, glowing tapestry. This 16-track cycle arrives as a summation of so many influences that have shaped Mehldau’s pianistic universe.  The lyricism of jazz piano, the harmonic intensity of 20th-century classical music, the earthy pulse of 60s folk-rock, the open-hearted warmth of Americana, and his enduring fascination with counterpoint. What makes this album feel different is its sense of architecture. These stylistic excursions are movements in a unified work, each track feeding the next with [...]

by Shannon Smith

In Anna, Dasha steps into a pop-country space, reintroducing herself not just as a pop-country hitmaker but as a songwriter reclaiming her given name and emotional voice. This eight-track EP unfolds as a portrait of growth that captures Dasha’s confidence as a vocalist and fragility in songwriting in equal measure. For country fans, it’s a revealing document of an artist finding equilibrium between commercial appeal and country storytelling.

Opening with the flirtatious “Work On Me,” Dasha immediately asserts her trademark blend of country twang and pop flair. Her phrasing is playful, her delivery effortlessly confident, and her [...]

by Steven Miller

Wayne Alpern’s Modern Music presents itself as twenty miniatures for solo piano (Steven Beck, the interpreter), and on its surface, one hears a blend of Baroque, Romantic lyricism, jazz-inflected harmonies, and classical dance forms. Upon listening more closely, one can hear how Alpern’s modernism lives in the structuring of rhythm, in the choice of intervallic motion, and in the way he scaffolds tradition to support stylistic inclusion without dissolving coherence.

In other words: Alpern is a polystylist at work; he is a craftsperson of interval and pulse, placing himself in a lineage of classical form but [...]

by Steven Miller

Wolfgang Van Halen’s The End, release date is October 24, 2025, via BMG, is a ten-track set that expands the world of Mammoth into focus with songwriting, tone, and an unshakable belief that great rock still lives and breathes through the hands of this determined musician.

Where many guitar-centric albums flaunt technique, The End builds its identity from compositional discipline. Wolfgang again performs every instrument, guitars, bass, drums, keys, vocals, and backing vocals. All recorded at 5150 Studios with longtime collaborator Michael “Elvis” Baskette. The production hits that elusive mark between clarity and warmth as each [...]

by Shannon Smith

Every songwriter creates stories in the hope of capturing love’s vocabulary without cliché. On The Art of Loving, Olivia Dean defines her heartfelt love stories. Each having soul, written from the inside out, melody and lyric arriving as one breath.

The record begins with “The Art of Loving (Intro),” where she uses multiple layers of her voice to set the thesis of intimacy as authorship. The transition to “Nice To Each Other” reframes courtesy as groove. Dean’s chorus hook is simple, cyclic, and affirming. Her vocal style has that soul that causes a revelation.

Her melodic instincts shine on “Lady Lady.” The [...]