A West Virginia native, Jason Scott (ze/zir pronouns) has covered a wide range of topics, from music and horror films to gender identity and healthy living. Zir work has previously appeared in Billboard, Grammy.com, Audiofemme, Consequence of Sound, Popdust, and more. With a background in theatre and entertainment business, ze is also the founder and editor in chief of indie-music and horror blog, B-Sides & Badlands.
“Time is elastic in our personal experience of it. Hours fly by like minutes, and minutes are oppressively slow as if they were centuries,” observes physicist Carlo Rovelli in his 2017 book, The Order of Time. Time as an experience is both wholly personal and universal, firmly in the grasp of the beholder. Singer/songwriter Leah Wellbaum, More
“Having kids makes you change, whether you want to or not,” whispers Thomas Rhett, sneaking away to find decent cell service. When he hops on the phone, a few days after the Fourth of July, the country superstar speaks radiantly about his life. On holiday with 17 other family members, holed away in a house More
“I would say that we’ve always done, more or less, what we want, but then you always have to compromise,” says singer/songwriter/guitarist Ben Shemie, the ringleader behind indie-rock trio SUUNS. “This time, we arrived at a place where we feel confident.” The band’s new record, The Witness, out today (September 3), contains “more ambitious, more More
Danny Gokey never set an intention to make a genre-busting album. “It just happened,” he says over a call from his Nashville home. The 12-track Jesus People, out today (August 20), zig-zags from glistening dance-pop opener “Make a Difference” to the Latin-flavored “Agradecido” and “All Are Welcome,” a more classically structured worship song. Such musical More
In the 1980s, Dwight Yoakam made music nobody else was making. With his unmistakably thick, twangy vocal tone, and those first three studio records, including his much-lauded debut LP Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (1986), he mined the Bakersfield sound while mixing in a style all his own. Across many more records, from the 1987 sophomore More
When Jimmie Allen first began writing his song “Freedom was a Highway,” with co-writers Ash Bowers and Matt Rogers, he dove back into his memory of driving around the streets of his hometown. A Milton, Delaware native, the singer-songwriter reflects upon a time “when I first learned how to drive before I had my license,” More
Nothing lasts forever / When it all falls down, gotta build it better, Natalie Imbruglia surveys the wreckage her life had become. “Build It Better,” the roaring lead-in to Firebird, her first album in six years, burns everything to the ground, metaphorically speaking, with Imbruglia reemerging a little more self-possessed and unbreakable. A co-write with More
Musical theater courses in his veins. When Jaten Dimsdale, known professionally as Teddy Swims, slinks his way down the sidewalk like Macklemore with “Broke” or pours his pain into the sweeping blues ballad “Bed on Fire,” he frequently demonstrates a flair for the dramatic. Raised on the work of Al Green, Marvin Gaye, and Keith Sweat, More
If you would have told Eric Burton even three years ago that he’d be a Grammy Award nominee, he wouldn’t have believed it. “It’s fucking wild,” he says with a laugh, the deep-chested kind. Alongside guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada, the duo known as Black Pumas went from zero to 180 in a blink of an eyeㅡor so it seemed. More
Elle King was 24 when she first started writing “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home).” The year was 2013, and the rockstar was riding high off the release of her self-titled debut EP, earning her slots on the Late Show with David Letterman and VH1 Big Morning Buzz. It was a time when she More
When he hopped back on stage in June, Justin Moore was “a little apprehensive,” he admits. Returning to tour life, and grasping onto something resembling normalcy, had him worried that he’d forgotten “the show that we put together a year and a half ago,” he says with a laugh. He even fretted over whether he More
“It only took us four years,” laughs Jacob Hemphill when he hops on a call with American Songwriter. He’s speaking, of course, about the four-year gap between SOJA’s 2017 studio album Poetry In Motion and the forthcoming Beauty in the Silence, slated for release September 24. Leading up to the project, anchored with previous singles More
