Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and several other notable folk singers brought a breath of fresh air to the genre in the 60s and 70s. However, as everything does, the sound and the stories born out of the Dylan and Mitchell era started to become a bit repetitive. Not bad, just overly familiar.
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Though when the 60s and 70s were all said and done, that familiar folk structure went away with the rise of indie, grunge, and punk movements. As a result, artists infused folk music with those genre elements, and what we listeners got was something totally new. And here are three of the folk singers who gave us that new sound.
Elliot Smith
Elliot Smith‘s folk music is dark, grungy, somber, and divinely melancholic. Smith dominated the 90s thanks to his indie, punk, and grunge-esque folk attitude and sound, and he did so in “Needle In The Hay”, “Between The Bars”, “Angeles”, and “Miss Misery”.
Smith altered the folk music genre entirely, as he matched the traditions of the past and put them in the context of the then-present. He’s a 90s diamond and also the leading voice behind the soundtrack of the infamous 90s film, Good Will Hunting.
Gregory Alan Isakov
Gregory Alan Isakov is one of the few folk musicians of the 21st century to release music that coexists with several different primary genres of music. In short, Isakov could be classified as indie, alternative, earthy, and Americana. Like a lot of music, it’s hard to put an exact label on what his music is, and that is wherein lies its beauty.
Some of Isakov’s more notable works include “If I Go, I’m Goin”, “The Stable Song”, and “The Big Black Car”. The fairly undefinable Isakov has impressively had four albums appear on the Billboard 200, and as one might imagine, that is quite the feat for a true folk musician in the 21st century.
Bon Iver
The band Bon Iver rose to prominence after the self-release of their debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago. Frankly, many folk purists well acquainted with the original sounds of the genre might not even call Bon Iver folk music, but in the 21st century, it certainly is.
While Bon Iver, at its base, is a folk band, it infuses genres such as EDM, R&B, and roots. When it comes to folk music, Bon Iver is arguably the most inventive and exploratory band out there, and to some, quite possibly of all time.
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