Some songs are like a time machine. You press play, and suddenly you’re somewhere else, some other time. Maybe it’s a smoky bar in the 1970s, a sweaty punk club in the 80s, or, in the case of “Oh Denise,” the new single from Ken Woods and The Old Blue Gang, a dusty dancehall on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, sometime in the not-too-distant past. The...

Before you can even properly settle into Tim Camrose’s new single, “Going to Nashville,” your mind gets delightfully snagged on the backstory. For forty years, this man was a surgeon and a professor—a life measured in scalpels and lecture halls, not chord progressions. It’s impossible not to picture those same steady hands, once dedicated to mending human bodies, now tracing the frets of a...