Listening to Elena C. Lockleis’s new single, “Mind - Vs. - Heart,” feels like witnessing a civil war fought entirely within a single nervous system. The sound is an intimate knot of pop architecture, the kind Julia Michaels patents in her sleep, where a confession arrives not as a ballad but as a skittish, rhythm-driven pulse. You feel the frantic heartbeat right there in...

When a German-born songwriter in his sixties filters his life’s rear-view mirror through authentic American roots music, you get The Cumberland River Project and the profoundly human new EP, "Meet Me In The Rain". Frank Renfordt acts as the absolute sole architect here. He is singing, writing, producing, and physically wrapping his hands around the acoustic guitar, baritone guitar, bass, mandolin, keys, and drum...