The moment the jaunty guitar kicks in on John Smyths’ new single, "Now I'm Wiser", you feel a familiar, comfortable warmth. It’s the sound of a good chair in a bar where the floor is sticky with spilled truths. And then the story starts, a classic yarn of a hard-living past yielding to a peaceful present. Smyths, a Dutch ex-metalhead singing country out of...

When I first heard Liz Nash and her latest single, "Little Box House", my mind immediately wandered to the structural integrity of a hermit crab’s shell. There is something profoundly architectural about this track, yet soft like a blueprint drawn on a velvet napkin. Nash, hailing from Mount Dora, Florida, seems to have distilled the specific heavy humidity of a Southern downpour into a...