Parmy Dhillon brings a searing kind of emotional gravity to his new single "Nashville", a track that manages to sound exactly like the specific exhaustion of staring at a ceiling fan in a hotel room three thousand miles from home. Coming out of Naarm, Dhillon has somehow bottled the very air of Tennessee humid, heavy with history, and thick with the tension of unfulfilled...

Take Jack Horton, a Portland-based singer-songwriter whose path to folk-Americana included stops at Japanese law school, Tokyo piano bars, corporate boardrooms, and government offices. His latest EP, "Imperfections," feels like finding someone's private journal set to music. And that someone happens to write really, really well. The five-song collection opens with "Set Me Free," a piano-driven confession that might surprise anyone expecting typical breakup bitterness. Horton...