Following the success of his critically-acclaimed-fifth-studio-album, Single Mothers, Justin Townes Earle is pleased to announce the release of the companion album, Absent Fathers. Comprised of 10 tracks, Absent Fathers was recorded alongside Single Mothers as a double album, but as Justin began to sequence it, he felt each half needed to make its own statement and they took on their own identities. Absent Fathers will be released January 13, 2015.

With material like this, he may even find a way to add a chapter to the Great American Songbook. --Austin Chronicle This is Earle's fourth release and follows his critically acclaimed 2010 album, Harlem River Blues, which debuted #47 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and led to a Song of the Year award at the 2011 Americana Music Awards. Produced by Earle alongside longtime collaborator Skylar Wilson, the 10-track album was recorded completely live with no overdubs over a 4-day period at an old converted church recording studio in Asheville, NC. Of the new record, Earle comments, I think that it s the job of the artist to be in transition and constantly learn more. The new record is completely different than my last one, Harlem River Blues. This time I've gone in a Memphis-soul direction. And that's true enough. While Harlem River was a love letter to his new hometown of NYC, this new album is a gorgeous, sometimes lush sometimes sparse, paeaon to a city that's given so much to the world musically. The sweat, the horns, the soul.....

Merge Records will release M. Ward’s A Wasteland Companion, on April 10th 2012.
The album, consisting of 12 stunning tracks, was made with 18 musicians and recorded in eight different studios in Portland, Omaha, New York City, Los Angeles, Austin and Bristol (UK). Ward’s honey-soaked vocals, deft finger-picking, innate sense of melody and beguiling lyrics have already cemented his reputation as one of America’s true musical treasures and A Wasteland Companion features some of the finest songwriting and most striking delivery of his career. With each and every recording Ward finds new ways to make the colors of his songwriting palate sparkle and his dexterous skills as producer, arranger, guitarist and singer seem to burst into even brighter bloom on each release.
A Wasteland Companion features the talents of M Ward (piano, guitars, voice, production), Mike Coykendall (percussion, bass), Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb (piano), John Parish (percussion, marimba), Bright Eyes’ Mike Mogis (organ), Susan Sanchez (vocals), She & Him’s Zooey Deschanel (vocals), Jordan Hudson (percussion), Adam Selzer (bass), Nathan “JR” Andersen (piano), Scott McPherson (percussion), Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley (percussion), Dr Dog’s Tobey Leaman (bass), Devotchka’s Tom Hagerman (strings), Oakely Hall’s Rachel Cox (vocals), Amanda Lawrence (violin), John Graboff (pedal steel) and Tyler Tornfelt (bass). The recording utilized eight engineers, including Tom Schick (Rufus Wainwright) and John Parish (PJ Harvey).

Since 2006’s Meadow, fans of Richard Buckner have been clamoring for new material and wondering what was keeping their hero from releasing the new songs he would perform on the road. Well, it’s a long story!
First, there was the score to a film that never happened. Then there was a brief brush with the law over a headless corpse in a burned-out car that had all eyes in Buckner’s small hometown in upstate New York turned toward him and his long-suffering truck. Shortly after a move to a safer, less popular corpse dumping ground, the death of his tape machine led to yet another reboot. After Richard called in pedal steel and percussion players and put new mixes on his laptop, his new “safer” place was burglarized. Goodbye, laptop.
Buckner says: “Eventually, the recording machine was resuscitated and some of the material was recovered. Cracks were patched. Parts were redundantly re-invented. Commas were moved. Insinuations were re-insinuated until the last percussive breaths of those final OCD utterances were expelled like the final heaves of bile, wept-out long after the climactic drama had faded to a somber, blurry moment of truth and voilà!, the record was done, or, let us be clear, abandoned like the charred shell of a car with a nice stereo.”