Nicole Atkins
“This whole album is almost like my fight against loneliness,” says Nicole Atkins of her latest release, Drama. “A lot of the songs came out of the fact that my husband and I basically have a long distance relationship. We’re both on the road. He’s a tour manager. I’m an artist. We can be apart for months at a time.” Those feelings of isolation and separation, complicated by sleep problems and some career uncertainty, left Atkins feeling overwhelmed at times. “I had to write myself through a lot.” As the material started to take shape, she felt like she was “building a life raft,” and not only for herself. “With everything going on in the world, it’s easy to forget that we’re all the same,” she says. “We’re being disconnected and pulled apart. We’re longing for connection. That’s what I want to write and sing about, and hopefully by doing that, make people feel a little less lonely.” The life rafts on Drama are sturdy, with smart design and a buoyancy that’s a tonic for our times. The Spectorized girl group rush of “Trippin’ On Teardrops,” the pulsing Memphis soul-styled “For No One,” the James Bond-meets-Stevie Nicks noir of “Danny,” and the ABBA-worthy, anthemic “Singing In The Mirror.” As always when dissecting Atkins’ neo-classic sound, it’s fun to play with mash-up descriptions – even she offers her own colorful takes – “What if Brian Eno, Scott Walker and Lee Hazlewood were all partying?” and “It’s like a Broadway show playing on a dive bar stage.” Her journey began in Neptune City, New Jersey, where she developed her taste and sensibility early. “There’s a poetic isolation at the Jersey shore,” she says. “All the tourists leave, and you’re stuck with this really gloomy, but beautiful place, and nothing to do. Also, there were all these summertime musicians who’d play every night on the beach. I grew up thinking that was a normal job.” Raiding the record collections of her parents and grandparents drew her to dramatic singers from Candi Staton to Roy Orbison. When she found an old acoustic guitar in the attic of her uncle’s house, her course was set. “Actually, I either wanted to be a rock star or a professional wrestler,” Atkins says, with a laugh. It had been six years since her last, Italian Ice, and Atkins admits she had some self-doubt. Enter another Nashville pal, Patrick Sansone. The producer and Wilco multi-instrumentalist proved to be the perfect foil for Drama. “Pat knows so much about that chamber pop style of music, and that’s my North Star and home base,” Atkins says. “I write like I write – sometimes it sounds ’80s, sometimes it sounds ’60s, sometimes it sounds ’50s. And Pat always gets it. He was able to help me sprinkle that baroque sound throughout the whole record, so it all made sense together.” And as on previous albums, she ups the ante by aiming to “write modern songs that could be part of the Great American Songbook.” But in her own way. “I’m not trying to rehash or celebrate some bygone era,” she says. “I’m just taking what I like melodically from the past, and channeling it into my songs. I like to make them deeply personal. The question I come back to is – how do I make this sound exactly like me?” Drama sounds exactly like Nicole Atkins.
Belles
Overtime & The Blue Collar Soldiers Band
Overtime & The Blue Collar Soldiers Band are hitting the road for the Modern Day Outlaw Tour (10 Years of Hunger In My Stomach)—a full-throttle anniversary run celebrating the 10-year mark of Overtime’s RIAA Certified Gold breakout, “Hunger In My Stomach.” This tour delivers a full-length live band performance featuring fan favorites like “Next To Me,” “County Line,” and “Divided We Fall,” alongside new releases including “Soldier Up,” “Stand Your Ground,” and “Stuck In My Ways.” Supporting the tour are Wildcard, DurtE, Jake LaCoste, and Shawn Paris, creating a genre-blending lineup that fuses country grit, rock energy, and rap intensity. No backing tracks carrying the show—just real performance and high-impact live music. If you like your concerts loud, honest, and high-energy, the Modern Day Outlaw Tour delivers.
Colby Acuff
A fifth-generation Idahoan, Acuff grew up watching his hometown Coeur d’Alene transform before his eyes. One by one, the lumber mills closed down as a blue-collar town turned into a ritzy resort escape for elites from around the country. Acuff’s childhood was full of music — Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, bluegrass — that situated all the changes he witnessed in a long lineage of working-class American struggle, and soundtracked the nostalgia felt by watching a way of life become bygone. By the time Acuff released his 2020 debut Life Of A Rolling Stone, his perspective and concerns as an artist were already fully-formed. He’d make two more albums while living in Idaho, 2021’s If I Were The Devil and 2022’s Honky Tonk Heaven before moving to Nashville to record 2023’s Western White Pines and 2024’s American Son with producer Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan and Brandi Carlile). After the release of American Son, Acuff sat down with his right-hand man, producer Eddie Spear, and they puzzled over a new approach to the next project. They decided to go out and talk to people, take the temperature, see what listeners wanted to hear. The resulting work still boasts the thoughtful reflections on American life that Acuff has made his name on, but refuses to simply stare into the void. Instead, the throughlines of the project became resilience and optimism even in the bleakest times. Having toured with the likes of Luke Combs, Charles Wesley Godwin, 49 Winchester, Midland, Whiskey Myers, Flatland Cavalry, Jon Pardi, Muscadine Bloodline and more, Acuff is embarking on the Handmade Horsepower headline tour in 2026 playing shows all across the country. For more info, please visit colbyacuff.com.
Eddie And The Getaway
No matter the genre, rules or expectations, Eddie And The Getaway is here to bend and break them all. At just 25-years-old, Eddie has built a passionate fanbase through emotionally raw Country lyricism fused with the high-octane guitars and rebellious spirit of early 2000s Rock. But his musical journey began early on, when a drum set gifted to him at age five sparked a passion that led him to pick up the guitar. As a teenager, the Phoenix, Arizona-raised musician formed his first band and won a local competition, earning an opportunity to open for Alice Cooper. Rooted in his enduring values of relentless hard work, unwavering passion and humble faith, Eddie has since crafted a sound that’s as grounded as it is high voltage. Solidifying himself as a true musical triple threat – songwriter, producer, and genre-blending artist – he’s found viral success with breakout tracks like “Love Myself,” “superNOVOCAINE,” “Cobain” and latest hit “Sleep Alone.” Independently, he’s amassed a devoted following of over 1.4 million across social media and garnered more than 83 million streams to date. Most recently, Eddie earned YouTube’s Silver Creator Award for achieving 100,000 subscribers milestone. With a “sound that feels both timeless and urgent,” Eddie is “unafraid to confront life’s challenges head-on, turning pain into music that is both cathartic and compelling” (All Country News) – a truth brought to life on his new TUMBLEWEEDS AND NICOTINE EP, out now. A storyteller at heart, Eddie wrote all six tracks and co-produced three, openly exploring mental health, personal battles and the steady presence of faith as a source of healing. Serving as both an escape and a mirror, TUMBLEWEEDS AND NICOTINE EP doesn’t just bend genres – it breaks them wide open, living at the intersection of personal reckoning and sonic rebellion. Beyond his own music, the multifaceted talent has written and produced for a range of artists including Jay Webb, Pecos & The Rooftops, LECADE, Sterling Elza and Lakeview – all while building his own artistry on the road. With momentum building and boundaries fading, Eddie is an artist you’ll want to keep up with – if you can. For a full list of tour dates and more, visit EddieAndTheGetaway.com.
Doin’ My Rounds Tour ft. Jaden Schumacher & Emily Raff
Ricky Chilton
Casper Allen & The Naturals
Color Green
For the California-based quartet Color Green, playing music together is all about stepping into the unknown. “When we play live, I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” says Noah Kohll, one of the band’s two guitarists and four vocalists. “You really have no idea what you’re going to get with this band, which keeps things fresh for us and maybe makes the live experience special.” In a very short time, they have developed a word-of-mouth reputation as a dynamic and unpredictable live act, grounding their cosmic jams in earthy melodies and drawing from ‘60s SoCal folk-r0ck, ‘70s classic rock, ‘80s underground rock, ‘90s psychedelic dance-rock, and any other sound that catches their ears. Adaptable onstage and off, Color Green has shared stages with a range of groups that reflect both the sophistication and the wild malleability of their sound, including Fuzz, Kikagaku Moyo, Circles Around the Sun, Hiss Golden Messenger, and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Yet, because they see boundless possibilities from one note to the next, they anchor their music in the urgent present rather than the distant past. Color Green can be a million different bands without losing their essential hue. Color Green started out as a very different, much more limited kind of group. “Me and Corey worked together in New York scooping coffee beans for a living and putting them into bags,” says Kohll. “I was living in a basement sublet, and he would come over to write and jam and record.” From those casual sessions came a self-titled EP in 2021, full of spectral jams and offerings up to Jerry Garcia, their spiritual guide. The next year they followed it up with a self-titled full-length via Aquarium Drunkard, with various friends helping to round out the songs. “These things happen in an interesting way,” says Kohll. After sharpening their attack on the road—playing DIY shows in small towns while opening for some of their heroes—the expanded Color Green began writing songs for what they considered a debut album. “One of us will come in with a riff or an idea, and the others will take it up and let it morph into something completely different,” says Perlmutter. “What we come up with together, I don’t think any of us could do by ourselves. The music we make is always surprising me.” We might spend a lot of time working on something and get nothing out of it, but then in the back of my head I’m thinking, if you take this and add it to that… Sometimes it takes hours to figure out two seconds of a song, but it’s always worth it.” The aching heart of Fool’s Parade is “5:08,” a moving expression of grief—not moving through it, necessarily, but simply living with it, moment to moment. “What’s it like, on the other side?” they all sing together, as though consoling one another. “Oh, the longing for the space to peer thru.” Inspired by the death of Madden’s father, it is rooted in a Spiritualized show. “I was going through some gnarly personal stuff,” says Madden, “and it was all hitting me at once, all these emotions. I talked my way through some crazy shit, and by the end of the show I had ‘508’ hashed out in my brain. It’s about losing people very close to you and wanting to communicate with them and not really knowing how.”“It’s the quietest song on the record,” says Rose, “but it’s also the heaviest. We all cried while recording it. Everybody’s singing on it, and everybody’s crying on it. Sometimes we’re like, Let’s not play that song tonight. It all depends on how we’re feeling.”
Bri Bagwell
Texas Female Artist of the Decade, Bri Bagwell, is a force to be reckoned with from her rousingly fun live performances to trailblazing recordings garnering her twelve #1 singles on Texas Country Radio and counting. With multiple Female Vocalist of the Year awards, Bri is making waves with her music drawing national attention. People Magazine raves, “Bagwell increasingly finds her name being mentioned amongst country music truth-tellers such as Ashley McBryde and Morgan Wade.” Her latest album, Corazón y Cabeza (Heart and Head), has already spawned three #1 singles, “Trenches,” “Free Man,” and “Hello Highway,” the latter inspiring her 2023 summer tour across 10 states and Mexico. Performing over 120 shows a year, Bri has shared the stage with a long list of esteemed artists, including Willie Nelson, Miranda Lambert, Robert Earl Keen, Kacey Musgraves, and Dwight Yoakam. Catch Bri Bagwell live on tour or listen to her latest podcast, ONLY VANS, at www.bribagwell.com.