I was raised a military brat and saw the world at an early age. The lifestyle must have stuck because, after dropping out of college which I found far too regimented, I really drifted around. I hiked the Amazon and the Andes, pruned apple trees in the Catskills, drove combine in the wheat fields of Washington, painted houses in Key West, drove truck in New York City, and used my early background in biology to land a job training sea lions at the Pittsburgh Zoo. You might say I worked my way through the alphabet, but it was more like I was a songwriter moonlighting as an apple pruner or zookeeper than the other way around.

I was a founding member of the band Sandoz which was signed to Relix Records in New York and played a ton of gigs mostly in the Pittsburgh area. Since then I’ve been doing more traveling, particularly out west, and that led to a lot of the songs that are going to be on my new CD, Out from Nowhere.

A lot of what I write about are real people and things I witness while I travel—I shoot for authenticity and to make the songs bigger than me. My roots are in folk and blues, and my influences include singer songwriters such as Dylan, Tom Waits, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, and Jackson Browne, but everything I listen to finds its way into my music.

Since leaving his day job in 2016, Nick Barilla has been inspiring audiences all over the country with his heartfelt melodies and honest lyric writing. In 2018, Barilla won the Pittsburgh City Paper Battle of the Bands competition. His original music has been heard on radio outlets both locally and nationally, including featured placements on Songtradr.com and AT&T Sports (Pittsburgh Pirates) Barilla has performed extensively at: Colleges, Concert Venues, Wineries, Hotels, Bars, and Backyards over the past three years. He has toured with names such as: Howie Day, Aaron Carter, Kate Voegele (One Tree Hill), Kina Grannis (Crazy Rich Asians), Indie Christian band Cloverton (Hallelujah Christmas), Kris Allen, Lee Dewyze (American Idol) and more! His third studio album, 'Moments', is scheduled to be released in summer 2019, and promises listeners a fresh new sound, with relatable lyrics pertaining to many of life's biggest moments.

Ryan Gustafson remembers very little about the origins of the ten songs on Unsung Passage, his profound new reflection on the emotional architecture of love, loneliness, and life at large.

He mostly knows that the songs were written during quick spans scattered between various tours of the last two years—as a supporting guitarist for his kindred North Carolina spirits Hiss Golden Messenger and Phil Cook’s Guitarheels and as the leader of his own long-evolving vehicle for a beautifully fractured vision of folk, country, blues, and cosmic American rock, The Dead Tongues. Gustafson’s third and best album under that name, Unsung Passage depends more on the songs themselves than the sounds around them. It is a first-person reckoning with the things Gustafson, a chronically peripatetic adventurer, has seen enough to sing about. “Every turn, every changing that occurs,” Gustafson offers during “The Broken Side of People Everywhere,” his voice sweetly yearning for whatever it is that might come next. “There’s a string attached, with a promise at the end.”

Indeed, funneling the lessons of the road into songs isn’t new for Gustafson; during the last two decades, it has become his standard practice. When he was twenty, he left North Carolina for the first of many backpacking trips across Europe, little but a sense of adventure and wonder to his name. He has hitchhiked from Oregon to New Orleans with a banjo and a bag and lived in and rebuilt an aging school bus, meant for an extended trek across the continent (that is, until the cost of gas proved prohibitive). After several years in a commune in the western woods of Asheville, North Carolina, he now lives in a nearby camper, at least when he’s off the road long enough to call anything home. “When I’m traveling, it’s like walking into these different windows. I’m a witness, with my mouth shut,” Gustafson says. “The people you meet, the way the landscape speaks to you, how a desert is different than a mountain: It has the potential to bring out something you didn’t know was there.”

The ten remarkable songs of Unsung Passage are long-distance distillations of such experiences, of events lived and places seen and pondered and ultimately poured into reflective anthems for our harried times. During “Like a Dream,” a gentle gallop of grinning harmonica and trickling guitar, Gustafson explores the balance of existence from a hillside vantage. He sees the curve of the earth while pondering his need for a paycheck, a moment that eternally pits the banal against the beautiful. “The Broken Side of People Everywhere” is a gorgeous love song written with the wisdom of someone who knows that nothing is forever or perfect, that there’s no real risk in a life where everything ends, anyway. There are meditations on mortality and devotion (the flute-laced dream “My Other”), on money and temporality (the banjo trot “The Giver”), and on impermanence and acceptance (the achingly gorgeous “Pale November Dew.”) This isn’t Gustafson’s idle speculation about life and the world; these are the realizations of a restless mind, of a songwriter who sings “this old town ain’t gonna watch me die” and means it.

Gustafson recorded these songs much as they were written—during short summer sojourns away from the road, when he and a quartet of friends could gather in the Chapel Hill studio The Rubber Room for two-day sessions. Longtime North Carolina confidants and collaborators James Wallace, Jeff Crawford, and Casey Toll form the rhythm section, while Mountain Man’s Molly Sarlé harmonizes softly and adds a filigree of unexpected flute. Other friends offer fiddle and percussion, cello and extra guitar, softly padding songs that stand as statements unto themselves. “Sitting down with an acoustic instrument and making a song, singing, and playing it was the idea,” says Gustafson. “I’ll follow a song to wherever it goes, but I tried to keep this one in the room. This sounds like what we played, what you’re hearing.” These ten songs are snapshots in time, then, glimpses at the sorts of emotional upheavals and adjustments we’re all forced to face as we move from day to day and, as in Gustafson’s way, place to place. The familiar sounds of Unsung Passage, a reflection of Americana bedrock, present a comforting score for some of life’s most uncomfortable situations. But they will pass. “Ain’t it all right?” Gustafson demands at one point. “Ain’t it all like a dream?” After all that living, it surely is.

On Ramonda Hammer's searing debut LP "I Never Wanted Company," frontwoman Devin Davis takes a hard look at her struggle between despairing loneliness and embracing independence. The Los Angeles quartet’s blistering guitars and Davis’s paint-peeling vocals – recalling past greats like Hole and likeminded contemporaries like Mannequin Pussy – form support for lyrics that grapple with two years of emotional upheaval for Davis.
Since the band released their 2017 EP Destroyers, a release that cemented Ramonda Hammer as a tentpole act in LA’s surging community of woman- and queer-fronted bands, Davis struggled to come to terms with her codependency, fought against her own overwhelming over-analysis, and got into her first queer relationship. The result is an album that’s bruising, cathartic, searching, and ultimately therapeutic. Featuring production by Alex Newport (At The Drive In, Bloc Party), I Never Wanted Company is a powerful and triumphant return for the quartet – including Justin Geter on guitar, Andy Hengl on bass, and Mark Edwards on drums.
“No one is coming! No one!” Davis wails at the end of lead single “Hoax”. On its face, it’s a bleak and almost nihilistic statement – but for her, it’s a call to independence. Davis hopes the album will help people who want to take better control over their own lives and emotions. “I’m an anxious person,” she says. “It helps me to play loud rock music with gritty sounds and brash lyrics. Sometimes you need to scream to wake up.”