Joan Baez, whose career spans five super-impressive decades, proves she is still a force to be reckoned with on this 24th studio album. Focusing on major topics like wartime, religion and death, Baez has teamed up with Steve Earle, who has not only produced the album but contributed three songs (two new compositions, and an a cappella version of his "Jericho Road"). As on previous collections, ...
A succession of plaudit-harvesting folk albums and subsequent international renown means that Yorkshire's Kate Rusby no longer needs to be nurtured with kind words of condescension along the lines of lass, babe and starlet, and yet there remains something irredeemably youthful about The Girl Who Couldn't Fly. It's not just the butterfly flutter of Rusby's voice--which allows the nudge and ...
Johnny Depp and director Gore Verbinski hatched the idea for Rogue's Gallery while filming "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"--that idea being to cast genteel rock superstars like Bono, Lou Reed, Bryan Ferry, Andre Corr, and Sting to reinterpret gritty seafaring standards for an exhaustive 43-track double-disc set produced by Hal Wilner. Throw in a bunch of credible folk stars ...
With Underneath the Stars, her first studio album since 2001's Little Lights, Kate Rusby takes a massive step forward. Like her fellow north-easterner Eliza Carthy, she's still plundering a folk back-catalogue that stretches back several hundred years and finding many a narrative to delight and amuse. But unlike Carthy, who attempts to inject a youthful wildness into this ancient ...