WNXP Podcasts

Hip-hop is known as aspirational music. Six One Tribe, Nashville’s largest hip-hop collective, is living its own version of that. The group is working to accomplish what once seemed impossible for the genre they love in the city they call home. Senior music writer Jewly Hight digs into the vibe of TRIBE, our WNXP Nashville Artist of the Month for June. Webpost

“If we hear some old adage or southern euphemism, we expect it to be honest and valuable to us, but sometimes it’s really not,” Jason Isbell says about the song “Cast Iron Skillet,” in which he delivers bits of folk wisdom over acoustic guitar, before giving dark details that counter the presumption of authority in an old saying. Isbell has been doing that for years with his music, and online pres...

Joy’All is Jenny Lewis’s fifth solo effort, and her first on the historic Blue Note record label. It’s also her first full-length release since the pandemic. Splitting time between Los Angeles and Nashville, her mostly solitary quarantine experiences gave her a lot to think and sing about in the tunes that make up Joy’All , several of them stemming from a virtual, song-a-day writing workshop led b...

Peter One’s story is incredible in itself. Peter is from Africa’s Ivory Coat. In the 1980’s he released an album that was very successful in Africa and had him touring the continent. In the 1990’s he came to the United States to make music, but found himself in a much more stable career, nursing, here in central Tennessee. And in his mid-sixties he released his second album, “Come Back to Me” in M...

The history of Hillaryville, Louisiana can be traced all the way back to the late 1800s. Located along the Mississippi River, the small community was founded by eight slaves who received it as a form of reparations after the Civil War. The stories of green sugarcane, longshoremen on the river, and rice farmers in this deep rural south of Louisiana are passed on generation after generation, includi...

Pearl & The Oysters Bandcamp bio reads, “After winning a free trip to the ★Ostreoid Asteroid Resort★ (from whence came their name) on the back of a dehydrated cereal box, a joyous society of galactic gleaners began making music together under the Neptunian moniker: 𝒫ℯ𝒶𝓇𝓁 𝒜𝓃𝒹 𝒯𝒽ℯ 𝒪𝓎𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓈. ✩ ☾ ❈❖✢❖” Here we have the real story. Starting with a picklemonger from Brooklyn to two high school studen...

Indigo De Souza has adopted, and been warmly embraced by, a new community since the making of her 2021 record Any Shape You Take . Her third LP, All of This Will End , is beautifully illustrative of De Souza’s recent shifts: shifts in mindset, in the people from whom she draws support and/or inspiration, and — as a result — in songwriting. Webpost

Initially self-released, Joy Oladokun’s 2020 record In Defense of My Own Happiness was created in pandemic isolation; she doodled her way to emotional, relational and social verities, mainly using the instruments, microphones and software she had on hand. For Proof of Life, she entered into a partnership with Verve Forecast and Republic that didn’t break her of DIY recording habits so much as vast...

Listening to Blondshell’s self-titled debut can feel like a punch to the gut. The relatability in Sabrina Teitelbaum’s lyrics may explain the instant buzz behind her latest project. Channeling the angst of ‘90s alt-rockers like Hole, The Cranberries and PJ Harvey, her sharp-tongued one-liners are backed by riffy guitars and scant drums, highlighting the emotion in Teitelbaum’s vocals. The coming-o...

It's been a decade since Devon Gilfillian landed in Nashville and set about slowly building his career in music. In that time, he's had a major label breakthrough — and also a parting of ways with that label. Now Marquis Munson says Gilfillian is having another moment through his activism, his latest album release, and WNXP's Nashville Artist of the Month. Webpost

On her new album, in|FLUX , London-based artist Anna B Savage zigs where many musicians zag. in | FLUX is all low end. There is a clarinet, a low saxophone and what sounds like a leopard’s growl. Lean in and you might hear a chime way in the background or something unexpected altogether. Savage’s parents are singers. Both classical. On in|FLUX , her poetry is in the forefront, but from first liste...

The band Wednesday stitch together the details of their lives with triumphant guitar riffs and tragic lap steel. They see the big by zooming into the small bits of life in and around North Carolina. Their new album is our Record of the Week, Rat Saw God . In it, Wednesday are authors of a new Southern Gothic.

Lover’s Game , the first The War and Treaty full-length released on a major country label Mercury Nashville, the two work up naturalistic, slow-burning, piano-driven arrangements of several of their originals, songs that spill over with devotion or need or take on the relational labor of giving comfort instead of slipping into cruel indifference. The Trotters sing them with a grown-up sense of pac...

Last year was shaping up to be great for Michigander. The Michigan born, Nashville-based artist was set to release an EP It Will Never Be The Same , he’d booked his first, major headlining tour and was about to mark a career milestone with the song “Stay Out of It” entering a top ten radio chart. But a pair of life-changing accidents altered the course of his career and revealed an unexpected sour...

The Hold Steady celebrates its 20th anniversary with the release of their ninth studio album 'The Price of Progress.' Singer, songwriter and frontman Craig Finn said that recording these songs together felt like a homecoming for him and his bandmates Bobby Drake, Tad Kubler, Franz Nicolay, Galen Polivka and Steve Selvidge. After swapping song stems and lyrics remotely, the six-piece got together i...

Pop artist Caroline Polachek brings her addictive beats, synths and vocal acrobatics to Ryman Auditorium for her American tour in support of her newest LP called Desire, I Want To Turn Into You . On a February day she was preparing to play in Paris, after some show cancellations due to winter illness, Celia Gregory snagged some time Zooming with a rested-up Polachek, one of modern music’s inarguab...

Interview with author Dan Charnas about the impact of De La Soul's 1989 debut album '3 Feet High and Rising' ahead of their catalog release on streaming services. Webpost 

Rory Allen Philip Ferreira is an artist with a bit of mystery. He’s lived in eight different cities and gone by five different names. He’s never had a publicist or a PR campaign, and yet he’s been acclaimed by The New York Times and The Needle Drop and his records sell for $150 a piece.  Let’s dive into the myth of our Nashville Artist of the Month, the uncompromising artist, R.A.P. Ferreira. He’s...

Nashville-based singer-songwriter Sydney Ward, known as Sunny War, says there are two sides of her. One of them is very self-destructive and the other is trying to work with the other half to keep things balanced. From a devastating break-up and the loss of her father, the conflict of pain and preserving, the balance between a break-up album and an uplifting project, this became the theme for her...

One of the first singles released from the long-time-coming 4th LP of Louisville, Kentucky band White Reaper, called Asking For A Ride , was the track “Pink Slip,” which laments: “Hard to believe us when we grow up so slow. ” Sure, the eternal youth modeled and perpetuated by a thrashy, bratty, moshy rock band is alluring in even the best of times and we can all agree the times since their last re...

On Honey , Samia’s second solo album, the indie singer-songwriter has actually refined and defined her voice by venturing away from that sort of certainty. By envisioning how differently someone else might have perceived an interaction and letting her questions for them hang in the air, she’s subtly enlarged the scope of her songs. Senior music writer Jewly Hight spoke with her about choosing that...

Being good at talking is what makes R.A.P. Ferreira, full name, Raury Allan Phillip Ferreira a great rapper. “5 to the Eye with Stars” is a line Ferreira lifted from vocalese master Kurt Elling. Five to the eye is a knockout punch. Like Elling, you might call Ferreira’s artform vocalese. Bending words into abstraction, using context clues to fill in the details, landing a syllable in an unpredicta...

Adeem the Artist’s 2021 album Cast Iron Pansexual , rendered with shaggy charm and a mixture of DIY and old-time string band sensibilities, was celebrated within the coalescing community of queer roots music devotees. They brought their strengths and insights together more fully on White Trash Revelry , a collection of keenly knowledgeable and arresting songwriting delivered over spirited, full-ba...