Country

A new album from Cowboy Jack Clement has the prolific producer performing many of his best-known compositions with help of Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell and John Prine.

Fresh Air critic Ken Tucker says Lauderdale's career is at once admirable and somewhat puzzling.

Trouble & Love is about a relationship that went bad. "I think that this is one where Mary finally gets the lesson," Gauthier tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Platinum continues Miranda Lambert's ongoing project to create songs about women who are complex, fun-loving, and assertive.

Songs feels like the work of an artist who's still figuring out who he is, where he wants to go, and what he wants to elaborate upon — or invent anew.

Williams is commonly considered the most important country music songwriter. Critic Ken Tucker has a review of a newly released CD of radio broadcasts and DVD of TV performances.

The country singer treats the classic songs on her new album like living, vital pieces of art that can withstand being taken apart, thought about and re-imagined.

Surrounded on the charts by younger men and their big hits about drinking and partying, Sara Evans' hit-single success of Slow Me Down's title song all the more heartening.

Church uses the power he's accrued from hit records to make exactly the kind of album he wants.

Both Jon Pardi and Jason Eady have to confront the dilemma of all young country musicians: how to navigate the pop current that keeps country music commercially viable while connecting to a past that fewer and fewer listeners are aware of.

Ken Tucker says The River & The Thread is a travelogue; a timeless work of comfort and quiet joy.

A new nine-hour box set, titled Sun Country Box: 1950-1959, collects Sun Records' country output.

When Price was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, he was described as a living link from Hank Williams to the country music of today. He died Monday at the age of 87. We'll listen back to a 1999 interview he did with Terry Gross.

Jason Isbell's Southeastern, Kanye West's Yeeezus and an assortment of remarkable women dominated the Fresh Air critic's year in listening.

Ken Tucker calls the country singer-songwriter's new 12 Stories a "modestly amazing album." Every song is striking, textured and finely detailed.

On Three Chords and the Truth, bluegrass musician James King picks from the canon of country music to rearrange its songs as bluegrass. On The Bluegrass Album, country star Alan Jackson has recorded his first collection of bluegrass music — some classics, some originals.

The singer's new album is a work of great, accomplished craft about the pointlessness of crafting anything you care about, because the world is just going to ruin it on you.

Country-music star Vince Gill and steel guitarist Paul Franklin have teamed up to record a new concept album called Bakersfield.

The singer-songwriter has said, as he was writing his new album Still Fighting the War, that "a theme of perseverance through hard times revealed itself." Rock critic Ken Tucker says the record is no downer and that Cleaves finds complex sentiments and wittily phrased ideas in many of his new songs.

Dawes has just released its third album, Stories Don't End. The band has cited Neil Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash among its influences, but channels them with good humor and confidence that its own distinctiveness will shine through.