Amy Helm, Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors, and more on Mountain Stage

Venue Presale: July 31 at 11am CST, 12pm ET.
On sale to the public: August 2 at 11am CST, 12pm ET.

Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been one of the most beloved programs in public radio history. Eclectic, authentic and unpredictable, the show’s varied guests have included iconic artists from John Prine and Townes Van Zandt to Wilco and Phish. Under the leadership of Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea since 2021, Mountain Stage continues to bring surefire energy and music discovery to parts known and unknown.

Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode is recorded in front of a live audience and can be heard every week on nearly 300 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org.

When creating her fourth album, the soulful and reflective Silver City, Amy Helm was guided by her North Star: women’s voices. “Women whispering, singing, shouting their stories - speaking the truth. I wanted to dig into that inherited narrative and reach for what I could.” The epistolary anthology is a collection of conversations that travel through time, exploring and celebrating womanhood in all its complexities. Silver City blends the folk twang of Helm’s childhood with gospel and soul, drawing inspiration from varied stories: the life of Helm’s great-grandmother, the story of a young fan struggling with substance abuse, Helm’s own life as a single mother and hard-touring singer.

The album was recorded at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, New York, with two core groups of musicians, both anchored by producer Josh Kaufman. Helm notes that this project brought out a different approach in her vocals. “Every time I've made a record, I’ve tried to give my strongest performance,” she says. “This time, I wasn’t thinking about the performance. I was rooted in the stories.”

Silver City began with a story that didn’t end up making the album. Helm wrote “Young Katie” to a young fan of hers who died of an overdose. “I began the song as sort of a letter to her,” she says, “and it just started to flow; the words weren’t even coming from me. And then the rest of the songs started to come through.” Helm says. The songs on this record are like letters, written to younger versions of Helm, or to other women she’s known. She continues, “‘Young Katie’ didn't fit conversationally with the rest of them, but it was the muse for this album.”

There are no strangers at a Drew Holcomb show. For the better part of two decades, the award-winning songwriter has brought his audience together night after night, turning his shows into celebrations not only of contemporary American roots music, but of community and collaboration.

He celebrates that sense of togetherness with Strangers No More, the ninth studio album from Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors. Written on both sides of a global pandemic that brought the band's schedule to a temporary halt, it's a record about the perspective of time, the rollercoaster of triumph and tragedy, and jubilation in the face of chaos. Holcomb and his longtime bandmates aren't just reveling in one another's presence after a long hiatus; they're expanding their sound, too, finding room for timeless songwriting, modern-day Laurel Canyon folk, amplified Americana, and heartland rock & roll.

The past decade has been good to Holcomb. Beginning with 2013's Good Light, he released five consecutive albums that peaked in the upper reaches of the Billboard charts. He launched Moon River Music Festival, an annual event celebrating the music of the modern-day American South. He became a father of three and watched his wife, Ellie, launch her own award-winning solo career. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone hailed him as "one of Americana's most popular stars" in an article praising Strangers No More's predecessor, Dragons, whose single "End of the World" became a hit on Triple A radio.

If Dragons was a rhapsody of life and family, then Strangers No More embraces a wider range of topics and textures. The songwriting is more introspective and universal this time around — "the kind of specific that applies to everyone," Holcomb says — and the love songs that filled previous albums have been replaced by tunes that cover friendship, death, introspection, and Holcomb’s connection to his audience. "There's a longer list of characters this time," he adds.

Even more important than Holcomb's characters are his collaborators, including bandmates Nathan Dugger (guitar), Rich Brinsfield (bass), Will Sayles (drums), and Ian Miller (keys). Some of those musicians have been members of The Neighbors since the very beginning. "Nathan and I have been playing together for nearly 20 years," Holcomb says. "Rich and I have been playing for 18 years. I wanted to lean into that shared history and make a genuine 'band record.'" Working again with producer and friend Cason Cooley, the group headed to Asheville’s Echo Mountain Studios to record Strangers No More in eight inspired days. They focused on live-in-the-studio performances that showcased the band's chemistry and camaraderie, capturing the bulk of each song — including vocals, instrumental textures, and solos — in real time. "We'd do eight to ten performances of a single song, looking for the revelatory moment," Holcomb remembers. "The goal was to prove an expanded vision of who we are and what we do."

Randall Bramblett is a lifer. For decades, he's explored the deep corners and outer orbits of American roots music, creating a southern sound that's every bit as eclectic as its maker. That sound reaches a new milestone with Paradise Breakdown, the thirteenth record from a musician hailed as "one of the South's most lyrical and literate songwriters" by Rolling Stone. The album finds Bramblett taking stock of past and present, embracing all the contradictory elements — love and loss; joy and disappointment; nostalgia and mortality — of a career dedicated to creation

"I've had the realization that this particular life isn't gonna go on forever," says the 70-something musician, who launched his solo career with 1975's That Other Mile while moonlighting as a multi-instrumentalist for acts like Gregg Allman and Sea Level. “It's true that everything ends, but things are still really beautiful, too. I'm healthy. I'm happy. I have a lot to be grateful for.”

Bramblett captures that paradox with tracks like the album's sunlit opener, "Fire Down in Our Souls" — a funky love song rooted in groove and grit, its chorus stacked with soulful vocal harmonies — and the mean, murky "Down in the Wilderness." "That's my kind of song: deep and dark," he says of the latter recording, which makes room for ghostly electric guitar, atmospheric chords, and a tense pulse. Things get psychedelic during the song's bridge, where Bramblett's upright piano leads the way into outer space. At its core, though, this is earthbound music — the kind of electrified soul-funk and dive-bar R&B that feels raw and broken-in, rooted in the storytelling chops of a man who's spent much of the past half-century in the recording studio and on the road.

Bramblett tracked half of the album in East Nashville. He'd been coming to the city for decades, not only to play his own shows, but to record some of his own earlier albums for New West Records, as well. Along the way, he'd watched other artists record many of his songs. Bonnie Raitt opened her Grammy-winning album Slipstream with his composition "Used to Rule the World" in 2012. The Blind Boys of Alabama covered his song "Almost Home" on their own Grammy-nominated record several years later. Blues legend Bettye LaVette took things a step further, recording 11 different Bramblett compositions on her Grammy-nominated record LaVette! and dubbing him "the best writer that I have heard in the last 30 years." Paradise Breakdown proves that Bramblett has plenty of material for his own projects, too. Teaming up with legendary instrumentalists like Tom Bukovac, Steve Mackey, Nick Johnson and producer/drummer Gerry Hansen, he cooked up up his own melting pot of urban swamp-soul and modern roots music in the East Nashville studio. Once those sessions wrapped up, he headed back to his adopted hometown of Athens, Georgia — a four-hour drive from his birthplace of Jesup — to finish the record with familiar partners like Seth Hendershot, A.J. Adams, Tom Ryan and Nick Johnson. The result is a mix of organic performances and electronic textures: an album built for roadhouse dance floors, dark lonely corners, and the long ride from past to present.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Franklin Theatre, 419 Main St., Franklin, United States