“There were ravines growing between me and people in my life,” Justin Osborne tells BandWagon. “And with COVID, everybody got pushed back together. Some of those changes had to be faced head on.”

Osborne is the commandant of North Carolina’s Susto and he’s just gone through some of the most intense years of his life.

“If humans are dimensional,” he says, “there’s a whole new dimension of myself that was awakened.”

Susto’s sound sits between Americana, psych-pop and the indie-rock church of rootsy folk. A mix of satire and earnestness adds a roughness; a raised eyebrow setting it apart from rural radio. Its dark, drug-influenced sentimentality and staunch idealism is, at its heart, just barefaced American songwriting.

“There were a lot of attempts at reconciliation – my own beliefs with how I was raised,” he says. “I’m trying not to disrespect,” he says, “but to participate in these big life events.”

Kevin Russell was nearing age 40, and given the upheavals in his career, should have been facing the clichéd mid-life crisis. Instead, he gave himself permission to be himself.

He left a band he’d played with for nearly 20 years, to focus on Shinyribs.

“The odds were against me for sure,” Russell said in a phone interview with BandWagon, “But I felt like I had to do it. It was a now-or-never kind of feeling. It was a gamble. But it was so great. We are now an instant party – wherever we go.” 

You’ve heard it.

It was written by a busker, in a closet, for a few friends at a youth hostel but somewhere on Planet Earth in the last three years, you’ve heard it.

The song is “Dance Monkey” and the number of times it has been streamed online is literally incalculable.

“I didn’t write that song to release at all,” Toni Watson aka Tones And I tells BandWagon. “I lived at a hostel. Like – I’d parked my van there, I used the showers. I played that song for a year on the street before I decided to release it.”

Now, for the first time, the one woman wonder is ready to collaborate – with her musical hero Macklemore, of course. “It’s just the most perfect track for both of us,” Watson says.

And she will finally release her first song ever about love. “I don’t mean to, but I’ve actually never written a love song,” Watson says. “I just don’t feel like I’d ever really known what it is.”

J.R.’s life as a touring bluesman came later than some. In his late 20’s, he was living in Brooklyn, bartending and teaching at a pre-school. He had a masters degree in printmaking, but the medium was quickly being usurped by digital alternatives. Still, he needed a creative outlet. 

A few years before, J.R.’s college roommate had introduced him to a song that made him fall in love with the blues. It was Blind Lemon Jefferson, a 1920’s singer and guitarist who is sometimes credited as the “Father of the Texas Blues.”

“I had never heard that raw, gritty passion in anything else,” he said. “It just kind of leveled me.”

From then on, J.R. spent his in-between time — in between work, school, relationships and everything else — playing the blues.

“There were a lot of DIY venues that popped up in loft spaces or garages. They were perfect for the type of music I was playing,” he explained. “All you needed was a condenser microphone, a picnic table and a cooler of PBR.”

Michal Menert has been thinking about fire.

The fires that have burned vast tracts of land near his childhood home in Colorado and not far from his former home in California. The fire that burned a warehouse full of his merch in Detroit last December. A fire that burned down the house in Fort Collins where he used to live with his bandmates in 2004. And all of the other metaphorical fires that have raged through his life over the years.

“Things burn down and then you watch the flowers grow back out of the cracks,” Menert reflected in an interview with BandWagon.

The theme has permeated the Pretty Lights cofounder’s music in recent months.

Jen Korte

Alysia Kraft can keenly use nature as a metaphor in her music. But in the case of “Little River,” a song with rich layers of meaning and potential interpretations, the inspiration was frighteningly literal.

“I almost drowned in the river by my parent’s ranch in the summer of 2020,” Kraft tells BandWagon. “It was a freak accident. The railing snapped on a bridge I was standing on and I was instantly tossed into a very high, very debris-choked river raging with freshly thawed spring snow.”

She lived to tell the tale. And in turn, make some of this year’s most resonant music.

A Wyoming native, Kraft’s is known in Colorado as one third of folk-rock favorites Whippoorwill and the voice of The Patti Fiasco. With therapeutic guidance, she came to an epiphany following the river trauma.

“From my own experiences, I’ve always wished more people from this country would listen to music that is not sung in English,” Jonny Jyemo tells BandWagon. “There is so much out there. Language should not be a barrier, but an invitation to connect.”

Jyemo is the founder of Jyemo Club, a Colorado band with members from 5 different countries. The band is based on a simple, inclusive idea: a concert where people from anywhere in the world would feel welcome. Where beats invite dancing and lyrics are felt beyond language. The Club has so many varying backgrounds that they can only be described as universal.