Simultaneously gruff and intimate, Caroline Herring's second album, Wellspring, offers 11 tracks of Southwestern acoustic folk-based country with appropriate focus on her obvious songwriting talent and her equally powerful voice. Like her soulful country contemporaries (Kim Richey, Shelby Lynne, Patty Griffin), Herring's breathy sensuality punctuates her themes of love, loss, and heartache, and her understated vocals, while never over-reaching, often swell and break under the str...   [ read more ]

CD $9.48

It's not easy being a great folksinger -- you've got to walk a tightrope across a musical minefield where the slightest misstep can find you wallowing in post-Joan Baez warble, drowning in affectation a la Martha Wainwright, or perishing in any number of other aesthetic pitfalls. Only a precious few learn to master that high-wire act; Kate Wolf, Linda Thompson, and Iris DeMent are some of the names on the short list, but Golden Apples of the Sun makes a strong case for the addition of {$C...   [ read more ]

CD $16.13

There's a moment on the third track of Twilight when the listener realizes he or she's listening to something special. "Devil Made a Mess," in fact, has just about everything that the average country hit doesn't: It's tuneful, has a well-crafted lyric, and the singer never overdoes the vocals. Caroline Herring is joined by several great musicians, including steel player Lloyd Maines, fiddler Eamon McLoughlin, and, on several cuts, newgrass luminary Peter Rowan. Whether singing {\cou...   [ read more ]

CD $14.23