I made most of Saints and Strangers at night, in a basement in Virginia, after long days working at a hardware store. The basement was the one place I could be loud without bothering anyone, and somewhere in those late hours the album took shape – eight songs that swing between the loudest and the quietest parts of me. Some nights that meant a fuzzed-out guitar and a drum kit going full volume. Other nights it meant turning everything off and sitting alonesong one melody until it felt true.
My first solo cassette was recorded in 1998. It was awful. I had some good ideas for a kid, but no talent at all, maybe except a knack for lyrics, and a bit of a gift for classical guitar and bass, definitely not for singing. I was also interested in much different music than most people my age in Poland back then. That’s why it took 4 years to form my first band in 2002. To take the shortcut, it took 9 more years to release my studio debut album “Second Hand Man”. In 2012, I started Sauer Adler, my second real band. And to take the shortcut again, in 2022, I formed Psychedelic Mayhem, and in 2024, I formed Bezkwit. Along the way, I also jammed, recorded, played, composed, and improvised whenever and wherever possible, with whoever was available at the time. That, through many shortcuts, takes us directly into the once-very-futuristic year 2026 (certainly around 1998).
by Sydney J
Hi, I’m Sydney J, an indie-folk artist based in Manhattan, New York. I’ve been writing songs for as long as I can remember, but in 2025, my approach to songwriting began to shift. I became more interested in creating something open-ended, less like a straightforward retelling of events, and more like a space where multiple emotions and experiences could exist at once.
That shift is what led me to create my most popular song, “but so close!”.
Continue readingby Poli Nika
I look into his eyes and remain silent. I know my silence wounds him, but I can’t utter a single word. My throat tightens, my head spins with the darkest thoughts I’d never dare say out loud. “What would he think of me then?” These are the monsters inside me, and I’ll never let them destroy what we have. I’ll never let them out, because then…
When I was a kid, I discovered Marty Robbins’ “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs” in my Dad’s record collection and played it obsessively. I fell in love with the stories that that album told and the colorful characters in songs like “Big Iron” and “El Paso.” It was immediately apparent that to me, music was not just a melody and a beat; it was also visual and preferably cinematic. The story that the lyrics told was what really brought a song to life for me.
by Ben Richel
During my childhood in Savoie, France, most of my free time was devoted to one activity: imagination. I imagine grandiose destinies but also standard and common stories: From fishermen in the Philippines to Western rockstars, from 19th-century wars to post-collapse scenarios, from my Star Wars spin-offs to projecting myself on stage later… I could imagine revolutionary flying machines, and the same day imagine the realistic routine of the today’s French middle class (I am myself in the middle, like Malcolm!)
For me, everything is interesting.
My life has been built by imagining and connecting lives. It was obvious that one day I would invent characters, partly because expressing my whole personality cannot be done by simply embodying a predefined, cliché role given by society.
Continue readingby John Kennedy of The Dark City Kings
Out of the blue? That doesn’t even describe the moment. Dark City Kings was the runt of the litter in the Asheville music scene. We’d lost two guitar players in the Spring and had just brought in a new guitar player and fiddle player. The core of Dark City Kings has been around the Asheville music scene for a decade – but this band was the runt of the litter and then tossed into a raging river to drown.
Dark City Kings? We were a drunken brewery band that was slowly writing original material. We wrote simple songs. We meant them. We wrote melodies you can sing in the shower and big sing-along choruses. We’d just decided to try again, write an entirely new songbook with this new band formation, practice twice a week, and play a show once a week.
We played our first show together on August 5th.
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Hi, I’m Raging Flowers, a singer-songwriter-producer from Auckland, New Zealand. My primary instrument is the electric guitar. I make jazzy self-help indie pop that celebrates the diversity of feelings. My music is about truthfulness, exploration, and hope.
My music career has had an unusual start. I’ve been a long-time music learner, but I decided to pursue a career in tech. I studied Computer Science and had a career as a Software Engineer. I worked for some of the top software companies in New Zealand. I was a star Software Engineer in various fields, including music, blockchain, and AI. Back in my programming days, my ambition was to run a small business of my own.
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Years back, I attended my late cousin’s funeral in the core of the inner city where she lived. One could call the area run-down, poor, and even scary. It was the kind of place where taking to the street at night was risky, let alone by day. Many of the shops were closed down, and the upkeep on the surrounding buildings was minimal, to say the least.
My cousin had been renting a three-room apartment over a dingy hotel where she lived a hand-to-mouth existence due to childhood traumas. Every time I went to this city, I made a point of stopping in on her for a visit because, despite her struggle, she hadn’t lost her sense of humor and hadn’t forgotten the ways of knowing taught to us by our grandmother. She was fun and had a great sense of humor. She didn’t let too much bother her, and I enjoyed spending time with her. It was relaxing because there was no pressure to be anything else than two cousins spending time together. We would often jump into my car, as she didn’t own a vehicle, and drive out to the country for fresh air and a change of scenery.
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Hi, my name’s Jamie Hutchings; I’m a singer, songwriter, guitarist, percussionist, and sometime improviser and producer. I’m based in Sydney, Australia.
Music was a given in my family household as my dad was a woodwind session cat. He’s 83 now, but he still gigs here and there, but as kids, it was his bread and butter. So all of us inherited his musicality in some form, but still (particularly with my brother and I), we found ourselves gravitating more and more towards rawness and originality over professionalism and technique. I was looking through my mum and dad’s record collection the other night, and it’s almost exclusively Frank Sinatra records. Sinatra is amazing, but the overexposure to music in a show-biz format perhaps contributed to us going in a different direction!
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