Mike Davies

Recorded in a break from touring with Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters earlier this year, Seth Lakeman’s ‘The Well Worn Path’ is yet another stunning piece of work and, as ever, rooted in his native Dartmoor.

Folk Fever brings together folk music luminaries who have taken a collection of disco and dance floor classics and given them a folk makeover. An inspired album that, once again, proves that, in the hands of the right musicians,  a good song can transcend all musical borders.

Having relocated from her native New York seven years ago to take up residence in Cambridge, this is Annie Dressner’s first full-length collection to be recorded in the UK…”Shatteringly good.”

Named after a line from a  poem by Marj Ann Samyn, The Place That You Call Home is a new project by New Orleans singer-songwriter Kelcy Mae, produced by Neilson Hubbard and featuring a host of guest musicians including Will Kimbrough.

Four years on from his double Grammy nominated Terms of My Surrender, John Hiatt returns with an album that pares it down to basics, his best work since Crossing Muddy Waters back in 2000.

Words We Mean is the second full-length album from Oklahoma trio Annie Oakley that charts a personal journey from youth to womanhood. The original Annie Oakley never missed her target. This is a bullseye too. 

Portland singer-songwriter Hip Hatchet makes his debut under his own name. His voice is dusty, world-weary and intimate, a melancholic caress, his guitar work simple and uncluttered. The work of a travelling troubadour reflecting on the miles covered…

Evening Machines is Gregory Alan Isakov’s first album of new material in five years. Listening to the album has been described as being enfolded in a comfortable solitude; settle down and enjoy the glow and the hum.

Healy’s second album steps up a level from her 2014 debut. One of the finest Americana albums out of the UK this year, Healy doesn’t just keep the flame alight, she ensures it blazes.

Four years on from her Chasing Ghosts debut, the Alabama-born multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sylvia Rose Novak returns with a self-produced album that welds the personal and the political.

It’s often the case that emergent young folk singers start out mining traditional folk roots before sewing their own crop, in reversing the cycle and visiting them directly here…she proves herself very much in command of rather than in thrall to them.

Iowa-born Nathan Bell follows up last years’ Love>Fear (48 Hours in Traitorland) with what he refers to as the unexpected fourth in his Family Man trilogy. A writer of songs both deeply personal and universal, long may he continue to toll.