Don’t Miss New Albums From Little Feat, Leftover Salmon, I’m With Her & Others

Veteran rockers Little Feat return with their first album of new original songs in 13 years, Strike Up The Band. Little Feat — longtime keyboardist Bill Payne, bassist Kenny Gradney , percussionist/vocalist Sam Clayton and multi-instrumentalist Fred Tackett, along with guitarist Scott Sharrard and drummer Tony Leone – released Sam’s Place in 2024, which featured Clayton singing blues standards and was their first new LP since 2012’s Rooster Rag and first recorded by the current lineup. The band worked with Vance Powell, who co-produced Strike Up The Band with Payne, and Sharrard on some tracks. Payne, Tackett, Sharrard and Leone are credited with writing the 13 new songs making up the Strike Up The Band tracklist. The song “Bluegrass Pines” was co-written by Payne and late Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, and features contributions from Molly Tuttle, Larry Campbell and Teresa Williams. The title track sees the band accompanied by Larkin Poe.

“When discussing the album with the band and where it sits in our canon, our predecessor to this record in my mind was Let It Roll,” said Payne. “We are in a similar position to introduce Little Feat once again with this new collection of songs. It is my feeling that, from what we had been playing over the last few years, there’s no question the overwhelming majority of fans would accept the album for what it is: an unmistakable iteration of Little Feat that highlights, with great songs and musicianship, the very best of an ongoing legacy, expressly evoking and expanding upon what people think of when they hear Little Feat.”

Leftover Salmon shared their guest-filled album, Let’s Party About It, today through Compass Records. The band celebrating their 35th anniversary recruited Del McCoury, Sam Bush, Jason Carter and Jeff Coffin for the new studio effort. LoS wrote the material for Let’s Party About It together in one session, a first for the group, with renowned songwriter and longtime friend of the band Aaron Raitiere.

Folk supergroup I’m With Her issued their highly anticipated sophomore album, Wild And Clear And Blue, via Rounder Records. The trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins released the debut I’m With Her album, the Grammy Award-nominated See You Around, in 2018. The trio recorded the 11-song follow-up with multi-instrumentalist producer Josh Kaufman of Bonny Light Horseman who along with drummer JT Bates also contributed to the album. Sessions were held in New York at The Outlier Inn in the Catskills and at The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck.

“When we write together it’s almost like we’re a three-headed creature—there’s never any need to take ownership of ideas, and always an ease of letting go when something isn’t working,” O’Donovan explained.

“Sometimes in the studio songs end up losing a bit of their sparkle, but with this record everything kept tumbling forward in a very natural, positive way,” Watkins said.

“Because we’ve played together so much at this point, we have a much stronger sense of what we’re capable of creating together,” Jarosz stated. “We wanted to be open to anything on this record, and give ourselves more space for the solo sections to really breathe.”

The Head and the Heart released their sixth studio album and Verve Forecast debut, Aperture. Written and recorded during a year of sessions in their home bases of Seattle and Richmond, the follow-up to 2022’s Every Shade Of Blue marks The Head and the Heart’s first self-produced record since their self-titled debut album in 2011. Vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Russell explained the call to the self-produce Aperture was “a 180 in terms of where we were headed. We really wanted to make our next music our own way, and it was a lot of fun to have all of us in a room together again. When we’d have downtime over the past two years, we’d all fly into either Seattle or Richmond and work in a specific studio in each place. We worked with engineers from our past. All these things went into being able to reimagine how we wanted to approach making music.”

“I believe we’ve made a very great record together and obviously the title is an important aspect of the final product,” added group member Matty Gervais. “For me, Aperture represents the choice we all must make between resigning ourselves to darkness, or letting the light in and recognizing our own agency to do so. It feels relevant to the times, in that we’re literally choosing between authoritarianism vs. democracy. Ignorance vs. enlightenment on a macro scale, and complacency/cynicism vs. hope, empathy and perseverance on the micro scale. To me, it sums up a lot of what each of these songs is grappling with in some form and what we’ve collectively gone through as a band. It’s about choosing hope again and again, no matter how many times it may feel that you have lost it.”

Singer-songwriter Jack Van Cleaf released his sophomore album, JVC, via Dualtone Records. Van Cleaf recruited fellow singer-songwriter Zach Bryan for the album’s lead single, “Rattlesnake,” a version of which oringally appeared on Van Cleaf’s 2022 debut album, Fruit From The Trees. Along with Bryan, JVC sees Van Cleaf joined by Austin Burns, Ethan Fortenberry, Hunt Pennington, Adam Carpenter, Nathan Cimino and Aaron Krak, as well as Annika Bennett and Heaven Schmitt (Grumpy). The track “Teenage Vampire” features special guest Gatlin. After achieving success behind the original “Rattlesnake” release, Van Cleaf suffered from self-doubt. He opted to retreat to remote places like Joshua Tree and the Texas/Mexico border to record the foundation of JVC with producer Alberto Sewald.

“I felt like I was staring into an emotional desert when I wrote these songs,” Van Cleaf explained, “experiencing this feeling of desolation around me and looking for little signs of life.”

D R E A M S I C L E is Maren Morris’ fourth solo album. Released today through Columbia Records, the follow-up to 2022’s Humble Quest contains the five songs that made up Morris’ 2024 EP, Intermission. Among the producers and songwriters Morris collaborated with include Greg Kurstin, Jack Antonoff, Joel Little and Julia Michaels (who features on the song “Cut!”). Morris shared a statement regarding the new LP:

“D R E A M S I C L E takes place in the aftermath of loosening my grip on my personal and professional life. Sweeping through the pits of grief, but never staying too long, and finding the joy in knowing that at my core, I’m still who I am – and that’s pretty f-ing great.

“D R E A M S I C L E became less about the hard lessons and more about enjoying the bumpy ride and finding people who genuinely want to be on it with you because they love you. It’s about appreciating and respecting the beauty and nuances of life while it’s happening, not after it’s too late.”

Alt-rock stalwarts Counting Crows released Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets!, their first full length album since 2014’s Somewhere Under Wonderland. Originally conceived as companion EP to their 2021 EP Butter Miracle, Suite One, the band chose instead to compile the four Suite One songs with five new tracks. Frontman Adam Duritz spoke about the album on a recently episode of the Broken Record podcast:

“This record, I wrote the first half of the record on my friend’s farm, and I went back there a year later and wrote the rest of it. On the way home, I stopped in London because my friends in the band Gang of Youths were making a record.

“I had already sung on it once, but they had scrapped the record and they were re-recording it and I needed to go sing on it again. So I stopped there and sang on a bunch of stuff. Then when I got home, a little while after I got home, David Le’aupepe, the singer, sent me the record, finished.

“It was so good. In listening to it, I thought, I didn’t hit this bar on the stuff I just wrote. Those songs aren’t good enough. And this has never happened before in my entire career. I’ve never second guessed a song like this. When I’m done, they’re done.

“If they’re not good enough, I usually throw them out. It was clear to me that I had kind of misjudged.”