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Music is a personal matter. Your favorite songs, the tracks that make your heart pump and your soul swell, may not do anything for anyone else. They may just be your own sense of pride or salvation. But music can also be passed down through the generations, too. Vinyl records, a favorite bootleg live performance, can be handed from adult family members to kids, and while individual songs or refrains may not stick to each person who indulges them, there is a good chance that, between kin, something will be loved in common. And for the outstanding musical duo of twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin, that reality occurred early in their lives.  

The two were born to young parents, who were 21 and 22 years old when the twins came into the world. So, of course, music was everywhere in the household, as is the case for many young couples. There was dancing and lip-syncing by all, including the kids. And this early introduction sparked something in the twins, who later ventured out on the road after high school, signed with Neil Young’s record label, and have since gone on to earn accolades out the wazoo. Tegan and Sara recently shared the release of their new LP, Crybaby (out in October), their second release of 2022 (Still Jealous came out earlier that year), the world is as open as ever to them. Sometimes it even resembles a luxurious “buffet.” 

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One syllable and you know it’s John Fogerty. His voice utters a note, a refrain and it comes out like lightning striking gravel. “Bad Moon Rising.” “Proud Mary.” “Fortunate Son.” These are just a sample of the songs that, thanks to Fogerty’s voice, have landed in the musical lexicon in the United States and abroad. These are the sinews and bones that make up a legendary body of work. And as it does for many legends before and since Fogerty, the magical journey of creation began even before he could speak—even before he was born in Berkeley, California, in 1945.

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Musician Harry Connick Jr. started young. That’s not always the case, of course, for every legendary songwriter and performer, but it was so for the New Orleans-born crooner. For as anyone who has ever visited the Crescent City knows, the bayou births songs. Melodies are in the ether. Rhythms emanate from the cobblestone streets. This is the world that Connick Jr. came into as a young person, and he took it just about as early as humanly possible. In New Orleans, anyone who is interested in music has immediate access to some of the greatest versions of it around, especially live performances. Artists roam the streets with instruments in tow, capable of playing and passing a hat at any moment. But for Connick Jr., his education, in a way, began even before that. Before he was born, his parents owned a record store. It was tradition for them to have albums playing in the house seemingly at all times. So, Connick Jr. began to play his own songs beginning at 3 years old.

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Bob Boilen works to bring music to the masses.

Whether on the weekly NPR program All Songs Considered or via his Tiny Desk Concert series, Boilen has jumpstarted the careers of countless acts, like Tank and the Bangas and Fantastic Negrito. He’s also showcased myriad songs to listeners who, like him, are constantly in search of what’s new, fresh and interesting in the sonic world.

Boilen doesn’t just reside on the media side of the music business. He’s also a songwriter, composer, and artist, himself, who creates textured, sometimes somber tracks that swirl and hover in a listener’s ear. Songs that display a lifetime of music appreciation as well as a hope to chisel out something surprising for music lovers to sample. To wit, Boilen’s latest solo offering is a new six-track, nearly 30-minute album he released on Bandcamp on January 14. Titled Brick Walls & Blue Skies, the project is as much a product of a lifetime of listening to songs as it is a call-and-response between Boilen and his favorite engineering software. 

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Legendary 86-year-old musician Buddy Guy wants to keep the blues alive. It’s been his mission his entire life to honor and participate in the significant musical style. Even before he could put words to the cause, he was constructing makeshift instruments out of wires.

“There are very few old blues cats hanging around,” he tells American Songwriter. “Every little bit helps.” As a kid, he was born so deep in the Louisiana countryside that his modest home didn’t have running water or electricity. In the summers, it would get excruciatingly hot. But there was no air conditioning. His mother put up screens in the windows to keep air flowing in and the mosquitos out. At one point, though, she noticed the bugs getting inside the house. She checked the windows and saw the screens had been fiddled with, stripped of their wires. Why? Because the young burgeoning musician had taken the wires out to make his own makeshift guitar. That’s the tradition from which Guy comes and the type of foundation that makes his newest album, The Blues Don’t Lie, which he dropped last year.

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Michael Bublé remembers being young. At five years old, he went into his bedroom and put an album on his Fisher Price record player and felt a strong sense of independence. Even before then, he says, he felt a “unique relationship” with music. He felt that it “spoke” to him. As a young person, it seemed to offer a singular guiding tone. It felt emotional and sentimental. Integral to every part of his body and being. He knew it would be part of his future. So, when his parents started to send away for little records in the mail and a young Bublé began to listen to them on his own, a sense of self began to form. He was listening to music that he chose, music that moved him. It was very empowering, even to the boy he was at the time. Now, Bublé is a well-known artist, one who releases acclaimed records, both seasonal and solo. His most recent achievement is a Grammy nomination for his 2022 LP, Higher. 

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For the multi-skilled artist and performer Vanessa Williams, music was always the art form that fused and combined her multiple talents. But her creative journey began with her supportive parents, both of whom were music teachers, themselves. Her parents also sang together in the local Westchester Baroque Choir. There, they would bring baby Williams to rehearsals and set her up in a playpen. As the story goes, at one of those rehearsals, all the adults looked around at one another, thinking the organ key had stuck as a note continued to ring out. But they soon realized it was just the young Williams imitating what she’d heard with her voice.

As she got older, Williams would retreat to her bedroom while her parents practiced, and she’d watch Disney or Wild Kingdom. She later played piano and French horn and her brother played the oboe and baritone saxophone. The two weren’t allowed to quit playing instruments until, at least after they’d graduated high school. Until then, it was the orchestra and the marching band. But it’s this foundation that has helped to lead Williams to her extraordinary, diverse entertainment career—one that continues with her forthcoming string of shows at the 54 Below Diamond Series stage in New York City. For the performances, Williams will play six intimate concerts from December 13-18, including her many hits, her work on Broadway, and personal storytelling.

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Atlanta-based musician-lawyer-entrepreneur Gabriella Logan—aka Guitar Gabby—has an engine that’s always humming. This is doubly interesting since Gabby used to build and break apart cars in her youth. The artist, who founded the growing musical collective known as The TxLips Band, works as an advocate, teacher, consultant, and more, striving to empower communities and grow collaborative possibilities wherever she travels.

If Midas turned everything he touched into gold, Gabby turns what she engages with into another avenue on the creative roadmap. Gabby works, connects, and builds. Her latest achievements include partnerships with Netflix for acting and music roles in films like The Harder They Fall and Wendell and Wild (the main character’s look was also based, in part, on Gabby). For Gabby, there’s always more on the horizon.

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Country star Mickey Guyton doesn’t want the moment to pass. In fact, she doesn’t want it to be a moment, at all. Equality and representation—these aren’t fads. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. And Guyton is focused on—and is watching—how the country world, specifically, approaches the dearth of Black and brown faces in the genre. With the social progress made in 2020 and subsequent years in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd, there has been an increased awareness from mainstream music gatekeepers to ensure equal opportunity for those who traditionally have not been afforded those opportunities that many white male artists have enjoyed in the past. But as 2020 becomes 2022 and beyond, it might be easy to fall back into old norms. Guyton prays this won’t be the case. In a way, she’s the Patron Saint of Representation in today’s country world. Guyton, who had doors slammed in her face, jokes made at her expense in her budding career has, more recently, had the last laugh. But breaking through wasn’t easy. It’s an emotional, powerful story, which she details on the new Audible Original series, Origins.

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Harry Connick Jr. didn’t waste any time. When the New Orleans-born songwriter and performer found out about the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing global lockdown in 2020, he got to work. Thankfully for the award-winning artist who has sold millions of albums, he has his own home studio. It was there that he began playing, recording, and honing tracks for his upcoming Christmas album, Make It Merry, which was announced Friday (November 18) and is set to drop later this month on November 26, exclusively via Apple Music. Connick Jr. is also set to undertake a holiday tour, beginning November 18.

When the world shut down two years ago, the legendary artist fired up his studio equipment and recorded the vast majority of each track, one by one, laying down his own versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” “Jingle Bells,” and more with his signature cozy croon.

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Even from his early days, David Portner, the de facto frontman for the acclaimed Baltimore-born experimental pop group Animal Collective, felt music was “like a different world.” It was something that presented a portal into something new, a dichotomous realm where he could absorb sounds solo, or with others around, engaging in the experience inwardly or outwardly. It has also provided Portner a way of life, a way to pay bills and a means to a massive creative output.

From the beginning, he was looking to participate in songs. He asked his parents for piano lessons at three years old. He also received records from older siblings that provided their own specific windows into new things. Today, these various pathways continue, both stretching and colliding in the artist’s orbit as well as in his own mind as he creates music that at times bounces and bashes, and at others smoothens and mollifies. Animal Collective, which released its latest LP, Time Skiffs, earlier this year, more recently released music for the score of a new film, The Inspection. But for Portner, each of these works marks another step forward in his constant artistic journey.

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Dolly Parton can take a compliment. It’s just that she doesn’t always want to. In today’s age of political division and social media obsession, the songwriter and performer has become one of the few people, it seems, that nearly every person on the planet appreciates. She’s regularly compared to saints and angels. She’s beloved for her songs like “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “9 to 5.” She’s an actor, a sight for many sore eyes. But she’s also just a human being. And she says when she hears the multitudes of hyperbole her fans and onlookers tend to offer her on the regular, it can be off-putting or jarring. Even “scary.” It’s odd territory, indeed. Parton grew up dirt poor in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She headed later to Nashville seemingly a split second after graduating high school, and she’s been making hay there ever since. She’s generous and charitable. A woman of faith, she’s kind and honest, too. But at the end of the day, she’s a person. Just like any one of us.

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Ever since he was 12 years old, Corey Crowder has played golf. Today, the songwriter and performer says, he is “somewhere between horrible and professional.” He laughs, the chuckle of anyone who’s held a club often, who knows the mired feeling of imperfection, of struggle. And of making hits. It’s a similar laugh he gives when talking about the craft of songwriting, too.

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Angel Olsen is looking for a cat-sitter. She released her latest LP, Big Time, on June 3, and was hitting the road in a few weeks for a big summer and fall tour to support the record, her first since Whole New Mess in 2020. She had many dates ahead of her—so many, in fact, that her manager joked about recording her verbal agreements so she can’t exact revenge later for the many stops. (Olsen laughs when sharing this detail.) But what’s not a laughing matter is that she needed to find someone to watch her cat as she traveled with Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker for their Wild Hearts Tour. Olsen, who is a genre unto herself, breathy and moody as a singer, poignant and beautiful as a performer, has high expectations for whoever will watch her feline.

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