Break Open the Dark

Memphis soul and blues singer. Covered the Beatles before the Beatles were cool.

British actor and musician. Psychedelic library music with the menace of a 1970s public information film.

Indie pop from a room you can never quite find again. Self-released and self-contained.

1960s harmony pop pulled from the Numero Group archives. A single, a b-side, then silence.

Folklorist interpreting traditional American songs from archival sources.

New Delhi band that sounds like a wedding reception at the end of the world. Crooning through chaos.

Quiet songs that land like a letter you didn't know you needed. Secretly Canadian.

Private press soul. One song, pressed in a basement, almost lost. Numero Group.

Boleros y mas. Latin standards on a Wurlitzer. Stones Throw Records.

Texas songwriter and visual artist. Songs and sculptures cut from the same cloth.

Folk songs from mid-century Taiwan. Reissued by Akuphone.

The man who invented the power chord. Shawnee ancestry. The FBI once banned Rumble for fear it would incite violence.

Bahamian folk music channeling spirits. The Obeah Man himself. Mercury Records.

Mick Hucknall. A song about his mother leaving. Blue-eyed soul that means it.

Dan Bejar. Vancouver art-rock that never stays in one place long enough to be named.

Songs that move at the speed of weather. Smog. Drag City. The voice that knows what it knows.

Fort Worth soul revival. A voice that sounds like it was recorded in 1964 and somehow got here anyway.

Wrote See You Later Alligator at seventeen. The Band covered his songs. The swamp's best-kept secret.

Yellow Magic Orchestra founder. Japanese Americana from a parallel timeline. Light In The Attic.

High priestess of soul. Sang Langston Hughes. Sang the movement. Sang what everyone else was too afraid to say.

Italian library music. Film scores for movies about mothers and friends and summer.

A working man's soul music. Questions asked quietly. Still in the Navy when he recorded his first album.

Classic Egyptian vocalist. A voice from Cairo's golden age of cinema and song.

Eric Bachmann. Merge Records. Songs worn down to their bones so only the necessary parts remain.

Josh Tillman. Sub Pop. A wedding song about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain.

One-man band from Florida. Played a bone. Sang through a toilet paper tube. Mississippi Records.

The music that came down the mountain. Blind since infancy, a guitarist who changed what American folk music could be.

Wrote Freight Train at eleven. Played a right-handed guitar upside down and backwards. Smithsonian Folkways.

Recorded in 1928. Farmed for thirty-five years. Rediscovered in 1963. The gentlest revolutionary.

1970s Bobo-Dioulasso dance band. West African highlife meeting Latin horns and funk rhythm.

The Mayor of MacDougal Street. Taught Dylan how to be Dylan. Brecht and Weill sung by a man who knows exactly what every word costs.