Last summer, Kentucky singer/songwriter Cole Chaney played Tyler Childers’ Healing Appalachia music festival. On stage at the Boyd County Fairgrounds, which were built on top of reclaimed coal strip mines — and the very same land where Chaney’s fellow teenagers used to go to run trucks, light bonfires, and mess around away from adult supervision — Chaney performed his song “Shadow of the Mountain,” the title track from his 2025 sophomore album:

I was barely a boy when the devil crept in
First he took my Pa and then hе took my friends
Be it by way of a pill or by way of a mine
Thеre were many good soul would be relieved of their life

In an early video released on Western AF’s YouTube, Kiki Cavazos sits by the Flathead River in Montana strumming her guitar at sunset. Fire crackles in the background as Cavazos sings low and earnest, facing the river more than the camera, “Heart slain, hard rain and I’m walkin’ home / Five blocks, it ain’t far, but always long / It’s the end of the song, you never sang along.” Her song “Cold Love” is small scale heartbreak, simple and true: “A cold love ain’t no love at all / Now it’s too hard to call.”

“Who heals the healer? / Who bandages the bleeder / who will sing to the empty theater,” wonders singer/songwriter Abbie McAllister in her song “Jester.” McAllister writes inquisitive, cerebral songs, which she delivers in a high, clear voice, riveting for its airy lilt, and readily setting up the 21-year-old West Virginian as a magnetic musical force. In “Jester,” an allegory for self-worth, she imagines both sides of a defiant conversation between a king and his court jester, singing, “slip your shoes on, and dance until you’re done / waiting alone, by a throne, with freedom as your gun.” Delightfully unexpected, the song lands in part because of its theatricality.

Singer/songwriter John R. Miller’s just returned home with some 30 used CDs. Over the phone, from the thick of the tedium of ripping the disks to his computer for his personal music collection, he’s reveling in the haul: The Jesus and Mary Chain, Tom Waits, Sparklehorse, The Outfield’s Playing the Field, Sunny Day Real Estate, Iron Maiden, Levon Helm, and a couple of sealed Replacements CDs. Like his listening tastes, Miller’s artistry resists any neat descriptor, and he chafes at the country label he’s sometimes stuck with, preferring folk, if necessary; Miller is wary of simplistic assumptions.