Brandi has announced her regional tour dates via her website. Expect a playlist from her latest heart-warmer Bear Creek.

Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Ashley Monroe, Like A Rose:

The high lonesome sound of Ashley Monroe’s Tennessee voice on the title song of her album there serves as a clear signal that she’s working within a tradition that extends back well beyond her twenty-something years on Earth. One of Monroe’s collaborators on that song was Guy Clark, a 70-something Texas country veteran who’s often too tough-guy romantic for his own good. But “Like a Rose” takes what could have been a treacly organizing premise — that the singer has had a rough life but come thru it smelling like a rose — and avoided the cliché I just used.

At his core, Tyler Lyle is an old soul from his rural hometown of Carrollton, Georgia.

His voice has the sultry candor of age, with lyrics that are both original and boldly charming. Tyler’s husky, impressive vocals have already given way to three finished products: Some Songs EP, the online only Bare EP, and most recently, Notes From The Parade. With the use of a dizzying array of instruments — trumpets, banjo, flugelhorn, cymbals, glockenspiel, guitar, and harmonica — Tyler’s latest release emerges as a soundtrack for life. As such, his bluesy tracks suggest a slower, more earnest time. For an audience hungry for more than just catchy lyrics, Tyler Lyle appeals as a genuine artist.

Laura Marling’s recent ukulele-backed tribute to the road, “Not Done Traveling,” was an update worth noting in the meantime, but it should be said there’s a much bigger project brewing from the British singer-songwriter: a new album, the follow-up to A Creature I Don’t Know is on tape and set for release next year. We’ve heard new songs live (not necessarily tunes on the record, though I’d bet they are), and October interviews with Marling suggest the next effort with producer/collaborator/solo artist Ethan Johns finds her taking an intriguing next step.Speaking to mxdwn, Marling says:

We’ve done a lot with resonance. I like low resonance; I think that’s interesting, when you can barely hear a tone underneath a tone. And also because there’s a lot to do with characters in this new album, we’ve kind of assigned a sound to each character that reappears throughout the album whenever they’re relevant.

She added that LP4 could be a “challenge” for some. “It’s a long album, you’d have to be a committed listener to get through it. But I don’t think it’s bad, it’s just quite long.” Needless to say as a fan of the first three, we’re up for any challenge in store. Above, revisit last year’s record via performances of two of its songs in a recent clip for Sideshow Alley.

It’s easy to understand why Phillip Phillips has ridden on the success of his Mumford-y smash “Home” for seven straight months. After becoming the unofficial anthem of the summer Olympics, the strummy coronation single earned a second life on the chart, and over the course the fall, became a commercial powerhouse.

Now, as the year comes to a close, sales for “Home” stand at nearly 3 million, it’s still in the Top 10 of Billboard‘s Hot 100, and it has helped to launch the American Idol winner’s debut album The World from the Side of the Moon successfully. (The disc has sold 377,000 copies in its first four weeks.) And yet, the time has come for Phillips to look beyond “Home.”

“The second single will be ‘Gone, Gone, Gone’” Phillips recently told Yahoo! Canada Music. “It’s a good little love song. Todd Clark and Derek Fuhrmann, they wrote [it] and brought it to me and I thought it was a beautiful song. The more I’ve played it live, the more I’ve made it more my own and people seem to really connect with it and really enjoy it so I’m excited to see how that song’s going to do.”

While I’d guess that Phillips may be a bit disappointed that his second single, due in early 2013, is a song he had no hand in writing (he wrote or co-wrote 9 of the 12 songs on his album), this is absolutely the correct decision by Interscope.

On Wednesday, The Lumineers To Perform on Saturday Night Live was a top story. Here is the recap: The Lumineers have signed on to be the musical guests on the January 19th episode of Saturday Night Live which will be hosted by Jennifer Lawrence.

The band will be appearing to promote their Grammy-nominated self-titled debut album,

The band will also be hitting the road later this month for a series of live appearances in Washington DC, New York, Boston and Pittsburgh. 

Click to go to the band’s website