Mary Gauthier As she has so eloquently accomplished over the past 25 years, acclaimed singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier has used her art once again to traverse the uncharted waters of the past few years. “I’m the kind of songwriter who writes what I see in the world right now,” she affirms. Thankfully, amid dark storms of pandemic loss, she found and followed the beacon of new love: Her gift to us, the powerful Dark Enough to See the Stars, collects ten sparkling jewels of Gauthier songcraft reflecting both love and loss. Jaimee Harris Jaimee Harris turned 30 during the pandemic. It’s a milestone that is a rite of passage even during normal times. But for this Texas-born singer-songwriter, it came in the midst of one of the strangest and most tumultuous periods in American history. When the world stopped during lockdown, Harris, like many others, found herself gazing back into the past, ruminating on the nature of her hometown and family origins, and reckoning with their imprint on her. The term ‘nostalgia’ derives from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain), and if Harris’s Boomerang Town can be regarded as a nostalgic album, it is only nostalgic in the sense that the longing for home is a desire to return to the past and heal old wounds. Carrie Rodriguez Carrie Rodriguez, a composer, violinist, and singer from Austin, Texas, finds beauty in the cross-pollination of diverse traditions. Her last full-length solo recording, the bilingual Lola, was heralded as “the perfect bicultural album,” and was included in NPR’s best albums of 2016 as well Rolling Stone’s Best Country albums of the year. In 2017, Carrie founded a highly acclaimed ongoing concert series which resides at the historic State Theatre in Austin, Texas called Laboratorio that both celebrates and explores Latinx culture and its contribution to the American experiment. Her most recent work has been as a composer/lyricist for an original musical, ¡Americano!, chronicling the true story of an inspiring DREAMer named Tony Valdovinos, which enjoyed a successful 6 week run off-broadway at New York City’s New World Stages in June of ’22, and also earned Rodriguez a nomination for a ’22 Drama Desk award for Outstanding Music.