Boulevards, Lera Lynn, Amy Millan, and more on Mountain Stage

We are excited to return to the Peoples Bank Theatre in Marietta, OH!

Available at peoplesbanktheatre.com/event/

Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been one of the most beloved programs in public radio history. Eclectic and authentic, the show’s varied guests have included iconic artists from John Prine and Townes Van Zandt to Wilco and Phish. Under the leadership of Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea since 2021, Mountain Stage continues to bring surefire energy and music discovery to parts known and unknown.

Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode is recorded in front of a live audience and can be heard every week on nearly 300 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org.

When Electric Cowboy was released, I asked myself what are my intentions for the next release? I needed to make sure I made a record that sounds like me and reflects my live show. I did not want to be a carbon copy and make the same record as my favorite influences growing up. The objective was to make a record that was creative, raw, infectious , syncopated basslines, tight drums, punchy horns that brings a soulful element to the funk. I knew that in order to achieve a sound that was authentic to me was to team up with funk producer Sergio Rios (Orgone) (Say she she) (Neal Francis). This is not a soul revival record, this is southern fried carolina funk!

In February 2022, Boulevards, the project led by musician Jamil Rashad, released its fourth studio album, Electric Cowboy: Born in Carolina Mud. That album culminated years of slow building and provided the Raleigh, N.C. native the breakthrough he deserved. After an 18 month rigorous run, he wasn’t ready to take a deserved break.

Upon Electric Cowboy’s release, Rashad’s creative ideas continued to flow. He reached out to friends and collaborators, like writer Gentle Nature and J.J. Whitefield of German funk group The Poets of Rhythm and began to mold his new ideas into full-fledged songs. After the campaign for Electric Cowboy wound down, Rashad returned to his home state of North Carolina and got to work on his fifth studio album.

As the song ideas flowed, Rashad explored the importance of self-reflection and personal experiences, in particular themes of love and vulnerability. Drawing from that prism and channeling the joy of his recent engagement, the artist had plenty of positive momentum heading into the recording sessions.

“After Electric Cowboy was released, I thought hard about my intentions for the next album,” shares Rashad. “The objective was to make a record that echoes the spirit of my live shows and reflects the truest ‘me.’”

Carolina Funk: Barn Burner on Tobacco Road is a tip of the cap to his home and will be released by the New West Records imprint Normaltown Records. At Killion Studios in Los Angeles, Rashad teamed with producer Sergio Rios (Neal Francis, Say She She, Orgone) to create an album chock full of a memorable uptempo “Southern Fried Funk.” For the first time in Rashad’s career, he recorded live and straight to tape, capturing the true essence of these songs, which was brought to life by Dan Hastie (keys), Dale Jennings (bass) and Sam Halterman (drums).

“Working with Sergio Rios as a producer allowed me to refine my vision while preserving the raw, infectious sound that feels most authentic to me,” Rashad adds.

With an assist from Whitefield, Rashad captured the raw, crunchy sounds he’d been hoping to incorporate into his recordings. The album also features the handy work of Mike Buckley (Daptones, Budos Band, Jalen N’gonda), who composed the horn parts, Blake Rhein (Durand Jones & The Indications), and Kendra Morris (Colemine Records). This is the album that finally captures the energy of Rashad’s high octane live show onto wax. Black Pumas virtuoso Adrian Quesada and Will Grantham mixed Carolina Funk: Barn Burner on Tobacco Road, giving Rashad the exact sound he sought to capture.

Rashad points to “What We Live For” as one of his favorite songs from the 10-song collection. In the past, he’s hidden his personal lyrics underneath the power of his groove-laden instrumentals. Not here. He admits that hearing the finished version gave him chills and he teared up a bit. At its heart, it’s what Carolina Funk is about: celebrating love. As tender as “What We Live For” is, Rashad didn’t want to get too hung up on sentimentality. The song’s rhythm and melody is club-ready with its funk-soul.

The same goes for “Run and Move.” Describing the fears of vulnerability in a relationship, Rashad brings an astute perspective to describing human nature. Despite it being one of his favorite songs, he admits that it was one of the toughest to track in the studio. Even so, the collection captures Rashad’s ethos as an artist and is his most well-rounded to date.

Like any great artist, Rashad writes in a fashion that is true to himself, yet has the ability for his rapidly expanding fan base to relate to. With Carolina Funk: Barn Burner on Tobacco Road, Rashad shows that he can’t stop and won’t stop channeling his creativity into funk-powered hits.

Lera Lynn is an acclaimed singer-songwriter whose haunting voice, cinematic soundscapes, and genre-defying style have earned her a devoted cult following. Blending Americana, indie rock, folk noir, and art pop noir, she has crafted an unmistakable sonic identity that is both timeless and ever-evolving. Lynn first gained wide recognition for her music featured on HBO’s True Detective (Season 2), where her atmospheric songs and on-screen performance left an indelible mark on viewers.

A fiercely independent artist, Lynn has built a career on thoughtful songwriting, poetic lyricism, and meticulous production, all while nurturing a direct relationship with her fans, running her own independent label, Ruby Range Records. Beyond her own albums, she has composed and produced music for video games, podcast theme songs, and films, collaborated with a vast array of artists, and produced records for others. Her music has been placed in countless films and television series, further cementing her ability to create evocative, cinematic soundscapes. On stage, she has toured from California to Eastern Europe and everywhere in between, delivering mesmerizing performances that captivate audiences worldwide.

Now, 10 years after True Detective, Lynn revisits that pivotal era with True Sessions, a four-song EP reimagining the music that introduced her to a wider audience. This special release serves as a heartfelt gift to her fans, offering a glimpse into how far she has come while honoring the raw, moody essence of those songs.

But Lynn is not one to dwell on the past. This spring, she will officially announce her ninth studio album, Comic Book Cowboy, set for release on September 19. Expanding her stylistic repertoire while sharpening her singular sound, this album plays with contrasts—gritty realism versus idealized heroism, and the absurdity of living up to a fantasy. It explores the tension between self-perception and the roles society expects us to play, capturing the struggle of wrestling with one’s own mythology.

Both self-aware and even subtly comedic at times, Comic Book Cowboy stands out as an anthem for anyone striving for authenticity in a world so full of expectations. It delivers the moody, immersive textures Lera Lynn fans have come to love while pushing into uncharted sonic territory. Lush production, dynamic arrangements, and deeply introspective lyrics weave together to create an album that feels both familiar and refreshingly new.

With Comic Book Cowboy, Lynn reaffirms why she remains one of the most compelling independent artists of her generation—an artist unafraid to evolve, take risks, and forge her own path, all while staying deeply connected to the fans who have supported her every step of the way.

The first solo album from Amy Millan in over 15 years, I Went To Find You emerged from the kind of once-in-a-lifetime serendipity that alters our experience of the world. After crossing paths with award-winning musician/composer Jay McCarrol in fall 2023, the Montreal-based singer/songwriter felt a sense of musical communion reminiscent of the elation she’d first accessed in singing with her father as a little girl—a connection severed when her dad was killed in a car accident just before her fifth birthday. As she began creating songs with McCarrol, Millan slowly realized that an unconscious desire to sustain that feeling had informed her lifelong devotion to music and her many cherished collaborations over the years, including her work as co-lead vocalist of beloved indie-pop band Stars and a satellite member of iconic collective Broken Social Scene.

“I so clearly remember being a kid and putting on my pajamas and being so excited for night time, because that’s when my dad and I would sing together,” Millan says. “Ever since then I’ve tried to make my life an arrow back to that feeling, but I didn’t fully understand that until now.”

In selecting a title for her third solo effort, she chose to honor that sense of revelation and self-discovery.“A lot of this record had me looking into my past for clues on who I have become and why,” says Millan, who names longtime musician-friends like Feist, Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin, Metric’s James Shaw, Stars’ Chris Seligman, and her husband and Stars bandmate Evan Cranley among the musical kin who’ve profoundly enriched her life. “The ‘you’ of the title is the people I found, the peopleI went looking for after they’d gone—and the ‘you' is the person you become when all these components align.”

I Went To Find You began taking shape soon after she and McCarrol first linked up at Dream Serenade(an annual fundraiser hosted by singer/songwriter Hayden at Toronto’s Massey Hall). At the suggestion ofMcCarrol (who won a Canadian Screen Award for composing the score to the critically acclaimed 2023 film BlackBerry), Millan stepped in for Feist and joined Hayden for a duet on his bittersweet and breezy“On a Beach,” with McCarrol singing backup. “Before the show Jay and I went backstage and sang the song together, and I had this visceral reaction that almost felt like my body going into shock,” she recalls.“I realized I’d spent so long trying to find that vocal harmony that puts me back into a place of bliss and safety.”

After returning to Montreal, Millan got a call from her best friend and Metric front woman Emily Haines, who urged her to reach out to McCarrol about potentially working together on the long-awaited follow-up to her 2009 sophomore solo LP Masters of the Burial. McCarrol, a devoted fan of Millan’s, asked her to send over some song ideas—a turn of events that quickly paved the way for the making of I Went To Find You’s centerpiece, the quietly majestic “Make way for waves.” “I sent Jay the first verse and a couple weeks later he sent a demo back, and I was blown away by how beautiful it was,” says Millan. “There’s something so cinematic about the way he writes and so much drama in his music, and it created such avast canvas for me to lay my feelings out and use my voice in new ways.”

Over the next two months, Millan and McCarrol continued their remote collaboration and soon arrived at an album’s worth of material sculpted from a gorgeously detailed sonic palette—an element Millan likens to “that feeling when it’s high noon in the summertime and you’re by the water, and the surface picks up all that light and makes it look like diamonds.”Produced by McCarrol, engineered by Jace Lasek (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Wolf Parade), mixed in part by Peter Katis (The National, Interpol), and recorded at Lost River (an idyllic studio deep in the Laurentian forest), I Went To Find You is a consummate vessel for Millan’s delicate yet powerful vocal work, and merges its luminous sound with her most candid songwriting to date. “When I look back at all the songs I’ve ever written, there’s a lot of moments where I’m expressing sadness about a lost love when really there’s a much greater loss at the core,” says Millan. “This record felt like the first time I was able to address that loss without clouding it all in lyrics about boys and whiskey.”

Made with a close-knit lineup of musicians including Cranley—with McCarrol and Lasek also contributing on a number of instruments—I Went To Find You explores such complex and intimate themes as the salvation of longstanding friendship (on the album-opening “Untethered,” partly inspired by Drew),the narrowly escaped consequences of certain reckless behavior in her youth (“The overpass”), and the precarious kinship formed from shared trauma (“Don valley”). And on lead single “Wire walks,” Millan delivers an ineffably lovely reflection on emotional damage and eventual self-acceptance, ornamenting the brightly textured track with lilting grooves, lush violin lines, and Cranley’s tender performance ontrombone. “There’s a lyric in ‘Ageless Beauty’ that says ‘Time will hold its promise,’ meaning that time will come and fix everything so you end up totally healed,” says Millan, referring to a song from Stars’ 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire. “But after two decades of singing that lyric I realized, ‘Or, maybe it won’t.’Maybe instead of trying to dodge the wound so you can turn into some better version of yourself, you should just lean into who you really are and who you’ve always been.”

As Millan reveals, much of I Went To Find You arose from an attempt at “contending with a mountain of a past and the forking river of the future.” “Everybody’s got their goals they set for themselves, but then once you reach them and feel a little more settled in life there’s that question of, ‘Now what?’” she says.“Meeting Jay was such a welcomed, unanticipated swerve in my creative world. I never expected to have the great luck of yet again experiencing such a profound musical connection with someone new. This brought me deep comfort—thinking that maybe the future is still a big unknown with open doors and opportunities I still get to dream up. So many of these songs are about being a woman moving through the world and trying to analyze all those feelings, and maybe in some way they’ll help others to move through their own lives too.”

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