NCW Libraries

The music on Deeper Well, the seven-time Grammy winner's fifth album, is almost chimeric. Rolling acoustic guitars, puffy clouds of strings and synth, warm bass punctuations, layered harmonies, moments of Celtic melody and plenty of room on the tracks for Musgraves' silvery vocals. On the bright, almost folky title track, the 30-something songstress surveys her life and priorities, recognizing what feeds her, drains her and even examines the childhood...

Aaron Lewis grew up in Springfield, Vermont, listening to his grandparents' Country 8-track tapes. Those roots inspired the multi-platinum Staind founder to return to his origins for the No. One Billboard Country Album debuts Town Line and Sinner, as well as Billboard's No. One Hot Country Song debut "Am I The Only One." Lewis has put a traditionalist brand on his outlier Country, and with his new album, the fifteen million-selling workingman's star...

"Taylor Swift always knew she wanted to be a country music artist, so at age thirteen, she convinced her parents to move their family out of Pennsylvania to Nashville. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, Taylor wrote songs about teenage heartbreak and fitting in with her peers, and she performed these and other tunes at open mic nights and karaoke events. Breaking into the music industry took longer than she expected because record executives...

"Seventeen-year-old aspiring journalist Darren Purchase has been a lifelong fan of country music legend Decklee Cassel, who's as famous for her classic hits as she is for her partnership with songwriter Mickenlee Hooper. The same Mickenlee who mysteriously backed out of the limelight at the height of their careers, never to be heard from again. Now Decklee's televised funeral marks the unveiling of her long-awaited time capsule. But when it's revealed...

"Set in a West Country farming village, The House of Broken Bricks lays bare the complexities of day-to-day life for a mixed-race family. Jess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in a city where she easily blends in into a creaking house on a floodplain where predatory birds hover over fields, eels coil in the river mud, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider and no one looks like...

A country music superstar ditches his beard, ponytail-- and temporarily, his career-- to reclaim his down-home country roots and to find the kind of love he'd only sung about.

Soon after a rising young singer-songwriter gets involved with a fallen, emotionally unstable country star, the pair embark on a career resurrection tour steered by her husband/manager, that includes a beauty-queen-turned-singer. Between the concerts, romantic entanglements and old demons threaten to derail them all.