The folk and roots music world is full of cross-generational collaboration. But it usually takes the form of folksingers pairing up with other folksingers, borrowing from a long musical tradition. It's another thing altogether to take words written long ago and give them musical life. Leyla McCalla does just that on her new album, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes. Though the disc includes a balance of her original arrangements with Haitian folk songs, what's most intriguing is the way she built many of the songs around Hughes' poetry.

She's a poet, a writer, an artist, an entrepreneur and someone who knows how to use her voice articulately and effectively to encourage great social change. She is Ani DiFranco, a fantastically talented guitarist and a singer who first started making music in coffee shops when she was just 9 years old. Early in 2016, Ani was at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida and she graciously sat down with us to talk about politics, music and everything in between.

When the Indigo Girls dropped by the Folk Alley house during this year’s 30ASongwriters Festival, the duo was gearing up for the release of its 15th album, Look Long. As they played an intimate set that included two new songs and one old fan favorite, the duo had much to say between songs about the new album, their decades of collaboration, their most requested classic, and much more.

At the 2020 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida, with her new album 'Long Way Back: The Songs of Glimmer' on they way, Kim Richey dropped by the Folk Alley house to wrap her smooth vocals around some solo, acoustic versions of songs from her 1999 album, 'Glimmer.' She also talked about the way the songs felt to her then and how they feel now, with 20 more years of life to them.

At the end of the day, Vancouver native and banjo player Taylor Ashton says, his new album is “pretty fun.” The Romantic is a record that was 10 years in the making, a record that forced Ashton into the solo spotlight for the very first time in his music career, and a record that is, at its heart, about change. Taylor Ashton joined Folk Alley at the eclectic studio space at The Porches Inn in North Adams, Massachusetts to share some thoughts about the winding road his music has taken him on and to share songs from his debut release.

Kyshona Armstrong was a music therapist before she shifted her focus to pursuing a career in songwriting. Drawing from her background experience of using music as a healing force in people’s lives, the songwriting on Armstrong’s latest album, Listen., is heavy on transcendence and empowerment. During this year’s 30A Songwriters Festival, we talked with Armstrong about all of this and more. Tune in and discover one of Nashville’s finest up-and-coming singer-songwriters.

During the 2020 30A Songwriters Festival, we chatted with the Secret Sisters - Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle - about their latest album, Saturn Return, as they performed some of the album’s finest songs at the Folk Alley beach house.

By the time I spoke with Allison Moorer at the 30A Songwriters Festival in Florida this January, she had been touring in support of her memoir and accompanying full-length album, 'Blood' for several months and had become accustomed to the way her audiences were inclined to bond with her, across their own traumas. In this Folk Alley Session, we discussed all of this and more, and Moorer also gifted us with some excellent performances of songs from the album.

It’s hard not to throw around words like “prodigious” when talking about someone like Sierra Hull. At just 28 years old, she has already released five albums, worked with many of the biggest names in Nashville, taken home a half-dozen IBMA awards, and earned a Grammy nomination for her sparsely arranged mandolin-and-bass 2017 singer-songwriter album Weighted Mind. So, when one hears her sing about wanting to slow down for a bit after “25 trips around the sun” on the title track of her new album, 25 Trips, one might understand the impulse. Lucky for fans, the new album doesn’t actually slow the gifted mandolinist and songwriter down a bit.

During a Folk Alley Session at the 30A Songwriters Festival, we sat down with Hull for a conversation about all of this and more.

Fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves and banjo player Allison de Groot first started their collaboration over the term “old-time music” and realized, pretty quickly, that their definition of the term was very similar. We like the same kinds of music, they say, and so it was easy to become musical partners and share that love with other music fans. The duo put out a self-titled album in 2019 and they came to Beehive Productions Studios in Saranac Lake, NY to talk about it and about their musical partnership.