Mark Rubin is a legend from back in the alt country days, known for his pioneering work in the 90s with his band The Bad Livers in Austin. While he’s never left behind his earlier punk bonafides, his new work in recent years, billed as Mark Rubin - Jew of Oklahoma, has been more focused on the complexity of his identity as a Jewish person of Southern descent. With his new album, The Triumph of Assimilation, he masterfully melds old-school roots music with Yiddish protest songs and brutally acerbic ruminations on the long history of American anti-semitism.

With its bright, circling musical patterns, “The Calla Lily Song” is the perfect song to listen to after a long, cold winter, for it contains the promise of new beginnings and the wonder that accompanies the renewal of life.

The bright, but oddly mournful, opening guitar notes of Vivian Leva & Riley Calcagno’s deeply affecting “Good and Gone” grab us right away and vibrate in our hearts, naming every moment we’ve yearned for lost connections, muddled about in a ragged search for completion, regretted leaving but longingly looked back, or run back home with jubilant ambivalence.

The effervescent soul of Mark Erelli's “Handmade” vivaciously affirms that anything worth doing takes time and patience and care and love.

If you’re looking for a breath of fresh air from the frozen North, turn to French-Canadian band Rosier, whose new album, Légerement, merges the balladry of old France with fresh new sounds from Montréal’s streets. Made up of the children of prominent folklorists and master traditional artists, Rosier have grown up deep in the Québécois tradition and have internalized the old songs in a way that only an artist who listened to this music in the womb can understand.

North Texas songwriter, Jackson Scribner has one of those intriguing voices that make you lean in and listen. His voice runs atop a meandering melody (has he been listening to Mary Gauthier?) on his new song “Family Gatherings,” which Folk Alley is happy to debut today.

Michael Doucet’s ferocious, almost, savage sawing of his fiddle opens this harrowing minor chord mantra about the fear, the claustrophobia, the anxiety, the isolation we’ve all been feeling since the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly around the world.

Robby Hecht is releasing a gorgeous and poignant orchestral version of "The Ends and the Means," just when we need it most. Ben Plotnick’s violin and viola and Kaitlyn Raitz’s cello introduce the song with soaring walls of sound that lay the somber foundation for Hecht’s luminous storytelling and searching meditations on human nature and its foibles.

Amanda Anne Platt & the Honeycutters’ gorgeous new song, “Desert Flowers,” washes over us in cascading waves of sound that evoke aching loneliness, yearning hope, hungry nostalgia, and pining for life on the road. The exquisite poetry and sonic splendor of the song lingers and resonates in the soul long after the last note fades

San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet (David Harrington, violin; John Sherba, violin; Hank Dutt, viola; Sunny Yang, cello) reimagines “Which Side Are You On?” on their new album Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger (out on Smithsonian Folkways on October 9).