’it comes from a joyful and wild place’

Inside the US singer-songwriter’s path from early DIY explorations to modern country-folk force

From Laurel Canyon to Chiswick High Road, from Rancho De La Luna to a warehouse in Tottenham, many of your favourite artists have been hard at work crafting the soundtrack of 2026. Over the next 10 pages, we bring you the inside track on forthcoming albums by STEVIE NICKS , COURTNEY BARNETT , ALABAMA SHAKES , THE ROLLING STONES , BILL CALLAHAN , BUZZCOCKS , LANA DEL REY , SUNN O))) , ROBERT PLANT , IRON & WINE and many more. “It’s a really special time for music…”

Ellie Taylor is known for finding humour in life’s chaos, but even she isn’t immune to the occasional mum meltdown. “In the run-up to last Christmas, everything was frantic and I filmed myself eating

In 1976, the revolutionary singer-songwriter LAURA NYRO returned from self-imposed exile. But her comeback confounded expectations, shifting away from the impassioned intimacies of her early albums to embrace more radical perspectives. Fifty years on, Nyro’s collaborators revisit her striking second act. “She was a hip American from the Bronx,” one friend and producer tells Rob Hughes. “But her soul was old.”

Everybody’s favourite Yorkshire lass tells Shereen Low why life in her sixties is better than ever

Christmas is… a really good time to spend time with family and see people’s faces when they open gifts. Christmas, when you’ve lost people, is never the most fun, but I try not to be the Grinch. Which