aj Hoge

With two decades of albums under his belt, the Nashville-based, warmly gruff singer-songwriter Will Hoge draws on a wealth of experience in the business. “When you're making records early on and you're working with big labels, the expectations are so big, because people start thinking about radio and formats and stardom and all of these things,” he tells Apple Music. “It's just like, ‘Well, you don't want to be too loud or too slow or too fast or too rocking or too quiet.’” Hoge applies that hard-earned perspective to his self-produced 11th studio LP Tiny Little Movies. “We can really just focus on what feels good,” he says. “There's some really, really quiet songs on this record, and I think that's how those songs should sound. There's also really loud, rocking songs, and that's how they should sound. I don't think you have to try to file down the edges of things to make them palatable for every single person. I think that's where you start to lose.”

AJ Lee & Blue Summit are an award-winning, energetic, and technically jaw-dropping bluegrass band quickly rising on the national roots music scene. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the group met as teenagers, picking together as kids at local bluegrass festivals until one day, they decided they would be a band. Their Signature Sounds debut, City of Glass is a spellbinding collection of original songs and covers that’s just as much country soul and gritty, bluesy Americana as it is rock club and festival-ready string band fare, all framed through a California folk lens. City of Glass not only focuses on AJ Lee’s songwriting and once in a generation voice, but also features the Bakersfield sound of guitarist and second lead vocalist Scott Gates on three tracks along with the guitar wizardry and indie rock influence of Sullivan Tuttle, the younger brother of Bluegrass superstar Molly Tuttle.