SPENCER DAY HOMETOWN: East Layton, Utah INFUENCES: Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, Paul Simon ALBUM: The Mystery of You, out now WEBSITE: spencerday.com Modern jazz singer and pianist Spencer Day learned the power of music during his troubled childhood. He grew up in a strict Mormon household in small-town Utah, and his parents divorced when he was young. His mother, a classical opera singer turned teacher, encouraged his love of music as a means of... 

GRACE POTTER She and her Nocturnals look a little more glam, but they’re grittier than ever   By Russell Hall  Back in 2010, fans of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals had a couple of big changes to deal with. First there were two new members, bass player Catherine Popper and guitarist Benny Yurco. But for listeners who had been following the band since it first hit the jam-band circuit in the early 2000s, the second change might have been even... 

FOLK FORWARD – ESSENTIAL FOLK DUST BOWL BALLADS (1940)  WOODY GUTHRIE  In a whirl of autobiography and activism, Guthrie reinvents American song. The Oklahoma native recorded this 1940 gem in two days, laying the groundwork for thousands of guitar-strumming followers. These are dusty, hard-bitten ballads that somehow gleam and soar more than 70 years after their creation. THE FREEWHEELIN’ BOB DYLAN (1963)  BOB DYLAN The folk bard’s... 

  FOLK FORWARD How a sound born of tradition is thriving in the modern day   By Peter Cooper It’s the other “F” word. And like its more obscene counterpart, it means different things to different people in different contexts. In the 1950s, it was sweater-vested political subversives. Later, it was shape-shifting musical revolutionaries and introspective singer-songwriters. It has been used to describe troubadours who specialize in journalistic... 

PAT METHENY The jazz guitarist’s new instrument might look funny—but it’s no joke No other jazz guitarist of the past four decades has done as much as Pat Metheny to broaden the definition of the instrument and expand its possibilities. Metheny reached out to listeners outside of the jazz mainstream with early releases like 1975’s Bright Size Life and 1980’s As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls, and he’s maintained a huge audience...