Today's Top Tune

Austin-based Charley Crockett is on the short list for Artist of the Year at the Americana Music Association Award at Americana Fest in Nashville in September and he’s in great company.

LA artist Jessica Pratt has been rounding up fans for a dozen years as a talented songwriter armed with an acoustic guitar and a soft-yet-penetrating voice. On her fourth album, Here in the Pitch, Pratt opted for “big panoramic sounds that make you think of the ocean and California” via nine songs that incorporate a range of instruments like the glockenspiel, timpani, baritone saxophone, and flute alongside her hypnotizing vocals. “Life Is” delivers a panoramic scope.

Ok, we get it. LA has a lot of characters who are easy to poke fun at, and now they’ve got an anthem all their own. Written in our fair city by Australian electronic duo Flight Facilities , “Days of the Week” features cheeky lyrics by Aramis Johnson of Enumclaw.

“What started out as a joke during a three-hour studio session with Aramis of Enumclaw has turned into one of our guiltiest pleasures: A modern-day ode to Los Angeles and the people who make it shine,” the band tells KCRW.

You may know Cor.Ece as the LA-based, Grammy-winning co-writer on Beyonce’s mind-boggling Renaissance album, but here he intersects with Brooklyn-based DJ, songwriter, and producer Bad Colours for a heart-thumping, propulsive beat on their new project, Been Here Before. The mix is powerful, laden with soulful house and disco, as exemplified on the album’s opening banger “Say Yea.”

Ten Fold is the new album by nuanced singer Yaya Bey , and if you are looking for a chill vibe from an artist with something to say, you’re on the right track. Somewhere between the sound of Roberta Flack and Nina Simone, we tune into Yaya’s frequency on ‘the evidence.’

Cheo, a founding member of the Venezuelan trio Los Amigos Invisibles, has decided to revisit and re-record some of the songs he wrote for the group, now with his new band. “Suddenly, one morning I woke up and thought ‘I miss playing these songs, I don’t have to get on a plane to play it, they are my kids and I love them,’” Cheo confides. “So I started strumming the guitar remembering them; I thought it would be painful, but nope… Why would it be painful? They always made me smile.”

The gorgeous new album My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall captures the work of one most illustrious of the handful of Black Country songwriters (let alone a woman) in Nashville. Randall’s catalog includes work with legendary artists like Trisha Yearwood and Johnny Cash but draws inspiration from the work of Ray Charles, Charley Pride, Lil Hardin Armstrong, and DeFord Bailey, to name a few.

Have you heard about Yannis & The Yaw ? Well, let us introduce you: They’re the intriguing collaboration of Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis and the late, great Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen.

Tuvan throat singers Huun-Huur Tu , producer-composer Carmen Rizzo , and two-time Grammy-winner Dhani Harrison converge for their first-ever collaboration. Their new album is more than the sum of its parts, at the crossroads of different styles, rhythms, and languages through which they celebrate beauty, harmony, love, and kindness, all through the lens of vocals without words. “Dreamers In The Field,” a lilting and peaceful composition, is the title track.

We’re celebrating our mothers this weekend, and to honor them we turn to the timeless singer Alex Cuba , who pays tribute to his own mother and the work she puts into her delicious dinners, to which no one else comes close. Not only did he write the song for her, but Alex invites his mama to sing with him on “No Cocina Cualquiera”