Muireann Bradley
Muireann Bradley is a 17 year old folk and blues guitarist and singer from Ballybofey in County Donegal. She specializes in performing acoustic fingerpicking country, piedmont, and ragtime blues styles from the 1920s, 30s and 40s as well as later folk, country and Americana.
Her influences include Blind Blake, Rev Gary Davis, Memphis Minnie, Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi John Hurt, Stefan Grossman, Ari Eisinger, John Fahey and Roy Bookbinder.
Her father started teaching her guitar when she was nine and then in 2020, she received an offer from Josh Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records to record an album after he saw her on youtube. In December 2023 this album “I kept these old Blues” was released to rave reviews.
Before the end of 2023 Muireann had played a live session on Highland Radio which went viral and recieved a standing ovation when she performed on Jools Holland’s annual New Year’s Eve Hootenanny.
In 2024 she did live sessions for Cerys Matthews’ BBC Radio 2 Blues Show, the Stephen McCauley show on BBC Radio Ulster and Ray Cuddihy’s Mise Sessions on RTE Radio 1. She also performed live on The Late Late Show and filmed sessions for Other Voices Anam in Ormond Castle and Acoustic Guitar Magazine.
“I Kept These Old Blues” reached number 1 on the Amazon download chart U.K. and got into the top 10 on the ITunes chart UK and broke into the Amazon New Folk Music Chart in the U.S. Not bad for a debut album in a genre now considered pretty uncommercial.
Hard copies of her album have been selling out everywhere leading to a second pressing with a third now on the way.
Muireann’s performances online have been viewed over 2 million times and her Irish and U.K. gigs have sold out.
Buffalo Nichols
On his second album, The Fatalist, Carl “Buffalo” Nichols does things with the blues that might catch you off guard. There’s 808 programming, chopped up Charley Patton samples, washes of synth. There’s a consideration of the fullness of the sonic stage and the atmospherics of the music that can only come with a long engagement with electronic music. But this is no gimmicky hybrid or attempt to turn the blues into 21st century music by simply dressing it with skittering hi-hats. Nichols’ vision for the blues is of a form of music that’s intimately tied to everyday life in 2023, something that’s reflected not only in the choice of instrumentation, but in the complexities of the songwriting and the gray areas his lyrics explore. This is music that comes straight from the present, and as such, it’s a reminder that the same shit that drove the first blues singers to pick up a guitar is still present behind the throbs of deep bass hits today. The Fatalist sounds unlike any blues record you’re likely to hear.
Of course, Nichols’ songwriting has always been firmly rooted in the present. He proved he could succeed on the music industry’s own blues terms on his self-titled 2021 debut, whose songs, Bandcamp Daily said, “seem to flow from some great repository of emotion and insight.” The Fatalist finds him digging deeper in search of answers to ever-more-complicated questions around responsibility and self-definition, his plainspoken lyrics both cutting and refreshing in their sincerity and refusal to accept pat solutions. Over a guitar line that blisters and pops with bright sunshine, he holds forth on the simple everyday power of love in “Love is All,” and when he shades his optimism with a clear-eyed view of “bad behavior in the canon of good men,” as he sings, his guitar line goes cloudy with the thought. He slowly walks around a broken relationship in “The Difference,” trying to find the faults. It’s a decidedly modern breakup song, one steeped in moral ambiguity. “I just don’t know the difference between love and sympathy,” he sings, before hoping his once-beloved “won’t forget the one who kept your ego fed.”
Still, Nichols rarely sounds like a blues singer. Like Leonard Cohen, he dominates these songs with his voice. His low, guttural baritone is high in the mix, and he sounds coiled, clenched tight. The slow drip of his songwriting lends The Fatalist an incredible amount of drama, which the production—at times dark and dewy and claustrophobic, at times zippy with light—further emphasizes.