Mark Erelli rose to the occasion with a writing streak, generating well over 30 new songs to choose from for his newest record. He ultimately gravitated toward those that wrestled with the questions we encounter in the “middle,” the certain point in life when you reflect on your hopes and dreams and what you thought were certainties. “One glance at the headlines and anyone can see that we are questioning the stories we’ve told ourselves and, in many cases, they aren’t proving as durable as they once seemed,” he explains. ”Do the things I took for granted as truth when I was younger still hold up? What can I still lean on? Am I strong enough for the ones I love to lean on me? The answers, if there even are answers, can be both unsettling and reaffirming.” Erelli has forged a colorful career by making the art of “being everywhere all the time” seem effortless. It’s hard to think of another artist who seems equally at home serving as a sideman for GRAMMY-winning artists like Paula Cole, Marc Cohn, and Josh Ritter, or producing albums for Lori McKenna, as he does writing and producing his own material, like last year’s “By Degrees,” on which he was joined by a host of voices including Rosanne Cash and Sheryl Crow.

With her stunning new album, ‘Violets as Camouflage,’ Mary Bragg examines that vulnerability in all its delicate splendor, holding it up like a diamond to the light as she carefully studies each sparkling facet. Self-produced and self-engineered at Bragg’s home studio in Nashville, TN, the fourteen-song collection is both beautiful and blunt, the work of an artist only just beginning to embrace the full range of her talents. She writes with a keen eye for detail and an extraordinary sense of empathy, populating the album with a cast of characters grappling with pain and loneliness and longing and desire, questioning when to dig in and when to give up as they struggle to cope with hardship and loss. The arrangements here are rich and rootsy, pulling from country, folk, and blues to weave a timelessly organic blend around Bragg’s breathy, evocative voice as she sings about the kind of raw emotion that might have seemed impossible to address even just a few years ago.