Thomm Jutz has been quietly turning out some of the best bluegrass-adjacent songwriting around, so a three-way record with Lacy Green and Adam Wright is worth an ear. The pitch is the old one, friends in a room with chord charts and no overthinking, and the review suggests it worked. Good craft talk for anyone who likes to watch songs get built.

A good week to catch up: the IBMA awards just handed out their hardware, and Folk Alley's show threads Billy Strings and Sierra Hull together with Solas and a live session on air. It is the kind of playlist that drifts from Kentucky to Kerry without anyone noticing the border. Jake Blount's new material alone is worth the hour.

Punch Brothers have been on the road all autumn, and this time the stop is Carnegie Hall, the venue where a string band stops being a novelty and starts being chamber music. The review frames the night as a journey to an invented place, which fits a band that has spent the year playing its new all-instrumental record. Worth a read to see how the set was built.

The headline grabber in No Depression's weekly roots-news column is a fresh batch of older material from Welch and Rawlings, whose archival digging has been one of the nicer slow projects in Americana. The roundup also comes with a Bandcamp Friday nudge, for anyone who likes their money to reach the musicians. Pour a coffee and work down the list.

Yes, the Jorgensen date turned up here yesterday as a calendar listing; this is the Connecticut press giving the visit a proper write-up, and favourite-band coverage gets in on its own ticket. The headline promises a scenic route, which for a band currently touring without lyrics feels apt. Tonight's the night, for anyone within driving distance of Storrs.

Straight from the editor-in-chief's own tip line, and the news is the best kind: a new solo record from one of the finest fiddlers working, with a pre-save button and absolutely nothing else to go on. Coming only months after North Node, her duo outing with sister Natalie, it suggests the Haas household is in a productive season. No title, no date, just a promise; tour dates meanwhile live with Hawktail.

Any week that I'm With Her tops a roundup is a good week, and here they get first billing ahead of Jack Blocker and the rest of the pack. The feed only carries the headline, so the details are behind the click, but the trio of Aoife O'Donovan, Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz rarely shows up anywhere without something worth hearing.

Eighty years after Carter and Ralph worked out what bluegrass harmony could sound like, and weeks after their Country Music Hall of Fame induction, the tribute album arrives on cue. Alison Brown and Garry West at the controls is a good sign that this will be a players' record rather than a souvenir. Listen for how differently the guests handle Rank Strangers.

Nobody has earned the right to a book about late-life creativity more thoroughly than a man who is still working at it. The review makes it sound less like a memoir than an evening on the bus, sly and cranky in about equal parts. The roll call of absent friends is what gives it weight: Cash, Haggard, Jennings and more.

The fourth Punch Brothers sighting on the tour calendar in a week, and the rule says a favourite artist always makes the cut, so here we are, unrepentant. This one's a New England date, in a campus hall they know, so if you're anywhere near Connecticut the Saturday is worth keeping free.

A fiddle player with a box of old mail is a dangerous thing, in the good way. Scheinman found the postcards and made a record that argues with the distance between then and now. Worth noticing how much of the praise here is about time rather than tunes.

Not string-band territory, but anyone who cares how American music got assembled should spend time here. Morton picked up opera house and ragtime as a boy in New Orleans and spent the rest of his life insisting he had invented jazz, which remains the best-documented boast in the genre. The early sides are where you can hear the seams.

Chris Thile, a man rarely short of things to sing, has gone quiet on purpose. This fall's Punch Brothers shows are billed as all instrumental, which is exactly the sort of dare this band enjoys, and the headline suggests the local press got the joke. New England readers should note the Vermont date is imminent.

Another stop on the tour that keeps surfacing here, and we are not complaining. This one is just a public radio calendar listing, so there is no review to read, only the mild pleasure of a record from 2016 getting a birthday lap around the country. Good excuse to put the album back on.

A follow-up to last week's Irish Times interview, this time in Hot Press, and the question has sharpened from how strange it feels to why the platforms aren't catching it. Hayes has a fair point: services that can identify a song from a few seconds of humming apparently can't tell when the artist never sang it. The pool had only the headline, so the detail sits behind the link.

A local listings story, not a feature, but McEvoy is on the always-goes-in list and the rule is the rule. Worth noticing that a Dublin songwriter with a catalogue this deep is still working the small rooms of the English Midlands, which is exactly where songs like hers land best.

Nothing but a calendar entry, and Pennsylvania is a long way from Penang, yet a listing is still proof the band is out on the road. Consider this a status report on the tour, filed by a man who will not be attending but would like it noted.

Twenty years in, Kristian Matsson turns back to the fiddle-rooted traditional music he grew up around in central Sweden. The New England and Irish fiddle tradition has a Nordic cousin here, and it is worth hearing what a songwriter does when he finally stops avoiding it. No Depression lets him tell it himself.

Songwriting-craft reading rather than a release plug, although the album did land the same day. The interesting bit is the starting point: a child who sang everything exactly as recorded and took no liberties at all. Anyone who has learned fiddle tunes off a record will know where that road goes, and how long it takes to leave it.