Jim Lauderdale, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Lilly Hiatt, and more on Mountain Stage

Ticket Information

All tickets to this show are e-tickets and will be emailed to you upon purchase. Open up the pdf and the QR code on your ticket will be scanned at the door. This event will also be offered as a livestream.

Mountain Stage Member tickets on sale: June 23 at 10AM ET

General Sales begin June 27 at 10AM ET

Watch the livestream!

Mountain Stage livestreams are free, however, there are some incredible folks out there who’d like to show their support through a donation-based, pay-what-you-want “ticket” for the livestream. This is a donation-based “ticket” to show some love for the program and is not a ticket to the live event.

You’ll be able to catch the show from the comfort of your home (or wherever you wish) Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025 – at 7 PM ET at mountainstage.org

About Mountain Stage

Since 1983, Mountain Stage has been the home of live music on public radio. Produced by West Virginia Public Broadcasting and distributed by NPR Music, each two-hour episode of Mountain Stage can be heard every week on nearly around 270 stations across America, and around the world via NPR Music and mountainstage.org.

Recorded in front of a live audience, Mountain Stage features performances from seasoned legends and emerging stars in genres ranging from folk, blues, and country; to indie rock, synth pop, world music, alternative, and beyond.

Jim Lauderdale

At any given time, you’re likely to find Jim Lauderdale making music, whether he’s laying down a new track in the studio or working through a spontaneous melody at his home in Nashville. And if he’s not actively crafting new music, he’s certainly thinking about it. “It's a constant challenge to try to keep making better and better records, write better and better songs. I still always feel like I'm a developing artist,” he says. This may be a surprising sentiment from a man who’s won two Grammys, released 34 full-length albums, and taken home the Americana Music Association’s coveted Wagonmaster Award. But forthcoming album Game Changer is convincing evidence that the North Carolina native is only continuing to hone his craft.

Operating under his own label, Sky Crunch Records, for the first time since 2016, Lauderdale recorded Game Changer at the renowned Blackbird Studios in Nashville, co-producing the release with Jay Weaver and pulling from songs he’d written over the last several years. “There's a mixture on this record of uplifting songs and, at the same time, songs of heartbreak and despair—because that's part of life as well,” he says. “In the country song world especially, that's always been part of it. That’s real life.”

Lauderdale would know: He’s been a vital part of the country music ecosystem since 1991, when he released his debut album and began penning songs for an impressively long roster of country music greats. “When I was a teenager wanting to be a bluegrass banjo player, I never would have imagined that I would get to work with people like Ralph Stanley, Robert Hunter, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, Lucinda Williams and John Oates ,” he muses. “Getting to work with them inspires me greatly to this day, and I know it always will.”

From rollicking guitar riffs on “That Kind of Life (That Kind of Day)” to the slow, sweet harmonies of “I’ll Keep My Heart Open For You,” Game Changer shows off Lauderdale’s ingenuity as a singer, songwriter, and producer—while reestablishing him as one of Americana’s most steadfast champions. "Country music is constantly evolving, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for steel guitar and a Telecaster," he says. "I have done my job on this record if people who love classic country feel like they can put it on, or have it in their collection, and it would fit right in."

Respecting the past doesn’t mean he’s not breaking new ground. “We’re All We’ve Got,” a co-write with Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris, offers a timely message about healing torn relationships at home and across the world. And “Friends Again,” a grinning number about rekindling a friendship, is fresh and forward-looking. At every turn, Lauderdale’s collaborative spirit and genuine love for the creative process reveal themselves in thoughtful, well-crafted songs sure to stand the test of time. "When everything works right, it's just magical to be able to hear them back," he says. "You feel, at least for those three-and-a-half minutes, like life makes sense.”

Aaron Lee Tasjan

Over his past decade plus of writing, recording, producing, Tasjan has released four excellent and critically acclaimed solo albums, toured the world over on his own and as the guitarist in the New York Dolls. He co-founded and co-wrote all of the material for the band Semi Precious Weapons. In 2021 he was nominated for a Grammy for his writing on Yola’s “Diamond Studded Shoes” and most recently, Tasjan produced Mya Byrne's album Rhinestone Tomboy (Kill Rock Stars Nashville) which helped to establish her as one of the first openly trans artists in Americana Music. He’s cultivated a brilliant and outstanding career to date already. But his forthcoming album Stellar Evolution (Blue Élan Records) is just what the title says. Tasjan’s new album is truly the sum of all of the parts of his diverse accomplishments to date while clearly heading in a brand-new direction. You can’t put any labels on Stellar Evolution except for it being a career defining work and a major leap forward for someone who’s never been afraid to push the boundaries of any and all expectations. As he set out to work on Stellar Evolution, Tasjan knew better than ever what was important to him. He’s been working his way towards a record like this since he first started making solo albums, with 2015’s In the Blazes. He stuck to an alt-country paradigm early in his career, though he knew that all of his favorite artists were the ones who broke out of their own boxes. His approach to that changed when he began to be more open about his queer identity. “I realized that part of being an artist means building a community. What do you want that community to look like? Who do you want to be a part of that community? As an artist, it’s your job to curate that, and to be a reflection of what you wanna see in the world,” he says. “I gradually got braver to share more and more of myself through each record, and the music just kinda had to follow suit.” Stellar Evolution is a record on which Tasjan’s songwriting is beholden to nothing — no expectations, and certainly no genre. Just the pure sense of wonder and discovery that had made him fall in love with music as a kid in Orange County, devouring it all with no understanding or care for what was “cool.” As he was writing, times became very dark for the queer community in the South. Bathroom bans and drag bans were enacted in Tennessee, while right-wing rhetoric around LGBT people became uglier and uglier. Tasjan knew this album needed to reflect the vibrant community that has become home to him. “You don’t wanna think that you live in a time where people are still so vocal about the hatred that they have for each other. But it’s something that I think we’re seeing the whole world over,” he says. “I felt like it was really important to let people know that they’re not alone, that we’re all in this fight together and that we see each other, and that we’re gonna do what this community always does, which is come together and have each other’s backs. “The record became a sort of rallying cry for being who you are in a time when people literally wanna try to make it illegal to do that.” Opening track “Alien Space Queen” is the perfect introduction to Stellar Evolution’s inclusive, celebratory ethos. Driven by slick, strutting synth, it’s a playful yet heartfelt ode to the brightest-shining weirdos among us. “She drives an old Trans Am in sunset gold / Yeah, she’s transfemme, a demigirl dream,” Tasjan sings, in what he describes as “a song of pure support and love.” Meanwhile, inside the funky grooves of “Pants” you’ll find perhaps Tasjan’s most life-affirming feat of songwriting. It’s a call for “authentic and righteous” self-expression, against all odds and despite all obstacles. This is a track that started out, in its early demos, as acoustic indie-rock; but the more Tasjan worked on it with co-producer Gregory Lattimer, the more he took it in the joyous and transcendent musical direction that became its final form. “It just didn’t feel right to me until it got to that place,” Tasjan says. “I wanted it to feel like we were all in a giant parade going down the street together, [saying] damn the torpedoes, we’re gonna be who we are and there’s too many of us to stop us.” Of course, the pursuit of living truthfully always comes with plenty to unpack and reflect on in your own self; and as such, this is also Tasjan’s most vulnerable album. On the lead single “The Horror of It All,” Tasjan reflects on the confusions and humiliations of queer adolescence — letting that pure and enduring pain bloom into a heartland-rock anthem. The woozy and darkly funny “The Drugs Did Me” sees Tasjan laughing so he doesn’t cry at the rocky, substance-laden path he had walked until fairly recently. And “Dylan Shades” is a gorgeous, tender love song, on which Tasjan reflects on the hypothetical idea of his partner deciding to leave him, and movingly explores the love present in letting go. “When I had the opportunity to examine a lot of the fear I have in my life with a therapist, there were times I allowed my brain to wander off and imagine these worst case scenarios in which I lost things or people I loved,” Tasjan explains. “I tried to imagine accepting the loss with a softness and nobility. I wanted to try to make peace with the feeling.” Two of the album’s most striking songs lie back-to-back near its center. “I Love America Better Than You” is a scathing protest song which took Tasjan eight years to write — and ended up more relevant now than it had been when he started. “I love America better than you / Her dirty water and her hot dogs too,” goes the winking chorus; “First Black president, insurrectionists / I love America better than you.” Then there’s “Nightmare,” a deeply poignant track, which subverts its clubby beat in exploring the ever-present fear of becoming victim to a hate crime. “I want all my friends to know I love ‘em, just in case I should disappear,” Tasjan heartbreakingly sings on the bridge. It’s a document of exhaustion and terror which will ring true to most queer listeners; and it’s a song like this that makes the celebrations elsewhere on the record feel all the more vital. The album comes to a sweet close with the duo of “Cry Till You’re Laughing”, a Lennon-McCartney-esque romp that calls out for hard-won optimism, and the hushed piano ballad “Young.” The latter track brings the scope of the album back down to something personal and bare. In each verse, Tasjan sings about his perspective of love from a different time of his life; from childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood. Yet each is tied together with the simple chorus line, almost a prayer: “Holding on to my only one.” “There’s parts of me that feel the same, as well as parts of me that life experience has changed forever,” Tasjan says. “It was another love song that felt a little different than the kind of stuff one usually hears. Maybe I can write one more verse when I’m 70?” There’s not a wasted word on Stellar Evolution, and that’s deliberate. After everything he’s been through and everything he’s learned, Aaron Lee Tasjan is a more intentional artist than ever before. “When you’re a touring artist, songs are like mantras; you have to say them every night. And so I really wanted those words to be affirming, and for the energy that’s gonna come out of them to create more of what I hope to foster,” he says. It’s another grasp towards the community and connection that matters most to Tasjan. “The role I feel like I can occupy is to say, okay, I’m gonna be in these rooms where people are gonna be paying attention, and somebody’s gonna get lifted up; who’s it gonna be?” That’s an attitude that harkens right back to the 11-year-old Aaron Lee in Orange County, a throughline that Tasjan never loses sight of for a minute across this album. With Stellar Evolution, he honors that kid and every other version of himself — past, present and future

Lilly Hiatt

The last few years have been a little hazy for Lilly Hiatt, who finds herself searching for answers on her striking new album, Forever. Recorded at home with her husband, Coley Hinson who produced and played most of the instruments, Forever grapples with growth and change, escape and anxiety, self-loathing and self-love. The songs are intensely vulnerable, full of diaristic snapshots and deeply personal ruminations, but they’re also broad invitations to find yourself in their unflinching emotional excavations. The result is a raw, unvarnished work of love and trust that walks the line between alt-rock muscle and singer/songwriter sensitivity, a bold, guitar-driven exploration of maturity and adulthood from an artist who wants you to know you’re not alone, no matter how lost you may feel.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Tennessee, Hiatt first earned buzz with a pair of early solo records before breaking out with 2017’s Trinity Lane, which helped earn dates with the likes of John Prine, Margo Price, Drive-By Truckers, and Hiss Golden Messenger in addition to festival slots from Pilgrimage to Luck Reunion. NPR called the album “courageous and affecting,” while Rolling Stone hailed it as “the most cohesive and declarative statement of the young songwriter’s career.” Hiatt returned in 2020 with the similarly well-received Walking Proof, and in 2021 with Lately, which The Boston Herald said showcased her “knack for plainspoken, poetic lyrics” and Uncut proclaimed “captivating.”

Joachim Cooder

On his Nonesuch debut, Over That Road I’m Bound, Joachim Cooder uses the plain-spoken songs of country-music progenitor Uncle Dave Macon as the jumping-off point for an album that feels more like a compellingly soulful reverie than a scholarly excavation. Family is at the heart of the project—as an impetus and as a theme. Cooder enlists family members to join him as he explores and expands upon tunes that his father had played for him and that Cooder now sings to his young children. He tinkers with lyrics and reworks banjo melodies for his own chosen instrument, an electric mbira, a variation on the African thumb piano. Culling material from a vast catalog, Cooder locates a gentleness and a plaintive quality in these songs; the novel arrangements he fashions often owe more to ambient or world music than to country. It’s an unexpected —and utterly original—take on the music Macon had performed.

“When I started the project, I didn’t know much of the derivation of Uncle Dave’s songs,” Cooder admits. “But I realized he was a collector of the music and songs he heard around him, like an Alan Lomax, repurposing and reinterpreting them for a new audience. And that was what I was doing with these songs without realizing it—reimagining and rewriting them. I realized we were doing a similar thing in a way.”

Although David Harrison Macon is a seminal figure in the evolution of American music, as noted in Ken Burns’ recent PBS documentary series, Country Music, he’s better known to working musicians and cultural historians than to contemporary listeners. In the early 1900s, however, the Tennessee native was a wildly popular entertainer, the first star of the Grand Ole Opry. He spent twenty-six years with the show and enjoyed success as a touring artist until the very end of his life. Born in 1870, Macon built a repertoire of songs from the latter part of the 1800s and attuned it for early twentieth century ears: minstrel show and vaudeville tunes, folk melodies, gospel numbers, gleaned from fellow travelers both Black and white. Though he was playing for white audiences, Macon, no doubt unwittingly, helped to preserve a trove of music bearing African roots that he’d heard in his travels. These songs became an unacknowledged but foundational part of country music, a legacy that’s been explored in depth by contemporary roots-music artists like Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

Cooder was a child when he first heard some of the songs Macon had recorded. His father Ry would play them for him on the banjo: “My dad would play the banjo a lot and he would sing a couple of these tunes. I gathered from him he had heard Pete Seeger play them and that Seeger was a big proponent of Uncle Dave’s music. There was one song in particular, ‘Morning Blues,’ that I remember being drawn to as a little boy.”

That song remained a tucked-away memory until Cooder himself became a father for the first time. (He and his wife, singer Juliette Commagere, are now the parents of two.) After his first child was born, says Cooder, “I would bring my daughter over to my parents’ house and my dad would play the banjo, and that’s when I heard ‘Morning Blues’ again. I said, ‘Wait, what is that song?’ By this point, I had been playing the electric mbira for a long time. There was something very modal about how my dad was playing that one song—or about banjo music in general—so I picked up the mbira and just started playing with him. There was a vague otherworldly quality to it. I thought, ‘I want to play these songs this way.’ I’m not a banjo player so I couldn’t come at it from a purist standpoint. I just started listening every morning; it became a tradition. I would put on an Uncle Dave box set and my daughter and I would listen to it. She, in a way, was the director of this project. She insisted upon certain songs and we would listen to the same ones over and over again, learning the songs. Then I started changing the lyrics around with her in mind.”

Tunes like the title track and “Rabbit in the Pea Patch” are indeed perfect for a kids’ sing-along while others, like “All In Down and Out” and “Tell Her To Come Back Home” couch adult drama in deceptively simple rhymes. “Come Along Buddy” and “When the Train Comes Along” contain undercurrents of melancholy in settings that are otherwise as comforting as lullabies. “Oh Lovin’ Babe” and “Morning Blues” showcase Cooder’s light but steady touch as a percussionist.

Embarking on this album project was initially about the sound Cooder envisioned for these songs; he would learn more and more about Macon’s legacy along the way. In many respects, the two artists couldn’t be more different. Macon was apparently a rambunctious performer, a natural comedian and constant showman, regaling audiences with jokes and banjo tricks as well as songs. He was an enthusiastic amateur until he turned 50 and only then began to perform professionally. Cooder, on the other hand, took up the drums as a child and has been performing professionally since his teens. He first learned of the mbira as a boy and the true inspiration came when he found a VHS tape sent to his dad of an mbira player named Juju Doxy: “I would go to my parents’ room and put in the VHS tape. I watched it all the time, I showed it to everybody. Those things stuck with me growing up.”

The soft-spoken artist has been a sought-after percussionist for two decades now. He performed on the now-legendary sessions in Havana that produced Buena Vista Social Club and has worked with many of its players on their subsequent solo discs. He’s recorded with a wide range of other performers, including Mavis Staples, Jon Hassell, Dr. John, and Ali Farka Touré, who further fueled his passion for the mbira. He’s produced albums for fellow artists including Commagere and singer-songwriter Carly Ritter; composed for film; and collaborated with choreographer Daniel Ezralow on music for dance. On his own, he’s released two albums, Love on a Real Train (2015) and Fuchsia Machu Picchu (2018), and an EP of haunting instrumentals, We Can Talk from Different Waters (2020).

Pairing the evocative sound of the mbira with this early American repertoire was an instinctive match of instrument and song, not a deliberate statement. Yet the album does point in a specific direction, serving as a subtle and poetic retracing of this music back to Africa, which, after all, is also where the banjo itself originated. For Cooder, whose career has often been about crossing borders and blending cultures, embarking on such a project as this feels like second nature. As he notes: “It’s a happy coincidence, to hear that music on the mbira. The banjo, the guitar, all these instruments we love, we all recognize them. I love the mbira, especially the one I use,”—called an Array Mbira—“because it’s the creation of one maker, Bill Wesley. I love to play it so much because it puts me in another place entirely. When people hear me play it, it puts them in another place as well, though maybe not the same place as me. They’ll say, ‘This sounds Irish,’ or, ‘This sounds African.’ Taking the Uncle Dave songs out of the strict banjo box, it takes the song out of that mind set, whatever one thinks of when hearing a banjo. Because of the nature of the instrument, whenever I sit down to play it, I get into this very dreamy state. In doing these songs, I found myself being in a very lullaby-ish state. I never wanted to get out of that, to get too jangly or too rambunctious. I wanted to keep this feeling the whole way through. Also, because the beginnings were tied in with my daughter, doing these songs for her in a way, there is a true lullaby aspect to these songs. I sing them to both of my kids now as we walk through the neighborhood, like a little internal meditation.”

As he worked on the melodies, Cooder began to incorporate his own words, often lyrics he had written to entertain his daughter: “I found that a lot of Uncle Dave’s lyrics were sort of like little bits that he took from other places. And I started doing the same thing.” He contacted his friend Rayna Gellert, a Nashville-based fiddler, told her what he was working on, and invited her to play on it. In another serendipitous moment, Gelhart “said that was something she’d always wanted to do too, and she started sending me all these Uncle Dave songs I had not heard. So it was this very organic process that took about a year and a half. Especially with raising kids, it had to be piece by piece.”

At the time, Cooder, Commagere, and their two children were living at his parents’ home on the west side of Los Angeles, so their daughter could attend a school nearby. Cooder set up a rig in his parents’ studio with the help of his good friend, the engineer and mixer Martin Pradler. Each day, after dropping his daughter off, he’d work with Pradler until the school day was finished. It was, he admits, “the only way to be present and help out while trying to make a record. When Juliette would record her parts, I would go and be with the kids. It was an ideal little situation.”

He gradually brought in other players, all friends and family: “My dad—since we were in his house—added little banjo parts, guitar, and mandolin here and there. Raina flew in from Nashville to play fiddle, Juliette sang all the harmonies, [fellow Nonesuch artist] Sam Gendel came in to play the bass-guitar hybrid instrument he uses. Everyone just felt very much in the zone of what the record was and played their lovely parts. I never had to say anything. I knew it would take the shape I’d imagined.”

For the haunting final track, “When The Train Comes Along,” he took a more experimental approach: “I was doing some shows with my dad and Rosanne Cash, playing the songs of Johnny Cash. During sound check, I would go to the pianist Glenn Patscha and say, ‘Glenn, just play some stuff.’ With my iPad, I would write on piano. Glenn would do interesting little things, like some prepared piano. I got back from the shows and started putting all of his stuff together, not sure where it was going. And that’s when I learned ‘When The Train Comes Along’ and I started singing it over the top of Glenn’s piano. That was done completely with little pieces of Glenn at soundchecks. I knew instantly it should be the end of the record, to go off with a train in the distance.”

Concluding Over That Road I’m Bound w ith a track that’s a veritable trip to dreamland seems especially fitting. As Cooder says, “I’m not intentional with my music. Everything for me has to come almost from my subconscious, without knowing I’m doing it, and then I go with that. I’ve never been able to choose what I’m going to do, other than play this one instrument. Sometimes when I listen back to this record, I wonder—how was this done? I was there, but I almost don’t remember.”

Sons of Town Hall

George Ulysses Brown

George Ulysses Brown hails from the South of England and a long line of butchers. At 16, he ran away from the family business and his abusive father and never looked back. George spent the better part of the next decade in and out of prisons and public houses. The only steady labor he managed to hold was as a singing waiter in the West End. He eventually met Josiah at the Old Star and the two set out for the New Land, new livelihoods, and new adventures.

Josiah Chester Jones

Josiah Chester Jones was born outside of Lexington, Kentucky, the son of a former Confederate general. Josiah was disowned by his family after denouncing the Southern cause. He was a stowaway on a merchant vessel bound for England and found his voice singing himself to sleep to ward off seasickness and keep the rats away. The streets of London were not kind to Josiah, and it wasn’t until he met George that his fate changed forever, though not exclusively for the better.