Grand Rapids native Rob Jordan isn’t new blood in the music scene ‘round these parts. He’s been writing and performing tunes in one capacity or another for more than a decade.

Despite its deep and dark subject matter, Jason Isbell’s latest album is a celebration of second chances. Completely clean for the first time in his career – that includes six hard-drinking years with alt-country rockers Drive-By Truckers, and another six with his backing band The 400 Unit – the Alabama-born Isbell headed to Nashville.

When Jason Huber and Jordan Kelley met, they never doubted their abilities to make music a full-time career. The two were attending Middle Tennessee State University’s recording industry program when they formed Cherub in 2010. Sounding like Daft Punk on muscle relaxants, the two have made a living on stretched-out electro-pop jams.

A lot has changed for Linda Tellis in the past couple of years. An Atlanta native by way of both West Virginia and Ohio, Tellis moved to Grand Rapids in 2009 and landed a job at Cascade Engineering, where she steadily built a career as a facilitator of Lean Enterprise Systems for the company.

Michael Gungor isn't a big fan of labels, especially when it comes to his art. Yes, he's Christian. And yeah, his faith comes through in the music he writes. But that's not because Gungor is a “Christian band,” it's because the music is written from a place that's completely honest.

There was a time when we thought we'd never hear new music from Neutral Milk Hotel ever again. The critically acclaimed indie band disbanded shortly after the release of its successful album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, which includes "Holland, 1945," No. 7 on Pitchfork's list of Top 200 Tracks from the 1990s.

Konrad Wert's first exposure to music was in the small Mennonite community where he grew up in southern Florida. The church setting taught him how to sing, and he later started picking up stringed instruments when his mother enrolled him in public school. Years later, it was a fellow student who inspired Wert to take music in a different direction.

While describing the influx of businessmen and record executives migrating from Los Angeles to his Nashville hometown, Justin Townes Earle emanates frustration. “It’s colonialism," he said. "The TV show 'Nashville'has made it sound like we are enjoying this new-found reputation. But if you ask me, we already had a pretty damn good one.”

It’s an interesting time to be in a band, what with society’s newfound hyperconnectivity and all. The seemingly endless tide of adept millennials pumping out totally decent music on bedroom laptops can bestow an unsettling urgency for artists to try and keep up. 

From psychological anthropology to tribal dance rituals, there isn’t much that doesn’t inspire Shara Worden. Since forming My Brightest Diamond in 2006, Worden has blurred the lines between classical, pop, cabaret and folk, while drawing upon wide-ranging themes. But to her, genre is irrelevant. Worden simply puts anything and everything she enjoys into her music.