Maria Taylor has been at this game a while.  She formed her first band, Little Red Rocket, when she was 15 years old. Since then, she’s performed in Azure Ray and Now It’s Overhead, collaborated with Bright Eyes, Moby, Crooked Fingers, and more, and released five solo records under her own name. In other words, Taylor knows what she’s doing. Nevertheless, even with 20 years of recording behind her, her new solo album, Overlook still feels distinctive and fresh to her. “It’s the first one that I’ve ever fully produced,” she explains, “and I did it all in a week; I usually take way longer than that.” Taylor speaks with a hint of the Southern drawl that reveals her Alabama roots. Overlook has a connection to the Heart of Dixie, as well, as Taylor moved home to Birmingham from Los Angeles to write and record the material. Being in her hometown afforded some easy opportunities for musical accompaniment: “My dad has never played on any of my records,” Taylor says, “and he played on this one, and so did my sister and my brother.” That’s Taylor’s father playing mandolin and singing backup on “Bad Idea”, and those are her brother’s basslines reverberating throughout the album. When Taylor speaks of her musical family, she seems as excited for the chance to work with them as any of her other more famous collaborators. It’s contagious—call it Southern charm.

“My parents gave me this little playhouse when I was three or four, and I turned it into a studio,” she says, laughing. “I put a microphone in there, and they say I’d just sit in there for hours until the tape ran out, just singing and singing.” Music has come naturally to Taylor since her earliest memories, though Overlook took shape only after a long dry spell. Taylor hadn’t written a song in over a year. Then, holed up in her old bedroom in Birmingham, she broke the spell by writing “Happenstance”: “Beginning to end—thirty minutes,” she says. After that, the songs kept coming. “I just sat in my room and literally didn’t leave for two weeks. I had bottles of wine and food and my friends seemed worried ... ” she laughs, trailing off. Taylor recorded Overlook‘s demos straight to her own computer, and you can still hear some of those original backing tracks on the album. When it came time, though, to fill out some of the songs with bigger instrumentation, Taylor drew on Birmingham’s musical community in addition to her own family.

Whether you know him by name or not, Mat Kearney’s soulful voice has been one of the most recognizable on the airwaves as of late. He’s found success by having his songs featured in some of the most popular shows on primetime television over the last five years—Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill, and The Vampire Diaries to name a few. His 2007 debut album Nothing Left to Lose  unearthed melancholy pop and spoken word stylings came at just the right time when airwaves were congested with folk-a-likes such as Daniel Powter, Teddy Geiger, Jason Mraz, and Howie Day. Soon after, Kearney used song licensing—the music industry’s best adversary or best ally (depending on how you look at it)—to gain traction, and his fan base bloomed which resulted in touring with the likes of John Mayer, Sheryl Crow, Train, amongst others. 

What set Kearney apart then and what sets him apart now isn’t just his acute sense of beat and stylistic prose (though that doesn’t hurt), but more so it’s the musician’s will for self-reflection. Frankly put, he’s not afraid to reveal himself to an audience and take the artistic journey with them. It’s what’s kept Kearney churning out an evolution of unique sounds with each album he releases, from the bare bones of Nothing Left to Lose, to his Kerouac-y road stories on City of Black & White, to his new chapter with Young Love. For the first time we hear Kearney’s structure his sound in the form of one big poppy love letter, for it’s a concept album that he wrote while falling in love with his wife. Its upbeat tones and fluid structure of storytelling is reminiscent of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and on first listen there’s no mistaking the evolution of his sound, especially on the bubble gummiest of them all, his latest single, “Hey Mama”. While the songs are peppered with simple up-tempo beats, there’s enough lyrical substance and bold narrative with songs like “Rochester” and “Ships In the Night” that the listener won’t confuse Kearney’s authentic artistic integrity for someone else’s style.

It’s been an interesting ride for Hurricane Bells’ Steve Schiltz. The man rose to prominence for fronting the underrated NYC guitar-rock act Longwave, but once Schiltz began branching out on his own for his more acoustic-based side project Hurricane Bells, a b-side from his project’s debut album, “Monsters”, wound up getting on the soundtrack to the second Twilight movie. Suddenly Hurricane Bells was more well known than Longwave ever was, even if the song was nowhere near indicative of the cathartic content of his newer project’s’ sound.

Just as 2011 wrapped up, Schiltz could proudly look back on what he accomplished: following the release of the solid Down Comes the Rain EP in late 2010, Schiltz went back and revamped his sound for this year’s Tides and Tales, a much more sonically dense, expansive album than his debut Tonight is the Ghost was. With Tides, not only do we see Schiltz expanding his musical palette, but we also get to see him really come into his own as a songwriter for Hurricane Bells: each band now has their own unique, distinctive sound, even if they do come from the same mind.

To help cap off his triumphant year, Schiltz sat down with PopMatters to reveal his top five favorite records of all time, explaining why these discs had a great influence on him in the way that they did, all while he muses as to why more kids aren’t a fan of the Edge . . .

North Hollywood is nestled in the San Fernando Valley. According to a 2008 profile in the Los Angeles Times, it has among the highest population densities in the entire county of Los Angeles, nearly 13,300 people per square mile. About 2,900 veterans reside in North Hollywood and approximately 3,300 families are headed by single parents. The median household income measures $42,791. Of course, that figure was collected during the middle of an 18-month recession.

“North Hollywood” is also the title of the opening track on What Were You Hoping For?, Van Hunt’s first release of new material on his own “godless hotspot” imprint via Nashville-based Thirty Tigers. “I would say North Hollywood is a combination of maybe East Village (NYC), Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco), and any other little L.A. city like Studio City or West Hollywood”, says Hunt. “There’s a NoNoHo in North Hollywood and that is definitely a rougher part, if you will, a poorer part of the area.”

Whatever you do, do not call them modern. Joshua Third (or Joshua von Grimm as he used to call himself) is clear that the Horrors are anything but. “I don’t like the word modern. We’re futuristic. That’s where our focus is; on the future.”

The British post-punk band recently released their third album, ambitiously entitled Skying, resonant of reaching new heights, and—in the case of the Horrors—new sounds as well.

“Skying is that feeling of being elevated; like you’re constantly moving upwards”, says Third.

Skying is experimental by nature, with plenty of melodies and synthesised beats to cement its place as essential indie listening. It’s a far cry from the band’s black-as-tar goth-punk days.