NPR Music

Singer-songwriter Lucy Wainwright Roche makes her second appearance on Mountain Stage. The daughter of folk-music royalty — Loudon Wainwright III and Suzzy Roche — Roche didn't jump right in to the family business. She studied creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio before earning a masters degree in education from Bank Street College in Manhattan.

An endless churn of new music constantly buries the past, so it's the mark of a great record when you still want to spin it long after a given year's best-of lists are published. Touché Amoré's exuberant road-worn confessional, Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, hasn't left my iPod or my psyche since last summer. And, while fans have already begun inquiring about a new full-length, the post-hardcore band's never-ending tour schedule doesn't stop until late December — for now.

I'm a sucker for a stuttered guitar sound. It's a sound I came to love listening to Fela Kuti and other African greats in the '70s and '80s. American rockers often tend to crank their gritty guitars to 10 — they get loud and gritty about two and a half minutes into the tune. But it's that sweeter, stuttered sound that grabs me right away; you can hear it these days in bands like Fool's Gold or Vampire Weekend.