August 8, 2026

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic wonders if a breakthrough album from a singer with a strong point of view stands a chance in the streaming age.

Ebru Yildiz

When was the last time you were truly gobsmacked by a song? It’s one of the most delightfully bewildering experiences a music-loving life can offer. There you are, puttering along listening to the radio or a playlist you don’t know well, and suddenly you’re struck by a voice, a riff, a rhythm. I do mean struck: “Gobsmacked” means, literally, punched in the mouth, but this encounter is clarifying. It rearranges your brain a bit, a beautiful smackeroo. You’re humming a new tune and seeing stars.

That’s how I felt when I pressed play on I Am Both, the new album from guitarist-songwriter-singer Margaret Glaspy, as I drove through a flash storm to the farmers’ market a couple of weeks ago. The first track, “Michigan,” took off with a hard strum and Glaspy’s crackly wail, a voice that’s trouble, like Shane MacGowan or Guyville-era Liz Phair. “I’m in Michigan, and it’s colder than I like,” Glaspy sings in her slightly damaged and defiant way. I pulled into the parking lot and sat there clutching my keys as the rain poured, letting the song’s story of a bad reunion unfold. The woman in the song had been tossed out of a romance only to have her heartbreaker change his mind and show up in the life she’d made without him. I got invested in the story fast.

Running as quickly as I could between the raindrops to get my greens before the vendors folded up their tents, I was already singing the song’s chorus in a loop: “You said you didn’t want me, then why did you come all this way?” I’ve been in similar situations, who hasn’t, and Glaspy brought me right back to that flurry of mixed emotions arising when a good lover turns bad and then tries to reverse the trend. I could feel her standing in her driveway in sweats and no bra, see her unkempt hair, feel the tension in her jaw. The story in “Michigan” isn't particularly unique, but Glaspy’s narration is so immediate and credible that for five minutes I wasn’t a shopper fighting warm southern rain, but one of the roommates that the jerk woke up, grabbing the push broom stashed by the door in an effort to defend her.

Now, one killer song does not make an album unforgettable. But once I had my rain-stained produce safely in the back seat, I drove home newly entangled with I Am Both. I’ve long enjoyed Glaspy’s big-swinging rock records but I quickly realized that with this fourth proper studio album, she’s entered new territory. It’s not a concept album, unless you count “life is messy” as a concept. What it has, though — what Glaspy’s been working toward, intermittently achieved, and now fully realizes — is a thrillingly strong point of view.

A distinct perspective like the one Glaspy displays in I Am Both can work against an artist in the streaming age. In the mainstream pop world, where adaptability matters most, stars define themselves through image, performance and the ability to integrate whatever’s selling at the moment into their various eras. The fact that many top artists shop for potential hits the way fancy people shop for couture clothing, trying on the same ones and then customizing what they purchase (here’s a Reddit thread about that), shows that when it comes to hitmaking, the art lies in balancing a marketable self with a willingness to adjust to trends. (The same is true in mainstream country music, a literal marketplace of ideas.) Historically for singer-songwriters, the opposite approach has been revered; the most respected and enduring embody stalwart individualism, even eccentricity. As Glaspy herself recently concurred by including “Fruits of My Labor” on her fine covers album The Golden Heart Protector last year, Lucinda Williams is the ideal: a writer and musician who’s thought hard about what she’s inherited and how she feels about it, who honors her inspirations without imitating them and who stands strong for what she believes and considers important while still remaining creatively open.

Unfortunately the shift toward an algorithm-based measure of success has favored voices that blend well into a stream instead of ones that stop a listener in her tracks. As much as I love Boygenius, I don’t think it’s an accident that the most successful act on the folk-pop border this decade is (was?) a harmonizing trio dedicated to blending three distinct sensibilities. With ambient and electronic music so dominant, many of the most talented songwriters right now are more interested in placing their voices within settings that fragment or diffuse them and finding meaning within that self-dissolution. This approach can be interesting, but it tends to sacrifice storytelling and strong self-expression.

On I Am Both, Glaspy stands up for her own voice — literally, relishing its rough and glinty edges — and makes sure that the stories she tells represents a coherent and powerful perspective. Since she emerged as a compulsively questioning 23-year-old (one of her first songs was called “You’re Smiling (But I Don’t Believe You),” she has experimented with clattering rock, synth-smudge retro pop and various skewed takes on the American roots songbook. Her lyrics have dwelled in vulnerability and yearning while maintaining an edge of rebelliousness. Sometimes she has let her impulse to muck things up in a good way get the better of her; every one of her albums contains gems, but at times her ideas have felt half-formed. Not so on I Am Both. Even the most compact songs complete their thoughts.

Producer Joe Henry creates space for Glaspy’s insights to resonate, helping her establish a naturalistic feel within a trio that blends studio chops with jazz inventiveness. The arrangements remain kinetic even in their relative calm, and the interplay between Glaspy’s guitar work and her inquisitive, conversational singing adds layers of meaning to every verse and chorus. The surrealistic love song “That Rose” rides along on a choogling rhythm that’s rendered off-kilter by the erotic weirdness of her lyrics. “Martin Luther King Jr.” risks being corny by invoking the most obvious source possible for a gentle hymn about love driving out hate — but does so with such humility and frankness that the saint invoked becomes warm to the touch. Songs like “Common Ground” and “Petty” home in on the most cutting aspects of intimate relationships with eyes wide open; when Glaspy sings, in the latter, “I’m folding your laundry and I’m making a meal of it,” you can feel the taut grasp of those fingertips around her lover’s undershirts, and the sharp eye she casts on any holes. Offering an apology in the lyrics, she undercuts that conciliatory gesture with crunching electric guitar chords, her playing tilting from prettiness to sheer force with the seasick rhythm of unresolved emotions.

This is the perspective that defines Glaspy’s art: a commitment to staying right in the middle of the heart’s mess, going through life’s eternal rounds of loving, hurting, being hurt, getting stuck and getting out, starting anew and realizing you’re in the same place again, and making art that finds its strength in going deep into all of those unresolved scenarios.

I Am Both, the title of this invigorating album, is Glaspy’s battle cry. In the title track, she places it in the mouth of a woman challenged by a man who wants to love her but doesn’t fully see her; she refuses to let him choose between his fantasies and his fears. Having found a musical setting that allows her to express clarity even as she dwells on tangled emotions, Glaspy has found her purpose. Live for the prickliness; sing the prickliness. “I could use a little thistle in my life,” she remarks. The blood spilled by the thorn, she shows us, reminds us that we are alive.

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Special series: The Ripple Effect

The Ripple Effect: The Grateful Dead's long, strange trip might keep going forever

Jackie Lay/NPR

It was a treat for me to read Isabella Gomez Sarmiento in this newsletter last week, sharing all the backstage details about the multi-platform series she and Felix Contreras created about the Grateful Dead and its community during this first summer after Bob Weir’s passing. There’s so much great content in that series, named “The Ripple Effect: The Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip might keep going forever.” Here is the home page for the series, which includes podcasts, a pictorial of current Dead fans and several fascinating deep dives into aspects of the band’s community and legacy.

Here are a few things that adjusted my perspective this week

I love folk troubadour Willi Carlisle’s music, and it turns out he’s an ace essayist, too. This account of how square dancing changed his relationship to masculinity is one of the best things I’ve read this year.
Jessie Gray has one of the most striking voices in Nashville right now, and I love her new album The Muse. As Bobbie Jean Sawyer says in this Nashville Scene feature, it’s a perfect late-summer listen.
Criterion Channel friends, please make time to watch Bye Bye Love, a lost-now-found 1974 masterpiece of psychedelic nihilism that portrays trans identity with prescient power and beauty. It’s so ‘70s, yet somehow so now. Here’s an essay about it.
I’m sending love to the staff members at Brooklyn Vegan and the other music publications who were hit by layoffs this week. Make sure you keep your eyes out for what these fine music writers do next.
Oh!!! My beloveds are back!! Imperial Teen forever. All Over You is out on Merge in October; for now, enjoy Will getting frisky with a baseball bat in the video for “Overdrive.”

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