Rock & Roots

When he's leading his band My Morning Jacket, Jim James often comes across as a seeker — someone with at least passing curiosity about the metaphysical, if not the unknowable. On his first solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, his questioning goes a bit deeper.

WUKY's Rock & Roots continues to support local musicians... LINK to Shaker Steps... "First and foremost, our goal is to document, present, and share the work of artists we respect performing their music in unique and often unexpected places. We live, work, and play in and around the Lexington, Kentucky area and our hope is to show how this environmental context shapes the music that is created and performed here." ENJOY!!

Singer/songwriter Carrie Rodriguez and Luke Jacobs performs a live version of "I Cry for Love" from Rodriguez's Give Me All You Got album at WUKY.

Ben Harper grew up roaming the aisles and restoring guitars at his family's music store, the Claremont Folk Music Center. Going on its 60th year of business, the storefront in Southern California is where Harper first discovered the harmonica playing of blues legend Charlie Musselwhite.

"We had Charlie's records stacked high at my family's store and at my house," Harper tells NPR's Steve Inskeep.

The title of Richard Thompson's 21st solo album, Electric, promises a change of pace while doubling as a mission statement. And, sure enough, the record finds the great guitarist, singer and songwriter plugging in and indulging his rock 'n' roll side, complete with occasional solos that qualify as workouts. On an acoustic guitar, Thompson often simulates the sound of several players plucking and strumming at once.

Quirky but cutting, playful but forceful, controlled but ragged, Thao Nguyen is one of the most commanding and distinctive young singers around. She infuses everything around her with electricity and mischievous boldness, from her live-wire concerts to the way her songs gallop and clamor, picking up intensity as they go along. With her band The Get Down Stay Down, Nguyen is about to release her third album — We the Common, out Feb. 5 — and it's full of tense, clattering folk-rock.

With My Morning Jacket, Jim James presides over a band whose only consistent characteristic is bigness, whether its members are raging through arena-sized rock 'n' roll, soaring like a choir or indulging a mile-wide playful side, with room for stomping funk, angelic ballads and everything in between.