About

When You Awake is an independent music journal. It covers Americana, folk, and roots music. The site has been writing about records since 2008.

What the site does

The site listens to records and writes about them. It runs playlists assembled by hand. It keeps a photographic record of artists it finds worth looking at closely. It publishes conversations when they are interesting enough to share.

It does not write news. It does not run label-serviced releases. It does not aggregate content from other sources. Everything here was written by someone who sat down with a record and thought about it.

The approach

The site's interest is in the tradition. American music has a long root system. The field hollers and ballads at one end of the chain connect, through a complicated set of channels, to the records that came out of Nashville and Muscle Shoals and Laurel Canyon. The site writes in and around that connection.

The Goes Twang series is the site's most characteristic work. It takes a mainstream or rock artist and pulls out the acoustic, country, or traditional thread that was always present but not always foregrounded. The premise is that the twang is structural, not decorative.

What the site does not do

No sponsored posts. No affiliate links. No advertising. No algorithmic recommendations. No email capture. No social engagement optimisation.

The five outbound links on this site point to reference archives and databases: Wikipedia for historical context, the Smithsonian for instrument and cultural preservation resources, the Library of Congress for sound recording archives, the Recording Academy for Grammy historical data, and Discogs for record catalogue information. Those are the five. There are no others.

Contact and corrections

Use the contact page for any corrections or correspondence.