There was something so cozy about that navy blue 1992 Toyota Camry.

With my mother behind the wheel of her new car, I was a 7-year-old kid cruising along to the sounds of 105.1 FM. The radio station call letters were WKOL (aka: KOOL 105) and the tunes were golden oldies from the late 1950s to early 1970s. All the good stuff, you know?

Just about a decade ago, on a school bus somewhere on the back roads of Black Mountain, four teenage boys sat together and conversed excitedly about their mutual love of music. 

Two of them were twin brothers, Kyle and Eric Travers. The other two were friends Ian McIsaac and Josh Clark. Though the siblings had been playing music since they were kids, Kyle on guitar and Eric on drums, talk surfaced to start jamming out in their parent’s garage. 

In 12 years together, Haywood County-based Balsam Range have played some of the biggest stages in the music industry, and have also taken home some of the highest awards in the bluegrass world. 

What Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan and Corey Ryan Forrester are doing is artistically and politically groundbreaking in the world of comedy.

Known worldwide as the “Liberal Redneck,” Crowder and his touring/writing partners on their “wellRED” tour rolled into the Bardo Arts Center at Western Carolina University on Oct. 29. Performing to a packed audience, the comedians presented their completely unique — and increasingly popular — brand of southern comedy.

About six years ago, I moved from Upstate New York to Western North Carolina. I was, and remain, some 1,100 miles or so from all things familiar and beloved back in my native North Country. 

But, it was always the music of that place, and also of my time there, I would return to for comfort whenever that feeling of being homesick would rear its ugly head, usually on those nights when you’re simply alone on your front porch amid a sometimes-deafening silence. 

Like a tumbleweed from his native Texas, Rodney Crowell has bounced and rolled along through life to wherever the four winds of the cosmos push him. 

In his 68 years on this earth, the singer-songwriter remains the fiery epitome of a troubadour, where truth is stranger than fiction, and the only way to make it through the day is to make sense of it through song and dance — with or without company, no matter. 

When one is in pursuit of their dreams, once-feared obstacles become golden opportunities, where you see what it will take to achieve what you need to do, in your own time, and you simply chip away until you overcome and overtake what it is you ultimately want, and need, to accomplish.

In the mid-1990s, just as the raucous nature of the grunge scene in the United States was hitting its peak, a wave of new rock acts from across the pond began to explode across the radio dial.

British groups like Radiohead, Blur, Oasis and The Verve were finally breaking into the mainstream, many after years of chipping away in the underground. And right at the forefront of this “seize and conquer” quest by these now legendary acts was, and remains, Bush. 

If change is the only constant in life, then Sanctum Sully is the epitome of change. 

Celebrating a decade together this summer, the Asheville-based band has always been hard to pindown in description, and in stage presence. Initially a rag-tag bluegrass and Appalachian music act, they’ve shed as many layers of their sound as they’ve conjured. The group has meandered along like a river through a deep holler, heading in whatever direction feels most comfortable and exciting at that moment in time. 

Legendary troubadour Jim Lauderdale is a longtime pillar of the fiercely independent singer-songwriter scene in Nashville. He’s always gone his own way, this melodic water witch, seamlessly following the ebb and flow of energy and inspiration, knowing exactly when and where to strike the ground in search of untapped creative waters.