FUV Essentials

The National's I Am Easy to Find, the band's eighth album, arrives just as the quintet of brothers, friends, and artistic sparring partners marks its own 20th anniversary as a group.

In the three years since FUV first celebrated Bob Dylan as an FUV Essentials, he's won the Nobel Prize in Literature, released another album of American standards and more volumes of the "Bootleg Series," and ahead, he unveils the colossal 14-disc The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings — accompanied by a Martin Scorsese documentary on Netflix too.

As a singer, songwriter, guitarist, acclaimed producer, Nashville studio owner, record label executive, modern bluesman, and a member of multiple bands, Dan Auerbach doesn't much sleep these days. Whether working with Patrick Carney on the Black Keys' ninth album or producing Yola or Shannon Shaw at his own Easy Eye Sound studios, the very busy Auerbach is one of our FUV Essentials.

The indefatigable and mighty Mavis Staples turns 80 on July 10, 2019. She's triumphantly celebrating all angles of that milestone birthday with friends and fans this May with a new album, We Get By, and three star-studded concerts in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles.

With his enduring voice, that honeyed sea of soulful and sensual yearning, and his embrace of both the spiritual and the secular, the Reverend Al Green is one of our FUV Essentials artists.

In 2019, everything is going Tank and the Bangas' way. The New Orleans band, winners of NPR's Tiny Desk Concert back in 2017,  releases its major label debut, Green Balloon, on May 3 via Verve Forecast. Frontwoman Tank Ball writes about what she loves about her NOLA's unique music in her "Five Essential New Orleans Songs," ahead of her band's appearance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on May 4.

Robert Smith of the Cure is crossing a batch of significant events in 2019: he turns 60 on April 21; the Cure's debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, turns 40 on May 8; and as of May 2, 1989's Disintegration, will have comforted the melancholy for exactly 30 years. And there's a new album on the way this autumn — it's the Cure's year indeed.

For anyone who has ever handled a guitar, watching Richard Thompson’s nimble fingers gallop up and down the neck of that instrument is pretty close

There is a perfect yin-yang balance to the music of Emily Saliers and Amy Ray, known as (the) Indigo Girls, and one of our FUV Essentials artists. As a duo that has broken barriers, they are sharp and caring cultural commentators and an example of how our differences make us better and stronger when we work together.

"I went swimming in the river with the ghosts and debris," sings Patty Griffin