Amos Lee

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With one foot in the real world and the other in a charmed dimension of his own making, Amos Lee creates the rare kind of music that's emotionally raw yet touched with a certain magical quality. On his eighth album Dreamland, the Philadelphia-born singer/songwriter intimately documents his real-world struggles (alienation, anxiety, loneliness, despair), an outpouring born from deliberate and often painful self-examination. "For most of my life I've walked into rooms thinking, 'I don't belong here,'" says Lee. "I've come to the realization that I'm too comfortable as an isolated person, and I want to reach out more. This record came from questioning my connections to other people, to myself, to my past and to the future."

In the spirit of fostering connection, Lee made Dreamland in close collaboration with L.A.-based producer Christian "Leggy" Langdon (Banks, Meg Myers). "I met with Leggy, who I really didn't know anything about, and before we even started to work we had a very open and vulnerable conversation about what was going on in our lives," he recalls. "So much of what I do is solitary work, and it felt good to find someone I could connect with—sort of like, 'I'm a lonely kid, and I wanna play.'" Thanks to that palpable sense of playfulness, Dreamland embodies an unpredictable and endlessly imaginative sound—a prime showcase for Lee's warmly commanding voice and soul-baring songwriting.

On his new album In Plain Sight, Neal Francis offers up a body of work both strangely enchanted and painfully self-aware, unfolding in songs sparked from Greek myths and frenzied dreams and late-night drives in the depths of summer delirium. True to its charmed complexity, the singer/songwriter/pianist's second full-length came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that's endlessly absorbing.