If life is more about the journey than the destination, ANNA VOGELZANG has proven herself the emerging musical force behind this age-old belief. Anna — a melody-driving, songwriting, Boston-born, LA-based multi-instrumentalist — has spent her formative years spread across the country, learning the musical languages of the Midwest, west coast, New England and all that lies in between. Building community from coast to coast, she has traveled with home on her fingertips, her music peppered with flavors of nostalgia and perpetual motion.

A lifetime of transient living and rigorous touring shaped Anna’s music, and developed her sound into a wide palette of imagistic gritty landscapes, ranging from the “warm, engaging folk-pop” (Relix) of her 2014 EP, Driftless, to the “wide expansive sound” (Magnet Magazine) of her most recent release, Hiker (2016). Pop Matters praised her 2012 release, Canary in a Coal Mine, saying that the album’s “exquisite lyrical craftsmanship evok[es] everyone from Regina Spektor to Ani DiFranco, shifting between delicate lilt and evocative howl at will.” Her upcoming album, Beacon (2019), features Los Angeles mainstays Jay Bellerose (T. Bone Burnett, Aimee Mann), Mai Bloomfield (Jason Mraz, Sara Bareilles), Tyler Chester (Jackson Browne, Andrew Bird), Adam Levy (Norah Jones, Vulfpeck), and is mixed by long-time collaborator Todd Sickafoose (Ani DiFranco, Anais Mitchell). Co-produced by Chester, Beacon is Anna’s seventh studio album and is set to release later this fall.

In 2012, Anna founded Wintersong, an annual charity show in Madison, WI that has raised over $34,000 for Second Harvest Foodbank of Southwest Wisconsin. For nearly a decade, she has taught at Girls Rock Camps across the country,youth-centered arts and social justice organizations teaching empowerment through music. Upon moving to L.A. in 2016, Anna co-founded the weekly songwriting group, “Song Salon,” with guitarist Adam Levy, which sparked a movement of residencies, live shows, and albums throughout the local musical landscape. Anna has been involved with the International Girls Rock Alliance, and in 2017 joined the LA College of Music’s songwriting faculty. Her efforts and approach to music are rooted in the belief that communal experience heightens the creative process, and that collaboration serves to remind us that the truest sense of home is within ourselves.

With her most recent release, Ready Reckoner, COURTNEY HARTMAN provides the listener with a conduit for self-exploration—a factor that fulfills one of her greatest hopes in sharing the album with the world. “If you listen to any of these songs and step away feeling lifted or carried to a different place, that is a real and true honor,” she says. Born from purposeful self-examination, Ready Reckoner finds Hartman taking the helm as producer transforming her most private ruminations into songs both bracingly intimate and magnificently vast. In that process, the Loveland, Colorado-based artist worked in collaboration with co-producer Shahzad Ismaily (a multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Lou Reed and Tom Waits) and assembled a close-knit community of musicians, including guest appearances from Anais Mitchell and Bill Frisell. Recorded mainly at Figure8 in Brooklyn and mixed by Tucker Martine (Neko Case, My Morning Jacket), Ready Reckoner unfolds in extraordinarily detailed textures, a nuanced yet wholly unpredictable sound equally given to moments of hushed simplicity, improvisatory freedom, and flashes of symphonic splendor.

Hartman’s finely-honed musicality has firm roots in her upbringing, which included taking up violin at three, learning to play guitar at 11, and writing her first song at 12. She spent much of her childhood immersed in the bluegrass world, a factor that eventually led to her seven-year stint in Grammy-nominated band Della Mae. During her time with the band, Hartman also released a collaboration album with Robert Ellis (2017’s Dear John) and another with Taylor Ashton (2018’s Been on Your Side).