What We Lost, by Ben Bedford

Ben Bedford creates cinematic folk music with the wisdom and depth of someone twice his age. “John the Baptist” is a rousing song despite its minor key, thanks to its carousel of organ, slide guitar and backbeat drums (“The devil skulks ’round every bend / And a broken soul you cannot mend / Not till you raise repentant hands”). Another standout, “Fire in His Bones,” pays tribute to an itinerant blues guitarist “with that blaze in his blood / and that brown Delta mud.”