The world, according to Richard Marx, “is not out there waiting for a new Richard Marx album.”

At 14 years old, songwriter and author Allison Moorer awoke to the sound of gunshots outside her Alabama home. In the pre-dawn dark, her father shot her mother and then himself, leaving Moorer and her then-17-year-old sister orphaned.

On the band’s new record The Thunderbird, Beau Jennings and the Tigers chronicle stories about fisherman Jimmy Houston and Dairy Queen employees lamenting their fate.

Art historians estimate it took Da Vinci at least four years to paint his biggest work of art, which is in reality very small. Wallows has been even more patient. Though the members are young, the band itself is not: Minnette and Lemasters became friends at nine and have been writing songs together since they were 11. They met Preston shortly afterward and went through a handful of iterations and regrettable band names before the official “debut” of Wallows in 2017.

Jay Farrar, songwriter and singer for Son Volt, laments the state of things in no uncertain terms on the band’s new record, “Union,” released in March of this year.

Pressed about the ardent devotion of Hanson’s fan base—many of whom celebrate and follow the band with the same fervor as they did when “MMMBop” dominated airwaves in 1997—Taylor Hanson offers an explanation as simple as it is true: “It’s hard-fought,” he said. “We just keep putting in the time.”

Ariana Grande’s Thursday night OKC “Sweetener World Tour” stop opened like her 2018 album “Sweetener,” with a stunning display of the 25-year-old singer’s a cappella vocal prowess by way of “raindrops (an angel cried),” an abbreviated cover of the Four Seasons’ heartbreaker “An Angel Cried.”

In his music video for “The Dream Is Dead,” Tulsa songwriter M. Lockwood Porter is at the tail end of the fifth stage of grief—acceptance.“The dream is dead, and everybody knows it,” goes the refrain, as an energized Porter, awakened by a glimmer of hope buried deep in a barrage of bad news, hangs fliers across Tulsa in hopes of inspiring human connection.

For his new album “Texas Piano Man,” songwriter Robert Ellis dons a white tuxedo and an uncharacteristically Texas-sized pop swagger.