FROM THE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025 ISSUE OF ACOUSTIC GUITAR MAGAZINE
The steel-string acoustic guitar is everywhere, but we don’t always hear it. It’s in the background of daily life—on records, in living rooms, onstage—and easy to take for granted. What makes the instrument worth paying attention to are the musicians and builders who keep finding new ways to make it matter. This issue focuses on some of them.
Our cover story features singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, best known for her work in the acclaimed indie band boygenius. Her new solo album, Forever Is a Feeling, is as direct as anything she’s made. Many of its songs were written while walking and then shaped on a modest acoustic she’s owned for years. The arrangements are simple, grounded in solid playing and plainspoken lyrics that stay with you. In her interview with Isa Burke, Dacus talks about how her process has evolved, how the guitar continues to shape her writing, and why she trusts it to carry the most personal parts of her work.
Sierra Hull appears elsewhere in these pages with her own version of growth. Known primarily for her virtuosic mandolin playing, she has brought guitar more fully into her music in a way that adds depth without changing her voice as an artist. Her new record, A Tip Toe High Wire, reflects that approach. In “Spitfire,” presented here in World Premiere, she writes about her grandmother’s resilience with a song that’s precise in craft and deeply felt—a reminder that great playing is most powerful when it serves the story behind it.
Other departments consider how songs endure across generations. In Campfire, Maurice Tani interprets “Wabash Cannonball,” a tune that has rolled through American music for more than a century. Alan Barnosky brings Matteo Carcassi’s 19th-century Etude No. 1 into the flat