Ten excellent songwriters to stoke your yearning

If you need a soundtrack for your melancholic wanderlust, you’ve come to the right place. As a child of the suburbs with a heart that belongs in the mountains, I’ve spent a lot of my life yearning out that open window and seeking out art that matches. Here, I’ve compiled for you some of the best musicians and songwriters for really capturing this feeling.

I present to you ten artists that fit the bill. Each one of these artists is a fantastic representation of this genre when listened to straight through. I also, though, got picky enough to craft a playlist including the songs from each that are the most resonant and relevant. That’ll let you get a little taste of each artist, all in one place. Put this playlist on to motivate you when you’re planning your next adventure. If you yearn hard enough, you just might make it out your front door.

The List

Gregory Alan Isakov

Greg is certainly a genre-definer, and he’s been one of my favorite songwriters for years. A vegetarian, medicinal cannabis and vegetable farmer, and in general an artist who recognizes the importance of using his platform for good, Gregory’s music echoes with his personal values and with the sounds of the hills. Just which hills, though, can be left up to our imagination; Gregory is Johannesburg-born, Philadelphia-raised, and currently lives in Colorado. His music employs a rich variety of folky instruments, augmented by poetic lyricism and masterful mixing.

There’s something about his music that has always felt cozy and familiar to me. Despite Gregory’s undeniable skillfulness and excellence, his music never comes at you with arrogance or loftiness. Understanding music theory or poetry might give you extra insight into his more complex works, but neither is necessary for feeling the emotive energy that Gregory conveys.

A photo of Greg taken by Blue Caleel and featured in an NPR article about his collaboration with the Colorado Symphony

His album This Empty Northern Hemisphere is my personal favorite and is an excellent front-to-back listen. Every single album features incredible art, though, so don’t limit yourself just to This Empty Northern Hemisphere or to the songs I included on the playlist.

Pinegrove

When people ask me what my favorite band is, I almost always say Pinegrove (except for when I say Hippo Campus). The first song of theirs that I ever heard was Iodine, from their album 11:11. One of my very dear friends from the west coast insisted that we listen to it as we drifted through sprawling Pennsylvania fields on our way to Safe Harbor (a small, local climbing crag).

She explained to me how something about the jangling backdrop for the swooping melody sounds like the Sierras at sunrise, and from that day forth I always thought of Pinegrove as belonging to the wanderlust genre.

As a band that sprung forth from Montclair, New Jersey, much of Pinegrove’s music captures the bustle and anxiety of small-city life. Many tracks, though, echo with the melancholy that rides beneath that day-to-day—so much so that, if you begin to Google “is Pinegrove—,” the first autofill suggestion almost always will be “is Pinegrove midwest emo?”

Whether they’re midwest emo or not, Pinegrove is a very special band. There’s a rawness to their vocals, rhythmic alignment, and narratives that you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

Highly skillful musicians and some of the best writers of their generation.

The Halfway Kid (Saeed Gadir)

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I found this poet on Instagram Reels. In the reel I saw, he sat serenely beside a flickering campfire, and the instrumentals of one of his tracks rolled by in the background audio of the scene. Text blinked into life above his head that explained the racial domination of the folk genre by white artists. He hopes to rectify this issue with his own music, which blends elements of soul with a traditional mountain-folk sound.

As a Sudanese immigrant in Britain, Saeed creates a lot of work that captures the longing of sharing your heart with more than one place. He explains in a snippet about the 2025 MOMO festival that this concept is largely in part the inspiration for his stage name–always half-way in one home and half-way in another. The Halfway Kid’s art is sometimes playful, sometimes haunting, and always deeply-feeling, punctuating artful lyricism with slide guitar so tasteful that it often sounds like a human voice.

Bon Iver (Justin Vernon)

My first vinyl record ever was Bon Iver’s self-titled album. I cannot recommend this artist’s music enough. Bon Iver was founded as a solo project by Justin Vernon in Eau Claire, Wisconson, but gradually gathered band members and momentum after Justin’s first album under the moniker. While Skinny Love and Flume are some of Justin’s biggest hits, Bon Iver has countless other songs that are beyond groundbreaking, and it is one of the most skilled creative groups I know of.

Every one of his albums has a distinct flavor, drawn out by instrumentation, texture, and the various missions of each song’s narrator. Fun fact: to write his album For Emma, Forever Ago, Bon Iver put himself in exile in a tiny, isolated cabin in the woods of northwestern Wisconsin. Talk about the Walden Pond healing experience.

Either way, the longing doesn’t stop at “For Emma, Forever Ago,” and this current of deep soul-baring exploration runs through every album. Justin’s sound is also exceedingly unique, and this effect stems from a huge pamphlet of various causes. He strays from conventional tuning in For Emma, Forever Ago, giving this album a literally otherworldly sound, experiments with and hones cutting-edge technology (most notably in 22, A Million), and collaborates with other brilliant minds to invent new and wonderful ways of making art, just to name a few.

John Vincent III

I regrettably didn’t know much about John Vincent III as a person before I researched him for this article—I just knew that, almost every time I found myself thinking who wrote this? this song is so good, it was this guy. He’s composed some of my favorite tracks, and his music is always candid and profoundly in touch. John admits to his current home being “kind of all over,” a culmination and continuation of the eight-month road trip that inspired his album Songs For The Canyon.

He explains in an interview with music publishing that “I just want my music to make people feel something,” encouraging his audience to “hold onto those moments” and “those younger days.” An excellent artist to soundtrack your frolicking in fields, watching raindrops pour down a window, falling in love, or crashing through life with a rollicking group of dear friends.

He has some very famous music that I totally recommend you listen to, but on this playlist, I’m including some of the shining stars that may have flown under the radar.

Adrianne Lenker

I sure hope you’ve heard of this fellow by now, but if you haven’t, here’s your introduction. The vagabond upheaval of Adrianne’s childhood floats in and out of all of her music, even all these years later, woven through her immensely poetic narratives and melodies.

You can find Adrianne on a number of solo albums, including the much-beloved songs, and as the primary singer and songwriter of the band Big Thief. I’ve listened to all of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You straight through too many times to count, but I still have so much listening to do, and I encourage you to keep listening, too, searching for all the little gems that populate Adrianne’s many releases.

Adrianne is a fabulously talented storyteller and relentlessly embraces the weird and wonderful, lacing her tracks both with warm familiarity and with stunning originality.

Chance Peña

Chance Peña, an immensely hardworking singer-songwriter from Tyler, Texas, is another excellent example of the yearning genre. His self-made drive and deep desire to connect with his audience comes through in his music, which resonates with a combination of big dreams, contemplation, and broad, sincere melodies.

Chance’s music is also more smoothed-out and soft-edged than some of the less-produced artists I have listed here, so if a raw sound bothers you, take a delve into Chance’s tastefully mixed discography instead. I often find that Chance has the unique ability to make me feel better about the parts of myself that I don’t like, lift me out of a low mood, or inspire me to keep battling whatever tribulations I’m facing. I hope he can do the same for you.

Nick Drake

When I was a kid, my dad used to take me on snowboarding trips almost every winter with some of our spare cash. We would line up a cue of several artists for the road trip, ordered in a spectrum ranging from a Jersey Shore suburban vibe to gritty, woody mountain music. We’d begin with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (which get played a lot at the Shore, even though they’re from California) and always would save Nick Drake for when we crossed the border into whatever little mountain town we were heading to.

Even those who knew him when he was alive don’t seem to have known what Nick Drake was longing for, but the longing in his music is unmistakable nonetheless. It transcends time and space to reach us today, and is reportedly a comfort and friend to many who experience the same.

Nick’s album Pink Moon, the most sparse of his three releases, features just him and his guitar. Open tunings abound in this album to accompany his famously original melodies and to create chords that were otherwise not frequently used (or even possible) in standard tunings. His shockingly modern folky sound might stem from his refusal to fold in with the trends of the 60’s and 70’s, a habit that allowed him to preserve his unique sound and sense of self even in a world where anyone who’s anyone wanted to be a rock star.

Novo Amor (Ali John Meredith-Lacey)

I first discovered and fell in love with Ali’s music because he sounds (to me, at least) a lot like Bon Iver on some tracks. After a deeper dive over the years, I discovered just how much more there is to him than that (he might not even like this Bon Iver comparison–it seems like he’s heard it one too many times). His music captures a vast host of values and feelings, ranging from urgent global conservationism to highly interior personal growth.

One of my favorite traits of his is that his down-to-earth honesty and familiarity extend beyond his sound and lyrics—Ali also speaks sincerely and at length in interviews, collaborates with artists of many different mediums, and even appeared on Reddit about a year ago to answer a host of public questions in an “Ask Me Anything” forum.

The diversity of emotion in Novo Amor’s music makes his tracks an appropriate soundtrack for any kind of voyage, be it a joyous road trip, a quiet journey through grief, or anything in between.

Sam Burchfield

Sam spent his childhood in South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, gathering inspiration from the natural world around him and practicing his lyric and musical craft. In a 2022 interview with MUSscribe, as in many more of his interviews, Sam emphasizes the concept of connection that arises in his music–he explains that the relationship between humankind and nature is just as important as relationships among people.

He also, in an interview with ShoutOut Atlanta, elaborates on his feelings regarding truth and the importance he places on this concept. You can always hear a golden thread of candor shining through the sometimes-dense poetics of Sam’s lyricism, marking the stages of his quest for meaning. I find that this resonant honesty, coupled with a profound devotion to seeking ultimate truth, is what draws me back to Sam’s music again and again.

“Blue Ridge June” will forever be one of my favorite songs.

Bonus Tracks

I’ve also included six bonus songs on this article’s playlist. These songs are all stand-alone wonders with unrivaled texture, narrative, lyricism, and/or melodic line that captivates the listener and transports them to a new state of the soul.

All of these tracks have made it onto many of my wanderlust playlists, recurring again and again in my roundups of the best songs in this genre. I hope with all my heart that you enjoy them.