The Acoustic World Is Having a Moment — And Everything Is Happening at Once — Soul Asylum, Shinedown, Daughtry, Michael Marcagi, Kip Moore, Jackson Dean and C.F. Martin & Co.
Right now, across the full spectrum of stripped-down, performance-centered, authenticity-driven music, some of the most significant things that have happened in this space in years are converging...
Right now, across the full spectrum of stripped-down, performance-centered, authenticity-driven music, some of the most significant things that have happened in this space in years are converging simultaneously. A Minneapolis alternative rock institution is building one of the most anticipated unplugged releases of the summer around the legacy of their most iconic television moment. Shinedown’s two most recognizable members walked into a Philadelphia radio studio and delivered an acoustic session that is already generating enormous excitement ahead of Thursday’s broadcast. Daughtry just locked in the final routing for an acoustic theater tour celebrating two full decades as a band. The USA TODAY Acoustic session series keeps adding artists and expanding its reach into mainstream rock and country in ways that continue to reshape the conversation about how established names connect with their audiences. And in one of the most quietly moving stories in the instrument world this year, C.F. Martin & Company released a limited-edition acoustic guitar built from wood that witnessed the American Revolution.
This is not a slow news week for acoustic music. This is one of the biggest.
Here is everything that matters, told the way it deserves to be told.
Soul Asylum’s MPLS Unplugged: Thirty Years Later, the Minneapolis Sound Returns to Where It Belongs
There are moments in rock history that define not just a band but an entire era of live performance, and Soul Asylum’s 1993 appearance on MTV Unplugged was one of them. At the height of the format’s cultural dominance, the Minneapolis alternative rock band delivered a performance that captured something the electric format sometimes obscured: the emotional directness at the center of Dave Pirner’s songwriting, the rawness of a band that had always been more interested in truth than in production polish.
Thirty years later, Soul Asylum has returned to that same spirit, and the result is MPLS Unplugged, arriving August 28th via Blue Élan Records. Recorded on April 20, 2023 — almost exactly thirty years to the day after the original MTV session — the album was captured live at the historic State Theatre in Minneapolis, the city where Soul Asylum has always been rooted. The lineup for the recording brings back several key figures from that legendary original performance, most notably keyboardist Ivan Neville, whose history with the band stretches directly back to the 1993 taping and whose return here creates a genuine sense of continuity across three decades.
Pirner is joined by guitarist Ryan Smith, bassist Jeremy Tapparo, and drummer Michael Bland, and the assembled musicians are further expanded by the STRINGenius string quartet and the Robert Robinson Gospel Singers — a creative choice that gives the recordings an emotional depth and textural richness that goes well beyond a standard acoustic strip-back. This is not a band simply unplugging their cables and playing the same show. It is a thoughtful, fully imagined reimagining of their catalog, one that honors where these songs came from while discovering what they have always been capable of becoming in the right setting.
The album includes classic tracks that any Soul Asylum fan will recognize immediately — among them “Runaway Train,” “Black Gold,” “Somebody to Shove,” and “Misery,” a song that originally appeared on Let Your Dim Light Shine in 1995 and reached number twenty on the Billboard Hot 100 while topping the Mainstream Rock chart. But the most revealing and significant inclusions are two songs that have lived exclusively in live performance for decades without ever being officially recorded: “What Will Become of Me,” first played in 1995 and beloved by devoted fans for thirty years, and “Farmer John,” another longtime live staple. Their appearance on MPLS Unplugged gives those recordings a formal, permanent, fully realized home for the first time in the band’s history.
Shinedown Goes Acoustic in Philadelphia — and the WMMR Session Is Unlike Anything They’ve Done Before
If you follow rock radio in the Philadelphia market, you know that 93.3 WMMR does not take its MMaRchive sessions lightly. Over fifty-eight years of broadcasting history, the station has preserved some of the most memorable artist moments in Philadelphia rock radio, and the MMaRchive catalog represents that legacy in its most curated and personal form. When an MMaRchive event is announced, it means something.
This Thursday, July 16th at 4:00 PM, WMMR presents an exclusive “Acoustic Afternoon” featuring Brent Smith and Zach Myers of Shinedown — and it is being broadcast commercial-free, which tells you everything about how seriously the station is treating this one.
The session is the first-ever crossover event between 93.3 WMMR and sister station 92.5 WXTU, and it captures Smith and Myers in a setting that could not be more different from the arena stages and massive production environments in which Shinedown typically operates. There are no walls of amplifiers here. No pyrotechnics, no elaborate stage design, no crowd of thousands. There is a studio, two artists, their instruments, and the kind of candid conversation that only happens when the performance stakes feel intimate rather than spectacular.
What the session reveals — and what longtime fans already know but newcomers may not — is that Shinedown’s music has always carried an emotional architecture that does not need amplification to communicate. Brent Smith’s voice is one of the most powerful and distinctive in contemporary rock, and stripped of the full-band context, its dynamics become the entire focal point of the room. Zach Myers, whose guitar work and harmonies are central to the Halestorm sound but often absorbed into the larger band texture in live settings, steps into a different kind of prominence here.
The acoustic set draws on catalog favorites including “Sound of Madness” and “Symptom of Being Human,” and the session also serves as a preview of material from the band’s newest studio album, Ei8ht. The timing of this session is not incidental: Shinedown returns to Philadelphia on July 23rd to headline the Xfinity Mobile Arena — the legendary “Big Joint” — alongside Coheed and Cambria and From Ashes to New. The acoustic Thursday and the full electric Friday represent an extraordinary forty-eight-hour window where Philadelphia gets Shinedown in both of the distinct registers they operate at highest level.
Daughtry’s “Acoustic 20 Years Tour” Is the Fall Theater Event That Acoustic Rock Fans Have Been Waiting For
When Daughtry announced earlier this summer that they would be marking their twentieth anniversary not with a greatest-hits arena tour or a legacy-brand stadium run, but with an intimate acoustic theater circuit beginning October 12th and running through November 14th, the response across the rock and acoustic music communities was immediate and enthusiastic. And it makes complete sense.
Chris Daughtry emerged from American Idol’s fifth season in 2006 and built one of the most commercially successful rock debuts in recent memory. The self-titled Daughtry album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, became the fastest-selling rock debut in Nielsen SoundScan history within its first five weeks of release, and earned four Grammy nominations along with seven Billboard Music Awards including Album of the Year. The songs that came from that album — “It’s Not Over,” “Home,” “Life After You” — are the kind of tracks that have lived inside millions of people’s personal soundtracks for two decades now, songs that carry specific memories and emotional associations that run far deeper than casual familiarity.
Stripping those songs back to their acoustic essence and presenting them in the kind of theater environment where every note is audible and every word lands without interference from production — that is a proposition that resonates on a very specific frequency for an audience that has been living with this music for twenty years.
The tour launches October 12th in Troy, New York, and winds through a month-long theater routing that includes stops in Beverly, Massachusetts; Uncasville, Connecticut; Waterloo, New York; Atlantic City and Englewood in New Jersey; and Huntington, New York before continuing across the country through mid-November in Texas. For Northeast acoustic rock fans, the October 17th Atlantic City date and October 21st Englewood date are particularly notable — two nights in close geographic proximity that offer real accessibility for audiences across the region.
USA TODAY Acoustic Keeps Expanding — Michael Marcagi, Kip Moore, and Jackson Dean Deliver the Format’s Promise
The USA TODAY Acoustic session series has become one of the most important ongoing platforms for unplugged performance in contemporary American music, and its most recent batch of releases demonstrates exactly why the format continues to resonate with both artists and audiences at a scale that few predicted when the series began.
The newest sessions include a three-song acoustic performance from rising rock artist Michael Marcagi, who delivers an intimate rendition of his breakthrough hit “Scared to Start” — a song that has built an enormous following through its emotional directness and melodic clarity, both of which come through with even greater force when the arrangement is reduced to its purest acoustic form. For an artist whose music has connected so widely precisely because it feels personal rather than manufactured, the USA TODAY Acoustic setting is an ideal environment. There is nothing here to manufacture the mood. What you hear is what the song actually is.
The newest country sessions feature Kip Moore and Jackson Dean, two artists whose approaches to roots-based songwriting sit in very different places on the spectrum but share a commitment to the kind of lyrical and emotional honesty that acoustic performance rewards. Moore, whose career has always prioritized the rugged, road-worn authenticity of country music’s most honest traditions, sounds completely at home when the production is stripped away. Dean, whose album Magnolia Sage established him earlier this year as one of the most compelling new voices in country’s more soulful, southern-rooted wing, brings a vocal depth and guitar instinct that the acoustic setting showcases in ways a full-band context sometimes cannot.
What connects all of these sessions — across genres, across career stages, across styles — is the same thing that has always made unplugged performance the most revealing format in live music. You cannot fake it. You cannot compensate for a weak song with a strong arrangement. You cannot hide a lack of genuine connection behind production choices. The camera records what is actually in the room, and what is actually in the room is either real or it is not. The artists showing up in the USA TODAY Acoustic sessions, week after week, are the ones for whom the answer is consistently real. That is why the series keeps growing, and why it will continue to matter.
C.F. Martin & Co. Releases the HD-28 Semiquincentennial: History in Wood and String
There are guitar releases, and then there is this.
C.F. Martin & Company — the Pennsylvania-based instrument maker whose nearly two-hundred-year history makes it one of the longest continuously operating acoustic guitar manufacturers in the world — has announced the HD-28 Semiquincentennial, a limited-edition acoustic guitar created to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence. Limited to a production run of just 250 instruments, this guitar is built around a story that is as extraordinary as anything in the history of American instrument making.
The tonewood at the center of the HD-28 Semiquincentennial comes from the Basking Ridge white oak — a six-hundred-year-old tree that stood through the Revolutionary War, witnessed the birth of the American nation, and lived through more than two and a half centuries of the country it predated. The reclaimed timber from that oak is incorporated into an instrument that sits on the iconic HD-28 platform, one of Martin’s most revered production models, known for its rich, balanced sound and its long association with the finest acoustic recording and performance in American music history.
The guitar also features a reclaimed Sitka spruce top adorned with custom artwork by Robert Goetzl, a longtime Martin collaborator whose illustration work has become one of the defining visual signatures of the company’s most celebrated limited editions. Together, the materials, the craftsmanship, and the artistic elements create an instrument that is simultaneously a piece of American history, a collector’s object of significant rarity, and a fully functional, acoustically exceptional guitar built to the company’s highest standards.
Two hundred and fifty instruments, one for each year of the nation’s independence. Each one carries wood that has stood through all of it. For acoustic guitar collectors, historians, and players with the patience and resources to track one down, the HD-28 Semiquincentennial is not simply a guitar. It is the kind of object that belongs in a conversation about what it means to build something worthy of enduring.
The Bigger Picture: Why Rock’s Greatest Names Keep Choosing the Acoustic Stage
Step back from any individual story in this week’s acoustic music landscape and a pattern becomes impossible to ignore. Soul Asylum is releasing a live album built entirely around the acoustic format as the centerpiece of their anniversary year. Shinedown’s two most public-facing members chose a stripped-down radio session to introduce their new album to a Philadelphia audience. Daughtry committed a full month of fall touring to the acoustic theater circuit rather than the arena route. The USA TODAY Acoustic series keeps adding major-label rock and country names to its roster. And C.F. Martin is releasing one of the most historically significant acoustic instruments in the company’s modern history.
These are not coincidences. They are signals.
The move toward acoustic performance among artists whose careers were built on electric power is not a trend toward nostalgia or a retreat from ambition. It is the opposite. It is a move toward the hardest, most demanding, most revealing performance context that music offers. When you take away the band, the amplification, the production infrastructure, and the visual spectacle of a fully staged show, what remains is the song and the person singing it. That combination either justifies everything that came before it, or it does not.
The artists choosing acoustic performance right now — from the biggest rock radio names to the most intimate singer-songwriters — are betting on their material. They are confident enough in what they have written and who they are as performers to let those things stand without reinforcement. That is not a small bet. And the fact that audiences keep showing up, keep tuning in, keep buying tickets for acoustic theater runs and intimate sessions and stripped-down radio broadcasts suggests the bet is consistently paying off.
Acoustic music does not need to position itself as an antidote to anything. It does not need to define itself in opposition to the louder, larger, more produced corners of the music world. It simply needs to keep doing what it has always done: give artists a place to be honest and audiences a place to actually listen.
Right now, more artists are choosing that place than at any point in recent memory. And Unplugged Live will be here to document every one of them.
Unplugged Live covers the acoustic, folk, roots, and singer-songwriter music world with the depth and attention it deserves — from major national releases and historic concert events to the intimate local shows happening in your own neighborhood. Stay tuned, stay close, and keep listening.
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