Two records landed on the same Friday, October 16. One is a debut album years in the making, from a Nashville musician carrying six generations of music into rooms where her instrument was never supposed to be. The other is a five-song EP from a Texas teenager still in the middle of becoming a writer, and honest about it. Different records. Different kinds of young. Both worth your drive home.

Photo: Trey Schueler

Charissa Hoffman is a sixth-generation musician from Nashville who built her sound around the ukulele, an instrument plenty of people still mistake for a toy. She took it to Berklee College of Music and became the first ukulele principal the school ever accepted. Horizon is her debut album, produced by John Mailander, with Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn, Chris Eldridge, and Nina de Vitry playing on it.

Some records you put on to be impressed. Horizon is one you put on to cook by, the kind of record that lives in the early evening, when the day finally slows down. Hoffman's playing is beautiful in a way that sneaks up on you, and "Parallel Lines," the song that closes the record, is hauntingly beautiful. But the playing is not the whole story. Underneath the picking and the famous guests sits real songwriting. "If I Could Fly," the track she points folks to first, wrestles with where she came from and still lands hopeful. Pretty records are common. Pretty records with something to say are not. This one is both.

We sat down with Hoffman for an upcoming edition of Six-String Travels, and she has plenty to say herself. For now, start with the record.

Photo: Brooks Burris

Jack Barksdale is barely 19, a Texas songwriter who plays guitar, slide, harmonica, mandolin, piano, and ukulele, and calls himself a songwriter first. His new EP, Battleground, is five songs, produced by Mark Edgar Stuart and recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, about as historic a room as a young writer could ask for. The title track features Canadian singer-songwriter Julian Taylor.

The accompaniment is lovely, and it never pushes the songs to do more than they should. Underneath it, Barksdale's voice is light and delicate, and the writing is youthful in the best and truest sense. You can tell he has something to say. He is still hunting for exactly the right words to say it, and there is a political lean running through what I heard. None of that takes away from the record. A song like "Battleground" shows a haunting side that stays with you after it ends. He is still becoming the writer he is going to be, and that is precisely why he is someone to keep an eye on.

Barksdale answered our questions too, and that conversation is coming to these pages soon. A young writer with this much already in hand is worth hearing in his own words.

Two records, two very different kinds of young. One finished and gleaming, one still reaching. Which one earns your drive home? Tell us in the replies. We read every one.

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