After years spent navigating profound personal transformation, Asheville-based singer-songwriter Jane Kramer has announced the release of her fourth studio album, Moon & Mother, due October 9. Today, Kramer shares the album’s first glimpse with “The Wanting Time,” an expansive and adventurous introduction to a collection shaped by love, loss, motherhood, and the ongoing process of becoming.

Written during a period of immense change, Moon & Mother marks the return of an artist who stepped away from the spotlight but never stopped creating. Following the release of her acclaimed 2019 album Valley of the Bones, Kramer became a mother, mourned the loss of her own mother, witnessed the devastation Hurricane Helene brought to her Asheville community, and found herself reconsidering what it meant to build a meaningful life as both an artist and a parent. While music temporarily moved into the background, songwriting remained a constant, eventually becoming the foundation for her most personal album to date.

“At the core of Moon & Mother is the acceptance that I can be a middle-aged mom who still makes music that matters,” Kramer shares. “I’ve maintained a career that I’m proud of. There’s a beautiful reckoning at this point, because music keeps my lights on and connects me with people I both love and admire. That’s enough for me.”

For Kramer, Moon & Mother is ultimately a record about connection: between mothers and daughters, between grief and gratitude, and between the person we once were and the person we continue to become. The album’s title pays tribute to Kramer’s mother, whose creativity, activism, and deep love of music shaped her daughter’s artistic path from the very beginning.

“Mom was a hippie activist who had a beautiful voice and an incredible ear,” Kramer remembers. “She introduced me to the music of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan while driving me to school, and she would make me sing the harmonies to each song, not the melodies. She was such a creative force. She was my moon.”

Recorded at Asheville’s renowned Echo Mountain Recording, Moon & Mother captures Kramer expanding beyond the folk foundations of her earlier work while embracing the full spectrum of her musical influences. Produced alongside longtime friend and collaborator Lillie Syracuse, the album was recorded live over four inspired days, preserving the chemistry and spontaneity of a band fully immersed in the songs.

For the sessions, Kramer once again reunited with internationally lauded trio Free Planet Radio (River Guerguerian, Chris Rosser, and Jacob Wolf), whose members helped bring the album’s intricate arrangements and emotional depth to life. She also called upon a remarkable collection of Asheville’s finest musicians, including Mike Savino (Tall Tall Trees), Matthew Smith, Franklin Keel, and Drayton Aldridge, while welcoming new creative territory with her first-ever recorded duet with a male voice on “May Revisited” alongside Thomas Kozak. Together, the ensemble created a richly layered sonic landscape that reflects both the intimacy of Kramer’s songwriting and the adventurous spirit of the community that surrounds it.

The album’s first single, “The Wanting Time,” offers an immediate glimpse into the emotional and sonic expansiveness of Moon & Mother. Inspired by a phrase Kramer encountered by chance, the song transforms an overgrown garden and a season spent on the road into a meditation on sustaining love — the daily choices, challenges, and acts of devotion that allow relationships to endure. With its spacious, sepia-toned textures and nods to the classic piano-driven singer-songwriter recordings of the 1960s and ‘70s, “The Wanting Time” evokes the emotional landscapes of artists like Jackson Browne while remaining unmistakably Jane Kramer. It’s a bold new chapter for an artist continuing to expand the boundaries of her sound.

Beyond “The Wanting Time,” Moon & Mother finds Kramer embracing a wider sonic palette than ever before. On “Polaroid Girls,” she pairs vivid Americana storytelling with a rhythmic, pop-inspired pulse, while “The Summer You Learned to Swim” creates a hazy, atmospheric landscape through reverb-washed guitar and distorted banjo from Mike Savino (Tall Tall Trees). Written during the final stages of her mother’s battle with cancer, “The Ballast” explores legacy, purpose, and resilience through soaring fiddle, layered vocal harmonies, and B3 organ, while “Lightest Heaviest” captures the complicated beauty of new motherhood through delicate piano and pedal steel. Across each track, Kramer finds new ways to express the same curiosity, empathy, and emotional honesty that have long defined her songwriting, while bringing those enduring themes into sharper focus through the perspective of motherhood, loss, and a life fully lived.

If Valley of the Bones explored longing and loss, Moon & Mother examines what comes next: the rebuilding, the reckoning, and the discovery of a new orbit. It is the work of an artist fully grounded in the person she has always been while making space for everything she is becoming.

To celebrate the release, Kramer will host an official Moon & Mother album release show at Ayurprana Listening Room in her hometown of Asheville on Saturday, September 19. The evening will offer local fans the first opportunity to experience the new songs live in the community that helped inspire them and purchase physical copies of the record before its widespread release.

Moon & Mother arrives on CD, vinyl, and digital streaming platforms Friday, October 9, 2026.

For more information on Jane Kramer and to stay up to date on upcoming releases and performances, visit JaneKramerMusic.com.