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The Austin 100: Andrea Cruz

Andrea Cruz
Gina Príncipe
Andrea Cruz

Hometown: Puerto Rico

Genre: Folk

Why We're Excited: Within the Puerto Rican music world, Andrea Cruz is a throwback: She constructs her softly flowing folk songs around acoustic instrumentation and lyrics that reflect on humanity's connection to the natural world. On 2017's Tejido de Laurel and the singles that have trickled out since, Cruz's sound leans hard into a kind of rustic lustrousness, enriched by arrangements that exude both subtlety and sparkle.

Listen to Andrea Cruz's "Vernos Crecer"

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)