nashville – Page 3

PLAYING NASHVILLE: 2020 Was a Tumultuous Year for Music City

Needless to say, 2020 was a challenging year. In a year bookended by a devastating tornado in March and a bombing on Christmas morning, with the COVID-19 pandemic sandwiched in between, Nashville has been dealt its fair share of blows this year. But these challenges also held a mirror up to the city’s resiliency, and through the highs and lows, the city proved not to be merely a group of citizens, but a family.

High: ACM Awards & CMT Awards cater to socially distanced format

Following suit with the many other awards shows, both the Academy of Country Music and CMT decided to go (mostly) virtual for their respective awards shows, adapting their formats to pandemic times. CMT wins the award for most creative, as the network invited its artists to perform at separate locations consisting mainly of outdoor venues across the Nashville area. From Little Big Town’s soaring harmonies bouncing off the walls of a cave, to Dan + Shay serenading us from a beautiful outdoor wedding venue while Luke Combs and Brooks & Dunn rocked the Bicentennial Capitol Mall Amphitheater, with Combs shotgunning a beer in the middle of the performance, CMT broke the mold on what a traditional award show looks like in a way that was both safe and entertaining.

The ACM also found a way to impressively adapt to the pandemic by hosting artists at three of Nashville’s iconic venues, the Ryman Auditorium, Grand Ole Opry and Bluebird Cafe. The artists performed to empty venues and were socially distanced with their band members on stage, the Academy going so far as to distribute the awards by placing the trophy on a stool that the artist would then solely collect. It was impressive to see the lengths that the Academy went to adapt appropriately to the public health situation while still honoring the best and brightest in the genre while making the participants – and viewers – feel safe.

Low: The CMA Awards

During a time when major awards shows opted to host virtual ceremonies in light of the pandemic, the CMA decided to forge ahead with an in-person November event in an effort to remain “representative of the brand,” according to show producer Robert Deaton. Filmed non-audience at the Music City Center with only the nominees and one guest peer nominee allowed in the venue, the CMA went through rigorous protocols to keep the environment as safe as possible with measures including rapid testing, sanitizing equipment between each award, seating a maximum of four people per table that were spaced eight feet apart, among them. But that still wasn’t enough to make this viewer and local journalist feel like it was worth the risk. It was disheartening to see the most prominent names in country music walking around the room without masks on, smiling and laughing with each other without following social distancing practices, especially during a time when COVID-19 cases were surging in Tennessee and local officials were urging citizens not to gather in groups larger than 10 people. Additionally, five acts had to drop out leading up to the day of the show due to testing positive for the virus or coming into contact with family members who had tested positive.

Perhaps the most devastating blow came weeks later; the country music world was heartbroken when Charley Pride, who flew from Dallas to Nashville to attend the show and accept the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, tragically passed away due to complications from COVID-19 at the age of 86 after he was hospitalized with COVID-19-type symptoms in late November.

While it’s uncertain where Pride caught the virus – his manager Kevin Bailey tells The Dallas Morning News that the CMA “took every precaution that you can imagine” and CMA asserts in a statement that Pride tested negative for COVID-19 multiple times after returning home to Dallas – it served as a sobering reminder that hosting a virtual show would have perhaps been the safest and more proactive choice.

Charley Pride was one of country music’s big losses this year. Photo credit: Joseph Llanes

Low: The loss of legends

Loss has sadly been a commonplace in 2020, and the country music community lost many beloved artists this year. Kenny Rogers passed away from natural causes in early March just before the pandemic hit, while Charlie Daniels suddenly passed away from a stroke in July, months before his annual Volunteer Jam was scheduled to take place in Nashville (it’s since been rescheduled to February and re-branded as a tribute concert to Daniels).

Additionally, K.T. Oslin, who made history as the first female songwriter to win the CMA Award for Song of the Year with “80’s Ladies,” lost her battle with Parkinson’s Disease one week after being diagnosed with COVID-19, merely days before Christmas. The ramifications of COVID-19 where also felt when Charley Pride, John Prine and Joe Diffie all succumbed to complications after contracting the virus, leaving their loved ones, fans and the music community at large to mourn the loss of such tremendous figures.

High: Country music reckons with systemic racism

In the midst of a raging pandemic, a mirror was held up to America’s long-rooted history of systemic racism following the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Their deaths inspired countless marches and protests and sent shock waves throughout the country that ultimately arrived at country music’s doorsteps, leading to several panels about the topic of diversity and breaking the cycle of racism in country music, with industry professionals and artists alike openly sharing their experiences.

This summer, during a panel called “A Conversation on Being African American in the Nashville Music Industry,” EntertainmentOne’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Gina Miller, spoke out, saying, “The best data we have are your stories.” She related her own experience in which she greeted a woman at her former workplace every day, her cheerful “Good morning!” going totally unanswered. She persisted for nearly two years, until she the woman finally reciprocated. “From that grumble of ‘good morning,’ I still said ‘good morning’ the next day and the grumble got clearer and clearer,” Miller recalled. “The day that I had the clear ‘good morning,’ I knew we had turned a different corner.”

As a white woman who covers country music daily, these discussions, and the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole, have opened my eyes to how I have unintentionally been a part of this system. Miller’s perseverance truly resonated with me and her story often comes to mind, even months later. Miller’s story, and the many others like it, have motivated me to take a hard look at my role as a journalist and be more intentional about shining a spotlight on the voices that deserve to be heard.

Though country music still has a long way to go before it achieves true equity, it feels as though the blindfolds came off this year in many respects, the industry now willing to not only have conversations about race, but make changes to establish a more inclusive genre. As Mickey Guyton’s star power continues to rise in light of her powerful songs “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?” and “Black Like Me,” the former of which made her the first Black woman to perform her own song at the ACM Awards in its 55-year history and the latter designating her the first solo Black female to be nominated for Best Country Solo Performance at the Grammy Awards, it feels like a glimmer of hope for a future that is more accepting, welcoming and loving toward all.

High & low: Tennessee tornado & recovery efforts

When a tornado tore through multiple towns in Tennessee in the middle of the night on March 3, it left 24 people dead and multiple businesses destroyed in its path. Nashville was among one of the hardest hit areas, leaving many local business owners to clean up the damage and piece their livelihoods back together – but they didn’t do it alone. Residents-turned-volunteers demonstrated why Tennessee is nicknamed the “Volunteer State,” whether donating money and resources or showing up by the thousands to help clean up the damage. The effort was so massive that there was a waitlist to volunteer while other times volunteers were turned away.

Photo courtesy of I Believe in Nashville

As one of those volunteers, I can attest to the awe-inspiring service of this city. Having only seen pictures of tornado devastation on the news, it was shocking to stand in the rubble of a home that had been torn apart in minutes, the owner remarkably surviving with only a few minor scrapes despite being trapped in the middle of the destruction. But the fear and heartache I felt as we picked up the remnants of someone’s life was immediately met with comfort and relief, working alongside selfless strangers who became friends through the experience.

While Nashville is a city of transplants, I believe it is reflective of our nation as a whole. As people who have moved here from across the country with a dream in hand collectively rushed to the call of duty, helping their fellow neighbors, the “I Believe in Nashville” mural – which remained unharmed while the buildings around it were destroyed – took on new meaning. It not only represents the resiliency of Nashville, but proves that we the people are invincible when we join together for the greater good.

PREMIERE: Allison Mahal Thrives After Heartbreak on Debut EP ‘Me Now’

Heartbreak has provided inspiration for endless songs and albums, not only because the topic is so universal but also because everyone somehow still has their own unique spin on it. For Nashville-based singer-songwriter Allison Mahal, a breakup was a catalyst for deep self-discovery and growth, as well as for her debut EP, Me Now.

The EP follows the emotional trajectory of a breakup: first, you get sad as you think back on the happy memories you shared with your ex, then you begin to cheer up as you remember why you broke up in the first place, and finally, you become more independent and aware of what you do and don’t want in the future.

After a brief drum intro, “Magic” sets the scene both sonically (think updated ’80s vibes) and thematically, touching on the healing power of music and name-dropping Sufjan Stevens. “After my breakup, I would dance in my room; I would rearrange my furniture and put on my favorite songs,” Mahal recalls. Lyrically, she reminisces on the things she misses about her ex – as well as her most desperate moments of post-breakup longing. With lines like “Looks like your magic is still wearing on me/I can’t shake it off in my sleep,” she puts a surprisingly negative twist on the idea of magic; here, it’s more like a curse than a blessing. “When I wake up in the morning and I feel you by my side/I’m so tired of this magic keeping us alive,” the chorus concludes.

With its upbeat percussion and electric guitar, Mahal describes it as the most heavily-produced of the collection. “I really wanted to make a song I could dance to in my room,” she says. “I didn’t want the production to emulate sadness because the lyrics were sad enough.”

Next comes the title track – a fun, deceptively breezy song full of plucky guitar riffs, where Mahal reflects on the ways she diminished herself to be in the relationship. “[I had] this revelation after repeatedly making myself small in relationships — small in the sense of being super agreeable and keeping shit bottled in because there was fear that who I was as a person and my truth would make people less interested,” she says. “I wanted to be confident in who I am, and I was dimming my shine just to be agreeable in relationships.” In the final lines, she belts, “All I have is me now,” acknowledging that she became more present when she wasn’t shrinking herself for anyone.

In “October,” a slow, contemplative song incorporating string arrangements and raw, emotive vocals, she reflects on what she could have done differently in the relationship as her ex becomes “a stranger who passes me by.” “Mustangs” finishes out the EP with a poppy reprieve, describing that feeling of hope that you’ll run into your ex whenever you see the car they drive, while simultaneously hoping it’s not them because you know you need space to heal.

Allison Mahal · Me Now

Mahal started the recording process in fall 2019, using producer and guitarist Sam Roller’s home studio as well as the famous Ocean Way Nashville Recording Studios. She, Roller, and Van Isaacson, who also played synths and violin, produced the EP together, and “Mustangs” was the only song they kept the same after the first recording. They listened to the rest and thought, “we want to make them more indie pop, less studio version, more electronic, and incorporate weird sounds and take our time,” she remembers.

Mahal has been playing guitar and songwriting since she was 12 years old and studied music business at Belmont University in Nashville. In addition to her career as an artist, she works as a PR rep for musicians, which she loves but views as separate from her music. She released her first single, “Little Blue,” in 2018, followed by “Me Now” and “Mustangs” this year.

She was going to therapy while recording the EP, which helped her to process the emotions that went into the music. “I had a lot of unsettled pain I didn’t know how to deal with on my own,” she says. “I was writing these songs and realizing a lot about myself and what I want in relationships, romantically and platonically. I think I found growth through pain, through writing these songs, through recording these songs, through therapy, and through surrounding myself with people who encouraged me to be vulnerable, who don’t make me feel small.” She counts Roller and Isaacson among these people, so recording the EP was an especially liberating process for her. “I felt I could be my loudest and my truest self, and that was super healing,” she says.

“I had a tendency of being a chameleon to make people feel comfortable in a room, and it took me until the recording process of this EP to realize it’s okay not to be an agreeable person all the time,” she says. “You can be a very kind-hearted person and still disagree with someone. You can be vocal and confident. It’s okay to mess up with your peers and make mistakes in relationships and learn from it, and you don’t have to be this perfect shell of a human and as a female. I’m learning it’s okay to take up space.”

Follow Allison Mahal on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

‘Regifted’ was a Beacon of Light For Ty Herndon

When Ty Herndon recorded a collection of holiday classics nearly 20 years ago, he could have never imagined the time in which they’d resurface.

On his new holiday album Regifted, Herndon breathes new life into his 2003 album Not So Silent Night, a project that’s taken on multiple forms over the past 20 years. Initially completed in 2000, Herndon released Not So Silent Night re-packaged with updated songs through his website in 2003, followed by another version with additional songs, A Ty Herndon Christmas, released in 2007. The original album came at a time when Herndon endured a series of personal challenges. He had lost his record deal three years prior and was struggling to find another one, in addition to overcoming alcoholism. “I was having a really tough time in life. At that point, I was lost, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was in a business that I felt had beat me up pretty badly, but it’s what I do. Just contemplating some poor choices in life at that point and just remembering that I was newly sober, it was a tough time,” he recalls to Audiofemme. “I just needed to make that record, so I took it back to the well of where I came from – my grandmother’s guitar.”

The recording process was as raw as Herndon’s emotions, the singer turning his living room into a recording studio where his friends helped him record the songs he used to hear echo off the walls of his grandmother’s Baptist church with her 17-soprano choir’s Christmas Cantata, including “O Come All Ye Faithful,” “Little Drummer Boy,” “Silent Night” and “O Come O Come Emanuel,” the latter of which is a duet with fellow country singer and then-boyfriend, Waylon Payne. “But the thing that wasn’t tough is sitting down on the floor in front of a microphone and singing – so simple,” Herndon continues. “And that was a superstar in my life, the gift was the superstar, and I had to follow that.”

Nearly 20 years later, that gift resurfaces in the form of Regifted, maintaining the integrity of the original album while adding a stunning rendition of “Orphans of God” featuring longtime friend and Tony Award-winning Broadway star, Kristin Chenoweth. During a year consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic that led to a shelved documentary, a new album being placed on hold and more than 100 cancelled tour dates, Herndon found himself back in a dark place – so much so that he was temporarily unable to sing. “Everything felt like it was lost. All that darkness, I lost the ability to sing, there was nothing coming out,” Herndon explains. “I found myself in a spot of such darkness that I had very little faith, and faith is the light.”

But when Herndon’s manager brought the anniversary of Not So Silent Night to his attention, he felt a shift. “I lit up a little bit,” Herndon says of his reaction. “The minute he said that, I’ll never forget this, what popped into my brain was ‘Orphans of God’ – it’s time.” Released in 2006 by Christian group Avalon, the Dove Award-nominated song is one that Herndon has long wanted to record, but was waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. He received another sign that it was meant to be when his producer informed him that the song was already tracked, as they had recorded a piece of “Orphans of God” for a song on musician Paul Cardall’s upcoming album.

The puzzle was complete when Chenoweth agreed to sing with him, along with supporting vocals from former Avalon members Michael Passons and Melissa Greene, who departed the group before “Orphans of God” was recorded. Their voices collectively soaring on the uplifting song brought Herndon to tears. “It was so special, I sat down and I started crying,” Herndon says, adding that he was intentional about making the word “God” universal. “That was to give a lot of people out there who are just are lost, they need a hug, the word ‘God’ in this is a hug. It can be anything you want it to be because there are no orphans of love.”

Though Herndon made subtle changes to Regifted, such as taking his manger’s advice and ending the album with the a Capella rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” which opens Not So Silent Night, he says that “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is a performance almost frozen in time. “‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’ was performed exactly like we sang it on my grandmother’s back porch almost my whole life. That is the most authentic piece on the record for me,” he says.

As Herndon reflects on the album’s initial creation, he remembers it as a family affair of people who showed up for him in his darkest hour, viewing the project from a meaningful perspective. “Having some of the greatest singers who’ve gone on to do magnificent things that were singing on that record, who just showed up because I called them and said, ‘I need you guys. There’s no money involved. I need you and come sing with me,’” he recalls. “It’s been crazy that music made in joyful desperation so long ago would surface today and sound so fresh. It’s like something from another world said ‘let’s just hold this album for 20 years.’”

Though time has changed many aspects of life in between, the albums have seemingly evolved with the singer, pinpointing dark periods in life that led Herndon to the light of music and self-growth. “The biggest thing I’ve learned about myself this year is that I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was,” he says. “There’s always been that underlying, ‘I’m going to crumble at any minute,’ and how much of me is really authentic and how much me is not. I know who I am now. I know who my people are now. I know who my friends are. So I have learned full circle what Tyrone Herndon is all about.”

He keeps the advice of his grandmother close at heart, too. “My grandmother used to tell me ‘if you go to sleep with the dark, you can certainly wake up with it. If you go to sleep with the light, you can wake up with it,’” he proclaims. “So I try to go to sleep with the light.”

Follow Ty Herndon on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Reyna Roberts Claims Her “Stompin’ Grounds” as 2021’s Next Country Star

Booming production can’t drown out Reyna Roberts’ awe-inspiring vocals. With fire-red hair and a voice to match, Roberts is coming for her country crown in 2021. Case in point: her latest single, “Stompin’ Grounds,” with its rollicking guitars and spellbinding blend of hard rock and country. Her rock influences – ranging from Jimi Hendrix to AC/DC – become apparent the second you press play. Roberts’ fierce voice is wild and free, yet she knows how to tame it as she wails on the spitfire lyrics, “Boots down/Flames up from dawn to dusk/Drowning in that whiskey river/But too damn high to sink.” It’s the type of song that’s tailor-made for a live show and one she’s bound to light up on stage with.

Roberts moved from LA to Nashville in March, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown swept across the country. A few months later, in July 2020, she unleashed “Stompin’ Grounds.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, she shares that the song is partially inspired by her military background. As the stepdaughter of a Marine, Roberts lived in Alaska for a period of time during childhood before calling California and Alabama home, noting that while writing “Stompin’ Grounds,” she thought of the servicewomen and men who have to make stomping grounds for themselves when they’re stationed around the world, her thoughtfulness adding a layer of compassion to an already striking number.

Roberts debuted with “67 (Winchester)” back in the beginning of 2019, then spent the next few years networking with songwriters and industry reps and honing her craft. But it was her vocal talent that propelled her into the spotlight this summer, when she uploaded a cover of Carrie Underwood’s “Drinking Alone” to YouTube. Poised at a piano in her home, Roberts voice flies as magically as it does in a professional studio. Her rendition won over the approval of Underwood herself, who praised “Looks AND sounds great!” after Mickey Guyton retweeted a video of Roberts slaying the song with her arena-ready voice.

On top of her electrifying vocals, Roberts has proven that she’s just as willing to be honest in real life as she is in her music. In a series of Tweets, Roberts is sharing her recovery journey with fans from a recent eye surgery she had to correct cross-eyed vision impairment she was born with as a premature baby. Whether she’s revealing to Billboard that she lost every high school wrestling match her first year, yet refused to give up the sport, or sharing her truth on social media, Roberts says she was raised to be fearless, and so far, it’s proven to be true.

Roberts will perform on Brandy Clark’s holiday special, Christmas From Here There And Everywhere, alongside Clark, Melissa Etheridge, Cam, Ashley McBryde, Shane McAnally and Charlie Worsham, when it airs on Circle All Access on Dec. 22 at 10 p.m. ET.

Follow Reyna Roberts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: K Michelle DuBois Dodges Self-Consciousness with “On the Run Again”

As humans, we crave being seen and acknowledged by other people — but the irony is that often, once someone else’s eyes are on us, we dodge their gaze out of fear that they won’t like what they see. Atlanta-based indie-pop singer/songwriter K Michelle DuBois gives a sound to this debilitating self-consciousness with her latest single, “On the Run Again.”

The song has a fun ’90s college rock vibe, with dramatic pauses exuding a fierce attitude, powerful guitar hooks giving it a mischievous feel, and guitar and keyboard solos that add a haphazard, chaotic energy. DuBois’ angst is palpable in the catchy pre-chorus (“Your words put me on trial/put me on trial/asking too many questions”) and reaches a climax with an explosion of electric guitar at the end.

DuBois wrote the music first without knowing what the song would be about. Then the phrase “on the run again” came to her, and she began writing lyrics about avoiding other people. “It’s just that feeling of someone having you under a magnifying glass, and you don’t want to sit still long enough to let them have you under the magnifying glass because it’s too close, it’s too intimate,” she explains. “You don’t want to be looked at too closely, so as soon as someone’s paying too much attention to you, you kind of run and hide.”

K Michelle DuBois · 3. On the Run Again

As a musician, DuBois tends to experience this feeling when she’s playing in front of small crowds, which feel more intimate than large ones; she remembers her fingers trembling as she played guitar in one performance. “I tried to take deep breaths and just sing my heart out and maybe closed my eyes a little bit,” she says. “But then honestly, probably by the fourth song I was into it, I felt good, and by the end of it, I was like, ‘Oh, I could do this again.'”

The song is off DuBois’s fourth LP as a solo artist, The Fever Returns (out February 5), which takes inspiration from the Divinyls and other favorite ’80s bands of hers. Some of the songs, like the title track that opens the album, have a slow, almost classic rock sound, while others, like “Heaven” and “Waves Break,” are full of ’80s-esque electronic effects. Metal influence is audible on tracks like “Southern Gothic Dream,” and the album takes a poppy turn on the catchy “All Night Glamour.”

DuBois recorded many of the songs herself using drum loops, then she’d take them into the studio to further develop them, her drummer Chandler Rentz adding live drum parts. She played the keyboard, and though she plays guitar, her producer Dan Dixon supplied the guitar parts for the album, improvising solos. “I’m trying to bring back the guitar solo,” she says. “I’ve heard people say the guitar solo’s dead, but no.”

Thematically, she considers The Fever Returns “very much female-centric, kind of encouraging my sisters out there to be free and wild and empowered and to find that thing inside you that you want to live for and really make it blossom,” she says. “The title track is kind of about leaving your comfort zone and spreading your wings, and when you have even a glimmer of something that might excite you, to let it go ahead and give into it and let it rage.”

“Southern Gothic Dream,” for instance, is a play on “Knoxville Girl,” a murder ballad popularized by the Louvin Brothers, and re-recorded by various musicians, from The Lemonheads to Nick Cave to Okkervil River. It’s about a man who beats a woman with a stick and throws her in a river; singing from the perspective of the victim, DuBois imagines coming back as a ghost and making the murderer’s life a living hell. “I wanted to write a murder ballad — I have a fantasy of kicking his teeth out on the mountain — so in a morbid way, that’s a female empowerment song as well,” she says.

DuBois grew up with a family of songwriters in Nashville and formed her first band, Ultrababyfat, with a high school friend. The pop punk group was around for 10 years, opening for Pavement and PJ Harvey and performing at Warped Tour in 2001. She formed her next band, Luigi, with a childhood friend in Atlanta, then began releasing solo music in 2012. Currently, she’s at work on a new, experimental EP called Vitamin 3 with her friend Paul Curry, who’s been sending her music and having her add the vocals.

“I just kind of stream-of-consciousness vocalize over it and see what happens, and then the little jewels that happen, I pick those out and build on those,” she explains. “It’s been a really fun exercise in trying to see a different way to [write], almost like painting with words.”

Follow K Michelle DuBois on Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING NASHVILLE: The Best Country Christmas Songs of 2020

With the 2020 holiday season comes a bounty of festive music straight out of Nashville. Stars across Music City have been getting into the holiday spirit with new Christmas albums, and while many offer sound renditions of the classics, they’ve also contributed their own perspectives with holiday originals. From a music legend to a bright newcomer, this collection of holiday tunes from some of Nashville’s finest provide comfort in their own unique ways during a time we need it most.

Dolly Parton (featuring Miley Cyrus) – “Christmas Is”

Dolly Parton has a monopoly on Christmas this year, and frankly, the world is better for it. When she’s not funding research for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, Parton is offering up her first holiday album in almost 30 years, A Holly Dolly Christmas. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, as the icon shares stellar covers of Christmas classics poised alongside a handful of Parton-penned originals that make the season bright, including the tender-hearted “Christmas Is” featuring her goddaughter, Miley Cyrus. During a tumultuous year, leave it to Dolly’s graceful nature to bring us back down to earth with a reminder of what’s truly important not only during this time of reflection, but all year round, with her message of kindness and the joy of giving over receiving. Her words are destined to bring a smile to your face – one of the many gifts from the national treasure that is Dolly Parton.

Best lyrics: “It’s all about kindness/Love and compassion/Better to give than receive/That is a true fact/But those who don’t know that/Well, they are the poorest indeed”

“Christmas is a time for caring/Being at your best/Christmas is a time for sharing/Knowing you’ve been blessed/Christmas is a time for giving/Love is made of this/That’s what Christmas is”

Ingrid Andress – “Christmas Always Finds Me”

2020 was a major year for Ingrid Andress. While her debut hit “More Hearts Than Mine” and corresponding album, Lady Like, scored the breakout star multiple Grammy nominations, Andress still managed to cut through the hype with the tear-inducing “Christmas Always Finds Me.” Backed by a piano and intimate string orchestra, Andress delivers a timely message for those feeling lonely this holiday season. The songwriter has a gift for visual storytelling, and these lyrics (co-written with Derrick Southerland and Sam Ellis) find her clinging to warm memories of the past that follow her wherever she roams the earth. Delivered with breathtaking vocals that speak right to the heart, Andress offers a message of comfort with this gentle holiday lullaby.

Best lyrics: “And even if I’m all alone/A million miles away from home/It shows up in warm memory/Another year older/Getting harder to believe/But somehow Christmas always find me”

Carrie Underwood ft. John Legend – “Hallelujah”

One can only expect greatness when two of the best singers in music team up for an original holiday song, and that’s precisely what Carrie Underwood and John Legend deliver on the gorgeous “Hallelujah,” which appears on Underwood’s first-ever holiday album, My Gift. The lyrics, co-penned by Legend, evoke beautiful imagery ranging from a choir of angels to embers burning bright, and one can feel the crisp winter-kissed air the Grammy winners sing of as their brilliant voices unite. The song is wrapped in a feeling of calm and serenity they bring to life on this cinematic number, all while offering a message of peace and hope that feels like a warm embrace. The video is clip from My Gift: A Christmas Special from Carrie Underwood which begins streaming December 3 on HBO Max.

Best lyrics: “Let there be peace on earth/Let the lonely join together, let them know their worth/Let the children know/There’s a brighter day ahead/Let’s hold on to hope/And on the coldest evening in this December/Let us pray the spirit of love will linger”

Dan + Shay – “Take Me Home For Christmas” and “Christmas Isn’t Christmas”

Quenching fans’ thirst for Christmas tunes, Dan + Shay offer a sugar and spice blend of holiday originals with “Take Me Home For Christmas” and “Christmas Isn’t Christmas.” The crossover duo, featuring Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney, offer a pair of festive songs that reflect the current time, juxtaposing the happy and the sad. “Take Me Home For Christmas” is a banjo-laden bop for new lovers spending their first holiday together, injecting the listener with a dose of Christmas cheer as the narrator beckons their partner to take them to their hometown where they established holiday traditions and memories. But Dan + Shay bring us back to reality with the pandemic-friendly “Christmas Isn’t Christmas,” the two serenading those longing for the person they love during a time when many are separated from family and friends on a holiday of camaraderie.

Best lyrics: “And those songs wouldn’t sound the same/Home wouldn’t feel like home/I’m thankful you’re here tonight/‘Cause all I know is/Christmas isn’t Christmas if it’s not with you”

Louis York ft. Jimmie Allen and The Shindellas – “What Does Christmas Mean”

Bust out those jazz hands – Louis York and The Shindellas shoobie-doobie their way into the holiday season with Jimmie Allen on “What Does Christmas Mean.” Originally released in 2017, the Grammy nominated duo of Claude Kelly and Chuck Harmony called on hit making country star Allen for a re-imagination of the track that finds them painting their ideal Christmas scene with snow on the ground and loved ones all around. Allen’s buttery-smooth voice and The Shindellas’ sparkling harmonies add flair to the already bouncy track, the three acts instantly igniting Christmas spirit the moment the song starts. But the real star of the show is the way Harmony tickles those ivories, creating a jazzy Christmas melody that’ll hit you in all the holly jolly feels.

Best lyrics: ”There’ll be snow on the ground/There’ll be lights in the trees/There’ll be love all around/But if you’re not with me/Tell me what does Christmas mean without you?”

CF Watkins Finds Beauty in Longing with “Come Around” Video Premiere

For pop-Americana singer-songwriter Cf Watkins, 2020 has been a catalyst for big changes. She left New York, where she’d lived for nine years, to ride out the pandemic in her North Carolina hometown with her parents. Six months into the ordeal, her relationship began to unravel – but Watkins quickly met someone else: her dog, Clara. “The day after he left North Carolina, Clara just kind of showed up,” she says with a smile. “I was sitting on the porch, you know, post-breakup crying. [My parents] live in the middle of nowhere and she just appeared out of the woods and sat next to me and, long story short, never left.” Clara was the perfect sign – it was time to move forward. She headed to Nashville, where she’s currently holed up with her pup and a guitar, contemplating her next moves.

In the midst of it all, Cf Watkins released her latest album, Babygirl, in October. She worked with producer and multi-instrumentalist Max Hart (The War On Drugs, Katy Perry, Melissa Etheridge) on the record for three years, over many trips back and forth from New York to LA, where Hart lives. They met through friends in Brooklyn; Max wanted to record some country covers and was looking for a singer. Watkins jokes that she wasn’t the brash, brassy Southern voice he’d originally envisioned, but during recording, her more subtle approach grew on him.

“That kind of connection with someone, it is almost as mystical as a romantic connection,” she says. “It’s just as rare to have a creative partnership where it just feels like you get each other. You get how to challenge each other and you get how to bring out the best in each other. We are so different in the way we think and create but it just works.”

Babygirl is all about personal connections, particularly those outside of romantic relationships, which are rarely examined in song. But there’s one outlier – “Come Around.” The song digs into feelings of inadequacy, something Watkins hesitated to bring to this album. “I felt really conflicted about putting it on the record, only because it didn’t feel like it fit with my vision for what I wanted the record to be; which was empowered,” she confesses. “That song was coming from not feeling in my power.”

The video, shot in a warehouse in North Carolina, echoes the sentiment of powerlessness. Watkins drops, seemingly from a dark sky, into nothingness. She roams quietly through empty white voids, which echo her words back at her. Griffin Hart Davis produced the music video, pulling Watkins into his world of ethereal spaces, where lighting grabs focus, allowing the audience to meditate almost solely on the focal point: Watkins herself.

“How do you feel about trampolines?” Griffin asked her before the shoot; the video was planned as a production “extra,” created in between snapping Babygirl press photos. Watkins says the challenge was to “make something beautiful with a short amount of time and a short amount of funds,” and they didn’t waste time on set. “Come Around” reveals a feeling of tenderness, a soreness to the touch; the delicate, complicated nature that anchors Cf Watkins’ music.

“I write songs when I am longing for something, for better or for worse,” she says of her work. While those themes remain pretty subtle on Babygirl, “Come Around” is more overt in its examination of love gone awry. “Come around, come around/I been to all my friends and I think things could be different if you come around, come around,” Watkins croons. “Tell me baby, what can I do?”

Her music is seemingly autobiographical, but she doesn’t agree with the label. “What is autobiographical?” Watkins muses. “It is coming through me, it’s my perspective of it. It is how it made me feel. When are you playing a character and when are you not playing a character? Sometimes I feel like in my day-to-day life I’m playing more of a character than when I’m performing. I definitely play certain roles in my friend group, at my day job. It’s almost harder to divorce yourself from the characters we play in our daily life so that you can actually be more honest in the music.”

Watkins grew up running around back woods in North Carolina, humming music to herself as she whizzed past pine trees. The landscape, wild and rural, shaped her personality, and allowed her to explore identities beyond any one defined character. “A name is given to you and you put on your personality. You create a personality throughout your life to find your place in the world and in a conversation and in a friend group and in school. I’ve never really loved my name: Caitlin. I’ve never fully connected with it. I don’t feel like it reflects how I feel about myself,” Watkins says candidly. “I think, for me, Cf Watkins got be who I am when I’m, as cheesy as it sounds, my more pure self, who I am when I’m alone.”

Watkins says there’s a hidden benefit to using her initials, too. “I did appreciate the androgyny of it. I appreciated that if someone heard, ‘Have you listened to Cf Watkins?’ they wouldn’t immediately know what my gender was,” she explains. “[It] takes away that unconscious bias – which may be a reflection of my own insecurities – but I think it was also helpful to separate who I am in my day-to-day life from who I am as an artist and as a performer. It does allow me to let go of some of my insecurities and to think of it as who I am to be, rather than just who I am every day. I don’t know why names make a difference, but it does feel different.”

Watkins has been performing since her mid-teens, finally releasing her debut album, I Am New, in 2016. Though New York’s city streets inspired her, she was surprised at how much her writing bent back toward home, particularly songs on Babygirl like “Changeable,” “Dogwood,” and “Westville.” “A lot of the album came from a place of homesickness,” Watkins said. “I love New York so much – I’m so grateful for it, and it’s magical – but I do feel like a visitor in it in a lot of ways. And I think that is what makes it so beautiful. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been there – it doesn’t belong to you. It’s something that’s constantly changing and there is a comfort in that as well, but I think that moving to New York made me feel more connected to North Carolina in a way. You don’t realize that connection stays with you.”

Watkins’ songs almost never start with words. “It’s too cerebral for me then – I get too in my head and it becomes a puzzle,” she says. “Most of my songs start with a feeling.” She plays guitar until she finds something that naturally matches that feeling; she hums, recording variations of sound on the voice memos app on her phone. “Come Around” is the oldest song on the record, something Watkins feels is a reminder of progress. “It is this piece of my past. Maybe it’s helpful to see the growth – going from a person who wrote ‘Come Around’ to writing ‘Baby Girl’, the last song on the record,” she says.

She and Hart are already discussing a new record, but it’s hard to pinpoint when they’ll be able to get to work on one. For now, Watkins is trying to write without an end goal in mind; she’s returned to writing for herself, like she did when she was a young girl humming to herself in the backwoods of Carolina. Back then, the songs were just a part of intuitive therapy, a way of working through emotions. They didn’t have a finish line. She feels much the same about her current home, set in a strange city where she knows no one.

“I am here because everything else sort of just fell apart and [Nashville] is where I landed,” Watkins says. “I don’t know how long I’ll be here. I think the beautiful thing about the pandemic is, you have to be in the present moment. I feel a little anxious that [I’m] completely unable to plan for my future or to know what I want… if I want to live in Nashville or if I want to go back to New York or if I want to go to LA… I don’t know. But for now I feel grateful to have a backyard.”

Follow Cf Watkins on Instagram and Facebook for ongoing updates.

Lauryn Peacock Muses on Memory with First Single in Five Years, “Coming Over Me Again”

“I loved digging into memory. It wasn’t intentional; memory just happened,” says Nashville-based singer-songwriter Lauryn Peacock of her time in quarantine.

Memory just happened. Many of us are finding that truer than ever in this stressful time that leaves us alone with our thoughts much more than usual. On her new single “Coming Over Me Again,” Peacock sets a place for the unshakeable familiarity of past relationships, how easily channeled the ghosts of our past are when we’re quarantined in our apartments.

Lauryn Peacock · Coming Over Me Again

Premiering today on Audiofemme, the single will see its official release December 4 as a stand-alone 7″ titled Quarantine Love. It was written back in April when Peacock was dealing with the unexpected stillness and memories her solitude had awakened. “There are a lot of loose energies right now,” she says. “I live in an old building near the hospital where everyone has died. This used to be a plantation. Then there are the energies of being in my apartment all the time.” The single precedes a full length album that Peacock plans to release in January 2021.

Given that this is her first release in five years – following 2015 LP Euphonia – “Coming Over Me Again” feels like a fitting title, and Peacock says she felt more than ready to make new music. Having written 50 songs over the past few years but being too busy earning a master’s in theology to make an album, she was eager to start recording. She found a like-minded producer in Andrija Tokic and worked to cull down the songs. But, as most things did in 2020, her plans took a sharp turn.

“Our start date was March 23, the first day that the mayor put down the stay-at-home order. I took a bunch of flak from people who wanted me to go in anyway,” Peacock remembers. “I waited until we could quarantine a little more, wear masks. We waited, and then it was July. It took a long time to get elements together. We only did one round of edits, but it took seven weeks.”

Despite these complications, she was determined to release something this year, with all those songs burning holes in her pocket. A GoFundMe campaign helped her cross the finish line, financing the singles, the album, and a short documentary on the making of the LP to follow; Peacock also plans to donate 15% of all proceeds to Gideon’s Army and tornado and COVID relief in North Nashville.

Currently working on an MFA in poetry at NYU’s low-residency program that was slated to include two weeks in France—a huge plus for the admitted Francophile—Peacock realized she’d have to trade in Paris for her apartment when the pandemic forced her classes onto Zoom instead. Peacock settled in to the unexpected lull, reading and writing poetry and curiously attending to whatever memories emerged. Whether they were happy or sad was less important than the immediacy of their all-consuming presence. “It’s about going through the healing process but also the energies that stay with you. They could be good or bad. I take the Buddhist path and say ‘How do I know what is good or what is bad?’” she explains.

In the middle of her third master’s degree and following a time living in France pre-pandemic, Peacock brings a kaleidoscope of vantages and experiences into her current songwriting. While the themes within “Coming Over Me Again’’ are apt for 2020, Peacock also wanted a ’90s feel as an homage to the decade where she came of age. She reminisces about the ’90s animatedly, remembering listening to Pearl Jam with friends and rollerblading to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” She feels fortunate that those songs soundtracked her adolescence. “I was very lucky to be in a cool pocket of music those years,” she remembers. When writing her single, she knew she wanted a ’90s easiness to the guitar work. Her producer introduced a technique of ’90s recording: mixing the vocals lower so listeners would have to turn the song up to hear them. The ’90s vibes aren’t retro or dated, though. They lend an easy, melodic sweetness to the song, as if to remind us that memory doesn’t have to be dark or painful all the time.

As with her previous work, Peacock’s warm, high voice is the perfect vehicle for the melody. The lyrics open on a younger, earlier time, propelled by acoustic guitar strumming. The verses build into an explosive chorus that repeats the song’s title: “You’re coming over me again.” Despite the rising action of the verses, the chorus’s transcendence feels like a surprise, like another memory coming from nowhere.

“Maybe the chorus is more about how as you heal from a relationship, it visits you, and you feel that person’s energy again, and it’s like they are there,” says the singer-songwriter, adding that she thought of different people while writing the song. “Certain relationships don’t shake loose. Some things are sticky.”

Follow Lauryn Peacock on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Lydia Luce Pours Her Heart Out on “Dark River”

Lydia Luce was listening to a podcast discussing how humans often retreat into nature to find themselves, the host pointing out that since we are made up of the natural elements of the earth, shouldn’t we go into ourselves to discover the answers?

This compelling notion draws connection to the title track of Luce’s upcoming album Dark River, arriving on February 26. The 11-track set came during a time of emotional healing after Luce left a toxic relationship and began looking inward, going to therapy to work through her own challenges, using the knowledge to form new habits that help set the course of her life moving forward. “I’ve never really been this vulnerable in my writing until this record, which feels good and scary,” she tells to Audiofemme.

Luce relies on the craft of songwriting as a mirror for what she’s experiencing internally, noting how songs have a distinct way of instilling her with valuable lessons on the other side of writing them, citing the title track as an example. “‘Dark River,’ for me, is a beautiful thing,” Luce says. “That song is about recharging yourself, fueling yourself up so that you’re able to go out and be a light in the world and be your best self.”

The song finds her declaring that she’ll no longer allow someone else to claim her power or light, demonstrated in richly poetic lyrics: “They put me on a pedestal/And I gave them everything/Now I’m waking slowly, with an empty feeling/I go down to the dark river/They can’t see me there/I’m gonna drink ’til my belly’s full/Pour it out when they need my help/Please, won’t you save some for me.”

“It took me a long time to write this record because first, I needed to settle into some of those negative tendencies and really come face to face with them and identify them and then start to dismantle them in myself,” she observes. “This year was an unveiling of interesting information about myself that I hadn’t come to terms with and then seeing how it’s affecting different areas of my life.”

The song and corresponding album was born after a Luce took a solo trip to the Pacific Northwest in 2019, Luce crediting the purity of nature in allowing for self-awareness she wouldn’t have otherwise. “Nature always cuts through lyrically, metaphorically in my songs, but also has been a source of quiet for me to be able to sort through whatever it is that I need to sort through in my own life,” she explains. “What I’m continuously learning, and a habit that’s really hard to break, is that when it’s hard to sit in struggle and there’s so many distractions around us, my tendency is to reach to that instead of sitting in the place where I’m uncomfortable, especially when it’s something like recognizing ‘that’s not good, I don’t want to be that anymore. I don’t want to do that anymore because that’s not helpful to me or other people,’” she continues. “That was the lesson that I worked through with that song.”

The theme of shedding the layers of her former self also arises in two of the album’s other key songs, “Maybe in Time” and “Just the Same.” Growing up in a Christian, conservative household in Florida, Luce has found herself straying from her family’s religious identity in recent years, yet is still able to find common ground with her loved ones. “’Just the Same’ was about me being so different from my family, but loving them just the same,” she shares, adding that she wrote the track after visiting her brother who is currently attending Bible school, the two bonding over their interpretations of the passages he shared during her visit.

The song also reflects the compassion and empathy she feels for her loved ones in spite of their opposing views, pointing to a “beautiful” and “respectful” conversation she had with her her father recently, confessing to him that she does not follow the Christian faith, her father respecting her decision and acknowledging the importance of being able to question something one doesn’t understand. “I value the things that we do have in common, but I also appreciate the respectful disagreements that we have,” Luce remarks of her family, channeling that understanding into the pair of tracks.

Creating the album was a liberating experience for Luce, one she hopes fans identify with and use as a safe space to genuinely be oneself. “For me, the writing of it has been me settling into more of who I am and being honest and open about it. I really hope that there’s some kind of freedom found in it and it’s okay to be the way you are and be proud of it and not ashamed of it,” she says. “I think the dark river is this place of serenity, where I have this place to go back to, and that is myself, and I’m finding that in myself more and more. So maybe I’m the dark river.”

Follow Lydia Luce on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for ongoing updates.

Danielle Cormier Eases Holiday Heartache with “This Time Last Year”

From what we typically see on TV and hear on the radio, the holidays are supposed to be a happy time. But for many people right now, that’s just not the case, largely because they’ve had to reassess the safety of long-held family traditions due to the pandemic, or, more tragically, have lost loved ones to COVID-19. Every winter for the past two years, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Danielle Cormier has written a Christmas song, and this year, she chose to sing about the sadness of celebrating the holidays after the death of a family member.

Cormier co-wrote the song, “This Time Last Year,” with singer-songwriter Karlie Bartholomew. Both of them had unexpectedly lost loved ones this year — Cormier lost her father, and Bartholomew lost her grandfather — and though neither of those deaths were due to COVID, the song was written with those who lost family members to the pandemic in mind.

“After my father passed away, I knew this was what I wanted to write a Christmas song about. A lot of people unfortunately can relate to not having a loved one there for them during Christmas, especially this year,” she says.

The single shares many typical elements of holiday songs: minimalistic piano and strings, lyrics about stockings and snow angels, and even sleigh bells. But unlike the cheery mood of your usual Christmas music, Cormier somberly sings about holidays that “aren’t the same” and “presents wrapped without your name.” Perhaps the most poignant line is, “I keep expecting you to walk through the door/Just like every winter before.”

Danielle Cormier · This Time Last Year

Writing the song was an emotional process for Cormier and Bartholomew. “We shared our experiences of what our holidays have been like in our families and just let it all out on the paper,” says Cormier. “And then recording it, especially singing it, I tried to not block it out but not let it get me too carried away while singing. But then every time I would listen back to the recording, it would feel really emotional. It was definitely therapeutic to create this song.”

She hopes that people who listen to the song feel less alone and know they’re not the only ones having a difficult time accepting that the holidays won’t be the same as before. “The lyrics themselves talk about how our traditions are changing for the holidays — nothing is traditional anymore because you’ve lost someone — so I hope there will be people who are able to find comfort in that and be able to relate to it,” she says.

Cormier has been singing and playing instruments since she was little and studied musical theater at New York City’s American Music and Drama Academy. She dreamed of starring on Broadway, until she realized she didn’t want to act anymore. So, she moved to Nashville and began releasing music in 2016, working with producer Adam Lester, who was Peter Frampton’s lead guitarist on tour. Her first full-length album, 2018’s Fire and Ice, features Frampton on the track “Can’t Quit You,” a country breakup song.

“My producer sent me an email one day and said, ‘here’s the final mix for ‘Can’t Quit You’ — by the way, Peter Frampton put a solo on it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s nice, thank Mr. Frampton for me.’ But my jaw just dropped,” she remembers.

Today, Cormier is continuing her education online through the New School and works part time processing shipments in the warehouse of a boutique in Nashville.

She began her annual tradition of writing holiday songs in 2018, after someone at a radio station told her they couldn’t play her songs unless they were either top 40 hits or Christmas songs. “Christmas songs have been the hardest for me to write, just to get into that mindset and trying not to repeat things,” she says. “I’d like to record a classic Christmas song as well, but it’s been really fun trying to create new Christmas songs or write a holiday song that hasn’t been said or hasn’t been done before while still carrying the message of the holiday spirit.”

Her first foray into holiday songs was “Christmas Is You,” which has gotten over three million plays on Spotify and was featured on the platform’s Christmas hits playlist in 2018. In it, she sings about her desire for the company of loved ones over Christmas, rather than material things. The following year, she released “Coming Home This Christmas,” a song about visiting family over the holidays.

She’s also hoping to release an EP next year consisting of five songs written in 2020. In the meantime, she’s compiled a mini EP called This Time Last Year consisting of all three of her Christmas songs, which each in their own way speak to the importance of spending time with loved ones over the holidays — and of appreciating any loved ones we will get to share the holidays with this year.

Follow Danielle Cormier on Instagram for ongoing updates.

Josephine Foster Paints a Mystical Wonderland with No Harm Done LP

There’s something otherworldly about Josephine Foster’s music. The Colorado-based folk singer creates transcendental states with her voice, and the eight tracks on her latest album No Harm Done are no exception, spanning from a conversation with the holy spirit to meditations on a kingless world.

Foster’s distinctive vocals have both a sweetness and a darkness to them on the album, which was first released digitally in August and comes out on vinyl and CD November 20. Many of the tracks sound like something between witchy spells and spiritual hymns, half-hummed, half-chanted against mystical harp and guitar.

In “Leonine,” her voice swivels and swerves through poetic lyrics — “Leonine lean lean on me/Leonine spring/spring on me” — painting an enchanting picture of a land ruled by no one, “where none is king…and all is blessed lioness.” The song is about “the fantasy of not being ruled by a patriarch, or just a way of life with shared leaders, guides, and more feminine presence,” she says. “It certainly feels like the earth is calling for that stewardship.”

Spirituality is a thread tying the songs on the album together, which for Foster is intrinsic to her art form. “I think the act of singing is spiritual,” she says. “It’s sort of decorating the breath and giving meaning with the words, bringing intention to the breath.”

She considers the biggest theme on the album, however, to be love. Perhaps the best example of this is “Conjugal Bliss,” an erotic love song she’s often played at weddings, featuring delicate harmonies against calm, peaceful guitar. “In he I blend/in me he binds/In he I wed/in me he winds,” she sings, in what sounds almost like a verse out of the Song of Songs.

<a href="https://josephinefostermusic.bandcamp.com/album/no-harm-done">No Harm Done by Josephine Foster</a>

Foster actually wrote “Conjugal Bliss” after she was separated from her ex husband at the U.S. border and he was sent to Europe. “I was waiting for him to return for a couple months and was thinking about him, and it turned into a song,” she remembers. Despite its overtly sexual subtitle, “69,” the song is also deeply spiritual. “It’s about lovemaking and being entwined with somebody you love,” she says.

“Sure Am Devilish,” a bluesy folk song about “the rise and fall into the same circumstances and learning the same lessons over and over,” was also written a while ago — 20 years ago, to be exact. “Sometimes, you like something and it just sits in the cellar, just like when you harvest grapes and put them down in the barrel, and then you might not want to drink that for a few years — give it a little chance to find its moment of uncorking the bottle,” she explains.

In perhaps the most haunting song on the album, the seven-minute, 21-second “Old Saw,” Foster’s voice operatically soars over the phrase “holy spirit,” addressing this being, “I would like to talk with you.” With an almost freak-folk style, she conjures the image of someone rising from their deathbed, about to commune with the angelic realms. “It’s a dialogue with your soul,” she explains. “It’s funny how we’re able to kind of unify ourselves and also have a duality in ourselves, so it comes and goes, and it’s really just a meditation to try to induce that state; it’s a repetitive series of chords.”

“Old Saw” was unfinished when Foster took it to the studio, then much of it was improvised. “I was surprised and pleased by the little that it has lyrically and harmonically, that it seemed to pass through a threshold and honestly transmitted the spirit of the song,” she says. “And just the repeating of ‘holy spirit, holy spirit’ — when I sing that, it feels so good. It just feels amazingly good to sing that little fragment, and then there’s an acknowledgment of having glimpsed at the whole, my whole self.”

The rest of the album ranges from the piano-driven, almost cabaret-like “Freemason Drag” and “How Come, Honeycomb?” to the country-inspired “The Wheel of Fortune.” Recording the album in producer Andrija Tokic’s analog Bomb Shelter studio, Foster played the guitar, piano, organ, harp, and autoharp and was accompanied by 12-string pedal steel and electric bass by guitarist Matthew Schneider, who she quarantined with in Nashville this spring. Currently, Foster is taking a break from recording new music and enjoying other art forms, like painting and gardening.

It’s been 20 years since she began self-releasing her first albums, including There Are Eyes Above and Little Life, and she feels she’s become more fully realized as an artist since then. “I think over time, you become more and more yourself more deeply,” she says. “That’s the gift of time.”

Follow Josephine Foster on Facebook for ongoing updates.

PLAYING NASHVILLE: Jess Nolan Premieres “Shame” Video

When asked what inspired her latest single “Shame,” Jess Nolan responds, “I keep coming back to this idea that shame is the tool of the oppressor.” She’s referencing ideology from author and podcast host Brene Brown, and though her song (and its video, premiering today on Audiofemme) comes from a place of personal contemplation, her aim is to liberate anyone who can relate. “Shame is used to oppress people, and it has been historically for so long, and when we use it against ourselves, we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people through that too.”

The indie pop singer-songwriter – originally from New Jersey, now based in Nashville – has crafted a lyrically rich anthem of freedom where shame takes on the form of a woman who arrives in her darkest hour, extinguishing her inner confidence. The songstress uses her lyrics to speak directly in defiance of the disparaging voices in her head, knowing that freedom is within her grasp.

“I live with shame for simply walking around, but I still believe in freedom, I trust that freedom is on it’s way,” she sings vulnerably over a simple, yet haunting melody of gently strummed guitar, piano and echoing strings. It’s this sense of freedom that

In an organic video comprised of Polaroid footage, Nolan and director Emerson Kyle juxtapose a sense of paralysis (limbs spilling over a piano bench, Nolan sprawled on black and white tile) with intention (tending to plants, painting watercolor blossoms), culminating in a stunning drone shot of Nolan’s graceful backstroke through murky water. “I wanted to show the progression of freeing myself through the video,” Nolan explains. “I wanted to encapsulate that feeling of being paralyzed or stuck or frozen, and as the video progresses, you see that I move outside. Emerson had this idea of getting that shot of me swimming and that being the freeing moment, freeing myself in the water and in nature.”

As a woman who has been in the music industry since the age of 12, the now 27-year-old describes how shame manifested in the stigma of feeling like she wasn’t “enough,” constantly striving for unattainable perfection. But after experiencing a bought of writers block, she had a breakthrough while writing “Shame” at the piano in her Nashville home.

“The song was the turning point for me being like I’m going to free myself from anything that’s holding me back, whether that’s outside of me or the voice in my own head that will stop me from trying things just because I want it to be perfect instead of just jumping and going for it,” she professes.

This applies not only to making music, but also to Nolan’s burgeoning role as an activist. “I’m learning, through the activism that I’ve been doing this year, it’s better to show up imperfect than to not show up at all,” she continues. “Striving for constant perfection in our personal lives and in music can really be a detriment and can hold us back from showing up authentically. That was a hurdle that I had to get over and I’m so glad that I’m continuing to do that work and not allowing that fear of being imperfect stop me from showing up.”

One of the song’s most powerful moments comes at its end, as Nolan gently, but confidently chants “freedom” while five female artists (Jasmine Mullen, Georgia English, Hadley Kennary, Rochelle Feldkamp and Becca Richardson) recite lines from her poetry. The words and unity reflect Nolan’s contemplative journey while creating her full-length debut album From Blue to Gold, released in August. While the project’s first four numbers are love songs, “Shame” is strategically placed as the sixth song, marking a more introspective space of self-examination. Nolan cites “Shame” as the north star of the album, symbolizing her journey from darkness to light as she finally finds the freedom she’d been searching for – a gift she hopes listeners gain as well.

“The song is dark in the beginning and it shifts to this hopeful thing and that’s the record in itself. There’s that turn of ‘there’s hope here,’ and the hope is in connecting with each other,” she expresses. “I hope that the message resonates with [listeners] enough to free themselves from anything holding them back, that it would inspire people of all genders and races to not let those fears of other people and their thoughts about you stop you from living out your deepest desires and dreams for yourself and to not let that voice in your head stop you. We have to speak kindness to ourselves if we want to be better people in the world and I think it starts with truly accepting yourself and allowing yourself to be free.”

Follow Jess Nolan on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for ongoing updates.

Jeni Schapire Reclaims Her Sense of Self with “What’s In A Name”

Jeni Schapire woke up one day and didn’t recognize her own life. Formerly known as Jennifer Rae, a professional moniker she had been using since she was 15 years old, the Nashville-based musician started to feel suffocated. Her stage name no longer felt true to who she had become, so she shed it completely. Reemerging clear-headed and much stronger with her debut single “What’s in a Name,” co-produced with Daniel Markus, Schapire reclaims her own narrative.

“It is the declaration that this is who I am and this is what I want to be called,” she tells Audiofemme. “Beyond that, when I wrote this song, I stopped to look at my life. I felt isolated, alone, scared, and I didn’t know the person who was staring back at me in the mirror. I had made choices for other people and didn’t know what I wanted.”

“What’s in a Name?” is a life-preserver, a way to uncover her identity and pull her safely back to land. “It isn’t too late for me to make the choices I want to make and to be the truest version of myself,” she says.

Schapire began writing her forthcoming EP (of the same name) nearly a year ago, and when COVID-19 hit, she, like many, turned inward to do some long-overdue soul-searching. “That’s when I was certain I needed to shed my stage name. So as any songwriter might, I wanted to write a song about it. No more hiding…. just pure authenticity,” she explains.

In taking stock of her life, she also realized how many toxic people she’d allowed into it, that truth be told, didn’t deserve her time or energy. “I was not putting myself and my goals first. I was choosing relationships and my partner’s goals over my own,” she admits. “Each song on this EP is an examination of myself in some way: looking at things I wish were different, ways I wish I could change, wanting to be someone else, loving someone who can’t love me back.”

With barebones lyrics that read as fleeting images flashing through Schapire’s mind, there’s a subtle sorrow etched into the song, a sorrow she must feel again if she has any hope of moving onward. And yet, “What’s in a Name” remains surprisingly textured and atmospheric. Synths thrash against organic instruments, including a brassy horn riff. It’s a delicious, hypnotic soundscape to give her sparrow-like vocals proper flight. “Another language/Lips moving/Shape shifting,” she chirps. “Say it again/Can’t grasp/Leave it.”

Jeni Schapire · What’s In A Name

By the song’s final frames, the music and vocals bleed together and fade, mirroring her personal journey to glorious enlightenment. “That’s not mine/What you call me/I’m someone else/Who you made me,” she sings.

“This song began with just experimenting with different sounds and plugins. Up until I became fluent with Protools, I felt like I couldn’t fully express myself. There was a powerlessness to having to rely on translating my vision through someone else,” she explains. “That power and clarity has made working with Daniel and other producers effortless. I lay a groundwork for what I’m imagining and then they can expand on it. Beyond experimenting and just really learning as much as possible, I listen to so much music. I’m so hungry to hear what speaks to people. It’s so informative. Everyone gains such a different emotional impact from music and that fascinates me.”

“What really unlocked it as a song was the piano part. It shifted the feel from C major to A minor, and from that point, the song kind of finished itself,” she adds. “But the outro did come from Protools freezing on the horn riff! A computer crash that I am actually grateful for.”

What’s in a Name is one of those wholly special records, culminated from a deep well of life experience. Playing piano since the age of five and growing up in Princeton, New Jersey (a “wealthy town with so many different kinds of people”) Schapire admits to having a pretty charmed life, while also navigating a broken school system. “The schools there pressure cook their kids until they either become astronomically successful or they burn out. It’s home, and I miss it, and I’m incredibly privileged to have been raised there, but growing up there was really hard.”

Schapire later studied at Oberlin College and eventually moved to Nashville. “People always say Nashville is a big city with a small town feel, and that is absolutely the truth,” she recalls of her early days there. When she first began actively recording, her style leaned heavily into the indie-rock and Americana arenas. Nashville’s in-built melting pot of influences was almost distracting, and to Schapire, the work never felt quite right. “I was still looking for the sound that felt like the truest expression of myself. That’s also why I’m so excited about this EP. It just feels like me,” she says.

What’s in a Name is about declaring her worth and staking her claim in the music world. One single in, and it’s apparent Jeni Schapire has something profound to say. As important as this moment is, she carries a bit of emotional weight on her shoulders. “I think the mistakes that I’ve made have cost me time. Making mistakes and learning lessons is a time consuming feat,” she says. “It’s so necessary, but I wish I never sacrificed myself, my goals, and my worth. I don’t regret the mistakes because they’ve brought me to where I am right now. But selling myself short ─ that breaks my heart.”

Follow Jeni Schapire on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Artist Kim Radford Creates Living Murals in Nashville’s Streets

Artist Kim Radford has never shied away from creating a piece that’s bigger than herself. “Scaling up has never been something I wasn’t interested in,” she professes to Audiofemme. “I’ve always liked to take it bigger.”

Radfrord made headlines in August 2020 with her East Nashville mural of Dolly Parton, when she included a quote from the country superstar’s recent interview with Billboard in which Parton stated her support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The creation was perhaps an act of fate, as Radford was originally commissioned to paint a series of murals at a new building in downtown Nashville, one of which was based on a vintage photo of Parton. When the project ultimately fell through, Radford began looking for a new place to bring her Parton piece to life.

After connecting with the owners of The 5 Spot in East Nashville, she put paint to brick. But just before Radford was done with the piece, Parton’s Billboard interview made waves when she was quoted as saying, “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen. And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” The quote quickly went viral, compelling Radford to weave the words into the massive painting that shows a beaming, bright-eyed and big-haired young Dolly surrounded by butterflies and flowers.

“I got home after a long day painting and her interview was all over my social media,” Radford remembers. “I listened to the video, and I loved how she treated a topic that we’re often forced to pick sides – ‘You’re for Black Lives Matter,’ ‘No, you’re against it.’ She did not treat it that way to me,” Radford continues, “We shouldn’t have to be forced to pick a side, and to me, the way she answered the question was perfect. It was the way most people feel, like why is this even a question – of course black lives matter. I liked the way she decompressed a hot topic.”

Radford also has a personal connection to Parton, in that her young son receives a free book in the mail each month through Parton’s Imagination Library. “Dolly just continues to give and give and give,” she admires.

The 42-year-old painter has also made a habit out of about giving back through art. Though originally from Nashville, Radford spent much of her childhood living in various parts of the south that would later inform her art, ranging from the small town of Slidell, Louisiana to the city of Atlanta. Radford eventually found herself back in Tennessee as an art student at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, where she met her husband, musician Jon Radford.

The couple is now based in Nashville, and Radford often gets referrals for work through her husband, including a commission from Americana band Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. Holcomb called on Radford to paint a mural based on encouraging lyrics from the title track of their 2019 album Dragons: “Go slay all the dragons that stand in your way.” Radford turned these words it into an eye-catching visual of a golden mythical creature with white smoke pouring out of its nostrils, almost as if onto the street. The larger-than-life painting has stopped passersby in their tracks, many posing for photos with it, accompanied by such hashtags as #goslaytheweek.

“Someone told me recently, ‘the imagery is really accessible,’ and my work has always been that way. I like big, familiar things done larger than life, which fits murals,” Radford says, adding that she enjoys taking traditional subjects and adding a “pop art” flair to them. And while she admires Nashville’s growing artist scene, she hopes to see more diversification in style. “Nashville can seem to be a little too tasteful sometimes and I would like to see it get knocked around a little bit visually, let some really different people do some amazing works,” she notes, adding point blank: “I want to see some art really fuck it up a bit.”

Radford’s nationwide appeal with the Parton mural proves she has the power to do exactly that. But while she hopes to see fellow artists breaking down the barriers of public art, she keeps its true purpose at heart. “I want people to invest in public art and see what it does for communities, because I really feel like it’s a community boost and it’s an investment in different neighborhoods,” she expresses. “I think it says to a community ‘this is permanent and it’s for you to enjoy. Walk up, touch it, take a picture, tell us what you think about it.’”

Radford experienced the impact of public art interaction firsthand when she pained a mural in Cleveland Park, a neighborhood that has a rich Black history in the city. The neighborhood experienced gentrification when out-of-state investors demolished several buildings and purchased several other properties. In spring of 2020, Radford took to the neighborhood to paint a mural on the corner where a community market once stood, featuring a quote from Maya Angelou that reads “precious jewel, you glow, you shine, reflecting all the good in the world. Just look at yourself.”

Some of the longtime residents of the neighborhood stopped by as Radford painted to tell her how much they appreciated the effort, their gratitude serving as a symbol of the value of public art. “If [the long-time community] thinks it’s beautiful and has a beautiful message, that’s really important than it just looking like brand new bricks and steel fences and nicer cars pulling up all the time. I think art is a gift to everybody that lives around it. It’s a commitment to community,” she concludes. “And it keeps the world interesting.”

To see more of Radford’s work, check out her website, Instagram and Facebook.

PREMIERE: Stephie James “Where the Sage Grows”

Stephie James’ musical career began when she was just 15 years old, at a Detroit coffee shop she and her brother opened together. “There was really nowhere for younger people to perform; we were too young to play in bars,” she remembers. Almost every night, she’d get on stage and play her own music as well as covers of songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Carole King. Then, one night, R&B icon Anita Baker walked in and watched her play. In what felt like a dream, they talked for the whole evening, and eventually, Baker invited James to tour with her. Before long, she was regularly opening for her shows.

Since then, James has provided backup vocals and guitar for country singer Nikki Lane, toured with rock band Clear Plastic Masks, and worked on production at The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach’s studio. Clear Plastic Masks’ Matt Menold — who also happened to be James’ favorite guitarist — encouraged her to make her own record and even offered to be involved in it. She dug up songs she’d been writing over the past few years and recorded what would become her debut EP THESE DAYS, out September 18, with Alabama Shakes producer Andrija Tokic.

“I’m just really excited to put something out that I created,” says James, who is currently based in Nashville. “It’s weird being an artist and not having had anything out for so long. It was frustrating to have songs and things we’d been working on over the years but not really putting them out, and it was nice to finally show something we’d been working on for so long and be like, ‘This is kind of what we do.'”

James considers THESE DAYS something of a heartbreak record, focused on navigating relationships and sexuality. Her first single off the EP, “Sin City,” gives off blues vibes as James sings of a romance with an archetypal bad boy. She followed it up by releasing the title track, a slow, dreamy, reverb-filled ode to the magic of new love, and “Lost With You,” a deceptively sanguine-sounding ballad about a dysfunctional relationship. “West of Juarez,” which has not yet been released, incorporates strings and western influences.

James’ latest single, “Where the Sage Grows,” is more cheerful, with folk and country influences as well as a bit of old Americana. She and Menold played a dual guitar part together, then he overdubbed organ and pedal steel parts on it. James’ spirited singing produces a carefree mood, with vivid lyrics about her experiences as she toured the West and Southwest. The song also has a deeper symbolic meaning about “leaving your past behind and starting fresh, allowing yourself to let go of things that hinder you,” she says.

Stephie James · 04 Where The Sage Grows 20 – 04 – 06

James has a diverse array of musical influences, including Billie Holliday, David Bowie, The Kinks, and Roy Orbison, and all of these are evident on the EP. James’ smokey voice gives off a jazzy vibe, and the instrumentals carry hints of country as well as classic rock. The band was recorded live in the studio, giving the music a sound true to James’ roots as a performer.

She chalks up her unique musical style to growing up in Detroit. “I wasn’t listening to the same things as most people,” she says. “I had so many influences, different sights and sounds around me. Everything from those Motown records to the Detroit rock ‘n’ roll stuff, to the more recent garage rock sounds coming from that area — everything coming out of Detroit had a kind of grittiness to it, and I’ve always been really intrigued by that.”

For her part, the artist has left her own mark on the city: the coffee shop she started, Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, still exists and now has three locations. They’re mainly run by her brother now, but she still manages bookings. During quarantine, she’s taken a break from this endeavor as well as her live shows in favor of watching “every single Scorsese movie.”

“Putting singles out in the pandemic is interesting,” she says. “Everybody’s home and maybe consuming media and content, so it’s kind of a cool time but also very weird that we haven’t been able to tour them.”

Even after all the varied things she’s accomplished, they’re just the first of many — the next goal on her bucket list is to write music for film. “Pairing audio with visual has always been really interesting to me,” she says, elaborating that her ultimate dream is to create music for a David Lynch movie. “If that’s too far fetched, I would settle for Tarantino.”

Follow Stephie James on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Samantha Tieger Illuminates the Power of Human Connection with Premiere of “You Light Me Up”

Samantha Tieger has two passions in life: music and language. “I really have this strong desire to connect with other people, whether it’s through language or music,” the Cincinnati-born, now Nashville-based singer professes.

She marries these two passions on her debut self-titled EP – particularly on poignant closing number, “You Light Me Up,” premiering exclusively with Audiofemme. Tieger has established a self-described “chill pop” sound: cinematic violin and piano layered over soft vocals that evoke a dreamlike feeling, capturing the sense of peace Tieger felt in the relationship that inspired the lyrics. “You light me up with your love,” Tieger sings, comparing that feeling to walking on air and brightening up the night. “I think it can be so easy to write about heartache and the negatives in a relationship, and for me, writing is such a good way to work through all of that,” she explains. “In this song, I really wanted to focus on positive elements of a relationship and I wanted the production and the vocal elements to reflect comfort and peace and joy.”

Tieger drew inspiration from the “good parts” of a previous relationship that were as sweet and simple as watching TV and cooking dinner together. When writing the gentle number with Ed O’Donnell, Tieger had a specific idea in mind of wanting the listener to feel as if a weight had been lifted off one’s shoulders. “I wanted the song to be like a sigh of relief and a breath of fresh air of ‘now I feel okay at the end of the day because of you,’” she describes. “You Light Me Up” is the light at the end of an EP that was born out of a series of emotional experiences Tieger endured through past relationships and breakups. “Close My Eyes” is particularly relevant, as Tieger wrote it about feeling distanced from her friends and family a year before the COVID-19 pandemic kept the world six feet apart.

At that time, writing the EP was simply about Tieger processing complex emotions. “I think it’s easier for me to close the book on certain chapters in my life after I’ve written about them. I feel really frustrated and sad about certain things and once I’ve written it down, I can move on,” she says. “To hear a song come to life that I wrote about an experience that was so emotional for me to go through, hearing the music come together, it’s thrilling and emotional at the same time.”

The EP is a reflection of Tieger being a lifelong learner of music and language. She grew up studying Spanish, French and Latin around the same time she had a budding interest in music. She later pursued a degree in Romance Studies at Duke University, her language studies taking her to immersion programs around the world in such countries as Spain, Argentina and Costa Rica. “Somebody recently said ‘you just have this strong desire to connect,’ and I think language is such a key to connection and music is a key to connection,” Tieger analyzes. The singer at one time was writing music in Spanish and French, a skill she hopes to resume in the form of cover songs in foreign languages.

It’s through the relationship between music and language that Tieger learned how to communicate her emotions, a gift she combines with her global perspective and transcendental sound that’s bound to leave a distinct mark on the Nashville scene. “Music really became a way for me to understand my thoughts and feelings and what I was going through,” she asserts. “Life’s too short to not tell people how you really feel.”

Samantha Tieger’s self-titled EP is available everywhere September 4. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Zoë Nutt Turns Challenges Into Triumph on Sophomore Album ‘How Does It Feel’

Zoë Nutt has a reliable sense of grit that sees her through any challenge.

Raised in Knoxville, Tennessee by a musical family, Nutt spent much of her childhood analyzing lyrics, yet believed at the time that music was an “unreachable” profession. In high school, she auditioned for the female lead in the school’s musical. Instead, she was cast in a small male role. But that’s when her determination kicked in – she hired a vocal coach to teach her how to sing classical music in order to attain the leads in the musical theatre productions. “And I did,” she asserts.

Nutt later enrolled at Nashville’s Belmont University as a classical performance major and was a few classes shy of graduating when she felt compelled to apply for the university’s esteemed songwriting program. When she got the acceptance letter, she knew she had both the talent and determination to make music a full-time job. But the new adventure didn’t come without strife. Since the age of eight, Nutt has been totally deaf in her right ear. She also has severe tinnitus, impacting the way she hears specific sounds and communicates with others. “All these sounds, like someone grabbing a water bottle or closing the door, would make me not want to leave the house,” she explains. “It’s strange – you lose your hearing, but you end up being extremely sensitive to certain things at the same time.” Then, during her first semester as a songwriting major, Nutt woke up to discover she had lost a large part of her hearing overnight.

Though the experience was “shocking,” it hasn’t stopped Nutt from pursuing her passions. Though hearing loss is not fundamental to her identity, it does play a noteworthy role in her songwriting. “Although a lot of my songs aren’t about hearing loss, a lot of the themes started focusing towards positive things happening in negative situations,” she describes. “I was definitely feeling that way of having gotten this great opportunity and then basically being told by the universe ‘that’s not in the cards for you with the hearing loss.’ So I’ve always felt that up and down feeling in my songs.”

While recording her sophomore album How Does It Feel, Nutt lost her hearing for an entire month. After multiple suggestions from her doctor, Nutt decided to go through with cochlear implant surgery to help improve her hearing, spending a year recuperating from the surgery before heading back into the studio to record the 10-song album. It was finally released this year, and thoughtfully captures the singer’s stories, which range from reliving her heartbreak due to a cheating ex on “Rewind” to a young woman aiming to break the mold on the self-fulfilling prophecy, “Girl of My Dreams.” But the album closer “Like You” tells a deeply personal story, one that Nutt hasn’t lived yet. The heartbreakingly beautiful song finds Nutt foreshadowing to the day she becomes a mother, saddened to be unable to hear her newborn child, yet hopeful in knowing she’ll feel her child’s love within. “I won’t ever hear you say you love me/I’ll never know whether you can sing/But I can’t wait to watch your lips speak wonders/Cause no one will ever sound like you,” she sings, her voice floating angelically over a melody of strings and subtle steel guitar.

“I’m not one to talk about my hearing loss a ton – it’s a very personal thing. For me to put that out there, that was really hard for a moment,” she says. “I think it’s one of those songs that later on in my life, I’m going to look at differently too, because when I wrote it, I was feeling this immense fear of not being able to hear anyone and that moment of thinking of all those important things in my life that I’m not going to be able to hear.” Writing the song, though, brought healing and new meaning into her life. “Now that I’ve moved on and I’m handling my hearing loss, I’m not in that moment when I’m thinking about it that way. But later on, I think this song is going to hit me really hard in a different way.”

Describing herself as someone who’s often felt like an outsider looking in, Nutt hopes that How Does It Feel will allow her fellow outsiders to feel not only accepted, but understood. “I think that’s what we all want down to our core is to be heard and to be understood,” Nutt refelcts. “I hope people listen to songs and feel a little understood.”

Follow Zoë Nutt on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit her website for ongoing updates.

Daniel Donato Conceives Cosmic Country On Debut LP

“Guitar is the great lighthouse of my life,” says Daniel Donato. The musician speaks with gusto about his work ─ and for good reason. On his debut album, A Young Man’s Country, he invites the listener into what it must be like for his live shows, and he dazzles not only with his thoughtful songwriting but his guitar work. Many of the songs, including “Always Been a Lover” and “Broke Down,” hinge on his ability to tell compelling stories with only his guitar. Strings crash along the melody lines with shocking electricity, and his choices are so rash and unexpected, you never know where he’ll lead next. Guitar solos range from seconds to several minutes, highlighting the album’s entrancing ambiance.

“With this record, I have a love letter proving that I am finding my own style,” he tells Audiofemme. Donato has gone on record citing such guitar legends as Brent Mason, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix as direct playing touchpoints, but across eleven songs, it appears he has finally unlocked his very own high-energy aesthetic. “I don’t think style is something arrived at, something found,” he says. “It is in a constant ebb and flow of change. That is, if you’re working on it diligently with truthful intention.”

A Nashville native, Donato’s musical interests were sparked early on by Guitar Hero, but he quickly left the video game behind and spent his teenage years leaving his imprint all over town. He gigged a number of years as lead guitarist for the Don Kelly Band, busked along lower Broadway, played every honky-tonk he could (including Robert’s Western World), and even wrote a revolutionary book called The New Master of the Telecaster when he was 18. Now 25, the accomplished musician has more than proven himself.

In a 2015 interview with TC Electronic, he expressed deep desires to tour and be his own artist, eyeing a slew of records. Well, life had other things in store, and time got away from him. But he doesn’t mind that it’s taken five years for a proper debut. “Time is a fascinating plastic energy that changes and morphs all of the time, especially during these times,” he muses, “but I’ve been dedicating my life to music for eleven years, every day, so five years is just the start of it for me.”

Donato dropped two EPs in 2019: Modern Machine and Starlight, two pieces to a much larger puzzle. Most of those songs fit onto the new record, but in a different sequence, the listener is called into an exuberant, lively, and free-spirited world fashioned with curiosity and freedom. It exists to showcase his gifts, of course, but also functions as existential exhibit.

“[This album is] about accepting the fact that you won’t be young forever. Mortality is the first fact of any matter,” he explains. “So, while I am young, I am going to play that way. I’ll have decades of being able to tone it down and apply less is more. So many people in Nashville are about this, but what has always inspired me are the people who play like their life depends on it. That’s what Jerry Garcia did every night. The first waving of the Cosmic Country flag into the world had to be as pungent and unique as possible. It is the way I am, as Merle Haggard had said, simply.”

A Young Man’s Country still bears marks of an artist still finding his groove. “I work out loud. I am not a perfectionist. I work, put it out, and listen to the people, and other life signs, on where to go next,” Donato says. “That honesty is what we owe listeners today. The masterpiece desire is not my bullseye, right now. I just want to bring value to people by figuring out my potential in real time, out loud, as often as possible.”

That philosophy comes full circle on “Diamond in the Rough,” a co-write with Paul Cauthen that takes a pair of jumper cables to the eardrums. “If I must confess, I’ve been running on no rest/Crazy just a touch, as of late, I have a hunch/That I’m blind/So I shine in the darkest night, my love/A diamond in the rough” he sings, before launching into one of the set’s most electric guitar solos. “The Cosmic Country style jam on the outro came from hours on the stage playing it live,” he says. “[Paul and I] did over 150 shows in one year; that song came from a slew of tunes written from that time in my career.”

Album closer “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” a Waylon Jennings cover, tips its hat to the original but picks up the speed with a horizon-bound gallop. Drums throb in the background and the bass line acts as a jackhammer to keep it barreling along. Many of Donato’s guitar solos ring similarly, always stimulating and ferocious, but each one stands on its own even as the record pools into a cohesive whole. He writes “from song to song,” he says, so it’s only natural the record would feel threaded together. “If I finish one, I let that song tell me where to start for the next one. That verticality is crucial to me. I want every song to feel like a Cosmic Country song. Just like how a J.R. Tolkien novel, or a Bukowski poem, clearly reads and feels like it came from that writer’s own gravitational pull.”

“I don’t know if I’m looking for a lot of contrast within this record from song to song, as much as I notice that this record as a whole sits in contrast to other records in the marketplace. If you listen to Tyler Childers, Grateful Dead, John Prine — their records sound like them for every second. Buck Owens — so many of his songs were similar that he’d play five hits by simply going from chorus to chorus, all in the same key,” Donato points out. “It’s a country music-ism, the similarity in the exoskeleton of a song.”

A Young Man’s Country (produced by Robben Ford) is composed of mostly whipping, heavily-rhythmic moments. But “Meet Me in Dallas” is one of only a few more somber performances, alongside a version of John Prine’s “Angel in Montgomery” and “Sweet Tasting Tennessee.” “I know how to be alone sometimes,” he sings on “Dallas.” Another Paul Cauthen co-write, the song literally hit him after driving 23 and a half hours from Wisconsin to Dallas while on the road.

“The second we arrived at The Belmont in Dallas, I took my guitar to Room 41 (the name of [Paul’s] most recent full length release), and I wrote it in 10 minutes,” he says. “I was in a relationship that was coming to an end at the time. That room has magic to it. So does heartbreak. So does insomnia combined with a melody in your head.”

Daniel Donato more than plants his flag in the industry. A Young Man’s Country cements him as a force to be reckoned with; its bold, sizzling guitar work sets him on a path to be one of the greats he so admires. All he needs is a bit more time. And he has plenty of that these days. In addition to his music, he interviews other musicians, songwriters, visual artists, and business people on a podcast called Lost Highway.

In reflecting on lessons learned, Donato offers this particularly sage bit of wisdom. “I’d say this philosophy can summarize a good strategy for success in life. Repeat this mantra 1,000 days in a row: Patience. Persistence. Positivity. In that order. Life starts to make a bit more sense with these parameters.”

Follow Daniel Donato on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Carmen Canedo Grows Through Life Changes and Mental Health Battles on ‘Know It All’

Nashville native Carmen Canedo strikes a delicate balance between her analytic mind and artistic soul on her new album, Know It All.

Immersed in what she calls a “DIY music scene” since childhood, Carmen Canedo was surrounded by expert musicians who were oftentimes her own neighbors. “Either your friends are musicians or your friend’s parents are musicians, and that’s been so true for me,” the 21-year-old recalls to Audiofemme of growing up in Music City. Teaching herself how to write songs and play guitar, as well as forming her first band at the age of eight, Canedo also learned the value of tapping into her home city’s rich musical well.

Her young adult life has been shaped by pivotal musical moments, from seeing local favorite rock band JEFF the Brotherhood live when she was 12 to touring as a bass player with Soccer Mommy the summer after graduating high school in 2017. “I really was influenced by how [Sophie of Soccer Mommy] was so hardworking and takes it so seriously, but also is able to enjoy it,” Canedo says of what she learned while touring with the burgeoning superstar. Citing herself as equally left and right brained, Canedo attended one of Tennessee Governor’s School for Scientific Models and Data Analysis that saw her taking college-level courses as a high school student. She later enrolled as a Statistical & Data Sciences major at Smith College before transferring to American University where she currently studies statistics. “I like to break things down a lot; being able to break down songs and think about it analytically, or even the process of making an album,” she says, noting how the structured and artistic sides of her brain cross.

Her most formative musical days were spent in the jazz band room of her high school, where she learned how to write guitar chords that she uses in her music to this day. It’s also where she and her friend Hayden Hubner of Nashville-based band Dancers would retreat during lunch hour to play guitar and write songs, leading to the creation of Canedo’s first album, Wheels Are Turning, which ultimately opened her mind to the idea of music as a profession. That pivotal project set the stage for her new album, Know It All. Written over the course of two years, the 10-song collection showcases Canedo’s old-fashioned voice that exudes a folk flair alongside pure lyricism. “I feel like each of these songs come from different times in my life,” she says.

The opening “Morrow,” named after the house she lived in on campus at Smith, reflects the universal feeling of adjusting to a new environment, surrounded by new people while longing for home. Meanwhile, “Vectors” evokes images of the two young children Canedo babysat for who would write her name in chalk on the sidewalk each time she visited, a song that finds her “taking little moments that I didn’t want to forget” and setting them to song, she remarks.

“Vectors” also reflects her personal triumph over mental health struggles. At a South by Southwest performance in 2019, Canedo felt the onset of PTSD, an experience that left her rattled and questioning whether or not she wanted to pursue music. After going on an eight-month hiatus, the singer managed to overcome her anxiety and headed into the studio to record Know It All, pointing to a line in the album’s ninth track, “Ocean I Swam,” that reflects her profound growth: “I am not where I began.” “I’m a very sentimental person. I love looking back and thinking about past times,” she shares. “But I think specifically in the past three years that I’ve really genuinely been focused on my mental health, it’s been a lot of recognizing the growth that I’ve made. I think that line demonstrates it.”

Originally scheduled for release on June 6, Canedo decided to move the release date for Know It All to August out of respect for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. All of the digital sales of the album throughout August, as well as 10 percent of Canedo’s merchandise, will be donated to the Nashville Community Bail Fund, an organization that provides financial support to low-income prisoners, and Drkmttr Collective, a Nashville-based venue that fosters a safe space for the underground music scene, as well as organizing and action planning.

Having written the songs prior to her mental health battle and then recording most of it in the aftermath, the transformation allowed Canedo to explore the songs in a new light and recognize how far she’s come. “Having time off not listening to the record was good because I was able to come back to it with a fresh mind and look at these lyrics from a different perspective – revisiting them and reclaiming them and giving power to them in like a different way,” she expresses. “Because it is such a reflective process, all these songs are genuine little capsules of who I was when I wrote them, so it’s interesting to play them or listen to them and feel how I felt then, but realize that I have grown.”

Whoa Dakota Dances Away Her Pain On Disco-Pop Jam “Walk Right By”

Photo Credit: Brandon Hunter / BESHOOTiN

Singer-songwriter Whoa Dakota released her 2018 album, Patterns, to much-deserved critical acclaim. The record, a woven fabric of spoken word and impressive indie songwriting, left an indelible mark, and people were paying attention. However, things weren’t so kosher behind the scenes. Relationships with her creative team and producers unraveled, and she soon parted ways. “The falling out left some emotional scar tissue for me,” says Jessica Ott, the mastermind behind the project.

The Nashville musician scoops up that pain into her new song and music video “Walk Right By,” premiering today, and it’s very clear she’s regained some of her swagger. Set inside Smack Clothing, a trendy hot-spot in Midtown, Ott browses through the racks and even becomes part of the display herself. “I caught you looking at me/And it felt nice,” she sings. “Red velvet blur, and my faux fur down to my thighs/You never make it easy/To change my mind/Yeah, I can tell by the way you stare/You’ve got a lot to hide.”

Ott dresses her lyrics with ripe imagery and metaphor, but her message still cuts deep. The album’s producers were unfortunately also close friends, and when the split happened, the pain shocked her system. “They weren’t bigwigs by any means,” she tells Audiofemme, “but it occurred to me how quickly people can turn on you when the idea they had about your relationship and who you represented for them feels threatened.”

She began to ponder the commodification of her art – and of herself. “It’s the music, too, but really, I get turned into a product,” she says. “The thing that’s tough about that is that in order to be a good human you have to be willing to change, grow, evolve, and be fallible. But it seems like in order to be a good product, the industry wants you unchanging, predictable, and to easily fall in line with whatever trends are currently returning the highest profits.”

In the two years since Patterns, Ott took plenty of time reassessing her life and what she wanted her music to be. She was unchained by a toxic past, so possibilities were endless. “I spent a lot of time sort of redefining how I approached music on my own without their input and gained a lot of empowerment around my abilities as a writer, composer, and producer in my own right,” she says.

She toured extensively to promote the record, too, which allowed her to hit thrilling creative strides in her career. The chance to perform in front of audiences was unmistakably vital to her craft and the ability to figure out “how those songs felt on stage and how we could apply them to a live setting in a way that felt both engaging and authentic,” she says.

“Walk Right By” (co-written with Nathaniel Banks of indie band Arlie, BESHOOTiN, and producer Timothy Ryssemus) is markedly different in style from her previous work. She leans hard into disco-pop and R&B, her vocals like a chameleon changing its colors. “And in my mind, you’re all I need/To get me higher, to get me higher,” she coos over a delicious sparkle. “But every time you worry me/I’ll walk right by ya / I’ll walk right by ya.”

The song began with its pulsating bass line, courtesy of Ryssemus, who had it on loop. On that particular day, Ott sauntered into the studio wearing “this great vintage fur coat with some red cowboy boots, so that sort of set the tone for the imagery,” she recalls. “That bass line and the imagery combined sort of created this ‘70s ‘don’t fuck with me’ kind of vibe, and we went with it. Then, BESHOOTiN added the screams that you hear in the background throughout the chorus, and it gave me major ‘Maggot Brain‘ vibes. And I just get so tickled every time I hear it.”

The visual, directed by BESHOOTiN, who also works as a prolific photographer in town, celebrates the song’s innate quirks and utilizes a host of creepy mannequins as a metaphor for the soulless poseurs that lurk in the music industry. “I think it’s great that the mannequins are creepy,” she remarks. “It’s creepy the music execs try to water down something as complicated as a human and lead the collective to believe that that’s all that person is.”

“I knew I wanted Be to film the visual. I’ve followed his photographs and video work for years. He’s got such an intuitive and authentic eye,” she raves. “I said I wanted a vintage ‘70s vibe and wanted to be dancing around, and he nailed it. The mannequins were his idea, and I love it.”

Ott’s willingness to dabble and stretch her chops marks an exciting chapter for her. She is now free to soar, explore, and create something new. Oddly enough, her renaissance and recent immersion in the Nashville songwriting community wouldn’t have been possible if not for the current pandemic. She explains, “In many ways, it’s opened me up creatively because I’m no longer burned out from working two jobs and trying to tour in between. Had it not been for the pandemic, I’m not sure I would have started writing country and setting up co-writes and trying to get into the ‘songwriter’ world of Nashville.”

“There’s only so much time in a day. So, when you’re working full time at a restaurant, and trying to get your business afloat, and be creative and inspired, sometimes something isn’t gonna get done,” she continues. “I realized for me what wasn’t getting done was having the time and space to get creative and really listen to what I had to say.”

However, the last five months have wrought anxiety, anger, and fear, too. “I’m terrified that we as a country won’t wake up to the role racism plays in our culture. I hate that we could have allowed such injustice to ever happen, and I’m afraid that we won’t rise to the occasion to be our higher selves and really come together in unity to get to the root of this problem. I’m terrified about the election” she expresses. “I don’t feel confident in any of our leadership to guide us through the pandemic. Some days, I’m afraid to be in this country at all. I have a scheme to book a house show tour in Europe whenever we’re allowed in and just play music there for a few months.”

Even more, she’s concerned “music will never really take off for me now because I’m 30 and this whole shit storm has really thrown a wrench in the plan. I’m afraid I’ll run out of time and will have to start thinking about kids before my career is able to stay afloat. The list goes on…”

“Walk Right By” is a call for liberation. Whoa Dakota exchanges her pain and disappointment for redemption, hope, and light. She learned what she needed to, and now she can stand in the sun. As much as she would love to be gearing up for a new album, it might not be totally realistic right now. “I don’t even think in terms of a full record these days,” she says. “It’s a bummer but it’s true.”

Recording even a nine or 10-song record can bear a considerably hefty price tag. As an independent artist, it’s too risky to dive head-first into another full-length. Instead, she eyes a series of singles and EPs. “I’m trying to be very smart about how I spend my money. I also have to be cognizant of the fact that records aren’t always the thing people are drawn to now. I love them. I love making them. Ideally, when I [make an album] again, I will have financial backing or will have placed some of my singles and created some capital for myself.”

To tide us over, Whoa Dakota and Collin Gundry (of Tuxedo Wildlife) are teaming up for a new project called Rodeo Glow. Details are forthcoming. “It does feel sometimes like we as artists have to be a canvas for whatever is currently trending in order to be relevant,” she says. “I’m okay with the work. I’m here to work, and it’s ultimately rewarding. But between all the social media platforms and different hats I have to wear, I sometimes forget about just sitting alone in my room strumming some chords and singing whatever the hell I want. That’s it’s own reward.”

Follow Whoa Dakota on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for ongoing updates.

PREMIERE: Treva Blomquist Explores Moral Ambiguity on Fifth Album ‘Snakes & Saints’

“We live in a world of snakes and saints/It’s hard to tell the difference these days,” Nashville-based singer-songwriter Treva Blomquist sings in “Strong,” the opening track on her latest album, Snakes & Saints. Blomquist’s angelic voice is comforting as she goes on to deliver sage pieces of advice like “It’s less about who you’ll meet/And more about who you’ll be” in the country-tinged pop song.

The contrasting imagery that comprises the LP’s title stuck out to Blomquist because of their moral opposition – and also their moral ambiguity. “You get an idea of good and bad, and you get an idea that the snake would be bad and the saint would be good,” she explains. “I don’t think that’s the way life is or works. Operating that way is like judging a book by its cover. It is what lies inside the book that tells the story. There’s a lyric in the bridge of ‘The Light’ which says ‘What are you holding onto?/Is it making you who you want to be?’ I think it’s an important question to ponder and an important step in the process of self-discovery.”

The song, and the album as a whole, deals with self-empowerment in a world where decisions are rarely clear-cut. “It’s about deciding who you are and where your heartbeat is and moving towards that, regardless of what the people around you are going to do or say,” Blomquist explains.

Treva Blomquist · SNAKES & SAINTS

Snakes & Saints is Blomquist’s fifth full-length album, a followup to 2016’s The Risk & the Gift. Each track, in its own way, explores the complexity of the human experience. In the cacophonous, synth-heavy “Anger,” Blomquist personifies the emotion and examines how you can respond to anger with love instead of more anger. The catchy, uplifting “The Light” similarly asks how we can “carry the goodness continually and keep it alive and believe in it regardless of what’s happening around us,” she says.

“The Light” came out on May 28, just as protests were breaking out around the killing of George Floyd. Even though it was written more generally about feeling the heaviness of the world, Blomquist was glad to be able to send that message at such a synchronistic time.

“That felt really timely,” she says. “I believe there are real powers of good and evil at play in this world. ‘The Light’ started with me feeling like I was standing in the dark with one tiny little light. It’s hard to know where to step and what direction to take when you can’t see very far in front of you. In those moments where we find ourselves in the dark, the light that we are carrying to guide us is so important. Without it, we can’t see. That’s the picture I was trying to paint with this song.”

Other songs on Snakes & Saints deal more directly with relationships. In the blues-inspired “Sugar,” Blomquist sings of losing trust in a partner. In “Sorry,” a recent single off the album and the subject of a cute lyric video resembling a hand-written card, Blomquist apologizes to ex-lovers for her previous immaturity. “I was thinking about my past relationships, like my first relationships that I was in, and I was thinking about how much I did not know about love and about what it is to be in love and to love somebody,” she says. “We’re all just learning about love, and it’s really messy and really clumsy.”

“I wrote [the album] while I was kind of going through some disappointment, so I was just trying to find the hope and the meaning in relationships,” she adds. “What happens when you get disappointed, or when people disappoint you, or when you disappoint yourself, and how do you move beyond that to where you’re okay with who you are?”

Blomquist’s friends Nathan Johnson and Brandon Owens accompanied her to record the album, using electric and acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and a synth called the Op1. In contrast to her more Americana and country-inspired earlier work, this record turned out poppier than the rest, which she says wasn’t planned. “The guys I worked with, they produced the album, and I feel like they influenced the sound a lot because it’s much more indie pop,” she says.

The quarantine hasn’t stopped Blomquist from sharing her music — she’s been posting live concerts on social media and intends to keep them coming. To celebrate her album release, she’s planning a “Live from my Yellow Couch” concert at 8 pm CST on Thursday, July 30th via Facebook and Instagram Live. On August 1st, she’ll get to share her music in person at a drive-in concert in Nashville.

“I’m just trying to figure out how to promote a record and play for people when we’re in this COVID place that we’re in,” she says. “It’s interesting — I’m so grateful for technology.”

Follow Treva Blomquist on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

The Love-In Wield Poetic Fury in Video Premiere for Forthcoming EP Title Track “As It Lays”

Nashville-based rock band The Love-In turn despair into empowerment in the video for their new song, “As It Lays.” It’s the title track of the band’s forthcoming EP, slated for release on September 4, which centers on the concept of freedom, particularly from social norms and gender roles that trap individuals into “a painful conformity” that’s ultimately “destructive, dangerous, and ridiculous.”

Written by lead singer Laurel Sorenson, “As It Lays” is inspired by Joan Didion’s 1970 novel Play it As it Lays, which tells the fictional story of an actress named Maria Wyeth as she goes through a series of personal hardships that lead to a mental breakdown. Sorenson read the book while dealing with a breakup among the original iteration of The Love-In, in addition to the tragic death of the band’s bass player, John Lattimer. “I was in a really dark spot in my life. I was caught up on ‘why did this happen?’’ Sorenson recalls of her headspace following the series of tragedies, adding that she related “deeply” to the book’s subject matter. “When I read the book, it lined up with the philosophy that I was starting to come up with for myself where it was like, that’s just how it is, it’s not really worth my energy or time to try and ask why all of this stuff is happening. Those are unanswerable questions for me.”

Sorenson penned the rock-leaning track, with its hint of electro-funk, over the course of a year, the verses coming to her before the chorus that finds her wailing, “The sun won’t rise ’til I get mine/Now the old rules don’t apply, so I just drive.” The idea of taking to the open road to unleash one’s fury is a commonality between Sorenson and Wyeth – the character in the book states that she drives down California’s famed 405 highway to gain clarity, a feeling that Sorenson knows all too well. “I drive to make sense of the world sometimes,” the Southern California native confesses. “The feelings described were trying to figure out what to do with despair and working through that, and that’s something that I was doing in my own life. The book posed a question and the song was my answer.”

Sorenson put as much intention into the video for the song as she did the lyrics. Shot in director Chuck Dave’s backyard, the video captures Sorenson and her bandmates (guitarist Emma Holden, drummer Michael Rasile and bassist Max Zikakis) performing the track in front of a towering banana tree. “I really wanted to capture a sense of rapid movement and stillness because that’s what the song feels like to me – I’m going as fast as I can, but I’m stuck,” Sorenson explains of the concept. She adds a pop of color to the visual by wearing red, a hue the band has been intentional about incorporating into its branding due to its ability to cover the emotional spectrum. “[Red] goes with our whole philosophy; you can be aggressive and angry and soft and loving all in the same person and the same body,” she expresses.

While The Love-In has a distinct way of capturing vast emotions, they also keep community at their core. The band’s name has another literary tie-in; it’s lifted from the book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968, which defines The Love-In as a group of people uniting in love and friendship, an ideology the eclectic foursome has wholly embraced. “The Love-In was described as a bunch of people coming together and loving each other and having that bond of fun and friendship also be a political act,” Sorenson shares.“It’s come to mean everybody that’s part of the community surrounding our band. We’re always saying to one another ‘Welcome to The Love-In, you’re in the party now.’”

Follow The Love-In via their website, Instagram and Facebook. for ongoing updates.

S.G. Goodman Lives the Change She Hopes to See on Striking Debut Old Time Feeling

S.G. Goodman stands as a pioneer for rural voices through her captivating debut album, Old Time Feeling, with a distinct way of embracing Southern traditions while slashing through harmful stereotypes. She demonstrates Southern hospitality by delivering groceries to her elderly neighbor, and in the same breath, denounces Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, asserting in her song “We Don’t Want You Mitch McConnell” that the state has “suffered” under the senior Kentucky senator’s reign. She makes it a point during a phone interview with Audiofemme to encourage her fellow Kentuckians to vote for Amy McGrath, the Democratic nominee running for McConnell’s Senate seat in the 2020 election, Goodman’s left-leaning views providing an antithesis to those who believe the South isn’t socially advanced. “The South has a bad reputation when it comes to civil rights and certain social injustices, and that’s true, we should definitely own that. But I would say that this current administration has proven that a lot of the things people want to point their finger at when it comes to the South, it’s actually everywhere, but the South is the main scapegoat,” Goodman analyzes.

Raised by a large extended family of farmers in Hickman, Kentucky, a town so small it didn’t have a stop light, Goodman was taught from a young age the values of hard work and dependability. The farmer’s daughter-turned-singer-songwriter is now using her voice to tell an all-encompassing Southern story on her glowing album, Old Time Feeling. She describes the 10-track compilation as a mix of “good, basic love songs,” like the “Tender Kind” of love she sings of on the gentle steel guitar-driven track, and “politically-leaning songs,” owning her identity as a sharecropper’s daughter who’s clever enough to know what outsiders think when they hear her thick Kentucky accent on “The Way I Talk.”

“Ultimately, that’s a pretty good picture of a lot of people’s experience in life, which is we’re human beings – we feel things and we do things,” she describes of the album. “I do write about my experience with living in a rural place, and I take that really seriously. I try to be respectful of my characters, no matter the P.O.V. that’s happening in the song, and not ever make a decision to not include something that may be a colloquialism for where I’m from, but try to be authentic through the process.”

Lyrically brilliant and stirringly poignant, Goodman strikes an intimate balance between spotlighting the plight of her home region, along with its beauty, through her music. This delicate dance is wrapped up in the album’s compelling opener “Space and Time,” touching on the lack of acceptance she felt from her community upon coming out as gay, yet acknowledging that each person she’s encountered has left a sincere impression. “I owe my life to even my enemies/The ones who have loved me/The ones who have tried/Their grips on my heart/And their grips on my mind…I never want to leave this world without sayin’ I love you,” she cries. It’s the last line of the chorus that opens the album, leaving an impact on the listener as meaningful as the one imprinted on her by her hometown. “It has a lot to do with reflecting on what makes a life, a life – the sum of all of our experiences happen to be other people and their involvement in your life. We can learn from good situations and from hard situations, but they still are a part of your life,” the singer observes. “I think sometimes when you don’t feel like you’ve said something as eloquently as you wanted, sometimes the best way is just coming out and saying the obvious. It’s not a bad way to start out an album by presenting a song that says exactly what you meant and all that you had to say.”

Goodman continues to directly express her opinions as she joins the thousands of people around the country who have flooded the streets to march for racial justice, taking to heart the lessons instilled in her as a child. “Being a farming family, the family’s work is everyone’s work,” she recalls. “A big thing that was stressed at my house was if you don’t know what to do, then you should find something to do.” Goodman channels this initiative into her music, particularly in the universal line “Be the change you hope to find” that she professes in the album’s hopeful title track, words she doesn’t merely sing, but has turned into action to create the just world she seeks.

“There are a lot of people marching in the streets in rural, mostly all-white towns across Kentucky. It has been really powerful. I’m not surprised that rural communities would take part in this because I know that there are people here that will call out injustice when they see it. It’s brought about a lot of long overdue discussions and I think there’s no getting back to normal. We’re as a society asking hard questions of ‘what do we want our world to look like?’ and we actually do have the power to change that,” she says. “How else are things going to change unless you pick up the hammer yourself?”

Follow S.G. Goodman on Facebook and Instagram for ongoing updates.

Madeline Finn Faces Her Fears with New Single ‘When It’s Dark’

Madeline Finn has a way of stirring one’s soul with her music, exemplified by her new song, “When It’s Dark.” The grunge-leaning track balances Finn’s stark resiliency with her refined voice, reminiscent of Evanescence’s Amy Lee. In the song, Finn examines fear in all its facets: the horror-movie creepiness of feeling watched; concrete phobia fodder like spiders and ghosts; anxiety and uncertainty in relationships and in the future, and more. But the song’s power comes from her vow not to let fear take over, but to understand it.

She uses potent metaphors in the second verse: “Fear is a delicate dance/She’ll spin you around and tie both of your hands/And she’ll force you to grow in ways you’ve never before/Like the ivy slithers through the cracks.” Soft, but ominous strings add to the song’s sinister vibe, Finn naturally intertwining eeriness into her genre-defying sound.

The song’s bridge mimics that sense of rising unease to stunning effect. The electric guitar starts off low, slowly building as she ticks off a whimsical list of activities that will somehow inoculate her to more serious terrors. Drums thunder and the intensity of the riffs grow louder behind her soaring voice as she reveals that she confronts her irrational fears “So that I may grow accustomed to the way that it feels/And I’ll treat it like an old friend when it tries to steal/My breath from my body/When it tries to rock me/Like a ship lost at sea.” Quietness guides us to calmer waters at song’s end, where Finn reprises the breathless statement “But I’m not crazy” in a manner that symbolizes self-soothing.

In a description of the song on Soundcloud, Finn reveals that the story poured out of her in 20 minutes after a bout with paranoia, when she thought someone was watching her from inside her home, resulting in a panic attack that she couldn’t alleviate. In a moment she says felt straight out of a horror movie, Finn turned to songwriting as a last resort to calm her nerves. “’When It’s Dark’ is the most powerful creation I’ve been able to channel from the muse to music,” the Cleveland-raised, now Nashville-based singer professes. “It gave me a sort of container to put all the fear into, and that’s what I do every time I sing it… I take all the fear and anxiety I’ve been feeling and put it all into that moment. It doesn’t get rid of it completely or make it so I don’t have to do any other work, but it does transport me back and remind me that I have in fact come out on the other side.”

“When It’s Dark” is one example of Finn’s gripping artistry. As the lead singer of pop-punk band Envoi and Americana-style group Whiskey Hollow, Finn proves she can cover the musical spectrum and blend these distinct sounds into her solo work. The delicacy of her voice is felt on “Love Me Like I Love You,” an ode to unrequited love and loneliness, while the video for “Save Yourself” showcases her ability to masterfully bring her words to life through captivating black-and-white images as she tries to keep her head above water in a bathtub while a series of hands attempt to push her under.

Part of Finn’s magic is that she strikes just the right balance between tenderness and intensity, bringing a mystical air to her work that demands attention. “When It’s Dark” asks us to consider what we do in the face of fear, but the bravery in Finn’s voice is unmistakable.

Follow Madeline Finn on Facebook for ongoing updates.

Tag: nashville