Kristina Murray’s country songs stand apart. To be sure, the Nashville artist loves the pedal steel guitar, and everything she does feels kicked-back at home in a honky tonk. Yet she’ll catch you off guard in the twangiest ways. Her debut album’s title cut rides a head bobbing pulse with verses that drone and build tension. While “You Got Me,” the opening song on her newest album, sets a love letter to her “onliest sweetheart” to a strutting, slippery funk that somehow feels more tuned to a plywood floor than a disco.
Not all the songs on Little Blue, which arrived last week, are as contented and sweet hearted as Track 1. It documents some emotional storms Murray lived through after the passing of her father, the perils of the pandemic, and the grind of a career more marked by critical acclaim than by material fulfilment. But the catchy, imaginative and moving songwriting never lets up, a continuation of what made her first two albums - 2013’s Unravelin’ and 2018’s Southern Ambrosia - so provocative and special.
“I'm a country singer. The biggest influence musically for me is obviously country music and country singers, and the way I sing is country,” Murray says in Episode 321 of The String. “That being said, I'm a huge Deadhead. I love The Band. There's a lot of other music that is important to me, and I'm so glad when that comes out in my writing and then the sonic component of my albums.”
Little Blue marks a new chapter for Murray because she’s launched a relationship with New West Records, specifically its Normaltown imprint. It’s named for a neighborhood in Athens, GA, where Murray spent a year after college, and where New West has an office. The label’s logo includes the state of Georgia, which was extra inspiring to Murray, who grew up in Atlanta. She loved Patsy Cline and Lucinda Williams, plus Outkast and Ludacris, ATL’s famous exports. The first record she remembers learning to sing in public was the Terri Clark version of Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” So she’s long acquainted with lonesome.
Before singing for a living seemed like a prospect, she attended Clemson and went to work in Colorado practicing recreational therapy. While there, she got into the swirl of the jamgrass scene and wrote songs, culminating in Unravelin’, which she recorded in Boulder. It was with a plan in mind though.
“I made that (album) and then basically moved to Nashville, immediately,” she says. “I think I did a lot of preparation before moving. And I'm always surprised when people move to Nashville and they're like, Oh I've never made a record. I've never played on stage for longer than 45 minutes, and I have only three songs I've ever written. I'm like, Are you crazy? You have to know all these things before you get up there!”
She was prepared to approach Santa’s Pub and Honky Tonk Tuesdays in East Nashville, where Murray settled into the scene and played regularly from 2015 on, building her tribe. When her second album Southern Ambrosia came out so well, drawing critical acclaim, it seemed she might have caught the same updraft that was lifting fellow travelers Sierra Ferrell, Margo Price and Kelsey Waldon to new heights.
“It came out right in a time when there were surges for my peers and my friends,” Murray says “And I was very caught up in thinking like, well, this just happened to this person, this person, this person - all very well deserved. My record is great too. Maybe those things will happen for me. And when none of them did, I fell into a pretty deep depression that lasted pretty much through the pandemic, which then kind of snowballed into writing for Little Blue.”
In these nine songs are pictures of lamentable characters, like the late-night loner in “The After Midnight Special.” In “Watching the World Pass Me By,” she’s at the bar, “left out, left behind and misunderstood.” The album-closing title track is a melancholy tour de force, rising from a whispering lo-fi narrative of a mind-clearing walk to crescendo set in space, with the lovely, lonely Earth spinning on an axis of existential uncertainty.
The globe evokes the epilogue of the story of Southern Ambrosia, because it may not have made Kristina Murray a star, but she says that its reach has surprised her. “I've shipped vinyl to Japan and Singapore and all over Europe,” she says. “And finally, last year, when I got to go to Europe, people came up to me and said, ‘I've been waiting for you to come here for six years (based) on that last record.’ So I know that it still touches people. I'm really proud of it.”
It’s a whole body of work worthy of pride and more attention. After meeting Kristina in this hour you’ll be rooting for her too.
