LINEUP

Courtney Patton & Jason Eady

Courtney Patton
Courtney Patton is a storyteller. She’s also a mother, a wife, a producer, a singer, a songwriter, a tour-van driver and a musician-as well as a world-traveler when she’s out on tour throughout the continental U.S., Canada and Europe. But to anyone lucky enough to be sitting in the audience while listening to her expansive Texas twang belt out her version of deep and soulful country music, she’s a storyteller. In a musical era in which clichés and bravado are mistaken for bold noteworthiness, there is something far more brave in peeling back highly personal and emotional open-book songs and delivering them with sensitivity and sentiment. Patton does just that. She is the consummate storyteller in her music. Heartache isn’t just described, it is tangibly felt. Following her previous solo albums, Triggering a Flood (2013) and So This Is Life (2015), and her acoustic collaborative project with her husband and fellow Texas troubadour Jason Eady, Something Together, (2017), Patton has drawn on true life day-to-day autobiographical life experiences and released her third album, What It’s Like To Fly Alone, earlier this year.

After having Kennedy produce her last album, Patton took the production reins this time around, further cementing this as her most personal work to date. There is no marketing team or music label support. It’s Patton and her spirited passion for the music that has her hands-on over every part of her career. That makes the fact that What It’s Like To Fly Alone debuted as high at #4 on the iTunes country chart and made a mark across four different Billboard album charts (including a Top 20 mark on their Americana Albums Sales chart) all the more remarkable. But then again, Patton is a storyteller. It only makes sense.

Jason Eady
Since the 2005 release of his debut album, Mississippi-bred singer/guitarist Jason Eady has brought a rare balance of unguarded honesty and poetic sophistication to his songwriting. With his catalog spanning from blues-infused Americana to bare-bones reimagining of classic country, Eady’s seventh full-length takes on a looser, livelier, more groove-driven sound than ever before. But while I Travel On brims with a feel-good spontaneity, the Fort Worth-based artist continues to instill each song with the subtle insight and emotional depth that makes his music so powerful.

The follow-up to his 2017 self-titled effort, I Travel On marks the first time that Eady’s recorded an album with his road band—a lineup whose rhythm section is made up of musicians from an R&B/roots background, and whose lead players hail from the bluegrass world. With Grammy Award-nominated duo Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley joining them in the studio, I Travel On wholly captures the unbridled energy and kinetic camaraderie that the band’s recently displayed in their relentless touring and in sharing stages with the likes of Sturgill Simpson.

Jonah Tolchin

Jonah Tolchin has wrestled with a wellspring of emotions in his 26 years, and in the process, has consistently found the means of integrating his sentiments into his songs. It’s been a relatively brief progression as far as his career is concerned, but the maturity and musical progression he’s tallied in that short time has been shared in sync with his coming of age. On his upcoming Yep Roc album, Fires for the Cold, Tolchin lays bare the conflicts and quagmires that have engulfed him over the course of the last few years. Given those circumstances and by Tolchin’s own admission, making the album wasn’t easy. Writing the songs became a kind of catharsis, one that found him sharing his most intimate feelings and, in turn, searching for a resolution and the answers he’d been searching for.

The results yielded some of the most beautiful melodies and emotive offerings Tolchin has ever delivered throughout his steadily evolving career. From the soothing strains of “Supermarket Rage” and “The Real You” to the rousing revelry of “Honeysuckle,” the steady determination of “Day by Day” and the percolating torrent of “Timeless River,” Fires for the Cold shares an emotional trajectory that resonates every step of the way.

Elaina Kay

Kay talks like she writes: defiant but vulnerable, hopeful but wry. Her new album wraps all those occasionally opposing forces in Kay’s countrified rock-and-roll to create a modern portrait of steely femininity that’s sad, funny, and ultimately, inspiring. Backed by The Texas Gentlemen, Kay’s moody soprano slides from breathy storytelling to golden-era country songbirding and back again, nuanced and captivating. She wrote or co-wrote every track, and the result is a layered collection that is both starkly personal and intensely relatable.

Kay comes by her self-reliance naturally. She grew up on her family’s ranch in Wichita Falls, Texas, 15 miles south of the Oklahoma border. Up at 4 a.m. every day, she helped farm and raise cows and cutting horses. In between ranch chores at dawn and dusk, Kay discovered music. Her grandmother, Meemaw, noticed, and took her to perform at county fairs, beauty pageants, nursing homes, and everything in between. Kay remembers vividly when she began composing her own songs.

For college, Kay loaded up two horses and her dog and headed to Tarleton State University, where she joined the rodeo team. Kay loved to rodeo, but she realized she loved music more. So she took her horses home and hit the road, this time with her guitar, singing songs in bars throughout the South. Nashville beckoned, and without a safety net or fully formed plan, Kay packed up and moved to Tennessee. She rented a room in what she became to know as the “rock hostel,” a three-story house full of boys in bands. Kay didn’t know a soul, but she jumped in, wrote more songs, and made more friends.

On Issues, Kay uses pieces of her unconventional upbringing to fuel her songwriting. The album opens with the strutting “Daddy Issues,” a true story about Kay’s biological father running afoul of the law. Kay says “more importantly, the song is about embracing our issues or problems that stem from our upbringing and to make light of the term ‘she’s got daddy issues.’ This shouldn’t be a bad or sad thing; it’s about being proud of what made us who we are.”