
Without wishing to see this descend into a “sisters are doing it for themselves” type cliché fest, particular as some of these “sisters” no longer identify as such, I will say this: Some serious female talent coming across my desk these days.
But there is something else I can’t help but notice: how often many of these writers have what you might call an interesting background.
Writers who drift into music on a gap year with money borrowed from parents, is really quite the exception.
Hurray for the Riff Raff is the name under which Alynda Segarra writes and performs.
She has a poet’s soul, which is small surprise given that as a troubled teen, raised by her grandparents in the Bronx, she was hopping trains by 17, listening to Woodie Guthrie and travelling America.
She is the very definition of Americana.
She collates those experiences here, writing with such hard worn wisdom of the souls she encountered along the way, a poet that “lives to sing the tale.”
This has been already described as the next great American Road album. I know it’s February, but this is a potential album of the year.
Ireland doesn’t have the rail network to produce writers like Alynda.
Lenker’s background is even more interesting: Raised in a Christian cult ‘til she was four.
Wrote her first song at the age of eight and recorded her first album aged 13.
Spent a summer travelling through the Midwest and living in her car, a Ford Transit, naturally.
You can tell her you don’t like her band, but I will warn you: she was state karate champion three years in a row.
Won a music scholarship to Berkely funded by Susan Tedeschi of the Tedeschi Trucks Band. The Tedeschi family owns a chain of shops, seeing as you asked.
The three songs available from this album so far, a March 22 release, confirm her huge talent.
The lazy line on social media is that she writes at a “Thom Yorke” level. I see her more as a Muhammad Ali; The songs float like butterflies, and yet.
She is also responsible for a moment in my car that will live forever.
When I started it one night, her song Anything started to play automatically. I checked to see if it was coming from my phone. But it wasn’t.
It was coming from my 15-year-old daughter’s. “I love her, dad,” she said.
No “hopped trains” here, but Katie Crutchfield – a product, disappointingly almost, of a white, Southern, fairly conventional upbringing – was singing Velvet Underground songs with her twin sister at all ages shows before she was knee high to a grasshopper.
Waxahatchee is the name she records and performs under.
Her album Saint Cloud was released as the world went into lockdown and was the backdrop to my first few weeks painting my home office as the radio talked of case numbers and deaths.
That does somehow give her a very special place in my heart.
She has a unique voice, there is no song that isn’t improved by her singing it.
Two tracks so far from an album scheduled for March release reveal an artist whose upward trajectory is sky rocketing.
Nadine Shah albums come with a lot of emotional baggage, and this is no different.
In fact, it probably trumps all previous releases in the “misery endured” stakes.
She has been through hell. Yet, as on previous releases, it is her wit, energy and incandescent life spirit that comes through the strongest.
Nadine also hasn’t ‘train hopped’ but she does have an interesting lineage: her mum is half Norwegian and her dad Pakistani.
Being a Muslim is important to her and she once said it would be great if her career inspired “any young Muslim to pick up a guitar and write a song.”
Then there’s Mitski. Half Japanese, half America. Had lived in Turkey, China, Malaysia, the Czech Republic and The Congo before writing her first song in Ankara at 18.
With that background, it’s a wonder she waited so long.
I write this in a week that I’ve witnessed CMAT being interviewed by Elton John.
Her rise and rise continues apace.
If all these talents have one thing in common it’s their ability to write songs that drip personality, wit, and insight. And leap from the radio!