Highway Queens

Two Runner have been quietly building a stellar reputation in the Americana scene over the last few years: recording sessions with Western AF and Gems on VHS, and going on tour with Alela Diane and Watchhouse. The new album ‘Porchlight’ comes six months or so after violinist Emilie Rose left the duo, making Two Runner now a solo proposition led by songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Paige Anderson.

After Dolly’s death this week the tribute statements and social media posts flowed in from family, friends, collaborators, fans and people all over the world. Her longtime friend and Trio collaborator Emmylou Harris did things differently. Emmylou is now 79 herself and was in Europe playing her farewell tour. She had made no public statement about Dolly’s death.

I’ve always known what song I would listen to at the dreaded moment I found out Dolly Parton was dead. The Grass is Blue might sound on the surface like a breakup song, but for me it is a song of mourning, of sorrow, an exploration of the way humans can lie to themselves to cope with the infinite darkness of life. A perfectly written song for any time the world threatens to destroy your sanity. Yesterday evening, I pressed play.

When the news of Nashville star Hayden Panettiere’s death broke last week, I was extremely sad but to say I was shocked would unfortunately be a lie. The exact circumstances remain unclear but it was well known that Hayden had been struggling for years with addiction and horrific turmoil in her personal life.

Laura Veirs’s new album is the first she’s entirely recorded and produced herself and the first in four years since Found Light. Her garden studio is called ‘Temple of Bloom’ and this was where ‘Temple Songs’ was born, after living through a songwriting drought she has reframed as a ‘gathering phase’. The seeds of that work have grown into songs whose roots feel surprisingly strong.

Over the past few months many in the music industry have been struck down with what is being called ‘blue dot fever’. The name for this disease comes from the way Ticketmaster show unsold seats on their site but this problem of lack of ticket sales is not confined to seated concerts. In Scotland alone this summer we’ve had cancelled festivals, and other major events offering heavily discounted tickets and buy one get one free offers for standing concerts.

On her recent appearance on the lovely ‘Playing Along with Norah Jones’ podcast Allison Russell described her favourite part of making music as ‘the collaboration’, calling her fellow musicians on this new album ‘In the Hour of Chaos’ a ‘rainbow coalition’. Allison begins her third solo album by singing an ode to the ‘Rainbow’, offering herself a reminder to keep hold of her childhood innocence, knowing as an adult that’s ‘it’s not easy to keep all seven colours in your mind’.

I hadn’t planned on going to Paris last weekend. I had seen a while back that Alela Diane and Kevin Morby were playing Paris one day after the other during my summer holiday but a trip to Paris in summer was surely going to be too hot and too expensive. And yet as the time drew nearer I felt like it would be more wrong not to go, especially considering these were two of my favourites who’d both released brilliant new albums this year and neither artist were playing Scotland on this tour schedule.

I’m just going to start by saying that nepo babies are fine with me if they meet two criteria: they have to be talented and their parents have to be cool. I have no problem with Rosanne Cash, for example and I don’t think many other music fans do either. The thing that people hate about nepo babies is the same thing that draws us to them. We want to know if they have whatever their parents had. We want to know if they’d make it without their last name.

This past weekend The Highwomen reunited at The Gorge for the first time since they last played that same venue in 2023. Honestly I’ve spent the last hour or so just watching the videos of the performances and I’ve felt a mixture of deep, deep FOMO, unabashed joy and just a sense of hope and optimism which only this group of women seem to create when they’re together. 2019, when the Highwomen united to release their only album, feels like a century ago.