Kristina Murray
“I’ve been to some pretty low places these last ten years,” Kristina Murray
confesses. “Faced a lot of heartbreak and loss and grief, but you have to learn
to live with those things if you’re going to survive. You have to persevere.”
That spirit of perseverance forms the bedrock of Murray’s stunning new
album, Little Blue. Recorded with producers Misa Arriaga and Rachael
Moore, the collection grapples with loneliness, desperation, and existential
crises through a series of cinematic snapshots of small-town burnouts and
last call lovers. Murray is a country artist in the truest sense, a genuine
craftswoman with a keen eye and ear for the little details that bring her
working-class characters to life, and her delivery is timeless, blurring the
lines between the old school honky-tonk, swampy Americana, and
R&B-infused southern rock she grew up on in her home state of Georgia. If
Murray sounds like a seasoned vet on Little Blue, that’s because she is. While
the album marks her Normaltown debut, Murray’s spent the last decade
since moving to Nashville paying her dues in an endless series of dive bars
and juke joints, and the result is an electrifying introduction to an artist only
just beginning to get the kind of wider recognition her talent has long
warranted.
“Country music is having a moment right now, and of course I’m thrilled to
be a part of that,” Murray reflects. “But even when that moment passes, I’ll
still be making it. This genre’s a never-ending treasure chest of discoveries.
Country music is who I am.”
Born and raised in Atlanta, Murray first fell in love with country music at the
age of five, when she heard Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits on cassette in her
momma’s car. After self-releasing her debut album in 2013, she moved to
Nashville, quickly finding her place in the community as she helped establish the now-legendary Honky Tonk Tuesdays series and became one of the first
women to front a band at Santa’s Pub.
“I wanted to surround myself with great writers and players so I could grow
as an artist,” Murray explains. “It’s funny to look back now and realize how
little I knew when I first got to town, but I was confident, I’ll say that,” she
laughs.
Murray worked multiple jobs at a time to pay for her sophomore album,
Southern Ambrosia, which landed on an array of Best Of lists and prompted
Rolling Stone to declare her an Artist You Need To Know, praising her sound
as “country-rock with a deep, poetic reverence for the land in which it was
born.” The breakout critical acclaim didn’t translate to breakout success,
though, and Murray soon found herself right back where she started, unsure
of where to go or what it all meant.
“I felt stuck,” she recalls. “My father died suddenly when I was 25, a wound
that never heals, and through breakups, car wrecks, and just general
brokenness, all of which I was still processing when the whole world shut
down in 2020. And while I’d had some brushes with notoriety and a few
opportunities to tour in Europe and share bills with some fantastic artists
over the years, it just seemed like I was spinning my wheels getting
nowhere.”
So Murray did what she always does when the going gets tough: she kept
writing, kept performing, worked harder.
“I just wrote and wrote and stockpiled songs for the right opportunity,” she
explains. “I knew I needed to level up, and that meant finding the people
who could help me get there.”
First up was Misa Arriaga (Kacey Musgraves, Wyatt Flores), who’d
collaborated with Murray on a covers project in 2022 and eagerly signed on
to help her record a full-length LP. It was around this same time that Murray
met Rachael Moore (T Bone Burnett’s longtime engineer), who was so blown
away by Murray’s live show that she invited her to come record in Muscle
Shoals pro bono.
“I wanted to work with both of them,” Murray recalls, “but with two different
producers in two different studios, I honestly wasn’t sure how it would all
come together. Rather than worry about it, though, I tried to just trust in the songs and be as present as possible in the moment, which helped me fall
more in love with the process than ever before.”
In the end, the dual producer setup proved to be perfect for capturing the
two sides of Murray’s creative personality. Over a winter weekend in Muscle
Shoals with Moore, she and the band dug deep and chased sounds with
meticulous focus and precision; over a spring weekend back in Nashville
with Arriaga, they were able to let loose and embrace a spirit of
improvisation and discovery.
“Both producers work in very different ways, but their techniques turned out
to be really complementary,” Murray explains. “The songs were so cohesive
when they all came together. It just felt totally natural and organic.”
Album opener “You Got Me” sets the stage, pairing the soulful groove of The
Band with the punchy swagger of a ‘90s Patty Loveless barnburner to create
an unlikely—and utterly infectious—hybrid. Like much of Little Blue, the
track is drawn from Murray’s personal experiences, but she rarely gets too
directly autobiographical on the album, opting instead for empathetic
character studies that play out like a series of interconnected short stories.
“The After Midnight Special” paints a portrait of a lonesome narrator
working her way through the late-night bar crowd; the aching 80’s pop
throwback “Has Been” laments wasted potential; the bittersweet “Fool’s
Gold” (featuring Erin Rae on harmonies) inhabits a protagonist wrestling
with a depression that just won’t lift. “It’s been all fool’s gold up ‘til now,”
Murray sings over weeping pedal steel. “I’ve been treading muddy water so
long, go on just let me drown / Maybe behind these gray skies I’m gonna find
out / That it’s just more clouds.”
“A lot of the characters on this record are coming to terms with the fact that
life just has a lot of sadness in it,” Murray reflects. “But making peace with
that sadness is what allows you to carry on and find joy and meaning and
purpose.”
The driving “Get Down To It” (co-written and featuring Logan Ledger) is a
boogie woogie ode to rolling up your sleeves and doing the work; the laid
back “Watchin’ The World Pass Me By” channels Jerry Jeff Walker and
Bobbie Gentry as a self-proclamation on how the Honky Tonk lifestyle
chooses its victims; and the lo-fi title track slow burns its way to an ecstatic
finale, zooming out far enough in the process to put all our personal trials
and tribulations into perspective.
“Our time here is so short on this little blue dot,” Murray muses, “too short
for all the bullshit we get caught up in day to day. This whole record is
dropping in and out of these little snippets of sadness in life, but I wanted to
end on this note of hope, this reminder that you can still find love and beauty
no matter how dark things may seem.”
All it takes is a little perseverance.
Website: https://www.kristinamurray.net/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristinamurray_