Emily Herring - Gliding (2017)

Emily Herring simply sings purest country music. Witness Gliding. Herring’s fourth record, produced by legendary instrumentalist Steve Fishell and released on Austin-based Eight 30 Records, delivers all raw emotion with a voice branded at birth for honkytonks. Listen. You’ll hear. The daytime auto mechanic and nighttime singer-songwriter effortlessly infuses her new collection with equal measures swagger (“Millers in Milwaukee”) and sway (“Best Thing”). “I found an immediate connection with Emily,” Fishell says. “Her voice rings like Rosie Flores did in the 1980s when I played with her during the Los Angeles cowpunk movement. She has that energy and fire.”

Gliding shows both while deftly balancing sharp songwriting (“Last of the Houston Honkytonk Heroes”) with endlessly energy (the Commander Cody classic “Semi Truck”). Spiritual motion guides the journey (“Gettin’ By”). “Gliding’s a movement with a certain stillness attached,” the longtime Central Texas resident says. “You’re at the mercy of the wind along with the extreme force of gravity. The title track leads you off the ledge and into a moment where time stands still, your thoughts slowly moving through what could have been with only the implication of the inevitable.”

Longtime fans know Herring’s elegant lyrics seamlessly balance Americana, Western swing, gypsy jazz and traditional country influences into her own signature sound. Her soaring vocals, however, set her apart from the rest. Emily pulls no punches. Her hard-hitting-no-frills crooning sung with a distinctive twang pays dividends: Fresh off the heels of her Swedish tour and a residency at McMenamin’s Crystal Hotel in Portland, Emily received a 2015 Ameripolitan Award Nomination for her CD Your Mistake. The album also won her the Carl T. Sprague Award from the Texas Music Awards, an honor she shares with only one other recipient, Michael Martin Murphey.

Your Mistake was featured in several publications including No Depression and CMT Edge. In turns dazzling and stark, Your Mistake is a love letter and a warning, a honkytonk when the lights come up, the ring of the last change in your pocket as you spend it on the only beautiful girl in town. Herrings’s songs are poetry, wrought with pedal steel, dobro, telecaster, a careful reverence, and an honest eye. Stretching across Texas and the new West, the songs recall the last fifty years of country music in a sound all their own. Now, with Gliding and producer Fishell, Herring takes her music to a new level.