Kayla Ray - The World's Weight (2024)

Dropping a needle on Kayla Ray’s music can feel a bit like driving down a sun-baked Texas highway. You roll the windows down, feel a sticky-warm breeze circling your hair and you let the soundtrack of real-life stories fuel every mile of the drive.

And for Ray, a fast-rising Americana artist, that’s no accident. A native of Waco, Texas, Ray was baptized to the tune of Bob Wills and Tanya Tucker. She can recite Merle Haggard deep cuts without missing a beat and as a kid, Ray often tuned into the Grand Ole Opry with her grandfather, who built a makeshift antenna to ensure the family picked up a long-distance AM signal from faraway Nashville, Tennessee.

And she spent years cutting her teeth in the industry, studying the rules of the road with country music’s Gimble family (Dick and Emily, the son and granddaughter of Country Music Hall of Famer Johnny Gimble) before tour managing for honky-tonk staple Jason Eady. In 2014, she graduated from backstage to centerstage, singing her songs – sprinkled with appreciation for the artists who helped raise her –Hank Williams, Tom T. Hall and, of course, Loretta Lynn.

Now, she’s releasing her long-awaited label debut The World’s Weight. A collection of songs doused in days of fall-too-hard love and nights of brown-liquored therapy, it debuts June 7 via Real AF Records, an Average Joes Entertainment imprint founded by singer-songwriter Bryan Martin.

“This album is a long time coming,” Ray said. “The songs span a big chapter of my life. The character falls in love, gets her heart broken, rolls around in fits of ravaged independence and falls in and back out of love again. In many ways, through it all, she finds herself and becomes unafraid to express her views of the world just exactly as she sees them.”

Ray decamped to Oklahoma City to cut much of The World’s Weight with producer Giovanni Carnuccio III at Castle Row Studios. The album pulls listeners into Ray’s take on tried-and-true country, with songs like opening number “The Place I Fell In Love With You” – a twangy, freewheelin’ jam that takes listeners on a love-tinged road trip – and standout cut “Carolina Pines,” a thoughtful country-folk stomper delivered straight from the soul.

Her sound isn’t the country-rock throwback of some of today’s top Americana acts, nor is stripped-back folk storytelling or old-time roots music. If asked by a stranger, how would Ray describe the old-school tightrope she walks in her music?

“I’m probably shuffling my feet and sheepishly calling it ‘Amerikinda.’ Not new pop country, not roots – just country music,” she said.

On the album, Ray puts her brand of so-called “Amerikinda” on display with “Good Old Days,” a piano-backed wistful ode to the past, and “No. 9 Diesel,” a breezy tale that wouldn’t be out of place on a back-porch hang. Her one-of-a-kind songwriting shines on heart-aching number “Until My Dying Breath” and “Likes to Drink Alone,” a fresh addition to country music’s tear-in-her-beer-glass songwriting tradition.

On “Likes To Drink Alone,” she sings, “It’s just that I’ve been thinking / Thinking maybe I’ve been wrong/ and it’s just the fact that leavin’/ It’s always been easier than stayin’ gone/ And if you were here, I’d tell you darlin’/ Oh, but how could you know / for the part of me that still loves you, darlin’/ is the part that still likes to drink alone.”

Off stage, Ray still surrounds herself with music. She’s chipping away at a master’s degree in mental health at the University of Oklahoma and developed a music therapy course for Texas inmates. During sessions, Ray led the inmates through listening sessions and songwriting discussions before building to writing their own tunes. The work partly inspired Ray to return to school after previously earning a degree in commercial music.

“To be boldly honest and transparent and to support one another instead of shaming them in particularly vulnerable moments … I watched music take men of all ages, races and backgrounds and unite them in ways I couldn’t have imagined. We shared tears, laughter and vivid memories of every variety,” Ray said.

And while she’s toured clubs and concert halls throughout the U.S. and some of Europe, her next dream, more than anything, she said – is to step inside the Grand Ole Opry circle to sing a few songs on the stage she’s been hearing music from since switching on the AM dial as a Texas kid with little more than a dream.

“I really want to tour as hard and heavy as possible,” she said, adding: “I feel so overwhelmingly lucky to get to do what I love in this capacity and with as much artistic freedom as I’ve been granted. I am aware that what I am is not like anything current, really, but, I don’t know how to be anything different.”