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About Katie Pruitt:
Katie Pruitt is living proof of music’s power to transform the way we experience the world. Soon after the arrival of her acclaimed debut Expectations — a 2020 LP on which she documented her journey in growing up queer in the Christian South — the Georgia-bred singer/songwriter/guitarist heard from countless listeners that her songs had impacted their lives on an elemental level. With her sophomore album Mantras, the Nashville-based musician now looks inward to explore such matters as gender identity, self-compassion or the lack thereof and the struggle for peace in times of chaos and uncertainty — ultimately arriving at a body of work that speaks to the strength in undoing harmful self-beliefs and fully living your truth.
Mainly produced by Collin Pastore and Jake Finch (known for their work with boygenius and Lucy Dacus), Mantras delves deeper into the empathetic storytelling and incisive self-examination that defined Expectations — an album that earned Pruitt a nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year from the Americana Music Association and drew praise from major outlets like Rolling Stone (who hailed Pruitt as a “dynamic new presence”) and Pitchfork (who noted that “[h]er songs are patient but determined, navigating serious subjects with quiet familiarity”). This time around, Katie sets her lived-in lyricism to a folk-leaning sound informed by her love for the more experimental edges of indie-rock, stacking her songs with plenty of propulsive grooves and overdriven guitars as well as working with musicians like string arranger Laura Epling (Orville Peck, Spencer Cullum).
Although several songs took shape with the help of co-writers like singer/songwriter Ruston Kelly (Bethany Cosentino, Amanda Shires), Katie wrote most of Mantras on her own and imbued her lyrics with an expansive element of autobiography. In penning the album-opening “All My Friends (Are Finding New Beliefs),” she mined inspiration from a Christian Wiman poem of the same name, dreaming up a fuzzed-out and summery track etched with both self-aware reflection and sharp-witted observation on the search for clarity and purpose. Next, on “White Lies, White Jesus and You,” Katie shares a hazy yet frenetic meditation on hypocrisy in religion, tapping into her intense frustration with conservative Christian ideology. A profoundly introspective album, Mantras turns the lens on her own inner life with songs like “Self Sabotage”—a gloriously cathartic track that opens up about her struggle with negative thought loops. Meanwhile, on “Blood Related,” Katie presents a raw but poetic rumination on how family can sometimes feel like strangers, enlisting her mother as a background vocalist and embedding the track with audio recordings of her father and brother from old home videos. And while Mantras often pushes into emotionally heavy terrain, its songs frequently echo the radiant sense of joy and discovery that defined the album-making process. On “Naive Again,” for instance, she infuses the bright and dreamy tones of glockenspiel and xylophone into her melancholy contemplation on loss of innocence.
Looking over the tracklist to Mantras, Katie notes that a certain narrative thread emerged without her intention. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but the throughline for this record ended up being my own personal journey of letting go and learning how to love myself again —it begins with tension, frustration, and fear and resolves to a place of acceptance, surrender, and stillness,” she says. “I hope when people hear the record they feel what I felt after writing it, which was a sense of trusting myself and trusting that — no matter how bad things look — there’s always hope where there’s fear. I know that so much of the time we feel alone in our pain, so hopefully these songs help everyone to see that they can work through those big life changes and end up loving themselves a lot more.”
About Tyler Ramsey and Carl Broemel:
Having been friends and occasional touring partners for well over a decade, Asheville, NC-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Tyler Ramsey and My Morning Jacket guitarist Carl Broemel have at long last made their full-length recorded debut with Celestun, out January 15.
A marvel of interwoven musicianship and testament to the duo’s singular camaraderie, the album encapsulates the two veteran guitarist-songwriters’ mutual admiration and effortless compatibility as they swap and share nine new songs of dazzling dexterity and grace recorded almost entirely on acoustic guitars.
Though their initial objective had been all instrumental, the natural flow of the sessions led the duo to begin incorporating vocal tracks. Stark yet intricately arranged songs such as the cinematic title track, “Flying Things” (featuring additional vocals from GRAMMY® Award-nominated singing siblings The Secret Sisters), and an incandescent version of Neil Young’s “Sail Away” are rich with dazzling dexterity and grace, Tyler’s nimble fingerstyle picking and Carl’s classically trained virtuosity aligning to create a predominantly instrumental song cycle of rustic beauty and atmospheric power. Music at its most elemental, Celestun sees Carl and Tyler stripping away artifice to unlock and explore deeply personal themes of wanderlust and familial love, of fellowship and communal adventure.
“We don’t step on each other’s toes,” says Carl, “we kind of fit together like puzzle pieces. Maybe that sounds grandiose, but that’s how it feels to me when we’re playing. We don’t even have to talk about it.”
“We just mesh together in a way that I can’t even really explain,” says Tyler. “I feel like there’s some magical connection between our two things, it just makes me smile and satisfies some itch as far as things that I would like to hear on the music that I write. I think he feels the same way about what I do. When I put a part to one of his songs, we both have this feeling like that is what exactly what was missing.”
Previously, Louisville, KY’s Carl Broemel has released a series of solo recordings over the past two decades, including 2019’s Brokenhearted Jubilee EP in collaboration with drummer Eric Hopper, and recent collaborations with The Futurebirds. Meanwhile, Tyler Ramsey, has earned praise for his former role as songwriter and lead guitarist in Band of Horses as well as an evolving solo body of work that includes 2024’s acclaimed New Lost Ages, hailed by Americana UK as “a gentle indie-folk gem.”
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1535 Spruce St, Boulder, CO, United States, Colorado 80302
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