Name: Kyshona at OLS
Start: 2024-06-14T20:00:00-04:00
Location: One Longfellow Square

Kyshona lends her voice and music to those who feel silenced, forgotten or alone. She began her career as a music therapist, writing her first songs with patients — students and inmates under her care. She became compelled to write independently and find her own voice, an endeavor which led her to the Nashville creative community and songwriting culture. Since then, she balances her music career with her passion to heal in community through her organization Your Song Kyshona’s new project, LEGACY, focuses on family.
Storytelling is the way we pass information – between friends, colleagues, and family. Stories are how we imprint our culture and give gifts from one generation to the next. Memory is imperfect. It is influenced by emotion, context, our state-of-mind on any given day, our health, surroundings, language, and how we have been socialized. In telling our stories, we not only enlighten one another to our truths, we also call upon our community to practice active understanding and to help us acknowledge, validate, and remember our past. In telling our stories of the past, we shape a collective future informed by where we have traveled, all we have learned, and who we have been. Every family has storytellers, because we are all storytellers. In her forthcoming album LEGACY, Kyshona tells the long story of her family’s journey. Through stories, photos, film, ancestry and genealogy research, and travels in the power of place, Kyshona shares her story while inviting listeners and concert goers to join her in exploration of self, healing and growth.
Over the last few years, in addition to three new original singles and multiple music videos, she released a collection of recordings and videos in collaboration with Centennial Park Conservancy – recorded at Nashville’s Parthenon, in front of a monument-sized gold statue of Athena. A song she wrote with ZG Smith called “Nighttime Animal” was named to American Songwriter’s Top 25 Songs of 2022 and enjoyed spins on AAA radio. She wrote an article for No Depression magazine, and was invited to speak at several events including giving a keynote address for 2023 Fulbright Scholars. She is featured in a 2023 PBS television show called “Ear to the Common Ground,” gathering fans around a dining table to discuss voting rights in America, and she will be featured in an upcoming video series featuring Americana artists performing in the prestigious Schermerhorn Symphony Center Theater in Nashville.
Her song, “Listen,” was an anthem for many in 2020. Of her album of the same name, one fan reviewer wrote: “Amidst these hard, divisive times this set of songs is a salve for the grief many of us are feeling about resulting loss of family, friends, and community.” Within the grooves of its 10 tracks, Kyshona blends roots, rock, R&B, and folk with lyrical prowess to uplift the marginalized and bring awareness to the masses. It’s for every silent scream, every heavy load, fearful thought, and a simmering sense of anger that the repressed, the lost, and the forgotten try to hide from the world.
Audiences will find a common thread of empowerment, overcoming adversity, and finding hope in her work. The show doesn’t end when the last song is sung. After her powerful performances, concertgoers often ask, “What can I do?”
Her response? “Listen.”