Brian Mackey

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Singer-songwriter Brian Mackey voices what often goes unsaid with warmth and vulnerability that is reminiscent yet new. He's often been told that he has a sound that combines a healthy balance of folk, pop, rock, and Americana, drawing comparisons to artists like the late Jim Croce. Originally from the northern Florida panhandle, Brian was raised on a diet of 90s alt-rock and 70s folk music.  

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Brian released his single "Keep the World Alive," written and recorded remotely as an anthem for 2020 and how the world as we knew it has changed - simultaneously with the loss of his brother. In a time when the pandemic has also changed the landscape of the music and live entertainment industry in its entirety, it was featured in American Songwriter Magazine; the video garnered over 2M views on Facebook, and sparked much coverage across numerous press outlets. 

Brian recorded his forthcoming full-length album, his second, at Sony Tree Studios in Nashville. A writing project during 2019-20 with his friend Jeff King (Reba McEntire/Brooks & Dunn) sparked several tracks—“My Only Friend” and “Six Strings” on the new album, as well as Mackey’s new standouts, “Saturday Night Sleeping,” “Even Though I Try,” “Count The Stars,” and “Bird In A Cage.” 

The album comes after a period of touring and single releases. In 2018 and 2019, Brian toured with Kate Voegele and Tyler Hilton on their joint European tour and on Hilton’s solo tour, with Howie Day, and American Idol Winner Taylor Hicks. The tours supported a collection of singles, "Promise Me," "Don't Own Much," "Underwater," and "Learn to Be," produced in Los Angeles by Jon Levine (Rachel Platten, Andy Grammer). "Learn to Be" charted #1 Most-Added for three weeks in a row, tied with John Mayer on the US FMQB A/C Charts. This single, poppy and bold, reflects on the life lessons of learning to live without a crutch, and the liberation of breaking free. The music video for "Underwater" premiered on the Huffington Post, boasting the headline "Sublimely Gorgeous Music From Brian Mackey." It was also officially nominated for an HMMA award for "Best Independent Music Video,” along with his video for “Don’t Own Much.” During this timeframe, he has also toured with David Bromberg in the US, with Ron Pope in Europe, and Jon McLaughlin for select dates.  

In 2015, Brian released his first full-length album Broken Heartstrings, a collection of pop infused American folk-rock, also in Nashville. The music took him through a very personal journey, spurred by loss and then renewal and signified a new beginning for Brian. He assembled a talented team: Producer Sam Ashworth, Engineer Richie Biggs (Tom Petty, The Civil Wars), bassist Mark Hill (Carrie Underwood, Keith Urban) and guitarist Jeff King, (Reba McEntyre/Brooks & Dunn). 

 Broken Heartstrings yielded his hit single, “Are You Listening,” which, after being featured on YouTube by gamer Gronkh about the PlayStation 4 game “Until Dawn,” became a runaway hit in Germany. The song peaked at #8 on the A/C Radio Charts in the US, charted top 25 on German iTunes, was on the ‘100 Most Sold’ chart on Amazon Germany, had over 400k streams on Spotify, and resulted in sold-out shows throughout the country.

Garrett Owen

Photo credit: Melissa Laree Cunningham

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Texas-born Garrett Owen had a musical awakening at age 14 that manifested as an intense desire to learn guitar and an insatiable love for all things heavy metal. Eventually, he began exploring other genres, diligently saving his weekly allowance to afford mail-order CDs to satisfy his typical childhood curiosity. But, Owen’s childhood was anything but typical.

Instead of Little League and sleepovers, Owen’s earliest memories involve frequent trips across the Serengeti and backyard wildlife most of us only experience at our local zoos. The son of church-building missionaries, he grew up in Tanzania and Kenya, riding on the luggage rack of the family’s Nissan Patrol, with vast clear skies above him and gazelles running beside. After leaving Africa, the family completed a stint in Ecuador before Owen’s parents moved the family back to Texas. Life as he knew it became a difficult endeavor; rimmed with the sharp edges of reality in an unfamiliar place, his attempts to settle into a culture he didn’t understand resulted in distress and a suicide attempt - a far cry from the idyllic landscape of his upbringing.    

“Getting to the point where songs could even come out of me at all again took some time,” he remembers. However, Owen’s decision to step up to the mic at a songwriters’ night in Fort Worth changed his trajectory and reminded him that the goal of pursuing music was no longer at home on the backburner.

Now, the award-winning artist, who calls to mind legends like Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Elliot Smith, and Jesse Winchester, is gearing up to release his second full-length album, Quiet Lives, on September 18th. Though he revisits familiar subject matter such as the push-pull of relationships, love, and loss, Quiet Lives is about growth, informed by the perspective gained from life experience. The diverse 10-track collection delves into more experimental musical territory, as Owen toyed with complex chord changes, melodic dissonance, and intriguing storylines.

“My relationship with technology and connection to nature are a new combination in my songwriting,” he says, as evidenced in the album’s lead single, “These Modern Times.” Its blend of folk-tinged finger-picking, synth-infused verses, and anthemic pop choruses illustrate the juxtaposition of old and new as he contemplates the ups and downs of our constant and instant access to digital information. “Hour In The Forest,” which begins as a dreamy folk-pop tune that explodes into searing, Queen-esque guitar rock in its second half, was inspired by two women - one, a potential love interest, the other the bearer of an unforgettable tattoo, while “No One To Save You” ventures into familiar territory as he revisits a past relationship that couldn’t withstand the pressures of life on the road. “I Must Be Evil,” a quirky tune wearing the uniform of a murder ballad, tells the story of vigilante justice. Owen even pays homage to the late great Waylon Jennings as he puts his unique and jazz-folk spin on Jennings’ 1977 tune “The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want To Get Over You).”

“At its core, all art is based on a ‘true story,’ and by true, I mean the version we carry in our head and heart - the one that can lift or crush your spirit with equal capacity,” the golden-voiced troubadour, who has shared stages with artists like Parker Millsap, Charlie Sexton, and Marty Stuart, explains. “Some suggest that your upbringing explains quirks of personality like my shyness, a tendency for introspection, and streaks of perfectionism. Maybe. I’m not so fatalistic as to believe our earliest experiences necessarily determine the arc of adult life, but my slightly foreign childhood never leaves my music or me. Everybody’s got a story to tell,” he adds. “I’m no different.”

Natalie Schlabs

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Nashville-based singer/songwriter Natalie Schlabs writes songs that explore the complicated emotions and perspective-shifting moments that make up family relationships. Her music often blends sublime vocal harmonies with lyrics about the secret desires and difficulties of living life among loved ones.

Her first full-length album, Midnight With No Stars, was celebrated for its willingness to explore the personal. New Slang praised the album for revealing “a rugged truthfulness we often save for conversations with ourselves.” There’s a richness and clarity to Schlabs’ voice reminiscent of artists like Norah Jones and Jill Andrews, making her a popular choice for harmonizing background vocals and a frequent collaborator with other musicians on tour and in the studio. Her stunning duet with Irish-born artist Ben Glover, “Fall Apart,” features vocals that “ring and resound like a fork tapping crystal” and was chosen as a Song of the Week on The Bluegrass Situation. Schlabs’ introduction to Nashville music came through collaboration, singing background vocals for fellow Texan Ryan Culwell, and performing with Katie Herzig at Paste Studio NYC in 2018. “I think there’s something cool about the act of stepping into someone else’s sound and blending with it,” she explains. “It’s a challenge, and a kind of freedom, too.”

Like many other Nashville musicians, the West Texas native grew up singing in church, but unlike others the majority of her early musical experience s took place at home with family. Her three brothers were musicians—one a pianist, one a guitarist and drummer, and one guitarist and songwriter—her mom sang, and her grandfather, a guitarist and vocalist who performed classics, often invited the family to sing with him. “It was very normal for all of us to be together in a room, playing instruments and singing together,” she recalls. “My love for music comes from my family, and my love for family is often the substance of my songwriting.”

Breaking a bit from her country roots, Schlabs’ new album Don’t Look Too Close, set for release on Oct 9, 2020, steps into indie territory with a compelling mix of instrumentation laced with solo vocals that bloom into easy, delicate harmonies. Co - produced by Juan Solorzano and Zachary Dyke , with Caleb Hickman on saxophone and her husband Joshua Rogers on bass, the album swells and ebbs with elegant, absorbing shapes. The songs are moody, candid, and tender , each featuring Schlabs’ characteristically sleek vocals front-and-center, backed by charming instrumental moments that add form and depth to the melodies. “Juan’s got a great ear,” she says. “He created really original textures with layered guitar. That’s a big part of the sound of the record.”

Recorded the year of her 30th birthday and largely written while pregnant with her first child, the album naturally focuses on tension s between past and present. “I was thinking about how to raise a child, how to pass down values,” she reveals. “There’s a dismantling of what I thought I knew. What do I value in my life and where did those things come from? What do I want to share with my children and what do I want to spare them from?” The tracks on Don’t Look Too Close traverse the spectrum of feelings that tend to coincide with love, from bittersweet consideration of “the wilderness caused by depression or illness” in “See What I See,” to the haunting gentleness of “Ophelia,” written for a friend who lost her daughter. The title song “Don’t Look Too Close” addresses the everyday aches and pains people tend to hide from loved ones. “There were entire rooms of things my parents went through that I had no idea about,” she says. “And my kid will have no idea about a lot of things I experience.” The song reflects on love’s blindness, how “sometimes the ones you love will never know how much you love them.”

The album as a whole represents a place, a time, and a pocket of feelings that are as distinctly human as they are beautiful. “Growing up surrounded by family in the flatlands, there’s not a whole lot going on outside of the people,” she continues. “The climate is extreme, and isolation binds you to the people around you. Everyone’s in each other’s business, and you learn that love can go in many directions. Sometimes it’s about solidarity and sacrifice, sometimes it’s obsessive or painful. This record is about navigating those feelings within our closest relationships .”

Matt Lovell

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BY MATT LOVELL:

I often tell stories by first explaining how they end.  Somehow the destination of a tale creates something like a center of gravity to draw all the details of the past towards the final point.

The story told in these songs has had several endings and several beginnings, a natural byproduct when a project spans the course of so many years.  I started writing this record in 2012, which means it will be nearly eight years old on the day it is released.

In these years of writing and recording, I have gathered quite a wild palette of paints.  In a way, Nobody Cries Today has actually been my teacher.  As I have written these songs, each of them has been like a tiny rowboat to get me from one day to the next.

These songs have witnessed me in the years that I was in the throes of trying to find acceptance for myself and for the world I’m living in.  As a gay man of southern origin, this proved to be a tall order.  

These songs have also helped me to explore things like zest for life, discontent, hunger, truth, and hope.  

All but one of these songs were recorded in 2016—just months before I nearly lost my life in a shooting.  On January 20, 2017, I was shot in the chest by a sixteen-year-old who was attempting to steal my car.  Miraculously, I lived.

This moment in my life created my new center of gravity and re-ordered my whole view and understanding of everything I’ve experienced in this lifetime.

Many people who experience an acute trauma go through somewhat of a euphoric period immediately after the incident occurs, and this was definitely my experience.  Call it a spiritual awakening, or the result of adrenaline and endorphins gone wild, or even just the natural result of a near-death story with a happy ending.  Whatever it was, this event threw me into a span of six months where it felt as if I was on a honeymoon with myself.  The level of peace I felt was something I had never touched before.  I wrote profusely, I gardened, I brought new life and vigor to my musical ventures, and I made peace with complicated friendships.  More than anything, I found a level of great self-acceptance, and this created space for me to begin to learn how to live this life.  

It was a golden age for me.

This era ended abruptly when PTSD showed up unexpectedly one day—about six months after I was shot.  It was—no doubt—the most difficult time I’ve ever faced.  It made me question just about everything.  For months, my entire consciousness felt as if it had been turned upside down, and I couldn’t find a way to articulate the horrors I was experiencing.  This kind of trauma is a knot you can only untangle with slow and patient work, and with the help of saints.  (Thankfully, I know a lot of saints.)

I’m now on the other side of that long nighttime, and I’m so excited to sing these nine songs again—for anyone who will listen.  Nobody Cries Today contains every bit of earnestness, desire, and love that I have to give.  These are songs that have brought me so much joy and healing over the years.