credit Sarrah Danziger
Asheville-based singer-songwriter Erika Lewis is set to release her anticipated album A Walk Around The Sun, a series of lyrical vignettes that examine the margins between love and loss, joy and grief, and longing and contentment. Lewis deepens her sonic palette across classic country, cosmic Americana, and dreamy indie-folk, and while enveloping a wide scope of roots music styles. Whether it’s through sweeping strings, pedal steel, a hybridized psych-rock guitar, or Lewis’ soaring vocals, A Walk Around The Sun takes a closer look at the connections between lovers and friends, and the effect of these relationships on the self.
Produced by John James Tourville (The Deslondes) and recorded in Nashville at Andrija Tokic’s analog paradise The Bomb Shelter, A Walk Around the Sun features 11 all-original songs that reflect Lewis’s songwriting power across narrative and textures.
After a health scare in 2020 that required a surgery that could damage her vocal cords and effectively end Lewis’ career, friend Lani Tourville inspired her to push through and record an album before the surgery. A Walk Around The Sun is another chapter in Lewis’ expansive songwriting, and a testament to her fortitude in the face of near-overwhelming pain and doubt. Lewis proves that to overcome the odds, you need to plow right through them.
Songs like “A Thousand Miles” and “If You Were Mine,” showcase the romanticism that runs through Lewis’ writing, while “First Love” examines young love lost in the rearview. Lewis excels at bottling sweeping, deeply relatable themes, and unraveling the human experience, all while pinpointing her place in these stories and within the world at large. “We walked til we ran and ran til we came to the point of no going home again,” sings Lewis on the album’s stunning title track.
Lewis’ approach as an artist and performer is informed by the years she spent cutting her teeth busking in the streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter and in Berlin. After relocating to New Orleans in 2007, she started a band with jazz artist Meschiya Lake called The Magnolia Beacon. After honing in on their sound in New Orleans, the two eventually crossed the Atlantic to the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin. Busking on the bridge or in Turkish markets in the daytime and hitting the local bars at night, the two quickly developed their writing and improvisational skills to listeners and travelers of all walks of life.
Upon returning to New Orleans, Lewis joined a team of fellow street performers and friends, making traditional jazz and swing music as Tuba Skinny. Eventually, she built up the momentum to record her own material outside of the group, finding inspiration in fellow New Orleans-based musicians, and songwriters including Alynda Segarra, Kiki Cavazos, Sam Doores, Riley Downing, Meschiya Lake, and more.
A Walk Around The Sun will be available for pre-save and pre-order on February 15th. Be sure to follow Erika Lewis at the links below for the latest news.
TRACKLIST
A Thousand Miles
If You Were Mine
First Love
Loser
Running Wild
A Walk Around The Sun
Hearts
Unsatisfied
Wild Thing
Love Song
Thief and a Liar
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