Photo: Jon Walder, Music City Studio B, Nashville, April 2023.

To hear Kristina Murray sing it, it’s only getting worse. There’s just more clouds. Two albums and nearly two decades after she started chasing this musician life, she’s still wondering how a woman can stop it from raining all day; why the only sunshine is the bottom of the glass, a horizon setting over the last sips of beer. “Are you dizzy too?,” she asks before repeating, “Little blue little blue oh little blue oh little blue oh little blue” over and over as a broiling psychedelic crescendo builds behind her softening voice to end the title track and the album of the same name—the band, picking her back up to dust off and try again tomorrow.

Beyond the ascendent singing voice and the band-leading prowess, songwriting is where Murray shines, and her growth is evident song by song. A turn of phrase, a twisted cliché turned into a late-night epic, lyrics that ride the melodies, and melodies that wrap the words; these vignettes–as she calls them–level a new playing field and raise a new bar for a Nashville scene in which Murray has been a shining star for years. A high bar, and one hopefully Murray no longer has to bartend behind. Not that there is anything wrong with that. She’s just been doing it for a long time and the tennis elbow probably should get a chance to cool down between mixing tin shaking and strumming guitars.

You see a few things as a bartender though. While it may not always serve her physical strength, it can serve a writer’s mind. How many of our nation’s greatest writers sat self-loathing, looking over the latest drink to disappear in front of them. It’s not hard to imagine Murray watching intently the nightlife within her neonscape, dwelling on characters as they come and go and blend into each other and into her work. “The After Midnight Special” is a cinematic and empathetic tale told in the first person of a single woman taking on the moniker herself while looking for… something… the song ends, “And if you don’t mind a heart that cannot mend, then tonight I’ll make you mine.”

Like the characters she conjures, Murray’s musical career suffers from a lack of fostering, followed by a lack of confidence, built up over the course of her life. Music was everywhere in their small, one-bath West Atlanta mill house. Paul Simon, The Band, Joni Mitchell loomed large, but neither parent was a musician, and they certainly didn’t see that as much more than a hobby for their youngest daughter. Though her mother remembers her Tina singing everywhere she went as a kid, mom also told her to have a fallback plan. The family wasn’t destitute, but neither were they rich. The working-class family provided opportunities for their kids and wanted them to see those through. Fiddle lessons fizzled thanks to their clinical, classical bent. It was the guitar, around campfires and at church camp singalongs to which she began to gravitate. After high school, without a thought she could make it in music, Murray attended Clemson University in South Carolina, where she hoped to get into nursing school. She didn’t. She studied recreational therapy and collected heaps of student loan debt. Another American dream.

Jon Walder, Music City Studio B, Nashville, April 2023.

On the advice of friends, Murray looked outside the South when it came to landing an internship, a mandatory part of her degree. Following her love of bluegrass music, she looked for locations with both an intern program and an acoustic music scene. In 2007, she landed in Boulder, Colorado. “When I wasn’t working I was pickin,” Murray says of her time in the Rocky Mountains. She got in with the local bluegrass scene but felt that parental pull again to have that fallback, that real job. After her internship finished, she moved to Athens, Georgia, with eyes on a graduate school program for music therapy. She didn’t get in.

She returned to Colorado in 2008, and more than ever before, she started studying music like it was her job. “I went to Telluride and RockyGrass and all that shit,” she says with a big grin. “I learned the Nashville number system, and I learned to sing harmony and how to have a decent right hand on the guitar. I studied and learned a lot of old music which pushed me into Tony Rice and all the Emmylou records, Guy Clark, Townes, Gillian Welch, Gram Parsons—all those amazing artists you think you’re the first to discover. I was out there for six years, touring the front range, beginning to dabble in writing. That time in Colorado was a huge learning period for me. And it’s where country music started really pulling me away from bluegrass.”

On this return sojourn West, Murray got to growing demand around the Rockies, hosting open mics, touring the Front Range and high country, putting together a country band that would help her record her first album in 2012, the independently released Unravelin. While she loved Colorado, she felt the ceiling closing in. Out West you quickly realize just how big it is and how small and isolated even the big cities can feel. “I’m not shitting on Colorado,” Murray says. “But drive six hours and you’re still in Colorado. From Nashville, you’ve run through several cities in that time; you’re just about halfway to Austin or New York. It’s crazy. I saw it happening to a lot of other artists, who were bigger than me. I also wanted to explore more original music, and most of the working bands were cover bands, doing bluegrass or country standards. I was imagining those late seventies-eighties artists like Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle and the Nashville movement they were part of that was so centered on songwriting. I wanted badly to find a space with like-minded folks. Nashville, really, was the only answer.” In 2014, she made the move once and for all back to the South.

Robby Moore, Nashville, December 2024

Welcome to Music City. Album in hand. Young ambitious artist. What to do?

“The thing I’ve come to realize,” Murray says, “is that I spent so long in the early part of my career learning the craft of music and songwriting, which I think was a very good thing to do, but I really had no sense of the business piece. When I moved to Nashville, I could do 3-to-4-hour sets of country covers, because I knew how to do that, but I couldn’t talk to industry people. When I found people all over these Nashville stages who could barely play 45-minutes of their own songs, playing with a music stand on stage, fumbling through songs… I was a little taken aback.

“What’s going on here? What are these half-hour sets? Why do people not know any covers or even their own songs? And then A&R people are coming out to see them? I just didn’t understand the business. I’d never had a manager or a booking agent. I did all that shit by myself. I think I am a good band leader; I pride myself on it, but I didn’t know I had to schmooze and network or how to get certain gigs. I was a kid with a CD then. I didn’t have a website or anything. I had to figure all that out. It quickly came down to, hey, forget the album; start working on the next one.”

Musician and producer Mike Rinne was one of the first in Nashville to approach Murray about recording music together. With his help, her second album, Southern Ambrosia, took shape and released independently in Fall 2018. She considered a crowd-funding campaign but decided against it for the recording process, with her parent’s voices chiming in her memory: “You don’t ask people for money, that’s rude. We don’t do that in this family. You work hard. And hard work pays off.” But she did try a pre-order to expedite CD and vinyl production, working with a company called PledgeMusic to help her pull it off. Shortly after she sold several thousand dollars worth of pre-orders, PledgeMusic went bankrupt and vanished with Murray’s and many other artists’ money. She’s not holding her breath on recouping anything. It still stings.

Murray admits to being impatient. Rinne advised her on shopping the record around to labels, but at the expense of another year until its release. She thought the music and the songs were good enough to get her to the next level. “But it turns out that is not the way the music business works,” she laughs. “Just because it’s good doesn’t mean Spotify is going to editorialize it.” She paid for a PR campaign with a credit card she didn’t have cash to cover. She wanted NPR. She didn’t get it. She paid for a 3-month radio campaign. It’s unclear to her what difference it made. “Basically,” she asserts. “I spent 2019 being very depressed about my record and working to pay all those bills. At the time, I was like, I just poured everything into an album—it’s good writing, good singing, great playing; it’s a collection of songs that are thematic. And nothing happened.” Meanwhile many of her friends started seeing some success, and at least in Murray’s mind, there was usually one shared variable: a record label.

“Yes their music is great,” Murray says with every bit of emphasis she can muster, “But I think mine is too. And also, other people tell me that! So, why isn’t my music getting me going? So, I look back, and it’s Rounder, Oh Boy!, New West, Third Man. I didn’t have a team behind me. I didn’t really have a plan myself. So yeah, I spent 2019 having a big ol’ pity party for myself. I was barely touring because I didn’t have any money to get on the road, much less for merch and all those other costs.”

For all the talk of democratization of art and music through things like streaming platforms, there is still power and value in the label economy. You get the team and all their connections, and production resources, but what may be worth the most, in Murray’s eyes, is that stamp of approval. For fans, maybe, but for radio, for PR, hell yes, for all those mechanisms and levers to pull, which are driven by more than a century of industry dynamics, politics and insider culture. Art knows no perfect path. Murray isn’t out here screaming about how she thinks she should be a star; she’s just trying to figure it out like everyone else. And yeah, she wishes she did a few things differently. Who can relate?

Schuyler Howie, Nashville, November 2023

After pulling together the record independently, Murray landed her latest with New West Records on their Normaltown imprint. For Little Blue, Murray worked alongside two producers, her touring band and session musicians to bring her latest labor of love to life. Longtime friend Misa Arriaga produced 5 songs in Nashville, while Rachel Moore, known for her work with T Bone Burnett among others, after seeing Murray perform one night, enticed the songwriter to lay down a few tracks with the touring band at Muscle Shoal’s East Avalon Recorders. How the album stays sonically in sync across all the changes is credit to the producers and musicians, but also the singular vision and sound that is unmistakable Murray.

She is honest, earnest even, in her search for her answers, her frustrations, and her career. This should be clear to any listener, as Little Blue is in many ways an open book, a fable to unfold. Amid the darkness there is ownership and mirrors, hanging about like pranksters pointing the finger back at the author. Lessons come to light through the characters beguiling Murray’s loose and lilting lyrics that make some of the saddest songs feel so good. “It may be a lonely way but to me it’s the only way. Everyday I fall a little deeper under. Thinkin that I’m playin it cool, but I’m just playin the fool. Don’t it make me the fool.”

It’s one thing to read that, another to hear it soar over simple, stretching steel lines and atmospheric accompaniments. It’s heartbreak turning to bliss. It’s not the sadness but the release.

This comes to life in the dreary details of “Watchin’ The World Pass Me By.” Murray cloaks industry disdain in a swampy romp, tipping hats to happiness while singing of sadder scenes, of other’s successes, all while trying to be tough. But still, before the first verse even ends, she knows what to do, alluding to the fun she’s willing to have with her own demons. “I get so tired of watching ‘em livin my dreams,” Murray sings. “I got to get to gettin’ while the gettin’s good.”

“Just A Little While Longer” sounds like a pining love song to a leaving lover. But could this be a love song to music itself? The song opens, “Well don’t I know, already, the unfortunate truth, that’s just what comes along with lovin a man like you.” For all her honesty, Murray’s writing allows for interpretation, stories listeners can sink teeth into and make their own. Ears may question at times whether this is a country record, but no one will question the sincerity of the artist inside it, so achingly, brilliantly trying to find her way. On the only co-write of the album, her and Logan Ledger sing, “I finally understand, that it’s all in my hands, if I get down to it.” It’s a simple song. Straight to the point. Metaphors no more. Just truth. Now that’s some down South dirty stuff.

>>>>>>>>>>>>

There’s so much to discover in each of these songs, SMP invited Murray to go deep on each song from Little Blue and speak about how the album came together. Hear directly from the artist, in what we’re calling, Song By Song.

Schuyler Howie, Nashville, November 2023