But the funny thing is, Riddy Arman ends up the inverse of the pretenders. A cowboy proving there is more to country music. The seclusion and landscape might have triggered the turn to folk, but the work itself is almost incidental. For songwriting and performing exist beyond the archetypes and myths of America, serve purposes more fundamentally personal. “Singing is my meditation, and I learned that in the imagery of Virginia,” Arman explains. “It sets the stage for healing.”

Take ‘Spirits, Angels, or Lies’, the first taste of her forthcoming self-titled debut on La Honda Records and Thirty Tigers. The song tells the story of her father’s final days, when Johnny Cash visited aboard a freight train to convince him to join his journey. Mr Arman politely declined and told his wife of the strange incident. “Mom turned on the TV and to her surprise,” Arman sings, “breaking news this morning, Johnny Cash has died / he passed away in Nashville, sometime in the night.”

Something in the song’s details puncture the romantic individualism of the cowboy image, not only dragging it into a world of modern medicine and celebrity visitations, but a sense of lineage and family too.

The nurses told my mom
don’t be surprised
funny things happen before someone dies
You can call it spirits, angels or lies
but we’ll never know what someone
sees with their own eyes

As the album draws nearer to its release on the 10th September, Riddy Arman has unveiled the first official single, ‘Too Late to Write a Love Song’. Though rooted in the heartsick country tradition, the track rejects the gratifying wallow of lost love, instead choosing to use the circumstances to fire a newfound sense of purpose. “I’m not one to dwell on what didn’t happen,” Arman says. “Been there and done that. Recording this song I knew I wasn’t alone or sad, and that’s where the choir comes in with triumph. Heartbreak can be freeing. It’s an energy, a powerup.”

Riddy Arman is out on the 10th September via La Honda Records/Thirty Tigers and you can pre-order it now.

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Emerson found himself in a difficult period during last year’s lockdown, frustrated at not being able to play to live audiences. Instead, he retreated to his shed and began to write new material. The result is a brand new self-titled record, produced by Rodney Crowell, an album that promises to continue the same thread of unpretentious country but with an increasingly personal edge. “The floodgates opened up for me in my songwriting and emotionally,” he says of the writing process, which led him to confront some intensely intimate subjects.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on single ‘Learnin to Drown’, which sees Emerson grapple with the death of his father. “I’ve been trying to write a song about my father’s passing for a while,” Emerson explains. “I was just having a hard time processing that emotionally. Before I was always trying to find a way to kind of dance around it and not really give too much away. But there’s no beating around the bush here.”

The ambience is worn and weary, as Emerson confronts personal pain and hardship with an air of resigned grace. But there’s also a glimmer of wistful beauty that plays across the everyday scenes like the silvery light of the moon, elevating these musings on misery into something almost beautiful.

I been sleepin’ in my car
been movin’ fast
but it seems I ain’t gone far
and I can’t believe
what I am
and what I used to be

Vincent Neil Emerson will be released on the 25th June via La Honda Records and Thirty Tigers, and you can pre-order it now.

Photo by Melissa Payne

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