Jobi Riccio
Jobi Riccio thinks of herself as an outsider — not quite fitting into the bubbles around country music or indie rock, but certainly borrowing liberally from both in her highly personal songwriting. Whiplash, out Friday via Yep Roc, is Riccio’s debut album, but she’s already garnered impressive accolades.
This summer, she played at the Newport Folk Fest for the first time, where she was the inaugural recipient of the John Prine Fellowship. In a few weeks, she’ll also play her first two sets at AmericanaFest: first, during the LGBTQ songsmiths’ showcase Americana Proud: A Voice for All at City Winery on Sept. 19, and again at Exit/In on Sept. 21.
“I grew up doing a lot of hiking and spending time outdoors in nature,” Riccio tells the Scene. She grew up in Morrison, Colo., the town about half an hour outside Denver that’s home to Red Rocks. “I always dreamed of moving to the East Coast and moving to a city. I ended up going to college in Boston, but once I was there I was super homesick for the West and for wide-open spaces.”
Riccio, a Berklee grad, earned her stripes in Boston’s folk music scene before returning home to Colorado for a stint, then moving to Nashville. This prompted Whiplash’s meditations on young adulthood and exploring one’s identity.
“For Me It’s You” is the first single released after she signed with Yep Roc last year and a standout on Whiplash. It’s a nuanced love song about losing a partner to someone else. Riccio’s narrator is fully aware of the situation by the time they’re singing the song, but it came through a process of slow realization, which they mirror for the listener as the refrain comes back around: First it’s “Everyone has a person they sing their love songs to,” then “Everyone has a dream they know probably won’t come true,” and finally “Everyone has a person who’ll never feel the way they do.”
Genre orthodoxy frustrates Riccio: “To be a creative, perceptive person, you’re always going to feel a little unsatisfied.” She combines her early love of commercial country music with her parents’ collection of singer-songwriters’ records, with touchstones like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Bruce Springsteen and Emmylou Harris. Riccio came to bluegrass as a teenager, reveling in the dynamic performances at festivals around Morrison.
While Music City’s primary export is commercial country music, Riccio was drawn to Nashville by the breadth and depth of the songwriting scene. She continues to be energized by the panoply of genres she and her neighbors dabble in after hours.
“My peers and I fall all across the spectrum of folk and rock music,” says Riccio. “I have friends who play alt-country, friends who play punk music, friends who play indie folk — we’re all sort of drawing from a similar source, and we all have a deep love for all kinds of music. Nashville’s music scene is the thing that really keeps me here.”
Even with all the momentum behind her, Riccio knows that professional life for a musician can be an uphill battle. But she’s determined to press on.
“I feel like I always knew that I would do this no matter what,” she says. “That I would go for this, that I would chase this. I’ve definitely had moments of doubt, and it still feels really unrealistic and really hard. And I still wanna do it.”
Whiplash has built plenty of buzz over the summer, and while Riccio is excited for it to be out in the world, she’s already at work on a new album. She’s going into that project with a new sense of trust in herself, built in part by working with her Whiplash co-producers Gar Ragland, Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard.
“Because of lockdown, we were able to really take our time on [Whiplash]. My producers really trusted me and let me lead in a way that I wasn’t really expecting — I wasn’t expecting myself to have such a strong opinion and vision about certain things on the production side. I always will be experimenting and trying to write and create what’s gonna make me the most excited.”
