Kristina Murray
Kristina Murray, who’s gearing up to release her third LP Little Blue on Friday, knows how to gracefully move through music-industry bullshit and deal with the disillusionment that can come with making music in Nashville.
“There are definitely quite a few years in the beginning,” Murray tells me, “where you’re like, ‘I don’t know if I’m cut out for this. There’s no way I can have a 401(k).’”
Originally from Georgia, Murray moved to Nashville in 2014 to pursue a career in music.
She fought through that early era of incessant doubt and established herself as a respected player in Nashville’s independent country scene.
“[You] ultimately get to a place where you say, ‘No, this is who I am — I am an artist and I’m going to do this,’ and just press on regardless,” says Murray. “Once you get there, it’s the center you go back to.”
Devotion to her craft has been the center Murray has been going back to over the past seven years since she self-released her 2018 album Southern Ambrosia. The record, her follow-up to 2013’s Unravelin’, was well-received by critics. Still, she bumped against the limitations of the strategies available to an independent artist without a lot of capital. “I never had the money to promote myself,” she says, “or fund endless tours that lost a bunch of money.”
On Little Blue, Murray writes about feeling stuck in your life and career. She spins gold out of fruitless nights in introspective songs like “Has Been.” The track evokes the roomy and lush arrangements of Emmylou Harris’ 1981 record Evangeline. Set on a neon Nashville night, the song teems with longing and expectations never met. Characters hope to transcend their realities of loneliness and stagnation. Yet Murray sings on the hook: “It’ll keep you awake at night / And it’s gonna get worse / Just give it time.”
On the single “Watching the World Pass Me By,” Murray is “hanging out in the shadows” in a honky-tonk, watching others live her dreams of success. On the surface, this swampy Jerry Jeff Walker-inspired tune plays bouncy and fun. Listen one more time and you’ll hear the angst and sorrow. It’s a classic device in country music, a genre Murray describes as a “never-ending treasure chest.”
“Once you start down the rabbit hole,” she says, “it just kind of gives and gives and gives.”
Kristina Murray
Each track on Little Blue is its own microcosm of country references, from Harris and Walker to Harlan Howard and Dean Dillon, whose influences as master storytellers inspire Murray’s down-and-out characters in “Phenix City.”
Conventional wisdom has it that Nashville is a “10-year town,” requiring a decade to achieve a measure of success. I’m happy that Murray has stuck around longer and is looking optimistically toward what’s next. After independently financing the production of Little Blue in 2023, she signed with much-loved purveyors of indie Americana Normaltown/New West for its release, which she’ll celebrate with a performance at East Side honky-tonk Skinny Dennis. She’s grateful for the “momentum” she feels on the label and can’t wait to connect with listeners on tour.
“The music business has broken my heart over and over again, but music has always regrounded me,” says Murray.
Widening her focus beyond the music scene and its politics, Murray cultivates her relationships with nature and her loved ones. She reflects on this in the album’s title track, a lullaby turned psychedelic workout that closes the album. In the first verse, she is on a depression walk; by the third, she is marveling at the little blue dot we live on. When you zoom out, suffering subsides like a wave, and gratitude for being alive is left like cowrie shells and bits of sea glass glimmering on the sand. Murray holds onto the thread that connects her to the larger world. It’s another center she comes back to throughout Little Blue.
“It’s very special that I get to exist in the same 100-year period that George Jones existed. I get to listen to those records. That’s amazing that I get to encounter all this beautiful art and natural beauty around me, my friends and family, in this short life.”
