Kassi Valazza had spent a decade living in the Pacific Northwest, having relocated from Arizona. It was in Portland where she started to build up her following, honing her mix of folk and Americana and eventually signing to the local label, Fluff & Gravy Records. But after two albums and countless tours, she decided to decamp once again, settling in New Orleans and getting to work on what would become From Newman Street, her third LP.
The album is both stark in its arrangements and in Valazza’s soul-bearing confessionals. Being vulnerable in new surroundings offered plenty of fodder for the record. “I discovered the less likeable parts of myself in that time,” Valazza says. You can hear that self-discovery in a song like “Your Heart’s A Tin Box” and you can hear her wrestling with the decision to stay put or move on in songs like the bittersweet “Roll On,” or “Shadow of Lately,” with its delicate guitar picking adding a bit to the weariness. Throughout the 10 tracks here, she contemplates moving on both geographically and emotionally from relationships.
Vocally, the comparisons to Joni Mitchell are impossible to ignore, with her airy, breathy vibrato adding a layer of both contemplation and loneliness to just about every song here. But rather than come off as just another Mitchell acolyte for the modern folk era, Valazza has just as much in common with Ray Price and Kitty Wells, thanks to the fiddles and pedal steel that populate these songs. “Weight of the Wheel,” is a perfect example of this – it also happens to be the strongest song on the album. Lyrically, it’s a great Hank Williams-adjacent tear in my beer ballad delivered over sliding guitar.
The record closes on the title track, a stripped-down sentimental song about thinking of what an old love is doing while you stoically keep moving on – in this case doing dishes. Despite closing the album, it serves as a thesis of the entire collection, loving but moving on.
