On her third record, and first for the Normaltown Records label, Kristina Murray is steeped in classic country and honky tonk. Leaning into heartache and loneliness, the Nashville-based songstress often falls in the same vein as Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and George Jones.
Across nine tracks on Little Blue, the Georgia native uses small-town characters as stand-ins for her own feelings of loss and loneliness. “I’ve been to some pretty low places these last ten years,” Murray says. “I faced a lot of heartbreak and loss and grief, but you have to learn to live with those things if you’re going to survive. You have to persevere.”
You can hear that loneliness in a measured song like “Fool’s Gold,” with a sad slide guitar accentuating her lyrics, and in the barroom waltz “The After Midnight Special.” You can even hear traces of it on “Get Down To It,” a more upbeat track, dueting with Logan Ledger, but a song with similar sentiments. “Just A Little While Longer” is another weeper that you’d swear was an old Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn cover.
But it’s not all melancholy and gloom. The defiant “Watchin’ The World Pass Me By” is a remarkably great song about just getting through – the most impressive song in this collection. The record closes on the title track, an uncluttered, bittersweet song that is twice as somber thanks to Murray’s heartbreaking delivery. The song perfectly showcases her impressive range.
She pulled in two separate producers for this album – Misa Arriaga (who has worked with Kacey Musgraves and Wyatt Flores, among others) and Rachael Moore (T Bone Burnett’s go-to engineer). Murray worked with both separately at two different studios, a process that results in being able to capture two different aspects of her music: one side more concentrated and focused and the other tending to be looser and more wide-ranging. Little Blue is the perfect soundtrack to your next heartbreak.
