Equally inspired by the Americana community of her Nashville home and the boardwalk culture of her native New Jersey, Lucy Isabel introduces herself as a road-ready songwriter with her debut album, Rambling Stranger (out June 14th).
Like the title suggests, Rambling Stranger finds Isabel on the move, taking stock of her world as it unfolds outside of the car windshield at highway speed. She’s been a traveling musician for years, ever since she shelved an acting career in New York City and moved to Tennessee. Living in Nashville motivated her, but it was the road — where she built her audience one show at a time — that sharpened her songwriting. She wrote folk songs, heartland roots-rockers, and acoustic ballads.
She wrote about her husband; about the changing landscape of her hometown back east; about the wanderlust that kept her moving night after night, traveling from the listening rooms of America to the pubs of Australia and back again.
Meanwhile, she also made time to visit the recording studio, releasing her first EP, 2016’s Along the Way, within two years of graduating from Yale. Another EP, KANE, followed in 2017, stocked with stories about her maternal grandmother’s family. With 2019’s Rambling Stranger, though, Lucy Isabel shows the full scope of her songwriting. These 10 songs are filled with images from an adulthood lived on the run: a shuttered army fort along the Jersey Shore; a mountain range outside of Seattle; a road leading to an unknown destination, promising nothing but the unexpected for anyone willing to take it. And Isabel, of course, can’t resist taking those paths.
Today Glide is excited to premiere “False Prophet”, one of the lead singles on the new album. With a mix of soul and folk, Isabel writes with a straightforward honesty and it’s hard not to think of fellow New Jersey truth-teller Bruce Springsteen. With subtle musical textures provided by the slide guitar, organ, and soft harmonies, it’s hard not to get swept up in the emotion of the song. Ultimately the song showcases the growth of an exciting songwriter.
Listen to “False Prophet” and read our interview with Lucy below…
What inspired you to write this song? Was there a specific moment that prompted it?
“False Prophet” is mainly about thinking you know what’s best for someone else and the lessons learned as a result of that. I initially started writing this song for a specific friend, but as time went on and I wrote more and more of the song, various people and relationships came to mind. I started to realize that often in friendships, I got caught up in thinking that I could help someone “fix” some aspect of their life. But sometimes it’s just up to the person to figure it out for themselves. And the same goes for my own experiences. I think we often look outward for the solution to a problem when we should be looking inward. “False Prophet” is my inner monologue as I work through that discovery.
Did the lyrics come first or were you noodling around with the music first?
With almost all of the tracks on Rambling Stranger, I started out with a little bit of music and lyrics at once. For “False Prophet,” the first bit of it that popped into my head was the chorus, “So then you call me what I am, a false prophet of adulthood…” It was pretty much the entire chorus – melody and all – in one fell swoop. From that point I figured out the instrumentation for what I already had and then did some noodling on my guitar for a while to try to figure out the verses. I initially had completely different verses, but they felt so out of place to me. I ended up trashing them and finding my way to something closer to true.
Who are your biggest influences? What do you like about them?
In terms of more current artists, Brandi Carlile really tops the list for me. When I was in college, a close friend introduced me to her music, and I realized that she was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. There’s a real unbridled passion in all of her music. You can tell she and the Hanseroth twins are doing what they’re meant to be doing. I felt the call of that and completely ditched the post-college plans I had to pursue the life that I lead now. I’m so grateful to have discovered her music because it felt like someone was giving me permission to be myself. In the end, I suppose it was me that gave me permission to be happy, but I don’t think I would have gotten there without Brandi’s music, and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to open myself up enough to write most of the music on Rambling Stranger.
You left New Jersey after growing up there and moved to Nashville. How do you feel that move and your new location impacted the music you made on this record? How do you think your home state of New Jersey filtered into the music?
I once had a friend tell me that they got the feeling that New Jersey was more than just the place that I came from: it’s a part of me. It’s hard to describe how a place can be so ingrained in your DNA, but that’s what it comes down to. I spent most of my adolescence kicking and screaming in an attempt to break free from it. But now that it’s been almost a decade since I’ve lived in Jersey full-time, I feel it calling to me daily. Rambling Stranger as a whole really speaks to that. Moving to Nashville allowed me to find my voice as an artist and as an adult, so the album is a testament to finding home in more than one place. It’s Nashville, it’s New Jersey, it’s someone else’s arms. It’s going to your hometown to discover that everything is different and nothing’s changed. It’s simple and it’s complicated. It’s beautiful and messy and confusing. Rambling Stranger is my attempt to put all of the emotions associated with that into words.
Photo credit: Andrea Morgan
