SIERRA FERRELL - LONG TIME GOING TOUR W. JAIME WYATT

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 2023

DOORS: 8:00 PM | SHOW: 9:00 PM

AGE RESTRICTIONS: 21+

GENERAL ADMISSION

Important Notice: All tickets are nonrefundable and nontransferable with the exception of event cancellation. Support acts are subject to change.

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About Sierra Ferrell:

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With her spellbinding voice and time-bending sensibilities, Sierra Ferrell makes music that's as fantastically vagabond as the artist herself. Growing up in small-town West Virginia, the singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist left home in her early 20s to journey across the country with a troupe of nomadic musicians, playing everywhere from truck stops to alleyways to freight-train boxcars speeding down the railroad tracks. After years of living in her van and busking on the streets of New Orleans and Seattle, she moved to Nashville and soon landed a deal with Rounder Records on the strength of her magnetic live show. Now, on her highly anticipated label debut Long Time Coming, Ferrell shares a dozen songs beautifully unbound by genre or era, instantly transporting her audience to an infinitely more enchanted world.

Co-produced by Stu Hibberd and 10-time Grammy Award-winner Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch), Long Time Coming embodies a delicate eclecticism fitting for a musician who utterly defies categorization. "I want my music to be like my mind is -- all over the place," says Ferrell, who recorded the album at Southern Ground and Minutia studios in Nashville. "I listen to everything from bluegrass to techno to goth metal, and it all inspires me in different ways that I try to incorporate into my songs and make people really feel something." In sculpting the album's chameleonic sound, Ferrell joined forces with a knockout lineup of guest musicians (including Jerry Douglas, Tim O'Brien, Chris Scruggs, Sarah Jarosz, Billy Strings, and Dennis Crouch), adding entirely new texture to each of her gracefully crafted and undeniably heartfelt songs.

A consummate musician's musician, Ferrell found an easy camaraderie with the many luminaries who accompanied her on Long Time Coming. To that end, her most cherished moments in the album's production include the recording of the soul-stirring choir-like harmonies of "West Virginia Waltz," as well as Rory Hoffman's impromptu whistling on "Bells of Every Chapel." ("Rory's got one heck of a whistle on him," she marvels). At the same time, the making of Long Time Coming fully affirmed her affinity for lifers like Strings. "Billy's in it for the music, which is something we have in common," she says. "We're just gonna keep playing till we're not on this Earth anymore."

While the wayward sound of Long Time Coming is in many ways a perfect echo of Ferrell's free-spirited nature, there's also a much deeper intention at play: a desire to expand her listeners' capacity for wonder, so that they might uncover some enchantment in their own lives. "A lot of us are taught to wake up, go to work, make money, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat," says Ferrell. "It's so easy to get caught up in that nine-to-five routine, and end up numb and dulled down to everything. I want my music to help people break away from that -- to get lost in their imagination, and start seeing how magical the world can be if you just pay attention."

About Jaime Wyatt:

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If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Neon Cross , the newest release from singer,

songwriter and guitarist Jaime Wyatt, it’s that life, in all its inherent messiness, goes on.

And through it all—good times and bad, triumph and trouble, dreaming and

desperation—Wyatt continues, to borrow the title of one of her new songs, just L I V I N.

To be sure, there’s a whole lot of livin’ in the 11 tracks on Neon Cross , from the

whisky-soaked honky tonks outlined in the heated and hungry title track, where Wyatt,

with “pitiful perfume, dark glasses, gold liquor and alligator shoes,” plies her trade from

the stage, to the mountains of pain, regret and loss baked into the slow-burning soul

groove of “By Your Side,” which the artist says she wrote “after my dad died and my best

friend overdosed, and I wasn’t able to show up for either of them because I was loaded,”

to the stark solitude of “Sweet Mess,” where Wyatt, in the throes of a crumbling

relationship, opines that “just like all the rest, I’ll be forgotten.”

“I tried not to have any filter with these songs,” Wyatt says about her open-book

approach to writing. “Because I'll be honest—it feels like I'm gonna die if I don't tell

people how I feel and who I am.” She pauses and lets out a slight laugh. “It sounds so

dramatic, but that's the truth.”

If Wyatt sounds defiant, well, there’s a reason for that. Her life story is specked with

difficult—and unusual—twists and turns. She’s an immensely talented and insightful

singer-songwriter who signed to her first record label as a teenager, achieving early

success before losing that deal and being put through the music-industry wringer; a

country music devotee who ever since has been honing her craft in bars and clubs, late

night after late night and long year after long year; and a hard-luck, hard-living artist

whose outlaw tales are more than mere lyrical fodder for a woe-is-me honky-tonk

tune—before she was even 21, Wyatt battled a nasty drug addiction and served close to a

year in L.A. county jail for robbing her heroin dealer, experiences that were chronicled

on her much-lauded 2017 effort, Felony Blues .

“It's been just this gnarly, gnarly process, but one that is so human,” Wyatt says. “So

there’s been a lot of turmoil and drama. But this record is a lot about rebirth, too.”

When it came to capturing that rebirth, Wyatt had some assistance from key

collaborators—in particular, Shooter Jennings, who produced Neon Cross . The two have

history together—Jennings has taken Wyatt on tour, and she used some of his backing

band on Felony Blues . But none of that mattered to Wyatt when it came to putting her

songs in Jennings’ capable hands.

“Shooter’s my friend and, yeah, he's Shooter Jennings,” she acknowledges. “But when it

comes to the studio I don't care who you are—I'm really, really decisive about what I

want, so I’ve got to be able to work with you. And what really sold me on Shooter is that

he understands grooves—he gets how to instruct a band to build a groove that is so

powerful underneath a song. And it’s crazy because that's what Waylon [Jennings,

Shooter’s father] did. He always had these rad country songs with these super-weird,

like, funky rock ‘n’ roll grooves under them. He would take things to interesting and

unexpected places. Shooter has that same instinct.”

As does Wyatt. Together, she and Jennings boldly color outside the country lines on

Neon Cross , taking a wide-lens sonic and stylistic approach to the songs. Sure, there’s

plenty of swaggering, tough-as-nails rock (“Goodbye Queen,” the aforementioned “ Make

Something Outta Me”) and classic-minded honky tonk (“L I V I N,” the

pedal-steel-doused Wyatt/Jennings duet “Hurts So Bad”) to be found on the album, but

the 11 tracks are also studded with all manner of sonic ear candy, from moaning, misty

guitars (“Mercy”) and stately pianos (“Sweet Mess”), to spacey effects (“Make Something

Outta Me”) sawing fiddles (“Demon Tied to a Chair in My Brain”) and even a Buddy

Holly-style rhythm pulse on the title track.

“I have a pretty strong vision,” Wyatt says, “but Shooter would suggest some crazy rock

reference on a song that I thought was clear-cut Buck Owens and somehow it would just

be right. It was this real organic process of working together.”

At the end of the day, that sonic backdrop (and it’s worth noting here that much of the

excellent six-string work on Neon Cross comes courtesy of the late, great Neal Casal, in

one of his final studio performances before his passing in August) is all in service to

Wyatt’s incisive lyrics and expressive vocals, which can be achingly sensitive and sincere

one minute, and unflinchingly cocksure and dispassionate the next.

Either way, they’re never anything but wholly captivating, and maybe nowhere more so

than on another duet on the record, “Just a Woman,” which sees Wyatt paired up with

an outlaw forebear, Jessi Colter, for a trad-country feminist anthem on which she

declares “There’s not a man in this world I would rather be.”

As for the origins of that one, Wyatt explains, “I was just living my life and having a hard

time with the fact that I can't really fully ‘bro down’ with a guy who does what I do,

because, you know, his wife is gonna look at me and think it's inappropriate.

“Also,” she continues, “I'm leading a band full of young men, and I’ve been doing it for

20 years now, and I have to find a particular type of young man that's going to listen to

me and trust me and want to work for a woman. And that's fine. It’s a deeply ingrained

thing and it's kind of odd that I do what I do. So I wanted to write a song that addressed

all that without being too...”—Wyatt pauses, searching for the right word—“lame.” And,

she says, “Who better to do it with than the queen of outlaw country?” Who better,

indeed?

And yet, as might be expected from someone with such a turbulent backstory, even the

challenges faced by Wyatt as a woman working in country music come with an extra

wrinkle: Following her most recent bid at getting clean (which, as of this moment, has

been successful), Wyatt confronted some hard truths about her life and past romantic

relationships, which resulted in her coming out as a gay woman to family and friends.

For Wyatt, a self-described introvert, this is very much a personal issue. “I'm not, like,

on the internet with flying rainbows,” she quips. But at the same time, she says, “I’m

also basically coming out to the world with this record.” This is particularly evident on

“Rattlesnake Girl,” where Wyatt sings, “I see my sweet friends out on the weekends, they

all look happy and gay / They keep their secrets all covered in sequins, people have too

much to say.” And for anyone who might have a problem with that? Well, there’s also a

line in the song about what Wyatt might do with her boot heel…

Addressing the lyrics of the song, Wyatt says, “My experience with recovery made me

realize I lost years of my life being in the closet and living a lie and trying to be someone

else. I just can't do it anymore. And yeah, I'm scared there are people that like country

music that aren't gonna like that I'm gay. But like I said earlier, ultimately I'm going to

die if I can’t be who I am.”

And besides, Wyatt, who was born in Los Angeles, grew up “in the middle of the woods”

in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Nashville, has never been overly

concerned with fitting in anyway. “I mean, honestly, I don't feel like I fit in anywhere ,”

she says. “But that’s fine—I wouldn't want to get too comfortable. Because as an artist,

being unique is my greatest asset. So if I were to fall into a scene, I probably wouldn’t

push myself to really make something that is captivating.”

With Neon Cross , Wyatt has indeed made something captivating—and also incredibly

unique. Which isn’t as easy as it might seem. “It’s like John Lennon said—there’s

nothing you can sing that can't be sung,” Wyatt surmises. “But hopefully you can at least

put a new spin on it.”

At the end of the day, she continues, “that’s all I’m trying to do. I’m just a songwriter,

and I spend a good portion of my life in barrooms performing and worshipping country

music and rock ‘n’ roll and telling my story. And I do it because I believe in the power of

music, and I believe that music has saved my life in so many ways,” Wyatt says. “And

that belief is a powerful thing.”

SIERRA FERRELL WITH SPECIAL GUEST JAIME WYATT

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 2023

21+

THE VOGUE THEATRE

INDIANAPOLIS, IN

TICKETS AT THEVOGUE.COM

PLEASE NOTE:

THIS SHOW IS GENERAL ADMISSION AND SEATING IS NOT PROVIDED. YOU MUST BE 21+ TO ENTER THE VENUE WITH A VALID FORM OF IDENTIFICATION. ALL TICKETS ARE NON-TRANSFERABLE AND NON-REFUNDABLE. TWO FORMS OF IDENTIFICATION MAY BE REQUIRED FOR ENTRY.