Photo: Amy Martell
While she’s been touring coast-to-coast with Run Boy Run over the past decade, Rebekah Rolland is still a newfound Tucson treasure to the world at large. Although she hails from the desert, the songs adorning Seed & Silo often evoke images of windswept plains, open skies, and rolling hills. In part, this feels due to the album’s inspirations.
On her forthcoming work, Rolland entwines her inventive mind with respects paid to some of her favorite authors (perhaps, most notably, My Ántonia wordsmith Willa Cather), as well as the National Park Service Centennial. Regarding the latter, Rolland was chosen as an artist-in-residence at Nebraska’s Homestead National Monument of America, wherein she began work on Seed & Silo.
Some may call these influences niche, but Rolland’s spirited heart is unrelenting. The way in which she so passionately delivers these authentic slices of folk storytelling makes for some of the most compelling listening from out of the roots world so far this year.
‘Standing Still’ is a testament to this if there ever were one. The single is a gorgeously written dose of Americana that delicately builds into an impassioned finale. Rolland’s crystalline vocals are matched in their beauty by a swirl of instrumentation that never overwhelms, but instead, serves to accentuate a thoughtfully developed arrangement. If the Americana world still has room for another breakout star in 2018, Rolland may just be it, bringing a heartfelt thoughtfulness to her music that evokes shades of such artists as Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan.
“I wanted to convey the vivid and intimate situations that we all experience,” says Rolland on ‘Standing Still’. “They’re the memories of people, places, and events that – for whatever reason – carry us through the years. It struck me that most of these things seem insignificant, and yet, they’ve affected us in really powerful ways.”
Rolland’s upcoming album, Seed & Silo, is currently set to be released on 20 July via Sky Island. It was produced by Rolland alongside her husband, Matt Rolland, who also offered his skills behind the fiddle, octar, guitar, and mandolin to multiple tracks on the album. It was engineered by Peter Dalton Ronstadt at LandMark Sound Recorders in Tucson. If you like what you hear, it is encouraged that you visit Rolland’s PledgeMusic campaign page. There, you can pre-order a signed copy of Seed & Silo, among a throng of other goodies.
Words by: Jonathan Frahm (@jfrahm_)