New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Nashville-based Americana singer-songwriter Ro Myra is set to release her extraordinary debut album, Nowhere, Nebraska, on August 6, 2021. Recorded in Denver, Austin, and Nashville, the album was produced by Myra, who fleshed out her vision of a record as raw and windswept as the fields of Nebraska, with a diverse cast of players including multi-instrumentalist Joshua Grange (Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow), Elephant Revival drummer Darren Garvey, bassist
Vanessa McGowan (Brandy Clark), and fellow singer-songwriter Phoebe Hunt, among others.
"I grew up in a small, dried-up oil and farming town in the middle of nowhere Nebraska," says Myra. "I spent most of my life running away from it, and now I'm right back where I started. I wanted people to be able to listen to this record and feel what it's like to stand in the middle of nowhere in Nebraska on a hot summer day, to feel the heat just radiating off of the wheat fields. I wanted it to sound like what growing up there felt like."
While the arrangements here are broad and sweeping, Myra's storytelling is sharply focused and firmly rooted, offering up rich, detailed character studies with keen insight and deep empathy. She writes with a novelist's eye, and she sings with a weathered grace that makes the hard truths go down easy. The result is a warm embrace of an album all about memory and forgiveness, growth and pain, freedom and fate, a collection that calls to mind everything from
Lucinda Williams to
Bruce Springsteen to Lori McKenna to
Brandi Carlile to
Sheryl Crow as it makes peace with the past in order to more fully inhabit the present.
Myra released "She's Not the Road" and "Half the Time" as early singles to tease the album. The third single from Nowhere, Nebraska was "Irene," which was released on June 4th, and it's about the power of self-love, and being the answer to ending cycles of abuse. The track and video premiered on June 3rd at Wide Open Country, who wrote: "Ro Myra draws on her upbringing in the windswept grasslands of Nebraska for her debut album, Nowhere Nebraska, an exploration of pain, uncertainty and finding peace in small town life." The video for "Irene" won the IMDb qualifier Independent Shorts Award in the spring of 2021 and also just won the award for Best
Music Video at the Venice Shorts Film Festival. The fourth single from the album, the languid "Railroad Weed," was released on July 9th and premiered at The Boot; the track's protagonist dulls their pain and uncertainty via escapism in a cloud of smoke. "Railroad Weed" is also a nod to Myra's late father, with whom she shares a passion for conservation; the pair planted trees together, and her father, who was well ahead of the curve, chose to do organic farming before it was popular to do so.
While Myra's past is firmly entrenched in the rural southwest corner of Nebraska where she grew up, she now hangs her hat in Nashville. Over the years, Myra's work in education reform and academia has required some moving around and has given her the opportunity to live in Austin, Denver, Lincoln (NE), Bozeman and Missoula (MT), and Traverse City (MI), offering her the ability to experience much beyond her small-town upbringing and expand her horizons. Back in the Nebraska days, music was her first and most precious escape. Growing up, Myra lacked formal training, so she invented her own notation system and taught herself piano, picking out songs by ear. In high school, she began studying classical piano then headed off to college to further her classical education.
Frustrated with studying and playing music written by "long-dead white men" and the inability to improvise or be creative in her studies, Myra shifted her focus from the arts to academics, eventually earning a master's degree in Intercultural Youth and Family Development. She helped launch an education and healthcare non-profit in Buenos Aires, worked with an international aid group distributing wheelchairs and mobility devices around the world, and taught underprivileged students in impoverished communities through the non-profit Teach For America.
While still in graduate school in Montana, she met renowned contemporary composer Dr. Eric Funk, who became her mentor. "I was having a hard time coming to grips with the idea that I could have a meaningful impact on people through my songs," Myra explains, "but Dr. Funk really opened my eyes. He said to me, 'You can keep on running away from music if you want to, but you are music, and you can't run from yourself.' That helped me realize that what the world needs more than anything is people who are fully alive, and I'm never more fully alive than I am when I'm writing music." After running from it for years, Myra found her way back to music after she was inspired by Dr. Funk's words. In pursuing music once again, she found her true place, winning honorable mention in the Woody Guthrie Songwriting Awards in both 2018 and 2019 and found a way to share her music and her voice with Nowhere, Nebraska.
Nowhere, Nebraska is a complex reckoning with the past, a nuanced, literate reexamination of small-town life in the shadow of heartbreak, self-destruction, and second chances.
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