ANGELA AUTUMN - Believer

Angela Autumn has slowly built up a modest reputation within Nashville's sprawling folk scene, where she currently lives, to the point of earning the affectionate nickname "The Appalachian Rose", a moniker that nods both to her family roots in the Allegheny Mountains and to her mastery of the banjo.
Angela is, in short, a folk singer-songwriter who loves to withdraw from the world, and indeed for this second album, "Believer", she says she wanted to "blend different aspects" of herself, adding words that immediately highlight her compositional approach: "A lot of my friends are dancers and strippers. So I like making music that lets them move. With this record I wanted to make something with more grit."

To give shape and substance to this inclination, the musician returned to the places dear to her childhood, ending up spending a great deal of time in the woods of Tennessee, between weekends spent alone in a treehouse in a rural area outside Asheville, and days spent inside a friend's warehouse in Chattanooga, sleeping, as she herself recounts, "on the concrete floor" and "writing music during the day." A wanderer in search of fresh inspiration, then: "I like putting myself in extreme situations in order to write. That's how I wrote songs like 'Jesus Heist' and 'In The South': leaving everything behind and immersing myself in nature. Without the land, I probably wouldn't have any music," the singer-songwriter explains further.
Having written the twelve songs in total harmony with her own world and, above all, her own time, Autumn (nomen omen, no less) then reached out to Isaiah Beard, the multi-instrumentalist known as Baerd, with whom she had already collaborated in the past, also enlisting musicians such as drummer Ross McReynolds. "I'd often double my voice to emphasize certain passages of the lyrics, while Isaiah sometimes layered six different guitar parts onto the same song. It was an experiment carried out in a spirit of fun, without taking ourselves too seriously," she says.

While most of the songs extol in their lyrics the charm of the canyons and valleys of the northern Appalachians (one example above all is the folk ballad "Mountain Stream"), the music doesn't always go along with that pastoral quality, as in the indie-rock trot of "Sage Bundle," almost a wry little tune in the style of Stephen Malkmus, feeding into alternating melodic solutions, while some passages also tackle themes such as the importance of being introspective and quiet, yet always bound to the redemptive power of nature, which is in fact her mantra.

It's within this shifting array of banjo melodies, sudden prayers sung with a doubled voice ("Jesus Heist"), elsewhere often quavering, and romantic acoustic openings worthy of an outgoing folksinger ("Electric Lizard") that Angela Autumn finds her new reason for making music.
And when the circle closes with an ecstatic dirge ("My Alchemy"), the impression is of having come across a fine album, with no apparent dips in quality, put together with a personal lightheartedness that, setting aside any possible derivativeness, manages to convince just enough.

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08/10/2026