Acclaimed Nashville singer/songwriter and "Americana Queen" (Noisey) Mary Bragg will release her new album Violets as Camouflage on March 1st via Tone Tree Music. Self-produced and self-engineered at her home studio, the fourteen-song collection was recently hailed by Billboard as "the most intensely personal Bragg has ever written." Both beautiful and blunt, it's the work of an artist only just beginning to embrace the full range of her talents. Today Bragg released her optimistic new song "The Right Track," which promises that hard work will be rewarded in the long run while encouraging patience when faced with self-doubt.
Listen to "The Right Track" below!
"The small victories are easy to overlook when you feel like nothing's going anywhere, but it's never really as bleak as it can feel," Bragg told Nashville Scene who featured the track. "When you're doing the work and taking chances on things that take a long time to come to fruition (whether in the music business or otherwise), there is such value in that, even if it doesn't feel like it at first. See - I'm a serial optimist."
Her most vulnerable, honest, and powerful album yet, Violets as Camouflage is the follow-up to 2017's critically acclaimed Lucky Strike. Hailed as a "sublime distilling of Southern grit" and one of the year's best by NPR Music, Bragg dipped her toes into a kind of radical honesty that she had only hinted at before, and it connected with audiences in profound and deeply personal ways. A Georgia native who grew up "where it's not super common to come right out and say what you feel or talk openly about your intimate emotional experiences," it was the first time she started to fully understand the importance of directly addressing really personal issues and hardship through song. It emboldened Mary to trust her gut in a whole new way on Violets as Camouflage where she reaches deeper than ever before, bares her soul, and opens herself up to the possibility of complete and total heartbreak in order to forge a strong and lasting connection.
The album's lead track "I Thought You Were Somebody Else" is also out now, a languid, seductive tune that feels both classic and modern at once. It's an ideal entry point for a record all about the stories in our heads, the little voices that delude us into hearing what we want to hear or weigh us down with self-doubt and insecurity. Rolling Stone stated "Like the long-lost ballad Patsy Cline never got to croon, 'I Thought You Were Somebody Else' mixes classic country twang with broken hearted sentiment and light touches of pedal steel." The Boot called it "A sorrowful, sparse song...lyrics floating along with a light drum beat, mournful guitar and Bragg's soaring vocals."
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