Mary Bragg Releases Self-Titled New Album

Acclaimed singer/songwriter Mary Bragg released today her anticipated new album through Tone Tree Music. Written over the past three years during a tumultuous personal life journey, the self-titled effort is a lush and achingly gorgeous collection of raw, honest, and unguarded new songs.

"If love begets love, and kindness begets kindness, what other option is there?" stated Bragg. "Even through my own growing pains of staking new ground, and living with the unfortunately still quite present consequences of coming out, I have to challenge myself to lead with an open, almost preemptive sense of love and forgiveness instead of giving into the anger I'm often wont to give into, both towards myself and other people. Making this record has been an exercise in that attempt."

Bragg is no stranger to baring her soul through song. Known for her fervent and vulnerable songwriting, her poignant new album is no different. She transforms her hushed, spare meditations on intimacy and identity into mesmerizing, cinematic sonic worlds. Where in the past, her songs have often focused on empathetic character portraits and external narratives, this time around the music is deeply autobiographical, with open, deliberate arrangements that reflect the unflinching honesty of her lyrics.

An exercise in catharsis, the songs are a hard look in the mirror, a long overdue reckoning with the fact that learning to love and to be loved starts with loving yourself. The album ultimately finds consolation in the bigger picture, in the knowledge that everything-sadness, joy, love, life itself-is transient and fleeting and all the more beautiful because of its impermanence.

Among the many changes, last year Bragg decided to relocate to New York City in order to advance her career in music production. With experience producing her own albums as well as others, including Grace Pettis, Jackson Emmer, and Natalie Price, at various studios in Nashville, she decided to make it official after becoming inspired by a shocking statistic.

"When the pandemic hit, I finally had the time to evaluate what I really wanted, both personally and professionally," she stated. "I'd been producing a lot on my own, but I still didn't consider myself a real producer. When I learned that only 3% of producers on the Billboard charts right now are women, I decided to strip myself of that self-consciousness and go all in."

Praised by World Café for her "refined, sumptuously melancholy take on Southern storytelling," Bragg has been exploring love and its complications for much of her career, wrestling with longing, desire, heartbreak, and insecurity across a string of widely lauded albums. NPR dubbed her breakout 2017 release, Lucky Strike, one of the year's best, while her 2019 follow-up, Violets as Camouflage, earned similar raves, with the Nashville Scene calling it "magnificent" and Rolling Stone hailing its mix of "classic country twang" and "gentle chamber-pop."

Listen to the new album here: