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New York-based country-soul singer/songwriter Lara Taubman delivers sobering subjects like mortality, mental health, spirituality, survival and finding hope in an exceedingly turbulent & traumatized world on her sophomore album, Ol’ Kentucky Light, out September 16 on Atomic Sound Record Company. Taubman clearly didn’t just stumble upon her muse. She channels her earliest influences—the classic country of Patsy Cline, the great gospel of Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers and Mahalia Jackson and the contemporary folk largess as filtered through Joni Mitchell. She reveals herself in her music. There’s vulnerability and vitality in equal proportions, resulting in clarity and conviction.

“The risk an artist takes is inherent within the act of surrender,” Taubman says. “Some artists prefer to hide out of fear that they’ll reveal too much about themselves. Music is a salve that allows me to excise my insecurity and discomfort. It heals me, and I hope that I can pass that resolve and reassurance on to my listeners, and that they’ll benefit from knowing they’re not alone.”

As a follow-up to her aptly-titled debut LP, Revelation, Taubman brings this idea of surrender and healing to full fruition in several of her songs on Ol’ Kentucky Light. “Silver Lining” feels like a gentle caress accompanied by an easy saunter and sway, “Darkness Before the Dawn” continues that ethereal glow, while being about going through hell before you get to heaven. “Lamb to the Slaughter” was inspired by a long life of anxiety and the consequences of addiction. “Mercy” veers from old school soul into “The Water” that reflects her new confidence and commitment. 

“The emotions that started me writing this album was a Matterhorn of addiction and anxiety,” says Taubman. “I was either going to die or surrender. ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ was the embodiment of  that moment. ‘The Water’ is about finding closure in difficult relationships. It expresses everything I needed to say when I wrote it a few years back. It was cathartic to write and even more so to sing it now.” 

The scars and dour impositions that Taubman faced are certainly her crosses to bear. “Come to Me” is about staying in flow with nature to use forces greater than our everyday selves, and on “The Other Side of the River” she sings about the beauty of being able to live to tell her tale.

“I have spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time thinking about my death,” says Taubman, “but now in positive ways. I wrote this song as I was coming out of a struggle with suicide, battling with it for most of my life. The scary thing is once it gets in you it stays like a virus. I’ve lived with it for a long time. Music rescued me from a lot of the bad thinking patterns and hopelessness. It has helped me find my personal power. It makes me feel useful in the world and to have control of my life for the first time. As the suicidal piece began to wane, I began to have the ability to choose my angels and my demons. Those are big choices to possess.”

Ol’ Kentucky Light was produced by her seminal collaborators Steven Williams (drums) and Paul Frazier (bass), arranged by Etienne Lytle (cowriter, keyboards), Walter Parks (guitars, lap steel, shared vocals on “The Water”) and Steve Williams, with vocal production by Yvette Rovira, Paul Frazier and Steve Williams. The album was recorded at Atomic Sound in Brooklyn, engineered by Merle Chornuk, edited by Paul Frazier, and mixed and mastered by Eber Pinheiro.

Raised in the Jewish faith, Taubman considers herself non-observant. Her forebears were tested in many ways, beginning with her grandfather who went off to fight in World War I at the age of 16. He eventually found success in the automotive business during the Great Depression. Her mother, born in Bulgaria, survived the Nazis only to have to flee the Soviets after World War II, and relocated as a refugee to Israel like many European Jews of that time. She moved to Virginia after she met and married Taubman’s father.

“My home growing up was filled with opera and classical music and the classic rock of the 1960’s and ’70s,” recalls Taubman, “but Southern folk and country music made a real impression on me too. My parents dragged me and my brother to temple every Friday night and I absolutely hated it, except for the music. Those ancient sounds really stuck with me, but I didn’t realize it until the last ten years when I began making music.”

Taubman’s journey has taken her from Virginia, to the Appalachians, to Baltimore and eventually Vermont. After college she moved to New York and then to Arizona, California and Montana before eventually moving back to her beloved New York City. On her life’s journey to making music, she’s had a long career in the visual arts as a painter and then as an art critic and independent curator. Her work as a critic took her all over the world, writing about contemporary art for Artforum, Art News, Flash Art and Sculpture magazines to name just a few. She published essays for gallery and museum exhibits. She curated exhibits at The Heard Museum of Native American Art, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Art in Embassies, curating historical exhibits from the Abstract Expressionist movement as well as curating and exhibiting the work of contemporary artists.

This transition from art critic to musician was not easy. Taubman faced her share of inner demons and destructive forces, making the challenge to strike an equilibrium that much greater. Fortunately, she found solace and security through song, helping to heal the pain that tormented her for so long. With the illumination of Ol’ Kentucky Light, it appears she’s accomplished that and perhaps much more. Taubman is currently working on updated versions of songs from her last album, Revelation, and plans on touring as much as possible now that her career is in full throttle.

“My job,” says Taubman, “my service in life, is to call down and identify what it is I need to make and put it into the world. I’ve discovered my destiny. While I continue healing, hopefully my journey can provide inspiration to others.”

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George Jones & Tammy Wynette. Loretta & Conway. Gram & Emmylou. Johnny & June. The power of classic country duets resides deep in the bloodstream of Nashville new-arrivals Megan and Shane Baskerville as they prepare to release their latest singles “Oh Hell” & “Put Me Down” (out 7/14). These songs are a couple of light-hearted romps set to follow up their more serious and critically adored LP Daughter of Country, which garnered them a nomination for best folk band at No Depression.

These singles represent a transitional period in Megan & Shane’s career as covid put a wrench in the married couple’s plans to open a fourth School of Rock location near their southwest Arizona home. Everything moved online and they found that they were able to spend more time together.

“We’ve been married for nine years, together for 12,” says Megan, “and we realized that we hardly saw each other while working at the music school. We never had days off together. All of a sudden we had all this time. We’d have drinks in the backyard every afternoon. One day I just looked at Shane and said ‘I love this human.’ How much time have we been wasting?”

The two took a trip to Nashville and fell in love with the city and its people, especially Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, a dive bar whose live stream performances they’d been watching throughout the quarantine, including a particularly memorable set by Margo Price.

“We were at Dee’s,” says Shane, “and a lightswitch just went off. I don’t fit in Arizona. I fit with these people. This is where we belong. When we got back, we put all our stuff into storage, moved out of our nice, bougie space and into a slum to save up to move to Nashville.”

The duo sold almost everything they owned, put what was left into a minivan, and hit the road towards Music City, USA. The trek across the country was a cathartic experience. They rode Arizona switchbacks at sundown. Wild horses watched them from the top of mesas, giving them permission to leave. They ate Texas BBQ. A cross the size of a skyscraper lit their way through a storm. They stopped in Memphis to revisit the Stax Museum of American Soul Music where they were married. They were practically chased out of what they call the “Murder Days Inn.” They eventually made it to their new Nashville home that they rented site-unseen, a charming 1920s house in the Old Hickory neighborhood that Megan describes as a “serial killer house with a creepy basement.”

Megan & Shane settled in and wasted no time getting back to work. They tapped Chris Mara (Jason Isbell, Old Crow Medicine Show, Molly Tuttle, Margo Price) of Welcome to 1979 studio in Nashville to produce and engineer their next set of singles. Mara is an analog phenom, and teaches classes on how to use his classic tape machines. Megan & Shane went into the studio and recorded live, straight to tape, with no overdubs with Third Man Records artist Lillie Mae (fiddle), Craig Smith (electric guitar), Brett Johnson (bass) who was a touring member of hip hop act Atmosphere, and Nick Larsen (drums).

“Oh Hell” is working class, three-chord, classic country magic. It has that fun and catchy quality of feeling like you’ve lived with this song your whole life, even on the first listen. It’s a collectivist take on when times get tough financially. “Working hard trying to pay the rent /  Don’t make enough for the money we spend / Never ahead, always behind / Just want a piece of the pie that’s mine.” They originally wrote this song shortly after they started dating in Minnesota, but the hard times that covid brought made the song feel relevant again.

“We wrote this while I was going through my divorse,” says Shane, “and now after the move and getting reestablished… even with this next album, it’s like how are we going to pay for this? I was thinking about John Mellencamp’s ‘Pink Houses’ a lot while we were getting this song together.”

“We both grew up in working class homes,” says Megan. “Sometimes it was hard to provide. We bonded over having a strong work ethic and the belief that you can make anything happen. We still believe in the American dream. We’re dreamers.”

“Put Me Down” imagines Megan & Shane back in an older generation, where minor bickering was thought of as a love language in the same vein as Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty’s “You’re the Reason our Kids are Ugly.” It’s an adorable country ballad that’s equal parts twang and sass that demands that you get on the dance floor and start two-stepping, especially when the dueling solos of hard-pickin’ guitar and fiddle kick in.

“This song always reminds me of my grandma,” says Megan. “She was always so cute. She’d make ice cream for my grandpa and tease him by asking ‘do you want nuts on it Gabe?’ He didn’t like nuts. We’d go visit her with Shane’s guitar and we’d play and sing for her. She said ‘you’re getting married,’ and here we are.”

Megan & Shane have already begun recording their next full LP with Grammy-winning engineer Brandon Bell (Brandi Carlile, The Highwomen, Alison Krauss) and a whole new cast of all-star players.

“It was nice to make some lighthearted music with ‘Oh Hell’ and ‘Put Me Down,’” says Megan, “as Daughter of Country was a sad album that we bared our souls on, and this next record is also very introspective. We’re back dealing with our mommy/daddy issues.”

“We have lots of shows booked, and even more on the horizon,” says Shane. “Nashville has been very welcoming to us. We’re excited to build a real home here.”

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