WNXP selects a different project each week for our Record of the Week series, and it’s especially meaningful when we can spotlight music made right here in Nashville. This week, instead of looking at a new album, we’re rounding up five of our fave past features that we think you wouldn’t find anywhere else, either because we were among the first outlets to cover these artists or because we took unique approaches to doing it.
Julia Gomez gave her/their first-ever interview to WNXP, just before dropping a self-produced, self-released debut album, Aren’t We All So Incomplete. We delved into the development of musical style, personal identity and DIY hustle that made way for the full-length, and dissected the surreal and sensual pop dream world that she created in “Night Drive” by giving the track the Singled Out treatment.
Still mostly under the radar in Nashville, corook recounted how she got from music schooling to the smart-assed, self-aware (and slightly salty at her dad) artist persona that she introduced on her Achoo! EP.
PETTY is one of Nashville’s most fascinating, elusive and independent-minded rappers, the kind of figure who others in town study and seek out for advice. During a late-night interview, he philosophized about what difference it makes when artists in the city support each other and how he’s building a distinctive legacy by flexing his mind with the prolific pace and conceptual nature of his output, including the year-long “53 Fridays” series and “Hold the Applause” EP.
Few realized that midwxst, a rising, genre-exploding hyperpop star, had lived and studied in Nashville, until he spoke with WNXP about how his online community of collaborators and his commitment to modeling emotional vulnerability as a young, Black man fueled his album, better luck next time. He broke down his warp-speed track “riddle” for a Singled Out feature, too.
In his music, his entrepreneurship, his organizing, even his narration in a recent Amazon documentary about Black country and roots figures, Mike Floss has long moved like an artist who’s about uplifting his community. When he released Contraband, the EP that he made during a one-of-a-kind artist residency with the Civil Rights Corps, he explored Fort Negley with the tape rolling, connecting the dots between the formerly enslaved people, referred to as “human contraband,” who’d been forced to build the structure and the systemic oppression he takes aim at today.