WNXP selects a different project each week for our Record of the Week series, and it’s especially meaningful when we can spotlight music connected to our city. This week, instead of looking at a new album, we’re rounding up five of our fave past features that took uniquely deep dives into music that was either made in Nashville, or in one case, released on an indie label based here.
Back in January, Isaia Huron was a quiet local presence who’d done few interviews, but already had a growing, virtual audience, drawn to the contemplative sensuality of the vaporous pop-R&B tracks he creates. During a thoughtfully mellow Zoom convo, he laid out how he found his way from his gospel rapping youth to the self-sufficient writing and recording that landed him a publishing deal and solid streaming numbers for the material on his Cerulean Tapes and Bound EPs.
After migrating quite the geographical distance, from her native Australia to Nashville, singer-songwriter Jo Schornikow detailed for WNXP how she collected up impressions, ideas and recordings spanning both places for her album Altar.
Namir Blade‘s head-turning debut on the respected hip-hop indie Mello Music Group coincided with the launch of WNXP, and his story of cultivating unbounded creativity, whether or not it helped him fit in with his peers as a schoolkid or a grown artist, was the first tale that we unfurled in the Nashville Artist of the Month series. We followed up when he dropped a collaborative project with labelmate L’Orange, and Blade welcomed us into his East Nashville home, his movie collection and his fascinating creative process when he dropped his latest album, Metropolis.
Daisha McBride was another previous Nashville Artist of the Month, who then turned around and dropped a new project too fully formed for WNXP to ignore, Let Me Get This Off My Chest, a song cycle exploring the emotional arc of getting deeply invested in, and eventually burned by, a lover. In a non-narrated audio postcard, McBride unpacked what prepared her to take her most confessional approach to date in her lyrics, melodies and delivery.
Seratones may not be a Nashville band, but they dropped their conceptually and rhythmically rich 2022 album Love & Algoryrthms on New West, a roots-leaning label that’s an indie pillar in the city. For another audio postcard, mastermind A.J. Haynes analyzed how she’d steered her band through wildly different musical phases on their way to this highly danceable soundscape and its meditations on seeking, claiming and savoring pleasure.