“I’ve lived a high-risk life.
I didn’t look over my shoulder a lot.
I learned from an early age, life is fleeting --
but I put my faith in Jesus Christ and that kept me fearless.”
If it sounds too dire to imagine, Leah Blevins’ incandescent sense of fate, faith and kindness gives the torch-pop country doyenne a light saber of clarity that cuts through emotions with dignity and a real sense of self. The Sandy Hook, Kentucky-born songstress lived in a space that was deeply present. The daughter of a dentist who became a career politician, and a teenage gospel quartet pianist who fell into deep addiction, she knows the reality of oatmeal baths in red water, no heat in the winter and finding out the teacher giving your family refuge was also your mother’s supplier before she got sober over 20 years ago.
It makes All Dressed Up, her Dan Auerbach-produced Easy Eye Sound debut, an album that will hit people wherever they live and offer insight into the struggles of those they love without ever preaching or judging the ones battling faithless love, drug problems, or struggling to believe in themselves.
“We got tossed off a lot,” the amber-headed Blevins explains. “My older sister and her husband took us in. I was in the 8th grade, and we all lived together ’til I graduated. My mom came from the Hatfields; her maiden name was Justice, and she started playing the piano in church at the age of twelve.”
Music, though, won out. Living with her siblings, she started singing background vocals in their band; Patty Loveless, Martina McBride, Miranda Lambert and The Judds informed their sound. By the time Blevins was studying Communications at Morehead State, Elliot Collett & the Articles swept her away to Nashville in 2011. Though the band didn’t last long, the ethics she learned from touring by the age of 20 gave her a compass, and in 2014 she made a choice after a lifetime of singing background vocals to pursue a career as a solo artist.
“My Dad’s mechanism of helping others became a premise for my development. I didn’t need to be sought after or famous, but I knew I wanted to connect with people, to use music to bring us together. That’s the greatest source to lead us to the other side, to a place that’s better, where love can take root.”
All Dressed Up grew out of that idea. If you face what’s hard, you can grow stronger and truer. Whether the steel-steeped seeking of “Hey God,” which extols “Jezebel or Jericho, you point me, that’s where I’ll go,” the minor keyed reassurance of “Leave It Up To Me,” and the cautionary glittering pop of “Be Careful Throwing Stones”, Blevins moves through the emotional gears with an ease that matches her willingness to pull back the layers. The smoky acoustic title track stares down a heartache, offering unabashed pain with a real talk chaser as it evokes classic Bobbie Gentry swelter.
Her transparency and unfiltered feelings drew Nashville’s greatest genre-spanning writers – Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves, Leon Bridges), Pat McLaughlin (John Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Alan Jackson), Paul Overstreet (two-time GRAMMY, Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music Song of the Year winner) – to join Blevins and Auerbach in excavating the realm of who she is, what she believes and wants to share.
But it’s more than turpentine truth lyrics. Melodies wrap around the emotions, twirling into ear worms, cascading down, slowly lifting the songs to new heights without throttling the actual song. Providing a canvas for iconic steel players Paul Franklin and Russ Pahl, who also contributes baritone, pianist Jim Moose Brown, organist Billy Swan, upright bassist Steve Mackie and GRAMMY-winning guitarist David Rawlings, there’s a spaciousness to the tracks that allow their gifts as musicians and channelers of emotion to expand and permeate the songs.
“When David Rawlings played on ‘Leave It Up to Me,’ I came a little unhinged,” she admits. “We cut live a few days, kept moving as fast as we could to keep the essence in the songs. I tried not to think about who all of these players were, because it’s a lot; even though they came in with no ego, it was more ‘we’re all just here making music.’”
From the chugging good things in dark places “Diggin in the Coal,” evoking great grandfather/miner Cole Grove and their East Kentucky roots to the tenderly self-assessing hurt-people-hurt-people truth “Below the Belt,” Blevins goes out of her way to hold hope even as she recognizes her own short-comings. A devotee of Emmylou Harris’ folk-country, she evokes The Judds’ earliest ballads with the lamenting “Tequila Mockingbird” and the elegant Patsy Cline Wurlitzer jukebox-perfect “Lonely.”
“The way you speak to yourself is more powerful than any outside voice,” she begins. “I think I’m innocent to the world, but I harbor all these experiences I’ve had. I spent so much of my life in a small town, trying to prove I’m something I’m not… I had an amazing English teacher who allowed us all to be bigger than Sandy Hook, studying Sylvia Plath and C.S. Lewis, just creating a world so far beyond what we knew.
“I gave up music for a second, and was working in a kitchen, being a cook. I’m a doer; I wake up every morning and do things. But I turned 30, felt lost and started asking myself, ‘Who am I?’ The answers led me here: How do we wrap some vision around it?”
Her friend Marcus King introduced Blevins to Auerbach, and the chemistry was instant. Recognizing the pull of small-town masks and a massive heart, they began collaborating as writers, she explains, “Emotionally being stunted in a lot of ways, I started punching through the walls of things like looking pretty. Instead of being so polished and put together, these songs say, ‘I’m human. I can be insecure.’ That’s real freedom.
“I don’t spend much time dissecting what I do,” Blevins adds. “I say it and see what happens. That’s not what you fine tune, but it’s a pretty good way to get to the truth… and then you go from there.”
