Alicia Blue Previews Shooter Jennings-Produced LP 'Country Desire' With 'Kentucky Cowboy'
(MPG) Alicia Blue announces her debut album Country Desire, due out August 28. Produced by 4x Grammy-winner Shooter Jennings, Country Desire finds the Nashville-based singer-songwriter navigating themes of longing, consequence and control in a blue-collar epic. Along with the news, Alicia shares her new single "Kentucky Cowboy," which captures the spark of a chance encounter and its lingering possibilities.
"In 2024, I drove up to the Kentucky-Tennessee border where I met a cowboy who had quite an effect on me," shares Alicia. "Between his wide open spaces, sincerity, pure heartedness and life rooted in the natural, I left with a million 'what ifs.' Like what would have happened if I went back sooner to say hello. I still have his spurs hanging on my wall. This song came on the tail of that experience, and I can't wait for folks to hear it."
That tension of reality reckoning with illusion powers every inch of Country Desire. After Shooter discovered Alicia's early demos, he agreed to make the album after their first meeting, with no label and no budget. A few months later, the pair stepped into Hollywood's famed Sunset Sound studio and refused to play it safe. These sessions pulled together a powerhouse of players including Jay Bellerose on drums (Alison Krauss, Robert Plant, Ray LaMontagne), Brian Whelan on keys and textures (Dwight Yoakam), Ted Russell Kamp on bass (Sturgill Simpson, Tanya Tucker) and Greg Leisz on pedal steel (Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton), alongside Alicia's guitarist Alex Labrie, each one serving the songs rather than polishing them.
What came out is a record obsessed with desire - not as fantasy, but as a force that distorts, drives and dismantles. "What didn't lead to Country Desire? I'd say a lifetime of parts of myself that came to the surface, that needed airtime, the spotlight, so they could stop sitting in the driver's seat. Parts that wanted the rush of a poetic life, at the cost of personal power and stability. Romance with cowboys, men with working hands but a notebook and guitar in the back. Mirrors and smoke and mirrors." The end result is a debut that already sounds lived-in, hard-won and mythic.
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