At age 11, Elise Davis knew she wanted to play the guitar and began taking lessons in her hometown of Little Rock, AR. Writing songs, let alone singing them in public, was never a conscious end-goal. She knew she loved music, but there was no telling how far its pull would shape her life.    One evening, after her parents forbid her to go to a concert in downtown Little Rock, she decided to run away from home and stormed out the door.      After a few hours of sitting in a cul-de-sac less than a mile from away, she grew tired of waiting for the arrival of her anxious parents searching desperately for her. After walking back into her living room, she was shocked to find her parents just as she left them; neither Mom or Dad had realized she was missing. The ploy for attention had the opposite effect, and she was furious. Stomping up the stairs, she grabbed her guitar, locked herself in the bathroom and wrote her first song start to finish in one sitting. At 12 years old, she knew it was her calling.    The Sandbox Lizards, Elise’s first band, played gigs in and around Little Rock throughout high school. Her senior year she decided to begin a solo career and released her first full-length album “Love And Leaving”.      She attended college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas for her first two years, but ultimately finished school at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She released an album each year at SMU and U of A, all the while playing gigs in hotel lobbies, dive bars and parties. She released “Same Vein” in 2010 immediately after graduation and was free to travel.     She booked a tour in Los Angeles at several small bars well off the beaten path. It was at one of these shows that a smug bouncer struck up a conversation with a touch of sarcasm “so honey where are you from and when you moving to LA to be in the music industry?” After explaining she was from Arkansas and hadn’t considered moving to LA, the bouncer squarely told her “you will never get anywhere if you stay in Arkansas.” On her flight home the next day, she made up her mind…she was moving to Nashville.    Without any sense of a safety net, and a mere three weeks after the in-flight decision to drastically change course, she was on the interstate headed to a town where she didn’t know a single living soul. Somewhat miraculously, the very week she landed in Nashville, she had arranged a group of studio musicians to record “Cheap Date,” which ultimately released November of 2011.     In March of 2013, Elise signed her first publishing deal with Horipro Entertainment. The opportunity was presented as a prize for winning a songwriting contest through American Songwriter and Martin Guitar in which over 800 songwriters entered. That win planted her firmly in the middle of the Nashville songwriting community, and she began writing songs in the spirit of co-writes and collaboration.    On May 27th of 2014, Elise released the Life EP in conjunction with her publisher Horipro Entertainment. While the songs on Life could take a slight right turn and fit nicely on the Music Row hit parade, there’s an honesty and sharp-witted integrity fueling her creativity and constantly veering left.      In June 2015 Elise finished up a new record with producer Sam Kassirer (Langhorn Slim, Josh Ritter, Lake Street Dive) recorded in Parsonsfield, Maine at Great North Sound Society studio. Sam and Elise linked up with an amazing band; Matt McCaughan (Bon Iver), Bradley Cook (Sharon Van Etten, Indigo Girls), and Josh Kaufman and recorded the a new album entitled "The Token" that will be released later this year.      Ultimately, staying true to her message may place her beyond the periphery of country label machine, but it simultaneously allows true music fans the opportunity to focus on a songsmith destined for a different kind of limelight. 

The Allen Thompson Band, East Nashville stalwarts for the better part of the last decade, could very well be writing the soundtrack for their ever-evolving neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood that, like the band, has changed markedly over the years, ever since Thompson, a Virginia native, left his home state and headed west. They’re a rock & roll band with roots in southern soul, California country, and psychedelic music. Along the way, they’ve grown a bit louder, too, adding a keyboardist to the lineup and replacing Thompson’s acoustic guitar, a familiar sound on earlier albums like Salvation in the Ground, with its electric cousin. The songs still takes their cues from the music that came out of San Francisco and Laurel Canyon during the ’70s, but the sound has broadened over the years, now owing just as much to the rock & roll that roared out of Minneapolis and Athens during the following decade. The sound coming out of Nashville these days is eclectic and ever-changing, which suits the Allen Thompson Band’s broadening sound. Rather than mimicking the past, Allen and the Boys are using their collective inspirations to reflect the sights, sounds, triumphs, and tragedies of their current surroundings, all the while keeping a hopeful eye toward the future, where more big things are in store!

A friend of mine once wrote some really nice things about me. She’s got a way with words. “Darrin Bradbury is as restless as he sounds, almost animalistic in his magnetic sense of place, captivating his desire to describe what he sees. His writing takes you to people, signage, to fingers, dirty knees and toes, through the drainpipe, but always back to the road. In a song, Darrin describes his best friends as cigarettes. He sees the subtler path we leave behind, the stories we tell, puffs of smoke as stories unfolding. Stories don’t always tell themselves, and he loves interpreting as much as he likes taking them in. The beauty of an ugly cigarette is in the breath. He sees stories as the stuff of roots. His roots look like roads. And there’s no road without purpose. Stories are made of purpose, and I think that’s what Darrin’s music explores. “Let’s Get Stoned and Go to The Zoo,” the amazingness and sometimes-absurdity of having a purpose when the world is strange and tough. People have to travel the hard way, with the weight of their bodies and baggage in tow. Darrin travels almost exclusively by car. He draws pictures with his wheels all over the continental map, leaving a trail of smoke. People remember Darrin, he probably remembers a lot of them too.  One could be tempted to see New York City’s main feeder zone, the lightning bolt-shaped land of New Jersey, Bradbury’s home state, as sort-of a Mecca of capitalism in this country. The road’s through it. The density, the people, it’s a magnet.  But Darrin has had the guts to leave and the humility to return over and over, and throughout, as he lives and dreams, he works on telling stories about roots and roads and the stuff making us continue to drive around like we do. He speaks American Post-folk English, and it’s actually a great dialect.”