Before she began writing songs for her new album, Still + Bright, Amythyst Kiah began to realize she needed a fresh approach. It wasn’t easy. Her breakthrough 2021 effort, Wary + Strange, found her working through the weight of past traumas, including coming to terms with her mother’s suicide when Kiah was seventeen and the long process of becoming comfortable as a Black, queer woman from the South. “Initially, songwriting was a cathartic release,” she says. “This go-around, I was in a headspace where I was able to explore other things, and in a way, I kind of had to relearn how to approach songwriting and how to write songs.”
A Tennessee native, Kiah lives in Johnson City with her fiancé, but as she began to sketch out the new album, she went to Nashville to meet other songwriters at the suggestion of her A&R man at Rounder Records. She met with many but especially clicked with Sean McConnell and Butch Walker, the latter of whom produced Still + Bright. “I wasn’t so mired down with grief and emotional baggage,” Kiah says. “So while there’s still emotional things going on in the songs, it’s a much more fun, collaborative experience.”
Still + Bright exudes the confidence of an artist who has unlocked a new door and jumped through it headlong. The melodies and hooks soar and flutter on the stomping rock of “Play God and Destroy the World” (which features a guest turn from Kentucky singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman) and the rollicking “Silk and Petals.” “Die Slowly without Complaint” is a sticky, memorable blues dirge, while Billy Strings sprinkles some bluegrass magic in the defiant “I Will Not Go Down.” Kiah had met Strings briefly and took the guitar phenom up on the “we should do something together” offer, inviting him to come to Walker’s Nashville studio. “He comes in and plays eight improvisational guitar parts,” Kiah marvels. “Incredible.”
Today, G&G is proud to premiere “Empire of Love.” Its accompanying video is the finale of a four-part series (previous installments can be seen here) in which a spiritual pilgrim begins a self-discovery journey before eventually returning home. She sings:
Johnson City, Tennessee
My home in Appalachia is still calling me
Give me a mountain, something divine
A river that can carve its way through stone and time
“Being a touring musician,” she says, “the more places I would go, the more I’d think, ‘I wonder what it would be like to live here.’ It’s the grass-is-always-greener kind of effect. Having that exploration is an important part of life. But having a place to call home and having a sense of community outside of yourself makes life worth living.”
Watch the video below. Still + Bright is out on Friday, October 25, and available for preorder here.