Trace Mountains latest LP is a reconsideration of Americana. Dave Benton is uncertain, defeated, earnest, ironic, heartbroken, and inspiring all at once.
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Photo: Alysse Gafkjen
âYou have to have some charm to play classic country â you have to have respect for your instrument,â says Shannon McNally, who is talking to me on the phone about her new full-length
The Waylon Sessions. The album features songs written and recorded by the great outlaw-country singer Waylon Jennings. Iâm catching up with McNally as sheâs making her way up I-55 out of Jackson, Miss., where sheâs played a show, back home to Nashville by way of Memphis.
I think I get what sheâs telling me about charm. Indeed, McNally found her own way to perform the Jennings songs that make up her latest album. McNally and I trade travel notes about the impossibility of splitting the right angle to save time between Jackson and Nashville, and you can tell she knows the territory. She lived in New Orleans and Mississippi before moving to Nashville in 2017. As I tell her,