by David Wilikofsky
The title of Sierra Ferrell’s debut album for Rounder Records, Long Time Coming, is apt. Ferrell signed with the storied label back in August 2019, and the fruits of their partnership have been feverishly anticipated in roots music circles ever since. Ferrell comes with a colorful backstory: she left her hometown in West Virginia in her 20s for a nomadic life on the road, living out of her van and busking across the country. She eventually settled down in Nashville, building a reputation as a magnetic live performer and inking her record deal off of it. While this backstory certainly adds to her allure, the music contained in Long Time Coming transcends any sort of packaging or hype. It’s the work a fearless artist rooted in tradition but unafraid to mess with it.
Ferrell proves her country bona fides beyond a shadow of a doubt on Long Time Coming, whether on the slow burn ballads “West Virginia Waltz” and “Give It Time” or the upbeat “Jeremiah”. But for every track that sounds rooted in tradition, there’s another playing fast and loose with it. It’s in these moments where genres dissolve into one another that Ferrell and the album shine brightest. Opener “The Sea”, in which Ferrell pays tribute to the deep, builds a spooky atmosphere with musical saws and a plodding bassline. Some of the song’s component parts scream country (steel guitar, a fiddle solo) but the end result is something harder to categorize. You can hear a similar sonic restlessness in the touches of dixieland jazz on “At The End of The Rainbow” or the dramatic slink of “Why’d Ya Do It.” Even some of the album’s more traditional moments yield surprises; for instance, on “Bells Of Every Chapel”, a whistled melody straight out of a Disney princess movie adds a theatrical flair to Ferrell’s lyrics about birdsong. It’s music that revels in the unexpected, surprising at every turn.
The discourse around country music can sometimes feel binary: either you’re carrying the tradition forward or desecrating it. If you’re a regular reader of this site you’ll know we don’t approach any music with rigid preconceived notions of what it should be, and clearly neither does Ferrell. This is music that doesn’t look at tradition as an immutable object gathering dust on the shelf, but as something living and breathing and changing. The real joy of Long Time Coming is hearing her experiment and play; she wrote or co-wrote every song on the album, and it’s clearly the work of an auteur. Artists like Ferrell are charting new paths for country music, and it’s exhilarating to get to listen in.