With her spellbinding voice and time-bending sensibilities, Sierra Ferrell makes music that’s as fantastically vagabond as the artist herself. On her highly anticipated Rounder debut Long Time Coming, Ferrell shares a dozen songs beautifully unbound by genre or era, instantly transporting her audience to an infinitely more enchanted world.
Co-produced by Stu Hibberd and 10-time Grammy Award-winner Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, Dolly Parton, Gillian Welch), Long Time Coming embodies a delicate eclecticism fitting for a musician who utterly defies categorization.
Long Time Coming features a stellar line-up of musicians, including country royalty like Chris Scruggs, Billy Strings, and her long-time collaborator Nathan Leath (a fiddle player she first met at the American Legion Post 82's Honky-Tonk Tuesday). Sprung from her self-described "country heart but a jazz mind," tracks include "Why'd Ya Do It": a beguiling and bittersweet lament partly inspired by Ferrell's fascination with calypso and tango music. ("That song took me a few years to put together-it's such a different vibe for me, and I'm ridiculously happy with the outcome," Ferrell notes.) And with its galloping rhythm and classic bluegrass storytelling-as well as a guest appearance from Grammy Award-winner Sarah Jarosz on background vocals-"Jeremiah" sweetly delivers what Ferrell dubs "a broken song, with a gleam of hope at the end."
Ferrell delights in defying all convention in everything she creates. "I want my music to be like my mind is-all over the place," she says. "I listen to everything from bluegrass to techno to goth metal, and it all inspires me in different ways that I try to incorporate into my songs and make people really feel something."