Alyssa Faye Sanders

I’m not in the habit of trekking 1200 miles to write a review. I don’t even like late 20th century new millennium country music. But something about the songs of Alyssa Faye Sanders told me to go to a land unknown, get in line early, and capture a front row table.
On a cold Monday night in February, Nashville’s Bluebird Café packed out within minutes of a locked door swung free at last. A small but critically pivotal stop for up and coming songwriters, such greats as Garth Brooks and Mary Chapin Carpenter have launched careers from the Bluebird’s small stage, graced only by a the unusual neon light hanging from the wall. In neon, a bluebird has found its way to the rainbow, presumably of happiness.
And here I was, in the front row.
When the thin, strawberry blond singer with green eyes
stepped onto the stage, guitar in hand, she seemed shy. Perhaps it was the way she reached for the
audio cable, or the way she wouldn’t look at the audience.
Had I made a mistake?
The answer came as soon as she opened her mouth to
sing. The tumbleweed of thought, the specks of dust like doubt clouding the eyes suddenly gave way to a heavenly light that was no mirage. I knew why, exactly why she had previously been
named the best female vocalist in all of Texas. The song unfurled from her heart like the petals of
a wild rose, a delicate soprano, a lonesome alto calling one’s name in a West Texas wind. The song seemed to rise like a prayer from the back alleys and the flyways of doubt and shame. “If there’s a God in heaven who knows my name,”
she sings, “could you tell
him that I need him?”
Like a half remembered fairytale, Sanders unearths an essential truth about dreams and finding something transcendent that should never have been lost.
“It’s been several years down this road that I’m on,
it’s such a long way back…. What happened to that little girl, the one that said she could change the
world?”
As they say in Nashville, it all begins with a
song.

~Mike Colbert
- Mike Colbert

I’m not in the habit of trekking 1200 miles to write a review. I don’t even like late 20th century new millennium country music. But something about the songs of Alyssa Faye Sanders told me to go to a land unknown, get in line early, and capture a front row table.
On a cold Monday night in February, Nashville’s Bluebird Café packed out within minutes of a locked door swung free at last. A small but critically pivotal stop for up and coming songwriters, such greats as Garth Brooks and Mary Chapin Carpenter have launched careers from the Bluebird’s small stage, graced only by a the unusual neon light hanging from the wall. In neon, a bluebird has found its way to the rainbow, presumably of happiness.
And here I was, in the front row.
When the thin, strawberry blond singer with green eyes
stepped onto the stage, guitar in hand, she seemed shy. Perhaps it was the way she reached for the
audio cable, or the way she wouldn’t look at the audience.
Had I made a mistake?
The answer came as soon as she opened her mouth to
sing. The tumbleweed of thought, the specks of dust like doubt clouding the eyes suddenly gave way to a heavenly light that was no mirage. I knew why, exactly why she had previously been
named the best female vocalist in all of Texas. The song unfurled from her heart like the petals of
a wild rose, a delicate soprano, a lonesome alto calling one’s name in a West Texas wind. The song seemed to rise like a prayer from the back alleys and the flyways of doubt and shame. “If there’s a God in heaven who knows my name,”
she sings, “could you tell
him that I need him?”
Like a half remembered fairytale, Sanders unearths an essential truth about dreams and finding something transcendent that should never have been lost.
“It’s been several years down this road that I’m on,
it’s such a long way back…. What happened to that little girl, the one that said she could change the
world?”
As they say in Nashville, it all begins with a
song.

~Mike Colbert
- Mike Colbert