Teri Joyce

Most people who follow the Texas Music Scene closely are very familiar with Teri Joyce, a pretty gal known for her larger than life country voice that's delivered in an (about) five foot package. She has been a staple in the Austin honky tonks, and well respected for her songwriting chops. She penned Rockabilly Queen Marti Bro's hit Blue Tattoo, and that is when others really started taking notice. An album of all original tunes by Joyce has been highly anticipated, and after all these years, here she is with one hell of a bang in Kitchen Radio, which she Co-Produced with Honkytonk Crooner Justin Trevino.

First off, I'd like to say (though Joyce is known for her songwriting) the vocals on KITCHEN RADIO are exceptional. She has one of the most unique and true to traditional country voices I have heard on record in years. It is as if Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn dipped their voices in honey to make one sweet voice. The inflections are perfection, I say. Am I gushing? Yes, I guess I am. Hell, I am allowed - this is real country, folks. But retro or not, the songs, with their precise arrangements and melodic solos, are fresh.

Fourteen original songs of pure, and I do mean pure, country. The lead track, Don't Look For Me Til You See Me Comin', is delightfully sassy and sultry. The title track, Kitchen Radio, really captures the whole essence of Joyce's music, with its nostalgic view of music and how the past affects the present. Joyce stays tried and true to the Honkytonk themes throughout in songs like Something Blue, I Can't Help Myself, and Bluebonnets For My Baby. A variety of special guests add to the mix with Brennen Leigh, Cindy Cashdollar, and a who's who of Texas musicians including Jim Stringer and Floyd Domino. And as if that weren't enough to make you snap up a copy and hook it into your Ipod, add two great duets with Texas star Roger Wallace, and you've got all the incentive you need.

http://www.outlawmagazine.tv/#magazine
- Outlaw Magazine

Not much country music comes out of mainstream Nashville these days. There's even talk, long overdue, that the very genre designation may be jettisoned. Still, real country music -- roughly defined as the blue-collar sound forged in Southern/Southwestern bars and dance halls in the middle decades of the last century -- thrives in local and regional scenes. The most prominent of them is Texas, which has always been unusually open to rooted music of various descriptions.

Never static, country music seemed to redefine itself every decade or so. It wasn't necessarily a straight-line progression from a rooted Southern sound to a more cosmopolitan pop, either. Country went backwards and forwards in periodic adjustments, straying only so far from its origins before stripping off the pop gloss and reinventing itself in a relatively rougher, more "authentic" direction. The genre resisted easy categorization as folk or pop, rural or urban; it was always a blend, though not always in identical proportions. What it always produced, however, was an identifiable sound. When you heard it, you knew it was country. Sometime in the last 20 years, when most Nashville music started to mimic 1970s rock and pop, "country" was reduced to a marketing slogan, surviving only because nobody in a suit could think up another one.

Active in the Austin scene as both performer and composer of songs for fellow artists, Teri Joyce is country by any definition. The title song of this, her debut CD, celebrates the great stuff that used to glide over the airwaves from country's outposts in Nashville and elsewhere. In those days country was a common language that spoke to all who would hear, and it was as close as your nearest AM radio. In the 1970s -- the decade in which her particular melodic country-pop approach dominated playlists -- Joyce probably would have been a star. Happily, she's young and doing what she does, which she does very well indeed, in the early 21st century. That means -- I hope -- that we'll be hearing her for years to come.
All of the songs here are of her own creation, and I know they're good because they just sound better each time I hear them. I enjoy everything about Kitchen Radio, not least the leanness and angularity of its production, courtesy of Joyce and her co-producer Justin Trevino, himself a hard-core honkytonk singer held in awe by all within listening distance or experience. A host of Texas' finest pickers (Bobby Flores, Cindy Cashdollar, Jim Stringer and more) backs up Joyce's swinging, good-timey vocals. Roger Wallace, another of the Lone Star state's top-drawer hillbilly singers, shows up for a sizzling duet on "Fifteen Minutes of Shame," an epic of lust and guilt like they used to before Nashville, to its everlasting shame, went family-friendly.

http://www.rambles.net/joyce_kitch09.html
- Rambles.NET

"Fans of REAL country music and heartfelt lyrics can't fail to enjoy this!" - Blue Suede News

"I've waited a long time for this record, and my unrealistically high expectations have actually been exceeded." [Five Stars] - Country Music People (U.K.)

"She's about as tall as a shotgun, but she's larger than life behind a microphone. [Kitchen Radio] solidifies her reputation as a country songwriter." [Four Stars] - 3rd Coast Music