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Can't make it to Austin or Nashville? Some of the best twang these days is coming out of the Pacific Northwest, with the Band of Horses, Sera Cahoone, Neko Case, and now, perhaps the most authentically country of them all, Zoe Muth.
The Seattle native has a sweet, lilting voice, and her Lost High Rollers)a Townes Van Zandt reference), are a crack band of laid back, rootsy honky-tonkers.
All that would be enough to land her a steady house gig at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle, but he's also a dandy songwriter. The Women in her songs are vulnerable, but don't want to leave without saying what needs to be said. Her men are inattentive and heartless.
The album opens with the single, "You Only Believe Me When I'm Lying," a mandolin and pedal steel weeper about finally moving on.
"I ain't gonna send you no love letters, 'cause you'll just shake your head at the proof, that I wan't you and that's the honest truth," she sings.
"Hey Little Darlin'" is a quick-tempo shuffler about a woman who tells her selfish lover she's had enough. "That hard look in your eyes, well I know now it ain't no disguise," Muth drawls.
Elsewhere there are lonesome two-steppers like "I Used to Call My Heart a Home" and Middle of Nowhere," both songs that wouldn't sound out of place on a Tammy Wynette album.
There are 12 originals here and not a throw away song among them. This is one of those debuts you'll remember hearing for a long time, like the first time you heard Iris Dement sing, or Nanci Griffith.
Muth has all the right stuff.
-Chris Jorgensen - Billings Gazette
Discography
Our debut album Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers was self released in August 2009. It has become a favorite of many the local Americana community radio dj's. We've also been recieving airplay on stations in Eugene,Oregon (KRVM), Fairfield,Iowa(KRUU) Cambridge, Massachusettes(WMBR) Davis,California,St. Louis, Missouri(KDHX), Pittsburgh, PA (WXLV) as well as on-line stations. The first cut from the record "You Only Believe Me When I'm Lying" was chosen as the August 7th "song of the day" on KEXP 90.3 Seattle.
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Bio
With the release of her debut self-titled album, Seattle native Zoe Muth took everyone by surprise. During the course of 2009, she went from playing dive bars and coffee shops to gracing the stage of the first annual NoDepression Festival. The album also ranked #25 on the NoDepression reader's top 50 of 2009, placing her among Americana legends such as Buddy Miller, Dave Alvin, and Lyle Lovett. The combination of her inventive songwriting, true-blue twang, and rock solid country band, The Lost High Rollers, has led critics to call her one of the best up and coming interpreters of traditional country music around.
Raised on a steady diet of classic-rock, country classics,
and working class values, Muth's lyrics reflect her love of the history behind the music and focus on the tried and true topics of everyday life: disappointment, lost love, trying to make enough money to live on. Beautifully rendered vignettes of heartbreak and longing, filled with subtle wordplay, these songs never fall simply into cleverness, but instead give us truths about our lives and relationships that are subtle and unflinching.
With her traditional sound, she's earned comparisons to Iris DeMent, Emmylou Harris, and Gillian Welch, but with a voice with a little more edge and her own original songwritng style, she's created a sound all her own. Together with the Lost High Rollers, an all-star band of some of Seattle's finest roots musicians, Country Dave Harmonson on pedal steel and electric guitar, Ethan Lawton on mandolin, Miguel Salas on bass, and Greg Nies on drums, Muth crafts songs that sound so true and familiar, you feel as if they've been around forever. If she can keep writing them like this they will be.
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