Editor's Note: Kristina Murray is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for May 2025. Learn more about her life and new album, Little Blue, which was released May 9, in this feature, and keep an eye out for more all month long.
Singer-songwriter Kristina Murray’s music conveys a realism that derives from life experience. Murray’s third studio album, Little Blue, is a paean to hard-won perspective, perseverance, and resilience forged by struggle. Still, more contemplative than gloomy, the album’s nine tracks dwell on faltering, rather than failing, and the quintessential act of coming out the other side.
“It's so part of being a human is having to go through the sad shit to understand that there is a lot of great shit in life, and that those things are made better because you've seen the low points,” Murray says.
Though it’s been seven years since her last studio album, Murray picks up right where she left off, beginning Little Blue as if mid-sentence: “And your love came in like a rain that never stopped / I had always been the kind that couldn’t get got / But baby you got me.” The time elapsed has done Murray good. In the intervening years since 2018’s critically-acclaimed sophomore album, Southern Ambrosia, Murray and the world have changed — a global pandemic, hyper fixation on streaming and social media stats, and the boom of Americana music (in all the flaws that term contains). Murray emerges grounded and with a lot to say.
“Two of my favorite songwriters, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch, both had about a six or seven year period between two records,” Murray points out. “At the end of the day, good things take a lot of time and a lot of hard work and dedication.”
Little Blue, Murray’s debut with Normaltown/New West Records, gets its name from the album’s final track, a reflection on life’s fragility. It was also inspired by a quote from naturalist Sylvia Earle, which Murray discovered a few years ago and whose profundity hit her hard at just the right moment: “I wish everyone could just realize how special it is to be alive on this little blue speck in the universe. It's a miracle that life exists at all and that we have a piece of time that is ours.”
Says Murray of that quote, “It really was so profound. …My experience with death in my own life is very much like, ‘We only have this period of consciousness for maybe, if you're lucky, 100 years, right?’ And the fact that I get to exist in the same 100 years that rock and roll was birthed was so amazing to me.”
Murray spends much of the first half of Little Blue deftly laying out how incredibly hard it is to be an independent musician, especially a woman. “She could’ve been somebody / With a little bit of luck and some money,” she sings, on “Has Been,” the album’s second track. Set on any old night out in Nashville, Murray spends “Has Been” searching for traction and comfort, frankly reminding the listener that the anxieties that keep her up at night will probably get worse before they get better.
Grinding through the last decade in Nashville playing infinite bar gigs and working side jobs, Murray’s hard work often felt as though it wasn’t enough. It’s from that headspace that she wrote the powerful middle of the album: the cheeky, funky bluegrass “Watchin’ The World Pass Me By,” and the forlorn “Fool’s Gold.” (Both were written after the depressed moments when Southern Ambrosia, which was critically acclaimed, failed to give Murray’s career the traction she craved).
“The wheel’s still spinning in the rut” Murray says. “I've been treading in this bullshit for so long. Should I raise my hands and let it drown me at this point?”
The hard work to success direct continuum is a myth in a music meritocracy that never really existed. Although she’s wallowing in it, mid album, Murray chose not to give up.
ALL IN DUE TIME
Murray writes her country music with great respect for the traditions and music that came before and is an avid and astute devotee of country music and its history. She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia listening to 1960s and ’70s rock and her mom’s record collection of singer-songwriter women Emmylou Harris, Jesse Colter, Joni Mitchell, and Bonnie Raitt — before discovering older country music from Charlie Pride, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn.
At her performing arts high school, Murray played violin until she gave it up to focus on dance. She picked up guitar after watching the cute counselors at church camp play, and because she wanted to sing and be able to accompany herself. Later, Murray worked in a summer camp where she dove deep into old bluegrass with fellow counselor Kyle Tuttle (who now plays banjo in Molly Tuttle’s band Golden Highway, no relation).
After college, Murray lived along Colorado’s Front Range mountains, to be around bluegrass music and get out of the south for a while. She learn to play on stage, sing harmony, and to view the world from a different perspective than the way she’d grown up.
“Growing up Southern is a very complicated identity. There's a lot of pride there, and there's also a lot of shame that's really hard to express, and there's a lot of cultural things that I think people don't understand when they don't grow up in the South,” she says of the need to live somewhere else for a bit. “Furthermore, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, so that South is quite different from somebody that grows up in like Lexington, Kentucky.”
Music also motivated Murray’s return to the South, when she moved to Nashville to be around people her own age writing and singing music. There, she built community with other independent musicians and was a critical part of the early days of Honky Tonk Tuesdays, Nashville’s long-running weeknight event for up-and-coming independent artists. The long hours logged in bars — both behind the bar and on stage — also gave her “The After Midnight Special,” which stars a brokenhearted barfly who owns her path in life and sounds like a first person twist on Emmylou Harris’ version of “Queen of the Silver Dollar” (written by Shel Silverstein).
Though full of sadness and disappointment, Murray imbues her songs with a seemingly-indefatigable drive to keep going in spite of it all. The second half of Little Blue pivots toward the future as Murray motivates herself on “Get Down To It,” a co-write with Logan Leger (who plays guitar elsewhere on the album, too).
Doubt in mind, never ends
Oh and here I’m overthinkin’ again
I’ve got to find a way to get myself out of the rain
And find my sunshine again
Winding road, goes on and on
Oh I’m tired of singing the same song
I finally understand, that it’s all in my hands
If I get down to it
The album’s next two songs aren’t particularly rosy — “Just A Little Longer” lets go an old, broken love story and “Phoenix City” (named for the Alabama city) stands in for so many decaying small towns and dreams broken by lost opportunity and addiction — but they convey Murray’s conviction that she’s right where she belongs, ready to meet the moment.
“When I talk about this record, when I say it came about so naturally, and I guess in its own right time, it's very true, there's no bullshit there,” Murray says. “The record came together when it was supposed to. I know that sounds so stupid and cheesy, but it really did.”
Perspective matters to perception, greatly. Little Blue comprises nine bright vignettes of context about life on Earth — precious, painful, and hopeful. On it, Murray has stopped and evaluated life, returning with renewed vigor and gumption.
Kristina Murray's Little Blue is out now via Normaltown/New West Records.
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