Editor's Note: Miko Marks, whose new LP titled Hell or High Wayer is due out October 30 via Redtone Records, is No Depression's Spotlight Artist for October 2026. Stay tuned all month for more about this genre-spanning roots musician.
Change is transformative, by its nature. For worse sometimes, other times for better. Getting through is often painful just the same. Still, from the crucible of a mighty confluence of life shifts, singer-songwriter Miko Marks emerged freer, and more grounded in herself and her music. The result is the first blues album in her decades-long career, Hell or High Water, out October 30 via Redtone Records.
“I didn’t know that I would find my voice the way I did in the blues,” Marks says. “I had this belief growing up when I was young, listening to the blues, it was always sad. It was always somebody lying and cheating in there, and just seemed so downtrodden. And I'm a happy person, and I wanted to make happy music; I wanted to make heartfelt music.”
Marks gravitated to country music, drawn in by its stories and enamored of the fiddle and banjo’s plucky melody potential. She established herself with two straightforward country albums, 2005’s Freeway Bound and 2007’s It Feels Good, helping challenge the industry’s enduring racist norms and asserting that indeed Black women could and should make country music. Then, Marks stepped away from the industry for more than a decade.
Marks returned in 2021 with Our Country, and its successor the following year, Feels Like Going Home. In her absence, the industry popularized the genre term “Americana” (which Marks dubs a “gumbo”), making room for the gospel, soul, blues, and country lineages in Marks’s music to coexist.
“Within the last six years, I've just started to get out of the [genre] box. And I'm 54 years old. So I've been boxed in quite a long time in my life,” Marks says. “The music I came back out with in 2021, that's when I started to really peel away the layers of my self-imposed prison, let's put it that way. Because nobody told me to get in this box. I got in there willingly, thinking that was the way.”
The requisite other side of the coin to sadness is the blues’ capacity for joy, which shines through on Hell or High Water. The album begins with a trio of songs, an ablution of sorts, and a directive for calm, and getting through — “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Bring Me Down,” “It’s Alright,” and “Ease My Mind.” Accompanied by deliciously slippery blues guitar and woozy harmonica, Marks’s voice sounds rich and deep with more than age: For the first time, she’s holding nothing back in her music.
