SPOTLIGHT: The Magic of Our Little Blue Earth [ESSAY]

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.

Coming on now 15 years ago, on August 19, 2010 — right smack in the middle of the dog days of the damp and suffocating Atlanta heat — I was riding in the passenger seat, my dad at the wheel, on the way to the airport. I was headed back to Boulder, where I had been living the previous few years. Having been back in my hometown for a friend's wedding and a week of reveling in the kind of weightless joy of being with the best of old friends, the drive to the Atlanta airport was feeling increasingly heavy — the slow anxious creep of stress and worry seeping back into my brain and heart.

Earlier that summer, a generalized anxiety, confusion, and unhappiness that I had not yet experienced in my young life had taken root. Burnout, work-related stress, lack of direction, and perhaps being too far from Georgia while denying what I was wanting from my life — all of this had me constantly worrying and not eating. To assuage my worry and gain much-needed perspective, my sister suggested I “call daddy; he’s so good at talking through these kinds of things.” So throughout June and July, I would call my dad and have long talks about these quarter-life existential crises I was going through. We’d grown so much closer over those summer months, musing about life’s comical absurdities, about art and music, and death.