In January 2024, Kim Richey found herself in Mexico, gazing out at a sea of people singing along to “I’m Alright,” one of her classic tracks. The three folks on stage with the veteran, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter were also raising their voices in harmony. To her right sat Brandi Carlile, to her left, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Brandy Clark. The formidable foursome was participating in a songwriter’s round only half-jokingly dubbed “Titans of Americana” at Carlile’s female-forward Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival on the Riviera Maya in Mexico.
“That was nuts looking out and seeing everybody arm-waving and singing along,” says Richey, still both incredulous and cheered by the memory of performing with that supergroup and later appearing alongside other Girls Just Wanna Weekend-ers Annie Lennox, Lucius, Allison Russell, and Sarah McLachlan among others. “It was just like, ‘wow’!”
The good news for fans of this particular Titan is there was soon to be a whole new batch of songs to sing along with and arm wave to with the release of her 10th studio album Every New Beginning in May 2024. The album features 10 tracks, written, or co-written by Richey with a coterie of characters, over the course of several years, and produced by critically lauded multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Lancio (Patty Griffin, John Hiatt). It was recorded at Skinny Elephant studio in Nashville with engineer Dylan Alldredge in August 2023 with musical assistance from longtime collaborators like Dan Mitchell and Neilson Hubbard — who produced Richey’s 2013 album Thorn in My Heart — and newer friends like Nashville neighbor Aaron Lee Tasjan, who lends his irrepressibly sparkly musicality to the proceedings. Every New Beginning manages to continue the throughline of Richey’s nearly 30-year career while simultaneously adding a new chapter.
The songs represent the full spectrum of the Ohio native’s gifts as both a revered songwriter who can leap from melancholy to mirthful in a single couplet — whose songs have been recorded by the likes of Brooks and Dunn, Patty Loveless, and Mary Chapin Carpenter — and owner of one of music’s truly celestial voices.
That voice, which Brandi Carlile has cited as formative in crafting her own style, is a widely sought after harmony instrument and has been featured on scores of albums including Jason Isbell’s acclaimed Southeastern, Trisha Yearwood’s Everybody Knows, Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams, Reba McEntire’s Starting Over, and Has Been by Capt. Kirk himself William Shatner, among many others. Richey’s music continues to loiter at the Americana intersection of country, folk, pop, and rock conjuring everything from Lucinda’s humanity, the Beatles shimmer, Tom Petty’s effervescent stomp and Joni Mitchell’s laser-sharp lyrical craft.
Given that Richey’s previous release was 2020’s Long Way Back… the Songs of Glimmer, an intimate reimagining of her acclaimed 1999 album, Every New Beginning is an apt title for the new album. It sprang from something Richey heard in the 2023 documentary King Coal. “It was really great,” she says of the meditative examination of the cultural legacy of the coal industry. “A little girl narrates the film, and it starts out with a funeral procession, and she says, ‘My dad used to say every new beginning starts with an end.’ And I was like, ‘I’ll have that. Thank you very much.’ And now it’s the name of my record and what this record means to me.”
For now, Richey only knows a few things for sure. One is it feels good to be considered a Titan — when peers like Carpenter, spiritual heirs like Carlile and Clark, and vocal acolytes like Isbell, among many others, sing her praises, she says, “It’s really nice. You can’t beat it, really.” The other is that with Every New Beginning Richey is still striving for the same goal she had at the beginning of her own musical life: “Whenever I write a song, the thing that I enjoy the most is when someone hears a song or a line and says, ‘That’s how I feel.’” As long as the music is connecting, there is no end.
The Makin Waves Song of the Week is "ICE SS" by the Central Jersey punk act Sally Draper.
