By Steve Wildsmith, The Daily Times Knoxville July 13, 2022
It’s been seven years since singer-songwriter Angela Easterling put out a studio album, but speaking by phone from her family’s home in Greer, South Carolina, it’s not difficult to understand why.
In the background, an all-too-familiar chorus of “Mom! Mommy!” comes from the other side of a locked bedroom door. She and her musical partner and life partner, Brandon Turner, have three children, the youngest born in 2020, and life, she told The Daily Times recently, has made studio time scarce.
That all changes this fall, however, when a new album, “Witness,” will be released, and for fans and followers here in East Tennessee, copies will be for sale at her shows tonight (July 14) at Barley’s Taproom in Knoxville and Friday evening at the Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center in Townsend.
“We had been recording a little bit along the way, but the last few years have been nuts as far as having babies and then COVID,” Easterling said. “It’s not as easy to go to Nashville and spend a couple of weeks to a month making an album, but we live in a really busy musical area, so we had been working in some local studios and recording an album a little bit along the way.
“We planned to release it in 2020, but then we found out we had another baby on the way, and then COVID hit, so we put the album on the backburner. In the meantime, I wrote a bunch of new songs I really liked, so we recorded them, and then it was a question of which songs are going on the album.”
With those questions settled, the title is drawn from Easterling’s childhood, she added. She got her start on stage in children’s and community theater, as well as through band and choir in school. Her religious upbringing, however, left its mark, and she returns to it on the title track of the new record.
“You’re always told you need to be a witness for your religion, but unfortunately what I found in many cases was that I was more a witness to judgmental behavior and sometimes even abuse, and it really made an impact on me,” she said. “The idea behind the song is how as adults, we grow up and try to break free of negative things from our childhoods, whether they have to do with religion or not. But even if you’re able to move on, it’s still there, down deep inside, and you’re still a witness to that every day.”
She found balance by serving as a witness to the beauty of music: After leaving home to study musical theater in Boston, she became enamored with the Indigo Girls and started playing guitar, and songwriting soon followed. Although the country music label left her feeling pigeonholed at first, she found her niche when she moved to Los Angeles and followed in the footsteps of such forebears as Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.
After releasing her debut record, she returned to Greer, settling on her family’s farm and began to plumb the depths of her connection to the land, to her ancestors and to the South in general. On “Witness,” she added, she broadens her gaze and ponders the state of the world during a time of social and political upheaval taking place concurrently with a pandemic.
“So many of the songs are me looking out at the world and things that are going on, and it feels like I’m a witness to it,” she said. “I’m sitting here like everybody else, raising my kids and doing my job and living my life, but I’m looking at how everything else in the world affects me and my family.”
The tracks include “Halfway Down,” a single released in 2018 that addresses the gun violence epidemic and a song “I would love to someday be completely irrelevant and not sing anymore,” she added. There’s also “Have You Seen My Friend,” about a codependent, unhealthy relationship that’s a metaphor for the growing polarization in the United States.
“All that sounds kind of heavy, but there’s also a lot of stuff about my family and my children,” she said. “The final song is called ‘Grow Old,’ and it’s sort of a prayer of mine that I would like to be a witness to: I would love to see my children grow old. That’s my greatest wish in life.”
“Witness” was recorded entirely in South Carolina, she added, with Turner playing most of the stringed instruments, and the duo’s regular drummer and bass player filling out the sound. Many of the songs have been part of her live rotation for a while now, and their warmth and familiarity made putting them down for posterity feel all the more genuine, she said.
“It definitely feels more than anything like a true representation of what I do live,” she said. “We can’t wait to play a bunch of new songs at the Heritage Center, which is such a wonderful venue. We’re excited to come back and see everybody.”