Musician Amythyst Kiah, a Chattanooga native, now lives in Johnson City, Tenn. The 34-year-old singer and songwriter fuses folk, blues, rock and once-hidden emotion on her new album, “Wary + Strange.” / Photo by Liam Woods/The New York TimesNASHVILLE – Before Amythyst Kiah made her new album, “Wary + Strange,” she veered between two distinct aesthetics. Her 2013 debut, “Dig,” was filled with spare acoustic renditions of old-time material. Then came a more robust set of indie rock.
“I do not understand what the hell my brain was doing separating the two,” she said recently, resting her elbows on a park picnic table. “I can do whatever the hell I want with the songs.”
When Kiah and producer Tony Berg recorded “Fancy Drones (Fracture Me),” a song about her excruciating awareness of being cut off from her emotions, in early 2020, the goal was to join the two halves of her artistic identity at last. The result: Kiah’s country-blues phrasing bent around a lurching groove, with the guttural buzz of Berg’s bass harmonica substituting for bass guitar.
“When we were done with it, we looked at each other as if to say, ‘What the hell was this?'” Berg, who has worked with indie-rock singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers and the band Phantom Planet, recalled in a phone interview.
To Kiah, this was the sound of self-actualization: “It was one of the best days of my life,” she said.