“I’ve been to some pretty low places these last ten years,” Kristina Murray confesses. “Faced a lot of heartbreak and loss and grief, but you have to learn to live with those things if you’re going to survive. You have to persevere.”
That spirit of perseverance forms the bedrock of Murray’s stunning new album, Little Blue. Recorded with producers Misa Arriaga and Rachael Moore, the collection grapples with loneliness, desperation, and existential crises through a series of cinematic snapshots of small-town burnouts and last call lovers. Murray is a country artist in the truest sense, a genuine craftswoman with a keen eye and ear for the little details that bring her working-class characters to life, and her delivery is timeless, blurring the lines between the old school honky-tonk, swampy Americana, and R&B-infused southern rock she grew up on in her home state of Georgia. If Murray sounds like a seasoned vet on Little Blue, that’s because she is. While the album marks her Normaltown debut, Murray’s spent the last decade since moving to Nashville paying her dues in an endless series of dive bars and juke joints, and the result is an electrifying introduction to an artist only just beginning to get the kind of wider recognition her talent has long warranted.
“Country music is having a moment right now, and of course I’m thrilled to be a part of that,” Murray reflects. “But even when that moment passes, I’ll still be making it. This genre’s a never-ending treasure chest of discoveries. Country music is who I am.”
Born and raised in Atlanta, Murray first fell in love with country music at the age of five, when she heard Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits on cassette in her momma’s car. After self-releasing her debut album in 2013, she moved to Nashville, quickly finding her place in the community as she helped establish the now-legendary Honky Tonk Tuesdays series and became one of the first women to front a band at Santa’s Pub.
“I wanted to surround myself with great writers and players so I could grow as an artist,” Murray explains. “It’s funny to look back now and realize how little I knew when I first got to town, but I was confident, I’ll say that,” she laughs.
Murray worked multiple jobs at a time to pay for her sophomore album, Southern Ambrosia, which landed on an array of Best Of lists and prompted Rolling Stone to declare her an Artist You Need To Know, praising her sound as “country-rock with a deep, poetic reverence for the land in which it was born.” The breakout critical acclaim didn’t translate to breakout success, though, and Murray soon found herself right back where she started, unsure of where to go or what it all meant.
“I felt stuck,” she recalls. “My father died suddenly when I was 25, a wound that never heals, and through breakups, car wrecks, and just general brokenness, all of which I was still processing when the whole world shut down in 2020. And while I’d had some brushes with notoriety and a few opportunities to tour in Europe and share bills with some fantastic artists over the years, it just seemed like I was spinning my wheels getting nowhere.”
So Murray did what she always does when the going gets tough: she kept writing, kept performing, worked harder.
“I just wrote and wrote and stockpiled songs for the right opportunity,” she explains. “I knew I needed to level up, and that meant finding the people who could help me get there.”
First up was Misa Arriaga (Kacey Musgraves, Wyatt Flores), who’d collaborated with Murray on a covers project in 2022 and eagerly signed on to help her record a full-length LP. It was around this same time that Murray met Rachael Moore (T Bone Burnett’s longtime engineer), who was so blown away by Murray’s live show that she invited her to come record in Muscle Shoals pro bono.
“I wanted to work with both of them,” Murray recalls, “but with two different producers in two different studios, I honestly wasn’t sure how it would all come together. Rather than worry about it, though, I tried to just trust in the songs and be as present as possible in the moment, which helped me fall more in love with the process than ever before.”
In the end, the dual producer setup proved to be perfect for capturing the two sides of Murray's creative personality. Over a winter weekend in Muscle Shoals with Moore, she and the band dug deep and chased sounds with meticulous focus and precision; over a spring weekend back in Nashville with Arriaga, they were able to let loose and embrace a spirit of improvisation and discovery.
“Both producers work in very different ways, but their techniques turned out to be really complementary,” Murray explains. “The songs were so cohesive when they all came together. It just felt totally natural and organic.”
“A lot of the characters on this record are coming to terms with the fact that life just has a lot of sadness in it,” Murray reflects. “But making peace with that sadness is what allows you to carry on and find joy and meaning and purpose.”
“Our time here is so short on this little blue dot,” Murray muses, “too short for all the bullshit we get caught up in day to day. This whole record is dropping in and out of these little snippets of sadness in life, but I wanted to end on this note of hope, this reminder that you can still find love and beauty no matter how dark things may seem.”
All it takes is a little perseverance.
Anthony D’Amato