PONDERROSA LIVE PRESENTS

“You’ll know next year’s girl not by the talent she commands / she’ll be the one with the scissors in her hands,” sings Rachel Allyn on the title track of her new EP, Next Year’s Girl. The song leads off the album, and by the time this scathing yet somehow comical line hits, you’ll realize you are listening to a writer who sees and hears the world just a little differently than most.

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Allyn is following the path that artists like Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, and Ashley Monroe are currently forging ahead of her, but she’s taking some elective and scenic detours along the way. “John Lennon once said, ‘You see? You just write what you feel, even if you don’t know where it’ll take you.’ I didn’t read that quote until sometime in college, but it embodies everything I had always thought to be true about music and songwriting. As long as it’s meaningful,” she says, “I don’t care what anyone wants to call it.”

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“Americana Country” is what Allyn is choosing to call her own music these days, though she enjoys watching lines blur and genres shift with each passing day. “Country music, Americana music, and alt-country music, however you want to define each of them, all come from the same place. They were all born of the same kind of storytelling, and I feel like they’re all converging again. This is a really exciting and interesting time for country music, and consequently, for myself as an artist.”