“In the fall of 2020, in the thick of lockdown, I began going out into our garage to play my childhood piano that my husband had hauled in a truck from Mississippi to our house in Glendale. The piano seemed to contain songs and stories that would come out a little at a time. I enjoyed going out there at all hours to see where they’d take me next,” says Claire Holley.

Claire Holley’s musings on her Mississippi childhood are soulful, but never sentimental.

Listening to “Where I Lived,” the new album from this native Mississippi songwriter, one might be stirred with feelings that tend to accompany holidays: pangs and twangs both bitter and sweet, strands of memory and longing that cross and tangle in our sleep and may take us by surprise with their intensity at year’s end.

Even mgk of the newly redacted tattoos, travels this intimate territory in his surprising release, Lost Americana. These feelings are what the Hallmark Channel strives for and usually misses, because the stories generating from those synthetic characters don’t land as authentic.

Some Americana relies upon the glitz of Rhinestone Cowboys and Gals. Where I Lived, on the other hand, unfolds like a letter from home, folded and forgotten. Maybe a pressed flower drops from the brittle folds, plucked from a long-gone garden on a long-ago Southern summer evening. These are the fragile sensations delivered by this new album released in November. And what is most remarkable about Holley’s accomplishment is the powerful sense of place evoked, making her summoning of home feel like our own, like places in the heart that we already know.

Holley now lives in Glendale, CA, a livable suburb in Los Angeles County. Speaking in person, there’s just the softest trace of Dixie in her voice. The same is true in her composing and recording, which arrive with contemporary and sophisticated polish. One of these cuts, “Lingering,” is propelled by a funky bass line. In “Landline,” rich accordion and banjo riffs back up phrases like “Feel the dirt on my feet.” “Bluebird” features a stinging guitar solo by Dan Phelps. In “4124,” the numeral of Claire’s childhood street address, a glossy audio bed reminiscent of Steely Dan arrangements gives the lyric a chilling turn as the narrator asks, “Are these my final days at 4124”?

A standout is “Beauty School,” written about the touching real-life friendship of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette. A fellow Mississippian, Wynette earned her cosmetology license as a hairdresser at age 21 and kept it current, saying that in case the “music thang” didn’t work out, she’d have something to fall back on. The First Lady of Country Music was visited often by Parton, who did Wynette’s hair and makeup as she lay dying tragically young at age 55.

Holley says “In the spring of 2009, I read a profile on Dolly Parton in the New Yorker by Lauren Collins and wrote “Beauty School” soon after. Collins writes, ‘If she had not succeeded at music,’ Parton said, ‘she would have been a missionary or a cosmetologist…’ While “Beauty School” pays homage to one of my favorite songwriters and one of America’s treasures, it also celebrates friendship – in this case, Parton’s with fellow country legend Tammy Wynette, who went to beauty school and kept her beautician’s license updated, y’all! Maybe you won’t be surprised to know that Dolly would ask to borrow Tammy’s card to get discounts on hair and makeup.”

Part of what makes these songs accessible is their brevity. Holley says she’s got “Nothing against a 7–10-minute song,” but brings these in between 3:00 and 3:30 minutes, citing David Byrne’s recommendation in his memoir, How Music Works. Holley adds, “Merle Haggard wrote wonderful songs in under 2:30, so there’s a place for the super short ones too!”

Of “4124,” she says: “In November 2011, I spent a week with my parents at their home in Mississippi. My Dad had recently been diagnosed with leukemia. A couple of months before I arrived, he’d had to tell his seminary students that he would no longer be able to teach them. My Mom was taking care of him but slowing down herself, her own cancer diagnosis imminent. And yet, their spirits were pretty good — fond memories of lingering conversation post-dinner, hanging out together, sometimes watching a little TV in the evenings. All this in the house where I grew up.”

A voice which guided Holley’s writing of the song “Landline” belongs to Kentuckian poet and novelist Wendell Berry, specifically in his work Hannah Coulter, the seventh novel in Berry’s Port William series. While never discussed explicitly in these songs, there may be an underlying bond between the writers, not one purely of geography.

Berry famously resigned from his long-term teaching position at the University of Kentucky to return full-time to farming the land that had been in his family since the early 1800s. With Luddite zeal, Berry worked his ancestral fields with horses and used strictly organic farming methods in alignment with his deeply held belief that traditional agriculture is essential to American culture.

While Holley may or may not have chopped cotton or gathered scuppernongs, Berry’s theme of the returning prodigal resonates in many of her lyrics, albeit in less literal form. In this way, Holley may remind us of Swamp Ophelia’s “Language or the Kiss” by Indigo Girls, and Jennifer Warnes’ “Mama.” “Where I Lived” feels like returning to a truer place, though not necessarily to our technical past or geographic roots. Instead, using subtle Southern inflections, Holley writes about her own travels through the illumination of self, the essential pilgrimage into the understanding of who and why we are.

The album can be purchase on Bandcamp.

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About the author: Honky-tonk angel and journalist Victoria Thomas is a Los Angeles-based pop culture writer. Reach her at victoriat@localnewspasadena.com