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Taken from AJ Lee and Blue Summit's forthcoming third studio album, City of Glass – their first label release – ‘Hillside’ is a breezy, but quietly incendiary slice of harmony-soaked bluegrass that uses the resilience of a hillside to endure extreme weathers and human destruction as a metaphor for the strength and resistance of women over time.
“With iron walls I guard these plains / Succeeding trials by wind and rain / “Eroding me with tools by trade but I will never bend that way,” de facto band leader and the song’s songwriter AJ Lee sings.
"The song is sung from the perspective of a hill that is being eroded by weather and chipped by the tools of man,” Lee told Holler. “Still, the hill aspires to become a mountain and refuses to give in to the bombardment of forces. The last line in the chorus is, '… a thousand years don’t mean a thing to the stone cold hill that you call me,' which I wrote with the idea that I will have confidence in myself no matter who tries to tear me down. I feel like I am becoming an immovable mountain that has been birthed out of proving my resilience. This song represents women empowerment, resilience and strength."
'Hillside' is premiering exclusively on Holler below.
Based in Santa Cruz, California, and currently made up of AJ Lee on mandolin, fiddler Jan Purat, and guitarists Scott Gates and The Tuttles’ Sullivan Tuttle, the group met as teenagers, picking and jamming together as kids at local bluegrass festivals until one day, they decided they would be a band.
Produced by Lech Wierzynski, of the California Honeydrops, City of Glass is their third studio album and follows up I’ll Come Back from 2021 and their 2019 debut Like I Used To.
City of Glass is released on July 19th on Signature Sounds
