Kristina Murray Premieres 'Watchin' the World Pass Me By' Video and Announces New Album Little Blue on Normaltown/New West

If you do what you do for long enough, it'll always come back around. The hardest part is sitting it out. It's the waiting around for it to happen that most of us can't handle, but if you stick around long enough, you're going to become fashionable eventually.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up," that inveterate good ol' boy Thomas Edison once wrote, and Kristina Murray has been in touching distance for a while now. Which is why Little Blue, Murray's first album since Southern Ambrosia in 2018, and her first with Normaltown/New West Records, feels like a timely return for one Nashville's truest believers. Kristina Murray's moment truly feels like it's come back around and she's made a record to meet it.

Having spent the last decade playing across Music City's dive bars and juke joints paying her honky tonk dues, it's fitting that, 'Watchin’ The World Pass Me By,' the first taste of the new album, should be a song about just that.

“After living in Nashville for over ten years, you get to seein’ it all," Kristina Murray shares. "A kiss off to the music business, the arbitrariness of success, and the sometimes strong desire to quit it all and move to the beach, this song’s got quite a few easter eggs for the careful listener. Ultimately, all I want to do is sit in a honky tonk with a beer and a great jukebox and listen to the classics.”

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 mother’s car.

"I fell in love with country music when I was five listening to a Patsy Cline greatest hits tape in the car, and then again age eight, when I heard Terri Clark’s ‘No Fear’ one afternoon at summer camp in Toccoa," Murray wrote in a recent post on social media if anyone was looking for an understanding of where she's coming from. "To go along with my Dad’s At Fillmore East and Blood on the Tracks records, Momma had Emmylou’s Quarter Moon and a Jessi Greatest Hits album that I would stare at endlessly pouring over the liner notes."

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 at the Legion and also became one of the first women to front a band at local favourite dive bar Santa’s Pub.

“I felt stuck,” she says, recalling how she felt when her breakthrough success didn't break through quite as far as it had looked like it was going to. “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.”

"Time after time after time and again and again I been left out, left behind and misunderstood," she sings, laying down a rightful claim to Nashville's non-conformist country throne. "And I get so tired of watching ‘em livin’ my dreams / I got to get to gettin’ while the gettin’s good / So I ain’t got a choice But to sit around in a honky tonk listenin’ to that old jukebox play them sad old lonesome country songs / Rockin’ a bar stool, tryin’ not to cry / Just watching the world pass me by."

Channelling the swampy country funk of Tony Joe White and stirring it all up with a little of Sammi Smith's smokey eyed swagger and Bobbie Gentry's Southern insouciance, it's no surprise to learn that the album was recorded in Muscle Shoals, AL as well as Nashville. Produced by Misa Arriaga (Kacey Musgraves, Wyatt Flores) and Rachael Moore (T Bone Burnett’s longtime engineer), it features guest appearances from Logan Ledger and Erin Rae as Murray grapples with loneliness, desperation and existential crises through a series of cinematic snapshots of small-town burnouts and last call lovers.

“I just wrote and wrote and stockpiled songs for the right opportunity,” she explains about writing the songs for Little Blue. “I knew I needed to level up. I’ve been to some pretty low places these last ten years. 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."

"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," she says. "But making peace with that sadness is what allows you to carry on and find joy and meaning and purpose.”

Watch the video for 'Watchin’ The World Pass Me By' directed by Joshua Shoemaker below.

Kristina Murray has announced her initial tour dates in support of Little Blue. Prior to her album release celebration on May 9th in Nashville, TN, she will appear at this year’s SXSW Music Festival in Austin, TX next month.

Kristina Murray Little Blue Track Listing:

1. You Got Me

2. Has Been

3. The After Midnight Special

4. Fool’s Gold

5. Watchin’ The World Pass Me By

6. Get Down To It (feat. Logan Ledger)

7. Just A Little While Longer

8. Phenix City

9. Little Blue

Kristina Murray’s Little Blue will be available across digital platforms, compact disc, and standard black vinyl via Normaltown/New West Records.