Jaimee Harris

With this concert, Jaimee Harris will be making her Godfrey’s debut on our stage.

This Austin-based country folk singer-songwriter is said to have the sort of voice “that reaches into your heart and makes you feel less alone, more connected, and somehow seen. In the tradition of Leonard Cohen, Johnette Napolitano, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, and Emmylou Harris, her rich tones and emotive delivery are as perfect for big wide open sky road trips out to the country as they are for introspective rainy days spent mulling over your tea and your dreams. ” ~ Cindy Emch, Country Queer.

Harris’s sophomore effort, Boomerang Town marks a bold step forward for her. It is an arresting, ambitious song-cycle that explores the generational arc of family, the stranglehold of addiction, and the fragile ties that bind us together as Americans.

For Harris, the album began gestating around 2016, a time of great loss for many in the Americana community, with the songwriter losing several musicians close to her. The shift in the nation’s political landscape had ushered in a new level of polarization that saw whole swaths of cultural life being demonized. For someone who grew up in a small town outside of Waco, Harris believed the values instilled in her by her parents were not entirely in line with how many on the left were viewing — and vilifying — Christians, citing them as responsible for the new change in leadership.

As a person in recovery, Harris has had to re-evaluate her own connection to faith and find strength in a higher power (“Though he’s not necessarily a blue-eyed Jesus,” she laughs), though she certainly knows what it’s like to “be told how to vote” in a Southern church setting. 

Boomerang Town traces the fortunes of a host of characters who live on the knife’s edge between hope and despair. The title track, whose sound recalls the best of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s ’90s work, features a young couple from a small-town working dead-end jobs who get “knocked up” and have their dreams put on hold. It is a portrait of rural desperation and the restless search for salvation against long odds. “This is what it’s like to be a part of the post- “‘Born To Run’ Generation,” Harris quips. “Springsteen’s generation had somewhere to run to. I’m not so sure mine does.” For the characters in these songs, escape isn’t always a matter of geographical distance.

“Jaimee Harris has been making waves with her emotive, stirringly honest songwriting that walks the often thin line between folk and country. Whatever you want to call it, it rides on the smooth instrument of Harris’s vocals and her courageous storytelling lyricism.” — Kim Ruehl, Folk Alley

CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT JAIMEE PERFORMING THE TITLE TRACK TO “BOOMERANG TOWN.”