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The Applestones make genre-bending, vocal-forward Americana built for close listening. Eighteen years of Danielle Applestone and Joseph Wharton's originals, reborn with acclaimed studio guitarist and producer Nicky Moroch into a debut that says the thing out loud. Real feelings, honest songs.

The Applestones began not in a studio, but in a parking lot in Arkansas, where a stranger named Nicky Moroch was trying to sell an amp to Danielle's dad. That stranger turned out to be an acclaimed studio guitarist and producer, and when Danielle Applestone heard him playing at a family jam gathering at Camp Clearfork, she asked to sit in. "You got any originals?" he asked. "All I've got is originals," she said. Six songs in, Nicky offered to help make an album. What he'd stumbled onto was a stack of songs, some written nearly two decades earlier, some co-written with longtime collaborator Joseph Wharton, that had never been given a proper home. Nicky heard something in them worth producing, and what followed was two and a half years of recording and mixing across studios including Whip Records in Berkeley and Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, on a mixing board rumored to have passed through Motown and Madonna's hands. The sessions brought together a wide cast of musicians and engineers — a Grammy-winning audio engineer, Gerry Brown, a violin once played in the original Wizard of Oz, and a group of collaborators who gave this project their all. The result is a genre-bending, vocal-forward record built for close listening: intricate arrangements, powerful vocals, and songs that go looking for the thing you might not want to say out loud — grief, estrangement, longing, rage, and the slow work of turning old wounds into scars. Think the technical chord work of Madison Cunningham crossed with the warm, country-edged heart of Brandi Carlile. It's sophisticated Americana with some quirk to it. This is a debut eighteen years in the making, born from a chance encounter and carried forward by people who believed in the songs before the songs believed in themselves. Genre-bending, vocal-forward, unapologetically honest. The Applestones say the thing out loud.