[Cover photo credit to Erica Nix]

Austin-based singer/songwriter Nichole Wagner has just released new album, Plastic Flowers, bringing together the threads of Folk, Pop, and Rock that she’s been exploring. Much of the writing for the album was born out of the COVID-era live music slowdown that hampered her plans to perform previous EP release Dance Songs For the Apocalypse.

She says:

These new songs are mostly out of the time when we were on lockdown and I was really having to sit with myself, alone, and had the chance to consider which relationships in my life were causing more harm than good, and how I actually wanted to show up for myself and others.

It’s been nearly a decade since Wagner braved her first open mic, which she followed with a solo acoustic EP, a 2018 full-length (And The Sky Caught Fire), an edgier, more experimental 2020 EP Dance Songs For the Apocalypse that blended originals with covers of Talking Heads (“Life During Wartime” ) and Neil Young (“Ambulance Blues”).

The album’s title track was born from therapy sessions that suggested writing letters to people, including yourself, to lay out your feelings, even if you never intend to send them.

Wagner explains:

Every verse in Plastic Flowers is looking at a different relationship in my life, whether it be romantic, platonic or familial, and thinking about what that letter might say.

Recorded in Austin, TX with producer & engineer Justin Douglas, Plastic Flowers is an invitation to a wider audience, but also a “life-affirming chapter” in Nichole Wagner’s ongoing musical conversation.