[Cover photo credit to Emma Ogilvie]

Singer/songwriter Annie Stokes will be releasing her new album, Ghostwriter on April 4th, 2025. It marks part of her wider embrace of personal storytelling in a musical story that goes back many years for her.

Stokes was fascinated by dance and entertainment from a young age, and grew up on the easternmost seam of the Blue Ridge Mountains and in college, she pursued the study of history and gender, which are two themes that come up frequently in her work. Having playes at open mics, bars, street festivals, and elsewhere in her 20s, she began committing to DIY music and making her own recordings for release around 2020.

We’re delighted to premier her new track here on Wildfire Music + News today, titled “Country Wife”, and taken from her upcoming album. “Country Wife” arrives on Friday, February 21st, 2025.

This is a song that packs in many surprising features and twists, but at heart follows the helpful trend of taking back terminology that has become cliche and investing it with new meaning, in this case the phrase “Country Wife.” Stokes takes hold of that idea with both hands and explores the sense of confinement that suburban life often brings, as well as the allure that escaping into a wilder, more down-to-earth life might hold. That becomes a new ideal of being a “country wife”, a woman who sets her own terms for her needs. In this case, that means embracing the natural environment, and seeking to “bear the burden of being okay.” The lyric “useful as a knife” also plays a key role in the song, combining something everyday and basic with its decisive qualities, and equating that with a country lifestyle. In essence, she seems to say there’s nothing limiting or wrong with being a country wife if you define those terms for yourself.

Musically, the song is a delightful and energetic outpouring of emotion, driven from the beginning by a powerful fiddle. The music keeps pace with what feels like a wild flight into freedom, and even when Stokes considers the missteps in her past that may have led to this need for change, the music helps bear the speaker towards a more hopeful future. It’s hard not to imagine this song being performed live and the energy it would bring to an audience, urging them to consider the things that they might have abandoned in life which could still be “useful” to them. While “Country Wife” is firmly rooted in Americana traditions, the explosive energy of the track calls to mind Irish and Scottish jigs and reels that elicit so much emotional participation from audiences as well.

Annie Stokes shares:

During the pandemic, I noticed two odd trends gaining popularity: homesteading and self-sufficiency, and traditional gender roles. While I intellectually (sort of) understood why people were coping with uncertainty by clinging to bygone eras, I find forced ideals of femininity to be at odds with daily survival. This song is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the empty allure of trad wives, and a very sincere nod to the lasting allure of wanting to feel happy and secure. 

For Stokes, who had begun creating her new album already, the pandemic period coincided with new motherhood, and she and her husband (and bandmate and co-writer) Will Berger found themselves with a newborn baby and a half-finished album.

She comments:

When you have a child, you have to squeeze an hour out of 20 minutes, and when the world is locked down, you have to pause. So we just cracked open some moments.

The result was their 2021 album, The One That Gets Away, which would go on to win the 2022 WAMMIE (Washington Area Music Award) for Best Country/Americana Album. Written and produced by Stokes and Berger, this album finally encapsulated the sound that had been gestating since Stokes’ busking days.

Stokes teamed up with producer Austin Bello for her 2023 EP Wild Rose, which had songs featured on season 6 of The Martha Bassett Show. She continued to work with Bello on her upcoming album, Ghostwriter.