[Cover photo credit to Sandlin Gaither]

South Carolinian Angela Easterling has previously released six albums, including Witness, and is a four-time Kerrville New Folk Finalist. Those who have been following her work know to expect great things from her, and her next project is her most ambitious yet, a narrative collection that may just make the leap in a more theatrical direction before long. It’s also a project very deeply rooted in her own family’s history.

Songs From The Knoxville Project, which will arrive on September 28th, 2026, is grounded in Appalachian Folk traditions and is a “Civil War tale without any literal battles but plenty of fighting.” It’s also a “celebration of hope in times of hopelessness.”

To dive deeper into the story behind the project, it looks at the female experience of being on the “right side of history but the wrong side of time” in Easterling’s family where one of her ancestors, Narcissus Middleton, who was a Union sympathizer, had to take her young children with her on a treacherous journey on foot from Confederate territory in North Carolina to Union territory in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Today, we’re very pleased to premier the song “Trouble” taken from the new project. The song arrives widely this Friday, August 7th, 2026. “Trouble” is a track that occurs early in the storyline of the collection, introducing us to the conflicts and the difficulties coming up further down the road.

This track is refreshingly modern feeling and accessible, even though it’s carefully crafted via Appalachian traditions, and carries so much rich history for Easterling. She’s clearly focused on a process of translating and processing her research into eloquent and universal terms, focusing on character and emotion. The sound of the song is lilting and reflective, swirling into the moody and melancholic as the narrator looks ahead. The universal idea of trouble, something that can come back “for another round” is something that a modern mother just trying to pay the bills can relate to, but here in the context of Easterling’s project, we know that the narrator is watching a world begin to descend into chaos. This marks an excellent moment of perspective, something of a calm before the storm breaks, where we can see the emotional turmoil brewing for a particular family.

The gothic, chillier elements of sound in the song are accentuated by fiddle and and other instrumental interludes, conjuring almost visually the feeling of a storm approaching. The fear creeping up in the song sets the stage for the story’s later development as our narrator fears for her children and, understandably, still wants to hold onto a normal life, even as that becomes impossible. We also see the seeds of determination taking root in her, and a clear-eyed look at what it’s going to take to survive, even as she admits that fear is “deep under my skin.” It’s interesting that the song’s narrator may even see things coming down the road before other people glimpse them, and intimate in an intuitive way what she made need to do to protect her family. In this way, Easterling points to the role of women in enabling the survival of families during enormous upheavals, and she humanizes all of this by focusing on a known historical figure and her journey. All in all, it’s an excellent stage-setter, with a strong prevailing mood, leading into the rest of The Songs from the Knoxville Project.

To tell this bigger story on the album, Easterling went with a Folk approach, including mandolin, fiddle and acoustic guitars. She reached out to the Southern music community and brought in great collaborators like former Emmylou Harris vocalist Fayssoux McLean and Americana champion Will Kimbrough, as well as Carolina locals like Darby Wilcox, Elizabeth McCorvey, Admiral Radio, and Audrey Neel and Molly Johnson of the Bluegrass trio, The Wilder Flower.

Players also included Sam Kruer on bass, Matt Purinton on mandolin, Robert Gowan on fiddle, and Angela’s musical/life partner Brandon Turner playing multiple guitars, banjo and dobro. The album was co-Produced by Turner and Ian Guthrie and recorded in South Carolina at Studio 101.

To help pay for this recording, Angela received a prestigious grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Another grant was provided by the Metropolitan Arts Council of Greenville, SC, and funding from Easterling’s own fans who generously gave to her Kickstarter.

Songs from the Knoxville Project sounds like a concept album, but it’s actually a bigger animal and leads to more than one album.

Easterling says:

I’ve been working on it for the last three years. I’ve written close to 30 songs. To me, it’s an Appalachian folk musical. I’d love to see it on the stage with a full cast, all the kids, everything.