Artists

Coralise sings the things that happen between other things: the morning after a bad day, the shade side of a porch in August, a creek stone with a hole in it carried in a coat pocket for twenty years. Her voice sits between southern soul and front-porch country blues, warm and unhurried, with a smile you can hear coming a line before it arrives.

Nothing dramatic ever happens in her songs, and that is the point. A newspaper promising sun all week. Two neighbours comparing kitchens over a fence. Toast landing butter side down. She writes small and sings big, and lets a Hammond organ and a muted trumpet do the sighing while she gets on with the story.

She opened the Dust & Amber catalogue and still sets its tone: slow tempos, live-room warmth, choruses you can sing back on the second listen.

Wade Renfro has a baritone with gravel in the corners and a habit of arriving at the end of the evening. His are road songs and closing-time songs: six months of touring in the rear-view mirror, a twenty-year-old car bought with the money from the first record, two porch lights burning through the same rain.

He sings plainly and keeps the punchline for the last line. Where Coralise finds the joke in an ordinary day, Wade finds the thing nobody says out loud, and usually leaves it unsaid until the song is almost over.

He came to Dust & Amber for a duet and stayed for the whole record: clean electric guitar answering the vocal, brushed drums, a trumpet somewhere down the hall.