Trust is a funny thing. One of my friends always said, “I trust people to be people.” I think this is wise. One area in which I trust another friend of mine beyond just being a person is in his musical tastes. He recently recommended Nikki Lane’s new album “Denim and Diamonds” to me and said it was “killer.” He was, once again, spot on.
First, I’m glad he told me about this because I wasn’t aware it had dropped yet. I’ve been looking forward to new material from Nikki. There’s so little new music coming out that is worth listening to that it’s nice to find something good. I enjoyed this album and added two songs to my playlist. They are titled “Good Enough” and “Faded.” There is a lot of good tracks on the album. These were just my two favorites.
While I did enjoy this album, I was concerned that they had picked the wrong genre based on the first two tracks. They sounded more like rock music to me than country. Nikki redeemed this on the rest of the album though. The remaining 8 tracks have a consistent western almost Willie Nelson vibe to them. I felt like I was entering a Quentin Tarantino movie or maybe some kind of parallel universe to Natural Born Killers. You’ll have to listen to the album to try and wrap your mind around this analogy – I know it’s a rough one.
I said this the last time that I blogged about Nikki, but it’s so cool she’s close to my age and from Greenville, SC. That’s a 45-minute ride from my house to her hometown. Keeping this in mind, I find her accent (at least singing) to be strange. She really does seem to be from a more Western part of the country when she sings. Although, there is a SC accent present too. I also found it interesting that some of her word choices were phrases we say locally very often. One of these that I heard was “all by my lonesome.” I have used this a lot and heard it said many times. She also paints some great pictures with the lyrics too. For instance, she says something about the “lamp of moonlight” – that may not be an exact quote. I love to see song writers do this.
I’ll close out by saying that I am very proud of my home state being represented in this genre by Nikki Lane. It is nice to see someone keeping this style of music not only alive but popular too. I’m looking forward to listening to more of her music. I would also like to see her live at some point. I’m sure she’ll be back in SC sometime. I’m buying tickets if I see that happen.
Check out Nikki Lane on Social Media and the web at the following links:
Web: nikkilane.com
Facebook: Nikki Lane
Instagram: Nikki Lane77