Bluegrass fans remember Courtney Hartman as the fiery flatpicker with prog grassers Della Mae, and before that with her family band, The Hartmans, back in Colorado.
Since moving on from the Dellas, Courtney has relocated to New York City and created a partnership with singer and old time banjoist Taylor Ashton. The duo are touring now in support of their debut release on Free Dirt Records, Been On Your Side. Officially releasing August 31, they asked us to premiere a track ahead of time to share their music with all of our readers.
Nature Of Us is neither pure bluegrass nor old time. You might call it contemporary folk if you need a label, but whatever you call it, you’re sure to find it to be a deeply reflective song about kinship and intimacy.
Hartman tells us a bit about how the song came to be…
“It is rare to find trusted relationships from which art grows. I wrote Nature of Us with a dear friend of mine and Taylor’s, Maya de Vitry. It stands to be one of the very few songs I have ever written from start to finish sitting beside someone. We wrote by the edge of Percy Priest Lake, outside of Nashville, threading the song together slowly, until the sun had snuck away from us. The lyrics speak to a depth of friendship, to those relationships whose subtle complexities can only be described as ‘the nature of us’.”
You can see Courtney & Taylor’s tour schedule online to try and catch them when they come your way. They are in Colorado this week and next, then returning to the east coast for a run of shows leading up to a visit to the UK in October.
