Liza Kate

Songwriters will maintain that sad songs are the easiest to write. This may be true, but it's not the whole truth. Profoundly sad songs - those that climb up into your chest and make it hard to breathe for loneliness, and make your whole body ache like a fleshy, living and hurting and dying thing - these songs are one in a million. Richmond, Virginia's Liza Kate writes songs like this, but they are unassuming and deceptively brief, existing as a quick-lit candle and then gone, epigrammatic crystals of scene, of situation.

Like the best writers of Southern literature, Liza Kate finds power in restraint, saying only what's necessary but meaning more than she says. "I feel like I'm overstaying my welcome all the time," she suggests, before silencing her audience with seemingly effortless music that may be devastating, or beautiful, or both.

Her geographical history reads like a well-worn map: Texas, Florida, New York, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Back to Florida, Richmond. She spent her childhood in constant migration and relocation, following the railroad routes of her father and the iron lines that employed him. Don't Let The Dogs tracks her movements through relationships, state lines, family ties, loneliness; it's an offering of the blues, a humble lesson in honesty and humility. Here, in the stack of snapshots, she is still. And you will believe her.

Genres: Folk, Indie, Singer-Songwriter, Alternative Country, Southern Gothic