MALL AMERICAN GIRL

"When people ask me what I do, I say, ‘Oh, I’m a singer-songwriter, I do Americana music.’ And then I break it down to kind of explain that this is just American music, essentially.”

And Amythyst Kiah has been exploring the wild definitions of Americana for more than a decade. In 2020, “Black Myself,” a song Kiah wrote as a member of Our Native Daughters, was nominated for a Grammy

for Best American Roots Song. The irreproachable folk label Rounder released Kiah’s album Wary + Strange in 2021 and will release her third full-length, Still + Bright, in October. The upcoming album, in its choices of producer (Butch Walker, whose CV includes Taylor Swift and Green Day), themes (sci-fi, Eastern philosophy), collaborators (Billy Strings and Rancid’s Tim Armstrong), and sounds (mandolins, garage guitars), makes clear that any category of country that Amythyst Kiah finds herself in is going to have the kind of open borders that make a certain kind of purist wet their white sheet diaper.