When you press play on this new single from Rowan Newby, you’re going to notice that it bares some striking similarities to a number of acts from the Athens, Georgia scene; you can feel that sort of baroque pop spirits in the burrowing beneath Newby’s voice. That, my friends, is just one of the various ways that Rowan has begun to build his own country-songwriting legend; he’s not quite cosmic, nor purely traditional, so we get to look at him as an independent spirit, the way country music should be. There’s some nice backing arrangements in the track’s latter half that really show his willingness to kind of take on a ghostly spiritualism that stretched my expectations of where the song was heading. Keep an eye out for Rowan’s new LP, Some Hippie You Turned Out to Be.
-Nathan Lankford