Five years since her debut album Delivery, Mikaela Davis has moved away from her hometown of Rochester, shared the stage with the likes of Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Christian McBride, Bon Iver, Lake Street Dive and Circles Around the Sun and entered a new decade. But it’s the ever-evolving relationships between her closest friends and bandmates that has propelled the Hudson Valley-based artist onto her new album And Southern Star—a truly collaborative effort that ruminates on the choices we make, and the people we always come back to. Davis earned her degree in harp performance at the Crane School of Music, and has molded her classical music training to create an original and genre-bending catalog that weaves together 60s pop-soaked melodies, psychedelia and driving folk rock. She met her bandmates at pivotal moments in her life—drummer Alex Coté in childhood, guitarist Cian McCarthy and bassist Shane McCarthy in college, and steel guitarist Kurt Johnson in her early twenties. It’s the band’s collective step into adulthood that has informed much of And Southern Star’s thematic landscape.

Over the course of her kaleidoscopic career, Bridget Kearney has followed her voracious creativity to a wildly eclectic series of musical projects. Along with touring the world and releasing a growing number of critically praised albums as a founding member of Lake Street Dive, the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist has brought her sophisticated musicality to such varied collaborations as indie-folk/chamber-pop outfit Cuddle Magic and bluegrass band Joy Kills Sorrow, joined forces with fellow musical polymath Benjamin Lazar Davis for a culture-bending album made in Ghana with such acclaimed West African musicians as Stevo Atambire, and shown her more idiosyncratic and introspective side on her 2017 solo debut Won’t Let You Down. At the heart of every effort is Kearney’s distinct gift as a songwriter: a profound capacity to capture complex emotional truths with empathy and humor and unfettered imagination, each song revealing her rare power to endlessly surprise both the audience and herself.