Finally Friday with Nick Nace and Andrew Duhon

In the early months of the pandemic, with touring out of the question and Nashville’s music industry shutdown, singer-songwriter Nick Nace decided to return to his native Canada to be close to family and familiarity during that unprecedented period. He discovered quickly that the months ahead would likely prove to be a creatively fertile time. This is when the songs for The Harder Stuff, his latest full-length album, began to take shape.

“The record is really about relationships,” Nace says. “It’s about how tricky and absurd and beautiful it is to just be a human on a day-to-day basis and how the past couple of years have really brought us, and me especially, face to face with what I call ‘the harder stuff.’”Speaking of the title track, kissed with lilting pedal steel that leads along a gently strummed acoustic guitar, it’s an unconventional take on a rather conventional sort of country tune – the drinking song. “it’s about how everything around you can go wrong, and things can go bad, but whiskey never seems to go bad and is there through thick and thin, but also looks into what the harder stuff in life really is.”

Nick Nace performs songs from his new album The Harder Stuff for WMOT’s Finally Friday From Home series.

The tracks on Andrew Duhon’s new album, Emerald Blue, show serious time spent in listening mode-both to himself, and to the world around him. From rich Americana twang and propulsive, clacking percussion of “Promised Land,” to the vintage rhythm-and-blues grooves of “Digging Deep Down,” Andrew Duhon meditates on what it means to be present and true, whether that’s to yourself and your ambition (“Down From The Mountain, “As Good As It Gets”) to a lover (“Southpaw” and“Plans”) or to a wider world whose fraught and violent track record demands meaningful acknowledgment, reckoning, and change.

The meditative “Everybody Colored Their Own Jesus,” is an appreciation of some basic wisdom from his church-school days: that faith, respect, and love are boundless and have no particular colors, traits, or rules. These are songs that come from a very particular time and place when so many of us–often alone with our flaws and feelings, with few of our regular, dependable distractions were forced to face hard truths. And yet, using the time-tested language of folk, of the blues, storytelling and soul-searching, voice and keys and strings, Andrew Duhon proves himself worthy of heroes like John Prine.

Andrew Duhon performs “Promised Land,” “Emerald Blue,” “Just Another Beautiful Girl,” and “Slow Down” for WMOT’s Finally Friday From Home series.