I first met Jaimee Harris at a Mary Gauthier concert in Glasgow. She was opening the show, and within two songs I knew I was watching someone special.
Jaimee grew up in Waco, Texas, playing cover songs during 15-minute breaks in her dad’s band from the age of ten. She went on to battle addiction, get arrested twice for drunk driving, and hit a point where she says she would have died if she hadn’t found her way out. The state of Texas actually told her to start drinking again so her insurance would cover rehab. She found another path instead. She’s now over eleven years sober and has turned every part of that journey into music.
Her debut album Red Rescue was compared to Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Her second record, Boomerang Town, got 9 out of 10 from Holler and landed on NPR’s New Music Friday. These are not polished Nashville songs about pickup trucks. They are real stories about real things: a classmate shot and killed in sixth grade, losing her mentor Jimmy LaFave to cancer, falling in love with Mary Gauthier, and figuring out what faith means when the version you grew up with no longer fits.
NPR called her the next queen of Americana folk. In this interview we talk about all of it: the sobriety, the songwriting, the moment Emmylou Harris walked into her show and she forgot her own lyrics, and what it takes to turn your worst chapters into songs that help other people survive theirs.
Cheers!
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