As a Southern girl, a real breakfast (and sometimes dinner if there is shrimp involved) includes a big, buttery bowl of grits. Any self-respecting grits aficionado will tell you that while the five-minute kind will do if you’re in a pinch, there’s nothing like the stone-ground, long-cooking kind of grits. Those are a labor of love; they have to be treated carefully as you stand over the not-too-hot stove burner, slowly stirring and coaxing ground corn into creamy goodness—and the reward is ten times worth the effort.
Meet Della Ray, the Florence, Alabama-based husband-wife duo of Adam Morrow and Natalie Jensen, who, amidst other projects and musical efforts, nurtured their passion for a project together to delicately combine grains of lyrical truth with memories and experiences; this has resulted in Blue World, an ethereal new EP set for release on November 30th. ”This EP is really a collection of our earliest songs, when we first started thinking about what we wanted Della Ray to be,” Adam explains. “It got pushed to the backburner, but it was something we always thought about and worked on.”
“A big theme is trying to be empathetic with a song’s character,” he continues of the album’s songs. “There’s usually a singular presence kind of trying to take in the world or a situation, and the voice of the lyrics is either questioning that individual, or speaking for them. As you get older and collect experiences and grow (especially as a touring musician), the world and how you thought you understood it has to grow a lot, too, or it breaks,” he adds. “And a lot of that, if you stay emotionally engaged, has to do with at least attempting an empathetic view of the billions of realities that look nothing like your own. I really struggled with what a song should be, so this gave a nice frame to work with.”
The EP was created with Alabama Shakes keys player and groundbreaking producer Ben Tanner, along with Reed Watson, one of the Morrows’ oldest friends, who now plays in John Paul White’s band and Belle Adair with Adam. “Ben sat behind the console (and played a lot of the keyboards), and Reed played drums,” he recalls. “We did it in a little less than a week back in May 2016. A few months later, John asked me to go play guitar with him on the road. Ben sent me the final mix of the final song while I was in the van in Indiana on a winter night. Point A to Point B was pretty interesting on this one,” he explains. ”Putting this out now feels like turning the page on one chapter and starting a new one. We’re already working on the next batch of songs and can’t wait to keep this rolling in our new home.”
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