Austin-based singer-songwriter Nichole Wagner finds art in balance, the complexity and duality that meaningful artists embrace then reflect in their craft and performance. A crafter of vulnerable and melancholy original songs who has the tenacity to make room for herself in a crowded music scene and finds great joy in doing it. A child of rural Colorado finding her adult self at home in one of modern music’s most crowded hubs. A petite presence who can tower onstage on the strength of talent and confidence and stands on the precipice of a major breakthrough.
It’s been nearly a decade since Wagner braved her first open mic, years that she has filled with ambitious and shape-shifting music. A solo acoustic EP in the early going to get her feet wet. A 2018 full-length (And The Sky Caught Fire) to flesh out that vision with fuller arrangements and deeper material (including signature songs like “Rules of Baseball” and “Yellow Butterfly”). An edgier, more experimental 2020 EP Dance Songs For the Apocalypse that showcased covers like Talking Heads (“Life During Wartime,” which scored some notable satellite radio play) and Neil Young (“Ambulance Blues,” which won the approval of rock legend Young himself).
It all set the table for Plastic Flowers, her newest and most ambitious effort, synthesizing and expanding the threads of folk, pop, and rock she’s explored with a new emotional focus to bind them together. Much of the writing was born out of the COVID-era live music slowdown that hampered her plans to capitalize on Dance Songs For the Apocalypse but gave her space to look inward for new creative inspiration. “These new songs are mostly out of the time when we were on lockdown and I was really having to sit with myself, alone,” Wagner explains, “and had the chance to consider which relationships in my life were causing more harm than good, and how I actually wanted to show up for myself and others.”
Leading up to the release of Plastic Flowers, Wagner has dropped 4 well received singles. “Monsters”, which leads off the album, embraces a courage that comes from acknowledging the fears we all have and tend to fill our lives up to avoid. Glide Magazine said at the time of release, “Wagner delivers a lonesome earnest melodic touch that incorporates the storybook musings of Neko Case and Jenny Lewis atop an engaging singer-songwriter vulnerability. Wagner takes on the isolating theme of depression valiantly, using her lyrical and musical chops as her pull through.”
Next Nichole gave the world, “Raised by Wolves” a track that confronts the sometimes difficult dynamic of dealing with our families. . Wagner says of the song “I had started this song after many conversations about how some of the things people were expecting as “normal” just confounded me. I had attributed this at the time to how my family communicated, and to some addiction issues in my family. In the time since writing it, I’ve discovered that it also speaks to my late-diagnosis with neurodivergence.” Americana Highways praised the track, stating it is a “demonstration of the depth that Wagner is capable of”. .
Later in the album the title track, which Rachel Cholst of Adobe & Teardrops lauded as being full of “confident riff and folk rock swagger”, was born from therapy sessions that suggest writing letters to people including yourself to lay out your feelings, even if you never intend to send them, in Wagner’s own words, “Every verse in Plastic Flowers is looking at a different relationship in my life, whether it be romantic, platonic or familial, and thinking about what that letter might say.”. Rounding out the singles from the album is “A Way With It”, a co-write with Jeremy Parsons, that tackles addiction from multiple perspectives.
Plastic Flowers meets its songs of hope, fear and self-awareness with bigger, fuller sounds evoking modern Americana rock, dream pop, and the crisp acoustic folk Wagner made her name on in the first place. Recorded in Austin, TX with producer & engineer Justin Douglas helping bring her visions to larger life, Plastic Flowers feels like not only an invitation to a wider listenership but also the next vulnerable, life-affirming chapter in Nichole Wagner’s ongoing conversation with the audience who has been listening from the start.
Photos
Click for high-res download.
