Portland, Oregon-based songwriter Darci Phenix bought her first bass guitar in her home town of Sacramento with the counsel of her mother, a lawyer turned musician, and Michael Roe, the leader of 80s rock group “The 77s.” A community of musicians and artists has always been the norm for Darci, from childhood where she would sit on shoulders during California’s Strawberry Music Festival, through her teenage years when she began to fine-tune her own compositions. Witnessing first hand the development of artists including Molly Tuttle and Alison Krauss, and being inspired by the likes of Jackie Green, Tim O’Brien, Emmylou Harris and John Prine. Darci’s exposure to the world of song from a young age made a lasting impact. Ten years after purchasing that first bass, Darci enlisted Michael Roe to handle the string arrangements on her debut album, “The Blue Period,” an album that Gold Flake Paint described as a “delicate paper doll’s house, revealing its rooms one by one.”
In true pandemic-era fashion, Darci’s new record, Wishbone, is a product of isolation, retrospection, and self-reckoning. Born out of 90,000 words of throw-away poems and rough drafts, walls covered in old pictures from National Geographic, and countless camping trips alone in Pacific Northwestern forests, Wishbone embodies Darci’s deeper commitment to the process of songwriting. With support from New Paltz, NY’s Team Love Records, her mother singing back-up vocals, and the same community of Sacramento musicians that helped raised her, Wishbone is an act of love. In a time where everyone needs a decade-long hug and no one is allowed to touch each other, Darci hopes this collection can do what songs do best, be the friend that asks for nothing in return, the teddy bear dragging behind you.
