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.” 

Darci’s new record, her first for New Paltz NY’s Team Love Records, expands from her debut both in terms of its sonic reach and the influences being tapped. Darci tells of being played Kate Wolf, Little Feat and The Grateful Dead while still in the womb, and she imagines those subtle and preconscious sounds are now manifesting in her own song-writing and lyrical creations. Entitled “Juniper Street,” the new record brings to the forefront these influences and crafts them to a fine point. It’s a mix of all that is great about the rich songwriting past she’s come to identify as a part of her self, and her own personal experiences as a young person navigating America in the early the part of 21st century. 

“Juniper Street” is out October 5th on Team Love Records.