Dougie Poole is a musician and songwriter living in Los Angeles. Coming of age in Providence, Rhode Island’s DIY scene in the early 2010’s, he dabbled in heavier and more experimental music before maturing into a country auteur.

On The Rainbow Wheel of Death, Poole’s 3rd release via Wharf Cat Records, he breathes new life into country music, retaining the acclaimed elements of his previous work — drum machines, acoustic guitars, synthesizers, and his deep-set voice — while pushing toward something warm, organic, and prismatic.

Nicole Lawrence is your favorite musician’s secret weapon, having toured globally with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Coldplay, Devendra Banhart, King Tuff, and Mary Timony, performing live on Late Night with Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten, collaborating in-studio with Neil Hagerty on a Howling Hex album, and soloing on pedal steel alongside none other than Bruce Springsteen at MetLife Stadium.

On her debut solo LP, Time In Love, she introduces her own voice, one of dryly poetic, road-tested wisdom, with the casual brilliance of a sought-after six-string heavyweight. Deftly weaving threads between the bar-smoke virtuosity of J.J. Cale to the slack eccentricity of early Beck, Nicole Lawrence’s debut effort shows the arresting confidence and refreshing wit of a seasoned artist who knows her craft inside and out—and knows what she wants to say with it.

In quiet moments off the road, at home in Los Angeles, Lawrence began to write—at first, eschewing solos and full-band arrangements in favor of unaccompanied “weirdo country-folk songs.” As the songs developed, they started to reveal themes of interdependency, of intimacy and tension, of relationships and freedom—and a clear craving for more collaborative instrumentation. “I learned to trust my ideas and let them live,” Lawrence reflected as the songs became mirrors through which she could sort out relationships, and reflect the world around her. With the creative mentorship of Mary Timony (Helium, Ex Hex) and collaboration with Jack Graddis, who contributed on arrangements and played bass and rhythm guitar, Lawrence started to channel these songs into explorations of the real and dark terrain of maturity. There evolved a joyful kind of creative abandon: one made possible by the trust of working with kindred partners, and an intimacy with one’s own inner material.

“A lot of themes in rock and country music are really about self-sufficient, individualistic, loner bootstrapism. Though I’m influenced by that, I quickly noticed that was not the message I wanted to put out there,” Lawrence remarks on her writing evolution. “I wanted to cultivate more themes of community and collectivism, and how relationships can be constructive, in contrast to ‘I can do it on my own’ attitudes.” Influenced as much by Blind Faith and Bluesbreakers albums as she was the societal commentaries of films like Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Linklater’s Slacker, the Coen Brothers’ Big Lebowski, and even the political philosophy of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, Lawrence traverses the heady and expansive terrain between the micro- and the macro-relational with brave vulnerability. Opening up to the idea of acceptance, not through approval of reality-as-is but rather as a recognition of the true facts of living, this record is “me working through some of these challenges we face collectively,” and of discovering and creating joy as its impetus.

Recorded primarily at Studio 606 in Los Angeles, Lawrence tracked the album on the same 80-series Neve console as the most impactful album from her youth: Nirvana’s Nevermind, linking the board’s inherent sonic elements with the psychic imprints on Lawrence’s musical DNA. As for working in the studio, Lawrence wanted to capture the tension-balancing texture of human interaction between her and other players, live to tape, never cutting more than three takes and often keeping the first. There’s a “kineticism in the recordings themselves,” Lawrence notes about the dynamic between players. “Capturing a performance is essential,” she explains, as the record itself is as much an expression of her inner evolution as it is a mark of her interconnected relationships to music, to partners, to herself, and to the wildly big, often dark, and very real world around her: “it's a living thing.”