Shoals Fest After Party w/Caleb Elliott and Mary Bragg

Shoals Fest After Party w/Caleb Elliott and Mary Bragg

CALEB ELLIOTT

Born and raised in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Caleb Elliott is far from your typical preacher’s son-turned-musician. With his father a pastor and his mother the church pianist, Elliott was immersed in traditional hymns from an early age, but it was his love for classical cello that would eventually jumpstart his musical career. While attending college in Lafayette, Elliott began playing 4-6 nights a week to support himself, your typical “covers gigs,” as he describes it. During this period of persistent gigging, he released his first EP of original songs in 2012, which had a surprising effect: now, everyone wanted him to play cello on their records. 

As a session musician, Elliott began lending cello to all kinds of albums in the Lafayette music scene, culminating in a moment that would change his trajectory and finally move him out of Louisiana. In 2014, singer-songwriter Dylan LeBlanc met Elliott and encouraged him to relocate to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he still resides today. Once settled in the Shoals, Elliott became the go-to cellist for an elite collective of collaborators such as Nicole Atkins, John Paul White, members of Alabama Shakes, Maggie Rose, and Cedric Burnside, whose 2021 record I Be Trying won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. 

As a singer-songwriter, Elliott released his debut record Forever to Fade in 2019, followed by Weed, Wine & Time in 2023 (both via Single Lock Records). He has opened for a variety of artists such as Alabama Shakes, Penny & Sparrow, Gaz Coombes (Supergrass), Sean McConnell, The White Buffalo, Fruition, and The Secret Sisters (who are featured on his recent single). This year, he follows up Weed, Wine & Time with two new singles, “Dead Ringer (feat. Andy Baxter)” and “Without Warning,” in which sonic influences like Harry Nilsson, Andrew Bird, and Louisiana’s own Bobby Charles can be heard woven throughout Elliott’s melodies and arrangements. 

When he is not recording and touring his solo project, Elliott is an active co-writer, with writing credits on songs like Mary Gauthier’s “Thank God for You” and Billy Allen + The Pollies “It’s Okay,” which was recruited as the theme song for Netflix’s The Madness. Elliott’s own songs have been featured on the Showtime series Shameless and the Marvel series Daredevil: Born Again. More recently, Elliott has found a love for co-producing records with long-time collaborator Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes), shepherding in the next generation of folk artists. As a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, session musician, co-writer, and producer, Elliott invokes a studied and heartfelt multi-disciplinary approach to bringing songs to life.

MARY BRAGG

Every great song is essentially a secret told to a stranger. And when the truth is clear, the stranger recognizes themselves in it. Mary Bragg describes the title Secrets to Strangers as a "zoomed-out representation" of her latest release, a collection of deeply personal stories offered to the outside world. "All these spaces are invitations to share a truth for the sake of connecting your own experience to another human being's," Bragg says.

Across twelve songs, she approaches memory, longing, and self-acceptance with grace and lyrical finesse. Recorded at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, a legendary room that captured landmark records by Aretha Franklin, Etta James, and countless others, one gets the sense, as more of Bragg's songs go to tape, that what is taking place will be a major career breakthrough. The hooky "Kid Flamingo," the bossa-tinged "I Like It Here," a poetic embrace of life's messiness: all come to life with co-producers Ben Tanner and John Paul White, stretching Americana to include indie rock, pop, early '80s radio vibes, and southern soul. "It's geographically neutral," Bragg says. "I like that it's not trying to satisfy the bounds of one genre." A dream team of players including Chad Gamble (Jason Isbell's 400 Unit), bassist Zac Cockrell (Alabama Shakes), and guitarist/keyboardist Jay Gonzalez (Drive-By Truckers) helped build the album alongside collaborators Maia Sharp, Mindy Smith, and John Paul White.

Bragg has quietly become one of Americana's most admired artists. NPR called her breakout Lucky Strike "one of the year's best," and Rolling Stone praised Violets as Camouflage for its "mix of classic country twang and gentle chamber-pop." A Berklee-trained producer herself, she handed off production duties this time, wanting to "expand what the songs could become in a way that was newly open to possibility."

The result is an album about giving yourself permission to enter a day without all the answers. "I hope that people who hear the record will immediately feel called to honor their own voices," Bragg says, "to hear their own joy and pain, and say, 'Yeah, that's me too.'"

Praised by World Café for her "refined, sumptuously melancholy take on Southern storytelling," Bragg has opened for the Indigo Girls, The Secret Sisters, Caroline Spence & more. A staple of the Nashville music scene, she has played the Bluebird Cafe dozens of times and tours regularly across the US, Canada, and Europe, both with her band and solo. Known for her generosity as a collaborator, she has become a central figure in a community of artists who continue to lift each other up.