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Local artist, Ro Myra has attended shows at Longstaff House and will be appearing on June 27th.

“I spent most of my life running away from it, and now I’m right back where I started.”

Nowhere, Nebraska, Myra’s extraordinary debut, is more than just a musical homecoming, though. Recorded over the last few years in Denver, Nashville, and Austin, the album is a complex reckoning with the past, a nuanced, literate reexamination of small-town life in the shadow of heartbreak, self-destruction, and second chances. While the arrangements here are broad and sweeping, Myra’s storytelling is sharply focused and firmly rooted, offering up rich, detailed character studies with keen insight and deep empathy. She writes with a novelist’s eye, isolating moments and emotions with surgical precision, and she sings with a weathered grace that makes the hard truths go down easy. The result is a warm embrace of an album all about memory and forgiveness, growth and pain, freedom and fate, a collection that calls to mind everything from Lucinda Williams to Bruce Springsteen to Lori McKenna to Brandi Carlile to Sheryl Crow as it makes peace with the past in order to more fully inhabit the present.

“This album was born out of an intention to become more of an observer in my daily life,” Myra explains. “I wanted to go back to this childlike state, to this honest, authentic space where I could try to understand the people and the places that shaped me, and maybe come to a better understanding of myself in the process.”