Violet Delancey

Violet Delancey grew up in Southern California, close to the clubs and recording studios where artists like Gram Parsons carved out their own brand of country music during the 1970s. Even so, it took a move to London — where Delancey studied Mythology as a graduate student, then switched gears by launching into a songwriting career — for her to fall head-over-heels in love with the music of her home country. Maybe it was the distance from home that fired up her muse. Whatever the reason, Delancey began writing her own music during her time abroad, first as a California ex-pat living halfway across the world, and later as a new resident of Nashville, TN. She moved to Nashville in late 2013, drawn to the same city that had energized many of her favorite artists. She wanted to drink from the same well that had fueled her influences — to take the songs she'd written in an East London flat and perform them in the world capital of country music. Her academic background in Mythology helped to inspire her writing. Delancey had spent years studying the ways in which certain stories appeared throughout time in different cultures. She'd realized that good songwriters were also some of the finest storytellers in recent history. Inspired by Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, she began writing songs that told their own stories — stories circulating around her coming-of-age in Los Angeles, her travels abroad, and her new life in the Bible Belt. When it came time to combine those songs into a proper album, Delancey turned to Brent Truitt, an East Nashville record producer whose credits include Dolly Parton and Allison Krauss. The two co-wrote wrote a handful of additional songs for the record that would eventually become When the Clock Strikes Midnight, and reached out to some of the best players in Nashville's music community to join them in the studio. Included in the mix were Grammy winners like guitarist Bryan Sutton and fiddle player Stuart Duncan. Together, the group recorded When the Clock Strikes Midnight, a record that frames Delancey's melodies with everything from pedal steel to accordion to mandolin. The result is Violet Delancey's own version of Emmylou Harris' groundbreaking work with the Hot Band during the 1970s. It's a modern album rooted in tradition; an album that takes the best of both worlds — the classic, left-of-center country music pioneered by Delancey's idols, as well as the freshness and fierceness of a new songwriter who, after years of studying other people's stories, is ready to spin some of her own — and rolls them into something new. By Andrew Leahey