When Ohio-born Megan Palmer began writing songs in earnest somewhere around 2004, she was a violinist gigging with Ontario-based Luther Wright & the Wrongs, known for their bluegrass reworking of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. This exercise in genre twisting serves as well as any to hint at the range of stylistic territory spanned in Palmer’s own music, which straddles the Americana and adult alternative radio formats while drawing from an even wider-ranging palette of influences that she blurs into original hues. Her voice, attractively austere and affectation-free, is nonetheless versatile enough to suit the varied styles housing her intelligent lyrics and deft melodies.

Palmer discovered a mettle she wasn’t aware was there after an X-ray found something unexpected inside her: breast cancer. The diagnosis arrived in doubly disheartening tandem with the June 2016 release of her fifth (and first Nashville-recorded) album, What She’s Got to Give, scuttling plans for a string of summer shows. Palmer filled the advance orders, played two release shows, and pulled the plug on everything for about a year.
Now gratefully cancer-free and back in action, Palmer — who’s also a part-time nurse — says that being forced to switch caregiver and patient roles “tweaked something in my writing. Instead of writing about how everybody was annoying me, I wanted to write about...what it’s like to be vulnerable.”
This new development will doubtlessly flavor her next album — the wistful, as-yet-unreleased “Stetson” chronicles the inevitable hair loss of cancer treatment and poetically imagines “a ‘perfect’ hat as a way to keep me in my body, perhaps more metaphysically than physically,” she explains. But even before turning a personal corner and still prone to writing about her aggravations, Palmer was writing therapeutically and, to an extent, vulnerably.