Jewly Hight for NPR –

On her sixth album, Grace, Lizz Wright translates with phenomenal fluency between inner awareness and outward demonstration, individual seeking and conscious communion, ecstasy and empathy. The achievement’s all the more remarkable when you consider that this 10-song set is the fruit of her will to overcome the alienation she felt from her native region in this distressingly divided political climate. Before completing the album with producer Joe Henry, she took a road trip through the rural South, reacquainting herself with the people and places she came from.

She told me that there was an urgency to the journey: “I need to remember what I know to be my home …and the way people relate and the way Southern people work, the way they cooperate, the way they’re in tune with the earth. I need to study that right now for my own well-being, because I know the truth. I know my life.”

Stream Grace and read the full review on NPR

Lizz Wright at TKA

Giovanni Russonello for THE NEW YORK TIMES –

The sensual and the spiritual have always been at play in the vocalist Lizz Wright’s music. On her new album, Grace, she adds to the scrum, mixing the sanctified with the political, the sexual with the social.

Cortez Franklin’s classic “Seems I’m Never Tired of Loving You,” taken at a slow, end-of-the-workday tromp, becomes a testimony of wearied patriotism. The title track, written by Rose Cousins as a torch song, is rendered here as a plea for collective ablution.

Ms. Wright recorded the album soon after last year’s presidential election. What had been planned as an ode to the American South became a declaration of redoubled faith, haunted by disappointment but not disillusion. “Grace” seems to draw its energy straight from the soil, with acoustic and electric guitars, organ and piano locked in an earthy symbiosis.

“Through this project, I really was sharing the same thing that I needed to remember myself,” Ms. Wright said in a phone interview. “I wanted to capture the sweetness of the South, and of my coming from it, and my experience of it.”

Read the full review on The New York Times

Lizz Wright at TKA