Bella White has a voice that Rolling Stone calls “sublime Appalachian heartbreak.” The Bluegrass Situation says “Bella White may be the next Queen of Country and Bluegrass Heartache.” Her bio gives us a hint of why that may be the case.

Although she hails from the Canadian city of Calgary, the 22-year-old singer/multi-instrumentalist grew up on the classic country and old-time music she first discovered thanks to her father, a Virginia native who played in bluegrass bands all throughout her childhood.

The first album for this Victoria, BC-based singer/songwriter — Just Like Leaving — “balances her old-soul musicality with a lyrical perspective that’s entirely of-the-moment, embracing an intense self-awareness as she documents her coming-of-age in real-time.” You can hear both in this live version of the title track, with its beautiful, evocative chorus.

And I’ve been grieving since I left old Carolina | The bars on my window didn’t leave me safe at night | Now I’ve chased your love cause I thought it might feel woolen | Like a dram on a damn cold winters night.

Her new album, released in April on Rounder Records, is Among Other Things. In the video of her debut on the Grand Ole Opry, White gives us a bit of her bio and why she’s producing the music the way she does. As she says, her songs tend to go between “storytelling” and “feelings-telling.” Break My Heart, the original tune she sings on the Opry, is a “break-up song” that falls in the latter category.

There’s a heartbreak of the young in the songs on this new album, as White is exploring themes common yet important to those coming-of-age such as “searching for purpose, the resilience of the human heart, and the deep-rooted tension between restlessness and inertia.” You get that sense in the title track, with its aching vocals and spare instrumentation.

Well, I can’t believe what’s become of me, was it just yesterday that I felt so free? Now all I feel is a pain so deep, but it’s for another, it’s not for me. It’s for another and it’s not for me.

The stripped-down live version of Numbers from a performance at Carter Vintage Guitars, gives the listener a chance to focus on that special voice and the story of the song, which she describes on her website.

“I wrote that song the day that my first record came out, which ended up happening in the middle of the pandemic,” she recalls. “I started writing about the confusion of nothing as going as planned, and realizing that maybe that’s just the way life is. The way the lyrics came to me was much more stream-of-consciousness than anything I’d done before—there was no pressure to appeal to a certain genre, and that felt like a real turning point. I just felt this incredible vastness.” In a testament to her innate eloquence as a lyricist, “Numbers” encompasses many of the elements that make White’s songwriting so spellbinding, comprising everything from clear-eyed observation (“The flowers my mama bought me/They only keep for two weeks/And then they just become another reminder/That he’s never gonna write to me”) to sharply poignant wit (“You would think that I should feel happy/But the truth is I feel spent/And the numbers they’ve been climbing/Just not enough to pay my rent”) to the kind of plucky self-awareness meant for free-spirited singing-along (“I’m still no good in lovin’/And lovin’ only leaves me losin’ anyhow”).

“When I was writing (Flowers on My Bedside),” White says, she “had this odd sensation of feeling really broken and sad about a breakup but also really excited about what I was creating.”

It felt like I was building my own little world within the song and growing as I wrote it. I found so much healing in that experience, I ended up coming up with seven other verses that didn’t make it onto the album.

This voice is meant to sing heartbreak. Let’s end up with just that voice and a guitar singing Now She Knows What It Feels Like, with a spurned lover singing to the one who took her lover, only to find that he also traded her in for someone new. Classic country.

For Washington area readers, Bella White will be performing at The Filmore in Silver Spring on October 9th. Enjoy.

More to come …

DJB

Photo of Bella White by Morgan Mason from Rounder Records