The Balladears

Country songs, ballads, blues, from the 50's to the 70's.

When Saskatchewan-born and Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Ana Egge set out to record her most recent album, 2011’s Bad Blood, she lined up some big time help. Steve Earle, who Egge first met when she sang on the Earle-produced Blue Boy album from Ron Sexsmith, served as the album’s producer, and the sessions were done in Woodstock at Levon Helm’s studio. The result is the most sonically immediate and impactful album of Egge’s decade and a half of releases.

Growing up with parents who “dropped out,” their chosen lifestyle to raise four girls in a lovingly cobbled together combination of a small farmhouse on the North Dakota plains, a bus on the California Coast, and a hot springs commune in rural New Mexico, scraping together dimes and hand me downs, Ana learned that her life was truly hers to create. When she got the musician bug as a teenager, she took matters into her own hands, building her own guitar and moving to Austin to observe, absorb and take musical risks. Seeing Ana perform live for the first time, you are immediately struck by the combination of this uncompromising fearlessness, her confidence in her place on stage and the earthy wit and kindness that is the lens she uses to see the world. Not to mention the crystal clear and uniquely affecting voice that is her vehicle. Living in Brooklyn, NY for the last 10 years, Ana continues to write and play live without losing the Western outlook that formed her.