I love to hear those stories you sometimes encounter when someone describes meeting their future soulmate as ‘just knowing’ on first sight that they’d be the one. It’s just so refreshing! It helps wash away that built up cynicism that is a hard to escape virtue of everyday modern living, providing that much needed inner-life affirming cleansing, if you will.
I occasionally get a similar feeling in relation to music. Within seconds of spinning a new track, your ears automatically pick up that something special is cutting through the speakers, even though you’re barely into the songs’ intro. Perhaps it’s some deep instinct kicking in, warning you that you just might fall in love from the off. Well, that just happened playing Julianna Riolino’s brand new single, “On a Bluebird’s Wing,” streaming now on Bandcamp and taken from the forthcoming album “Echo in the Dust,” out later this year in both digital and vinyl format on her own Moon Whistle records.
Maybe it was something to do with how the plectrum fell from the outset across the strings, producing that warm yet meaty, slightly fuzzy guitar tone – with just enough treble to indicate life is fast approaching, but by the time the short descending bass run introduction meets it, I was already starting to take serious notice. Any residue of doubt surely evaporated when the drums and Hammondesque organ join the party, and there’s also a twangy hand plucked banjo playing a delicious melody line driving the track ever forward.
Taken together, it’s the perfect backdrop to Riolino’s southern Ontario vocal tone that somehow manages to fuse young, old, tough and tender into a single entity. The overall vibe is infectious melodic alt-country in nature. I’ve heard others describe her vocal delivery in comparisons to the like of Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, and even Dolly Parton. Not bad company for someone so young, barely into what surely must be long and distinguished musical career awaiting.
Riolino describes the track far better than I ever could as: “a cyclical celebration of inner and outer growth. What is it to be human? To love? To yearn? To falter? To learn? We must celebrate the good with the bad and forgive ourselves for our past mistakes. Feeling the freedom of self in song and spirit. Turning your corner, and letting you grow. At long last, winter has faded, and spring is on the wing of tomorrow! Smell a flower, twirl with the wind, let love be the lesson and begin again? Or let love win.” She also cites Roy Orbison, The Roches, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, John Lennon, and doom metal bands like Om as influences behind her sound.
Recorded at Gold Standard Recorders in Toronto in 2024, both this track and the album promise to be a more confident and rocking extension to her previous “All Blue” album that received such positive widespread recognition upon its release back in October 2022. Julianna is also out and about gigging on the festival circuit throughout summer, so my advice would be to catch her if you can.
If music is about how you feel within yourself, well I feel younger and more vibrant having heard “On A Bluebird’s Wing.” That’s some achievement for a song lasting a mere two minutes or so. I can’t wait to hear the album – don’t forget to check it out for yourselves, but be warned, you might fall in love oh-so-easily!
Photo Credit: Colin Medley / Bandcamp
Music has been a lifelong passion, a journey that as a child embraced the late 60's counter culture and has lasted until the present day. Despite trying to play guitar for the best part of 45 years, to his own frustration, never much beyond the first four bars of “Stairway to Heaven.” A self-confessed vinyl junkie, his other interests include collecting music memorabilia, old Muhammad Ali fight programs, and watching film. He lives alone in Nottingham (England) and still uses the term “Groovy” - these two facts may be intrinsically connected.
