With a time-stopping voice, born in New York but simultaneously roughed up and refined by New Orleans and Mississippi, Shannon McNally has cut a singular path through the musical landscape - one that includes a Grammy nomination and a place on the stage with a who's who of rock, country and soul: Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Bonnie Raitt, Vince Gill, Levon Helm, Dr. John, Bobby Rush, Derek Trucks, and most recently, Americana legend Rodney Crowell who took the producer's chair for her upcoming release on Compass Records, a collection of transcendent folk-blues and country-rock songs that are poised to solidify her place as a peerless Americana songwriter and performer.

"Only Gram Parsons' term "Cosmic American Music" begins to touch her mercurial, changeling roots aesthetic, . . . McNally is a Zen-like, post-Beat song poet” —Thom Jurek, All Music

FROM Rodney Crowell:

I first heard of Shannon McNally through John Leventhal, who described her vocal skills as having just the right amount of girlish smoke. At the time I was looking for just the right singer to make a cameo appearance on a song I was recording called “Famous Last Words of a Fool.” Trusting John’s appraisal---from his description I imagined something of a cross between Joan Jett and Lauren Bacall---I set about tracking the mystery singer down. What I eventually discovered in the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi was this dark-eyed beauty who wrote grown-up songs, played a pretty mean Fender Stratocaster and, at times, sounded a lot Jesse Mae Hemphill. From our first meeting I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was the right man for the job of shepherding the next Shannon McNally record into existence. Now that the record is made, I hope music lovers around the world will come to know what I and many others already know: This girl belongs in the Americana Music spotlight.