Nashville Scene34%
Jessie Gray Seeks Answers From the Universe on ‘The Muse’ 17%
By Bobbie Jean Sawyer20%
7/30/2026, 3:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Indoctrination, and Optimism Bias, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 13.7% saturation with 106 hits. Analysis detected 733 faulty-reasoning hits from 775 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28.3% and a BS Rank of 17% (20,903 of 25,180 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.00% of the article peer group.
In many ways, singer-songwriter Jessie Gray’s new album is a scrapbook of her first few years in Nashville.
Gray wrote most of the songs during her first couple of years here, following her arrival in 2021, and began recording the album in 2024 at renowned East Nashville studio The Bomb Shelter with producer Matthew Welde.
The work continued outside the studio as vocals and string arrangements were overdubbed at friends’ houses around Music City.
“This is my first Nashville album,” Gray tells the Scene.
“Matthew Welde was doing this recording process with me, so it was like having a friend help you who sometimes believes in your music more than you.
It was a really special experience because of that.”
The result of that labor of love is Gray’s second record The Muse, out July 31 on Bandcamp and on streaming platforms next month.
It’s a stunning nine-track album with spare arrangements built around gentle fingerpicked guitar and Gray’s ever-so-slightly tremulous voice, which she uses to explore various catalysts for inspiration and artistic expression.
“There’s the muse of grief and heartbreak and loss, and there’s the muse of longing for everlasting love,” Gray says.
“Then there’s the muse of creation.
There’s the muse that’s guiding us through all that we do.”
Raised in a musical family in New Jersey — her father played guitar and her grandfather was a drummer and saxophone player — Gray recalls that singing and writing were always constants in her life.
“I was always writing … just for my own catharsis, or [writing] journal entries or poetry,” she says, noting that Jeff Buckley, Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf, Adrianne Lenker and Laura Marling are among her inspirations.
“I was trying to figure things out with writing.”
Though she grew up singing, Gray didn’t start writing songs until her early 20s.
A monthlong stay studying yoga in an ashram helped her rekindle her passion for music in general and for her voice in particular.
“We all had to sing together every night,” Gray says.
“I remember that feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, I miss this feeling of singing.’
It’s been the thing that’s given me the most life.”
Gray’s warm, ethereal vibrato has a timeless quality that sounds like it could be from the 1920s as easily as the 2020s.
Take “Can We Call It Love,” a delicate, cinematic standout from The Muse, which Gray says was inspired by the “tangible desire to understand the more human relationships I was in.”
The night before she wrote the song, a talk with a friend about the nature of creativity lit a spark for her.
“Ideally as artists we’re antennas, and we’re trying to pick up what God or the universe is sending and just let it come through us,” she says.
“I remember that conversation being really inspiring.
The next day I was sitting down to write and just sitting with that.
I was in a new relationship at the time.
I remember wanting to grapple [with the question of] ‘What is eternal love?
What is real love that is unending and love that is forever?’
It was trying to answer the big questions that we can’t answer.”
In “The Moth,” Gray explores the muse of artistic creation.
“I remember sitting outside and being at a point where I had to decide to focus on the light, and on the things that I knew would prevail in me,” she says.
“It was kind of like my future self guiding me towards something that I knew I wanted to go towards, but I couldn’t see it yet.
I remember a literal winged creature flying around me.”
The Muse is a perfect late-summer album, made for twilight listening amid a chorus of cicadas and katydids.
Gray’s vocals and vivid lyricism are at the forefront of each song, such as the haunting “Follow,” which echoes with the eldritk lilt of a forgotten fairy tale, and “Black Sea,” a mournful sea shanty featuring pure notes at such high pitches that they feel supernatural.
“We really wanted the raw voice to be on top,” Gray says.
“A lot of music tucks the voice, tucks the lyric.
We wanted it to be really live and real and raw.
… It’s pretty sensitive and open to touch.
It’s right there.
I’m proud of the way that truth came through, the honesty of it.”
Gray hopes her music encourages listeners to slow down and focus on their own humanity and how we’re all connected.
“I would love people to feel less alone.
We’re all in our own aloneness in some way.”
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