On April 14, 2021, after more than a year off the road due to COVID scares and restrictions, Mikaela Davis and Southern Star rocked a small audience inside Relix Studios in New York City plus more fans who tuned in to watch via the Twitch live-streaming platform—though not me, as I wasn’t aware of either the concert or Twitch. As a result, I can’t say whether The Relix Sessions, which was released into the wild a year later as a vinyl-only set, captures the entirety of the concert or just highlights from it. Whatever the case may be, however, what’s here is magic pressed to wax. It’s a delight.
For those unfamiliar with Davis and band: She sings and plays harp, while Southern Star consists of Alex Cote on drums; Kurt G. Johnson on pedal steel and guitar; Cian McCarthy on guitar; and Shane McCarthy on bass. (The two McCarthys also provide backing vocals.) They make harp-led rock, which sounds weirder than it actually is. Both live and on vinyl, they come across like a quadraphonic blend of Sheryl Crow and the Grateful Dead. Theirs is a luscious and lustrous sound, in other words, rich in dexterity and soul, one part pop and two parts folk-rock.
The morning after seeing them in concert in mid-April, I stumbled upon The Relix Sessions listed among the limited-run live albums (by various artists) in the Relix Marketplace. The black vinyl version was no longer available, but a “sunflower splatter” edition could be had for $5 more. Twenty days after ordering it, however, I’d received nothing more than the same-day confirmation email. I sent a note asking what had become of my order only to be told that the website was wrong—the “splatter” vinyl was no longer available. They were able to locate the original black vinyl, however. Did I want it? (Yeah, I know. Silly question.)
The two-LP, 12-track set opens with “Get Gone” from Davis’s 2018 Delivery album, the first of three songs from it. As with “Other Lovers” and “All I Do Is Disappear,” the addition of Southern Star transports the songs into another dimension. The remainder of the songs from Sides A through C, eight in total, hail from her sparkling 2023 And Southern Star album. She and band shimmer and glimmer throughout; the moment the harp and guitar blend on “Far From Home” is pure bliss, for instance, but the same can be said of various moments in the other songs. It’d take too long to catalog the epiphanies.
The set closes with an album-side rendition of “Bird Song,” which was written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter as a tribute to Janis Joplin after her passing. It was performed by the Grateful Dead in the early ‘70s, recorded by Garcia on his 1972 solo album, but faded into the domain of secondhand cassettes until the 1980s and ‘90s, when it again became a staple of the Dead’s concerts. Davis and Southern Star turn it in an ethereal and elegiac jam that sounds much shorter than its near-19 minute length.
Finding the album at a reasonable price may prove problematic, unfortunately. As I write, Discogs lists just two vendors selling used copies—one black, one splatter—for much more than the original prices. (Relix Marketplace, for its part, now lists both editions as sold out.)
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