About
Over the course of three EPs, Chicago-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Alaina Stacey sets out to musically interpret the aesthetics of DAWN, DAY, and DUSK. It is an untraditional approach for a recording project, but one that she hopes reflects the scope of life that these songs cover. “These are songs that I’ve written over the last decade,” she explains. “They don’t all make sense on the same album. Instead, I like to imagine them reflecting different sonic and emotional moments in my life.”
On her latest EP, “DAY”, which is the second in the three-part EP series, Stacey hones in on active energy, the feeling of walking into broad daylight with a determination to right all of one’s wrongs. “If I could take our love and remake it/ Take your heart and unbreak it/I can’t/but if could/I would,” she sings on the first single “I Would,” “I would’ve taken more time to listen to/That band you loved from Santa Fe/ Picked you up from the airport/Called in sick and laid in bed all day.”
Stacey grew up in a musical family in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago. Her parents played in an alt-rock band called “Chris Stacey and The Strangers,” and she recalls being told that “folks would come to shows just to see if my mom was going to go into labor onstage.”
Stacey was the third of four children, and when she turned 10, her dad took her on a road trip out west. “My dad worked a lot, and there was a tradition in the family that he would take each kid on a special trip when they turned ten, so he could get some one-on-one father-kid time with us”. The trip ended up being more formative than he could have imagined, as driving through Colorado and Utah, Stacey heard country music on the radio for the first time. “I became completely obsessed,” she explains. “I think the first song I heard was Brad Paisley’s ‘Alcohol,’ and then later I got really into Miranda Lambert, Taylor Swift, and Kacey Chambers, who was my ultimate songwriting muse.” Stacey began playing guitar that year, writing her first songs as a teenager.
At 17, Stacey attended a music camp run by the GRAMMY association, which brought together promising young musicians for classes, seminars, and collaborations. There, she was paired up with two other women, Katy DuBois and Kristen Castro. “It was kind of a last kids picked in gym class situation,” she laughs. Despite their humble start, the trio ended up clicking immediately, both musically and personally, and they formed the country trio Maybe April.
The three women moved to Nashville to pursue the band full-time and moved into a house together; Alaina was eighteen years old. “It was a big leap,” she says, “and when I think about me now versus then, I just didn’t understand the importance of everyday life…I think I let a lot of time slip by. There were a lot of awesome moments, but I think I have a much greater appreciation now for how much every moment matters.”
Now working under her own name, Stacey’s 3 EP project has set out to highlight all of the important moments in each and every day, and the way those moments move between dawn, day, and dusk. Stacey’s solo work fuses her love of 90’s and early 2000’s country with other musical influences, both old and new. “Living in Nashville actually made me move away from country music a bit because the sound was everywhere, and I started to feel like it was all the same. I started to dive deeper into the Americana stuff, like Jill Andrews, Kathleen Edwards, and Phoebe Bridgers.”
Recorded and produced by Evan Redwine in Nashville and Brian Deck in Chicago, Stacey’s EP “DAY” features a bright and sunny sonic outlook, despite many of the songs being drenched in heartbreak and lyrical melancholy. From “Break Your Heart” to “Liar,” Stacey works with an upbeat and shiny pallet to bring hard truths into the harsh light of day.