Alicia Blue
- Singer/Songwriter
Born and raised in the last eastern town of LA County, just steps from the San Bernardino line, the daughter of a truck driver father and bank teller mom, Alicia Blue is no stranger to desolate landscapes. Desolation is something that comes to mind when recalling her childhood, despite her insistence that she is also a “closeted optimist.”
Working multiple jobs to pay rent while in college, Alicia stumbled upon a job helping to take care of an aging soul singer named Malcolm Hayes, Jr who’d been disabled from a stroke. It was that fateful meeting that opened the doors to her realizing she needed to set her words to music as a means to reach people…and it was Malcolm who first said to her, “Why are you so blue?” Up until then, Alicia had never played more than a few chords on guitar for fun at an old boyfriend’s house. But she was determined to learn to play for real and studied and practiced relentlessly. In 2015, Alicia Blue did her first open mic and started writing her first songs. Alicia began busking around LA, playing every open mic and opening shows whenever she could. One of her first recorded songs, “Magma,” was featured by Starbucks in their stores worldwide and on their Spotify playlist and brought her a good amount of attention. By 2020, Alicia had established herself in the LA music scene as a true poet / songwriter.
In 2021, Alicia Blue started spending a lot of time in Nashville writing and working on new music. This led to a deeply creative period in which she began collaborating with people like John Paul White (Civil Wars), Sadler Vaden (Jason Isbell) and Lincoln Parish (Cage the Elephant), setting the stage for what would become 2022’s release Inner Child Work, produced by Lincoln Parish and recorded in Nashville.
The following spring 2022, Alicia packed up her life and relocated to Nashville.
In late summer 2023, Alicia recorded a new batch of songs with producer Dan Knobler (Allison Russell). She caught the attention of legendary producer/songwriter Butch Walker that year, bringing them together to write for her album, and even having him feature on one of her songs. That winter, Alicia Blue was named one of American Songwriter’s 16 Artists to Watch. During this same period, Alicia Blue’s music was discovered by the Jack Kerouac Estate curators and asked to compose a song inspired by the soon-to-be-released Kerouac collected writings, “Self Portrait.” After meeting in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, MA, they invited her to stay for a few days and record at Jack’s former home in St. Petersburg, FL just after her tour with Lucinda Williams. There she got to stay in Jack’s room and sleep in his bed while going on to record three songs with Kerouac lyrics and do a live broadcast. She is solidly endorsed by the Kerouac Estate and even thanked in the first printing of “Self Portrait.”
Alicia Blue wrapped her second year in Nashville with one final meeting that would consecrate her path and place as a songwriter, in which she got to give an impromptu performance of her songs for the legendary Lucinda Williams at a party. That led to Lucinda featuring on her upcoming single, “Tennessee,” (out July 2024) and a growing friendship between the two that led to Alicia joining her out on tour in early 2024. With singles from her new album hitting each month throughout 2024, plus the success of her second single “Tennessee,” released in July and still going strong, and a growing and important presence on the Nashville scene, Alicia Blue, is already looking toward the future and writing for her next album to be produced by Butch Walker in early 2025.
