Crate Digging: Steph Grace-Summers, Friday Music

Crate Digging is a music discovery platform where contributors take home and discuss two records from across Concord Recorded Music’s active and historical labels.

Steph Grace-Summers, Music Supervisor at Friday Music, discusses her top two finds.

My frontline find is Katie Pruitt’s Expectations. My dear pal Michael Panting once told me about a podcast from NPR called 'All Songs Considered' and there began a new obsession. I used to listen to that show religiously and one of the many, many artists I discovered on it was Katie Pruitt.

Expectations is a thoughtful country-folk, indie album. It's an impressive debut record, written completely by Pruitt alone, who hails from Georgia, USA. It's a mixture of intimate songs and big ballads. It's Katie's story, her coming out as gay and the religious and social constraints that come with living in the Deep South.

Don't quote me on this but I'm fairly certain that 99% of country songs are about drinking beer, men loving women or women loving men. Lyrically it's refreshing to hear something different. ‘Loving Her’ is a beautiful, relatable song that I can imagine will be very important to many young people growing up in similar circumstances to the artist.

Katie Pruitt would be great for a bunch of US TV shows.

For a catalogue record I went for Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. I love me a Christmas song and I had to delve into A Charlie Brown Christmas, even if it is February. It won't be long until the Christmas briefs start coming in so it's always good to get a head-start. 

A Charlie Brown Christmas sounds like what sitting next to a nice fire at Christmas feels like. It's warm and toasty, there are little sparks of joy flickering playfully throughout, it's just cosy and peaceful.

I haven't given this record as much listening time as I'd like but on a first pass, ‘Skating’ caught my attention. It's lively and has this neat groove that comes through. It's evolving, playful, dynamic and everything I'm not in ice skates.

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