To Denitia, music is a mirror.
The songs she sings give audiences an opportunity to see themselves in her and connect over shared experiences and emotions.
“We’re all people just trying to live our lives,” Denitia says, “and there’s so much of it that we have in common.
But Denitia also wants her music to give audiences an opportunity to connect with themselves. “If a song of mine helps someone reckon with their own emotional life or their own experiences, or it helps them experience empathy or open their mind or expand, that’s what I’m trying to do,” she adds.
“I’m trying to make music I love that moves people while just being myself.”
On her new album, Sunset Drive, Denitia shares her story of going after something new — a life back in Nashville, where she attended college, immersed in both the city’s roots music scene and the community of the artist collective Black Opry — while experiencing the menagerie of emotions that come with leaving behind what you knew and starting over. As she was making and releasing her 2022 album, Highways, Denitia realized the life she was building in New York’s Hudson Valley was no longer serving her or making her happy. So, she made some drastic changes.
“In the first song, ‘Good Life,’ everything is technically fine, but something’s still missing. ‘Sunset Drive’ is ‘It’s time to keep evolving’ — and so on and so forth,” Denitia says. “The album tells that story of walking forward on a path and dealing with that push and pull of the past and the future.”
“Sunset Drive,” the album’s title track, expresses both the beauty and the pain of such a situation. Over an open, slightly hollow, melody, Denitia uses the Hudson Valley’s unforgettable sunsets as a metaphor for the end of a relationship: “The sun is going away, and now we’re going to be faced with the night, but as it’s leaving, it’s leaving us with such a gorgeous, moving picture,” she says.
There’s both beauty and pain, too, in “Don’t Let Me Go,” a song about romance suddenly developing in the wake of a breakup. Denitia is overwhelmed and falling apart, yet she can’t get enough and is desperately trying to stay in the moment for as long as possible. “I’m drowning in water, but I’m drying out,” she sings over driving acoustic guitar, buoyed by lonesome pedal steel and a big, open backbeat.
Throughout Sunset Drive, Denitia is an open book sonically. She draws from the country and alternative rock music she listened to growing up outside of Houston; the songs of artists such as the Eagles, Vince Gill, Waylon Jennings, Joni Mitchell, Dolly Parton, and Neil Young, ever present in her life; and the decade she spent entrenched in Brooklyn’s indie music scene. “I wanted to make a sonic world that you step into, and you’re not really sure what’s gonna happen, but something feels familiar enough for you to stay,” she says.
Acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and Denitia’s sweet, sparkling voice create cohesion among Sunset Drive’s 12 songs. Helping, too, is Denitia’s co-writer and producer, Brad Allen Williams, guitarist in Brittany Howard’s touring band who has also collaborated with Brandy, Nate Smith, Cece Winans, and others. Denitia met the Memphis native shortly after moving to Brooklyn and has worked with him ever since.
“We have an incredible, valuable, trusted relationship because I’ve known him for so long,” Denitia says. “He’s seen a million different iterations of me and observed the through line, and I think that relationship plays a lot into bringing out the best of me sonically.”
Denitia mixes her influences throughout Sunset Drive, but the album does include two straightforward country songs: “Back to You” and “Gettin’ Over.” The former, with a nostalgic melody reminiscent of Glen Campbell’s best work, is a reminder that leaving something behind often isn’t all that easy. “I wanted it to feel lonely, but okay with it,” Denitia says.
The latter, meanwhile, is a working-people’s anthem in the vein of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It.” Consider it a companion to “Lavender Coast,” another Sunset Drive song that expresses a desire to eschew responsibility — or at least take a break from it — in favor of a carefree life.
“At the time we wrote that song, I was working constantly,” Denitia says. “I had plenty of experiences and little vignettes to lend to the working woman’s life and knew the feeling of wanting to just stop and take a break.”
Indeed, Denitia keeps busy. Her music has been featured in the films Nanny and The Invitation, as well as in the series Better Things (FX), Broad City (Comedy Central), Dear White People (Netflix), Shrinking (Apple TV+), and The Terminal List (Amazon). She has toured extensively with the Black Opry Revue; been invited to perform at the National Museum of African American Music and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville; and shared stages with Amythyst Kiah, Joy Oladokun, and Allison Russell, among other artists. In 2023, Denitia earned one of five spots in a residency hosted by the Black Opry and WXPN, was named to Rissi Palmer’s Color Me Country class, and was one of three artists selected for CMT and mtheory’s Equal Access cohort.
The momentum has continued in 2024. Denitia is one of CMT’s 2024 Next Women of Country and was named an artist to watch by the Nashville Scene in January. She made her Grand Ole Opry debut this summer, and she is opening shows for Mickey Guyton in the fall/winter.
Sunset Drive concludes with two ballads — “Wild Light,” about unrequited love, and “Anywhere You Could Run,” a story song that evokes ‘90s folk-pop — but it ends on a hopeful note. “There’s a steadfastness — an unconditional love and unconditional commitment,” Denitia says. “I wanted it to feel, after we go through all this uncertainly and ambivalence, like, ‘Well, there are some times where you just feel clear.’”
That’s how Denitia feels these days: bolder and freer. “There are fewer things holding me back in terms of where I want to go musically and how fast and focused I’m gonna be getting there,” she says.
“The only thing that’s anchoring me right now is my passion for making more records.”