“My prize for winning was to go and make a record with Gar Ragland at his studio in Asheville, North Carolina,” explains Riccio. Riccio was already starting to turn heads with her music by this point, performing everywhere from Sundance to the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival, but when she took top honors in the 2019 NewSong Music Competition, it seemed clear that the universe was calling her east again. She headed east for college but moved back home in March of 2020, wrestling with all the complications of finding herself and her place in the world while letting go of her childhood and the sense of grounding that came with it.

“That rush of stress and adrenaline felt similar to what I was experiencing as I emotionally processed my adolescence-almost as if I was being jerked around by one big life change after another.”īorn and raised in Morrison, Colorado-a tourist town in the foothills outside of Denver that’s home to Red Rocks Amphitheater-Riccio fell in love with country and roots music at an early age. “When I was writing these songs, I kept coming back to this image of someone slamming on the breaks in a car crash and this idea of emotional whiplash,” Riccio explains. Add it all up and you’ve got an album that embraces its multitudes, a profoundly vulnerable work delivered by an artist navigating the complicated transition into adulthood with remarkable grace and maturity. Sonically, Riccio’s music effortlessly melds classic folk and country sounds with indie, atmospheric production to forge a lush, expansive sound that feels traditional and experimental all at once. Riccio grapples directly with her queerness for the first time on the record, baring her truest self with raw candor, and she explores her desire for connection and belonging with similar honesty, searching for a place to call home against the backdrop of an ever-evolving identity.

Written over the course of several formative and tumultuous years in Riccio’s late teens and early twenties, the collection is a revelatory coming-of-age story from a writer torn between east and west, intimacy and independence, and her past and future. It makes perfect sense, then, that Riccio’s stunning debut would be called Whiplash. “It feels like I exist in all these different worlds, and I can feel each of them tugging at different parts of me.” “I’ve always felt pulled in a lot of directions,” says Jobi Riccio.

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