With spring in full bloom and love in the air, it’s wedding season — which makes it the perfect time for bluegrass great Rebecca Frazier’s reminder that those round symbols of a couple’s commitment are supposed to stay where they’re placed: on fingers.
In her new single, “Available,” releasing today on Compass Records, the singer-songwriter and flatpicking guitar player constructs a story of promising nuptials and a bride’s disbanded dreams, delivered as a wife’s tongue-in-cheek ode to her philandering man as he ringlessly galivants about town, touting his fabricated availability.
“My mother unwittingly set up this song when she teased my dad for never wearing his wedding ring,” Frazier explains. “They’ve been married for 51 years, but she still jokes, ‘He’s just trying to look available.’ I realized that’s actually a very real issue in a lot of marriages. It’s fun to joke about, but it’s not so funny when you’re living it and it really is your spouse’s intent.”
But examining serious subjects with humor is a tried-and-true country tradition; in “Available,” Frazier nails it perfectly.
“As the saying goes, ‘Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.’ We’re playing it and singing it in a lighthearted way, but there’s still an element of calling out the spouse for mistreating his lady,” Frazier says, adding, “I wrote this song while sitting on a piano bench at Nashville Music Academy, where I was teaching piano. It just came into my head in one piece, both melody and lyrics. That rarely happens for me.”
Praising producer Bill Wolf, she notes, “He made it a point to highlight the irreverent, but fun nature of the song.” That wasn’t hard to capture with a studio full of willing, outstandingly able players: Trey Hensley and Shelby Means on harmonies, Sam Bush on mandolin, Stuart Duncan on fiddle, Ron Block on banjo, Josh Swift on dobro and Barry Bales on bass.
“There’s a playful feeling, as though I’m teasing the guy, but still contemptuous,” she says. “At the end, we’re all laughing as Trey insists, ‘It’s too tight!’ Even Bill chimes in with, ‘No kidding.’ It reminds me of an old-fashioned, romping country song.”
A bluegrass luminary herself, Frazier gained notoriety as the first woman to grace the cover of Flatpicking Guitar Magazine. In 2018, she also became the first woman to earn a Guitar Performer of the Year nomination from the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America, an honor she received again in 2019. Frazier is widely known for her work with Colorado-based outfit Hit & Run, the only band to score the bluegrass-world trifecta of winning Rockygrass, Telluride and SPBGMA festival band competitions.
Pre-save link: found.ee/available
More information: rebeccafrazier.com
