Jeri Katherine Howell: "Woman"
I had the pleasure of collaborating with Jeri Katherine Howell on an artist bio for her new album. She and I were in the same Kentucky Community Scholars course and have crossed paths in the Kentucky music scene for several years now.
I have always admired her voice and her music. Her newest release, “Woman,” is absolutely fantastic. It's available on Bandcamp right now and will be globally released on May 23, 2025, on all major streaming platforms.
Jeri Katherine Howell’s latest release, Woman, features nine lush Americana originals that document the pleasures and pains of a life in bloom. It pushes its way up through the cracks of life’s deep shifts, and lures the listener to stay in love with the world despite its challenges.
The subject matter collides head-on with a lifetime of contradictions defined by the flesh-and-blood expansion of a human being—specifically a woman’s frame of reference—where acceptance is met with a surrender of epic proportions, embracing life for exactly what it is: a beautiful mess. The album cover image captures the artist in motion, powerfully mirroring the movement of her body, alongside a collection of songs that signify the unraveling of society’s imposed boundaries.
The lead single and title track is a celebration of Howell’s identity and a deconstruction of the label itself. “Woman” is an invitation into the work of loving ourselves wholly every day,” the songwriter says. Manifested in lyrics such as, “Wrap your love in lace and wildflowers/leave it on your porch in the moonlight/wake up, sweet woman, your time has come/to walk out that door, walk out that door/and claim your love,” these ideas give voice to that journey.
“These songs, for me, were a balm,” Howell says, and provided the means to get closer to herself in the purest form, and most importantly with the unlearning of a world swimming in stereotypes and assumptions about women: what they can and can’t do and be—and ultimately, say. “I get a lot of strength and affirmation in my identity as a woman, in my family, and as a Kentucky artist,” Howell says, “and we are so much more than how the world may label us.”
The songs on the album emerged over a five-year period, marking a pivotal phase of personal growth, challenged by a series of major life events. Loss defined her journey just as much as her inevitable evolution did, and she found form and meaning in the undefined space beyond life’s predictable parameters.
After being uprooted from her family farm, she also experienced profound grief in the loss of two close friends and a family member. Life as she knew it turned on its head. She chose to confront herself and intergenerational struggles with mental health and addiction the only way she knew how: through her art.
Howell courageously steps into her voice as the lead producer. Despite covering the difficult topics of profound loss, the songs are delightful in their ingenuity, subtly crafted and arranged with precision. Each song has its own nuances and personality, proving that it has the authenticity to stand on its own and find a home with the listener. Howell plays with form and song structure to find a natural ease between subject matter and depth of melodic expression.
“Her” documents the move from the country to the city and the search to reconnect not only with the natural world, but to discover herself in the balance. Drawing from a well of Appalachian soundscapes, the track is punctuated by the delicate voicing of banjo, fiddle, bass, guitar, and harmonies. Its lyrics capture a current of contradiction and healing that culminates in vivid images, like “cloaked in oak, witch hazel, and pine…plants she grew to heal and hide” and “she speaks kestrel screams to the sky.” The end-of-song instrumental breakdown provides an emotional release, that feeling of being home in your body again.
“Rest” is another standout track whose chorus would turn over in her head when she needed consoling while processing the grief of friends who died young. Howell completed the song with them in mind, to mother herself, to connect with them, and to heal. “Rest, now child/won’t you rest?/lay down, child/won’t you rest?” while Howell’s voice lilts over the gentle guitar and fiddle accompaniment. Another stirring feature of the song is the rushing water of a Franklin County, Kentucky creek added to the mix, which Howell recorded herself and bookends the song for full effect.
The arrangements reflect the progression of her musical ear—after all, she began performing at festivals and venues at the tender age of thirteen. Howell knows how to fuse her developing sensibilities—and sensitivity—to the natural world to claim her artistry in a way that only an award-winning songwriter could procure.
With validation from being chosen as the Winner of the Songwriting Contest at Nicholas Jamerson’s Sleeping in the Woods Festival, to bringing home an Honorable Mention from the coveted Rocky Grass Folk Festival Songwriter contest in 2024 alone, Howell burns bright as these ideas are amplified from pen to paper to stage. Her instincts are finely tuned.
Subtly buried in soft ground of “Still Me” are compelling lyrics: “there’s still a you-sized hole/in the left side of my heart/I’d like to feel it crumble/in and fill with dirt/so I can plant some seeds/let it blossom with all the colors of me,” where the listener can feel their heart grow back around the scar of misalignment.
“We Got Lost,” which reflects Howell’s travels, carrying worlds in her head, is sung with lovely trills and surprising turns of phrase in English, French, and Spanish. Phrases like “even though I know someday this will end / I’m always in love” on “Always in Love” and “caught your gaze and looked down / we both pretended to be strangers in our hometown” on “Thinking and Loving” prove she is a wordsmith for catharsis of the highest caliber.
“I want to embrace how each of us are beautifully complex and difficult to label,” says Howell, “and that we will dynamically change our whole lives, just like the Earth, just like these complex relationships between species.”
Howell often experiences strong emotions as bold colors, which translates effortlessly in an infectious melodic refrain in “Cheyenne:” “She leads me places I would never go/places that I would not find on my own/and when i think about her I feel purple and green” as a surge of bass, drums and playful vocal harmonies joyfully celebrate the love in the relationship between life forms, vocally experimenting with bends and soars as she sings her dog’s name.
Over the course of a year, Howell recorded Woman uplifted by a crew of long-time collaborators and friends at Teal Turtle Studio in Frankfort, Kentucky. She shines forward on guitar and lead vocals with engineer and co-producer Marcus Brothwell steering an undercurrent of organ, bass, and harmony vocals. Ellie Ruth Miller (fiddle) and Don Rogers (electric guitar) craft key characters with their instruments throughout the album. Fiona Palensky (drums, harmony vocals) and Nathan Link (bass, harmony vocals) inject grounding energy that makes you sway. Nat Colten (banjo, harmony vocals) and Jasmine Fouts (harmony vocals) enhance the collective sound.
Her clear and distinctive voice is a sweet taste that lingers long after the last track is done—an allure that tempts the listener to return, press play, and wade back into the deep. The emotional depth of this album is subtle because its approach to the subject matter is so lovingly held, authentic in its accessibility, and compelling in its final form. The songs celebrate the extraordinary ordinary moments, the consolations that comfort us in the in-between times of transition and accompany our steps as we emerge into altogether new territory.
“In many ways, the album as a whole is a gift to myself that I choose to share with you,” confides the songwriter. Howell bares her soul—and its movement through a world of healing, loss, love, and self-liberation. Woman illustrates a path to rediscovery, and Howell deftly provides a light to lead the way.
Jeri Katherine Howell has also received recognition from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and Music to Life (a nonprofit founded by Noel “Paul” Stookey of the ’60s folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary and his daughter, Liz) for using her music and teaching artistry to build community and drive social change. Her work continues to inspire women and encourages artistic expression as a means of authentically sharing one’s story. She is an artist worth paying attention to, one with whom the listener can grow, no matter their identity, alongside songs that inspire their own way forward.
