This is a pre-order. Orders will ship by or on August 1, 2025.
Raised on a small farm where the Midwest meets the South, Emily Hines crafts earnest indie rock with a twangy, unruly air. These Days, Emily’s first album for Keeled Scales and her initial offering to a wider world, features seven songs thoughtfully recorded to cassette from a tiny house in South Nashville.
These Days traces Emily’s progression as a twenty-something seeking love and meaning in late-stage capitalism. The songs play like a stack of Polaroids on the coffee table, candid and nostalgic.
Emily wrote her first songs with her brother at the tender age of 7 as a welcome home present to their sick mother. That initial experience instilled a passion for the honesty, compassion, and transformation that songwriting can offer.
After writing most of the album during an interlude of organic farming in Ohio and Kentucky, Emily quickly began playing shows around Nashville, connecting with a warm collective of like-minded musicians that eventually led her to her producer and partner, Henry Park. This quiet blossoming of community was powerful and formative, informing her writing process and eventually connecting her to her band – a rotating cast of generously talented musicians including Liv Greene, Holden Bitner, and John-Ruben Medina. Drawn particularly to improvisation and collaboration, Hines and her band shaped the songs over countless gigs and rehearsals.
The recording process was joyful and experimental, initially with very few expectations of the outcome. Trusting the power of embodied presence in a performance, they recorded live takes of her voice and guitar to cassette, which were then layered upon by her band, who added drums, cello, and more.
Hines worked with producer Henry Park. Together they drew inspiration from acts like Duster, Laura Marling, and Karen Dalton to record simply and add layers one at a time.