Cyrena Wages w/ Granville Automatic and Silas Nello

“The Wages’ were run out of North Carolina for stealing horses and other boorish behavior. We settled in North Mississippi and evolved into three groups: the preachers; the drunks and the outlaws; and then kind of a mid-range group. I came from the mid-range group.”

Cyrena Wages fell in love with music on the country backroads between Millington and Shelby Forest, two small towns just north of Memphis. Her father, the hometown judge, drove her to school every day in a 1967 gold Cadillac with the license plate “ROBN HD” on the back, an homage to the underdog ideology, and a conceptual through line of her debut 2024 album, Vanity Project. Wages tapped producer Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, St. Paul & the Broken Bones) to helm Vanity Project, a heavy hearted country soul meets indie pop confessional, at his Southern Grooves Studio in Memphis. Upon its release, Cyrena toured in support of artists like Lilly Winwood, Hailey Whitters, Maggie Rose, Lucero, and Chaparelle, and debuted in spaces like the Troubadour, The Bluebird Cafe, SXSW, and Americana Fest.

Produced by Johnny Black, Cyrena’s sophomore album, Miss Melancholia!, may differ sonically (and emotionally) from her debut, but the delicately punk narrative remains intact: a woman raised in North Shelby County, relishing in the witticisms of the South, while fighting like hell to shake its “Bible Belt beauty pageant” conditioning.

“I didn’t go in to make this new record feeling unheard or carrying unarticulated pain. I wrote Vanity Project from a wound, and I am writing this project from a scar. If Vanity Project was despair, healing, and truth telling, this album is swagger, boundaries, levity, fun, and a sense of humor that I lost touch with for a long time.”

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Granville Automatic is the songwriting partnership of Elizabeth Elkins and Vanessa Olivarez. Not quite a country band, and not quite a rock band, they will both agree they are, above all else, a storytelling band.

The band’s new double album, Ghosts of Rooms, is about Paris’ Hotel La Louisiane and New York City’s Hotel Chelsea. Every song is a first-person account of the experience of a famous resident, including Miles Davis, Simone de Beauvoir and Salvador Dali in Paris — and Patti Smith, Sid and Nancy, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Eugene O’Neill in New York.

Ghosts of Rooms is coming late 2026.

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Granville Automatic writes songs the Associated Press calls “haunting tales of sorrow and perseverance.” The duo is named after a 19th-century typewriter.

The girls’ devotion to the project has proved a chaotic road of back-breaking touring, interpersonal tension, former-day-job balancing, other-band leaving, and a love-hate dynamic that brought them from Atlanta to Nashville. Theirs is a creative partnership reminiscent of Lennon-McCartney, a dreamer-doer, accessible-obtuse, country-rock collision of two polar opposites. What the two share, however, is a love for nostalgia: old records and antiques, tarot cards and dusty books, ghosts on battlefields and lost stories from the past. That common ground has produced music praised by The New York Times, USA Today and Rolling Stone.

They have millions of streams to date, with appearances on Apple Music’s Hot Country Tracks, Featured Americana Tracks, and the Southern Craft playlist – as well as Pandora’s New Country and Spotify’s New Music Nashville.

Granville Automatic’s last two albums, Tiny Televisions and Radio Hymns feature songs inspired by Nashville’s lost history. It’s a subject they know well, as Vanessa and Elizabeth are co-authors of the critically-acclaimed book Hidden History of Music Row (The History Press), with a foreword by Kix Brooks of Brooks & Dunn. The book was named the Best Book of 2020 by No Depression.

Outside of Granville Automatic, the two have written songs recorded by country stars Billy Currington (Billboard Country Top 30), Sugarland, Ward Davis, Cassidy Daniels, Aubrie Sellers, Kira Isabella (Billboard Canadian Country Top 10), Aaron Goodvin, Wanda Jackson, Angaleena Presley and others. They have been Composers in Residence at Seaside, Fla.’s Escape to Create program. They’ve appeared on Sirius XM’s “The Buddy & Jim Show”, DittyTV, PBS’ Sun Studio Sessions and WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour. You may have heard their songs on ABC’s American Crime and The Lying Game, as well as Netflix’s The Ranch. They used to tour constantly, including stops at SXSW, the Key West, Island Hopper, Red River and 30A Songwriters festivals, CMA Fest and Tin Pan South. They’ve played at venues from the legendary Joshua Tree roadhouse Pappy & Harriet’s to Texas’ haunted Gruene Hall and have shared the stage with Gretchen Peters, Little Texas, Shenandoah, Radney Foster and The SteelDrivers. But for now they focus heavily on songwriting, playing a handful of shows and support dates annually.

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Los Angeles based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Silas Nello has been a staple of the indie-Americana scene for nearly a decade, and he shows no signs of slowing down. A native of Daingerfield, TX, Nello’s upbringing in a pastoral East Texas town left him with a deep respect for tradition and a powerful need to be on the move. His career has seen him tour across both the US and the United Kingdom, playing festival bills, club shows, record stores, and intimate listening rooms in both countries. Often joined onstage by a rotating cast of brilliant session players, Nello’s singular blend of blues, rock, and folk music pushes the notion of genre to the breaking point.

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