Singer/songwriter Laci Kaye Booth has a gift for mining beauty from moments of deep sadness. As a little girl growing up in a trailer park in East Texas, she first began penning her own soul-baring songs after taking up guitar at age nine, then set off on a self-driven career that’s included both immense triumphs and tremendous setbacks. Newly signed to Geffen Records, the Nashville-based artist now steps into a bold new chapter with The Loneliest Girl in the World—an album that finds her taking complete creative control for the very first time, arriving at a body of work that strikes a rare balance of raw emotional realism and bittersweet romanticism.

“For a long time I was afraid of how many sad-girl songs I was writing,” says Booth, who names Stevie Nicks and Merle Haggard among her main inspirations. “But then I thought about the artists I love most and all the sad songs they’ve written, and how much those songs have helped me process my own emotions. There’s a lot of lonesome on my new album, but I think it tells the truth about what it’s like to be a girl in her 20s, trying to figure life out.”

Raised in the small town of Livingston, Booth was born into a long line of country musicians that dates all the way back to her great-great-grandfather, who played in a Texas swing band called the Polk County Ramblers. But while she learned to play guitar from her father (also a country singer), Booth considers her mother an essential influence on her path as an artist. “My parents were 15 and 17 when they had me, and I always had a really strong relationship with my mom—she bought me my first guitar and always encouraged me to sing, even though I was so shy about it,” she reveals. After performing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” onstage on at a family jubilee when she was eight, Booth began to shake off the shyness and picked up the guitar. “My dad showed me three chords and I started teaching myself after that, and pretty soon I was writing little songs on my bedroom floor,” she says. “They were so silly, but they were definitely sad-girl songs even back then.”

In her school years Booth sang in a regional choir, taught guitar lessons, and played gigs wherever she could find them (including, at one point, a Christmas party at a tanning salon). While studying biology at Sam Houston State University, she played restaurants and bars every weekend to earn the gas money for her commute between campus and home, then received a life-changing opportunity her senior year. “I was 30 hours away from my degree when American Idol reached out and asked me to audition,” recalls Booth, who eventually dropped out of school and made it to the top five on the show’s 17th season. Although Idol led to her signing Big Machine Label Group, the company dropped Booth in 2022—a turn of events she now sees as a blessing in disguise. “Right after I got dropped I called [songwriter/producer/multi-instrumentalist] Ben West and asked if he wanted to make a record with me,” says Booth, who first met West upon moving to Nashville in 2019. “We started working together, and it was so powerful to make something that felt authentic instead of trying to be what I’m not. I remember thinking, ‘This is who I wanted to be all along.’”

Produced by West (who’s also worked with the likes of Lori McKenna, Mickey Guyton, and Parker McCollum), The Loneliest Girl in the World unfolds in an earthy yet ethereal sound that Booth originally conceived as “dreamy country”—a fitting backdrop to her lived-in reflections on lost love and shattered hopes and the thrill of following your heart, even when it leads you astray. On lead single “Cigarettes,” she presents a gritty and gorgeously detailed account of her life story, adorning that confession with gauzy textures and soaring strings (from the opening lines: “I was all of 17/Going bad-boy crazy/Podunk county beauty queen/And not your auburn-headed baby/You kicked me out, I packed my bags/Hair dyed dollar-store jet-black/You played ‘Jesus, Take The Wheel’/Every day till I came back”). “True Love” brings a spellbinding melody and tender acoustic-guitar work to Booth’s finespun tale of longing for an ex, while the cathartic “I Let Him Love Me” captures the glory in moving on from a toxic situationship. And on the album’s title track, Booth builds a brilliant tension between her painfully candid lyrics and the song’s radiant sound (including bright hand percussion, effervescent gang vocals, and a majestic guitar solo). “I’d just gotten out of a five-year relationship when I came up with ‘The Loneliest Girl in the World,’ and I wanted to write about how it’s okay to drink a whole bottle of sauv blanc and take up a king-size bed to yourself and fall asleep with the TV on,” she says. “It’s okay to feel lonely sometimes.”

To access the unbridled truth of her songwriting, Booth tends to start songs on her own, often late at night on her balcony with her guitar and a notebook full of poems. “Making this album taught me that as long as I have that raw honesty in my writing, I’m going to come up with something I love,” she says. “It always blows my mind when I share a song that feels almost too honest and then I get comments like, ‘How’d you get inside my brain?’ I just want to keep being myself no matter what, so that hopefully my music can bring people into a world where they feel safe and less alone.”

“When I was thinking about this project, I really wanted to say something beyond break-up songs and love songs,” says Kameron Marlowe. “I wanted to throw life songs in there as well. These are all real things that I've gone through, and there's a lot of loss, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of love. It really tells the story of these past two years.”

One of Nashville’s most exciting up-and-coming voices, Marlowe has indeed been through some changes recently, from adapting to a new life on the road to breaking through with the Platinum-certified single “Giving You Up” and touring alongside some of country music’s biggest stars. That journey is reflected in the sixteen songs of his sophomore album, Keepin’ the Lights On, from the introspection of “On My Way Out” to the romantic turmoil of “Strangers.”

“I grew a lot mentally,” says Marlowe of the album’s emotional range. “I had a lot of hard stuff on my plate and I had to learn to be a little stronger and not take things so personally all the time. I learned how to fall back in love—getting engaged and fixin’ to get married—after going through a situation I wrote about on the last record. I've lived a lot of life in the past few years that really opened my mind to some new ideas.”

The scope and maturity of the album establish Marlowe as a true force in today’s country music—a triple-threat singer, songwriter, and performer blazing his own path, marked by his distinctively soulful and resonant vocals. And it hasn’t taken him long to find a following, having already racked up almost 900 million career global streams.

Born in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Marlowe grew up singing in church and formed a band in high school. After leaving college to help support his family, he began uploading performances online and started gaining traction. He subsequently moved to Nashville and released "Giving You Up" independently; when the song—written by himself after his girlfriend broke up with him, right before he was planning on proposing—went viral, Marlowe landed management and songwriting deals and eventually signed with Sony Music Nashville.

He released several more singles and, in 2022, put out his acclaimed debut album We Were Cowboys, which included the Gold-certified tracks “Burn ‘Em All” and “Girl On Fire.” Named to CMT’s 2023 Listen Up class and Opry’s NextStage program, Marlowe was also highlighted as “One to Watch” by Amazon Music, Pandora and Spotify.

His powerful vocals made an immediate impression, but Marlowe wasn’t satisfied with his songwriting. “I felt like some of my songs in the past were surface level as I was still growing in my comfort and confidence around songwriting and sharing my story,” he says. “But on this, it was time to dig deeper. I can write a break-up song 573 different ways, but if it's saying the same thing, to me it's the same song.”

He points to the song “Never Really Know” as a turning point in the direction of the new album. “That song fired me up so much, because it was so personal and so special, and something that I hadn't written before,” he says. “That really started shaping this album to be what it was. It’s almost a folky kind of production, which really made the lyric shine and made you want to keep listening to the story—that was a challenging thing to do, but probably the most rewarding once we finally got it right.”

Keepin’ the Lights On was produced by Dann Huff, who has worked with the likes of Taylor Swift, Keith Urban and Bon Jovi, among countless others. “Dann is a mastermind,” says Marlowe. “Sometimes we only worked on one song a day—we wanted to make sure that they all got the attention that they deserved, and we really took our time with the sounds and the overdubs and the things that bring the songs to life.”

Huff was so taken with Marlowe’s commanding voice that he had the singer cut most of his parts live. “Even if I went back and tried to re-track it,” says Marlowe, “he was always like, ‘Nah, when you're in the moment of the song being created, there's a different emotion level there.’ With his encouragement, I really went all out and made sure that I went for those high notes to show my range. It’s something I'm really proud of on this album.”

Marlowe learned from the success of “Giving You Up,” but maybe not the lessons you expect. “That song launched my whole career,” he says. “I don't know where I would be without it, even though I had to go through some of the darkest times in my life to get that song. But having so many people reach out and be like, ‘Man, you don't know what that song did, how it got me through a hard time’—for me, that means more than the plaque on the wall. I feel like I really connected with people and hit a chord with them, to the point where they felt like that song was also a part of their story.”

With the song “Quit You,” he makes an explicit connection between his first hit and his current state of mind. “The hook is ‘I'm giving you up, just like I did them Marlboro Lights/And I’m giving you up the same way I did the whiskey on ice,’” he recites. “I wanted to start ‘Quit You’ by rehashing that, because ‘Quit You’ is the ending chapter of that book for me. I finally found the love that I was looking for. People get hopeless about relationships and stuff like that, and I was that way, too—I thought I was hopeless, but then my fiancée came along, so I wanted to make sure that I included that piece by using those same lines.”

Elsewhere on Keepin’ the Lights On, “I Can Run” is a celebration of rebuilding your sense of self; “I had some low spots. and I had to find myself again, and it felt like I lived every word to that song,” Marlowe says. “911,” meanwhile, is a ‘90s country-style honky-tonk banger. “I don’t go to bars that much anymore,” he says, “but it takes me back to when I was younger and first moved to town and I loved going downtown and having a ball.”

As his profile has grown, Marlowe has shared stages with the likes of Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs, Riley Green and Lainey Wilson. “Everyone I've toured with is an incredible artist,” he says, “and I try to take a piece from each person that we go out with.”

Clearly, he has studied well—he played over 100 shows in 2023 and graduated to more than 30 headlining dates, which extended into 2024 owing to demand. Sharing the stage with the same band he’s had since he was 14, he’s known for delivering high impact performances, with all the energy of a real rock show.

To Kameron Marlowe, if his second album is a statement of purpose, the culmination comes with the title track. “My family was never rich, we've always just made it by,” he says. “And for the first time ever, I saw my dad kind of be humbled when he lost his job of almost 20 years working in a magnet factory. He came to me and was like, ‘Man, I really don't know how I'm gonna keep the lights on.’ This music industry is so hard, and it can mentally drain you and screw you up, but when I started my career, I made a promise to myself that as hard as it would get, I would always try and tell the truth and do this the right way versus just chasing whatever’s working at the time. This song represents that for me and that's why it had to be the album title.”

“If I can continue to be this personal in my writing, I feel like it will connect to people in a deeper way,” he adds. “That's all I want to do. And when you go deeper with yourself, you can connect deeper with other people.”