Following the path of other Arizona artists (you know who you are) who fled Arizona in search of greener country pastures in Nashville, mother-and-daughters trio Lucy Angel, originally from Mesa, has launched a budding career in Tennessee capital. With it has come the requisite highbrow opening slots -- Jake Owen, Neal McCoy, Montgomery Gentry and Charlie Daniels, to name a few -- a Walmart distribution deal of their upcoming LP, Crazy Too, and Sirius XM debuts to boot.
What separates Lucy Angel, composed of mother Kate Anderton and daughters Emily and Lindsay, from other familial country acts is their upcoming reality show, Discovering Lucy Angel, premiering on AXS TV in January. Yes, we know of other family acts -- The Band Perry and Parmalee in the popular spotlight -- but the mother-daughter connection in modern country hearkens back to the days of The Judds. It's prime fodder for a reality show, and an aspect of their record rollout that few, if any, country artists get to exploit.
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Arizona is a country music mecca; lest we forget that Country Thunder happens down in Florence, with Phoenix as a prime tour stop for some of the genre's biggest names, and we can lay claim to Dierks Bentley as one of our own. The question arises, however: Could Lucy Angel have been as successful as they've been while staying in Phoenix?
The short answer is no, they could not. The long answer is that the Nashville migration is a musician's tale as old as time, a rite of passage that most country artists take at some point in their career, independent of their place of discovery. With the uprooting comes a set of tribulations that rivals moving to any music-saturated location, whether that be Austin, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, or any culturally-minded metropolis. To fight and claw one's way to the front of the pack requires equivalent amounts of talent and luck, and Lucy Angel seem to be finding such a balance, with Noah Gordon (LoCash Cowbody, Colt Ford) producing their record and a release on an independent label.
Reality shows about music in general are can be ill-received, but Discovering Lucy Angel is helmed by JT Taylor, the man behind The Osbournes. Will the wacky, voyeuristic feel of his most successful project translate well to an act with little under their name but a debut record on the horizon? It's yet to be determined, and the one-minute promo clip on Youtube is about 66 percent music video and little else, but whatever their success may be, we Arizonans can add one more artist's name to our list of country music exports.
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