Happy New Year from the ranch. And happy longest month of the year in North Dakota. Or is that February? I can’t remember. Winter up here sometimes is like childbirth, you forget the horrors when you’re in the middle of those beautiful June days.

I sent my daughters off to school for the first time after their break and now I’m alone with my thoughts for the first time in weeks. And so it seems like a good time to announce that my new album “Yellow Roses” is set to release everywhere on January 11^th. I think it’s a proper way to ring in a new year, with new music.

The truth is, I didn’t think I had another album of original music in me. I’ve been at this since I was sixteen years old, writing songs about the people and landscape of a place and life pretty obscure to most of the world. My last original release was over eight years ago, songs written before motherhood and performed and released when I was pregnant with my first daughter.

It was a time in my life that held so much hope and promise, tangled up with no guarantees in that complicated way that hope and promise always seem to be.

And it feels like all our real life has been lived in that space between that last album and now. Between working on raising babies and cattle, we’ve faced the near loss of my dad, a job layoff, a new business endeavor, keeping a non-profit afloat and my cancer diagnosis during a pandemic and my slow recovery figuring out how to live a life with pain that just won’t let up. And we’ve put that all up against the promise to love each other forever and make sure our young kids don’t figure out too soon that life can be scary.

I’m looking back at that list right now and am fighting the urge to delete it all. I don’t want to be the person that lists the struggles, mostly because I can’t carry on there. I prefer and thrive in the spaces in between: the slow walks to my sister’s with the kids stopping every few feet to pick up a rock or dig in the dirt, the quiet times at night laying next to my husband and telling him the funny things Rosie said, my favorite horse and teaching the girls to ride, wildflowers on the kitchen table, new calves trying their legs in the fresh green grass, watering my tomato plants, walking a cattle trail, the way the evening light hits the Blue Buttes, watching Edie catch and love all the frogs, a small stage in a small town, making you a cup of coffee while you tell me about the old days, sitting in the passenger seat of the pickup while he drives…

These spaces in between, that’s where the songs are for me. And that’s what this album is. It is a finishing up of the ideas that have been sitting in pages on the shelves for years and it’s the songs the tall grass knows that I can finally hear. It’s the retelling of old stories to a new melody. It’s the sound of kids growing up and the generations before us and the weight of the holding on. It’s the hum of April blizzards and frustration and potential of changing times. It’s the sound of Nashville players behind the words of a ranch kid all grown up now.

And so on January 11^th, I hope you’ll take a listen. I hope you’ll find these songs wherever you are and I hope you find yourself in them somehow, even if it’s just in the rhythm of your toes tapping. People like me, for whatever reason, live our truest lives by telling about it. Thank you for listening.

Watch for tour dates coming in early spring, where I’ll take the songs to you.

Buy a signed “Yellow Roses” CD at www.jessieveedermusic.com today, pre-save it on Apple Music and get three of the twelve tracks right now or get the full album on January 11^th wherever you get your music.

Thank you for listening.