Emily Scott Robinson

Appalachia

Up a hill in upstate New York, surrounded by a grove of trees, Emily Scott Robinson found her magical place. She walked into a church sanctuary built in 1896, heard the floors creak and spotted cobwebs clustered above the stained-glass windows as the morning sun illuminated walls of organs.

Her recording engineer, D. James Goodwin, circled the room clapping, listening for echoes in order to capture the fullness of a space where people once worshiped. The air was thick with history, the room ethereal and sacred.

“This is perfect,” she told herself.

Over five days in the spring of 2025, Robinson recorded Appalachia with producer Josh Kaufman at Dreamland Recording Studios near the Hudson River. It will be her third album with Oh Boy Records, and her fifth since beginning her career as a singer-songwriter nearly a decade ago. Robinson is now 38, a savvy veteran of touring nationwide and overseas with a guitar in hand. Her time on the road has honed her talent as a storyteller and performer — details of everyday life keep audiences spellbound. Often, people come up to her after a show with tears in their eyes to say, “That song means everything to me.”

In a voice as mesmerizing as a sunrise with a range of nearly three octaves, Robinson sings about love and loss, pain and joy, grief and hope on Appalachia, set for release on Jan. 30, 2026.

Her talent is no surprise to the music industry. Her records Traveling Mercies (2019) and American Siren (2021) both landed high on Rolling Stone’s “Best Country and Americana Albums” and Stereogum’s “10 Best Country Albums” year-end lists. She’s been lauded by the Washington Post, Billboard, American Songwriter and No Depression, and earned the 19th spot on NPR’s “100 Best Songs of 2021” with her song “Let ‘Em Burn.”

It was another song that caught the attention of Oh Boy Records, the independent record label co-founded by John Prine in 1981. His son, Jody Whelan, the director of operations at Oh Boy, heard “The Time For Flowers” and sent Robinson a private message on Instagram, telling her how meaningful the song was as his family walked through the grief of 2020. John Prine had died from complications related to COVID-19 eight months earlier. He was 73.

Whelan’s warm message led to a professional relationship with Oh Boy and the opportunity to become one of the label’s esteemed singer-songwriters. Robinson remembers what Fiona Prine, John Prine’s widow and president of the label, told her once: She said that John loved people, that it came through in his songwriting, and that she saw the same quality in Robinson’s craft.

Oh Boy provides Robinson with the resources that help build her career. One of many highlights thus far was seeing her name on a dressing room door backstage at the Country Music Hall of Fame next to Emmylou Harris and Mary Chapin Carpenter, women who inspired her long ago and who she’d perform with as a tribute to John Prine.

 Appalachia is one more step in Robinson’s career — and she believes it showcases the best songs she’s ever written.

That … is saying something.

“Appalachia,” the title track, captures the horrors of a hurricane that pummeled Western North Carolina in September 2024. Robinson heard stories from her friends in the North Carolina mountains of how Hurricane Helene turned rivers into oceans and destroyed everything in its path. Those stories hit her heart. 

Oh, my heart swept down the river

And though it all be washed away

It’s not the first time I’ve had nothin’ and knelt to pray

My people came from pain and famine

A hundred days on a dark sea

You think I’d let some wind and water tear the roots from me?

Like with many songs she writes, Robinson centered “Appalachia” around a character. This time, it’s a mother resilient after facing the wrath of Mother Nature.

We will dance with all our sorrows

And we will sing through all our tears

We’ll tuck our babies into their beds and hope for better years

“The song is less about what we can control and more about how we can care for one another,” Robinson says. “I think that’s the phase I’ve come to in my life. It’s the wisdom of accepting death and mortality, grief and destruction, and knowing we have to live with that. But we don’t have to do that alone. We’re so much stronger when we have community. Then we have hope.”

“Appalachia,” the album’s first single, will be released on Oct. 15, 2025.

Robinson’s roots in North Carolina run deep. The oldest of three, she grew up in Greensboro. Her mom was a journalist; her dad, an elementary school teacher. She fell in love with songwriting around a campfire in Michigan, where she joined her cousins at summer camp and sang folk songs at the end of each day. She came back home and borrowed her mom’s old guitar, downloading chord charts for all her favorite songs and practicing for hours every day in her attic bedroom. She was just 14. Robinson went on to graduate from Furman University in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and become a social worker in Colorado.

Then, at 26, a friend convinced her to attend a songwriting retreat, where she met and listened to like-minded souls and had an epiphany: She could make a career playing music. She took the leap with her debut album Magnolia Queen, which came out in 2016.

Robinson says she became a social worker because she wanted to live a life of service. She sees her career in music — her songs and her lyrics — as doing just that.

“There’s this thing I do with every record I make,” she says. “I knit a prayer into it, and I ask for all these songs to find their way to everyone who needs them. That prayer always takes me to some really amazing and interesting places. I ask these songs to be of service, to help people find and experience joy. If my music can do that, I’ll die happy.

“I hope that’s far in the future,” Robinson adds, laughing. “But that’s what I want my songs to do. It’s like a ministry, my ministry.”

Now comes Appalachia. Robinson sings about her grandmother slipping into dementia on “Time Traveler,” a widow bargaining with death on “Sea of Ghosts,” and the kind of love that comes with scars and age on “Cast Iron Heart,” a duet with Grammy winner John Paul White.  The album features “Dirtbag Saloon,” a honky tonk anthem that takes on gentrification and the housing crisis through the lens of a cash-only bar full of characters. 

“Hymn for the Unholy” opens Appalachia and represents what Robinson loved about her five days at Dreamland. It’s because of her producer Josh Kaufman, a multi-instrumentalist who has worked with everyone from Taylor Swift to Bob Weir of The Grateful Dead. In the first few minutes of their first phone conversation, she knew he could bring to life what she heard in her head.

“The way I like to do it,” he told Robinson, “is to get in there, have you play a song, and then we start playing around with different ideas… . We see what sounds good and feels good. We’ll know it when we find it.”

Kaufman’s free-form style of creativity opened up Robinson to experiment with sounds and song construction on Appalachia. With “Hymn for the Unholy,” she put down her guitar and sang solo over the bare organ. Kaufman then built the song by adding percussion and asking Duncan Wickel to overlay fiddle and cello, creating a spacious, reverent introduction to the 10-song cycle.

“We hit record and just went for it. I sang rubato with Josh following me on the organ — and I love how hyper-present it is… . It draws you in because there’s no rhythm to lean on for the first two verses,” she says. “And the words of this song mean so much to me. It’s about not being precious with your plans in life.”

“Hymn for the Unholy” will be released as a single in January 2026.

Not long before joining Kaufman in the studio, Robinson received a text message with news that broke her open — the early death of an old friend. He was a farmer and native son of Western North Carolina. He ran a community garden and led song circles in an old tobacco barn during their college days. He died by suicide at the age of 38.

Let us play one more, my friend, did you bring your old guitar?

I will sing so clear and high you can hear it from afar

I saw you last in younger years in the light around the fire

Tell me where’s the fairest view?

Is it heaven or North Carolina?

The next day, as she drove down Interstate 40 in North Carolina toward Chapel Hill, Robinson passed the exit for the town where he had lived and, out of the blue, she started to write a song for him. Over the sound of passing trucks, she hit record on her iPhone’s Voice Memos app and sang tentatively, finding the words as she went. Then, Robinson thought of her friend Lizzy Ross. 

It was a week before Robinson would walk into Dreamland Studios with Ross by her side to sing harmonies on Appalachia. She called her to share the heartbreaking news about their friend’s death and they cried together over the phone. Then Robinson said, “Lizzy, I think I have a song coming through… . Can I send it to you? I have a feeling I can’t write it by myself. I have to write it with you.”

At Dreamland, Robinson and Ross sat on the studio floor at the end of the first day, held hands and asked their old friend, “Will you help us write this song?” That night, Ross woke up at 2 a.m. and feverishly began to write. The refrain had come to her in a dream. On their last night together, the two finished the song in tears. They recorded it in their final hours at Dreamland, their voices rising in the vaulted-ceiling sanctuary like a choir of angels.

And the church bells are ringing

And your sisters are singing

And the fiddles and the forest

And the creatures are the chorus

Robinson and Ross call their song, “The Fairest View,” and it ends Appalachia on an ascendent note.

“That song is like so much of this record,” Robinson says. “The veil between life and death, love and loss is so very thin. But the brightness of life is still very close to us, and if we’re in the right place, we’ll feel and see that light.”

- Jeri Rowe