Taylor Rae spent years touring behind her career-launching debut Mad Twenties, driving herself from show to show, watching America unfold outside the car windshield. With her second release, The Void, she takes her eyes off the road and turns her attention inward. Filled with the most personal songs of her career, The Void is a sharply-written record that celebrates the contradictory and complementary parts of the human experience, exploring life's dark corners — from breakups to intergenerational trauma — with a colorful mix of roadhouse roots-rock, modern-day folk, alternative music, blues, and analog Americana.

"The main theme is introspection," says Rae. "The past four years have been such a trying time with constant change. Sometimes it felt like I was staring into the void, and I decided to document the moment by writing these songs."

Constant change, indeed. When the 2020s began, Rae was still a relatively new face in Austin, having left behind her native California (where she grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, studied music in L.A., and began playing 200 gigs per year after graduation) to go explore a different horizon in Texas. With a songwriting style that explored the uncharted spaces between genres, she took inspiration from the roots of American music while maintaining a modern edge, too. Austin welcomed that eclectic sound, and Rae began building an acclaimed career — and a new home — in the Lone Star State. That momentum couldn't help her from hitting a roadblock during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when her long-term relationship disintegrated into a messy breakup. She felt raw and heartbroken, robbed of the anchor that had kept her grounded for five years. As Taylor Rae fought to restore her inner balance, she also found herself thrust into the spotlight as her debut album, Mad Twenties, became a national hit. The record wound up spending more than 30 weeks on the Americana Radio charts. In 2022, while she crisscrossed the country in support of its release, no other independently-released album enjoyed a longer stay on the Americana charts.

Those cross-country tours gave Rae the chance to road-test new material. Songs like "Home on the Road" (her first Top 10 hit, occupying the upper reaches of the Americana Music Singles Chart for more than a month) were becoming staples of her nightly shows, but so were the newer songs she'd been writing back home in Austin. Some of those tunes were self-examinations rooted in loss and heartbreak. Others were celebrations of new love. Together, they explored the contrasts that seemed to fill her life: darkness and light, chaos and balance, closed doors and new beginnings.

When it came time to record that material, Rae turned to Eric Krasno, the Grammy-winning musician and versatile producer who'd already spent decades fusing together different sounds as co-founder of Soulive and Lettuce. "Eric worked on some of my favorite records, like Revelator by Tedeseci Trucks Band," she says. "He's played with Dead & Company, too, and I'm from the Bay Area, so the Dead always feels like home to me. Everything just felt really right about working together." 

Holed up at Krasno's home studio in Pasadena, they created an immersive and wildly eclectic album that both confirmed Rae's status as an Americana A-lister and reached far beyond the genre's borders. Some songs were built around live-in-the-studio performances that showcased her strength as a stage performer. Others were recorded layer by layer. The results are stunning, from the slow-building crescendo of "The Void" — a cinematic title track that begins with Taylor Rae's acoustic guitar, then grows into a southern swirl of upright piano, organ, amplified slide guitar, and overlapping vocal harmonies — to the field recordings that bring the album's final number, "The Airport Song" (where Rae examines the scars left behind by her road-warrior lifestyle, wondering if they've done damage to her personal relationships, too), to a vivid finish. Along the way, The Void makes room for reggae rhythms ("Hi"), bluegrass-inspired road imagery ("Telluride," featuring contributions from Sierra Hull), self-empowerment anthems ("Not Mine," with its bass-driven bounce and coffeehouse charm), and heavy-hitting alternative juggernauts ("Maybe I'm The Villain," which trades Rae's Americana credentials for an AAA-worthy combo of muscular melody and electrified energy).  

Already hailed by No Depression as "a singer fully in command of her vocal gifts and a songwriter who enfolds her lyric sensibility in haunting musical sketches," Taylor Rae didn't just write The Void's 11 songs. She played an active role in shaping their sonic palette, too. "I went into the studio with a document of production references that was six pages long," she explains. "I'd taken so much time to think about the album and conceptualize it on my own, even before I decided to work with Erik. I dove into each song and made a playlist for every track, to make sure we had a good jumping-off point." The references on those track-by-track playlists were as eclectic as the album they helped inspire. For "Cologne" — a song about lust and longing, driven forward by groove, guitar, and bluesy grit — Rae pointed Krasno to songs like Derek Trucks' "Crow Jane," Sheryl Crow's "A Change Would Do You Good," and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss' version of "Can't Let Go." For "Undertone," she directed him to the sidechaining techniques of EDM duo Marian Hill, which gave way to the song's pumping organ sound.

Rae also paid attention to The Void's sequencing, deliberately following the album-opening title track with the larger-than-life "Maybe I'm The Villain." "I realized that all my favorite records have an ethereal beginning, and then track two hits really hard," she says, referencing albums like Alabama Shakes' Sound and Color, Nirvana's Nevermind, Arctic Monkeys' AM, and The White Stripes' De Stijl. The rest of The Void has a similarly dynamic ebb and flow. The escapism of "Hi" is followed by the emotional prison of "Trapped," where Rae sings about the lingering memories of a no-good lover whose presence always seems to hang just outside of reach. The calm comfort of "Cologne" — which finds Rae alone on the road, missing her new partner so much that she applies his favorite amber oil to her skin — gives way to the uncertainty of "Undertone," a haunting-sounding soul song about unanswered questions and sinister undercurrents. 

As "The Airport Song" brings the record to a close, The Void ends the same way it began: with Taylor Rae on the move, last night's show in the rear-view mirror and some new stretch of uncharted territory up ahead. The song's outro nods to the 1970s glory days of witchy women, bell-bottomed blues, and classic rock guitar heroics — an era that Rae both references and reshapes throughout the record — but the final seconds snap us back into the present. Those seconds consist of audio that she recorded on her iPhone in an airport, the intercom blaring its announcements about curbside parking and late arrivals. As the sound fades into the ether, we're reminded that the road goes on forever, shuttling us from the past toward whatever future lies ahead. The Void is the soundtrack to that unending journey, whipped into existence by a singer/songwriter who's dedicated to the long haul. 

"I wrote this record about an incredibly trying period in my life, but I'm coming out of that void now," she says. "I'm excited and going into whatever the next phase might be."