SILVER LINING - MISTY BLUES

ALBUM NOTES

Written by: Elizabeth Gardner

Blues artist Amy Winehouse once said that “every bad situation is a blues song waiting to happen.” Gina Coleman, frontwoman of Misty Blues, learned early on that those bad situations are the very best teachers, that if you get knocked down, you get back up—and you’re better for it. This is the very essence of the blues ethos that has fueled the 111 or so songs she’s written for the 15 albums she’s recorded over the course of the 25 years she and her band have been doing their thing. It’s also what has enabled her to lead her band through the intrepid terrain of the music industry, while also tending to her family, and working full-time as an educator, administrator, and coach. She’s relied on a veritable blues toolbox of decidedly helpful things to help her navigate the ups and downs—the perseverance, dedication, creativity, humor, and patience that took root in early childhood and which has only deepened over the years. Given the usefulness of that toolbox—and the tempestuous force with which the blues have again and again brought her back from the edge of casualty and almost certain collapse—Gina wishes, of course, she’d discovered the blues earlier.

“In a lot of ways, it is the only thing that allows me to rebound from all the rug-pulling that has occurred throughout my life. I’ve always had the rug-pulling—but haven’t always had the blues to cushion the fall.”

There is a certain kind of groundlessness that comes with all the rug-pulling—but unexpected insight and light, too, kerneled in the chance to get back up and try again. And there is nothing, nothing, like a good blues song to set you right again.

Silver Lining, a celebration of the band’s silver, or 25th anniversary, and their 15th album, was recorded at Studio 9Porches in North Adams, Massachusetts, in January of 2024. The sessions were conducted as a recording retreat, with band members staying on the premises to be able to more fully live and breathe the tracks they were laying down. It worked. The eleven songs brilliantly and lovingly bemoan the repeated knock-downs, the ache of living—true loves leave us, we feel lost, rejected, we make mistakes, we let ourselves down—and then shift into a fresh outlook—buy some brand new shoes, find a new perspective, shake those blues, baby! The balm of the blues is that it allows us to feel all we need to feel, say what we need to say, and rise up, lighter, better, stronger—so we can “have the time of our lives…”

“It can’t be all heavy,” Gina reminds us, and there is much fun to be had on this album, with a few songs taking on the more playful, signifying, suggestive forms of the blues, just to keep us on our toes. Enough Lovin for Two, with all of its titillating metaphors—I want your kisses…And if you’re down, we’ll mess around…I’ll be your rhythm, I’ll keep your time—has echoes of a bawdy Bessie Smith song. Gina’s vocal delivery is frisky, kittenish, a flirtatious, back and forth romp with the band. But those undercurrents speak only to Gina’s confidence in leading the band—”Listen, I’ve got enough drive and energy for all of us. If you can only give 10%, don’t worry, it’s ok, because I’ve got the 90.” I’ve got you, she says, because I’m just that fine.

Here’s the thing: Gina Coleman is that fine—but has also realized just how much more fine she is when she surrounds herself with good people who can help bring her deeper into herself, and into her potential. Part of the ever-expanding toolbox. On this album, she intentionally opened herself up to a larger community of people to help drive the project, from production to promotion. Coleman relied most heavily on her core band of seven, all mad-chopped multi-instrumentalists—Gina plus Aaron Dean, Rob Tatten, Seth Fleischmann, Bill Patriquin, and her son Diego Mongue—but also dipped into her farm team, and brought in countless guests, featured artists, old friends and new, to collaborate on songs and arrangements. Silver Lining, the title track, and the first single released, features Early Times, primary DJ at Sirius XM Bluesville radio, as a guitar soloist. Grammy Nominated R & B artist Matt Cusson completely re-arranged Chasing Gold, giving the album’s featured back-catalog track from Call and Response a fresh spin. On The Upper Hand, Gina had written the lyrics with some rudimentary music to aid in the song-writing, but felt no attachment to any form, so handed over the song over to her son, Diego, who said, “I got you, Mom. We’re going to go like, old school, deep R & B with these blues lyrics. Like, slow, really milk this one.” Gina and Diego also collaborated on the final track, Blues Never Ends (feat. Diego Mongue Band), with Gina writing the lyrics, and Diego writing and arranging the music. His band, Diego Mongue Band, joins Misty Blues and a total of 17 artists on the song—an apt celebration of the enduring quality of the music, stories, and people that continues to journey, being reshaped over generations and time into ever new iterations.

Coleman happily keeps adding to that toolbox, learning as she goes, about the connective tissue that runs through us all—and the benefits of being open to what might happen in the shared spaces. It’s not about chasing gold to find those shiny medals, but working within that synergy and symbiosis to set transformative possibilities in motion, together. Coleman embraces the way sharing stories begets connection, and how being present for a mutual unburdening can be both ennobling and empowering. As activist and author Ilyashah Shabazz says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Gina is hoping to go far.

From the first song on the album, Seduction by Blues, to the last, Gina’s love affair with the blues is on vivid display—the sheer joy of making blues music a “steaming ride spinning off its axis.” It is a seduction, indeed. Ed Moran’s harmonica pulls us in close, as Gina’s breathless whisper works like a raw confessional—”I’ll swim the channel of love……I’ll walk across burning coals.” The love is so great that even the “searing pain” cannot “divide us.” And then, just when you think you’re nestled in a sweet little love song, the “music starts to play,” ramping up the heat. As the band takes over, we can hear and feel the blues surging through Aaron Dean’s sax, Seth Fleischmann’s guitar, Rob Tatten’s drums, Bill Patriquin’s bass lines, Dave Vittone’s keys, and Diego Mongue’s baritone guitar—a full-on, synergistic life force that Coleman so clearly embodies. “I am the blues,” she says, “I live and breathe the blues.” Amen.

If you’ve ever taken in a live performance of Misty Blues, you know the power and majesty of being invited into what is clearly a sacred space for Gina and her band. To witness the full expression of this embodiment—which Coleman calls the “truest version” of herself—is to hear a soul laid bare by an unquenchable thirst for the blues. “When I’m performing, I’m just channeling all of this stuff, and you’re going to see every bit of emotion on my face because I am incapable of hiding that. I am incapable of putting up any facade. This is who I am.” 

In performance and in life, Coleman exudes something African American philosopher and social critic Cornell West called “an elegance of earned self-togetherness, so that you have a stick-to-it-ness in the face of the catastrophic and the calamitous and the horrendous and the scandalous and the monstrous.”  And to borrow from Ralph Ellison, while embodying that quintessential blues “impulse to keep the painful details and episodes alive in [her] aching consciousness,” she also “transcends it, not by consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” Double boom-pow. We’ll live through it, and we’ll have fun doing it.

Silver Lining brings the same palpable energy, making every listen a crackling livewire show that pulls us into and out of our own blues spaces, reminding us that the power to transcend and transfigure lives in each of us. With that traditional blues ethos and expressiveness on full display, Silver Lining takes us, too, into new territory, with a genre-bending exploration through songlines reaching back to Gina’s childhood influences, and beyond. While still remaining true to the traditional blues form, Coleman stays expansive in songs like Sofrito my Blues by mixing the Latin and soul rhythms of her old South Bronx neighborhood, with lines of jazz, funk, Creole, and Zimbabwean—a fusion that feels natural and energizing. Her band brings an infectious enthusiasm to their own virtuosity, versatility, and verve in performance and production, animating those blurred lines, keeping pace with Coleman’s off-the-charts, crackerjack vocals—and punctuating the lyrical energy with their own vocalizations. See them live if you haven’t. Crazy good.

As Misty Blues continues to push the boundaries through experimentation, “No matter what we do, it is still blues in lyrical content. For me, that is the most important thing about telling truth and stories, sharing the beauty that comes out of pain. That’s my jam right there.” 

About a month before she was set to record Silver Lining, Coleman discovered Gnawa music, a wildly popular and wholly embodied spiritual music in Morocco, but rooted in the journeying of enslaved black Africans, and was inspired to consider the journey her own music has taken. The fusion of influences on her latest album suddenly made more sense to her—she, too, made more sense to her. Gnawa, exemplifying the role of oral traditions in the movement of both sound and stories, and the re-storying power of music, shares deep parallels to and DNA with American blues. The actual iron shackles that once held enslaved peoples have been transformed into the krakebs, or castanets, that drive the beat and spirit of the Gnawa music as it moves through and shakes the body and across the stage to catch fire in the massive crowds that move together in a kind of collective trance. Sound familiar? Shake These Blues, one of the more traditional blues songs of loss and reckoning on Silver Lining, resounds with the mystical and upbeat elements of the Gnawa-shaking-spirit, moving the pain of being in an empty home out of the body by shaking those blues, a literal and figurative somatically healing force. Gnawa, like the American blues, has turned the painful past into something beautiful—her jam. The blues jam.

American blues, after all, came from a people who found their hope and freedom where they could—in expressing the pain and agony and glory, too, into a certain kind of joy and ecstasy through music, their own way. The pain became a life force, driving creative resistance and building resilience, grit—that ability to get through the unimaginable, to “sing strong.” And that life force remains, in the blues ethos that continues to define the genre today—and in the power and possibility in the re-storying. 

As so many blues songs are, Nothing’s in Vain (Steve Beastie’s Song) was born out of deep personal pain—and a story about its transformative powers, and one too heartbreakingly beautiful not to share. In November of 2023, Gina was starting to let herself believe she might have a chance at securing a Grammy nomination for one of the three albums she’d put out that year. She knew, too, that if she could get a Grammy nomination, she could get one from the BMAs—her own people—which felt most important. “Can I actually hold onto that with some hope? Am I allowed to do that? Do I dare?” She had always shielded herself, her whole life about just “taking it.” But she took the chance, daring to lean into this as a possibility. She acknowledged to herself that if she actually got what her heart most desired, the Coleman Curse may very well assert itself again, that she would “deal with the fact that I will get run over by a bus if it happens. I can deal with that. But it would be so nice to get this.” When she was blanked out from getting any of the seven possible Grammy nominations, knowing, too, what it meant to the BMAs, however, she fell into deep despair—and ended up writing one of the more beautiful songs of her career. 

“That was a hard day for me, a hard get-your-ass-back-up day for me. I had to knock myself out with Benadryl to get through the night—my head was swimming, and there was no way I was going to get through that night—and this song came to me in my sleep. Clearly, I am processing—it is a licking-my-wounds song. But I also think it’s probably one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever written. Lyrically, I think this is my best song.” Despite or maybe because of that, Gina concedes that she was uncomfortable with why she wrote it: “I struggled with not getting the nominations. And that’s how this came to me. And it felt unsavory in a way.” 

This continues to be an emotional space for Gina in all ways. But in December, things would shift. Gina’s friendship with Steve (Morris) Beastie, of Voodoo Radio’s Beastie’s Blues Club, had been growing over the past year, across the pond, and would provide her with some perspective and grace to reframe what this beautiful song meant to her.

By all accounts, Steve Beastie, represented the best of us—he was adored for his kindness, humor, and compassion, and his enthusiasm for the blues was legendary. A huge champion of Misty Blues, Steve, with his wife, came to Misty Blues’ show at the Frazer Theater in Knaresborough, England, during their 2023 UK Tour. Despite battling cancer, Steve came to their show and gushed about them during a live performance review the next day, calling it “another absolute corker,” in that wonderful accent.

On December 11th, Gina saw a social media post and learned that his battle with cancer was coming to an end. Gina sent him a special message in a voice recording, in which she shared her sorrow and gratitude with him—as well as a hauntingly lovely, from-the-heart a cappella version of Nothing’s in Vain, which had not yet been recorded.

Self-professed “terrible morning voice” aside, Gina’s vocals are just right. She tugs at the ache of missed opportunity in all of us—“You had all your dreams in one basket, But the fates chose a different pathway…” — and the disappointment that can quickly become an all-consuming bitterness if we allow it to, but which can push us, too, to new heights if we heed the call. The end, a throaty slowed-down whisper, wraps him in a promise—“These blues are here to sustain you, these blues cast off the pain…”

Steve’s text message back to Gina captures not only his grace but the grace of the song, and Gina’s delivery, as well: “Oh my Gina, I am done in bits, turned to mush, the most beautiful thing…thank you so much. I hope I can hear it in full; if not, this will live forever with me.”

Steve Beastie died two weeks later, before the song would be recorded. Gina realized that this was no longer a “wound-licking” song to her, not a song about chasing gold and only coming up empty, but a song about what matters more than the shiny medals—those golden threads of love that run through all of us, that bind us to each other, that are everlasting. Lyrically, she speaks to herself from a place of love—that deepest, most compassionate part of ourselves that rises within us when we most need it—and is able to shift the wallowing into another I will rise moment. Gina would dedicate the song to him—an affirmation that despite the challenges of rollercoastering through the highs and lows, most everything we experience, whether failures or triumphs, but most particularly connections with others, teaches us something worthwhile. 

Each of the eleven songs on Silver Lining weaves together music and stories both ancestral and personal, reminding us that everything comes from something—and that everything comes from the blues, deep in the belly, and threaded in our DNA. Silver Lining tells Gina’s own origin story within the larger origin story of the blues, harkening back to Gina’s beginnings—and to the stories that remain long after the people are gone.

Gina’s childhood musical glitter-globe resounded with all the lush multiplicity of sounds spanning genres, influences, and generations. Gina’s mother was only 16 when she had her, so Gina was raised by her grandmother, with lots of help from her godmother, Maximina, and the usual “village” of close friends and neighbors. Gina was raised bilingually, in language and music. In her predominantly Puerto Rican and African American neighborhood in the South Bronx, Latin sounds mixed and mingled with the hip hop that was bringing new energy to the streets against a backdrop of Motown and R & B. Gina’s childhood best friend, Evelyn, lived down the hall, where they’d spend hours immersed in the salsa music spinning from Evelyn’s older brothers’ turntable. At home, they listened to records her mother and uncles had left behind—Aretha Franklin was an early favorite. With Maxi, she learned to love the sounds of Celia Cruz and Tito Puente. She and Evelyn would later join the Latin Drum Corps in middle school, traveling all over the northeast to play Puerto Rican festivals, Evelyn on the glockenspiel, Gina on the tritone, bringing the same poppin’ energy that she loves to build in her music now.  

Amidst an ongoing succession of personal loss and difficulty for Gina and her family, music offered sustenance and soul, fortifying Gina with a work ethic and devotion to her craft that has only deepened over time.

Gina remembers listening to her uncle Stanley, her mother’s twin and a musician himself, play his saxophone—an almost liturgical memory of a young man who was murdered while still in his 20’s, soon after her beloved grandfather had died. 

While her grandmother Ruth was all business, her grandfather Dan, a barber, was all “light, the fun guy.” Instead of getting payment from people, he often bartered, big-heartedly sharing the occasional windfall with all the kids and their friends. It was he who finagled a piano this way for five year old Gina, who took piano lessons with a “horrible Mrs. Horowitz,” a white lady who corrected Gina by bludgeoning her: “I remember my grandmother sitting in the practice room, reading the Post, while Mrs. Horowitz would take her wooden ruler and crack me over the hands for dropping my wrists.” For nine whole years she endured this—nine years! 

Many children would have abandoned music altogether after that. But not Gina. She muses now that maybe she could have become a “skilled instrumentalist” had she been more kindly instructed (and in truth, she is a skilled instrumentalist)—but the lessons remain. Little did she know she was building her blues toolbox—the discipline, the courage and fortitude, the stoic persistence to get back up and do it better—all parts of her that still fuel her music, her songwriting, her blues.

The stories remain as well. That piano that her beloved grandfather scored for her in some shady deal, that became a source of so much agony for Gina, still resides with her—but she will not tend to it nor tune it, such is the pain that still resides in those keys. It’s bittersweet how those stories inhabit not only the things we keep but the internal spaces as well. For Gina, her love of music resounds with the untold stories, too, those ancestral songlines that have given shape to her own story. Gina grew up hearing about her own grandmother’s singing prowess—but sadly would never hear her sing. Everybody talked about how her Nana Ruth had been legendary, called the next “Marion Anderson.” What had happened to shut that down? The untold story would always tug at her.

“In a lot of ways, I keep on persevering with the music, pushing it and getting right back up, not only because I love it and it is therapeutic for me, but also to honor my grandmother and to do something that I know she was really good at and probably really passionate about—but that circumstances shut down for her in a world I will never know or understand. It is a way of honoring what she wasn’t able to accomplish.” 

There were others in Gina’s constellation of star-makers. Mrs. Brown, a lone teacher in sixth grade, and one of the only African American teachers at Gina’s elementary school, PS43, saw potential in Gina, and convinced her grandmother to let her go to a different school—a pipeline to certain programs that would give her a proper launch. What happened next is a testament to how one person who takes the time to speak up for a child can have a powerful impact. Gina navigated a series of public buses and long walks in between to make this new school work for herself. She and Evelyn stayed close through their time together in El Primer Grupo de Batuteras, Cheerleaders, y su Banda, music and friendship interwoven, instilling in Gina a certain kind of surety. Eventually, she landed in the A Better Chance program, bringing her to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she attended Wellesley High School and lived with five other girls from all over in a big scholarship house—her own “Facts of Life,” but better. They all shared in the extensive chores and learned to take care of the space as well as each other. By the second year, Gina’s new residential leaders, a young couple who had recently graduated from Williams College, took the girls for a campus visit that would make an indelible imprint on Gina. While there, Gina bought a yellow, emblemed Williams t-shirt off a rack at the Williams Shop, which she promptly folded and put away in her bottom drawer back in her room, promising herself that she would not put the shirt on until she had been accepted at Williams. The universe has a way of connecting us to the people we need at certain times of our lives—and Gina would spend the next two years working towards that goal, with help from her English teacher, whose husband had gone to Williams as well. In 1986, Gina finally donned that t-shirt, and started as a freshman at Williams, where she would continue to reshape her musical and personal journey. Freshman year, she took a Harlem Renaissance Winter Study course with Sandra Burton; it would be her first introduction to the Blues. She took African drumming with Professor Ernest Brown, learning about African rhythms from the Ghanaian master drummer Obu Adi, taking her back to the beginning.

She unexpectedly found her people when she joined the Rugby club—a feeling of absolute acceptance and belonging which has not just remained but gotten better over the years. There’s a place for everyone on the rugby pitch—and at the rugby table, too—a genuine camaraderie and love that moves through the practices, the games, and the circling up after the game with the very people you’ve just been trying to take down. And there was a lot of singing in that sisterhood—raucous and bawdy and joyful—that features still in Gina’s throaty delivery, her energizing way of commanding the band, and her tribute shows to the Queens of the Blues, who in many ways to Gina must feel are kindred spirits, calling forth the unapologetic moxie and grace of the Rugby Goddess within. Miraculously, Gina still coaches the women’s rugby team at Williams.

After Williams, Gina stayed in the Berkshires, working in education, and discovering by chance a talent for singing when she won an open mic competition at a local club. She sang first as a duo with Dave Lincoln on guitar, calling themselves The Siblings, then as Cole-Connection with Mark Massery on keys. She “got the itch for a bigger sound,” and so formed her first band, the folk-rock-funk-fueled Cole Connection, which would bring in some key members of Misty Blues, including Bill Patriquin on bass and Jason Webster on guitar. In the summer of 1999, Gina returned to work at Williams in the admissions office, and late in the game was asked to join the incredible cast of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun at the Williamstown Theater Festival, after the director’s search for an African American “gospel singer” led him to Gina. During the show, she walked the fire escape and catwalk over the main stage, singing traditional spirituals like Climbing Higher Mountains in between acts. My road’s been a little rocky on the way home…

After the show, cast member Ruben Santiago-Hudson told Gina,“You got to give up that folk funk nonsense! Your voice is perfectly suited for the blues,” and gave Gina the double CD collection, Men are like Streetcars—Women Blues Singers, 1928-1969, to seal the deal. It worked. Bill and Jason were down, Gina added a drummer, Dan Teichert, and Misty Blues was born. 

25 years and 15 albums later, the band continues to grow and evolve, the original four shifting into numerous, dynamic iterations, with the backing of a deep and resplendent farm team. As frontwoman, Gina is still picking up the mantle, paying homage to her grandmother, her first Queen, and to the other Queens, matriarchs of the Blues—Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, Ruth Brown and Koko Taylor. Most recently, Coleman and Misty Blues honored Odetta, which she calls her “first wormhole,” and whom she shines up like a silver dollar in the gorgeous live tribute album, Tell Me Who You Are, the second of three albums the band recorded in 2023 alone. The second live Odetta tribute is planned for March of 2024. The success of I Don’t Sleep on last year’s Outside the Lines, one of the more autobiographical songs she’s written, inspired Gina to include more of herself in this album, letting her own varied influences and honest vulnerability give voice to classic blues situations and form. Her “I’ve got things to do” work ethic pushes her to work harder than anyone out there to keep honing her craft. As she sharpens her considerable songwriting skills, she adds, too, to the impressive cavalcade of instruments she can comfortably command—her cigar box guitar, guitar, and percussion joining the piano, sax, trumpet and sousaphone she played in her younger years. And after discovering Gnawa, she’s opening to new possibilities all around. She’s added a gimbri to the mix, which will no doubt make an appearance at a live show soon.

Despite the ever-escalating uncertainty of this world, the music will go on, with the blues taking our collective sorrow by the hand and giving us the chance to make it right. Blues Never Ends, the last song on the album, takes us back through the eternal origin story of American blues music, and forward, too, by ultimately reminding us of what we are capable of—not just in inflicting harm on others, but in rising again, and our resilience in the face of absolute annihilation. In the repeated refrain Never ends, never ends, the troubles will always be there, but the music will, too—as a salve, yes, but also as a golden thread to bring us into a richly-embedded ancestral fortitude and universal interconnection. Blues Never Ends follows the journey of oppressed people “from the ship’s dock to a shared crop,” and to feeling “like an outcast,” even in your own community. Pulling on the thread of truth-telling, and the challenges of putting that into the world, “got in a street brawl on the way to the juke joint” evokes the in-fighting that can be so divisive and destructive. Coleman, too, has experienced the feeling of being othered by her own people, the brush of judgment and exclusion reopening old wounds. “BB King used to talk about how there were certain groups of people who would chastise him for singing the devil’s music when he should be singing about the Lord. “Well,” he’d say, “the Lord’s not providing for me and putting food on the table.” But as Coleman knows, you keep on, stay loose, trust, look forward—and keep reframing. Blues Never Ends, with its African/blues mix of music and voices, leaves us with the more exaltant, transcendent “makes my heart sing,” showing us that we return again and again to the blues for sustenance, salvation, redemption. There is no other way through. Hear me now.

It is, after all, what the blues offers to all of us—and Silver Lining is no exception—the chance to tune in to our own torment, the pent up rush and roar, and to let the music meet us deep inside, so we might feel the force of that simmering howl, before releasing it with an untempered, unapologetic expressiveness—the blues-catharsis. And in doing so, we discover what is indestructible within. Like a good friend, the blues bears witness—I got you. And when the Misty Blues band circles up and takes turns giving voice to Gina’s lyrical get-up-and-go, they exuberantly breathe into being an empathetic call and response, sending connective, electrical currents to crackle and pop between Gina and each of them—and the listening audience. And when that unburdening is shared, the blues becomes infinitely more transformative and healing—and we are all better for it. Hallefuckinlujah. Xo.