Celebrated singer-songwriter Mya Byrne announces her new album Rhinestone Tomboy will release on April 28 via Kill Rock Stars Nashville. Produced by Grammy-nominated songwriter Aaron Lee Tasjan, this is the first album released on the all-new sister label to legendary indie rock label Kill Rock Stars. Along with the announcement, Byrne shares a sunny music video for her new single “It Don’t Fade,” a celebratory reminder that there is always room to stand again on the other side of hardship. 

“‘It Don’t Fade’ came to me while walking down the street in my neighborhood in Berkeley, CA, and I improvised the lyric and melody almost entirely as it is into my phone recorder,” explains Byrne. “It was the height of the pandemic, and I was feeling wistful and thinking about the threads that tie us together, about my family, who I was so very far away from at that time, and my recovery, which was only a few months in – how even in our hardest moments there might be sunshine somewhere. Hope is a hard thing to find, and I’ve had some hard times, but the music I make helps me get through, and this song has gotten me through so much.”

Aaron Lee Tasjan speaks about his role in the project: “Using my skills as a producer to help create a path for Mya to succeed was something I felt called to do in my soul. If our goal as a society is to become softer, more loving and more accepting of each other, we need artists like Mya Byrne, who possesses these qualities, to help lead us on our mission.”

Rhinestone Tomboy finds Mya Byrne at the forefront of a movement propelled by a much needed burst of fresh air. A queer trans woman playing Americana steeped with potent branches of blues, rock, glam and country music, she is every bit the voice of the outsider that built the foundation of the genre. Her new album is a 12-song journey into redemption and a masterclass at world building, as she gives life to stories from her times of joy and challenge. Several of the songs were written during the 2018 California wildfires, others pulled out of her time spent in New York nightlife in the late aughts, and several were written during the week following the loss of John Prine, a musical spirit living in the realm of Byrne’s influence. 

Most notably, many of the songs were written after Byrne became sober, and paired with the richness of being trans revealing itself over time, this is an album that is deeply reflective of what it means to see the full breadth of ourselves. “I think I finally integrated a whole bunch of myself into my music in a way that I don’t think was possible before,” Byrne says of the album’s themes. “I think in a lot of my previous work there was this element of I needed to discover who I was.”

Photo Courtesy: Niki Pretti