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Phoebe Hunt’s sparse and vulnerable new album, Nothing Else Matters (2023), feels like an exercise in stripping things away—peeling back all the layers to get to the heart of who and what she really is. After years of writing, recording, and touring as a band member and bandleader, her latest recording finds her as a woman standing alone, just her voice and her fiddle. In that empty space left behind, Nothing Else Matters is an album that asks many questions, the most central being, “Is this enough? Am I enough?”

This question has quietly loomed in the background of Phoebe Hunt’s entire career as she’s searched the world and herself for the purest expression of her art. Though born in Texas, she has been a citizen of the world and the road. From Austin to Brooklyn, India to China to Africa, Los Angeles and Colorado and Nashville, her journeys have all added to and colored who she has become as an artist. She was classically trained as a violinist, but an affinity for fiddle and old time music led her on the path to where she is now. She played for years with genre-bending folk band The Belleville Outfit, and more recently served as bandleader with her own backing band The Gatherers. But through all of the added layers of her illustrious career, the

“enough” came when she returned to herself and her fiddle – the two voices singing to one another in harmony.

The songs that comprise Nothing Else Matters were written in 2020 at a time when Phoebe was off the road in Nashville, far from her bandmates in Brooklyn. As she sat in the guest room of

her house, flipping through a notebook of around thirty song ideas she’d written over the course of several months, she knew that she was ready to make another record. But it would have to be different than the ones that had come before. Whereas previously it was a challenge to find ways to strip down her songs with the band into arrangements to perform alone for solo gigs, these songs had been born out of total creative isolation—just her voice and fiddle had given life to each of them from the beginning.

“These songs have never even been played with a full band. It was really a different process to work from the inside out instead of from the outside in. I just realized that there is this tiny little world inside of me… my own little reality. In the past few years, I have gotten to really spend time there, and this album is my way of sharing that tiny little world with others.”

The original idea for Nothing Else Matters came during a conversation with Lawson White, the producer and recording engineer Phoebe worked with in Nashville. At the time, there was a sense of frustration with the difficulties of scheduling and distance from her band. They were discussing if there might be another way. She had spent the rest of her career making expensive, high production albums, but she wanted a way to express herself in spite of the circumstances, in a way that could feed and nurture her heart and soul instead of just depleting her.

“In that moment on that call with Lawson, I came to see that my voice and fiddle are enough… that I am enough. And that was our rule: no bells, no whistles, no overdubs, no frills. I believed

that standing on my own two feet, with the instrument I’ve given thirty years of my life to, singing the songs that come from my heart can be enough. And I hope this record can give that kind of permission to the listener, allowing them to find their truest expression… no matter what their limitations or circumstances look like.”

Throughout the eleven powerful and haunting tracks that make up Nothing Else Matters—all written by Phoebe with co-writers including Maya Devitry, Jillette Johnson, and Dustin Welch—there is a sense of both independence and empowerment, but there are also many questions.

On “Galloping,” a song Hunt says captures one of the overall themes of the record, she grapples with the more existential implications of what it means to be both an artist and a human being. Is it our goals that drive us, or our process and the journey we’re on? And even more pressing, do we have any control at all? Will we make it to where we want to be?

Horse to the barn, running and sweating,

Galloping the whole way home if I let him.

Who's in control, rider or beast?

Will I ever make it home for the feast?

But even in the midst of the introspective anxiety of finding purpose and meaning, there is a bold and raw resolve in her song “Carry On.” Here we see a hard-won self-assuredness reflected in her, earned over years of chasing the path in pursuit of her expression and truth.

Through the years, through the dawn, through it all I live on.

And I waited for tomorrow like I waited for today.

Full of innocence and sorrow, through cacophonies of pain,

I carry on, carry on.

“I think of my art as an expression of myself and my own way of healing. It’s me processing the quandaries of life and the little pains and successes, too. I know that there are no answers presented, it’s just a way we can follow the breadcrumbs and bear witness to our own transformation.”

For being her most stripped down outing to date, there is an unmatched sense of strength at the heart of Nothing Else Matters. While there’s a fluid sense of questioning throughout, working its way through the streams of Phoebe’s consciousness, the final takeaway is the deep, authentic expression of a woman who knows she is in fact enough. In spite of her circumstances, in opposition to the difficulties, she has the answer to all of it already—flowing through her hands and across her instrument, moving through her chest and out of her mouth.

I don’t need the world to hear me to know that I am singing.

I’m singing… nothing else matters.