Kiss On a Cold Cold Stone

With her 2025 life-saving surgery behind her, Branscomb has rebounded to record not one, but two diverse albums with iconic casts this year: one a boundary-pushing masterpiece and the other a close-to-the-bone bluegrass album with longtime performing colleagues Johnny and Jeanette Williams. With Kiss, she gives us a sneak preview and a reminder of her capacity to write Bluegrass to the bone.

"After I recovered, I found myself standing on a moment like the pinnacle of a hill. I could see forward and back. I wanted to push new boundaries with one project. But I was also called to look back, to reflect on my musical home in Bluegrass, where my professional songwriting began over 50 years ago.

"Kiss" is a sneak peek at the latter, fearlessly Bluegrass, and fearlessly Branscomb, with “Kiss” blazing the way. This album, #14 for Branscomb, features all originals performed with Johnny and Jeanette Williams, friends and bandmates for over a decade. "I picked this song because there just is no better high lonesome singer in our times, I feel, than Johnny Williams, and this is the lonesomest song I think I've ever written. I call it "Rawgrass.”

The tension in this song is the agonizing plight of someone's longing for their lost love, the torturous search for one more kiss. The singer climbs up to the family graveyard, overgrown with wildflowers, but can get no closer than a kiss on a cold, cold stone.But he finds the stone rough and cold, indifferent to his broken heart.

Kiss is one of those rare "nuff said" songs that speak for themselves. It's the best of its kind: haunting, plaintive, and raw as the granite that meets the lips of a grieving loved one’s kiss. "I am lucky to have Johnny Williams to produce and deliver a song like this, and hammer out the rhythm guitar too. And equally fortunate to have Jeanette on bass and vocals. When I play with Johnny and Jeanette, it's like coming home."

Branscomb, an iconic songwriter known for an extensive contribution of originals to the bluegrass canon, refuses to be typed. She has given us the lyrical classic Steel Rails, which broke barriers with Alison Krauss; the chart-topping old-time "Barefoot Girl," sung by Becky Buller and Russell Moore; and an unsurpassable ballad in the 2017 Song of the Year, "Dear Sister," co-written and sung by Claire Lynch.

With "Kiss," however, she's formidably and unapologetically Bluegrass, as certain as words in granite. Branscomb can still throw some "rawgrass" at the Bluegrass wall, and it's gonna stick.