New Music Friday 2/23: Posthumous Mama Zu debut displays huge loss left in Nashville music scene

New Music Friday 2/23: Posthumous Mama Zu debut displays huge loss left in Nashville music scene

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The Nashville music scene is a close community that has grown over the decades that the city has been lovingly referred to as Music City. The scene has seen some of the most talented musicians in the world cross its paths and grow with it. Singers, guitarist, song writers and everything in between have come from inside the Davidson County limits and from far away to craft their talents and to call Music City home. 

Anyone who has spent any amount of time exploring the sounds of the Nashville music scene outside the confines of lower Broadway knows that there is so much more to the scene than just country music. While the genre is what put the city on the music map it is the work of countless artists from all genres of music over the last few decades that has really earned the city the title of Music City.

Paramore, Kings of Leon, Miley Cyrus, Young Buck, and Kesha are just some of the non-country artist that have helped Nashville grow into a music nirvana. In addition to the numerous household names that have called Nashville home there is a myriad of musicians that serve as the foundation of the scene that many never learn the name of. 

The alt-country, rockabilly band Those Darlins is one of those bands from Nashville that spent a decade honing their craft and building their name while showing there is more to Music City than traditional country music. When their self-titled debut album was released 15 years ago the sudden success found them opening for The Black Keys in front of massive crowds all over the world. For the next five plus years Those Darlins released 2 more albums and toured relentlessly until they went announced they were going on hiatus in late 2015. 

Front woman Jessi Zazu and drummer Linwood Regensburg almost immediately began to work on a project together. The two formed the duo Mama Zu and had big plans for the new music but life as it does got in the way. Jessi succumbed cervical cancer in September of 2017 at the young age of 28 leaving a massive hole in the heart of the Nashville music scene. Her departure from the world left many what would happen to Mama Zu and the music they had recorded.

Regensburg told the Nashville Scene last year, “I didn’t want to play the songs or listen to the songs, let alone finish them. It just seemed like such a daunting task with a lot of layers — there was a lot of work left to do, but then there was also this exhausting underlying emotional component that pops in and hangs around the moment I’d open a session.”

In 2020, he felt he was ready to tackle finishing the project so he spent the better part of three years spending as much time as possible with them as a therapeutic way of obtaining closure and saying goodbye to a great friend. 

The posthumous album titled Quilt Floor is out now and puts on showcase to the world how much of a talent Zazu was. The album has a number of ‘fuck you’ songs including the lead single “Lip” that one can just envision a large crowd of young women singling along with. It is a song that would perfectly fit on an album for an artist like Miranda Lambert. 

The albums first few tracks are upbeat rocking tunes that help define what Mama Zu’s sound was destined to be but then takes a left turn on “Guitar World” when the catchy old-country tune drops you into an East Nashville coffee shop sipping on a mocha latte fingering and through the latest issue of the magazine looking for a ‘guitar queen.’ 

Zazu’s songwriting strength is put on beautiful display on “Capital Kind” where she writes about how it was politicians that were trying to kill her just as much as the cancer was. Ever since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2013 providing health care to millions and millions of Americans who other wise could not afford it. Jessi as a musician was one of numerous Nashville musicians that benefited greatly from the new law and as soon as the law went to effect lawmakers have been plotting ways of overturning it. The law, colloquially known as Obamacare, helped Zazu fight the disease until the end.

Jessi sings on “Capital Kind,” “Badly I want to be free, so badly. I wanna be me so how do I kill a poisonous pill we all seem to swallow with ease.”

Never being able to hear these songs live in Jessi’s voice just adds to the infinite reasons why cancer sucks.

Steven McCash is the Lead Music Writer and Utility Man for SoBros Network. Steven is the host of the ‘Drinking With…’ podcast, and the pioneer of New Music Friday, highlighting each week’s new releases in the world of music in addition to the occasional live show review. He also pitches in as a Nashville lifestyle writer and football analyst (hence the ‘Utility Man’ title). Follow on Twitter: @MC_Cash75

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