Kathy Mattea Releases New Single “Mercy Now”

First New Album in 6 Years Out 9/7 via Captain Potato/Thirty Tigers

On September 7, Kathy Mattea returns with Pretty Bird, her first studio album in more than 6 years. On Friday (8/24), Mattea released “Mercy Now,” the third single to be released from the forthcoming album. Parade Magazine said, “Gorgeously performed, this tender prayer for understanding benefits from Mattea’s simple yet masterful delivery.”

Stream “Mercy Now” via YouTube: https://youtu.be/XHzcHEEaIUY

“This song is written by Mary Gauthier, a songwriter’s songwriter here in Nashville. I found myself listening to it for my own solace, and decided that if I could learn to sing it, I’d get to live with it every night,” explains Mattea. “I tried for months to sing it, had to shelve it, brought it back out, and was finally able to find a point of view that felt like my own. Bill Cooley, my longtime guitarist, came up with wonderful hymn-like arrangement, and when I sing it, I think of it as a prayer.”

Pretty Bird is now available for pre-order and includes instant downloads of “St. Teresa” and “I Can’t Stand Up Alone.”

Rolling Stone recently praised Pretty Bird as “one of the year’s most affecting LPs,” and “a new era in Mattea’s 30-plus-year career.”

Pretty Bird is Mattea’s first studio album in six years, following 2012’s Follow Me Home. Hailed by The Washington Post as “one of Nashville’s finest song interpreters,” Kathy Mattea has enjoyed the kind of success many artists only dream of: two GRAMMY wins, four CMA Awards, four #1 country singles, and five gold albums (plus a platinum collection of her greatest hits).

The dream almost ended, though, when Mattea entered her 50s and began to find her voice changing. What followed was a three-year journey through life challenges and vocal glitches that she describes as her “dark night of the soul,” a trying time of personal anguish and professional uncertainty that threatened to silence her singing voice ermanently.

Hailing from West Virginia, Mattea headed to Nashville in the late ‘70s. Her commercial breakthrough arrived with albums Walk The Way The Wing Blows and Untasted Honey. Mattea was named Country Music Association (CMA) Female Vocalist of the Year in 1989 and 1990 and earned a 1983 Grammy Award for her album Good News. Her list of hit singles includes “Love at the Five and Dime” (1986), “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” (1989), and “Where’ve You Been” (1990).