Artist of the Week: The Weeping Willows

CountryTown is proud to announce Golden Guitar-winning alt-country duo, The Weeping Willows as our Artist Of The Week, following the release of their new album, You Reap What You Sow.

Partners in life, love, and song, Andrew Wrigglesworth (guitar, ganjo, lead vocals) and Laura Coates (lead vocals) are a couple of old souls, steeped in bluegrass tradition and draped in Gothic Americana imagery. They regale their audiences with stories of sunshine and romance, the lost and the lonely, the heartsick and the harried, God and The Devil, murder, and decay. 

Wrigglesworth started listening to country, folk and bluegrass music as a teenager, whereas Coates’ appreciation for the genre was influenced by her father’s love of artists like Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. She started performing in local musical theatre shows such as Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz and Les Misérables. Her mother is also a classical music teacher.

The Weeping Willows released their celebrated debut album, Till The North Wind Blows in 2012. They followed it up with the critically-acclaimed Before Darkness Comes A-Callin’ (2016) and 2021’s Southern Gothic EP.

2017-2021 saw The Weeping Willows nominated for 10 x CMAA ‘Golden Guitar’ awards, 4 x Country Music Channel (CMC) awards, 2 x Australian Folk Music Awards (AFMAs), ‘Live Act of the Year’ (Country) in the National Live Music Awards (NLMAs), performing at AmericanaFest (USA), Folk Alliance International (USA), Maverick Festival (UK), Port Fairy Folk Festival, Queenscliff Music Festival, Out On The Weekend and the Australian Americana Music Honours.

They’ve also supported Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real (USA), Iris DeMent (USA), Hayes Carll (USA), Eilen Jewell (USA), Kevin Welch (USA), Shane Nicholson, Bill Chambers and Lachlan Bryan.

After six years, You Reap What You Sow is the Melbourne-based duo’s long-awaited third studio album, which debuted at #3 on the iTunes Country Albums Chart, behind Dolly Parton and Casey Barnes, and features their 2021 Golden Guitar award-winning ‘Instrumental of the Year’, Prelude. 

Recorded, engineered and mixed by Ryan Freeland at Los Angeles’ Stampede Origin Studio, with additional instrumentation and overdubs by Australia’s own Roger Bergodaz, with You Reap What You Sow, The Weeping Willows light a path through the thickets and brambles of a fraught world, excavating and illuminating profound human truths in signature, ageless style.

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