Growth takes time, and it’s a dirty, fraught journey. We may decide one day who we want to be but it takes an abundance of effort to get there.

Consider, for a moment, flora: each year, we tend to seeds and bulbs plunged into cold, hard ground. Then each spring, we till, nourish, and water, waiting for greenery to grow and appear. There’s hope that this work leads us to, say, lush peony bushes, draped and slunk over under the weight of their own elegance. Something beautiful, something special after all of that hard work. And so, we endure the labour of the transition that got us there. This liminal space of transformation is where we find singer-songwriter Julianna Riolino on her sophomore record, Echo In The Dust.

Echo In The Dust arrives this fall from Riolino’s own label, MoonWhistle Records, unfurling like a once tight bud into a languid blossom. By Riolino’s own admission, Echo In The Dust is markedly different from her debut, All Blue, released in 2022. She breathes new confidence into her performance—the sort that burns from belly to brain, roaring from her throat but landing sweetly on our ears. The Southern Ontario musician is soft as she is tough on these songs; seeing the benefit of laying down armour and splitting her heart open so that we may get a glimpse of our own.

The songs on the record consider relationships of all sorts as the foundation for her awakening into a different creative self and person in this world; working through loss, grief, habits, and decisions she once made, seeking clarity in the past before leaving it there to move forward. The sentiment “you don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been” rings especially true on this album.

“What I'm talking about on this record are universally felt: you can have a romantic relationship, friendship, or professional relationship and start to identify as you grow and learn the toxic parts that can exist in all of those,” Riolino explains. “You think, ‘why do I feel bad? Why is this happening again?’ But I'm allowing this to happen because I haven't told myself I deserve better. This record helped me learn to accept and love myself. To put myself first and stand on my own two feet.”

After non-stop touring for other projects she has since left, and wrapping up live promotion for All Blue, Riolino began recording for this new album in 2024 at Gold Standard Records in Toronto. While she played guitar, she also tapped her regular collaborators, Matthew “Roddy” Kuester to play bass and guitar, Peter Landi on drums, Thomas Hammerton on piano and synth, and producer of the album Aaron Goldstein on pedal steel. On top of that, a whole host of other instrumentalists rounded out the sound of the album including Alex Edkins (Weird Nightmare, Metz) on guitar for “Full Moon,” “Like a Rembrandt,” and “The Less I Know,” and Nashville’s Sean Thompson on guitar for “On A Bluebird’s Wing.”

The songs on All Blue, Riolino says, had the privilege of being played and workshopped in front of a crowd but the songs that make up Echo In The Dust were written before, during, and after her debut in moments of confusion and clarity. These songs are like journal entries; attempts at deciphering what she wants out of her relationships and creative life in music. She transports us into big feelings layered with guitar twangs, vivid pedal steel and walloping horns, anchored by her tender vocals as though she embodies Dolly Parton and Linda Ronstadt in one person.

Echo In The Dust builds on the alt-country elements of All Blue. Yet, no algorithm can contain Riolino or what moved her this time around. She cites Roy Orbison, The Roches, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy),” and doom metal bands like Om as influences on the album.

“It's kind of punk, it's rock n’ roll, it's still kind of country. It's more rocking than All Blue. It's an amalgamation of everything going on in my mind.”

Indeed what’s going on in Riolino’s mind is a lot. Separating oneself from a situation, person, or habit to better understand yourself is the hands-in-the-mud kind of work she considers on lead single “On A Bluebird’s Wing.” Riolino sings, “To grow is to be the fruit of our lowest lows!” The vibrancy of the pedal steel on the track anchored with Riolino’s vocals is perfect for hot summer days flying down a highway in need of a song to belt out on repeat.

Much of the record is perfect for driving, for the quiet contemplation that arrives when you’ve listened to a track for the millionth time on the road set against a clarifying, milky blue horizon and cotton candy pink streaks. Over swelling horns and crooning “oohs,” on “Seed,” Riolino considers how she needs to grow for herself, singing “I was your seed / when you were in need.” While “Running” is an epiphany, an urgent call to run towards her dreams, anchored by the aural confidence of a guitar solo. Ever interested in a cool phrase in songwriting, her lyrics remain sticky and unforgettable, like “love me on the inside / or settle for my dregs” on “It’s a shakedown!”

What makes Riolino a compelling performer and songwriter on this record, and in her career, is how she inhabits past sensations and feelings, reliving and reviving them again to release. While a lot of these experiences are composites and memories, stitched together into 11 tracks, the impressions are of a real, vivid journey through an immense experience of rediscovery toward intuitive knowing.

Riolino needed to unravel before she could clarify who she is now and who she’ll be next, and the result is Echo In the Dust, a beautiful sonic result of what it’s like to stay out of one’s own way.