Daiana Feuer on December 10th, 2018

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The daughter of musical parents — her father Larry Brown played in The Association, Smothers Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, when he met her mother, singer Anne-Marie Brown — Dominique Pruitt loves a good old-timey song, and she’s put her predilection for music of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s into “High In The Valley,” her first new single in five years. “I had written down that song title a few years ago,” she says of the song. “It was such a part of me at one point to feel like I was trapped in this hopelessness of being so close to what you want in a way but so far away.” Perhaps that has something to do with her musical trajectory getting interrupted.

In 2009, Pruitt recorded three demos of her father’s old songs, which in 2011 got her attention from Merovee Records. Her Dave Darling-produced EP, “To Win Your Love” was released in 2013 and though she completed a full-length, she decided to shelve it and the label ultimately folded. From there she did some wandering and creative soul searching, mining her love for Wanda Jackson, the movies “Cry Baby” and “Gypsy,” with burlesque, vintage show girls and Americana, which completes her vision that encompasses both the auditory and visual experience. “That’s something important. I want to put on a show with a spectacle,” she says.

“High In The Valley” was written in collaboration with Jasmine Ash, Joseph Holiday and Kenny Fleetwood. With a little growl in her voice, it opens on the evocative line, “Closest that I’ve ever been to God is a Bible on a nightstand at an old roadside motel” and follows with musings on being broke, “getting high,” being close but yet so far from the glitz of Hollywood stardom, and feeling sad and lost, but the combination of all these elements stirred together makes for a rather glamorous cocktail.

||| Stream: “High in the Valley”

||| Also: Watch the video for the song

||| Live: Dominique Pruitt is among the artists playing Sunday at the Grand Ole Echo Winter Dance Formal at the Echoplex — along with Brian Whelan and the Rockin’ Roachas, Elijah Ocean & the Countrysiders, Gethen Jenkins, Chris Shiflett, Leslie Stevens, King Leg, Mara Connor, Johnny Travis Jr, Leeann Skoda, Ben Reddell, Kate Flannery (of Big Dick), Ruby Force, Emily Rose, Little Lonely and Molly Jenson. Tickets.