Texas blues-rock singer/songwriter and exceptional guitarist Ally Venable has a new album coming out in April and makes an appearance in her hometown of Kilgore amid her national 2025 tour.
A Kilgore native, Venable began singing at church at four and picked up the guitar at age 12. By 13, she started her own band and through her early influence of Stevie Ray Vaughan captured the passion and yearning for more in the blues genre. Early releases No Glass Shoes (2016) and Puppet Show (2018) started her fanbase, charting radio play, and several East Texas Music Awards.
It was 2019’s #2 Billboard Blues charting Texas Honey and rocking sets on Ruf’s European Blues Caravan tour that propelled her internationally. She released another Blues Billboard charting album, Heart of Fire in 2021, which challenged her to write not only about love but the unguarded honesty of feeling pain.
”On this album, I really wanted to create a tone of overcoming your struggles and persevering through them,” she explains.
In 2022, Guitar World Magazine named Ally #2 on the top 15 Young Guns Making the Gibson Les Paul Cool Again, and she received the Road Warrior award from the Independent Blues Music Awards.
Along with Ally’s own tour domestically and in Europe, her band has supported Buddy Guy and Kenny Wayne Shepherd throughout the US, as well as Colin James in Canada. She has performed as a featured artist on the Experience Hendrix Show at the ACL Live at Moody Theater in Austin. Venable’s recent spring 2023 release produced by Grammy award winning producer, Tom Hambridge, includes a duet with the iconic Buddy Guy and a song featuring powerhouse guitarist Joe Bonamassa debuted at #1 on the Billboard Blues Charts & has remained in the top 100 since the release date.
Her new album, Money & Power, releases April 18.
A website statement on the album says, “Rules are there to be broken. Expectations are there to be defied. Glass ceilings are there to be shattered. Having spent the past decade carving out her own unique space in the male-dominated world of blues-rock, Ally Venable’s combative sixth album, Money & Power, demands more of both — for herself, for women around the world, and for anyone else who thought they weren’t worthy of a seat at the table.
“Money & Power is such a strong statement, especially for women,” Venable says of her Nashville-recorded new release. “All the songs on this album showcase the theme of what it truly means to be a force to be reckoned with. I want this record to wake people up.
“Making this album felt very therapeutic, as well as a milestone in my musical journey,” she says of the 11 originals (plus a hard-driving cover of Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat”). “I hope these songs allow people to see into my life in a vulnerable way and hold a strong perspective that empowers women and breaks the glass ceiling.”
That attitude is palpable on opener “Brown Liquor,” with a guest guitar solo from Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram. “Maybe Someday” is a blissful moment of redemptive soul, carried along by horns and barbed lyrics aimed at an old flame (‘You want to make up for the times you did me wrong/You think a woman’s love can just be turned back on’).
Next up is the title track, with Venable’s guitar set to a seething message.
“‘Money & Power’ shouts to the masses,” she explains, “that women are not to be doubted in their ability to thrive in the world.”
The album’s mid-section is just as vital, flowing from the stormy alt-rock of “Do You Cry” (“It speaks on a lost love that once was,” she says) to the up-for-a-fight roadhouse rocker “Heal Me,” with its squalls of blues harp and slide guitar. Stopper “Back Popper” shifts gears again, with Venable hollering at the barman over glassy funk-soul chording. “Legends” is a reminder that nothing in life worth having ever came easy (‘The bigger the dream/the bigger the fight’).
Pitched somewhere between wistful and hopeful, “Keep Me In Mind” is another gem.
Vital right to the end, Money & Power plays out with “Stepping Stone’s” earthy roar of empowerment, the shuddering, spooky, tremolo-soaked groove of “Feel That Sting,” and the dust blown rocker “Unbreakable,” where Venable goes toe-to-toe with New York powerhouse Shemekia Copeland.
“That song spreads a message of women that have been oppressed,” she says, “to rise to the occasion and break above it all.”
Read more about Ally Venable in the County Line archives. She’ll be in Dallas on April 12 and in Kilgore on April 19. Get details and tickets on www.allyvenable.com.
