Sabina Chantouria Sent Echoes to Ventura and Let American Session Players Carry It
A Swedish Georgian Songwriter, a Los Angeles Rhythm Section, and One Slide Guitar
Echoes opens on an acoustic guitar and a voice, which is the least surprising way an Americana single can begin. What happens underneath it is the surprising part. The drummer is Kenny Aronoff. The bass player is Jorgen Carlsson. The slide guitar is Doug Pettibone. Sabina Chantouria released the song on 2 June 2023, and it runs just under four minutes.
Sabina Chantouria’s music sits in the playlist below, and this desk’s coverage of her collects on the Sabina Chantouria profile. Echoes reached this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Give it a listen before reading on.
Who Carried the Song, and Where They Came From
Chantouria is a Swedish Georgian singer and songwriter. Echoes was not made where she is from. She recorded it in Ventura and Los Angeles with the producer Dave Jenkins, who also plays keyboard and sings harmonies on it. Between them, the players Jenkins brought in carry most of a century of American roots records.
Kenny Aronoff has drummed for John Fogerty, Mick Jagger and Willie Nelson. Doug Pettibone has played guitar for Lucinda Williams and Marianne Faithfull. Jorgen Carlsson holds the bass chair in Gov’t Mule. These are not names hired to decorate a press release. They are a working rhythm section with a shared vocabulary, and you can hear that they have played this kind of song before.
What Those Players Buy the Sabina Chantouria Single
What it buys is restraint. A session player at this level knows the difference between filling a bar and leaving it alone.
Aronoff keeps the kit low and unhurried rather than driving the tempo. Carlsson stays under the vocal instead of walking around it. Pettibone’s slide arrives in the gaps rather than over the melody, which is the harder discipline, and it is what makes a country lane feel like a country lane.
The mastering was done at Lurssen in Los Angeles. That matters less as a credit than as a decision. A song this sparse has nowhere to hide, so the final polish is doing real work on a mix with only five or six elements in it.
The Song Itself, and What Its Sparseness Is For
The subject is time and the memory of a particular person, and the writing keeps it plain rather than reaching for imagery. Illustrate Magazine, reviewing it, called the vocal both powerful and intimate, and picked out the range and the depth as the highlight. That is the right read. The arrangement is built to put the voice at the front and keep it there.
An acoustic strum, a slide line, a low bass and a kit behind the beat is a very old arrangement here. It has carried country and folk songs about leaving home for seventy years. Chantouria is not doing anything novel with it, and the record is better for that. The form is a container, and what she has put inside it is specific.
The tension worth noting is one of geography. Here is a songwriter from Sweden with Georgian roots, writing a song that sounds like American country lanes, cut by American players in California. That could easily have come out as pastiche. It does not, though. The players are not performing an accent. They play the tradition they come from, and she sings over it in her own voice.
What Came Next, and Where to Hear Sabina Chantouria
She has since gone back to the same team. Changes, her later single, was made with the same producer and the same musicians, and it took First Prize for Best Original Song at the ORFEUM Awards. That is the useful signal about Echoes. The session was not a one-off arrangement of convenience, but the start of a working relationship.
MusicRoots.News curator team: “The credit list is the story here. Getting Aronoff, Pettibone and Carlsson onto an independent single is one thing. Writing something spare enough that all three of them play less than they could is another, and that second part is what makes the record work.”
On release, Echoes was picked up by The Other Side Reviews as a track of the day, by FV Music Blog, by Illustrate Magazine and by Music For All in Brazil. For a catalogue single from an independent artist, that spread is what keeps a song findable years after its release week.
Listeners who came to Lucinda Williams for songs where the slide answers the vocal instead of competing with it will recognise the shape. That is unsurprising, given who is playing it. Emmylou Harris fans will hear the other half, which is the tradition of a clear voice set over a small, patient band.
You can hear Echoes on Spotify, hear her later single Changes on Apple Music and Spotify, and follow Sabina Chantouria on Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok and her YouTube channel, with more at her official site.
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