Ally Cribb looks beyond the present and into the future with her penetrating new single Now — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
It’s tempting to say that when you’re passing from your teens into your 20s, all you know is the moment. But Cribb’s haunting Now is far more worldly wise than the song’s deceptively simple title suggests. With an eagle-eyed perception that would be enviable at any age, the Halifax singer-songwriter describes the feeling of exiting a relationship (and, by extension, an entire era of your life) that your brain knows you have to put behind you, even though your heart may be slow to get the message:
“If I could let it go I would
Staying won’t do me any good
There’s nothing left for me now
Now I know what I was missing
’Cause now I’m missing you
Now the damage has been done
But I’m not done with you
Oh I wonder what you would do
If you knew.”
“I started writing Now when I was 18 and watched it evolve over the past two years,” Cribb says. “The song’s narrator is a girl struggling with uncertainty in herself, turbulence in her life, regret about decisions and wistful hope for what might lie ahead. It’s where I am. Now.”
It’s also the title track to Cribb’s sophomore EP, a five-song affair that represents a giant leap ahead for her as an artist on several fronts. For one thing, this is the first record she’s written entirely by herself, and the sophistication of tracks like Know Better and Not This Time shows that she’s wholly justified in being proud of her development as a lyricist.
Then there’s the matter of musical direction: Now constitutes a move into pure country after her previous dalliances with pop and adult contemporary — an artistic gambit she credits her producer Igor Vrabac (of Toronto’s Akashic Rekords), with encouraging: “He’s incredibly talented and trusted me enough to follow my vision of creating a country EP, as it’s the direction I’ve always seen myself following since I first picked up a guitar.”
Now is remarkably composed and gentle in a way that betrays Cribb’s debt to her heroes Joni Mitchell, Shawn Colvin and Taylor Swift, along with her musician father. In 2019, she released a cover of Radiohead’s Creep that netted more than 200,000 views. She followed it up with Bigger, an anthem of resilience that constituted her coming-out party as an original artist.
On her debut EP Unbroken, she worked through the grief she was experiencing after suddenly losing her mother in the thick of Covid-mandated isolation. The unvarnished sentiment struck a nerve with listeners, leading to thousands of streams per week and highly positive coverage by dozens of media outlets. Two songs from Unbroken reached the finals in the international category of the Song Academy Competition. Her track California was named the one of the four winners of the 2024 Write Out Loud song contest. As her prize, Cribb will get to hear her song recorded by a Broadway star and performed in a concert at New York’s 54 Below.
Check out Now above, hear more from Ally Cribb below, and spend some time on her website, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
