SPOTLIGHT: Watch AJ Lee and Blue Summit Perform ‘Hillside’ 10,000 Feet Above Sea Level
Stacy Chandler
Posted On July 15, 2024
AJ Lee and Blue Summit (photo by Natia Cinco)
EDITOR’S NOTE: AJ Lee and Blue Summit are No Depression’s Spotlight band for July 2024. Learn more about them and their new album, City of Glass (out July 19 on Signature Sounds) in our interview, and look for more all month long.
AJ Lee and Blue Summit’s new album, City of Glass, kicks off with “Hillside,” a full-hearted song about thriving despite all the things that try to pick away at you and surviving to grow into a mountain.
That imagery, songwriter Lee said in a recent interview with No Depression, came from what she saw all around her in her Bay Area stomping grounds. The hills and mountains on the horizon had endured for eons. And while humans have a much shorter lifespan, we constantly endure forces trying to break us down. But if we’re lucky, we build up instead.
Lee found particular resonance with that imagery as a woman, having weathered the music industry from the time she was a child, through her teens, and now in her 20s.
“I just remember feeling the strength in that, where you have this almost eternal-feeling natural structure that no matter what, there’s basically nothing you can do to topple over this hill that’s going to become this mountain,” Lee says. “And I feel like that’s a really great message for women to have that confidence and encouragement to just keep being a woman, keeping being yourself, and you’re going to have all these obstacles against you, but you’re on this path that’s set for you, and you go, girl, you just keep doing your thing.”
What better place to spread that message, and the song, than from the mountaintops around the Telluride Bluegrass Festival? AJ Lee and Blue Summit were part of the lineup for the 2024 festival last month and took some time out to perform “Hillside” just for ND readers. Watch that video (and catch that view!) below:
