Indie outfit The Good Graces open for the Indigo Girls at the Orange Peel, June 23

Atlanta-based indie band The Good Graces, now touring in support of recent album release Close to the Sun, will open for the Indigo Girls during a show at the Orange Peel on Tuesday, June 23, at 8 p.m. (tickets $34/$39). The band calls this third full-length project — recorded in Chapel Hill and Atlanta — a “diverse collection of catchy songs that explores a variety of styles and genres, from folk and alt country to 90s-inspired indie pop.”

For more information, visit theorganepeel.net or check out the band’s facebook page.

Here’s the full release from the band:

Indie collective The Good Graces have been handpicked by The Indigo Girls to open their upcoming summer tour. The Good Graces’ new album, Close to the Sun, was co-produced by Rob Dyson who has also worked with Emily Saliers and passed along some tracks from the new album to the Indigo Girl—Saliers was impressed and invited The Good Graces on tour.

The band recently won the Searchlight song competition from In Search of a Song, a national radio series that interviews artists on songwriting, and played Toronto’s NXNE fest last year.

The old adage “rules are made to be broken” is not a strange mentality for most indie artists to grasp. But for the Good Graces’ Kim Ware, it’s an outlook she’s only recently adopted.

The Atlanta-based indie-folk collective’s new album Close to the Sun starts off with the dreamy “I Don’t Know Where to Start,” which has Kim pondering her need for “an explanation for breaking my own rules.” It’s something she says she was hesitant to do at first, but now embraces — stepping away from traditional song structures and instrumentation in favor of capturing a certain mood, even if that means forgoing choruses or using drum machines rather than actual drums.

The resulting 11-track offering hints at a wide variety of influences, ultimately coming off like an indie Lucinda Williams or perhaps a countrified Liz Phair. There are a number of twists and turns along the way, like the rubbery drum machine on “My Own Grace,” to the military drums and trumpet that come in from out of nowhere on “Under the Weather,” to the multiple drum tracks that conclude “Curb Appeal.” It’s a diverse ride for sure, but one always anchored by Kim’s twangy, soothing vocals and witty, endearing lyrical style.

While no stranger to releasing records (Kim ran the Eskimo Kiss Records label for 10 years), Close to the Sun is the Good Graces’s first release captured on vinyl and first for the Fort Lowell Records label. At once intimate and atmospheric, catchy and quirky, confessional and carefree, it finds Ware finally shedding her acoustic, singer-songwriter badge she had worn so comfortably since the release of her 2007 debut Sunset Over Saxapahaw, replacing it with a style that’s more confident, edgy, and unpredictable–yet still decidedly very southern. The aforementioned “… Where to Start” in fact starts with a lone, eerie keyboard drone, letting the listener know right away that this is not your typical acoustical fare. From there, beeps and bleeps, drum machines, and electric guitars abound, a style hinted at with portions of last year’s Drawn to You, but now fully realized.

Close to the Sun was recorded partially in Chapel Hill, NC with Jay Manley (Velvet, Hindugrass) at the helm and then completed at Rob Dyson’s Wizkid Sound Studios (Indigo Girls, Brandi Carlile, Lucy Wainright Roche, Book Club) in Atlanta. In addition to Manley and Dyson’s instrumental and production thumbprints apparent throughout the record, it features a talented cast of supporting musicians including John McNicholas (The Sunset District, Spiller), who typically joins Kim for the Good Graces’s live shows, David Minchew (The Skylarks, Angela Faye Martin), and Michael Roman (Stokeswood). The album was mastered especially for vinyl by Rodney Mills at Rodney Mills Masterhouse. Mills has lent his ears to such talents as Pearl Jam, Sugarland, Bob Marley, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Matthew Sweet, Drive By Truckers, Journey, the Allman Brothers, and countless others.

Recalling days when MTV played music videos, your favorite songs were released on black vinyl, and a song’s message was as immediately obvious as its medium, Close to the Sun documents an artist truly coming into her own. Kim laughs that a lot of the album’s songs are about “just trying to figure shit out.” This introspection is perhaps most obvious in the record’s standout track, “Under the Weather,” which starts with Ware lamenting her love for the summer, as it’s a love that only ends up burning her in the end. By the song’s conclusion, though, Ware experiences quite a revelation:

“I’ve always thought that there was a plan
Some bigger purpose, one day we’d understand.
But what if the truth is there’s just today?
And in this very moment, everything is ok.”

Listening to these 11 songs, one gets the impression that it really is.