For Amy Ray, half of the Grammy-winning duo Indigo Girls, her latest project Holler isn't her first trip to the rodeo when it comes to creating music with a country flavor.

Since her first demo with long-time musical partner Emily Saliers back in 1981, Ray has found ultimate creative freedom splitting her time between steady recording and touring with Indigo Girls, overseeing her own label — Daemon Records — and developing her own solo projects that have produced a half-dozen studio albums to date, as well as three live albums.

That solo work has proved to be as diverse in its sonic content as it has been satisfying for Ray as an artist.

Her willingness to explore various styles has kept Ray's fan base guessing as she explored punk roots with her albums Stag and Prom; veered back to the folk-rock stylings of Indigo Girls, albeit with her own tonal and lyrical harder edge on Didn't It Feel Kinder and 2012's Lung of Love, before she began exploring country influences on Goodnight Tender, and completely crossing over into the genre with last year's Holler.

That album includes some of the last work from the late Kofi Burbridge of Tedeschi Trucks Band on keys, along with the masterful slide guitar of Derek Trucks (Tedeschi Trucks Band, the Allman Brothers), and vocal harmonies from Vince Gill, Brandi Carlisle, the Wood Brothers, Lucy Wainwright-Roche, Phil Cook, and Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).

Hitting the road with a stellar recording/touring band that features multi-instrumentalist Jeff Fielder; Matt Smith on pedal steel, dobro, and guitar; Adrian Carter on fiddle and guitar; Kerry Brooks on upright bass and mandolin; Jim Brock on drums and percussion; and Alison Brown on banjo, Ray called in to The Newtown Bee to chat ahead of a couple of local shows. She is scheduled to be at Stage One in Fairfield on Sunday, May 26, and then at Daryl's House Club in Pawling, N.Y., on Thursday, May 30.

The Daryl's House show will be supported by opening act Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters.

Ray said her backing band spent the four years between her last two solo projects getting ever tighter while at the same time becoming more familiar with each other as musicians and colleagues. The result, as ticket holders for her local shows will see, is a solo show the likes (and musical quality) of which has never before been seen in these parts.

Looking back to that first foray into a country sound, Ray said she also spent the ensuing four years leading up to the Holler sessions "learning how we all play together."

"I wanted to write for Holler in a slightly more expansive way, and give the band room to play around a little bit more," Ray said. "So I guess the main thing I learned was how to trust everybody. I didn't need to control it — I just had to trust the producer, too, to work as a sounding board while molding it into the kind of shape it needed to be in. Otherwise I let everybody else just do their thing.

"They're better musicians than I am, so I'm constantly learning from them," she continued. "I've probably learned a few tricks from them as far as chord changes that I applied to this record — places to go musically that I never thought to go before.

"What I really set out to do was make a record that built slightly on the last one with some more upbeat material, and that included strings and horns to hearken back to the country sound I like from the late 1960s. I also wanted to add in Alison Brown, who has played a lot with Indigo Girls but never played with me solo."

Maximum Output

Ray certainly squeezed the maximum output from her backing musicians while completing almost all the recording in a nine-day window of time.

"Some of what you hear on Holler was happening live in the moment as we were recording," Ray said. "But we had done some rehearsing to work on structure — this is going to be where a solo is, and this is going to be the bridge — but we hadn't necessarily nailed down some of the things that developed in those interesting moments when we were just playing off each other.

As far as the strings and horns, Ray said Kofi and violin player Adrian Carter kind of worked independently, "and once we got in the studio together they were actually finishing the charts off sometimes between takes," she added, laughing. "So we put down all the songs and left tracks open for the horns and strings because while they were live to tape, they were not live with us in the studio," she said.

"We were able to adjust the charts to showcase the best talents of the players, though. So we had a sax player who was really good at a certain thing, so I said let's leave some more time for him to do that, or we'd maybe write an extra part for him."

Only having the horns for one session and the strings for one session created what Ray described as "a crazy recording laboratory."

Ray said there were two numbers on Holler that developed differently than she first envisioned them in the songwriting stage. She said "Dadgum Down" went into the studio with a very loose structure, "and I really didn't know how to play it. I couldn't play banjo the way I wanted to hear it, so that one created itself in the studio completely. Eventually, I just put the banjo down — which was probably the best thing I could have done — and I just sang it while the band played it."

And within an hour, "Dadgum Down" was in the can. The other song that morphed between concept and completion was the title track.

"When we started recording I had part of the song and I was trying to finish it," Ray recalled. "So I was writing at night and in between takes. And once I got it finished it was just melody, words, and guitar. So Kofi and Jeff started playing along with me and it just became what it is. We had played with Kofi a little before he came on board, and Alison had played with us too, so it was easy for us to go into the studio and just have fun — we made it work."

Personal Experiences

Ray said every song on Holler emerged partially or fully from personal experiences, but she singled out "Didn't Know a Damn Thing" as one tune that was a thorough reflection of her life growing up in rural Georgia.

"I was born in '64 so there was a lot of stuff going on in the civil rights movement all around me," she said. "I was also young and pretty sheltered from it, and white, and segregated. But my elders, and the people of color who were around me — when I think of it now, they probably had gone through so much. I guess I was just thinking about what their life was like being black and going through that whole experience. I was really into history, but at first I think I took a lot of things at face value that I could have studied up on a bit more. A lot of bad things happened, so that's a song where I'm trying to be honest and humble."

Ray said leading up to this tour, she and her band have been working on identifying material from her catalog, as well as a few covers, that would be served well in the "country-fied" environment of the Holler Tour.

"We've always done covers," Ray said. "We've done a couple of Tom Petty tunes, and a Neil Young cover once in awhile, but we also do an Indigo song called 'Bitterroot,' that Indigo Girls don't do much because it just sounds better with a rootsy band. And once in awhile we do 'Share the Moon.' 

"But we also learned six or seven songs from my other solo records. And we're constantly thinking about other songs that we can try to tackle, even though there's never enough time in the set to play what we want to play. I think we're going to get to a couple of the punk songs down one of these days."

With Kofi Burbridge gone too soon, Ray has enlisted Ann Wilson and Heart keyboard player Dan Walker. But with Heart reuniting and prepping for a big summer tour, his tenure with Ray's band on the road is sketchy.

"If we have a keyboard player, a lot of those punk songs sound really cool!"

To learn more, visit [naviga:u]amy-ray.com[/naviga:u] and click on the Gigs tab to access any remaining tickets to the Fairfield and Pawling shows in the coming days.