Alice Wallace grew up around the sounds of her parents playing guitars and singing, with “Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, their favorite,” she recalls. She also absorbed the country rock of ‘70s-era Linda Ronstadt on the turntable. “I really taught myself to sing by mimicking their styles,” she says. “The powerful belt that Linda has. The emotive lilt to Emmylou’s voice. Trying to navigate those different elements helped me find my own voice nestled in between all that.” She first picked up guitar at age 10, with her dad teaching her to finger-pick at 15, and by senior year in high school, Wallace was performing original compositions at the local Borders bookstore. It was in college that she discovered yet another calling: yodeling, that haunting vocal style that blends blues, country, and western. Wallace’s own “A Little Yodel” added her to the ranks of legends Patsy Montana and Carolina Cotton.

Tanbark began in 2011 as a long-distance songwriting collaboration between Chloe Nelson, who was studying art history in London and James Jannicelli, a musician in Minneapolis. By 2012, they were both in the Twin Cities, where their country and folk-inspired songwriting and close vocal harmonies began to form the basis for their sound. After relocating to New York City later in 2014, Tanbark quickly found their place in the thriving Brooklyn music scene. Nelson's rich, delicate vocal anchor the sound as the arrangements move between Fleetwood Mac-pop and Neil Young-folk. The album "Tanbark," will be released in 2019