That producer is Mark Nevers, whose fingerprints on Lambchop's *Nixon* and *Is a Woman* taught a generation of listeners that country music could whisper as effectively as it wails. Here, paired with several members of that same Nashville outfit — pianist Tony Crow, guitarist William Tyler, Paul Niehaus on lap steel — Nevers builds Moore a room to sing in rather than a stage to perform on. The distinction matters enormously. Opener "Closer Than" drifts in on glassy guitar and a percussion so restrained it barely announces itself, and Moore's voice, when it arrives, carries the unhurried confidence of someone who has spent decades listening to other people's troubles for a living and has finally decided to unpack her own.
Because that biographical detail cannot be set aside: Moore spent over twenty years working as a therapist, and it shows — not in any clumsy, diaristic way, but in the precision of her attention. "Don't stop taking chances / don't be afraid of the cost / live the stuff of dreams before the time is lost," she sings on that opening single, and the line lands with the weight of someone who has counselled others through exactly this dilemma before finally taking her own advice.
The album's ten tracks were cut in three astonishingly swift days on Pawleys Island, South Carolina, with Moore reportedly spending her breaks watching sanderlings skitter along the tideline, and something of that coastal patience has seeped into the grain of the record. "Down the Road" and "Maybe I'll Be Here Again" move at the pace of tide rather than traffic. "Trouble in Mind," the title track, deploys Roy Agee's horn with a restraint that recalls late-period Candi Staton — present, felt, never showy. By the time "The Real Thing" arrives, seven tracks deep, the album has established its own weather system: warm, slightly overcast, entirely convincing.
What lifts this collection above pleasant Americana pastiche is the tension running beneath it — between the folk clubs of Moore's youth, the Foggy Cry years spent supporting Hawkwind on bills that must have felt like accidents of geography, and the disciplined songcraft she has clearly been refining in private for decades. Closing pair "I Use to Cry" and "When the Storm Breaks" don't resolve that tension so much as sit comfortably inside it, Moore's voice never straining for effect, never asking to be admired, simply telling the truth as plainly as she can manage.
Jeb Loy Nichols, the man who first pushed these demos towards Nevers, called her gifted with a sublime voice and a natural instinct for how to use it. Both halves of that verdict hold up. *Trouble in Mind* is patient, handsome, quietly devastating work from a songwriter who spent her career listening before she finally sat down to speak. Rarely has unfinished business sounded this graceful.
**Trouble in Mind** released 24th July 2026.
