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Hope Dunbar

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Singer-Songwriter Hope Dunbar is a pioneer of the new American prairie style—the incarnation of Americana and Country-Folk sound staking claim under a big sky, shouting at the north wind, digging in and refusing to leave.

Dunbar’s newest release, Three Black Crows, heralds a strong new voice in the singer-songwriter genre. An unexpected voice of simplicity and authority, honesty and hope. A voice that could not come from anywhere other than the expansive land of her home. She was born in Southern California, but traveled as a young girl, a peripatetic childhood that landed her for six months in Paraguay. Her parents eventually settled in Mission Viejo, California. At university, she met and married her husband and moved with him to a small town in Iowa, where he had been appointed to minister at a Lutheran church. To help her adjust to these surroundings, she started singing folk songs with a new friend, at public libraries, farmer’s markets and fairs. They eventually settled in Utica, Nebraska, an unlikely place for a restless artist, falling in love with the craft of writing, but Hope is a writer with an ability to find truth in overlooked spaces “I really enjoy the empty space,” she says. “There’s no noise where I live in Utica that can get in the way of what my brain wants to write about.”

Dunbar’s songs live on two planes simultaneously. One describes the everyday routines to which we all eventually surrender. The other zooms in on the people who move through their habitual rituals. Her target is the sorrow from which they’ve learned to hide but can never escape, reconciling the two with resignation.