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"The Texas-based singer-songwriter draws on the region’s legends for this album, a gentle tour through nostalgic music all about the people who break our hearts – and what it takes to pick up the pieces, even if they can’t be glued back together. On A Soft Place to Land, Hastings dazzles with the wide array of musical styles she excels in. Western swing, folk, country, honky-tonk, it doesn’t matter: it is clear that Hastings knows herself, and that foundation gives this album life."

Rachel Cholst, No Depression

John Smith, Musician

Bio

BIO

Candace Hastings

Candace Hastings is an Americana singer-songwriter, both Indigenous and cowgirl, whose small songs about big things blend rough-cut beauty, sharp observation, and a lifelong search for hope and home. Adopted, and often on the outside looking in, she learned to study the world from the edges, capturing in words what people carry. Her latest album, Soft Place to Land, was released in June and has received accolades from the Bluegrass Situation, No Depression, and Americana Highways.

Spending time watching Candace Hastings play live is like finding a new friend. Both cowgirl and Indigenous, Candace Hastings walks in two worlds and builds bridges between them for her and for others, writing songs that connect disparate identities and communities.

Growing up adopted, Candace often felt like she was on the outside looking in, searching for her real self by trying on different identities and studying the world from the edges. That distance became its own kind of training. It made her a sharp observer of others, and over time she developed a rare skill: capturing in words and music the truths we all have in common, even if our stories are different.

Later in life, Candace reunited with her birth family and discovered she was a tribal member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The knowledge that she was Indigenous didn’t simplify her—it deepened her. As she puts it, “When I started going to ceremony and learning the language, I was finally at peace with who I am. As a songwriter, I was always mindful about being myself, but now I also focus on mno-bmadzewen, which means living in a good way on this earth.”

Candace’s style is best described as bricolage. She is the bricoleur, using whatever is at hand to make art. In her work, the song decides what it needs to be, because the story, the feeling, the moment requires it.

Music

Candace describes Americana music as the sweep of the AM radio dial in a ’66 three-on-the-tree pickup. Her latest album, Soft Place to Land, is an old-school AM radio road trip, each song a different station on the Americana radio dial.

Her road trip starts by taking listeners due west on a two-lane, blacktop road with the classic country song, “Loving Cowboys,” and then meanders the backroads to the high desert, where everyone can find a “Soft Place to Land.” It highlights the big city heartaches of “Call Your Mama,” and pays homage to ’90s country in “I Was That Woman.” “Come Home” heads north with a Texas-style, Irish waltz, but it’s not a wrong turn. It’s just taking the long way home to find the sacred in the Indigenous lands and Potawatomi people of “Horses I Left Behind” and “As Eagles Fly.” “It’s Too Damn Hot” turns down that dusty dirt road toward home, where the road trip ends with a triumphant jump in a clear, spring-fed river as co-producer Lloyd Maines calls off the beats to champion fiddler Dennis Ludiker, who unleashes a 40-second fiddle jam of pure joy and mayhem.

Ultimately, Candace’s work keeps returning to the same horizon: home. She’s been looking for it all her life, and she’s finally almost there, both in understanding who she is and in the music she’s making. Her songs have a natural beauty forged from rough cuts, a montage of multiple places, people, and identities. And underneath it all is hope: a chord you can come back to, like that soft place to land the album title so appropriately describes.

Candace’s advice? “Load up your friends in the truck, roll down the window, look at the stars, dial in Soft Place to Land, and head out on the open road.”

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