If California Country is a thing, that thing has nestled itself into ZB Savoy’s bones.  ZB is a San Diego native who fell onto the path of creating Americana and Country music three decades ago. He’s been walking that imprecise trail ever since.

A prolific writer who performs some two hundred shows a year, the only thing he enjoys as much as penning new songs, is playing the classic country song book that Willie Nelson and his pals were passing around in the 70s.  

His “Songs of Willie Nelson” show is a musical journey through the annals of country music history, keeping in the tradition of the great storytelling that accompanies those tunes.  

He also hosts a knockout raucous country jamboree of a time at his “Night of Willie Nelson Duets” at San Diego’s famed Belly Up Tavern with a bevy of local and regional performers joining his 7 piece band.

Members of said band include local legends Mike Butler (The Box Masters), Dave Berzansky (Deke Dickerson), Bobby Furgo (Leonard Cohen). Patrick McClory (Sarah Petite), and Danny Campbell (Bob Weir).

Special guests for Duets night last included Tim Flannery, Francis Blume, Nena Anderson, Cannon Kristofferson, Chloe Lou, Marie Haddad, Cody Carter, Ash Easton and more.

When not trying to channel Willie’s transcendent spirit ZB stays busy putting out his own music. His newest album “Dear World” is being slowly released into the wild throughout 2024, with roughly half of the songs available currently where ever one listens to music. Influenced by alt-country songwriting greats like Jason Isbell, Zach Bryan, Ryan Adams, and Willie himself, the album is filled with a plethora of Americana gems and soul quenching musicianship by the aforementioned crew of players.  

His ”Songs of Willie Nelson” show will be touring the West Coast late summer of 2024.  And the “Dear World” album is set to be released in its entirety this coming Fall. 

An outlaw country headliner whose music reaches far beyond the genre's borders, Sara Petite has built an award-winning career with songs that owe as much to the rock & roll roadhouse as they do the honky-tonk. 

Hers is a raw, rough-edged version of American roots music, delivered by a five-time International Songwriting Competition finalist who's spent nearly two decades calling her own shots. Sara has no interest in chasing trends. She's too busy chasing the muse instead, earning a wide range of accolades — including Top 40 success on the Americana charts, international airplay, and more than a half-dozen trophies from the San Diego Music Awards — along the way. 

"When I first began playing shows, people used to tell me 'You've gotta pick a sound,'" she remembers. "I didn't like that advice. I like to do things my way, and that means going all over the map, from country to rock & roll to soul to punk. This music is my own, after all. It should sound like me."

The Empress, her seventh record, marks a return to the intersection of country twang and roots-rock bang. It's a place Sara knows well, and she sketches its dimensions in sharp detail. These 11 songs take place in dive bars, trailer parks, the throes of passion, and the feedback loop of addiction, with Sara embodying her characters fully. From the heartbroken narrator of "The Mistress" — an old-school country/soul ballad about a lover's affair with alcohol, punctuated by pedal steel and electric piano — to the hell-raising hillbilly heroine of "Bringin' Down the Neighborhood," she maintains a strong female perspective, celebrating the full range of womanhood along the way. The Empress is an album for all genders, stocked with songs that tackle the universal struggles we all face. Even so, its central heroes are Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalene, and other woman who, like Sara, have pushed against imbalances in society for the sake of fairness. 

"'The Empress' comes from the idea that our world is out of balance," she says of the album's anthemic title track, which salutes the empowered rule-breakers of the past with fiddle and galloping drums. "Everything's gone off-kilter, and we all need that mix of feminine and masculine energies in our bodies. The more that women are respected and held to the same level of importance as men, the better off we're all going to be. On this album, I'm not writing about misogyny as much as I'm writing about my own life and the strong women I see in my world."

Produced by Grammy nominee Eric Corne, The Empress crackles with the energy of a live band whose performances match the material's unique punch. "Sara is a great lyricist and singer," says Corne, who recorded the bulk of the album during a pair of inspired weekends. "She deals with real emotions, real stories, real feelings. It's easy to understand why great musicians play with her, like piano player Bobby Fuego, who played with Leonard Cohen, and bass player Jorge Calderón, who worked with Warren Zevon. They're the real deal, and so is she."

With a voice that swoons one minute and snarls the next, Sara charges her way through The Empress like outlaw country royalty. "God Save the Queen," a Rolling Stones-sized rocker that kicks off the album, finds her singing about Mother Earth. "Take care of me; I am your home," she demands during the song's final moments, while stomping drums underscore her urgency. She reevaluates the Adam and Eve story with the greasy raunch of "Forbidden Fruit" — "Let's head east of Eden / Ain't the Garden, but it's nice / Cut them apron strings / Let's start our own Paradise," she sings — and even slips into French during the country-fried Cajun track "Le Petit Saboteur." For the album's two-part closer, Sara revisits "Lead the Parade" — a song that first appeared in 2008, back when it served as the bluegrass title track of her sophomore album — and slows the tempo to an elegant shuffle, turning the track into a New Orleans funeral procession. "Now here I am with a rose in my hand / All dressed up to go away / This ain’t no rehearsal; it’s the real thing today / So driver, let the hearse lead way," she sings, backed by fiddle and upright piano. The reimagined song then gives way to "Meet Me on the Other Side," a gospel rave-up that blends the energy of Saturday night with the emotional uplift of Sunday morning. Here, the mood is far more celebratory than crestfallen, with Petite asking the departed to "bring your dancing shoes and happy feet / 'Cause that's the day our souls will meet / When I meet you on the other side."

Released on the heels of Rare Bird, The Empress shines new light on a singer/songwriter who grew up in a tulip farming town in rural Washington, launched her career after moving to southern California, and continues to perform on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a rawly-refined record that's every bit as diverse as Sara herself, with songs rooted in history and experience. "I'm an ever-evolving person who refuses to stay the same, and The Empress reflects that," she says. "My work is very personal, so this record is me — a securely insecure, confidently unconfident person who's learned to be comfortable with the in-between." 

An idiosyncratic artist with a background in classical piano, Stacy Antonel makes jazzy, country-leaning, clever Americana that feels both vintage and hyper-modern at the same time. Rooted in classic country but influenced by jazz, pop, and R&B, her throwback “country jazz” style conjures the 20s-30s musical era when jazz and country weren't such disparate genres. There’s a complex, conversational quality to her lyrics, reminiscent of alt-rocker Courtney Barnett, paired with the effortless, emotive vocal power of country icon Patsy Cline. “I like passionate, full-throated singing,” says Antonel. “I want the notes to burst out of me.” Now based in Nashville, Antonel is poised to release her Americana debut Always the Outsider, featuring compelling, narrative storylines (taking a page from Willie Nelson’s songbook), agile vocal melodies, and unexpected thematic twists. 

Antonel grew up in a seaside San Diego town called Ocean Beach, listening to pop and R&B hits and studying classical piano until she was eighteen. She cites an eclectic range of artists as her earliest musical inspirations: Tori Amos for her peculiar phrasing and distinct songwriting, Otis Redding for his rich, emotive vocal delivery. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she moved to Buenos Aires, where she answered a Craigslist ad for a singer who sounds like June Carter Cash, and contributed vocals to several jingles for MTV and Jeep that aired throughout Latin America. She sang in a friend’s electro-cumbia band for a while before returning to California, where she started singing professionally at weddings, bars, and local venues. But it wasn’t until discovering country music that she felt at home. “I often felt like a fish out of water in San Diego. One day I randomly bought a bunch of 99 cent country records and fell in love with the genre; the concision of the writing, the wit, how it doesn’t take itself too seriously even while dealing with deep subject matter.” In 2014, Antonel won $10,000 in a televised local singing contest, “3 Minutes to Stardom”, and quit her job to focus on music. She formed a country band later that year, performing covers of classic country hits as Ginger Cowgirl, and in 2017 moved to Nashville to record her debut EP at the city’s Historic RCA Studio C. Ginger Cowgirl released their debut self-titled EP in 2019, featuring five original songs and one cover (a blend of Patsy Cline’s and Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”). The EP was praised as an “Americana tour de force” with “razor sharp lyrical wit” and a “refreshing mix of old school and modern spin”. In late 2019 Antonel toured California and the Southeast, and in early 2020 toured the UK and Germany before the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In 2021, Antonel teamed up with guitarist Paul Sgroi (who won 2nd place in the 2021 National Flat Pick Guitar Championship) to work on her debut full-length album, Always the Outsider, set for release in June 2022 under her own name. “My musical impulses are extremely diverse, and I want to feel free to follow them without being pigeonholed by the country implications of a name like Ginger Cowgirl,” she explains. Recorded at Singing Serpent Studios in San Diego with producer Ben Moore (Hot Snakes, Diamanda Galas, Burt Bacharach),  Always the Outsider blends elements of mid-century country music with unconventional subject matter and virtuosic instrumentation– including tracks with Doug Pettibone (Lucinda Williams) on pedal steel and acoustic guitar, and Joe Reed (Merle Haggard) on bass. The thematically unique collection explores metaphysical and supernatural concepts (alien-earthling romance, past-life trauma) as well as grounded narratives of everyday experience (isolation, disconnectedness, sexual desire, feeling like an alien in your own body) in Antonel’s distinctively jazzy style. There’s an intelligent, otherworldly beauty to the album, with many anthems of outsider-ness made more striking by their classic-country sound and structure. At times, Always the Outsider feels like an elegant relic from a bygone era, other times it’s a glimpse into the distant, mystical future of country music.