Mikaela Davis is a Rochester-born singer, songwriter, and harpist who has spent her whole life bending a classical instrument into pop, psychedelia, and folk rock. She took up the harp at eight years old, studied in youth orchestras rather than garage bands, and earned a degree in harp performance at the Crane School of Music. That training powers a catalogue that runs from her Rounder Records album Delivery in 2018 to And Southern Star in 2023, and along the way she has shared stages with artists including Bob Weir, Bon Iver, and Lake Street Dive.
Her new album, Graceland Way, was released April 24, 2026, on Kill Rock Stars. It was co-written and co-produced with guitarist John Lee Shannon — the debut of the Davis–Shannon songwriting partnership — and its songs together tell the story of an unnamed antihero navigating life in a failing world: "The songs were written from our personal experience, but together they tell the arc of humanity," Davis says.
"(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses" is the opening track, and it announces that story in one gesture. It opens with a harp glissando burst that her album notes compare to being burst through a blissful wormhole, then settles into dark Western tones, with Kurt G. Johnson's pedal steel and harmonies from guest vocalists Madison Cunningham and Tim Heidecker — both also credited as featured artists on the song and its video. Of Cunningham, Davis says: "I feel like I found my Emmylou."
The lyric is a jilted lover's inventory of false hopes, sung clear-eyed after the fact: "Throwing pennies in an empty fountain / Rainbows in the dark / Pulling petals from a dying flower / A sudden change of heart." She painted pretty pictures with the stories she was told, she sings, but the colours all ran — and the title turns into the diagnosis: looking through rose coloured glasses, thinking it might be blue. The video, directed by Mama Hot Dog, gives that waking-up a dreamy, film-textured world.
It is a perfect album opener because it does two things at once: the harp says wonder, and the words say the wonder was a mistake. The rest of Graceland Way sets out from exactly that place — a journey into the unknown, taken with open eyes this time.
— Red Hector
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