"Amber Cross is a singer-songwriter who writes from her own life’s struggles and experiences, delivering her stories with unforgettable power and emotion."

Wide Open Country have the title track from Amber Cross' Savage on the Downhill saying it has a "California vibe and an instinctual clarity" in the duality of the songs themes, the literal in hunting the boar, whose skull can be seen in the image above, and the figurative of "being trapped in a controlling relationship and being haunted by a dark piece of your past". Cross' idiosyncratic vocals take a slightly plaintive lilt on the track, with an atmospheric backdrop accompanying the steady guitar and rhythm section.

Authenticity is a difficult thing to measure in American roots music. It’s not in the hat you wear, or the twang in your voice. It’s in how well you understand that the music comes from the land, and that its roots run deep. Americana songwriter Amber Cross understands this, and on her new album, Savage on the Downhill, she makes music as beholden to the landscapes of Northern and Pacific California, where she lives and travels, as to the visually-rich songwriting she crafts around it. Her songs hang heavy with the yellow dust of dirt roads, plunge deep into the soft loam of the forest. As a hunter, a fisherman, and a woman of the backcountry, she knows the countryside well, and has a deep respect for the honest work that makes you a steward of the land. It’s something she shares with other roots musicians, a community she found attending her first Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. Her contacts from the gathering helped her connect with Savage on the Downhill’s producer, Canadian blues and roots musician Ray Bonneville. Traveling to Austin to record the album with Bonneville, Cross connected with other great American songwriters, Gurf Morlix and Tim O’Brien, who both came onboard for the album, with O’Brien complimenting her “no bullshit style of singing.” If there’s a rawness to Cross’ voice, a plainness to the words, it comes from the fact that Cross knows the roots of this music aren’t fancy. They’re built by hand and filled with honest words and hard-won truths.