There’s something unbelievably soothing in Becca Mancari’s voice. The Staten Island-born singer/songwriter was raised in rural Pennsylvania by her parents — an Italian-Irish preacher and a Puerto Rican mother — but Mancari took to traveling early on, with stints in Florida, India, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia, and Nashville. Those last two steps helped cement the sweet country sound that’s all over her debut album, Good Woman, where she’s perfected a cosmic roots sound that has its origins in the earthy sounds of traditional music, but that spreads ever outward, into the future.
Today we’re premiering the title track off her record, a silvery, slow song that descends as lightly as falling snow, a huge visual motif in the clip. Mancari shared the true story behind the song below, a reckoning with her own desire to be a “good woman” and what the parameters of that character might include. Read her story below, and check out the snowy, solitary video above.
“‘Good Woman’ is the title track to my debut record, and it’s based on a true story,” Mancari said of the track. “We have a local paper in town that people who are homeless or hurting can sell on the street. I kept seeing this woman selling her paper with her one-year-old baby in tow. Finally, one day she came up to me and asked me if I could drive her to her hotel room and pay for it.
My first instinct was I did not want to. My second instinct, as I complied to her request, was that I hoped someone watched “my good deed.” As I talked to her, I asked her daughter’s name and it was “Iris,” the same name of my mother. I hadn’t talked to my mom in a long time, so it was a very emotional experience for me.
The whole song describes a fight within myself to not pretend to be good… to not try and be seen and make people think I’m this ‘good’ person.
The video captures a magical moment where we came across a snowstorm in Arizona. We filmed the walk scene in one take. It’s very simple, and hopefully helps you sink into the moment and the song.”
Additionally, Mancari is part of another crew, her side project trio Bermuda Triangle with Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes and Jesse Lafser has been touring the US and racking up support on their own. Either way, Mancari is guaranteed to be on the country radar well into 2018 and beyond, so get familiar with her before she breaks out in a big way by watching the Calvin Brue-directed video above, and streaming her entire debut album below.
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Good Woman is out now via Gold Tooth Records. Get it here.
