Half Truth
New Album out June 12th 2026
Avery Hellman has been a rancher, an alt-country musician, and, always, a dreamer. But they recently found themself once more while looking for Lucinda Williams. In 2023, Hellman was hard at work on an album, podcast, and documentary delving into the psyche of the country singer-songwriter when they discovered how much poetry played into Williams’ general talents. “That was a really big shift for me,” Hellman says. “I was like, ‘Well, why don’t I learn how to write poetry?’” Add another job to that resume.
Coincidentally, Hellman had been invited to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, where they presented a few early poems — and opened the barn door. Creativity stampeded out, and, with the help of co-writer/producer Sam Cohen, Avery penned their new record as alt-country project ISMAY, Half Truth, out June 12th 2026 on Fossil Records. “My intention with the record, especially given the fact that a lot of the songs started as poems, wasn’t to be perfect,” they say. “I wanted the words to be in the forefront — not smooth, but raw.”
Hellman grew up in the Bay Area on Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Hazel Dickens, hanging out backstage at their grandfather’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival since age eight. As a young person, they initially wanted to get into environmental studies — inspired by their work on the family ranch — but when their grandfather died, they decided to preserve his legacy. They started playing with his band, then honed their own sound, dropping their debut album as ISMAY, Songs of Sonoma Mountain, in 2020 (one of KQED’s 10 best Albums in the Bay Area), then Desert Pavement with Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse in 2024. Through it all, they grew into their own as an artist, performing at music fests and opening for the likes of Steve Earle, John Doe, and Chuck Prophet, and scoring a role on TV+ Show My Kind of Country, produced by Kacey Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon. And, after immersing themselves in the study of poetry, they wrote Half Truth, an 11-song suite of wry yet lonesome tracks about rodeo horses, salvation, and finding yourself — again and again.
Hellman workshopped the lilting, unhurried title track in a writing class. “I was getting feedback from my teacher, and realized that the poem was about what parts of ourselves we show and share with other people,” they say. “There's this whole inner world we want to show, but a lot of us keep within our minds. I felt like the idea of a half truth just resonates a lot with me as a person, how I'm able to communicate.” And then there’s the eerily beautiful “American Flag,” about trying and failing to train a wild mustang during the pandemic. “I had to let go of this horse being this thing I envisioned and let her live how she wanted to,” Hellman says. “Everybody who's creative knows how that is.”
“Torture Either Way” sidles in next on a sunny melody that amplifies the tongue-in-cheek lyrics. “Not creating art is like torture, but creating it and putting it out there also feels like torture,” Hellman says of the song. “The Let Down” rips in next, the tale of a teen much like Hellman who dreams of becoming a farmer, only to change their mind once they get down in the muck. “In discussing the concept I found a lesson from these youthful experiences,” they say. “That often my vision for a life as a musician, or a farmer, or a horseback traveler was too rigid.”
“Jesus Sign” could score a sepia-toned, dusty Western, inspired by a man Hellman saw standing on an freeway overpass holding a sign reading “Jesus Saves.” “All I could think about was the fact that this person was sitting in the shade of the Jesus sign,” they recall. “It was really hot that day, and so it just made me laugh a little bit and think about the whole nature of: what are we talking about when we say a god saves us? Is it about the afterlife, or providing literal shade halfway across the freeway overpass?” The bright, quirky “Shy Ann” brings us back to the ranch, where a poor brown horse watches on as the beautiful paints get all the shine at the rodeo. Little do those rodeo clowns know, but Shy Ann has the skills.
“Problems Galore” trips in next, its title belying its sweetness. “It's the theme for the record,” Hellman says. “This idea of when you're younger and you don't have a lot of experience, you can be part of this fantasy world where there's so many things I could become. I could be a horse trainer, I could be a rodeo rider, I could be an alt-country musician. But, in the end, you reconcile dreams with reality. And that’s OK.” The sweetly mournful “I Don’t Look at You” is another dose of reality, about obsessing over global issues and ignoring your partner. And then there’s the narrative song “Wildfire,” recounts their experience in the 2017 California blaze, and a phenomenon Hellman heard about where children birthed during the fires were born with their eyes wide open, so stressed were their mothers.
“On the Honest Edge of Being” began as another poem, an exercise where you set up a scene and let it play out on the page. “I based this story on my own experience, but also an imagined experience of a sister and a brother dealing with the sister’s mental health issue, traveling these mental trails over and over,” Hellman says. The siblings see that same experience playing out outside their window, where the feet of deer have worn down the hillside over the years as they traverse the same paths. “It’s about the bond between siblings,” Hellman adds.
The deceptively simple “Miracle Cure” concludes the record, a somber song about a snake oil salesman conning a farm family. “To me, that applies to the modern day,” Hellman says. “We're brought into these coercive communities and sometimes it’s hard to convince the people we love that they’re being had. I usually write such complicated songs, but with this one I kept it simple — repeating minor chords, a familiar story. But fresh in a way I’ve never experienced before.”
Finding Lucinda Soundtrack (2025)
This record includes covers recorded during filming, one with her guitar & mandolin player Buddy Miller, and one recorded in the sheep barn on my family’s ranch where this journey began. There are poems by her father, celebrated writer and teacher Miller Williams, whose straightforward writing style and mentorship shaped his daughter’s work greatly. One of the poems is read by Lucinda devotee Mary Gauthier. A few tracks are from a re-creation of a 1981 session, recorded in the same location in 2025. I invited Lucinda’s long-term collaborator Charlie Sexton, members of Los Texmaniacs, and the son of the fiddle player from the original session. All of these are live recordings.​
DESERT PAVEMENT (2024)
"Hellman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Marlin create rich colors and hazy atmospherics in a sweet and savory mix... this record is an inviting pathway to ISMAY.”
- The Associated Press
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"With Desert Pavement, ISMAY points to a folk music that can last hundreds more years, a tradition that is essential because it helps us understand us."
- No Depression
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"They tread the fertile ground of nostalgia yet never make anything sound old, dated, or retro. They’re as important an artist as when Jewel, Paula Cole & Joan Osborne first arrived."
- Americana Highways
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“A great songwriter can pull you in. Ismay with their intimate tone and genuine storytelling, grabbed us. Welcome to the old world charm that is Ismay.”
- Western AF
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"Working with producer Andrew Marlin of Watchhouse, the song has that same effortless magic as early Lucinda Williams or Mary Lou Lord; jangling 90’s alt-country with the kind of modern polish that have made recent records from Janet Simpson and Waxahatchee so captivating."
- Holler Country
Desert Pavement, the sophomore release from ISMAY, is a tapestry of alternative American roots music, full of alt-country textures and woozy folk songs that transcend traditions and blur boundaries.
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For Avery Hellman, the Bay Area native behind ISMAY’s unique sound, the album builds a bridge between past and present. "I create music that's informed by older traditions and makes you feel the way old folk music does," they say, "but it doesn't sound like something you've heard before."
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Like Songs of Sonoma Mountain, ISMAY’s critically acclaimed debut, Desert Pavement was heavily influenced by the California ranch where Hellman spent most of their 20s working the land. "My mom bought the ranch when I was 19 years old," Hellman remembers. "Environmental restoration was very important to her, and I was with her every step of the way, working to develop the ranch, raise cattle, replant creeks, and tend to the sheep. The perspective of my songwriting is very rooted in ranch life."
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Listening to Desert Pavement is a vivid (and often visual) experience, with songs that evoke the landscapes and lifestyles of rural California. "Shearer and the Darby Ram," the album's opening track, is a modern-day folk tale, blending acoustic guitars with an imaginative storyline about a larger-than-life ram whose wool changes a family's fortune. It's based upon an old British tall tale, but ISMAY breathes new life into the narrative by focusing not upon the animal itself, but upon the child called to shear it. "Stranger in the Barn" is similarly inventive. The track unfolds like a bluegrass-inspired mountain song, punctuated by bursts of mandolin, brushed percussion, and ISMAY’s breezily gorgeous vocals. At its center is a storyline about a family who discovers a drifter sleeping in the sheep barn. Rather than run him off, the family embraces the newcomer like one of their own. ISMAY turns the song into an allegory about human decency. "The story is about taking down our walls, and rather than meeting the unknown with contempt and anger, instead offering curiosity," Hellman clarifies.
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California may be one of Hellman's muses, but that didn't stop the songwriter from traveling 2,600 miles east — to the famed Echo Mountain Recording studio in Asheville, North Carolina — to capture these songs in a series of live takes. "We recorded 13 songs in five days," Hellman remembers. "The whole band played together, all at once, and I tracked my vocals live. A big part of the live recording process is embracing the imperfections of a performance, and Desert Pavement sounds real and raw to me."
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It sounds experimental, too. "The Dove, The Shrew, & The Raccoon" blends American folk influences with south-of-the-border rhythms, while "Streaming Family" — a song about modern technology's impact on our daily lives — pits traditional instrumentation against a contemporary message. While writing material for the album, ISMAY found a new collaborator in Andrew Marlin, best known as a member of the progressive folk band Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange). The two came from different backgrounds — not only geographically, but musically, too — and ISMAY was intrigued by the idea of Marlin producing the album. "I didn't know what the outcome was going to be, and I liked engaging with the uncertainty of that," Hellman says. "Andrew took an experimental approach to the recording process, which I loved. He'd record a guitar part by setting up the microphone in an entirely different room, to capture the sound of the space itself. He'd record our backing vocals through a Leslie speaker. He liked being impulsive, and that was a nice change for me."
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Another change was Hellman's songwriting itself. With 2020's Songs of Sonoma Mountain, Hellman had looked to songwriters like Leonard Cohen for inspiration, resulting in a darker, melancholic album anchored by Hellman's fingerpicked guitar. Creating Desert Pavement was a different experience. "I was hugely inspired by Bonny Light Horseman's debut record, and I began writing songs that were based in rhythmic strumming rather than fingerpicking," Hellman says. "I didn't know what sound I was creating at first, but I knew I was writing songs that made me curious. That was the most important thing to me. I'm not trying to copy anybody else or take a pre-determined path with my music. I'm just trying to be me, whatever that may be."
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Desert Pavement is an album that owes that owes more to geography than genre. It's the unique sound of the New American West. For Hellman — who grew up attending Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the music festival launched by their grandfather, Warren Hellman — California has always been a melting pot of cultures and art, with Desert Pavement serving as the newest entry in the state's musical history. "It's obvious that psychedelic music, alternative music, and the Summer of Love all influenced the music that's made our here," they say. "It's a music that's open-minded and experimental. It's music that doesn't feel the need to be boxed in."
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In other words, it's ISMAY’s kind of music. With Desert Pavement, ISMAY paves a path toward a new horizon, filling the journey with songs about the sights, sounds, and singular characters found way out west.
SONGS OF SONOMA MOUNTAIN
SONGS OF SONOMA
MOUNTAIN
SONGS OF SONOMA MOUNTAIN named one of
"The 10 Best Bay Area Albums of 2020" by KQED Arts
"An enchanting composition that reflects the storybook wistfulness of Aldous Harding and Weyes Blood. ISMAY helps usher in an era of mystical folk that is both incisive and playful and somewhat mysterious."
"Every song weaved around the sights, sounds, and feel of the surrounding land and guided gently by ISMAY's meticulous guitar and delicately captivating vocals."
-American Songwriter
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Off Shelf Magazine Editor's Top 10 Records of 2020 alongside Death Valley Girls, Guided by Voices and more
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Five years spent working and living on the family ranch informs ISMAY's debut full-length record, Songs of Sonoma Mountain. This album was recorded in a 100-year-old sheep barn at the ranch, seeking to immerse the listener in the world of Sonoma Mountain, and to evoke the sense that we aren’t as separate from nature as we may think. Co-produced by Robert Cheek (Engineer: Band of Horses, Chelsea Wolfe) and Avery Hellman, Songs of Sonoma Mountain features live vulnerable performances that bring out the character of the space. These songs tell stories from the perspective of the mountain, the animals upon it, and ISMAY themself to examine gender identity, loss, and a search for belonging. The record interweaves field recordings with intricate songwriting and experimental production.
