There was never a word for what Ariel Jade is.
Country didn’t cover it. Rock didn’t either. Americana came closest, but even that lane was too narrow for an artist who curates various artist showcases each week, a Twitch room any night she wants one, a media show called Music Row News, a studio inside RCA Victor, and an Americana record all at the same time. She is too wide for any one room, too charged for any one lane. The only word that fits her is the one she had to create.
Just like everything else.
And then she named her brand new record label after it. Or should we say, after her.
Ariel Jade is Eclectric — and now she runs Eclectric Records.
Roots: The Americana Album dropped May 31, the label’s first release, and its lead single, “Down in the Delta,” is more than a proof of concept; it’s a sign of what’s coming, the grid live from the first signal.
The Eclectric Era
To understand what Eclectric means as an era and not just a label, you have to understand what has happened in Nashville in the last six months.
Eclectric Records grew up. What began as Ariel Jade’s release home has become a working Nashville label, signing artists outside herself, building a roster the rest of the city hasn’t seen yet but will. The principle behind the signings is the same principle behind every move she has ever made — artists who are building something deliberate, on their own timeline, in more than one lane at a time. Eclectric — eclectic and electric, range and current. The artists she is developing and signing are, in other words, eclectric themselves.
The label is only one wing of the architecture.
Ariel Jade has taken a board seat at Women Make Music, the Nashville coalition founded by producer Patti Price to advance women across the music and film/TV industries, with leadership connections across WIFT, the HotSpot Nashville media operation, and the music supervision and licensing world. Board seats like that one are not given. Ariel Jade earned it — and is already turning it into the stage.
Above and beyond the board, Ariel Jade and her partners at Studio X TV are gearing up to release the world wide debut of the She Sang Women in Country Music documentary in Nashville this September. Working alongside documentary director and multi-discipline creative Dona Nichols, Grammy-winners Wood Newton and Robin Ruddy, and so many more notable Nashville talents, Ariel Jade once again proves to place priority on elevating other women in the music industry while carving out space for her own sonic exploration and others’ expansion.
While Music Row News has quietly climbed into the top 2% of music podcasts worldwide, Ariel Jade has been busy turning Studio X TV into something much larger than a media platform. With the launch of Studio X Spotlight, she has expanded her lens beyond the headlines, shining a light on Nashville’s next generation of artists, established hitmakers, and touring acts passing through Music City.
What began as an independent media venture has evolved into a creative engine. Beyond writing, directing, hosting, producing, and distributing her own content, Jade and the Studio X team are developing documentaries and docuseries centered on some of music’s most compelling stories, including projects featuring Leftover Salmon frontman Vince Herman and legendary Elvis Presley producer Felton Jarvis.
That same independent spirit fuels Jade’s music career. Studio X TV now produces all of her music videos in-house, creating a rare level of creative control across every aspect of her work. The video for “Pebbles,” released ahead of her album Roots, has already drawn more than 26,000 views. Her latest visual, “End Up In A Song,” arrived online the very day she took the stage during Nashville’s largest music festival—a fitting collision of the two worlds she’s been steadily building: artist and storyteller, musician and media entrepreneur.
All month she has been carrying Roots across the city in the kind of June rollout most Nashville artists dream of. On June 5, she performed at the Women Make Music–curated showcase at the iconic ACME for CMA Fest, taking the stage of the same organization she now helps govern. She also began her creative curation at The East Room for Women Make Music — an all-original-music showcase she is programming herself.
Then there is the rest of the live calendar. Jaded Jams runs Wednesday nights at Drifters in East Nashville — a free weekly showcase (skipping only the first Wednesday of the month) on the patio, featuring artists Ariel Jade curates herself. Bluegrass Pride runs monthly at Canvas — a room she co-hosts with Grammy-winning songwriter Melody Walker. Three rooms a month, four formats, one curatorial hand.
She is also a growing voice inside Music Venue Alliance Nashville, the citywide organization advocating for independent venues, and is coordinating marketing for 615 Indie Live, the platform amplifying the city’s independent live scene. The pattern is consistent: wherever the independent infrastructure of this town needs building, Ariel Jade shows up and helps build it.
Underneath all of it, Roots is rolling out the way records used to roll out — a radio tour, station to station, market to market, including a classic vinyl & CD release in August.
You do not algorithm your way into this lane. You drive full speed ahead into it.
This is what the Eclectric Era looks like. A label. A board seat. A festival stage. A radio tour. A growing footprint inside the organizations that move Nashville’s independent scene. One album, the soundtrack to all of it.
The Record
Roots does not pivot. It clarifies.
Honky Tonic leaned country. Crazy Loves Company leaned rock. Underneath both, the lineage was always Americana — Delta blues running into Southern rock running into back-porch storytelling. Her latest single “Pebbles” – written at age 14 and performed for the first time live on the iconic Bluebird Cafe at a round with Carl Jackson, Wood Newton, Jerry Salley, and Larry Cordle – was the first look into more of her deep grassroots.
Roots: The Almericana Album is the record where she stands inside the tradition fully.
The opener is a swampy, guitar-forward Southern rock groove in conversation with B.B. King and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Across the eight tracks, the instrumentation pulls from the genre’s foundational vocabulary — Ariel Jade on mandolin, Randy Kohrs on lap steel, Aubrey Haynie on fiddle, Josh Shilling on B3 organ. These are arrangements played by musicians who have nothing to prove, for an artist who has stopped asking permission.
Ariel Jade did not chase the tradition. She belongs to it.
And she is already past it. Even as Roots lands as the most rooted Americana statement of her career, she is at work on the next record — a project she is describing as breaking the box open completely, pushing past the boundaries of Americana entirely. Of course she is. Eclectric does not stay in one lane.
The Players in the Room
The credits on Roots are the heaviest of her career — the kind of personnel sheet that takes a decade of earned Nashville relationships to assemble in a single room.
Randy Kohrs, the Grammy-winning lap steel and dobro player, appears across the record on harmony vocals and steel. Randy LeRoy — the multi-Grammy-winning mastering engineer whose credits read like a survey of modern country and Americana — mastered the album. Aubrey Haynie, the Grammy-winning fiddle player who has recorded with Vince Gill and Dolly Parton, brings the fiddle work. Tim Galloway, the 2023 ACM Acoustic Guitar Player of the Year, takes lead guitar. Steve Brewster, one of Nashville’s most-recorded session drummers, plays drums across multiple tracks. Mark Fain, Ricky Skaggs’s longtime bassist, holds down the low end. Chris Condon and James Mitchell split the rest of the guitar chairs. Josh Shilling of Mountain Heart adds B3 organ. John Salaway and Larry Cook round out the rhythm section on the more contemporary cuts.
The early tracks were cut with longtime collaborator Mike Loudermilk — co-writer, producer, and engineer on the leadoff side. Three more were recorded and mixed by Eddie Gore at Historic RCA Victor Studio C where the likes of Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Wayland Jennings have recorded. As a bonus to the “A Side” / “B Side” vibes of the first six songs, Randy Kohrs was also called to bring his talent to the table and produced the last two tracks on the record.
A roster like this does not show up unless the artist already has the trust of the room.
There is no version of this story where Ariel Jade is an artist who got into business. There is no version of this story where she is a businesswoman who happens to make records. Ariel Jade is a creatrix. The build and the songs have always been the same act, the same charge, the same current running through every room she has wired in this town.
Eclectric is who she is. Eclectric is what she built. Roots is what it sounds like when the artist, the label, the rooms, the board, the show, and the radio tour all light up at once.
The first record was the arrival. The second was the refusal. The third was the system.
This time, the whole grid is live — and the songs are coming through, amplified.
Roots: The Americana Album is out now on Eclectric Records and debuted at No. 9 on iTunes. Unlike streaming charts driven by passive listening, every position on the iTunes chart reflects a purchase—evidence of an audience willing to invest, not just consume Ariel Jade.
Stream and order the album at ArielJade.com/newmusic. Catch Ariel Jade live at Jaded Jams (Wednesdays, Drifters, East Nashville), Bluegrass Pride (monthly, Canvas, with Melody Walker), and the Women Make Music showcase she is curating at The East Room. Follow at @arieljademusic on Instagram, watch her stream live on twitch.tv/arieljadelive, and at join her VIP mailing list at arieljade.com for bonuses and exclusives.
Learn more about Women Make Music at womenmakemusic.org.
Support the Women in Country Music She Sang Documentary at shesang.org.
Watch the official “Pebbles” music video here!
Watch the official “End Up In A Song” Music Video Here
Stream music at https://www.youtube.com/@arieljademusic
