“I’ve been writing songs ever since I can remember, but they’ve never fit into any kind of box,” says Corrina Rose Logston Stephens. “I feel like it’s time to share them.” Rrinaco is the playground for Stephens’ original music. As a fiddler and singer, Stephens has long been associated with hardcore traditional music and has struggled to find a way to present the music in her head. “I needed a place for it all to live. Rrinaco is just that. It’s a nickname I had among my closest artist friends in middle school, a name I associated with who I truly was. Almost four years ago, I was praying about how to release my music, and this all came back to me out of no where. I’ve never been able to get away from it.”
Rrinaco is about the art, not the artist, a prospect that inspires Stephens to be even more creative. “I’ve never been that into promoting ‘me,’ and I tend to get stuck in my process with that. But if it’s about the music and the art, no holds barred, I’m raring to go,” Stephens says. “It’s a clear path for me to feel free to be an artist and let the whole thing be part of the artistic process.”
The artistic process for Stephens is a whimsical one that she takes very seriously. There are simple yet strong melodies, realistic lyrics that somehow flow like nursery rhymes, and subject matter that spans the divine to the ridiculous. Spiritual songs are very core to the Rrinaco repertoire, but no life happenings are off the hook. “When I’m dealing with anything, I’m usually singing about it,” says Stephens. “That’s how I probably get songs about gaslighting, cluttered desks, awkward social situations, and tinnitus. But the spiritual songs are my favorite. They are special, and they all tend to have special stories or special inspiration that comes from outside of myself — they are the real impetus for me to want to bring this music to people.”
But one unique concept continues to inspire new secular material for Stephens. “I think growing up as a 90s kid with the Disney princess mania, there was a bag of goods we were sold that told you, ‘When you get married, you live happily ever after.’ Well somewhere along the way, I believed that. And I found out that even in a very happy marriage, heartbreak still exists in life, and people don’t talk about that. Popular music doesn’t talk about that. Your relationships that exist outside of marriage — friendships, business associates, parents and family — can create very emotional situations. I found out when you start writing about that, it sounds like love songs,” Stephens laughs. “So I like to cover these weird relationship dynamics, and well, they usually turn into love songs. But they come from this deep emotional place with feelings that our culture doesn’t have words for.”
The delivery of these little songs feels very folk-centric, honest and conversational, with none of the instrumentation straying too far from the bluegrass fold. “I hear things through the instruments I grew up with and am familiar with. Most of it feels close to bluegrass, and my friends from home would probably still call it that. Sometimes there’s a hollow body electric guitar. But if Charlie Monroe did it, I think it’s got some roots to it.”
There’s an authenticity to Rrinaco that feels inventive yet familiar. Like an old record you’ve put on a million times but you’ve never quite learned the words to the songs on it, the songs feel like something you know in an almost visceral way yet can’t put your finger on. That’s the junction of roots with revival — a new voice speaking into the doldrums of the human experience. “I am, at the end of the day, more than anything else, an artist,” says Stephens. “I’ve never quite gotten to express that to the extent that I’d like, so I’m very excited.”
