Julianna Riolino knows how to capture and highlight beauty before it fades. She spent her days running up to the release of her solo debut helping restore the stained glass windows at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto. Riolino couldn’t help but reflect on her own past and the memories of pains, healing, and love strewn through it. “It made me think about life as a balancing act, and we’re all just trying to do our best to navigate it,” she says. That focus on morality and the stretch of time seeped naturally into Riolino’s Americana-indebted songwriting, resulting in the golden, fluid album “All Blue”, “If I was a painter, this would be my blue period,” she says. “I’m looking at my life, all my decisions lined up, and either atoning for them or laughing them off.”
The true religious fervour both in Riolino’s life and in the LP is directed towards icons like Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and The Band. Inspired by those artists, Riolino asked for a guitar as a child, and began teaching herself how to bring similar life to the melodies in her head. And while she honed her voice by participating in school musicals, songwriting remained a deeply personal venture.
The stories are told with a hefty dose of wit and wordplay mixed into pitch-perfect representations of classic Americana tropes. Riolino has shown that same duality in her role as a member of cult favourite Daniel Romano’s backing band, The Outfit, here utilizing Romano as a guitarist and putting a tighter focus on her powerful vocals.
Leaning more heavily on emotional reality than diary details, the kernel of truth and experience always shines through in Riolino’s songwriting. Lodged somewhere between AM radio breeze and the florid wash of Waxahatchee. Trilling organ and Roddy Carlyle’s rangy bass play the perfect complement to Riolino’s sweetly strummed acoustic.
Blending past and present musically represents Riolino’s own experience as well, the songs written over a period of years, their meanings picking beyond that stretch and pulling lessons forward. And in that process, her philosophical lyrics bring that complexity forward to the listener in surreally sweet melodies, pouring growth and healing directly through the ear and into the heart. “For me it was about looking into a reflection of who you once were, letting go of that idea of who you thought you needed to be, and being okay with who you are.”
The Fat Angel Sings 