Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine — Callie Collins

Against the vibrant, bluesy backdrop of 1970s Austin, Texas, this shimmering debut follows the collision between hicks and hipsters that ultimately results in tragedy.

Austin, Texas is a town in the throes of social upheaval and the Rush Creek Saloon, five miles on its outskirts, is a bar without a crowd. Until a strange new house band transforms it from moribund honky-tonk to thriving blues bar. But are the throngs of people and the rowdy music worth the chaos that comes with them?

Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is told through three perspectives, each of whom is in some ways responsible for the rebirth of Rush Creek and for the violence that follows in the afterbirth. Doug Moser, a country-and-blues guitarist from San Antonio, is seizing his long-awaited chance at fame but cannot turn away from the easy booze and drugs that come with the life. Deanna Teague owns Rush Creek. Her marriage is rocky and so is her sense of herself, but she sees a crack of light if she can just hold it all together. And Steven Francis is a boy who loves too fiercely. He grapples with his sexuality, his God, and his place in a town where he badly wants to belong.

In her heartfelt, electrifying rockabilly ode to a place in a permanent state of becoming, Collins has captured the roughhousing mood and paradoxical longings of the American psyche. The embrace of both inertia and danger, the longing for freedom and anarchy even as we crave a place to belong. Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine is a time capsule stuffed with heat and booze, electric guitar riffs and big, empty spaces. It's about the cost of fame -- the real price of attention -- and what it can do to a person, to a community, to a whole damn town.