Country music’s brightest duo, Thelma & James, peel back the layers of life on their achingly honest debut EP ‘Starting Over,’ weaving together a musical tapestry of country, pop, gospel, and indie music.

Stream: ‘Starting Over’ – Thelma & James

MacKenzie Porter (Thelma) and Jake Etheridge (James) bring a pure melancholy to the Americana scene with their band Thelma & James.

Their music feels completely free from expectation and fear. Each song on Starting Over (via Big Loud) is an ode to the indie records of the early-2000s whilst also being a luxurious melancholic soundscape you can disappear into. Etheridge brings up the viral meme where it says “me restarting my sad song because the part that hurts me the most didn’t hurt me enough.” That is Starting Over in a nutshell. Keep pressing repeat until the music really hurts.

“We are just trying to write songs. We really try not to have any sort of constraints or boxes around the music. We’re just going to do this crazy thing. We do lean towards country, but we’re not interested in restraining ourselves. We have to let it out. Scratching the crazy!”

Porter released her debut record Nobody’s Born With A Broken Heart in 2022, and Etheridge has been releasing EPs independently while also writing and touring with the band The Common Linnets. Their individual music ranges from country to indie, to folk and pop, which explains why Thelma & James’ music is so eclectic and refuses to play by any genre-specific rules.

On first listen, I was struck by how similar the storytelling and music of Starting Over is to that iconic early-2000s film soundtrack, Garden State, which featured music from The Shins, Nick Drake, Remy Zero and Iron & Wine.

This is one of the first things I say when I meet the duo in Nashville. “Oh my God. Thank you. ‘Garden State’ was a pretty monumental subject for me,” Etheridge tells me. He then goes on to admit to hearing the soundtrack before seeing the film, and then mistakenly watching the film ‘Elizabethtown’ instead.

For those of you who missed out on this awesome piece of independent filmmaking, Garden State, both the film and the soundtrack, was a big deal in 2004. Starring Zach Braff (who also wrote and directed), Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, and the late Ian Holm, it tells a story of starting over by coming home. It was and still is, a funny, heartfelt and above all, honest piece of storytelling. Many films tried to copy its template, but never quite got it right.

Folks who have been following Thelma & James will be pleased to know that the song that started all of this, “Happy Ever After,” is track one on the EP. The song stands the test of time.

A part folk, part country, part-Americana eruption of raw emotion. The pair trade verses detailing the memories each carry of a relationship that disintegrated in their hands, even as they were clutching the pieces. “I got them words you said still ringin’ out, ‘I love you babe, but it’s too late now.’” The verses are so hyper-specific that you can see each like a polaroid laying on a dusty coffee table.

I got a hole in my heart damn
near the size of Texas
and I think you left it
I got a picture of you and me circa 2019
Don’t know why I kept it
I got a story I tell myself
until my face is in the blue
But I got no happy ever after you

When I spoke to Thelma & James earlier this year, Porter said that her favourite lyric was from the song “Loser.” I asked her if that still stands; she said yes.

Loser, loser
I knew you’d lose her 

In-between the beloved chaos of raising a daughter, acting in various TV shows, writing, performing and touring, and Porter winning Female Artist of the Year at the 2025 Canadian Country Music Awards (CCMA Awards), Porter and Etheridge sat down with Atwood Magazine at their kitchen table to talk the record, why sad music is better than bops, and how magic sometimes happen when they write.

On “Loser”

“Loser” is a soaring, raging song about what happens in the immediate aftermath of a break up. But it’s also mostly about the person who broke up with you in writing because they were too cowardly to tell you face to face. “We co-wrote that song with Natalie Hemby,” said Porter, “but it started with Jake in our music room and me in our bedroom, working on an idea. It was funny because he came in and he’s like, ‘I have this idea.’ He then went on to sing the first verse of what became ‘Loser’ and I had what became the chorus of the song.”

Etheridge added, “It was kind of wild. It sounds pretty made up, like a TV version of songwriting.”

I can’t read your cursive writing
But the words are on the page
I put it in my right shirt pocket
‘Cause my heart can’t take the weight
And I bet you’re somewhere driving
Telling your Momma she was right
And I know that you ain’t crying
Or feeling you’re dying
The way I am tonight

The lyrics are so raw and honest that it often leaves you feeling breathless. This is the song on the record that reminds me the most of the Garden State soundtrack, with its screaming and queasy electric guitars, muddy drums, and angry vocals. The song sounds and feels like it was tracked completely in that moment of rebelling against a break up. Getting drunk, screaming, crying, playing your guitar way too loud, and turning up on their porch when the sober you who knows better than that. “Loser” reverberates round and round your brain. It’s a delicious moment to lose yourself in.

Now I’m drunk and on your driveway
You turned the light on, on the porch
You’re coming to your senses
But you ain’t coming to the door
Loser, loser
I knew you’d lose her

On “Parking Lot Prayers”

“Parking Lot Prayers” is just that – a prayer. Etheridge opens the song with the deeply vulnerable verse about the fragility of life and the inevitability of death whilst always asking the question we have all asked ourselves when we’ve been deep down in the rabbit hole, “why do we keep trying when everything ends?”

I don’t know why I start
getting sad around seven thirty
Don’t know why my sister
picks them fights with strangers at the bar
Don’t know why my Papa’s
memory is slowly disappearing
Don’t know why them things are the way they are
I’m starting to wonder if
there’s even any rhyme or reason
Why even say hello if it all ends in goodbye
And I don’t know why he grabbed
the keys when I begged him not to drive
And I don’t know how to watch his mother cry

I asked Etheridge if this particular song is his baby. “The beginning is my experience but the rest of the song is everyone’s baby. The first part is about my sister, my grandad, my friend who passed away… but the rest of it is a last cry to get some sort of sign.”

Damn it throw me a bone
Could you send me a sign
I ain’t gave up yet
But it’s a real thin line
So if you’re in the business to listening
To parking lot prayers tonight
Starting to think that you ain’t there
I dare you to change my mind

Etheridge and Porter told me they hired a choir for the song. “They were incredible. There were only a few of them, but then we stacked their vocals in the studio, and it became what you hear on the EP.”

The gospel choir and their soulful harmonies give a song that starts off desperate and lonely, a soothing balm. The intertwining of Thelma & James’ vocals and the vocals of the choir is beautiful and can only make you smile. Whether you have faith or not, this song and music in general, is often a sign we can all recognise to keep going or a message we can cling to in our darkest moments.

On “Starting Over”

Ain’t it messed up that the ending looks
an awful lot like when I use to hold ya
Oh you used to spin the world for me
now the two of us spin out of time
Just because you close the door
don’t mean you’re gonna get yourself some closure
I think I’m starting to see this is you and me starting over 

Etheridge and Porter shared that they co-wrote the title track with the acclaimed songwriter and singer, Lori McKenna. “We have a very young daughter, so when Lori came over to write, she was in bed upstairs and the three of us just had really good conversations about our life and our family. It was a pretty spiritual experience.The song itself is about the beginning of something new. It could be about a relationship being over and you starting again by yourself, but it is also the beginning of our band, you know?”

“Starting over, starting fresh,” Etheridge sings in the first verse over a plucky guitar chord progression. Etheridge and Porter’s vocals dance around each other, intertwining in the chorus, then pulling apart in the verses. Like all endings, there’s a bittersweetness to the music but there is also a lightness to it. The characters in the song might be breaking apart and going their separate ways but as the duo said, it could also be about something new coming together; “I think I’m starting to see this is you and me starting over.”

Thelma & James give words and melodies to the heartbreak, the grief, the endings and even the beginnings. Starting Over is a masterpiece in making the hard bits hurt a little less.

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