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INTRODUCING ROBYN OTTOLINI

In country music, the very best narratives are almost always lifted from life’s messy playbook. It’s a paradox, but if you can tap deep into the ordinary — articulating the soul-crushing losses and sustaining wins of the everyday — you create something extraordinary. It’s a sort-of superpower shared by the most acclaimed and enduring artists, and it’s a superpower wholly possessed by  Robyn Ottolini.

 

The fast-rising, Nashville-based country singer-songwriter will tell you straight-up she’s just a trucker’s daughter (yup, really) from a small Canadian town with blue-collar values and a roadhouse to match. “I feel like the most regular person,” she says, “and I always thought it would hold me back. But I think that lets me write about experiences that make thousands of people say, ‘Holy shit! I’m just like her. I’m not alone.’”

Over the last five years, Ottolini has amassed more than 160 million streams, leveraging that ordinary extraordinariness across a quintet of EPs and multiple dazzling singles, perhaps most notably the rip-snorting heartbreak smash, “F-150.” The single, from 2020, accounted for nearly 60 million of those streams, incinerated TikTok, impressively charted including reaching #3 on Rolling Stones’ All Genre Viral Chart, scored heaps of applause and awards (including a CCMA Award for Rising Star) back in the homeland, led to a short-lived deal with Warner Music Nashville - and earned Ottolini her first platinum-certified song. She has seen the likes of some of country music’s biggest festivals, headlined shows across Canada and opened up for Shania Twain, Tim McGraw, Breland and Tyler Rich, just to name a few.

Ah, but as the saying goes, what doesn’t kill you makes you infinitely better equipped to deal with the myriad notorious complexities of the country music business while strategizing your next move. 

“That song was a Catch-22,” Ottolini confirms of “F-150,” noting that, on one hand, it helped jumpstart her career. “I never would have quit my job as a barista or signed a deal.” But it also demonstrated that labels operate at a pace not always compatible with songwriters as creative as Ottolini. Live and learn.

Now blissfully independent, with new management, a fresh perspective, and a clutch of electrifying, lived-in original songs pointing towards her hotly anticipated debut Album (ETA TBD), Ottolini is not just ready for her proverbial closeup. She is writing, directing, producing and starring in it herself. Only a fool would bet against her.

 

Witness new single “Singin’ Bout Cowboys,” a strummy, sun-streaked, and shamelessly knock-kneed scorcher that nods a head to everyone in the genre who sings about Stetson-wearing, free-living cowboys, but surmises, that Robyn tends to sing instead about the working-class, 9 to 5 men who find themselves in her orbit.  “I love a good country song about a cowboy, but I’ve never been able to write one because quite frankly, I’ve never met one,” Ottolini laughs. “I found a way to still sing about them in a sense, while paying homage to the guys that I do know a thing or two about: the blue-collar, steadfast fellas that give unconditional love and work their butts off,” she says, neatly summarizing the song’s goosebump-raising coda: “I don’t think I’m missing out/’Cause I sure like my view/Everybody’s singin’ about cowboys/I just wanna sing about you.”

“People will tell you that country has to be about beers and trucks,” she says, playfully adopting a drawl. “And while I may write about those things, I’ve always thought country was also just the truth and a bunch of chords more than anything. So, I write the most honest truths I can possibly write. No matter how my delivery may push the boundaries, my honest lyricism is pure country.” 

Listening to Ottolini’s sparkling catalog to date, it’s clear she deeply respects country music tradition. But much like Kacey Musgraves or Megan Moroney, kindred musical spirits, Ottolini is unafraid to explore contemporary sensibilities, musically and topically. 

Her lyrical laser-focus may be why Ottolini’s music scans so genuinely, as if her words were being conspiratorially whispered in your ear by a tipsy girlfriend perched on the next barstool. Take Ottolini’s play-by-play of the hilarious/horrifying real-life events that occurred on her first — and last — date with the crackpot chronicled in “Airplane Bottle.” 

Among other grievous misdeeds, Ottolini’s date brought a mini-bottle of vodka to the bar where the pair was meeting. Teased on TikTok, the unreleased tale has been causing a frenzy and, if history repeats itself, could land as another big one. 

“I guess the red flags were there, but I didn't see ‘em/Until you left me on the side of the road at 11 pm,” our heroine sing-talks (as she does so very well) in one of the single’s many effervescent, and startling, turns of phrase. Life’s messy playbook exquisitely captured.

Then there’s the gently propulsive “In A Small Town,” Robyn’s  subsequent release to “Singin’ Bout Cowboys” expected in March ‘25,  gorgeously buoyed by Ottolini’s elastic, amber voice. Written solo at the behest of her hometown fans at the height of the pandemic when Ottolini put out a request for songwriting ideas, the track vividly sketches small-town life, from childhood to grave, in breezy, tender strokes as recognizable in Uhland, Texas as Uxbridge, Ontario where Ottolini grew up. 

“It’s the crosses at the red light, the bar everyone goes to, and I thought, ‘How lucky am I to grow up in a town that people want me to sing about?’” she says. “I still go back to get my dad to change my oil. I still go to the same bars where the same people work. It’s the exact same in many ways, yet I couldn’t ask for more.” “I want my music to give people an escape,” says Ottolini, who turns 30 this summer, an event she hopes to celebrate onstage at a festival or as the opener on an arena tour… or maybe, making her Grand Ole Opry debut. 

“There is so much going on in the world that it can feel very chaotic and lonely. I write music because I feel lonely and I want to be that little anchor in a crazy, all-consuming ocean for people to go, ‘Oh, someone out there gets it, gets me. And it’s all going to be OK.’”

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