Listening to Broken Gold, the new record from singer-songwriter Erin Ivey & The Finest Kind (Rolf Ordahl, Ross Alexander, and JJ Johnson), brings me back to the first time I heard Erin sing. It was a beautiful night last May and I had invited a group of women—including Erin, who was a new friend—over to the house for margaritas. When she walked in with her guitar in tow, I knew we were in for a treat. After about an hour, she pulled me aside and asked quietly, “Would you like me to do a song or two?” Does a margarita have salt? Cocktails in hand, we gathered around as Erin—gorgeous without a stitch of make-up—sat down on the edge of the sofa, lifted her guitar onto her lap and began to sing. Her voice as warm and breezy as the summer night, the moment was sublime. Erin sang two songs for us that evening: “Chocolate,” a French ditty about “her favorite drug,” and “Go! Go! Go!,” a smooth-flowing rap. Both are among the 11 urban folk originals on Broken Gold, all featuring Erin’s glowing vocals and stories that will touch your heart. When I found out that Broken Gold would be released this month, I had to ask for an audience with Erin Ivey.

Tell me about Broken Gold. What inspired you to make it?
Rolf, Ross, JJ and I had the Kaleidoscope Project (a collaboration among Ivey, The Finest Kind and a group of other artists) under our belts, so I decided to take them into the studio to see if we could capture some magic on tape. We recorded the basic tracks for the record live in a day and a half. It was so much fun. In the song, “You Got Your Wishes Wrong,” I was dancing like crazy while I was singing. The band was slamming! That song has one of those great unscripted moments where Rolf and Ross stopped playing, like it was the end of the song, but JJ and I just kept on going. It creates the coolest breakdown and is one of my favorite parts of the album.

I know the stories behind your songs are an important part of your music. Tell me about the title track.
“Broken Gold” was written for a friend who lost his fiancée in a tragic car accident in West Texas. I wrote the song for him as a method of healing. It took over a year to write and is really emotional to perform.

Do you have a favorite song on the record?
I love them all for different reasons. Each one has its own story, about how it was written or for whom, how it was recorded, or how it’s being interpreted by others now. Maybe it’s like having 11 children and seeing parts of yourself in each of them, but knowing they are so much more than you, too.

One doesn’t usually think about rap and folk together in music, but it works so well on Go! Go! Go! Tell me about working with Mic Flo.
My manager, Brian Conway, thought “Go! Go! Go!” would make a great hip hop track and asked Mike [Mic Flo], formerly of the Austin group Mike & Ike, if he’d come down from his medical residency in Fort Worth to lay down some tracks and we’d see how it went. Well, it went great. Mike really got the spirit of the song. He was, after all, pulling crazy hours in his residency and needed the encouragement as much as any of us. There was some concern among the band about the track not fitting in with the rest of the album, but GOING FOR IT is what the song is all about, so that’s what we did. Mike’s laugh in the middle of that song is another one of my favorite moments on the album.

What’s it like to be part of the music scene in the ‘live music capital of the world?’
Austin audiences are blessed by so many opportunities to see live music and they are really open to new and different things. That said, performers in Austin need to be all the more savvy about how they reach their audiences, which makes Austin a great proving ground. Being from Austin holds a lot of cache out on the road, too, which is always helpful.

What’s next?
Like it says in the lyrics of “Go! Go! Go!,” I’m “walking the edge of a precipice I never thought I’d find. Every day I make up my mind.” I’m very proud of this record. It’s the best thing I’ve made yet. In the end, that is more than enough.

Erin Ivey & The Finest Kind’s new record, Broken Gold, will be released on February 22 and is available for purchase at erinivey.com, itunes and Waterloo Records. Carla McDonald is the host of the Austin Arts Minute on YNN as well as a wife, mother of two daughters, successful entrepreneur, community advocate, and fundraiser.