ROBYN OTTOLINI - In A Small Town - Aleu Records

Following the very well-received “Singin’ Bout Cowboys,” Canadian country songstress Robyn Ottolini continues today to navigate her heart fluttered, falling in love era with the release of her nostalgic new single, “In A Small Town.”

“I wrote this one by myself, but it feels like I wrote it with my hometown at the same time! it's just a song about a small town somewhere… ya but it's about my small town & I miss it!” Ottolini shared to her social pages.

In what plays out like flipping through a photo album that Polaroid maps her small-town, coming of age story, Ottolini reminiscently travels the emotional strains of missing what you never knew you had while wishing you could go back to it again today.

Pinpointing simpler things like how in a small town your best friend’s never change while holding the complexity of realizing how much your hometown means to you only once you’ve punched your ticket out, Ottolini tilts her vocal edges so that they strike the proper heart chords of every emotional facet we all feel when we’re looking back on our growing up years from today’s jaded perspective.

Confessionally admitting how the backroads made them, the bonfires shaped them, and the crosses at the red lights are the reminders that life is too short so hold tightly to the ones you love, Robyn ponders what was versus what is as the hands of time don’t stop moving no matter how much you wish they would.

However, where this song becomes so intriguing is when she digs into a thought we haven’t heard from her before; a very forward perspective of her own someday, one day children growing up too fast, and like her, yearning for a way out of the small-town way of life without really understanding how good they have it right where they’re at.

“Life flashed before our eyes
Fell in love with the small-town state of mind
Our kids in the truck bed playing Peter Pan
Are lost in Neverland
I'm scared if I look away now I'll look back again
They'll turn eighteen and say there’s nothing for them
In a small town”

From the breakout success of “F-150” to the fiery “Match For My Memory” and the extremely vulnerable “Sad To Work” and “Sick of Sex,” Robyn Ottolini has continually opened her diary with the utmost transparency while battling emotional discontent and maturing through it from song-to-song to get to where she’s at today; duct taping together the fragments of her once broken and fractured heart to find herself now standing at the crossroads of hopefulness and gratification.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis)