Songwriter and instrumentalist Charissa Hoffman is looking through the clouds of the past and emerging with a fresh, new perspective on her thoughtful debut album, Horizon. Drawing from her personal experiences with family history, a religious upbringing, and pursuing a singular musical path, these nine original songs are supplemented by Hoffman’s inventive ukulele arrangements and supported by special guests such as Béla Fleck, Abigail Washburn, Chris Eldridge, and Nina de Vitry.

 

A sixth-generation musician, Hoffman is eager to show audiences just how versatile the ukulele is. From the start, the young Nashville native wasn’t interested in hearing other people’s perceptions about the limitations of the ukulele, or their insistence that she should learn to play guitar. Instead, the small instrument was chosen as an ideal vessel to express herself through songwriting. 

 

“I always saw myself as a writer,” she says. “I was a really bookish kid and I loved music, so I took a songwriting class. I wrote a song but I didn’t play any instruments. It was like a corny 11-year-old song, but it was such an emotional release for me. I'd never experienced anything that cathartic before. I was really chasing that when I decided I wanted to pick up an instrument. And I chose ukulele, not only because I didn't think I could screw it up. It was also because I was trying to feel more of that catharsis.”

 

The fascination with the instrument carried her from Nashville to Boston where she was the first ukulele principal to be accepted at Berklee School of Music. The roots music curriculum allowed her to meet some of the top musicians in acoustic music; in addition, she could immerse herself in practicing her instrument for 10 hours a day. But after graduation, she endured the uncertainty of the pandemic, a pivotal time of evolution in her own life.

 

Produced by John Mailander, Horizon opens with “Forward Motion,” which Hoffman wrote after stepping away from the Southern Baptist denomination. Despite some wonderful aspects of the church, she says, “I was picking up on some things that I felt were maybe inconsistent or maybe not coming out of a place of profound love and kindness. So, for the first time in my life I was starting to push back against exactly how I was raised – ‘Oh, you're gonna believe this, you're gonna say this, you're gonna follow this’ – and I started to say, ‘Hey, let me think this through on my own and decide.’”

 

The evocative “If I Could Fly” contrasts a swift musical flow with introspective lyrics, while “Kitchenette” showcases the instrumental talent of her studio band. “Who Am I” explores the theme of personal identity, a recurrent theme throughout Horizon.

 

For example, a great-great-great-grandfather was a music professor at West Virginia University but was killed in a farming accident. In addition, a great-grandfather had to give up music lessons and head to the coal mines at age 12 when his father abandoned the family; however, his fiddle was passed down through the generations and Hoffman inherited it. Stories such as these are woven into another compelling composition, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” with lyrics detailing her ancestors’ impact on her own life.

 

“I feel really lucky that I'm not a coal miner in poverty, and also a little bit guilty that I get to have such a good life,” she says. “That's kind of an undercurrent for me, and it plays into the same thing of stepping away from being Southern Baptist, and all these other things of gratitude for what's happened, and feeling a little bit guilty to try to find my own way. The songs were my way of processing those feelings, and being like, ‘It’s actually OK. You can be grateful for what everyone's given you, and not feel guilty for getting above your raising, you know?”

 

Working with Béla Fleck on “Love Is an Ocean” was especially gratifying because she grew up listening to her grandmother’s New Grass Revival albums.

 

“He's such a natural collaborator. He's so good at serving the music and bringing his voice to it, but in a way where it's making the song more powerful overall,” Hoffman says. “The song is about trusting the journey and not believing that you're stuck. Someimes I think when a bad thing happens, everything's gonna be bad forever. So I was trying to write something that was against that idea, and saying good things can happen again. It doesn't have to be scarce. There can be lots and lots of room for everybody at the table.”

 

The album title of Horizon is lifted from a coming-of-age song titled “Natchez Trace Bridge,” named for a Middle Tennessee landmark, while “St. Joseph” is a page from her pandemic experience when she lived next to a convent called the Sisters of St. Joseph of Boston. The album’s closer, “Parallel Lines,” is a delicate mix of storytelling and gentle melodies on the ukulele. When she performs it at the end of her shows, the audience always grows quiet and she can see on their faces that they're thinking about their own experiences of connection.

 

Hoffman dreams that all the songs on Horizon will help other listeners find that connection too.

 

“When I was a young teen, I was very curious, listening to Pandora and buying CDs from secondhand stores, stuff like the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Aoife O’Donovan and Gillian Welch – singer-songwriters touching on topics that I hadn't heard before,” she explains. “I think a lot of folks go through this phase of figuring out who they are, apart from their parents, by listening to music. If someone hears this record and it resonates with them in the same way that those records resonated with me, then it's a success. I'll be very happy.”  Craig Shelburne