Julia Blair is known for her ability to strike emotional chords her audiences didn’t realize were waiting to be hit. Her work lives at the coalescence of laugh-out-loud humor and acute melancholia, and it’s a rare show that doesn’t elicit tears from someone in the crowd. Praised by Pitchfork for her “smooth country alto”, Under the Radar described her sound as an exploration of the “broader world of chamber pop, soul, and gentle salves of singer/songwriter intimacy.” Graham Hunt has called her a modern-day Carole King. Some people look effortless on stage; Blair somehow pulls off the opposite trick. She doesn’t traffic in effortlessness– she performs with full-body earnestness that sings from the crown of her head down through her toes. Her new album, All of My Important Things, is out November 7 on Don Giovanni Records, examines our relationship to material possessions through the lenses of childhood memory, a secondhand blanket, and the enduring notion that a lifetime of accumulated shit can never match the wonder of the first little treasures we held as kids.