Dwayna Litz Music Recap of 2025
I ended 2025 working with these great musicians, and an incredible soloist who has been classically trained from Juilliard, now living in Nashville, Robert May. We sang a duet of “Oh Holy Night,” and it was beautiful.
I recorded four Christmas songs for 2026, including one I wrote called “Smoky Mountain Christmas.” I worked with musicians: Tim Crouch, Charlie McCoy, Ryan Jones and Mark Niemiec engineering. (And, no one is more important than the right engineer I found last year in Mark Niemiec)!
Nathan Meckel and Sean Kelly came to videotape it and interview me for a mini-documentary to be out this new year about being true to ourselves as artists in music with their company, Stereophonic Films. We recorded and filmed at Ronnie’s Place on Music Row.
Last year I have also had the joy of finding my own sound, thanks to great musicians like Steve Brewster (drums), Andrew Carney (trumpet, flugelhorn), Tim Crouch (fiddle, mandolin, guitar), James Mitchell (electric guitar), Duncan Mullins (electric bass) and pianists Jeff Taylor and Ryan Jones (a new pianist I love working with whose arrangements are more Jazz than pop or country, which is perfect for me). I have also found this sound, thanks to great vocalists adding parts like Nathan and Suzanne Young and Michael Mishaw and Connye Florance. As always, Billy Decker, does the final mixing.
I am now working with Tinderbox on radio promotion, and I was featured in Spin Magazine last summer as an “artist to watch,” based on a song I wrote called “Stayin’ Gone” that got played on many rock stations, as it was country/rock, opening the door for journalists, online magazines, blogs and Spotify radio stations from all over the world to play my music. This is how the radio promotion team found out about my music, so we are now building my platform on YouTube and building a “hot sheet” of FM stations to eventually work up to the next level of radio, which is Sirius XM.
What an honor to also now be working with Morris Northcutt on trumpet and flugelhorn, as well as Emmanuel Echem; I have had the pleasure of working with Randal Clark also on saxophone last year, as horns are now added to almost everything I write and record for elements of country, pop, Jazz, rock, bluegrass and gospel, all in one.
To say I am thankful, as 2025 closes, is an understatement. I am working on finishing four new albums’ worth of songs I have written, and for every song and for everyone who has worked with me and inspired me this year to be all I can be, I am thankful.
Dwayna
