"Holding On to Heartache: Miss Freddye Channels the Blues Tradition on Slippin’ Away"

When Miss Freddye opens her mouth to sing, she doesn’t just perform—she confesses. And on Slippin’ Away, her latest single released in June 2024, the Pittsburgh-based vocalist delivers a performance steeped in the blues tradition: a lamentation of love lost, stripped to its emotional essence and laid bare for all to feel.

Written by the late Mike Lyzenga in 2018, Slippin’ Away is a torch song in the truest sense—sorrowful, aching, and resonant with every note. It’s the kind of tune that doesn’t just echo through the speakers but settles in your bones, stirring memories of love that once burned bright and now flickers in the shadows.

The recording, tracked at Red Caiman Media in Miss Freddye’s hometown, features a lineup of seasoned musicians who know exactly how to support a story this intimate. Mike Huston’s guitar lines are tasteful and aching, delivering slow blues phrasing that bends like a sigh. Jeff Conner lays down gentle, gospel-tinged keyboard textures, while Greg Sejko (bass) and Bob Dicola (drums) provide a steady, unhurried foundation that lets the space between notes breathe. There’s restraint here—a mark of musicians who understand the genre and know that in the blues, silence often speaks as loudly as sound.

But the soul of the song is Freddye’s voice. She doesn’t just sing the lyrics—she inhabits them. There’s weariness in her tone, but also resolve. When she sings, “I feel you slipping through my hands / like water I can’t hold,” it isn’t melodrama—it’s memory. It’s lived experience. And that’s what separates the real blues singers from the rest. There’s a quiet strength behind the sorrow, a sense of endurance that only comes from walking through the fire and finding the words to tell the tale afterward.

Freddye produced the track herself, and her choices reflect an artist who’s not chasing trends but honoring truth. The mix is clean but unvarnished—no frills, no unnecessary layers. The vocals sit right where they should: front and center, raw and immediate. This is music with callouses on its hands and stories behind its eyes.

Slippin’ Away speaks to anyone who’s ever loved hard and lost quietly. It’s a mirror held up to the heart.

In a world where blues is too often reduced to a genre tag or background flavor, Miss Freddye reminds us that it’s still a living language—a way of processing life, one aching phrase at a time. Slippin’ Away is not just another single; it’s a small, powerful reminder of what the blues has always been about: truth, struggle, and the beauty of what remains after the pain.

This is the blues as it’s meant to be—deep, deliberate, and utterly human. Miss Freddye doesn’t just keep the flame alive—she sings straight from the fire.

–Shannon Blue