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Kyshona Armstrong started out enabling others to enjoy the healing properties of songwriting, and keeping her thoughts to herself. When you’re a music therapist to incarcerated and institutionalized adults and school children with emotional behavior disorders, artistic considerations aren’t even on the table.

“A lot of my first songs were dealing with what I saw my patients struggling with,” she recalls. At a certain point, her emotional investment in her patients’ pain became too much to purge at coffeehouse open mics. “You’ve gotta know when to tap out,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m not of any use to these kids if I can’t give myself as fully as I used to.’ So Armstrong got on the college singer-songwriter circuit, blending skills of empathizing and entertaining.

Her set lists might put a strummy version of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” next to Confined, a song she’d written with a couple of 20-somethings in the mental hospital. Armstrong moved to Nashville in January 2014, spending the first couple months commuting back to Athens to record her album Go, but easily made friends and landed bookings in local folk singer-songwriter, pop, and soul scenes once she was around more.

Armstrong has reached the point where she embraces repetitive internal rhythms that emerge in some of her songwriting, likening them to both gospel spirituals and the viscerally simplistic utterances of her former patients, and she’s delivering her roots-soul originals with articulate warmth and newly claimed authority. “I feel like I’m only just now stepping into this activist role,” she says, “or not activist, but someone who speaks out or brings up a subject that’s uncomfortable."