Audra Mae: Songs of Joy & Peace with Dylan Meek

One of pop music's great singer/songwriters, Audra Mae, finds her guiding light close to home. The songwriter behind massive, international hits by Celine Dion, Kelly Clarkson, Christina Aguilera, Avicii and Little Big Town, with solo material heard all over radio, television and film, Audra Mae, somehow found herself in her old backyard. In less than a year, a pandemic changed her audience from a 58,000-plus sold-out crowd at Friends Arena in Stockholm, Sweden down to two: her 7-year-old twin niece and nephew in Edmond, Oklahoma.  

Finding herself far across party lines during the turmoil of civil unrest, she felt both home and a thousand miles from it. But in that backyard of her past, a pair of the sweet faces looked up and asked their Mae Mae to sing.  

“Songs of Joy & Peace,” filmed at Beverly Hill's Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts as part of its virtual Sorting Room sessions, grew from that simple reminder that a song can mend the heart, a word can comfort in the face of fear, music can burst in the soul like a belly laugh and love can suddenly feel like the most precious gift. Brand new and just the same all at once. That thousand mile drive she made a million times had become a journey to the heart of things, a real road home.  

In a holiday season when everything seems upside down and inside out, only LOVE can put everything in its right place.