With You
Courtney Hartman (Reckoner Records, 2025)
Courtney Hartman is a guitarist and songwriter from Colorado whose music is imbued with a sense of place. In 2019, she incorporated the crunching of her shoes while walking the Camino into her songs. In her 2021 album, Glade, she recorded music in a barn in Loveland, Colorado, breathing the air she calls home while singing about home.
In Hartman’s latest release, With You, the place is her body and her child—these songs are about pregnancy, labor, caretaking, and motherhood. She collaborated with other folk and bluegrass musicians who are also mothers.
Hartmann’s guitar work evokes gentleness and light—but there are touches of grief that show these songs were written from a fragile and tender place: “No one needs mothering / like a woman in the summer days of mothering,” she sings in “Like A Woman.”
In “Growing,” she sings about her own transformation along with the baby: “Pushing up from the ground / I’ll know you then like I know you now / it’s all a mystery still to me / we’re growing.”
Hartman includes so much nature imagery in her lyrics: a creekside, iris, grapevine, hummingbird, nectar, rainstorm, maple, moon, swan, berries, golden apples, flower vines, a quiet bright winter, a big blue sky.
“All my blood is radiating,” Hartman sings on “Softening Again,” which she wrote before going into labor, “breathing out my fear.” She sings about her child: “Who you are: a bright and a brand new star.”
The abundant life—birthing, caring, growing—on this album reminded me of St. Hildegard of Bingen’s concept of viriditas, the ever-greening life force. With You is about that constant greening and changing, both in our loved ones and in ourselves.
This article also appears in the March 2026 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 91, No. 3, pages 47-49). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Courtney Hartman With You album cover art
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