Soul food, soulful music, and an album review from one of our favorite musical talents

You might be picking up on the thread that we love musicians around here. We've already featured several and we're back this week with two more. First up, our friend Thad Saajid who produces Handy Street Fest every July (Fernhill Realty was a sponsor this year), and is a talented musician and restaurateur.

Plus a new section called, Press Play. It's an album review that'll be written by a rotating local musician every few weeks. We asked Adam Morrow of Sister Ray Davies to kick it off for our first one.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Fernhill Edition, and by all means, let us know when you do!

-The Editors, Fernhill Edition

Feature Story

Church was Thad Saajid's conservatory

Thad Saajid is a busy man. He runs his own restaurant operation, Soul Wingery on Poplar Street in Florence, regularly performs at festivals, one-off shows, events, and for churches, produces the annual Handy Street Party in July, and is releasing his first full-length album on Single Lock Records in a few months. He sings, plays half a dozen instruments (approximately), writes music, lyrics, and the occasional essay.

His resume includes a stint in the military, teaching elementary school, attending cooking school, and firefighting, but music holds his heart. And while it may seem the most impractical of his various pursuits, it's the thing he wants to do all the time and forever. Lucky for us. Because the man has a special talent unlike much of the Shoals music scene that ranges in influence from Sly and the Family Stone to jazz and 90's East Coast hip hop to rock-n-roll and pop, and so many points in between.

"I'm on no one's time clock. This is my life. I only get the one. I better do what I want to do." —Thad Saajid

Growing up in a family deeply-anchored in the church gave him the first taste of music and musical education that informs his talents today. "Church was like a conservatory," he says. At 12-years old he was regularly performing during church services. He recalls being tasked with playing the organ at the last minute—he didn't even know how to turn it on. Before long, they had him singing and playing every instrument available. He credits the church for being his conservatory. "Trying to take church out of me is like trying to take out my blood," Thad says.

His soulful vocals are distinctive, smooth, and carry an inviting warmth that accurately matches the man. You feel it when you step inside Soul Wingery & Records, a fried chicken spot and second-hand record store he opened in 2017. All along the walls are album covers from pivotal influences, a chalkboard menu includes chicken and waffles, a nod to the jazz artists of Harlem who'd play the clubs all night and go looking for dinner and dawn. Three tables inside and two outside lend a cozy vibe. The whole joint, kitchen included, is roughly 625 square feet.

What inspires a musician to open, and run, a restaurant? For Thad Saajid, it's family. His grandfather owned the now-shuttered Carroll's Market in Florence and his aunt owned a small restaurant called Smack in Killen. His mother owned a florist business in downtown Florence for 30 years, so the entrepreneurial spirit is family strong. When he got the idea for a restaurant, it was his mother who told him, "Do it while you're young." He listened.

Soul Wingery & Records is the anchor point for the annual Handy Street Party, a live music and family event on Poplar Street, just outside the restaurant that typically happens the weekend before Handy Fest kicks off.

About the new album

Thad Saajid will release his first full-length album with Single Lock Records early next year titled, Get Ready With Me. But the first single, Recurring Character, will drop on October 28th. In true Thad fashion, the album's genre is not easily defined. In fact, he says they had to create something akin to a new category for the PR sheet. "There's elements of rock and roll, there's elements of hip-hop, there's elements of just, acoustic stuff...Funk, soul," he says. They finally landed on "alternative indie R&B".

"Everything I do is conceptual. Every project I've came up with (they've all been three to six songs) they're all conceptual pieces. So they tell a story. This album's telling a story. It's going through a day in the life. Just waking up, getting ready to go to work, at work, how I'm feeling...It's telling the whole story, going throughout a day." —Thad Saajid

"I'm very excited about the writing specifically," Thad says of the new record. "That's kind of my triumph. I feel like I'm a decent writer. I ain't gonna say I'm the best, but I enjoy what I write, and I hope other people will."

You can listen to Thad's existing EPs and each new track of Get Ready With Me as they drop, through links on his Instagram profile. And keep an eye out for live performances. He's one you don't want to miss.

Press Play

Adam Morrow reviews The Dreaming Spires' Normal Town

The songs that make up The Dreaming Spires’ 2025 album, Normal Town, jangle with a hand-hewn beauty and deft touch that frame a central concern: “The times they are changing, and they’re changing for good.”

Singer Robin Bennett delivers this line in the midst of “Normalisation,” and while Normal Town’s music nods to a lineage of Big Star, Gram Parsons-era Byrds, and Teenage Fanclub, and any comparisons to The Kinks’ concerns over the loss of the village green are warranted, these are songs crafted in a specific time and place. Bennett’s protagonists face our dilemmas: A disappearing middle class, environmental degradation, a deluge of vitriolic public discourse, and the irony of our collective feelings of isolation.

How do you balance hope and despair? Defiance and resignation? With immensely listenable beauty, apparently.

“I know how it feels to slip through the cracks,” Bennett sings on album opener and title track, Normal Town. The song sighs to life and kicks things off in medias res, with glimpses of a hometown that has exchanged its soul for progress, and turned unrecognizably bland as a result. There’s the high street without a blade of grass, the place where young friends used to gather and pretend to smoke, and it used to be home, but that’s all in the past. At the song’s emotional climax, the protagonist cries “I don’t want to die,” and leaves this most basic of human desires hanging for a breath before clarifying, “in a normal town.”

The band hails from the area around Oxford, and while you might have your suspicions about someone from the countryside that inspired The Shire lamenting a loss of simple, bucolic beauty, there’s a lot of common ground between their very British response to the beige takeover of 21st Century life and the experience most of us have in small Southern towns here in America. Mom and Pop’s become big box stores. Places with preserved, inherited memory are paved over. The dignity of work, as argued for so beautifully by Wendell Berry over his long life, becomes mechanized convenience; toil is for the robots you’ve been replaced by.

A community becomes a collection of individuals, people who won’t “look you in the eye,” when you pass, as Bennett sings. The question throughout the songs seems to be, Has the trade been worth it? And for those of us who don’t make the decisions, what does it mean to be disenfranchised and left behind, short on funds, unsure of purpose, and without an obvious set of folks to commiserate with?

Crucially, the songs acknowledge a malleable future, and are far from hopeless. Rather, they ask us to consider what is worth cherishing and fighting for, and to hold on to whatever magic is right in front of us.

Don’t let the weighty themes scare you off. There is righteous fury throughout, and plenty of glimpses into the existential void, but it’s still an absolute pleasure to listen to.

If cars still had CD players, this one could spend months on repeat, its sweet sounds and lyrical vignettes accompanying your day-to-day with their waiting depth and lack of insistence. Robin’s delicate voice is often paired with his brother Joe’s in the kind of harmonies that are a hit of pure joy, and the arrangements and playing by their bandmates Jamie Dawson, Tom Collison and Nick Fowler bring the whole thing to life.

These are musicians who once made a pilgrimage to record at Ardent Studios in Memphis, who know the records and the players that made the Shoals legendary. They are British students of what has been great about music from our corner of the world. To hear that reverence free of our own familiarity is a treat. Stream it, buy a digital copy on Bandcamp, and engage with it at whatever level suits you. You’ll find something waiting.

Adam Morrow is a musician living in Florence, AL. His band Sister Ray Davies released their critically acclaimed debut album, Holy Island, in November 2025 with the iconic London-based label Sonic Cathedral, and have spent 2026 performing headline shows in the UK and as support for legendary bands Chapterhouse and Luna. Morrow has played guitar with John Paul White, Donnie Fritts, and Belle Adair.

Sister Ray Davies’ new single, Walk Away, was released on September 30th. Their only Shoals gig this year will be on Halloween night at the newly-opened Red Jack's in Seven Points.