Back in Business: Sasha Colette & the Magnolias Bloom on the Levee
Some careers restart quietly. Sasha Colette's restarted with a five-song EP and a slot opening for one of soul music's most beloved live acts. Not bad.
This Friday, July 24, Colette and her band, the Magnolias, open Live on the Levee for headliner Allen Stone — the falsetto-blessed Washington soul singer whose concerts have become word-of-mouth legend. Free show, Haddad Riverfront Park, openers at 6:30, Stone at 8. For Colette, it is a hometown-region showcase at the exact moment she has new music to sell.
That music is "Back in Business," an EP released May 31, 2026, and its title is a mission statement. Colette hails from just across the line in Olive Hill, Kentucky, but she has spent years working the Tri-State's river towns — Portsmouth, Ashland, Huntington, Charleston — the connective tissue of a regional scene that doesn't much care about state signs. The Magnolias' sound leans on storytelling and honest musicianship, songs about independence and reinvention delivered with equal parts introspection and grit.
Ask her why she keeps doing it and the answer isn't complicated. "There is nothing like a room full of people joining in on the same song," Colette has said. "That's the beautiful thing of a great stage performance." That's the whole ballgame for a working songwriter in this part of the country — not the streaming numbers, not the algorithm, but a crowd on a riverbank singing your words back at you.
Here's the context worth flagging for anyone who thinks the Levee is only a launch pad for out-of-towners: it isn't. The series has long made a point of pairing national headliners with regional openers, and the openers are frequently the reason to arrive at 6:30 instead of 8. Colette is exhibit A. The EP is out, the band is tight, and this booking is a genuine step up in front of a genuinely large, genuinely free audience.
And the momentum doesn't stop at the river. Colette and the Magnolias are also slated for a Mountain Stage appearance later this year — which is to say, from the Levee's grass to public radio's flagship stage in a single season. That's a good year. "Back in Business," indeed.
Sources: Herald-Dispatch — Sasha Colette and the Magnolias are ready to bloom; Ironton Tribune — Being heard worldwide; Herald-Dispatch — 2026 Live on the Levee lineup