Two gifted singers, guitarists, and songwriters (Justin Davis and Sarah Zimmermann) team up to create Striking Matches, a Nashville-based duo whose music is a fresh combination of country, blues, rock, and pop, with an approach that respects roots music traditions while making room for new musical thinking. In 2012 T-Bone Burnett was hired to help coordinate the music for an upcoming television series set in Music City, appropriately titled Nashville. Burnett, impressed with what he had heard from the duo, used eight of their songs on the hit show. When I.R.S. Records was revived and opened a Nashville office, Striking Matches were one of the first acts they signed, and the duo's first full-length album, Nothing But the Silence, produced by Burnett, arrived in March 2015. ~ Mark Deming