Kimberly Dunn is releasing a new album, and she's giving readers of The Boot a sneak preview of one of the new songs.

'Trashy Side' is a step in a sightly different direction for Dunn.

"It's one of those empowerment songs for girls," she explains. "It's about a girl seeing that some other chick is trying to take her man, and she is absolutely, 100 percent not down with that, and she's just telling her, 'If you don't step off, you're gonna bring out my trashy side.'

"Like, let's drop the lady act, and I'll take off the gloves, and here we go," Dunn adds with a laugh.

The song came about at the last minute, when the Austin-based singer-songwriter felt there was still one flavor missing from her upcoming album, 'Forever on the Run.'

"I go through the emotions of really happy songs, and then angry songs, and then sad songs," she relates. "I'm currently on the end of my sad song stretch, and I'm ready to get back to happy songs, and I'm just not in that moment.

"I was having a hard time writing something spunky like this, and I have a good buddy named Rachel Loy. I was like, 'Hey, I'm looking for something that's got attitude,' and she said, 'Oh my gosh, I totally have something for you.' So she sent me 'Trashy Side,' and I fell in love with it," Dunn says. "This is the first time I've ever recorded something that wasn't mine, so it's different. I'm nervous about it, but I'm excited."

So excited, in fact, that she's not only added the song to her album at the last minute, she's also made it the lead single. It's an interesting change of pace from much of Dunn's own material, which runs the gamut of various tempos, moods and subject matter.

One of the album's standout tracks, 'Bones,' takes a particularly dark tone.

"I had an idea that I really wanted to write a song about a murder," she shares. "I wanted it to be very much like 'Goodbye Earl,' but a little darker. So I got this idea about this girl dating some guy, and he's wonderful on the outside, but he's hiding skeletons in his closet -- literal skeletons in his closet. So in the end of it she ends up killing him, because she has to get away from it. So it's a very eerie song.

"I was writing as if it was just gonna be an acoustic thing; I had no plans for it, production-wise, and then one of my producers heard it and went, 'Oh my gosh, we can totally make this like Johnny Cash, a little heavier song,'" Dunn adds. "So I was like, 'Sure! Let's do it!'"

The title song, 'Forever on the Run,' is a likely candidate as another single.

"That's my most favorite song on the record," Dunn says. "That was my first total co-write song. I wrote that with a buddy of mine, who's actually the guy who produced all of the vocals on the record. I told him I wanted to write a song about two people that are trying to fall in love, and society's not letting them.

"The idea came from back in the days when slavery was still in effect, and the farmer's daughter was black, and the daughter of a slave, and the preacher's son was white and had all this society surrounding him, and they fell in love with each other," she explains. "I wanted to put that into a song. I love that song, I just think there are so many beautiful lyrics that say what I wanted to say, without so many words."

The new album has been several years in the making and comprises songs from previous projects that Dunn released to Texas radio to get a feel for her audience. She has balanced those with six new tracks, resulting in a collection of songs that truly represents her journey as a writer and artist.

'It's like a road map of where I've been in the last three years," she says. "I was at a different spot in my life in every single part of those times that I was writing."

Dunn says that 'Trashy Side' fits right in with the rest of the collection.

"I feel like 'Trashy Side,' even though I didn't write it, is totally on par with all of the stuff I want to write, I have been writing, and I'm going to come out with on future records," she says.

'Forever on the Run' is available at Amazon. For more information about Kimberly Dunn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to Kimberly Dunn, 'Trashy Side':

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