“Deep inside me “I always felt that this was my dream and my true path,” says Noeline Hofmann.

Two years ago, Hofmann was working on a ranch in western Canada. Her high school years had been thrown into disarray by the pandemic, and she had given up all hopes of a career in music.

Today, she is in the midst of a breakthrough that is rapid even for the meteoric rise of 2024. Not even three months after her song “Purple Gas” was released as a duet with Zach Bryan after the country star discovered it on social media and introduced it to the world, the 21-year-old Hofmann is about to release her debut EP, also titled Purple Gason October 4th.

Hofmann performs her shows with an impressive stage presence that combines charisma with confidence, and sings with an impressive voice. Combine that with a realistic approach to songwriting that is heavily influenced by the western music of Colter Wall and Charley Crockett, and it’s hard to ignore Hofmann’s potential in country music.

Her EP includes the title track, which refers to a special purple-colored fuel that Alberta farmers can use with significant tax breaks. Farmers who are allowed to use the fuel put special license plates on their vehicles indicating they are eligible to do so. She wrote the song a year ago after a summer of playing small bars on the regional music scene. Hofmann says she liked the song at the time, but wasn’t prepared for how much and how quickly it would change her life.

“‘Purple Gas’ is about my childhood in rural southern Alberta,” says Hofmann, who was born on Bow Island in the southeast of the province. “Some of the imagery in that song is mostly from a ranch I worked on in western Manitoba. I wrote that song almost exactly a year after the day I left that job. I was just feeling very sentimental and thoughtful.”

Hofmann says she’s barely active on social media, so when Bryan became aware of the song in the fall of 2023, she was largely unaware of it. While eating breakfast on the morning of Canadian Thanksgiving, her phone began to light up.

“‘Zach Lane Bryan mentioned you in her story,'” Hofmann recalls. “At that moment, I just dropped my phone.”

To put the impact of this social media tag into perspective, one must remember that all of this has only happened to Hofmann since the beginning of June: Bryan released “Purple Gas” as a duet with Hofmann and included the song on his album The great American bar scenewhich was released on July 4. Hofmann opened for Crockett and Wyatt Flores on their respective headlining tours and booked prime support slots on upcoming tours with the Turnpike Troubadours, Colter Wall and Shane Smith and the Saints.

She released her solo version of “Purple Gas” along with “Lightning in July (Prairie Fire)” as singles on August 9.

In late July, Hofmann celebrated her 21st birthday while on tour with Flores, who serenaded her during her show in Boise, Idaho. It was the culmination of a tour in which she quickly became friends with the in-demand Flores.

“When I first met Wyatt, we had a very similar upbringing,” Hofmann says of Flores, who is two years older than her. “We come from similar parts of the world and experience this world of music – we have a lot of shared experiences and understand a lot about each other already. It’s a little bit breath-taking to talk about it so much, because even though I don’t know Wyatt well, I’m really proud of him.”

Hofmann cites both Wall and Crockett as her biggest influences, and her first tour was with the latter, who recruited her for his $10 Cowboy tour. “Charley Crockett is a hero of mine. I took it very seriously and felt it was a huge responsibility to be able to play with him,” she says. “But then there were so many moments – whether it was a one-liner from Charley backstage or conversations with Taylor (Grace), his fiancée, or fans at the barrier hoping to catch a glimpse of his band on their way out. There were always these haunting moments where I felt like I was walking through the Charley Crockett documentary.”

The prospect of playing with Crockett brought to life at least one song that made it to Purple Gas. “Lightning in July (Prairie Fire)” is an uptempo country song that fans have already started singing along to at Hofmann’s shows. It’s marked by an energetic defiance that recalls the unforgettable songs of Martina McBride or Trisha Yearwood from the ’90s, but Hofmann’s perspective as a farm girl from Western Canada who wasn’t yet 21 when she wrote the song comes through, and the song fits seamlessly into the wave of emo country music currently sweeping the industry. When she sings, “Ah, they didn’t see me coming, must have happened overnight,” it’s an adrenaline rush, but it’s also an apt reference to her career so far.

“It’s a somewhat ironic self-introduction,” says Hofmann. “It’s about knowing you’re walking around with a loaded gun, but being overlooked and underestimated. It’s a fight song that you can’t stop and don’t want to stop. And I wrote it because I wanted energy. I wanted a country banger in the setlist.”

No matter where Hofmann’s career takes her, she approaches it with caution. She’s learning as she goes – true to the old saying, “If you take a leap, you’ll find wings on the way down” – and doing everything she can to enjoy the feeling it has brought to her life and her music.

“The whole year before, I was struggling through the regional scene and trying to make a name for myself,” says Hofmann. “I never tried to play the social media game. The fact that all this happened to me is incomprehensible to me.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose third book, Red Dirt Unplugged, is scheduled for publication by Back Lounge Publishing on December 13, 2024 and is available for pre-order.