Jill Zimmerman and Alaska Reid at Live From the Divide on Saturday, June 28th at 8pm.

Have you ever heard the sun rise? Have you ever held the concept of your own life in your hand? Have you ever felt, simultaneously, the sum total of all existing happiness and the sum total of all existing sadness? Of course not; nobody has. But we’ve come close. The evidence is in the music of one Jill Zimmerman. Her songs are real. Take an average song you hear on the radio. Strip off the layers of nonsense. Remove the unnecessary production. Get rid of the fabricated reality and insincerity laced within the words and the melody. Replace these elements with real, honest-to-goodness truth. Then add some soul. I’m not talkin’ about the musical genre. I’m talkin’ about the part of a person that makes them real…

Singer-songwriter Alaska Reid has decided to adopt the band name Alyeska, but the teenaged singer-guitarist is still the writer behind the trio’s beyond-their-years folk-rock. Reid, who hails from Livingston, Mont., and is now based in L.A., deals in raw, forthright confessionals that sound like they could have been birthed in a Laurel Canyon backyard back in the day. Notable, though, is Reid’s sense of self-awareness: “Honest, I’m too young to reminisce,” she sings in “Honest.” The new EP “Alyeska,” recorded at Sunset Sound, is more ambitious than the “Powerlines” EP that Reid released under her own name; hers is a developing story well worth following.