Tag: alex hargreaves

BGS Class of 2023 Favorites So Far

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Somehow, it’s July and more than half the year has already blown by! In many ways it feels like 2023 is still brand new, despite the calendar saying otherwise and the overabundance of amazing music that has soundtracked the past (nearly) seven months. With many more albums and songs yet to come, we wanted to reflect on the music that has stuck with us and become new favorites of ours since January. It’s a stout list – if we do say so ourselves.

We want to hear from you, too! What albums, songs, and artists have been the underscoring of your 2023? Who’s missing from our list? 

(Editor’s Note: Scroll to find our complete BGS Class of 2023 playlist, which is updated every week.)

Rachel Baiman, Common Nation of Sorrow

Fiddler, songwriter, and activist Rachel Baiman has been a part of the BGS family for quite a while now, but recently she joined the ranks of our contributors, as well. (See her writings here.) Her new album, Common Nation of Sorrow, has been a standout for the entire team since it arrived in late March. Though she’s always helmed her creative and musical projects, in many capacities, this record marks the first time she’s been the sole producer on one of her own releases. Her fingerprints are indelible and striking; challenging and convicting. It’s introspective, but expansive. 

boygenius, the record

An album so nearly perfect we just have to include it, even though some may believe its connections to roots music are tenuous at best. (We disagree, of course– and wrote an entire list of folk bands for boygenius fans to prove our point.) Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus somehow, against the odds, rise above the simple sum of their parts while reminding of former folk supergroups like Trio (that is, Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou) and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. 

Caitlin Canty, Quiet Flame

With its acoustic aesthetic and simple, string band underpinnings, Caitlin Canty’s Quiet Flame is a surprise superlative among bluegrass records released in 2023. Her past albums aligning more with folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter traditions, Quiet Flame was produced by Chris Eldridge and though the production values were quite intentional, the bluegrass result was more a happy byproduct than a deliberate destination. Filmmaker and playwright Noah Altshuler spoke to Canty about the project for a recent feature. 

Brandy Clark, Brandy Clark

The BGS team has been fans of country singer-songwriter Brandy Clark for quite some time, so it’s more than a little bit enjoyable to watch as more and more listeners and fans discover Clark. And they have so many pathways to find her, whether through her hit, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Shucked, her collaboration with Brandi Carlile – who produced the new, self-titled album – or her many charting hit songs. There’s a point of view on Brandy Clark that we never knew we missed before, a maturity that she never lacked, but she has certainly distilled. It shines in its many spotlights. (Watch for a feature on Clark coming soon to BGS.) 

Michael Cleveland, Lovin’ of the Game

Michael Cleveland has won IBMA’s Fiddle Player of the Year award more times than any other fiddler in the organization’s history. His obvious adoration for the instrument – and the life it has led him to – is front and center on his latest album, Lovin’ of the Game. Though he’s collaborated with virtuosos like Chris Thile, Béla Fleck, Billy Strings, and many more over the past handful of years, his perspective remains markedly down-to-earth. As is on display in our Artist of the Month interview from March.

Cat Clyde, Down Rounder

In mid-February, we premiered the music video for the lead single off Canadian alt-folk singer-songwriter Cat Clyde’s album, Down Rounder, and this collection has stuck with us since. For those of us with an affinity for a good red-dirt or red-rock hike, and for western, nomadic, cowboi (that is, all-gendered cowboys) aesthetics – since long before the recent rise of yeehaw culture – this album will provide such perfect daydream scoring. It’s ideal music for journeys internal as well as external. 

Iris DeMent, Workin’ On A World

An album of hope – but zero toxic positivity. Iris DeMent knows how it feels to be burnt out, bedraggled, exasperated, defeated. But hope is a radical act and, in those dark moments where hope seems so ethereal and distant, existence is a radical act. The songs of Workin’ On A World never feel preachy or condescending, even while they remind of weeknight church – all-denominational, of course – and raising voices together in the face of oppression and fascism. DeMent isn’t just workin’ on a world, she’s imagining one, too. It’s our job to bring it to fruition, even if we never see it. 

Amanda Fields, What, When and Without

Amanda Fields’ voice is impossibly tender, but do not let your guard down or it will bite you just the same. Especially when delivering a bittersweet, southwest Virginia-tinged lyric equally at home played by a bluegrass band or, like on What, When and Without, backed by a vibey, homespun, alt-country sound bed. For a voice and perspective as traditional as her’s, Fields still finds endless new ground to break and lines to color outside of. Her collaboration with guitarist and producer Megan McCormick (who has new solo music coming this year, as well) finds Fields’ musical output climbing to even higher levels of realization, innovation, and professionalism.

Ashby Frank, Leaving Is Believing

Mandolinist, singer, and songwriter Ashby Frank is in the running for IBMA’s Best New Artist award this year, and while reaching the second ballot in this category is certainly a well-deserved recognition, it’s a bit… inaccurate! Frank is not exactly a “newcomer,” as he has been a near permanent fixture in bluegrass, country, and Nashville for the greater part of two decades, performing with outfits like the Likely Culprits, the infamous Darrell Brothers, Special Consensus, Mountain Heart, John Cowan, and so many more. He’s even subbed regularly with the Earls of Leicester – and he’s a hit bluegrass songwriter, too, with charting cuts by Junior Sisk, Dale Ann Bradley, and more. His emerging solo career is where he’s truly hitting his stride, though, and in real time, with this outstanding “debut” on Mountain Home Music. 

Brittany Haas & Natalie Haas, HAAS

Genre is dead, we know, but if it hadn’t already been dead, chambergrass, classical-meets-fiddle, string band music such as this would have killed it. It’s a glorious musical territory and is no better inhabited by anyone in this particular scene than sisters Natalie and Brittany Haas, who return to collaborating with one another in an “official” format on HAAS. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of just how toxically masculine improvisational, jammy, virtuosic bluegrass and chambergrass have become. An album like HAAS quickly grounds this aesthetic – so far outside the realm of similar more performative, self-indulgent projects – and reminds just how much newgrass and chambergrass are still out there to be discovered and made. 

Jaimee Harris, Boomerang Town

A glut of queer country records are being released at this particular moment in time and Jaimee Harris’ Boomerang Town stands out in a niche that’s becoming more and more crowded. No one welcomes this quick change in country music more than ourselves – and Jaimee, too, we’re sure – but with more voices to be heard, one like Harris’ certainly cuts through. Boomerang Town isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it drips with Harris’ lived experiences and plays as if you’re sitting quietly with her, alone in her room, as she picks each intro on her favorite guitar and every track grows into a fully-realized number. It’s a not-so-idyllic snapshot of a hometown, like country does so well, and, like queer folks the world over know so intimately, the exact hometown really doesn’t matter. 

Brennen Leigh, Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet

We hope Brennen Leigh, a multi-hyphenate picker, performer, and songwriter, is never through honky tonkin’. With her latest Signature Sounds recording Leigh has raised the bar for honky tonk sounds – a bar that should never be re-lowered. Equally at home as a “sideman,” a bluegrass picker, a songwriter (with cuts by Lee Ann Womack and others), and as an in-town Nashville picker, Leigh typifies the country everyman archetype – or, perhaps, the country “renaissance man” archetype. Or both! – while doing it better than nearly everyone else in the game, currently. With Nashville’s best on the album’s roster – as band members or featured artists – Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet is a gem. 

Darren Nicholson, Wanderer

Mandolinist Darren Nicholson recently left Balsam Range, the North Carolina bluegrass group for which he’s known, after criss-crossing the country – and the globe – with the IBMA Award-winning and Grammy-nominated band for decades. He announced his departure from Balsam Range in 2022 and his first release as a solo artist, Wanderer, is a huge success. Nicholson stakes out and lays claim to his own brand of bluegrass – which is rooted equally in the high country of Western North Carolina (Nicholson hails from Haywood County) and in an effervescent joy. Besides his old-time influenced, traditional mandolin picking, his smile and laugh might be his most recognizable traits. The humor he relishes in life comes forward in his playing, too. Wanderer is a harbinger of many fine solo projects to come from Darren Nicholson.

Nickel Creek, Celebrants

Nickel Creek returned and millennial roots-music fans everywhere rejoiced, joining in the Celebrants celebration. After a nearly ten-year wait since 2014’s A Dotted Line, Celebrants seemed to once again impossibly capture the Nickel Creek lightning in a bottle. A Dotted Line felt mature and confident, self-assured but not cocky. On Celebrants, the throughline could be described as gentleness and gratitude; perhaps from Thile and Sara Watkins both becoming parents in the interim. Nevertheless, Celebrants would have been one of the most notable albums released this year – and for good reason – even without these subtle growth points and nuances.

Mighty Poplar, Mighty Poplar

If ever a bluegrass, old-time, and/or string band supergroup convenes with a pun for a name and we do not react with unabashed glee, please check the collective team BGS pulse. Mighty Poplar checks all of the boxes and then some. Yes, with its particular convention of pickers this album could be seen as a “return” to bluegrass, but that’s perhaps the most boring angle on this fascinating record. It’s not merely a return to the format that musically birthed each of these instrumentalists (Chris Eldridge, Greg Garrison, Alex Hargreaves, Andrew Marlin, and Noam Pikelny), it’s a demonstration in bluegrass not just as an aesthetic and tradition, but bluegrass as expression. 

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, City of Gold

Though we still have a couple of weeks until City of Gold drops, Molly Tuttle is our current Artist of the Month and we would be remiss to not include the most buzzed about bluegrass album of the year on this list. Singles “El Dorado” (above), “Next Rodeo,” and “San Joaquin” are out now, tempting and teasing another record influenced so heavily by Tuttle’s growing up in the bluegrass scene of California and the West Coast. Her band, Golden Highway (Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Dominick Leslie, Shelby Means, and Kyle Tuttle) are featured heavily on City of Gold, for which Jerry Douglas returns to producing. Turns out it’s been Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway at the end of the rainbow this whole time!

Kassi Valazza, Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing

Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing, but she does know the power and magic of live recording. Her brand new album, tracked with backing band, fellow Portland, OR-based artists TK & the Holy Know-Nothings, was all tracked live, including vocals. As a result, the entire record buzzes with energy, whether toe-tapping or subdued. Sometimes, it’s a calm, warm, and honeyed patina that feels solemn and poetic, but ultimately, the entire collection is danceable. It’s tear-in-your-beer country and boot-scootin’ country – but that doesn’t make it simplistic. Which might be surprising, from someone who famously knows nothing. 

Sunny War, Anarchist Gospel

Sunny War’s latest album, Anarchist Gospel, finds her sound having grown and expanded, while still held together by the most fantastic of glues: Her confounding and entrancing right hand. Yes, War combines DIY music, punk, and grunge with roots music and fingerstyle blues, but that’s decidedly not the point – certainly not the centerpiece – of her art-making. (Despite what the guitar bros might tell you.) The truth is, at times, so much more complicated. At others, it’s really quite simple and literal. As she told us in an interview from earlier this year, she just plays the songs, the licks, the hooks, the lyrics as they’re meant to be played. And anarchy isn’t just a concept. 

Bella White, Among Other Things

Bella White’s breakout debut, Just Like Leaving, had already been released when she signed to Rounder Records, who then picked up and distributed the album. It received widespread acclaim as her Alberta- and Virginia-influenced bluegrass sound and Gillian Welch-like lyrics resonated with listeners and critics alike. Her brand new album, Among Other Things, then, feels like both a debut and a sophomore outing, devoid of any sort of “sophomore slump,” but capitalizing on the excitement she continues to generate in the bluegrass realm and well beyond it, too. We featured the new project with an interview in May.

Julie Williams, Julie Williams EP

We first became acquainted with Julie Williams’ music through Black Opry, the artist collective and revue who were our June Artist of the Month. In the Black Opry Revue’s simple, writers’ round format, her songs shone, gorgeous even in their very simple trappings. On her new EP, each of her songs are given the full treatment they deserve. Though they never feel lacking when delivered intimately and stripped down, unencumbered, Williams’ songs in this context soar, especially because they each give us an individualized window into her creative process, her songwriting imagination, and the production landscape she’ll continue to conquer into the future. 

Jess Williamson, Time Ain’t Accidental

In May we premiered “Chasing Spirits,” a delightfully hooky number from Jess Williamson’s latest album, Time Ain’t Accidental, which we are glad to return to here. (Williamson, you may know, is one half of duo Plains with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield.) Time Ain’t Accidental finds its home base where Williamson was raised, in Texas, and while it processes and puts under the microscope a past, failed relationship, this album is about movement, regeneration, and forward momentum. That she accomplishes this with imagery that’s pastoral, stark, and bristling is not an accident, either.

 

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As the Newest Supergroup in Bluegrass, Mighty Poplar Goes Back to the Classics

Posted on by Editor

At your average live music event on the folk and bluegrass circuit, the stage isn’t the only place where great performances are happening. There’s the campfire and parking lot picking scene at the big outdoor festivals, of course. But a lot of it goes on out of sight backstage, too, when musicians who don’t often see each other come together to play with and for each other. A close approximation to listening in on that is Mighty Poplar (Free Dirt Records), the self-titled first album by the group of the same name.

The bluegrass world’s newest supergroup, Mighty Poplar is a five-piece band centered around three virtuoso players from the Punch Brothers orbit — banjo player Noam Pikelny, guitarist Chris “Critter” Eldridge and original Punch Brothers bassist Greg Garrison, currently in the band Leftover Salmon. Out front as primary vocalist is Watchhouse mandolinist Andrew Marlin, with well-traveled fiddler Alex Hargreaves (currently knocking ’em dead in Billy Strings’ touring band) filling out the lineup. Over the years, various subsets of this quintet would cross paths out on the road and jam, generally falling back on the old numbers everyone knew as a common language. That’s how Mighty Poplar began to coalesce.

“There’s a pretty complex web of relationships between all five of us that began with a lot of hanging out,” says Pikelny. “There’s this beautiful thing about bluegrass, the amazing music and all the shared songs. There’s a great social component that can exist with the music if you let it, and it became a reason to get together and have fun.”

While none of Mighty Poplar’s members come from acts you’d really call “bluegrass,” you could say they’re all at least bluegrass-adjacent. And none of them have ever come down as top-dead-center old-school bluegrass as on Mighty Poplar. The album’s 10-song tracklist draws material from A.P. Carter, Bob Dylan, John Hartford and Leonard Cohen, with songs made famous by the likes of Hazel & Alice, Uncle Dave Macon and Bill Monroe fiddler Kenny Baker.

Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, also figures into the proceedings in terms of inspiration for the ensemble’s name. Proposing Mighty Poplar as a moniker was Marlin, someone who definitely knows his way around names involving wordplay (witness the original name of Watchhouse: Mandolin Orange).

“I was listening to a Bill Monroe and Doc Watson live recording where they were about to kick off ‘What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?’” Marlin recalls. “Bill said he and Charlie recorded it in ’19-and-36’ in Charlotte and it had been ‘mighty poplar down through the Carolinas.’ We had a huge text thread already going about band names, where my phone was always going BING at 2:30 a.m. So many names we considered, but everybody thought Mighty Poplar was a good awning to stand under.”

While Mighty Poplar is only now coming out in the spring of 2023, the album has actually been in the can for a couple of years. It might never have happened without the Coronavirus pandemic shutdown of 2020-21, which took everyone’s regular bands off the road for an extended period of time.

In isolation, everyone felt drawn toward bluegrass as the musical equivalent of comfort food. So they took this on as a pandemic project, convening with engineer Sean Sullivan at Nashville’s Tractor Shed for a brisk three-day session in October of 2020.

“There was a sense that we were getting away with murder, traveling across the country and podding up while everything was closed up,” says Pikelny. “There were logistical hurdles and we had three days, so we had one shot to get it all at once. So we worked out as much as we could ahead of time, even the sequence. The concept, if there was one, was that this was the closest thing to a real-deal, traditional, classic bluegrass project any of us have done in a long time, maybe ever.”

As lead vocalist on six of the album’s 10 songs, Marlin is the primary out-front voice of Mighty Poplar. But he felt like he had to step up his game on the instrumental side, to keep up with his bandmates.

“It was intimidating, but not because those guys are intimidating,” Marlin says. “As a musician, I’ve had to figure out how to feel like I can express myself in front of people I look up to. But that’s on me for projecting my own shit onto them, because they don’t wear that. So ‘Grey Eagle,’ an instrumental fiddle tune Alex brought forth, I was kind of sweating that one in the studio. That kicked off at 150 beats per minute and everybody else is just looking around, casually exploring the nooks and crannies of the tempo while I’m popping a vein and kind of being drug behind the horse. But I managed to keep it together. Ultimately all those guys still love a great song as much as anyone. There’s something about simple songs that leave it up to the player to bring whatever they want. I love it when the song’s not telling you how to play it, and I feel lucky that they were down to explore that approach.”

Song choice was pretty casual, mostly in favor of material from a bit off the beaten path. Even with a Hall of Fame list of songwriters, they focused on less-well-known songs from the repertoire of each — Dylan’s take on the A.P. Carter tune “Blackjack Davy” rather than “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” or Hartford’s Mark Twang riverboat song “Let Him Go On Mama” rather than “Gentle On My Mind.”

“It all happened pretty organically,” says Eldridge. “In the initial text volley about what to do, there were a lot of songs we would’ve been happy to cut. It’s hard to say why we landed on these particular songs other than that they felt right. I would not say there was an overarching concept beyond good songs that felt right.”

While they considered including some originals, ultimately they decided to stick with covers, mostly of older vintage (the most recent song on it is Montana singer/songwriter Martha Scanlan’s “Up on the Divide,” from 2012). In that way, Pikelny looks at Mighty Poplar as a classic folk record.

“In other genres, people might call this a ‘covers album,’” says Pikelny. “But if you record solo Bach compositions, that’s not ‘Bach covers.’ It’s repertoire, reinterpretations of classics to pass down. It was born of a desire, almost a need for all of us, to gather around a bluegrass project. And it was such a joyous process. It felt like coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas and being around family you’ve not seen in a while, in the home you grew up in with a turkey in the oven. It was that kind of comfort, the warm fuzzy feelings of gatherings like that.”

It went so well, in fact, that they were in no hurry to get around to the detail work of mixing and mastering the record after they finished tracking. Pikelny says they felt almost paranoid about not wanting to touch it, for fear of messing up a good thing.

“We’ve been sitting on this for so long because it felt like such a special session,” Eldridge says. “So effortless and deeply joyful. Magical, even. We didn’t want to let it go because it felt like all we could do was ruin it. But I kept coming back to it, listening now and then and thinking, ‘I really like this. We have to share it, plus it’s a good excuse for us to get together again.’ It’s ironic that we’ve not actually played it live yet, and we’re already kind of getting the next batch together.”

Indeed, Mighty Poplar’s first real touring commences in May. With Hargreaves busy playing arena-sized venues with Strings for the foreseeable future, John Mailander will stand in for him on the first leg of touring. And all the principles are cautiously optimistic that Mighty Poplar’s first album won’t be its last. Pikelny likens their hoped-for trajectory to Tony Rice and J.D. Crowe’s Bluegrass Album Band, which periodically convened to make albums and tours through the 1980s and into the ’90s.

“Bluegrass Album Band was never a full-time group for any of those guys, it was a very sustainable side project whose records served as homecomings,” says Pikelny. “They’d go off to do whatever else and then come back for another edition. It’s a celebration of our love for bluegrass. As long as it stays as effortless as this felt, I think we’ll keep doing it when we can.”

Photo Credit: Brian Carroll

LISTEN: Grant Gordy, “Journey to Miniera”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Grant Gordy
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Journey to Miniera”
Album: Peripheral Visions
Release Date: March 3, 2023

In Their Words: “This music has been a long time coming: I made my debut record, Grant Gordy, 14 years ago with much the same band (Alex Hargreaves on violin, and Dominick Leslie on mandolin), and there’s been a small but consistent clamor for another ‘Grant Gordy Quartet’ record in the intervening years. Somehow it just took this long to come around to it. This time, it was us three with the great Aidan O’Donnell on bass — Aidan and I have been working together frequently since meeting here in NYC almost a decade ago, and we play in the band Mr. Sun together. So I have long-standing relationships with all three of these musicians, and I think that though the GGQ isn’t a full-time project (hence, to some degree, the record’s title Peripheral Visions), that spirit of experimentation and camaraderie comes through in the music. I played with the David Grisman Quintet/Sextet for six years and I feel like ‘Journey to Miniera’ displays the most direct connection to Dawg music on the album, though there are other musical inspirations at play here, too. The title is a dedication to some beautiful friends I’ve made working over in Italy, at a music camp called Minieracustica, truly a paradise-on-earth kind of situation. I can’t wait to make the return journey to Miniera.” — Grant Gordy

grantgordy · Journey To Miniera

Photo Credit: Jacob Blickenstaff

LISTEN: Gina Leslie, “I See You Everywhere I Go”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Gina Leslie
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Song: “I See You Everywhere I Go”
Album: No, You’re Crying EP
Release Date: February 11, 2022

In Their Words: “This song comes from a small bedroom in a yellow house in New Orleans, where I was nursing my heart back to health after a never-ending ending. Surrounded by the photos on the walls, dead flowers and love letters, I was spinning in my heartbreak. This song came to light as a call to letting go, even when I know there’s no forgetting. I had all the pieces of the song swirling around for some time, and my good friend Elise Leavy helped me finish the puzzle.

“I started recording my EP just a few weeks before the lockdown, and the project got stalled for months, so I holed up in that same room and recorded my own harmonies to stay busy. The most sparse track on the EP, I wanted to keep the raw and intimate feeling that song was born from. I sent it to my friend Alex Hargreaves and he added a ghostly and melancholy string section that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” — Gina Leslie

Photo Credit: Noe Cugny

John Reischman’s “Salt Spring,” Tune of a New Old-Time Generation

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The “bluegrass songbook,” a suitably vague though well-known concept in bluegrass and old-time circles today, is a phrase that references the collective of songs and tunes most popular and most played by the community that makes up bluegrass and old-time music. Most of the melodies included in this informal — though often gatekept and debated — canon have well established origins, from source recordings, legendary writers and composers, famous performances, and so on. Even so, it’s difficult to trace each and every Bluegrass Album Band hit or Del McCoury favorite back to the beginning, when it was first being adopted and popularized among jam circles, as fiddle tunes, by and for laypeople as much as the performing professionals. 

With material by forebears like Flatt & Scruggs (“Foggy Mountain Breakdown” to “It Ain’t Me Babe”) or Bill Monroe (“Muleskinner Blues” to “Monroe’s Hornpipe”) or the Stanley Brothers (“Ridin’ that Midnight Train” to “Little Maggie”), the Osborne Brothers, Hazel & Alice, Reno & Smiley, and on down the line, it’s not so much a question of why or how their charming, archetypical songs made it to open mics and festival parking lot jams. But in modern times, as in bluegrass days of yore, just as many new, contemporary tunes, songs, lyrics, and melodies are being translated from professional studio recordings, radio singles, and on-stage hits to sing-alongs, play-alongs, and day-to-day jam fodder. And the process by which this happens is, part and parcel, what bluegrass and old-time are all about.

How did “Rebecca” become an almost meme-level instrumental in the past fifteen years? How did Frank Wakefield know that we needed a “New Camptown Races?” How many millennial and Gen Z pickers learned “Ode to a Butterfly” or “Jessamyn’s Reel” note for note? Each modern adoption into the bluegrass songbook, into that unflappable canon, is an idiosyncratic marvel unto itself — and perhaps no modern, original instrumental tune encapsulates this phenomenon better than John Reischman’s “Salt Spring.”

Being a picker myself, I first learned “Salt Spring” in Nashville in perhaps 2012 or 2013, taught to me by fiddlers who encountered the melody from John himself — and through the bluegrass and old-time camp scene in which he’s pretty much a ubiquitous figure, especially on the West Coast, where he lives and grew up. At that point, the song was regarded as a Colorado-grass staple, transplanted east by a regional genre phenotype that celebrates and capitalizes on timeless, sometimes ancient-sounding aesthetics played with chamber music-level intricacies and techniques. The forlorn, winsome — though simple — chord progression in the A part give way to a longing, pensive, and momentum-building B part — and no matter how “Salt Spring” is rendered, as an “everyone play at once” old-time jam song, or a thoughtful chamber-grass slow burn built to a raucous, defiant end, or as a no-holds-barred SPBGMA style MASH number, it’s a chameleonic composition, allowing itself to fit into every single context in which it’s applied. 

“Salt Spring” is truly the instrumental song of the post-Nickel Creek, post-Crooked Still, post-grass generation. As string band genre aesthetics dissolve in the global music marketplace, songs like “Salt Spring” typify this generation’s longing for music that feels honest, true, and real as much as it’s approachable, whimsical, and joyful; songs that celebrate the traditions that became the bedrock of these musics, without being predicated upon militaristic and arbitrary rules to “protect” or propagate those traditions. 

And, though modest to a fault, unassuming, and generally pretty subdued as a person and performer, Reischman has felt this phenomena metamorphosing his composition all along. With his first recording of “Salt Spring” available digitally and writ large, he’s communicating to everyone who loves the song that yes, he knows what it means to us, what it’s become, and what it could grow into still. It’s no wonder then, that when putting together the roster for this new recording and iteration of the track, that he didn’t simply call on his band, the Jaybirds, but he looked to the very generation that’s chosen “Salt Spring” as its own with Molly Tuttle on guitar, Alex Hargreaves on fiddle, Allison de Groot on clawhammer banjo, and Max Schwartz on bass.

A veteran of The Good Ol’ Persons, the Tony Rice Unit, and many other seminal acts of his own generation and time, Reischman knows firsthand the value of cross-generational knowledge sharing and his new album, New Time & Old Acoustic demonstrates this ethos in both conscious and subliminal ways. “Salt Spring” is a perfect distillation of these values and it’s truly fitting, as the tune will forever be enshrined and ensconced in the indelible, if not somewhat squirrelly and subjective, bluegrass and old-time songbook and canon.

(Editor’s note: New Time & Old Acoustic is available for pre-order now.)

Photo courtesy of the artist.

The BGS Radio Hour – Episode 208

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Welcome to the BGS Radio Hour! Since 2017, this weekly radio show and podcast has been a recap of all the great music, new and old, featured on the digital pages of BGS. This week, we bring you new music from both our Artist of the Month, Allison Russell, off of her brand new album Outside Child, and from the late Tony Joe White, too — plus much more! Remember to check back every week for a new episode of the BGS Radio Hour.

APPLE PODCASTS, SPOTIFY

Maia Sharp – “Things to Fix”

Moving across the country is stressful enough on its own. At the end of a 21-year marriage, Maia Sharp put her energy directly into working on her new Nashville home — painting one room, then another, and another. She took the idea to her co-writer on “Things to Fix,” relating the things that could have been fixed in her relationship to what she was fixing in the house.

Last Year’s Man – “Still Be Here”

Singer-songwriter Last Year’s Man (Tyler Fortier) explained his new track “Still Be Here” to BGS, relating, “I think we’re all eager for life to get back to what it was in some way or another and this is a love song built out of the idea that it will.”

Casey Driessen featuring Taro Inoue – “Little Cabin Home on the Hill”

Casey Driessen’s recent project Otherlands: A Global Music Exploration, is a self-produced travelogue of on-location recordings, short films, and essays that documents collaborations with masters of regional music in Spain, Ireland, Scotland, India, Finland, and Japan, where he recorded this bluegrass standard with his friend and mandolinist Taro Inoue.

Tony Joe White – “Smoke From the Chimney”

Legendary country singer and songwriter Tony Joe White, who penned hits like “Polk Salad Annie” and “Rainy Night in Georgia,” passed away in 2018, leaving behind quite a legacy of music. However, the material didn’t quite stop after he died. His new posthumous record, Smoke From the Chimney, was recorded a year later in 2019, as producer Dan Auerbach built the music around voice and guitar demos that White had left behind.

Carsie Blanton – “Mercy”

Carsie Blanton wrote “Mercy” for her husband Jon, who helped her find out that love can be a gentle force that allows us to become more ourselves: “Once I discovered that, I was able to envision a whole world of love; a world that’s less about control and more about compassion.”

Angela Autumn – “Sowin’ Seeds”

“Sowin’ Seeds,” the latest track from Americana singer-songwriter Angela Autumn, explores the could-be life of a musician, one of imagined ease and free from sacrifice.

Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass – “Date With an Angel”

Up next is Baltimore bluegrass royalty Danny Paisley with a track off of his newest record, Bluegrass Troubadour. Paisley started out performing in the Southern Mountain Boys with his father, Bob Paisley, and Ted Lundy. Years later, Danny formed the Southern Grass and performs with his own son as well as the sons of Ted Lundy. They’re a two-family, three generation band! Paisley is the most recent IBMA Male Vocalist of the Year, an award he’s received more than once. Listening to Bluegrass Troubadour, you can see why.

Beth Whitney – “I Go”

Singer-songwriter Beth Whitney wrote “I Go” inspired by her family’s tradition of taking backpacking trips and her favorite Wendell Berry poem, “The Peace of the Wild Things.” While she’ll be the first to admit that she doesn’t backpack gracefully, though as blisters and bug bites take hold, “as the wilderness takes me in, it starts to heal me somehow and I come into focus.”

Amy Helm – “Sweet Mama”

“Sweet Mama” is a rock and roll track made with love in Woodstock, NY by Amy Helm with one and only Phil Cook on harmonica!

Allison Russell – “Montreal”

Our current Artist of the Month, Allison Russell, has just released her stunning solo debut, Outside Child, an album that delves deeply into the extreme trauma she experienced in her youth spent in Montreal. We recently spoke with Russell about her experience making the record and the relief that songwriting, music and art can bring.

Mike Barnett featuring Alex Hargreaves – “Piece O’Shrimp”

Mike Barnett, a Nashville-based fiddle player who recently released +1, an album of duets with friends and heroes, had originally slated the album for release in late summer 2020, but was delayed when he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, putting his career and life on hold. Undergoing extensive rehabilitation, he posted a welcome update in February on his GoFundMe (support here) that a full recovery is still possible and likely! While we’re wishing Mike the best, and supporting his recovery through his GoFundMe, we’re also enjoying a “Piece O’ Shrimp” from his new album, featuring Alex Hargreaves.

Christina Alden & Alex Patterson – “Hunter”

UK-based folk duo Christina Alden & Alex Patterson wrote “Hunter” inspired by an unlikely friendship between a grey wolf and a brown bear, as captured by Finnish photographer Lassi Rautiainen.

Charlie Marie – “El Paso”

Country singer-songwriter Charlie Marie recently joined BGS for a 5+5, that is 5 questions and 5 songs. She talks growing up listening to Patsy Cline, meditating before “big” shows, listening to Frank Sinatra at old school Italian restaurants, and more.

Photos: (L to R) Amy Helm by Ebru Yildiz; Allison Russell by Marc Baptiste; Tony Joe White by Leann White

With Day Jobs on Hold, These Acoustic Musicians Go Solo (Sort Of)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The widespread shuttering of the music industry during coronavirus has given many musicians, bands, and artists the opportunity to inspect and reconfigure their priorities. In the many months since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, this phenomenon has been well-documented in writing about music — music released as a result of the coronavirus or released in its all-eclipsing shadow, both. Artists have altered so many of the ways they interact with and create music and watching creatives respond to this worldwide cataclysm has been all at once entrancing and existential. 

Especially in instrumental music. Especially in instrumental music made in the off time — away from the “day job,” the main gig, or perhaps, again the off time afforded by COVID. In the gaps, where life allows, acoustic musicians in bluegrass, Americana, and old-time have been exploring the existential questions brought about by the pandemic — and also often by parenthood, by identity, by health and well being, or simply by the pursuit of self — in endlessly fascinating musical endeavors.

Andrew Marlin, co-frontperson of longtime Americana string duo Watchhouse (formerly known as Mandolin Orange) released not one but two albums of such endeavors this year, ostensible results of introspection of his role as a father, fighting-while-resigning-to the day-to-day beauties and fears within fatherhood. There’s a bleak, beautiful nakedness to “The Jaybird,” off Fable & Fire, an age-old sounding fiddle tune with sleek, modern simplicities that seem to indicate the gorgeousness possible from being still, watching, waiting, and listening. 

On Witching Hour, “Too Hot To Move” isn’t a barn burner, it’s a Musgraves-level slow burn; a tepid, mosquito-laden, languid afternoon on a back porch, the air thick with humidity. Again, striking in its display of the delectable everyday, in not just occupying the same place with the same people daily, but inhabiting that place with intention. Marlin’s backing band of Clint Mullican (bass), Josh Oliver (guitar, piano, and more), Jordan Tice (guitar, bouzouki), and Christian Sedelmeyer (fiddle) is largely consistent between the projects as well, reiterating this point.

Sara Watkins, known for many a “main gig” — whether that be Watkins Family Hour, Nickel Creek, or I’m With Her — released another fantastic solo offering, built on many of the same tenets evident in Marlin’s recordings. Under the Pepper Tree, whose title track is the album’s sole instrumental, is a whimsical, winking collection of near-lullabies and other ageless classics rendered as only Watkins could, with pop underpinnings and gloss, but a worn, charming patina of bluegrass and Americana via the American Songbook and its associated canon. 

“Under the Pepper Tree” listens like a fiddled campfire coda to a day on the trail; or, similarly, as if a goodnight to Watkins’ young daughter, after returning from tour. While the album as a whole carries the movement and adventure of the Wild West, as well as theatre and cinema and gaiety, its sense of place — of rootedness — is remarkable, especially in “Under the Pepper Tree,” oozing of lessons learned and intentions made underneath its boughs through pandemic isolation. 

Continuing on fiddle, Mike Barnett’s non-Ricky Skaggs & Kentucky Thunder project released in 2020, +1, feels like somewhat familiar territory, a collection of duets with friends and musical compatriots that stretches out purposefully and athletically from his tours with the Country Music Hall of Famer (who also appears on the album). “Piece O’ Shrimp,” with guest Alex Hargreaves on twin fiddle, is wonky, newgrassy, orchestral, and sly with old-time baked in and a dash of Darol Anger & Mike Marshall’s duet work. 

The poetry in the tune, and the entire project really, came from a health-related pausing of a different kind, though. While the rest of us felt the world halt due to the coronavirus, Barnett’s record release, as well as his performing career, were unexpectedly paused when Barnett suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in July 2020. This collection of songs gains an entirely new meaning, not only in the context of COVID-19, but also as a waypoint on Barnett’s journey through music, his recovery, and his eventual return to playing. Still in in-patient rehabilitation and therapy, Barnett posted an update via GoFundMe (support here) in February 2021 that closed, “…A full recovery is possible and likely!” 

Finally, to conclude our foray into solo instrumental explorations, Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter of Meadow Mountain, considers ideas of place, identity, and belonging on his upcoming crowdfunded release, Spark in Your Smile. Decidedly forsaking tradition-adjacency, perhaps more than might be expected if a listener’s entry point is Meadow Mountain, the album is a testament to Armstrong-Zickefoose’s commitment to community building; he’s utilizing music and creative expression for that purpose. The expansive quality of the project’s lack of genre conjures joy first and foremost, especially on “Mona,” and globe-crossing communities as a near second, each instrument, texture, and tone evidence of what’s possible when roots music allows folks to be and to belong. A priority high on everyone’s list, but especially queer folks in bluegrass, old-time, and Americana like Armstrong-Zickefoose.

As touring bands return to the road, it will continue to be fascinating to watch musicians navigate the reconfiguration of their priorities — and how they will continue to carve out the time to express themselves, instrumentally and otherwise, while life, and the music industry, charges on ahead.

Photo credit: Sara Watkins by Jacob Boll; Andrew Marlin by Lindsey Rome.

WATCH: Garrison, Gordy, Hargreaves, Walsh, “Sports”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Garrison, Gordy, Hargreaves, Walsh
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York/Denver, Colorado/Portland, Maine
Song: “Sports”
Album: Bluegrass and the Abstract Truth
Release Date: April 16, 2021

In Their Words: “Instrumental tunes are wonderfully subjective, like little movies whose narratives and meanings can transform and reflect the places they’ve seen. ‘Sports’ started as a little tune in my head riding the D train home from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and had its first public appearance on a local jazz gig. It followed me around, enjoyed some unveilings in the UK under a few different titles — I think I even took a fruitless audience survey to come up with a fitting appellation. When we went into the studio to record this group, its true title came to light and Joe, Alex, and Greg expressed its shifts of mood and character masterfully. We were so delighted to see our friend Danny Barnes’ take on what ‘Sports’ was communicating, and the video he made couldn’t have been a better fit for the mood of the piece.” — Grant Gordy

Photo credit: Dan Cardinal

Sam Reider, “Trio Sonata”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

All disbelief suspended, composer and accordionist Sam Reider’s work is essentially string band music. Yes, he’s an accordionist (which shouldn’t really be remarkable, because… Sally Ann Forrester), and yes, Eddie Barbash plays saxophone on the most recent album, The Human Hands EP, but we’ve suspended disbelief here for a reason. Whether the rest of the band were rounded out by Dominick Leslie, Duncan Wickel, Alex Hargreaves, Dave Speranza, and Roy Williams or not, these tunes would feel fiddle-y. They’re folky and down-to-earth and approachable and danceable and they cheekily, defiantly traipse across the borders of bluegrass. 

The truly remarkable thing about this music is not this feat in the face of (gasp) an accordion and a saxophone!? It’s that these folky-feeling tunes are… composed. These melodies and ideas are directly tied to a musical history and tradition often regarded as devoid of any idea rootsy or vernacular. “Trio Sonata,” a two-part composition on the new The Human Hands video EP, draws from the Baroque trio sonata, a 400-year-old musical form that derived from popular dances of the day. The three parts of Reider’s “Trio Sonata” are I. Reel, II. Jig, and III. Breakdown, amounting to an unlikely, four-century-old parallel to modern fiddle contest song selections. 

In this way, there’s a satisfying sense of symmetry to Reider’s idiosyncratic approach to fiddle-oriented instrumental music. It defies any so-called logic we might try to use to justify certain genre designations, it mocks the idea that we ought try to delineate between “classical” versus “folky” approaches to writing and creating music, and perhaps above all else, the music centers dance. Movement is certainly a unifier, and in this case, it unifies all of these musical eccentricities — from squeezebox to Bill Monroe to Baroque compositions to sax — in a perfectly digestible package.

LISTEN: Carrie Newcomer, “Shelter of the Sky”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Carrie Newcomer
Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
Song: “The Shelter of the Sky”
Album: The Point of Arrival
Release Date: March 22, 2019
Label: Available Light Records

In Their Words: “Growing up near Lake Michigan, you learn to love expanses of sky and freshwater, so I have always felt a certain kind of homecoming under the dome of an expansive sky. No matter where I am, there is the dome, the wide arms of something always changing but timeless. Because I am a touring musician, I am often a stranger who is far from home. It is easy to get ungrounded when you travel so much. But everywhere I go, there it is again, my feet on the earth and the dome of the sky above.

“The musicianship on this album and this song is nothing less than joyous. What a delight to work with such brilliant and totally original artists — Jordan Tice, Tristan Clarridge, Alex Hargreaves, Moira Smiley, Joe Phillips and Gary Walters. Together it felt like we created something that moved and expanded like fast-moving cloud banks, opening up into solos that felt like flying.” –Carrie Newcomer

Photo credit: Hugh Syme