One of my most consistent sources of inspiration, when it comes to writing and recording my own songs, is the music of my friends and contemporaries. JVC is an album made amongst friends and the songs were written, if not with their direct help, by the grace of a friend’s emotional support or a colleague’s awe-inspiring set during a time of my life that otherwise felt lonely and lifeless.
In the spirit of that, here’s my Mixtape of 12 songs from contemporary inspirations of mine, whether I know them well or not at all, many of them local to the Nashville scene. – Jack Van Cleaf
“Afterlife” – Joelton Mayfield
This playlist is in no particular order, except maybe when it comes to this song. “Afterlife” was my most-streamed song last year, and Joelton Mayfield is one of the few artists I’ve considered dropping everything for and driving eight hours to catch a set (particularly when he opened for Robert Earl Keen in Winston-Salem). I’m lucky to be close enough in his orbit to catch most of his shows in Nashville, and they never cease to amaze me. If I want my faith in the importance of music restored, I go see a Joelton Mayfield show.
“Laughing Out Loud” – Ethansroom
I’ll never forget when my best friend sent me this song he just wrote. I was holed up in a motel next to my restaurant job in Carlsbad, California, while my family was all down with COVID. He sent me this as a voice memo and I listened to it as I was getting ready for bed; then I listened to it again. It gripped me from the get-go and it still amazes me. I have the privilege of playing nearly every show and recorded track I’ve ever put out alongside Ethan Fortenberry. His musical prowess is only rivaled by his capacity for love, as evidenced by his latest record. This song will always be one of my favorites.
“Lying Lately” – Emma Ogier
Emma Ogier is opening on tour for us this May and it is no exaggeration to say I feel lucky to see her in venues this size while it’s still possible. Emma’s brother, Aidan, also an extremely talented player and writer, is a good friend and introduced me to her music when he invited me to their show in San Diego, when I was living there. Anyone who has seen Emma live knows how powerful her performances are. Songs like this, and the trove of unreleased music I’ve heard her play, keep me inspired and constantly on the edge of my seat for the next line she delivers.
“Groundhog Day” – Nic Fair
I saw Nic play a Halloween set at the East Room just over a year ago and I’ve been itching to see another show of his since. His vocal runs will stun you first, but directly after that you’ll be immersed in his lyrical world of unexpected images and keen metaphors as exhibited in “Groundhog Day,” one of my personal favorites that I remember clearly from that Halloween show.
“Tomatoes” – Briston Maroney
Briston Maroney has just come out with an amazing new album. I was lucky enough to get the sneaky link and I’ve listened to it front-to-back over and over again for the past few weeks. To me, JIMMY seems like a perfect balance between where Briston’s been and where he’s going. I hear familiar traces of songs like the ones on “Carnival” while enjoying something totally brand new: like the narrative moment in this song when Briston talks about “picking out his grave at the graveyard” – it’s fresh and I’m addicted to it. I’ve felt very fortunate to have lots of meaningful conversations with Briston about life and art over the years; he continues to inspire me as a friend and from a distance, as an outside observer of his brilliant work.
“co-pilot” – Val Hoyt
I pursued Jack Schneider, guitar virtuoso and tape enthusiast local to East Nashville, to record my live acoustic album because of his work on Val Hoyt’s Muscle Spasms. This record is full of beautiful songs, masterfully written and recorded. Val’s guitar performances coupled with his unique melodic and lyrical approach to songwriting stops me in my tracks. This song has me singing along in my car every time it finds its way, inevitably, to my monthly playlists. It’s the lyrics and Val’s vocal performance that get me, but Jack Schneider’s guitar solo being possibly my favorite acoustic guitar solo I’ve ever heard doesn’t hurt, either.
“Camcorder (recovered)” – Macho Planet
It’s no secret to most of the indie singer/songwriter scene in Nashville, but Macho Planet’s ‘Still, You Don’t Joke About It’ is near flawless. It’s an album I come back to again and again and hold in the highest regard as a blueprint for a successfully crafted full-length record. I find a new gem every time. “Camcorder” could be considered the hit off the record, boasting the most streams. It was my gateway song into Austin’s music, and it functions as a great introduction to an equally magnetic catalogue of songs that will remain special to you long after the first listen.
“Ovid” – Annie DiRusso
I had been bumping the singles to Annie DiRusso’s debut album, Super Pedestrian, for months leading up to its release; it was no surprise to press play on her record on release day and be greeted by this rock masterpiece. The opening line draws me right in (still have no idea what it’s about) and the very relatable reprise keeps coming back again and again every time I hop in the car. It’s one of those lyrics that leaves me surprised I haven’t heard it before, because it feels timeless: “Always looking for something to change my life/ Never wanna hear nothing to change my mind.”
“Heaven Is” – Melanie MacLaren
Melanie does an incredible job of writing Americana songs that carry the torch of greats like Gillian Welch while bringing something totally new, fresh, and honest to the table. Her lyrics are a well-balanced mix of captivating imagery and straightforward truth telling. “Heaven Is” is an awesome example of her ability to make a listener enjoy a song that forces them to face their own mortality.
“high achiever” — Charli Adams
Charli sang on one of the songs on my record, JVC. She lent her voice to the bridge of the second song, “Piñata.” I asked her to do this because Charli’s voice is one of my favorites in the singer-songwriter world. It’s completely unique to her, incomparable to anyone else I can think of. On top of this, Charli’s long been an inspiration to me in her songwriting. Her EP, nothing to be scared of, is a vulnerable look at childhood and self-growth that spares not difficult topic. “high achiever” is one of my slow-burning favorites.
“I Like to Worship the Devil” – Dan Spencer
This man is a master of writing lyrics that engage a sense of humor while still remaining totally sincere and heart-wrenching. Some of the best theological lyrics I’ve heard, put forward so casually, come from Dan Spencer’s songs. This one gets me singing along every time. (Dan’s voice is probably the only one that can get me to sing, full-heartedly at the top of my lungs, “Pissed my pants and shit the bed.”)
“Neighbors” – Future Crib
I was fortunate enough to see Future Crib at their album release show at The Blue Room in Nashville, just a couple weeks before I played mine there. I don’t hesitate to say that they may be the best band we have today. The love amongst the members and in the music they make is so palpable that it’s hard not to feel. Every time I see a show of theirs I feel I’m a part of something important. The performance of this one at their release show, and the energy in the crowd, was particularly memorable.
On the album cover for singer-songwriter Katie Gavin’s solo debut album, What A Relief, she sits half-dressed in the middle of her shiny, sage-green bedspread with various clothes and possessions strewn around her and the floor; even the cat stands awkwardly mid-sit or stand, it’s hard to tell. The immediacy of this messy in-between moment conveys the intimacy Gavin reaches to again and again on the album.
I want you to see me When you’re not looking I want you to fuck me When we’re not touching
The album’s opening track, “I Want It All,” exhumes a lust for connection so all-consuming she knows already, “I’m gonna lose my mind / I’m gonna lose…” But it’s also Gavin’s thirst for and attention to these acutely relatable moments of humanity that render the album enticing.
“I’m really hungry for connection. And I think that in putting out songs that express that, or putting out images that express that, and having it met with understanding gives me that experience of like ‘we’re all humans having a human experience,’” Gavin says. “I want to push myself in terms of what I allow other people to see.”
Much of Gavin’s career has been with pop band MUNA (who opened for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour earlier this year). Solo, Gavin sheds her dazzling pop-star persona and the trappings of MUNA’s spectacular auditory and stage presence, retaining their honesty and emotional precision. What A Relief, which was produced by Tony Berg, is a collection of 12 songs Gavin wrote on the side over the past seven years. With them, and a clarity born of self-assurance and yearning for connection, Gavin pulls up a chair to settle in for a heart-to-heart with her audience.
“Some days you do your best / Some days you do what gets you out of bed…” Gavin sings on “Casual Drug Use,” possessing an inscrutable ability to pinpoint reality neatly and poignantly. That realism remains throughout the album, which unfolds as a masterful look at the human condition through the micro view of Gavin’s relationships with the world, herself, and others. Many times, she sounds so thrillingly close to the microphone it’s as if she’s singing right into your ear.
As she winnows down her experiences to a few kernels of truth, Gavin deliberately and deftly seeks accessibility and relatability without catering to weirdness or discomfort simply to make a point. “I am pleased with the same chords, over and over, as long as there’s a story and someone is saying something compelling,” she explains.
Her lack of pretense serves as shorthand for her palpably raw portraits of life: “But I think this is as good as it gets, my love/ I think this is as good as it gets/ Pray to god that you think that it is enough…” she sings in “As Good As It Gets” – which features guest vocals by Mitski – about a relationship that is not always a fairy tale. It’s an acknowledgement that you can both love someone and be underwhelmed by them, at least some of the time.
“‘As Good As It Gets’ reflects this big question that I’ve had for a long time, and I still have about what is reasonable to expect from a romantic relationship. And how good is it supposed to feel?” she says.
Elsewhere on the album, in “Sanitized,” Gavin carefully takes a wet washcloth to the bottoms of her dirty feet, afraid to stain her lover’s clean bed (“I lie perfectly still so I don’t mess up my hair/ I’m a sanitized girl, I clean up for you my dear”); or promises not to stalk her ex online, except “once in a while I’ll wanna know if you’ve died,” as she muses in “Keep Walking.”
Growing up in Illinois, Gavin’s parents gave her free reign to explore music and she gravitated unsurprisingly to pop music, entertaining preteen love for the Spice Girls and Samantha Mumba, and teen obsessions with Riot Grrrl, Gravy Train, and the Weepies’ “Gotta Have You.” She also gravitated toward queer, explicit music (Gavin is queer, but was in the closet at the time). When she started writing her own music as a teenager, her mother introduced her to Imogen Heap and her father stoked her folkie music interests with Jackson Browne and Jim Croce.
Gavin’s broad musical tastes inform her writing of course. In the case of What A Relief, she draws particularly on her love for John Prine’s flawed, human characters, and perverse, weirdo songster Loudon Wainwright III whose Attempted Mustache remains one of Gavin’s favorite albums.
“It’s the same magic that’s in a lot of John Prine songs, where these people aren’t afraid to talk about what real people experience in their real lives, even if it’s really silly, and then really mixing that with the profound.”
Silly mixed with the profound is perhaps the best possible description of Gavin’s own music. In the middle of the album, Gavin drops the bluegrass-folk portrait “Inconsolable,” about generational baggage’s impact on our well-being. Wrapped around a divinely-gratifying fiddle melody (she brought in Nickel Creek’s Sara and Sean Watkins to add a little extra bluegrass cred to the track) the song is first and foremost a reflection on learning to be vulnerable while falling in love.
It’s an experience that feels every bit as familiar as Gavin’s messy bed, but in a way that seems to make sense for the very first time – the gift of a stellar songwriter. More than that though, “Inconsolable” is a study in the way tiny moments elevate Gavin’s songs through her allegiance to the balance between silly and unvarnished experiences. We’ve all curled up on the couch hesitant to show how we’re really feeling.
But I’ve seen baby lizards running in the river When they open their eyes Even though no one taught them how or why So maybe when you kiss me I can let you See me cry And if we keep going by the feeling We can get by
Mid-verse, Gavin pivots from the endearing image of baby lizards learning to swim to emotional vulnerability in a fledgling relationship with the blockbuster realization that salvation and connection again might just come from that blind leap of trust.
Gavin’s quest for an honest examination of emotional intelligence stems in part from time spent with her grandparents, two of whom she lost in the last few years. Soaking up their stories, she thought about how much they endured and how many times older generations weren’t afforded a chance to be heard, or to feel their feelings.
Elders teach both by omission and by passing the torch. In “The Baton,” What A Relief’s anthemic third track, dedicated to the lineage of socially and generationally inherited womanhood, Gavin outlines her understanding of resilience as it passes from mother to daughter. Imagining what she’d say to her own daughter, Gavin also reaches to the wisdom from generations before her:
I’d pass her the baton and I’d say you better run ‘Cause this thing has been going For many generations But there is so much healing That still needs to be done
Not for rebellious reasons, but rather to instill a deep love of self, by the end of the song, Gavin’s come out the other side as her own mother.
“It’s a sense of learning, a sense of ownership and agency and learning to really listen to myself and trust myself, like if I’m going into a situation that I’m nervous about,” she explains. That’s a transformation not unlike her experiences writing the album, which she started when she was 24 and concluded at the age of 31: “You’re kind of moving from this archetype of maiden to mother.”
“I’m aware of a younger part of me that might be nervous and might have needs,” she says. “I often talk to her and say, ‘I got you, you’re coming home with me.’ And, ‘You don’t need to worry that I’m gonna forget about you or give you away to somebody else, or make you tap dance for somebody else.’”
Part of mothering yourself is finding your pitfalls and learning to prevent them. For Gavin, that includes thinking about addiction a lot, well beyond drug use.
“I can get addicted to a lot of different things; I can get addicted to different processes; I can get addicted to people; and I can get addicted to looking at furniture on Facebook marketplace,” she says. “I was thinking about this idea that when we as humans get stuck in the process of addiction, the things that make us feel good, and our actual relationship with the world gets smaller and smaller.”
That idea became the song “Sketches,” wherein Gavin distills addiction into a two-dimensional study of self reduction. In a simple acoustic guitar and cello-accompanied track, she imagines her character reduced to a sketch by an overbearing relationship: “That the deeper I’d go/ The smaller I’d get…” until she takes back control, painting herself back to size.
“The process of recovery has been really one of expansion, learning that I can feel intimacy and connection and pleasure and joy from so many different experiences in life and from so many different people,” Gavin says. “And there’s something that just feels very profound about that for me in this time.”
Even when it comes to writing about climate change, Gavin filters her stories through our relationships to one another. It feels more effective than shaming people for not recycling, she says. In “Sparrow,” she ruminates on the dangers of the quick fix, hoping in vain for the song of a sparrow in spring, only to discover that the tree it would perch on has died of a cure applied rashly and without thinking.
But perhaps Gavin’s most profound relationship moment on the album comes when she eulogizes her dog in “Sweet Abby Girl.”
“She’s taking up most of the mattress/ Can’t imagine being so un-self conscious/ She’s pushing her back up against my legs…” Abby becomes a foil for Gavin’s insecurities, as throughout the song she considers the vulnerability within unqualified love for another being.
Buried late in the album, “Keep Walking,” its penultimate track, reveals Gavin’s raison d’être: “What a relief / To know that some of this was my fault.” Superficially, it’s a breakup song. But it’s also a relief for Gavin’s to put these songs into the world, to share another side of herself, and forge new connections with listeners.
Fundamentally, we get through hard times by laughing with our friends, Gavin says. As she’s matured as a songwriter, she’s been drawn to including those moments of levity in her songs. Invariably, they feel like the best of conversations with friends and lend themselves well to What A Relief’s stripped-down, singer-songwriter format.
“There was just something funny about this idea of putting out this part of me that had up until this point been unexpressed; it does feel like a relief to just let it out,” Gavin says. “I like the sentiment in the song … ‘what a relief to know that some of this was my fault,’ which is just agency. I haven’t behaved perfectly, and that gives me some space to have compassion and forgiveness for you.”
“Real life” is such a tired phrase. Gavin’s version, though, feels scintillatingly, comfortingly relatable, and like her messy bedroom, gives the listener agency to let go and just be, too. What a relief.
Growing up in a musical family, I was exposed to a lot of different sounds from an early age – a lot of them, not by choice. I had a dad who preferred country radio and led gospel music at our church. My mom played classical and Civil War songs on the piano daily while I played with my toys. Next were two older siblings using seniority to lord over the dials at every chance – they also both played classical piano.
As I got older and carved away at my own musical sensibilities, these dictates became accidental influences to the soundtrack of my life and shaped who I have become as a songwriter and musician. This playlist includes some early influences along with music that has turned me on for one reason or another, which I’ll do my best to explain. Thank you to everyone who has helped shape the soundtrack of my life so far, especially my family and mentors. – Nathan Trueb, Another Glory
“Surfer Girl” – The Beach Boys
Some of my earliest memories growing up involve the Beach Boys. I remember the Endless Summer cassette tape and its painted album cover distinctly. We would listen to it on road trips and I remember my dad and his friends playing guitars and singing these songs. My older brother got really into the Beach Boys and I remember he loved this song. Even though he told me he didn’t know why, but it made him sad. It also became my 2-year-old daughter’s favorite song and band.
“Why Not Me” – The Judds
As much as I didn’t want to like country music, it started to become harder to make excuses as to why just as soon as I started to play the guitar and take music more seriously. If you were to ask anyone in my grade school what music they liked, the only acceptable answer was, “Everything BUT country.” The more discerning my ear became I couldn’t deny the masterful playing and even, dare I say, “shredding” of the players on these then-contemporary records. The other thing that country brought to the table were some perfectly crafted, three-minute-and-twenty-nine second pop masterpieces like this one. Although I couldn’t show it outwardly to my family, I was rocking out on the inside.
“Black Cadillac” – Lightnin’ Hopkins
We used to go over to my uncle’s house from time to time when my mom was at work. On one visit, around the time when I had just started playing guitar, I found out my uncle played a left-handed acoustic guitar that I really admired. I also had no idea that he had been learning some blues and showed me a few licks and we jammed together. He had a few records laid out and this one leaped into my hands. He put it on and I couldn’t believe my ears. The voice, the guitar, the storytelling and humor. I did that thing where I didn’t let go of the record until my uncle suggested I take it home. I still play that same copy to this day.
“Going to California” – Led Zeppelin
I owe the most to my brother as a musical influence – I guess just influence in general. He was always there with the next record I needed to hear. It was a pipeline from his friends to him, him to me, and then me to my friends. I’ll never forget the day that he played me Led Zeppelin and it completely blew my mind. Growing up in a conservative household, I had never heard anything like it and everything changed after that. I became obsessed with Led Zeppelin like people get obsessed with Harry Potter or WWII. “Going to California” came to me around the time of first loves and I really got it. “Sell the Farm” off of the Another Glory record is a direct hat-tip to this song. I love the way it made me feel and how it still transports me to long phone calls in my attic room in the summer time.
“Michelle” – The Beatles
My first memorable crush was named Michelle. She was my sister’s friend and would visit our house often. We grew up on a farm and that meant that my brand of flirting was often hurtling cow pies at my sister’s friends. Somehow that first love was unrequited.
I remember a trip to the Puget Sound where my brother loaned me his Beatles 1962-1966 disc (the red one with the whole apple/cut apple on the compact disc), popping it in the Discman, putting the headphones on, and listening to that song over and over. I loved it, but it made me sad. Now I knew how my brother felt when he listened to “Surfer Girl.” I sing this song to my daughter and it’s still amazes me that they wrote it. Like, how? I’m sure there’s a story about it somewhere, but I don’t think I really want to know. My wife and I have been together since high school and the first time I visited her bedroom she had every single Beatles album in a dedicated, spinning CD tower.
“Naptown Blues” – Herb Ellis
My mom was driving me to school one day my freshman year and I had the local jazz radio station on, 89.1 KMHD. I think playing the guitar a lot when I was homeschooled for a couple years took me on a trajectory from Led Zeppelin to Steely Dan to trying to understand jazz by listening to the radio. This song came on as she dropped me off. I said, “I don’t know what this is, but I want to play like that.” Bless her heart, she must have written it down as the DJ read that title after the song ended (in their soft, publicly-funded morning voice), because I unwrapped this CD for my next birthday and I remember listening to it while I went to sleep until I had every part memorized.
“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” – Bob Dylan
Speaking of girlfriends, my first real girlfriend in high school had an older brother who was a Dylan fanatic. I remember looking through his 72-disc Case Logic CD case. I opened up the first page, Dylan. Second page, Dylan. The entire thing was filled with Bob Dylan. He asked me if I was a fan and I remember saying, “not yet.” For some reason I had a feeling I might be someday.
Well, I don’t remember how, but when I moved out of my folks’ place this song hit me like a freight train. Dylan’s influence is so obvious in any modern music, especially when you are a guy fingerpicking a guitar, but we have to give credit where it’s due. I’d like my old girlfriend’s brother to know that I finally crossed the Rubicon.
“My Funny Valentine” – Bill Evans & Jim Hall
I’ve had a few guitar teachers in my life and had the pleasure of taking some lessons in college from Jerry Hahn. He had his own books and I think was a big fan of Jim Hall. He turned me on to this record and this style of walking bass with chords. He also taught me to keep a list of “must-have” or “must-find” records in my wallet for the record store. I still have a list to this day in my notes. He said this one should be on there. Years after taking from him, I found an original copy somewhere in California. This is one of my all-time favorite records.
“Run That Body Down” – Paul Simon
I got pretty into this record at some point and into Paul Simon’s writing in general. I used to have two enormous PA speakers that we used for band practice in my basement. Late at night I would sit between them and listen to music very loud. This song was on and the guitar solo caught me by surprise. I looked up the song to find out who played the solo. It was my old teacher, Jerry Hahn!
I ran into him at a jazz club not too long after and asked him about it. He recalled it perfectly and said he turned down the offer to come to the studio because he was “too busy.” They kept calling, so he went and remembered being frustrated. Take after take, Paul wasn’t getting what he wanted. Finally Jerry took the solo in a totally different direction, against his good sense, with the wah pedal and all. After the take Paul exclaimed, “That’s it!”
“One Mo’Gin” – D’Angelo
After listening to all of the Motown one can get their hands on, you start to wish there was more. Or, that it continued to evolve into modernity with class and style instead of flaming out, morphing into disco dances by designer drugs. Like when your parents started “raising the roof.” At some point you just have to put it down, like Old Yeller. Then decades later someone comes along who has filled themselves to the brim with that old tonic and others that had filled up on the same, and it comes spilling out in biblical proportions in a perfect statement. Voodoo is that album. D’Angelo is that prophet. I have listened to this record so much in my life that it’s hard to state exactly what influence it has had on me. “Fool For You” was a song written a long time ago and it was a direct attempt to do something in that vein.
“I Don’t Know” – Nick Hakim
As you get older it gets harder to get the same high from music that you did when stuff first really freaked you out – or maybe that’s just me. So, when you find that something or someone, it might become an instant obsession. Nick Hakim had that effect on me. I loved everything he was doing; it was so different, sonically, than most of the bedroom pop stuff or neo-soul. It felt like a modern psychedelic Voodoo, but also just heartbreakingly beautiful. His ability to mix his jazz-school-kid sensibilities with gospel and indie-rock set a high bar and still does.
“The Only Thing” – Sufjan Stevens
It seems that everyone has a favorite Sufjan. His prolific list of albums seem limitless in their scope and bending of genres. The only Sufjan for me is Carrie & Lowell. I don’t think there is an album that equals it in creating a soundtrack for sadness, grief, regret, love, life, and death – at least not that I have found. His lyrical imagery seems to be divinely inspired and it’s hard to pick one part of the song, so I’ll quote the first words:
The only thing that keeps me from driving this car Half-light, jack knife into the canyon at night Signs and wonders: Perseus aligned with the skull Slain Medusa, Pegasus alight from us all
“The Magician” – Andy Shauf
This song came on the radio while I was driving in Portland over a bridge with a view of the river and the city behind it. (I often remember an exact time I heard a song with perfect clarity. Maybe everyone does? “Mo Money Mo Problems” I was passing the Chevron on Molalla Ave., Oregon City, circa 2001.)
After the 8-bar intro to this intriguing new single on the local indie radio station, I nearly crashed my car. I instantly remember being like, “OKAY!” and banging my head when the beat dropped. It’s a perfect song to me and a perfect recording that is perfectly produced. You can’t say that about every song you love.
“If I’m Unworthy” – Blake Mills
Every guitarist sooner or later was exposed to Blake Mills. A friend of mine turned me onto his first album early, before all the hype, and I quickly became a fan. His songs and voice weren’t typical and were totally unique to him. I had watched a lot of videos of him playing and he quickly became the best living guitarist that I was aware of.
His long-awaited sophomore album was finally announced. When he came to town to support the record he was booked in a small room, seated. His name was so unknown I couldn’t find anybody to go with me. I also had inside knowledge that his then girlfriend, Fiona Apple, was likely to make an appearance. So I stood silently in line to the sold-out night and kept my mouth shut.
During his set, I popped out to the bar to get a drink and bellied up to the bar. I let the woman to my left go ahead of me. It was Fiona Apple. She laughed when I nearly spit out my drink. “If I’m Unworthy,” in the moment it was released, became the new “guitar song” for guitar nerds. Every single guitarist has to learn it, as a rite of passage; like Stevie Ray Vaughan or “Sweet Home Alabama.” The song is a snapshot of the Blake Mills that revolutionized guitar once again and then quickly retired, confounding dad-rockers with little tube amps and glass slides adorned to their fingers. Will the real Blake Mills please stand up?
“Body” – Julia Jacklin
MLK & N Fremont, near the Chevron. That’s where I first heard this song. Maybe I only have autobiographical, photographic memories of songs if they involve a gas station, specifically Chevron. We were riding in a friend’s Subaru, which we always drove around in. A peace-sign necklace swinging from her rearview mirror, rain hitting the windshield, the music always blasting. I had never heard the song before and I was all-in from the downbeat. Such a heavy song and so personal.
Julia’s lyrics make you feel like it was you yourself on that Sydney tarmac. And the haunting question, “Do you still have that photograph?/ Would you use it to hurt me?” Like the photograph, the song is naked and circles around a singular progression, building tension until finally quietly cracking open for some light at the end.
“I guess it’s just my life, and it’s just my body…” which, on the first listen, could sound sarcastic, but on the repeat she sounds relieved or at least vindicated. And of course it is probably both. The progression gives hope that this chapter of her life, or ours, is closed. In my experience, that is what a lot of good songs do: close a chapter for the artist and the listener.
“Are You Looking Up” – Mk.Gee
Not a secret any more. Still mysterious, but not just the guitar-guy in the Dijon video. Still shy, but now he’s in the spotlight. The leap from his 2018 album to Two Star & the Dream Police might as well have been a tightrope walk over the Grand Canyon. I loved the old stuff, but when I saw the live video of “Are You Looking Up” with Mk.gee hanging out of a tour bus or train car – whatever it was – I nearly fell out of my chair. I had a hard time explaining why to some who just heard Doogie Howser synths.
His way of playing might not sound outwardly complex or groundbreaking, but in my opinion, it is. Everything about the homespun, demo-quality recordings reminds of me of how a Wu-Tang record sounds completely superior to anything else on MTV at the time, not due to its polish, but rather its grit. Mike’s voice has the perfect dichotomy of rasp and softness. He has a unique ability to sing almost indecipherable lyrics over such memorable melodies that the words could be an afterthought, not unlike Bon Iver.
I had the pleasure of meeting Mike when he came through Portland. He is shy and a lot of lyricists seem to guard their lyrics due to insecurity, but the lyrics are so good, too. I see Mk.gee as the new guitar gunslinger with his outlaw jacket as his cape. He’s single-handedly doing for guitar what The Mandalorian did for Star Wars.
Stelth Ulvang is a storyteller, but as he shares in our conversation, if it hadn’t been for a broken mast on a famous sailboat years ago, his stories might have found a different outlet than music.
Since then, his musical life has unfolded from one wave to the next. From playing with established bands like The Lumineers or his own projects like Heavy Gus to finding pick-up bands in different towns, he is fast and prolific. His latest effort, Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips, is a ten-song opus, cut in New Orleans by The Deslondes (a band he indeed met through a friend). A self-declared autumnal record, Ulvang grapples with death with a lilting cover of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon” and guides the listener along his travels in “What Three Dogs.” The (mostly) live recordings lend themselves to the raw emotion of the storytelling.
BGS spoke to Stelth Ulvang over Zoom from his home in Bishop, California.
How’s your life?
Stelth Ulvang: Well, we just got back from a family vacation, and our 3-year-old hates us for trying to explain jet lag to him.
It sounds like you were on a real adventure. Where all did you go?
Greece, Turkey, and the Republic of Georgia. We have a friend there that is a wild, wild, Wild West woman.
She won this great horse race, and she’s really into cooking over big fires. She won the Iron Chef competition there. She’s a pretty versatile human, but pretty wild. So it was fun to have a friend in these places. We had friends in Greece and we had friends in Turkey. But we didn’t have instruments. My wife and I play a lot of music together, so we’ve always traveled with instruments, and this time we refused to.
I’ve just been recording all last year. I’m sitting on three records of recordings and trying to just put out one of them right now.
Nice. That’s awesome. Do you write alone, or do you and your wife write together sometimes?
I normally write alone. I have a hard time writing with others. I just haven’t had enough practice with it. With our other project, Heavy Gus, we will bring songs to the table and then we’ll intermingle and edit them together. But for the most part, it always comes from one voice or another. We haven’t sat down and said, ”Let’s write a song.” I find it harder. It’s more vulnerable than the other parts of a relationship, I find. After like sexual or intimate vulnerabilities, I found writing music together was like by far the last tier.
Well, not to make it about me. But I write music with my husband. Co-writing and the kitchen are the only places we fight.
Oh, yeah, totally. It can get really impassioned. You are just opening yourself up on the table in this way, and it can just go so quickly to feeling under attack about this very personal thing.
You’re very prolific. Sounds like you got a lot of stuff in the pipeline to release.
When The Lumineers stopped touring, I kind of just rallied and tried to get everything done. I did a lot of the writing on the road with the band. There was a lot of downtime in hotels. For a long time, I was recording in hotel rooms with my phone on voice memos and stuff like that. But then I got into using Garageband on my cell phone and making more produced tracks. I released a record like that.
Ultimately, I found that my favorite thing to do was to find a band. If we have a few days off in a town, I find a band and go into a studio somewhere and see if we can just record five tracks. So that’s what I kept doing around the States during this Lumineers tour for the past three years. I had written all these songs over COVID. So we’d be in Cincinnati for three days and I’d find a band and record five songs.
When you say “find a band,” what do you mean?
I mean whip a band up. Ideally, find a band that plays together and they’re down to just like learn a song of mine.
Are you meeting them at a show or are these people that you’re like friends of friends with online?
Yeah, sometimes friends of friends, people that I’ve never played with. But for this record, Stelth Ulvang and the Tigernips, this is all people that I had never met. A friend who was going to be on the record but then left for a tour was like, “Well, they’re good people, you’re in good hands.”
It was fun to just use real old gear, old vintage mics and run it all through tape. We recorded everything live. Singing it live, that’s something I’m not as used to. But with this band from New Orleans, the magic was quick to come.
Did you know you wanted to cut it to tape before you headed down there? Or was that circumstantial?
That was circumstantial. It’s funny with tape right now, because obviously, everything just gets digitized. I was trying to think, “Is there a way that we can keep this off of ever touching digital?” And it’s almost impossible. You know it’s possible, but it feels impossible.
With the record I made on my cell phone, I only released it on cassette tape for a while, which was the reverse. So I should have tried to be true to form and release it just on vinyl and tape in analog form. But it’s 2024.
Well, tell me about self-releasing music. What does that feel like in 2024?
It’s like I finally figured out the releasing stuff. I’ve had help through Emily Smith, with the Alt-Country Show. There was a lot of logistical stuff that I was getting new anxieties about – a lot of social media.
You think you have it all figured out and then it’s just all about being a content creator. I feel like an old man. It’s so complex, but it’s true. I finally kind of figured out how to self-release and self-book shows and now that almost feels like an obsolete skill set. I’m doing a whole tour around the Northeast on this record for a few weeks and booked everything myself. Amazing that it like came naturally, just writing people and asking for help. But yeah, the content is a skill set that I forgot to put my 10,000 hours in on.
I feel that. For the tour, is the band that played with you on this album from New Orleans going?
No, they’re all gonna be in Spain at a sick residency that they do every year. The band goes to Spain once a year. They’ve done it for 3 years. Now this will be, I think, their fourth year. And there’s a huge following in Seville of American country and folk.
It’s interesting that country music is getting big. But in Europe right now, it’s getting huge and friends who do country tours in the States are having much more success in Europe right now.
It also feels like the genre is broadening. There’s obviously the stuff at the top of the pyramid that, depending on your ears, can be exhausting. But there’s more room for more kinds of country.
In that realm, I don’t know that I like the song for what it is, but “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X – to have a gay Black man put out a track at the top of the country charts, I think opened up the the floodgates to be like, “Anything goes.” I think that is an extraordinary gift to any realm of music, to do something so left field and find success for it. So bless Lil Nas X for that and maybe only that.
What’s a Tigernip?
What is a tigernip? I don’t know. I forgot. … I was just trying to think of something that wasn’t a Google trope. But I wanted the combination of very quick, ferocious, and sweet. We recorded half of the album in the space called the Tigerman Den so I was starting to call it “the Tiger Men.” But there were women in the project. I think I said “Tiger Dicks” at some point, and everyone was like, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
But then, something about a tigernip kind of sounded like a tiger lily or catnip.
I wanted it to be clear that the band that recorded on this record was actually a band and it wasn’t me just doing like solo songs. And how much the album was influenced by these relationships that we had over a very short few days. So, that’s why I was really set on trying to find a band name for us.
There’s a frequent revisiting in the songs on this album to the theme of water. And I read that at one point you sailed from Hawaii to Seattle. Since you have this connection to water, I’d like to know about that sail and if you have an everyday connection to water?
It’s funny, I don’t necessarily buy into astrology, but being an Aquarius, I am appalled that it’s not a water sign. I feel completely more watery than airy. [My birthday is] the very last day of Aquarius before Pisces, which is a water sign. So maybe that’s why I’m compelled to lean into the water sign. And my Chinese zodiac is the tiger.
Back to the sailing trip! I did not want to play music before this time in 2008. I met this musician who invited me on this sailing trip and I just wanted to go on an adventure.
Meaning you didn’t want to play music in your life, or you needed a break from it?
I was playing in high school and I tried to go to college for it. I didn’t like it and I dropped out. I just wanted to travel. I had gone on a bike trip, I was hitchhiking a lot, and I was riding trains everywhere. If music could help me travel, I was open to it.
I traveled to Hawaii to pick up this boat that was famous in National Geographic because of this teenager, Robin Lee Graham, trying to sail it around the world in one go. He left his boat in California and it got moved to Hawaii. I had somehow signed up with a buddy that I barely knew to travel with this boat from Hawaii up to Bellingham, Washington, where it was going to sit in a boat museum for its historical significance.
At the time, this was the youngest boy ever to sail around the world alone. The record has since been broken by a young woman. [The boat] had so much repair work that had to be done on it. So we’re in Hawaii for like five weeks, during which I got arrested for shoplifting some food at Sam’s Club, because we’d run out of all of our money that we had saved up to do this journey. I decided, “Screw it. We’re we’re just gonna skip the court date, I’m gonna get on this boat and we’re gonna sail.” So we bail on this court date, establishing a nice bench warrant that I had to deal with much later on. We make it a week out and the mast busts, and we had to get rescued. And I have never sailed extensively since then.
While we’re at sea my buddy had this mandolin. We sit there, and we’re just trading verses back and forth, writing this kind of silly song as this joke idea that we’re these stranded pirates. We’re just coming up with lyrics. We get towed back to Hawaii; I was really nervous about going to jail. We go to the airport and beg these flight attendants to basically put us on standby to get us back to the States. The only flight that they could put us on was one that went up to Seattle. We’re like, well, “We can hitchhike home from there.”
So, we go up to Seattle and we have no money, not even bus fare, to get to my friend’s house that lived in North Seattle. So we sit in the airport and we play this song, making up words on this mandolin with a little hat out [for tips], just for bus fare. As soon as we get the bus fare, we leave and we’re at our friend’s house. We tell him the story and he’s like, “You know, we’re having a show tomorrow night. You guys should play your song at this show that we’re having in our basement.”
That was the first show essentially that I ever played. By the end of the trip, we traveled for another couple of weeks back to Colorado, we’d written an entire album’s worth of stuff. As soon as we got back to Colorado we already had a band name. We had all the songs ready to record and all of a sudden I was a musician again.
Wow! All because of a broken mast. That’s wild.
SU: The boat was called the Dove. And the book that was about the boat is called Dove. So we called our band Dovekins. Never looked back.
Looking back at her wildly successful and always adventurous career up to this point, it feels inevitable that Lisa Loeb was always going to be a songwriter. But young Lisa probably could have done any creative job well. She grew up surrounded by music, yes, but she also had a passion for theater and got her degree in comparative literature. It was her theater and film side hustles that led Lisa to her first big break. Lisa’s friend Ethan Hawke shared her song “Stay” with Ben Stiller, who included the song in the soundtrack for the film Reality Bites. “Stay” was a massive hit and Lisa was the first-ever artist to have a Number 1 hit on the Billboard charts without a recording contract.
The second act of Loeb’s career is the main focus of our Basic Folk conversation. This chapter in the book of Lisa Loeb is all about… children’s music! As her latest album, That’s What It’s All About, demonstrates, Loeb has managed to keep playfulness and curiosity at the center of her life well into adulthood. She has figured out the delicate balance of making music for kids that adults can relate to as well. Happy memories of music from her own childhood, as well as nods to her elders, make this new record a sonic storybook that listeners of all ages will enjoy.
Artist:Max McNown Hometown: Bend, Oregon Latest Album:Wandering Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Almost went by Max Winter (Winter is my middle name)!
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
My pre-show rituals remain somewhat consistent from show to show. I stay hydrated throughout the day leading up to soundcheck and I typically take it easy on my voice while I rehearse the songs (because I haven’t warmed up at that point). Post-soundcheck, I rest in the green room and use a steam inhaler to clear my sinuses before letting my vocal cords cool down from the heat for at least 30 minutes. After that, I kill time until around 30 minutes before I hit the stage, occupying myself with iPhone games to distract me from the pre-show nerves. At 20 minutes before the show I do a 10 minute vocal routine. At the 10 minute mark I call a circle with my band and say a prayer of thankfulness, asking that whatever happens, we impact the crowd for good. Minutes before stepping on the stage I conduct a box breathing exercise to slow my heart rate, and I’m off to the races!
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
Growing up, I leaned on music to get me through some of my most difficult moments. If I could summarize my “mission” it would be to return that healing… To repay what music has done for me to those who hear my own songs.
How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?
Considering nearly all my songs are directly influenced by my own life, I hide behind characters often. I purposefully keep it vague when discussing which lines in which songs are fully “true stories.” Some of the most impactful films of my life are “based on a true story” and I take that knowledge into every writing room. Occasionally I take liberties when storytelling, but a lot of my work is pretty accurate to my own life journey.
Does pineapple really belong on pizza?
Considering Hawaiian-style pizza is one of my favorite foods, I strongly believe if you enjoy the taste, you can put whatever you want on pizza!
If you were a color, what shade would you be – and why?
If I were a color I’d have to think I’d be my favorite one, forest green… Simply because of my upbringing in the lush Oregon trees, my green eyes, and my love for nature!
From the crosshairs of the Boston folk community and punk/DIY scene emerges Sweet Petunia, an innovative duo consisting of multi-instrumentalist songwriters Maddy Simpson and Mairead Guy. A synthesis of banjos, queerness, emotive lyricism, and life-affirming harmonies, the pair’s music explores the fluidity of futurity, even when anchored in centuries of tradition.
With two EPs and several singles under their belt, Sweet Petunia graces the ears of multitudes with an active touring schedule and their vigorous participation in the Boston music scene. The queer alt folk duo’s commitment to community and uplifting overlooked histories only deepen the resounding impact that their music inspires.
So, to start things off, how did the two of you first meet?
Maddy Simpson: We both went to Berklee College of Music and we got placed into the same ensemble, 21st Century String Band, taught by Greg Liszt, who is an incredible banjo player. One day we were supposed to have an additional rehearsal with another guy that was in the ensemble, but he stood us up (shoutout Rob with your Legends of Zelda beanie with a brim!) The two of us showed up for the rehearsal and he never came. So we just had 45 minutes to talk to each other. We ended up talking about our goals, the music we liked, and found out that we had a lot of similar likes and plans for the future. So we decided to get together and play some music. When we did, immediately we were like, “Okay, let’s be in a band.”
What does your musical chemistry with one another feel like?
MS: Well, we always joke that we’re related. I mean, we do sound very similar when we sing together. So it kind of feels like we’re like a family band even though we’re not related.
Mairead Guy: Yeah, I mean it just works – really well. Obviously we put in a lot of work into what we do. But a lot of it feels very easy when we’re playing and arranging together. We have similar intuitions about the way things should go, and that makes it really fun and special to play together.
What is your process like when you songwrite and arrange together? And what’s it like arranging with two banjos?
MG: Most of the time we come to each other with an almost-completed song. Sometimes we write together, but usually we come together once the song is pretty much finished and arrange it from there. And that’s just a lot of playing it over and over and over and over, trying different things and seeing what sticks and what pops out.
That works! How did each of you come to the genre and/or the banjo?
MS: I came to folk music through the folk revival of the ’60s. I listened to a lot of Simon & Garfunkel growing up and then when I was a little bit older, I got into the folk revival revival, so like Mumford & Sons, The Head and the Heart, The Lumineers, and that kind of stuff. I had no idea that was just the tip of a really big iceberg – I didn’t really discover true traditional music until college, when I got really into old-time music and ’50s country blues and that kind of thing.
The reason I started playing banjo is that obviously it was pretty present in the music that I was listening to like all throughout high school and my childhood, but when I got to college I had a dorm-mate who played banjo. He was a banjo principal and he would play banjo in the lounge and the laundry room – just everywhere. One day I told him that I was interested and he said, “If you buy a banjo, I’ll give you lessons.” So over Thanksgiving break I went home, bought a banjo, came back, and started taking lessons with him. And then I started taking lessons with other people at Berklee and that was it for me – it became my primary instrument.
MG: So, I grew up in Virginia. There’s a lot of traditional, old-time bluegrass around in that area and a lot of my family is pretty musical – my uncle and aunt and my great uncle and his longtime partner. We’re are all professional musicians and my great uncle was a phenomenal clawhammer banjo player. My brother plays the banjo and I’d always wanted to play it, because it’s such a beautiful instrument. When Maddy and I first started playing together, we had a lot of songs where we would trade our instruments around. When she switched to banjo I thought it was the perfect time to finally sink my teeth in and do it. Similarly to her, once I picked one up I was like, “Oh my God, why haven’t I been doing this the whole time?” Yeah, it’s an addictive instrument to play.
I noticed that the stylization of a lot of your lyrics is super unique and you have several songs with strong narratives. Can you talk a bit about the song “Quilt Too Big to Fold”? I’ve had it on repeat for weeks.
MS: Thank you. Yeah, I wrote that song for a class. We were given this assignment to write a story song. And I was thinking a lot and sort of had this refrain in my head, “All you do is sit all day and sew.” So I did some journaling about all of the things that you can sit and sew. Fiber arts are really important to me and at the time of writing that song I was really into embroidery and I was getting really into visible mending – dabbling in this world of fiber arts.
I started thinking about all of the different fiber mediums you can have. And I started to think about quotes. And then, obviously, I’m also gay. I had already seen the AIDS Memorial Quilt, so I began to look into it more deeply. The quilt was started by a lesbian and was just one of the many forms of activism that came out of the AIDS crisis. The song sort of formed around that pretty quickly. It was easy to write given the fact that I’m queer and then just creating this work of fiction where I did a lot of thinking about what it would be like to go through that, taking my own passions and interests in sort of like translating them into a historical lens. And it was really an interesting process.
Really, really amazing stuff. I also saw that you both played an integral part in Club Passim’s inaugural Pride show? Can you talk a little bit about that and what that was like?
MG: Oh it was all Maddie! Well, we played it together, but it was all Maddie.
MS: Mairead kept me sane – I was freaking out the whole time. I was given the opportunity to curate Club Passim’s first ever truly Pride-themed show. We’ve done Pride open mics and once we had a queer festival, but that was during COVID, so it was all online. So we’ve had some queer-centered events before, but this was the first ever show specifically dedicated to Pride Month.
I was given this opportunity through The Folk Collective, which is an initiative that Passim is spearheading right now. Basically, it’s a cohort of 12 artists and cultural thought leaders that live in and around Boston. Passim has invited them into the club to synthesize what the future of folk music could be like, since folk music has, in the cultural narrative, been seen as a really white-washed and male-centric genre. So it’s 12 people of varying marginalized identities and people of all ages and races and gender identities and sexual identities coming together to talk about what the future of folk music could look like.
I was given an opportunity through the Folk Collective to bring together six queer acts who are making music either directly inspired by or within the traditional genre. We had several performers who played super traditional instruments – I mean, we both played banjo and we had somebody who plays the mountain dulcimer, which was really cool. We had somebody else who did country blues and talked about gender non-conforming people in the genre. And we also had some incredible singer-songwriters as well. It ended up being a crazy night of celebrating queer identities and also celebrating the traditional music that everybody at Club Passim loves so much. It was very, very awesome.
MG: Hell yeah. Beautiful night – Maddie put so much time and effort and care into curating all of these artists and making this happen in such an important and cognitive way, and it was just such an incredible thing to ride along the coattails of.
Hopefully there are many more! In general, what does the community feel like in Boston, within the folk scene, and how do you see Sweet Petunia fitting into it?
MG: I think that Maddie and I have a particular perspective on it just because we work at Club Passim, so we see all the musicians that pass through. But I mean, as is evidenced by the event that we just had, there is a pretty wide community of queer and trans folk musicians who are drawing inspiration from traditional roots music. And even beyond tradition, things like the pedal or lap steel are becoming super popular in different genres of music. Even the banjo people are using electric banjo to get a super sick like electric guitar tone and that sort of thing.
MS: Yeah, I was just gonna say that we sit in a really weird intersection, because we’re not quite in the traditional folk scene. We’re also really established within the DIY scene as well, which is primarily indie rock and hardcore music in Boston. But because we exist in both circles we get the best of both worlds. Sometimes we get asked to play punk shows, but we also can play listening room venues like Passim.
Outside of the folk and Americana scene, what are your biggest influences right now?
MS: I love slowcore and also the huge bootgaze thing that’s happening right now. I feel like I exist in the perfect time to be 25 and into DIY music, because most of the music being made around here at this point has some bootgaze element.
Could you define bootgaze?
MS: It’s like shoegaze-inspired country music. Or country-inspired shoegaze music. Some blur into indie rock, some are just shoegaze bands that use country instrumentation or come from a place where country music is the main genre. The band Wednesday is probably the biggest right now. They sort of pioneered the genre. MJ Lenderman, Florry – there’s lots to explore if you look up bootgaze or countrygaze.
What about you, Mariead?
MG: I mean, definitely same. I’ve also really been loving a lot of hyperpop and pop music recently. Just like the energy in songs like that is so interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about the banjo as a similar percussion to a drum machine in a super fast hyperpop song. I’ve been trying to think about ways to incorporate that because most of the songs that I write make you feel kind of bad, but I think it’d be kind of fun to write songs that made you feel kinda good.
I think you’re onto something! Do you two have any fun projects coming up?
MG: We’re working on a Dolly Parton cover EP. Every year for Halloween since 2019 (except for 2020 because of COVID) we have done a Dolly Parton cover set. And so this will be our fifth year of Dolly Parton cover sets. So we wanted to do a little something to commemorate it.
MS: Yeah, it’s gonna be really fun. That’s coming in October. There will be a bill for a cover show. So if people are local to Boston, they can come to that.
That is so exciting! So you’re our One to Watch, but who are you watching? Are there any artists, creatives, musicians, etc. that you’re appreciating especially right now?
MS: I think that my one to watch is Roman Barten-Sherman, the person from Passim’s Pride show who does traditional country blues. She’s incredible. She’s so good. She is so smart. And so well-read and knowledgeable about early American country blues. During her shows she’ll introduce every song with so much knowledge about the genre and people who play it. She knows so much about gender-nonconforming and trans individuals and Black women who have contributed to the genre. She knows everything – it’s crazy. And then she’ll play the song and it’s the best fucking thing you’ve ever heard. She’s just so good. I think she’s going to take over the world. She’s my one to watch.
MD: I definitely second that – she’s one of the people I was thinking of. I would also say Jarsch. Just absolutely incredible, visceral songwriting. Beautiful lyricism relating to both the pain and joy of queerness and gender and life itself – religious trauma, all sorts of things. Everytime I see her play I literally just cry and cry. It’s so beautiful. She’s the only person I’ve seen able to yield a guitjo in an appropriate manner, and she just has so much love for what she’s doing and the community she’s in. I feel very lucky to know her. Definitely a one to watch.
(Editor’s Note: To mark the occasion of Bonny Light Horseman’s brand new double LP, Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free – which were released in June – we invite our readers to be as flies on the wall during a special exclusive interview, an entertaining and joyful conversation between the members of this folk supergroup, Eric D. Johnson, Josh Kaufman, and Anaïs Mitchell.
Read about the band’s memories of their first gigs played for money, about popular bands they don’t really “get,” and so much more below. Plus, dig into their deep and broad discography – together and separately – with our in-depth exploration of their catalog of recordings here.)
Eric D. Johnson: We totally love each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and we talk about everything, and I know everything about you guys, pretty much. I got some deep shit on you guys!
But, one question that I didn’t know the answer to, because I have a really funny answer for it is, what was the first show that you ever played where you got paid money? Do you remember?
Anaïs Mitchell: Oh wow!
EDJ: Can you guys remember that?
Josh Kaufman: I can remember. I don’t know if it was the very first, but it was certainly early. I played a yogurt shop in Port Jeff. I definitely played a lot of Grateful Dead songs. I think I played “Peggy-O” and like “Friend of the Devil.” I may have tried an ambitious solo acoustic version of “St. Stephen.”
EDJ: Tell me more though, was it a band? Was it you solo? And did you go just under the name Josh Kaufman?
JK: Just me. I don’t know if I was even booked. I don’t know. I may have just shown up.
EDJ: And what was the yogurt shop?
JK: I can’t remember the name of it either. I feel like I have a couple of friends that definitely would remember and definitely were there. That was the ‘90s, that was the era of the yogurt shop. It was basically a cafe, but let’s face it, it was a yogurt shop. I don’t know what I got paid, but I did get paid. I was probably 16; at a yogurt shop playing Grateful Dead songs for money.
AM: I want to see you then, Josh!
EDJ: I totally want to see him! I want to find the bootleg of that show. How did you get hooked up with the yogurt gig?
JK: Well, I was kind of in bed with big yogurt–
EDJ: You’re a big deal going way back–
JK: Going way back now! Well, how did I know about [it]? I think my friend Kevin Jones worked there. I think this is what happened. My friend Kevin Jones worked there, who you guys will meet when we play in California, because he just moved to the Bay Area. He’s going to come to our show. I think they were looking to up their game [at the yogurt shop]. And he was like, “Let’s see what happens. Let’s bring in a professional.” It must have been such a hot mess.
EDJ: I bet you were good from the jump. That’s my guess.
JK: That’s generous.
EDJ: Anaïs, what about you?
AM: I think the first time I made money for music was [when I was] 18 years old and I took a gap year. I was going to go to school, but I took a gap year and then I moved to Boston. You guys know this. I know you know this about me.
JK: You were a waitress.
AM: I was a waitress. Right. At this diner and then later as a waitress at this Cajun/Mexican place, which really sucked. It was in Central Square and I remember I had that job, because I quit it when I realized that I could make money playing in the subway. I could make equal money to what I made as a waitress. Basically, I would go down – I want to say that I played an Ovation Guitar. I’m sorry. [Laughs]
EDJ: Classic! Love this. I’m just gonna say: Ovation Guitar; yogurt shop. Just as visuals.
AM: Totally. [Laughs] I love this. They go together.
JK: You can actually eat yogurt out of an Ovation Guitar.
EDJ: They are designed for eating yogurt out of – in the ‘90s!
AM: I had a little portable [amp], my first amp. I just started playing electric on tour with you guys, but that’s not my first amp. My first amp was a little Crate amp. Do you know what those are? It was bright yellow. And it was cool. For plugging in your Ovation Guitar when you played in the subway, they were amazing.
So I did that. And the cool thing was I was really just getting going. I had written maybe a handful of songs – that I’ve repressed [since]. Like they were really not good, but if you’re playing in the subway, the audience turns over every 10 minutes. I played the same songs. I would just play them again and again. It was mostly my new songs that I had written. And I think I played a couple of folk songs that I learned from the Rise Up Singing folk music bible.
EDJ: But were people like throwing in money? What was your haul? Not because I care that much about money, but I’m just asking, is this your first profesh gig? Do you have your case? Do you have a little hat box?
AM: You got your case open and you put a couple dollars in there. You put like a five [dollar bill] to show people that. You don’t put coins, because then that’s what people put. I actually can’t remember, with inflation, like, what was that? I want to say I would go down there for an hour or two and make fifty to a hundred bucks.
JK: Oh, that’s really good. That sounds really good to me.
AM: That’s why I quit my waitressing job! I was like, this sucks. I’m just gonna do this.
EDJ: You’re 18, what is that, the year 2000?
AM: Or something… it was ‘99. Yes.
EDJ: Okay, sick. With inflation, I think that’s good. I think you did really well
AM: I might be misremembering, might be adjusting for inflation [wrong] in my memory.
JK: I think I got paid, by the yogurt shop, like $46 or something like that, which when I think about it now it’s almost like the tooth fairy or something. I think somebody just felt bad for me. They’re like, “This is 36, 46 bucks, just take it, go.” You know that, “Here’s some gas money.”
EDJ: I like that it was $46.
JK: I don’t think it was $50. I think I’d remember it if it was $50. That would have seemed like a lot of money to me. I will say, the guitar I was playing, Eric, and Anaïs, would have been the same guitar that I still play – the Guild that we made our records with and that Eric played on our recent tour.
AM: I spent some time with that guy.
Eric, I want to hear your story.
EDJ: I got you gonna beat financially by a couple bucks. When I was like 17, my friend Steve and I decided I was going to join Steve’s band just as a singer, but I was too scared to just sing and stand there. I did not know how to play guitar. So, I got a crash course in guitar from Steve. Steve came to one of our shows last summer, I think, or two summers ago when we opened up for [Bruce] Hornsby.
Steve gave me a crash course in guitar, but I didn’t really know how to apply guitar chords to cover songs, you know? I was like, “I guess I’m going to have to write.” I immediately became a songwriter, because I was too dumb to learn how to play a Pink Floyd song or something like that.
All of a sudden we became this folk duo that played a mix of covers and originals, as I was learning chords. I learned how to play some covers. I think “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead was the first – speaking of Grateful Dead, Josh. We played at this cafe in our little downtown of our funny little suburb called Caffe Trieste. It was actually really cool. It was very ‘90s. When I remember it, it smelled like clove cigarettes in there and herbal tea. It was literally a coffee house, like from the old times where you smoke cigarettes and drink coffee at night and watch music. I’m not saying it was like Greenwich Village or something like that, but it was cool.
We would play there, but for no money. That was kind of like open mics and stuff like that. We played “Tangerine” by Led Zeppelin and we played “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead. I think we played “Wish You Were Here.” And then we played sort of a smattering of my originals, which were terrible.
But, I was at home [one day] and this is in 1993. My mom was like, “You have a phone call.” And it was some lady and she says, “My daughter, Katie, she’s turning fourteen and she’s a huge fan of your music. And will you play her birthday party?” And I was like, “What?” We don’t have a band or like fans or anything like that. But apparently this girl had seen us at a school assembly – where all we played was the Cheers theme – and she’s turning fourteen. I was like, “What type of money do you usually get for things like this?” But I sort of fumbled and before I could finish and name a price, she was like, “Would $150 be good?”
That was like an unfathomable amount of money. But she also wanted us to play two sets and play for like literally two hours in their living room. We had about 20 minutes worth of material.We went to the house. Her dad owned an automobile dealership, so the house was nice. It was a room full of thirteen and fourteen year old, she was a freshman and we were seniors. I just remember that. So maybe she was turning fifteen.
When we walked in, it was like Beatlemania. They like, screamed and stuff. There were parents, friends, and stuff who were there and they were kind of these wealthy people. My house was very unsophisticated and it felt like we had sort of stepped into this sophisticated realm of our like dumb little suburb. These were the elites! We played our show, only we had not learned more songs in order to play. So we did the Anaïs thing, but without the audience turnover. We just played things over again. And they asked us to play “Rocky Raccoon” by the Beatles. Then there was a set break and we had no more songs. We went out to Steve’s Jeep and got super high and then came back in and just played literally the same set again and doubled up on “Rocky Raccoon.” We played it four times in one night.
Anaïs Mitchell: What were you wearing? Did you dress up?
EDJ: I’m sure I was wearing something weird. I had a very schizophrenic style at the time. It was the ‘90s! I would wear plaid ‘60s golf pants, but I had this shirt that was a bread truck delivery shirt that had the name “Byron” on it like a name tag. My hair looked like Jason Priestley from 90210. I hadn’t honed my style yet, but I’m sure I just tried to dress up cool.
It was quite a first taste.
AM: That’s amazing. You might be the only band to play “Rocky Raccoon” four times in a show.
JK: The Beatles never played it one time in a show, I don’t think. So you beat the Beatles.
EDJ: Someone asked me this question recently – and you don’t have to answer with a modern band, because it could be more controversial – but what’s a band that’s iconic, that people love, that you’re like, “Not that…”
JK: Oh, Annie has a list of these they’re called like, unimpeachable bands that she doesn’t want to listen to. That she wants to impeach.
AM: I want to know her list!
JK: For instance, I think the Stones are on there. She’s like, “I mean, sure, the Stones are great or whatever, but I don’t want to listen to them.”
EDJ: For the Situation readers, by the way, this is Annie, Josh’s wife [we’re talking about]. Annie Nero.
JK: Yeah! But, for my own… let me think about that for a second.
AM: I have one, maybe. Maybe it’s going to be the same.
EDJ: Mine’s a little bit The Smiths – I actually think that the band sounds great. It’s sort of like The Doors, for me, where I’m not as into the front person [as I am the band], and I have to believe in the front person.
My other one is that I love Bob Dylan, but he’s like my 18th favorite songwriter. It’s still really high up there in the pantheon of songwriters, but probably a very low ranking as far as Dylan goes. I know Dylan’s a big one for you, Josh, but for me I have seventeen others I put above him. That’s an arbitrary number, but yeah.
AM: I was gonna say Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I’d be interested in hearing Annie’s whole list, ’cause I do wanna say, I feel like it’s a gendered thing. I’m not even gonna be eloquent about it, but I do think we have deified certain male artisan bands.
Where it’s like, “Aren’t you into this?” And I’m like, “Actually no.” But I sort of feel like they’re unimpeachable. Like I’m supposed to be like, “Oh yeah, CSNY!!” But my feelings are complex about CSNY, because I love Neil Young and I love Graham Nash. I think it’s really David Crosby – rest in peace – that like, for somehow I’m [hung up on]. I read about how he produced the first Joni Mitchell record and, for me, Joni’s like the top of the totem. Reading about their dynamic, back in the day [is troubling.]
Everyone loved Crosby. She had to kind of be like, “Oh my God, it’s Cros!” You know, but she was Joni Mitchell! I couldn’t really feel that stuff. Yeah, that’s gonna be my band. It’s frustrating.
Sorry, we canceled. [Laughs]
EDJ: No, I think CSNY is a reasonable one!
JK: I was gonna say The Who, honestly. The Who are awesome and everything and certainly there’s ‘60s garage [rock] stuff that’s fun and everything.
EDJ: I think it’s okay to throw fire at those guys. Dylan can take it and be pissed. They can fucking take it!
JK: I guess I feel like that’s lazy of me.
I think Anaïs’ comment about this sort of Mount Rushmore of at the time, early 20s baby boomer white men [was well made]. When they were very young with guitars, for some reason, we’ve decided that those guys are the best.
EDJ: It’s like the Rolling Stone magazine “top 40 cool guys” list. It’s like a mural at a guitar center in suburban Atlanta that you stopped at on tour.
But also Anaïs, sidebar, in my seventeen songwriters above Dylan, Joni Mitchell is my number one, so…
JK: She’s at the top of my list for sure, but I think in the top zone. I don’t know if they’re like tiered necessarily, because since it is art and stuff, it does sort of depend on the opening that I have for it on any given day to enter my heart.
AM: I got a couple more. You guys, this is going to be wild. Well, maybe not. I mean, you guys know me pretty well, because it’s some of these things, the music is undeniable and has shaped other music, but it’s not for me, you know? I would put the Beatles in that category.
JK: I was waiting for you to say that!
AM: I would put both [CSNY and the Beatles] in there. And I sort of appreciate it when I hear it. Like when I hear it coming out of someone’s car or on the radio or whatever, but I will never put that music on myself.
EDJ: I feel like with Beatles, if it didn’t catch you at a certain moment it’s a tough, massive thing to dig into. I didn’t get into Joni until I was 30, and it was like one of the pivotal musical moments of my life.
That’s not to say, “I think you have to be 38 to get into Joni,” but I think for whatever reason, she’s so deep and cool and crazy that I think it took me having a little life behind me to sort of understand what it was about. Someone who had seen clouds from both sides now, like at that point, it hit me like super hard.
I think Beatles, talk about iconography and stuff like that! It’s like, I totally get it. But I can’t. I love the Beatles. It exists in my musical and our band’s musical DNA. I’m never not thinking about like a McCartney melody.
AM: I had some grand thought while you were just saying that, about when you encounter music and when it speaks to you. Because yes, if you’re fourteen, if you’re fifteen discovering Ani DiFranco as I was. She became like my whole raison d’etre, but then for someone discovering her later, at a different time in their life or whatever, it’s different. You had to be a certain age to get the Joni.
And, I wanted to talk about the Grateful Dead because, like the Beatles, I might’ve put them in [this category] if we had spoken a different time, but now I know and love you guys. I sort of became like a late-blooming deadhead, because of your love for the dead. I really got into it and really into the lyrics. I genuinely, really appreciate that music now, in a way that I didn’t like, ten years ago. Part of that is because I love you guys.
I kind of love how your love for people then transfers to your love for the things that they love. And that then becomes a thing that you love.
JK: I totally feel that. I’m not going to name any names here, because I feel like it could be misconstrued, but I do feel like I remember early on going out and opening up for bands with friends and at the beginning of it having already made up my mind about this music or something. But then, getting to know these people intimately over the course of a month and having these accelerated friendships as a result of being around each other every day and sort of falling for what they’re doing a little bit. Or maybe, at least being way more open to it than I ever would have been just hearing it on the radio or hearing it in a friend’s car.
So much music [from] growing up I associate with people that I love, for sure. Getting into Bob Dylan ‘cause I love my dad. At a young age like, “This guy’s obsessed with this guy!” And I guess I’m kind of obsessed with this guy who’s into this guy.
A funny one for me is They Might Be Giants. I love the songwriting of They Might Be Giants and I love that band so much, but I wouldn’t expect one of you guys to get into it now if you weren’t into it when you were fourteen. You know what I mean?
EDJ: I love the point you made Josh, about touring with bands or something, especially in the indie rock days, where you’re really like up in each other’s grills. You bond in a kind of a different way. …
You guys, we have four minutes left. What are your top three favorite foods, Josh.
JK: My top three favorite foods, um… Today I would say, I like Szechuan Chinese food. I like Greek food. And I like Italian food. You know, all the classic Northern Italian things and all the Roman pasta stuff. I mean, who am I kidding, right?
I’m going genres, not dishes, because for me, it’s definitely more about a palette than it is about a specific [dish]. You know, grilled fish and lemon and tomatoes and cucumbers. If I want something in that zone, then I want Greek food. If I want spicy, zingy Szechuan peppercorn, it doesn’t really matter what it is, it could be like shrimp or tofu or chicken, or it could just be string beans. I just get in the mood and go in that direction.
EDJ: Anaïs, what do you got?
AM: I just got so hungry when you described the fish with the lemon and then the tomatoes, Josh. Now that’s what I want. All right. The first thing I’m going to say is Josh’s food. I want not what you just said, but food that Josh Kaufman cooks. I would like the fluffy eggs that you make sometimes. And also one time you whipped up a chicken soup. Do you remember that? You just whipped it up so fast and it was the best chicken soup I’ve ever had.
JK: Oh, I love that. That’s so sweet. I love cooking for you guys.
AM: I also love and I recently had– do you remember the place Wang’s in Park Slope? It’s kind of like fried chicken, Southern stuff, but then also is it Korean?
JK: Korean fried chicken? I think, right?
AM: I had something like that with Ramona, my older daughter recently, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is very delicious.”
Eric, you tell us yours.
EDJ: Oysters, shrimp cocktail, nachos… uh, buffalo wings. And that’s it. Love you guys.
AM: Love you.
EDJ: Love you. Hopefully it’s all turned out awesome and we have so many cool things to talk about. I’ll see yous on Thursday night!
Today, critically acclaimed roots musicians Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin (Odanak First Nation) have announced their upcoming collaborative album, symbiont. The news comes with a first listen, “My Way’s Cloudy,” featuring Joe Rainey (Red Lake Ojibwe) and an entrancing video directed by Lokotah Sanborn. (Watch and listen above.)
The album, set for release September 27 on Smithsonian Folkways, builds loosely on the storytelling of Blount’s lauded 2022 project, The New Faith, imagining a not-so-distant future world marked by climate disaster and civil unrest. Utilizing Blount’s expertise on discovering, uncovering, and showcasing vernacular music often forgotten or overlooked by folk, old-time, and the greater roots music communities, the duo look forward by looking back. “My Way’s Cloudy,” for instance, is described in a press release as “a spiritual collected from formerly enslaved Black people at the Hampton Institute – mere miles from where Jake’s family originates.”
But, as the track demonstrates, Blount and Obomsawin defy expectations and longstanding traditions of “song collection” or colonialist archiving that’s typified this type of repertoire building in the past. As they declare in the album materials:
“symbiont is a remix album,” they explain. “The works included here synthesize instruments, songs, teachings, and oratory from different traditions with modern literary, political, and compositional sensibilities (and even a dash of ‘hard’ science). The interactions between these disciplines give rise to the musical, ideological, and spiritual synergisms that undergird symbiont – and also to points of intense conflict.”
It’s clear this “genrequeer” project will be transformative and revolutionary – literally and figuratively. “My Way’s Cloudy” is ethereal, grooving, and dark, but with a glint; a slight sheen that denotes even in the proverbial (or demonstrable) end times, there’s art to be made, conversations to be had, and stories to be told, kept, and carried on. Between Blount’s curatorial and ethnomusicological knowledge, Obomsawin’s remarkable compositional and free jazz chops, and the duo’s multi-instrumentalist skills, these old-time folk remixes – made with assists from incredible collaborators and often, plants as music-makers! – symbiont will illustrate so many of the intricate ways by which music can transcend time, alter history and the future, while having a striking purpose in the present.
symbiont is impeccably described as “Indigenous and Afrofuturist folklore,” but do not mistake these songs and their inspirations for fantasy. If there’s one thing Blount and Obomsawin can accomplish together, it’s grounding such a high concept project in reality and the everyday. This will be a must-listen album, as “My Way’s Cloudy” foretells in so many ways.
In Their Words: “I wrote this song as I was having a reckoning about a sense of stagnation — in my life and personal growth. Nothing was bad, but nothing was great either, and I knew it was time to blow my life up a little and make some space for new things.
“Sonically, we all had The Beatles song ‘Two of Us’ very much in our ears when we were working on the arrangement, and Dominic Billett slipped right into that vision with his drumming. Owen’s dog gets a production credit, as he chose to ring his dog bell right as we were trying to find the perfect sound to complete the chorus. He has been immortalized in the track.” – Libby Weitnauer
Photo Credit: Betsy Phillips
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