Tag: Americana

WATCH: Audrey Spillman, “Summertime”

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Artist: Audrey Spillman
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Summertime”
Album: Neon Dream
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Label: Paper Star

In Their Words: “I’ve always loved ‘Summertime’ and the way it pulls you in emotionally through the lyric and melody. I wanted to create a swampy, dark, lullaby-esque sound that you could get lost in and somehow capture the way that song has always felt to me upon hearing it for the first time. Throughout my journey I’ve worked at trying to uncover my unique voice. I’ve always been drawn to the torch singers of the past and this song allowed me to further explore that style of emotive singing. Throughout the whole album, moments of my life are highlighted whether it be falling in love, having a child, or the loss of someone close to me. These songs give life to my most precious moments and memories.” — Audrey Spillman

Photo credit: Neilson Hubbard

WATCH: Jackson+Sellers, “Hush” (Yamaha x BGS Artist Sessions)

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Artist: Jackson+Sellers (Jade Jackson and Aubrie Sellers)
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA and Nashville, TN
Song: “Hush”
Album: Breaking Point
Release Date: October 22, 2021
Label: ANTI-

In Their Words: “I really loved [Aubrie Sellers’] voice and asked if she’d be interested in doing a co-write / duet. I wasn’t expecting a response but moments after I sent the message she responded with she’d love to. I knew the song would benefit from heavy female vocal harmonies, but working with Aubrie was such a boost. Collaborating with someone who’s so energetically strong, it gives you even more creativity and license to explore.” — Jade Jackson

Editor’s note: Watch more of our Yamaha x BGS Artist Sessions here.

WATCH: Digging Roots, “Cut My Hair”

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Artist: Digging Roots
Hometown: Barrie, Ontario, Canada
Song: “Cut My Hair”
Album: Zhawenim
Release Date: 2022
Label: Ishkōdé Records

In Their Words: “‘Cut My Hair’ is a mishkiki (medicine) song about the Indian Residential School experience which is directly linked to genocide, colonialism, oppression, and the actions that this country is built upon. While our families were taken from their homes and sent to these horrible Canadian institutions, we were the last generation to not attend, but consequently suffer from over 100 years of generational effects. With the growing present findings of over 6,000 buried children at Residential Schools across Canada this song was written as an attempt to focus our energies in a positive and grounded direction. Where does one go when one’s people have suffered this much? It gets funnelled into belting out lyrics that feel meaningful and playing slide guitar until my bellbottoms quiver because the amplifier is cranked. We believe in the transformative power of music and its healing effects, this is our offering.” — Raven Kanatakta, Digging Roots

Photo credit: Ratul Debnath

The BGS Radio Hour – Episode 219

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 have a previously unreleased live performance from Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers, as well as Béla Fleck’s return to bluegrass, a conversation on songwriting with Rodney Crowell, and much more.

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Béla Fleck – “Round Rock”

Our current Artist of the Month recently gathered an incredible crew of bluegrass power pickers for a live rendition of “Round Rock,” a tune that he included on his recent album My Bluegrass Heart, but that he had in his back pocket for nearly 20 years. He had been saving the piece for the right band to come along, and with this lineup, he has certainly found the players up for the task.

The Kody Norris Show – “Farmin’ Man”

Kody Norris’ “Farmin’ Man” is a true-life account of the American farmer – from the perspective of Kody himself, who grew up in a tobacco farming family in the mountains of east Tennessee. “I hope when fans see this they will take a minute to pay homage to one of America’s greatest heroes…”

Katie Callahan – “Lullaby”

Katie Callahan wrote “Lullaby” on the edge of the pandemic, before anyone could’ve imagined the way parenting and work and school and home could be enmeshed so completely. The song became a sort of meditation for her amidst the chaos.

Della Mae – “The Way It Was Before”

For Della Mae’s Celia Woodsmith, the process of writing “The Way It Was Before” was one of the toughest. [The song] “took Mark Erelli and I six hours to write (three Zoom sessions). Half of that time was spent talking, looking up stories, getting really emotional about the state of the world. We wanted to make sure that every word counted, so we took our time and tried to honor each of the characters (who are actual people). The pandemic isn’t even behind us, and yet I keep hearing people say that they can’t wait to get back to “the old days.” There’s so much about “the old days” that needs changing. After everything we’ve been through in the last 18 months, I found that writing a song like this felt impossibly huge. I may not have finished it if it hadn’t been for Mark.”

Ross Adams – “Tobacco Country”

The inspiration behind singer-songwriter Ross Adams’ “Tobacco Country” came from the idea of always staying true to your roots and remembering the people who helped you follow your path and dreams.
It’s a track paying tribute to the South.

Swamptooth – “The Owl Theory”

Savannah, Georgia-based bluegrass band Swamptooth wrote this jammy, energetic tune based on a Netflix series and true crime mystery with an unlikely theory that involves an owl. Read more from Swamptooth themselves.

Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers – “Roses In The Snow (Live)”

A September 1990 performance by Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center in Nashville had been lost to time, but now, Nonesuch Records has released it as a new live album, which features a slew of songs that were not performed on the iconic At the Ryman record.

Jon Randall – “Keep On Moving”

“‘Keep On Moving’ started with a guitar lick and a first line,” Jon Randall tells us. “Once I put pen to paper, I never looked back. That’s exactly what the song is about as well. Sometimes I wish I could just get in the car, hit the gas and keep going. I think we all feel that way and probably hesitate to do so in fear of finding somewhere you don’t want come back from. What if there is a place where nobody gives a damn about where you come from and the mistakes you’ve made? That would be a hard place to leave.”

Fieldguide – “Tupperware”

“Tupperware” came to Canadian singer-songwriter Field Guide all at once in about 20 minutes. It’s a song about his early days living in Winnipeg, but it’s also more generally about the beautiful parts of life that aren’t meant to last forever, and coming to terms with that.

Rodney Crowell – “One Little Bird”

Courage and truthfulness. Those qualities permeate Rodney Crowell’s new album, Triage; in fact, it’s safe to say they’ve guided Crowell’s entire career. In our latest Cover Story, we spoke to Crowell about the new project, making amends, mortality, and so much more.

“I learned a long time ago,” he explains, “If it’s coming from my own experience, there’s a good chance I’m a step closer to true. And I can mine my personal truth, but confessional only goes so far. I’ve tried to walk that line; if I can carefully write about my own experience and put it in a broader perspective, then [for] the listener, it becomes their experience…”

Triage, as specific and particular as it gets, feels like it contains truth that belongs to each and every listener. “That’s why I feel like I have to be really careful; if I make it too much about my experience, then I start to tread on the listener’s experience.”

Suzanne Santo – “Mercy”

In a recent edition of 5+5, Suzanne Santo shared her thoughts on the emotional alterations of cinema, the gift of playing music for a living, taking long, rejuvenating walks, and much more.

Jordan Tice (featuring Paul Kowert) – “River Run”

Hawktail members Jordan Tice and Paul Kowert collaborated on an original tune, “River Run,” during lockdown. According to Tice, the song “started with a little lick I had been carrying around in the key of D — a speedy little cascading thing that felt good to let roll off the fingers that I’d find myself playing in idle moments.” The end result evokes the lightness and constancy of a swiftly moving river as it passes over rocks, rounds curves, and speeds and slows. “[I] hope you experience the same sense of motion while listening and are able to glean a little bit of levity from it.”

Skillet Licorice – “3-In-1 2 Step”

Skillet Licorice combined a few different old-timey, ragtime, swinging melodies into a sort of parlor song medley that feels like it came straight out of Texas, complete with banjo and mandolin harmonies.

Photos: (L to R) Rodney Crowell by Sam Esty Rayner Photography; Emmylou Harris by Paul Natkin/Getty Images, circa 1997; Béla Fleck by Alan Messer

LISTEN: Fireside Collective, “And the Rain Came Down”

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Artist: Fireside Collective
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina
Song: “And the Rain Came Down”
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “A few years back, I was listening to a story on NPR about some of the intensifying storms that had been hitting the coastal regions of the Southeast. At one point, the host said ‘the rain came down, and the rain came down…’ and for some reason it stuck with me. I jotted it down in my notebook and started thinking of ways to use it in a song. It didn’t hit me until about a month into COVID, when there was still so much uncertainty and nobody really knew what was going to happen. It just so happened that I had recently begun reading the Old Testament from a historical/analytical perspective and the story of the Great Flood in Genesis seemed to resonate with our current times. I started thinking of the whole experience as a paradigm shifting event, much like the events of Genesis. There were so many parallels between the never-ending storms of Noah’s time and the sociopolitical events that took place during the first few months of the pandemic.

“Despite the song’s somber overtones and the uncertainty of the story, there is still a message of hope. The sailor in the song seems to understand that despite the endless storms and the rising waters, behind the clouds the light still shines. He keeps pushing on despite the challenges he faces with hopes of a brighter day. Many people in the music industry were forced to find silver linings and to push through the storms in the last year and a half. Fireside Collective has found many ways to reinvent ourselves and to use the situation to better ourselves. Even though we still face unprecedented challenges, we are fortunate to be able to still create music and find ways to share our art with the world. We are beyond thrilled to release ‘And the Rain Came Down’ and we are so delighted to be able to record new music. We know there are brighter days ahead and we have never appreciated the ability to play music for a living as much as we do right now.” — Jesse Iaquinto, Fireside Collective

Photo credit: Jace Kartye

WATCH: Single Girl, Married Girl, “Wreck Cut Loose”

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Artist: Single Girl, Married Girl
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “Wreck Cut Loose”
Album: Three Generations of Leaving
Release Date: November 19, 2021
Label: Head Bitch Music

In Their Words: “I’ve always loved torch songs and big weepy ballads, especially country ones. ‘Wreck Cut Loose’ lets me belt and sing like the incomparable voices I grew up listening to and have tried to emulate countless times — Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Tammy Wynette, and Patsy Cline, but in a contemporary musical setting. We didn’t want to sound like an old country or pop vocal song, but the lineage should be obvious.

“Lyrically, it’s about something most people have gone through in their lives — a breakup, but Dan Morosi, our friend and former drummer, who wrote the song, manages to portray the emotional intensity we feel in the aftermath of being dumped through simple, direct language. It sort of fixates on mundane elements that belie the complex feelings being expressed and examined, all the while building to this heartbreaking crescendo.

“For the music video, we wanted a concept that was not gimmicky but a little tongue-in-cheek. It’s literally one shot once the music starts; I’m walking home from being dumped and encounter multiple friends along the way who try to cheer me up, when all I want to do is go home, be alone, and have a really good cry. It’s all to say that we need a little support in our lives during hard times, that we are stronger together. We hope the video feels like a big group hug.” — Chelsey Coy, Single Girl, Married Girl

Photo credit: Anna Azarov

WATCH: Colin Linden, “Honey on My Tongue”

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Artist: Colin Linden
Hometown: White Plains, New York; Toronto; Nashville since 1997 and as long as they let me.
Song: “Honey on My Tongue”
Album: bLOW
Release Date: September 17, 2021
Label: Highway 20/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “Roots music and blues do speak to a lot of people right now. Much of the healing and release you get from listening to this music, the power and form of expression, has shown itself to be so vital in these times. It feels timeless because it’s such a raw nerve. I hope the memories of every soul who has loved and been loved are like honey on our tongues.” — Colin Linden

Photo credit: Laura Godwin

Béla Fleck: “It’s Clear to Me That Bluegrass Is Still My Defining Element”

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Novelist Thomas Wolfe famously declared that you can’t go home again. But then again, Wolfe is not remembered as a musician who played bluegrass, a style that’s all about going home again.

So it is that Béla Fleck’s new album is a homecoming, and an ambitious one at that. A third installment in Fleck’s long-running bluegrass trilogy, My Bluegrass Heart (Renew/BMG Records) is his first bluegrass album of this century. It’s a double-disc effort with an all-star cast – from old hands like Sam Bush and Jerry Douglas to new stars including Sierra Hull, Molly Tuttle, Chris Thile, Billy Strings, and more – with a running time not much shorter than the first two volumes put together.

“It’s hard to get around,” Fleck says. “As much as I may pretend to be something else, I am bluegrass at heart and that’s okay. It’s something I’m proud of and have come to embrace more as time goes on. Part of that is aging – do something when you’re young and you may not want that to be what defines you. Bluegrass just seemed like too obvious a pigeonhole for a banjo player when I was starting out and there was so much other music I loved, too. But after a lot of exploring, it’s clear to me that bluegrass is still my defining element.”

The album title of My Bluegrass Heart is actually a riff on an unexpected source, the late jazz pianist Chick Corea, a sometime collaborator of Fleck’s. One of Fleck’s favorite Corea albums was 1976’s My Spanish Heart, an ironic title because Corea was of Italian rather than Spanish descent.

“He was a guy from Boston with a natural affinity for Latin music, which was central to who he was even though he did not have legit entry in terms of ethnicity,” Fleck says. “That resonates for me. I’m from New York, of Eastern European and Russian descent with no natural connection to folk or bluegrass. So I’m defining myself with music that’s not necessarily my heritage, but being an outsider helps you bring new things to the idiom. When I go off to study Indian music, I can come back and write this album’s ‘Vertigo,’ which has very Indian rhythmic devices. Finding a way to insert Indian music or jazz or classical into bluegrass is very satisfying.”

The roots of My Bluegrass Heart go all the way back to Fleck’s first bluegrass album, 1988’s Drive, which he made with a core group including Bush, Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Mark Schatz, and most notable of all the late great guitarist Tony Rice (to whom the new album is dedicated, along with Corea). That same cast appeared on the 1999 follow-up, The Bluegrass Sessions: Tales From the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 2.

Had Fleck had his way, the same crew would have convened for volume three, and it would have come out many years ago. But the holdup was Rice, the troubled but brilliant guitarist who died in 2020 on Christmas day after years of health struggles.

“Playing bluegrass with Tony Rice was such a profound, dramatic upgrade from anything I’d ever experienced before,” Fleck says. “I wanted to do it again and reached out a lot over the years, but there was no response. I was puzzled and disappointed. Hurt, even. But come to find out that a lot of his other friends were going through the same thing with him as he started to isolate. He was not confident about playing anymore, so he shut it down and withdrew. And at a certain point, I heard about some close musician friends of mine who were starting to have hand problems. I thought, ‘If I don’t do this soon, some people I want to play with might not be able to anymore.’”

To that end, Fleck convened the surviving cast from his first two bluegrass forays, while adding young guns like Strings and Tuttle as well as other longtime pals including Tony Trischka, David Grisman, and Michael Cleveland. There’s plenty of firepower throughout these 19 tracks, especially on “Slippery Eel” — the first-ever studio work featuring the pairing of Strings and Thile. Fleck did his best to come up with something that would challenge those two, but notes that, “Of course they made it look easy.”

All 19 tracks are instrumentals, with a conservatory feel akin to Punch Brothers (several of whom appear) or the Kruger Brothers. But there are vocals of a sort, between-song quips and jokes by various players.

“This is such a community record and I thought it’d be cool for people to know this bluegrass community through these voices,” Fleck says. “You know, Sierra Hull talking, Tony Trischka and Jerry Douglas laughing, Sam Bush being silly, David Grisman being David Grisman. I think people in the bluegrass world will know every voice. When I’d play the record for people, they would always tell me, ‘I hope you keep that stuff in. It really humanizes it.’ I’m really excited and satisfied with everything about this record. The community aspect, hearing everybody play and talk, makes me happy. It’s like a love letter to the bluegrass community. If there’s ever been any doubt I love this music, there’s this.”

Editor’s note: Read about more about our Artist of the Month, Béla Fleck, here.

Photo credit: Alan Messer

The Secret Sisters Dust Off a 1940 Woody Guthrie Track on ‘Home in This World’

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Eighty-one years ago, an icon of American music released a record that has stood the test of time like few other bodies of work. Legendary storyteller and musician Woody Guthrie’s album, Dust Bowl Ballads, is that record, and now Elektra Records has issued an album that celebrates its musical singularity.

Titled Home in this World: Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads, the collection is far more than a restoration, remix, or remastering. Instead, producer Randall Poster tailored a reimagination of the album and rerecorded it with a slew of carefully curated artists such as John Paul White, Colter Wall, and Chris Thile. One of the highlights is “Dust Cain’t Kill Me,” performed by the Secret Sisters. “One of our COVID lockdown highlights was holing up in a hometown studio to record a tribute song to the great American storyteller, Woody Guthrie,” they said. “We loved swampin’ up his folk tune with a little Alabama mud. Hope y’all like it too!”

With such passion at the heart of it, Home in This World brings new life to music that has shaped American culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. An avid fan as well as an experienced music supervisor, Poster cast the artists by drawing on his keen sensibility for film music. “Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads is as relevant as ever,” he stated. “While profiteers exploit our natural resources, there is a growing sensitivity to the harsh farming practices that put our well-being at risk, and a concerted movement toward regenerative agriculture that can reinvigorate the soil and push back on climate change. I asked some of my favorite artists to help render these songs, hoping that this collection will reinforce the enduring power and prescience of Guthrie’s music and reveal the power of song. I tried to think of these songs as the soundtrack to a movie, building a narrative, a story where the world wakes up to the climate threats and unite to combat it successfully. It’s a great movie.”

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

The Show on the Road – Sammy Rae & The Friends

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we talk to Brooklyn-based bandleader and jazz-roots singer extraordinaire Sammy Rae, who for the last four years has barnstormed the country with her kinetic octet, The Friends.

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Look, when you’re young and inspired, you drop out of college, you’re waiting tables and you’re thinking about starting a jazzy pop band — most people (as well as common sense and basic economics) tell you to start small. Get a few like-minded musicians in a room, work and work on your best songs, try packing out a few local shows, put some radio-ready singles on the internet, do a music video or two. See what happens. But Sammy Rae does her own thing — and has done pretty much the opposite.

Much like your host of this fine program, Z. Lupetin (who went against all advice and began Dustbowl Revival as an 8 to 10 piece genre-bending, New Orleans-string band mashup in 2008), Sammy has harnessed the open-minded, countercultural energy of Broadway musicals, the slinky funk-pop of the 1970s AM radio, and her own rapid-fire poetic style to create a massive sound that’s made with three singers, two saxophones, and a fearless, seasoned rhythm section. Plus, they are all friends who don’t just treat this as a temporary weekend gig. Too much too soon? Well, ask the packed houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard if they care about playing it safe.

Sammy Rae knows the road ahead for The Friends won’t be easy, but so far, the response from listeners has been undeniable. Starting at tiny supportive clubs in New York like Rockwood Music Hall and graduating to the biggest rooms in one of the hardest towns to impress, the group struck a nerve with their debut EP The Good Life in 2018 — with the standout jazzy experiment “Kick It To Me” gaining nearly ten million steams and counting. “Don’t record songs over four minutes long,” they keep telling us. “No one will pay attention!” Yet their most listened-to track clocks in at nearly seven minutes.

What’s the lesson here? For Sammy it’s finally learning to trust her instincts and be herself. Their upbeat EP Let’s Throw A Party dropped in 2021. Make sure you stick around to the end of the episode to hear how Sammy’s experience as a queer teenager in a Connecticut girls’ Catholic school informed their new track, “Jackie Onassis.”