Tag: ani difranco

Ani DiFranco: Steady as She Goes

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Two decades ago, 1996 was a leap year, a time before America had lost itself in iPhones and Instagram, before music was as much of a soundtrack to life and love as it was a 10-second signal that your mom was calling, and why weren’t you picking up? It was also the year that Ani DiFranco released Dilate, her seventh album, which began, about one minute in, like this:

“Fuck you, and your untouchable face,” she sang. “Fuck you, for existing in the first place.”

DiFranco fired those words with both tenderness and insurmountable fury. And when she did, she spoke for a generation of people who were sick of being polite and playing by the rules — who didn’t fit in with political norms, gender norms, sexual norms, norm norms. With her hair braided and her arms toned from hours upon hours of strumming the guitar, she smiled as she sang; venom dripped from her lips, sealed with a kiss. Her words often rolled out like poetry or magnificent chains of thought, and she didn’t sensor. She was both a political voice and slinger of love songs, a truth-teller and a vehement judge. She took artificial nails and attached them with electrical tape, so she could pluck the strings hard enough to ask the harder questions. It was certainly never what Lee Press-Ons had in mind.

Dilate was just over 20 years ago. And her new LP, Binary, is her 20th studio album. But anyone who expected DiFranco to look back retrospectively on any of those occasions is searching in the wrong place, for the wrong person.

“I’m not really about heralding numbers or time,” DiFranco says. “For me, it’s really all one long song. Other people have asked or presented the idea of looking back. On the anniversary of Dilate, it was, ‘Oh, you should go back on tour and play Dilate!’ I’m like, ‘No, no. That is never going to happen! Next idea?’ I’m into looking forward. What’s the next idea? What’s the uncharted territory?”

Binary is DiFranco taking stock of her present, our present, and, in her own sort of premonition-inclined mind, the future. Though the songs were written before Donald Trump was elected president, they feel as though they could be a reflection on the 2016 election cycle and the world at large, and that sort of preternatural sense is something that DiFranco has always possessed. “See how quickly shit gets absurd,” she sings on “Alrighty.” “You invented angels and then you ignore the birds.” Or, on “Play God”: “You don’t get to play God, man. I do.”

“That has happened to me my whole songwriting life. I’m like a Sunday scientist,” she says in the DiFranco chuckle, mischievous as it is. “I love quantum physics. I love the vanguard of scientific understanding, which has brought us full circle back to a very ancient understanding. I go into this subconscious place when I am writing. That shit, my consciousness sees it coming, even though I don’t know what I am writing about until it happens.”

Many have long-turned to DiFranco as a fearless feminist leader: An activist and outspoken voice against the patriarchy of politics, corporate America, and everything in between, she launched Righteous Babe Records in 1990 as a way of taking control over her own artistic property. She was always going to grow and change, but the morphing DiFranco was sometimes a difficult thing for her long-time fans to stomach. Getting married, having children … these choices occasionally were hard for those who saw DiFranco as belonging to only herself — up there on the stage, tank top tight with sweat and chinos that could have been worn by both a woman or a man — and to them. And though she has released albums since giving birth to her two babies, now 4 and 10, Binary is an album that explores how exercising our rights to belong to one another — be that a lover, a son, a daughter, a friend, or even our green earth — is one of the most feminist proclamations of all.

“I was trying to approach this concept of feminism without saying the word ‘feminism,’ and really get at it in an elemental way,” she says. “That the universe is born of relationships. And until we start holding that understanding as high as we do the individual and the hierarchy of individuals in competition, then I think we’re never gonna get to the right answer.”

The process of becoming a mother was a complex one for DiFranco. Though the act of raising a child “totally reinforces my feminism,” she says, some of the constructs of parenthood were more difficult to see through her enlightened lens.

“I remember the first time I had to push a stroller down the street,” she says. “I felt like such a fucking asshole. There was something about pushing a stroller down the street that didn’t fit with my sense of my own identity. I sort of remember in a humorous way trying to reconcile my identity as a mom with my life until then. But that’s surface, superfluous. Underneath it, the real situation for me was that becoming a mom really reinforced everything I thought I knew. Once I had actually lived the literal experience of ‘Your body is my body,’ I could stand there as tall as I ever did and say, ‘This idea of autonomy is a fallacy.’ The feminist idea is holding relationship higher than anything else. There is no separation between you and me.”

Indeed, Binary is about how our existence, our thoughts, our love, our presence, our fights are only in relationship to something else or someone else. So to celebrate that spirit, she decided to extend outward and invite some participation from special guests: violinist Jenny Scheinman, keyboard player Ivan Neville, Maceo Parker, David Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.

“My manager said, ‘You have a lot of amazing friends. You should call them. You should connect with people,'” she recalls. “A lot of my artistic life has been in isolation. I write songs alone. I play them alone. I develop a relationship with an audience alone. But I’ve always been jealous of people whose bands are beautiful communities, and I have been more solitary than I want to be in my art. Calling people up and connecting with them, that was just one of the oblique strategies in his record. How do you make album 20 new and fucking fun again?”

Binary is, well, fucking fun. It’s full of fire, horns, and funky riffs, and stacks of DiFranco couplets that feel as urgent as ever: “They got networks like insects with webs of deception,” she sings on the title track, both a manifesto for the album’s central themes and a call to put down our screens and look not into that white glare, but the white’s of each other’s eyes. And not just look, but listen. “Right from the beginning, I was like, ‘Fuck all that,'” she says. “‘Talk to me.'”

In 2016, DiFranco used her tour to encourage voter turnout: Called “Vote Dammit,” she registered fans in each city she passed through. And she will, of course, still stay political in a Trump era, letting the words of Binary lead the way. But she’s also paying attention to what lies beneath the dark side; and she has been following the shifts in the energy of the earth charted as the “Schumann Resonances.” Remember, she’s a Sunday scientist. Things had been pretty steady here on the planet, but then, just as Trump took office, that measure of energy plummeted.

“If you’re me, you could take this really far,” she says laughing. “What we see up there at the podium is the shadow side of an awakening. And this is the trigger. This is what it takes for us to wake the fuck up. And I feel so excited that there are people who want to talk about the things I want to talk about. And I feel less alone and more hopeful in many ways than I have in my whole life.”

Because consciousness, as she sings, is binary.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Healing the Heartbreak: A Conversation with Chastity Brown

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“All my life, I was afraid of everything, and I wouldn’t touch what was beautiful to me,” sings Chastity Brown on “Drive Slow,” the first track on her new LP, Silhouette of Sirens. Appropriately, it’s a song filled with motion: an automotive chug toward the horizon, a call to move on and leave our ashes behind. But, like Brown herself, it’s more complex than just that. There are moments to stop, plant your feet, and savor the stillness, a rearview mirror filled with memories both sweet and sinister.

But Brown likes to move, no doubt — right now, she’s just completed a run in Denver, where she’ll be singing in Ani DiFranco’s back-up band later in the night. She certainly likes to move on, too, and Silhouette of Sirens finds the Minnesota-residing, Tennessee-born artist pondering perseverance: how to overcome and heal a broken heart with an understanding of all the many ways one can be shattered in the first place.

Now signed to Red House Records, Brown crafted Silhouette of Sirens with her longtime writing partner, Robert Mulrennan, and the result is a set of songs that exist in the perfect sweet spot between roots inspiration and modern sensibilities. And with plenty of soul-bearing honesty, too. “I try to find a way to sing where I’m not having a therapy session,” says Brown. “But I think there is a lot of longing on this record.” These aren’t songs to be heard prone on the couch anyway. “Pouring Rain” has a soul-filled groove, and “Carried Away” is a delicate but sweeping mid-tempo ode to rising up and over what sets us adrift.

You just got back from a jog — does running help you think creatively?

It helps me calm down. I think I have such high anxiety that it clears out the cob webs. I don’t do it to be entirely healthy. I just have to have something to take the edge off.

It’s been quite a bit of time since 2012’s Back-Road Highways, your last release. So much has changed since then: You have a new label, you’re five years older, we have a new president. How do you reflect back on it all?

There are mile markers that I think are physical: a record label, for one. I finished the album two years ago and, at that point, I had taken two years to make it. That was the longest I had taken for anything. And, at that time, I was also turning 33. I’m not religious or anything, but I was like, “This is my Jesus Christ year. This is my Buddha year.” Thirty-three is where you go big or go home. And I gave myself permission to actually be ambitious and gave myself permission to get what they call in the music business a “team.” To make the album, I had emotionally gone through a really dark time without realizing it, and that influenced the work. I was separating all the dark shit going on in my head with these songs I was writing with my writing partner. It wasn’t until after I finished that I was like, “Holy shit, this actually digs deep into my subconscious and exercises some demons I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.”

How so?

The music reflected itself back to me and, in one part, let me know I was quite broken, and in another part of the album, let me know I wasn’t that way anymore. It’s a fucking therapy session, but I can’t say what it feels like to be different. Though I know I’m literally in a different place than when I was making it.

Was it difficult to give up your independence and sign to a label?

Yeah, I’m a little bit — and I think my band mates can vouch for the fact that — I am a little bit controlling. But at the same time, this isn’t really possible to do alone. I had to ask people for their gifts and talent. It was difficult to relinquish some of that, but we all work really well together. I’m a 34-year-old woman who is not going to be told what to do. Working with these people on collaboration, I don’t feel like it’s me telling them what to do or the opposite. But I do have clear goals, and it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment decision. It was thought out, and I have to trust them. And I do.

You mentioned the album was finished two years ago, so do these songs still feel fresh to you?

I was expecting them to be old by now, but they’re not old to me. Maybe it’s just my relationship with them. For 2016, I got the incredible opportunity to tour with Ani DiFranco, and that was the real test of these songs. And I feel like they can hold their own. I still love them. But after you create, and you go on the road, and you geek out, the songs are still evolving. All I did is capture where these songs were at the time. But now I’ve changed, shit’s changed. They augment with me.

Who were you then versus now?

What I was experiencing during that dark time was having a really dark childhood. I think because of that — and the album is not about that at all — but I feel really sensitive to other people’s stories, and what I had realized is, that time period in my life broke my heart. As a child, my heart was broken, and it has taken me so long to mend that and allow love in my life. So the overall theme came out that there are different types of heartbreak. Of course there are love songs, but there are other things that break your heart. There is more to life than songs about coupled relationships — though I love those — but this is a little bit broader. A macro view of different types of heartbreak informed by my own personal heartbreak.

You’re singing with Ani tonight and you’ve opened for her in the past. That must have been an amazing, informative experience.

Yeah. Shit. I’ve said this before: It’s the most generous thing that any artist has done. She’s showed me how it’s done, in a different way. I’ve been touring for 10 years, but there are different things at her level, which you can only see from there. In the folk world, it’s generational, passing things down. It’s huge to me, how generous she’s been. And it’s a good affirmation that someone I respect gives me a thumbs up.

Did you have conversations with her about what it means to be a politically engaged artist?

Well, I don’t think we talk in terms of what things mean. We were out on the road when Trump was elected president, and what we talked about was how to act, and in what capacity. We have such a privilege, all across the country: When you step on stage, you are the loudest person in the room. I feel like Ani teaches by showing. She stands in her integrity so fiercely, it made me want to articulate even more what matters to me. Like how Black Lives Matter has been a huge cornerstone in what I talk about from stage the past year-and-a-half, and it will be until I feel like folks get it. You’d be surprised how many “liberal” audiences have a rebuttal to that.

Really?

I remember in Utah, I was talking about this Nina Simone song and I said, “I play this because Black lives matter.” And this woman was like, “All lives matter!” I want to use compassion to educate people, but at the same time, God, that woman fucking infuriated me. But it wasn’t the time. Going back to what to do as an artist during these times, it’s to use your voice in the capacity of your life. I’m from Tennessee; I have family members who voted for Trump. And those are family members I love, and I can’t pretend that they are evil. But I can get down and dirty in a difficult conversation, trying to figure out where they are coming from.

Have you written any overtly political songs?

I have, but none that I would play out. One of the titles was like, “Fuck You Pieces of Shit!” An ongoing rant. I was like, maybe I can kind of hone it in! But I have been creating. A lot of people are saying, “What are artists going to say as a comeback to all this?” And I’ve heard some incredible work that’s going after how fucked up our government is, but there are other things to focus on. Like the beauty of being a brown woman and celebrating that. There was a time after so many police shootings, all the songs I was writing were really angry. But Solange [and her 2016 LP, A Seat at the Table] was a great reminder of “Yo, let’s talk about our beauty.” And we should.

Photo credit: Wale Agboola

Like Woody Guthrie Before Them, Roots Musicians Take on Trump through Song

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If there are two American figures one would least expect to be connected, they may well be Woody Guthrie and Donald Trump. Guthrie, one of the most revered political songwriters ever to put pen to paper, has next to nothing in common with Republican presidential nominee Trump, a man who represents everything against which Guthrie fought as a folk singer and activist. But the two do have one connection: Trump’s father, the late New York real estate mogul Fred C. Trump. 

In the early 1950s, Guthrie was briefly a tenant of Trump’s Beach Haven apartment complex, a Brooklyn property the elder Trump developed using an FHA subsidy specifically designated for affordable public housing. Years after Guthrie moved out of Beach Haven, in 1964, Trump would be investigated for profiteering, having, as Will Kaufman wrote in a story on Guthrie and Trump for The Conversation earlier this year, “overestimat[ed] his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of $3.7 million.” And in 1973, six years after Guthrie’s death from Huntington’s disease at the age of 55, Trump was sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against Black people, eventually settling outside of court.

“In 1950, Woody and his family rented an apartment in the complex called Beach Haven that was owned by Fred Trump,” Deana McCloud, Executive Director of Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center, says. “After they moved in, it came to [Guthrie’s] attention that the elder Mr. Trump would not lease apartments to African-Americans, which did not sit very well with Woody, as an advocate for civil rights.”

It was the racism of “Old Man Trump” that stoked the most intense anger in Guthrie, inspiring him to write two sets of writing — the first being the better known “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” a re-working of an existing Guthrie song called “Ain’t Got No Home” and one that is often referred to as “Old Man Trump,” and the second, “Racial Hate at Beach Haven.” Both writings are available on view at the Guthrie Center and, since Kaufman’s piece was published, have been fodder for outlets as large as NPR and the New York Times, once again relevant in light of the 2016 election. As seen in the images provided by Kaufman, Guthrie punctuated his lyrics with exclamation points, a seemingly small detail that McCloud finds very telling.

“What’s really interesting for me is, I looked at the lyrics for ‘Beach Haven Ain’t My Home’ and — of course, we have thousands of examples of Woody’s handwriting and very seldom does he use exclamation points — in this particular lyric, every line is followed by an exclamation point,” she says with a slight laugh. “His emotions are very apparent in the lyrics. It was just an issue with him, the idea that people should be separated and kept apart in anything, but especially when it comes to allowing them to live together and learn together and cooperate with each other.” 

A reimagined “Old Man Trump,” recorded by Santa Barbara band U.S. Elevator, made its way into current headlines just a few days ago as part of the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project, an initiative spearheaded by acclaimed author Dave Eggers (famous for works like 2000’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the more recent novel A Hologram for the King; he also documented his time at a Sacramento Trump rally for the Guardian) and Zeitgeist Artist Management’s Jordan Kurland, who is known for his integral role in the careers of artists like Death Cab for Cutie and Bob Mould. The project, which kicked off October 10, is a playlist of anti-Trump songs, proceeds from which will benefit the Center for Popular Democracy, written and/or performed by a diverse roster of artists that includes Aimee Mann, Jim James, R.E.M., and Adia Victoria. At press time, the initiative has grown to become “30 Days, 40 Songs,” and could continue to grow larger as Election Day draws nearer. “30 Days” follows the pair’s 2012 effort “90 Days, 90 Reasons,” a series of essays by figures like Roxane Gay and George Saunders that argued for the re-election of President Barack Obama. 

“One of the things that really struck [Eggers] about the rally was the music that was being played,” Kurland says. “It was so off-base from Trump’s message, you know? It was Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ or Bruce Springsteen or the Who — clearly just songs that didn’t make sense contextually, but also songs that there’s no way the artists would have approved. So Dave came back with the idea to get artists to write songs that should be played at Trump rallies, with that meaning they could be songs either directly about Donald Trump or songs that celebrate all the things that Donald Trump is against, like diversity and freedom of speech, etcetera, etcetera.” 

Nashville artist Adia Victoria — who speaks powerfully on race, class, and Southern culture in both her music and in interviews — contributed the sparse, sobering “Backwards Blues” to the playlist. When sharing the song on Facebook, she wrote, “Perhaps the greatest irony is how a campaign fueled by outright lies reveals a deep-seated kernel of truth of what far too many Americans hold up as sacred: massive wealth, the sway of celebrity, branding, power, and greed. I don’t want to say that he’s the president we deserve, yet here we are.”

Many other musicians outside of the “30 Days” project have found themselves getting political in recent months, too. Ani DiFranco recently released the song “Play God” which, while not overtly anti-Trump, champions women’s reproductive rights, a message that flies in the face of Trump’s endlessly mysognistic rhetoric and behavior. “As we prepare for our first woman president, isn’t this the perfect time for all of us to put women’s civil rights into law?” DiFranco asks. “Make reproductive freedom a Constitutional amendment. With the Supreme Court in flux, we cannot afford to leave our rights in the balance.”

Revered Nashville/Austin songwriter Radney Foster contributed to the conversation with “All That I Require” — what he describes as an “anti-fascism history lesson” that, to name only one example, feels especially chilling in light of Trump’s third debate comments about his reluctance to concede the election were Clinton to win the presidency. 

“The voices of extremism and fascism are ringing more loudly in our national debate than ever before in my lifetime,” Foster says. “Questioning the free press and the peaceful transition of power never ends well. All of the sloganeering in the song are taken from Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco — demagogues from the right and the left. I hope the song is something that will make us all, Democrat or Republican, do some soul-searching about what kind of country we want to be.”

One of the most powerful, acclaimed albums of 2016, the Drive-By Truckers’ latest release American Band, was described by Slate‘s Carl Wilson as “the perfect album for the year of Trump.” DBT songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley address a number of difficult topics, including racism, immigration, and police brutality, on the LP, with songs like “Ramon Casiano” and “What It Means” two standouts (among a consistently stellar batch of songs) whose narratives have chilling parallels: The first describes the death of Mexican teenager Ramon Casiano at the hands of Harlon B. Carter; the second refers to the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, as well as cases like the police killing of Michael Brown. The album grapples with many of the very issues for which Trump stands, providing alternative viewpoints from, as Wilson describes, a group of men “embodying the stereotypical demographics of a Trump voter (white, male, middle-age, non–college-educated).”

Akron, Ohio, songwriter Joseph Arthur released his anti-Trump number, “The Campaign Song,” which juxtaposes audio and video of clips of Trump shouting catchphrases like “Build That Wall” with lyrics like “Trump is a chump,” earlier this month and invoked Guthrie’s legacy as a political songwriter, as well as his unfortunate connection to the Trump family. “Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song about Donald Trump’s grandfather,” Arthur wrote on his website. “So this is like carrying the torch for Woody. I used the lingo of a by-gone era to accentuate that aspect like ‘America really should boot bums like this out’ and ‘Old scratch’. I wanted to use the lingo of Trump’s elders as subtle form of linguistic manipulation designed to send him under his bed shivering like the whimpering maggot that he is.”

A particularly biting critique of Trump, his policies and his deeply flawed Trump University comes from folk singer/songwriter Anthony D’Amato, who released the song “If You’re Gonna Build a Wall” and its accompanying video via MoveOn’s Facebook page last week. D’Amato was inspired to write the song, which references Trump’s desire to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and includes lines like “Oh if you’re gonna build a wall / You better be ready the day it falls,” after covertly attending a Trump Rally in Long Island.

“I wrote this song last Summer during the primaries,” D’Amato says. “I was home from tour with a broken finger and bombarded by election news every day. The rhetoric was dark and divisive and ran counter to a lot of the ideals I always felt like this country was built on. Trump’s campaign was the initial spark, but the song touches on race and class and privilege, too. History doesn’t look kindly on those who build themselves up by excluding  and demonizing the less powerful. If you’re going to do that, you’d better be prepared for the consequences.”

Pioneer Valley band Parsonsfield also felt compelled to write about Trump’s hypothetical wall, expressing their frustration in the song “Barbed Wire,” a stirring track off their recently released album Blooming through the Black. “It’s funny how the loudest voices championing freedom are the ones who want to erect the clearest symbol of restrictiveness,” the band’s Chris Freeman says. “It will never happen, but the rhetoric is frightening enough. The song references the wall in the sense that they are often built as a mechanism to keep others out. The builder usually fails to see that they are also the ones being kept in.”

Like his father’s before him, Donald Trump’s policies seek to exclude rather than unite. And like Guthrie before them, today’s musicians are using their platforms to voice progressive platforms, the latest entrants into the long, continually evolving songbook of American protest music. Protest music is most commonly attributed to the 1960s — just look at this year’s somewhat unusual, certainly polarizing winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — but it’s a tradition that’s been around in America for centuries. To name just two, non-’60s American milestones that birthed political music, the Civil War inspired a number of tunes, including “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Song of the Abolitionist”; and the gay rights movement of the ’80s and ’90s brought us “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill and “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper.

Trump is, of course, not the first politician to inspire musicians’ ire (and he certainly won’t be the last), although he has accomplished the not-so-desirable feat of doing so before the election results have even been tabulated. Bright Eyes, Radiohead, and, perhaps most famously, the Dixie Chicks were among the many artists who called out 43rd President George W. Bush through song. Ronald Reagan had the Ramones and Prince as detractors. And, in case you thought musicians only targeted Republicans, Democratic President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions have been documented by artists as high-profile as Beyoncé — though it’s important to note that Monica Lewinsky is often, problematically, the target, instead of Clinton himself. 

“The way that music makes a difference in society is still apparent today,” McCloud says. “You still have those people who are raging against injustice and we know that Woody’s work is as relevant today as it was whenever he was writing it. The specific names might have changed a little, some specific details may have changed. But when you look at the lyrics that Woody wrote, and that Pete Seeger wrote, and Phil Ochs wrote, we’re still struggling with this huge divide between the people who have so much and those who struggle just to get by every day.”

And while many artists choose to express political views through song, others take stances by withholding their music from candidates with whom they disagree. Just this year, the Trump campaign has received cease and desist letters (or, some cases, some very angry rhetoric) from the Rolling Stones, Adele, R.E.M. (who, along with Sleater-Kinney, just released their own “30 Days” tune), and several other artists regarding the usage of their songs at Trump rallies and events. 

“Music and protest, for a very long time, have gone hand in hand,” Kurland says. “For this particular project, it’s to get people inspired about the election or voting that have maybe been somewhat apathetic to it. Certainly Bernie Sanders captured a lot of people’s attention and imagination amongst younger voters and it just felt like, in May or June, there were people who were disappointed and people who weren’t really seeming like they were very engaged. So the idea of doing this is a way of getting people motivated by hearing a well-written song about an important topic. The goal with this project, and the other projects we’ve worked on in the past, is to appeal to younger voters who maybe don’t fully grasp the importance of this election or understand how different the two candidates really are. I get so sick of hearing, ‘Hillary is the lesser of two evils.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth.” 

While Guthrie isn’t alive to sing us through these last few weeks leading up to election day, many of the issues for which he fought are, unfortunately, still issues today. McCloud believes he would have been just as disappointed by Donald’s political rhetoric as he was by Fred’s housing practices. “I certainly don’t want to put my thoughts into Woody’s voice by any means, but based on my knowledge of what he wrote and his perspective of things, I think, like many of us, it would be deeply troubling to him to see the lack of civility and the divisive nature of today’s political climate,” she says. “This idea of getting together, walking together, talking together, solving problems is almost nonexistent in what we see today, and I think that would be deeply troubling to him.”

Though it appears as though Hillary Clinton has all but clinched the election, the work to heal from and evolve past the divisive, racist, bigoted rhetoric in which the United States became ensnarled throughout this election is only just beginning. It’s another chapter in a long, bloody story that is centuries long — one that Guthrie, like his modern counterparts, immortalized in song, offering small glimpses of hope, wisdom, and catharsis for all of us hoping for a better world. 

McCloud sums up Guthrie’s feelings — which were messy, uncomfortable, unresolved, but ultimately hopeful — when she recounts his writing “Racial Hate at Beach Haven.” “What I really love is the way he ends it,” she says. “The last paragraph — it’s so lyrical. It’s, ‘Let’s you and me shake hands together and get together and walk together and talk together and sing together and dance together and work together and play together and hold together and let’s get together and fight together and march together until we lick this goddamned racist hate together, what do you say?’ That’s Woody. He was upset. He was angry. But he still understood that this is a problem, and let’s sit down and talk about it and solve the problem instead of just being separate and having our own opinions. Let’s solve the problem.” 

Lede photo courtesy of U.S. Consulate General Munich from Germany and Joseph Arthur

LISTEN: Peter Mulvey, ‘The Last Song’

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Artist: Peter Mulvey
Hometown: Milwaukee, WI
Song: “The Last Song”
Album: Are You Listening?
Release Date: March 24, 2017
Label: Righteous Babe

In Their Words: “We were circling the beast in Big Blue (Ani’s home studio) trying to find a way into this, when she suggested I play it on the guitar given to her by Michael Meldrum, an early mentor for her as an artist. Suddenly the song fell into place.” — Peter Mulvey

Photo credit: Elisabeth Witt

There Will Be Dancing: Erin McKeown in Conversation with Chastity Brown

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It’s a wonder that we journalists ever get away with describing an artist as a singer/songwriter and leaving it at that, as though the meaning of the categorization is so simple, stable, and straightforward as to be universally self-evident. Singer/songwriters, themselves, conceive of what they do in vastly different and ever-evolving ways.

Chastity Brown and Erin McKeown exemplify just how dynamic the role can be. Last week, Brown announced her signing to the folk label Red House Records and McKeown recently released her EP, According to Us, but both are at least a decade into the process of responding to their changing understandings of themselves and the world around them through their music. Along the way, they’ve recalibrated how they want to communicate in, around, and between songs. They were both up for a bracingly honest conversation about what their work requires of them.

Have you two ever crossed paths before now?

Erin McKeown: We haven’t, no. I spent a little time this afternoon perusing Chastity’s website, listening to some music. And I see that you’re on the road with Ani DiFranco right now, which I’ve done before. So I’m surprised we haven’t crossed paths.

Chastity Brown: But I’m glad to cross paths today.

I didn’t consider the Ani overlap when I asked you both to do this interview.

CB: No pun at all, because that’s one of Ani’s songs — “Overlap.” People think that women are constantly trying to compete against each other. There have been several possible opportunities of me opening for other people — other women — and managers have been real quick to be like, “No, we don’t want two women on the bill.” Ani’s ethos is really about locking arms and supporting each other, even if we do such different shit [musically]. It makes sense that we would cross paths today, in my opinion. For me, and probably for the both of us, it’s really about locking arms. The music business is difficult enough without trying to compete with your comrades.

EM: I totally agree. Some number of years ago I was like, “I’m just going to play shows and make records with people that make me happy.” Just remove the, like, “Could this person advance my career?” Any of that stuff, in my experience, nine times out of 10, it doesn’t. And in the meantime, I would just rather have a more interesting experience that arouses my curiosity, rather than just punching a clock toward some goal that may or may not materialize.

It seems to me that both of you have evolved in how you think about a particular aspect of being singer/songwriters — whether, why, and how to say things of social and political significance in your music. Erin, you sort of poked at traditional notions of gender and relationships on your album Grand, but your writing on more recent projects, including your new EP, has a different sort of directness and urgency. Chastity, the sound of your music, in itself, makes a statement about how country, soul, and R&B traditions are intertwined, but up until recently, your lyric writing hasn’t been explicitly political in nature. Could you both speak to how your priorities have changed, in terms of what you seek to express?

EM: I appreciate you pointing to what was happening on Grand. Such a long time ago, by the way. At that time, I was definitely knee-deep in trying to advance my career, and I was working with a big — not huge — but big record label at the time. … I was trying to advance my career by a blueprint that was laid out by more or less the label and a more traditional path of the people that had come before me. It’s not that I didn’t know about Ani, of course, but I was sort of trying out this thing and hoping it would work for me. I was definitely exploring politics and relationships in my music, but it was quite cautiously. Some of that was my own personal journey about my internalized homophobia and my internalized misogyny. That’s been a long journey for me of becoming more accepting and open about myself for myself, and that naturally gets reflected in songs. But, at the time, I was very sure that, if I spoke out more clearly or openly or in a less coded way in my songs, there would be some sort of commercial consequence. … Now I’m just looking for an effective song to connect with people. For me, that has been more effective, if I have been more clear about stuff.

CB: I’ve always just sung whatever’s on my mind. And in the beginning, on stuff that wasn’t properly released, it was very hippie-dippy: I love the trees. And I still do — I still fuckin’ love trees.

[All Laugh]

CB: It centered around, “What is this song about? And how can I exhaust this story but not exhaust the listener — like, get the full story out?” It wasn’t ever specifically political. But 10 years later, what I’ve realized is that the personal is political. Just by me being a bi-racial, half-Black, half-white woman living in the world in America right now is political. My focus, as far as this last record, I guess it’s really been psychological. I’m really intrigued by the perseverance of the human spirit and the complexities and contradictions that we embody as human beings. At my live shows, I use the time between songs to dig a little deeper with the folks that are listening about where these things are coming from, whether it’s a blues song that I wrote about Detroit, Michigan, going bankrupt and people losing their retirement. That song is essentially about putting your trust in something that you later realize you shouldn’t have. But if someone doesn’t know that, they might just think it’s a love song, that I’m saying “Fuck you” to somebody.

That rang true for me — what you said, Erin, about trying to be as clear as possible. But because we’re making art, there’s this room, this ambiguity. What happens when you release art to the public is, no matter what narrative I give you, you still may extract pieces of that narrative. People will make it their own and make it applicable to their own spheres. But that’s one huge realization for me as a 34-year-old woman and what’s been happening in Minneapolis — Philando Castile’s murder and last year with Jamar Clark. Just being a person of color, a queer woman of color, for that matter, is freaking political. I don’t even have to say anything; I just leave my house, and that’s a statement. I practice good eating habits and I exercise; radically loving myself is also political. I see that now, and my hope is that that comes out in my work. There are other stories to tell other than just the specifics of politics or my stances on things.

It sounds like those are realizations you’ve come to and priorities you’ve embraced over time.

CB: An author I love, Octavia Butler, she’s freakin’ blowing my mind. Such imaginative writing. She was the first Black woman to write sci-fi. I was geeking out yesterday and watching these YouTube clips of interviews with her. The interviewer asked her about her stance on current politics, and she was just like, “There’s so much that Black people can write about other than just being hated.” There’s so much more to life experience other than just constantly defending your queer self and your queer and transgender brothers and sisters. I love the way that Octavia put it: There’s far more vast creativity within us.

EM: I love that. I also love the reminder that art gets at things in oblique ways that are often just as useful as clear ways.

Erin, on your new EP, you play with the power of a person claiming an identity for herself. You noted in an interview a few years ago that, when first you began to get attention for one aspect of your identity — being queer — it wasn’t because you’d decided that you wanted to start writing or talking about it, but because a blog labeled you that way. Once there was the expectation that you’d be speaking from that identity, what’d you do with that?

EM: Basically, what happened was, I did an interview with a lesbian website. Up to that point I had never come out, and that had been on purpose. We never talked about it in the interview. Then when the article was published, the headline was “lesbian singer/songwriter.”

CB: Oh, damn!

EM: I know! I started getting these emails from people that said, “Oh my God! You’re a lesbian! That’s so great! Thank you for coming out. That means so much to me.” Besides the functional piece of I wasn’t really ready and it wasn’t on my terms, I also felt the responsibility to those folks to say, “Right on! You’re okay as you are!” Because that’s the underlying message that I would hope to give anyone. I just felt like I didn’t have any choice but to just jump off the deep end and accept that it happened and try to work on my own fear about it and try to be a kind and loving example for other folks who could identify with me in that way. I don’t identify as lesbian; I’ve always identified as queer. But I think 10 years ago that was a conversation that wasn’t as nuanced as it is now, which I’m really glad to see.

I played on sports teams in high school — I still play on sports teams — but I always hate putting on the same shirt as somebody else. I think my journey has been to try to recognize that impulse in myself and put it aside and kind of work with the identities that get foisted on me, even though they’re not always my choice or the timing is not my choice.

Once that happened, how did you make creative use of it?

EM: I ignored it. I ignored it in my writing for a while. So much of this work happens, like Chastity said, in between songs. And I’ve always been someone that likes to go out and meet folks after the show and talk. So much of this work in those spaces, as well. I just found, in those interactions, that I could make better use of these identities, if I just gave people space to put their own into the conversation with me.

Chastity, in an interview you gave a few years back you reflected that making political music had become a more isolating practice than it might’ve been for previous generations. At that time, political songwriting didn’t really seem attached to a movement. So much has happened since then. Have your feelings about that changed? Do you feel musically connected to the Black Lives Matter movement?

CB: I’ve never been so specific on stage about current events than I have as of late, on these last few tours. I think it’s this realization that my personal life is political and that I have the fortune to be elevated and amplified night after night; I’m the loudest thing in the room. And what am I gonna do with that type of power?

I came home after the mass demonstration that we did for Jamar Clark through the streets of Minneapolis and wrote this song called “Hey You.” It’s very gentle. Initially, the song was more like, “Fuck you.” [Chuckles] But what I realized was that that changed the focus. If I’m saying, “Fuck you,” that means that I’m on such high guard that I’m also not celebrating. Alice Walker says, “Where there are tears, there will be dancing.” I wanted to write a song in solidarity that sets up these different scenes of brown folk culture and is celebrating it, and then give the listener an opportunity to think about that. The song closes with a bridge saying, “I was wanting you to see me to show you that I exist, but I put that down when I raised my fist.” I would’ve never written a song like that had I not participated in these protests where we’re all crying and then moments later thousands of us are jumping in the streets, dancing to Kendrick Lamar.

I just finished watching the Nina Simone documentary. She was doing her thing; she was rocking it; she was blowing up all over the world. And then the Civil Rights movement happened, and she couldn’t help herself. I felt a kinship to that feeling: I cannot help myself. I talk about Black Lives Matter at ever single concert, and I often will follow it with a Nina Simone song, because she’s such an eloquent woman. I lean on her in that moment, and say, “If I can’t be eloquent enough, let Nina Simone do it.”

Erin, I love what you were saying about the folks who come up to you, because I also have that, especially with little mixed girls. Those of us who grew up in a small town with an afro, you’re really, really aware. And I’m not even dark-skinned, you know? But there were all these nuances that I didn’t have a language for, until I started seeking out images of myself. And there’s nothing more powerful than that sentiment. Even if I’m playing a show in front of a thousand people and I sure as hell know there are only eight people of color there, those eight people of color are definitely gonna link up after the show and just be each other’s echo or be each other’s mirror.

Because I play Americana, it’s been interesting reminding even the Black community that the banjo is an African instrument: “We’re so diverse. We’re so capable of everything.” I end up, in certain ways, educating both sides of me, the white side of me and the white audience and the Black side of me and the Black audience.

I’m glad you brought up the Black banjo tradition. You said that your very existence is political — so is your musical imagination. You have a song called “Banjo Blues” on a recent album where you’re singing over an abstract programmed loop. You’ve incorporated loops in earlier tracks, too, like “House Been Burning.” That album, Back-Road Highways, opens with a very laid-back loop that could work just as well for you if you were a rapper rather than a singer.

CB: Oh, I wish I could rap.

You incorporate hip-hop production elements and myriad rooted musical traditions, including soul, gospel, and country, into what you do. What possibilities do you see for expanding our notions of rooted musical traditions to include hip-hop?

CB: One thing I’ve always said to my band is, “If I don’t feel the kick drum, it ain’t a fuckin’ song.” There’s just something with Black folk music — the beat is essential to everything. What I layer on top of the beat just so happens to be the acoustic guitar.

Since I’ve been playing publicly, people have always questioned me about my genre-blurring. I never had the language for it until this past year. It’s truly, I am both things; I am just as much one as the other. I love Dolly Parton just as much as I love Beyoncé, but for different reasons — or as much as I love Mavis Staples or Van Morrison or Ryan Adams. I grew up listening to Americana and old-school country, and I grew up listening to R&B and gospel, and Irish music. This is just me. If you can’t get it by now, I’m putting out my sixth album and I’ve been pretty consistent. I am soulful, and I’m country. That’s just what’s up. I feel like I’m better able to articulate that this whole duality that people are seeing is, in fact, me. It’s not a duality to me because it’s the life that I live.

EM: Chastity, I appreciate hearing your experience with the assumptions that people make and the way that you don’t even consider having to reconcile those things in yourself. There’s nothing to reconcile. It’s just you. … In the second or third season of Orange Is the New Black, it seemed like there was a tiny little theme running through the whole season where anything any of the characters had a chance to talk about what music they liked, it was never …

CB: … what the stereotype would suggest.

EM: The, I think, racist assumption that, if you’re Latina, you have to listen to Latin music, or if you’re African-American, you have to listen to soul music. I was thinking, “In what ways do I have my own version of answering these questions in my own work?” Obviously, as a white woman, I come with a different set of privileges to unpack and participate in this conversation in a different way than you do. Something that’s been important to me to do in my work is to notice these assumptions and to try to make a space to undo them with actual songs.

CB: I like that. Hell, yeah.

Musically speaking, Erin, you’ve created a lot of space for yourself to maneuver and experiment. In a previous interview, you said that rhythm is often the engine for your songwriting .

EM: Yeah. That’s always been my deal. I don’t know why or where that came from for me, but it’s always been rhythm is the most important thing to me. Then I found Garage Band 10 years ago; the premade loops in Garage Band are the canvas that I start everything on. Stuff evolves or takes left turns, but that’s been my main way of writing of for a long time now.

You’ve expanded into the producer role on your more recent projects. It has to be empowering to have the tools at your disposal to explore these rhythmic ideas and build tracks like you did for “Where Did I Go” and “Histories.”

EM: I could definitely relate to Chastity when you said, if you can’t feel the kick drum, it’s not a song. … For me, that sense of propulsion and directness and body has to be there for me to be interested in music.

I wanna throw something in here. This is something I’m thinking about for the first time as I’m listening to this conversation. It’s making me realize no one has ever asked me, as a white person, to reconcile the different types of genres that have been in my music. No one’s ever asked me that. And I think that there’s something there. There’s a dominant paradigm of “it’s not that interesting if a white person loves soul music.” People don’t question it. It sounds like, from the experience you’re talking about, Chastity, people ask you that question — "These genre that are unexpected from a person of color, why is that in your music?" People don’t ask me that.

CB: Almost every interview I’ve ever had. … That’s crazy that no one’s ever asked you. That blows my mind.

EM: They’ve never asked it to me in the context of me being white. I’ve been asked that in the context of, “Isn’t it unusual for jazz to sit next to rock in your songs?” But I think it actually is an explicitly racial question. No one’s asking me that because I’m white and there’s a long history of it being ”okay” for white people — I’m going to use this word on purpose — to dabble in the music of people who are not like them.

CB: I appreciate you recognizing that.

Erin, I’m surprised that no one’s asked you about some of your global sources, things like borrowing West African blues sounds for “The Jailer.” So that’s not a conversation you’ve ever had?

EM: I have spent lots of time with African music and love it, and it comes through in my writing because of my love of it. I always think about [the fact] that I’m a white person working with those texts, for lack of a better word. I think about that stuff and I try to be as responsible as I can. I certainly have conversations with other musicians about it. But my point was, I’ve never been asked that, in terms of people trying to make sense of my music. And I think that that’s relevant to what we’re talking about.

 

For more on race, politics, and community in music, read Jewly's conversation with Heather McEntire and Sweet Honey in the Rock.