Tag: AOTM

Sean Watkins Heeds Good Advice (or Not) on Watkins Family Hour’s Second Album

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For brother sister, Watkins Family Hour’s sophomore album and first in five years, Sara and Sean Watkins decided to tighten their focus, writing songs that allowed them to shine as a duo. “It was an experiment, and it ended up being so fun and totally different from the first Watkins Family Hour record we did,” Sean says. “In this case, more than any other project, we were very deliberate about the style of the songs, how they came together, and how we recorded them.”

The effort paid off. Ringing in at ten tracks, including seven originals, brother sister ranges from glittering, harmony-driven folk (opener “The Cure”) to can’t-help-but-dance silliness (“Keep It Clean,” a Charley Jordan featuring vocals from David Garza, Gaby Moreno, and John C. Reilly). We caught up with Sara and Sean individually, chatting about the album and the forces in their careers that built them, including their early years with Nickel Creek. Read our Artist of the Month interview with Sean below, and catch Sara’s interview here.

BGS: You wrote a good portion of “Fake Badge, Real Gun” before you brought the idea to Sara. What inspired it?

Sean Watkins: I have a folder in my notes on my phone, Future Song Titles. I like to think about what a good song title is — you know, when you see a song title on a record and you’re like, “Oh, I really want to know, I want to hear that song.” A book title can be the same way. I heard the term “Fake Badge, Real Gun” in a hotel room on some kind of local news station. It was a headline, probably a story about a kid, or somebody who was pretending to be a police officer. When I heard that phrase, I put it in my phone, because I just thought, “There’s a lot more in there to be explored.”

There are plenty of people in power who don’t deserve to be. They have the power to destroy and create a lot of chaos, but they didn’t really earn it, or they don’t deserve to be there for one reason or another. Everybody comes into contact with authorities who affect you in profound ways, especially when you’re younger, without knowing how they’re affecting you negatively. At a certain age you get to a point where you unpack your childhood — what your teachers taught you, what you heard in church or what you heard in college — and you have to look at it objectively and figure out who gave you that advice, what they were meaning to get across, and whether you still believe it.

Did anything in your life specifically come to mind?

I went to a Baptist Christian school for a while. It wasn’t because my family was Baptist, but because it was the closest private school, and my parents were public school teachers and didn’t really like the way public school was going. The teachers were pretty strict, evangelical, and I remember this girl who was probably in seventh or eighth grade. She had a great voice, and she got vocal nodes on her vocal chords — it’s just something that happens when you don’t use the right singing technique. It happens to a lot of people. But she asked our Bible teacher, “Do you think God gave me these vocal nodes because I’ve been singing secular music?” I think she’d sang an Oasis song at a coffee shop or something.

And the teacher said, “Yeah, that’s probably why.” Like, in all seriousness, he told her that, because she sang a secular song, God gave her these vocal nodes. And he believed it! But who knows how long that stuck with her, that by singing a certain kind of song God will strike you. You can carry that with you for the rest of your life, whether you know it or not. So I try to think about that in my life: What are the things that I’m carrying around that I don’t need to carry around, because someone who had authority used their “gun” in a way that was, looking back, absolutely wrong? You can take the idea out to any number of places in the world.

The cover of the Charley Jordan song is so fun — what a way to end the record. Can you tell me about deciding to cover “Keep It Clean”?

A few weeks before going into the studio, and we were taking inventory of what we had, what kinds of things might be fun to add to the record, what was missing. We just thought it’d be fun to have one song that’s just a party song: what people know the Family Hour to be, which is kind of a wild, fun ruckus; a song that’s easy for anyone to jump in on, with different people singing verses. Something that sounds like what we do when we play our shows [in Los Angeles] at Largo.

Originally I heard this song when I did a month of shows with Lyle Lovett, playing in his band years ago filling in for a friend of mine who played guitar with him. He did that song every night, but totally different: His version was a bouncy, Texas-swing kind of vibe. I really liked it, and I asked him where it came from. He said it was a Charley Jordan song, but that he’d changed it a lot, and that I should check out the original. It’s so funny because it’s such an old song, but it has such a beautiful, almost current pop melody to it. The guitar line in the original version sounds like a Beach Boys melody. It doesn’t sound like ‘20s blues at all, and I thought that was a really cool element of it. So we based our version on that, although it evolved and sounds very different.

Another thing I like about it is that the lyrics are just quirky and weird; you can’t really tell what they are. The verses were based on popular off-color jokes at the time. So people hearing the song back then would have gotten these references that we’re not getting right now. [Laughs] And they might just be really dumb jokes! It’s like a museum piece. I thought it was so cool.

It’s been twenty years since Nickel Creek released its self-titled, breakout album. How do you feel like the success you had then influenced the way Americana and bluegrass are perceived now, or influenced the player you are now?

Every seven or ten years it seems like there’s a recurrence of some kind of music, and at that time, there was a confluence of things that happened that brought acoustic music way more to the forefront. A big one of those was the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack: a soundtrack for a movie that sells millions and millions of records, and is mostly old-time bluegrass, that’s a big deal. Alison Krauss was the only one selling millions of records playing anything related to bluegrass, and she wasn’t playing very traditional music. So that record came out, and Alison was — still is — just cranking away, hugely popular. We kind of got lumped in with all of that. People thought we were on the soundtrack a lot, which we weren’t. [Laughs]

There was just a wave. We have to give Alison credit because she saw the potential in what we could do. That first record is a very different record than we wanted it to be. We were so young, so green. We wanted to make a much more wild and aggressive type of record, and she was like, “Listen, that’s fine for your live shows. But it’s not gonna wear well. It’s going to be exciting to listen to the first couple of times, but people aren’t gonna want to listen to it a year from now — you’re not gonna want to listen to it a year from now.” She was really wise in restraining us in a lot of ways that we wouldn’t have.

Do you still take that advice to heart when you’re recording?

Absolutely. I have a mental bag of tricks that I’ve collected from different people over the years. A lot of the great producers will say something that really sticks with you, and it’s immediately like, “I’m gonna remember that and apply it the rest of my life.” I remember being in the studio one time for something that T-Bone Burnett was producing. We were in the control room, and he was musing and talking about the creative process, and he said, “People think about writing songs like writing songs. Don’t think about it that way. Think about writing a feeling. Like when you’re writing a movie, you’re writing a story. When you’re writing a song, just write a feeling — don’t write a song.” I was like, “That is soooo great.” Because that’s exactly what it is! A song’s supposed to make you feel something.

(Read our interview with Sara Watkins here.)

Photo credit: Jacob Boll

Artist of the Month: Watkins Family Hour

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Sean Watkins and Sara Watkins have factored into some of the most accomplished and creative ensembles of the last two decades, while building a cool catalog of their own solo albums, too. Familiar to many as co-founders of Nickel Creek (with Chris Thile), the California siblings are once again teaming up as a duo for brother sister, their second album as Watkins Family Hour.

“From the beginning, our goal was to work on these songs to be as strong as they could be, just the two of us,” Sara says. “And with a few exceptions on the record, that’s really how things were. It was a tight little group of us, working dense days where we could squeeze them in.”

Sara won a Grammy earlier this year for “Call My Name” as a member of I’m With Her (with Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz). In addition to producing, Sean has recorded with collectives such as Fiction Family, Mutual Admiration Society, and Works Progress Administration. Their appearances at the Los Angeles club Largo have inspired a number of impromptu collaborations on stage as well. Together, however, the siblings make a powerful unit, capturing a band sound with essentially two people — but incorporating a fresh perspective through producer Mike Viola.

“Mike brings a diverse musical history to his production work,” Sean says. “He’s worked with a lot of people [from The Figgs to Fall Out Boy] that surpass just bluegrass or folk, but his sense of the songwriting craft and melody is right in line with us. He was bringing ideas that we would have never had, and vice versa.”

Enjoy new tracks from Watkins Family Hour in our BGS Essentials playlist, plus choice cuts from throughout their brilliant careers.

Our Artist of the Month interviews are here! (Read part one here. Read part two here.)

Photo credit: Jacob Boll

WATCH: The Secret Sisters Welcome Solace of Spring with “Late Bloomer”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With spring just arriving, our BGS Artist of the Month has just given us a seasonal freshen-up with a lovely new release. Siblings Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle, known as The Secret Sisters, released their latest album, Saturn Return, at the end of February. The new record was produced by Brandi Carlile along with Phil and Tim Hanseroth and was released on New West Records.

“Late Bloomer” and its accompanying video have the same glow that an old photo album or a home-cooked meal with your family might have: welcoming, heart-warming, and encouraging. The message of the song is one of affirmation and reassurance, reiterating that everyone’s story is different and every path is unique. For a peak into what Saturn Return holds, watch the Secret Sisters’ touching music video for “Late Bloomer,” a spring of solace for those who feel the familiar impulse to compare and pass judgment on their own experience.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

The Secret Sisters’ Lydia Slagle: Good People With Great Purpose (Part 2 of 2)

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Hearing the Secret Sisters sing captivates you immediately. Known best for their entrancing harmonies, the Alabama-born artists write songs about everyday hardships and headline-grabbing injustices, with a balance of poetry and punch in every lyric. It’s made fast fans of many, including Brandi Carlile, who called sisters Lydia Slagle and Laura Rogers in 2015 and offered to produce their next record, 2017’s You Don’t Own Me Anymore.

On the new Saturn Return, co-produced by Carlile and Phil and Tim Hanseroth, the duo expands beyond their well-known harmonies by exploring the previously untapped power that their voices have solo, recording many segments separately for the first time in their decade-long career. In a nod to that milestone, BGS spoke to each sister individually in advance of the album’s release. Here, Lydia Slagle talks about Carlile’s strength as a producer, finding hope despite hardship, and the distinct pride in being a late bloomer.

Tell me about your upbringing and your first memories with music.

We’re from rural Northwest Alabama. We grew up running through the woods and making forts and playing in the creek. We spent a lot of time outside with our cousins, and it was really family-oriented. Our dad is in a bluegrass band, so we were going to bluegrass festivals every Saturday. We went to church every Sunday, and the church that we grew up in was all congregational. Everybody sang together, so from a very early age, you had to learn to sing harmony.

You were the main writer on “Late Bloomer,” one of my favorite tracks from Saturn Return. Has anything ever made you feel like a late bloomer? How did you reframe that feeling with the positivity we hear in the song?

I’ve always felt a little bit behind. People in my grade, or my age… I always felt like they got there before I did. Part of that is being a Southern woman. I think that we are a little more pressured to have children faster, or get married at an earlier age. Even though I’d been all around the world, I still felt that pressure — I still felt behind. When I wrote “Late Bloomer,” my husband and I had been trying for a baby for almost a year. That particular day, I was just really frustrated with the whole situation. I thought, of course, this happens to me. I’ve been behind in every other aspect of my life, so of course I’m gonna be last for this, too — which sounds dramatic, I know…

No, it sounds… relatable.

Well, it was September, and I was at the piano looking out the window. I had been told that March or April was when I should hang my hummingbird feeders, because that’s when they’d come to the house. And I had not seen a hummingbird all year until the day I wrote this song. It made me start thinking about that aspect differently: they’re late coming to the party, so it’s OK for me to be, too. It’s OK to feel behind. Whatever timeline you set for yourself, it doesn’t matter, because we’re all on our own path. It was a really encouraging way to look at it. I’ve tried to look at it like that ever since.

Brandi Carlile produced your third album, You Don’t Own Me Anymore, and you chose to work with her again on Saturn Return. What made her the right person to produce this album?

We had a lot of fun with our third record. Not that we didn’t with our others, but we were so serious in the beginning, so concerned with being perfect, with having every note be exactly right. With the third record, we were this big family, just playing music together, just jamming. We really wanted to have that same experience again with the fourth record, especially because we had gone through some stuff before this record that was really hard. I was struggling with infertility; I didn’t really understand what was going to happen with our careers. We needed the positivity that Brandi tends to bring to a situation. She always helps us remember that we do this for a reason — and that we’re good at it. It was a really great communal effort, and I would say we were more comrades this time around. It felt like a bunch of friends playing together.

She recommended you and Laura record your vocals separately for the first time ever. What was going through your mind, from the first time you tried it to when you heard it played back?

It felt like an out-of-body experience in so many ways, just because we were so used to singing at the same time, into the same mic. So it was a new, refreshing experience to remember that we are separate people, with our own voices and our own things to say. That’s what Brandi is so good at doing — helping us remember what our talents are. It was a really important part of this recording process itself: finding our own voices and being who we are separately, but still being a band; and learning how to still sing together, even when we have our own perspectives to draw from.

As the album’s closing track, “Healer in the Sky” has a deeply spiritual and peaceful theme — a message of hope. Through the making of this record, what’s something that made you feel hopeful?

Even though we were on separate paths, Laura and I, there was a common thread going through our situations when we were recording. We were kind of settling into adulthood. Our grandmothers had just passed away within a week of each other, and we could see that our parents are getting older and going through health issues. We were both at a time in our lives when we were trying to reconcile things that don’t seem fair, seeing how other people around us have struggled. The reality of adulthood had set in, and you can hear that in a lot of the songs on the record.

But what gives us hope is that we’re people of faith. You do hear it especially on “Healer in the Sky” — we try to remember that we have a bigger hope, and we have a reason for why we do this. It’s easy to get ‘in our heads’ about things that seem hard at the time, but when you look at the grand scheme of things, those things are usually actually pretty petty. So for us, it’s been important to remember our purpose, and to just try to be good people along the way. That’s all that really matters.

Read the first part of our Artist of the Month interview with the Secret Sisters’ Laura Rogers.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

The Secret Sisters’ Laura Rogers: From Separation to ‘Saturn Return’ (Part 1 of 2)

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Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle are best known for doing things together. As sisters, they’ve celebrated birthdays, graduations, and many more of life’s big milestones together. As the Secret Sisters, they’ve made a name for themselves singing together, with intuitive harmonies that lend a honeyed sheen to folk tunes, country anthems, and the occasional murder ballad, too. But for their latest album, Saturn Return, the duo tried things a little differently.

At the suggestion of Brandi Carlile (who co-produced Saturn Return with twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth), Laura and Lydia recorded their vocals separately for the first time, integrating lengthy solo segments in addition to their trademark harmonies. The resulting record reveals two women at the top of their crafts, reveling in their independence while cherishing the inimitable depth of their voices together.

In tribute to their recording individually for the first time, BGS spoke to each sister separately, too. In part one of our Artist of the Month interviews, Laura talks about the influence of her hometown, self-inflicted career pressure, and how Carlile introduced the sisters to new sides of themselves — both individually and as a group.

BGS: You sang separately from your sister on this album for the first time. What did that feel like at first, and how did your feelings about it evolve?

Laura Rogers: I was very uncomfortable about it at first. I play off of Lydia, and I choose my notes based on what Lydia chooses. We read each other so closely when we sing together. Singing without her felt like driving a car for the first time without your parent in there. But when Lydia sang by herself, even though I know she was uncomfortable, I sat there listening to her and thinking, She is so good. She’s so good. I remember thinking about how glad I was that her voice was finally going to get a chance to be heard without mine, because her voice has so much beauty to it.

I thought, It’s time for people to hear what Lydia sounds like without me distracting them. But I was super scared to sing by my self, just because I … Well, I just don’t feel like I sing as well without Lydia. I’m more critical of myself, and I don’t have her to kind of pick up the slack that I need. [Laughs] So in the moment, I remember thinking, I don’t know if this is the right thing. How are we going to pull it off live? But then of course, after the record was done, we would listen back to it, and Brandi’s theory about it was so… right. And so beautiful.

How so?

While we were recording, Lydia and I really were in really separate places for the first time in our lives. I was pregnant and Lydia was trying to get pregnant. We felt this chasm, the two of us. We felt like we were in different places. Brandi could see that, in her bird’s-eye view of our circle. She knew that she needed to capture that moment.

Lo and behold, a few months later, we found out that Lydia was pregnant too, and we were back on another path together. We had been separate for only a moment. So I’m really thankful. I feel like Brandi is a really good photographer who caught the perfect moment with the perfect light and the perfect ambiance — this really special moment that will never come again.

You’ve recorded murder ballads and darker songs, and “Cabin” on this record — which you’ve said grew out of coverage on the Kavanaugh hearings — touches on a crime that was never brought to justice. What are the challenges and nuances you have to consider when broaching topics like those?

That’s a good question. “Cabin” can really be about a pretty broad range of crime. But we were specifically writing about sexual crime: abuse, harassment, and mistreatment of people by those in places of power. We had a message that we wanted to convey, but it felt like we had to tiptoe around some things to try to avoid any sort of heavy political slant.

Lydia and I are not political songwriters. We just aren’t, and don’t want to be. But there are certain elements of that that do come up in our writing that we feel like we have to kind of carefully craft in order to express ourselves, but not isolate. That’s also true with murder ballads. It is a sensitive subject matter, and our protection — up until we wrote “Cabin” — was the fact that those songs that we had written were mostly fiction.

When [our songs] talk about getting your heart broken, or going through bankruptcy, or being done wrong by someone who is supposed to be your friend, those are actually based in truth. We would never specifically mention anyone by name, but if they hear the song, they’ll know that we’re talking to them. If you feel like we’re singing to you, we are.

That’s the way that we view our music — as therapy. The murder ballads have always been about us challenging ourselves to write songs about things that we didn’t experience. On the flip side of that coin, there are a lot of songs that we went through firsthand and had to process through writing.

You sing about the push-pull of success in “Nowhere Baby.” What does that song mean to you, and how do you fight back against the low moments?

I hope that people can find their own story in a song like that. For us, “Nowhere Baby” is about constantly feeling like we’re arm wrestling the music industry; feeling the need to say yes to everything that comes along, because you’re afraid that if you say no you’re going to set yourself back or miss an opportunity; feeling like you need to prove yourself. As artists, creative souls, and women, sometimes we put that on ourselves. We make these ridiculous schedules that we think we have to stick to. “If we don’t go do this show, what’s gonna happen? Are we gonna miss something that could be really important, could get us to the next level?”

We are so hard on ourselves about our careers. We love music, and we love that we’ve gotten to make a lifestyle of playing our songs on the road, but it’s a hard life. You sacrifice more than people on the outside ever realize. You miss the birthday celebrations and the holiday events. Through experience in the ten years that we’ve been on the road, we’ve learned that it’s OK if you need to just be a person for a minute. It’s OK if you want to just sit at home for a few weeks. Nobody’s gonna forget about you, you’re not going to lose your edge.

You’re from just outside of Florence, Alabama, and started singing harmonies with your sister at church. Did your hometown have any impact on the artist you are today?

Oh yes, 100 percent. We grew up pretty close to Muscle Shoals, which is obviously a legendary place for music. But we weren’t exposed to the music of Muscle Shoals as much as you might think. We listened to more folk music, bluegrass, gospel, and country. And where we are geographically had influence on us as musicians — I mean, it’s this weird little place that’s so perfectly located. It’s close to Nashville, so you get the country music influence. It’s close to Memphis, so you get a little bit of the blues. It’s close to the mountains, so you get some Appalachian music. You get gospel music, because we’re in the middle of the Bible Belt. It’s this perfect spot where these little genres of roots music all began.

I think living in a rural place, and growing up where there isn’t a lot to do other than hang out with your family or do sports or play music, is why we are the way that we are, and why we’ve become the musicians that we’ve become. We are so spiritually tied to our hometown. When I leave, I become a different person, and it’s almost like I have to go back to regroup and establish myself again. I come home and I’m like, oh, that’s who I am. [Laughs] I may get to go to all these great places, but when I come back, I’ve still got to scoop up chicken poop off my porch.

Read our interview with Lydia Slagle here.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Artist of the Month: The Secret Sisters

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The secret is out, as the Secret Sisters have finally issued their newest album, Saturn Return. Time is a through line of the project, heard in songs like “Late Bloomer,” as well as the album title, which is an astrological reference to Saturn returning to the same location in the sky as it was when you were born. Motherhood also informs the music, as sisters Lydia and Laura Rogers were new mothers at the time, but also grieving the recent loss of their grandmothers.

Produced by Brandi Carlile and Phil and Tim Hanseroth (aka “The Twins”), Saturn Return positions the sisters as solo vocalists to some degree, as both Lydia and Laura recorded separately for the first time. And in contrast to their other albums, they wrote all of the material here themselves. A sweet celebration of the women who came before them can be found in the opening track, “Silver,” while the final track, “Healer in the Sky” is poignant, vivid, and simply beautiful.

Look for a two-part interview with the Secret Sisters — our BGS Artist of the Month for March — in the weeks ahead. (Read part one here. Read part two here.) In the meantime, enjoy our Essentials playlist, comprising choice covers (including one of Carlile’s songs), rare and interesting collaborations, and new music you’ll want to hear from Saturn Return.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

On Tour, Nathaniel Rateliff Wants to Create an Experience (Part 2 of 2)

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Nathaniel Rateliff’s And It’s Still Alright marks his first full-length solo release in seven years and grapples not just with the loss of a romantic relationship, but with the unexpected passing of his friend and collaborator Richard Swift, with whom he had planned to record it.

In this portion of our conversation, we discuss Rateliff’s songwriting on And It’s Still Alright — which ventures further into vulnerable, introspective territory than did his previous work with his band the Night Sweats — as well as his time in the studio and how he plans to bring these songs to life on his solo tour, which runs through the summer.

Read the first part of our BGS interview with Nathaniel Rateliff.

BGS: Given the way “And It’s Still Alright” came out, you mentioned earlier that “All or Nothing” began with a chord progression. Do you have a songwriting process you typically follow, or does the creation look different each time?

Rateliff: It’s really song-to-song. It always seems to change for me. “All or Nothing,” with that song in particular I really wasn’t trying to write a song. This progression had come up and I played it at a bunch of different tempos. It reminded me of the Eddy Arnold song, “Anytime.” It has this Western-swing progression to it, and I really liked it. Then I started playing these jazzier chords I had learned that I wouldn’t play with the Night Sweats and it turned into a song eventually.

I had a handful of different words to it. As I remember, at one point the chorus was like, “I got heavy shoulders but I’m not blue.” It didn’t really make sense. [Laughs] That turned into, “I got all this and nothing, too.” So it really does vary. That song was a chord progression that a vocal melody kind of came out of. And sometimes I’ll start with a vocal melody or a phrase and write music around all of that.

“And It’s Still Alright,” the original idea was me sitting in a hotel playing guitar by myself. Richard and I went and saw Tom Petty together. The way [Petty’s] song structure was, you start with a massive chorus and it goes into a verse that’s an even bigger chorus and it’s hook after hook after hook. One of my buddies was listening to “And It’s Still Alright” and he’s like, “Yeah, it’s kind of like it’s only bridges. There’s no chorus.” But there’s something interesting about it, since it doesn’t have a traditional hook.

You mentioned the time you all spent in the studio together. It sounds like you had a great group of players and collaborators who were able to join you. What do you look for in a collaborator, and what is it about a musical partnership with someone that feels right to you?

Even in the beginning, when the first Night Sweats records started, I had grown weary of being the traveling singer/songwriter troubadour kind of guy. I was really over playing acoustic guitar for a little bit. So I was making these demos in my attic, then I shared them with Richard and we decided to make a record. I brought Patrick Meese out with me, because I knew we could both play multiple instruments and that we’re pretty good at not getting our feelings hurt when advising each other about portions of the songs.

Sometimes you have something you think is a great idea and it just doesn’t work; being able to work with somebody who isn’t overly sensitive about that stuff is really helpful. You don’t want to have this unspoken tension or this idea that someone is musically picking on you when they don’t like your ideas… The biggest thing is being able to be in the studio with somebody where there is this element of seriousness in approaching it as work and respecting it as a craft, but there’s another side of it where you have to lighten up and have a good time.

Yeah, if you aren’t having fun, what’s the point of doing it at all?

Exactly. I hear stories of people who are like, “Oh, they got that on the 70th-something-odd take,” and it’s like, “Fuck that!” If we’re not getting it in the first two or three, we’re probably screwing something up.

With the Night Sweats, of course, you were releasing music via Stax, but this is your first solo release you’ve been able to do with the label. Given the label’s history, what does it mean to you to be able to work with them, and what has spending the last several years of your career with them opened up for you creatively?

With the Night Sweats stuff it was like, well, the sound I’m really trying to come up with is influenced by Sam & Dave. My original idea for the Night Sweats was, I wanted to have the feel of when the band would play R&B songs like “Don’t Do It.” Their sort of gritty, funky, but slightly Southern feel and approach to the songs — swamp rock, I guess. But then also have these harmonies, like the Sam & Dave harmonies, with these big, powerful voices. Then I wanted everyone in the band to be working for the song. I wanted it to be a sweaty revival.

Originally I was signed to Rounder and got dropped when Concord kind of took over. Then I eventually got signed by the parent company, Concord, and when I found out they worked with Stax, I was like, “Is there any way we can put this out with Stax?” We shared the record with them and that started our journey together. To me, Stax is such an important part of the community in Memphis and part of the thing I love about music is how it’s a community-builder. We really need that nowadays. We need to be more in touch with the people around us and be more understanding and more caring overall. Also, just that roster; it’s all the greats. It hits me when I look at it. It’s pretty amazing.

It sounds like the tour will really showcase several different sides of you as a musician and as a performer. What are you most looking forward to about getting on the road and getting to play these new songs live?

We’re really trying to create an experience. The other thing, too, since it’s mostly the Night Sweats guys in this band, it’s fun to be able to show people, in pulling these songs off live, that we’re really creating and playing whatever type of music that appeals to us at any given time. Hopefully that will make us look like we’re not just a one-trick pony.

The Hurt Behind Nathaniel Rateliff’s ‘And It’s Still Alright’ (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

Nathaniel Rateliff’s And It’s Still Alright retains much of the soul and swagger of his work with his band the Night Sweats, but its subtler arrangements and sparser atmosphere offer more room for Rateliff to showcase his introspective side as both a songwriter and vocalist. Songs like the title track, which chronicles the aftermath of unexpected loss, and the poignant “Time Stands,” hark back to his salad days as a solo singer-songwriter while also marking his immense artistic growth over the past decade.

As his first full-length solo album in seven years, And It’s Still Alright comes on the heels of two acclaimed albums from Rateliff and the Night Sweats, both of which released via STAX Records and found the Missouri-born artist digging deeper into rock-influenced soul and R&B music.

Rateliff originally planned to make the new album alongside friend, frequent collaborator, and beloved producer Richard Swift, who died unexpectedly in July 2018 at the age of 41. Swift’s passing is a heavy presence across the LP in myriad ways, including Rateliff’s decision to record the bulk of And It’s Still Alright at Swift’s National Freedom studio in College Grove, Oregon.

Below, read part one of our conversation with Rateliff, held in the weeks leading up to And It’s Still Alright‘s release.

BGS: You’ll release And It’s Still Alright in just a couple of weeks. What are you feeling as you anticipate having this new music out in the world?

Rateliff: I’m excited. I’m excited to share it. This is kind of the first time that me and the band have done real rehearsals. [Laughs] I feel like with the Night Sweats we’d be like, “Oh, we know these songs,” and just kind of rock through them. These songs have such a different intention than that, and there’s so much more subtlety in performing them live together. It’s been an interesting yet fun challenge to figure that all out together.

Having been a few years since you last put together a project that wasn’t with the Night Sweats, what was behind your decision to move forward with another solo album this time around?

When we were making the last Night Sweats record, I had a lot of these songs that I was working on. I was sharing them with Richard. We had intended to make this record together before he passed away. So I guess I followed through on my commitment to him in making this record. We tried to do it the way we thought he would do it.

What did those early song ideas, as well as those early conversations with Richard about what you envisioned for the album, sound like? Was there a moment or a song that made the project feel like it had clicked for you?

I remember playing “All Or Nothing” — I had the chord progression for it, and some of the words; it wasn’t really done yet — and I was kind of sharing it with Richard and he was like, “Man, I love this. You can’t be too Nilsson, man.” And so I would say, “OK. We’ll see how Nilsson we can get.” That was one of the things I wanted the record, or at least some of the songs, to have, that feel and similar approach to Harry Nilsson’s. Then a lot of the songs had a lot to do with Richard passing away, and some of our similar struggles that we shared in our personal lives and in our friendship together. So it seemed fitting to follow through and make a record.

Would you be open to sharing a bit about what you were feeling after he did pass, and when you made the decision that you were going to follow through with the album? How did doing the work feel in the wake of his passing?

It’s devastating, still. I still think about Richard and miss him most days, you know? He had this amazing ability to make the people around him feel very loved. As far as a creative partner, he was my favorite person to really work with. I really hadn’t intended on working with anybody else. So a really big part of the process of making this record was to go back to his studio. It has such a sound and feel to it there, so it kind of made me feel like he was with us in some way…

The band and I had all worked a lot with Richard and kind of new some of his tricks, which he was super open and willing to show us when he was still around. We really tried to approach it like, “What would Richard do?” song-by-song. Then there’s always that point in the process when you listen to the songs and say, “OK, what is there too much of here?” and kind of strip it back. Then we added a bunch of things to it. [Laughs]

The title track is so powerful and is one of several songs I’ve found myself returning to often since first sitting down to listen through the album. What was the experience of writing that song like for you? Did it bring about any healing for you?

I had a bunch of songs that I was writing with Richard in mind. When we were in Cottage Grove making this record in March, I’d had that song and was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee in the morning and just kind of instantly wrote it all out. At first, when you’re listening to it, the words came out so naturally that you don’t really take the time to question or examine what you’re trying to express personally. There was a moment in the recording process when I was like, “Oh fuck, I can’t believe I’m writing about this.” It’s heartbreaking at first but there is an element of healing to it. Sometimes to relinquish things you just have to say them out loud.

Read Part two of our interview with Nathaniel Rateliff.

Photo credit: Rett Rogers

Artist of the Month: Nathaniel Rateliff

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One of the most powerful artists in roots music, Nathaniel Rateliff has a solo album coming out in just a couple weeks, and as a preview, he’s released a music video for the title track. The evocative video mirrors a song with a lot of weight and meaning behind it, a trademark of Rateliff’s style. A simple song — voice accompanied by galloping guitar and a swirl of ambient textures — “And It’s Still Alright” has a beckoning quality that is matched with a grainy film aesthetic, shot in black and white with a splash of washed-out color.

In 2019, Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats scored a platinum single with “S.O.B.” and a gold record for their self-titled album. Now the pieces are in place for the next installment of Rateliff’s music as And It’s Still Alright is slated for a Valentine’s Day release. Tour dates are filling in, including a stop at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, as well as multiple shows in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, and Minneapolis. His European tour kicks off in April.

To hold over the anticipation for the new record and our upcoming Artist of the Month coverage, enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist.

Photo credit: Rett Rogers

Anaïs Mitchell Follows Broadway’s ‘Hadestown’ with Bonny Light Horseman

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In June 2019, Anaïs Mitchell picked up her first Tony Award when Hadestown beat out bigger productions like Beetlejuice and Tootsie to snag Best Musical. It was an unlikely win for the eccentric and ambitious production — and the culmination of fifteen years of hard work bringing it to Broadway.

“I had no idea how long I was going to work on it,” she tells BGS. “I really didn’t. I just knew what the next step always was and just kept taking them.”

A folk musician born in Vermont and based in Brooklyn, Mitchell first staged Hadestown as a regional production around New England, and it resembled something like a traveling medicine show, as she and her friends toured it the way they might tour an album. In 2010, she released it as something like an Americana concept album, casting colleagues and collaborators in key roles: Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon plays the role of Orpheus, while Ani DiFranco is Persephone.

The story is old, even if the production is new. Mitchell borrowed characters from Greek mythology, combining the stories of Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from the underworld and Persephone warring with Hades. But she filtered them through John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, imagining the underworld as an industrial hellscape, like a sooty factory or a mine, with Hades abusing both the natural world and his workers.

In 2015, she began working with a stage director named Rachel Chavkin, who brought the award-winning Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 to Broadway. Together with a team of producers, musicians, actors, set designers, choreographers, and many others, they began to rework Hadestown for a bigger stage, streamlining the story and rearranging the music for maximum impact. In some cases they rewrote entire characters or scratched entire songs, searching for the best possible way to tell this complicated story.

When it debuted at the Walter Kerr Theater in March 2019, Hadestown barely resembled the production Mitchell staged around Vermont. It was bigger, flashier, more accessible, but also truer to the big ideas that inspired her in the first place. At its heart is an America defined by conflicts between industry and environmental conservation, between commerce and art, between various forms of love and labor. Yet, in its most innovative stroke, the production retained its roots in folk music and its populist ideas. The original cast recording just earned a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

“It’s a little crazy to be on the other side of it,” Mitchell says. “I’m still trying to bend my head around what that means. Like, what kind of songs do I write now?” For the moment she’s focusing on her new band, Bonny Light Horsemen, which is something like a supergroup trio with Fruit Bats mastermind Eric D. Johnson and multi-instrumentalist/producer Joseph Kaufman. Featuring members of Bon Iver, the National, and Hiss Golden Messenger, their self-titled debut album resituates centuries-old folk songs in new settings. “Bonny Light Horsemen has been this really assuring kind of space to be creative in and make music and not feel like it’s my new statement,” she says. “Because it’s not.”

As she was packing to launch a lengthy tour with Johnson and Kaufman, Mitchell spoke with BGS about Greek and American mythologies, creative uncertainties, and songs that straddle the line between personal and universal.

BGS: You lived with Hadestown for more than a decade, during which time it morphed into a brand-new creature. What kept it compelling for you?

Mitchell: I would say that like the simplest answer to that question is that it never felt done. The studio record that we made in 2010 felt done for a studio record. It felt like a complete statement. But the show began as a stage performance piece and I always wanted to see it that way again. As soon as I started the next phase of development with Rachel Chavkin it was one chapter after another: We’re going for off-Broadway. Then we’re going for regional. Then we’re going for Broadway. And it always was like, “It can be better, it can be better…”

And the people kept the wind in the sails of the project. At a certain point it became so much bigger than me. Maybe it always was bigger, because there’s the orchestrators and the singers and all the people in the different cities. It became something like a whole community of people just chipping away at the same piece of stone. It was very exciting to be in the room with those actors and with Rachel and seeing the choreography and the sets coming into focus. It was like a hive. I couldn’t have turned my back on it.

Do you feel differently now that it’s up and running in its current form?

Now that it’s up and running, I don’t even go. It’s happening every night and I get a little report by email here in Brooklyn. It really has a life of its own. It’s become its own animal. And I think I did max out what I could give it in that period. So it feels great to just be making folk music with Bonny Light Horseman right now. It definitely feels like the right place to be.

Why did you want to pursue this story as a stage production? What made it something different than an album or even a book?

From the earliest moment of starting to work on the piece, I was excited by the idea of telling a dramatic, long-form story with larger-than-life characters. I love songs so much, but I remember noticing that even at my favorite concerts by my favorite songwriters I would start to get bored with all these tiny climaxes in the songs. There was a disconnect from one song to the next.

I will watch a terrible movie all the way to the end because there’s that question: How is this going to end? What’s going to happen next? That is so powerful and it will carry you through. I wanted that for this piece. I wanted all the songs to lean on each other, so that you had to watch the whole thing and get through to the end.

That took you well outside what most folk musicians and singer/songwriters are doing. What did you learn during that process?

There was so much learning in terms of writing a song that felt like it was structurally perfect for the album, like “Wedding Song.” It’s just three verses and a little interlude. I would play that at my songwriter shows and think, yeah, it’s so tight. But it fell flat as a dramatic scene. I had to find a way to explode the form without breaking what works about it.

I also learned about putting space into a song. You might put space into a song so that a musician can improvise or express themselves. The same is true for drama: There was to be space for the actor to create the character. As a write, I tend to want to fill that space with words. I think both of these mediums are really similar in the sense that you’re building something for someone else to inhabit. You’re building a house that someone else can live in.

If you can write a song that’s good enough that other people are going to sing it and cover it and let it live in the world, you’re creating something that is similar to a play, which can be revived just by other people’s involvement in it. It’s bigger than you. And hopefully it’ll outlive you.

That’s interesting, because right now it seems like most people prize the singer/songwriter model, where the song is heard as an extension of the person and means less when it’s covered by someone else. The idea of somebody telling their truth seems to have more validity right now than a song that can change and accommodate new interpretations and maybe means something different when different people sing it.

I think we’re approaching an idea that feels really important to me. I haven’t talked about it enough to have language about it, but I do think things need to be true emotionally for the person who’s writing them. I would say all of the songs in Hadestown came from a place of personal truth even though they maybe took on the clothing of the character or the needs of the scenario. There has to be some emotional truth. That’s a sacred thing. But there’s something intersecting that idea. What is universally true or part of some collective unconscious stuff can be exciting.

You could go about trying to write something like a hit or a standard as a kind of exercise, and it might not feel true to you. To be honest, I think a lot of Nashville co-writing scenarios end up this way, where you get something that feels structurally tight but is missing some kernel of personal truth. But you can go too far in the other direction where it’s like the person is totally self-expressing. How does that mean anything to me or to someone else?

It’s that middle ground you’re looking for, where you can sing from your own heart and experience, but you’re also singing from the heart of the world, from the world’s experience. Folk music is really interesting for that, right? Because it’s like water from a deep well. Those songs tap into a universal experience, and those archetypes and images are going to live forever. So if I can find a way to write that taps into that but also feels true to me, then that’s the zone I want to live in.

Do you feel like you reached that with this iteration of Hadestown? Is this the final form it will take, or will you keep developing the story?

There was a moment when I thought I was going to revise it for the tour that we’re doing in the fall. But we just put out this cast recording, which is beautiful and has all the material in it. I think people might want to go to the regional version and be able to experience the show that they’ve listened to on that recording. I do fantasize about a film version, but that’s maybe years down the line. For the time being I think it’s best for me to take a step away, but I could see getting really excited to roll up my sleeves again for what would essentially be another phase.

I’ve actually been working on a book, which has been very therapeutic. It’s coming out sometime this year and it’s basically the history of the project, the evolution of the lyrics. It’s called Working on a Song. I was able to go back and look at a lot of these songs and see where they came from and how they evolved. I often would say I felt like I was banging my head against the wall: The idea was wrong, the thing was wrong. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, and then suddenly it’s right. At the time it didn’t feel like those wrong choices I had made meant anything. But when I look back on the process, I can see more clearly the way certain lines came up or certain songs or ideas came about. They didn’t come up quite right, so they went back into the soil. They nourished the ground that then the right thing could grow out of.

So much of the time you feel like everything is futile. Like, I can’t believe I just sat here for however many hours and made only one rhyme that might not even be good. That happens to me all the time. So the metaphor that I came up with has to do with gardening. You have to rake around, and the raking is sort of aerating the soil. You’re preparing the ground for the right thing to come up. And when they do come up, they’re beautiful, like flowers. And then they go back into the soil and eventually nourish the next thing.

That definitely seems to fit with the story Hadestown is telling, about an artist who literally goes into the soil to rescue his beloved and finish this unfinished song. From a creative perspective, how much did you identify with or relate to the character of Orpheus?

Totally. It’s interesting that that character took so long to come into focus. Ever since our off-Broadway version of the show, Orpheus confused a lot of audiences. People weren’t falling in love with him. They found him and Eurydice to be less fully drawn and therefore less compelling than the older couple Hades and Persephone. I always thought of Orpheus as this really crazy optimist. He’s got this faith in the world and in his own music, but then he ends up besieged by doubt at the end, which is supposed to be crushing. But he has a lot of lines that if they were delivered wrong — even just by a tiny fraction of a percentage wrong — they felt swagger-y and cocky, which is not what I intended for him.

I always thought of him as this sensitive soul, and that kind of machismo was not in keeping with that idea. His first line was, “Come home with me.” And people were like, who is this guy? Why’s he trying to pick up this chick? Why should we love him? People weren’t identifying with him, and they didn’t care if he won or lost. Obviously, if you don’t love him and want him to succeed, then the story falls flat. You’ve got to love Orpheus.

After we debuted in London, there was a crisis moment when we had this awful nagging feeling that something was not quite in focus. People don’t love this hero. It came up in a lot of reviews. So we went into triage mode, me and the director and the producers. How can we fix this? So we decided that for Broadway, we would really lean into his naiveté. He’s a boy who’s lost in his own world. He undeniably has a gift to give the world but he’s not very good at living in the world the way it is. He’s socially inept. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Suddenly that made him appear much younger and much more innocent. It’s not like he’s so brave to stand up to Hades. It’s more that he just doesn’t know any better. He’s an innocent who finds himself in the belly of the beast, and he doesn’t know any better than to call out what he sees as true. What we fall in love with is his purity of heart. That’s what comes through in his singing. That was a really fascinating journey with that character for me. That song that Orpheus could never finish was also the song that I felt I could never finish.

(Read our second installment of our Artist of the Month coverage on Anaïs Mitchell tomorrow.)

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez