Rose Cousins and Edie Carey‘s friendship has blossomed for over two decades. On the occasion of Rose releasing her new album, Conditions of Love – Vol 1, the pair appear on Basic Folk to discuss the new music. They reflect on their early days and their first meeting as well as the ways they’ve influenced each other’s careers and personal growth.
To witness Rose’s new album through the eyes (and ears) of her best friend feels like a huge privilege, a front-row seat looking into what the human heart and mind are capable of. Edie prompts Rose to expand on the challenges of balancing love and freedom, the complexities of navigating midlife, and why the piano is her soulmate. With humor and depth, they tackle the big questions of life, love, and the creative process, revealing the layers of their artistic identities.
“I just had a really moving, hilarious, enlightening conversation with my best friend Rose Cousins,” Edie reflects. “We talked about vulnerability, middle-aged gardening, accidentally putting in one another’s eye contacts, and befriending our own mortality. We also talked about her stunning new record, Conditions of Love – Vol 1.”
Explore more of our Artist of the Month coverage of Rose Cousins here.
One day, as a favor for a friend who was building a recording studio, Rose Cousins wandered through a piano showroom. She had no intention of buying anything for herself, but then she came upon a 1967 Baldwin baby grand. She asked the salesperson about it and was told it already had a buyer. She asked to put her name on a waiting list, though, just in case.
“A few days later,” she said in our recent Zoom interview for BGS, “they called me and said, ‘It’s become available.’ So then I went [back to the store] … and they pulled it into a room so I could play it. I spent a couple of hours with it and then freaked out over the next month. And then ended up buying it as my first real piano.”
Piano had been an early acquaintance for Cousins, when she was first finding her voice as a musician. Growing up on a Prince Edward Island farm, the second of five children in a tight-knit family, Cousins was both poet and athlete. The piano was an early friend to her empathic insides as she began to find her voice amid the bustle of a busy household.
More than twenty years and nine releases into her JUNO Award-winning career, Cousins has long since migrated to Canada’s mainland. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is one of her country’s finest contributors to her generation of singer-songwriters. Across her career, she has mostly recorded her own songs, often on guitar, but the piano has been a constant presence, both in the studio and her live performances. She has turned to it for pulling the feelings forward in cover songs like Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” She has relied on it for original songs that are especially emotionally demanding, such as the devastating “Go First” from 2012’s We Have Made a Spark and “Grace” and “Like Trees” from GRAMMY-nominated Natural Conclusion (2017).
Now, Cousins has reached her tenth release, Conditions of Love – Vol. 1. For it, she has laid her Martin acoustic guitar to the side. From the album’s opening instrumental overture, “To Be Born,” to its final rumination, “How Is This (the last time),” we hear Cousins playing that beautiful old Baldwin. Taken in its entirety, Conditions is a collection of songs that is even more deeply vulnerable than usual, with good reason.
“The sensation of playing a full, real piano of my own and having it in my space,” she says, “it’s kind of like a zone I go into. It’s a very intimate relationship.”
These are strong words coming from an artist who has sold T-shirts at her shows that read “Feelings Welcome” and “Rose Cousins Made Me Cry.” That there might be some deeper well of emotion available to her than she has been willing or able to access on previous projects, might make some listeners nervous. But there is no need for a wellness warning on Conditions of Love – Vol. 1.
Once the listener is “Born” into this album, the first song with lyrics is called “Forget Me Not.” It’s delivered in list form, an ode on spring and, perhaps, a nod toward rebirth.
In 2020, Cousins says, the pandemic lockdown saw her moving neighborhoods. “I got a dog, and that meant I was walking outside multiple times a day. I was walking through, particularly, the spring and summer.” Free of the administrative tasks that pile up when she’s planning for another show or tour, she adds, “It’s like my peripheral vision widened and my top vision heightened and my noticing was so much sharper. I was just noticing things blooming – and when they were blooming. It seems ridiculous, because I’ve lived many, many springs, but I actually haven’t experienced spring in the same place multiple times in many, many years. And here I was experiencing it. … It really was this, like, holy shit [moment]. Like oh, snowdrops are the first thing you see. You see them come up and there’s still snow on the ground.”
For an artist – a poet – who had grown up on an island roaming the woods and the beach and playing outside with her siblings, this return to the city oddly necessitated a return to nature. As the rest of us watched YouTube videos of mountain goats and bears roaming urban neighborhoods the world over quiet from COVID lockdowns, Cousins was developing a kinship with those wild things reclaiming their natural environment, even if just for a moment.
“Sweet fern and knapweed,” she sings. “Lavender and rosemary.”
Perhaps an accident, perhaps a nod to the album’s theme, the flowering plants come in pairs. There is some kind of partnership between, say, the “buttercup and poppy,” though it would take a gardening expertise beyond this writer’s own to specify why. And yet, the casual observer, rekindling a relationship with the earth, can sense it.
“Forget Me Not” shifts when Cousins begins listing trees. “Dogwood and gingko,” she sings as the lyrics evolve into sentences. “The poplar leaves clap as the wind blows.” Nature is spreading its roots and branches. There is more space for more observations, more developed ideas, more potential.
The blossoms open. The bees arrive. The eye draws upward.
By the end of the song, Cousins is simply imploring, “Don’t forget me,” but there is a sense that she is not speaking to a lover or even a friend. This is a dialogue with the earth, with the seasons and sky. She is speaking for and to them as much as she is speaking for and to herself.
“Dogwood was one of the trees that I absolutely fell in love with,” Cousins continues. “I planted one on my property two falls ago. The fall dogwood. I just couldn’t even believe how beautiful it is. … I probably would have seen the dogwood before, but didn’t know that it was called dogwood, you know. I didn’t have a relationship with that tree.” But now she does.
Perhaps one condition of love is first knowing what it is.
Here is where the idea of love’s conditions immediately turns. After all, love is one of the most commented upon musical subjects. Contemporary music typically focuses on the romantic sort – particularly brand-new or just ending. But that is not all Rose Cousins is here for. (The album is not called Conditions of Romantic Love.)
From the first set of lyrics on this album, we are handed an implicit definition of love: It is small and big. It is colorful and everywhere. It is where you may not expect it. It is of the self and of the earth. It emerges at the right time. It withers and hibernates and invisibly readies rebirth.
Perhaps love is always – even when it is not. Yet it can feel so elusive, so impossible to pin down. “Love makes us insane,” Cousins says, while discussing the album’s third track and its first single, “I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard).”
“We’re kind of told that we want it. We kind of do want it. We get into it. We struggle with it. It’s ridiculous. … And it’s like, ‘I want to have this. I’m doing my best out here to try and have this love thing.’ … But then [there’s] the choice between being in a relationship with somebody and working through all the ridiculousness – or being wild and free.”
Which brings us back to the mountain goats and bears wandering cities during lockdown. Back to Cousins walking her dog, noticing flowers and trees. Reacquainting with oneself is part of love, whether it comes in the throes of a long connection with another human, or after such a relationship has come to an end.
Indeed, this juxtaposition between endurance and ending is among the running themes on Conditions. In reality, love does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It is not a story we tell as much as it is an ongoing pursuit of life itself. “There [is] a cycle to every relationship where you come in close, and then you move back, [and then] you come in close,” Cousins says.
“Denouement” is another sort of list song. “Dissonance,” she sings in its final verse. “Elephants. Vigilance. Grand defense.” And as she lists these rhyming words, the inclusion of “Elephants” feels so ridiculous. She is recounting a lovers’ spat, which ends with “dinner mints” as her protagonists presumably leave the restaurant together.
All kinds of love relationships can turn on what we tend to call “elephants in the room.” There are the things we decide to not bring up over dinner – with our families or our lovers or our friends. The times we hurt one another, the grief and fear, the secrets between us. The willingness to hold these things, to let the elephants stand as we take our dinner mints and move on, that gives love room to persist.
“There’s this movie I watched on an airplane on my way back from Calgary in 2023,” Cousins recalls. “It’s just this small Canadian independent film called Wildhood. … There [were] a couple characters who come from tough homes. One of them says, ‘Love has conditions, I guess.’ … And I was like, fuck, it’s exactly that. Does it ever, you know?”
Cousins is careful to clarify that she doesn’t understand her album’s theme as merely a push-and-pull between conditional and unconditional love.
“Conditions, in all of the definitions of ‘conditions,’” she says. “It’s like – what is the weather in this relationship today? What are the guises under which I’m going to be loved and that I belong, or that I will be accepted, or, you know, that I can be vulnerable? There’s no one [condition]. There’s just so many.”
While many of the songs are clearly circling around an understanding of romantic love, there is also the love that exists within a family of origin. Love that is perpetual and yet can feel as though it rests on one or more people behaving a certain way. This love can feel more like a barrier than a connection. Like reaching toward a wall, unable to even see whether the person on the other side is reaching too.
The places where this image resonates most – “That’s How Long (I’ve waited for your love),” “Wolf and Man,” “Borrowed Light” – come in the second half of the disc. If we are to take Conditions as a birth-to-death exploration of love, these are the songs that come with middle age. When we have the same amount of time behind us as we do in front. When we begin to wrestle with familiality and community and our own identity in relation to both. The balance of love between self and others.
“I am borrowing light from the moon, who is borrowing light from the sun,” she sings in the album’s penultimate track.
Perhaps another condition of love is connection and disconnection, the way we use each other, the choice to depend upon another body.
“As we age,” she adds, “if you choose it, there’s a lot of facing oneself that can be really fruitful and deeply painful. And I think that the pandemic did that for me. As glorious as it was to have the ‘Forget Me Not’ experience of … [a] revisited relationship with nature. It also was really arresting in the way that it was holding up a bunch of mirrors.
“Like, where are all these mirrors coming from? I was able to kind of ignore [them before], or didn’t know that they were there, that I needed to look into them, because I was just so busy with work and motion and the next thing. So, as painful as that was, it was a rich ground for growth. And growth is most often painful. I definitely learned a lot about myself during the last four years.”
Cousins pauses before continuing: “I don’t really know how to talk about this.”
Fair enough. The music she’s created, as usual, speaks plenty.
Rose Cousins is nothing if not intentional. With her new album Conditions of Love – Vol 1 (out March 14), Cousins demonstrates a controlled discipline as she considers the most unruly of our emotions. The JUNO award-winning artist is a student of love, from the sweet certainty of “One Love” from her 2016 album If You Were For Me to the entirety of her 2017 masterpiece Natural Conclusion to “The Agreement,” a consideration of the liberties and drawbacks of a long-distance open relationship from her most recent prior full-length project, Bravado.
Over the years, Cousins has honed her approach to her craft as carefully as her music, even taking a five-year break between albums to recover from burn out and focus on songwriting over performance. That commitment to her art is just one small part of what has earned Cousins the recognition of being named BGS’ Artist of the Month.
Conditions kicks off with “To Be Born,” an instrumental channeling of the rural Prince Edward Island where Cousins grew up. Buzzing wonderment introduces us to a song cycle of love in all its forms: romantic, platonic, a sense of one-ness with the universe – and what causes them to grow and die. At the beginning of it all, Cousins tells us, is that sense of wondrous possibility.
“I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard)” harbors a desire that Cousins hinted in a 2012 interview with No Depression – a fascination with songs that are upbeat and poppy, but communicate something serious. The song is a catchy thesis statement for this album: that as much we depend on our bonds with others to survive, we crave our individual freedoms and yearn for balance.
I know in love it’s hard to be Everything that someone else could ever need While holding onto “wild and free”
Wild and free Wild and free Wild and free Wild and free
But there are certain types of love that require obligation. “Needed You” weaves bitterness and compassion together with the opening salvo,
Yeah I turned out fine It’s what we do I spent my time looking for clues So I became a wishing well And I don’t need water Is what I tell myself
In this moving piano ballad, Cousins considers both the person she’s become and the inner child who needed nurturing. While the song seeks to find reconciliation between that vulnerable inner core and the people in our past who make us lock that core away, the song also invites us to empathize with the legacies of intergenerational trauma that can lead to a family’s failure to meet a child’s emotional needs. It’s an astonishing track, one that efficiently wraps years of therapy into four minutes.
“Denouement” is even more precise – an airy collection of word associations that invite us to fill in the blanks in the arc of a relationship.
Happenstance Vast expanse Circumstance Second glance Take a chance New romance Take my hand Can I have this dance
Cousins’ abstraction is delightful, a wry acknowledgment of how cliche love can be, even as we revel in its glorious highs (and pray that the lows stay away as long as possible – forever, ideally.) But the cycle eventually starts again – after all, we’re only human – and the dance can feel as familiar as it does wondrous.
That feeling extends to another shade of love: gratitude. “Borrowed Light” asks us to reflect on the ways we connect with everything around us, and to appreciate the all-too-brief length of time we have to experience it.
I am borrowing light From the moon, who is borrowing light From the sun who comes back every time Every time
“Borrowed Light” is anchored by a questing piano line, an instrument that Cousins feels is her first love. As the instrument – a 1967 Baldwin grand that Cousins and long-time collaborator/producer Joshua Van Tassel fell in love with immediately – traverses the cosmos, Cousins is buttressed by a backing chorus momentarily, sublimely, at the song’s apex.
Conditions of Love – Vol 1 doesn’t offer many answers and, of course, the title hints at further dives into the topic. However, Cousins does offer one example of how to live, a waltz dedicated to her late friend and colleague, Koady Chaisson, “K’s Waltz.”
Your heart It did not give out or give in It gave everything It gave everything It gave everything It gave everything
As hard as it is, Cousins begs us to be as open as possible, to feel all of it – love and joy, yes, but also grief at partings that are inevitable, no matter what. It’s only when we push through our defenses to embrace radical openness, when we “give everything,” that we can say we have lived well.
We are so very excited to name Rose Cousins our March 2025 Artist of the Month. Dive into our exclusive interview with Rose all about the new album here, listen to Rose in conversation with her longtime friend Edie Carey on Basic Folk here, explore our Essential Rose Cousins Playlist below, and follow along on social media all month long as we go back into the BGS archives for anything and everything Rose Cousins.
In 2022, punk-blues innovator Sunny War moved into her late father’s house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and began making repairs. There was no heat that first winter and the house needed a full electrical rewiring. By winter 2023, she had the money to heat the place, but as the temperature rose each night, Sunny felt a strange impulse to patrol the house in the dark, swinging her grandfather’s machete at the ghosts inhabiting the top floor.
At the start of our Zoom call interview in January, Sunny recounts the bizarre magical realism of the weeks she spent living with an undiscovered gas leak. I ask enough follow-up questions to be reassured that my friend is not still being fumigated in her own home before I allow myself to belly laugh. “I have to fix everything,” she sighs.
Sunny goes on to explain that by the time the city discovered and fixed the problem, the mood had already been set for her forthcoming album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. I would describe the results as psychedelic and subtly dangerous.
My friend Sunny can be a little hard to read, a fact which she mentions at one point during our call. We first met at Americanafest in 2019. It was my second year traveling from New York to Tennessee for the annual roots music conference and festival. That summer I had made up my mind to bring Black artists together during the festival for our own unofficial day party. I booked Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, cross-referenced names on the festival poster with Google image searches, and sent out a few invitations. Sunny agreed to perform, as did Tré Burt and Milwaukee folk duo Nickel & Rose (featuring Carl Nichols, the artist soon to become Buffalo Nichols). One after another we played our songs then stepped out onto the Madison, Tennessee, porch, most of us meeting for the first time. It was the greatest number of Black people I had ever been around in a professional space since releasing my debut album in 2017.
It was clear to me even then that Sunny was a star. Carl, Tré, and I were on ascendant career arcs of our own, but Sunny was out ahead somehow. She was already well known in songwriter circles for her inimitable movements on the guitar and for her punk rock roots, but it was the intensity of her stage presence that stood out to me most on that first meeting. I watched her suck in the air and light around her as she sang, quietly commanding the audience’s attention. Songs like “Drugs Are Bad” and “Shell” became spells when sung in War’s almost-effortless, warmly breathy style. She appeared peaceful in her own creative world amidst the restless energy of the festival.
2019 was also the year that Sunny founded the downtown Los Angeles chapter of Food Not Bombs, a national network of community groups addressing hunger. In interviews about the movement she was candid about having experienced houselessness herself and how she noticed the disproportionate presence of veterans on the street. She organized weekly meetups in which volunteers made meals and shared them, potluck-style, with their unhoused neighbors on skid row. When COVID hit they switched to burritos and sack lunches. On “Deployed and Destroyed,” one of the outstanding tracks from Sunny’s 2021 album, Simple Syrup, she invites her listener to spend three minutes and 54 seconds in the shoes of a 26-year-old unhoused veteran experiencing PTSD. When I listen to her sing “I still love you/ We’re still friends” I feel like I am sitting beside her. This is what Aristotle and contemporary Marxists call “praxis.”
Sunny is fearless on stage. Six years into our friendship I remain awed by the way in which she commands attention without ever seeming contained by it. Her presence has a kinetic power that you can more easily get lost in than describe. We met up in Chicago on a winter night in early 2023 when Sunny was on tour and I was in between tours. Both of us were depressed, I think. Wide, wet snowflakes were beginning to fall outside while we caught up over drinks. We bribed the DJ into letting us jump the line for karaoke and then launched into a formally unconventional performance of Destiny’s Child’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin’.” The mostly-white crowd of beer-drinking twenty-somethings were amused at first and then bored. I gave up. Sunny stayed the course, winning the audience over with mischief in her eyes.
Later that year Sunny released Anarchist Gospel on New West Records to well-deserved, unanimous acclaim. The album featured Americana heavy hitters Allison Russell, Dave Rawlings, and Chris Pierce. She also toured with Mitski, broadening her fandom to include more indie listeners. I cheered my friend from afar, mostly on Instagram, as her star continued to rise.
When I ask about her memories of that album cycle, Sunny enthusiastically recalls the younger audiences who discovered her music. She expresses gratitude that a 14-year-old at a Mitski concert, someone who “actually is into music for the first time in their life, in the way that you are when you hate your parents and all you have is music” would become a fan. A lot of journalists described her as an “emerging” artist or a songwriter soon to be one of the most beloved in Americana. But for those of us on the fringes of the format, Sunny had been the best around for a minute and the momentum of her career spoke for itself.
Sunny’s latest album, Armageddon In A Summer Dress, comes out on February 21. I ask her to describe the new record in her own words. “Silly,” she responds. I ask if there is a genre descriptor for her music in general. She says, “No.” I am going to follow the artist’s lead and not do her album the disservice of describing it too much. I will say that Armageddon In A Summer Dress is her seventh full-length effort and contains her most inspired vocal performances yet – and some of her finest lyrics.
There is a haze hovering in the top layers of some of these tunes. The winding guitar melodies often weave themselves into the vocal lines, but sometimes they go their own way. I ask her if audiences are reacting to the Black anarchist content of her songs differently than they did the last time she released a folk album with transparently leftist politics. “I don’t feel like people pay that much attention to my lyrics,” she responds. Her primary musical concern, she reflects, is playing the guitar. And in any case, the best way to metabolize these songs is by listening to them repeatedly.
Sunny, Carl, Tré, and I have remained loosely intertwined in the years since that first Americana kickback. We have toured together. We run into each other at festivals and in thrift shops. Tré and Sunny were roommates for a time and in the summertime can be seen riding bikes like cousins in Sunny’s recent music video for “Scornful Heart.” I interview my friends periodically.
We all continue to embody aspects of the blues tradition while resisting categorization. Sunny continues moving patiently through her own cycles of living, transforming, creating in darkness, and then telling the story. She leaps unexpectedly from now to the future and then doubles back to sample tradition, inviting you to keep up. Her lyrics are disarmingly empathetic. Like all great artists, Sunny moves in her own time, less concerned with debating the canon than she is with creating the future. She looks back on the nights she hunted ghosts with her grandfather’s machete joking, “That wasn’t me!”
There is great integrity in Sunny’s storytelling, which means that no matter how long it has been since we last spoke, she will catch me up quickly when we meet again. I ask her who the narrator of “No One Calls Me Baby” is, trying to signal that I am a feminist who recognizes women writers as authors beyond the world of autobiography. But she quickly tells me that the narrator is her and fills me in on the past few months of her life. She has been single for over a year, and has been learning to enjoy the alone time in a house she owns. We commiserate about being single, but we are both leaned back by this point, looking down on loneliness together. “No one calls me baby anymore/ I hold my own hand now…”
One of my favorite things about Sunny is that whether she’s playing a dive bar or a sold-out theater, everyone walks away dazzled. She is just as warm and entertaining sitting across from you in her home. She accompanies herself.
Sunny War has done it again. Her brand new album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress (out February 21 via New West Records), is yet another anarcho-punk-roots masterpiece in her already deep-and-wide catalog of superlative recordings. The project builds on the sonic and rhetorical universe of her critically acclaimed and triumphantly received 2023 release, Anarchist Gospel, further expanding her charming, down-to-earth doctrine of mutual aid, community, and truly radical ideas – musically, and otherwise – exactly when we need them most.
That fact – the apropos timing of this collection of songs and their release – feels most striking because this music wasn’t written expressly to be a response to the current critical mass of fascism, oligarchy, and attacks on human rights in our country and around the world. Instead, the messages and morals in these songs are well-placed, not as slapdash reactions to the current political discourse or as activist-branded cash grabs in a terrifying societal moment, but by focusing on the real day-to-day implications of such imperialism as evidenced within War’s own life and her own inner circle.
On Armageddon’s opening track, “One Way Train,” she sings:
When there’s no one left to use And no police or state And the fascists and the classists All evaporate Won’t you meet me on the outskirts Of my left brain Close your eyes and take a ride On a one way train
This album is exactly such a refuge on par with the singer’s “left brain” – and stemming directly from it! – in “One Way Train.” Armageddon is a respite from the noise of the news cycle and the sensationalism of consumerist media that needs not deny the realities we all witness and live through in order to be a resting place. This isn’t toxic positivity or “joy” and “hope” as cudgels to smack down criticism of inequalities, corruption, and ruling classes, thereby reinforcing the status quo. The songs of Armageddon in a Summer Dress do feel hopeful– but because they acknowledge and grapple with these issues, instead of willing them away under the rug or into hiding.
The deft and artful positioning of these incisive songs is directly tied to the ways anarchy, mutual aid, and solidarity have been woven into War’s life as an artist – and as a human, since even before she picked up the guitar. These are embodied, real concepts to Sunny, not just intellectual ideas and hypotheticals.
Punk and blues, folk and grunge ooze out of songs ripe for protest and resistance, but never packaged in a pink crocheted pussy cat hat or internet-ready bumper sticker quips. Sunny War knows the violence and tyranny we all face – she has faced it her entire life – and gives it the treatment it deserves, but without ever preaching or finger-wagging. The beliefs evident in Armageddon in a Summer Dress are never contingent on which team, “red or blue,” holds the power. Rather, the hope and tenacity in these songs feels derived from an intrinsic understanding that it’s always been “the many versus the few” and “the powerless versus the powerful” where the battle lines are drawn, instead.
“Walking Contradiction” – which features punk icon Steve Ignorant – is searing in its indictment of toothless neoliberalism having landed us in this exact political and social scenario:
…While the war pigs killed more kids today Picket signs were made 6,000 miles away And all the lefties and the liberals were marching so you know Just because they pay their taxes doesn’t mean that they don’t know All the pigs and the big wigs foaming at the mouth Look down at us laughing like we’ll never figure out All the war outside starts here at home If they didn’t have our money they’d be fighting it alone Doesn’t matter what your silly little signs have to say ‘Cause the genocide is funded by the taxes that you pay
Stopping and inhabiting this song, one of the project’s singles, and its message is illuminating. Especially when you realize it was written under the prior administration, but applies to the current one as well. And, perhaps, to every other presidential administration in U.S. history.
Armageddon in a Summer Dress still feels light and rewarding, though. It’s flowing and intuitive, and decidedly charming, even with these stark messages. Because, like most of Sunny War’s creative output, it actually drives to the heart of the issues we all turn over in our minds and on our screens each day, rather than tilting at superficial, sensational windmills that end up reinforcing our oligarchic status quo.
Of course, this album is not solely political and anarchic and intellectual. In fact, it’s not attempting to be cerebral and be-monocled at all. These are songs of love, of grief, of being an individual with a collective mindset in an individualist world with collective blindness.
There are songs of introspection, of perception, of self growth, of regression. Each feels fully realized in production, lush and deep. But there, in the gaps, in the bones of each track, are War’s signature fingerstyle licks, hooks, and turns of phrase on the guitar. She plays banjo throughout the project as well, and though the referenced genres evident on the project are endlessly rootsy, the blues and folk approach that charmed much of the bluegrass, folk, and Americana worlds previously serve a more subtle purpose here. War’s personality on her instruments is still prominent, and is ultimately successful playing more of a support role to the greater whole. Above all else, you can tell creating this album and these songs must have been so much fun to make.
Tré Burt, Valerie June, and John Doe – along with Ignorant – all guest on the record, which was produced by Andrija Tokic and recorded in Nashville, just up the highway from War’s current hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like Anarchist Gospel, seeing War’s community of collaborators grow and morph on the new project again speaks to the way this guitarist-songwriter-performer’s mission is an active, constructive one. It’s never merely a mantra hung on the wall to be admired from afar.
As we all face an ongoing apocalypse, as we each reckon with the indisputable fact that we are already living in dystopia – and have been – Armageddon in a Summer Dress is the perfect album to bring along with us. Dancing and flowing and twirling through the end of the world is certainly not a winning strategy, but dancing, marching, caring for one another, and lifting each other up despite Armageddon and imperialism might just do the trick.
She perhaps encapsulates this feeling best alongside wailing organ on “Bad Times:”
Had nothing so I had to borrow What I owe’s gonna double tomorrow Maybe now or in an hour or so I’m gonna have to let everything go
So long room and board And all the other things I can’t afford You’re overrated anyway I’ll be good soon as you Bad times stay away Bad times stay away Bad times stay away Bad times stay away…
This affirmation is not the end game, it is merely the beginning. If we take Sunny War’s ideals to heart, if we sing along at the top of our lungs, if we do mutual aid on a daily basis, if we take each moment, one individual second at a time– we, too, can navigate through Armageddon in a Summer Dress, emerging on the other side in a better, more just, more sunny world.
Sunny War is our Artist of the Month. Check out our exclusive interview with Sunny by her friend and peer Lizzie No here. Make sure to save our Essential Sunny War Playlist below while we gear up for the new album on February 21. Plus, follow BGS on social media as we dip back into our archives every day for all things Sunny during the entire month of February.
Megan and Rebecca Lovell are Larkin Poe, a band that nestles into a myriad of genres – and the sisters are good with that. Their newest full-length album effort, Bloom, out January 24, comes fresh off the heels of a GRAMMY win for Best Contemporary Blues Album with last year’s Blood Harmony. They also landed Duo of the Year at 2024’s Americana Honors & Awards, proving that by digging into their own stories, collaborating even when it isn’t easy, and filtering it all through what the music will feel like on stage, they carve a sound that knocks down doors into multiple genre territories.
Independent spirit permeates everything the sisters do, from the way they write and produce the music to how they map out the aesthetics of how they present the work. Bloom is no exception, finding the women delving deeply into personal and social themes in a way they say they have not before, the result of getting real with each other and learning how to collaborate through the writing process.
In “You Are the River,” we find them contemplating a common theme throughout the album, that sometimes the best and the worst are married inextricably and tie us to each other.
The sand in the oyster The pressure on the coal The sum of the parts is greater than the whole A chain of reactions A butterfly’s wing My hand holding yours to form another link
For our Artist of the Month interview, BGS spoke with Megan and Rebecca via Zoom from their respective homes in Nashville. The Lovells discuss the challenges and joy of writing together, the evolution of their relationship with their fans, and the pressures of public life in the age of social media.
You all have been lauded in multiple genres, from blues to Americana. You are also identified as a rock and roll band and here we are talking on a bluegrass outlet. What do you think about genres in general, and do you consider them at all during creation of the music?
Rebecca Lovell: One of the greatest pieces of advice that we’ve ever received was from Mr. Elvis Costello. Many, many years ago, he advised us to defy the temptation to put ourselves into a genre box. He has lived up to that creed himself, having made bluegrass, gospel, country, punk, rock records, operatic records, and musical records.
For us, having been able to sample all the different facets of who we are as people and music lovers allows us to connect with the people who are consuming our music. I think increasingly, all of us consume music from a wide range of genres. I do think that that’s one gift of streaming platforms. The very barest of silver lining is that it opens up your mind to the fact that there is great music to be found in every genre, and I think genre-blending is the way of the future.
So we call what we do roots rock and roll, which is intentionally very vague because we get great joy out of letting the many flavors of our musical heritage be represented. That allowed us this past summer to play at a bluegrass festival and then play at a world music festival, play at a pop festival, a rock festival, a country festival, and it keeps it fresh. It keeps it exciting.
You’ve won awards in multiple genres, especially in the past few years. I was curious: are awards ever a motivator for you? Do you ever think about them when you’re creating?
Megan Lovell: Winning awards is a very new thing for us. We’ve always made music with a different focus, because we’ve always felt that the real reward is people being willing to stand in line or travel and buy a ticket and wait at the venue for us to come and play. So that’s always been our focus. Not to say that winning an award isn’t a cool experience, and definitely something we’re super appreciative of, but I don’t think it’s something we consider when we’re writing or recording.
We’re definitely thinking about our live show. We’re really writing intentionally, thinking about how it will feel when we’re touring. Because that’s what we do most of the year is tour.
Tell me about your writing process, both when it’s just you two as sisters, bandmates, and business owners and then also when you bring in other folks to collaborate.
RL: I think Bloom represents a really cool point in our evolution as creative collaborators. Since the ground up, Megan and I have been projecting together since we were little kids. It’s felt like [there was] a lot of foreshadowing in our childhood that we would work together, because we’ve always been so collaborative. But songwriting was one of the last holdouts of our working relationship that there was friction in. I’m sure it has to do with the fact that there is a piece of this sibling rivalry thing. But getting older, being more comfortable with and accepting your flaws, and being able to then have the self-confidence in a writing session to throw out ideas – that inherently, because they are ideas, they’re not fully fledged. They can be misunderstood or sound stupid.
I think we’d had some writing experiences in the past where we had not had the best of times. It just felt like a lot of false starts. We typically had written separately, but something clicked in the last 6 to 8 months leading up to the writing process for Bloom. We made the commitment to and had many conversations about writing the record together, and I really think you can hear the progress that we made as a team in manifesting that true creative collaboration. I think the songs are so much better.
There was a real commitment to being very intentional with everything that we said on this record. Being a songwriter and a performer, there is always this temptation to self-aggrandize, or build a character for yourself, or be the movie theatrical version of who you are and what your life feels like. I specifically have written from that space in the past and listening back, we wanted to do something different this time. That was our consensus. We went through every song, every lyric on this record with a fine-tooth comb, to ensure that real vulnerable authenticity was represented in the lyrics. That took a lot of courage and I am really proud of us for making that commitment, and being able to actually pull it off with this album.
ML: You know, what’s funny is, when we were thinking about bringing in a third collaborator, did we go outside? No, we actually end up working with Rebecca’s husband [Tyler Bryant] a lot. So we have that sibling dynamic and the husband-and-wife dynamic. We really like to complicate things.
RL: There is a certain shorthand that exists when someone knows you really well, when you know someone really well, and especially between Megan and myself – and also Tyler. We all have very closely mirrored musical upbringings and we have a lot of kindred spirit energy in the records that we’re all referencing for the production and the songwriting.
It does create this space, when handled correctly, for being really truthful, being really genuine, and allowing yourself to actually go to those spaces. I was the big crybaby on this record. I was weeping in these co-writes, like inconsolable. But that allows you to really channel some specific, detailed stuff from your own experience. The more specific you’re able to get with yourself, the more likely it is you’re going to be able to connect with other people. And that is our biggest motivator.
That’s so wonderful. Speaking of, what is your relationship with your fans like? And do you see it evolving as you change your process and become more open that way?
ML: We have a lot of musically deep music lovers and they’re really cool, knowledgeable people. I think because we’ve kind of always been a little bit left of center, we’ve attracted a cool audience; people who appreciate the do-it-yourself attitude and people who just really want to support a grassroots effort.
We’ve had people who have been following now for decades, which is strange to be able to say, but they’ve really stuck with it. Of course, those relationships do shift over time. And certainly through the pandemic. That was a huge shift in the way that we related to people, because we were using the internet to connect. We had these pretty spiritual conversations with people that I’m not sure would have happened if we hadn’t been online and talking all of the time. We came out of the pandemic with a lot more intimate fans.
Can you talk about the recording process? Where did you cut this record? How did you decide to bring in your husband as co-producer?
RL: I do think the pandemic played a big role in the shift of Megan and myself bringing Tyler Bryant in as a co-producer because, for the last 10 years, we’ve been self-producing our records. At Megan’s behest as the big sister, she was like, “It’s time. We need to self-produce our records.” That was very scary at first, but we got our feet wet and got our bearings.
Ultimately, we’re so grateful that we made that shift, because it allowed us to hold the reins in the studio and steer the music in the direction that we wanted to go. Through the pandemic, we built a state of the art recording studio in the basement of our home, and we wanted to make records. We didn’t want to hold up our creative process. We were still distancing in our bubble. But it was the group of us, and by necessity we started recording in that home studio; we’re kind of blown away at the sounds we could get. There was an effortless nature of being in a really safe home environment.
When Megan and I tour with our band, we’re a four-piece, so we set up as a four-piece in the studio and went for it. Hopefully, that will allow our records to age gracefully because they are very true and very stripped down to who we are as a band.
ML: But honestly, when we were going to studios, we were experiencing a lot of Keurig machines and we like really nice espresso machines. So we made the decision to stay home.
Let’s talk about the song “Pearls.” It seems to be built around the idea of maintaining a sense of self while you’re navigating the world that’s constantly reflecting you in such a public way. I wanted to know, as family and as bandmates and business partners, how do you navigate the ever-changing and tumultuous world of being in the public eye, especially in the age of social media?
RL: I think it’s one of the hardest things. It is so challenging to exist in a space where you need to have just enough ego to get on stage and perform. But you can’t identify too much with that ego, because then you’re creating a very limited, narrow lane for yourself. But don’t have too big of an ego, because then you’re going to be a bitch and nobody’s gonna like you. So it’s this weird straddling of all these different elements of our identities. And then we’re having to do that together.
With so much shared experience between us, Megan knows the true me. I think that you and I have cultivated a great deal of grace, allowing that true nature to evolve. Who we were when we were 5, is simultaneously the same as who we are now, and also very, very different. Allowing that leeway for ourselves is only something that we’ve started really engaging with in the last 5 years. Right, Megan?
ML: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of conversations over the last couple of years. We are coming to more of an understanding of where the tension was coming from, from who we are as people, and then who we expect ourselves to be on stage. Then also that sort of external pressure that everybody has that we also felt from a very young age from the people around us. There are people in the industry who expect us to be something and then fans who come and meet us. There are a lot of opinions flying around, but you really don’t have to take anything on board that you don’t want to.
Whether it’s that one negative comment on a post that you for some reason have to obsess about, even though there are 99% positive comments. You just can’t get that negative comment out of your head and I don’t even know if I trust that person’s opinion. It’s a good reminder to just steer your own ship.
You mentioned different kinds of festivals, different genres of festivals. When you think about your tour, what kind of stage do you feel the most at home on? Is it a festival? Is it a club or theater? Is it a genre of festival?
ML: 2025 is going to be a big year for touring. Last year we played a lot of festivals. This year we are playing a lot of headline shows and we’re going to start in the U.S. and go through the spring. Then we’re gonna do a big fall European tour. And it’s shaping up to be really, really amazing. We have a really substantial following over in Europe. We have done a lot of work over there. There’s some bucket list venues that we’re gonna play.
I love a headline show. You know, where the place is packed, and there’s that energy in the audience, and everybody knows the lyrics. There’s nothing that beats that vibe and you can find that anywhere. You can find it in a tiny rock club to an arena or a festival. The important thing is that people are engaged from the stage to the audience, and vice versa.
Same for you, Rebecca?
RL: Yeah, I agree. I love a headline date, I think, especially because Megan and I are album people. We like a body of work. I like to sit down and listen to an artist’s album from the beginning to the end to try and get a sense of where they were at when they were writing the record. Megan and I, when we make our records, we obsess about the content, about the story arc, about the sequencing of the record, about the packaging, about the font.
And I think we get that same kind of energy in a headline show because we’re thinking about the colors of lights and which of the songs we are going to include and how much of the old material. We really want to have that space with the music and the emotional content of the music, and you feel that energy, and you feel that resonance. If everything goes right and everyone has their hearts open, you gain access to this portal where I think a lot of transformative change can happen between humans. And that’s what we seek.
Larkin Poe are unstoppable. The incendiary sister duo – made up of Megan and Rebecca Lovell – have enjoyed near constant growth and momentum building over the past decade and a half, since they emerged from their younger family band era in the early 2010s as an endlessly gritty and gutsy Americana-meets-blues-meets-Southern rock phenomenon. Now, their sights are set on their upcoming seventh studio album, Bloom (out January 24 via Tricki-Woo Records), with a year’s worth of accolades – including their first GRAMMY winand being named the Americana Music Association’s Duo/Group of the Year – firing like afterburners on their already rocketing career.
Their perseverant climb of the music industry’s ladders is the least remarkable aspect of Larkin Poe’s trajectory, though. The sisters Lovell outwardly channel a sort of outlaw-styled disaffection for the trappings and machinations of the industry or Music Row, inhabiting self-assured personas that fit seamlessly within the genres they call home. They know they’re stellar songwriters, they’re virtuosic pickers, and they’re fluent in the aggression, anger, and release of rock and roll. Across their entire catalog there are clear demonstrations – from the winking and sly to the outright and overt (see, for instance, “She’s a Self Made Man“) – where Larkin Poe show their listeners they aren’t just living in “a man’s world,” they’re owning it, re-centering it, and doing it better than the machismo naysayers rife in these roots styles. Styles where a corrective phrase like “Um, actually…” is still wielded as a cudgel or seen as valuable social currency.
Um, actually… these women know exactly what they’re doing. And they would have to, given they came up through bluegrass, folk, and string band circles as a bluegrass(-ish) family band, the Lovell Sisters, with their sister Jessica. Winning songwriting contests and appearing on Prairie Home Companion, the Lovell Sisters were quickly beloved in bluegrass, honing their chops while also getting their first tastes of being written off or sidelined as “merely” a female-centered novelty act. When the group decided to disband, Megan and Rebecca “reskinned” as Larkin Poe, immediately transforming so many of their “I knew them when” audience members into “I wish they still played bluegrass” skeptics. Not that the Lovells cared, ultimately. A hallmark of the duo since their rebirth has been agency, autonomy, and self-possession. (Something of a prerequisite for successful women in roots music, to be sure.)
Seven studio albums into their grooving, rollicking, no-holds-barred catalog, Larkin Poe are even less concerned with external forces or outside variables influencing and impacting their music. Bloom builds on the confidence and clarity of Blood Harmony‘s GRAMMY Award-winning vision. Produced and co-written by both Lovells and their longtime collaborator (and Rebecca’s spouse) Tyler Bryant, Bloom zooms in on the individual stems, leaves, and petals of the agency and self-determination that have run through all of their music. It is, yet again, a decidedly familial project, but despite all of the ground they’ve covered together and all of the miles they’ve traveled over their lifelong careers together, rebirth and reinvention continue to blossom on each of their projects. It speaks once more to the music itself being their guiding light – rather than commercial appeal, marketability, or continuing to do it simply because it’s what they’ve always done.
“Bloom is about finding oneself amidst the noise of the world,” says Rebecca via press release. “About wholeheartedly embracing the flaws and idiosyncrasies that make us real. In one way or another, pretty much all of the songs on this album are about finding yourself, knowing yourself, and separating the truth of who you are from societal expectations.”
Perhaps only a group of women could make a Southern rock album with this sort of message at its core. They may peacock and strut, on stage and in the studio, just like their male peers and contemporaries might, but they do so with a message and mission that’s decidedly antithetical to most creators in Americana, rock, and blues these days. Especially the “Um, actually…” set. By taking on these characters and personas, Larkin Poe aren’t hiding their truths from us, but putting their most authentic selves directly into the spotlight.
At the same time, when you’ve spent your entire adult lives making and performing music with your family, with siblings and in-laws and chosen family, too, it’s often a passive and subconscious process by which you slowly lose pieces of yourself, of your individuality, of your sacred selfhood. It’s no wonder, then, that Larkin Poe have crafted a stunning, engaging, and iconic catalog of music that orbits around this very dichotomy. To be a family band, to sing or pick or channel blood harmonies, is to give up yourself for the greater whole. Megan and Rebecca and their compatriots then use that same music to find and re-find that sense of self as it slips away. Each time, each album and each set of songs, it is a musical gift; and each time, including the latest effort, Bloom, Larkin Poe find and share themselves anew.
We are so very excited to name Larkin Poe our January 2025 Artist of the Month. Stay tuned for our exclusive interview with Megan and Rebecca Lovell coming later this month, dive into our Essential Larkin Poe Playlist below, and follow along on social media all month as we dive back into the BGS and Good Country archives for everything Larkin Poe and the Lovell sisters.
That, Mickey Hart recalls, is the first thing Zakir Hussain said to him when the young Mumbai-born tabla player, having recently arrived in the U.S., knocked on the door at the Grateful Dead drummer’s Marin County ranch.
“His father said, ‘I can’t play with you because I play the quietest instrument in the world and you play the loudest,’” Hart says, laughing in the den of his ranch house on a recent Zoom chat. “But he said, ‘My son, he could play with you. I will send him to you.’ And so he did.”
And? “It was just magic,” Hart says, beaming with the memories.
Soon Hussain moved into the barn studio facility at Hart’s ranch. And they played. And played.
“We played for four hours one time,” he says, then realizing that was nothing. “We played for four days and nights! Four days and nights! We really got to know each other and played every day. He was the crown prince of tabla, and when his father died he became the king.”
Father and son, in fact, duetted on Hart’s first solo album, Rolling Thunder, released in 1972. Soon other collaborations followed, including the creation of the Diga Rhythm Band, which grew around a multi-cultural percussion ensemble Hussain formed at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Berkeley. The group’s lone 1976 album also featured Hart’s Grateful Dead mate Jerry Garcia on two tracks.
“He loved Jerry, they just loved each other,” Hart says. “Their personalities were very similar. Jerry was really kind, loving, thoughtful, and so was Zakir.”
Hart and Hussain sparked creative energy in each other and an eagerness to explore.
“He taught me various ways rhythms could be used, exposed me to rhythms that I could never imagine, which I took to immediately, and I wanted to learn them,” Hart says. “When we did Diga Rhythm Band together, that was the first time I had to learn composition. He composed half of it and I composed the other half.”
If Hart had to learn new discipline, Hussain had to unlearn some.
“When he came to America he kind of picked up on some American traits, and he liked the looseness of my style,” Hart says, slipping back and forth between talking of Hussain in the present and past tenses with the freshness of this loss. “It freed him from the strictness of Indian classical music. My gig was a little serpentine, you know. His is straight down the pike. As accurate as he could be, it is like a machine. He’s the Einstein of rhythm, so playing with Einstein was really cool. But I didn’t have that sensibility. That’s not the way we did it in the Grateful Dead, right? And he loved that. He really took to it. And that’s what he said I taught him. It was a wonderful combination, a meeting of the minds and a meeting of the hearts.”
The meeting, and the mutual growth and openness to new vistas, continued as Hussain had key roles on Hart’s 1990 album At the Edge, 1991’s Planet Drum (which won the first-ever GRAMMY Award for World Music), 1996’s Mystery Box, 1998’s Supralingua and 2000’s Spirit Into Sound. Each brought together a world-circling community of percussionists on stage as well as in the studio.
With 2007’s Global Drum Project, the Planet Drum ensemble coalesced around a core of Hart, Hussain, Puerto Rican conguero Giovanni Hidalgo and Nigerian talking drum master Sikiru Adepoju, the quartet mounting several dazzling concert tours and coming together again for the 2022 album In the Groove. The joy they brought each other was clear to anyone who saw their shows.
The same spirit sparked much exploration throughout Hussain’s life. Around the same time he was creating Diga, he teamed in Shakti with jazz guitar boundary-breaker John McLaughlin, Indian violinist L. Shankar, and Indian percussionists Ramnad Raghavan and T.H. Vinayakram, rooted in traditional styles but reaching to new territories. Hussain and McLaughlin teamed regularly through the years with several other lineups (at times called Remember Shakti) and a triumphant final Shakti album and tour in 2023.
Hussain also had his own regular tours and recording projects with different ensembles under the name Masters of World Percussion, as well as a 2015 tour leading an East-West ensemble with veteran jazz bassist Dave Holland inspired by the oft-overlooked world of Indo-jazz.
Taking another tack, with Béla Fleck and Edgar Meyer he created a banjo-bass-tabla triple concerto, “The Melody of Rhythm,” crossing lines of progressive bluegrass and both Western and Indian classical as documented on a 2009 album with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. The three came together again in 2023 for the album At This Moment, which also features Rakesh Chaurasia on the Indian bamboo flute, the bansuri.
Other collaborators, among many, included Yo-Yo Ma, Van Morrison, George Harrison (Hussain played on the 1973 album Living in a Material World), Bill Laswell, and even Earth, Wind & Fire. He also had a long association with saxophonist Charles Lloyd that produced several wonderful albums, including 2022’s Sacred Thread, a trio with guitarist Julian Lage. And, of course, he made countless concert appearances and recordings with the top artists of Indian classical music.
“No one has crossed more borders than him,” Hart says. “Yeah, I’ve crossed a few myself. Not like him. He’s gone beyond me or anybody else I’ve ever met or heard of. He took to the air and went to all these different places, interacted magnificently with all these different cultures. What an incredible ambassador of music.
“And he was very kind when he played with you. He never overplayed, which he could do in an instant. But he was so kind, such a great person that he reserved himself. He never tried to show you up, he was never in competition with me. He was harmonious and rhythmically blissful, in a way. I guess you could call this bliss, bring the bliss word into this.”
Can Hart hear Hussain in some of his own and the Dead’s music?
“Oh God, yes!” he says. “Think of all the Grateful Dead rhythms.”
He cites “Playing in the Band,” for which he wrote the music with Bob Weir, adapting a piece called “The Main Ten,” a version of which appeared on Rolling Thunder.
“That’s 10/4 rhythm,” he says. “Nobody played 10/4 then! And there was ‘Happiness Is Drumming,’ which became ‘Fire on the Mountain.’ That was one we did in Diga. And the 7/4 on ‘Terrapin Station,’ and a lot on Blues for Allah. That was what we were playing in Diga and Phil Lesh picked up on it and everybody picked up on that rhythm and that became ‘King Solomon’s Marbles.’ No one did that in rock ‘n’ roll.
“So Zakir influenced me in so many ways, subtle ways and obvious ways. He was a big influence on the Grateful Dead. And he loved the way Bill [Kreutzman] and I interacted. That became kind of a model for him in some ways because it made it, I don’t know how you’d say it, legal for him in a way. He said, ‘Oh! Now I can do this! This is okay!’ Because only two drummers could do something like that.”
With all that, where would Hart recommend someone wanting to get to know Hussain’s music start? At first he insists that he couldn’t possibly narrow it down.
“I’d rather not,” he says. “Anything he ever played on is a wonder.”
But he gives it a little thought, mentioning several of the cross-cultural albums they made together, before focusing on Venu, a very traditional session he recorded in 1974 featuring Hussain in duet with Indian classical bansuri flute player Harisprasad Chaurasia. This came about when George Harrison’s “Dark Horse” tour, which featured the Indian all-star ensemble Ravi Shankar & Family (including Hussain’s father) as well as Western musicians, did shows in the Bay Area. Harrison and Shankar arranged for a private concert to be held at the historic Stone House, a granite building in Fairfax.
“We brought a bunch of them back to Marin County,” Hart says. “I had just got a 16-track machine from Ampex, threw it in the back of my pickup with a bunch of hay and all that. We went there and did the first 16-track remote recording.”
The music on the album is gripping, two long pieces featuring the venerable Rag Akir Bhairav, a devotional melody meant for the early morning hours, unfolding with grace and power. The first part is largely Chaurasia solo, with Hussain coming in for the second half, the pairing at times delicately rippling, at others building to frenzies, always in perfect, empathic sync.
Hart also cites Sarangi, a second album which he and Hussain co-produced at the same event with Ustad Sultan Khan’s sinewy playing of the bowed instrument that gave the album its title, accompanied by tabla player Shri Rij Ram.
Legacy is a difficult thing to predict. But to Hart, Hussain’s artistic importance is found in the drive the two of them shared to experience all music and cultures and to bring them together.
“He brought together cultures that no one had ever dreamt of, from Egypt with me and [oud player] Hamza El Din, from Nigeria with [drummer] Babatunde Olatunji, with Airto from Brazil. We introduced into the Western world something filled with all these gems and wondrous rhythms. That’s something that will never be forgotten. And all the cultures he touched around the world for all these years. He made quite a difference. There is no place that he’s played that he is not revered.”
It’s talking on a personal level, though, that Hart becomes emotional, effusive, as he reaches back through time to that day Zakir Hussain came to play.
“We just fell in love with each other,” he says. “We really liked each other. He is such a kind man. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like him. I can’t say that about anybody else, actually.”
He throws his head back and laughs.
“He’s singular in that respect. And it reflected in his music and the way he played with other people.”
It’s hard to imagine Billy Strings as anything other than the glass-shattering guitar virtuoso he’s become. Over a decade, he’s flipped, rearranged, and altogether transformed bluegrass music. He leads with instinct, allowing the music to speak on a much deeper level than many of his contemporaries. Four albums deep into his career, in addition to a live album and several collaborative projects, Strings immerses himself in the tradition of string music while bringing a fresh, exciting perspective to the classic structures of flatpickin’.
Our November 2024 Artist of the Month, Strings continues cementing his legacy by stretching boundaries and pushing progressively forward. With a foot firmly rooted in the past, always feeling ripped from another era, the musician remains intently focused on breathing life into the genre for modern audiences. As much as he’s built upon his growing solo catalog, he’s also known to frequent other artists’ work and inject his unique charms into their shared musical performances.
Strings has remained committed to bluegrass and jamgrass through the last 10 years and more, while often stepping outside these tight genre boxes for some playful excursions. From appearing on a Dierks Bentley song to teaming up with a rap juggernaut-turned-country-star Post Malone, the Michigan native keeps an open musical mind and heart. He’s an unstoppable force, always willing to try something new.
Below, we’ve put together nine of Billy Strings’ best features, both on his own projects and on others’ releases, too.
“Things to Do” with Zach Top
Zach Top recently released a three-track collaborative EP with Billy Strings as an Apple Music exclusive. “Things to Do” sees the duo injecting the track with a healthy helping of pep. The pair swaps off verses, each bringing their strengths to the performance.
“Girl, it just ain’t right / You’re burning up my daylight,” they sing. On a wide stretch of musical canvas, Top and Strings paint with vitality and urgency. The special release also includes a cover of Ricky Skaggs’ 1983 classic “Don’t Cheat in Our Hometown” and “Bad Luck,” another Top original, which appeared on his 2024 studio album Cold Beer and Country Music.
“California Sober” featuring Willie Nelson
On the eve of Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday, the country legend hopped aboard “California Sober” with Billy Strings. The rollicking track celebrates weed in moderation, finding the pair giving up late-night parties and weekend binges for a chiller sort of high.
In classic Nelson fashion, dusty strings give an air of a traveling tune and barreling down the highway at 100 miles an hour. The one-off collab single (written by Strings, Aaron Allen, and Jon Weisberger) demonstrates someone maturing and realizing that some vices should be left in the past. But regardless, the duo still cheekily admits: “the devil on my shoulder always wins.”
“M-E-X-I-C-O” with Post Malone
Post Malone dove head first into country music with the release of 2024’s F-1 Trillion. Featuring everyone from Dolly Parton and Tim McGraw to Luke Combs and Lainey Wilson, the collaborative set made quite a splash – seeing the rapper swerve into modern country with his own special twist. “M-E-X-I-C-O” is a certified barn-burner, among the project’s standout moments. Credit should be given generously to Billy Strings, who infuses his twangy, finger-pickin’ bluegrass style into the explosive, toe-tapping experience.
“The Great Divide” with Luke Combs
“The Great Divide” arrived in 2021 as a cautionary tale during troubling sociopolitical times.
“We’re striking matches on the TV / Setting fires on our phones,” warns Combs in the opening line. The singer fuels those flames throughout the song, sending smoke signals as things methodically escalate. “We’re all so far, far apart now / It’s as deep as it is wide / We’re about to fall apart now,” the lyrics burst like dynamite.
The song isn’t all doom and gloom, though. Later on, the lyrics detail how many strangers love one another despite glaring differences. Several years later, the song rings even more eerily poignant than ever before.
“Dooley’s Farm” with Molly Tuttle
A long-time fan of The Dillards’ classic, “Dooley,” Molly Tuttle updates the story to reflect an elderly man’s penchant for growing weed. “Dooley’s Farm” is a slower ditty, unlike the giddy-up pace of the Dillards’ song, and darker in tone and feel.
Strings lends his voice for spooky backing vocals, poking through the track like a ghost in the night. Their performance is found on Tuttle’s 2022 album, Crooked Tree.
“You can hide by day, but the night will find you / They caught Dooley in the moonlight,” whispers Tuttle over the gentle cry of a fiddle.
“Too Stoned to Cry” with Margo Price
Margo Price had been wanting to record “Too Stoned to Cry” for years, ever since hearing its writer Andrew Combs perform the lonesome ballad. Working with Beau Bedford, she convinced the producer to put his magical touch on the song. When it came to enlisting a duet partner, Price turned to Billy Strings, who turns in a sinewy and evocative lead performance.
“There’s whiskey and wine and pills for the pain / Fast, easy women and a little cocaine,” they sing, their voices tangling like barbed wire. With its frayed, tired edges, the song proves to be an ample showcase for both singers’ talents. It’s as classic as you can possibly get these days.
“I Will Not Go Down” with Amythyst Kiah
On her 2024 album Still + Bright, Amythyst Kiah reaches into the depths of her songcraft for a cinematic stunner. With Billy Strings in tow, “I Will Not Go Down” pounds with alarming emotional urgency. Taking cues from such film staples as Avatar: The Last Airbender and Lord of the Rings, Kiah mounts an expedition across space and time, metaphorically speaking, as she slays dragons and seeks life’s simple truths. Strings supplies a startlingly resonant knit of guitar work that punctuates Kiah’s flame-throwing vocals.
“Muscle Car” with Andy Hall
Two musical forces collide for a bedeviling five-minute epic on “Muscle Car.” With no vocal line, the composition here sizzles and pops, as it transmits its very own story through the power of instruments.
Andy Hall’s 2023 album, Squareneck Soul, delivers a torrential downpour of raw storytelling. Hall (of the Infamous Stringdusters) expertly offers up rip-roaring string work, matched with his companions’ equally engaging performances. The track also features Sierra Hull (mandolin), Wes Corbett (banjo), and Travis Book (bass), who all band together for one of the decade’s finest bluegrass moments.
“Bells of Every Chapel” with Sierra Ferrell
Sierra Ferrell pulls Billy Strings along for a charming lovesick gallop with “Bells of Every Chapel.” Found on her 2021 album, Long Time Coming, the mid-tempo track sees Ferrell peering through rose-tinted glass, examining unrequited love that squeezes your heart.
“They were ringing so clear/ But you couldn’t hear/ And your heart could never be mine,” she sings. Old-timey in spirit, the song soars higher and higher with Strings’ choo-choo train flatpicking.
The first time I heard Billy Strings’ name was in 2014, from a guitar picking pilot friend of mine from northern Kentucky who was working up in Michigan. I first met him at the Frankfort Bluegrass Festival in Illinois two or three years later, by which time I’d played a song or two from the Fiddle Tune X album on the satellite radio show I was hosting with Del McCoury. Billy had either recently gotten or was about to get his first IBMA Award for Momentum Instrumentalist of the Year (his then-roommate, Molly Tuttle, got one at the same time).
After that, I’d see him from time to time – I was already writing songs with fellow Michigander and Billy’s across-the-street neighbor Lindsay Lou – but it wasn’t until June 18, 2018, that we got together to write our first song, “Love Like Me.” We wrote a few more after that, he went into the studio, and put most of them on 2019’s Home. Since then, working as a team with another Michigander, Aaron Allen, we’ve written many more, for Renewal and now for Highway Prayers, too. To be honest, it’s been a little life-changing – a taste, at least, of what it must have been like for Music Row songwriters back in the day.
One striking feature of Billy’s trajectory has been his ability to keep the enthusiasm of the normative bluegrass industry and community that the IBMA generally represents; my social media feeds regularly remind me that most of the stalwart traditionalists among my friends – people who grew up immersed in scenes that trace back to the music’s earliest days – aren’t dissing Billy Strings. They’re cheering him on. That hasn’t always been the case with bluegrass artists bringing the sound and the songs to larger-than-usual audiences, but it’s indisputable here, as three successive IBMA Entertainer of the Year awards (finally supplanted this year by Del, another traditionalist admirer) demonstrate.
The reason, I think, is that, as BGS Editor Justin Hiltner puts it in his Artist of the Month reveal essay, “the most innovative and revolutionary aspects of Billy Strings and his version of bluegrass are not what he’s changed, but what has stayed the same.” When the BGS team invited me to have a chat with Billy for Artist of the Month, I figured it was, among other things, an opportunity to dig deeper into that idea – and so I did.
Together, we talked about recording Highway Prayers, about working in a band, about writing songs and making set lists. We talked about a number of things, but somehow always wound back up, again and again, at the endlessly rewarding music of Mac Wiseman and Larry Sparks, “Riding That Midnight Train” and “Cumberland Gap,” “Uncle Pen” and more.
Does it get any more bluegrass than that?
You didn’t record Highway Prayers all at once, did you? Wasn’t it recorded over a while?
Billy Strings: Right. We started in January out in LA at EastWest Studios, with Jon Brion the producer and Greg Koller at the helm as engineer. We recorded a few tunes out there. I really love what we got sonically, but I just don’t know if being in LA while trying to make a record was right for us – we were right downtown in freaking LA, man. I felt like, “What the hell am I doing out here in this big city where all these movie stars are, trying make a record?” I was working with Jon [Brion], who is a genius, that’s where he likes to work and the sounds we were getting were awesome and everything was cool, but I think it was also at a time where I was wanting to get the guys together without a producer and just throw stuff at the wall.
So we threw a makeshift little studio together and brought in Brandon Bell, and that’s where we recorded a good bulk of it – just threw up a couple of mics with a little lunch box of pre-amps and went for it. We would sit there and work a song out and then go upstairs and cut it. The great thing about being at my house was, it’s like there’s no authority figure there and it doesn’t feel like a studio – it just feels like we’re at band practice. And if you wanted, while somebody’s trying to do a overdub or something, you could go for a bike ride. Just that in itself was mentally freeing.
I will say that the tones we were getting out there with Jon were unquestionably better to me. But I’m kind of in the spot where I’m just, like, “Does it really matter?” Well, even if most people listen to music on their damn phone, it does matter. That’s how you make a sound that can evoke emotion. But also, as a bluegrass musician, any time we get with somebody or something, it’s like, “We should record you guys on these old ribbon mics and straight to tape with no edits,” and it’s just like, “Well, dude, it’s 2024.”
I feel like in some ways when people do that, they’re kind of privileging the process over the result, when the result is what people are gonna hear and what they’re gonna relate to.
Yeah, I’m just chasing something and I’m not trying to think about it too much. I read something in a book the other day, it’s called Blues and Trouble, by Tom Piazza. He says that sometimes you can push an idea up a hill, and you gotta push and push to get it to the top of the hill, but sometimes an idea gets going and you have to run to keep up. That’s where I like to be – you know what I’m talking about as a songwriter – when it just kind of falls out. Those are the best ones, you know, and quite a few of these songs just rolled off the page. Like “Be Your Man,” for instance, I wrote it in 20 minutes; it just came out. Of course there are other ones you have to work hard on, but, man, those – I just love when they show up like that, it almost feels like you just siphoned it out of the ether. Who wrote the song, you know?
That’s something that I’ve heard a lot over the years from a lot of great songwriters: it’s just like pulling it out of the air, and it kind of falls right in there. When you’re in that zone, you can’t hardly beat that.
No, you gotta keep going with it, you know. It’s hard to get in that zone, and like I said, it’s rare for me, it might only happen a couple of times a year that I write a song like that. That’s how “Dust In a Baggie” was. I wrote it in 30 minutes at work – I didn’t even have a guitar, I just had the melody in my head and a little notepad. I was cleaning rooms at the hotel and I sat there and wrote that. That’s still how the song is today, you know, it was just… it was done. Finished.
Let me ask you a little bit more about your process more generally. What’s the role of the guys in the band? You know, in the bluegrass world, at one extreme you’ve got the Jimmy Martin style of bandleader, which is, you know, “This is my sound, and this is how you’re gonna do it, and I will tell you what you need to do and show you what you need to do.” Then, on the other end, you’ve got somebody like Bill Monroe or J.D. Crowe, who says, “I brought you in to do your thing and let’s see how it fits together with everything else going on there.”
I very much lean towards the latter. I’ve got such amazing musicians that I’d be stupid not to listen to what they’ve got to say, you know? They’re so amazing and each one of them has their own strengths. So it’s a good mixture of like, I’m the band leader, kinda what I say goes, but I also take into consideration everything that the guys say. Sometimes I really need their advice and ask for it– like, for instance, most of the time I write the set list, but sometimes … I’ll go to the front lounge and say, “Hey, what do you guys wanna play tonight?” And then some ideas will come at me.
They’re there when I need them and they also don’t take anything personally when I say, “Hey, no.” It just depends, because sometimes it’s touchy when you write a song and somebody else wants to try to change it. But sometimes, if you hear them out, the idea that they come up with is way better. It just takes you a second to see what they’re talking about.
What you said about Crowe, bringing people in to do their thing, that’s really what I want. I don’t wanna be the dictator. I wanna be somebody who’s in a band. My whole life, my friends have been my family, especially when I was a teenager and started playing in bands. The word “band” means a lot to me. It means my brotherhood, you know, my closest friends and family.
That leads me to something that I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody else talk to you about this. You’re constantly bringing new material into the band – not originals, but older songs, old bluegrass songs. You’re always refreshing the repertoire. Are you just listening to old stuff all the time and hear something and say, “Man, that’s cool, let’s start doing that”? How does it work?
There’s a lot of songs in my head just from growing up playing bluegrass and we still haven’t scratched the surface of it. You know what I mean? Like, one night I’ll just be thinking of my dad in the old days, how we used to pick down around Barkus Park, and I get feeling sentimental or something and all of a sudden we’re gonna play “Letter Edged in Black” or whatever.
There’s just a whole well of tunes to pull from the bluegrass songbook and I like to mix it up. Like, if we did “Cumberland Gap” last time, then let’s do “Ground Speed” this time and if we did “Ground Speed” this time, next time let’s do “Clinch Mountain Backstep.” And then sometimes you play a tune and it feels good, so then it will stick around – like we’ve been playing “Baltimore Johnny.”
I guess having the guys in the band that you do helps, because a lot of them already know those tunes – or at least have some idea how they go, so you can work something up pretty quick.
Yeah, and they’re quick learners. Most of the time I wake up at the hotel and I’m stressing until I can write a set list, until it’s finished. Otherwise I can’t take a nap, because it’s a puzzle every day. There’s so many people that come to every single show of ours and we see the same people in the front row every night. I just don’t wanna feed them the same thing for dinner. I wanna mix it up.
Sometimes it takes two or three hours to make a set list. I’m doing it all on my iPad, so I’m not actually crumpling up paper and throwing it in the waste basket, but that’s what I’m doing. I’ll make a set list and I’ll go, “Oh, fuck that, that’s garbage.” And then eventually I’ll land on something that I feel is suitable or whatever. But it’s a puzzle every day. And then usually there will be a song or two on there– back in ’23, or maybe ’22, we played a new song every single show of the entire year. Every set that we played, we debuted a new cover. That was a task; once we got halfway through the year, it was like, “We gotta keep it going.”
So these days, it might not be every single show that we’re having to learn a new song, but we’re definitely having to refresh on things and arrangements and stuff. Every day before a gig, if we go out on stage at 8:00, then 6:45 or so we’re getting our instruments and sitting down and we’re starting to talk through some shit. Sometimes we’re learning these songs. And then sometimes we go out there and wing it. I like to be in that space, too. A lot of times, if we over rehearse things and think about it too much, somebody will fuck it up. But if we just get the basic idea down and go out there and somehow believe in ourselves, then we get through these songs.
Leaving the covers aside, I was reading a review of Highway Prayers and the guy who wrote it seemed almost baffled by the fact that it’s really a bluegrass album. And it is, from “Richard Petty” to the opening song that you wrote with Thomm [Jutz], to “Happy Hollow” and even “Leadfoot.” These are songs that, to me, are almost super-traditional in the forms that they use and the melodies.
Do you feel like your ear is kind of trained enough to feel comfortable with reusing folk materials, for lack of a better term? Like “Leadfoot” has this “Lonesome Reuben” kind of sound to it – but it’s not “Lonesome Reuben,” either. That’s gotta enter into your process a lot, I would think.
Not consciously. I grew up playing bluegrass and sometimes when I’m trying to write a song, that’s just how I think about it. When I first started writing, back when I was 16 years old, I would just rewrite “Riding That Midnight Train” or something. Not trying to, I would just write a song and then I would be like, “Oh, fuck, this is just ‘Riding That Midnight Train,’ it’s just the same melody. I can’t even call this my own song. But now, with a song, I show it to the band guys and they’ll say, “I don’t know, I think it’s your tune.”
I’m just trying to chase the idea, and not get in its way, and not let anything – especially from the outside world – into my brain to influence my direction. When I’m writing something good, it’s like I’m trying to write in my diary or something – or like I’m trying to write a bluegrass song that is [reflective] of my childhood and my love for the music. It’s that sentimental feeling that I get when I hear bluegrass music, that I love it so much, that it reminds me of my childhood. That before I knew anything dirty about the world, there was this love for bluegrass music and that’s the kind of music I wanna make.
I’m a bluegrass man. You know, we do all this other stuff, and I write other songs too, but at the core of it all is a bluegrass musician who was fed Doc Watson and Bill Monroe and Larry Sparks. So that’s the stuff that I like. I’m still listening to the Stanley Brothers all the time. I’ve listened to this shit my whole life and I still haven’t heard it all, you know?
You could do pretty much whatever you wanted, and yet you are still, at the core, playing bluegrass music.
What’s authentic? You know? I’m trying to not lose myself to this fucking big monster, you know what I mean? Because, yeah, I could get a drummer and pick up my electric guitar. I could put on a cowboy hat and join that whole bandwagon, too. But that’s not me and it’s not true. I don’t care about that shit. The more that I’m in this industry, the more that I’m just trying to stay true to myself and my music, because I see past all the bullshit and see past the glam of it. And I’m so grateful – so, so grateful – to have a fan base that will allow me to just wear a pair of blue jeans on stage and play three chords and the truth at them.
I feel like if I went and changed it up too much, then I might lose a bunch of those folks. And that’s hard, too, because sometimes I feel like we need a drummer. We’re in these giant arenas, it’s like, “Man, if I had a drummer and I could pick up the Les Paul, we could just fucking chop heads.” And I do enjoy that, too, because that is part of who I am. When I got out of playing bluegrass so much, when I was a kid, I played some electric and some Black Sabbath and shit – so there’s some of that in there.
But what I play is what’s in my heart, man. And that’s why I’m still playing Mac Wiseman songs, and there’s something – it’s almost like a freaking kink or something. I just love it so much. I love playing “It Rains Just the Same in Missouri” to a big crowd of people, or “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home, or “The Baggage Coach Ahead,” or any of these old [songs].
You get out on the big arena stage like that and you play “Uncle Pen,” it’s like, “Fuck, yeah!” It’s kind of like just force-feeding these people bluegrass, and I love it, you know.
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