Tag: Artist of the Month

Dolly Parton Proudly Shows Her Bluegrass Influences

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

No genre of American music has been untouched by the influence of Dolly Parton and bluegrass is surely no different. Given Dolly’s homegrown, East Tennessee roots and her pickin’ chops on many of bluegrass’s signature instruments, her connection to the genre perhaps runs deeper than any other style she’s accomplished — besides good ol’ classic country, of course.

In April 2020, Dolly announced six albums – including Little Sparrow, one of her bluegrass forays – from her back catalog would be made available on digital streaming services for the first time. In an episode of 2019’s Peabody-Award winning podcast, Dolly Parton’s America, a portion featuring the London debut of Parton’s 9 to 5 musical details that many of Parton’s inner team regard her 1999 release, The Grass Is Blue, as one of her best – critically and otherwise. We even featured The Grass Is Blue in an episode of The Breakdown. Trio and Trio II, Heartsongs, and even the genre-mashing White Limozeen all contain heavily bluegrass and string-band inflected songs – the influence of her home turf and its musical accompaniment are evident throughout her artistic output.

Live and from the studio, through cover songs, collaborations, and in casual jam circles, Dolly and her songs have fully infiltrated bluegrass. It’s no surprise she speaks of it often, simply referring to the music as she did in her youth (and all throughout her career): as “Mountain music.” To celebrate Dolly in December, here are a few of our favorite Dolly/bluegrass cross-pollination moments:

“Sleep With One Eye Open” — Dolly Parton

Her 1999 all-bluegrass album, The Grass Is Blue, was named one of our 50 Most Greatest Bluegrass Albums Made by Women — and for excellent reason. It may very well be the one of the best bluegrass recordings born in the past few decades (check out that roster of pickers!!) and it brought bluegrass to Dolly’s greater audience — Norah Jones went on to cover the title track. Dolly even made an appearance at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s award show in 2000, as the project won Album of the Year. Dolly’s bluegrass skills are no better displayed than on this perfectly-executed cover of an all-time bluegrass classic.

“I Feel the Blues Movin’ In” — Trio

Both Trio albums (Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt) could arguably be categorized as bluegrass, but Trio II ticked quite a few more of traditional bluegrass’s boxes, especially with this cover of a Del McCoury original. To this day he’ll announce the song on stage as being the best, “Because Dolly Parton sang it!”

“Heartbreaker’s Alibi” — Rhonda Vincent & Dolly Parton

Dolly and the Queen of Bluegrass collaborate on this 2006 release from Vincent’s All American Bluegrass Girl. Vincent and Dolly have gone on to work together on a handful of other projects, as well. Something about that bluegrass vocal blend… Mmmm.

“Jolene” — Alison Krauss with Suzanne Cox and Cheryl White

And of course, covers of Dolly’s countless songs have filtered into the bluegrass songbook across the years. Alison Krauss leads an all-star band on this cover of perhaps Dolly’s most iconic song, “Jolene,” for the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors show.

“Islands in the Stream” — Love Canon with Lauren Balthrop

And it’s not just Dolly’s more country and bluegrass adjacent songs that have found themselves homes in bluegrass set lists and cover projects. Charlottesville, Virginia-based, bluegrass-meets-the-80s band Love Canon covered the iconic Dolly and Kenny duet “Islands in the Stream” for a BGS Sitch Session.

“Muleskinner” — Bill Monroe and Dolly Parton

They both had hit versions of this song, after all. Though this writer might be partial to the version that gleefully shouts, “I’m a lady muleskinner!” It’s badass no matter how you cut it, really. The Big Mon and Dolly, doing it right. And there’s something just so beautiful about Dolly Parton cueing the Kenny Baker into his solo.

“Little Sparrow” — Dolly Parton

2001’s follow up to The Grass is Blue, Little Sparrow continued Dolly’s bluegrass explorations, but with folk and transatlantic sounds joining the mix.

“Viva Las Vegas” — The Grascals with Dolly Parton

The Grascals take the CMA Fan Fest stage in Las Vegas with Dolly Parton singing an absolute classic with a good ol’ dose of bluegrass fire.

“Banks of the Ohio” — Dolly Parton

Not all of Dolly’s bluegrass forays have been… well, bluegrass. Here, she adds her theatrical, dramatic touches with a fresh-written preamble to the classic lyrics of “Banks of the Ohio.” Her soft spoken-word, the sumptuous strings, and a soaring, Dolly-vocal-run-filled arrangement give this staple a special hue that’s 100% herself.

“Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That” — Della Mae

Della Mae has plenty of experience covering Dolly, even once being the house band for a Dolly Parton tribute show in the UK. Once again, they’re pulling a cover that comes from outside Dolly’s bluegrass-y songs, and it’s fantastic.

“Just a Few Old Memories” — Dolly Parton

A legendary combination. Dolly Parton sings Hazel Dickens. What more would we ever need?

Well… Hazel’s in the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Maybe it’s time Dolly ought to be inducted, too. After all, you just took a split second scroll over her major influence on bluegrass and vice versa — and her bluegrass outreach, as well. The case is made for itself. Dolly for the Bluegrass Hall of Fame!

Rosanne Cash Brings Urgency, Courage to ‘She Remembers Everything’ (2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

On her new album, She Remembers Everything, Rosanne Cash keeps watching the clock. It’s an album about time slipping away, about the bittersweet realization that you have more time behind you than ahead. “It just wasn’t long enough,” she sings on the hymn-like “Everyone But Me.” “Still it seems too long.” And on “Many Miles to Go” she puts her affairs in order, itemizing the artifacts and inside jokes she shares with John Leventhal, her frequent collaborator, longtime producer, and husband of twenty-three years. With its rambling, almost anxious upbeat tempo, the song celebrates their relationship more than it commiserates its inevitable end: “There aren’t many miles to go and just one promise left to keep.”

However, she didn’t record that song with Leventhal, who produced roughly half the tracks on She Remembers Everything. He was, she says, shy about the song. Instead Cash traveled about as far from her home as she could, all the way from Manhattan to Portland, Oregon, to record with the album’s other producer, Tucker Martine. By disrupting her creative process, she says, “It did break something open in me.”

(Editor’s Note: Read Part 1 of the Bluegrass Situation’s interview with Rosanne Cash here.)

You’ve mentioned that these songs are very autobiographical. How does your relationship with these personal songs change over time? What is it like to revisit them onstage?

I played some of these songs for the first time just recently, and it felt good. I felt very relaxed with them. You know how the truth can unsettle you and scare you, but the truth can also allow you to let your guard down and relax? That’s how I felt. But it’s different every night. Every audience is going to bring something different to what they hear, and hopefully they will bring their own lives to it. They’re not coming to hear about my feelings or about my life. They’re coming to experience their own lives and their own feelings. They’re coming to have things reflected back to them that will be revealing or inspiring or whatever.

That’s the function of art. It’s that kind of service industry. We help you access your life and feelings. It’s not about narcissism. It’s not about me. That takes the fear out of it. These aren’t diaries; they’re songs. There’s craft that went into them. There’s music. There’s a beat and a melody. So I’m not going to be up there naked.

That leads me to another song I wanted to ask about, “Not Many Miles to Go,” which almost sounds like a letter you wrote to your husband.

I have a very tender feeling about that song because I really did write it for John — and to John. When you’re in a long-term relationship, it’s inevitable that one of you is going to leave the other. It’s sad, but it’s worth acknowledging the artifacts of your life together, even if it’s just a Telecaster. So you know when we’re gone, that Telecaster will still be here. Our son will probably play it. I wanted to document those things for us.

I like the idea we keep the beat for each other.

That’s a beautiful idea, and a close couple will do that for each other. When I wrote that line, I was thinking about the actual tempo when I play rhythm guitar for him. We have to remind each other to stay in time. I’ll tell him he’s too slow, or he’ll tell me my timing is off. He used to complain about my meter a lot, and then we did a gig with some other people a few years ago. When he came offstage, John said, “I’m never complaining about your timing again!”

How does he feel about the song? It’s really an intimate conversation in front of the audience.

I think John felt a little shyer about it than I did, but I think he’s gotten past that. And his guitar solo just kills me, especially that real Telecaster sound that he pulls off. It sounds like Clarence White or James Burton. When I wrote the song, it had more of a folk vibe, and then Tucker took it to this really intense place with a lot of energy to the arrangement. That was a bit of genius on Tucker’s part. It’s funny, I couldn’t have done that song with John. I had to do it with Tucker, and then we flew John’s solo into the track.

How did you end up working with Tucker Martine?

I’m a huge Decemberists fan, and he works with them. Then I heard the case/lang/veirs record he produced and I just loved it so much. I’d been thinking that I wanted to break away from John a little bit, because I felt I’d grown so dependent on him. He has very forceful opinions and it’s easy for me to acquiesce to his sensibilities because he’s such a gifted musician. I started thinking, you know, I need to be making those decisions, even if the choices are “wrong.” I need to do that. I called Tucker out of the blue and asked if he’d be interested in working with me. I truly didn’t know what he would say. Maybe I wasn’t his kind of thing.

But he said he’d love to and it was a matter of getting our schedules together. I was nervous, he was nervous — we didn’t know how it was going to work out. But it was this incredible experience, start to finish. I teared up many times, feeling so grateful to be working with him. It did break something open in me. After doing five tracks with Tucker, I came back to work with John and I felt fresh. We wrote some of the best songs I think we’ve ever written, like “Crossing to Jerusalem” and “Everyone But Me.” I had most of the lyrics for “The Undiscovered Country” and he wrote the music for it.

And you got The Decemberists frontman, Colin Meloy, on the record, too.

That was through Tucker. I was really shy about asking him and one day I just asked Tucker if he thought Colin would sing on the record. He thought he might, so he called him and Colin came down to sing on “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For.” While he was there, we snookered him into singing on “Rabbit Hole.”

Overall, on these songs, I get the sense of time running out. This seems to be an album about realizing that time is short and that creates a sense of urgency.

Well, time is running out. It’s an hourglass. It’s less than half-full now, and I feel an urgency about saying whatever else I have left to say. It’s really quite emotional to me. The regrets I have at the end of my life — except for the regrets I have about hurting anyone or mistakes I made as a mother — are going to be about what I didn’t say in my work, in my life. What I held back. So there is some urgency to get that out there, but I feel more liberated than ever because now my thinking is, what’s the point of not doing it or not saying it? This is the life I’ve chosen, to live in a public sphere and to be in this service industry of songwriting and performing. I don’t want to hedge my bets anymore.

Most people would rather not think about the time they have left and what to do with it. I know I’m guilty of that a lot of the time.

It’s painful, so that’s what we do: We push away what we don’t want to consider. Buddhists say death is certain, so how will you live? We push out the first part, and then we push out the second part to the extent that we default on our choices every day. We put the blinders on and think we have forever. I do not exempt myself from that. I do it, too. I say, “I’m going to wait to do that.” No. Can’t do it anymore.

When I heard Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, that gave me a little more courage. Even the title of that Paul McCartney album from a few years ago, Memory Almost Full, struck me too. Paul and Leonard are obviously older than me, but they were signposts in that direction. I notice those things when they’re out in the world. I notice those pieces of poetry and music. I find myself responding to it more and feeling somewhat comforted by the fact that other people my age are doing it as well.

Photo of Rosanne Cash: Michael Lavine
Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Richard Thompson, “Banish Misfortune”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Our artist of the month, iconic English folk rock singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Richard Thompson, is well known for his literary, poetic, and evocative songsmithery. His decades-long career and international recognition were built not only on the deft timelessness of his pen, but on his instrumental chops as well, his ease and aplomb on the guitar paving a clear, direct path of delivery for his lyrics with a strong sense of personality and melodic identity.

We would be remiss, in our month-long celebration of the man and his brand new album, 13 Rivers, if we didn’t dive deep into his discography to showcase his six-string prowess. On his 1981 release, Strict Tempo!, Thompson tracked 12 traditional songs and tune sets and one original number, playing every single instrument on every single tune himself (except the drums). In a modern context, and juxtaposed against 13 Rivers, the record is a beautiful retrospective that showcases the fundamental building blocks of Thompson’s musical worldview: traditional Irish, Scottish, and English tunes played by folk instruments, in live-sounding, raw contexts that let the tunes themselves — and Thompson’s fleet fingers — shine. “Banish Misfortune,” a traditional Irish tune also known as “The Stoat That Ate Me Sandals” and myriad other names, stands out. Thompson allows the jig’s lazy lilt to gently pull his fingerstyle rendition of the late 1800s melody forward, while he embellishes with that classic Irish guitar flair, a dash of Thompson whimsy in every note.

There’s a compelling argument to be made here, that having this sort of “institutional knowledge,” an understanding, appreciation, and working vocabulary of the folk art forms that gave rise to our current genres and formats, is directly correlated to an artist’s longevity and their ability to connect, musically, on a much deeper level — of course, that could just be the magic of Richard Thompson himself.

Richard Thompson Lets the Songs Guide ‘13 Rivers’

Posted on by Editor

Richard Thompson’s new album contains 13 tracks and is called 13 Rivers, which suggests an intriguing metaphor regarding music and bodies of water. These are songs as rushing currents, as tributaries cutting through the landscape with unstoppable force; they can be dammed but not contained, their power harnessed but not diminished. Or perhaps they are obstacles to be crossed, either by swimming against dangerous rapids or by devising elaborate feats of engineering. It is any wonder that songs have bridges?

Thompson admits he didn’t think too hard about it. “It’s just a convenient title, and I liked the way it sounds,” he says with a chuckle that sounds both self-deprecating and possibly curious about the idea. “I’m not sure how deep it is or if it stands up to intellectual scrutiny. I guess songs and rivers can be fast or slow, straight or meandering. They have a beginning or end. You should make of it as much as you can. The more you make of it, the better I sound.”

He doesn’t need me or anyone else to make him look smart, but let’s go ahead and make too much out of that metaphor. Thompson’s catalog is full of raging rivers, most with rock rapids and treacherous oxbows, some stretching for miles and miles or years and years. He’s been navigating them for more than half a century, ever since he strummed his first notes as the guitarist and occasional songwriter for the famed London outfit Fairport Convention. That band helped to electrify folk music in the late 1960s, adding drums and Stratocaster to centuries-old rural ballads about maidens and knights, before Thompson went solo to emphasize his own songwriting.

For years he was merely a cult artist in the States, his early records available only as imports, at least until 1980’s Shoot Out the Lights—written, performed, and recorded with his then-wife Linda Thompson—established him as an insightful chronicler of the challenges of commitment and contentment, a songwriter who is neither blandly optimistic nor cynically dismissive, but somewhere right between bitter and sweet.

And, of course, he is a guitar player whose resourcefulness somehow dwarfs his technical virtuosity. A teenager in the late 1960s, he was too young to be as enamored with American blues as other players were, which means he was never a contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix. Instead his playing is grounded in folk music, aligned with the experiments and excursions of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, and Davy Graham. Like them, he has significant range, incorporating a range of styles and sounds: African desert rock, urban punk, country & western, Indian ragas. His solos change shape constantly; listening to him play, you never know where he’s going but you know he’s going to get there.

While many of the players listed above have either died or all but retired, Thompson continues to make relevant music in the 2010s, both as a songwriter and as an instrumentalist. “The most important thing is the song—the particular batch of songs you find yourself with. That dictates so much about the way the record sounds,” he says. “The songs are going to tell you how they want to be shaped, how they want to sound in the end. They tell you if they want to be acoustic or electric; they tell you if they want to be simple or complex. If you’re listening to what the songs are saying to you, then making the record should be a fairly easy task.”

The batch of songs that comprises 13 Rivers stemmed from what he calls a “difficult time in my life,” although he declines to discuss the specifics of those difficulties. Still, it’s possible to gauge the general nature of them based on songs like “Rattle Within” and “Shaking the Gates,” which suggest a feisty relationship with the idea of mortality. Writing them, however, is not necessarily a conscious effort to address certain events or predicaments. “It’s a semi-conscious process. You’re not always thinking about the big picture. You’re just kind of floating sometimes. You’re almost allowing yourself to switch off some of your critical faculties in order to write. And once you’ve written it, you think, okay, here’s this song, now what does it mean? But you’re not thinking about that meaning while you’re writing it.”

Take the opening track, “The Storm Won’t Come.” A low, brooding number with a worried vocal and a searing solo, it reverses the typical storm metaphor, casting the thunder and rain as something other than destructive. Especially opening the album, it almost sounds like an invocation by an artist waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning. “That’s not what I had in mind, but that sounds great! I was thinking more than sometimes in life, you can feel stymied and you long for change. Sometimes if you try to change it yourself, it doesn’t work. You have to wait for the world to do it to you,” he says.

One storm arrived just after he had assembled this batch of songs: The producer backed out of the project, leaving Thompson to ponder its fate. Thankfully, pragmatism won out. “I thought, well, the studio is booked, the musicians are booked, we’ve got the material, so I’ll just produce it myself. I’ve done it before. It’s always nice to have the contrast of working with other people, but it can be good to do it yourself. You can get more into the nuts and bolts of what you really intended to find in the songs.”

Perhaps that’s why so many songs have a raw-nerve friction to them, lyrically and musically. After a handful of solo acoustic albums, including 2014’s Still, produced by Jeff Tweedy, Thompson put together a very tight, very agile rock and roll combo to give these songs a jittery energy. He’s worked with bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome for years, “so I know them a bit—what they’re likely to come up with.” They worked quickly in the studio, learning the songs just enough to pound them out but not enough to pound them life out of them. “I try to not get too embedded in learning the song. We just give it a couple of listens at rehearsals,” he says. It’s a way to avoid what Thompson calls “overlearning” the song, to allow room for happy accidents and to keep the possibilities wide open.

When the song goes out into the world, those possibilities shrink dramatically. The song becomes settled, more or less. “What the song is now is public domain. It becomes a kind of public property, and the audience won’t let you change it, even if you want to. I’ve got songs where I’ve snuck in the odd word change, but to change a verse or even a line is just asking for trouble.”

Being the song’s creator doesn’t mean he determines that meaning for anyone else. In fact, his interpretation is only one of so many. “It’s always amazing to hear other people’s ideas of what a song is about. I may have written it as a satirical song or a very pointed song, and people will say, ‘Oh that’s about Bob Dylan’ or something. How did they reach these bizarre conclusions? But I’m glad they can find their own meaning in it.”

Illustration by: Zachary Johnson
Photo by: Tom Bejgrowicz

Lori McKenna Finds Comfort and Reflection in ‘The Tree’

Posted on by Editor

Some writers seek out the truth, excavating situations to uncover a universality that shines some light of understanding on the world. For others, the relationship works another way. Hungry to be heard, the truth seeks them out, and time and again makes itself known.

For Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Lori McKenna, the latter seems to be the case. Her lyricism, sketched from life’s myriad everyday scenes—hearth fires, heartbreak, and the like—strikes upon central truths to an almost uncanny extent. Listening back through her catalog, which now numbers eleven albums with her new release The Tree, it’s as if she wields some otherworldly wisdom and has been kind enough to share it with listeners.

McKenna’s the first to admit it’s all a “happy mistake.” As she explains, “I think my brain starts small and it takes me a minute to see if there’s a bigger message in there.”

Small has been McKenna’s modus operandi since her 2000 debut album Paper Wings and Halos. She regularly portrays characters’ private interiors, snapshotting quiet moments typically shared with oneself, a partner, a parent, or even the small town one wishes to escape. On The Tree, McKenna found herself identifying in larger ways with what she was writing, even if she hadn’t set out to hold a mirror up to her life. “The more you write, the more comfortable you get in your craft, the more of you reflects back in it, even if it’s a character that isn’t you,” she says.

Time’s circularity informed several songs on The Tree. At a moment when her aging father needed more help and her children needed less, she was struck by the roles she was being asked to play. “Your mom role is getting less intense, and your child role—as far as helping parents—gets a little thicker,” she says. “I think a lot of people get to exactly to this place.”

McKenna took all the fears and pain that go along with aging, and penned a beautiful ode to the daring act of living. On “People Get Old,” with a slight twang to her vocals, she sings: “Time is a thief/ Pain is a gift/ The past is the past, it is what it is / Every line on your face tells a story somebody knows/ It’s just how it goes/ You live long enough, the people you love get old.” The catch is the last line: “You live long enough.” Life can and does hurt like hell, but if you’re lucky you’ll make it long enough to acquire all those scars.

Though she’s been writing and playing for herself since she first picked up a guitar as a teenager in Massachusetts, McKenna’s obvious talent for distilling greater wisdoms down into a hook caught Nashville’s attention early on in her career. Faith Hill recorded three of her songs—”Fireflies,” “Stealing Kisses,” and “If You Ask”—on her 2005 album Fireflies, and set into motion a relationship with Music City that continues to this day. McKenna has gone on to pen songs for some of the biggest names in contemporary country music. “I had never tried to write a song for someone else,” she explains about when she first visited Nashville.

In 2016 she teamed with producer Dave Cobb to release The Bird & the Rifle, a critically-acclaimed project that led to two award nominations from the Americana Music Association — for Artist of the Year and Song of the Year (“Wreck You,” written with Felix McTeigue), as well as three Grammy nominations. She reunited with Cobb for The Tree sessions as well.

McKenna now splits her time between Boston and Nashville, visiting once or twice a month to work on songs. She speaks fondly of her adopted city. “I fell in love with the community. Nashville is such a songwriter town. They really honor their songwriters,” she says. “I have to pinch myself sometimes when I think about the group of people that I get to write with because it’s not just that they’re all great writers. I’ve really found a group that I feel so comfortable with. [An idea] might not be right and it might even be kinda stupid, but they won’t judge me. They’ll say, ‘Well, let’s see. How can we make that work?’ The people that you feel bravest around are the best people to be creative with.”

Among their many collaborations together, McKenna, Hillary Lindsey, and Liz Rose wrote “Girl Crush,” which Little Big Town recorded for their 2014 album Pain Killer. The song focuses on a woman who finds herself developing a complex desire for her ex via his new love interest. It’s jealousy painted in layers: “I want to taste her lips/ Yeah, ‘cause they taste like you.” Despite complaints to pull the song from country radio due to a growing controversy about whom the central figure wanted, it went on to earn McKenna her first Grammy—for Best Country Song. She repeated the following year for “Humble and Kind,” recorded by Tim McGraw.

When it comes to the success of “Girl Crush,” McKenna says she, Lindsey, and Rose weren’t anticipating a hit. “We didn’t think anybody would cut the song—we just chased the song,” she explains. “That song was about reminding ourselves how we want to write the best song we can and reaching that goal on our level.” That same sentiment pops up on The Tree’s final track, “Sing It Like Patsy Would.” McKenna, Lindsey, and Rose wrote the gut-honest song, which details the strife and success of the creative path, but ultimately ends with the important point: Let the love for the work drive you. If you’re looking for fame, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.

The work clearly drives McKenna and other songwriters in Nashville, but the question looms about why men continue to dominate the country charts. “I think overall if you had to figure out why is there are fewer women on country radio—and I’ve never asked anybody this so I might be wrong—I think it may have something to do with the fact that women are less likely to write a party song,” she muses. “They do, but when you look at the women who have become the biggest part of country music, most of their songs—the biggest songs—are statement songs. They say things that men can’t really get away with. Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, they’re saying things.”

Whether or not country radio ever wakes up to the imbalance in its formatting remains to be seen. Even McKenna admits the conversation has been going on for some time. “Ever since [I arrived in Nashville in 2005], I’ve heard people say, ‘The woman thing is coming around. You just watch. I can feel it.’ It’s funny because it always does feel like it’s going to turn.”

In the meantime, she and her cohorts will continue writing the songs that make people sit up and take notice, that help shift the conversation. She says with a chuckle, “I love landing in Nashville and going, ‘Somebody’s writing a great song right now.’ It’s just a given.”

Photo credit: Becky Fluke
Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Punch Brothers, “Three Dots and a Dash”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The Punch Brothers begin “Three Dots and a Dash” with their best impression of the blips of a telegraph wire — or perhaps the bouncy, cyclical polyrhythms that we most associate with the soundtracks of news programs on TV and the radio — but this low-hanging, tangible thread of metaphor and text painting quickly falls away, enshrouded and enveloped by much more complicated beauty. The Punch Brothers embrace the befuddling, confounding, sometimes overwrought detail and musical acrobatics in their composing and arranging like a magician would, painstakingly poring over every last detail of their magnum opus illusion, leaning into the unwieldy and counterintuitive, knowing that these are the most compelling and awe-inspiring moments.

“Three Dots and a Dash” anchors these more lofty components with the pulsing, beating, metronomic undercurrent. That approach keeps the entire song bound together while myriad melodic narratives may pull listeners down one of so many theatrical, cinematic rabbit holes. So, when it dawns on a listener that “Three Dots and a Dash” also references a traditional, Tiki-style cocktail — a nod to the album’s title, All Ashore, as well as an homage to the band’s love of beach-ready libations and leis being a fundamental accessory in their current stage wear — that syncopated urgency brings their ears back to the core. And then, when it’s realized that in Morse code, three dots and a dash designate the letter V, which often stands as an abbreviation for “victory,” we realize two things: first, that once again, there is never just one take away from the beautiful, complicated, string band-centered art that the Punch Brothers execute on a higher level than almost anyone else operating within similar aesthetics, today; and secondly, that complex music is not inextricably bogged down by its own intricacies, when victorious, it can be intensified, deepened, and enriched by them.

Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

To celebrate our Artists of the Month and their brand new album, All Ashore, we interviewed each individual member of the Punch Brothers, exploring the processes, circumstances, and factors that led to the creation of this latest crop of songs. The themes and responses are just as diverse as the five men themselves and their musical approaches.

Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player – and some might say secret weapon – in Punch Brothers, has been a performer for nearly his whole life. As a kid, he toured the Southwest playing bluegrass with his family’s band; that’s how he met Chris Thile, forming a musical friendship that has spanned more than three decades. Though his stage presence is low-key, his musicianship is undeniable, playing as joyously or mournfully as a song requires. This is also true on All Ashore. [Read Gabe’s interview]

Paul Kowert came on board as bassist for the Punch Brother about 10 years ago, stepping into a band of musicians he knew casually but admired greatly. In the following decade, he’s gained even more visibility in the world of acoustic music through his band Hawktail and a gig as bassist for David Rawlings Machine. His versatility is reflected in the list of bassists he cites as influences: Edgar Meyer, Mark Schatz, and Roy Milton “Junior” Huskey. He’s quick to admit that he’s not a lyricist, yet his musical contributions definitely shape the undercurrent of the new record. [Read Paul’s interview]

Chris Eldridge, the good-natured guitarist for Punch Brothers, comes by his bluegrass pedigree honestly. As a young man, he attended innumerable shows by Seldom Scene, a pioneering ensemble whose lineup included his father, banjo player Ben Eldridge. After studying at Oberlin Conservatory, he co-founded the Infamous Stringdusters, which won three IBMA Awards following their 2007 debut project, Fork in the Road. Indeed that album title proved auspicious, as Eldridge took a different path with the formation of Punch Brothers – a rewarding partnership that a decade later has yielded their newest project. [Read Chris’s interview]

Noam Pikelny has a dry delivery only when he’s joking around. But as the banjo player in Punch Brothers, his playing is crisp, inventive, and in step with his colleagues. This is especially true on All Ashore, which explores the personal challenges of relationships as well as the growing political divide in America. This year he’s nominated for IBMA Banjo Player of the Year, while his two previous solo albums earned Grammy nominations. His Twitter bio sums it up: “Widely considered the world’s premier color blind banjoist. Punch Brother.” [Read Noam’s interview]

Chris Thile is walking briskly into the venue while chatting agreeably about Punch Brothers’ new album. He’s used to multi-tasking, of course. In addition to kicking off an extensive tour with that eclectic band, he hosts the public radio show Live From Here, and he’s also a husband and father with a lot on his mind – particularly when it comes to the state of the world. [Read Chris’s interview]

Illustrations by Zachary Johnson

Del McCoury: Whatever Suits the Song

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

There are three things that you need to know about Del McCoury before anything else: His hair is incomparable, he giggles almost ceaselessly, and he still sings bluegrass.

Fifty years ago, after ending his stint with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys as lead singer and guitarist, McCoury released his debut solo project, Del McCoury Sings Bluegrass, with his now-iconic pompadour coiffed proudly and precisely on the cover. The album was released on Arhoolie Records, whose founder and proprietor, Chris Strachwitz, produced the album, phoning the young McCoury barely a day before the session to offer him the deal. Because of the severely short notice, the band was cobbled together from whomever was available and the songs chosen from whatever Del knew: A lot of Bill Monroe material, plenty of traditional bluegrass, and some old-time country, too.

Since those days in the late 1960s, songs have been the most significant driver of McCoury’s inspiration and creativity all along. “In the early years,” he remembers, “my producers would bring songs to me and I would usually just do them, even though sometimes I didn’t really like the song. As time went by, I got to thinking, ‘I’m just going to record songs that I like, instead of doing everything [anyone] brings to me.’ I figured I’m the one who’s going to have to sing these songs!”

It’s this love for the songs themselves that has informed his entire career, sculpting the iconic McCoury style that can be detected through each and every one of his albums. It’s remarkable that he’s been able to sustain such a particular, tangible musical identity over the decades without it ever growing stale or cliched. That identity — innovation balanced with tradition and overlaid with melody-focused, virtuosic picking, while centered on soaring, high lonesome vocals, all accomplished with a wink and a smirk — doesn’t always come from overt attempts at consistency. “I’ll tell you what it is,” he says in a tone that foretells that this is not some ironclad secret. “It comes down to, simply, I just record songs that I like. It’s hard to say where they’re going to come from. … I don’t think about if anybody else is going to like it when I do it. I just think about me having to sing it.” And as far as production and arrangements? That’s no proprietary recipe under lock and key, either: “But really, it’s whatever suits the song.” Whatever he’s throwing into the pot, it is downright delectable on McCoury’s brand new album, Del McCoury Still Sings Bluegrass.

 

 

Thank goodness that he does. If his signature chuckle, a constant as he tells stories and discusses the new record over the phone, wasn’t indication enough, Del has always been a beacon of joy in bluegrass communities. From the first second of track one, the slightly silly, totally burning, almost-a-love-song “Hotwired,” through a high-speed Alan Jackson cover, a classic fast waltz, yes, a train song, too, and another couple of handfuls of carefully curated material, that joy is palpable. It’s a striking through line that stems first from his absolute adoration of just doing the thing. It’s a love he’s always had. “In the early days,” he says, “When I was playing bluegrass festivals, we’d stay up all night, play all night, and go and do a show the next day in the afternoon. I had that much interest in it that I could play night and day and never stop. When you get older, you can’t do that; you have to pace yourself. But I still have that interest, I really do.”

Even casual observers would not note McCoury’s current clip as “pacing oneself.” He’s a member of the Grand Ole Opry and a Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, he tours nationally, he hosts the radio show Hand Picked with Del McCoury on SiriusXM’s Bluegrass Junction, and he presents an annual roots-music-festival-meets-family-reunion, DelFest, in Cumberland, Maryland, every May. All of that notwithstanding any current album release cycles and press junkets he may be running. While plenty of other artists with such long, successful careers would be pumping the brakes, Del is still looking ahead. “I just never lost interest in it. I never lost interest in recording records and entertaining folks. It’s something I love to do.”

And the folks love him back. Whether listeners come from the most staunch camps of bluegrass diehards, or from hippie festivals and jammy string band gatherings, or symphony halls and performing arts centers, they all count Del as one of their own. The rarity of that fact is not lost on him. “[That’s why] when we do a show, we never have a set list. We figure these people paid to see us, so we’re just going to do what they want us to do, we’ll see what they want to hear. It keeps me enthused, the audience excited, and also the boys [excited, too.] And the audience never know[s] what we’re going to do. ‘Cause I don’t!”

 

 

By choosing to record and perform material that he connects with personally, he’s passing down that care and respect for songs to every one of his audiences, who, in turn, learn to appreciate and then reinforce that care. So, when a song comes along on Still Sings Bluegrass that includes an extended, rip-roaring electric guitar solo (in this case played by Del’s grandson, Heaven), or when “To Make Love Sweeter for You” kicks with a jangly upright piano, you don’t hear the predictable, “that ain’t bluegrass” balking. Furthermore, the traditional, straight-ahead policers are visibly absent from DelFest, where more fringe, jammy acts like Trey Anastasio and The String Cheese Incident are just as likely to appear as Larry Sparks — or Tedeschi Trucks Band. And whether he’s recording a set of songs such as this fresh crop, curated by the man himself, or lending his voice and his band to projects like Del and Woody, an album of unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs, or American Legacies, the New Orleans-meets-Nashville, jazz-meets-bluegrass, Del McCoury Band-meets-Preservation Hall Jazz Band crossover album, his footing within bluegrass never falters and is rarely challenged.  

Del doesn’t believe there’s a secret antidote to the signature, absolutist trains of thought some find in bluegrass and he clearly says so. When asked why he thinks his fans might let him off the hook he laughs, “You know what, I’m afraid they’re gonna let me go any minute!” But we know this isn’t true. Now more than fifty years into his song-led career, Del’s creative vision has never been so clear, his perspective never more innovative, his hair never more enviable, his laugh never so charming, and his music never more joyful.

No matter how that ends up sounding from the stage or through the speakers, by definition, it’s still bluegrass.

Illustration by: Zachary Johnson

 

John Prine: The Difficulty of Forgiveness

Posted on by Editor

In the days following the release of The Tree of Forgiveness, John Prine — the 71-year-old master song crafter, storyteller, and lover of a good meatloaf — had the best sales week of his decades-long career. His first album of originals since 2005’s Fair and Square, it’s a rare bit of triumph for the good guys — and for an artist like Prine, who has shaped our current musical climate in ways that are often beyond measure. Because, despite being one of the primary influences on Americana’s best and brightest — from Jason Isbell to Margo Price and Deer Tick — Prine’s never banked those platinum albums. Though 1991’s The Missing Years eventually sold around a half-million copies some 20 years after his self-titled debut, records, like the rest of human life, then went online: People stopped buying, and started streaming.

“Just as I started selling records, records stopped selling. I hope it wasn’t my fault,” Prine says, chuckling from his living room at home in Nashville. “I’d be spoiled, if I sold a million records. I probably wouldn’t go on the road for 10 years. But I don’t ever want to sell so many records that I have to do shows in a stadium. Stadiums are for sporting events: They’re not to watch a guy with a guitar come out and tell his story.”

He’s right, though if there’s anyone who could capture a stadium full of people with just an acoustic guitar and his heart-shaking stories, it would be Prine. The Tree of Forgiveness, an exquisite record that finds Prine looking at love, death, and the passage of time with humor, lightness, and his own quirky sort of grace, isn’t a set of arena rock barnburners (obviously). Instead, it’s touching moments of humanity that stick to the bones and linger in the mind, letting the imagination wander in exactly the direction that Prine wants it to … which is everywhere. Take “Summer’s End,” a nostalgic track if there ever was one, though it’s not explicitly clear for what — for summer, for a relationship, for life itself. “I could sell John Prine Kleenex with a song like that,” he says, laughing.

But it’s hard to be too sad about the end of life or love in Prine’s world, particularly life, if what happens next is as fun as “When I Get to Heaven,” the album’s closer. With Amanda Shires, Jason Isbell, and Brandi Carlile all chiming in on kazoo and vocals — all three appear across the Dave Cobb-produced LP — it details Prine’s perfect afterlife, where he can smoke again, post-cancer, hug his loved ones, and drink his signature cocktail, the Handsome Johnny, to his heart’s content. Like most of what Prine does, “When I Get to Heaven” is loaded with a potent combination of humor and vulnerability. Death is life’s biggest mystery, and Prine would rather solve that problem with lightness than exist in the dark, reality be damned. And Prine likes a good story as much as he likes (or doesn’t like) reality, anyway.

Prine’s own life story is a bit of rock ‘n’ roll lore: He grew up outside of Chicago in a mill town, and formed his songwriting voice after leaving the Army, writing between shifts as a mailman. But much of his signature finger-picking style and his artistic identity come from Kentucky, where his father hailed from, and which feeds the deep bluegrass presence within his songs.

Prine is equally important to Kentucky, too — and to Kentucky’s artists, like Kelsey Waldon, who will open select shows for him in the fall. “John Prine’s music is very special and significant to me,” says Waldon. “He brought together my country and bluegrass worlds, but with relevant and honest songwriting that I think would touch most any walk of life. As a Kentuckian, yes, of course his bluegrass roots make me proud. I have spent some time in Muhlenberg County, and I believe that’s where John learned to play, from his grandfather. That is the area where the great Merle Travis is from, and you can really hear a lot of Merle in John’s pickin’ style — that rhythmic thumb picking. The Everly Brothers and Bill Monroe are also from around the same area so, you know, it’s a lush environment for music. Something has always been in the water. I had heard in an interview that his daddy used to drill the kids that they were not only from Illinois, but also from Kentucky. So, I’d say the roots run deep.”

“I can never really lose those roots,” Prine says. “My family is a big part of my life. A lot of the older relatives are gone now, but I still have family in Kentucky, and I still go to my family reunions every year. Country and bluegrass have always been big influences on me and my music. I still listen to that music.”

Prine listens to a lot of Isbell and Shires, too, and Sturgill Simpson, a fellow Kentucky native with whom he shares a songwriting office — which has never actually been used for any songwriting. Prine stores a big pool table there and, besides, they can’t give it up. Producer/engineer Dave Ferguson uses the space next door, and he likes to smoke there, so Prine and Simpson hold on to it so a new tenant doesn’t put the kibosh on the stogies. “Friendship and cigarettes,” Prine says.

“I would love Sturgill if he was from New York City,” says Prine, “but he is from Kentucky, and I love that he respects and cherishes those roots as I do. He and I both come from the same long line of country-folk-bluegrass guitar-playing musicians. I learned to fingerpick by listening to Elizabeth Cotton and musicians in our tradition. We are all still playing and writing about stuff we know.”

One of the reasons that Prine’s songs are so impactful is how they balance what he knows and what he doesn’t — the mysteries of life, its frustrations, and unknowns. On The Tree of Forgiveness, recorded at RCA Studio A, he’s thinking a lot about forgiveness, itself, and what it means to be kind, something that resonates loud and clear in the Trump era. Prine didn’t write explicitly political songs on this record, but that simple act of forgiveness and kindness is political, in and of itself, in 2018 — a concept that other country and folk singers, like Kacey Musgraves and Courtney Marie Andrews, have also explored on their recent albums.

“Forgiveness, to me, it’s probably the most difficult thing to do,” Prine says. “And the most difficult person to forgive is yourself. A lot of people go through life not forgiving themselves for short-selling something, or paying enough attention to kids or parents, not looking after them when they get old. But the most difficult thing is to forgive yourself.”

Prine’s songs include so much permission to forgive ourselves for being imperfect, for acknowledging that we can love our weaknesses as much as our strengths, and for being content with our priorities, however skewed they may be. Some of Prine’s personal priorities are songs, a good meatloaf, and friends and family. His record label, Oh Boy, is a family affair, with his wife and manager Fiona running things with their son, Jody Whelan. When he’s not touring or playing with his grandkids, he’s writing with friends like Dan Auerbach, who appears on the record, and Pat McLaughlin, or seeing shows around town. He recently checked out the I’m With Her gig at the Station Inn in Nashville. “His support is incredibly meaningful,” says Sara Watkins, who could see he him bopping along from the stage.

“The longer I live in Nashville, I only co-write with friends,” says Prine. “Because, if you spend an afternoon together and you don’t write a song, at least you get to hang out.” For one of The Tree of Forgiveness‘s tracks — “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)” — Prine and McLaughlin were writing together on a Tuesday (“meatloaf day, that’s our carrot on a stick”) and Prine brought up a story about how he’d heard of farmers taking their daughters to town in order to pawn them off for marriage — which he’d heard jokingly referred to as “egg and daughter night.” Naturally, this gave Prine a good laugh. And an idea.

Prine didn’t think it was a real thing, though (according to Google, apparently, it is), but they wrote the song anyway. “We didn’t think it was about the truth and, when you aren’t writing about the truth,” he says, “the world is your oyster.”

Illustration by Zachary Johnson

Joan Baez: Turning the Glass Upside Down

Posted on by Editor

Joan Baez admits there’s a gaffe in “Civil War,” a harrowing song of uprisings, both personal and public, on her new album, Whistle Down the Wind. “There are a couple of words that come out funny,” she says, “and there’s one where I sound like I have a big lisp.” It’s hard to catch that particular mispronunciation, especially as the lyrics are littered with sibilant S’s (“… this civil war”) that might blur her words together, and those mistakes may not be apparent to a casual listener or even an obsessive fan. But Baez hears them every time.

Partly, those blemishes are the byproduct of the recording process, which was loose, casual, and largely unrehearsed. Baez made the trip from her home in the Bay Area down to producer Joe Henry’s studio in Los Angeles, where she worked with a band of session musicians who have become regulars on the albums he has helmed for Solomon Burke, Lizz Wright, Bettye LaVette, and Over the Rhine. She would play a song a few times for them, enough to give them a sense of the piece and the ideas she wanted to convey. “I didn’t stop to say, ‘Listen, we’re going to hold this note for this long and do this thing here,’” says Baez. “I just didn’t know any of that. We just pieced everything together.” As a result, “We’ve got mistakes all over the place, and we didn’t bother to fix them, because the feeling was right. We didn’t want to sacrifice that feeling in the song for some technicality.”

Henry agrees, arguing that a mistake isn’t a mistake, if it actually strengthens the song: “To me, it’s only a mistake if it breaks the story and takes you out of the trance. I don’t hear that happening anywhere on the album, because people are playing together. They’re in a real-time conversation, musically speaking. They’re in a moment of discovery together, in real time. Nobody is playing anything by rote.”

Least of all Baez. Sixty years into a storied career, she is still searching, still discovering. Whistle Down the Wind is her first album in 10 years, and she has intimated that it may be her last. If so, it will be a remarkable swan song: a collection that gauges the tenor of 2018 just as intuitively and authoritatively as her self-titled debut did in 1960 or Diamonds & Rust did in 1975.

Baez speaks through the songs of other writers, bending them to the present moment or finding new implications buried in the lyrics and melodies. There are two Tom Waits character studies, odes to personal stubbornness, whose melodies and sentiments fit so well with Baez’s delivery that you’d think he wrote them specifically for her. She covers Zoe Mulford’s “The President Sang ‘Amazing Grace,’” about President Obama’s impromptu performance of an old Sacred Harp hymn at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Josh Ritter’s “Silver Blade” sounds like a response to the traditional ballad “Silver Dagger,” which has haunted Baez’s set lists for half-a-century.

Whistle Down the Wind is not interested in replaying old glories or indulging any nostalgia for the heyday of folk music. And that’s why those technical mistakes matter so much. Even if you don’t hear them, they nevertheless act on your subconscious. They increase the intimacy of the recording, making these songs sound more direct, more forthright, more urgent. Moreover, they speak to the messiness of what has become Baez’s truest subject: the times. Certain ideas and issues — whether it’s civil rights in the 1960s or gun control in the 2010s — are much more complicated and unwieldy than the means by which we choose to address them. It is less the fault of the song than the singer. As well intentioned and as righteous as an artist may be, the implication is that she or he remains an imperfect vessel for the song and the ideas contained within. Leaving that lisp in “Civil War” is Baez’s way of acknowledging that fact.

The miracle of her long career is that she still believes mightily that such songs are still worth singing, that they can speak to their historical moment, that music still has a function in the everyday life of a community or a nation or a planet. “It’s community building,” Baez says. “It’s empathy building.”

In the 1960s, that belief placed her at the epicenter of the folk revival, when she played demonstrations as routinely as she booked concerts. Like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, she was armed with a guitar, an encyclopedic history of folk music, and a strident sense of mission. Unlike those two influences, she had a high-flying voice, one that swooped playfully around her upper register. In recent years, age has robbed her voice of its former agility, but on Whistle Down the Wind, it has grown deeper, taking on a slightly rougher texture, yet retaining its original authority and compassion.

Her peers might have taken determined steps away from the responsibilities of protest music, but Baez simply expanded her scope and subject matter. Especially in the 1970s, she found new ways to mix the personal and the political. Never a confessional singer/songwriter — at least not in the way the West Coast folkies were — she still put a lot of herself in her songs, whether they were about her own personal relationships or those between communities. “I don’t know how I would have done that stuff back then without the music,” she says. “That was such a big part of it.”

Few folk musicians of her generation managed to keep the audience rooted in the foreground of her music. Her songs speak to “you,” but in most cases that “you” is plural. On her cover of “Another World,” by Anohni, who previously performed as Antony & the Johnsons, Baez bangs softly on the frets of her guitar, creating a gently frenzied pulse for lyrics about leaving this world and finding a new one. Her version is an ecological warning, a life-size take on a planet-size woe.

“I’m gonna miss the snow,” Baez sings. “I’m gonna miss the bees.” As the song continues, that guitar thrum becomes a timer counting down the end of a life or possibly the end of all life. “The song is as dark as it is beautiful and as beautiful as it is dark,” says Baez. “It’s spellbinding. [Anohni] turns the glass upside down. It’s not half-full or half-empty, but upside down.”

Baez changes the song in one crucial way. In her original, Anohni sings, “I’m gonna miss you all.” Baez adds a new word: “I’m gonna miss you all, everyone.” It’s a small change that doesn’t disrupt that melody or change the song in any dramatic way, but it does give an idea of the audience Baez (and Anohni) imagines for herself. She is addressing that “everyone.” “Joan understands very well that music is about community,” says Henry. “It’s about gathering people in real time to a pointed moment. It’s always and only about community for her.”

That idea is ingrained in her vast catalog, although it grows more poignant now that her career appears to be winding down. “When I go tootling around the world, I’m seeing so many different audiences,” Baez says. “I’ve played a lot of festivals in Germany and adopted France as a second country. I do five songs in French for them. I have a song for each country, or sometimes it’s just a line. It means so much to people, if you sing something to them in their own language. It’s hard work, but it’s a way to thank people for showing up.”

It’s also a way of speaking to them more clearly. In 2009, she recorded a simple YouTube clip of herself, presumably seated in her kitchen, singing a version of the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome.” It’s a song she’d sung countless times, but this version was both in English and Farsi, and she dedicated it to the people of Iran, who were protesting the contested election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The lyrics were written out phonetically. I couldn’t possibly remember them. And they don’t have the same scales, which meant I couldn’t get the notes right. They just didn’t exist in my vocabulary of notes.”

For Baez, music not only speaks to these communities; it binds them together and can, in some ways, define them. Every movement demands a soundtrack, and Baez is under no illusion she can provide one for March for Our Lives or Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. “We need a brilliant anthem so people have something to sing, so they don’t have to shout so much. I wish I could write that kind of thing. But it’s so hard. Still, I think it will come.”

Illustration by Zachary Johnson