Tag: Artist of the Month

From Banjo to Opera, Rhiannon Giddens Brings History to the Stage

Posted on by Editor

An interview with Rhiannon Giddens these days feels like a game show lightning round. Since winning the Steve Martin Banjo Prize in 2016 and a stunning $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, the songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist has widened her scope and let a range of fine and folk arts projects flood into her idea-driven world. When we caught up with her in Nashville, for example, she was in rehearsals for Lucy Negro Redux, a multi-layered original ballet about Shakespeare, his purported black mistress and issues of identity and otherness. Working with poetry by Caroline Randall Williams, she composed the music with one of her latest collaborators, jazz pianist and world percussionist Francesco Turrisi. They’ve made a duo album set for release this year.

Here, Giddens speaks about her broader artistic scope and her attention on how women of color negotiate the past and present.

How different is your creative life now versus five years ago?

Oh my god. It’s like: “Who was that person?” I don’t even know. I am so grateful for that time. I was transitioning from the Carolina Chocolate Drops to my solo career. But it’s definitely become more of a creative life. I still am very much an interpreter. I’m very interested in giving old songs new life and putting them through a lens of today and I think there are a lot of things that are left on the shelf that need to be aired. But I definitely have found over the years that I’m finding more and more of my creative life to be in writing and collaborating. I’m very rarely going to sit in a room and write stuff. It’s like I write things and then I want to work with somebody and develop them or have a reason to do it.

So my collaborative opportunities have really grown since I left the band because it’s a lot easier to do things as your own person. There are all these things you have to think about when you’re in a band that I don’t have to think about any more. And it’s really allowed me to focus on the woman side of things, which is hard to do when you’re in a band full of boys, you know? Now I feel I can focus a bit more on what I’m finding is very important and front and center for me, which are women’s issues and women of color, in particular. Dealing with the history of what we’ve had to go through in this country and in other places, and what does that mean? And creating platforms for other women of color to have their voices heard, in my limited capacity.

You have background in opera, which may be the most collaborative of all the fine arts, with all its component parts. And you’ve started doing Aria Code, an opera podcast. What’s that about?

I was approached by Metropolitan Opera to be guest on this podcast and it just turned into becoming the host. And that’s been really fun. The wonderful producer Marrin Lazyan, she’s put it all together and I’m there to provide context and if there’s stuff that jibes particularly well with what I know like Otello, the Verdi opera, I can bring in my expertise on blackface and things like that. It’s been great.

And I’m going to be in my first production next year as a mature artist. I’m doing Porgy & Bess with the Greensboro Opera. It’s to open up the new arts center in Greensboro. So it’s kind of part of my involvement in my hometown. And also an opportunity to sing Bess, which I’ve never been able to do. So opera’s come back into my world in kind of unexpected ways. I’m writing an opera. I sing with orchestras on a regular basis. So it’s been really wonderful to see that come back into my life because it is something that I love so much and that I have spent a lot of my years doing. So we’ll see where it goes. I don’t know!

You produced the album Songs of Our Native Daughters, which brings you together with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla. What motivated this and how do you put these women into context?

It was an amazing opportunity. I was already working on this idea of early American musical history and speaking to it through the music of the banjo and the music of minstrelsy for Smithsonian Folkways. So it took this little turn and became a record with these really strong women of color. With my co-producer Dirk Powell, we were talking about who we wanted to be on this project, and that’s where we ended up. I was like, “Oh, this is where it needs to go.” From then on it took this slightly different path down to really talking about the woman of color’s experience in America and having a platform to respond to that in an artistic way.

And to each of the women who came in, I said, look, bring your banjo. And let’s talk about what it means to be a woman of color here and what it means to have ancestors who’ve gone through what they’ve gone through. It was an amazing experience to watch them feel like they had this space to write about these things that maybe they’ve touched on, but to have days to focus on these themes and these ideas. It was a beautiful collaborative thing. I’ve worked with each of them in various ways so I just knew it was going to work. And it worked better than I could have ever really dreamed. It went places I’d never have considered. That’s why you pick people and then you let the project do what it does instead of going, “It’s not exactly what I envisioned.” Well, usually because it’s better! So leave it alone and let it do what it’s going to do.

In this respect, do you see yourself as a mentor, or as a leader in this widening and overdue effort to infuse folk and roots music with more voices?

I’m always looking for ways to facilitate. People in these positions, like the folks putting on the Cambridge Folk Festival or at Smithsonian Folkways, they’re looking to me, and I’m like, “Hey these people, because they’re awesome.” And if that’s how I can use whatever little power I have in the world, that’s what I want to use it for. I’ve got my own career and it’s very important to me, but that’s also very important to me–creating the community of people that are doing this.

Because that was the strength of the Carolina Chocolate Drops. We were a band and we had each other. In a time where, even less than now, people were like, “Black people on banjos? What?”, we had each other and I know what that community can mean as an artist. It really gives you strength. And that was my idea with Our Native Daughters and with anything I’m (doing). Amythyst has opened for me. Leyla was part of the Chocolate Drops. JT and Ally (Birds of Chicago) — I’ve definitely championed them. I think that’s what we need to do for each other. If I’m in a position where somebody who has power asks me, I’m going to spread that around. Because I think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

They tell writers that it’s better to show than to tell. And it strikes me that roots music is moving from a phase of ‘telling’ about inclusion to a phase of showing. Is that fair to say?

I think so. I’m definitely moving that way in my own life. There was a lot of talking with the Chocolate Drops because you had to educate people. But there was also a lot of just doing. We found the balance; we’re going to contextualize this, but then we’re just going to play it. Because the facts are the facts and we’re not in a position to shame you about not knowing this. We didn’t know this. But I definitely found that over time, I’m tired. I just want to play and sing.

And the next record of mine is not a project. It’s not a mission. It’s coming out in May (I think) and Francesco and I did that together. It’s really all the worlds that I’ve been talking about and being in all together. I just want somebody to put it on and listen to it, and they don’t know anything about me, and they come away – I want them to love the record but I also want them to feel this aspect of nobody owns any sounds. Nobody owns any experiences in humanity. We’re taking all the sounds you heard in the ballet and the notion that humans have been moving since the beginning, and we’ve been affecting each other since the beginning.

So a religious trance drum from Iran works perfectly well with an Appalachian a cappella ballad. Because they’re representing universal human truths. It would be really nice for people to just experience that through sound and through the experience of the songs. And of course we’ll talk about it. But I’m kind of moving toward showing and inhabiting all the work that’s come up until now and living in that and taking that to where it needs to go.

Craig Havighurst covers music for WMOT Roots Radio. Hear the interview.

Rhiannon Giddens, “Following the North Star”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Rhiannon Giddens is not only our Artist of the Month, she’s roots music’s renaissance woman. She’s an outspoken activist, a MacArthur Genius grant winner, a veritable music historian, and opera-oriented podcast host who has scored and staged a ballet, acted on a major television series, given her fair share of keynote addresses, and has helmed more than one supergroup. Somehow that list only begins to scratch the surface of Giddens’ contributions to our roots music communities. Who knows what other incredible ideas will come from her mind, her pen, and her banjo in the months and years to come.

Here’s the thing. In the flurry of credits Giddens’ bio will inevitably spit at you it’s easy to forget what might be the most important line item in her IMDb or Wikipedia profiles: she’s a damn fine picker. “Following the North Star,” an amuse-bouche of an instrumental from her 2017 release, Freedom Highway, is an excellent reminder of that fact. The bouncing, clawhammer banjo is stark against just percussion and bones, a percussive folk instrument played by hand, similar to playing the spoons. It’s a shockingly simple, but never simplistic production. Each note drips with Giddens’ understated virtuosity. Her understanding of the music’s past, present, and future is translated effortlessly by buttery fretless banjo, which retains every ounce of its haunting, melancholy potential in defiance of the tune’s forward-leaning tempo.

‘Tis sweet to be reminded that, no matter where her creative compass may take her, she’ll always have the chops — she’ll always be a killer banjo player. And, from this banjo player’s perspective, that’s what’s most important anyway!!

Rhiannon Giddens Prepares for ‘Lucy Negro Redux’ Ballet Premiere

Posted on by Editor

Rhiannon Giddens will reach a new milestone in her ever-diversifying career as the Nashville Ballet hosts a world premiere of Lucy Negro Redux on Friday, February 8. According to press materials, the production explores the mysterious love life of William Shakespeare through the perspective of the “Dark Lady” for whom many of his famed sonnets were written.

Giddens collaborated with jazz musician Francesco Turrisi on the score. The narrative is based on a book by Caroline Randall Williams, a Nashville-based poet who also contributes spoken word during the performance. Paul Vasterling serves as Artistic Director.

In the video below, Giddens explains, “I said yes to the ballet because it’s a really interesting story and it fits very neatly with my mission of highlighting interesting and overlooked possible connections in history, and this is a very, very intriguing one.”

She adds, “I just hope audiences will take away that you can do things in a lot of different ways. And there are so many different ways to collaborate and there are so many different ways to make a statement. I think this ballet, this collaboration, has a really great opportunity to do that – to show audiences that ballet can be this, as well as Swan Lake and some of the other things that you see. In my world, that banjos and folk music can be partnered with really a high-art dance form and it works. So, it’s like, hopefully we bring the two sides together to see each other and go, ‘Hey, you’re not that different from me actually.'”

Photo of Francesco Turrisi and Rhiannon Giddens by Karen Cox

Artist of the Month: Rhiannon Giddens

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Our February AOTM is Rhiannon Giddens: singer, multi-instrumentalist, actor, writer, song collector, activist, and composer.  Giddens has been developing her multi-hyphenated legacy of cross-cultural creativity for over twenty years, from being a founding member of the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, to multiple solo albums, to her roles on Broadway and TV’s Nashville, to high-profile collaborations like The New Basement Tapes, and as a creator of new boundary-breaking artistic projects around the world.

Throughout the month, we’ll be bringing you several stories about Rhiannon’s resounding legacy as one of the strongest voices in American roots music today, including a preview of her new collaborative album Song of Our Native Daughters with Leyla McCalla, Amythyst Kiah, and Allison Russell; an in-depth interview about her latest project with the Nashville Ballet and writer Caroline Randall Williams, Lucy Negro Redux; and a recap of her powerful keynote address from the recent Americana Music Association – UK.

“Nobody owns an instrument; no culture gets to put the lockdown on anything.”
-Rhiannon Giddens at AMA-UK, January 2019

For now, get primed for the month ahead with a collection of some of her best work in our new Essential Rhiannon Giddens playlist on Spotify.

 

For our regular readers, you’ll notice a slightly different structure to our AOTM feature.  Starting this month, we’ll be kicking things off with an introduction to the artist and a preview of the month of coverage ahead.

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.