Tag: Artist of the Month

Melissa Etheridge: The Rock ‘n’ Soul of Self-Respect

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Melissa Etheridge is closing in on three decades since her first full-length of original material was released and, over the years, she’s represented something distinct to many different kinds of fans. Most know her for her music, with well-loved hits like “I’m the Only One” and the Grammy Award-winning “Come to My Window.” To other fans, her public battle with breast cancer and resilient spirit are an inspiration through illness and hardship. Beyond that, Etheridge’s outspoken and unwavering dedication to human rights causes and the LGBTQ community has made her an icon and an articulate voice for the causes and issues that affect people every single day.

But before Etheridge was on the national stage, it wasn’t always about her own words, songs, lyrics, and melodies. “I’ve always played other people’s music,” says Etheridge with a laugh, recalling a string of cover bands and her earliest gigs. “I learned by playing other people’s music, from country to rock ‘n’ roll to R&B.”

That affinity for the classics has been made apparent plenty of times throughout her career — check her jaw-dropping rendition of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart” for evidence that Etheridge can slay a cover song — and when she was approached by Concord Records to take a crack at the Stax catalog on her latest studio release, Etheridge jumped at the opportunity. Her forthcoming full-length album, MEmphis Rock and Soul, is a 12-song compilation that covers Stax songs originally recorded by icons like Otis Redding, the Staple Singers, and Rufus Thomas, and it zeroes in on the music that inspired her own.

“Stax, as far as I am concerned, it’s the soul, it’s the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll,” she says. “I’ve seen film of Janis Joplin watching Otis Redding in concert, and then she moves and sings just like him at Woodstock. The artists that inspired me were inspired by Stax, so this is going back to my serious roots.”

Where does one even begin when the Stax catalog is your playground? Etheridge was left with 200 tracks to choose from after she’d gone through and selected her favorites. Slowly, she picked them apart and narrowed it down to 100, then 50 songs, and finally she got down to the 20 numbers that she brought into the studio. “The main criteria was how I felt inside when I listened,” she says.

“Some of them were inspiring. I mean, ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ is great, but it’s been done a million times, and I didn’t feel like I could give anything newer to it. I tried ‘Knock on Wood,’ and that one just didn’t read, didn’t flesh out. Then, there are even a couple that no one’s heard of that I found. I just loved the beat, loved the whole thing, and thought, ‘Okay, I’m just going to put my rock ‘n’ roll spin on it.’”

The Etheridge you hear on MEmphis Rock and Soul embodies the unrestrained passion that so many artists have found in these songs before her. Maybe it’s the ghosts of Royal Studios coming back for one more encore — after all, the Memphis spot where Etheridge recorded the album was hallowed ground for the likes of Al Green and Chuck Berry, and it was started by Willie Mitchell, whose son Boo Mitchell produced the record with Etheridge.

“Without Boo, this project would not have happened,” says Etheridge. “He was the first one there and the last one to leave every day, and the respect he has for the music, for his father, for his father’s legacy, for Vaughan and Lowe … It’s a real family down there.”

Much is added to MEmphis Rock and Soul beyond Etheridge’s recognizable vocals — astute listeners will catch the sounds of the Hodges Brothers and many other Memphis music legends in the background of the soulful tracks — but Etheridge found herself taking on greater roles than she’d bargained for, too. Take the enthusiastic “Hold On, I’m Coming” — the first single from the forthcoming album and one of her favorite numbers from the compilation. “For the longest time, I was looking for someone to sing it with me. I kept thinking, ‘It’s a duet. It’s a duet. I’m going to ask this person, that person,’” she says. Things didn’t pan out, but she brought the song into the studio on one of the final days of recording. “I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to put the pedal to the metal and just hit this thing as hard as I can. Make it as rock.’”

Jumping into the recognizable number by herself, Etheridge railed through the song with all of the noisy edge she’d hoped for, zeroing in on her own unique take on the song while preserving the energy that made it a hit in the first place. The vocal that made the final mix was the live one they recorded right then in the studio, and you can hear Etheridge beam as she relives the recording process. “It was just such a great experience, with these musicians there. They’ve seen so much. They’ve played on so much,” she says. “They took me in. I have such great respect and love for all of them.”

Respect comes up a lot in conversation with Etheridge, but her rendition of the Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” might be the most soulful embodiment of the virtue.

“I decided to go into Respect Yourself and take the heart of the meaning, and the purpose behind the song,” she says, citing Black Lives Matter and the nationwide push for change and equality as catalysts for her lyrical direction. She called fellow songwriter Priscilla Renee with the intention of maintaining the sense of urgency and the call to action that inspired so many in the ‘70s, but modifying the original lyrics for today’s social and political climate. With the weight of her activism to guide her, Etheridge makes for a compelling voice behind so many numbers that served as a soundtrack for the nation’s civil rights movement.

“I’m 55 years old, and I’ve seen some things,” she says. “I do understand one thing, and that is that I can’t change the world, or I can’t ask the world to change, unless I come from a place inside myself. I can’t ask for respect from the world unless I respect myself. I can’t ask for the world to love unless I love myself. When I do — when I love myself, when I have a deep respect for myself as a human being and as a member of society, when I respect who I am truthfully — every inch of me — then I can truly look at my neighbor with respect, and they will see what respect is. They will see it in me.”

On MEmphis Rock and Soul, Etheridge owns this mantra with a reverence for the musicians who came before her that reveals itself in her respect for her own tastes, interpretations, and talents. It’s easy to belabor the places we’d like to see a bit more respect — on the Internet, in the schoolyard, on the political stage — but it’s got to start somewhere. Why not with a little rock ‘n’ soul?

 

Enjoy thoughtful female singer/songwriters? Read our Artist of the Month feature on Mary Chapin Carpenter.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Linda Ronstadt: Hasten Down the Wind

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In Home Free, his 1977 novel of faded denim hippie dreams, Dan Wakefield described his wandering anti-hero Gene Barrett overhearing a song on a nearby record player as he dozes in a hammock in Maine — Linda Ronstadt singing her folkish country ballad “Long Long Time” in the alto that wafted through many a window in those imperfect, exploratory days. “Gene was glad it was Linda Ronstadt, not someone soppy or sickly sweet,” Wakefield wrote. “Strong. Gutsy. Belting it out. Her voice didn’t seem just to come from the house, but out of the earth, over the water into the rickety little town and the scrubland and forest beyond it.”

Beginning in the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt’s singing has had that kind of geological effect throughout popular music: steadying, seemingly able to erase time and trends within one flow of feeling that goes below the surface and the deeper strata of American consciousness. In a time of fading utopian hopes, she emerged as an emissary able to connect old musical ways with the new consciousness of her own maverick generation. “She is offering us something very valuable for the '70s: not a fantasy figure, but a reality figure,” wrote the rock scribe Tom Nolan in 1974. Raised on country and the ranchera music that echoed through her Tuscon, Arizona, neighborhood, Ronstadt sang with a verve and directness that eradicated the pretentiousness that could sometimes afflict the children of the counterculture. Album titles like Hand Sown…Home Grown, Simple Dreams, and Hasten Down the Wind celebrated a naturalness that was complemented by a meticulous attention to musical detail and one of the greatest ears of the rock era.

Those who underestimate Ronstadt as a pretty face and voice who rose to fame on the power of others’ songwriting and production talents — and there have been far too many in that camp — are ignorant. From her teenage days in the folk trio the Stone Poneys, Ronstadt developed a persona that spoke profoundly to women waking up to the way many men had condescended to them throughout the early years of the supposed sexual revolution. She was an everywoman who, instead of building a world through songwriting, did so by taking on others’ words and melodies and reshaping them with intelligence and boundless energy. She grew up in public through her recordings. In 1971, when she was 25, she told a reporter that she didn’t have the voice to do soul music; by 1974, she’d developed her own style of testifying that made her funky reinterpretation of Dee Dee Warwick’s 1963 shouter “You’re No Good” into a number one hit, one she’d follow up by reinvigorating songs by Martha and the Vandellas, Chuck Berry, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, among others. At the same time, she continued championing her own peers, who played on her most successful albums. She was that woman who, like so many others, did the real power lifting within a scene dominated by self-styled heroic men.

When the multi-platinum success of her fifth album, Heart Like a Wheel, sent Ronstadt into the arena-rock stratosphere, she became the premium interpreter of an American songbook that she’s continued to redefine throughout her career. It now includes everything from George Gershwin and Cole Porter to early rock 'n' roll, the Nashville sound, Mexican canciones, Laurel Canyon balladry, Cajun two-steps, and the punkish sounds of New Wave. She developed her singular eclecticism, in part, as a way of coping with a music industry that would have kept her in a stadium-sized box — she hated playing those big venues, ripping up her voice in front of anonymous-feeling hordes — and turned to theater music and standards as a way of reclaiming her right to be a subtle interpreter. "Your musical soul is like facets of a jewel, and you stick out one facet at a time," she said in a retrospective interview in 2003.

Even as a teenager, when lesser musical adventurers would fall into a rut, Ronstadt would change course. Setting forth on a solo career after early success with the Stone Poneys trio challenged the boundaries of strummable folk music by foregrounding its connections to country and becoming as much an inventor of country rock as was Gram Parsons or the Eagles, who famously formed as her backing band. After finding a niche as the patron of her L.A. neighbors, from Warren Zevon to Randy Newman and Jackson Browne, she teamed up with producer Peter Asher to hone that rocked-up pop sound that made her a superstar. Throughout her career, she would return to that sound which, in turn, became hugely influential, forming part of the bedrock of many future stars’ styles, from Olivia Newton-John to Sheryl Crow to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Carrie Underwood.

Meanwhile, Ronstadt became a producer herself, an extension, in some ways, of her role as a brilliant collaborator. Her work behind the boards with the soul legend Aaron Neville, for example, complements her many beautiful duets with him. Her deep love of harmony singing, along with her dedication to uplifting the women with whom she feels the deepest musical kinship, led her to form one of the most beloved vocal groups in recent pop memory — Trio, her project with Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. “I always mean to be a singer, not a star,” she said when the second Trio album was released in 1999. In fact, Ronstadt’s stardom has been predicated upon her ability to consistently remind listeners that to sing is to cultivate a space where all the trappings of the moment — fashion, fame — fall away, a space of pure joy and sensual release.

Linda Ronstadt can no longer call that space into being in real time, having lost her voice to Parkinson’s disease in 2013. But she remains a bright spirit: the author of a revelatory book, Simple Dreams: A Musical Memoir, and a role model for a new generation of musical boundary breakers. And through her immortal recordings, her voice still permeates the soil of our consciousness, a clear liquid presence easing our minds and, by example, urging us to continue challenging ourselves. A natural gift beautifully cultivated, Linda Ronstadt’s legacy still challenges us to be more free, even as it hastens down the wind.

Ann Powers is critic and correspondent for NPR Music and the author of several books, including Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music, forthcoming from Dey Street Books in 2017.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Judy Collins: Singing Through the Memories

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Judy Collins has a gift for determining what songs to record. Call it gut instinct, call it intuition, call it what you will, because she, herself, has difficulty articulating the feeling that strikes when she hears something she simply must sing. “I can’t tell you that because it’s a secret,” she says. “I don’t know the answer myself or I would tell you, but if I love it, I have to sing it. It’s that simple. But it’s really the only answer I know.”

Although recognizing songs she wants to sing might be analogous to a lightning flash, singing them often takes far longer. It isn’t a matter of hearing one and then rushing out to record it within days or even weeks. “Songs will sit around and sort of cook in my mind, or I’ll forget about them — but then I never totally forget about them, if I have some feeling about the fact that I should sing them. They hang around waiting to be paid attention to,” she says. Collins points to one song, in particular, that has haunted her ever since she first heard it many years ago: Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Even though she very much wants to record it, she hasn’t figured out how. “I’ll do it someday,” she offers. “It’s a magnificent song. It’s a description of a thing that happened that’s awful and probably preventable, but it’s a very dramatic song and very moving. I don’t know: Maybe the motto is ‘Don’t get on ships that have holes on them.’” It’s a line that could apply to more than just boats. Upon hearing this, her mind immediately jumps to relationships. “That’s an interesting word,” she adds. “I didn’t think of relationships in terms of ships. I’ll have to think about that.” And it rings true: Don’t get on board a relationship with holes, whatever you consider “holes” to be in such a scenario.

The now 77-year-old Collins rose to fame on the strength of her voice, which she used to record covers of folk songs, Broadway hits, and more. But she’s no stranger to songwriting and, along with singer/songwriter Ari Hest, has co-written and recorded a new album, Silver Skies Blue. “I’m just crazy about him,” Collins laughs, letting a more playful side of herself emerge. It seems fair to say Hest feels the same. Both appear smitten with each other in the way creative counterparts often exude an excitement and respect for collaborations that grow and stretch and help one become all the better for it. “It’s one of those gifts that comes along and you think, ‘Mmm, this is really wonderful. I wonder where this came from?’” she ponders. The two first partnered when Collins invited him to take part in her 2015 duets album, Strangers Again, by recording his song by the same name. “The process of recording the song was easy, very fluid,” Hest recounts. “I think everything went as well as it could have and the result was that we just really wanted to do more together in the future. It spurred on the idea of writing together, which started only a couple of months later.”

The chemistry they manifested on “Strangers Again” exceeded how their voices paired together — a unique high and low combo that finds its most remarkable element in the way their beautiful timbres counter one another. There also seemed to be a natural and easy collaborative partnership ready for the plucking. The two began meeting in New York to work on what would become Silver Skies Blue. “We’d sit around, have some coffee, talk about our lives, and then have a writing session,” Collins says of their writing time. Hest saw an interesting challenge in their different music sensibilities, since he came from pop and she from folk. That stretched not just the act of their writing together, but writing beyond genres both felt most comfortable in. “For me, the idea of writing songs that were heavily based in verses and more about the story itself … this was a fine concept for me even. We tried to blend the two,” he says.

The result is a 12-track album spanning love songs, meditations on life, and loss, as well as the current state of the world. On “The Weight,” the up-tempo pace creates a foreboding feeling furthered by mournful guitar. “I will soak my soul / Let the river take control, let the river take control / I know it’s not too late / To let go of the weight, to let go of the weight,” Hest and Collins sing together on the chorus, her soprano adding color to his dense alto. That’s the real beauty in the album: The harmonies both singers have discovered in each other’s voices and the way they so agreeably merge into the same song space together. “I’ve sung with a lot of people in the past and, when you sing with somebody who has a similar voice to you, you can almost cancel each other out in a way,” Hest says. “Also, she sounds so angelic, it’s hard not to sound good with her.”

The songs Collins and Hest have written add to the large oeuvre of her work, which largely involves singing words and melodies someone else has penned. Through it all, she’s made each song her own. She says, “I think songs have a very strong life. It has little to do with the writer. The writer writes them and then maybe sings them, maybe not, but then they take on a life of their own and go around and meet other people. They have a whole existence, I think. You hear a song that you like, and you’ve heard 15 people recording it or singing it, then you know it’s always different. It always sounds like the singer who’s singing it. It will stand out in a different way for each performer.”

After all, songs for Collins carry an important message from the past that must be shared and shared often. In speaking about songs as memories, she touches upon whales. “I have this friend — he’s a whaling person,” she explains, “He says that the whales are singing for very specific reasons about memory: where to go, what to do, how things are going, if the planet is in good shape or not. They have to remember where they came from and who they were and who they are, and that’s what I think it is about music.” In the way that whales communicate through song, Collins draws a parallel to music’s purpose in the modern world. Of course, there are the less thoughtful hits that provide entertainment, but songs with real meaning — with real messages — resound throughout the ages. “The thing about music that I think is very powerful is, I think it’s a tool, a facilitator of memory,” Collins says. “I think that’s probably what it was supposed to be about always. 'Let’s remember where to go to get that incredibly good bison we shot a few weeks ago, and if we put it into a poem or a song or we draw it on the wall of the cave' … Somehow — but particularly in music — there is a memory that is reignited. The best part of us comes out when we listen and when we perform, as well.” She continues to sing because she wants to participate in the storytelling, in the memory sharing. “I think it’s true that we have to find some way back to that memory because the world around us tries to shatter it over and over again,” she says.

If her age suggests she’s slowing down, Collins doesn’t intend to stop anytime soon. Hest says, “One thing I really envy about Judy is she is constantly looking for new things to do, new kinds of songs to sing, new projects to get involved in. She has the energy of someone who’s younger than me, and it’s really cool to witness it.” She’s already working on a Stephen Sondheim album, something she’s wanted to do for years. Given her love for Broadway music, would she ever follow in Sara Bareilles’ footsteps and write the music for a musical? She pauses. People have asked her to perform in Broadway musicals, a potential strain on her voice given the number of performances required each week. But writing might be another thing. “Maybe there’s something in that idea. Maybe I should try to shape something that would be doable by other people. I will think about it. It’s a good idea,” she says. Whether she does or not, her work ethic promises listeners that she will continue finding songs or creating them in order to share those crucial memories connecting then and now.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

The Avett Brothers: A Truth That Soars Above the Bickering

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True Sadness is an album about duality. It would have to be, really, for the boys behind the big-smiled, unbridled, foot-stomping joy on-stage at an Avett Brothers show to be naming a record something that sounds like such a drag. From lyrical jabs at the aging process to a well-rounded foray into new instrumentation, the Avett Brothers' effort catapults the listener and its authors into a sort of maturity where sadness isn’t a monumental event, but rather an underlying part of everyday life.

“It’s not necessarily this ongoing bummer,” Seth Avett says. “True sadness isn’t about becoming this dark thing, where you’re just giving up and realizing, ‘You know what? Screw it. Everything sucks.’ It’s more about just sort of accepting, as Bob [Crawford], our bass player, has very eloquently put it many times, that the human heart is fully capable of experiencing great joy and great sadness simultaneously.”

For True Sadness, the band’s fourth consecutive full-length working with producer Rick Rubin, every song began with a bare-bones recording using only the core trio of Seth, Scott Avett, and Crawford. Then, the songs were recorded with the full seven-piece band all live in the same room — a studio setup they hadn’t pursued since 2007’s breakout record, Emotionalism. They didn’t stop there: With Rubin’s assistance, a third step brought the final tracks well outside of their boundaries, instrumentally.

“We worked with another engineer who took the raw tracks and sort of re-imagined them with all these different samples and synths — just all these crazy sounds,” says Seth. Then they re-performed every song with the added depth of the tape sounds and synths, with certain tracks maintaining more of the new territory than others.

“What we ended up with was about four versions of every song,” Seth offers. “’You Are Mine’ ended up being one of those that was in, like, that third stage … third or fourth stage … it’s kind of everything mixed up in one.”

While this experimental, synth-stained streak reveals itself most clearly on tracks like “You Are Mine” and “Satan Pulls the Strings,” the energy behind the songs is unmistakably created by the same band that came up screaming and stomping their way through Southern stages.

“The simple answer here is that we do our best to just follow the song. Whichever way the song is represented best, that’s the way we leave it. We try not to get too caught up in how we’re perceived,” Seth says. “Like, ‘Well, we’re an American Roots band or and Americana band, so every song has to have only acoustic instruments’ and all that. We’ve never really felt any kind of allegiance toward that. [If] one song was kind of an oddball, [it’s because] it felt right like that.”

While the band is tapping into new sounds for True Sadness, they continue to thrive thematically with material that can be continuously re-interpreted by the listener: On standout track “Smithsonian,” the narrator rails through universal truths about aging like they’re breaking news. The song zeroes in on the strange quality of certain lessons or life changes that you have to experience yourself to truly understand, keeping pace with the album’s overall perspective.

“It’s a lot about resolve,” says Seth. “Just coming to a resolution about breaking down, and how that is completely, 100 percent natural — 100 percent normal — and it’s all good. It’s fine!”

A scroll back through the Avetts’ catalog almost feels prescient. Lyrics like the forlorn mention of elections on “Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise” feel almost political today, where they may have once felt coming-of-age. The Avetts’ songs evolve with the listener in a way that’s given them a timeless quality, and True Sadness expands upon that facet of their music admirably.

“The truth remains the truth,” Seth muses. You won’t hear the Avetts proselytizing about current events — despite the ongoing controversy in their home state of North Carolina — but that’s not to say there aren’t takeaways that feel bigger than heartbreak or personal strife. “If you have your heart in the right place and you’re making your comments about humanity from the right place,” he says, “I think that it soars above the bickering within the political landscape.”

Lead single “Ain’t No Man” makes a strong argument to that point:“Ain't no man or men that can change the shape my soul is in / There ain't nobody here who can cause me pain or raise my fear.” You can take it as a personal pick-me-up, a nod to religion, or a knowing wink at current events, but you certainly won’t come away from the song feeling weighed down.

“It’s meant to be self-motivating — a little bit of currency to buy yourself a little confidence when you’re not feeling so confident,” he says. “We don’t always wake up in the morning thinking, ‘All right! Now I’m gonna knock it out today. I’m going to be joyful and I’m gonna be confident, but I’m also gonna contribute!’ Some days, you’re stepping into ‘em feeling just like a wounded animal. It just takes everything you’ve got to act civilized, in a way. So I think the song is a little like just giving yourself a motivational speech, and just getting solid and getting centered and kind of squaring your shoulders up, picking your head up, and just getting into it.”

True Sadness was announced to the world in an open letter about the ways that the Avetts’ music has become intertwined with their real lives, pointing from the very beginning to the heightened thematic complexity in each number.

"It does occur to me now, that in some regard, before any professional success, we were perhaps paradoxically more self-aware. The songs would show mere versions of ourselves — the heartbroken introvert, the frantic worker, the forlorn traveler, the philosopher, the romantic, the loner — all somehow imbued with the meaningful sheepishness of a James Dean character. We used to hope and vie for that attention, that perceived personality, that coolness."

If their previous work was about compartmentalizing the parts of themselves that feel, True Sadness abandons the pursuit of cool in favor of a pursuit of the optimistic and honest. “You have to come to a place of resolution within the tragedies that are always happening,” says Seth. “You don’t ever get to a point in your life, regardless of how well things are going, where everything is good — where it’s all good. There’s always going to be a duality, and I think we are all more aware of it than ever.”

Leave it to the Avett Brothers to serve up True Sadness and leave us mostly with real, gritty, imperfect joy.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Graham Nash: Pursuing the Hopeful Path

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It’s been 14 years since Graham Nash released his last solo album, Songs for Survivors. In the interim, the 74-year-old has experienced rather significant challenges — both personal and professional — all of which have naturally informed his new album, This Path Tonight. Not only are Nash and his wife Susan Sennett divorcing after 38 years of marriage, but the singer/songwriter also called the future of Crosby, Stills, and Nash into question when he admitted to Dutch magazine Lust for Life in early March that David Crosby had treated him “like dirt” and he wouldn’t be participating in any future CSN records or shows.

As harsh as those comments seem given his typically amiable demeanor, they might have as much to do with the creative place he’s in as a solo artist. The tough experiences he’s faced have let loose a veritable musical flood. Working with producer/guitarist Shane Fontayne, the pair produced 20 songs over the course of one month, 10 of which would eventually comprise This Path Tonight. And Nash doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. “I’m still writing with Shane,” he says. “We were writing last night, as a matter of fact.”

It seems the prolific songwriter has once again found his creative sweet spot and, while the circumstances instigating that output are less than ideal, they’ve sparked an album of brooding intensity. “Everything is going according to plan, but it’s an emotional rollercoaster, and This Path Tonight is my emotional journal through my life, at this moment,” Nash admits in a forthright tone.

If it seems like This Path Tonight would be a woebegone album thanks to the themes of loss, heartache, and nostalgia which arise in certain songs, think again. Hand a songwriter as talented as Nash difficult moments, and he deftly transforms them into rich introspections offering messages of hope. “If there’s any message in This Path Tonight, it’s that you have a future. Figure out what you think will make you the most happy, and go grab it and run,” Nash says, his voice taking on an optimistic note as he discusses his latest work.

Both melodically and thematically, This Path Tonight reveals Nash at his contemplative best, oscillating between the melancholy nature of questioning one’s place and path in life, and the hope that can be attained from finding answers … or at least enjoying the search. Unlike Songs for Survivors — which felt like a stiff, overly structured album — This Path Tonight contains a lush quality all the more intriguing for its simple, straightforward arrangements and production. “I’m really proud of this record,” Nash admits. “I think it’s a good piece of work.”

Nash has struck on the magic that makes him such a legendary songwriter. On “Fire Down Below,“ the song’s bluesy feel — found largely in gritty guitar riffs and rhythmic piano underpinnings — contrasts Nash’s airier vocals, but all work together to build into a chorus that feels plucked from the 1970s. It’s as catchy as it is meaningful, a hard combination to hit upon.

While having to venture down that path of self-discovery at 74 could, understandably, feel like a burden considering such soul-searching tends to fall within a more youthful domain, Nash’s natural curiosity about practically everything helped guide his way. Beyond his songwriting, he pursues artistic expression in myriad forms, including photography, painting, and drawing. “I’m a curious man,” he admits, recounting a time he received a blast from his past while doing a book signing for his autobiography, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life. “A kid came up to me, and he gave me an 8×10 manila envelope. He said, ‘You need this.’ In this envelope is my report card from when I was 11, and the first thing that a teacher said on my report card was, ‘This boy wants to know everything.’ And I guess I haven’t changed,” Nash chuckles.

That kind of curiosity allows him to communicate back from the trenches, so to speak. “I’ve already realized that it’s the duty of every musician and every artist to reflect the times that they live in, and that’s exactly what I’m doing here,” says Nash. “These songs are what’s happening in my life right now, and probably to a lot of people out there happening to their lives at the same time.” It’s a gift he’s been offering listeners ever since he put pen to paper to melody and formed English pop-rock band the Hollies in the 1960s.

Nash displays a penchant for writing particularly instructive songs. He’s long been attuned to the political issues and social injustices that continue to affect the world. Explaining a new song he’s working on with Fontayne, he says, “I saw a terrible photograph that somebody sent me last night that was taken in the 1940s, and it was of four beautiful children sitting on a stoop outside their shack next to a sign that said ‘Four Children for Sale.’ In the 1940s, there were people that were so poor they had to sell their children. Don’t think that didn’t start me thinking, so Shane and I started to write a song.”

Two of the songs on This Path Tonight’s deluxe edition continue a similar political work even while the rest of the album concentrates on more personal fare. Nash wrote “Mississippi Burning” about three college students murdered in the 1960s when they tried to help black people vote, while “Watch Out for the Wind” deals with the morning Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri.

Still, he takes issue with the fact these situations keep surfacing with no clear resolution in sight. “It’s one of the saddest things about being a songwriter,” he candidly says. “Yes, I’m loving the fact that people still love to hear ‘Military Madness’, but holy shit, what a drag to keep singing it. I wrote that 45 years ago about my father going off to WWII.”

He continues, “The world is so crazy. It is so nuts out there. I mean, just look at the political landscape, for instance: It’s a clown car. It’s insane. And that’s just the politics, not the wars, and Syria and Yemen and Afghanistan and Iraq. The world is crazy. We have to hope it will get better.”

Music offers one such balm, and it’s a point he examines in one of his new songs, “Golden Days.” Nash plays upon the song’s title, a phrase that arises and shifts with each verse, beginning as “olden days” before transitioning to “golden days,” “broken days,” and finally back to “golden days.” With each utterance, memory alters the way one looks at the past. Set against a solemn melody plucked on guitar, the song’s central theme concerning time’s passage gives way to what music offers life through all its ups and downs. Nash sings at the song’s close, “Songs with soul and words with so much hope for a brighter day.”

The hope that informs his music plays a large role in his own personal outlook. “My basic understanding is that life truly is simple. Take care of the area around you, take care of the litter around you, encourage your child, smell a flower, do something every single day that makes you smile and you will live longer. Well, I’m 74 now, so it’s stood me in good stead,” he says.

That would be prosaic advice coming from someone who wasn’t aware of the world’s greater injustices and dilemmas, but from Nash, it’s a sage attitude steeped in understanding.

As music journalist turned cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in a 1967 essay about Bob Dylan, “In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.” The same could be said of Nash. At the heart of it all, he remains a translator, one who skillfully expresses those personal crises threatening to undermine even the strongest individual in order to offer listeners an inspiring perspective instead.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.