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Few artists have changed country music like Lainey Wilson.
The bell bottom-wearing, slow-talking singer-songwriter from small-town Louisiana has taken the genre by storm since dropping her breakout third studio album, Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’, in 2021, and she’s reshaped the country music industry along the way. With Wilson’s highly anticipated fifth studio album, Whirlwind, due August 23, she’s bound to shake things up once again.
If you’ve engaged with just about any form of media in recent years, chances are you’re already familiar with Wilson, who also starred on the fifth season of the wildly popular Paramount Network show Yellowstone. She’s racked up a room’s worth of trophies, including a Grammy, six ACM Awards and seven CMA Awards, including the coveted Entertainer of the Year award in 2023, which made her the first woman to win the honor since Taylor Swift’s win in 2009.
And somehow, in a genre that infamously allows mostly men to dominate charts and radio air time, Wilson has found mainstream country success commensurate with her critical acclaim. She’s notched four number ones on country radio when many women can’t even get their music played. She’s lent assists to big names like HARDY (2022’s “Wait in the Truck”) and Jelly Roll (2023’s “Save Me”), and for a while seemed to be country’s favorite feature – since 2021, she’s also collaborated with Dolly Parton, Lauren Alaina, Ernest, and Cole Swindell.
So, what is it about Wilson that resonates with so many people?
Her breakout single, 2020’s “Things A Man Oughta Know,” is a great place to start. Wilson’s voice is undeniable – like Parton or Loretta Lynn, Wilson has an inimitable sound and style – and a ballad like “Things A Man Oughta Know” gives her ample room to shine. Her voice is nimble and elastic, rich and dynamic. She knows when to stretch a note for emotional effect, like when she sings, “How to keep it hidden when a heart gets broke,” bending the final syllable to reinforce its ache. Lyrically, the track epitomizes the grittier side of Wilson’s persona, as she shows herself to be as adept at love as she is “chang[ing] a tire on the side of a road.”
That tune first appeared on Wilson’s 2020 EP, Redneck Hollywood, and would be reprised on Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’. It would prove to be no fluke, too, as the LP released to near-universal acclaim. While much of commercial country music was steeped in pop and hip-hop influences, Wilson’s music was traditional but forward-thinking, sounding like AM radio classics, but from a fresh perspective.
It seemed as though Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ made Wilson an overnight success, but like most artists who come to Nashville seeking a big break, she had paid serious dues. After graduating high school, Wilson moved to Nashville from Louisiana in 2011, living in a camper van while she found her footing in town.
She’d honed her musical chops as a kid, first discovering a love for music as a young child. As she grew older, Wilson’s dream of pursuing a career in music grew, too, and by the time she was a teenager she had regular gigs as a Miley Cyrus impersonator, showing up at weekend birthday parties to perform for kids.
That would be good practice for building a career in Nashville, as grinding it out at local writers’ rounds, bars, showcases, and open mic nights is, for most artists, a Music City rite of passage. Nashville’s “10-year town” reputation, which posits that an artist must keep at it for a decade to break through, proved true for Wilson, who had spotty success between 2011 and 2021 before finally clearing the hurdle.
Wilson would follow Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’ just a year later, eschewing a more traditional two to three years between records in favor of maintaining her momentum. Bell Bottom Country did just that and then some, catapulting Wilson from up-and-coming country star to household name.
The album, with its retro, Stevie Nicks-coded cover photo, also further developed the Lainey Wilson brand, which is more hippie than hillbilly. (Or rather, it’s both – the second track is called “Hillbilly Hippie,” after all.) Her bell bottoms quickly became part of her iconography, like Dolly Parton’s colorful makeup or Brad Paisley’s traditional cowboy hat. The imagery matches the mood of the music, as even Wilson’s more somber songs still have a sense of looseness, of freedom.
Perhaps a product of her decade-plus in the game, that ease is evident on Bell Bottom Country hit “Watermelon Moonshine,” a spiritual descendent of Deana Carter’s “Strawberry Wine” that is sure to be a country classic. Steeped in nostalgia and illustrated with vivid imagery (“kudzu vines,” “old farm ruts,” “a blanket ‘neath the sunset”), the song is a tender ode to young love, balancing youthful abandon with the melancholy of hindsight. It’s also a showcase for Wilson’s melodies, which are sticky but not cloying, and just poppy enough to catch the ear without distracting from the story.
Bell Bottom Country also birthed “Heart Like a Truck,” a massive hit for Wilson thanks, partially, to its use in a Dodge Ram commercial. The song is, blessedly, proof that a “truck song” can still be creative, as Wilson likens her aching heart to a truck that’s “been drug through the mud.” It’s also one of Wilson’s most powerful vocal performances, letting her play with dynamics before letting go and wailing toward the end of the song.
Wilson uses Bell Bottom Country to show off her broader musical ambitions, too. “Grease” is syncopated and funky, reminiscent of more recent work from The Cadillac Three or Brothers Osborne. “This One’s Gonna Cost Me” flirts with arena rock, made epic with production from Jay Joyce, famous for his work with Eric Church. And Wilson surprises with a vibrant cover of “What’s Up (What’s Going On),” the iconic 4 Non Blondes hit.
Such sonic detours hint at what might come with Whirlwind, whose title no doubt references the wild last few years of Wilson’s life. Lead single “Hang Tight Honey” is tight and catchy but sonically complex, with girl-group vocals and a rockabilly beat accompanying Wilson’s soulful, swaggering delivery. “4x4xU” recalls the mid-tempo drama of the best Lee Ann Womack songs, though with a funkier groove. And on “Country’s Cool Again,” Wilson reminds that her country roots run deep, with a deliciously twangy chorus that more than earns the song’s Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn references.
Despite these country bona fides, Wilson has still faced accusations of inauthenticity, particularly around her thick Louisiana accent. In a January interview with Glamour, she says, “I think sometimes, especially when people were first getting introduced to me, they heard my accent and immediately thought, ‘There’s no way this girl could be that country.’ The truth is, you can say anything you want to about me, but when you start talking about my accent, I’m ready to fight somebody because then I start feeling you’re talking about my family.”
Debates about authenticity in country music are a dime a dozen, though they tend to be directed at women artists more often than their male counterparts. You don’t hear skeptics of, say, Morgan Wallen’s accent or Tennessee roots, or of Jelly Roll’s history with incarceration. But a quick search of “Lainey Wilson fake” turns up video after video dissecting her accent, most of which barely – if at all – engage with her actual music.
For her part, Wilson seems largely unfazed by doubters and detractors. In that same Glamour piece, she later shares, “When you grow up somewhere like I did with the kind of people that I did, you can’t help but to be country. You can’t escape it no matter if you move eight hours away like I did. Country music was the soundtrack of our lives. We lived it out.”
While Wilson’s musical talents will always be her biggest draw, her larger-than-life personality is a close second. She’s a famously electric live performer, vamping across the stage and bantering with fans with such ease it seems second nature. That she does this without missing a note is what elevates her artistry – that CMA Award isn’t called “Entertainer” of the Year for no reason.
It’s hard to imagine a future in which Lainey Wilson isn’t the stuff of country music legend. She’s got the chops, the drive, and no shortage of charisma, and it’s easy to picture her as a Parton-like figure several decades from now, ushering in and supporting a new generation of country artists whose reverence for and innovation of the genre will help keep it alive.
(Editor’s Note: For the first time, BGS and Good Country are teaming up for a very special crossover Artist of the Month! During the month of August, on BGS and GC we’ll be celebrating music, songs, and stories by and a new generation’s country superstar, Lainey Wilson.
There’s no wrong place to start with Lainey Wilson’s music. Though the small-town Louisiana-born country star is still deepening her catalog, Wilson boasts four excellent records (and a fifth is on the way — Whirlwind is due August 23), each jam-packed with traditionally informed country, swaggering Southern rock, alt-country and roots rock grooves, and no shortage of emotional ballads. Good Country and BGS have compiled our Essentials Playlist of the fiery singer-songwriter’s best and most beloved tunes, with some deep cuts tossed in for good measure.
Despite being a relative newcomer and a woman in a male-dominated genre, Wilson has notched a string of hits since breaking out with her 2021 album Sayin’ What I’m Thinkin’. That record features “Things a Man Oughta Know,” a nuanced take on traditional country gender tropes and Wilson’s first number-one hit on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
Arriving as Wilson’s ascent grew steeper, 2022’s Bell Bottom Country expands on its predecessor’s sound, giving Wilson space to get more vulnerable – “Watermelon Moonshine” is a sweet and nostalgic tribute to teenage love – and a little funkier, like on her unexpected but perfectly suited cover of the 4 Non Blondes hit “What’s Up (What’s Going On).” That album is also, of course, home to “Heart Like a Truck,” a centerpiece of Wilson’s discography and one of the best examples of her singular songwriting – this is not your run-of-the-mill “truck song.”
Dive into some of Lainey Wilson’s best songs below on our Essential Lainey Wilson Playlist. And stay tuned for more Artist of the Month coverage on Wilson coming soon from BGS and GC.
Banjo master Tony Trischka is a bluegrass and roots music renaissance man whose career goes back nearly 60 years, to his early days with his first group, the Down City Ramblers. He’s been making recordings for almost as long, appearing on-record for the first time on Country Cooking’s 1971 debut for the fabled Rounder Records label.
Given the width and breadth of Trischka’s career and sprawling discography, summarizing the man’s recorded legacy is not just a tall order, but a mountainous one. Nevertheless, we’ve made the attempt. Here are a dozen recordings that give a sense of Trischka’s many artistic sides as collaborator, innovator, teacher, keeper of the flame, and all-around musical good spirit.
“Kentucky Bullfight” – Country Cooking (1974)
Trischka was one of two banjo players in this collegiate ensemble. The other was future Hot Rize member Pete Wernick, who spent some time talking up his bandmate to Rounder Records co-founder Ken Irwin. “I was writing a bunch of tunes, and Pete told Ken, ‘Tony should do a solo album,’” Trischka remembered. “Ken said, ‘Sure, go ahead.’”
Irwin cites “Kentucky Bullfight” as the Country Cooking song that convinced him Trischka would be worth signing as a solo act, too.
“China Grove” – Tony Trischka (1974)
Trischka hails from the Northern environs of Syracuse, New York, and it was fairly common for Yankee banjo players of his era to indulge some unusual tangents. “My first album was, comparatively speaking, a little on the bizarre side,” Trischka himself admits. That’s certainly the case for this instrumental from his 1974 solo debut, Bluegrass Light. “China Grove” has East Asian accents throughout and even a saxophone solo from his Country Cooking bandmate, Andy Statman.
“Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms” – Tony Trischka (1976)
It seems like a rite of passage that everybody has to put their own stamp on the venerable Flatt & Scruggs bluegrass classic, “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” That goes for Trischka on his 1976 album, Heartlands, but few other artists would have the imaginative audacity to kick it off with a drum solo (plus more saxophone).
“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” – Tony Trischka (1978)
Another piece of classic repertoire from the wayback machine, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” is the song that made bluegrass forerunner Charlie Poole a star in 1925. Trischka cut it on 1978’s Banjoland in an ambitious all-star arrangement alongside fellow banjo players Bill Keith and Béla Fleck. Also present are resonator guitarist Jerry Douglas, mandolinist Buck White, and guitarist Tony Rice, who adds a definitive vocal.
“They’ll Never Keep Us Down” – Hazel Dickens (1981)
Formerly half of the pioneering female duo Hazel & Alice (with Alice Gerrard), the late great Hazel Dickens was one of Trischka’s best longtime collaborators. His elegant banjo and her emotionally raw voice were a great match on many songs, among them this classic from Dickens’ 1981 album, Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People.
“Bill Cheatham” – Béla Fleck, Bill Keith, and Tony Trischka (1981)
In which three of the foremost roots music banjo virtuosos of the 20th century mesh with tasteful seamlessness while deftly keeping out of each other’s way. From 1981’s Fiddle Tunes for Banjo, this was one of the album’s three tunes that featured Trischka, Fleck, and Keith all playing together.
“Country Death Song” – Violent Femmes (1984)
From Milwaukee, this folk-punk trio puts a gothic spin on folk music. To that end, they often enlist unexpected collaborators to do cameo appearances, adding just-right punctuation. Here is one of the Femmes’ early examples, featuring Trischka’s banjo on their 1984 second album, Hallowed Ground. Nearly two decades later, the Femmes would return the favor by appearing on “Down in the Cider House,” a track on Trischka’s World Turning album.
“New York Chimes” – Tony Trischka (1985)
Trischka has always had a way with clever puns, “New York Chimes” among them. From 1985’s Béla Fleck-produced Hill Country album, “New York Chimes” is also a fine example of Trischka’s higher-gear fast playing. And the band is, of course, spectacular – Jerry Douglas, Tony Rice, Sam Bush.
“Old Joe Clark” – Tony Trischka (1992)
As a dedicated keeper of the flame and teacher/mentor, Trischka has always been up for putting the music into unusual places. One of the most unusual was a 1992 episode of the children’s cartoon, “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?,” on which Trischka wandered on camera playing the 19th-century fiddle tune “Old Joe Clark” during a game-show segment.
“World Turning” – Tony Trischka (1993)
Among Trischka’s many virtues as a player, one of the best is that he knows how to back up great singers. And here is a classic example from Trischka’s wildly eclectic 1993 album, World Turning. The title track is a cover of the 1975 Fleetwood Mac song, sung by Dudley Connell and Alison Krauss with Trischka adding just-right banjo flair.
“Shifting Sands of Time” – The Wayfaring Strangers (2001)
Another of Trischka’s far-flung, multi-hyphenate genre experiments is his 2001 album, Shifting Sands of Time, with a wide-ranging guest list that goes from bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley to ’90s pop star Tracy Bonham. The title track is at least as worldly as anything his longtime mate Béla Fleck ever put out.
“Brown’s Ferry Blues” – Tony Trischka (2024)
We close with another of Trischka’s all-star collaborations, the opening track from this year’s Earl Scruggs tribute album Earl Jam. “Brown’s Ferry Blues” kicks off with very choice guitar and vocals from modern-day superstar Billy Strings, and Trischka, Fleck, Bush, and fiddler Michael Cleveland are all right there with him.
Banjoist Tony Trischka is a brilliant creator, an entertainer, and educator who makes his own time. He’s always on the run, trying new things and yet also always ready to stop and have a friendly chat and a catch up. His musical life includes teaching, performing, and recording as well as studying music history. And, at a very young 75, he’s always up for an impromptu jam.
In 1976, when he was 28, Oak Publications published his Melodic Banjo, an instruction book featuring his transcription tablatures of pieces by and introductions to the top players of this new style of bluegrass banjo in which he was already recognized as a virtuoso. The book became a modern bluegrass banjo classic and was later published in new editions by Hal Leonard.
When Rounder reissued Tony’s first two albums as Tony Trischka the Early Years, Berklee’s Matt Glaser wrote:
Rarely, perhaps three or four times a century, some music will be created that is a pure explosive expression of life energy and uncontaminated joy. The music on this CD is, in my humble opinion, exactly that. … I put Tony’s early music in the same category as the best of Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Scotty Stoneman, and Wagner, mad and magnificent. … It’s some of the most unjustly neglected of all popular music masterpieces.
Tony’s passion about bluegrass banjo history came to the fore in 1988 when he co-edited “the most comprehensive banjo book ever written,” Masters of the 5-String Banjo, with Pete Wernick, his partner in the early ‘70s band Country Cooking.
There’s not enough room here to write about Tony’s full career, but it’s important to know that in addition to performing on the banjo doing everything from straight-ahead bluegrass to rock, avant garde, and theater, he’s also a band leader, producer, teacher and historian. A Grammy nominee and winner of the IBMA’s 2007 Banjo Player of the Year award, he now teaches an online banjo course for ArtistWorks, and continues to appreciate the pleasures and challenges of jamming – the subject of his latest album, Earl Jam, which was released June 7 on Down The Road Records.
I met Tony in 1986 in New York where I was giving a lecture to promote my new book, Bluegrass: A History. We got together afterward to explore our shared interest in bluegrass banjo. Since then, we’ve worked together on several projects, the latest being Earl Jam.
In November 1990, we reconnected at the Tennessee Banjo Institute. He took me to hear Institute faculty member Carroll Best, a North Carolinian who’d been playing melodic banjo since the ’50s. We ended up together at Best’s campsite. In 1992, Banjo Newsletter published our interview of him along with Tony’s transcription of his work.
Trischka’s 1993 album, World Turning, reflected his eclectic experiences in taking the banjo to the world. Bob Carlin called it “his bid to move the instrument back into the mainstream.” Beginning with an African tune, he explored the banjo in a variety of genres – minstrel, classical, old-time, ragtime, new acoustic, and rock, along with his own brand of bluegrass.
In 2001, Tony and I reconnected at Banjo Camp North in Massachusetts. In addition to its concerts and workshops featuring big-name instructors like Tony, Bill Keith, Pete Wernick, Tony Ellis, and Bill Evans, there was free time for informal music-making. Tony and I spent a pleasant evening jamming together.
For his 2007 album, Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, Trischka recorded duets with 10 banjo pickers, with backing by top-flight bluegrass instrumentalists. These recordings have taken on new meaning now that some of his musical partners on this award-winning production – Earl Scruggs, Kenny Ingram, Bill Emerson, and Tony Rice – are no longer with us. The album introduced a generation of young musicians, showing the remarkable depth of Tony’s musical connections.
Tony’s brand new Down The Road album, Earl Jam: A Tribute to Earl Scruggs, reflects his longstanding interest in bluegrass banjo’s late founder. The album began during the pandemic, when Banjo Newsletter columnist, Bob Piekiel, author of “Earl’s Way” and a Scruggs family friend, sent Tony a thumb drive containing two hundred songs and tunes recorded at jams with Earl Scruggs and John Hartford during the ’80s and ’90s.
Tony and Piekiel had been working on the “tabs” – tablatures – for a new Scruggs banjo book. Since the early 1970s, bluegrass banjo tabs have been key musical manuscripts. None are more important than those of Scruggs, whose iconic statements – the ones he recorded – were published by Scruggs himself in tabular form in 1968. Many banjo pickers learned “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and other familiar favorites from Scruggs’ tabs.
Like any written music, tablatures are scores meant to describe how music is created on an instrument, while simultaneously prescribing how it is to be reproduced. Tony made tabs of Earl’s jam breaks so that he could recreate them. Jamming with Hartford, Scruggs played familiar pieces he’d never before recorded or performed in public. On that thumb drive, Tony found Scruggs’ impromptu banjo statements as interesting and entertaining as the old familiar recorded and transcribed ones from his commercial appearances.
Change and innovation are part of the ambiance at jam sessions. Playing an old tune or song in a new way is a sure route to pleasant interaction in these friendly musical conversations. Here, ideas are expressed, tested, embraced. Participants play for their own delectation and to pique the interests of the other jammers.
It’s not easy for those of us who enjoy hearing commercially produced Nashville music to know what goes on informally and privately in that town’s local music scenes. Beyond the bars, stages, and studios, away from the producers, who jams with whom? In 1998 when Tony interviewed the late Bobby Thompson, melodic banjo pioneer and Nashville studio A-lister, he got Bobby’s answer to that question:
Scruggs, he’s real nice. Me and him would get together and play a lot. Lately I do him and John Hartford and bunch of them come over here a lot.
In his notes to Earl’s 1972 album, I Saw the Light with Some Help from My Friends (Columbia KC 31354), Bill Williams wrote about star-packed jams at the Scruggs home, calling it “a gathering place, a watershed of talent, a place to be oneself,” adding that “while the industry has known many outstanding jam sessions, there are none quite like these.” By that time, jams had been going on at the Scruggs house for a long time.
A number of the old Flatt & Scruggs songbooks published snapshots from ’60s jam sessions at the Scruggs home. And just as some people took snapshots at such sessions, others made recordings. John Hartford had recorded his jams with Earl and given Piekiel a copy because he worried that if his house burned down all those jam recordings would be lost.
Nashville pros like Thompson and Hartford – whose success as a singer-songwriter (“Gentle On my Mind”) underwrote a unique career – would, as Thompson said, “get together and play a lot” with Scruggs. Hartford, a Scruggs fan from an early age, played the fiddle while listening with pleasure to Scruggs’ banjo statements, and began bringing a tape recorder along.
Earl and John had played what they knew, taking pleasure in attacking old favorites in new ways. After learning and transcribing Earl’s banjo jam breaks, Tony put together a band to showcase them in a show at in the New York club Joe’s Pub. What people heard was first-class bluegrass musicians along with Tony’s musical recreation of Scruggs performing an eclectic repertoire – pre-war and post-war country classics, traditional tunes, rock, bluegrass, folk and more.
On Earl Jam, which grew out of Tony’s showcase band, we hear leading contemporary artists, including Sam Bush, Michael Cleveland, Dudley Connell, Michael Daves, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Ferrell, Béla Fleck, The Gibson Brothers, Vince Gill, Brittany Haas, Del McCoury, Bruce Molsky, Billy Strings, and Molly Tuttle, in new musical conversations with Tony Trischka providing the “banjer” voice of Earl Scruggs.
Here, today’s artists each perform with their own contemporary voice while Tony, consummate and experienced stage actor that he is, takes center stage in the role of Scruggs-at-a-jam. He’s a musical equivalent of actor Hal Holbrook, who brought the voice of a famous American author to millions in his one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight.”
A good example of the music on Earl Jam is “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” the album’s first single. It opens with a solo guitar break by Billy Strings during which rhythm instruments: mandolin (Sam Bush) and bass (Mark Schatz) come up behind. Then Trischka introduces one of Earl’s jam breaks, after which Strings sings the first of six verses.
After each verse, we hear an instrumental solo. First comes Michael Cleveland, who throws in some licks associated with Foggy Mountain Boys fiddler Benny Martin. Next is Bush playing his usual great, hot stuff.
After verse 3, Tony plays not one but two more Scruggs jam breaks, each quite different from the other. After verse 4, producer and banjoist Béla Fleck contributes a statement in his unique style. Following the next verse there’s a blazing guitar break from Strings, who then sings a newly composed verse that names everyone at this live session, after which the track closes with all five instruments going full-bore as if at a jam – instruments like voices at a cocktail party.
Tony’s newfound conversations demonstrate Earl’s economy and genius, and his ability to inject feeling – humor, soul, hot, cool – in unexpected places. Scruggs’ musical vision is an education and a pleasure. We’re grateful to Tony for capturing it, preserving and showcasing it.
This truly is a unique album. Each track combines the contexts of bluegrass and theater. We hear bluegrass and old-time music’s standard verses and instrumental breaks. They are mixed so that we can visualize each musician stepping up to the mic to sing or pick. And then the curtains open and Trischka appears spotlighted in a cameo closeup delivering lines – breaks – that Earl spoke at the end of the century, when he was in his 70s.
It’s ironic that tabs have crystallized an aural model of Earl Scruggs’s banjo playing based largely on his ’40s and ’50s work with Monroe and Flatt. That music became the model for classic bluegrass. It still sounds great today. But by the ’60s, Earl had moved on. As Tommy Goldsmith (Earl Scruggs, p. 120-123) points out, an informal backstage jam in New York with saxophone virtuoso King Curtis convinced him that he could take his banjo into other genres like rock.
As soon as he and Flatt parted ways in 1969, Earl joined his sons to form the Earl Scruggs Revue. In the following decades he played with them as well as a variety of folk, rock, and pop acts, fitting his banjo into many new contexts. By the times of his jams with Hartford, foremost in Scruggs’ mind were the then-recent years of touring with the Revue and trying new stuff.
In 1983, L.A. producer (Byrds, Flying Burrito Bros.) Jim Dickson told me why he came to like bluegrass: “It was part formal and part improvisational breaks, the same kind of structure jazz had.” (Bluegrass: A History, p. 190) Tony’s cameos highlight the improvisational genius that kept Earl’s music fresh and inspired a generation.
On Earl Jam, Trischka explores Scruggs’s genius in various ways. Several individual song arrangements have modulations (as in “Dooley” and “Casey Jones”) that show how Earl was able to recast his melodic ideas in different keys and tunings. Tracks like “Liza Jane,” “Lady Madonna,” and “Brown’s Ferry Blues” close by moving beyond solo breaks into riff trade-offs to portray the playful conversation that is the essence of jamming.
Tony’s sense of history is reflected in his repertoire choices – reflecting rich heritage and continuing experimentation. Like a painter he has blended, collaged, borrowed, and adapted widely from past art. The result is a series of vignettes building on the shared creativity of today’s most gifted singers and players while also embracing Earl’s many paths.
I visualize these tracks as tangible works of art like we might see in a museum or gallery – from antique quilts to abstract modernist paintings. BGS’s Artist of the Month, Tony Trischka, has created a veritable aural exhibition.
Over the nearly two-and-a-half decades since their debut, the Avett Brothers have constructed their own creative universe.
They’ve released 11 studio albums, earned a Grammy award (plus three more noms), and bounded around stages for countless tour dates and festivals the world over. May It Last, a documentary film about the influential North Carolina group, offered a glimpse at the band’s dynamic through big and small screens.
Scott has also been a working visual artist since before The Avett Brothers as a band even entered the public consciousness, earning a BFA in studio art from East Carolina University in 2000 and depicting Southern family life through paintings and sculptures that would go on to make moving exhibitions—all while he also created stunning album cover imagery (for his own band as well as the great Brandi Carlile) or provided the visuals for such epic music videos as “Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise.”
Musical theater, too, has been touched by the Avetts: Their musical, Swept Away, will make its mark on Broadway this fall. But the band’s eleventh album, The Avett Brothers, feels less like a charge into new creative territory and more like a reflection on the other things that have sustained them over the years.
“There’s certainly an unsettling feeling in that shadowy twenties and thirties where you get trapped into thinking that you are what you make,” Scott told Holler Country last year. “I’m settling into a season of life where I’m welcoming the reality that I am because I am, not I am because I do.”
That realization gets top billing on The Avett Brothers. Classic ballad “2020 Regret” sounds so quintessentially Avetts that it could have easily appeared just about anywhere in their catalog, if not for the veiled references to the year. It, too, embraces the idea that a life without regrets is less about what you do than it is about the people you do it alongside.
“Life cannot be written,” read the lyrics on album standout “Never Apart.” “It can only be lived.” The song muses on a long-term relationship; it’s presumably a romantic one, but would it be so crazy to listen to it through the lens of the band and its legacy?
Most bands don’t wait twenty-plus years into their trajectory to release a self-titled album — in large part because a lot of them simply don’t last that long. It’s a banner accomplishment to forge a musical path that sustains itself in any capacity for multiple decades; it’s entirely another to push forward with nearly the exact same cast of characters you started with, still collaborating and creating with the same heart and satisfaction as before.
“It’s trust. It’s a trust that’s built in,” explained Seth to NPR last month when asked about the secret to the band’s longevity. “My trust in that Scott has my best interests in mind is something that it would never occur to me to question.” He may be referring specifically to the lifelong brotherly bond he shares with the other Avett in the group, but certainly the larger band has formed a different kind of family.
Bob Crawford, who has been playing upright bass (among other instruments) with the band since 2001, took a year off to support his daughter’s battle with cancer and Avett fans followed and supported the journey at every turn. Cellist Joe Kwon, too, has an immovable fixture in the band since 2007; crowds go wild for him at every show. “We’ve been lucky and blessed to transform with each other,” added Scott, “to change with each other and watch this happening to us.”
“Cheap Coffee,” one of the album’s underrated masterpieces, makes great fodder for the idea of a group that constantly evolves and grows together. Producer Rick Rubin, who has been with the band since their major label debut, I and Love and You, apparently cut all the lights out and had them record the song entirely in the dark. The story holds up well for a song that engages so many senses: the distant smell of coffee, the feel of an outgrown apartment, the sound of a kid imagining the very highest number they possibly can. “Didn’t know how, didn’t know how good it was,” the group sings, lyrically balancing major milestones with the types of tiny details in a memory that feel insignificant at the time, but become the stuff of nostalgia decades on.
“We’ve always had this quasi-fatalist attitude, like oh, this might be the last time we ever do it,” joked Seth in an interview between their tenth and eleventh albums. “Now we’re really like, okay, we’re probably only gonna do this one more time.” In the interview, this line reads as a joke, but fans have speculated the same thing many times, too, cobbling together similar statements from the documentary film and various other interviews to try and guess how many more albums they might get.
Regardless of the band’s plans for the future, this eleventh album embraces plenty that fans love about the past. “For the Love of a Girl” is the jump-around number you can’t wait to hear live. And “Country Kid” offers an ambling glimpse at a rural North Carolina upbringing, with a heavy twang and plenty of backwoods imagery to match.
Taken altogether, The Avett Brothers feels like a worthy prize for the five-year wait between releases. “We’re not in the same hurry we used to be,” Scott explains. “Our home lives are super busy. We’re teaching kids things.”
In a way, maybe the greater message of The Avett Brothers is that the work will always be there — the opportunity to create, to explore, to have some kind of output. So maybe it’s really not so surprising that the band would wait to release an eponymous album so many years into their career, or that they might take five years since their last full-length to release it, or that they might not make promises about the future. As their influence has grown, so have the demands for their time and the expectations around what they make — not just how much of it there should be, but what it should sound like and how it should reflect the world around them.
What a beautiful thing to ignore those voices, to be enlightened by the past without being imprisoned by it; to turn off all the lights and sing in the dark.
(Editor’s Note: Read more about our selection of the Avett Brothers as Artist of the Month, explore their discography, and check out our Essentials Playlist here.)
(Editor’s Note: On May 17, The Avett Brothers released a new, self-titled album. BGS is proud to bring them back as our Artist of the Month for June 2024.
Below, enjoy a musical exploration of their illustrious career and prolific catalog. Plus, you’ll also find our Essential Avett Brothers Playlist for even more discography digging. And, you can revisit our feature from June 2016, when they were first selected to be our AOTM eight years ago.)
Depending on how you reckon it, you could say The Avett Brothers’ career goes back about two-dozen years – or Scott and Seth Avett’s entire lives. Even if you know nothing at all about them, all it takes is a few seconds of hearing them singing together to realize that they really are brothers.
Elder brother Scott’s voice is usually earthy and down below to Seth’s angelic up above. They meet in the middle to harmonize on songs about a series of quests – for love, redemption, family, pretty girls from far-away places, or just to be seen. Small wonder that one of their latest undertakings is Swept Away, a musical inspired by the mythology of their musical world.
To celebrate our Artist of the Month, here are a dozen songs about The Avett Brothers’ remarkable journey.
“Pretty Girl From Matthews” (2002)
Pretty girls are, of course, a perennial songwriting topic for the Avetts – most of them identified simply as “Pretty Girl From.” It’s taken them far and wide, from Michigan to Chile, Annapolis, San Diego, Cedar Lane, Raleigh, Feltre, Locust and even “at the Airport.” But here is the earliest example in all the Avetts’ early, detuned glory, from a town southeast of Charlotte. Originally titled “Song For Robin,” “Pretty Girl From Matthews” was the opening track on 2002’s Country Was.
“Talk on Indolence” (2006)
Folksy Americana trappings aside, Seth and Scott started out playing in bands that did a lot more screaming and thrashing than crooning and strumming. And even as their music has grown more polished and stately over time, their raw streak still comes out regularly. This breathlessly paced head-banging rant, which kicked off 2006’s Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions at an amphetamine pace, is one they still play at most shows.
“Distraction #74” (2006)
Another Four Thieves Gone recurrent, “Distraction #74” evokes British seafaring vibes seemingly tailor-made for raucous pub sing-alongs. And it has a perfect Avett Brothers lyrical theme: Torn between two lovers, the protagonist mostly wonders which of them he’s going to miss the most. The only certainty is that he’ll blow it with both of them.
“Die Die Die” (2007)
In which the Avetts don’t just make a simple pop move, but pull off what might be the least-likely Beatles rip ever. “Die Die Die” opened 2007’s Emotionalism, their first album to crack the Billboard 200 and a showcase for new cellist Joe Kwon. Among the Fab Four echoes here are Beatle-esque vocal harmonies and a guitar solo that’s pure George Harrison. Onstage, they’ll sometimes make it even more overt by closing with flourishes from “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“Paranoia in Bb Major” (2007)
Nothing fancy, just a little banjo and glockenspiel number from Emotionalism that perfectly captures the Avetts’ manic whisper-to-a-scream mood swings. Then it closes with one of their quirkiest recorded moments, wordless falsetto chanting that is somehow adorable.
“Murder in the City” (2008)
From 2008’s The Second Gleam, “Murder in the City” came out right when this cult act was about to go mainstream. It feels like one last look back before stepping into the spotlight, a series of epigrams about love, jealousy, family and forgiveness.
“Murder in the City” remains one of the Avetts’ regular live set-pieces, with lyrics that have evolved to reflect the brothers’ evolution from children to parents themselves. It’s a cinch they’ll still be playing and updating it someday when they’re grandparents, too.
“Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” (2009)
Fittingly, “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” was the song the Avetts played during their star turn with Mumford & Sons behind Bob Dylan at the 2011 Grammy Awards. “Decide what to be and go be it” might be their most durable manifesto, which is a big reason it remains their most-performed song live. According to Avett Brothers super-fan Tim Mossberger’s database, it’s closing in on 1,000 live performances. And it still kills. All it takes is hearing Kwon’s cello riff to bring on chills.
“Laundry Room” (2009)
Like “Head Full of Doubt,” “Laundry Room” is drawn from the Avetts’ 2009 big-league debut, the Rick Rubin-produced I and Love and You – their first gold record. It’s a beautifully poignant portrait of stolen-moment love that may or may not be doomed.
“Tonight I’ll burn the lyrics/ ’Cause every chorus was your name,” Scott sighs, contemplating a “head-full of songs” he dreamed up overnight. The double-time hoedown outro plays like a bittersweet wake. “Laundry Room” ranks second on Mossberger’s live-performance database.
“Live and Die” (2012)
From 2012’s The Carpenter, the Avetts’ first to crack Billboard’s Top 10, “Live and Die” is just about the poppiest they’ve ever sounded – even with banjo as lead instrument. In contrast to the Avetts’ usual outlook, it is surprisingly optimistic, which made it the perfect upbeat closing-credits accompaniment for director Jud Apatow’s romantic comedy, This Is 40.
“Satan Pulls the Strings” (2014)
The studio version of “Satan Pulls the Strings” appeared on 2016’s True Sadness, but this one was around for years before that. In fact, its best incarnation is as entrance music for the live show. Among my favorite in-concert memories of the Avetts was watching the entire seven-piece band enter the stage one by one and start in on this song on New Year’s Eve 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina. That performance appears on 2015’s Live Vol. Four.
“No Hard Feelings” (2016)
In recent years, “No Hard Feelings” has been the Avetts’ customary show-closer, ending each night on a prayerful, elegiac note. As depicted in the 2017 biopic May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers (overseen by Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio), recording it for 2016’s True Sadness LP was an overwhelmingly emotional experience. It triggered a meltdown by Scott immediately afterward, a sequence that proved to be the film’s most memorable moment.
“Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” (2022)
On-record as well as onstage, the Avetts have always had splendid taste in covers, dipping into the songbooks of Townes Van Zandt, John Prine, Bob Wills and many others. There’s also “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels),” a 1972 Top-40 classic by the late great folk-rocker Jim Croce. Seth started doing a stripped-down acoustic version of “Operator” with bassist Bob Crawford back in 2012, and it’s one they still dust off regularly 12 years later.
Read more about the Avett Brothers’ eleventh and self-titled album here.
A deep reflection born from a time of the extreme silence and noise of the pandemic, Kaïa Kater’s new album, Strange Medicine (out today, May 17), digs into the feelings society tells us not to feel, imagines healing and revenge from abuses, and reckons with themes of racism and sexism of the past and today. While the undercurrents are heavy, the arrangements are gentle and flowing, juxtaposing our expectations of what we think it means to process the darkness in life with the truth that many emotions can exist simultaneously.
Written from home in Montreal, Strange Medicine takes us on a cathartic journey imagining characters interwoven with parts of Kater and parts of the world she observes. Drawing on inspiration from artists like Steve Reich, Brian Blade, and Johnny Greenwood and partnering with Montreal-based producer Joe Grass (The Barr Brothers and Elisapie), she took a different musical path than in the past.
Leaning into her primary instrument, banjo, Grass and Kater built the framework for each of the tracks slowly, starting with bedroom tracks and expanding to include arrangers like Franky Rousseau (Andrew Bird, Chris Thile) and Dominic Mekky (Caroline Shaw, Sara Bareilles) and musicians Rob Moose (Bon Iver, Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon), Robbie Kuster (Patrick Watson), and Phil Melanson (Andy Shauf, Sam Gendel). Kater spoke to BGS via Zoom.
Hi! How are you?
Kaia Kater: I’m okay! A couple of days ago I dropped my phone directly onto my laptop screen and it cracked. I had to go to Apple. So I am without a laptop, but thankfully have my 10-year-old iPad, bless her!
Apple is coming in clutch. Also, Apple product destroying Apple product is kind of funny.
Yeah, it’s an Apple-on-Apple hate crime. It’s terrible. I feel so weird about it. But I have AppleCare, which is good.
With the couple of sentences that you just said it’s no wonder the Department of Justice is looking into Apple as a monopoly. Vertical integration. Well, how are things going other than Apple problems?
The record is out in a week, so I’m excited. Thank you for doing this piece. I never take any press for granted, especially after the pandemic, when things were so terrible and hard.
What a weird time. Is that when you started writing this record?
Yeah, pretty much. I wrote my first song in April of 2020. We finished the record in 2023. So I would say like 2020 to 2022, was the writing window.
This album is a pandemic baby!
It is. Yeah, I’m proud of my little pandemic baby. Born out of a lot of feelings of stasis and confusion, but also just so fun to record. I think that there’s a lot of grief in the lyrics. But you can still vibe to sad songs, especially when they feel groovy. So that was the intent.
So when did you start recording it?
Let’s see, we went in to record in October of 2022 but the official recording days were preceded by a ton of demo days. So throughout 2021 and into 2022, I would go to my co-producer Joe’s studio in Montreal. We would just track stuff and either bring people in or ship the songs out to people and pay them a demo fee and have them kind of like splash around and see what their interpretation of the song was. That was kind of like how we selected personnel. I think we had a pretty strong idea of what we wanted to do by the time we got into the studio, which is so different from other projects I’ve been part of and other records I’ve done.
How was it different?
I guess, with the pandemic, I had the blessing of time, which I never had before really. With Nine Pin, I recorded on my winter break from college in my senior year, and then Grenades was done from start to finish in two weeks. And so with Strange Medicine, it was about two years. There are advantages and drawbacks to that. It is very easy to start second guessing some choices that you’d made in the previous calendar year, but I think it was to me such a novelty to be able to write and then listen back, and send the arrangement to someone and have them send their work back. It was so much more thoughtful because we had the time to do that.
That makes total sense. So you started writing it during the pandemic. What was your writing process like? Did you have ideas that you came into the lockdown with, or were you processing things in real time?
Well, originally I was like, “I’m never gonna play banjo again.” I don’t know what I was thinking. I think I was trying, to a certain extent, to escape my roots, transform, or do this phoenix thing. Where people are like, “Whoa! She was a banjo player and now she’s an electronic pop musician.” That was maybe a facet of my mid-20s to late 20s, having that crackling feeling that all the different paths your life can take feel like they’re narrowing. And so you’re kind of like fighting against that and going, “No, I still can transform again, musically.”
Really what led me to write more songs on the banjo, especially for Strange Medicine, was that it was really comforting to me. I think I went back to it after wanting to spread my wings. Once I was alone in a room I was like, “What do I want to do right now? I just wanna play banjo.” And for a long time that’s all I did. I didn’t really write. The songs trickled in bit by bit. But you know I definitely gave up that idea of trying to metamorphosize in the way that I thought I was going to. I think I did it in a different way.
Can you talk a little bit about what it meant to be in Montreal writing this record and just in general? What influence did the town have on this particular record? And how does the music community there influence you?
Well, it’s very experimental there. And there’s a kind of freedom and risk-taking. People are not afraid to have things fail or to have things not quite work. Even now, I’m sort of deconstructing the idea that I grew up with, this idea of what a songwriter is, which is that you work really hard at your craft, you play the song down. And the way that you improve every night is how you perfect and tighten the song as much as possible. I’ve been getting into this idea of improvisation.
I don’t know if it’s because the rent is cheaper there, so you don’t have to hustle as much. I just felt so much more space to play around.
While we’re on the subject of Montreal, you collaborated with Allison Russell on “In Montreal” about your shared hometown. I was curious since Aoife O’Donovan is from Massachusetts and you’re talking about witches on “The Witch” – was that a purposeful choice?
No, but that occurred to me about a week ago. I was making dinner, and I was like, “Wait. Aoife’s from Massachusetts!” It must have been in some way subconscious. I kind of see people as the roots that they’ve grown from. And definitely, when thinking about the features I wanted, I wanted it to make sense with who that person is. For example, with Taj Mahal, he’s who I learned about the black roots of the banjo from first. He was doing that in the ‘60s, and he has a lot of Calypso and Caribbean influences and heritage. Bringing him into a song about a Caribbean revolutionary felt like, “Well, of course.” I even wrote him a little letter explaining the song, because he’s 80. He doesn’t need to be on anybody’s record. And so I was like, “Let me tell you what the song is about, and maybe you’ll want to sing on it.”
That’s so cool. And how did the collaboration on “The Witch” come about?
Aoife has always been really supportive of me as a person and as an artist, going back to 2017. She’s kept me in mind for a lot of things and she’s suggested me for opportunities. She’s also really community-oriented. She’s very cognizant of supporting women musicians and young musicians. I’m a mega fan of hers.
I had written “The Witch” and I thought she would sound great on it. Fast forward to the end of the process, when all we had left to do was harmony vocals and I was really nervous to ask her because I think I was scared to get a no. But I’ve been practicing. You have to ask, because if you don’t ask you don’t receive anything. I texted her, and she immediately responded yes without even hearing the song. Then she laid down all these like really intricate harmony parts. She’s a genius.
Your voices are beautiful together. It works really well. And the Massachusetts thing — it’s perfect. While we’re on the subject of that song, what connects you to the stories of these women who were accused of witchcraft or adultery and were punished for it?
To me, it is the juxtaposition of having this perceived power in the minds of men as being capable of influence, capable of seduction and luring, and superseding a man’s high intelligence and thoughts of himself and overtaking will power. But then, when women were accused of being witches, their already limited power just absolutely disintegrated and they were executed by mobs. I was thinking a lot about these kind of polar ideas of women having so much power over men, but then we’re struggling to be taken seriously in a workplace or struggling to feel like we are on equal footing.
I think sexism and racism today are much more insidious – as are homophobia and transphobia. It’s so palpable. Being able to give voice to someone in history who may meet a different fate; maybe they try to kill her, and she’s like,”Ha! I survived. And now, aren’t you scared of me?”
The influence came from a lot of different places; the witches from Macbeth, and the Roald Dahl witches. They are all in our popular consciousness to a certain extent, and I think we have a fascination with them.
Absolutely. Let’s talk about the song “Floodlights.” It reminded me of Joni Mitchell for two reasons. One is the sonic palette and the orchestration reminded me of her. Second, I saw a video of her recently and she was talking about how a good song should make a listener think of themselves rather than of her. That’s obviously an objective idea, but this song, though focused on a romantic relationship, reminded me of some of my own, but also friendships and working relationships and how the dynamic of one person’s power over another can be so incredibly detrimental. But there is hope and life on the other side of that. It is a special way you tell the story in a cafe where the protagonist is feeling herself rise over a past love for the first time. I was wondering if you find that you have clarity around power dynamics yourself as you grow older as the protagonist does?
I’ve recently turned 30. And to me, that seems to be the absolute blessing of your 30s, that you have this kind of clarity and understanding of who you are and what you are willing and not willing to tolerate. That song itself is about an age-gap relationship that I was in. We had an 11-year age difference. I was super young. I was 18 or 19 when we got together, and this whole conception that I had was, “I’m mature and I’m actually better than the other women my age, because I have someone who is super mature and who thinks that I’m interesting. I’m also better than the women his age. There’s something special about me,” like I felt chosen.
That was such a powerful feeling at that time when so much of my self-esteem was dependent on what other people thought of me. Slowly, through the course of this relationship, I realized that he chose me, but not for the reasons that I thought I had been chosen.
I mean he was a walking red flag and I just did not trust my intuition to understand that. This wasn’t a good scenario, and now, on the other side of it, at 30, I couldn’t imagine dating a 20-year-old. There’s an inherent power dynamic there. I wrote the beginning of the song two years before I finished it, because in the beginning, I couldn’t think of an ending. I couldn’t have seen him at a bar (which really happened) and just been scared and left. I wanted to give the protagonist a better ending than that.
It sounds like you did a lot of processing on this record through your writing, like maybe you released some frozen anger. I think most women can relate to that in general, because we are so often encouraged or told to suppress that emotion. I was wondering how your relationship with anger and revenge evolved and shifted through the creation of this album?
I think therapy seems to be a theme in a lot of artists’ albums these days. I didn’t realize how much anger I carried until I went to therapy. I had always grown up thinking that any kind of anger is debasing yourself. You’re losing power and you’re not being your highest, most evolved self.
Every time I got angry, I felt like I’d failed to access my more evolved emotions. It was through therapy that I learned that anger is, in many ways, necessary. We are refusing to be treated a certain way.
I think adventuring through these ideas of revenge where it’s like, “Well, what if I don’t choose forgiveness? What about that? Why do I have to be the peaceable one? Why do I have to be the one to absorb all of your violence, and then somehow process it out so that we’re good?” I have to say, it was really fun to write these lyrics and not shy away from some more violent imagery, especially in “The Witch.”
I heard someone say something like, “Anything that’s human is mentionable. And anything that’s mentionable is manageable.” I think singing it out is so nice because it’s mentionable. It’s manageable.
Speaking of, this is a great segue. How does it feel to perform these songs live?
It feels really good. It feels vulnerable too, having lived with them so long during the pandemic. It’s interesting to start sharing them with people. I have this ritual where the day before a single comes out, I listen to the song on a walk. And I’m like, “Okay, this is the last time this is gonna be only mine.” I think that ritual has really helped me. It’s a really personal album in a lot of ways for me.
I’m looking forward to trying it out in many different configurations, continuing the idea of play that we started out with this record, and seeing the different ways it can evolve and change.
BGS first had the opportunity to work with singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Kaia Kater all the way back in 2016. She appeared on our inaugural Shout & Shine showcase stage that year at the International Bluegrass Music Association’s business conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was the first ever showcase celebrating diversity at the headline bluegrass event and it was also where I met her for the first time in person. We were both panelists for another first-ever, IBMA’s round-table style panel on inclusion that was convened the day after Shout & Shine. Partially planned in response to North Carolina’s just-passed transphobic measure, HB2 – one of the first anti-trans “bathroom bills,” beginning what would become a nearly decade-long and as yet unfinished battle in state houses around the country for equal rights for trans folks – the panel’s format was all about direct conversation and reaching folks where they were at.
A grassroots collective of musicians, artists, and industry professionals who represented often marginalized identities in bluegrass had decided enough was enough, we would have to stake out and hold space at IBMA’s conference to have these long overdue conversations about who is and who isn’t excluded from these roots music genres and what we can do to make all folks feel safe(r) and at home in these communities we love. Kater was right there, engaging and often leading dialogues on these important subjects. A handful of days later, she published her first byline on BGS, an incisive, compassionate, and necessary op-ed on Breaking the Wheel of Silence – calling out all too common “closing of ranks” and music industry status quos that reinforce and protect misogyny, patriarchy, and systems of sexual harassment and sexual violence and their perpetrators.
In short, Kater has long been a thought leader in roots music, especially in bluegrass, old-time, and our BGS family. We’ve been fortunate to get to collaborate with her in various ways on that vital work, from having her writing published on our site and in our year end round-ups to covering her own art and roots music creations.
Luckily, the music she crafts and the messages within it make it infinitely easier to spotlight these often touchy and incredibly nuanced issues. From her debut, 2015’s Sorrow Bound, to 2016’s impressive Nine Pin – which some call her “break out” record – Kater has been spinning complex and entrancing roots music threads that draw on her lived experiences as a Canadian-Grenadian banjo player and lifelong folk musician, turning over and examining what are often called “thorny” or “divisive” issues. Her music grounds abstract and theoretical concepts in the past, present, and future. But her songs don’t sound mired in these issues or concepts at all, just the opposite.
Over the course of her career, from her teens and young adulthood to today, on the cusp of releasing a new album, Strange Medicine (out May 17 via Free Dirt Records), this singular perspective Kater has cultivated continues to blossom, grow, and come into sharper focus. 2018’s Grenades, a sort of concept record placed decidedly in the Caribbean and tracing Kater’s roots back to the beautiful island of Grenada, processes generational traumas, the machinations and intricacies of culture, the nebulousness of belonging, and so many other colors and textures decidedly at home in folk music, but enlivened constantly through Kater’s creative lens. Grenades is a master work, demonstrating a creator and musician who knows who they are – even when they do not.
Six years later, enter Strange Medicine, another album masterpiece that finds Kater still more confident, more at ease, and just as convicting. Genre parameters, her prior records, and her strong positioning of community are all present here, but perhaps not as directly. Instead, Strange Medicine seems to be grown from the fertile, rich, and dense soil of Kater’s career to this point. There are indirect touches of all of the above, but overall this collection feels brand new. It is a novel synthesis of her values systems and worldview, one that feels assured while still exploratory, firm but flexible, responsive but not reactive. Strange, indeed, but never odd (or estranged).
With stunning collaborations with Taj Mahal, Allison Russell, and Aoife O’Donovan – who is featured on “The Witch,” a track made available today – Kater demonstrates how, more than ten years since she began her professional trajectory, her music shines with cross pollination, positioning the community members who helped shape her own music within that very body of work. It’s part of why her new band, New Dangerfield – with Jake Blount, Tray Wellington, and Nelson Williams – can be called a supergroup, though that moniker immediately feels reductive. Kater and her cohort are no longer simply adding their voices to an ongoing conversation, they are the conversation. The center of gravity – in folk, old-time, bluegrass, Americana, and beyond – has shifted, and with that shift we see Kater, many of her peers in her generation, as well as those collaborators and influences who came before continually advancing these discourses.
Her medium, as always, is music. Her dialogue, as always, is not simply with those who choose to consume her art, but specifically with those who engage with it, try it on, turn it inside out, and kick the tires. This is music that will stand up to that sort of holistic interaction. It’s infinitely listenable, incredibly fun, and grooving, too; Strange Medicine might be the danciest record in Kater’s catalog. It’s intellectual, yes, but more than that, Kater shows us that music can be nutritious, challenging, and dense while effervescent, joyful, and soaring.
All month long, we’ll be celebrating our pal, collaborator, and constant source of inspiration Kaia Kater as our Artist of the Month. Below, enjoy our Essential Kaia Kater Playlist and watch for an exclusive AOTM interview coming in just a couple of weeks, too.
Back then in 2015 and 2016, when we were just introduced to Kater and her music, if you had asked any of us if we’d expect her to be our Artist of the Month someday, down the line, I think almost any of us would’ve responded with a resounding, “Yes!” So we’re especially proud to celebrate Strange Medicine and Kaia Kateras our May Artist of the Month.
Sun Without the Heat is Leyla McCalla’s fifth solo album, but it is different from past efforts and she brings the listener through the transformative process with her. Produced by Maryam Qudus at Dockside Studio in Louisiana, McCalla dug into her personal history, primary sources from Amistad Research Center at Tulane University’s archives, world musical influences, and her creative trust in her long time bandmates to bring forth a bright, kinetic, and meditative project.
The studio, nestled along the Vermilion Bayou, offered an insular, bucolic setting for the nine days McCalla and band were recording; a place where friends and children could visit and local fishermen provided fresh catch for dinner. Qudus’ direction provided McCalla with space and vision to piece together her research and personal edification, while her relationship with her band allowed a deeply creative process to unfold. McCalla spoke wistfully about the experience, “It was very luxurious to have that kind of space. And it’s just really a very nurturing environment.”
Traditionally a cellist, on this project, McCalla explores her relationship with the guitar. She delves into West African and Brazilian polyrhythms flowing underneath lyrics that, at times, feel like a repetitive prayer or mantra. She balances the seemingly unanswerable aspects of life with the sometimes illusive, but simple notion that many contradictory feelings can be true at once.
BGS spoke with McCalla via Zoom from her home in New Orleans earlier this month. McCalla discussed the experience of researching, writing, and recording, her relationship with fans and supporters, creative freedom, and trusting the process.
I’ve been listening to all your music the past couple of days and I’ve noticed that the sonic palette of this album is somewhat of a shift for you. It seems like there’s a transformation theme running through it, both lyrically and musically, and it seems like even in the process of recording it. So I wanna talk about that on multiple levels, but can we start with the process for this? It sounds like you went into the woodshed and didn’t come out until the record was done.
Leyla McCalla: This is an album that was mostly finished in the studio. I had a pre-production session with Maryam Qudus, who produced the record. It was also just this really crazy time in my life. I was on tour a lot and coordinating with kids’ schedules. We really only had 36 hours of workshopping songs. Maryam was really amazing at being like, “Okay, let’s play with this idea, and come up with a verse and a chorus.” So I think we came out of that pre-production session with about 7 different demos that were just these rough sketches and we sent them all around to the band. When we went into the studio, everyone contributed what they were hearing to the songs. I’ve been working with my band now for about six years. I think that we have developed fluidity in our process of coming up with parts and talking about music. And so I knew that I had these sort of vague notions of delving into psychedelia and Afrofuturism and mining, this incredible music from Africa, ultimately. I think that that’s been a consistent through line in all my work is connecting my music through the ancestral lines of the sounds themselves.
I played a lot more guitar on this record than any other record. For me, it was really about delving into the songwriting and figuring out what I wanted to say. I’d been doing a lot of reading of Black feminist thinkers, and contemporary thinkers like Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Octavia Butler. I think this record for me was really about, “How am I going to survive life? What does it mean to be resilient? What does it mean to transform and change? And give myself the space to grieve and also to hope and to dream.” There are a lot of things that I was meditating on when I wrote these songs.
I remember feeling very vulnerable, because I was really going back into this more beginner’s mind. I’ve never gone into the studio and been like, “I don’t know what it’s gonna sound like on the other side.” I’ve always had the band pretty well rehearsed and gone in. This time it was like, “These are the things that are emerging in real-time.”
Did you feel nervous about it? It seems like you have a lot of trust with your band, which is a great starting point. And you had the 36 hours of workshopping and all the ideas that you came up with. But were there nerves about it walking in to record?
Oh, yeah. It was not nerves about, “Can I trust my bandmates to be awesome?” It was more nerves of, “Do I suck?” Which is classic imposter syndrome that artists have as part of the process of writing. You get an idea. It’s a good idea. You question whether it’s a good idea.
I’m trying to do a new thing. I’m trying to break new ground in my creative life and in my sonic expression. Within that, I think that there’s a lot of room for self-doubt. That’s why for this album it was critical to have the support of my bandmates and of Maryam, who didn’t have that kind of attachment to any of the songs. They were just there to help execute what I wanted. I think this album really has strengthened my trust in my songwriting and in my creative process. And just knowing that you don’t always have to know what’s gonna happen to know that it’ll be good.
Absolutely. I was just going to say when you said it was a sort of meditative for you, I think that really comes across, lyrically and sonically. There are these phrases that you repeat that are meditative and it seems like you’re asking questions, you’re answering the ones you can, and you’re submitting to the ones that you can’t. What you are saying you wanted to happen comes across.
Yeah, I think so. I think that there is, on a spiritual level, deep healing for me in writing these songs. I was calling that in. I was navigating single motherhood, divorce, breakups, and big deaths in my family. It was like, “How do I call myself back to myself, what is gonna guide me through that?” I think for me, doing a lot of sort of ancestral healing work and meditating on the the gifts and the things that I’ve inherited from my ancestors, those made their way into the songs.
Speaking of process, you mentioned in your liner notes that you are grateful for creative freedom on this project. And I’d love to know what creative freedom looks like for you and how it impacts your work. And maybe what a lack of creative freedom has felt like in the past for you.
I think creative freedom, for me, was kind of twofold. I have a label that is mostly doing stuff outside of the commercial realm. Obviously, we’re part of the music industry, but I never felt like I needed to make a particular album. I felt like the question from the label was, “What kind of album do you want to make? What is coming through right now for you? What do you want to say?” Being able to come from that place is very different than, “Try to take over this part of the market,” or something. It’s a lot more empowering experience. Also, not being afraid to go in different directions. Not being afraid to use weird pedals on my guitars, experiment with synths, have a freaking psychedelic freak out, or have piano on the songs or organ. It was just sort of intuitive, “Yes, this belongs.” And not feeling like anyone was going to disapprove of that.
I never felt that there was a particular agenda outside of the agenda that I wanted to fulfill. That has been a really empowering experience for me, coming off of my previous record where it was like, “Okay, these are these ancient rhythms that are Haitian and African, and this is a mapping of where Haitian people come from.” I felt empowered by that, but in a very different way, almost like I wanted to serve this music. For this record it felt like, “Okay, how can this process really serve me and serve my creative genesis?” Returning back to like a more beginner’s mind, “What are the things that really I love about music? What are the things that make me wanna write songs?”
I didn’t have as much of a mind for that with Breaking the Thermometer, because it had been such a longstanding collaboration that I had been working on for five years with a crew of theater makers and different musicians and then going into the studio.
I always felt like that project was like a garden of weeds that are growing out of control. It could be a book. It could be a theater project. It could be a dance piece. I explored the intersection of all those things together. Whereas this was like, “Okay, I’m just returning back to this one format. We’re making an album.”
It meant connecting with some of my earliest influences. That’s why I went back to listening to a lot of artists from the tropicalismo movement in Brazil, in the ’60s and ’70s. There was all this experimentation with traditional music forms and rock and roll and psychedelia. I love that music. There’s something about it that just really speaks deeply to me. And I think that it’s also because of my generation, who I am, and where I am. I’m drawn to things that are out of the box. And I’m also drawn to really solid groove and feel and deep emotional content. I never had an agenda other than to figure out what I want to sound like and being able to have that space. A lot of these songs were about like, “How do I get out of my own way?”
When you started thinking about making this record did you know that you’d be playing more guitar than cello? Did you write on guitar? What was the relationship with that instrument like?
I was writing a lot on guitar. I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna play guitar and not cello.” I didn’t have an agenda in that way. I really wanted to explore different shapes in my fingers and try different rhythmic structures. Guitar is exciting for me in that way. I’ve done a lot of finger-picking in my work and there’s plenty of that on this record. But I’m like, “What about this inflection? What about this texture? And what about this feel? What does that conjure?” That was really fun for me.
Fun was also really central to the process. I was like, “I want to heal, I want to be creative, I want to expand my sonic palette, and I also want to have fun.” I do this work to have fun. I don’t do this work to be the “king of the capitalists” or something. I want to have a good experience with it and find it enriching. I feel like the guitar is the ultimate symbol of liberation and freedom. It has a different meaning to me than the cello. With cello, I know the notes. I am thinking about technique and I have to think about how I’m holding my body. Guitar is just like, “This is who I am.”
For sure. Partly because the guitar is so mobile. You can walk off into the woods with it.
Yeah, totally. You should see me walk through an airport. I’m carrying my guitar, my banjo, and my cello, and I’m always like, ”Man, life would be so much easier without this cello.” But it’s such a powerful thing. When I’m playing cello, it feels totally like, “Wow, this is also home.”
Cello moves so much air. It can completely change the vibration of a room.
Totally. I always tell my bandmates, “Oh, we gotta be careful with that cello. It’s like melting a dark piece of chocolate on stage.”
I think a lot about sense of place and how a place can affect the creative process. Since you were sort of in a “lock-in” at Dockside Studio, I want to know if that studio and that place had an effect on this record.
Oh, yeah. Dockside is an incredible place. There’s a house with a pool and then a whole other house with a studio. The grounds are beautiful and well-kept. You’re right by the river.
There was a sense of deep relaxation for me there, because it is kind of separate. If it were in the middle of a city, there would be so much more distraction. But because there isn’t, I felt like it really helped me to focus and to tune in. We burnt candles there every day. We were calling in a lot of spirits and support. I did a lot of just sitting by the river and writing and reading in order to write.
And Maryam is amazing. If it had just been me producing the record, it would have been way more disorganized. Maryam was amazing at being like, “Okay, Leyla, we don’t need you in the studio right now. What we really need from you is to go and write.” I feel like I do best in those sorts of relationships, when someone is gently nudging me in the direction of what’s gonna be most productive for me. I was really able to get to a place of being productive and feeling quiet enough to actually hear whatever was coming through. If we had made the record anywhere else, it would have probably sounded completely different. We are all pretty well versed in the different styles of Louisianan music, so we kept thinking, “What is this sound that we’re coming up with?” And we were like, “This is Louisiana tropicalia.” It’s a fun construct.
Tell me a bit about what your relationship is like with fans and supporters of your music and the impact that they might have on your creations or your career.
For my first record, I did a Kickstarter campaign and I asked for $5,000, because I didn’t know how expensive it is to make albums. I ended up making over $20k. That whole process of doing the Kickstarter was such a boon to my career. At that point, I had been touring with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. No one really knew who I was, but I realized that there was support and space for me to be doing these projects that combine research and intellectual pursuits with making music. That’s the line that I have been toeing this whole time. And it is incredible, over the years, the number of connections that I have made from pursuing two things at once and growing this academic life within my body of work as a recording artist.
People have brought me, over the years, limited edition Langston Hughes, Haitian Creole poetry from the 1800s, translations of Zora Neale Hurston books that are in French or German. Those are the kinds of connections that feel so sustaining creatively for me and really enriching. The music industry is so inundated with artists, and everyone’s trying to stand out. That kind of symbiosis, I think, is really critical not only to me as an artist but to me seeking support.
That’s wonderful. There’s something sort of clinical about the traditional record label rollout of material in the past, but now it feels like, because of social media, because of things like Kickstarter and house shows, a wall has broken down.
Totally. And I feel people really connect to that, even sometimes more than the actual songs. Which may be problematic in one way. Everything is kind of about more of this “cult of personality” thing. Not that I’m super invested in developing that, but I do feel like the fan base is invested in me as a person, and wants to want to support the music as a result of that.
Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration with the Rivers Institute and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane, and how that might have informed this project, or what you’re working on in general?
I was invited by the Rivers Institute to be their first music fellow. They have this incredible artist-in-residence program that is in concert with the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, which is an incredible archive of stuff from all over the South, particularly Louisiana Black culture. There are so many oral history interviews. I discovered writers that I didn’t know about, particularly a guy named Tom Dent, who feels like he’s kind of like the Langston Hughes of Louisiana.
I’ve always known how important archives and libraries are, but it’s just so much information. There’s a woman named Jade Flint who works there who helped me. She was like, “What are you interested in?” I’m like, “I like poetry. I like organizers. I like movement work.” I found myself down this path of discovering letters that Fannie Lou Hamer had written to her best friend. She was from the Delta in Mississippi and in the ’60s was really active in registering Black voters at the height of Jim Crow. She was attacked. She was beaten really badly for that. She just kept on fighting her whole life for Black people to have the right to vote and for political participation for Black people at a time where that came at a great cost to her mental, emotional, and physical health.
There’s an organization called Core New Orleans, which actually did a lot of COVID testing during the pandemic, but they were also working on voter registrations. I was reading their pamphlets that were like, “This is how you deal with potentially violent situations. This is how you approach people about trying to get them to vote.” I was doing that and concurrently reading things about emergent strategy and pleasure activism and comparing notes like, “These are the activists of yesteryear and the organizing principles.”
And then I was reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s books. She’s like, “You’re gonna need to masturbate before reading this chapter, because otherwise you won’t be connected with your pleasure center. That is essential to this activist work.” You could see this sea change in the attitude about what is actually going to aid our collective liberation the most.
During this time, my grandfather passed away and he [had] started a Socialist Haitian newspaper called Haiti Progress. Both of my parents are activists. I’ve been immersed in a lot organizing and activist stuff my whole life like going to protests throughout my childhood, especially regarding Haitian immigrants and human rights issues in the United States.
All of these things just really filled me with this feeling of, “Wow! It’s taken so much bravery to be able to fight the good fight and keep these conversations moving forward.” I think we still have a long way to go. I did a lot of reflecting on that. And that song, “I Want to Believe,” was written during that residency. It’s a simple song, but I wanted to write something that was almost a song that could be sung at a protest, something that was not quite gospel and not quite protest music, somewhere in the middle.
I love a library, I love an archivist, and I love being in that space and finding things that feel like a secret. How you process that as a person in the present, feeling the history in the present, and how it comes across – that is reflected in your lyrics. We have access to so much information today, but that information is very much filtered by these multinational corporations. There’s search engine optimization and all that, and we can’t really dig down until you go into a place like that where those regional details exist, like in an archive or library.
It just is incredible to me, because there’s so much to keep track of. And you know, even the different categories like oral histories or audio interviews or drafts of books or poems. There are unpublished pieces that may only be read by five people every year. Those five people then know about this thing and can share it with their community, and make work from it, or include it in their research papers. There’s there’s endless ways to see the world and then filter this information.
I feel like my job as a musician is looking for those bits of information that feel like the diamond in the rough, like the thing that I’ve been looking for my whole life. That’s really the chase. It really keeps me in the archives.
Can you talk specifically about the title track, “Sun Without the Heat?” In your liner notes, you dedicate the song to Susan Raffo and Frederick Douglass. I’d love to know more about that.
Susan Rafo released a book called Liberated to the Bone: Histories. Bodies. Futures. I went down this rabbit hole of progressive thought. Her book is written for healers, people working within the medical industrial complex, and anyone who’s engaged in healing work, whether that be on a community level or on a one-on-one basis. I read that book, and it was really fortifying for me.
She has this theory of the original wounds of our society, which are the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African people through the transatlantic slave trade. It’s about our inability to grapple with the harm that has been perpetuated and is being perpetuated from those original wounds. It is holding us back from larger systemic change. There’s a chapter where she references a speech that Frederick Douglass gave in 1857 to a room full of white abolitionists. He said, “You want the crops without the plow. You want the rain without the thunder. You want the ocean without the roar of its waters.” I was immediately like, “Those are song lyrics.” I just heard it immediately. Those were just such beautiful words and and phrases and concepts, and I kept on singing that.
It occurred to me, “You can’t have the sun without the heat.” I was like, “There are only three phrases, and I need that one other thing.” I was also thinking about how so many of these songs to me are about transformation, and are about what change really requires of us. And it felt like those phrases spoke so well to that theme.
I read a book called Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Ghums. It’s a Black feminist study of marine mammals off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia and the things that we can learn from them about survival, resiliency, living on this planet, and our inherent connection to nature — you know, how to thrive on this seemingly unsustainable planet. It is also about our connections to each other and community.
For a long time, I think in my own personal life I was like, “I just can’t help but feel like I’m drowning.” But I didn’t want to just make a record about that feeling. I wanted to make a record about getting through that feeling: about breaking through the overwhelm.
There’s a confidence and ease to Aoife O’Donovan‘s music making, brought forward throughout her career by her languid, tender, and emotive voice. Just as striking and crystalline as it is cozy and comforting, her voice is a truly iconic instrument in Americana, bluegrass, and new acoustic music. Still, as she readies her new solo album, All My Friends (out March 22 on Yep Roc), it feels as though O’Donovan is decidedly stepping into a new era of confidence and self-assuredness, devoid of any sense of desperation or flightiness or unfettered ambitions. There’s a steady, intentional march to the blossoming of her catalog and her artistry and it’s on full display on All My Friends.
The album was conceived as a sort of tribute to or reckoning with the cross-generational struggle for women’s rights, highlighting the passage of the 19th Amendment over 100 years ago and picking up that timeless mantle of ever-striding towards justice. It’s a perfect project to highlight during Women’s History Month; the intellectual and political messages within it are softened – though never outright whitewashed, revised, or sanitized – by O’Donovan’s perspective as a mother of a young daughter. With All My Friends, she is continuing her journey with another timeless tradition in string band music: the role of mother-activist-songwriter-composer.
One of the record’s lead singles, “Daughters,” was heralded in a press releases as “a meditation on the eternal quest for women’s rights and equality.” Meditative qualities might be the most tangible and original through line of O’Donovan’s songwriting, song collection, composition, and her vocal affectations – from as far back as her days with Crooked Still, or evidenced by the songs she brought to her supergroup trio, I’m With Her, with Sara Watkins and Sarah Jarosz. As on “Daughters,” O’Donovan more often than not opts for quiet-and-impassioned, subdued-while-soaring vocals. She’ll wrap you in the gauze and glitter of her one of a kind voice and, in doing so, prepare you ever so gently and kindly to receive the messages in her lyrics – however demonstrative or abstract they may be.
O’Donovan’s latest era of confidence is also well marked by her vast and varied resume of musical collaborations. Besides Crooked Still and I’m With Her, she’s released music with Goat Rodeo (Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile), Noam Pikelny, the Milk Carton Kids, Taylor Ashton, Donovan Woods, and so many more. In more recent months and years, she’s featured Allison Russell on a track (on 2022’s Age of Apathy), collaborated with mind-boggling guitarist Yasmin Williams and step-dancer Nic Gareiss on a stunning number entitled “Dawning,” and even “came back” to straight ahead bluegrass with a recent single feature on a Becky Buller track, “Jubilee.”
Her output is ceaseless, her art is prolific, but here – as in the new album, and across her discography – the hallmark of O’Donovan’s work isn’t volume, but intention. This is not breakneck, music industry ladder climbing, this is an artist deliberately expanding the universe of her music bit by bit, voice by voice, collaboration by collaboration. It’s part of why she’s such an effective voice and influence in control rooms, too. (Though her production credits are relatively few, they are mighty.) And it’s part of why, as you scroll through our Essential Aoife O’Donovan playlist, you’ll find as many surprising and eyebrow-raising selections as you will her mighty, familiar modern classics.
All My Friends – with appearances by The Knights, The Westerlies, Anaïs Mitchell, Sierra Hull, Pikelny, and more – is yet another demonstration of O’Donovan’s community, her central role within it, and her confidence in inhabiting that role wholly and completely. This is meditation without stagnation, orchestration without machinations, softness and tenderness, but with a steel spine. These are challenges to the status quo while knowing real progress is made with one foot placed in front of the other – and with many other footsteps following her own.
Throughout the month of March, as we highlight Women’s History Month, we’ll be celebrating the new album, All My Friends, and Aoife O’Donovan as our Artist of the Month. Stay tuned for a special “In Conversation” Artist of the Month feature to come later in March featuring an amazing artist and collaborator of O’Donovan, and we’ll also be dipping back into the BGS archives to resurface so many amazing songs, videos, articles, and stories that highlight the incredible music of Aoife O’Donovan.
Photo Credit: Sasha Israel
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