Tag: author

BGS 5+5: Carrie Newcomer

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Artist: Carrie Newcomer
Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
Latest Album: Until Now (September 10, 2021)
Personal Nicknames/Rejected Band Names: My husband calls me “bunky” sometimes. 🙂 My bands have always been just The Carrie Newcomer Band. My first band was called Stone Soup.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I don’t think it happened for me in one moment. It was a slow turning, a claiming and reclaiming, a deepening. My favorite game as a little girl was called “Makin’ Somethin’.” I was always making songs, stories, and pictures; painting, sewing, and hammering together boards; cooking or putting on plays in the backyard. I was drawn to creating just about anything, and all these years later, I’m still inordinately happy when I’m makin’ somethin’. But it took me a while to truly claim calling myself a songwriter and poet. I went to school for visual art, then later got a teacher’s license. Both are honorable vocations, but I believe I chose them because it felt too risky to follow what I loved the most: music.

During that time, I was writing songs and playing music everywhere. When I finished school, music was calling. So I followed, not really knowing where it would lead me. But even as I stepped fully into a life in music, things continued to unfold. Something good happened to my writing when I gave myself permission to sound like a “Hoosier,” to claim my own authentic Midwestern voice. Something also shifted when I stopped following music business and started following what my songs were about — asking good questions, sensing a spiritual thread, our shared human condition, finding something extraordinary in an ordinary day. My life as a musician also shifted when I stopped believing that I had to be the best singer-songwriter and knew that all I needed to do and be was the truest Carrie Newcomer.

Today, I have released 19 albums. Music still continues to be a choice. A life in the arts means you must be willing to step right up to your next growing edge and lean in. So every day — even in this time of great disruption and uncertainty, when hope feels a bit frayed at the edges, I still choose to live like an artist, approach my life as an artist, and stay true, lean in and always keep “makin’ somethin’.”

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?

I have always been a passionate reader. Of course, music has always moved me, but I am even more drawn to the way music and lyrics entwine to create something uniquely powerful. Many of my songs are inspired by literature (non-fiction and fiction) and particularly poetry. Songwriters have many ways they go about writing a song — if you ask 11 songwriters to describe their process, you’ll get 15 different ways they approach songwriting. My process often begins with writing essays, poetry, short stories and character studies. I have three books of poetry and essays: A Permeable Life: Poems & Essays, The Beautiful Not Yet: Poems, Essays & Lyrics and my newest collection Until Now: New Poems that will published as a companion piece with my new album Until Now, on September 10, 2021. I’m also a visual artist (mixed media and small sculpture) and visual imagery is always present in my songwriting. Oh, and I’m a passionate knitter.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

I try to find a place to get quiet. I meditate, I find my inner center so that I feel more grounded when I step on stage. I’m not a natural performer. In fact, I’m pretty private by nature, which is not uncommon for performers. But I love people, and I love music, and I love what happens when we connect through music. There is nothing like it. Music, when it’s really flowing, comes up from something deep and centered and true. It reaches into the heart of the listener where the listener is deep and true. I imagine those of you reading might know what I’m talking about.

During COVID, we all had to learn how to do this heart-reaching in new ways. I turned to online streaming, as my husband Robert Meitus is (lucky for me) one of the co-founders of Mandolin, a high-quality concert streaming service that streamed the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and RockyGrass this year. Streaming was an incredibly different performance experience. If a live in-person show is an apple and recording a performance is an orange, streaming is kind of like a kiwi. It has many similar elements, but it’s also entirely different. The exciting thing I learned was that the spirit of music really can reach further and wider than I ever expected.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

If I had a mission statement for my career it would be, “be true.” My work in the world is to express what it means to be authentically human with all its ache and awe, sense and senselessness. It’s to hold fast to the power of simple kindness, to acknowledge its messiness, and to be honest about where I most need to grow. My job is to lean into unabashed delight and to be with uncontainable grief. Music reminds me that working toward a better, kinder world is not a destination as much as an orientation. My job is to put into music and language the things we feel that have no words, to do my own inner work so that I can bring what I find there to my outer calling. My job as an artist is to pay attention and ask good questions — and, as much as possible — to be kind.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

Natural imagery is almost always present in my poetry and songwriting. It is where I catch glimpses of something extraordinary (even sacred) in the most ordinary of days. I live out in the wooded hills of southern Indiana where years ago, the glaciers stopped their earth-smoothing slide south, leaving deep ravines and beautiful hills. I have walked these hills for years; these forests, creeks and small lakes have become old friends. On my wide, old-fashioned front porch, I love to sit and watch a big storm come in, to feel the drop in the barometric pressure, a rush of cool air, and then waves of summer rain. I love the quiet of the snowy hills, particularly the ones that are lined with elegant smooth beech trees. In senseless times, I take comfort in what never stops making sense, like trees and songbirds, like how the light changes in autumn and the world quiets in the winter. There is a song on the new album called “I Give Myself To This.” It is a love song about what I choose to release and what I fully embrace out in the natural world.

Photo credit: Elle Hodge

Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn Join Forces for ‘Lost in the Cedar Wood’

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It was a week into lockdown last March that Robert Macfarlane got in touch with Johnny Flynn. The pair were already good friends. Macfarlane is a Cambridge University academic and a bestselling author; his many books, such as The Old Ways and The Wild Places, have helped shape a renaissance in nature writing. Flynn – as well-known for his acting as his albums – writes songs that reverberate with an inescapable yearning for the rural and the pastoral. Britain’s landscape is a place of solace and inspiration for both.

The early days of the pandemic were disturbing, disorienting, frightening. They were also quiet. The nation stayed home and traffic all but ceased: towns fell as silent as the countryside, birdsong had never sounded louder. Macfarlane asked Flynn if he’d like to write a song together and the act of creating together was something to cling to amid the tumult. “It started as just a song,” said Flynn, “and then it became a few songs… but it held me in place and kept me from completely spinning out.”

This May they released the result of their labours: an album, Lost in the Cedar Wood. The combination of Flynn’s folk sensibility with Macfarlane’s sense of place is so sympathetic that you can’t quite believe it’s their first collaboration. But then, Flynn had been reading Macfarlane’s books long before they first met. And Macfarlane was listening to Flynn’s albums like A Larum and Country Mile as he wrote. The author, in fact, thanked the musician in the acknowledgement pages, “because they were the songs I was listening to when I was out walking, and I knew every chord by heart.”

Eventually, a mutual friend introduced them; their first meeting was, in the most English of ways, at a friendly game of cricket. Their shared love of nature and passion for conservation sparked instant bromance. All three of those things manifest in the music they’ve made together.

“Rob was sending me articles about the pandemic being created by deforestation,” says Flynn, “but we were also talking about all the literature that people were reading with a new interest or perspective – Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, or Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Thinking of Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, based on the Orpheus myth, they wondered what other stories might be worth exploring. Flynn looks at Macfarlane and laughs: “And you said ‘There’s always Gilgamesh’ – as if that was too obvious.”

A 4,000-year-old poem about a Sumerian king, written in cuneiform and discovered on tablets in the ruins of an ancient Assyrian library, might not seem that obvious a starting point to everyone. But it is, as Macfarlane points out, “the oldest story in world literature,” and its potent themes cast extraordinarily contemporary parallels. In the poem two warriors, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, defy the gods by cutting down a sacred forest, bringing calamity upon themselves. “The most powerful myths have a prescient as well as a retrospective vision to them,” says Macfarlane. “And that combination of ancient and urgent pushed us on.”

The songs were written back and forth via WhatsApp and voice memos: “There’s an incredible ease to writing with Johnny,” says Macfarlane. “I never worry much, and we trust each other to say if something isn’t working. I call it the Johnny Flynn song machine. I type out a bunch of words, send them over and they come back as this unbelievable song.”

Macfarlane would like to make clear, at this point, that he can’t play a note; he describes himself as having “all the musical abilities of a deckchair” (“Not true!” says Flynn). When it comes to collaboration with musicians, however, this deckchair has an impressive résumé. He has written a libretto for a jazz opera, had his poems turned into protest songs, and worked with a supergroup of British folk talent – including Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart – to create Spell Songs, a musical adaptation of his and Jackie Morris’s book The Lost Words.

Those experiences taught Macfarlane a great deal. “I’ve learned that good lyrics are about letting go, about cutting out order,” he says. “My teacherly prose writer’s inclination to bring grammar to everything has to be left at the door. And a year working with Johnny has brought me to the point where I’ve learned to let the light into language.” He’s particularly pleased with the song “Uncanny Valley,” to be released on seven-inch later this year, “about how things don’t join up with each other in the year we’ve just lived through.”

That sense of dissociation permeates Lost in the Cedar Wood, where melodies expand and contract like our perceptions of time during lockdown. The album doesn’t retell the Gilgamesh narrative – it’s more a series of meditations inspired by it – but Flynn and Macfarlane aren’t shy of tackling its epic themes like death and rebirth.

This should not imply that listening to it is a heavy experience: quite the opposite, in fact. What’s astonishing about the record is how much delight there is in it, from the instantly catchy resonator riff of the opening track “Ten Degrees of Strange” to the modal funk of “Bonedigger.” It often manages to be moving and funny at the same time, as in the plaintive lyrics of “I Can’t Swim There”: “My friend Harry’s got legs to spare/But I can’t find my body, I’ve looked everywhere.”

That sense of light and dark is beautifully mingled in “The World to Come,” which begins with an owlishly haunting melody and ends in a mighty accelerando, gathering speed until it’s a wild, whooping chorus of multiple voices – including Macfarlane’s. “In his wonderfully inclusive way Johnny did recruit me into some distant backing vocals,” he laughs. “And that song is effectively a party — not at the end of the world, but maybe at the beginning of a better world to come. So Johnny was encouraging us into the kitchen — whack the taps! jump up and down! There’s a cutlery basket that goes down at the end and the rawness of that in the record is wonderful to hear.”

The majority of the tracks were recorded in an off-grid cottage on the borders of Dorset and Hampshire, the recording equipment run off batteries powered by solar panels. “I love those albums like Music from Big Pink and The Basement Tapes,” says Flynn, “where you’re feeling the room where it was recorded. And for this one we were in the middle of forestry land, so there was the sound of chainsaws cutting pine trees coming through the windows, and we’d jump out of the window to record birdsong, and we were really in the sonic universe of the stories we were telling.”

Also singing on the album is Flynn’s nine-year-old son Gabriel. That inclusion was important to Flynn – not just because Gabriel is a promising young musician, but because parenting was such an intrinsic part of Flynn’s life, and even his creative process, in the past year.

“I was getting up before the kids in order to write and I’d be halfway through an idea when they piled down for breakfast,” he grins. “Often Rob would get a phone demo of me trying to sing a song and halfway through I’m shouting at the kids…”

“Daddy, where’s the marmalade?” says Macfarlane, recalling the interruptions.

“It was intense,” adds Flynn, “worrying about three kids, but the lovely thing about having them at home was getting to really go into every aspect of their thought process and their day.”

Macfarlane nods. “Stepping out of work into the arms of my eight-year-old, as he runs down the garden, that’s a nice commute.” He pauses. “I hope something like that stays, after lockdown.”

Because that’s the real question behind this album: what have we learned from humanity’s most recent crisis, and how will it change us? When Gilgamesh loses Enkidu as a result of their sacrilegious actions, he begins a new quest for the secret of eternal life. It’s no spoiler to reveal that he doesn’t find it: appreciating what he already has is more to the point.

It is not lost on Flynn and Macfarlane, for instance, that Gilgamesh is a story of close male friendship – even if, as Macfarlane jokingly points out, one of the characters dies horribly and the other’s a brutal despot. You can picture them together, Flynn and Macfarlane, on their much-prized walks through the English countryside, talking of this and that, and coming up with their next creative ideas.

It has, they agree, been a joyful process, and this joint project is surely the first of many. It may have forced them to confront some of their greatest fears for the natural world and the planet on which we live, but it has also endowed them with fresh hope.

Macfarlane also hopes that people don’t feel they need to know anything about Gilgamesh to enjoy the songs – or treat it as a pandemic album. “The days and months of lockdown do soak through its pores but they’re never named,” he says. “I hope in five years time anyone can put their ear to it and not feel they need a key to understand it.”

Photo credit: Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz

As an Author and Musician, Allison Moorer Writes About Her Tragic Past in ‘Blood’

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Allison Moorer has always loved words and it shows in her new memoir, Blood. Expressed in a literary voice that’s both erudite and intimate, her writing goes well beyond the devastation of the 1986 incident where her father shot and killed her mother, and then himself. Surveying Blood as a whole, her childhood stories will be familiar to anyone who has grown up without money, who has relied on other family members to help raise them, and who has found an identity through music.

This fall, Moorer has been touring behind the book by presenting on-stage conversations with music-minded moderators, such as her sister Shelby Lynne (they affectionately call each other “Sissy”) and her husband Hayes Carll. During these events she performs music from her new album, also titled Blood. While that project is inspired by her family trauma, it is not a direct re-telling of it. Longtime producer Kenny Greenberg gives it a sonic texture that fits perfectly in a catalog that now spans two decades.

She caught up with the Bluegrass Situation by phone in between her travels.

BGS: I really admire the research you put into this project. You were willing to try to fill in some gaps. One of the passages that I thought was interesting was the email from your father’s friend, Leon, who wrote this line: “I’ve never figured out if Franklin was two people in one body or if he was one person who made a change into someone I did not know.”

AM: Yeah. That’s pretty powerful, isn’t it?

Do you remember the emotions you felt when you read that message from him?

I felt like I had been seen. Because that’s often how I felt about my father. One of the reasons I wrote to Leon in the first place was because very often I had heard about this great guy that my father was. So many people had admiration for him and the person that they described was not who I knew.

He was a teacher at Leroy High School. This was when I was very small but I remember him being the shop teacher, and he taught English. That’s how he was introduced to my mother in the first place, because he was a teacher where my aunt went to high school. He was a juvenile probation officer. His last job was overseeing the vocational school. And so he had an effect on a lot of people.

But at home, what I had in my mind was not matched up with this person that I heard people outside of our house describe. I spent probably too much time trying to reconcile that and what I know about that is we all are many things. Who we are on the outside is not always who we are on the inside, and we can be more than one thing at the time. So I think in some ways I came up with more questions than answers, but sometimes the questions are more important than the answers.

One thing I found interesting is that he seems to have passed on a love of music and a love of literature to you.

Absolutely.

Have you always been in love with words and storytelling?

Yeah. I don’t think that I knew when I was a kid that I was in love with words. I just knew I liked to read and I had an affinity for them. I somehow kind of knew how to read before I went to school. I went to first grade when I was 5 — funny thing about my momma, she decided that I didn’t need kindergarten and she forged my birth certificate and put me in first grade when I was 5.

It probably had something to do with her work schedule because kindergartners had a shorter school day I think. But they found out that, “Oh, well, Allison at age 5 goes in the advanced reading.” [Laughs] That’s a little revealing about who I am. But I definitely found solace in books and in music when I was a kid and still do, still very much do.

Your father was writing music and lyrics even before you and Shelby came along, but I didn’t know the history of “I’m the One to Blame” on your record. I heard the music before I read the book, then found out later that he wrote those lyrics. I was curious, how did the melody come about to that song?

Sissy wrote it. She found that lyric in his old briefcase, not long after they died. We were definitely in the throes of shock and grief, but I love that she was still able to go, “Hmmm, that’s pretty good. I think I’ll put tune to it.” [Laughs] She did, and she did a fantastic job. So that song’s been around all this time, and neither one of us had ever recorded it. I thought this album was a really good way to do that and to share that with the world. It was important to me that be heard and that he could finally get a song out there. I wanted to do that for him.

I think “The Ties that Bind” is one of the most eloquent songs you’ve ever written.

Thank you. I’m proud of that one, too. I think that’s something that every person asks themselves.

What was on your mind when you were writing that? Did you have to go to a certain frame of mind to get that song out?

Wrestling with the question of inheritance is a big deal for me. How do you take the good and not the bad? How do you make sense of where you come from, and from whom you come? And not drag all of the baggage with you? It’s a tough thing and it’s a never-ending question, right? It’s the theme of a lot of psychological exploration and family therapy and individual therapy. It depends on what school you come from, but a lot of things in people can be traced back to how they were raised, and by who raised them.

We inherited these qualities from our parents whether we want them or not. That’s what “All I Wanted” is about as well. It’s about that same thing – I really am sorry that I inherited your ability to argue with a fence post. But I’m really glad that I got, you know, whatever, this thing or the next thing. I think that’s something that we have to work at as people. I’m fascinated by families and by inherited traits.

There’s a passing reference in the book about how you can feel at home by putting books on the hotel nightstand. That struck a real visual with me. As you’ve moved over the years, you carried all your books with you?

Oh my God. You would not believe how much it cost to move those fuckers. Of course I did! And I’m sure you have the same problem. My books are my prized possessions in a way. I’ve got some guitars, I’ve got a kick-ass shoe collection, and my books, and my heirlooms from family and my little things… I don’t hang on to much. I’m not a hoarder of any kind. I like to keep things pretty sparse but it’s really difficult for me to get rid of a book.

You must feel very comfortable in a bookstore then.

I do. My dream job is to be a librarian.

I am curious about the book event that you just did in Mobile. Because so much of this book is set near there, what was it like for you to go back to that part of Alabama and tell the story?

Well, I played Birmingham on Wednesday night and Mobile on Thursday night, so I had family at both of them, and I have to say I was nervous about talking about this book in front of them. I didn’t ask permission from anybody, and I don’t have to, and I know that, but I still understand that some of these memories are painful. I also realize that some of the things that happened to my sister and me when we were kids might’ve still been unknown to some of our family members and our friends.

So, I’m aware of that and there’s part of me that wants to make sure everybody’s OK. But I also know that’s a trap. And taking care of people is not why I wrote this book. My desire to take care of people is not at all why I wrote this. I think that that’s worth mentioning because I think that not talking about these things is part of what perpetuates the cycle.

So I did feel very much that because I had family in the audience both nights, the instinct is to not say it, to not expose the secrets, to keep hiding because it makes everybody feel better. But what I know is that’s exactly the opposite reason of why I wrote this book. So I had to balance that with myself, and I was aware of it, and I just talked myself through it.

What caught me off guard in this book was the passage titled “What Happens When You Hit Your Daughter.” I felt that deeply.

A lot of people are feeling that.

What have people told you about that passage?

I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they’re going to hang it up in their office because they’re therapists. And I am no therapist. [Laughs] Or any sort of professional. I wrote that passage because I had done so much reading and research on the family and cyclical violence and what the effects of abuse are. On an intellectual level, it’s interesting, but on an emotional and personal level, it’s devastating to me. I have seen to varying degrees all of those things I talk about in that passage applied to my sister, I think. So I wrote it for us.

Look, it’s like this. I recognize that this book has done a lot for me in terms of me coming to terms with my childhood and in realizing what the fallout has been on us. It showed me to myself as art does. We reveal ourselves to ourselves through making art. And the wonderful thing about art and the purpose that it serves in the world is it serves as a mirror for other people. The job of the artist is to reflect the world.

And what I’m getting back from the world about this book is that it is encouraging other people to look under their own rocks and to look at themselves and look at where they came from. They want to then tell me their stories, which is a lot to absorb but I’m also honored and I’m happy about that because so much of these sorts of things are made worse by the shame that they put on us, because we’re told not to talk about Daddy’s drinking or Mama’s violence or whatever’s going on at home.

When children are told to deny what they see and hear and feel, they become distrustful of themselves. I have noticed that in myself. Because growing up we were always told, “Don’t say anything about this. Don’t say anything about that.” In essence, “This isn’t happening,” because you have to deny your feelings. I think that’s absolutely the wrong path. So if someone is able to speak their truth because I spoke mine, then it means I did a good thing.

Photo Credit: Heidi Ross