Tag: ballads

Into the Squishy Middle: Humbird Celebrates Being Wrong on ‘Right On’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When I first heard Right On, the new album from Humbird, (the moniker for Minnesota-based singer-songwriter Siri Undlin), I thought immediately of Jason Molina and Magnolia Electric Co. There’s an emotional rawness in the production paired with a choral background vocal style on songs like “Fast Food” that reflects a Midwestern landscape to my ears. Imagine a million ears of corn singing to nobody in the blazing heat of summer, right beside a sprawling concrete strip mall.

“Quilted miles of iron and wheat / does it count, if it just repeats?” Undlin sings.

I had the privilege of talking to Undlin over the phone about her new album, while she was at home in Minnesota and I was in a parking lot outside of a Barnes & Noble somewhere in Maryland. The first thing I asked was if she was familiar with Molina’s work, and much to my surprise, she was not. So, I will have to assume that what I heard as historical reference is merely a shared landscape of influence and delicious, melancholy songwriting.

Throughout her new album Right On, Humbird explores the human desire to retreat into ease, safety, and ignorance, rather than put oneself at risk of being wrong. Undlin begins this exploration with the experience of heartbreak, but quickly zooms out to include topics of cultural conflict, destruction of natural ecosystems, societal priorities, and gun violence. All the while, these songs ask us not to know the answers, but to merely be willing to ask the questions.

On “Child of Violence,”she sings: “I could be a break in the chain / you could be a break in the chain / you could be a piece of the change / When you talk about it call it by it’s name…”

I have been a fan of Humbird ever since I saw her performance at the Mile of Music Festival in Appleton, Wisconsin, this past summer and I was thrilled to get to interview her about this album.

Central to this record is a kind of celebration of being wrong. Can you speak to the specific benefits of being wrong and what being wrong means to you?

Siri Undlin: I find that there is a carefulness and reservedness, a real fear of being wrong, that often gets in the way of important conversations, and prevents people from trying to learn and do better. The reality is that sometimes you’re wrong, but you still have a responsibility to show up and be a part of things.

Ah, that makes sense. So on the title track you sing, “You might be dead wrong… at least you’re trying…” This particular song seems to be about a romantic relationship, but in a broader sense, is this about avoiding apathy?

Yes, it’s a central message of the album, and honestly I need to hear it as much as anyone. There is a time for resting and rejuvenating, but I think it’s important to be really honest with yourself about whether you are in that process, or whether you are making excuses because it’s hard. You have to be able to get into the squishy middle of things and really dig in.

I’m from Minnesota and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, which I have written about explicitly on other records, I’ve had to realize how slow change can be. You have that initial communal outrage, but then what happens a year later? What happens two years later?

Whether its a global event or personal event, I’ve done a lot of growing up and I can’t just ignore these things. It’s a kind of rugged realism that comes with this greater knowledge, which can be really beautiful, but there’s a reframing that just has to happen.

When you talk about rugged realism, it makes me think of your song “Cornfields and Road Kill,” which is one of my favorites on the album.

That is my favorite song to play live and has been for years. I just think it’s one of the more honest songs I’ve ever written. I was able to capture a lot of what I feel about the landscapes where I’m from and the complexities and subtle beauty of it.

There’s so many road songs, but there’s very few songs written about the landscapes of the Midwest; roadkill and monocrops, soy and corn, and animals that are dead is the reality of traveling and the landscape and the economy of the area. It’s this visual representation of the choices that we’ve made about culture and society.

I was just mad about that when I wrote that song. I wrote it as a connecting tool and a bridge rather than just rage… but it is also just fun to be loud and turn up the amps and be cathartic…

I feel like the Midwest is having a real artistic moment right now with Waxahatchee/Plains and Kevin Morby, how do you think the Midwest and specifically Minnesota influence your work?

It’s tricky, because it’s such a subtly nuanced place in a lot of ways. It’s home, first and foremost, which is an endless topic of analysis. But creatively, I do feel really inspired by the landscape of the prairie, because of its subtleties. It’s a landscape you really have to sit with and pay attention to in order to understand it. You have to really slow down. I also think there’s a lot of space for a creative community, which is really exciting when you take into account income inequalities and the densities of the larger cities. There’s space here to collaborate and there’s not really the infrastructure that super ambitious people are interested in, so they move away… I think it was Prince who said that “The cold keeps the shitty people away!” [Laughs]

I am blown away by the production on this record, you worked with Shane Leonard who is another artist heavily rooted in the Midwest. What was the process like working with him, and what did that collaboration bring to the project?

Shane is a dear pal who I have recorded with before, so we have an established workflow. I, along with two of my bandmates, had been playing these songs live for a couple years on tour by the time we went to record, so going into it we were aiming to capture the live feeling of these songs, very much trying for the sound of a band in a room.

In approaching the record, I thought, let’s just go and hang with Shane and record live to tape and try to capture that energy. Because we do tackle heavy and weighty topics, but at the end of the day we still have a blast playing together.

I loved recording to tape. Instead of going into it with infinite options it was like, “Here’s how we play it and just do your best.” That infused the whole process with some magic and adrenaline, and it was awesome.

Humbird is a pretty fluid project, there’s a cast and crew of folks who are always shifting based on people’s lives, but I made the record with Pete Quirsfeld (drums) and Pat Keen (bass) and the three of us have been playing together for six-ish years. So these are road worn and comfortable songs that were ready to be captured.

I read that you spent a year doing research as a Watson Fellow. I’m interested to hear about what you were studying and how that has influenced your own music?

Yeah, the Watson Fellowship is this insane opportunity you basically do research on a topic of your choosing for a year. In my case, I was comparing Celtic and Nordic traditions and their storytelling. Historically, so much happened via trade routes and conflict, particularly in the balladry tradition and saga tradition, you will find that similar motifs and melodies crop up across folklore traditions that are also so specific to certain places.

I spent a year shadowing storytellers and musicians, compiling this bank of folk tales and ballads. I was doing a lot of writing and researching and playing music already, but I didn’t actually know that making music could be a job. When I went and did this research and was shadowing all these folks who were essentially doing DIY touring, or playing or performing in community spaces, witnessing how they move through the world I realized, “Oh my god, you can do this?”

One person I spent a lot of time with is Brendan Begley, on the west coast of Ireland. The Begley family are these incredible musicians on the Dingle Peninsula. It was the first time I was exposed to a DIY arts culture… it was so mush part of the fabric of life there and when I came home I realized I want to make art this way, I don’t want to do it academically. I feel like often in the classroom you’re in the business of taking art apart and I wanted to actually create it.

Speaking of the ballad tradition, when I heard your song “Ghost on the Porch,” it sounded like a brilliant remake of an old ballad a la Sam Amidon, but in this case it is actually an original song. I find your songwriting to be more through-composed in a storytelling way than a typical commercial song might be. Do you draw on that ballad tradition in a conscious way or do you hear that influence?

That is actually a song that started as a short story, a fairy tale of sorts. I love to write fiction and non-fiction and it generally happens on a Humbird record that one or two songs per album are drawn from a short story or some other writing format. I’ll write out prose and then think, actually this could be a song.

Anytime you’re writing fiction your own life is in there, but I have not personally had the experience of a ghost of my own likeness standing on the porch telling me to run for my life, which would be terrifying.

Sometimes with writing, it’s almost like dreaming, where you don’t know where things come from!

Photo Credit: Juliet Farmer

Lori McKenna Shows Love of Every Kind on ‘The Balladeer’

Posted on by Editor

When it comes to capturing life’s big loves — romantic ones, sure, but also the love between siblings, parents, children, and friends — Lori McKenna is one of the strongest songwriters of our time. The Stoughton, Massachusetts-based singer finds fodder in the everyday moments that most of us overlook, reminding us that every day is worth singing about.

Her new album The Balladeer, produced by Dave Cobb, embraces the same openness, expert wordplay, and quiet wisdom that have become her hallmarks. “This Town Is a Woman” uses extended metaphor to reflect on the push-pull of a hometown. Perceptive songs like “When You’re My Age” and “Til You’re Grown” offer hope and direction to a younger generation, while “Good Fight” is an ode to hard-won, imperfect, lifelong love. The Balladeer shows McKenna at her best.

BGS caught up with McKenna by phone about where she found the courage to try open mic night, the advice she’d give to aspiring artists, and the family moments that keep her centered.

BGS: How did you first begin writing songs?

McKenna: I started writing songs with my two older brothers that were songwriters. They always wrote songs in their bedrooms and that’s what I would always do with my siblings. I grew up just outside of Boston and we were listening to singer/songwriters and talk radio and things like that, but not a lot of country music. But strangely enough, the first song I wrote was a country song about… a rodeo? [Laughs] My mother was like, Where did this come from? I joke now that I must’ve brought it along with me from another life.

How did that evolve into performing and writing professionally?

It was really unexpected. I’m sure my husband would say this as well, but I didn’t know that I could do music for a living. I never sang outside of our house, because I had such a strange voice — certainly, compared to my siblings, I have like the weirdest voice out of all of us. My siblings all sing so beautifully. [Laughs] I never thought that I really could do it.

I always say my kids really gave me the courage to really step out and try. I started doing open mics around here in the Boston area because we have this really great community of venues and a great acoustic or live music scene. But it was especially a surprise to me more than anybody else, that I could do this. It has been such a big part of my life since and I’m very thankful for it.

“This Town Is a Woman” finds so many ways to drive home the metaphor: “You curse her every time she tries to change / and when you’re not happy, you swear that she’s to blame,” which sounds like a tumultuous relationship, or “The way you talk is partly her fault / From the back roads to the church parking lot,” which sounds more motherly. What was the first example that clicked for you, that told you this was a comparison you could make?

The song came to me in a strange conversation that I had with Dave Cobb on the phone one day. He called, and he was talking about putting together a record of women singer/songwriters in the Nashville community. The next day, I was driving my daughter to school, and it just occurred to me that if a town could have a gender — you know, the way they name storms after women, or boats, or whatever — surely a town would be a woman. I mean, there’s just no question.

It’s very motherly, in my brain. She’s gonna let you grow up and push you out, but she’s gonna wait right there for you to come home if you need her. She’s always gonna see you as yourself. She’s gonna know things about you that nobody else knows. It’s that calling; that call of the blood, the call of the hometown. Springsteen talks about it in Springsteen on Broadway, how he couldn’t wait to get out of there and now he lives five minutes from where he grew up. We all have that in us. And if so, it’s definitely because … well, it’s a woman.

And you live in the same town where you grew up. What do you love about where you live?

I think there’s just something in my bones about New England; it would be hard for us to leave here. I live just up the road from where I grew up in this town — I could walk to my dad’s house — and my husband grew up here as well. Our kids had some of the same teachers we had. Family is such a big part of both of our lives. I’m the youngest of six kids. My mom passed away when I was little, and when that happened my family just hunkered in on each other. The older I get, the more I realize that my siblings are such a big part of my life. I need to be around them.

You write a lot about family, specifically about motherhood. You were young when your mother passed away, but is there any specific way you feel she shaped you, particularly as a writer?

There’s some sort of button that was pressed when we lost my mother. I had just turned seven, and when there’s a death of someone that big in a family, and you’re that young, everyone’s going to come up to you and explain that your emotion is warranted: This is a real emotion, you should have it, it’s your right to have it and own it. When kids have really blissful lives, everyone’s brushing off their emotions a lot. You’ll be okay. You fell, but you can get up. You don’t need a Band-Aid. You’re tough. But because at such a young age, I had this family around me that said, “You’re sad, and it’s okay,” it stuck with me. I gave my emotions, when they came to me, a little bit more space than some people are able to. Me having the right to a very powerful emotion at such a young age informed a lot about being a songwriter.

What advice would you give someone who’s just embarking on a career as a songwriter and artist?

The biggest thing they have to be careful of is not changing themselves to bend toward what is in style at the moment. I was so lucky, in so many ways, that I started so much later than everybody else. I was too set in my ways to change very much. Your best asset is to be yourself — nothing is going to be always right for everybody, so you might as well. I think with any kid growing up, they have to learn not to look at social media and feel like it’s a lesson book on how to be. You have to be who you are right this minute, and it may be different next year, but you still have to be who you are as an artist — even if it’s an artist that’s not ready.

You recorded the title track a little differently than the others on The Balladeer, two vocals singing in unison throughout. Why?

That was one of my favorite production moves of the record. It was Dave Cobb’s idea and I’ve never done it on a whole song before. Making demos over the years, there are times where you’ll double your vocal on a chorus, but that song actually doesn’t have a chorus. [Laughs] That’s the reason he thought to do that. He didn’t tell me he was going to do it: We tracked live, and when we finished, he said, go ahead and sing it again. I said, What do you mean? It’s over! You’re crazy! And it just came out so good. To a producer, a song like that, without a chorus, is a little bit of a challenge. And he just brought it to life.

The main character in that song struggles with an insecurity — the idea that if she stops being sad, she won’t be able to write. Have you encountered that fear in the songwriting world — in yourself or in collaborators?

I definitely have had that conversation with people over the years, and I’ve always been kind of the opposite of it. I’ve been so lucky in my career and in my life, and I’ve had so many blessings — things I don’t even know how I got so lucky to do. People sometimes ask me, “How are your songs so sad when you’re so happy?” … But I think your job as an artist or as a songwriter is to learn how to not always need the pain to be able to write. Pain cannot always have to inform your craft. Once I discovered that character in “The Balladeer,” I liked the idea of her being challenged by that, and then coming back and realizing that there is pain in life no matter what — it just doesn’t have to be all of it.

So many of your songs are a good reminder of that balance, the good and the bad. Right now, is there anything in your life that centers you when things get tough?

That’s such a good question, especially now, because we don’t really know what’s next. Every day is like four days, emotionally. This whole time and space thing is like… you forget what day of the month it is, but you’ve had four emotions before lunchtime. For me, I still draw from music, and I’ve had really, really great dinners in the backyard with my kids, because everyone’s slowed down a bit.

In the past, my husband and I have taken the kids on vacation, tried to do all these things to make all these moments. But this year my favorite moments have been sitting in the backyard, with takeout, and talking to each other. We’ve all had to slow down a little bit, and as scary as that seems sometimes, I’ve tried to find the beauty in it. Watching most people around me find the beauty in it has been rewarding, too.

Photo credit: Becky Fluke

A Story Should Be Sung: Saro Lynch-Thomason on Ballads and Purpose

Posted on by Editor

On a hot August day in 2011, a long line of demonstrators were crowding the shoulder on the road that winds up Blair Mountain in Logan County, West Virginia. The protesters were speaking out against the threat of mountaintop removal coal mining that endangered the historic site where, 90 years before, 10,000 men and women had taken a violent stand for a working union and human rights in the coalfields. Against the reverberations of history rising up from that mountain ground, Saro Lynch-Thomason stood behind a megaphone and taught the crowd the refrain of “Hold On,” an African-American spiritual and mainstay during the Civil Rights Movement. Adapted for that moment and that struggle, she sang, “We’re gonna march our way to Blair and we’ll meet with our comrades there. Keep your eyes on the prize and hold on.”

Saro Lynch-Thomason sings with purpose. A large part of her singing repertoire and life’s work is Appalachian ballads — the narrative songs which helped an immigrant people remember their homes and histories in a strange land. Noted North Carolina ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams, one of Saro’s mentors, often tells of the older singers calling all the ballads “love songs,” despite storylines riddled with murders, jealousy, and bittersweet, complicated feelings. Whatever they are called, these ballads tell the truth. Set far apart from high-brow popular music, these songs tell the people’s history, brought over time from farmers’ fields and kitchens to concert stages and digital online archives.

In an age when music is most often consumed singularly — and through earbuds — a generation of young singers, including Lynch-Thomason , are committed to learning songs in person and valuing the stories that surround the music. Reviving the old “knee-to-knee” style of sharing stories line by line, Saro collects songs from mentors older than her and her age peers, then adapts the pieces to her own experience. In turn, she teaches workshops that continue to circulate this way of learning. Lynch-Thomason’s work with contemporary media and visual art also serves the mission of rejoining the music with its historical context. She co-produced the multimedia CD and educational resource Blair Pathways; wrote and illustrated Lone Mountain, a children’s book on Appalachian culture and mountaintop removal mining; and has recorded a beautiful solo album of unaccompanied ballads, hymns and group songs titled Vessel. 

Saro, could you tell me some about your first experiences with singing and what drew you to unaccompanied singing, in particular?

I was raised in a church that had a strong children’s chorus, so I grew up with a certain amount of unaccompanied singing in a religious atmosphere. I was raised Unitarian Universalist, and we had a very charismatic chorus director who exposed me to a variety of music styles, including shape-note singing. That was a big influence on me as a kid and, at the same time, my father played a lot of British folk revival music in our house and my mother played a lot of music by contemporary female balladeers — like Sinead O’Connor and Loreena McKennitt — and that music really struck me.

So I learned a lot of ballads growing up, just on my own, by myself, not knowing anyone else, as a kid, who liked to do that. Both of my aunts had been active in the folk revival and taught me a few ballads growing up, too.

I’m wondering, when you were young and learning some ballads — and as you continue to learn ballads today — do you think of them visually? I know you’re a visual artist and illustrator, so I was wondering if those two arts are connected for you.

Yes, definitely. I was raised doing a lot of art and had the intention of being an artist as an adult. When I’m singing ballads, I’m always visualizing the story in my head and I use that a lot as a memorization technique, as a way to stay rooted in the story and know what verse is coming next. In some ballads, I see myself as a character, especially when the ballads are in a first-person perspective, and I feel myself taking on and exploring the emotions and the attitude of that character. But, in other cases, I try to take a step back — especially if there are several different characters in a story. I take a step back and try to use my body in a voice that’s setting the scene for the story, and not be a character, specifically, in the story.

Speaking of singing and how it involves the body, I love your record Vessel, which you put out in 2013. I love what you said, that “with each transfer, the song is refitted and molded to the character of the singer.” So I was wondering if you could talk some about that and making that recording.

My CD Vessel is called “Vessel” because these songs, through the fact that they’re transmitted from person-to-person, sort of take on their own character and life. A lot of singers, including myself, feel like we’re vessels — we’re housing these songs until they pass on to the next person. In a way, we’re holding these songs that have their own spirits. So there’s a balance that you have to find between putting yourself in a story and also letting the story tell itself, and letting an audience or letting listeners interpret the song and take the song into themselves and let it be about their own story and their own narrative.

And Vessel, as my first CD, was an attempt to do honor to ballad singers I had learned from — including Sheila Kay Adams and Bobby McMillon and many singers who are long deceased — who told such beautiful stories and expressed themselves so beautifully … like Texas Gladden and singers from archives who we don’t know that much about. My ballad “True Thomas” comes from a woman named Becky Gordon from Catshead, Sugarloaf, North Carolina, and I don’t know much of anything about her, but she had this beautiful song that wasn’t collected anywhere else.

Speaking of your collecting and how you learn from mentors in North Carolina … why do you think it’s important to learn these songs in person, in addition to studying recordings, but also building these relationships with singers?

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is the broader oral tradition around ballad singing, which is what we say about those ballads, what we know and what we share about them, the stories we connect to them. Learning face-to-face with someone, you get to understand so much about them and empathize with them when they tell you how they connect to that ballad and what they have learned from that ballad.

Ballads are intensely personal and intensely public at the same time, and one song can carry so many different stories, depending on who you ask and how they’ve interpreted the song. And so, I think largely learning in what is sometimes called the knee-to-knee style is a practice in empathy and in deep listening to someone else.

I agree, for sure. Can you talk about how ballads, in part, have lead you to North Carolina and how you identify your home there with singing, and also the role of place in this ballad-singing tradition that you’re part of?

I was raised in Middle Tennessee, and a lot of my mother’s family is from East Tennessee and has been in East Tennessee for several hundred years. So I was raised with a big connection to the Blue Ridge Mountains and being in those mountains a lot. I decided to move to North Carolina after college to connect to what I had heard was a vibrant singing community in Western North Carolina, which turned out to be true.

Talking about place in these songs … even though a lot of these songs go back hundreds and hundreds of years, people’s experiences — and, I believe, their physical landscape — changes how they interpret a song and what the song is for. I think there is a way that you can hear the landscape in these songs and, of course, the topic matter of the songs themselves is often about the experiences in the mountains and that connects to experiences that my own family has had and contemporary experiences, too — anything from out-migration from Appalachia to digging ginseng to opposing mountaintop removal. This is a contemporary tradition, and what I’m compelled by is when that sense of place and attachment to this region becomes expressed in these songs in a way that other people can empathize with and understand.

That’s really well said. Tell me about your identity as an activist and how this kind of cultural preservation and singing that you do is tied to your work in social justice movements?

A big connection point for me, coming to Appalachia, was learning, really in college, about social struggles in Appalachia and about mountaintop removal mining. I started to learn in college about the West Virginia coal mine wars and fights for union rights and safety rights for coal miners and that really intrigued me, especially because I was raised in a social justice-oriented household. So I became interested in how people in this region had fought for their rights and how they had used music as a part of that.

Part of what’s intriguing about Appalachia, as a place and how it is viewed by the rest of the country and the world, is that it's a very historicized place — it’s a place that is put in the past. What I love about ballad singing and traditional music from the region is that it can educate so much about Appalachia’s rich and diverse history and it is used as a contemporary tool to express Appalachia’s current situation and its people. Something that I really enjoy doing as an educator and as a ballad singer is doing workshops specifically on Appalachian movement songs, mostly for the reason that it brings people up to date on Appalachia!

Yes, I struggle with some of those same things out on the road and I think it’s important work you are doing. What about your teaching, workshops, and also the Asheville Community Sing that you lead?

I mentioned a little earlier that, as a kid, I was raising myself to be an artist and through whatever I’ve done, it’s always been about stories to me, whatever media I’ve been working in. I like to lead workshops and performances that focus on a theme, like Appalachian movement songs or women’s stories in ballads. My goal is often to give people a sense of history, a sense of our heritage through song, but also to give people confidence about these traditions being a part of their lives and being a way for them to express their stories and to not feel stuck with the stories they’re given, but to feel that they can change them and keep on the oral tradition that way.

The Asheville Community Sing … that’s a monthly event that I’ve been running since 2010. I started the Sing when I moved to Asheville because I wanted to build a traditional singing community around me — kind of a selfish thing! What I wanted to do was build an environment where anyone was welcome, where everyone felt like they could sing as much or as little as they wanted, and share these fantastic traditional songs, most of which were designed for group singing.

So much singing in our contemporary culture is focused on work by singer/songwriters that is not designed to be sung in groups. I wanted to create a space where people felt empowered to sing and, in order to do that, you need to provide songs that are easy for people to sing together. We sing work songs and sea shanties and hymn songs and union anthems and all sorts of songs that people can feel confident doing together.

You talk about how the ballads still have this contemporary relevance, and I know you sing some recently composed ballads. Also, you compose tunes — I know you wrote a beautiful melody to that text of “True Thomas.” So you’re both performing old material and bringing new material into the present?

Different folklorists and singers have different ethics around how much to change a song or not change a song, and I’m basically of the opinion that, if it’s a good story, it should be sung! I think that the most important work that these songs do is to help people connect to their own emotions and their own narratives and to affirm their own experiences. If I connect to a song, but it’s not quite saying what I want to say, I’m all right with changing it … as long as its history is acknowledged in the process.

I found this text of “True Thomas,” which is the only American variant of this particular ballad that I’m aware of, and I just thought it was too precious to not bring back, so I put a melody to it that felt appropriate. There are other times when I have taken a song and politicized it or taken a song and made it much more personal.

A song I like to sing a lot is called “I’m So Glad Today I’m Ready,” which came out of the archives at Berea College when I was studying some there. This song was originally from the perspective of a woman who is going to Heaven and how glad and ready she is to go, and I changed the song to be, instead, about going back to the Blue Ridge Mountains and going back to the New River, which flows through Asheville and has sustained me and given me water. Those are the places I want my body to return to when I pass on. I wanted to keep the spirit of the song, but make it about where I feel rooted and what my story is in Appalachia now.

I think both those stories are important. It’s odd to think about, but perhaps 200 years from now, some folks are going to be referring to singers like you and me as the ancestors who were singing these songs. So we’re constructing these stories and other people can take them or leave them and whatever is relevant will stick.

Ballads are so functional. People sang them in their homes while they worked or were rocking their children or passing the time on long journeys. People really held dear that history and that singing of the ballads. What role do ballads and singing play in your life — what function do they serve for you?

I think, at my core, these songs, what they help me do is emotionally process my experiences. I was teaching a workshop recently on women’s stories in ballads, and something that came up from a lot of people is that there are songs on pretty hard topics for women that many of us enjoy singing by ourselves, but would not share in a group because the content can be disturbing. And, yet, we sing these songs all the time by ourselves because they help us process our experiences. I think that’s a big resource that these songs can provide.

They also help me connect to my fellow humans in that magic way that, when a group of people are sharing vibrations in a room — making vibrations together with their voices — we learn to immediately connect with each other no matter how different we are or how much we might agree or disagree politically, et cetera. When we share our voices, we learn to connect so quickly … and you can think about that from a practical perspective or a spiritual perspective, but that’s another way that these songs help me in my daily life.

Sam Gleaves is a folk singer and songwriter from Southwest Virginia. His latest record, Ain’t We Brothers, is made up of stories in song from contemporary Appalachia, produced by Cathy Fink.

Photo credit: Sarah Morgan