Tag: BGS 5+5

BGS 5+5: Cale Tyson

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Artist: Cale Tyson
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee by way of Fort Worth, Texas
Latest album: narcissist

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

This is going to sound self-deprecating, but my favorite show of all time was at this dumb barbecue restaurant in Kentucky. It was the first show of a three-week tour and I had assembled my favorite band of musicians. We rehearsed a ton beforehand and I was promoting the hell out of the tour for weeks leading up to it. Anyway, the barbecue restaurant was the first show. We were supposed to play for like an hour and a half, and about 30 minutes into our set, the sound guy came up to the stage and was like, “guys, no one is here…just stop playing.” So we did. I could immediately tell that the tour was going to be a major success.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Every single song I’ve ever written has been a tough time. I honestly have no idea how anything of substance ever comes out. Every time I sit down and write a song that I’m somewhat proud of, I’m like absolutely floored. I don’t understand how it happens. Then, I proceed to freak out and convince myself that it’ll never happen again and that was the last song I’ll ever write. Fast forward a few days, weeks, or months, and somehow it happens again…fingers crossed.

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

Before a show, I like to drink a bunch of herbal tea and use a Neti pot, then completely counteract that with beer, tequila, and some shitty food from my rider. I’m working on getting better at this.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Obviously, this would be Mark Kozelek (Sun Kil Moon) and a nice bread bowl of tomato soup from Panera Bread. I like to imagine that Mark eats at Panera as much as he mentions it in his songs. Panera sounds really good right now actually.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

I used to do this a lot, but lately I’m pretty transparent about it. If there’s a character in my song, there’s about a 95% chance the character I’m referring to is myself…or at least shares some essential qualities with me. I think my biggest personality flaw is oversharing brutal details of my life, but I’m working on convincing myself that it’s good for my songwriting.

Photo credit: Bridgette Aikens

BGS 5+5: Steve Gunn

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Artist: Steve Gunn
Hometown: Landsdown, Pennsylvania; currently Brooklyn, New York
Latest album: The Unseen in Between

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

One guitar player that has influenced me over the years has been guitarist Jack Rose. Sadly, Jack passed away too young, nine years ago, and I still think about him on a daily basis.

I first met Jack in Philadelphia in the late 1990s. I was just out of high school and getting serious about playing guitar. We both worked at place called the Reading Terminal Market, with Jack working at the coffee shop, and me at the ice cream stand. I would always walk over to the coffee shop when I had a break, and we would talk at length about various records and all things guitar related. I really looked up to Jack, and he was super generous with his knowledge of music to my young ears. I learned so much from those conversations.

He lost his job at the coffee shop suddenly for apparently not giving a cop a free cup of coffee, and immediately after that he started practicing acoustic guitar about five to eight hours a day. I witnessed the results of his woodshedding at a house show in Philadelphia shortly after that, and was completely astonished and inspired by his playing. Seeing his hard work pay off — and his demand for respect as a performer — was revelatory. Jack taught me how to practice. His willingness to share his guitar ideas, work ethic, and encouragement with my own playing has stayed with me.

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

I think the first moment I wanted to be a musician is when I saw Prince play guitar in the film, Purple Rain. When I was young I was very enamored with pop music. I loved Michael Jackson, Madonna, Def Leppard, etc. I watched a lot of MTV and listened to a lot of radio. Music was always on in the house, car, basement, or garage. My parents played a lot of records from the ‘60s, and they also liked the ‘80s stuff a bit. At a pretty tender young age, I somehow was allowed to watch Purple Rain, or maybe I watched it at a friend’s house — I can’t remember. I do remember being astonished by this pop musician who could absolutely destroy on guitar. He also looked cool as hell and drove a purple motorcycle. It can’t be denied that he was the best. He’s still one of my favorites of any era.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

I knew that I wanted to write a song as a tribute to my father, but it was hard to summon one during a pretty fragile and delicate time in my life. “Stonehurst Cowboy” from my new album, was emotionally exhausting to play and sing. The song is the deepest I’ve reflected on my own emotions since I started making records. It was a difficult, sentimental, but also very cathartic time to write.

The words came to me pretty quickly, but I had trouble singing it when it was first written. It’s an extremely personal song. I had to let my guard down for this one, it was almost as if I didn’t have a choice. It was a hard one to write, but I know I had to, and ultimately I’m very proud of it. My family and friends that knew him seem to really appreciate the tribute, which means a lot me.

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

Trying to remain calm is important! Nerves can be the worst deterrent in performing and recording for me. I’ve been figuring out ways of dealing with this for years, and in many respects I have learned the hard way. For a performance, I do a few stretches and breathing exercises to calm down a bit. Often times, especially with performing, I like to have glass of wine before I go on stage. Warming up on the guitar itself really helps also. Strumming whatever random few chords allows me to connect myself to the instrument a bit better. For me it’s important to connect with my mind, telling my body that it’s time to get it together.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I’d like to grill some fish, eat oysters, and drink wine with Neil Young. We could have a few bottles of really nice wine, a bunch of salads, a few different types of fish and oysters. This meal would ideally be outside, just me and him. Maybe a few dogs. I’m thinking this could be somewhere in coastal California, obviously, right along some rocky ridge somewhere. We’d light a fire after the meal, I’d listen to his stories, and later strum some old 1930s Martins together. Sounds good, right?

Photo credit: Clay Benskin

BGS 5+5: The Steel Woods

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Artist: Wes Bayliss of The Steel Woods
Hometown: Woodland, Alabama
Latest Album: Old News

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

My grandpa is one of my biggest musical influences. I grew up in a very musical family. Although most of them had a hand in teaching me about music, the most influential as far as style goes was Grandpa. I remember all us kids would be trying to watch TV when he would grab a guitar and start picking and pretty soon we were gathered around trying to pick along with him.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

One of my favorite memories of being on stage would have to be the first time we played the Opry. It was not at the very top of my bucket list so I couldn’t have anticipated the feeling of standing in the circle. There are so many people that have dreamed of being on that stage all of their life and never got the chance. Realizing that in the moment was one of the most humbling feelings in the world.

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

My family had a southern gospel band when I was a kid so we were on the road a lot. One day when I was eight, my uncle bought me a harmonica at Cracker Barrel. I’m sure he immediately regretted that when he realized I was gonna blow it until my lungs gave out and we were all stuck on a bus together for hours at a time. He finally told me if I was gonna be making noise I would have to start making it sound good so I did just that. With his help I learned a few cross harp licks and joined the band within weeks. I knew then that music was gonna be my thing.

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

We don’t do much as far as pre-show rituals other than the one most important thing for any musician to do before playing. Tune your instrument! I still fail to do that until I get on stage from time to time.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

If I understand this question correctly I would like to pair country fried steak, double hash brown casserole, fried okra and a sweet tea, with myself! I would follow that with a hearty helping of blackberry cobbler and of course, I would have to follow that with a day of fasting.

Photo credit: Alyssa Gafkjen

BGS 5+5: The Delines

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Artist: The Delines
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Latest album: The Imperial
Band members: Amy Boone, Cory Gray, Sean Oldham, Freddy Trujillo, Willy Vlautin

Answers by Willy Vlautin

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Man oh man that’s a tough question. I go in phases so I can’t name just one. I grew up worshipping Willie Nelson, he’s always been my personal sorta saint, next was X and then The Pogues and Los Lobos then probably Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong and a dozen others as well.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

The Delines were playing a gig in Madrid and in the audience, right in front of the stage, were two couples making out. A man and a woman and then two men, and I went to myself, goddamn maybe what we’re doing is working! With Richmond Fontaine no women ever came to our shows. It was all middle-aged drunk dudes and none of them had probably made out with anyone in years.

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

I always write songs thinking they are part of a movie and I write novels for a living so those two have always been a big part of my life. I love novels more than anything and I could spend my life in a movie theater. Since I started, I’ve written in characters and stories. For a shy kid it was always easier for me to do it that way. I could say what I needed to say without anyone looking at me. I was way too insecure otherwise. Writing in stories gave me complete freedom from everything, including myself.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Probably from age 12-26. I wrote obsessively, hundreds of tunes and not one good one. Not a single one. You would have thought I’d have stumbled upon one or two but I didn’t. But I loved writing them even though I knew I was no good at it. And then finally a good song came to me. I was 27 and worked at a trucking company loading trucks and all the drivers were talking about seeing shit on the road late at night, white line fever. I was like hot damn, I’ll write that tune. So I write the tune about a long haul trucker who never calls his wife and all the while his wife is on a bender and ends up in a psych ward. I was so proud of the tune, my first good one after 14 years of writing bad ones. Then I played it in a bar one night and a guy comes up to me and says, “That sure don’t sound like Merle’s ‘White Line Fever’ to me.” That’s when I found out Merle Haggard had already written the tune. Even when I was certain I’d gotten a good one someone had already done it.

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

It started for me around ten but I never thought I would be much of a musician. I just always wanted to plant my flag with musicians because I grew up believing in records more than anything else. Records were always my favorite friends in life. So after a while, just to get closer to them, I joined up.

Photo credit: Jason Quigley

5+5: Old Sea Brigade

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Artist: Old Sea Brigade
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest album: Ode To A Friend
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Here’s an ongoing list of fictional band names. I’m sure at some point some of these were rejected band names: Dog Park, Denim Ego’s, Definite Lefty, Almost Pasadena, Almost Passed Adena, Chad The Gardener, Spiders in Australia

Which artist has influenced you the most and how?

I’d say Tom Waits. A friend of mine first introduced me to his music when I was 16, and having been a big Springsteen fan, I found a similarity between his and Waits’ music. I came to find a lot of influence from Tom Waits, particularly by how he lets his songs speak for themselves. He’s not afraid to change sounds and consequently allows his voice to present itself bare-naked to listeners. There’s such an intense degree of depth and emotion in his music that always draws me in.

What’s your favorite memory on stage?

Back in February 2016 I was on tour in the UK and Europe with Joseph. For the London date I had the privilege of opening up their sold-out show at Union Chapel. The venue is an old church that has such deep history as well as amazing acoustics. The date was particularly significant because exactly a year before I was traveling around the Midwest playing to basically no one. One night I had slept in my van and woke up thinking I was going to freeze to death in a Walmart parking lot. Going from that to playing a sold out London show in front of 900 people, exactly one year later, was definitely a memorable moment I’ll never forget.

What other art forms inform your music?

I think in a lot of ways, dance has greatly informed my music. With that said, I’m a horrible dancer, but my mom was a professional ballet dancer so I spent a lot of my youth hanging out in dance studios. I’ve always been drawn to the connections between dance and music, especially for ballet. I love the unity between free flowing motions and musical rhythms, and how they seamlessly morph together to form an even greater artistic expression.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song?

I’d say I generally try and avoid writing completely fictitious songs. If it’s a character-based song, I still draw on personal experiences. Sometimes it’s easier for me to come up with one central character that embodies multiple people in real scenarios.

What’s the toughest time you’ve had writing a song?

“Love Brought Weight” was a tough one to finish. I wrote the main chorus hook years before I wrote the verses. When I initially wrote it I wasn’t releasing or performing my own music and couldn’t seem to figure out where the chorus should go. It was probably three years later that I wrote the verse to the song. I initially intended for the verses and chorus to be totally different songs until I couldn’t finish either. One afternoon I realized they were in the same key and they seemed to fit perfectly together. It was one of those moments where I realized, in just five minutes, I had solved a three-year puzzle.

Photo credit: Steven Mullan

BGS 5+5: Liam Russell

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Artist: Liam Russell
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest album: No Contest
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Liam Titcomb

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Up until a few years ago, it would have been The Beatles. I learned everything about popular music from The Beatles. Chord progressions, melody, harmony, rhythm, lyrics, attitude, production. … I was pretty obsessive in my teen years about them and I honestly think it improved me greatly as a musician. I learned to play guitar by learning all their songs. I completely learned how to sing harmonies by deciding one day to only sing along to them in harmony and because I knew the songs so intimately, it worked!

A few years ago, I started to dig deeper into lyrics and so I’m returning to other things I’ve loved over the years and going over the lyrics with more of a fine-tooth comb. Lucinda Williams is a really big one for me these days but also Patty Griffin and John Prine, etc. It’s a long list.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

I got to take part in a 70th birthday tribute to Joni Mitchell in Toronto for the Luminato festival. They got Joni’s band to be the house band, Brian Blade was the musical director and then there was a handful of singers. Myself, Chaka Khan, Kathleen Edwards, Rufus Wainwright, Glen Hansard, Lizz Wright, etc… Joni decided to come to the event and had said she wasn’t sure if she would sing but then I got an email that said: “Joni’s been singing at every rehearsal and has decided to sing a couple songs.”

That alone was exciting enough for me because I’d never seen her live before and now I was gonna be really really up close and personal. The whole thing was like a dream. I had to pinch myself even during rehearsal with those incredible musicians because Brian Blade is probably my most favorite drummer of all time and they were all just so damn good.

Then I met Joni before one of the shows (we did two nights) and she was delightful and had watched my performance and was giving me wardrobe tips for the second night because of the lights for my songs. It was wild. But all this to say that my favorite memory from being on stage is singing “Woodstock” with Joni and that band as the grand finale. That was just unbelievable and so special. I’ll never forget it. She killed it and she was so supportive of me too. What a woman.

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

I was 7 years old at an after-party for a big fundraiser show that was for one of my dad’s best friends, Bob Carpenter. There were all kinds of folk music big shots there and people were clumped into groups of four to eight, all having little jams. My ah-ha moment happened when I saw Soozi Schlanger playing Cajun songs. She was playing the fiddle and singing with all her heart and it blew my mind. I totally had the thought, “That’s what I wanna do.” And I did! I convinced my God-mum to rent me a violin, got my parents to beg Soozi to teach me and it all started there, playing second fiddle with Soozi and learning to sing in French phonetically.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

“To Be a Man” is a song off this new EP inspired by the #MeToo movement and it was definitely the hardest song I’ve ever written. I wrote it with my friend Robby Hecht (another great Nashville singer-songwriter). We had gotten together to write a song and started talking about the movement and what it meant to us as self-identifying “good guys” and whether we even really were good guys and it just spiraled into this heavy conversation about what it is to be a man and we thought “we should write about this” but neither of us realized how hard it was going to be.

It took us about six get-togethers to get it done and it was a slog every time. We labored over every line and made sure to run it all past my wife Zoe Sky Jordan to make sure nothing would be misconstrued. It was a serious challenge but one I’m very proud of. Frankly, after thousands of years of men taking advantage of women in one way or another and them suffering from it, it had better be hard and a little painful for me to write a song about it. Men deserve to feel a little discomfort for a change.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

I used to this a lot. I think it’s very common to do this as a young writer. It’s hard to confront your true self, let alone put it on display for everyone else in a song. I mean, how often do we even do that in conversations? The older I get, the more I value writers like Lucinda Williams who just lays everything out for all to see. Every ugly bump, every beautiful twist and turn. To me, the most fascinating writing is the honest and vulnerable writing because that’s what we all are! We’re vulnerable and we have warts and we’re just trying to figure it out and not fuck it up. I endeavor to never make this mistake in my writing again and really hope I only get more honest as time goes on.

Photo credit: Blu Sanders

BGS 5+5: Cedric Burnside

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Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

The artist that influenced me the most: Well, of course my “Big Daddy” (R.L. Burnside). He just had a great stage presence. And even though people loved his music, he played with so much passion that most of the time I don’t think he noticed! One of my favorite memories on stage was when my Big Daddy didn’t know there was a smoke machine on stage, so he stopped in the middle of a song and was about to run off stage, lol! That was a funny moment, lol!

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

Earth is my favorite element. I love nature, I love sitting on my porch listening to the birds, walking in the woods. It helps me think, it helps me be creative. A few rituals I like to do – I like to play my guitar a little and I like to meditate and pray before I go on stage.

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

I would say one part that helps me would be dancing, because when I see people dance to my music, it makes me want to write more. My mission would be to put as much love as I can into my music and spread it around the world.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

The toughest time I had writing a song was when my brother died. Normally I still could, but when he left me, it was just hard for me. Years ago, I hid behind a character when I wrote. But now I just try to stay true to myself, and tell it like it is.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Music and food! I would say eating a plate of pinto beans, and listening to a little of my Big Daddy and a little Fred McDowell! I knew I wanted to be a musician at a young age, since about 6 or 7 years old, from seeing my Big Daddy, my Daddy and uncles at house parties. That’s when I knew I wanted to play music for the rest of my life.

Photo Credit: Abraham Rowe