Tag: bj barham

The Show On The Road – American Aquarium

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we’re back for the fall season with the first face-to-face taping in nearly two years. I was able to catch up with the fearless deep-voiced frontman BJ Barham of North Carolina roots-rock favorites American Aquarium, in the front bar of The Troubadour in LA as his tour was passing through.

 

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American Aquarium’s rawly personal new LP Chicamacomico dropped earlier this year and focuses on the twin losses of BJ’s mother and grandmother — as well as a dark point in his own marriage when he and his wife lost a child. He was already building a room for the little one during the pregnancy when everything changed. While fans have been following the band as a roaring country-tinged rock outfit since they formed in Raleigh around 2006 (the masterful Jason Isbell-produced Burn.Flicker.Die put them on the map right as they thought they would quit), it’s with Barham’s more poetic, stripped down offerings like 2020’s Lamentations and his searing solo work Rockingham that he is breaking new ground. Barham isn’t shy about processing his adoration for The Boss as the preeminent living rock-n-roll intellectual king, and there are cuts off the new LP like “The Things We Lost Along the Way” that feel like they could have been recorded in that haunted place alongside Nebraska or Darkness on the Edge of Town.

As a new dad myself who just experienced my wife going through a terrifying birth, BJ’s songs hit me a little harder these days. I can’t think of a country artist today with as big a following from North Carolina to Texas who would center the title track of his record around the unspoken tragedy of a late miscarriage, but Barham pulls it off with a remarkable sensitivity. Like Isbell, Barham notes that his career really began when he got sober and could finally examine the dark corners of his history, his relationships and the fractured history of the South he grew up in.

Though hard to say, naming a record about working through deep loss Chicamacomico makes all the sense in the world. It’s a real place of course, a life-saving station built in 1874 on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and a beach area where BJ and his wife tried to go to blow off steam and forget their sorrows. Now a proud dad to a little daughter (see the cheerful country banger “Little Things”) Barham has learned that in the end, being a father and husband first doesn’t make him less of a hard-working, deep-thinking artist. In fact, it’s finding that balance that has allowed him to write the most powerful songs of his career.

American Aquarium’s BJ Barham Takes a Long Road to ‘Chicamacomico’

Posted on by Editor

The first two songs on American Aquarium’s new album Chicamacomico refer to the past year as one that nearly “broke us.” It’s a weariness that frontman BJ Barham came by honestly, writing songs in the wake of a string of losses — the death of his mother and grandmother, the suicide of a close friend, and a heartbreaking miscarriage that he and his wife suffered through before the birth of their daughter Pearl, now 4 years old.

Ably produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger and Hurray for the Riff Raff), Chicamacomico is titled after the name of a life-saving station on the Outer Banks of Barham’s native North Carolina. It is the group’s 16th album in a 16-year career, a span of time that has seen American Aquarium move steadily up the Americana ladder. They’ve gone from hardscrabble bar-band origins to headlining Nashville’s fabled Ryman Auditorium, and even the Billboard charts. They cracked the Billboard 200 for the first time with 2020’s Lamentations, and bigger horizons beckon this year.

BGS: When American Aquarium was just starting out, could you even imagine a career like this?

Barham: When I first started, my goal was a bar tab. I was pretty awkward talking to girls, and having a band was a way to do that and also drink for free. I thought it might last through college. Well, it made me leave college, and I have not had to work a straight job since 2007. I always used to joke I’d never live a normal life where you go from point A to point B. But I ended up at B, I just took a weird way to get to family, home, kids and security, both financial and mental. There were a couple of pit stops deeper into the alphabet. As a kid, you don’t have the foresight to even think, “Twenty years from now, I want to have 15-plus records out.”

I never looked up at a clock until I started reading articles where they’d list us as influences. I remember coming up and listing Drive-By Truckers, Lucero and Whiskeytown as influences. And I appreciate being thought of in the same way now, but it kind of hurts to know I’m not the young guy on the scene anymore. I guess I’m the wise old guy now? Or old wise guy? But I’m very fortunate. With social media, you’re constantly comparing where you want to go and not looking down the ladder at where you’ve been, how far you’ve come. The last couple years taught me to appreciate the journey so far rather than the rungs still to climb.

Do you have any personal connection to Chicamacomico, the place you named the album after?

It’s where I wrote the record. Last few records, I’ll take a writing retreat with the wife and kid, go somewhere for a week and a half, rent a good-sized two-level house. I’ll go in the basement and write from 8 to 5, then come out for dinner and hanging out. For Lamentations, it was a cabin in the mountains in Waynesville in the fall. From the subject matter in my notebook of one-liners, I knew this record would be dark from processing some losses. So I picked a beach town off-season, Rodanthe, and it was desolate as a ghost town. That brought some things out you can hear on the record, because I couldn’t have written this there in July.

Every day, I’d take a break at lunch to go on a run, and there was this giant water tower that said Chicamacomico. I looked it up, and that’s what North Hatteras Island used to be called by the Algonquin tribe that settled it. It means ‘sinking sand.’ When the U.S. Postal Service came to town, Chicamacomico was hard to pronounce and spell. So they turned it into three separate cities: Rodanthe, Waves and Salvo. What better name for an album about loss than a place that lost its name to ‘progress’? The place has its own version of loss.

Everything came back to this idea of loss, and where I was. And it was desolate. I’d go on five- or six-mile runs every day, and I think I saw two cars the whole week. There were all these $4-5 million beachfront homes standing empty, real Walking Dead-type stuff. Maybe it was the quarantine, but we’d go on these beach walks and there were no footprints. My daughter loved having this entire town to herself. It was the perfect backdrop for this dark, personal record I was waking up every morning to write. Once I wrote that song, I knew it would be the title.

The title song “Chicamacomico” came from a miscarriage you guys experienced, right?

It happened about five-and-a-half years ago, before Pearl. It’s a heavy thing that takes a toll on both of you. There’s a lot of shame and blame, wondering if you were too stressed out. Did you do something wrong? Did previous actions set this in motion? Who knows? It’s a song for people who don’t know how to talk about it. I have the gift of being able to tell a story, which I’ve sharpened over 16 years. I have a strong ability to boil something down to a two-and-a-half-minute story I can present to people. I still couldn’t have written this one at age 25, or even five years ago. It would have been too new. But five-and-a-half years later, it feels real rather than just angry or sad. You have to give yourself time to rise above it and look down.

The honesty of it evokes emotions in people. That’s what drew me to music, getting down to the quick, as honest and raw and emotional as I can. John Prine was the master who could make you weep and laugh in two verses of the same song, and that’s the goal, to make you feel something. That song’s been six years in the making and it was a giant weight off my shoulders. First time I played it live, someone came up afterward to tell me their story and I still hear that from people. There’s no reason for blame or shame, 30-some percent of adults will experience it whether they know it or not. If I’ve learned anything in the way of sage advice, it’s that dragging stuff out of dark corners into the light takes away its power. I wanted to make sure I did it justice, not as a woe-is-me pity party. Let’s overcome this, talk about it, get past it.

This is a heavy, heavy record with a lot of loss. Tell us about “The First Year,” the song about your mother.

My mom died New Years Eve of 2019. My family jokes that she saw what was coming, so she checked out. But nobody wants to lose a parent. It’s heavy, and we had a strained relationship toward the end. The loss did not hit me at first, because the funeral was the easy part — friends and family telling great stories about her. That was comforting. The hard part came with the first birthday and anniversary and Thanksgiving and Christmas without her. On my birthday, my phone did not ring at 7:34 in the morning with her wishing me happy birthday. That’s when reality set in that she was really gone.

For my dad, it was their wedding anniversary. They’d married on the July 4 Bicentennial, and now his wife of 44 years was not there. My dad’s not an emotional person, but that day was extremely emotional for him. That song in particular was one of the heaviest, and it grounded this record. When we started sending out pre-orders, “The First Year” emerged as the song that was just wrecking people. As a songwriter, you want to evoke emotion and I feel like I hit the mark with that one.

I don’t think anybody has made it through the last two years without losing someone, whether to suicide or overdose or Covid or just getting old, just the myriad things plaguing us right now. That song can be hard for people, but I hope it serves as a salve. I’m not as old and wise as some, but the last 20 years, I’ve come to realize that this just never ends. I went to the funeral of an old high-school friend just last week, not even 40 years old. Luckily, I have songs as a conduit. I stay pretty chipper because I’m able to compartmentalize things, get them off my back, put them into the world and move on.

On the lighter side, there’s that line on “The Little Things” where you say you’re “just a father and a husband who knows his way around a microphone.” It sounds like you made good use of quarantine time.

That verse just wrote itself, one of those moments where I was trying to talk to my wife and in runs our daughter screaming about some dinosaur show she was watching. A lot of musicians looked at Covid as the industry stopping for two years, no shows or anything. But me not being able to play shows allowed me to be present as a great dad and fall in love with it so much. Now there’s no amount of money that can pull me away. I’ve turned down a lot to be there for the preschool play, swim lessons, picking her up from school. It’s like a new job.

Now I still love the other job, after 16 years. But being a dad is hands down the best. Now real life bleeds in when I write. I started out trying to write songs I thought might make people like me. A lot of posturing: “This is what rock and roll is, I’ll write about living that life of the hard-partying rocker on the road. It’s what they want to hear.” Then sobriety came in my 30s and I was not the rock and roll guy so much. It was more about real life. Then the kid comes and it changes to bigger social pictures, which is where the last three records have landed. It’s no coincidence that that happened after fatherhood. It’s not a magic switch so much as seeing the impact you have on another human and having a platform to say bigger things.

Your voice is certainly out-front on this one more than ever before.

I’ve become more comfortable with being intimate. Brad’s been a lot of help there, encouraging me not to scream so much. Live, I’m emoting over a powerful six-piece band cranked to 10. Here I’m out front with the band sitting behind it. Feels like being in a small room telling you a story no one else can hear, kind of controlled and hushed. Confessing, which can be just as powerful as a booming guitar solo. After we were done, I thanked the band for doing exactly what they needed to do. Not a lot of bands are confident enough to do ‘less is more.’ At the root of it, we’re a big rock and roll band, but they were great about showing restraint.

You see this a lot in Americana, rockers who are songwriters becoming more comfortable with being vulnerable and intimate as they get older. All my favorite songwriters start doing more of this over time, where it sounds more like a conversation between friends rather than a transaction at the local enormodome. Maybe I’m at that point. I’ve attempted records like this before, but there’s always been some bombast. This one hit the nail on the head of intimacy for me. It checks a lot of boxes: honesty, intimacy, confession. Simple but powerful. It didn’t leave me wishing for more guitar solos, it left me fulfilled.

LISTEN: American Aquarium, “Wildfire”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: American Aquarium
Hometown: Raleigh, North Carolina
Song: “Wildfire”
Album: Chicamacomico
Release Date: June 10, 2022
Label: Losing Side Records/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “‘Wildfire’ is a song about someone coming along and simultaneously fulfilling and destroying your life. The destructive kind of love that burns fast and bright and serves as a lesson for future relationships. The kind of love that teaches you the definitions of unfathomable joy and catastrophic collapse at the same time. These are the relationships that you never want to end but know they must. The kind of love that, for better or worse, leaves its mark on you forever. We have all had these moments. We have all lost these moments. I wanted to capture the experience in a song, and I’ve always loved the imagery of fire. This cleansing destruction that teaches us to grow back stronger.” — BJ Barham, American Aquarium

BGS & Come Hear NC Explore the Musical History of North Carolina in New Podcast ‘Carolina Calling’

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

The Bluegrass Situation is excited to announce a partnership with Come Hear North Carolina, and the latest addition to the BGS Podcast Network, in Carolina Calling: a podcast exploring the history of North Carolina through its music and the musicians who made it. The state’s rich musical history has influenced the musical styles of the U.S. and beyond, and Carolina Calling aims to connect the roots of these progressions and uncover the spark in these artistic communities. From Asheville to Wilmington, we’ll be diving into the cities and regions that have cultivated decades of talent as diverse as Blind Boy Fuller to the Steep Canyon Rangers, from Robert Moog to James Taylor and Rhiannon Giddens.

The series’ first episode, focusing on the creative spirit of retreat in Asheville, premieres Monday, January 31 and features the likes of Pokey LaFarge, Woody Platt of the Steep Canyon Rangers, Gar Ragland of Citizen Vinyl, and more. Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and be on the lookout for brand new episodes coming soon.

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They’ve Got You Covered: 10 Tributes You Need to Hear

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

2020 was a year of many things – COVID-19, existential elections, the shuttering of the music industry, and on and on – but one common, non-catastrophic throughline of the musical variety was cover songs. Many musicians and artists, finding themselves with more free time than usual and more standard-fare albums and cross-continental tours back-burnered, took the opportunity to explore live records, collaborations, and yes, covers. From Molly Tuttle to Wynonna, livestreams to socially-distanced shows, covers became an unofficial pandemic pastime. 

Now, in 2021, many of these cover projects conceived and created in 2020 have made it to store shelves – digital and otherwise – and we’ve collected ten tributes worth a listen:

Shannon McNally covers Waylon Jennings

It’s fitting that Shannon McNally released The Waylon Sessions on Compass Records, whose headquarters now occupies “Hillbilly Central.” As Tompall Glaser’s former studio, the building helped give rise to country’s outlaw movement and it’s where Waylon himself recorded. With guests like Jessi Colter, Buddy Miller, Rodney Crowell, and Lukas Nelson, the project recontextualizes Waylon Jennings’ material, which is usually associated with hyper-masculine wings of the country scene. As McNally puts it in a press release, “What Waylon Jennings brought to country music is what country music needs right now, and that unapologetic and vulnerable sense of self are what women are tapping into artistically right now as the industry evolves.” 

Steve Earle covers Justin Townes Earle

Many a musical child has covered their parents’ catalogs in retrospect, but it’s rare that we see the reverse. A gorgeous, gutting, and laid-bare album, Steve Earle’s J.T. is a ten-song tribute to his son, Justin Townes Earle, who passed away suddenly in August 2020, shocking the Americana and folk communities. Earle’s signature emotion bristles and crackles throughout the project, giving Justin Townes’ songs an even stronger quality of visceral electricity. Proceeds from the album will go to a trust for Etta St. James Earle, Justin Townes’ daughter and Steve’s granddaughter. 

The Infamous Stringdusters cover Bill Monroe

Spread out from North Carolina to Colorado and beyond, the Infamous Stringdusters utilized home recording from their respective studios during the pandemic to accomplish musical creativity their jam-packed schedule hadn’t really allowed in the “before times.” Their brand new EP, A Tribute to Bill Monroe, returns the virtuosic jamgrass outfit to territory familiar to those who first found the group when they were cutting their teeth, striding out from traditional bluegrass into the vast, expansive newgrass-and-jamgrass unknown. The project illustrates that the true strength of this ensemble is found in utilizing traditional bluegrass aesthetics for their own creative purposes. For example, you might listen through the entire record without realizing the Stringdusters made a Bill Monroe tribute album without mandolin!

Mandy Barnett covers Billie Holiday

Mandy Barnett is a cross-genre chameleon; between her talent, her voice’s timeless Americana tinge, and her appetite for classics — from Nashville staples to the American songbook — she often finds herself reaching far beyond Music Row and classic country to R&B, standards, and in her most recent release, Billie Holiday covers. Every Star Above was recorded in 2019, pre-pandemic, and includes ten songs from Holiday’s 1958 Lady in Satin album – songs previously also covered by Frank Sinatra, Dinah Washington, and many, many others. The project feels akin to Linda Ronstadt’s pop and big band forays, never fully detached from Barnett’s country roots, but built atop their solid foundation. In another Ronstadt-esque move, Barnett partnered with recently departed jazz arranger Sammy Nestico; Every Star Above was the award-winning composer’s final project.

Charley Crockett covers James Hand

Country-western crooner Charley Crockett is truly prolific, having released nine full-length albums in the past six years. As the story goes, before his friend, acclaimed Texan singer-songwriter James “Slim” Hand passed away unexpectedly about a year ago, Crockett promised he would record his songs. “Lesson in Depression” captures the sly, winking quality of the best sort of sad-ass country, which isn’t burdened by its own melodrama. While it’s certain Crockett (as Tanya Tucker would put it) would have rather brought Slim his flowers while he was living, there’s a poignancy in how 10 For Slim – Charley Crockett Sings James Hand, like Earle’s J.T., immediately demonstrates how these impactful musical legacies will live on.

Lowland Hum cover Peter Gabriel

Lowland Hum’s album covering Peter Gabriel’s So — which they’ve cutely and aptly entitled So Low — began as a passing joke, but the folk duo of husband-and-wife Daniel and Lauren Goans followed the passion and fun that led them to Gabriel’s hit 1986 release, quickly unspooling the passing whim into inspiration for a full-blown project. “We already loved the iconic record, but in translating Gabriel’s melodies and otherworldly arrangements,” they explain on their website, “we fell even deeper in love with the songs, Gabriel’s voice, and his uncanny ability to fully inhabit both vulnerability and playfulness…” Their “quiet music,” minimalist approach is well suited to the material and the entire project is incredibly listenable, comforting, and subtly envelope-pushing.

Chrissie Hynde covers Bob Dylan

After The Bard released “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes” early in 2020 (and in the pandemic) founder, singer, songwriter, and guitarist for The Pretenders Chrissie Hynde was inspired to once again revisit Dylan’s catalog – a limitless fount of material with which she was already intimately familiar. Her new album, Standing in the Doorway, features nine Dylan tracks recorded with fellow Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne – almost exclusively via text message – and for their coronavirus YouTube video series. Hynde opts for deeper cuts, showcasing her affinity for swaths of Dylan’s career often overlooked by other would-be cover-ers. This classic, “Tomorrow is a Long Time,” feels appropriately sentimental and longing, a perfect encapsulation of the day-to-day of the realities of the pandemic, filtered through a Bob Dylan lens and Hynde’s distinctive voice. 

Various Artists cover John Lilly

John Lilly is a songwriter’s songwriter. Based in West Virginia, his original music has been covered by modern legends like Tim O’Brien, Kathy Mattea, and Tom Paxton. April In Your Eyes: A Tribute to the Songs of John Lilly gathers various artists from the folk, old-time, and bluegrass communities – in West Virginia and otherwise – spotlighting the incredible depth and breadth of Lilly’s catalog. The title track is stunningly rendered by Maya de Vitry and Ethan Jodziewicz, who were connected with Lilly originally through West Virginia’s iconic old-time pickers’ gathering affectionately referred to as “Clifftop.” Paxton, O’Brien, and Mattea all make appearances on the project, as do Brennen Leigh & Noel McKay, Bill Kirchen, and many other members of Lilly’s musical family and inner circle, giving the project an intentional and intimate resonance.

American Aquarium cover ’90s Country Hits

BJ Barham’s American Aquarium dropped a surprise album, Slappers, Bangers, & Certified Twangers: Volume One in May. Featuring ten covers of some of the band’s favorite ‘90s country hits, it’s a dose of all-star-tribute-concert packaged in a pandemic-friendly stay-at-home-form – and available on John Deere Green vinyl, of course. One particularly sad casualty of the coronavirus pandemic has been these sorts of musical nostalgia bombs – when was the last time any of us attended a theme night or tribute show at say, the Basement East in Nashville or Raleigh, NC’s The Brewery? – and Slappers, Bangers, & Certified Twangers has us in the mood to attend the first ‘90s country covers live show possible now that things are finally reopening.

Various Artists cover John Prine

A year without Prine seems far, far too long to travel with such a Prine-shaped hole in our musical hearts. But his presence and legacy certainly still loom large; the Prine family has announced “You Got Gold: Celebrating the Life & Songs of John Prine,” a series of special concerts and events held across various venues in Nashville in October. Oh Boy Records is also planning to release a new tribute record, Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2, to coincide with You Got Gold. The first two tracks from the project that have already been unveiled feature Sturgill Simpson performing “Paradise” and Brandi Carlile’s rendition of “I Remember Everything,” which you can hear above. Each month until October, the Prine family and Oh Boy will release another song from the project, unveiling special guests who each pay tribute to Prine, his songs, and the enormous vacuum his loss has left in the roots music industry.

 

The String – Steve Earle and B.J. Barham

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Two of the most exceptional and provocative songwriters of their respective generations take on America’s political divide and inject some radical empathy in the red/blue schism.

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Steve Earle addresses coal mining from the heart of a state that didn’t vote like he does in Ghosts of West Virginia. BJ Barham caps off 15 years of leading American Aquarium with the amazing Lamentations, which debuted atop the Billboard Americana chart. This is a timely and complimentary pair of conversations.

BGS 5+5: American Aquarium

Posted on by Editor

Artist: American Aquarium
Hometown: Raleigh, North Carolina
Latest album: Lamentations

Answers provided by BJ Barham

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

I can confidently say that I wouldn’t be the songwriter I am today if it weren’t for the discovery of Bruce Springsteen and his music in my early twenties. A friend played me Nebraska and I was floored. Must have listened to that album for a month straight. He was one of the first artists I have a clear memory of hearing and saying, “I want to do that.”

He writes these elaborate short stories set to music. The songs are expansive and cinematic. The characters are all people we know personally. Intimate snapshots into the lives of the working class. He speaks the universal language in a way not many people will ever be able to. There is something so simple, yet so complex about the way he tells stories. I don’t trust a songwriter who says they aren’t a fan of Springsteen.

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

I read a lot. I usually prefer fiction, but I’ll occasionally do a deep dive into a music-related autobiography. I tend to go for Southern writers and gravitate to the darker side of the genre. My songs take place in the darker corners of the Southern experience, so it doesn’t surprise me that my literary taste tend to go there as well. Faulkner, O’Connor, Harper Lee. The greats are what sucked me in.

I’ve been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy, David Joy and Barry Hannah as of late. There is a familiarity of place that I really enjoy about them. I think a lot of the flaws in the characters of my songs are a direct result of the books I read in my leisure time. In my lifetime, literature has informed so much of what I know about people, I would be lying if I said it didn’t have an effect on me as a writer.

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

The first time I played songs in front of people I was hooked. I was double majoring in political science and history at NC State University with every intention of going to law school after my undergraduate work. Then I fell in love with songs. I remember the first show like it was yesterday. Me and some friends from high school played (horribly) at Tate Street Coffee in Greensboro, North Carolina, in front of about 20 people. I was hooked. I became a student of every aspect of the trade. Songwriting. Performing. Business. There was no looking back after that first show. I had found my calling.

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

I played a lot of sports growing up and every time I would complain about a loss or another player just getting a “lucky” shot, my father always said that “luck was the product of hard work” and that is something that has always stuck with me. Work Hard. Get Lucky. It’s so simple, yet so profound. I have those words tattooed across my chest to remind me every morning that luck is not just something that happens to people. There’s a really great quote about luck being the intersection of hard work and opportunity. I think that was what my Dad was trying to say all those years ago, just a little less poetic.

When I started this band back in 2005, I knew I wasn’t the best writer. I knew I didn’t have the best voice. The one thing I did have control over was how hard I was willing to work. I truly believe that willingness to outwork anyone that was better than me is the only reason that I am where I am today. I get to earn a living from writing songs and playing them for people because I dedicated myself to the craft of songwriting and refused to take no for an answer. Some friends always say that I’m so lucky to be able to play music for a living. I just smile and silently thank my father for the lessons he instilled in me at such an early age.

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

When I first started writing songs, they were extremely detailed and autobiographical accounts of my youth. The partying, the mistakes, the love lost. As I got older, I started moving more toward character based fictional narrative. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a little bit of myself in every single one of my characters. Some more than others. I believe it’s important to always add those dashes of personal experience into the songs. It makes them more believable to the listener and allows you to fall into those characters as you perform these songs every night.

The fiction is where you have the ability to make the songs universal and not just about you. The bigger picture versus the guy looking back at you in the mirror. I think part of the craft of songwriting is learning that balance. The greats came out of the gate with that gift. The rest of us had to learn it the hard way. It took me quite a few years to stop writing about the person that I currently am and start writing about the better versions of myself that I hope to become.

Photo Credit: Cal & Aly

Squared Roots: BJ Barham on the Brilliance of Bruce Springsteen

Posted on by Editor

Bruce Springsteen. What, really, is there to write about him that hasn't been written thousands of times? (Although this ranking of all his songs is awfully cool!) He's a working-class hero, a thinking-man's poet, an activist-artist, a national treasure, and a songwriter's songwriter with 18 albums and millions of record sales to his credit. Over the past five decades, Springsteen has witnessed and documented in song the American dream — its promise, its realization, and its demise. For that, he can also be credited as an oral historian.

To American Aquarium's BJ Barham, Springsteen is also the greatest ever. Full stop. On his recent solo debut, Rockingham, Barham puts that admiration and influence on full display, working through an Americana song cycle about small-town living with a gruff voice and a simple message.

What is it, for you, that makes Springsteen so great?

Springsteen, for me — and I've argued this with plenty of people — he's simply the greatest American songwriter we've ever seen. [Bob] Dylan's good. I really like Dylan a lot. I really like Tom Petty a lot. Dylan wrote a lot of artsy, abstract stuff, too. Springsteen always writes to the core of America. Springsteen writes songs that 21-year-old hipsters in East Nashville can relate to or, you can play them for my father, and he relates to the same exact verbiage, same exact song. It's timeless. You play Thunder Road, you play Born to Run … you play anything from Born to Run and it could've happened today; it could've happened in the '60s.

There aren't many songwriters that we come across in this business that have that ability. And I'm one of the countless songwriters who spent my entire 20s at the “Church of Springsteen” and am, really, sometimes just doing a pale imitation. Everybody who writes songs about small-town living that comes out and says Springsteen didn't influence their music are liars. [Laughs]

He taught me that you can have a guitar and three chords and tell people stories about where you're from and people will relate to it. There's no greater lesson that I have learned than from Springsteen: Write what you know. He made New Jersey sound romantic. That's how good Bruce Springsteen is. New Jersey is a terrible place. Springsteen is the only guy who can make New Jersey sound appealing or romantic or nice or not a shithole. I can say this because my bass player and my guitar player are both from New Jersey.

Having never been to New Jersey, on my first tour, I made sure to book a gig in Asbury Park. On the way up, I was like, “Man, this is going to be a game-changer. This is going to be life-altering!” Then, you pull up to Asbury Park, New Jersey, and you're like, “What the hell?!” [Laughs] “Did they do nuclear testing here after the Springsteen records came out?! Maybe this is the desolate wasteland that came after the vibrant city he painted picture of …” Then you realize, that's how good Springsteen is. He's such a good writer, he can make New Jersey sound like a hotspot tourist destination.

Being a guy from a small town that's not really desirable in too many different ways, it taught me that you can sing about what you know — sing about things that are close to you — in a way that made it relatable to the rest of the world. On my new record, Rockingham, all of these songs are about my hometown. They are all about a very specific time and place. And I attempted to make these songs so that somebody in Anchorage, Alaska, or somebody in Wichita, Kansas, can hear these songs and put themselves in these characters' shoes. That's what Springsteen taught me, that most of us have the same perspective.

It's interesting what you said about how his old records are still just as relevant today. That's great for him — that he's able to write such timeless pieces. But it's also a little bit sad for us — that there's been very little progress.

Very much so. If Springsteen came around today, he wouldn't exist as Bruce Springsteen. He would've put out his first record, Greetings from Asbury Park, and he would've been dropped from his label immediately because he only sold 100,000 copies. And he might live in obscurity. If Springsteen came out today, he'd be one of the guys who're on the road 200 days a year playing in empty bars singing songs about common people. It was the right place, right time for Springsteen. Luckily, Columbia Records gave him three shots. That's unheard of today.

Well, he was a critical favorite, right out of the gate, some 43 years ago. But, you're right, the big sales didn't come along until later.

Don't get me wrong, by '84 or '85, that man was playing football stadiums — a level of fame, arguably, nobody today really understands … unless you're Beyoncé.

Right. A singer/songwriter doesn't do that.

Nobody walks into Giants Stadium and plays, at the root of it, folk music. Don't get me wrong: He had the bombastic band and, in the '80s, he made the horrible decision to add synthesizers to everything; but, at the base of everything, those are three-chord folk songs. Nebraska is a great example of what Springsteen sounds like in his room just playing an acoustic guitar.

I was just listening to Nebraska and Tom Joad. That's John Moreland. That's Jason Isbell. That's Lori McKenna. Those are the artists making that kind of music today. But, yeah, they are, at best, playing a nice theatre or maybe a small shed.

If you look at some of the outtakes from Nebraska … “Born in the U.S.A.” was supposed to be on Nebraska and there are acoustic versions floating around of demos he did for “Born in the U.S.A.” It's a haunting folk song about the reality of the Vietnam War and what it did to the American psyche. But, if you talk to anybody my age about “Born in the U.S.A.,” it's, “Oh, that's that cheesy Springsteen song.” It's all because of that synth line that makes it danceable and pop-py and sellable. But, when you strip everything away from any of his songs, they're John Moreland, they're Jason Isbell. They're everybody that we look up to today in the Americana scene. Springsteen just put 20 instruments over the top of it to sell it.

But he was a product of his environment. That's what was going on in New Jersey. If you wanted to play on the beach, you had to have a band that made people dance. He learned that, as long as he had the band to make people move, he can sell it mainstream. And he got to sneak in all these amazing poems. The best part about it was, America thought, “This is really catchy.” But they were listening to, in my opinion, the greatest American songwriter ever to write songs.

It's interesting because, I think, those are the people — much like Ronald Reagan trying to use it for a campaign song — they weren't listening. They're listening on the surface to the riff and the chorus, but they weren't actually tuning into it.

And it blows my mind because the first line of that song is such an epic line: “Born down in a dead man's town. The first kick I took was when I hit the ground.” WHAT?! [Laughs]

[Laughs] So do you have a favorite era or album? Or can you not pick?

For me, it's Born to Run. It's eight songs. It's perfect. A 47-minute record. It's funny that my debut is an eight-song, 45-minute record.

[Laughs] Hmmm. That is interesting.

[Laughs] Springsteen taught me that, nowadays, everybody wants to put out 16-song records with a five-song bonus disc, if you get the deluxe edition. Born to Run, arguably one of the best records that will ever be made, in my opinion … eight songs. It's the perfect four songs on each side of vinyl. I can't even get started. “Jungleland” … I still cry.

Every generation has great songwriters. For my generation, Isbell is that … for me. He's playing big theatres. Let's be generous and say he's playing for 3,000 people per theatre. That's one-tenth of what Springsteen was playing. We'll never see anything like what Springsteen was. It was a cultural phenomenon, the fact that America rallied around a songwriter. Beyoncé is lucky to sell out a football stadium now and she had 16 ghostwriters on every one of her songs. Springsteen was a guaranteed sell-out. So, if he booked a football stadium, he might have to book two or three nights because it sold out so quickly. I don't think we'll ever see that again, in our lifetime. It was such a perfect storm.

Looking back, I don't understand how it happened. It's like if John Moreland got famous, or someone you loved in your record collection that you wondered why nobody else knew about them got extraordinarily famous. The closest we have, to me, is Isbell. Knowing him pre-Southeastern and going to one of his shows now and seeing how big it is, it's still not even a speck on what Springsteen was, which is hard to wrap your head around.

For more songwriters admiring songwriters, read our Squared Roots interview with Lori McKenna.

Photo of BJ Barham by Joshua Black Wilkins. Photo of Bruce Springsteen courtesy of the artist.