Tag: british folk

Folk Singer Sam Lee Instills Hope and Inspires Action With ‘Songdreaming’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Sam Lee’s musical career grew out of his environmental activism, from the Mercury-winning album, Old Wow, to his ongoing conservation project Singing with Nightingales. The British folk star’s fourth album, songdreaming, released earlier this year, is his most creative venture yet. It’s a manifesto for reconnection with nature constructed from luscious, haunting reinterpretation of the songs of the UK’s Traveller communities.

Its title comes from the summer retreats Lee leads that bring people together to connect to their land and ancestry through song: “Singing to the land happens across the world in Indigenous communities that still have their relationship to nature very much intact,” says Lee. “It’s ceremony, it’s devotional work, it’s prayer.”

We spoke to Lee about songdreaming, how he sources material, queerness, connection to nature, and much more.

Sam, your music is usually based on traditional folk song, but these songs go far further from the source material than you’ve ever taken them before.

I had done a little bit of original writing on Old Wow, but this is an album where almost everything is written by me, some to the point where there’s no semblance of the primary folk song left. And that was a big risk, because I’m quite shy when it comes to thinking of myself as a songwriter. It’s not like I’m a seasoned Johnny Flynn or Anaïs Mitchell. It’s not my training, and I’m a very reluctant writer, because I failed English at school. I’ve always had a great sense of inadequacy.

What prompted you to step out of your comfort zone?

It actually came about in an unusual way – the songs were originally commissioned for a movie, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It was an adaptation of a much-loved book about a man who walks the entire length of the UK, a portrait of our connection to the land and the healing power of passage-making. I was already a great fan of its director, Hettie Macdonald – her first movie, Beautiful Thing, was seminal for me when it came out in 1996 – so I was really excited to be involved.

We arranged and wrote lots of songs to capture the mood of the film and some were used, but there were all these, dare I say, leftovers? Being the resourceful, waste-not-want-not type, I said, “Well, these all have something in them that is powerful.”

What was your writing process?

I don’t have one particular method, but the way I work is a bit like the way I interact with nature. I’m a forager for sonic and lyrical opportunity, seeing relationships within words in the way that I see relationships within the ecosystem. You start to find what Simon Armitage, Britain’s beloved poet laureate, will call the “neon” moments, things that suddenly shine.

Can you give an example?

Absolutely. “McCrimmon,” the third song on the album, is a ballad I learned from my late mentor Stanley Robertson, who was a Scottish Traveller. There’s a lyric in the original which is, “no more, no more,” but I heard it as “in awe, in awe.” Suddenly a whole song about the state of awe appeared.

There’s another track which is a love song between a fair maid and a plowboy – I recalibrated and reframed it, so it’s a more complicated relationship between species that are in a state of separation. The folk songs say everything already. I’m like someone taking a Shakespeare play, resetting it, maybe adapting some of the language, like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.

Which of the songs came easiest?

“Green Mossy Banks,” which is actually about pilgrimage, was so easy to write. It was like, “Oh my god, I’ve been wanting to write this song forever.” And they didn’t even use it in the film!

What is it in that song that you had been longing to express?

The story of the film paints this wonderful portrait of free passage – there’s never a moment where it deals with trespass or permissions or this idea of private land. No barbed wire fences, or angry landowners going, “What do you think you’re doing here?” One could walk from Devon to the borders of Scotland and never have any issue.

But there is no person in England who goes on a country walk and isn’t affected by our punitive, archaic, and utterly unequal private ownership laws. That’s why I was a founder member of the Right to Roam movement. For all its avoidance of politics, “Green Mossy Banks” is a deeply political song. Social and ecological injustice is at the roots of so much of our international crisis.

Is the UK not quite a good place to walk compared to, say the US? The English have ancient rights of way that allow them to walk across private land, whereas try it in the US and you might get shot…

Absolutely. But where does the US get their notion of land rights from? They were inherited as an enhanced version of British law at a time when, in England, if you were caught poaching a hare or something, that’s it, you had your hands cut off, or you were hanged, or sent to Australia.

On the music video for “Green Mossy Banks” we see you surrounded by various mesmerising English landscapes.

It’s a combination of many of the pilgrimages that I’ve made with Chris Park, a druid, and Charlotte Pulver, an apothecary. At cardinal points of the year – the solstices, the equinoxes – we lead communal pilgrimages to places like Stonehenge, or the South Downs.

Are there any songs on the album that were inspired by specific places?

“Meeting is a Pleasant Place” is very much about the Dartmoor landscape, down to the very tor that we filmed the video on. The exact location shall remain nameless, because it’s one of the few tors that exist in a forest, as opposed to Dartmoor’s sheep-wrecked landscape of denuded grassland. It’s deep in beech and oak forests, which makes it especially stunning.

And the song itself came out of a Devon Gypsy folk tune.

Yes, and it contains this rather mystical language that had become something of a mantra to me. “Meeting is a Pleasant Place/ Between my love and I/ I’ll go down to Yonder’s Valley, it’s there I’ll sit and sing…” It’s bad English, but at the same time so powerful in its ambiguity. It could be a love song between two people, but in that Gypsy corruption of the words, suddenly it speaks about something so much bigger. So then I wrote my three verses as a love song to the land.

The appearance of the Trans Voices choir on the chorus turns it into something epic and anthemic…

It’s English folk gospel, as I call it. ILĀ, who runs Trans Voices, is an old friend and when the choir was set up I said I’ve got loads of songs that I’d like to speak to the queerness of land. Folk song often tends towards the heteronormative, and I want to break that down.

In the liner notes you also talk about the queerness of nature, what do you mean by that?

When you look at relationships within the natural world, sexual or otherwise, what you see is massive diversity in roles and identities. In the fungi world, for instance, there are hundreds and hundreds of genders, working collaboratively in community. Humans, too, need to start to recalibrate the way we behave in nature. So much of our subjugation and exploitation of nature has come through a male-dominated worldview and it’s not working.

One of the species you have a great connection with is the nightingale – as well as singing with them in secret woodland gigs every year, you recently wrote a book about their threatened extinction.

Yes, and when I’m with them, for seven weeks each spring, I get this sense of what is it like to be in a relationship that’s falling apart. That heartbreak, saying farewell, and knowing that it has a time limit to it. That’s what inspired the opening track, “Bushes and Briars.” It was the first folk song Ralph Vaughan Williams ever collected, and it’s a lament of a man and a woman who are separating. As somebody who spends a lot of time in bushes and briars trying to keep a relationship with a bird going extinct happening, that’s a space that is very familiar to me.

Coming from a background of singing acoustically, outdoors, how do you work up the big, dense sounds that populate your albums?

I do my writing with James Keay, who plays piano in the band. We both want a richness of sound, so that what are often very repetitive lines and melodies can take the listener on journeys through different emotional states. It’s about trying to paint as big a painting as possible.

As well as strings and horns and pipes, you’ve added a more pan-global feel with a Syrian Qanun, and a Swedish Nykelharpa.

We wanted to create textures that gave a sense of both the ancient and the unusual. I’d never used a Qanun in an arrangement before, though I have used dulcimers before on almost every album, which are part of the same family.

Maya Youssef, Britain’s best-known Qanun player, features on the one folk song that you haven’t changed, “Black Dog and Sheep Crook,” about a shepherd being thrown over by his lover because he’s “just” a shepherd.

I’ve kept its truth and entirety – it just felt so wonderful bringing the tragedy and the melancholy of the Qanun into that song.

So often in this album you’re grieving our detachment from and devaluing of the natural world. But the spirit and purpose of the music, as you describe it, is also to re-establish those connections. What are your current priorities for climate activism?

At the moment, there’s a big campaign to get young people voting, and voting for nature, in the UK. Hope for me is always about having a plan. And there are many brilliant plans out there. It’s about overcoming apathy and resistance and reawakening people to what we have to lose.

I can’t speak to what I think the outcomes will be, I think that’s a dangerous thing to do. But I hope that the album has as many opportunities to instill hope and beauty as there are moments of doom and tragedy.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

WATCH: Teddy and Richard Thompson Swap Songs on ‘Woodstock Sessions’

Posted on by Editor

As we begin to roll into a new year, it is important to remember the important things in life and to be thankful for the goodness around us, like health, family, and music. In this edition of Friends & Neighbors, father and son Teddy Thompson and Richard Thompson grace the camera and perform a lovely set of songs for a Woodstock Sessions crew. With familiarity and comfort that only kinship can produce, the two share laughs, smiles, and charming songs that have decorated each of their respected careers.

The sessions kick off with the title track from Teddy Thompson’s new album, Heartbreaker Please. It’s his first solo release since 2011 and a complete representation of what he describes as a catholic taste in music, enjoying sounds and styles from many eras and genres. In addition, this Woodstock Session includes two of Richard Thompson’s landmark songs, as well as a cover of “Cut Across Shorty.” The fun and joviality this duo has while performing together is enough to warm the heart and kindle the flames of thankfulness and reflection. Watch these British icons share the frame here.

 

Sam Lee’s Garden Grows Songs and Fights Climate Change

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

A lush, resplendent, living and breathing album, Sam Lee’s brand new record, Old Wow, is something of a garden — and not simply because the opening track, “The Garden of England/Seeds of Love” sets such a tone. In this arboretum, Lee is collecting the most rare and fragile of cultivars — ancient folk songs. He is carefully tending them, gently fertilizing, grafting, hybridizing, and cross-pollinating them with bits of himself, bits of this global moment, and bits of this generation.

BGS contributor Justin Hiltner strolled down New Orleans’ Canal Street with Lee during Folk Alliance International to find a secluded, sunshine-y balcony for a chat about action, queerness, folk traditions, fatherhood, and much more.

My first experience with the new record was the video for “The Garden of England.” It felt so lush and verdant, it immediately made me think of your relationship with nature and the ecosystems you operate in, as well as your environmental activism. How strong of a presence do you think that part of your life — the activism, especially the environmental aspects — carries through the album? It’s visible in a lot of places overtly, but there’s an undercurrent in there, too. 

It’s funny, you use all of the words that I use, “How overt/covert” or “how implicit/explicit it should be.” Since the previous album I’ve gone through a very different journey of who I am, what I am meant to be doing, and why I’m doing music. I’ve come to the acceptance that actually, first and foremost, I’m an activist, not a musician. Music is the medium through which I disseminate, articulate my activism and my beliefs within that.

I’m very thrilled that I can do it in a way that is emotionally guided, as opposed to having to be statistically informed, or having the best persuasive political argument, which I’m terrible at. Through the mediums of song, ancient song, song that’s connected to the land by nature of its ancestry, I found I’ve got these really unusual resources and tools.

Something I like to ask musicians a lot is, how do we make this music relevant? How do we show people it’s not just throwback music or time capsule music? What I heard you describing is that you’ve found a relevance in these old songs for this current moment in geological time, due to the climate crisis, but also socially and politically. 

It is that, but I say it’s more about the essence of the songs. … I’m playing with tradition, but there’s a certain distillation process that I’m using within them, which like any distillation process is also highly adulterative and adaptive. I’m contorting them, but I’m also working with an unusual aesthetic, because that’s all we can do, be artists. I’m taking risks.

Like, with videos like [“The Garden of England”] and the one that’s just come out last week for “Lay This Body Down.” I’m going to use mainstream values and imagery and concept on some deeply ancient ideas in a way that doesn’t really happen very much.  And I’m not saying that’s because I’m pioneering! [Laughs]

I think it’s a vital thing to have to address, how does one tell these stories in ways that are going to be digestible by a new audience? One that actually would never encounter the tradition, in certain ways, because in the UK we live in a very musically segregated society. Most people aren’t thinking about music or that music can change identity, especially on such an ancient level. I’m having to test these things out.

Roots music and eroticism don’t really feel like they go together. “Lay This Body Down” feels so timeless and ancient, but the video for it has this level of eroticism and sensuality that feels current. I may be projecting my own queerness onto it, but I wanted to ask you how much of that eroticism comes from your queerness, or doesn’t it? 

You know, you might be the first person to ask me these questions. Generally music journalists where I come from are uninterested in that, or the ones that are wouldn’t come across me.

I didn’t approach it from a sense of wanting to work with queerness, I love working with dance. I come from a dance background 

And dance is very queer as is. 

It is, but why does it have to be? Because the irony is, and it shouldn’t make any difference, that all the dancers in that video are heterosexual. That doesn’t matter, but it was so wonderful working with men who were actually very comfortable with their heterosexuality, but also in their intimacy and physicality and their sense of body contact. Working and being in that space was so energizing. It wasn’t erotic, it was simply sensual. The funny thing is it comes across as erotic, as homoerotic, but in all honesty I think that’s the viewer’s perception.

 Maybe what I mean by “the video feels queer” or “dance itself is queer” is more accurately, “It leaves the door open for non-normative ideas and feelings.” Is that what you mean? The viewer can sense this because you left a crack open in the door of normativity for people to step through?

You’re absolutely right, and I’m very conscious of that. There’s a very Caravaggio-ness to this film. You couldn’t put any more arrows pointing [toward eroticism and homoeroticism.] I’m also fascinated with the queerness of folk song, particularly in the ambiguity when men are singing from the perspective of women and all those sort of rule-breaking things that were never rules in the first place.

I think it’s only the conservatism, in the sense of boxing what “is” and what “isn’t,” that binary-ness, that starts to do that. When you actually go back into history, those sorts of boundaries [weren’t as present], and I think that’s what I’m celebrating a little bit.

It’s a song about death, actually. These aren’t sexual beings, they’re mortal or immortal or transitionary. Their nakedness is as much about that shedding of materiality of the living and this idea of the trajectory from one realm to the other. They’re all expressions of myself… That’s what these movements are all about, for me.

 That sort of ambiguity you mention, “Sweet Sixteen” felt to me like it was pulling from that tradition — am I reading too much into that? Where did that song come from?

Interesting. It’s not [from that], in fact, for me it’s the most heterosexual moment of my entire career, that song. [Laughs]

Interesting! And right, I heard heterosexuality in it, but also — and again, perhaps this is my projection — more than that, too. 

This is the funny thing about making music, once you’ve put [the songs] out, you don’t own them anymore. They’re not yours. And never would I ever want to make music that was utterly explicit.

The song was a really hard one to choose to do and I don’t know why I did choose to do it. It’s actually more about me being a parent, because I’ve become a dad. In many ways I’m living in a heteronormative set up, even though it is unusual. We’re not together and we don’t live together and we never have, but the itinerant-ness of being a musician and leaving mum doing most of the care requires a little bit of me acknowledging that, through song.

This is my acceptance that I am a bit of that, packing my bag and heading off, away from the family set up. It also holds a little bit of my judgment upon that nuclear family thing, of husband and wife and child at home, and my terror of that. Which, I think has nothing to do with being gay. I think if I was straight I’d probably feel like that, too. [Laughs] It’s very much me trying to channel what a baby’s mother is thinking.

You carry on this tradition of folk singing unencumbered by music, a capella, but that to me, as someone who is a singer and musician, is kind of terrifying. The space that you play with, as a vocalist, on this record feels so vulnerable. What does it feel like to you?

I think I’m quite comfortable with vulnerability. Which is sort of a paradox, in a way, because the point of vulnerability is that it is uncomfortable. I think that space of exposure, for me, is a very exciting place. It’s not exciting because I get to see myself more, it’s because by being vulnerable you have to step outside the realm of protection, of comfort, of security. In that position you can do much more interesting things, finding perspective and placement and by that, a relationality to the world around you.

[Sometimes] you have to be an outsider, and that’s something that, by nature of who I am — by being gay, by being Jewish, by being the kid that never quite fit into any of the places that I was I’ve always been in that position. It’s a place I’ve always been drawn to, most artists are like that one way or another. I’m not particularly exceptional, I’m not saying I’m necessarily special, but that’s something that I’ve certainly been accustomed to.

When it comes carrying on the tradition, I did exactly the same. I went down the deepest root of folk music, but never went fully into those folk scenes. I was always an outsider in the folk world. I was always an outsider in these deep traditions, I was never part of the communities that I’m learning from. Yet, at the same time, you find yourself weirdly in the center of these places as well. This idea of, there is no center and there is no outside. Actually, these are all constructs only in our minds and we are all outsiders in the end.

When it comes to the music — and it’s funny, because I didn’t mix the album, though I was very involved in it — when [producer] Bernard Butler did that we were very aware of keeping the voice up front and center. Maybe there’s a little bit of ego and selfishness that he’s recognizing. That, as a singer, you need to be center. You are your voice. Not because I want to be up front, but maybe because I’m very clear about what I want to say in this record, so I think I have to mark my place in that respect.

Photo credit: Julio Juan

The Show On The Road – Sam Lee

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show, Z. Lupetin speaks with renowned British song collector, sonic interpreter, roots music promoter, and deeply intuitive folk singer Sam Lee.

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Lee came to music almost by accident after a former life as a wilderness survivalist and nature advocate. Since, he has become one of the leading voices in Great Britain, saving the treasured endemic music cultures that rapidly disappear each year. His gorgeously delicate and meticulously researched debut, Ground Of Its Own, shot him from hopeful academic to nationally recognized folk star — partly by being nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. Lee has relentlessly worked to save and rejuvenate the ancient melodies and songcraft of Irish and Scottish traveller tradition, Romany rhythms and stories, and connect those traditional melodies to a youthful pop culture that is yearning to know where it came from and where it is going next.

His Nest Collective, an “acoustic folk club,” gathers artists, authors, dancers and theatrical renegades and puts on shows and events across London – making Sam a rare double threat – as both an artist and a promoter of other artists.

His newest release, Old Wow, drops January 31, 2020.

Baylen’s Brit Pick: Ferris & Sylvester

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ferris & Sylvester
Hometown: London, UK (Specifically, an area called Streatham in South London … They LOVE Streatham.)
Latest Album: Made in Streatham (See?!)

Sounds Like: Time-traveling musical beatniks plucked from 1960s Lower Manhattan and plopped down in modern-day South London with a bit of blues, a bit of folk, and a bit of alright.

Why You Should Listen: I first saw these guys last year on a chilly London night in a little candlelit hippie dive bar on a side street in North West London with precisely nine people and a dog in attendance. Being from Tennessee and living in South London now, I have a bit of a “Southern by the Grace of God” mentality, so I wasn’t overly excited to be going north of the river on a Tuesday, but I’d heard good things about Ferris & Sylvester — plus there was the promise of gin, and I love a hippie dive bar, so off I went. Lord, am I glad I did.

With clever, funny, touching, and observational lyrics and catchy, snap-along-able, sometimes dreamy music, I felt right at home with with my fellow South Londoners Issy Ferris and Archie Sylvester on stage, but you can be from anywhere and their music will hit a sweet spot for you. Before the first song was even finished, I knew they were something special and filed them in the “I saw them when …” category for when they were on everyone’s radar. I didn’t have to wait long — since then, they’ve opened for Tyler Childers, George Ezra, and Susto. They’ve played sold out headline shows across the UK, and their EP has garnered acclaim from critics, tastemakers, and fans, alike. Labels are falling all over themselves to sign them.

Here’s the thing: They played to nine people and a dog with charm and gusto, as if they were playing to thousands, like it was the most important gig they had done. That’s how you know an act is in it for the right reasons — they love making music, they have something to say, and they want you to hear it. I look forward to watching them as their stages and audiences grow. Sure, I’ll miss the dog, but I’ll still be able to say I saw them when …

As a radio and TV host, Baylen Leonard has presented country and Americana shows, specials, and commentary for BBC Radio 2, Chris Country Radio, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio 2 Country, BBC Radio 4, BBC Scotland, Monocle 24, and British Airways, as well as promoting artists through his work with the Americana Music Association UK, the Nashville Meets London Festival, and the Long Road (the UK’s newest outdoor country, Americana, and roots festival). Follow him on Twitter: @HeyBaylen

In Countering Melodies: Molly Tuttle in Conversation with James Elkington

Posted on by Editor

As soon as I get Molly Tuttle and James Elkington on the phone, the conversation immediately turns to who is the better guitar player. There’s no showboating or bragging. On the contrary, each insists the other is much more accomplished, much more refined in their technique. “I hadn’t actually heard much of your music until a couple of days ago,” Elkington admits, “but I have to say that you are the far superior guitar player.”

“No way!” Tuttle insists. “I love your guitar playing.”

Their mutual demurrals stem partly from modesty, but also from the fact that both Tuttle and Elkington practice such different folk traditions that there’s very little overlap in their playing styles. A bluegrass picker who grew up in California and made her stage debut at 11 years old, Tuttle attended the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston and formed the Good-Bye Girls. On her solo debut, an EP titled Rise, her playing is rhythmically complex, technically precise, and remarkably fleet, as though there are two sets of hands running up and down the frets, yet the guitar remains secondary to her evocative songwriting.

Elkington, who originally hails from a small village outside of London but currently lives in Chicago, is a self-taught guitarist with a background in indie rock, most notably with the Zincs, the Horse’s Ha (featuring members of Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater), and Wilco. However, his new solo debut, Wintres Woma, leans more toward folk music — specifically, the British folk revival of the 1960s, when players like Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, and Richard Thompson were melding early music, rural folk, jazz, and rock.

Their albums couldn’t sound more different, despite the shared combination of voice and guitar, yet both bluegrass and folk music value technique in service of interpretation; more important than the fluidity of notes or the deftness of picking is how the artist updates, refines, and furthers the musical ideas of the past.

One of the reasons I wanted to get you two on the phone is because I’m fascinated by the very different strains of folk music that you represent. Both of your albums strike me as using something — bluegrass or British folk revival — as a jumping-off point for something very different, very current, and very personal.

James Elkington: I didn’t really grow up in much of a folk tradition, outside of the fact that we sang those songs at school and they always seemed to be around. It seems like it’s probably part of my DNA. When I started writing my own songs, which was comparatively late, other people told me that I sounded like that. I didn’t really know that it was in there, and it’s one of those things that I’ve subsequently found I have quite a deep connection to. But that’s why I don’t perform an awful lot of traditional music, although subsequently I have gone back and arranged those tunes just because I love playing them. Now it’s part of what I do. That’s where I’m coming from.

Molly Tuttle: I grew up listening to a lot of bluegrass. My dad is a bluegrass music teacher who teaches all the bluegrass instruments, so I always heard him playing traditional songs. They seeped into my brain, I think, so that when I started playing, I was learning all these bluegrass songs and old traditionals. That was my background and, as I got older, I started listening to other genres and styles. I started writing songs and still had the bluegrass form in my head, so it was definitely a starting point for me.

JE: You know, funny thing that I’ve found actually … I find that somehow the physicality of playing folk music demands a certain technical ability. It feels good to play, as well as sounding good, and when I started writing my own songs, I wanted that to factor in somehow. In some ways, it adds not a limitation exactly, but something like that. It sets up a nice boundary to work within, if you use those traditional forms as a jumping-off point.

MT: It does make it accessible for other people to learn the songs and join in, too.

JE: And to actually know where you’re coming from.

What other music informs what you do?

MT: A lot of singer/songwriters, actually. I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, when I was starting to write songs. Before that, I had heard a lot of bluegrass songs and felt limited by that. But when I heard Dylan, lyrically and musically, he was just breaking so many boundaries and that opened up my songwriting a little bit. I was just really inspired by that. Joni Mitchell and Gillian Welch are big heroes of mine, too, and Dave Rawlings, who plays with Gillian Welch.

JE: He always plays the right thing at the right time. The way he thinks of arrangements is …

MT: Yeah, he’s doing a counter-melody sometimes, just always putting the perfect piece in. What about you? I’m interested to hear about where your playing style comes from.

JE: I started playing guitar when I was about 10. There are vaguely musical people in my family, but no one who really plays anything. And the guitar was something that was just for me — something I could do privately, sort of like my own private little island to go and visit. And when I started out, I was just really into chords. This was in England in the 1980s. I don’t know if you can have any conception of what that was like, but it was a lot of really jangly guitar bands. It was like this Renaissance of underground bands, like the Smiths and the Cure. When I was learning the guitar, I was really into those groups — particularly Johnny Marr, who was the Smiths’ guitar player.

MT: He’s one of my favorites.

JE: That’s great to hear, because he’s like really the last great British guitar hero. His guitar playing on those records is amazing. The strange thing about it is that I found out subsequently that a lot of what he does, in terms of using other tunings and his approach to finger-style guitar, is really from people like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, and Joni Mitchell — all this stuff that I didn’t grow up listening to, but somehow it filtered through him in a way.

MT: I listened to the Smiths so much in high school. I was obsessed with Morrissey’s lyrics, and then the guitar playing was a second thing that I got really into, but I’ve never tried to learn any of his parts to figure out what he was doing.

JE: When I was a kid, I thought that’s really how you had to play the guitar. What changed me was that, when I was in my late teens, I started working in a music store, and there was a guy there who was really into bluegrass. He wanted me to come and play tunes with him, and for some reason, I had no interest in playing the guitar in that setting. But I had this strange attraction to the five-string banjo. I never got very good at it, but I learned the basic rules. Then, when I’d been doing it long enough to realize that I couldn’t play it well, I just applied all of that to the guitar, and that was the start of me doing finger-style stuff.

MT: I play three-finger banjo, so when I play finger-style guitar, I feel like I’m using some banjo stuff, as well.

JE: So you play banjo and guitar? Do you play anything else? Any fiddle or anything like that?

MT: I’ve tried to play fiddle, but I can’t get the hang of it. I play a little bit of mandolin, but not very well. I saw that you play a lot of different instruments.

JE: To a medium-low standard, I would say. I started out playing drums, which I loved. The drums are my favorite instrument, but I didn’t ever seem to get any better at it. For some reason, guitar is somehow easier for me to play. I do play some other things, but it’s not to the point where I could actually say, “I’ve really got this down.” I think I have a really short attention span, is what it is. I tend to move around a lot.

But you played most of the instruments on your album, right?

JE: Yes, but the arrangements are pretty sparse. My friend Nick Macri plays all the upright bass on it. I’ve been playing on and off with him for a long time. And I have some string players who are part of the jazz and new music scene here in Chicago. But mostly it was just me. It’s some fairly simple stuff. I’m mostly self-taught on most instruments. I really took the slow way round. I learned mainly just from trying to play along with the record. Molly, I saw some footage of your band playing, and they all seem equally amazing. Where did you meet those people? Do you always play with the same people?

MT: It’s a little bit of a rotating cast. For the most part, I’ve been playing with Wes Corbett, who’s a banjo player I met in Boston when I was studying at Berklee College of Music. He was teaching there, and we started playing together after I graduated. Right now, I’m on the road with Joe Walsh, who’s also currently teaching at Berklee. He’s an amazing mandolin player and singer. And then Hasee Ciaccio is playing bass with me right now for the summer and fall, and she’s a great upright bass player who lives in Nashville. We’re actually neighbors. What made you gravitate toward Chicago?

JE: It was a few different things. When I was in my later teens and early 20s, all my favorite music was coming out of Chicago — the underground and experimental rock stuff. I had a chance to come and visit here with friends, and I found that it was almost exactly what I wanted it to be. I’m sure, when you moved to Nashville, it was because you wanted to be around that music and be part of that community. I felt exactly the same thing with Chicago. I felt immediately at home here, like this was the place where I wanted to be. It actually all worked out, too. I really did end up playing music with people whose records I had. It’s really a “Hey, let’s all pull together and make something” type of place. I lived in London before, and I never really felt like that there.

MT: That’s how I feel about Nashville.

JE: Did you make your record in Nashville?

MT: I did. It’s my first solo release, so it’s all original stuff that I’ve been working on for years. I did it in Nashville with producer Kai Welch. It has some of my favorite musicians on it. It was great to finally make something of my own, because I’ve done stuff with other bands before but never released anything under my own name.

JE: That’s something I wanted to ask you: Have you played in other people’s bands a lot? Have you ever been just a guitar player in someone’s band?

MT: A little bit, with different bluegrass people. When I was living on the East Coast, I used to play a little bit with this banjo player Tony Trischka, who is like a great …

JE: Oh my God! Really?

MT: You know him?

JE: Let’s briefly go back to 1989 here. When I thought I was going to be this banjo ripper, Tony Trischka wrote THE best books. This friend of mine was really into that resurgence of bluegrass that Rounder Records were putting out — Tony Rice, Hot Rize. He would give me all these records — Béla Fleck records, stuff like that — and Tony Trischka was one of two people who had written sensible, up-to-date books on how to approach the five-string banjo. So you used to play with him?

MT: I did a few tours with him. I always have a lot of fun playing in someone else’s band and being more of a sideperson. I find that a really fun role. And I have another band called the Good-Bye Girls that I play with. It’s all people I met when I was in Boston. We do a couple of tours a year, but that feels more like less of a lead role to me. I like stepping into different roles and not always doing stuff where I’m the lead.

JE: I’ve found exactly the same thing. I’ve found that actually being able to play in different bands and have the focus be different each time means I never need to take a vacation from it, because it’s different enough each time. If I was just a singer, I think I would need to take a break from time to time. But I never really feel like that, and I think it’s because I have enough plate-spinning that I’m always mixing it up. I can tell from the way that you play that you have a deep knowledge of the bluegrass songbook, that when people call tunes, you can just play them — which is not something that I can do. I can’t even play my own songs sometimes when someone asks me to do that. That’s always something I admire in other people.

MT: Oh, thanks. It’s a really nice tradition, because once you have learned enough bluegrass songs, you can make it through most of the standards, even if you don’t know them. A lot of the songs have similarities, and you can jump in, which makes it fun. Even people who are new to the genre can jump into jams and find their way through songs they don’t know very well.

JE: I stopped listening to bluegrass for a while, but then, a few years ago, a friend of mine who has a band called Freakwater was doing a tour to celebrate an album that came out 20 years ago [Old Paint]. This album had a lot of dobro on it, and they wanted me to play dobro. I play a little bit of lap steel, but I’ve never really played dobro before. So I bought a cheap dobro and really got into it! It totally took over for about a year. That’s all I was doing. But now I don’t get asked to play it very much. I played it a little bit on my own record and I’m planning on playing it more, but I think you actually have throw yourself more into the bluegrass community.

MT: Was it a steep learning curve for you, or did you find it similar to lap steel?

JE: It was not too bad. I could already play some lap steel, and I’ve played bottleneck slide, so I had a little bit of understanding. But I had to watch a lot of Jerry Douglas YouTubes! You don’t even think some of that stuff is possible unless you actually see and hear and do it.

MT: Is this your first solo album?

3×3: Ned Roberts on Big Bird, Berlin, and Bob Dylan

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Artist: Ned Roberts
Hometown: London, UK
Latest Album: Outside My Mind
Personal Nicknames: Nedley, Neddy, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

 

Just chilling in the back garden with @rebeccacollingwood

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If you had to live the life of a character in a song, which song would you choose?

I’ll say the Jack of Hearts from the long story song “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” on Blood on the Tracks. He doesn’t quite get the girl at the end, but he does get the loot. I’ve always pictured it like a scene from Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.

Where would you most like to live or visit that you haven’t yet?

To live, San Francisco or, perhaps, Berlin. To visit, there are still too many continents and countries I’ve yet been to — India, South America. But actually, I think the Lake District is next.

What was the last thing that made you really mad?

The builders drilling and hammering right above my head this morning. Working at 8 in the morning, what is this madness?

 

That’s the 2nd largest pair of bellows hanging from pub ceiling I’ve ever seen.

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Which Judd is your favorite — Naomi, Wynonna, Ashley, Apatow, or Hirsch?

I confess I had to look them all up, so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

Whose career do you admire the most?

The guy who’s been inside Big Bird for nearly 50 years.

What are you reading right now?

This year, I’m catching up on classics I should have read years ago. So it’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which to the surprise of absolutely no one, is really quite brilliant. I also just finished The Touchstone by Edith Wharton.

 

Broadway market putting on a big one.

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Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Both.

Whiskey, water, or wine?

Whiskey, then wine, then water. Reverse the process in the morning.

Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram?

I use them all for music, but I’m actually partial to Instagram …

United Bible Studies, ‘Recruited Collier’

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Though American music draws from dozens of different musical traditions, most of what people think of as purely "folk" music has its roots in the British Isles. Many old-time Appalachian ballads began in England or its neighbors hundreds of years ago, and reels and other fiddle tunes come from similar Celtic backgrounds. United Bible Studies — whose members spend most of their time in Ireland and England — are breathing new life into some of these old, old songs. The band's new record, The Ale's What Cures Ye, is a collection of reimaginings of some of these traditional songs from abroad. 

"Recruited Collier" is one of the album's nine tunes. The song is pretty but spooky — part of which can be attributed to the fact that it was recorded in the Mupe Bay Smugglers Cave in the English county of Dorset. "The tide was fast approaching, and in our haste, I sang 'take my heart' rather than 'break my heart'. Not only that, but I sang it twice, perhaps recalling Pavement's advice to repeat any mistakes you made so as to make them seem deliberate,"  David Colohan explains. "With no room for second takes, we made good our escape from the Smugglers Cave … and I swore to never haul a harmonium up and down a cliff face ever again."

"Recruited Collier" sounds distant as it begins, with a low drum, heart, and flute floating over sounds of rain. The troublesome harmonium comes in later, sounding almost otherworldly as it wheezes through the song. Let United Bible Studies enchant you with "Recruited Collier."

Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker: Exploring the Spectrum of Melancholy

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The way British singer/songwriter Josienne Clarke describes herself — as the committed harbinger of melancholy — brings to mind the spirit, if not the letter, of Sir John Everett Millais’s haunting painting “Ophelia.” Capturing Shakespeare’s tragic character mere moments before she drowns herself, Millais positions her against a lush landscape so beautiful it contradicts the melancholy writ large across her face. He captures in a frame life’s duality: how the dark exists within the light, how everything contains at least a piece of its opposite. In music, Clarke captures a similar theme, fascinated as she is with the spectrum of melancholy. She and her musical partner, Ben Walker, have a penchant for sad songs, either penning original compositions or interpreting traditional folk tunes that take advantage of the weighted solemnity in her voice. Walker’s arrangements punctuate her writing without adding too much to what she’s saying or leaving her words so bare they freeze. It’s an approach which won them the 2015 BBC Folk Award for Best Duo.

The pair made their Rough Trade Records debut in 2016 with Overnight, which showcases Clarke’s razor-sharp precision for striking upon despondent moments. Paradoxically, they tend to be happier times. On “Something Familiar,” she mourns the loss of an afternoon spent with her love. “For there’s no way of keeping the day we’ve just had,” she sings at the very end, her voice filling the speakers while Walker’s guitar strikes a final note before falling silent and letting her voice linger. Theirs is a realistic perspective more than a strictly melancholic one. If the only certain thing in life is uncertainty, there’s grace in allowing moments to breathe and to be.

If Clarke’s commitment to melancholy seems like an overly serious tone with which to present an existentially plagued perspective to the world, rest assured both she and Walker have a droll sense of humor regarding the whole thing. After all, anyone touting themselves along such lines needs a bit of grit — and a good laugh — to go along with the image. Laughter can exist alongside sadness, much in the way beautiful moments contain their own end.

Your voice sounds so mature and your subject matter is so somber, which belies your age, I suppose. Did this subject matter find you or did your voice find that subject matter?

Josienne Clarke: I don’t really think that melancholy is the exclusive privilege of older people. I’ve always been drawn to the darker songs. Even as a child, my dad used to play me songs like “Man of the World” by Peter Green, which is really, really sad. So I think it started off with that as a nugget for songwriting, and it seemed quite normal to me that song matter should be quite reflective and sad.

How did you two get linked up, originally?

JC: This is Ben’s story.

Ben Walker: I was playing electric guitar in a number of indie bands around London, and a mutual friend was doing some mixing for us. He had an acoustic guitar in the room, and I had a go on that just because I hadn’t played one of those — it was a Martin — in a while. He basically said, "Well, if you play acoustic guitar, what are you doing playing electric guitar in these bands that aren’t going anywhere?" I didn’t really know who played that music, and he introduced me to Josienne, who was at the time playing guitar for herself.

Josienne: I was playing bad guitar for myself, and I felt like it was holding me back, so I definitely had a vacancy for a decent guitarist.

You’ve described your writing style as being quite economical. I’m curious how you two work together as writers, but also how much revision plays into it.

JC: I realized what I was always trying to do is to condense an idea down to its smallest form, so managing to express an idea — and it’s usually something like the pain of existing, some sort of existential despair — into the smallest amount of words I could manage. And that’s usually the point at which I take the song to Ben, when I’ve got a kind of melodic and narrative idea down, and he gets involved in the harmony, which chords should go underneath where, and extra instrumentation.

BW: Sort of trying to get the song to a point where nothing else needs to be added and nothing else needs to be taken away. If you take something off, you notice it’s gone; but if you add something on, it feels like it’s overloaded, so it’s trying to find that balance. You can be as economical with that instrumentation as Josi is with the writing structure and the lyrical content, as well.

It seems like it adds a certain melodic emphasis to make the words shine that much more.

JC: I have a bit of a personal hatred of songs that go beyond five minutes. If you have a seven-minute song, you’re getting the song form incorrect. It stops being a song; it becomes a symphony of words. I feel like, when I manage to get it two-and-a-half, three, three-and-a-half minutes … done. That’s a successful songwriting endeavor.

So we shouldn’t expect any kind of major jam session from you two?

JC: We may get bored with our current set-up.

BW: We may record a jazz odyssey.

JC: We can never say never.

Like a folk opera of some sort?

JC: Oh yeah: ”Fopera.”

Are you familiar with "Texts from Your Existentialist” on Instagram, which plays off the "Texts from Your Ex” phenomenon? There’s a certain kind of humor that arises when you’re dealing with existential subjects, and I thought of your tour’s hashtag #MagicalMiseryTour. How do you bring a bit of light or humor to being the “harbinger of melancholy”?

JC: We’re both a bit sarcastic by nature, and I’ve always tried to keep to the principle of taking the music really seriously but ourselves not so much. So, in a live performance, that kind of conversation between the songs is of a comic nature, you know — not slapstick, but kind of dry and sarcastic. I started doing it originally because it made me feel more comfortable in a performance, but I realized that it kind of worked for the audience, as well. In 45 minutes to an hour of really intense music, they kind of need a little break between those three-minute nuggets of sadness. It balances it out, so it doesn’t feel you’ve been through some sort of trauma.

BW: You have to put yourself in the seat of an audience member, not just from a performer’s point of view, but if you were going to come along and see this: How would you feel sitting through an hour-and-a-half’s worth of music where you couldn’t laugh, you couldn’t smile, you couldn’t feel that anything you were doing? The amount of concentration needed to sustain that … you need a little relief in there.

JC: [Laughs] It also stops us from looking hideously pretentious.

BW: There’s also the thing where, although we do take some elements from classical music, we never do the kind of gig where everyone has to turn up in suits and sit in perfect silence from beginning to end.

JC: Well, that’s what I mean. It’s not a recital.

Turning to the album itself, one of my favorite lines on “Something Familiar” is when you sing, “There’s no way of keeping the day we’ve just had.” It’s like every beautiful thing contains its opposite or its demise. How do you live with that knowledge of everything disintegrating?

JC: I think everyone has to live with it, and I don’t know how people manage to live with it without being able to write songs about it.

I think people know it to an extent, but they don’t tap into that awareness as often.

JC: Yeah, maybe I’m the only one constantly banging on about it. That idea has kind of pervaded all of my songwriting in some sense. I just thought of “Silverline” [off Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour]. There’s a line about “for each pound of joy, there’s an ounce of regret,” and it’s that thing where, for every great moment, there’s also a tinge of sadness that that’s the only moment like that you’ll ever have. There’s a real beauty in it, and I feel like it forces me to make the most of those moments more. That knowledge makes me more inclined to cherish the life that I do have.

BW: Until you realize that all things must pass, there are two ways you can approach it: You can make all things last indefinitely. Yes?

JC: I’m just intrigued that you’re involved in this part of the conversation. [Laughs]

BW: I’m just thinking you can sort of embrace it and say, "Well, let’s just try and make everything last forever," or actually you can say, "No, look, we’re just going to enjoy the moment. We know it’s going to end."

You’re not getting attached to any one moment or any one person; you’re able to appreciate them for what they bring and then let it go.

JC: Yeah, I think that’s what we all have to learn to do, and I’m still learning or I wouldn’t still be writing songs about it.

But we tend to get very attached to things and, in turn, get upset when they’re no longer around for various reasons. I think recognizing moments and people for their fleeting nature is quite beautiful. I’ve really been drawn to your lyricism because it touches on that point more than what I’ve heard in a while.

JC: But I think that plays into the overall concept of the album — the cyclical nature — that everything has an element of change built into it. That’s the acceptance you have to make. It underwrites absolutely everything, everywhere, from the seasons to the moon to the tides to the sun. It’s an inevitable part of existence.

You’re not getting any kind of argument from me on that point. Besides your original songwriting, I know you’ve covered Shirley Collins, Kate Rusby, and Jackson C. Frank, among others. What do you look for in someone else’s music?

JC: We never kind of specified that we were folk musicians. That was applied to us, in a way, and we always liked songs — generally sad ones — but those can come from any genre of music. We have quite a wide interest. Our albums have more than just folk songs on them.

BW: Generally, when we’ve found songs that we’ve decided to cover, you actually hear it and go, "Well the sentiment works, the idea works." You start sparking ideas around and going, "Well, it would be great if we tried it like this." It goes from there, really.

JC: I’ll give you a specific example: Gillian Welch’s “Dark Turn of Mind.” I felt they kind of do it as a straight piece of Americana, but I always felt like I could hear a kind of torch song in there somewhere and I guess wanting to try that to see if I could bring that out of it some way. Obviously, I identify massively with its sentiment, to a point that I feel like I would’ve written it, if I feel like she hadn’t got there first. But we’ll say, on a musical level, I could hear another interpretation in listening to it and that’s why that one, specifically, was more compelling than some of her other songs, perhaps.

BW: We’ve never been ones to do a carbon copy of the original, because it already exists. Why would you do it again? So it’s that sort of thing where you reimagine things, or the classic one for us is to learn it, forget it, and then try and re-remember it.

JC: Yeah, you have to feel you have something extra to bring to it. It’s never going to be the original, but you might be able to add something else that makes it a credible interpretation.

That’s why I loved what you did with “Milk and Honey.” It was really something.

JC: That was weird because I don’t know how I thought of it, but I heard the melody and I thought, "Well, this melody will work with ‘Tis Autumn,’ another standard." I’m not sure I could’ve worked it out, technically. I just knew it was, and then Ben is tasked with doing the technical splicing and putting it together.

Like, "Here’s the idea: Structure it and make it work."

JC: Right. “Can you just make this work? Thanks. I know it will. Can you just do it?”

Going back to this Twitter description you’ve given yourself as the "Harbinger of Melancholy" — what do you do if men stop you on the street and ask you to smile?

JC: I find the phrase “Fuck off” is really … or I’ve got a special face. It’s sort of like “meh.” It happens to me quite a lot. People used to come up after the show and say, “Oh, couldn’t you just do one cheery one to fluff it up a bit?” And, obviously, they didn’t get a very good response to that. I was like, “This is what we do. This is what people come for. We’re not going to do happy tunes. If you don’t like it, don’t come. That’s fine.” But we’re not going to change.

As we’ve discussed, you tend to focus on these moments of joy that contain inevitable kinds of sadness. What brings you both joy? What moments do you look for that register in that way?

JC: I guess the weird thing about it for me is performing. It’s really sad music, but nothing makes me more joyful than singing. It’s the sensation of singing something really sad and completely full of joy, which is kind of a bit dark and sadistic and weird.

BW: I think the performance element of it is the thing that brings us both a lot of joy.

JC: And the process of making the album — when I think of putting that thing with that thing and seeing it form, that’s huge fun. Like trying a thing, taking it back off again, putting something else on. The process for us is incredibly joyful; it’s just the subject matter that’s quite sad.

Squared Roots: Courtney Hartman on the Urgency of Nick Drake

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Nick Drake is one of those musical unicorns who achieved amazing posthumous success, though enjoyed very little acclaim while alive. Having recorded and released three albums between 1969 and 1972 — Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon — Drake was working on a fourth prior to his death by overdose in 1974. Drake was plagued by depression and his work reflects a depth of feeling that can often only come from someone who has faced those sorts of demons. Still, there's a certain mellow peace in there, too.

It's that peace that drew Courtney Hartman into Drake's work. On the heels of three albums with Della Mae, Hartman recently released a solo EP, Nothing We Say. Though her earliest influences are guys like Norman Blake and Bill Frisell, Hartman was, in more recent years, drawn to Drake's spirit and captivated by his craft.

For folks only knowing you from Della Mae's brand of bluegrass-tinged folk, Nick Drake probably seems like a left-of-center pick. Connect the dots.

First of all, as I've been digging in the past couple of days, it's an endless well of darkness. [Laughs] I think it was somebody in Boston who told me to check him out. Probably Pink Moon was the first album of his that I listened to. I listened and connected, but it wasn't actually until I heard his mom's [Molly Drake] recordings that I was like, “OH!” It was like the bigger picture and it made me want to dig in more. I remember I was on a Megabus heading down to New York from Boston, maybe six years ago, and somehow came across Squirrel Thing Recordings. That was a little group that put out a release of Molly Drake songs. I was floored and listened to that over and over again, then went back to Pink Moon and dug in from there.

I think the first thing that struck me about Nick's playing … as, primarily, a guitarist, that's one of the first things I listen to when I'm listening to music. What struck me about his playing, maybe more than anything, was his rhythmic integrity … which sounds, potentially, so surface. But I was blown away by that. You can hear all the other possibilities of instrumentation while only listening to just him. He brings all of that into a singular voice. And, also, the way that he has an incredibly conversational style between his voice and guitar.

That's fascinating to hear you describe it that way. Not being much of a guitar player, that's not how I hear it, but I totally get it when you describe it that way. And, when I think of timeless-sounding records, his always make the cut. That's the beauty of roots music made with real instruments — you don't get caught up in technology trends that pin your work to a particular moment. There's such a purity to what he did … which ties back to what you were saying.

Totally! I think, particularly in Pink Moon. His first two albums had more instrumentation and were brilliant. He had a buddy from Cambridge do his string and horn arrangements. Reading about that a bit … He was working on that first album with Joe Boyd and he had brought in someone to do the arrangements and they just weren't feeling right, so Nick said, “Hey, I want my college buddy to do it.” Turns out, that was the first time Robert Kirby had ever done studio work before. Listening to those string arrangements knowing that is kind of mind-blowing. Obviously, Nick had a sonic vision and knew which direction to go.

All that is to say, those first two albums could sound dated, but I think that's more due to arrangement stuff. His third album, Pink Moon, absolutely could have come from any time.

It's stunning to listen to all of it and know he made it all before the age of 26.

It's insane! I'm 26. It's wild to think of that. [Laughs]

The depth of soul and emotion conveyed … it really is insane.

Absolutely. He also recorded Pink Moon in two nights — just him and an engineer.

Oh! I didn't know that. Wow!

When you hear it, there's an urgency about it, in some sense. I don't know … It's all kind of blowing my mind right now. There's a sense of urgency, but to me, that album doesn't feel incredibly dark. If you read about it or listen to other people's takes, it's often portrayed as being a really dark album because it maybe came from a really dark time in his life. But it doesn't feel that dark. There's a connection to it. I think what people connected to, after the fact, after he died, was maybe a similar thing … like the cult following of Frida Kahlo, where they connect at a very deep, foundational level with the raw pain she put into her work. The urgency comes from a necessity of the work. She had to make what she made. It was a survival work for her. I think, for him, it was also a survival work.

For people like that, particularly ones with mental health challenges, depression, music — or art — must seem like the only real truth in the world.

Potentially, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the only thing that can even come close to capturing the textures and layers and colors and all of the different elements that they are feeling and experiencing in one little nugget. It's pretty powerful.

There's a book by Elizabeth Gilbert called Big Magic. In that book, there are parts where she wants to debunk some common beliefs and assumptions about art and artists. One of them being … with so many artists, we assume that it was their art that eventually drove them insane — it was their craze, their need to create. She wants to bring up the perspective of that maybe being what saved them. And maybe there's a little bit of that in Nick's work. We can't say. We can only speculate. We have the music that he put out into the world, which I'm grateful for.

You have to wonder, if he'd had the success he had posthumously while he was still alive … would that have made it better or worse for him? That's another impossible thing to know.

In interviews with folks who knew him, when they question whether it could have saved him to just take him out to a bar and slap him around a little bit and say, “Hey, man! Wake up!” You can only question those kinds of things so much. You don't know.

So, since you are 26 and he was 26 … how do you gauge where you are? [Laughs] It's an impossible question, right? When you look at other people your age and what they've done … it's hard to take in, I would imagine.

[Laughs] It is hard to take in. I think an easy death of inspiration is comparison, whether that be boosting up what you've done or degrading it. We live in a really weird time of perpetual comparison. We're flipping through Instagram and that is, ultimately, just a big, white board of life comparisons. And we put filters on it to make it look better or more melancholy or whatever it is. That's our time.

[Laughs] That's funny. Technology has done a lot of wonderful things. And it also hasn't.

Reading about Molly Drake … she created just to create. She just made these songs. Nick's sister, Gabrielle, has said that they just had a reel-to-reel recorded in their living room. When he was a young kid, his mom encouraged Nick to play piano and he would just record stuff. They were just creating to create, at that point. Her songs … she never anticipated them going out. She was a poet, but never really had her work published. So there's this private sense about their work, as well, that I don't think we can quite fully grasp now because it's all so the opposite. And maybe Nick didn't quite know how to reckon with that. He maybe saw that private creation side of his mom, but also knew for his survival's sake … Who knows?

I sometimes will listen to Jeff Buckley's Grace record or watch a River Phoenix movie and wonder what they would have become. If they were that great at such young ages … but they gave us all they needed to give us, then took their bow and exited stage left.

Yeah. I think what you asked about summing up your life's work up to where you are … more than anything, music and work like his that does feel so urgent and inevitable makes me want to just buckle down and work and understand what it is that I need to do that feels inevitable. Because we put off those things. People like him … you go away from their work wanting to be more of your own thing, do more of what it is that you do. I think that the great artists, ultimately, that's what they do.

 

For more insight into artists' influences, check out LP discussing Roy Orbison.

Courtney Hartman photo courtesy of the artist. Nick Drake photo via public domain.