Tag: brittany haas

LISTEN: Carrie Newcomer, “Potluck”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Carrie Newcomer
Hometown: Bloomington, Indiana
Song: “Potluck”
Album: A Great Wild Mercy
Release Date: August 28, 2023 (single); October 13, 2023 (album)
Label: Available Light Records

In Their Words: “Writing and recording this song felt like a magical collaboration with of some of my favorite musicians on the planet to work with creatively (Jim Brock, Brittany Haas, Paul Kowert, Jordan Tice, Gary Walters, & Siri Undlin). ‘Potluck’ was co-written with a luminous new writer Siri Undlin from Humbird. We were both musing one day about the spirit of Midwestern pitch-in gatherings. Essentially, you choose to trust whatever people bring to the table. In times when there seems to be so much distrust and division, a potluck is still a place where we welcome one another with a bit of grace and humor, a place where we still meet folks right where they are — with all their joys and sorrows, quinoa, kale, chocolate cake, and deviled eggs.” – Carrie Newcomer

Photo Credit: Jim Krause

BGS Class of 2023 Favorites So Far

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Somehow, it’s July and more than half the year has already blown by! In many ways it feels like 2023 is still brand new, despite the calendar saying otherwise and the overabundance of amazing music that has soundtracked the past (nearly) seven months. With many more albums and songs yet to come, we wanted to reflect on the music that has stuck with us and become new favorites of ours since January. It’s a stout list – if we do say so ourselves.

We want to hear from you, too! What albums, songs, and artists have been the underscoring of your 2023? Who’s missing from our list? 

(Editor’s Note: Scroll to find our complete BGS Class of 2023 playlist, which is updated every week.)

Rachel Baiman, Common Nation of Sorrow

Fiddler, songwriter, and activist Rachel Baiman has been a part of the BGS family for quite a while now, but recently she joined the ranks of our contributors, as well. (See her writings here.) Her new album, Common Nation of Sorrow, has been a standout for the entire team since it arrived in late March. Though she’s always helmed her creative and musical projects, in many capacities, this record marks the first time she’s been the sole producer on one of her own releases. Her fingerprints are indelible and striking; challenging and convicting. It’s introspective, but expansive. 

boygenius, the record

An album so nearly perfect we just have to include it, even though some may believe its connections to roots music are tenuous at best. (We disagree, of course– and wrote an entire list of folk bands for boygenius fans to prove our point.) Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus somehow, against the odds, rise above the simple sum of their parts while reminding of former folk supergroups like Trio (that is, Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou) and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. 

Caitlin Canty, Quiet Flame

With its acoustic aesthetic and simple, string band underpinnings, Caitlin Canty’s Quiet Flame is a surprise superlative among bluegrass records released in 2023. Her past albums aligning more with folk, Americana, and singer-songwriter traditions, Quiet Flame was produced by Chris Eldridge and though the production values were quite intentional, the bluegrass result was more a happy byproduct than a deliberate destination. Filmmaker and playwright Noah Altshuler spoke to Canty about the project for a recent feature. 

Brandy Clark, Brandy Clark

The BGS team has been fans of country singer-songwriter Brandy Clark for quite some time, so it’s more than a little bit enjoyable to watch as more and more listeners and fans discover Clark. And they have so many pathways to find her, whether through her hit, Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, Shucked, her collaboration with Brandi Carlile – who produced the new, self-titled album – or her many charting hit songs. There’s a point of view on Brandy Clark that we never knew we missed before, a maturity that she never lacked, but she has certainly distilled. It shines in its many spotlights. (Watch for a feature on Clark coming soon to BGS.) 

Michael Cleveland, Lovin’ of the Game

Michael Cleveland has won IBMA’s Fiddle Player of the Year award more times than any other fiddler in the organization’s history. His obvious adoration for the instrument – and the life it has led him to – is front and center on his latest album, Lovin’ of the Game. Though he’s collaborated with virtuosos like Chris Thile, Béla Fleck, Billy Strings, and many more over the past handful of years, his perspective remains markedly down-to-earth. As is on display in our Artist of the Month interview from March.

Cat Clyde, Down Rounder

In mid-February, we premiered the music video for the lead single off Canadian alt-folk singer-songwriter Cat Clyde’s album, Down Rounder, and this collection has stuck with us since. For those of us with an affinity for a good red-dirt or red-rock hike, and for western, nomadic, cowboi (that is, all-gendered cowboys) aesthetics – since long before the recent rise of yeehaw culture – this album will provide such perfect daydream scoring. It’s ideal music for journeys internal as well as external. 

Iris DeMent, Workin’ On A World

An album of hope – but zero toxic positivity. Iris DeMent knows how it feels to be burnt out, bedraggled, exasperated, defeated. But hope is a radical act and, in those dark moments where hope seems so ethereal and distant, existence is a radical act. The songs of Workin’ On A World never feel preachy or condescending, even while they remind of weeknight church – all-denominational, of course – and raising voices together in the face of oppression and fascism. DeMent isn’t just workin’ on a world, she’s imagining one, too. It’s our job to bring it to fruition, even if we never see it. 

Amanda Fields, What, When and Without

Amanda Fields’ voice is impossibly tender, but do not let your guard down or it will bite you just the same. Especially when delivering a bittersweet, southwest Virginia-tinged lyric equally at home played by a bluegrass band or, like on What, When and Without, backed by a vibey, homespun, alt-country sound bed. For a voice and perspective as traditional as her’s, Fields still finds endless new ground to break and lines to color outside of. Her collaboration with guitarist and producer Megan McCormick (who has new solo music coming this year, as well) finds Fields’ musical output climbing to even higher levels of realization, innovation, and professionalism.

Ashby Frank, Leaving Is Believing

Mandolinist, singer, and songwriter Ashby Frank is in the running for IBMA’s Best New Artist award this year, and while reaching the second ballot in this category is certainly a well-deserved recognition, it’s a bit… inaccurate! Frank is not exactly a “newcomer,” as he has been a near permanent fixture in bluegrass, country, and Nashville for the greater part of two decades, performing with outfits like the Likely Culprits, the infamous Darrell Brothers, Special Consensus, Mountain Heart, John Cowan, and so many more. He’s even subbed regularly with the Earls of Leicester – and he’s a hit bluegrass songwriter, too, with charting cuts by Junior Sisk, Dale Ann Bradley, and more. His emerging solo career is where he’s truly hitting his stride, though, and in real time, with this outstanding “debut” on Mountain Home Music. 

Brittany Haas & Natalie Haas, HAAS

Genre is dead, we know, but if it hadn’t already been dead, chambergrass, classical-meets-fiddle, string band music such as this would have killed it. It’s a glorious musical territory and is no better inhabited by anyone in this particular scene than sisters Natalie and Brittany Haas, who return to collaborating with one another in an “official” format on HAAS. Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of just how toxically masculine improvisational, jammy, virtuosic bluegrass and chambergrass have become. An album like HAAS quickly grounds this aesthetic – so far outside the realm of similar more performative, self-indulgent projects – and reminds just how much newgrass and chambergrass are still out there to be discovered and made. 

Jaimee Harris, Boomerang Town

A glut of queer country records are being released at this particular moment in time and Jaimee Harris’ Boomerang Town stands out in a niche that’s becoming more and more crowded. No one welcomes this quick change in country music more than ourselves – and Jaimee, too, we’re sure – but with more voices to be heard, one like Harris’ certainly cuts through. Boomerang Town isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it drips with Harris’ lived experiences and plays as if you’re sitting quietly with her, alone in her room, as she picks each intro on her favorite guitar and every track grows into a fully-realized number. It’s a not-so-idyllic snapshot of a hometown, like country does so well, and, like queer folks the world over know so intimately, the exact hometown really doesn’t matter. 

Brennen Leigh, Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet

We hope Brennen Leigh, a multi-hyphenate picker, performer, and songwriter, is never through honky tonkin’. With her latest Signature Sounds recording Leigh has raised the bar for honky tonk sounds – a bar that should never be re-lowered. Equally at home as a “sideman,” a bluegrass picker, a songwriter (with cuts by Lee Ann Womack and others), and as an in-town Nashville picker, Leigh typifies the country everyman archetype – or, perhaps, the country “renaissance man” archetype. Or both! – while doing it better than nearly everyone else in the game, currently. With Nashville’s best on the album’s roster – as band members or featured artists – Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin’ Yet is a gem. 

Darren Nicholson, Wanderer

Mandolinist Darren Nicholson recently left Balsam Range, the North Carolina bluegrass group for which he’s known, after criss-crossing the country – and the globe – with the IBMA Award-winning and Grammy-nominated band for decades. He announced his departure from Balsam Range in 2022 and his first release as a solo artist, Wanderer, is a huge success. Nicholson stakes out and lays claim to his own brand of bluegrass – which is rooted equally in the high country of Western North Carolina (Nicholson hails from Haywood County) and in an effervescent joy. Besides his old-time influenced, traditional mandolin picking, his smile and laugh might be his most recognizable traits. The humor he relishes in life comes forward in his playing, too. Wanderer is a harbinger of many fine solo projects to come from Darren Nicholson.

Nickel Creek, Celebrants

Nickel Creek returned and millennial roots-music fans everywhere rejoiced, joining in the Celebrants celebration. After a nearly ten-year wait since 2014’s A Dotted Line, Celebrants seemed to once again impossibly capture the Nickel Creek lightning in a bottle. A Dotted Line felt mature and confident, self-assured but not cocky. On Celebrants, the throughline could be described as gentleness and gratitude; perhaps from Thile and Sara Watkins both becoming parents in the interim. Nevertheless, Celebrants would have been one of the most notable albums released this year – and for good reason – even without these subtle growth points and nuances.

Mighty Poplar, Mighty Poplar

If ever a bluegrass, old-time, and/or string band supergroup convenes with a pun for a name and we do not react with unabashed glee, please check the collective team BGS pulse. Mighty Poplar checks all of the boxes and then some. Yes, with its particular convention of pickers this album could be seen as a “return” to bluegrass, but that’s perhaps the most boring angle on this fascinating record. It’s not merely a return to the format that musically birthed each of these instrumentalists (Chris Eldridge, Greg Garrison, Alex Hargreaves, Andrew Marlin, and Noam Pikelny), it’s a demonstration in bluegrass not just as an aesthetic and tradition, but bluegrass as expression. 

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, City of Gold

Though we still have a couple of weeks until City of Gold drops, Molly Tuttle is our current Artist of the Month and we would be remiss to not include the most buzzed about bluegrass album of the year on this list. Singles “El Dorado” (above), “Next Rodeo,” and “San Joaquin” are out now, tempting and teasing another record influenced so heavily by Tuttle’s growing up in the bluegrass scene of California and the West Coast. Her band, Golden Highway (Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, Dominick Leslie, Shelby Means, and Kyle Tuttle) are featured heavily on City of Gold, for which Jerry Douglas returns to producing. Turns out it’s been Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway at the end of the rainbow this whole time!

Kassi Valazza, Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing

Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing, but she does know the power and magic of live recording. Her brand new album, tracked with backing band, fellow Portland, OR-based artists TK & the Holy Know-Nothings, was all tracked live, including vocals. As a result, the entire record buzzes with energy, whether toe-tapping or subdued. Sometimes, it’s a calm, warm, and honeyed patina that feels solemn and poetic, but ultimately, the entire collection is danceable. It’s tear-in-your-beer country and boot-scootin’ country – but that doesn’t make it simplistic. Which might be surprising, from someone who famously knows nothing. 

Sunny War, Anarchist Gospel

Sunny War’s latest album, Anarchist Gospel, finds her sound having grown and expanded, while still held together by the most fantastic of glues: Her confounding and entrancing right hand. Yes, War combines DIY music, punk, and grunge with roots music and fingerstyle blues, but that’s decidedly not the point – certainly not the centerpiece – of her art-making. (Despite what the guitar bros might tell you.) The truth is, at times, so much more complicated. At others, it’s really quite simple and literal. As she told us in an interview from earlier this year, she just plays the songs, the licks, the hooks, the lyrics as they’re meant to be played. And anarchy isn’t just a concept. 

Bella White, Among Other Things

Bella White’s breakout debut, Just Like Leaving, had already been released when she signed to Rounder Records, who then picked up and distributed the album. It received widespread acclaim as her Alberta- and Virginia-influenced bluegrass sound and Gillian Welch-like lyrics resonated with listeners and critics alike. Her brand new album, Among Other Things, then, feels like both a debut and a sophomore outing, devoid of any sort of “sophomore slump,” but capitalizing on the excitement she continues to generate in the bluegrass realm and well beyond it, too. We featured the new project with an interview in May.

Julie Williams, Julie Williams EP

We first became acquainted with Julie Williams’ music through Black Opry, the artist collective and revue who were our June Artist of the Month. In the Black Opry Revue’s simple, writers’ round format, her songs shone, gorgeous even in their very simple trappings. On her new EP, each of her songs are given the full treatment they deserve. Though they never feel lacking when delivered intimately and stripped down, unencumbered, Williams’ songs in this context soar, especially because they each give us an individualized window into her creative process, her songwriting imagination, and the production landscape she’ll continue to conquer into the future. 

Jess Williamson, Time Ain’t Accidental

In May we premiered “Chasing Spirits,” a delightfully hooky number from Jess Williamson’s latest album, Time Ain’t Accidental, which we are glad to return to here. (Williamson, you may know, is one half of duo Plains with Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield.) Time Ain’t Accidental finds its home base where Williamson was raised, in Texas, and while it processes and puts under the microscope a past, failed relationship, this album is about movement, regeneration, and forward momentum. That she accomplishes this with imagery that’s pastoral, stark, and bristling is not an accident, either.

 

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On ‘Quiet Flame,’ Caitlin Canty Finds Truth and Hope in the Middle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Caitlin Canty is in the middle — in the middle of moving houses (behind her when we connected on Zoom this spring is a Jenga tower of bankers boxes) and in the middle of prepping an album release, which we’re in the middle of talking about when she isn’t in the middle of pushing a pair of overeager dogs from her lap (“These dogs!”), all of which is taking place in the middle of her toddler’s nap.

The moving, the music, and the motherhood are taking place in the middle of her life (Canty turned forty-one in January) and the middle of her career: Quiet Flame, her latest record, is her fourth.

Oceans of ink have been spilled on beginnings and endings, on best new artists, and lifetime achievements. We rarely think about the middle, write about it, or sing about it. But Caitlin Canty does.

Quiet Flame is a dispatch from — and a celebration of — the middle; it is a testament to the in-between, to the precious spaces between day and night, birth and death, here and home. It is also a rallying cry, a call not to run from middle moments, but to revel in them. “Breakneck boy goes speeding by / In a hell-bent race to some finish line,” Canty sings on the album’s opening track, “Blue Sky Moon.” “I ain’t going with him… Gonna take my time in the middle of the road.”

This is a new message for Canty, one that asks the listener not to “get up before the road pulls you under,” as Canty sang on 2015’s Reckless Skyline, but to accept the road as it is, accept that it may pull us under, and enjoy the ride. “If the pandemic and [2020 Nashville] tornado taught me anything,” Canty says, “It’s all the things I thought I could control are out of my control. The natural world is beautiful. It’s also terrifying,” she exclaims with a half laugh, “it can just crush you in a second.” (That tornado missed her house by thirty feet.)

This new vision, however, hasn’t diminished Canty’s optimism. With a heightened sense of all that is lost and lose-able, Canty offers not less hope, but more. “Let it roll, let it ride / Let your sweet heart open wide,” she sings on “Pull the Moon.”

“I let go of a lot of things I thought were my fault, or my responsibility, things I thought I could do everything about, or take care of, or succeed at,” she explains. “And what I found was an ability to be happy in devastating moments in time. Even when it gets dark and troubled, to find a way not to ignore that — to address it — but to stay buoyant.”

It is this clear-sighted courage — what amounts to Canty’s profound musical and lyrical authenticity — that not only sets Canty apart, but draws so many of the acoustic world’s greatest artists into her corner. “Caitlin just has such a magnificent view of the world,” Grammy Award-winning guitarist and Quiet Flame producer Chris Eldridge says. “It’s so strong and true and clear and honest. You just believe it.”

Among those drawn to Canty’s vision — to her clarity, honesty, believability — are some of the greatest artists in contemporary music, making the Quiet Flame band a bona-fide acoustic supergroup: on banjo, mandolin, and harmony vocals you have singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz (another Grammy winner); on bass, Paul Kowert of Punch Brothers and Hawktail (yet another Grammy winner); and on fiddle, Brittany Haas (also of Hawktail and the newest member of Punch Brothers), who is widely considered the greatest fiddler of her generation.

“Every artist has a vision,” Kowert says, “But I specifically would say I believe Caitlin. I believe her about what she’s seeing in the songs.”

“There’s such conviction,” Haas adds. “It’s so clearly from the heart.”

For Jarosz, Canty’s super-distinction is the totality of her authenticity and an unusual ability for Canty to “sound like herself” in every domain of her artistry. “Her ability to be herself within her songs has always been very obvious to me, before I even knew her,” Jarosz says. “My favorite singers sound like themselves when they’re talking — their singing voice is a genuine extension of them, their personality. Tim O’Brien has that, Gillian Welch has that, Caitlin has that. It’s almost like Caitlin’s voice is so true —it’s like it’s not an option for her to be anyone but herself. And the songs are also that way.”

The songs of Quiet Flame mark not only a musical achievement, but an achievement of spirit. “It takes a very self-assured, fully realized human being to be able to make a record that’s this exposed,” Jarosz continues. “The record takes its time. It takes a very mature musician — and person — to have the courage to let these songs unfold the way they do.”

It is no small feat that Canty manages to make this deliberately slow journey, this taking our time in the middle of the road, so arresting. Such is a testament, of course, to the music as music; to Canty’s voice (“Caitlin, in her way, is as good a singer as exists,” Eldridge says); to her effortless melodic sensibility; to what Haas calls the unusual “variety and diversity of what [her] songs are like, what they allow and make room for texturally.” It is also a testament to the production vision of Eldridge, who Canty calls the perfect “co-pilot,” and to his attention to the “big picture.”

Each member of Canty’s band offers a tour de force on their instruments. In Canty’s words, Kowert is a “Multi-instrumentalist on his instrument… essential, the strongest foundation… my favorite bass player I’ve ever played with”; Haas is a “Flamethrower! Her fiddle is an electric guitar! It’s grit and mournfulness — not sad, defiant; not sorrowful, defiant”; Jarosz is “Just insanely good — insanely good singer, insanely beautiful instrumentalist — the most solid partner; she held it down!”

In turn, the band is quick to praise the rare musical freedom Canty affords them. “She makes so much space for other musicians in her music,” Haas says. “She’s really good at being like, ‘I hired you to be you,’ instead of, ‘I want you to do this very specific thing that involves only playing these four notes.’”

The result? The band gets to see their true selves in the work — even their best selves. “‘Odds of Getting Even’ is one of my favorite performances I’ve ever played,” Kowert remarks. “My playing on that song is really exemplary of something that I am uniquely able to do, which is bowing the bass that way, driving the rhythm with the bow.” Multi-instrumentalist Noam Pikelny (still another Grammy winner), who is featured on “I Don’t Think of You,” says much the same: “[It’s] easily one of my favorite examples of my playing captured on record.”

Most of all, however, the success of Quiet Flame’s slow burn is owed to the trust Canty engenders in her audience. It is a trust natural to Canty, but made all the more affecting by her decision, for the first time in her career, to make an entirely acoustic record. “Intimacy is just kind of baked into the nature of acoustic music,” Eldridge explains. “You just intuitively understand that what you’re hearing is what can happen in somebody’s living room. So when you commit to doing a string band record, you’re committing to a certain kind of intimacy. It casts the artist, and the songs, in a different light—in a light that asks the listener to lean in a little bit more, asks the listener to be a part of a moment.”

It is with the listener leaning in close, grounded in the moment with Quiet Flame, that Canty offers a vision both audacious and convincing, that she shares the unmistakable and unshakeable sense that all will be well; that even in the face of so many black holes, we too will be okay; that we, like Canty, will arrive “by the highway home” – a lyric after Robert Frost.

“They all told me love could feel this way,” she sings. “I never thought I would see the day.”

It is the peculiar gift of Caitlin Canty that when she says love can feel “this way” – or even that “nothing’s gone, only changed” – one can’t help but think she’s right.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • STITCHER • AMAZON • MP3

(See our full post on Caitlin Canty’s episode of Basic Folk here.) 

Photo Credit: David McClister

Basic Folk – Caitlin Canty

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Urgency and patience are the two poles of New England songwriter Caitlin Canty’s magnetism. Her music invites you to quiet moments of reflection with unhurried confidence. When I first heard her song “Get Up” in 2015 I felt like I was receiving a very important magical message. Canty’s subsequent releases have further revealed her uncanny talents for grooving at the right tempo, describing the memorable image, leaning into elegant arrangements, and letting delicate moods hang in the air.

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Canty’s new album, Quiet Flame, was recorded live with a string band and no drums. Live tracking has become her signature over the years, and this new record shows the authentic and powerful moments that can only be created in that setting. Produced by Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers and featuring collaborators like Sarah Jarosz, Brittany Haas, and Paul Kowert, Quiet Flame is not only a showcase for Canty’s unmistakable voice and songwriting, but also a celebration of her impressive artistic community.

Caitlin knows a thing or two about teamwork after many years of team sports. She was a soccer player and heptathlete through her college years, and I have a hunch that her athlete-brain and her musician-brain share a particular wisdom. Pacing, collaboration, focus, and graceful movement characterize her unique body of work. It was a true delight to talk about writing, friendship, family, touring, humility, and self-belief with this gem of a musician.

Photo Credit: Louise Bichan

WATCH: Caitlin Canty, “Blue Sky Moon”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Caitlin Canty
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Blue Sky Moon” (written by Caitlin Canty and Philippe Bronchtein)
Album: Quiet Flame
Release Date: June 23, 2023

In Their Words: “‘Blue Sky Moon’ is an ode to the slow road. It’s a stubborn refusal to travel at anyone else’s speed but your own. This song is about moving through the world at a satisfying pace, and I recorded it with the most satisfying band I can imagine; Brittany Haas (fiddle), Sarah Jarosz (banjo, vocals), and Paul Kowert (bass) were the core band for this video as well as our Quiet Flame recording sessions, produced by Chris Eldridge. This song reminds me to notice those magic moments at the edges of the day, to hold my ground as the world goes rushing by. ‘Rock in my tire keeping time with the strobing light between the pines / My heartbeat finds the rhythm / Breakneck boy goes speeding by in a hellbent race to some finish line / I ain’t going with him.’” — Caitlin Canty

Photo Credit: David McClister

Basic Folk – Brittany Haas

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Fiddler Brittany Haas has an impressive resume: she started touring at 14 with Darol Anger, recorded her debut album at 17, started performing with Crooked Still before she finished college, has played on Chris Thile’s radio program Live From Here and done stints in David Rawlings and Gillian Welch’s David Rawlings Machine. Currently, she’s teaching workshops and classes in between working with her band Hawktail along with Paul Kowert, Jordan Tice and Dominick Leslie. Their latest album, Place of Growth, is a song cycle in appreciation to the natural elements, which have always intrigued Brittany.

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She’s a trailblazer in fiddling and also has an acute awareness of burnout. The past few years have seen her pursuing and obtaining a masters in social work and teaching classes at East Tennessee State University as their artist-in-residence. Our conversation includes a discussion of balance and awareness when it comes to keeping her music joyful. And then there’s science: she has a degree in Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. Also, Hawktail’s latest album is a journey through the natural world. We talk about the band giving each other the space to be themselves on the record. Brittany is chill, brilliant and generous. Enjoy and then go listen to Hawktail’s new record all in one sitting.

Editor’s Note: Basic Folk is currently running their annual fall fundraiser! Visit basicfolk.com/donate for a message from hosts Cindy Howes and Lizzie No, and to support this listener-funded podcast.

Photo Credit: Dylan Ladds

Hawktail’s Instrumentals Add a Storybook Spirit to ‘Place of Growth’

Posted on by Editor

The music on Place of Growth, the new third album by the Nashville acoustic string band Hawktail, calls a lot of things to mind. One thing it decidedly does not call to mind is the late country singer and songwriter Roger Miller.

And yet, here on a Zoom chat, the quartet’s bassist Paul Kowert is singing the opening line from Miller’s kids song, “Robin Hood.”

“Robin Hood and Little John and welcome to the forest,” he intones in a goofy, sing-songy, Miller-esque voice, from a hotel room in Seattle where he’s on tour as a member of the Punch Brothers. That, understandably, cracks up Brittany Haas, Hawktail’s fiddler, also on the Zoom from her Nashville home, just back from a duo tour of Europe with her cellist sister Natalie.

What the album does evoke is a lovely nature walk in a spirited suite of pieces including “Antelopen” (German for “Antelopes”), “Updraft” and “Pomegranate In the Oak Tree,” and three short linking “Wandering” interludes. Kowert, who is releasing the album on his Padiddle Records label, is cautious about overplaying that angle, though.

“It’s not programmatic and the titles aren’t even prescriptive,” he insists. “It’s just you need a title and what’s more universal than nature? It kind of pulls it all together, and there’s sort of a storybook quality to the music.”

Hence the Miller ditty.

Kowert, keeping a remarkably straight face, adds, “So that’s not inherent to the piece.”

But it works.

“It works, yeah,” he says. “It’s just that the album would take your imagination on a journey of its own creation and that each thing that comes leads you a little further on your trip. It was the desired effect.”

So yeah, Roger Miller is an unlikely reference. But how about Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, with its Promenade interludes, and — dare we say — Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, a.k.a. the Pastoral? Given Kowert’s strong classical background before he wandered into bluegrass, that’s not a stretch.

Place of Growth saunters through landscapes where bluegrass, newgrass, fiddle tunes and, yes, composed classical music blend vividly, reflecting the sensibilities of the musicians, with guitarist Jordan Tice and mandolinist Dominick Leslie filling out the foursome. More immediate antecedents would include the artistic expanses covered by Chris Thile (Kowert’s Punch Brothers boss), Béla Fleck, Bruce Molsky and Sam Bush.

Most directly, they cite two mentors: Kowert, who grew up in Wisconsin, studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with pioneering multi-genre composer and double bassist Edgar Meyer. San Francisco Bay Area native Haas, as a teen, connected with fiddler Darol Anger, a founding member of both the bluegrass-gypsy jazz hybrid David Grisman Quintet and the classical-jazz straddling Turtle Island String Quartet. Not only did he take her on as a student, but put her in his Republic of Strings ensemble.

Underscoring the classical connections, Hawktail has put out a companion to the album: sheet music of the gorgeous Place of Growth piece “Shallows,” arranged for violin and guitar by Kowert. Vinyl? Cassettes? Whatever. This is the real throwback format.

The letterpress print is lavishly illustrated with a stately heron and flowering vines by friend Heather Moulder, including a limited-edition hand-tinted version. This follows two earlier, finely crafted poster prints done by Moulder incorporating musical notation.

“That was sort of an early pandemic response,” says Haas. “We lost a bunch of gigs and said, ‘Let’s do something.’ You put the music in the hands of people in their homes and they can read it and play it themselves.”

So are fans playing from the sheet music?

“Some people are,” Kowert says. “Even if you don’t, it’s an art piece. It’s quality. It’s letterpress. You can run your fingers over it. You might not be able to sight-read music. You might not even be a musician. But you can see that the line goes up. you can see it go down, see how long the tune is. It’s like sharing the spirit of it, even if you don’t read the music.”

Ah, but is Hawktail playing from written music? Well… yes and no.

“I prefer as much variety as possible,” Kowert says. “Our music will have a segment of five seconds where everybody is composed and 20 seconds where two people are composed, but two are improvising, 10 seconds where one person’s composed and one person’s improvising and the other two are resting.”

“It’s pretty fluid,” says Haas. “Like, ‘This person will take this melody or that stuff.’ But it’s still like you don’t have to do what it says.”

They both laugh.

“We still want everybody to be themselves within it,” she adds.

Tice and Leslie add bluegrass roots — both of their dads play banjo and Tice’s mom is a fiddler — but go far beyond. Tice cites Tony Rice and Norman Blake as influences and has played with the Dave Rawlings Machine (as has Haas), Carrie Newcomer, Steve Martin and Yola, among others. Leslie, who grew up in bluegrass-rich Colorado, has played with Noam Pikelny and is currently on the road with Molly Tuttle.

Haas, Kowert and Tice connected on the festivals-and-camps circuit more than 15 years ago while going to college — Haas (who had joined “chamber-grass” band Crooked Still alongside singer Aiofe O’Donovan) at Princeton in New Jersey, Kowert at Curtis and Tice at Towson University in Maryland.

“When we first met it was clear there was a synergy between us,” Kowert says. “Jordan had a car, so he would pick me up in Philly and we’d drive out to see Brit and we would play [Norwegian hardanger fiddle player] Annbjørg Lien and [Swedish trio] Väsen tunes, music that was really suited to our ensemble, stuff we could kind of get excited about and play for fun.”

Not exactly the Bill Monroe canon.

“It was also music that was slightly on the fringe of what was most common to be playing,” Kowert says.

That carried through with the 2014 Haas Kowert Tice trio album You Got This and the first two Hawktail quartet sets, 2018’s Unless and 2020’s Formations.

Place of Growth is a culmination of that, meant to be taken as a whole piece. And that’s how Hawktail has been playing it in concerts — when they’ve had chances. Given each of the members’ active careers in other pursuits, that’s tricky.

“Hawktail’s a project that we all hold dear to our hearts,” says Haas, who is artist-in-residence and teaching at East Tennessee State University’s bluegrass program these days. “So we make time for it when we’re able to, and we really value that time and just the kind of musical bond that we’ve forged between the four of us. It’s instrumental music, and in the world at large it’s not that there’s not space for it. There totally is. But it’s not mainstream. And so it kind of finds its way, it curves around through.”

Fittingly, she turns to nature for an analogy.

“It’s like a little stream that’s running alongside the larger flow of music or something. It’s something that will always be there for us.”

Adds Kowert, “Hawktail has been our avenue to put our own personal twist on it. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a string band. They’re playing this fiddle tune, but this stuff is happening I’ve never expected.’ And we love that.”

Photo Credit: Benko Photographics (lead image); William Seeders Mosheim (inset)

LISTEN: Brittany Haas with Paul Kowert & Mike Gaisbacher, “Ninety Degrees”

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Artist: Brittany Haas with Paul Kowert & Mike Gaisbacher
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Ninety Degrees” (by Brad Leftwich)
Album: Impromptu Sessions No. 1: Brittany Haas
Release Date: March 18, 2022
Label: Padiddle Records

In Their Words: “This album is a reimagination of 12 old-time tunes. Of the 12, this is the only modern one — written by the great fiddler Brad Leftwich. As primarily a fiddler myself, playing all these tunes on the banjo really freed me up to explore the melodies and each tune’s personality without thinking about living up to any standards on my instrument. The layout of the banjo is obviously totally different from the fiddle, which was a challenge for this tune so I ended up ‘inventing’ a tuning so I could get all the notes (maybe other players use this tuning, I just hadn’t tried it before! fCFBbC). The melody goes up a fifth in the second part and there are a lot of major second intervals. The funkiness of this melody inspired some very cool ideas from Paul Kowert and Mike Gaisbacher on the basses. Brad wrote a good one!” — Brittany Haas

Image Credit: Chris “Critter” Eldridge

Hawktail’s “Antilopen” Is Playful and Awe-Inspiring at the Same Time

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One of the most fearsome foursomes in modern instrumental bluegrass is at it again. A year on from the release of their sophomore record Formations, Hawktail spent their time off the road and in the lab over the last year, writing and arranging music that offers their characteristic finesse and virtuosity while never sacrificing melodic excellence. In the simple setting of a garage, the group performs “Antilopen,” which features a harsh, angular melody that gets traded around between bass and fiddle, while the guitar and mandolin provide rhythmic support and melodic responses.

As the song develops, all four musicians have a chance to really stretch out over the tune, passing the spotlight between them in a way that is playful and awe-inspiring at the same time. That’s no surprise when you consider the creativity of its members: Hawktail is composed of fiddler Brittany Haas, bassist Paul Kowert, guitarist Jordan Tice, and mandolinist Dominick Leslie. And if you haven’t treated yourself to this Nashville-based band’s music yet, we implore you to check out this live rendition of Lena Jonsson’s “Antilopen,” which was released this spring. You won’t regret it.

Photo credit: Dylan Ladds

Twenty Years After ‘O Brother,’ John Hartford Gets Grammy Attention Again

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Some years after the late great John Hartford passed on, his daughter Katie Harford Hogue wound up with his archival material in her basement in Nashville. It was a huge collection, a lifetime’s worth of recordings, books, instruments, notes, stage outfits and all the rest. So she dutifully began wading through everything to sort, organize and catalog it all. And she would come across notebooks with numbers on the cover, which she set aside – 68 of them all together.

“It can be a pretty heavy task to go through someone else’s things like that,” Hogue says now. “And I was not sure what they were at first. But we were able to piece together the puzzle and figure out what these were: They had been his creative journals.”

Representing decades’ worth of raw material, the journals contained nuggets straight out of Hartford’s musical mind. There were some transcriptions of old tunes by other artists, but the vast majority of it represented original music composed by Hartford himself, amounting to several thousand tunes. It was a trove that yielded up a couple of projects that have returned Hartford to widespread attention coming up on two decades after his death.

First came a 2018 book, John Hartford’s Mammoth Collection of Fiddle Tunes, featuring transcriptions of 176 compositions from the journals as well as Hartford’s own illustrations plus writings from Hogue, musicologist Dr. Greg Reish and others.

That led to an accompanying album, The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project, Vol. 1, featuring an all-star cast of players recording 17 of the archival Hartford songs.

Even though it was independently released, The John Hartford Fiddle Tune Project is up for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Bluegrass Album, alongside Billy Strings, Danny Barnes, Steep Canyon Rangers, and Thomm Jutz.

“Winning would mean a lot,” says Hogue, who is credited as co-producer with Matt Combs. “But I certainly feel honored to be considered, especially in a field like that. The fact that there’s something new that has people paying attention to my dad’s work again is wonderful. Mind-blowing, even. It’s a side of him that a lot of people did not know about, another dimension. I love being a part of that.”

Hartford was no stranger to Grammy Awards, going all the way back to his mainstream breakthrough with “Gentle on My Mind.” Reputedly inspired by the 1965 romantic epic Doctor Zhivago, Hartford wrote and recorded the first version of “Gentle on My Mind” for his 1967 album, Earthwords & Music.

Yet it was Glen Campbell’s version from later that year that put “Gentle on My Mind” on the map. Industry lore has it that Campbell made what he thought was a demo, complete with yelled instructions to the Wrecking Crew studio musicians. Campbell’s producer Al De Lory cleaned it up enough to release as-was. And even though it barely cracked the pop Top 40, “Gentle on My Mind” never left the radio. In 1990, BMI rated it as the fourth-most played song in radio history.

Along with setting Hartford up financially, Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” cover won Hartford his first two Grammy Awards. He won another for 1976’s Mark Twang, an album inspired by Hartford’s riverboat experiences on his beloved Mississippi River. And his final Grammy was awarded posthumously, for his contributions to the landmark soundtrack for the 2000 Coen Brothers slapstick epic, O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother’s surprising popularity launched a bluegrass revival and also put a luminous bookend on Hartford’s career. He emceed the Down From the Mountain show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on May 24, 2000 (filmed by D.A. Pennebaker for the concert film of the same name), in which Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Ralph Stanley and other stars from the soundtrack performed. The soundtrack was just starting to take off a year later, on its way to topping the charts and winning a Grammy for Album of the Year, when Hartford succumbed to cancer on June 4, 2001, at age 63.

“He didn’t get to see all of that, but he would have told you that the coolest part of that movie being popular was that it put an old Ed Haley tune in the forefront,” Hogue says. “There’s a campfire scene with a lonesome fiddle playing, and that was my dad playing the Ed Haley tune, ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.’ That was always his goal, to highlight the old-time music and fiddle players he loved so much. I don’t think he would have taken any of the accolades for himself.”

The Fiddle Tune Project album liner notes include a quote from Hartford himself, something he told Matt Combs once: “If we play our cards right, we can fiddle all day and on through the night.” That play-all-night-play-a-little-longer spirit animates the album, as played an all-star cast including Sierra Hull, Ronnie McCoury, Alison Brown, Tim O’Brien, Brittany Haas, Noam Pikelny and Chris Eldridge from Punch Brothers and Hartford’s old bandmate Mike Compton.

However, Hartford himself is the real star, in absentia, via the 17 songs pulled from the 2,000-plus in his journals. Hogue calls it a celebration of his creative process.

“Creativity with him was like a faucet he could never turn off,” Hogue says. “His journals are full of weird late-night thoughts and ideas he’d jot down, and then go back and try to work into something. He was very prolific and would go down rabbit holes very quickly. His journals have a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing where he was looking for different ways to come up with songs. He was a very open free-thinker.”

Combs oversaw recording at Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa, a Nashville studio formerly operated by Jack Clement. It is the studio Hartford used to make his 1984 album, Gum Tree Canoe. The project was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $33,000 from 468 contributors. As the Vol. 1 in the title implies, there will be future volumes if only because more musicians wanted in on it than they had room to accommodate on just one record.

Indeed, tending to her father’s posthumous legacy has turned into quite an ongoing project for Hogue. Hartford left behind so much material in so many wide-ranging areas that the family donated parts of it to four different institutions. The Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library at the St. Louis Mercantile Library is where Hartford’s photos, journals and research pertaining to the Mississippi River wound up.

“That’s where the papers of all the river people and mentors my dad grew up with are, so it already looked like his office on steroids,” Hogue says. “So that was a no-brainer for everything of his related to the river, from when he had his pilot’s license. Had he not been a musician, he would have been a boat pilot up and down the river. That’s what he really loved. It was his passion.”

Putting together these projects has been therapeutic for Hogue, who was raised by her mother after her parents split when she was very young. She didn’t see much of her father during her childhood, and there were long stretches when she mostly heard from him when he’d mail her copies of his latest album.

“I still remember opening the mailbox one day and finding Aereo-Plain,” she says, referring to Hartford’s 1971 hippie-bluegrass classic.

For all Hartford’s success, his daughter still didn’t realize his stature until relatively late in his life — especially from all the visitors who came to see him at the end. That carried over to when she was dealing with the archive that yielded up the book and the album.

“There’s a lot to sift through in a process like that,” Hogue says. “The public sees the figure and the persona and hears the music, but there’s so many different dynamics behind that for friends and family. When you lose a parent, it’s like the world comes to a stop and there’s suddenly a period at the end of everything they were. There’s so much joy, anger, frustration, confusion. Going through all his things this way made me able to see the human side of him, which was healing. It’s been a way to say, ‘Hey, Dad, we’re good. I did this because I love you.’ There’s a lot of joy in these songs. They just make you want to dance, and his spirit comes through. I love that. I’m thrilled to be able to have this with him, even though it’s posthumous. A father-daughter project, where he’s here in spirit.”

Photo credit: Charles Seton