Tag: composer

Carolyn Kendrick Takes on the Devil, Moral Panics on Her New Album

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Carolyn Kendrick is known among folk and roots fans as a fiddler with legitimate trad bona fides and as a singer-songwriter prone to introspective, observational songwriting. In the podcast zone she has carved a place as producer, researcher, and composer for several shows, including the award-winning You’re Wrong About podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.

In fact, it was while Kendrick was researching the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s for an episode of You’re Wrong About that she became obsessed with cultural panics in general. That obsession ultimately led to her haunting new album, Each Machine, which released December 6 on Occulture Records.

Last month, from her home in Los Angeles, Kendrick explained the album’s genesis.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about lineage and tradition lately,” she says. “… I’ve been thinking of all of these songs that have these deep traditional roots, that I’ve been listening to and learning and singing around campfires with, you know, friends at bluegrass festivals and folk festivals for years and years and years.”

The songs that were standing out to her all carried some darkness, a little shadow of the devil. She started wondering what might happen if she decided to reinterpret some of them in a way that asserted her personal instincts. “That includes things like more electric instrumentation, more sound design, more world building,” she says. “Not for it to sound inflated, but what if it was part of a more extended concept rather than just, you know, individual songs?”

To explore these curiosities, she enlisted the collaboration of her friend, multi-instrumentalist, and fellow Berklee grad Isa Burke (Aoife O’Donovan, Mountain Goats) to help her flesh out the sonic landscapes that are sure to envelop Each Machine’s listeners in a creepy, devilish fog.

Indeed, the album’s swallowing darkness even pervades on deceptively welcoming songs like “Sumer (Sing Cuckoo)” –sung here in the traditional round, a cappella except for some decidedly spooky timpani wallops. As a result, and in the context of so many songs about the devil, the duo’s approach feels particularly untouchable, like the story of a photograph of a memory of lighter times.

Then again, Kendrick felt compelled to include it amid her exploration of panic. As if to say: Perhaps the light is gone for now, but the nature of summer is that it returns.

To that end, she notes: “It was really, really fun to be able to take these older songs that have such a rich lineage and reinterpret them with the lens of … the issues that we’re going through as a people right now.”

This side of the 2024 election, most topical interpretations are probably incidental – she wrote the album long before votes were cast. But, while Each Machine implies a general warning about what happens when humans become wrapped up in an historical moment, it also becomes specific, for at least one track, on the topic of women’s health.

Track nine is a spoken-word piece Kendrick has titled “Sugar and Spice.” For fifty-five seconds, the listener is treated to a collection of recordings about what it is to be a woman in America. From the nursery school rhyme from which the track gets its name to a news report about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the track ends with a distant crowd of protestors chanting about abortion. This is followed by the artist’s take on the trad song “Wind and Rain,” about a pair of sisters competing for a man’s attention: In pursuit of her prize, the one shoves the other into a river to drown.

Kendrick isn’t wasting anyone’s time being subtle about her views here. Then again, where’s the room for subtlety amidst panic?

As The New York Times reported in 1994, the Satanic Panic encompassed “12,000 accusations of group cult sexual abuse based on satanic ritual.” The same Times article clarified that none of these events seem to have actually occurred, but the fear they provoked in the public was definitely real. As a folk singer drawn to moments of cultural import, digging into the Satanic Panic caused Kendrick to consider the way these “panics” might be connected.

That she tied in songs about the devil; ruminations on a view of Earth from space; what womanhood requires of us; and even the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke means this is not an album meant to be background music. To be sure, the musicianship and arrangements are lovely, but the spoken word bits are necessarily jarring.

Over and over, the disc interrupts itself with interludes that pull one’s attention back – from feeling to meaning – before moving into another song. This tennis match between the heart and the head reaches its apex about halfway in, when Kendrick pivots between two separate recordings, “Are You Washed” and “In the Blood.” Between them sits a spoken word piece (the title track) which feels intimidating and disorienting.

Her decision to include two interpretations of the one song was inspired by Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger. That book, Kendrick explains, “really changed how I’m thinking about how we receive information.”

“As Americans,” she adds, “our media diets are so different and atomized from one another. And there’s also this confusion within the conspiracy landscape that we live in right now. … How can we be receiving the same information and interpreting it so differently? … [So that song is] an experiment. How do I approach one thing and look at it from all different angles? And how will that make me feel differently?”

Indeed, Each Machine is clearly trying to get through a whole lot of questions. And in just eight songs, it somehow achieves its goal. In addition to the questions already mentioned, there’s the Satanic Panic of it all. What, then, does fear – of the devil, of freedom, of technology, of one another – teach us?

As she sends Each Machine out into the world, Kendrick is clear that the lesson she learned is that she’s grateful to have a creative outlet to help her find light in darkness.

“I had been going through all of this really difficult subject matter,” she says. “… I had so many feelings of distress and worry – and also of hope. [I was in] this flurry of all the big emotions that we go through [when] we’re dealing with reality. I needed a place to put all of my feelings about moral panics, I guess.”

Photo Credit: Alex Steed

‘Acadia’ Expands Guitarist Yasmin Williams’ Creative Universe

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Oscar Wilde said, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it is worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for.”

Composer and guitarist Yasmin Williams can certainly relate to the sentiments in Wilde’s reflection. Williams – who went from New York University in 2017 to releasing her first LP in 2018 to performing across the world – says when she picked up the acoustic guitar, it was about “trying to become the best guitarist [she] could be.”

Though a straightforward aspiration, and one that Williams has pursued fervently between the release of her debut album and now of her third record, Acadia, Williams has lived through ups, downs, and unknowns of the music industry, which have shifted her goals along the way. Particularly between 2020 and 2024, when Williams wrote the songs that would become Acadia, the inherent nature of public visibility and the process of establishing herself in the music landscape led Williams to discern what exactly is worth doing, having, waiting for, attaining, fighting for, and experiencing as a musician. It’s this amalgamation of inner realizations and external escapades that make Acadia the compelling journey it is.

Listening to each piece is like exploring a miniature world. Songs like album opener “Cliffwalk” unlock the door to an event memorable to Williams and all the emotions that came with it – performing at Newport Folk Festival and writing most of the song the night before, with the rest unfolding as an improvisation on stage. Pieces like “Virga” and “Dream Lake” reflect the duality of positive and negative challenges that come with nurturing a career as a musician. The two tracks are fittingly written with this direct connection to the other in mind.

Acadia as a whole is brimming with collaboration, a potpourri of artists, instruments, and culture, songs like “Harvest,” “Hummingbird,” and “Dawning” speak directly to what can grow from embracing new friendships, communities, and the unique creative resonance that can be found therein.

Acadia may encompass a fixed window of time in her life, but much like the many meanings of its title and Williams’ own ethos for the album – a place of peace, a place where creativity can blossom – the project endures as an oasis, a reminder from the past thriving in the present that scatters new seeds for music in the future, as Williams continues to walk down a trail of her own design.

Speaking with BGS by phone before a tour that will take her across the U.S. and to the UK later this year, Williams talked about the value of empowerment and patience, the expectations of the music industry, insights that came from producing her own music, and more.

What was the evolution of your vision for Acadia like and how did things develop as you met new artists and had so many new experiences from 2020 to 2024?

Yasmin Williams: I wasn’t really envisioning the album being as expansive as it is. Back in 2020 and even before that, I was still focused on just trying to become the best guitarist I can be, trying to become more confident in my playing and more confident in my abilities.

When I played Newport Folk Festival [in 2021], it gave me the confidence and the encouragement that I needed to realize that I can actually do this for a living – be a professional musician. It definitely lit a spark and after that, I realized I should take meeting people more seriously. Not necessarily networking, but just trying to make friends with musicians that I’m meeting at these festivals since I keep seeing the same people. That’s kind of how the collaborations came about: Just me being not afraid to tell people, “Hey, I really like your music. I’d love to do something with you,” or people telling me that and me not being afraid to follow up with them because, I guess I dealt with some sort of– I don’t want to say, “inferiority complex,” but like, I feel like the musicians that are on the record have been doing their thing for long time. I’d be afraid to reach out to people and ask them to collaborate with me.

After 2021, I got over that fear, which helped immensely. That led to the collaborations and that led to me thinking, “My next record can be what I want it to be but, I can also invite people to do things that I cannot do.” Like, I don’t play saxophone, I don’t play drums. I’m not super comfortable singing on my music yet and inviting all of these people to do those things really created the atmosphere and the universe that I wanted for Acadia. I wanted it to be something that my other two records aren’t necessarily, which is a more expansive kind of universe.

How did you approach conveying themes, motifs, or emotions when writing music to include others versus writing for yourself?

Every song was different. As far as [asking myself], “How does this person fit into the theme or the emotion that I’m trying to present?” What I did was, I told the collaborator, “Here’s what emotion or mood I’m trying to evoke here. Does this make sense to you? Do you think you can do this? Let’s figure out a way to do it.” I gave them slightly free reign, but help if they needed help figuring something out.

Where does your dedication to informing folks about the social and historical aspects of music, and the prospect of personal responsibility around that, fit within your music career?

It took me years to figure out if I even wanted to be involved in making people aware of the historical aspects of the music that I was playing. I also had to learn a lot about music that I was playing and about folk music in general, because I didn’t really grow up listening to folk music at all or bluegrass or things like that. So I’ve learned a lot in the last five, six, seven years.

Things changed when I finished [my album] Urban Driftwood. Just remembering, going to protests up here in Washington, D.C. when George Floyd’s murder happened and seeing all of the political unrest and social unrest around here where I live, and obviously seeing it on the news everywhere else definitely made me change my mind. As far as being open about, for example, speaking about being a Black female guitarist, which is not something I really wanted to do in my late teens, early 20s. I definitely came around to it and now see it as a necessity.

To me, social media is a great tool to try to help educate folks, because there’s so much online at our fingertips that’s just factually incorrect. Anything I can do to try to help mitigate that, I think is good. I think it’s important for me now to be involved in the full scene in a way that’s positive and educating people – to just get involved in things or be involved in ways that I’m interested in. I’ve always been a history nerd anyway so to me, it makes sense now to do that, whereas before, I guess I just wasn’t mature enough to understand why I would have to be a musician and educate folks and have a social media presence. But now I don’t have a problem at all.

What would you describe as the most challenging aspect of making Acadia and how did you wade through that experience?

Figuring out how to finish some of the songs. I realized I have to let time pass and let it come to me. “Sisters,” for example, I came up with that melody like, two, three years ago now? And it was stuck being a two-, three-minute song for years. I thought, “This doesn’t feel done.” But I couldn’t come up with anything. Then, the night before my recording session, I came up with four extra minutes of material. For me, I can’t force the issue of finishing a song. It just kind of has to come to me. And whenever it comes, it comes. And these songs, some of them took a really long time to get finished. So that was probably the most difficult part of it.

What was the most interesting new musical technique or process you explored while making Acadia and why was it so meaningful?

Producing was the most interesting part of it; hearing what people heard in my music was by far the most interesting aspect of recording. Just hearing how people process it, then hearing what they do in response. Pretty much everyone grasped what I was trying to accomplish in the song that they’re featured on.

For example, “Hummingbird” with Allison de Groot and Tatiana Hargreaves. They both come from a more, I guess, old-time tradition, which is very different than [the kind of song] “Hummingbird” is. It took a little while for us to kind of get the song in the studio, because the song is very difficult, first of all, to play. But they absolutely nailed it. Hearing how they heard the timing and the syncopation and the melody, and the melodic aspects of the song, and how they thought, “Okay, I can fit in here and drop out here and harmonize here,” it was really interesting to see how people’s brains worked and how it’s so different from how mine works but it somehow fits together pretty seamlessly.

How did you discern your feelings when a collaborator might encourage you to try something new, versus deciding to stay true to yourself and your voice as a composer and musician?

I feel like I was more so bringing the collaborators to a different place that maybe they weren’t used to and pretty much everybody who’s on the record was willing to do that and go to somewhere new.

Once the recording process and collaboration process got started, it was really easy for me to just tell people, “Okay, I want this, this, and this.” And most of the time, people are just like, “Yeah!” With Darlingside and the song “Virga,” I made it clear that I actually wanted them to do lyrics and then we worked on that. They were open to it for the most part so for me it was easy. But maybe for some of the collaborators it was about getting them out of their usual music making mode and into a more open-minded mode.

Being ready to make an album like this, it took living life and having different experiences.

(Editor’s Note: Continue exploring our Artist of the Month coverage of Yasmin Williams here.)

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Mike Post: From Hootenannies at the Troubadour to ‘Law & Order’ to Eddie Van Halen

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Whether or not you realize it, the majority of people reading this have been listening to Mike Post’s music for a very long time. Like, a lot of it.

Post is the guy behind the theme songs to Magnum P.I., Hill Street Blues, Quantum Leap, The Greatest American Hero, and countless others. He even invented the famous Law & Order “DUN-DUN.”

But that’s only part of the story. Post began his 60+ year career as a member of the mythologized Wrecking Crew, becoming a Grammy-winning record producer who has worked with the likes of Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and Van Halen whilst finding his niche in the television world with frequent collaborators Dick Wolf and Steven Bochco.

Now, Mike Post adds another chapter to his biographical tome, having released Message from the Mountains / Echoes of the Delta – an ambitious double album that blends his love of bluegrass and blues with his orchestral pedigree.

BGS co-founder Amy Reitnouer Jacobs sat down with Mike for an in-depth conversation, covering everything from Aaron Copeland to Earl Scruggs to Eddie Van Halen.

Amy Reitnouer Jacobs: Mike, what was your introduction to roots music? Because there is a long history, I think, of bluegrass and folk in Los Angeles that a lot of people don’t expect or understand. How did you get into bluegrass and Delta blues specifically?

Mike Post: I think I was first attracted to the harmonies and the melodies that are common to Irish music, to bluegrass, to the blues. There’s this modal sort of a thing that all those genres share, right?

Maybe even as far back as lullabies… My mom used to sing me this Irish lullaby, “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral,” and I still remember it. And then I recall the first time I heard The New World Symphony and Grand Canyon Suite, things my parents were playing when I was 4 years old.

But, like every other white middle class kid from the Valley, when [Flatt & Scruggs’] Foggy Mountain Banjo album came out, it was like somebody handing you the Bible or the encyclopedia or something. I had to understand everything about it.

It wasn’t like [just] one thing that happened. It was a mishmash of The Kings: B.B., Albert, and Freddie. Flatt & Scruggs led me back to Monroe, which led me to Jim & Jesse and the Osbornes, and then I just drowned in this stuff.

This is not just a roots music album though, and I think you’ve kind of just touched on this in saying about how many different things you were pulling from. This is a record that has a really epic scale, often only saved for symphonic pieces and movie scores. It evoked Aaron Copeland the second I heard it. But it also has some of the most legit roots music players in Los Angeles on there, like Gabe Witcher, Herb Petersen, and Patrick Sauber. How did you get connected to those folks for the project? Did you already know them?

I met Herb when I was 18. You know, he just moved down from Berkeley. He’s about six months older than me, but we actually met at Hootenanny Night at the Troubadour. He was in a band called the Pine Valley Boys from Northern California, I had this five piece folk group; we were sort of like an expanded Peter, Paul and Mary. I had a Gibson 12-string and I’m a finger picker.

I heard [Herb] before I met him and I went, “Who was that?” And through Herb, I’ve known Gabe since he was a little boy.

Actually, I hadn’t worked with [Gabe Witcher’s brother], Mike Witcher before. And I’ve heard and worked with the best guys. So when I heard Mike, it was shattering to me because he is so soulful. You know, he’s not the flashiest, overplayer in the world. There’s a lot of them out there that have brought it to a place of technicality and speed that phenomenal. But Mike’s got the thing that Josh [Graves] had, which is the way he vibrates.

You can’t find much more authentic, better bluegrass players than the guys that are on this record. And the reason both the blues piece and the bluegrass piece are weird is because I’m weird.

You know, I’m a rock and roller folky that learned how to read, write, and orchestrate. So the idea for this was an odd idea. It only happened because my TV shows were on the beach, because of COVID. So I’m sitting there with nothing to do and I’m driving down to the desert to play golf. And I go down this Spotify bluegrass rabbit hole. I heard a couple of things I hadn’t heard before. And it just struck me.

I said, “You haven’t done anything scared you in a long time.” Not that I’ve been coasting – I’ve been writing music for television shows and producing some records all this time. But as a composer, you know, I’m the guy that at 23 years of age did this record, Classical Gas, which was supposed to be kind of off-the-beaten-path. I thought, well, why can’t you combine the orchestra and a bluegrass rhythm section? Not just a single fiddle player or a dobro player or a banjo player or a guitar player. Why don’t you put the five guys in front and have a conversation?

To have those things feed off of each other is really the formality of an orchestra and the improvisation that comes with bluegrass. It works really beautifully.

Thank you. I didn’t even know whether this was going to work. But I did it the old way… I got my drafting board out and my papers and pencils and score paper and did it by hand.

The we went into the Sony scoring stage in Culver City and had 80 players, genius orchestral players come in and it was thrilling.

Because orchestral recording, at least for television scoring, is more rare these days, has this inspired you to want to do more? To not just compose for picture?

It certainly was a different kind of rewarding. You know, working with pictures is fun because it’s so collaborative. They bring me their art and I put my art with it. Hopefully the whole thing’s more artful, right? But the truth is, I’m so satiated. I’ve been a member of the union since I was 16. I’ll be 80 in a few months. I’m still working. I was in here this morning working on the last episode of the season of SVU and still enjoying it!

One thing that I have noticed throughout your career is you consistently surround yourself with great collaborators that also seem like friends. First there’s your time starting with the Wrecking Crew and producing Kenny Rogers & the First Edition. Then there’s your ongoing projects with Steven Bochco, Stephen Cannell, Dick Wolf. Can you talk about those friendships and returning to work with people that you love and trust over and over again?

You’re never going to find anybody more fortunate than me. I am – it’s a corny word cause everybody overuses it – but I am blessed. It’s supposed to be a treacherous business, right? Supposed to be a business of people elbowing each other out of the way and climbing over bodies and litigation and getting screwed by the man and by the club owner and the record company. That never happened to me, none of it. I’ve been treated great. So why not give that back in double?

You know, I’ve been so fortunate to meet Steve Cannell before he’d ever sold a script. To be musical partners with a guy like Pete Carpenter… we worked together for 17 years. We wrote 1700 hours of music together for TV and never had an unkind word. So, you know, that’s the way my life has gone. Cannell led me to Bochco, Bochco led me to Dick Wolf. Cannell, Bellisario, Bochco, Dick Wolf. We did all kinds of stuff together, musically and film-wise and fun-wise and business-wise.

I just have never embraced the competitiveness. I’ve either made dear friends with the people I work with, or hired my friends, or the guys that hired me were already my friends. Wow, who gets to do that?

I moved out here to LA to work in film and then kind of stumbled into my musical life. But the whole time, I only wanted to surround myself with good people. It’s not about the competition. And it always surprised me, I guess, how revolutionary that seems to some people.

Speaking of working with your friends, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about your work with Eddie Van Halen. Eddie is such a consistently referenced and venerated artist by some of the biggest bluegrassers today, like Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton. I read that you and Ed were friends before you produced Van Halen III. What was it about your musical sensibilities that attracted you to work together?

Let’s be honest. Eddie Van Halen is not the first martian that landed on the face of the planet, okay? Look at Mozart! Fast forward… how did Earl Scruggs sit there and go… [imitates the banjo]. Every once in a while, a genius shows up and changes everything.

After becoming friends, Eddie turned to me and he said, “Hey, will you help me with something?” I said, “Sure. What?” And he said, “I’d like to do one sober.”

I’ve never done any drugs. And Eddie knew that. So he said, you know, you can help me do this without any substance.
And I went, am I producing an album or am I the sergeant at arms at the door? Am I your sponsor? And he goes, man, I don’t know, both? And I went, all right, fuck it. Let’s go.

Basically all I did was get out of the way. It’s not a very good album. It’s nobody’s fault. It was an experiment. Unfortunately, [Alex Van Halen] was going through a terrible time in his life. So Al didn’t play on that. Eddie played everything. It just didn’t have magic. That’s all.

Ed was right on that trail of genius martians that look at music a different way. And no one else is ever going to do it like that. That’s just once. When you study Mozart, you look at it on paper and you go, “How in the world did that happen? Look at that.”

It doesn’t make sense, actually. That’s the beauty of it.

Exactly. It doesn’t make sense.

The last thing I wanted to say is what a fan I am and to let you know how grateful I am for taking the time today. I was going through your catalog last night and realizing how many of the songs you have written have been true soundtracks of my life. I kid you not when I tell you that “Hill Street Blues” is still my ringtone on my phone. So, uh, I just need you to know that I still love that song.

That really makes me feel really happy! Sometimes [I look back at my career and] I don’t know that I actually believe that emotionally; I believe it intellectually. I go, “Oh yeah, that’s me up on the TV.” Like, did this really happen to me?

Photo Credit: Lawrence Sumulong

WATCH: Tommy Emmanuel, “Bella Soave” (From ‘Endless Road’)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Tommy Emmanuel
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Bella Soave”
Album: Endless Road: 20th Anniversary Edition
Release Date: May 17, 2024
Label: CGP Sounds

In Their Words: “The song was written after my first visit in Soave, Italy in 1999. It was the first festival I ever played. I was so happy and overjoyed from the experience of the festival that I started writing when I got into the backseat of the car. We were driving from Soave down to Rome for a show and workshop, and I wrote this song on the way there. I got it finished and played it that night at the show. I tried to give it a sort of Spanish feel in the bridge, because I had met a lot of Spaniards that weekend at the festival. Bella Soave means ‘beautiful Soave.’ It’s a beautiful place and has been a big part of my musical life.” – Tommy Emmanuel

Photo Credit: Simone Cecchetti

Mandolinist Ethan Setiawan’s Influences Run the ‘Gambit’ on New Album

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Ethan Setiawan knows the importance of a good pick. The Portland, Maine-based mandolin player has lately been experimenting with changing the entire sound of his instrument through one tiny, flat piece, pinched between his fingers. The material, girth, texture, and weight of his pick all play a crucial role in how his mandolin sounds, sometimes bright and plucky, or dark and full-bodied. “It’s good to have a sound and have gear that you like, but often the thing that helps me be more creative is just being able to change it up,” he says. “Change is helpful for your own growth and can really spark new ideas or keep things fresh.”

On his new record, Gambit, he finds himself somewhere in between, which is fitting given the way he fuses his entire musical background to create something completely new. It isn’t jazz, but it’s not not jazz. It’s bluegrass, but not in the traditional sense. It’s funk, but also old-timey. 

The Berklee College of Music grad could easily fool you into thinking he’s much older than his years. A seasoned bandmate to some of bluegrass music’s finest — including Gambit producer Darol Anger, whom he first met as a high school student — Setiawan is beginning to carve out space for his own songwriting. Written in Boston, workshopped in California, recorded in Maine, and then mixed in Nashville, Gambit, as its title suggests, is a joyful mixed bag of the many styles of music that have shaped him into one of the most formidable mandolinists of his generation. 

BGS: Darol Anger produced this record, and though you had been playing together for some time, this was your first experience working with each other in this capacity. What led to this partnership?

Ethan Setiawan: We’ve played a bunch of gigs over the years, and it just felt like a good next thing to do was to make a record with him. And he was on board thankfully. We had plans to [record] in August 2020, and then the pandemic started to happen, and it became apparent that wasn’t going to work. So eventually I did make this big road trip out to California where Darol was living at the time, and we had these really nice couple weeks out there, working through the material, just me and Darol kind of playing through the stuff, trying to solidify arrangements and get ideas down on paper to go into the studio with. And eventually in October, we made it into a studio, the Great North Sound Society Studio in Parsonsfield, Maine. We had this four-day session and worked probably 12 to 14 hours a day, every day. And sometimes sessions like those feel like work, you feel tired and drained after a day. But at least for me, those sessions felt really fun, really good. Part of that was not having played music with a band before that time for six months or whatever, and it was cool for me to see these tunes come together, and just working with Darol and seeing how he functioned in the studio. He put in the longest hours of everybody. He was up until 3:00 every night, replacing fiddle parts and working on everything. 

The tunes on Gambit are all originals, but there’s so much tradition rooted in these styles of music you’re playing. How do you reconcile that when trying to create your own compositions?

I do a lot of that, pulling from past traditions or old recordings. A lot of the compositional ideas and things that remain the same throughout the record are tunes by people like Matt Flinner and Béla Fleck, other people that have kind of pushed the envelope compositionally. On the record there’s kind of a whole, well, gambit of different styles. There’s old-timey music with fiddle and banjo, Appalachian string band [style] — and kind of in chronological order, I guess the influences would start there. Then you’d move into bluegrass, get into jazz and eventually fusion, funk, that kind of thing. Darol actually summed it up nicely. He was in the David Grisman quartet way back in the day, so he kind of had a hand in forming this style of music. He said something along the lines of, it felt like a journey through the past 40 years of his career. It just ended up this way that all these tunes grabbed from different areas of the past 40 years. The old-timey, the bluegrass, the sort of new acoustic, the jazz. And hopefully by merit of them being my tunes, they kind of hold together as a collection at the end of the day. 

How much of creating an original arrangement is improvisational?

For me, there’s always a lot of throwing paint at the wall. There’s a stage that kinda looks like that, where I write a lot of tunes or even just generate a lot of ideas, not even taking the tunes to a completed state. The way I write is kind of two stages: there’s the melody and there’s the harmony, these two sides of the composition. Basically, I write the melody and I try all different combinations of notes and phrase endings. With chords, I’m always trying different stuff. That does a lot to create a mood, I think, for the tune. For any one note, you could harmonize in many different ways, and for any one bar. So I think the important thing for me is just to try all the options, really try to be objective, and see what works the best and what feels the best. Mandolin is the main thing that I play, but I also play some guitar and some cello. So just getting off the instrument I’m most familiar with and getting onto something else can be really helpful in sparking some creativity. 

Given this wide range of styles of music you’ve played over the years, how do you describe your sound now?

I’d say that it’s sort of a furthering of the stuff that Darol’s been really involved in, this new acoustic sound. Which is not a label I totally love—just the sound of it—but it’s kinda what we got, I guess. It’s using the attitude of bluegrass in a lot of ways, but not being confined to the stylistic trappings of bluegrass if that makes sense. If you think about how Bill Monroe created bluegrass, he’s kind of the guy that finally took all these influences and put ‘em together and said, ‘here’s the thing.’ He wasn’t even trying to be original; he just was being original. He was just taking all the music that he liked and synthesizing it into what he wanted to hear. And that isn’t often actually the attitude of bluegrass musicians today, but it’s an interesting concept to me and a really interesting way to sort of look at music. So that’s the essence of bluegrass that I’m trying to go after.

How has your relationship with bluegrass evolved since your earliest experience with it?

I think bluegrass is kind of the underpinning of everything that I do, even if it’s not at the forefront of the final product. When I started playing mandolin, I started playing these old-time fiddle tunes, which pretty quickly brought me to bluegrass. When we’re talking about progressions, that is kind of the natural next step for somebody who’s interested in the tunes and the music and improvising especially. You’ll get drawn to bluegrass and then eventually to jazz and so on. That bluegrass vocabulary on the mandolin is really the basis of most of my writing and my playing. And I think that comes through on the record almost more in the way that we approach the tunes and treat how we play the tunes more than the compositions themselves. There are a couple tunes that are a little more bluegrass, but they’re always a little weird. There’s always something a little funky about them. It’s sort of the attitude of the thing that I think has stuck with me the most. 

Photo Credit: Louise Bichan

Artist of the Month: Chris Thile

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Chris Thile found solace during the pandemic in a church — more specifically, a remodeled one that now houses Future-Past recording studio in Hudson, New York, where he and his family were temporarily living in the summer of 2020. “I went in there to look at the space and instantly felt so at home,” Thile said upon announcing his new album, Laysongs. “I loved the amount of sound around the sound. I had two sonic collaborators on this record: the tremendous engineer Jody Elff and that church.”

With a suggestion from Nonesuch Records’ Chairman Emeritus Bob Hurwitz to make a record that was both spiritual and a snapshot of the pandemic, Thile decided to pursue the idea, putting together six originals and three covers with only his voice and his mandolin. In April, he introduced the project with the lead single, “Laysong.” As he noted, “It is a lifelong obsession of mine, even post-Christianity, what the impact of that kind of devotion to any organized religion is.”

Laysongs offers the three-part “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which was inspired by C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters; a song Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’ “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me;” and an original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J.S. Bach’s Partita for Solo Violin in E Major. Thile’s wife, actor Claire Coffee, serves as co-producer.

It’s the latest creative endeavor from the MacArthur Fellow, whose exceptional career spans far beyond his solo work. From Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers to a pair of Goat Rodeo albums and the much-missed Live From Here series, Thile remains one of acoustic music’s most visible figures. You can read part one of our Artist of the Month interview here. Read part two here. Meanwhile, enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist, a tip-of-the-iceberg hint at the remarkable breadth of this masterful musician.

Photo credit: Josh Goleman

BGS 5+5: Scroggins & Rose

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Artist: Scroggins & Rose
Hometown: Oakland, California
Latest Album: Curios
Release Date: June 26, 2020
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): We’re not really the nickname types. haha I think for a while we thought of calling ourselves Spiral or something like that, but we landed on Scroggins & Rose pretty quickly.

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

Alisa Rose: I believe any art that I experience influences what I create. I love the floaty mysticism of Chagall’s paintings, the elegant structure in Martha Graham’s dances, the lyricism of Morrison’s books, and the beautiful details of Proulx’s stories. I hope a bit of all of these seep into what I create.

Tristan Scroggins: I’ve always loved paintings and have been inspired by how they can convey so much meaning and emotion through things other than the picture itself. The brush strokes and colors and style all tell their own story without necessarily being the center of attention and I try to incorporate that idea into my playing as much as I can. With composition I/we draw inspiration from a lot of different sources. One of my favorite writing games we did while writing the tunes on this album was listening to an album of tongue twisters and trying to write tunes based on the rhythm of certain ones.

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

AR: When I was 6, I read a story about Paganini and how he played the violin so beautifully that he made people cry. I was really struck by the power of music, and from then on I thought I would like to be a violinist.

TS: I grew up listening to my dad play the banjo but it had never crossed my mind to play music until I was 8 years old. I was watching my dad perform and was overcome with a sense of pride and I asked him to teach me to play. It was never a conscious decision after that to be a musician. I always just assumed that I was going to do that.

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

AR: Before a big show I like to have a few hours of relaxed practice with some slow work on intonation, basics, and the pieces I’m going to perform. I also try to eat well (I like lots of protein before a performance) and go on a walk or a run in nature if possible. With Scroggins & Rose performances it’s important for us to improvise and warm up together as well to make sure we are both attuned to each other and able to connect well on stage.

TS: For a long time I would do confidence exercises/meditations. I’m pretty shy in everyday life so I had to consciously embody the persona of someone who wanted to be the center of attention. For Scroggins & Rose shows we usually warm up together and will do some improvisation games so that we can get in the mindset of reading body language and musical cues on stage.

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

AR: I spend as much time as I can walking through redwoods and exploring the rocky dramatic Californian coastline near my home in the Bay Area. For me, music is deeply associated with my experiences in the natural world and many of my tunes are inspired by the feeling of specific places I’ve been to. For instance, “Wisconsin Wayside” is about driving through beautiful green rolling hills and cornfields on winding country roads in Dane County where I grew up. I also spend a lot of time thinking about melodies I’m working on while I hike; the melodies often find their own path while I’m walking on one.

TS: I spend a lot of time looking at nature but not really being a part of it. I’ve gotten to see lots of really beautiful things but usually through a car windshield. Those sceneries and landscapes are often used as inspiration for textures and moods in composition (such as the “wide-open” feeling of tunes like “the French Cowboy” or “Wyoming”). I also find myself writing about birds a lot. I wouldn’t call myself a “bird watcher,” but I do spend a lot of time watching birds and I have written a number of tunes about birds.

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

AR: Although the music I write has no words, to me the tunes are often about a character or story that is not my own. I feel music is a powerful way for people to connect to each other around the shared experience of listening, even if what each of us hears is unique. To perform a tune, like an actor, I find I need to experience the story and emotions as my own, even if they were not originally conceived that way.

TS: I think this is a really interesting question as someone who mostly writes instrumental music, because I think the answer is “always.” Or at least almost always. Whenever I write a tune about a personal event or feeling I don’t feel the need for any restraint because, ultimately, people are going to interpret the tune in their own way. That’s the nature of instrumental music. It’s like a magic trick where the interesting part of the performance is only happening in the viewer’s mind. Of course I can lead the audience’s interpretation by telling them what I wrote it about before it’s played, but even then what each note means to me will be different from what it means to them.

Photo credit: Lenny Gonzales