Tag: Country Music

LISTEN: Sam Morrow, ‘Heartbreak Man’

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Artist: Sam Morrow
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Song: “Heartbreak Man”
Album: Concrete and Mud
Release Date: March 30, 2018
Label: Forty Below Records

In Their Words: “For some time, whenever I sat down to try and write, the term ‘Heartbreak Man’ kept coming up, and I couldn’t figure out exactly why. I decided I wanted to challenge myself and use it for a song. It naturally matched up with the breakup I had just gone through. Breaking up with this person was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but I wanted for this song to make it sound easy. I wanted this song to have a naïve strut that illustrated a broken man breaking anything that’s in his way — a man that knocks a lamp off the table and claims that its the table’s fault. That table should’ve known who he thought he was and that lamp never looked good there in the first place. I cowrote this song with the great Ted Russell Kamp and Eric Corne.” — Sam Morrow

Photo credit:Chris Phelps

LISTEN: Mike and the Moonpies, ‘Steak Night at the Prairie Rose’

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Artist: Mike and the Moonpies
Hometown: Austin, TX
Song: “Steak Night at the Prairie Rose”
Album: Steak Night at the Prairie Rose
Release Date: February 2, 2018

In Their Words: “’Steak Night at Prairie Rose’ is a nod to my very first gig. When I was 14, my dad booked all my shows. I played every Wednesday night at a bar in Decker Prairie, Texas, called the Prairie Rose. Wednesday was always ‘steak night,’ and there was always a game on while I played. I told my wife that story a while back, and she said it would make a great song title. My wife is always right. Everything in this song is true, other than the very end. My dad is still alive and well, and loves the song.” — Mike Harmeier

Photo credit: Greg Giannukos

Mary Gauthier: Finding Each Other in Song

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When singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier plays the Grand Ole Opry, she knows the crowd can sense that she doesn’t quite fit the mold. “I can tell that the audience can tell that I don’t look like Carrie Underwood,” she laughs. “I’ve got a gay look. I don’t mean to have a gay look, but I’m gay!” The stage where country music was born wouldn’t be the first place to come to mind when considering where an LGBTQ+ person might belong, but the Opry house’s response to Gauthier isn’t cold or forbidding; in fact, it’s the opposite. “I’m going to stand up there. [My queerness is] going to be obvious. Some people will accept it, but some people will struggle with it. I’m going to talk to them as if they’ve already accepted it, and I’m going to send love out to them. My fear of rejection will not supersede my intentional effort to connect and be loving.”

Connection and loving are core values, a strong and sturdy backbone, through Gauthier’s music and life. She’s faced abandonment, addiction, and otherness, but through the struggles of her own life, she realized that loving others, seeing others, listening to others, and putting empathy out into the world are surefire ways to find healing within. Her new album, Rifles & Rosary Beads, is a perfect continuation of these practices. Gauthier has co-written an album of absolutely poignant, heart-wrenching songs with veterans of the armed forces, all the while focusing on not just loving, seeing, and listening, but propagating these skills, as well. The record is a sorely needed standard for how to traverse the divides and chasms that seem to criss-cross our country, society, and globe. Whether they exist between gay and straight, civilian and military, or left and right, the only bridge we need is empathy.

There’s this cliché or this stereotype that LGBTQ+ people and the military are diametrically opposed, whether this comes from issues such as the trans military ban or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, so it might surprise people that you took on this project. It must challenge the assumptions of some people who might not expect a progressive, LGBTQ+ person to collaborate with veterans.

I think the idea of the straight white guy soldier is a dated stereotype. That’s really not who our military is any more. In my experience working with members of the military over the last five years, the soldiers I’ve worked with look like people you’d see walking down the street in Manhattan. Our military is very diverse. It’s made up of all segments of society, including gay, lesbian, and trans people, people of color, Hispanic folks, and a whole lot of women. So we need to update our visuals around what we think a veteran is.

Today’s military scans 55 percent Democrat. People don’t know that. It’s a younger military. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by a group of people that are much younger than what you would think. We have to match our visuals to the reality of who’s wearing those boots on the ground.

I’d like to speak to the unsuccessful and failed trans military ban. The reason that it probably became an issue is because there are quite a few transgender people in the military. I don’t know the numbers, but it’s in the thousands. These are people who are volunteering to serve and are serving well. Our justice system has done the right thing in upholding their right to serve. Judgment about whether or not someone is worthy of service has not a thing to do with sexuality or gender.

Yes! Absolutely.

It’s irrelevant. It’s parallel. It has nothing to do with any of the requirements around the ability to serve. The justice system and the judges are upholding the current law because it’s the right thing to do.

When I listen to the album, I wonder how those veterans’ feelings — of loneliness, of facing a forbidding world that can’t really understand, of walking through life and not seeing oneself or one’s experiences reflected back by society, of coming home to a place that they don’t recognize anymore, to people who don’t recognize them anymore — these feel like they relate pretty easily to the queer experience.

I never thought of that. I don’t know. I’d hate to generalize. [Pause] What I do know is that an awful lot of our veterans are experiencing trauma — traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. The trauma that they carry becomes a life and death issue for them. It doesn’t heal itself. It doesn’t get better over time. It holds its own. We’re dealing with somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 suicides a day by military members.

There may be a parallel between that and the trauma a gay kid feels, being beat up. It’s a different trauma, but trauma is trauma. There’s been, as we well know, a huge problem with suicide in our gay kids. Now in our trans kids. The way that we’ve dealt with it, the way that works to help ease people’s burdens, is to tell them that we love them. We see them. They’re valuable. They matter.

I feel that message when I hear you singing these songs. I feel that emotion. I feel you, yourself, living through each of these co-writes with each of these veterans. I love that this is a testament to the fact that the “divisiveness” we hear about every single day is not actually a barrier between all of us.

Here’s what I know for sure: We’re in an empathy crisis.

Yes!

And this empathy crisis, from what I can see, has created a divide. The divide, politically, is between the left and the right, but we’re also in a civilian-military divide. Civilians don’t understand or even know people who have served in our military, particularly in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this divide started in Vietnam, after our soldiers came back really rejected and treated so poorly.

I think the divide can be bridged through empathy. The way I know how to create empathy is through song — not preachy songs, not songs that tell people what to think, but songs that tell the story of what people are going through, so that we can see inside and know how they feel. This is the job of the artist and the job of art — to generate connection and empathy. That’s my belief.

So [when writing for Rifles & Rosary Beads] we stayed away from ideology. We stayed away from policy. We stayed away from lecturing. All politics is off-limits. These are songs that tell important stories. If you want to come up with policy after you empathize, that’s whole different discussion. In my years of writing with soldiers, I have never gone to politics ever, because it’s not going to get us a good song! It’s just going to be a rabbit-hole, and we’re not going to get where we need to go to get to a good song, which is connecting and feeling each other, knowing each other’s heart. Whether or not we agree with the politics that got us into the war — wars — is one thing, but I think we can agree that those who served, who are hurting, who are struggling, who are in pain, who need our hand, we can reach out to them.

That makes me think about roots music’s transportive quality. These genres came out of very downtrodden, forgotten places as a vehicle to take people out of the harsh realities of their everyday lives. I’m convinced that that quality of roots music really is available to everyone, whether we’re talking about someone who’s LGBTQ+ or these veterans.

There’s a couple of big thoughts in there. One is, roots music is the best place for story songs. The best music always comes from the worst pain, from the soul howling in pain. “Does anybody see me?” “Am I alone here in my sorrow?” The response to that call is, “No, you are not! We see you! We feel you!” This is why singing the blues together makes you feel better. There’s an alchemy that happens when you’re able to sing your sorrows inside a group, singing not alone.

At the end of the day, the important thing about writing with people who are dealing with trauma, particularly veterans, is giving voice to something that is very, very hard to talk about. It may even be ineffable. There may be no way to talk about it, but we can sing it. We know it, when we sing it. We feel it. That is, I think, one of the most important uses of songs — to reach the ineffable. Melody helps move meaning into people’s hearts.

On the song “Brothers,” I felt the Venn diagram between the LGBTQ+ experience and the military experience overlap the most. The line, “Don’t that make me your brother, too?” Coming from the perspective of a female soldier, it is such a distillate of what we’re trying to accomplish with empathy, reaching out to people who have opposing views. Where did “Brothers” come from?

It came from these two women’s experiences. They lived it. My co-writers lived it. They were of the first generation of females in our military sent to combat. At the time, all of the language was male. They served with valor and courage in a situation that was really, really hard for them. What the females went through is a whole lot like what people of color went through when the military was integrated. It was very difficult.

There was a moment, after [one of the women] got home, when one of their friends raised the flag on Facebook on Veterans’ Day for “all the men who served.” She was shot at. She was in combat. She would’ve died for her brothers. She felt very excluded by the sexist language. The statement [in the song], “Say it for me. Say it for your youth. Your sisters are your brothers, too,” is a howl. “Don’t you see me? What do I have to do to be seen?” Of course, every marginalized community has had that howl. “What do I have to do to get your respect? I’ve done everything within my power, and I’m still invisible. I am hurt and I want to be respected.”

Honestly, in the five years I’ve been doing this, the language has been changing. Now people in the military, when they speak of the kinship, I’m hearing more and more “brothers and sisters.” It’s expanding. The first generation of female combat veterans had it hard, but it’s changing because people like them are brave enough to stand up and say that it hurts. It’s not “servicemen,” it’s “service members.” It has to be updated. They’re going to get there, but it takes time and people get caught up in a culture that doesn’t see them.

I want to ask you about that. You were recently on Sarah Silverman’s Hulu show, I Love You, America, and the overarching message through the show, which is somewhat radical these days, is seeing people — seeing people for who they are, accepting people for who they are. You being a guest felt so natural, because this is kind of the backbone of what you do as an artist, as well. Like you said, empathy first, empathy through song. How do we spread this idea? How do we translate and illustrate this intensely personal and individual reality of being on the fringes of society to help others understand the importance of empathy, of choosing to see people?

It’s a big question. No easy answer. What we can do, for example, is what I’m doing. To come out, to be seen in the truth of who we are, and to challenge people’s prejudices through loving, through kindness and tenderness and love. I’m working with veterans because I love them. Because I love them, it would be very difficult for them to reject me because I’m gay. They’re in a place, most of them, where they’re so grateful to be seen and loved that they open their arms and bring me into their family. I couldn’t have imagined five years ago, starting this, that it would lead me here. There’s a place for going in the streets and protesting, but there’s also a place for what Sarah [Silverman] is doing, what I’m trying to do, what Brené Brown is talking about, what Father Gregory Boyle over in Los Angeles is tackling with the gangs. What we’re talking about is sitting down and listening.

We may not agree on a single thing, politically, so let’s not talk about politics. Tell me how you feel. Tell me how it was for you, coming back from the Middle East. Tell me what it’s like now. Where does it hurt? I’m listening. I’m not in judgement. I think that empathy and listening is a big damn deal. What maybe happens when we’re young — I’m older now, you know? — when we’re young, we want to be heard. I wanted to be listened to. I felt as though what needed to happen was people needed to hear me. I’m older now, maybe it’s emotional maturity, but I realized what might be even more transformative, instead of me demanding that I be heard, is that I sit down and listen to other people. To give them the empathy that heals me. This is cliché sounding, but what I get from this work far, far surpasses what I give.

I love that. It’s one of my favorite things about these conversations. If we’re open and vulnerable and real with each other, we will constantly be surprised by each other in the best way.

Yep. And we find each other.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Bobby Osborne

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Artist: Bobby Osborne
Song: “They Called the Wind Maria” (originally from the 1951 Broadway musical, Paint Your Wagon)
Album: Original

Where did you first hear this song?

The first ones I ever heard do it were the Browns — Jim Ed and Maxine Brown. I kind of liked it then, but my brother and me didn’t want to cover it right then. It’s been a long time ago since I heard it. This project that Alison [Brown] came up with, with me and Compass Records, I thought about that song. My son and me were trying to get some songs together so we put it down on the list. The chord progression on it and the song itself, I’ve always really liked it. Of course, the Browns did a great job with the recording they had on it. I never did hear anybody else, maybe I didn’t listen, but I didn’t hear anybody else do it.

When I put it down on the list, Alison wrote me back, she said, “That was one that I wanted you to do!” [Laughs] So that turned out real good. Then I had to learn the thing, then. The melody and the harmony and all that on it. To me, it was just right down my alley.

What about the song made you think it would be such a great fit for bluegrass?

Well, it’s different from what most people would do, I think, in the story of it. A lot of people nowadays are doing arrangements like that, something similar to the way the melody and the harmony goes with that song. A lot of people are doing stuff that they didn’t do back when the Browns did it. If you went into a key that wasn’t just G, C, and D, you lost a lot of people, way back then. Nowadays, why, it’s not unusual at all.

My brother and me did some things — I don’t know if we were the first or not — but a lot of people in country music were doing that [sort of a thing]. But, as far as bluegrass goes, most of the time it was just plain Monroe-type music, Flatt & Scruggs, and the Stanley Brothers. A lot of folks didn’t go to those keys — what I always called it, the off-keys — with the melody of a song. My brother and I, we got tied in with that harmony we’d come up with and the endings that we had, everything just fit right into the melody of “Maria.” I was really familiar with that type of thing.

Fans might think, “He’s changed that around. I don’t like that kind of music.” But the song was written like that, so you can’t deny that. It fit us so good. Alison said it was always one of her favorite songs, too. Her being the producer, she asked me to do that, and it just tickled me to death. The more we worked with it, the better it got. It turned out to be a great recording.

You and your brother have always covered non-bluegrass songs throughout your career, and it’s kind of a tradition in bluegrass to take songs from outside the genre and repurpose them for bluegrass. Why do you think this is a tradition and why have you always made a point of recording these types of songs throughout your career?

You remember the song, “Once More”?

Yeah, of course!

We were doing just plain bluegrass, you know, Monroe-type and Flatt & Scruggs. Just G, C, D, bluegrass — three chords to it. Well, we were up in West Virginia, and a man up there by the name of Dusty Owens had a band and he had written that song, “Once More.” He had recorded it on a little label up there. He gave me one of the copies of it and, when I listened to it, I felt that would be a great thing for us to do with the harmony that we had. When we first recorded it for MGM Records, they were strictly [having us record] three-chord bluegrass.

I got the words to “Once More.” We had a couple hundred miles to drive home from Wheeling, and Red Allen was with us at the time — it was just three of us. We got to singing it just like we would normally do any other song, but there was just something missing with it. Of course, we were just doing regular harmony singing then. We had never featured a high lead on a thing in the world. My voice being the type that it was, it was made for high lead. We were just sitting in the car driving along. We didn’t have any instruments or nothing. We were just trying to learn the song. All of a sudden, I don’t know, I started singing the lead in a way-up-higher register. Red Allen was a tenor singer when he came to work with us, so he just started singing the tenor, but then it was the low part. My brother was good on the parts and chimed right in with the middle part and, boy, when we got to singing it like that, we knew right there we had run into some kind of harmony that we had never heard before. We had 200 miles to go and we sang that song all the way home so that we wouldn’t forget what we had learned. That’s how we came across that type of harmony.

When we went to Nashville to record again, we were dead set on putting that on a record, because that was brand new and it was different from Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and all that. It was so different from anybody. Wesley Rose was the A&R guy for MGM at that time, so we approached him with that type of harmony, and he looked at us and said, “You can’t do that. That’s some other kind of music and harmony besides bluegrass.” We had a talk and talk and talk. He said, “You put something like that out after what you’ve already done, you’re liable to lose your recording contract.” We were so set on it we said, “We’ll just take a chance on it, if you don’t care.”

When we recorded it, we had been using everything regular bluegrass people used — fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, and bass. We figured the snare drum was perfect with bluegrass. We went back to [Wesley] and said we wanted to add dobro and drop the fiddle. Well, he had a fit over that, too. We hesitated to mention that there was one thing we’d like to do with the rhythm on it, the snare drum, but just the brushes. The guy says, “You’re getting completely away from bluegrass!” Well, no. It’s just going to match our singing. We finally talked our way into him letting us do “Once More” just like the recording is now. He was not happy with that at all.

Well, we all know how that turned out!

[Laughs] Back then, I think it was on the top 40 country, I believe. It made number 15 or 16 on the charts. We never heard another word out of Wesley. [Laughs] That right there led us into going deeper and deeper into that kind of harmony. It became our trademark.

What’s your favorite thing about performing “They Called the Wind Maria”?

I kind of like the hesitation between each line, you know? I like that because we were kind of used to that kind of thing and changing from one key to another. That’s one of the main things that really took the song off with me. The hesitation between each set of two lines. Then the tune of it, the melody to the song. When we put the three parts to it, it really dressed it up and made it even different from what the Browns did.

Now you know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

Well, after what me and my brother have done, there’s not much we can say to argue with what anyone thought! [Laughs] People still ask us about it.

When we switched from MGM to Decca Records, Owen Bradley was the producer over there. He knew about us and he latched onto [what we were doing] in a hurry. He said, “Do what you want to do. You know more about what you want to do than I do.” We got a taste of country to go along with the bluegrass, and he went right along with us. It really worked out pretty good. When we were allowed to just do what we wanted to with the harmony, the instrumentation, and the lyrics to the songs, when we got into that, it became a standard thing for the Osborne Brothers. A lot of other people jumped on that type of harmony in a hurry. It became a standard thing about every one of them wanted to do.

I love that on your latest record, Original, you’re carrying on that tradition of doing songs that some people might not expect to be on a bluegrass record.

Oh yeah, that was a thing we knew [from the begining] with one playing the banjo and one playing the mandolin and singing [in the Osborne Brothers]. There’s no way we’d ever get away from the sound of bluegrass instruments. What we had in mind was to play those instruments and make them fit with what we were doing. We were putting bluegrass and country music right together, and people just loved it. Our harmony singing fit bluegrass and country music, both. In one sense of the phrase, we had it made right there.

Being Your Own Gravel Road: A Conversation with H.C. McEntire

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Singer/songwriter H.C. McEntire has been making music for many years now — formerly with the punk band Bellafea and more recently with the indie country outfit Mount Moriah. But last year, she paused that trajectory to tour with Angel Olsen. Speaking from her home in North Carolina, she explains, “There are not many voices I’d put my own career on hold for.” The opportunity was an exciting one, but McEntire’s not prone to multi-tasking, so she found it hard to stay connected to her own creative direction while touring someone else’s.

Enter: Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna. A chance encounter between the two women developed into a professional acquaintance, which eventually became a strong friendship. Upon request, McEntire sent Hanna her entire hard drive of demos, hoping Hanna could forge a path through the disparate songs she’d written outside of Mount Moriah’s catalogue. “A lot of it was weird, abstract punk stuff that didn’t fit in to other things I was making, and some of it was real sweet pop, kind of twee,” she says. “It was all over the place.” Rather than cull together the raucous material, Hanna saw something in McEntire’s folk-driven country tunes, so the pair worked closely to refine the ideas that’d been bubbling on the margins for years. Sometimes, in order to find your voice, you need someone to guide you back to it.

McEntire’s resulting debut solo album, LIONHEART, sets about reclaiming country music from the bros, belles, and other tropes that fail to leave room for new stories because they’re proscribed as “the norm.” Growing up a queer woman in the South, she’s familiar with such labels and how they’re used as an exclusionary tactic.

McEntire was raised in a Southern Baptist family; she learned about the communal inclusivity church can offer only to experience its steely opposite when she came out. The hymnal ballad “When You Come For Me” finds her questioning her place in the land that birthed her against woozy pedal steel and a quavering rhythm. “Mama, I dreamed that I had no hand to hold. And the land I cut my teeth on wouldn’t let me call it home,” she sings, her voice forthright.

She’s struggled with her faith, her family, and even herself over the years and, with Hanna’s guidance, has channeled the result of those trials and the subsequent peace she’s found into LIONHEART. On “Quartz in the Valley,” the conventional images that have long embodied the South shed their sheen: Mascara-caked lashes smear after a long, passionate night, bouffant hair wilts with the sunrise. McEntire repurposes the region in her image, making a space for herself rather than waiting for a space to be made. There’s no metaphor more assertive than when she sings “this gravel road don’t need paving.”

What does Americana mean to you, and how have you found yourself defining it in your own terms?

It’s situational for me. I think a lot of us end up using it, and we don’t totally know why or, at least, I don’t know where it all started.

It’s a more recent definition for a lot of different styles, like an umbrella term.

That’s how I feel, too. Not that it doesn’t have value, but I think it’s kind of … I’m sure there’s a fancy word for it, but just like a term that gets used so much you forget what it means.

And yet somehow manages to be exclusive.

Right, because people think Americana isn’t country, like there’s a hard line there. So I guess my answer is I don’t know.

You’ve played other musical styles in the past, your musical career, but the traditions you cull on LIONHEART harken back to your upbringing. Why was it important to use that music to make this statement?

I think as I’ve gotten older — and maybe it’s something that you do, you know, reflecting on your childhood and what you cut your teeth on — it just kinda happened. I started remembering what music I loved and it was a natural thing. Maybe it’s like a language that I stepped away from and lost a little bit, and I’ve been slowly trying to relearn and reconstruct in this way that fits my life.

There’s something powerful about co-opting the language that can be used against you and making it your own, so I could see musical styles serving that same idea. What did you grow up listening to?

All my family lives on one road. There’s a communal farm in the middle, and that was the hub, that was the homestead. My uncle ran a mechanic shop there, and there was always country music playing from the radio — ’80s country, pretty much — which is a lot of the country I love. Also, I was privy to all the old-time and the bluegrass that trickled in from community get-togethers, like church. Lots of hymns. That’s a big pillar for me. That’s what I remember listening to, up until I started getting some cassettes, like Bruce Springsteen and the Beach Boys. Those were supplemental, but the foundation was whatever was circulating through the radio dial or the church.

You said you’ve strengthened your connection to your faith in recent years?

It’s definitely a process that I’m still refining. I grew up in a Southern Baptist family, and the church was really close to our house; my great-great-great-whatever grandfather founded it back in the 1700s. That’s just what you did. I never really thought about it. I had moments where I connected with it on a deep level, and I had a lot of moments and years where I was sort of robotic. As a teenager and later in my teens, I realized, as I started forming my own beliefs, that a lot of those were incongruent to what I was hearing on Sunday mornings, and it was really confusing. I struggled with that for a very long time. When I went off to college, I shut the door on organized religion. I felt kind of betrayed by it. It was painful; I didn’t think I had a place in it. I was bitter and, for many years, I could not talk about religion.

I can see how you’d want to stop trying to connect.

Exactly. All the while, I really felt a void. I was hungry for those moments when I was younger, when I was sitting on the pew, and I felt this profound power in the form of a congregation. Those moments where I did feel love, and I did feel faith, I was hungry for those again, but I wanted them on my own terms. They needed to make me feel valid and whole. Over the last 10 years, I lowered my guard — a lot of this is in this record, I did that. I had to be really vulnerable.

On “Quartz in the Valley,” you’ve got one of the finest metaphors I’ve heard in some time: “This gravel road, it don’t need paving.” How did you set about clearing a space for yourself in a home that hasn’t always been accepting?

That’s a cool line.

It’s a great line!

I hadn’t thought about it that way.

I thought it was such a great declaration, and I don’t even know if you meant it like that.

I definitely think I was alluding to something. All I can say is, it’s taken a long time, and a lot of stops and starts, and a lot of being vulnerable and really being active about researching certain spiritualities that I’m interested in, or experimenting with different churches in the area. It was really hard walking through the door of the first church that I went back to, but once that happened, it’s been so liberating and I realized that it’s not a formula. Re-discovering that and reconnecting with [my spirituality], I feel more whole. I feel whole in a way that I’ve never felt. I’m allowing my spiritual journey just to be whatever it is. I don’t really adhere to labels or anything, so I just want to grow.

I feel like any time you add a descriptor to an experience like that, people tend to characterize it in terms of exclusion.

Exactly. That word “exclusion,” to me, that is really confusing when you talk about spirituality because it’s the opposite of exclusion. But there’s so much of that, especially in the South. Certain groups find power and they quell their own anxieties and fears by excluding other people.

It’s the opposite of the message.

Exactly.

Your relationship with the land comes across powerfully in “When You Come for Me.” Where does it stand now?

When I wrote that, I was imagining the land I grew up on — the road I’m talking about with my family — and I think it also was inspired a little bit by … several years ago, I learned that my parents had bought my brother and me this plot in the church cemetery. That is actually a normal thing to do, just buy up a whole thing so your family can be together, but it made me think what that actually meant. I’ve carried a lot of pain with me over the years. I grew up in a very tight-knit family, and I love the land I grew up on. It’s in the foothills of the mountains in western North Carolina; it’s a small town. I’ve been in a lot of pain with how to relate to that particular area, socially, culturally.

Right. If they’re not making a space for you, then how do you see yourself as part of the community?

I think it’s actually more of a question to my family. It’s something I’ve been grappling with. My self-identity and yearning for that land and that inclusion, but I’ve never totally been accepted by my family. I’m still coming out to them over and over again.

Do you feel like you’ve reached a shift from proving yourself to making a statement?

There’s some peace in it. I feel I’ve reached this point where I don’t want to say I’ve stopped trying, but I’ve stopped forcing it. A lot of LIONHEART has been me reckoning with all this we’re talking about, so there must be some sort of peace that I’m at least able to write about it in a poetic way. That’s a challenge I liked: How can I connect with these communities and with different layers of myself and do it in a poetic narrative instead of a punk song or a hit-you-over-the-head anthem? I’m interested in finding that medium place where I can relate to all sides.

Kathleen Hanna isn’t exactly an artist I would place under the umbrella of Americana, but I love that you two connected and she kept wanting to talk about your music. Can you delve into that collaboration?

I’m sometimes still surprised.

It feels like kismet!

Yeah, it was a real gift that the universe gave me. I’ve looked up to her for a long time. We peripherally had been friends, but just through the music scene — the punk scene. She provided this mentorship that — I’m going to get emotional — it came to me at a time when I needed some direction. I was pretty lost creatively: I wasn’t sure where Mount Moriah was going, I’d just taken this job singing in Angel Olsen’s band that I knew was going to physically and creatively take me away from certain things.

This record would not be … it just tears me up. She didn’t have to do all that. She didn’t have to be this editor and mentor and fan of what I was doing, but it just shows what kind of person she is. She asked me to send her demos. None of us knew exactly what her role was going to be, whether it would be her producing or me and her co-writing things, and it kind of became all of the above. I sent her everything I had on my hard drive, like six or seven years. I anticipated her to be drawn to the more rocking, cathartic music that I knew she had made, but everything she picked were all the country songs. I think that’s when I knew that it was real. I needed to trust her and step back a little bit and let somebody have the first shovel dig.

Especially if you’re going through creative doubts, to have someone step in and build you up is worth more than gold.

Oh, totally. It’s been one of the most powerful things in my life. I needed someone to believe in me. I’d lost sight of that. I loved singing with Angel; I loved my role in that band, but it psyched me out too because I’m not very good at multi-tasking. There are not many voices I’d put my own career on hold for, but in the middle of all that, I got lost and Kathleen … like you said, it’s one of those things that even further connects me to the spiritual world, quite frankly.

It almost, in its own way, feels like amends for what you’ve been through.

Damn, dog. Yeah! That is a really amazing way to think about that.

Just having her listen through your entire hard drive of music … that alone … not many people would spend that kind of time.

It was symbiotic in a lot of ways. I think she got a lot out of switching gears and trying on a different hat. We were both new at all angles of it.

Are you ready to loose it on the world?

I’m ready to see what this year has in store. I’m trying not to have expectations, because this record could get panned a lot of different ways, and I could get pigeonholed a lot of different ways. It really got me out of a dark place, so I’m grateful to it, no matter what happens.

Photo credit: Heather Evans Smith

Caleb Caudle, ‘Love That’s Wild’

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It’s a new year and, thus, time for renewal: an action which manifests itself in most of us as a set of empty promises that we’ll make, and then break, as the months progress. Drink less or, at least, just have a glass of red wine instead of those tequilas. Exercise more, at least three times a week. Try for a raise or a new project. Speak up on the job. Stop biting your nails. Do more this, do less that. Resolve to have resolve.

Caleb Caudle’s not making resolutions for just one year on “Love That’s Wild,” from his forthcoming LP, Crushed Coins. Instead, he’s casting a humble promise for eternity — and that’s to love the one you’re with, and do it well. Caudle has a knack for simple melodies as much as he does unusual arrangements, and here he rests his sweet, casual delivery on an understated but infectiously captivating ode to romance. “I was a wreck ’til you came along, stumbling home at the break of dawn,” sings Caudle to a jangly rhythm. “Now we fall asleep with all the lights on.” A wild love doesn’t have to be unpredictable and uncertain; love can be wildly fulfilling when it’s permanent and secure, too. So maybe don’t give up the carbs this new year, and resolve to gamble on a love that’s wild, instead.

Lee Ann Womack: Keeping it Real

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Lee Ann Womack had to get out of Nashville to make what she calls a real country music record. Specifically, she had to get about 800 miles away. For her eighth — and maybe her best — album, The Lonely, the Lonesome & the Gone, Womack trekked down to Houston, Texas, and set up camp at the historic SugarHill Studio, which has hosted famed sessions by some of her musical heroes: Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Sir Douglas Quintet, George Jones, and many others. Nashville has plenty of similarly legendary rooms, of course, but Womack needed to get away from the grinding gears of the country music machine — what she derides as “McRecords.”

“It’s like a factory,” she says. “What was great about being down there in Texas is that you’re in a studio where people go to work everyday and you have all kinds of music being recorded there. Nobody’s going in thinking, ‘We’ve got to lay down a three-minute uptempo love song for radio.’ They’re not thinking about how we’re going to make the most money out of three minutes of music. All they’re thinking about is going in and making great music.”

Womack is one of the few artists who can drop a phrase like “real country music” into conversation without sounding defensive, dismissive, or derisive — in other words, without buying into received notions of authenticity. Her definition of “real” is deeply personal and based on the country music that was popular 40 or 50 or even 60 years ago, but Lonely proves that even old tunes and old sounds can speak to this modern moment. Rather than restrictive, the term becomes freeing: These new songs range from the stately countrypolitan of “Hollywood” to the gritty blues of “All the Trouble,” from the beautiful reimagining of the 1959 Lefty Frizzell “Long Black Veil” to the remarkable insights of the title track, a country song about country songs.

Recording in Houston actually brought her closer to some of her Nashville heroes. Womack grew up in a small town called Jacksonville, Texas, about three hours due north of Houston. Her father was a country radio DJ, a profession that provided his daughter with a deep grounding in the music’s history. As a child, she loved Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. “I thought he was funny. The music was upbeat and bouncy, which any kid would like, and then you’ve got this guy talking all over the tracks: [Imitating Wills’ falsetto] ‘Shoot low, sheriff! I think he’s riding a Shetland!’” She might have been laughing at the bandleader’s antics, but she was subconsciously absorbing the complex horns and fiddles. “It becomes part of the fabric of your musical DNA.”

As she grew up, Womack raided her parents’ record collection, which was full of albums by Ray Price, George Jones, Porter Waggoner, Dolly Parton, and, of course, Willie Nelson. “Twin fiddles and steel guitar and story songs — these were the things that I thought were country music, and I thought my idea of country music was everybody’s idea of country music.” Ironically, being in Nashville only distanced Womack from her first loves. “Growing up in East Texas, I was full of dreams and hope. Then I moved to Nashville and, after 20 years, you get kind of jaded. Things change,” she says. “Every time I go back home, I have a spark of that feeling I had growing up. I wanted that again. I haven’t made a record in that frame of mind in so long. I just wanted to be surrounded again by the things that shaped me growing up.”

All of those old sounds inform the new record, which was produced by her husband, Frank Liddell, and finds Womack moving even further away from the country mainstream. Disregarding the need for radio airplay and signing with ATO Records [home to the Drive-By Truckers and Hurray for the Riff Raff] suggests she is cementing her place within the Americana market, adopting a rootsier sound for a very different kind of audience. As she recounts her career, however, Womack insists she has always gravitated toward this kind of music, even when she was just starting out. “When I walked into the offices of Decca Records to audition, I walked in with just an upright bass, myself, and an acoustic guitar. We played as a trio, right there in the office,” she recounts. “And that’s exactly who I was. My first record had a song on it called ‘Never Again, Again,’ and that was stone-cold country. Even in 1997, I felt like I needed to remind people of what country music really was.”

And yet, within the country sphere and without, she is best known for 2000’s smash single, “I Hope You Dance,” which achieved the crossover success so many Nashville artists covet. Recorded with Sons of the Desert, it’s a slick and sentimental pop-country anthem whose uplifting lyrics could double as a graduation speech or a Hallmark card: “I hope you still feel small, when you stand beside the ocean. Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens.”

To her credit, Womack doesn’t ignore or disregard her biggest hit, no matter that it is something of an outlier in her catalog. She still performs it at almost every concert, still sings it like it’s a brand-new song, still invests those lyrics with sincerity and immense generosity, even as she strips it down to its core. “Those lyrics still stand up with just an acoustic guitar,” she says. “I might have cut a couple of lightweight pieces along the way, but I tried to cut the best songs I could find. And now when I go out and play with fewer musicians in a more stripped-down setting, those songs hold up because they were great songs to begin with. I guess a lot of shit got put on them to make them more commercial.”

That is perhaps one of Womack’s most undervalued talents: She is a sensitive and intuitive song collector with a discerning ear for complex sentiments, sturdy melodies, and relatable characters. On her last album, 2014’s The Way I’m Livin’, she covered the Texas singer/songwriter Hayes Carll and managed to outdo Neil Young on her tender version of “Out on a Weekend.” Lonely includes a handful of old-school covers, but the standouts are those penned by young scribes like Brent Cobb, Adam Wright, and Jay Knowles.

During the sessions in Houston, there were discussions about the title track, which includes the line, “[Hank Williams] never wrote about watching a Camry pulling out of a crowded apartment parking lot.” According to Wright, who co-wrote the tune, “Some people were like, ‘Camry isn’t very cool. Is there another car we can use?’ But Lee Ann said, ‘No, it’s a Camry. Those are the lyrics and that’s what it is.’ And that’s the point, after all. It’s not a Jaguar. It’s not a cool car. It’s not romantic.” As she sings it, that is one of the most arresting lines in a song this year — country or otherwise — and she delivers it with a gentle despair and even a little resignation, as though measuring the romance of an old country song and the reality of everyday life. “The care she takes with these songs left a big impression on me,” says Wright.

For Womack, country music is real when it’s about real people — not just the musicians who write and sing the songs, but the listeners who play those tunes over and over again, who hear their own dreams and hopes echoed back to them. “I have this theme about myself and about others,” says Womack. “I don’t know how else to describe it, except to say that I am drawn to losers. I hate to call anybody a loser, but I throw myself in that pile.”

By “losers,” she means people facing down challenges bigger than they are, and that accounts for just about everybody on earth. “That’s why I’m drawn to songs like ‘All the Trouble’ and ‘I Hope You Dance.’ They’re about challenges, about hard moments in life,” she muses. “There was a time when country music spoke more to those types of people. Now it’s speaking to a different group of people. That’s fine, but I want to speak to the challenges of life. The lonely, the lonesome, and the gone? Those are my people.”

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

Hangin’ & Sangin’: Little Bandit

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From the Bluegrass Situation and WMOT Roots Radio, it’s Hangin’ & Sangin’ with your host, BGS editor Kelly McCartney. Every week Hangin’ & Sangin’ offers up casual conversation and acoustic performances by some of your favorite roots artists. From bluegrass to folk, country, blues, and Americana, we stand at the intersection of modern roots music and old time traditions bringing you roots culture — redefined.

With me today at Hillbilly Central, Little Bandit! Or Alex Caress of Little Bandit.

Hi!

…

Breakfast Alone is the album. Nashville Scene voted it best country album of the year!

I can’t believe it!

Frankly, I was shocked and so happy when I saw it.

Yeah, I mean for a really independent record to obviously have made that sort of impact is humbling. It’s awesome.

Yeah, cool. And we premiered a video (“Sinking”) this week on BGS, so you’re just going to town!

Yeah, me and Stacie Huckeba, who directed the video, went up to the river and made sure no one was around and jumped in the river naked. There were some shocked joggers, but it was alright. [Laughs]

…

Well, we mentioned your new video for “Sinking,” but in your “Bed of Bad Luck” video, I appreciate how fully and honestly you represent yourself. You have your fella in there, and you’re making out with him in it, and I feel like … I appreciate it as art, first of all, but I appreciate it as a gay person because that takes the energy; it kind of sucks the air out of the room and it takes the shame out of it. So, then, if anybody does have an issue with who you are, it’s not you, it’s clearly them. Was that kind of part of your thinking, in not just that video, but how you present yourself as who you are?

Yeah I never wanted there to be a question, or have it be “Is he or isn’t he?”

Scuttlebutt.

Yeah, “I heard that he has a boyfriend” or whatever. May as well just put it out there, and I felt like, at the time that it came out was in January of this year, so it just felt like the right moment to be open and to be honest and show the world that I don’t care. [Laughs]

…

Even in [the Americana world], though, do you ever feel tokenized? Othered? Because I go to a lot of shows, and there are very often, probably nine out of 10, I’m probably the only queer in the club. Although I do joke that sometimes Kacey Musgraves is there to help me balance the room. [Laughs] It’s not that I don’t feel welcome; it’s just that I notice, “Okay, I’m the only one. Okay, whatever.”

There is an element of tokenization, is that the word?

Let’s go with it. We could say “tokenigaytion.”

[Laughs] I was hoping that I wasn’t putting myself in that position by having come out of the gate with that video, but for the most part [there’s], been a lot of support and a lot of the right things have come out of it, you know?

At AmericanaFest this year, they invited me to a panel about identity in music with Patterson Hood and Chastity Brown, Rev. Sekou, [and] I felt like, “What am I doing here? I’m just gay!” [Laughs] … But you know, I felt that there might be elements of tokenization — tokenigaytion — but I feel like the conversations that have come out of it have been more valuable than any of that.

Right. And you also run around with a pretty cool group of folks — Margo Price, Adia Victoria, Nikki Lane, and a bunch of other super talented people who also have some element of outlier in their identities, too. So that must help, I would assume.

Yeah we “grew up,” so to speak, at the Five Spot, just hangin’ there every night and playing shows, sort of feeling like outcasts over in East Nashville doing our own thing, before it was “East Nashville,” you know?

…

Musically, you have this classic sound. The outlaw country vibe is all the rage these days, but you go further back than that. You go back to ‘50s, ‘60s — where country, pop, rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly was sort of all still mushed together. Where did that come from? Was that stuff that you listened to growing up?

Well, growing up, it was a lot of Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, and my dad loved Roy Orbison and stuff like that.

There it is!

Yeah, and I feel like that contributed a lot to it.

Roy’s kind of the quintessential intersection of all that stuff.

Yeah, and having that sort of drama in the music really appealed to me. [Laughs] Because I did theater, too, and that sort of theatrical thing that you can bring to music and a live show really appealed to me. I love getting on the stage and sort of putting it all out there.

…

Song-wise, what’s so great is that you sketch out the lives — and, more than once, the death — of these marginalized characters, in a song like “Platform Shoes,” for instance. What draws you to those types of stories? And to murder?

There’s nothing like a tragic country song, and there’s something very real and palpable about tragedy and death that you can really wrap your mind around. As far as, you know, murder and all that stuff …

‘Cause it’s not just death, it’s murder. Let’s be clear!

Some of that is thinking about all those old murder ballads and kind of seeing a little bit of the humor in that, and kind of taking that trope and throwing it on its head and making it something a little bit more subversive.

And I’ve noticed in reading about you that I’ve seen the word “sardonic” applied a number of times, and comparisons to Father John Misty and what not. And I get that. That’s definitely there, but I feel like — and you can tell me if I’m getting this right — I feel like there’s a compassion underneath that, in your songs, that I don’t necessarily hear in some of the others in that milieu that write like that.

Right, I mean it’s not supposed to be a comedy show, you know? And it’s not supposed to be 100 percent satire or commentary. There’s a little bit of humanity in there.

It’s like you’re telling it from the inside out rather than an outsider just watching something.

Right. Because, I mean, there’s still humanity in it. There has to be a way to connect to that character’s humanity. And I guess that also brings you back to the theater element, because you put yourself in that person’s shoes, you’re gonna start to feel those emotions, too.

Watch all the episodes on YouTube, or download and subscribe to the Hangin’ & Sangin’ podcast and other BGS programs every week via iTunes, Podbean, or your favorite podcast platform.

WATCH: Kristina Murray, ‘How Tall the Glass’

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Artist: Kristina Murray
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Song: “How Tall the Glass”

In Their Words: “For a month or so prior to writing ‘How Tall the Glass,’ I’d been on a listening binge of early turtleneck-wearing Willie and pompadour-styling Paycheck, and was just obsessing over both their exaggerated vocal phrasings and unique perspectives on love, life, and drinking — and how and when those things collide. Late one night last November, I’d been sipping Bulleit bourbon, missing my lover, and messing around just writing and picking, when I said to myself — as I reached for another beer — ‘Well, it’s just a two-step process from the fridge to the cup!’ I thought that sounded like something Willie would philosophize, and the song just poured (no pun intended) out from there; it really took shape with the refrain line, which muses and smirks in self defeat, ‘How empty the bottle, how tall the glass.” — Kristina Murray

Photo credit: Sarah McLaughlin

Amanda Shires Calls Country Out on the Carpet

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The slogan tee has been around for a minute, but lately they have evolved from funny pop culture references — “My neck, my back, my Netflix, and my snacks” tee comes to mind — to thought-provoking and political statements. Some of my personal favorites include Third Man’s “Icky Trump” tee, Midnight Rider’s “Nasty Woman” tee, Rorey Carroll’s “DIY Choice” tee, and Amanda Shires’ “Nashville Sound” tee. They’ve even found a place in high-end fashion. Dior’s artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, sent models down the runway wearing the titles of two different feminist texts, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” and “We should all be feminists.”

Slogan tees are a portable billboard, allowing wearers to open up a dialogue about issues that are often ignored. So, whether this latest trend has you rolling your eyes or loading up your shopping cart, you can’t deny its success in sparking curiosity and conversations this past year.

Singer/Songwriter Amanda Shires knows how to get a message across and she did just that earlier this month at the 2017 CMA awards. Ditching the request for formal attire, Shires stood tall on the red carpet wearing heels, fishnets, a pencil skirt, and a mauve tank top with lyrics “Mama wants to change that Nashville sound” (from Jason Isbell’s “White Man’s World” off The Nashville Sound) printed across the front. These lyrics acknowledge the struggle female artists face in mainstream country music, and Shires felt there was no better place to display this message than at the CMA Awards.

In order to keep the conversation of gender inequality rolling, I sat down with Amanda and asked her a few questions.

Earlier this month you wore a tank top to the CMAs with Jason Isbell‘s lyric “Mama wants to change that Nashville sound.” Why do you feel those lyrics were important to wear to the CMAs?

I feel like it’s important because I feel like there’s room to let more women’s voices be heard and there’s not enough being done about it in the moment we’re in right now.

What is the change you would like to make in the “Nashville sound”?

I mean, ideally it would be equality — the number of female singers to male singers being played on the radio. A shorter distance in the earnings between the two sexes, but that would have to start higher up because the industry is still being run by old-ass white dudes, and you know it could use a lot more women, a lot more people of color, it could use a lot more as far as diversity goes.

I listened to the radio and, out of 28 songs, I heard two women voices and one of them happens to be in a band that also has male singers, and I feel like that’s a step, but there are a lot of steps to go from. Okay one of the problems, one of the defenses that country radio stations have is “There aren’t requests for female singers,” and that’s a weird cycle, a weird catch-22 because if there were more women being played, then the audience would have more women to choose from as far as requests goes, but as it is, you can really only name two if you’re just a general country listener. Whether or not it changes, I mean, TBD.

We have to try and speak up for one another and try to do it together.

When you wore that tank, you were voicing a desired change for equality in a male-dominated genre. Do you think the lyric was also written with other country music minorities in mind?

I don’t know because I didn’t write it, but I do know that it applies to me, and that’s why I feel I can pirate that and take it to be mine because, whoever said it or wrote it first, Jason Isbell, that’s fine, but it is also like, “Oh cool. There’s a guy out there actually thinking about that, too.” It’s good to know there are more socially aware and empathetic persons out there than just those of us who are struggling.

I know that we can stand to see more diversity than just being a woman vs man struggle. I don’t even it’s like a versus — I think it’s just a thing that exists. I think if there was more education and more thoughtfulness in what was being played on the radio and not treating ladies like they’re a garnish or tomatoes on a salad, we could be getting a lot further. I feel like country music is behind the times in a lot of ways. Pop, rock, hip-hop … they play lots of ladies. Country? Behind. That’s not even talking about the musical part, which needs to change, too.

Country music subject matter is lame these days, too. That’s another soapbox, but part of the change we need. We can’t wear a tank top and skirt to an awards show while a guy wears a tee shirt and jeans? “Oh my God, someone call the E! Online!”

Do you feel your message was well received at the CMA Awards?

At the CMA Awards? I don’t know, but I know as far as fans of my work and people that are like-minded, it was well received. I don’t really hang out with industry folks, so who knows?

Why do you think E! chose to focus on the outfit being inappropriate and Rolling Stone chose to focus on the statement?

Because E! is base. Rolling Stone, I think Rolling Stone knows what time it is. E!’s not credible. No one thinks “Oh, I should listen to what they think of someone’s style opinions.”

You mentioned earlier about how the woman’s role in country music has changed a little, but is still stuck in 1957.

Yeah.

Kelly Garcia, Amanda Shires, Ledja Cobb, and Dave Cobb at the CMA Awards.

What do you think are the steps needed to progress a little bit (or a lot!) more here?

Women championing other women. So much in music is, “Oh, how do you explain it?” Say that there are 10 slots for you to make a top 10 record. They give one, if you’re lucky, to a female. And all the girls are fighting for this one spot, so naturally they’re sort of like, “Oh no, if this person gets it, that means I’m less than,” but it’s not that way. Everybody who makes something great is worthy of a spot. It’s just they don’t make enough spots.

I would say for every time they play that Keith Urban “Female” song, which this article is not about that, they should probably spin three-to-five female artists directly following, if that’s the message that they are trying to send. If Urban is really wanting to do something, he should probably really do it. I really hope folks aren’t treating this idea as a trend, and I really hope the ultimate goal isn’t to monetize this important shit. Because right now, to me, it feels a lot like, “Oh, this is a cool trend to follow. This is what they want. I’m gonna go cash in on that right now.”

Other steps would be to hire women engineers etc. I know a few engineers and women producers. I don’t know.

What role do you think listeners/fans have in raising awareness and affecting change?

Just have the conversation… They can call their radio stations and complain when women aren’t being played. They can count the songs and write down who sang them and have proof when questions are asked. They can also go support live lady artists. A lot of people claim that they don’t like a female voice. Well, it’s just they haven’t heard enough of them. Everybody likes fucking Joni Mitchell. Yeah call in, make things happen like that. Actually support live music because as hard as it is for a parent, a mother or father, to go out and see live music, pay to park the car, and buy dinner and all that, it’s the same amount of difficulty for a woman who is a performer with a child and all that kind of stuff.

I think to make a difference you have to be active and you have to actively participate within your community further than just messaging on social media. That’s not enough. You have to participate. You have to actively support and actively show up. You might get to bed an hour later, but you’re doing something. Anything you can do to support is good past being on a screen. I think that being in the moment and showing up with your physical self — body  or whatever I don’t know — means more and it’s more noticeable.