A Harmonic Convergence: An Interview with Robert Ellis and Courtney Hartman

There’s a strangely specific conversation that takes place between two guitars. Long-time friends Robert Ellis and Courtney Hartman know the very kind. They’ve been playing music together for some time now, but they partnered in a new way when they set about to record a selection of folk singer John Hartford’s songs for their collaborative tribute album, Dear John. The musicians — solo artists in their own respect (with Hartman also playing in Americana group Della Mae) — paired their guitars, as well as their voices for a harmonically infused update on Hartford’s work, both known and obscure.

While their voices ebb and flow like the river that runs central to Hartford’s songwriting, it’s their stunning guitar work that elevates the 10-track LP into a conversation within a conversation. The slow, building guitars of “Delta Queen Waltz” trickle like a stream, widening at the first verse’s start to allow Ellis’s and Hartman’s voices space to enter. Then, of course, there’s their take on one of Hartford’s most famous songs, “Gentle on My Mind.” As the song winds down, their guitars spend nearly two minutes in a tête-à-tête that is as evocative as their harmonies at the beginning. Dear John is a winsome nod to the “weird” writing of Hartford told not through his traditional banjo and fiddle, but two very talkative, beguiling guitars.

What was it about this opportunity to sing together that felt so enticing?

Robert Ellis: We’ve been friends for a long time. We’ve been taking every opportunity to play together ever since we met. I think the tour and the record are products of that vibe of enjoying each other’s company.

Courtney Hartman: Exactly. And, actually, the record had been made before we toured.

What about Hartford’s songwriting feels modern or timeless to you, and how do you feel his subject matter still resonating?

CH: John Hartford writes really specifically and really poignantly, and I think those lyrics will always feel timeless. He would also write some really specific cultural or political or environmental songs, and I think they’re still very relevant today.

RE: Yeah, I think that’s a strength of his style. I was explaining to a student the other day — we were talking about writing — I think, when we’re young, all of our instinct as writers is to want to be profound, to search for this way to say something meaningful that no one has said, or just say something in this unique or profound way. I think, as we get older, we figure out that the most profundity there is in the universe is in the little details of, you know, ironing your shirt or the weird interaction you had with a lover at a coffee shop. There’s something about the very specific narrative nature of that tradition that makes these profound things happen. I think, for John Hartford’s stuff, they’re specific ideas about a specific thing happening, and that says something about this much larger, more important thing.

Speaking about his political songs, “Old Time River Man” comes to mind because I couldn’t help drawing parallels to, let’s say, “Peg and Awl,” and the plight of the laborer. Even that feels relevant still.

CH: I think his songs about interactions, people’s interactions, are imminently relatable, and I think it’s the same specific details that he gives that make you go, “Oh, I know that feeling.” Those are still and always will be relevant.

He once described his compositions as “weird songs.” Where do you see them fitting in the greater tradition of folk?

RE: Especially in the context of the world he was in, he’s very weird. I guess everyone’s odd in some way, but he definitely embraced his eccentricities. Rather than shy away from something that’s really nuanced and John Hartford-y, he would embrace it. “Down on the River,” from an arrangement perspective, you have these weird, old-time fiddle lines, and it sounds like he overdubbed 20 tracks of them. It’s a huge section of fiddles. His instinct was to really be himself regardless of the context. I think that’s what drew both of us to him.

As far as themes, one thing I really like about his meaning and motive for writing songs is that he’s really careful to highlight beauty in the world rather than to call out specific things. You catch more flies with honey. Instead of going out and saying, “This is messed up! This is messed up!” he really shows someone how poignant a day of labor can be. A song like “Tall Building,” it’s not necessarily about how the city sucks. There’s this depth to everything he’s saying that’s much more fair and real-life to me, it’s not so preachy.

CH: I don’t know if he would have said it was protest songwriting.

Not exclusively, but I do think protest comes up in a rather sneaky way.

CH: Mmhmm, and I think it comes with a sense of tenderness.

RE: Exactly. It’s not that he’s softer; I just think he’s more honest. Life is this really nuanced, gray area most of the time, and I think songwriting has a bad habit of not allowing that. Instead of being the gray, uncomfortable feeling we all feel, songwriting tries to be very pointed and very one-sided. Writers like Hartford were comfortable being nuanced.

CH: And he wasn’t afraid to use humor and just be a weirdo in the way that he wrote. His ability to make people dance and his deep rhythmic groove and integrity … when people are dancing, you can’t help but listen to what someone’s playing, so songs like “Up on the Hill Where They Do the Boogie,” who knows what that’s about really. I think there are a lot of things that song can be about. Part of the gift of getting to play it for generations is to go, “Oh, maybe it’s about this. Maybe it’s about the hippies on the hill. Maybe it’s about the White House.”

RE: We were playing it the other day, and I thought, “Oh, maybe it’s about Capitol Hill, and you were like, ‘Well, yeah.’”

CH: I was like, “Duh.”

RE: That had never occurred to me. I had never heard it that way.

CH: The whole time I’m like, “This is such a political song.”

Hartford brought together banjo and fiddle for his compositions, whereas you’ve partnered your two guitars. How did you want to cultivate that particular sound while paying homage to Hartford?

CH: My first introduction to learning Hartford material was his fiddle tunes. I think one of the strongest components of his songs is to shape melodies, and to write really memorable melodies. Coming from playing fiddle tunes on guitar was a bonding place for both Robert and me, when we both came to this material. The first tune we learned together was “Delta Queen Waltz.” We thought it sounded really good; we had a lot of fun playing it.

RE: A lot of it, for me at least, was really intuitive.

It does seem that way watching you two play, but that makes sense, if it’s born of this friendship.

CH: We had two days to rehearse this material, but rehearse meant play it over and over again and learn it, and then we had two days to record, so it was all done in four days. We kept being like, “Dang, this is pretty easy,” because we both had similar instincts, so we didn’t have to talk about nuanced arrangement parts of dynamic because there was a deeper level of understanding, musically.

RE: It was really easy. All of it’s been really easy.

It’s nice when it works out that way. This is a weird question, I admit, but besides sounding beautiful, what did you hope your harmonies would achieve?

RE: I think there’s definitely a tension in the harmony thing that we’re doing on this record; I think we went for more of a conversation within the harmony itself because we are doing this thing as a duo. I don’t know. This is all subconscious. I think when musicians do interviews, a lot of the time they do things because it feels right and they do them naturally.

Right, and then they’re asked to think about them more critically.

RE: And then they have these grandiose explanations as to why. The harmony is having a conversation while the two of us are having a conversation, and I think it accidentally — in a good way — reinforces the lyrics of a song. If it’s a love song, then the harmony tends to be really sweet and beautiful and then, if it’s a song about tension in a relationship, we kind of leaned on dark harmony. I think it’s entirely natural that it happened that way. A lot of it is taking cues from the writing. Hartford already did a lot of the work in the writing.

Robert Ellis & Courtney Hartman, ‘Gentle on My Mind’

Sometimes, songs become so imbedded in our minds, and our culture, that their essential nature makes us forget how unusual they may actually be. And one like “Gentle on My Mind,” written by John Hartford and made iconic by Glen Campbell, is no exception. Hartford, himself, admitted that it actually broke all the musical rules, in terms of what should work commercially — it’s layered thick with his signature newgrass banjo instrumentals, it’s more poetry than traditional verse-chorus-verse (in fact, there is no proper chorus), and it was written in just 20 minutes. Now, it feels like a traditional, and a priceless one at that. Still, Hartford’s not a household name. Though years after his death in 2001, he’s up there amongst the treasured gods in the eyes of so many modern working artists, particularly in the folk, Americana, and country realms.

He’s certainly an influence on Robert Ellis and Courtney Hartman, who toured together and developed an artistic symbiosis on the road before recording Dear John, their tribute to the work of Hartford that will be released on December 8 through Cory Chisel and Adriel Denae’s Refuge Foundation for the Arts. And this version of “Gentle on My Mind” from the collection showcases the kinship Ellis and Hartman carry with the Grammy winner. Together, their voices meld into a soft, harmonious coo, and a luscious, complex interplay of guitar gives the song new life despite its classic status, particularly as the last minute dissolves into just instruments alone when these two incredibly gifted players add what feels like a hidden last verse with no vocals to be found. Utilizing the bones of the past to pave way to the future, they prove that timeless and gentle can still cut just as deep.

Squared Roots: Courtney Hartman on the Urgency of Nick Drake

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh! I didn't know that. Wow!

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

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

Potentially, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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


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