Tag: Cover Story

Cover Story: Brittany and Natalie Haas on Sharing Melody, Rhythm, and Space

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

What changes about the oft championed phenomenon of “family harmonies” when the voices entwined together are not voices at all, but strings, plucked and bowed and fingered? It’s a question that immediately comes to mind as you hear the first notes of Haas, the recent duo album released by sisters, fiddler Brittany Haas and cellist Natalie Haas. It’s also a question that immediately came to mind as we chatted via Zoom last month.

“I feel like I connect more deeply with Brittany than anyone else from a rhythmic standpoint,” Natalie responds after a thoughtful pause. “That’s not so much the family harmony thing, but it does play into everything.”

The familial blend they’ve established as adults – in many ways, Haas is their first deliberate and intentional music making as a pair since their teen years – defies any and all boundaries and language, as they swap melodic hooks and call and respond and toggle between accompanying and leading, adding texture and tenderness or vigor and enthusiasm. Their interplay is as comfortable and cozy as you would expect these two sibling virtuosos to be together, their reunion the not-so-subtle underpinning that makes the entire collection of tunes and sets sparkle.

This is family harmony – and family rhythm – but unspooled, complicated, and set to a new acoustic, Celtic, chambergrass sound that defies categorization. Haas also gently and kindly stands in implied opposition to more masculine, performative, and competitive musicians and groups in similar spaces. It’s a brilliant, crave-able album that showcases how much can be accomplished musically when one’s goal isn’t just the cooperative music one creates, but the space one opens up with another in which you cultivate that cooperative music.

I wanted to start by just asking y’all how long it’s been since you put out music together, or since you’ve been in like a creative space together? How does it feel to be “reunited” in this way?

Natalie Haas: We sort of played together as kids in chamber music groups and youth symphony together. And we went to fiddle camps together – that was how we got excited about maybe doing music as a career. That would sort of continue throughout the year, because the way for us to continue all that excitement and motivation that we got at fiddle camps was for us to play together.

We did the odd gig together as teenagers, like farmers markets, school performances, and that kind of thing. Then we sort of went our separate ways and we’re both very busy doing our own thing, but we took every chance we got when other people would hire both of us to be on their gigs. We always said yes because we just wanted to hang out with each other. So this is like the first time that we’ve done anything like this and it’s pretty exciting.

The way that your musical paths have diverged, they don’t feel like they’re that separate from each other. It feels like the vocabulary that you both draw from is very similar. When you started sitting down to think about doing an album together, what changed about the way that you thought about music separately or together? 

Brittany Haas: That’s a cool question. I think, it all felt kind of new in a way, but also so familiar, you know? Because it’s us. We have made a lot of music together. I think on my side, it was really cool because Nat already had a bunch of tunes. So some of [our collaboration] was just like, schedule based, it was like, “Okay, we know we want to do this thing, because we’ve been getting odd gigs.” It was really like motivated by the fact that we had shows coming up, and that was a reason to be like, “Let’s have new material for that.”

Then we were like, “Here’s our days when we can put together material.” Nat had just done a writing session where she had all this new stuff ready to go. These are the tunes that she’s cranking out and they feel very much like they come from something or some place that is like so near and dear to me, because it’s from our shared fiddle-camp upbringing. That’s like the source, the well, where the tunes come from, even though they’re new and different. It feels like very homey, I guess? The kind of tunes. And then I think we’ve just both grown a lot over the decades as musicians and as arrangers. We like bring more stuff to the table than when we were teenagers.

NH: I should certainly hope so! [Laughs]

That is the goal. [Laughs] That leads really naturally to my next question, which was going to be about material curation, especially because you both have demanding schedules that kept you apart, I’m sure, during the album creation to some degree. What was it actually like when you were like setting aside that time, like you’re talking about, to get together to make the music? What was the curation process like? It’s all originals, but one, yes?

NH: Yes. And yeah, that’s the nice thing about us both being busy is when you set aside a block of time, that’s all you are focused on. Brittany had all these amazing musical ideas and made all of my tunes better the minute she got her hands on them. The arranging process, it was pretty easy, because we’re both, comfortable switching back and forth between roles. I was just amazed at how much we got done in such a short amount of time, both in the arranging process and in the recording process. It all felt very easy. [Laughs]

BH: We did the bulk of it together, I think we had like a week or maybe slightly under a week when we first met to gather the material. And wasn’t that before we even knew we were making a record then?

NH: Oh yeah, that was preparing for a tour. Our first adult sister tour.

BH: No, no, no – second.

NH: Oh, second. Yeah! Because we toured Ireland. Right. We were playing all of these trad tunes, our shared repertoire from our of teenage years. And then for [Haas], we decided to make it all original. For the most part.

BH: Do you remember the moment when we actually said, “Let’s record this”?

NH: Uh… well, I think we toured it first. Then Brittany brings her handheld recorder to all of those gigs and recorded everything. We listened back to it and decided that it was actually pretty good and that we should make something of it. I think we had another tour coming up, of Australia, and we decided it would be fun to have something for people to take away with them.

BH: At that point, we didn’t meet again until a few days before the studio. We had arranged the material and toured it, so we kind of had it under our hands pretty good. And then a long amount of time passed, but during that time it was good to listen back to stuff and decide what we wanted to change.

We had like a couple days of rehearsals and revisions. That was from listening and emailing and saying like, “I have this idea about this. What do you think of that?” Then we had like three days in the studio before it went back to email, because Natalie lives in Spain and we’re also both busy doing stuff. So it was emailing like, “Do you like this take?” and, “Is it okay if I edit out the second B part on this?”

Did you trip into or over any sort of feeling like, “This reminds me of when we were playing together as kids” or did it feel like you were getting back on the bicycle in a way?

BH: I’d say mostly yes. It’s just really easy. I think in other collaborations, people aren’t always so willing to just try anything. We have this basis of, “I love you no matter what, and even though you’re being really annoying and you’re asking me to do something I don’t want to do, I’m still going to do it, because might as well.” It’s an ease of communication, which I think mostly comes from family. [Laughs]

NH: We were never really a band as kids. We did the odd gig, but it was always just for fun. Our parents weren’t pushing us into performing together. So yeah, no bad memories, really, associated with playing together as kids. But we do have the ease of having this shared history of fiddle camps and learning from the same kind of mentors.

BH: Since we’re both like primarily collaborators, this project was like running our own band. As adults we’ve both come into our own and we’ve probably become more opinionated about musical things as a result of that. So it’s fun to meet again where there’s a lot of give and take.

What do you think of the term, “chambergrass?” Is this album chambergrass? Is that even a thing?

BH: I like the term, but I’m not sure it applies here. I also don’t mind it applying here. I guess maybe that wouldn’t have been what I would have gone to, because from my perspective, it just feels so much more Celtic. It’s still in that sort of “past of American music,” that’s more over there in the Celtic Isles. It doesn’t feel very grassy, but I mean, that’s a part of me as a musician. So, it’s not like it’s not in there.

NH: It does feel like chamber music to me. Yeah… I’m not familiar with all of the myriad grass terms. [Laughs]

BH: We grew up going to Valley of the Moon Fiddle Camp, where there were a lot of genres meeting. So the boundaries were very blurred, and both of us having worked with Darol [Anger] from a young age, he’s all about blurring and negating the idea of boundaries. It’s everything, it’s all of that, it’s all the influences and where they’re going. I know the current Celtic world less than Nat does, but it seems like a lot of the forward-thinking, new tunes on stringed instruments are happening in chambergrass, the new acoustic realm, so it’s definitely an influence on both of us.

NH: It does have a Celtic bent, but it is Celtic from an American perspective – because we’re American. I’ve listened to a lot of stuff in the new acoustic realm – like Brittany said, all of our influences are coming out, and it’s hard to define a genre.

BH: I think Nat, for all of her “I don’t totally play bluegrass” sense of self, she can and she does sometimes. Some of the bluesier tunes that she writes lend themselves to that area.

You make very in-the-moment music, there’s a lot of improvisation, there’s a lot of dialogue, and this kind of music can often feel very – it’s silly to say this cause you’re literally performers – but it can often feel very performative and like there’s a lot of hubris in it. I also feel like new acoustic music, newgrass, jamgrass, and that sort of “Let’s jam out together, let’s be in the moment together!” music, it can often feel really masculine and toxic. How do you go about creating this space you’ve made together, to have those moments, to be together and present and making music, but it doesn’t feel like you’re being self-absorbed or self important?

BH: That is something I think about when I’m listening to music – and sometimes when I’m playing it. Sometimes I do feel like I’m uncomfortable, like that’s not something that I want to do. Even though you think that that’s what the music calls for in this moment, it can feel a little bit too masculine.

It’s like, “No, I don’t want to take a really long solo there.” I think I’m embracing that it’s okay to say, “No, I’m not gonna do that.” It’s a tricky one, because a lot of our heroes in that realm of creating this newer music, they’re men, and that nature is informing the music that they’re making and the way that they’re arranging it. It does have that hubris thing built into it. On some level, that is important and it does work well, for stepping into the moment and taking a great solo. You kind of have to have that attitude. But, it’s not necessarily masculine or feminine. Like it doesn’t have to be either one. It could be both.

What we’re trying to do, it’s a little more tune- or melody-based than based on soloing, so it lends itself well to a tight arrangement. That may not be the right term, because it still is loose, there still is a conversation going on. But, if there is a solo it’s pretty short, it’s this little thing we’re going to do to give a breath of fresh air here. It’s not like, “And now, we will rip for 50 more bars!”

“And now everybody look at me!”

BH: Yeah! I think in a duo especially, because we’re very equal and we like sharing, that’s just kind of part of the vibe. Even when Natalie’s filling more of an accompanist role, it’s still such a powerful, interesting sound. It’s so varied that it doesn’t fade into the background. It’s super interesting all the time. It’s like both voices are very equal, even if mine is higher.

NH: It’s interesting because, like Brittany said, a lot of our heroes are men. That’s definitely a generational thing in the Celtic music world, because like, the people that we grew up sort of – I don’t want to use a phrase like “hero worshipping” – that we admired and wanted to copy were mostly men, with a couple very key exceptions. But then, my generation in the Celtic music world is almost exclusively women. There are some men doing it, but it’s very different than the bluegrass thing.

Also like Brittany said, soloing is not as much a part of it. That changes the dynamic a little bit. But it is kind of a melody>accompaniment hierarchy going on. But I wouldn’t say that that’s necessarily a male thing, I don’t know.

As Brittany said before – and I hate to associate this with just feminine energy – but both of us coming from being collaborators in our other projects rather than soloists, per se, you could say that that is the more feminine approach, maybe, to music making. It does feel very equal because the melody playing is getting passed back and forth all the time. And it does feel very conversational, even though the soloing thing is not as prominent as it might be in some other genres.


I think that’s part of why you can listen through y’all’s entire album and it doesn’t feel stale, it doesn’t feel boring, while it also doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard. It doesn’t feel like you guys have something to prove.

NH: That’s part of the thing with having done it at this point in our lives, it doesn’t feel like we have anything to prove anymore. We’re doing it because we want to, not because we’re trying to prove anything to the world.

Photo Credit: Irene Young

On a Loving Tribute Album, Sam Bush Salutes John Hartford’s Songwriting

Posted on by Editor

Sam Bush is well-known for his innovative style, virtuosic playing, and exciting performances that have made him pivotal to bluegrass music. Yet he is quick to point to John Hartford as the pioneer of so-called newgrass. Bush has covered many of Hartford’s songs throughout his career (such as New Grass Revival’s rendition of “Vamp in the Middle” or the legendary “Steam Powered Aereo Plane”), and during our conversation I learned that both Hartford’s influence and the friendship they shared was much deeper than I knew.

Bush’s new album, Radio John: The Songs of John Hartford (released on Smithsonian Folkways), is not only a musical love letter but a peek into the relationship between two of bluegrass music’s biggest innovators. The track listing seeks to highlight Hartford as not only a brilliant, if not esoteric, songwriter but also as a creative composer, a humorist, and talented banjo player who approached music and life with a sense of wonder and whimsy. What’s not contained in the covers can be found in the one original song, “Radio John,” which weaves many of the facets of Hartford’s life into lyrics. By playing nearly every instrument on the album himself, Bush has created a loving tribute to a dear friend.

BGS: Looking back at your careers through the lens of history, I’ve always thought of you two as contemporaries who were kind of shaping music together. But reading your liner notes, I realized how much John influenced you. In what ways do you think John’s music influenced yours?

Sam Bush: That’s happened a lot to me over the years where I’ve been fortunate to get to meet some of my heroes and then end up playing with them and becoming pals that way. John was totally influential on me and the New Grass Revival. I grew up north of Nashville outside Bowling Green, Kentucky. We got Nashville television stations out on the farm (when my dad would climb up on the roof and adjust the antennas). At the time, I didn’t realize what a fortunate situation it was that I got to watch all these great players and singers on TV. Living close to Nashville I never realized until I got out and started traveling for a living that friends of mine around the country hadn’t seen these country TV shows like I had.

I was watching The Wilburn Brothers Show one day when this guy came on singing, playing Earl Scruggs-style rolls on the banjo while he was singing. I’d never seen anybody do that. My first thought was, “Why don’t you get a guitar?” But then later to find out, well, he is a great guitar player. I didn’t catch his name. But my dad and I, within a few weeks, went to Nashville and were in the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, and I found an album called Earthwords & Music by John Hartford. I looked at that picture on the cover and said, “That’s the guy. That’s the guy I saw.”

And so I brought it home and that album included “Gentle on My Mind” and a couple of others that actually are on this record. What it was that drew me to John was the banjo picking. But once I got the record, it was the way he wrote songs. Then I was struck by hearing John play along with a rhythm section of drums and electric bass and piano and maybe orchestration right off the bat. If you listen to the way I make records to this day, I will sometimes use electric bass, a drummer, and I enjoy the rhythm section mix of the bluegrass instruments. In that way, John was one of the first performers I might have heard mixing up bluegrass instruments with drums and electric bass. I mean, Flatt & Scruggs did that later on in the ‘60s.

It’s only in the last few years, like 10 years, maybe 20 years, that I’ve really started paying attention to lyrics and songs. I started as an instrumentalist, so I sang a lot of choruses and learned the words so I could sing along. But even back then I could tell John’s songs were different. They were the ones whose words I did pay attention to. Back then, John’s main direction was songwriting and singing. The RCA records were very influential in that they weren’t bluegrass at all. His progressiveness was really attractive to me.

 

Sam Bush with John Hartford. Photo: Lynn Bush

 

It makes a lot of sense that there wouldn’t have been anything at that point in time that sounded anything like that.

No, because he was putting out records like this even before the Dillards made Wheatstraw Suite. I became a big fan of his. I would pay attention and see him pop up on The Smothers Brothers Show and later learned that he was one of the comedy writers. Of course, we got to see him on Glen Campbell’s show. They’d have a little acoustic picking segment in each of Glen’s shows and that was really fun for me. I bet there’s a video on YouTube somewhere of Glen and John Hartford doing “Great Balls of Fire,” bluegrass-style. Well, I was taping that and later the New Grass Revival learned that arrangement and that’s the one we performed. Courtney [Johnson, the banjo player in New Grass Revival] pretty much played the same chromatic run that he learned from John Hartford off of my tape of them doing it on TV.

I was really paying attention to him at that point and keeping up with him, buying his RCA records when I could find them down at Ernest Tubb. It got to where John was selling seats and doing good in larger places. John played at the basketball arena at Western Kentucky University where I grew up in Bowling Green. I think I was a senior in high school when John played there and all I know is that I couldn’t get there fast enough. But I had to march in the marching band at halftime for our football game at school. I wanted to get there so badly, I jumped in the car practically straight off the football field. It was really muddy and it started raining on us. I got there just when they were bringing the lights down for John Hartford and ran on in with my muddy band uniform.

That particular group that he had then was what he later told me he called the Iron Mountain Depot Band. Iron Mountain Depot was one of his last records, if not his last one, for RCA. The band was John, a keyboard player, bass, drums, and a twelve-string guitar. The next time he had a band style situation, it was what we call the Aereo-Plain Band with Tut Taylor, Norman Blake, and Vassar Clements. So that was a big change in direction for him.

What did you play in the marching band?

I played drums. Junior year, bass drum, and senior year I made it to snare. I guess I played “drum,” not “drums” plural. I played drum in the marching band and I played bass violin in the concert band. I got serious about bass and took lessons. I would take the bass fiddle home every night and practice and take it back the next day. All the kids would say, “Here he comes, carrying his bass.” I would later use the bass in professional applications here and there, as I did on this record.

Right, about that: I listened to the record before I read the liner notes —

I’m hoping that you liked it (laughs) you know what I mean? It’s supposed to sound good before people read the liner notes.

That’s the thing. I listened to it and I was trying to figure out who was playing, and then I read that it was you playing all of the instruments. I know that you play fiddle and mandolin, obviously, and I’ve seen you play lots of guitar, but I’ve never heard you play banjo or bass.

Yeah, nobody has. This totally blows my cover. But I picked up the five-string somewhere around 13 or 14 and started messing around with it. My parents had my granddad’s old Blue Comet five-string banjo. My mom played the guitar, and my dad played the fiddle. So, I got interested in banjo and I remember the first instruction book when I was a kid was the Pete Seeger book. After that, the next one I found was a Sonny Osborne book. That was really cool because I was a big fan of the Osborne Brothers.

And after that the Earl Scruggs book came out in the late ‘60s, and Alan Munde at this point was preaching Earl Scruggs to me. He’d say, “Fancy licks are fine, but they don’t mean anything if you can’t play like Earl.” I don’t think I took Earl for granted, but he was just one of those guys that I saw on TV my whole life. But when you start hauling down and trying to learn every note out of that book like Earl does it, it’s the great humbler. That’s when you find out the genius of Earl Scruggs. So, I’ve always played the banjo. Back when Courtney Johnson was in New Grass Revival, I’d get up generally every day and go to his camper. He made very strong coffee and we’d drink coffee and play guitar and banjo and we’d switch. Sometimes I’d play banjo and he played guitar, but usually more me on guitar, and we would learn things together. We learned John Hartford licks together and Alan Munde phrases and Bill Keith things that we could figure out together and go through the Scruggs book.

At that point I played a lot of banjo. When Béla Fleck and Pat Flynn joined New Grass Revival, the situation wasn’t the same. Sometimes Béla and I’d swap a little bit, but we didn’t have a dobro in the band anymore, so there wasn’t much reason for me to play guitar. I used to be a much better flat picker, but that’s the great thing about recording, I could just keep working on it until I got it. But just circling back to thinking about banjo picking, that’s one of the reasons I went ahead and played it myself, in that I watched and played with John a lot over a period of years, and I knew how he made the forward rolls and stuff. I am trying to play the banjo like John on the record. The other instruments sound more like myself but banjo and guitar, of course, I was trying to emulate certain things and phrases that John did.

I was impressed by how much it sounded like John Hartford-style banjo, especially on that instrumental, “Down.”

Well, thank you. Playing it all by yourself is fine, but it better sound good, because when you’re driving along in your car, if it’s not sounding good, it doesn’t matter who all played on it or what they went through. That’s the proof. Does it sound good to me? And these Hartford songs are kind of this way. When I have a reaction to music, it’s like, “Did I feel something as I listened to it?” These songs, they make me feel something.

And if anything, I’m hoping maybe through this record people can go back and dig through some of his early song work on RCA because probably a lot of people don’t know those records at all. As he aged, it was interesting to me that he got more traditional, got more old-time in his thinking, whereas when we met, we’d listen to Birds of Fire by the Mahavishnu Orchestra going down the road and try to figure out how to do some of those notes. There was just a heck of a lot of variety in his work. Later in life, he’s writing all these fiddle tunes, while early in his career, it was the songs.

This was a pre-pandemic project that is now being released post lockdown. Making a solo album where you play all of the instruments is the sort of thing that you would expect to have happened during that period of isolation.

We had it started down in Florida. [My wife] Lynn and I try to go down to Florida once a year if we can. Once the middle of November hits, there really isn’t much work, so I like to drive down to the beach, take a variety of instruments, and some kind of recording machine. Well, in typical fashion, I have this recording machine that I was not succeeding with. I was spending much more time messing with the stupid machine than I was getting to play my instruments.

 

Sam Bush and John Hartford. Photo: Lynn Bush

 

I was jamming with our friend Donnie Sundal one night, and he asked, “What are you up to?” I said, “I’m trying to record some stuff by myself, but there’s a latency and I can’t seem to overdub in time. Something’s wrong.” And he said, “Oh, I bet I know what to do. I’ll stop by tomorrow.” So, Donnie stops by and his car is full of equipment. He brought a total ProTools rig, mics, preamps. He even brought another electric bass for me in case I didn’t have mine with me.

Once I started cutting these songs with Donnie digitally it was like, “Oh, now this is recording studio quality here.” I was originally only meaning to make tapes of these John Hartford songs to show the guys in the Sam Bush Band and then maybe we’d record them. I was not that far along in my thinking. I was really just at the beach so I could sit and make up tunes. But the joyful thing was to kind of sit and play John Hartford songs. As I started thinking about these tunes and everything, and when I started overdubbing them by myself digitally, I thought, “Well, maybe this could be a solo record.” And then, of course, we got shut down.

Rick Wheeler was the soundman and road manager for me and the band back then. Rick’s got an overdubbing room at his house. During the lockdown, we’d test and felt safe to be together and that’s when I got serious about working hard on the vocals and putting the banjo on. I tried putting some banjo down in Florida by myself, and I didn’t like any of it. A couple of the tunes I had to totally start over on.

Thanks to the generosity of Béla Fleck, I had some great-sounding low banjos to choose from. And the low one that I played the most was a Gold Tone. He had all wound strings on that banjo, which agreed with my lack of finesse with a right hand. He also loaned me one of John Hartford’s banjos, the one that he would tune to low D. But that one had thinner strings on it, and I didn’t feel I had the finesse to succeed on John’s banjo. It was set up in a lighter way whereas Béla’s was set up heavier for my claw to be able to get a better tone out of.

I started putting these tunes together, and I started thinking about that phrase “Radio John.” When New Grass Revival’s first album came out, there was a poem written about us, and it’s signed, “Radio John from Topanga Canyon.” Well, it was Hartford, but I think there was some kind of contractual thing where he could not use his name, John Hartford, on other albums or something. So, he just signed things as “Radio John,” which was his DJ name as a kid.

I started thinking about “Radio John” and wanted to write a song. I got together with John Pennell, Alison Krauss’s original bass player who wrote a lot of great songs that Alison recorded. We started writing this song over the phone during lockdown. We started making a list of all the things that we would try to mention in the song, and, man, we didn’t come close to being able to get all of the things that John was good at. I didn’t touch upon his beautiful calligraphy handwriting, and we couldn’t figure out a way to work 4×6 index cards into anything, but we just wanted to honor his many talents. Steamboat captain, singer, dancer, picker, writer.

I knew I wanted to involve the band and have Chris Brown on drums and it needed a better banjo picker than me. As it turned out, that was Wes Corbett’s first recording with our group. Once again, thanks to Béla’s generosity, Wes played John’s low-tuned banjo on “Radio John” and pulled beautiful tone out of it. I’m really happy with the way the song turned out and glad that the band could do it.

That’s such a great story and it’s such a beautiful project because of your personal connection to these songs.

Lynn phrased it the best when she said, “It’s your love letter to John Hartford’s music.” But making a record and playing everything yourself is not even close to being as much fun as playing with other people. I’m glad I did it once but the nostalgia for John is the joyful part of it, for sure. What’s funny is that after all these years, I made this record as a tribute to John and it’s probably my most acoustic record. Besides the electric bass. John’s old records had Norbert Putnam on electric bass, and then, of course, on Aereo-Plain, Randy Scruggs was playing electric bass. That sound kind of blended in with Hartford music for me.

Yeah, I can hear that. The tunes “Down” and “John McLaughlin,” definitely have an electric bass feel.

Yeah, oh, and speaking of “John McLaughlin,” there’s a certain way John played his banjo rolls there. Boy, when I’m listening back to the original version that I played on with John, I had forgotten that he had an octave low banjo that was tuned all the way down to A. God, that’s low.

That’s part of the fun with this record; getting to listen to your versions of these songs and then go back and listen to John’s versions. It’s interesting how much of the similarity you’ve captured while still making them unique.

That’s always the trick of trying to pay tribute to something while giving it another slant for people to hear. When I was recording, I was trying really hard to think of John’s phrasing and how he would sing it, and I did, for the most part, succeed. But now when I go back and listen to John’s version, I go, “Well, I don’t really sound like John but that’s good.”

That’s sort of like what I was saying earlier, about you and John as contemporaries while your music was also being influenced by him.

That’s the fortunate part of where I’ve been in that we became contemporaries. I was fortunate to get to know one of my heroes and play with him.

Photo Credit: Jeff Fasano

Asleep at the Wheel Turns 50, But Ray Benson Didn’t Know If It Would Last

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The term eclectic hardly seems broad enough to accurately describe either the approach of the marvelous band Asleep at the Wheel, or the energetic and fluid style of its lead vocalist and guitarist Ray Benson. The band he formed along with Lucky Oceans and Leroy Preston while farm-sitting in Paw Paw, West Virginia, 50 years ago is now an American cultural institution, although things didn’t really explode for them until they relocated to Austin.

Their latest release, Half a Hundred Years, pays homage to Asleep at the Wheel’s diverse and impressive legacy, although it’s one Benson freely admits he never seriously thought would continue for 50 years.

“Well, when you’re a 19-year-old kid, you don’t even know if the band will be around for 10 years,” he tells BGS with a laugh. “It really wasn’t something at the time that I had any notions about, things about legacy or impact. We were a band that wanted to play a lot of different types of music and enjoyed being around each other. That’s kind of been the trademark ever since.”

Country and Western swing are the foundational genres of their music, but the ensemble is hardly restricted or limited by them. Over their tenure Asleep at the Wheel’s repertoire has also included R&B, blues, jazz, rock and pop, while their albums and live shows feature a constantly evolving blend of originals and inspired covers. In addition, the band seamlessly maintained its trademark sound through numerous personnel changes, while navigating shifts in audience tastes and music industry practices.

“I’ve always been a real music lover, and that’s what’s driven the band all these years,” Benson continues. “Of course, the music business today is so different from the way it was when we started out. Hell, when we started they didn’t even have fax machines. You really thought in terms of radio and marketing a song, and you were trying to get your album played and then that would be the springboard for having it sold in the stores. Today, there’s such a focus on streaming. Vinyl’s made a bit of a comeback, but that’s because CDs are doing so poorly. Then the technology changed so dramatically, with the ability to sonically do things in the studio that we didn’t even dream about back in the ’70s.”

Indeed, Benson’s entire career — inside and outside the band — has been one of variety and experimentation. He taught himself to play the guitar as a 9-year-old. The first song he ever played completely came from a beer commercial he heard during broadcasts of his hometown Philadelphia Phillies. Benson teamed with his sister in a folk group The Four G’s at 11, then while in college he encountered a group whose concept he utilized (with variations) upon forming Asleep at the Wheel. It was that Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen concert in Washington, D.C., where Benson saw and heard a band brilliantly mixing multiple genres in a free-flowing performance mode.

Following their time in West Virginia, Asleep at the Wheel relocated out west in the early ‘70s, playing in various East Bay clubs in California. A show where they shared the stage with Van Morrison, followed by his raving about them in Rolling Stone, began to open some doors. They toured with Black country vocalist Stoney Edwards in 1971, cut a debut LP that did well in the Southwest, then moved to Austin in 1973 after being encouraged by Doug Sahm and Willie Nelson. Upon their arrival in Texas, their second LP was issued by Epic.

However it was after their third LP, with the Top 10 country hit “The Letter That Johnny Walker Read,” that Asleep at the Wheel emerged as a top attraction. By 1978 they were winning the first of their 10 Grammys. They survived a lean period in the ’80s, then bounced back in the ’90s. Benson made another savvy decision that helped sustain the band’s success, recruiting several top country artists to cut two Bob Wills tribute LPs. Then came another hit in 2000, “Roly Poly,” with the [Dixie] Chicks. As a result, Asleep at the Wheel became one of the few country acts that’s managed to have chart records across four consecutive decades.

Their journey is duly reflected in Half a Hundred Years. “I looked at this album as a way to kind of look back and ahead at the same time,” Benson continues. “It covers everything that we’ve done and are doing.” Besides including such heavyweight guest stars as Lyle Lovett, George Strait, Lee Ann Womack, Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, the CD is sequenced in an intriguing fashion. The first 11 songs are new tracks featuring original band members. Songs 12-16 (with the exception of 14) feature the current band teaming with various band alumni. Cuts 17-19 are previously unreleased material, while track 14 combines the current band with two of Asleep at the Wheel’s former female singers. “We’re putting this out pretty much every way (configuration) that you can,” Benson adds.

Despite the pandemic, Asleep at the Wheel’s already done several shows and plans more in the near future. Benson has also branched out over the years to do things outside the band arena, among them being on the board of Austin City Limits, a role that led to his hosting the regional TV series Texas Music Scene for several years. He’s also been a prolific producer on LPs by Dale Watson, Suzy Bogguss, Aaron Watson, James Hand and Carolyn Wonderland, plus singles for Willie Nelson, Aaron Neville, Brad Paisley, Pam Tillis, Trace Adkins, Merle Haggard, and Vince Gill. Benson even cut a solo LP, Beyond Time, in 2003 and his autobiography Comin’ Right at Ya was published in 2015. In addition, he’s a founding member of the Rhythm & Blues Foundation, and the owner of a recording studio and label (Bismeaux Studios/Bismeaux Records).

Though it doesn’t seem possible that there are things in the music world Benson hasn’t done yet, he’s quick to list a few people he’d love to work with. “Well, I always wanted to record with Tony Bennett, but he’s retired now,” Benson says. “I’ve sung with Boz Scaggs, but have never done a whole album with him. I’d really enjoy doing that. Also, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. He’s someone else I’ve sung with, but really would like to do a complete project.”

He concludes, “At this point I really don’t even think about how much longer Asleep at the Wheel will go on because who would ever have given us 50 years? But I can say that I’m still really enjoying it, and this latest project and going out and playing to support it, and the reaction of the people even with everything that’s going on now… well, that tells me we’ve still got a lot of folks out there who enjoy what we do.”

Photo credit: Mike Shore

Rodney Crowell’s ‘Triage’ Is All About Love, Mortality, and Making Amends

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Heartbreak songs, political takedowns, pronunciations of judgment — on his 18th album, Triage, Rodney Crowell doesn’t indulge much in any of them, with the possible exception of judging his own foibles as he burrows deep into his psyche, hoping to extract whatever nuggets of wisdom might still be buried there.

To help in the trenches, he enlisted son-in-law Dan Knobler, a rising talent who produced one of Crowell’s current favorite albums: Allison Russell’s Outside Child. “I respect him, and I learn from him,” Crowell says. “I learn from young people around me. You kiddin’? They’re on to things that I’m not on to, and they have information that I need.”

Knobler’s not the only family tie: another young artist, Jakob Leventhal, sings backing vocals on “Hymn #43,” a track that also contains contributions from his parents, John Leventhal and Rosanne Cash — Crowell’s ex-wife and mother of Knobler’s wife, Carrie. And though it’s “aimed more at the universal than the personal,” there is an homage to Joe Henry, who produced three Crowell albums: Sex & Gasoline, Kin: Songs by Mary Karr & Rodney Crowell, and The Traveling Kind, his second collection of duets with Emmylou Harris.

“I have a deep abiding love for Joe,” Crowell says. “I wrote the song ‘Triage’ for and to Joe, because the conversations we had when he was in the darkest part of coming to grips with a pretty shocking [cancer] diagnosis, his vulnerability and his courage and willingness to embrace everything about it inspired me, and I wanted to make a song based on the inspiration that I got from Joe’s courage and truthfulness.”

Courage and truthfulness. Those qualities permeate the entire album; in fact, it’s safe to say they’ve guided Crowell’s entire career.

BGS: Reviews are saying Triage is one of your most personal albums, and you referred to making amends in an NPR interview. But I suspect your use of “triage” has more to do with the global state of affairs than the need to address any personal sort of emergency at this stage of your life. Is that a reasonable assumption?

Crowell: Yeah, that’s most reasonable. I think the conversation with NPR started with the opening song [“Don’t Leave Me Now”], which is basically an attempt at amends, and it went from there. But the broader stroke on the album, and in my contemplation as I was writing the song, was how do I weigh in without dating myself? If you go political, or if you go topical in the moment, six months from now … you know, unless you write “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “This Land is Your Land,” you’re not timeless.

So my overview is that I want to write about, say, climate change, and I want to write about a monotheistic approach to livin’ my life, and instead of writing about boy/girl love, to write about a higher love — as Steve Winwood sang, “Bring me a higher love.” That’s what I had in mind, so I spent a lot of time revising all of the songs, checking and double-checking to make sure that I was grounding the language, because I was reaching into that place that’s very hard to define.

And yet, you do go topical on “It’s All About Love,” referring to Greta Thunberg and others, in that kind of talking-blues list style that you do so well. You often throw in pop-cultural references; how do you choose what works?

Well, when COVID happened, I got to slow down a bit and not try to race to make a release date, which allowed me to go back through the songs … you know the old saying, “Show, don’t tell”? I was able to go back through and say, “Oh, here I’m telling. I need to bounce this out of here,” and to stay in the show part of it, which is whatever metaphorical angle you take or however you ground the language in such a way that you can’t be accused of thinking you know better than everybody else.

It’s tongue in cheek for me to stick Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Greta Thunberg and Jessica Biel and the devil all in one stanza; honestly, I’m giggling to myself. They might not get it; they may take me literally, but this is humor.

You touch on religion repeatedly, and at one point in “I’m All About Love,” you chant the names of the lord, so to speak, so the sense is acceptance. Yet you mentioned monotheistic love, and the notion that there is one particular God seems to be expressed here, regardless of which one.

My mother was quite religious in the Pentecostal, speaking-in-tongues, emotional religious paradigm, and even as a child, it didn’t serve me. I just sensed something was amiss with it. I’ve always felt that way. Religion, I mistrust; the creator of it all, I do trust. Whether that creator of it all is a team, or whatever that is, I don’t really know. But I feel it. And hopefully, as I’m writing the songs and exploring that, I’m not saying that I really know, because I don’t. I can’t tell you anything about your god, and I really can’t tell you a lot about mine. But I sure do have a feeling.

When you’re writing songs, in some cases, you must have specific people or incidents in mind. But you also want to get them to the point where they have that universal feeling, where the listener can relate it to something in their own life. How do you strike that balance of not revealing too much about what’s going on in your life, while alluding to enough of it that it does personalize the lyric and make it touching?

I learned a long time ago, if it’s coming from my own experience, there’s a good chance I’m a step closer to true. And I can mine my personal truth, but confessional only goes so far. I’ve tried to walk that line; if I can carefully write about my own experience and put it in a broader perspective, then [for] the listener, it becomes their experience. It’s no longer my experience. That’s why I feel like I have to be really careful; if I make it too much about my experience, then I start to tread on the listener’s experience. The goal is to get it in such a way where — and there again, it’s the “show, don’t tell” — if it’s show, you show somebody their emotion, their experience. If you tell, you’re tellin’ ’em about you. And down there somewhere in the gravel of it all, I’m telling you about me.

But you’re actually not revealing that much, even though it comes across that way. I can’t listen to this and guess what’s happening in your life, even though I can sense what has happened, possibly.

Well, there you go. If that’s your experience, then I’ve succeeded, because I don’t want [the song] to be about me. I want it to be about it.

Other songs here, like “One Little Bird” and “Girl on the Street,” seem to be written for your children, or specific children. Am I close?

Yeah, you are, in a way. “Girl on the Street,” it’s something that happened in San Francisco. I met a girl and … however she could get money off me for drugs, she was willing to go there. And she was young and beautiful and reminded me of my own children. That was why the regret that the narrator has in the song is like, “I could have done more.” I could have bought her a room for the night where she could get a shower and a good night’s sleep. Or I could have taken her and bought her something to eat and sent her on her way, but no; I gave her 45 cents. So I really failed as an adult on the street. And that’s what I hope the song says.

Regarding amends, who in your life do you feel you haven’t apologized to that you still need to?

I’ve apologized to everybody that needs to be apologized to. But that doesn’t mean everybody accepted. And I have to live with that. If you look closely, in “One Little Bird,” it’s in there. I’ve been rebuffed.

You hit that one high note in “One Little Bird,” that falsetto, that I don’t think I’ve heard you do before. It’s evident that there’s definitely some change in your vocal style; that it’s actually expanding with age, which is interesting, because one would not expect that. Are you doing more training, or just finding ways to do that yourself?

I’m learning; as a matter of fact, I retired “Shame on the Moon” from my performances for years because Bob Seger sang it so damned well. And I’ve reinstated it into my live shows for the first time since ’84. I got an outro that will stand alongside Bob Seger’s now, as far as I’m concerned. I can ad-lib the outros in a way where I feel like, “OK, this is my song again.”

You took possession back.

Yes. I’ve repossessed “Shame on the Moon.” [Laughs] But I had to grow as a vocalist to where I could legitimately reclaim it. So that’s cool, I mean, from my perspective, to want to grow to become better. If I know that I’m getting better on that front, I’ll keep on writing songs because I’ll want to continue to experiment with what I can do.

I wanted to address the issue of mortality a bit. Let’s face it, we’re not all that young anymore, but it sounds as if you’ve still got a lot of plans. So how do you regard life now that there’s plenty of it in the rearview mirror, but you’re not ready to sign off?

Now that time is compressed? [Laughs]

Yes.

As a younger artist, quote/unquote, I was quite comfortable with broad-stroke; I wrote “Please Remember Me” and “Making Memories of Us” and those broad-stroke love songs because I was experiencing life in a way that I was trying to express myself outward, to understand how I fit into that world out there. And now as I age and become a septuagenarian, I made Triage as the kind of record it is because I am facing mortality. As you realize that the time out in front of you is a lot shorter than the time behind you, rather than going for those broad-stroke love songs to send out there into the world to find out who you are, I’m writing about my interior life, because I think, to prepare myself to leave this planet, I have to have a better understanding of my interior self.

What would you still like to achieve that you haven’t yet?

Mmmm, that’s interesting. Well, I’m working on achieving certain things as a singer that continue to reveal themselves to me. I’ve become a better singer and I’m continuing to develop as a vocalist. That makes me happy, because for a long time, I was very unhappy on that front. As I age, the more singular my sensibility becomes about my interior experience; I’m also arrogant enough to think that’s worth sharing out there with these records that I make. But I may yet open up onto another plateau where I’ve examined mortality enough that, hey, it’s time to celebrate a little bit, and I’m gonna make a blues record, or I want to make a honky-tonk record that sounds like 1954. Who knows? I’m pretty much free to do exactly what I want to do.

Photo credit: Sam Esty Rayner Photography

Andrew Marlin Reveals the Observations and Explorations Behind ‘Watchhouse’

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When you’re the child of musicians, you get to see the world. By the time Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s daughter Ruby was one year old, she had been to 34 US states and nine different countries. “She was on a bus when she was three months old,” says Marlin. “She loves traveling.”

After a year of hiatus, the family of three is back on the road again as the duo formerly known as Mandolin Orange tour their new self-titled album, Watchhouse. And Ruby, now a toddler, has transitioned back to road life more smoothly than her father, who admits he’s still “struggling to find my sea legs.”

But then this has an unarguably big summer. Performing as Watchhouse, after more than a decade as Mandolin Orange, was no small change. A year of lockdown had given the couple space to reflect on a name change that they’d wanted for a while, but resisted, concerned at how any reinvention would affect their devoted following.

Their latest project proves that their fans have nothing to fear: a medley of richly intimate songs and beautiful vocal harmonies that’s as identifiably them as anything they’ve ever made. Marlin, who writes the songs and plays mandolin to Frantz’s acoustic guitar, spoke to BGS about the new album from their North Carolina home, where they were enjoying a short pause between gigs.

BGS: Your current tour’s taking you coast to coast, from the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island to Redmond, Washington and all points between…

Marlin: It’s all over the map, literally. We’re out for three or four days at a time and I’m enjoying being back on tour but it’s kind of difficult to get in the groove. After we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace at home this past year, this all feels so fast-paced, so much to keep up with!

How do you feel about touring in this age of COVID. Does it feel safe yet?

I was one of the naive ones who thought we were nearly done with this thing, but we’re really not. There is a vaccine but people just aren’t taking it. So no, I don’t feel safe at all. But it’s a balancing act: we need to make money because we haven’t worked in 18 months, and we want to play shows, because that’s what we’re driven to do. Everybody wants to get back to their lives, everybody needs purpose to stay sane. To feel like there’s a reason to get up in the morning.

Was a year of lockdown hard as a new parent?

It’s all relative. Emily and I travel so much that we wouldn’t have spent so much time home as full-time parents otherwise. Eighteen months ago you would have been talking to a different person, but now I just try to live day to day, and write a little here and there. It was really difficult to write at the beginning of the pandemic, though. As a songwriter I try to latch onto things that not many people are writing about and with so many people thinking about the same thing it was hard to separate myself from it and find a way to write about it that didn’t seem unoriginal. I wrote a lot of instrumentals so I could explore how I was feeling without having to put it in words.

Have you discovered some good tunes for getting Ruby to sleep?

Pretty much anything by Paul Brady. She loves him, especially that album he did with Andy Irvine. I put that on and she’ll start talking to Paul and Andy. And because she’s been around our music since she was in the womb, if I sit down and play mandolin very quietly that’ll chill her out. I’ll sit in her room and play and she’ll doze off.

There are a lot of songs sung from a parent’s viewpoint on this new album: “Upside Down,” “New Star,” and “Lonely Love Affair.” Has becoming a father changed your perspective as a songwriter?

Passively, yes. I think the change is that I would love to help pave a safe path for my daughter and hopefully inspire some of our listeners to be kind and open up a kind world for her to go into. And that’s made my its way into my perspective even in songs where I’m not talking about it.

That’s very much the message of “Better Way,” which is about online trolling. Was that inspired by a specific incident?

A number of incidents. It isn’t unique. Every time somebody puts themselves out there on social media you have the people who love to drum up negative energy. And I can’t wrap my head around it because that’s not how I was brought up. I rarely meet people who would do that when they’re talking to you face to face. So I don’t understand why those people feel compelled to sit at their computer or pick up their phone and try to rip others apart. It’s a weird way to live.

Emily says it’s one of the favorite tracks you’ve ever laid down together.

Yeah, I love the sound of that tune. It’s a gentle drive to it, the way the groove is so set. It has this steady pulse that fits with the whole idea of the tune, this nagging thing in the back of my head: why do people feel compelled to be such assholes?

These songs were recorded all the way back in February 2020. Where did you decide to record them?

We did it right outside of Roanoke, Virginia. It’s not quite in the mountains, but it was in the hills for sure, a very peaceful place on a lake. I like making records in places that aren’t studios. It feels a little more free, to just go sit in a living room and to turn that space into a very positive musical environment is way more appealing to me than a studio where you’re watching the clock and every time you hear it tick that signifies a certain amount of money. I think you feel that relaxed energy. There’s no trying to beat the clock on this record. It’s exploring all the directions we could go as a band.

The sound of the album is certainly more exploratory than previous ones — a little richer in texture, a little less acoustic, even a touch psychedelic at times…

There are a lot of sounds we’ve used in the past but on this one we didn’t try to hide them. In the past we’ve tried to keep the simplicity of what Emily and I do in the forefront and have all these light textures around that. I think of it as a mountain peak. We’d be up at the top singing our songs and beneath us is this luscious forest, a lot of organ songs, electric guitar, drums, bass. Well, on this record we brought all the sounds up to the same level.

We’d been touring with many of these musicians since 2016 and so we were already thinking about arrangements that worked for the band and it’s a good representation of what we can do live, as a unit. A lot of people think of Emily and I as a folk duo but we have a lot of music in us! It felt nice to change the name and feel we can do whatever we want to and not limit ourselves to any idea of who people think we are.

The new name, Watchhouse, seems to be a good choice to reflect the observational world of your songwriting.

One of the most important things you can do as an artist is observe the world around you and I’ve always sought out those little peaceful places I can let my mind wander. I don’t do well in chaotic situations. I’m not the one to be right up the front by the stage in a show. I’ll usually go hang out in a corner and close my eyes and listen. I just like to find those places wherever we are, whether we’re on tour, in our neighborhood, or at home.

It makes you sound like a pretty chilled person to live with.

I play music a lot, so if you don’t like to hear constant music then probably not… in lockdown there was a lot of noodling, a lot of searching. A lot of aggression being taken out on an instrument too.

Fair point, I can see Emily needing an occasional break from that.

Oh yeah, all the time! She’d send me out of the room, or she’d go out herself…

You’ve been in a band together for 12 years, and all that time you’ve been a couple too. How do you manage to spend so much time together without driving each other crazy?

We’ve talked about that sometimes, especially with Emily’s parents. They can’t seem to wrap their head around it. I guess we just like each other!

One song on the album that seems especially raw is “Belly of the Beast.” Can you tell me the inspiration behind that?

I wrote that tune after Jeff Austin committed suicide. I didn’t know him super well, but we had a lot of mutual friends and had crossed paths through the years and it woke me up in a scary way. Being a full-time musician you have to continually find new ways to stay relevant and interesting to people, and you have to deal with real bouts of anxiety and self-consciousness. Is this good enough? Am I good enough? Writing and playing is something I’m extremely driven to do for myself, but I also have to do it for others, and I throw my music out in the world to be judged by other people. It’s a weird process that I’ve found is extremely helped by therapy!

So is that what performing is for you: “Hiding from the monsters in the belly of the beast”?

Yes — I love that line. When people talk about being nervous to perform, for me it’s not wondering whether I’m able to perform well, it’s more that when I step out on stage I don’t know what that crowd’s energy is going to be, how receptive they’re going to be. Are these people going to allow me to be myself tonight or am I going to have to put on a hat? For the most part our fans are really receptive and I can be myself. That’s when it feels like things are right.

“Beautiful Flowers” is one of the more cryptic songs on the album. It starts with a tiny flash of color and ends with some powerful images about the climate crisis. How did you get from one to the other?

I hit a butterfly when I was driving down the road and it really bummed me out. Animals have no ideas what cars are. For something to come out of nowhere at 70 miles per hour has got to be the weirdest thing in the world. And that got me thinking about who had made the first car, and it turned out it was this guy, Karl Benz. And when he made this car he had no idea where it was going to lead and how terrible it was going to be for the environment.

For our own convenience we destroy a lot of this world and don’t give a lot back as humans. And my car hitting that butterfly felt like a really strong metaphor for what we’re doing to the earth. It’s a very delicate ecosystem and we’re killing all its intricate little working parts.

Is that a challenge for you, too, with your own carbon footprint as a touring musician?

Our carbon footprint is massive, riding on buses and planes and cars… going to a festival and them using generators to supply all the power. We all see all the problems but how to step outside of your own daily needs and confront them is the conundrum, and I’m as guilty as anyone. How do you inconvenience yourself to make positive change in this world? We’re asking ourselves that right now in terms of racism, climate change, housing inequality, you name it.

Given how personal the songs are, and the fact they’re drawn from your shared life, do you ask for Emily’s input or approval as you’re writing them?

No, not really. The way I write I’ll take a specific idea and continue to break it apart until it’s more universal. I don’t want to reveal too much of myself in any given tune. I’m not laying out a bullet point retelling of my life, just musing on how I felt in a given situation — or maybe how Emily felt, or maybe a friend of ours. In fact sometimes I’ll play a new song for Emily and I’ll tell her what it’s about and she’ll say, “Huh, I thought it was about this.” And you know what? She’s not wrong.

Watchhouse is coming to the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 19th 2022 – grab your tickets here.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

Returning With ‘Cycles,’ Rachel Baiman Works Through the Stories of Women

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Rachel Baiman has never been afraid to delve head first into speaking her mind on the state of the world through her music. But with her new project Cycles, she approaches that task through a new lens focused on narratives that spark empathy in this era of entrenched polarization. Recorded in Melbourne, Australia, and steeped in its indie rock influences, she leans into a new sonic landscape with ease, collaborating with co-producer and Oh Pep! front woman Olivia Hally.

“This album started with the title song ‘Cycles,’ which was a co-write between me and Olivia,” Baiman says. “That happened around 2018 when she was in Nashville. I had been a big fan of hers for a long time. She asked if I would want to write with her when she was in town and I was like, ‘Absolutely, that is my dream.’ So we had that one writing session and it was a magical musical experience. It was kind of like going on a date, like an amazing first date. Because there was such a great working connection, I asked if she would want to co-produce the whole record.”

During her long-awaited first tour since early 2020, Baiman called in to BGS.

BGS: This album takes a bit of a departure from earlier bluegrass leanings. What has been influencing your sound these days?

Baiman: This album in particular was really influenced by the Americana and indie rock sounds coming out of Melbourne and that is what led me to want to work with Olivia Hally. There are a lot of artists and bands that I love from that town in this exciting roots music scene. Oh Pep! obviously was an influence on this record since Olivia had such a hand in it. But also I love Courtney Barnett, Dan Parsons, and The Maes. There are so many cool bands coming out of that scene. That was the impetus for going for that soundscape. Also, a lot of the more contemporary artists that I have been listening to are more in that rock and grunge vibe (probably more so than I would want to get to myself). I’m a huge Lilly Hiatt fan and Margaret Glasmeade as well.

You collaborated with amazing women on this record. Was that an intentional choice?

Yeah I’m always wanting to work with the right people first and foremost, but I definitely was thinking about how I could work with more women. Especially for the thematic nature of the record. A lot of it is written about women’s stories and about family. I did think it would be really cool to work with a female producer and when Olivia and I hit it off, I knew it would be awesome. It did change the environment. I felt very comfortable and at ease in the studio, which ideally you always want to be.

But when you are working with someone who you feel a little intimidated by, that can change the dynamic and limit your free flow of ideas. I am a huge fan of Olivia’s so that easily could have been the case but the dynamic was such that she made it feel very, very comfortable. There was no ego or shooting down of ideas. I think that when you are a woman in a male-dominated space, even if people are trying to make you feel comfortable, there is always going to be a layer of feeling like you are the outsider or that you have to prove yourself. Having that removed from the situation really did make a huge difference.

Bree Hartley is an incredible drummer. She was a rock star in this situation because we actually had to record all of the drums first because of a studio mishap. That’s a really crazy way to make a record. She had to go in there and make 12 drum tracks to nothing. She had one chance and that’s what we had to use and she nailed it. And Shani Gandhi is obviously such a rock star engineer. I was almost shy to reach out to her because she is so established. I was really stoked that she was into the project and she did an amazing job mixing it. Those are some of the chief players and all of them stand out in their fields.

This question is inspired by Cycle’s first single, “Joke’s On Me.” I read that you’d had a bummer of an experience in your music career that inspired this song. Can you talk about what some of the challenges in the music industry are and what you might change if you could?

That’s such a big question. I think a lot of the challenges honestly stem from the way that people in the country are treated when they don’t have a regular 9 to 5 job with benefits. Obviously healthcare is a huge challenge. Any kind of retirement plan is a huge challenge. Just having those basic safety nets that make you feel like if something goes wrong, you won’t be out on the streets and that your basic human needs are met, like health care. That is a countrywide systemic issue. I wish that everyone had access to that because it would dramatically change the experience of freelancing or being an artist.

On the artist side, everyone is trying to create art that is new and beautiful or that innovates. On the business side, innovation is scary because people don’t have a model. There is always going to be a disconnect between the art and the commodification of the art. When you are trying to make a living off of art, you have to have team members that need to make money off of you. …

For me, [I was] getting dumped from a booking agency for no reason other than they were merging and the people at the top of the new company decided I wasn’t making them enough money. It was hard because I knew I had a new record. I knew I needed one more record cycle and I could be there, just nine more months basically. I think that my personal agent would have kept going but he didn’t have a choice. You become a commodity because they aren’t looking at the art and thinking about ideas you have for the next record, they don’t care. They are like, “I looked at the spreadsheet and you didn’t make enough, bye!” I don’t have any big solution, but I do think there are some things we can do as a country to make sure that everyone is doing ok.

You are very vocal about what you think and feel. What is your experience like in speaking your mind through your art about the state of the world?

It can be hard. It is similar to everything in this country right now. It is really polarizing. A lot of people do rally behind it and feel heard and seen and want to be supportive of it. And then there are a lot of people who get mad. I’m trying to think about what makes people empathize with each other. It is a different landscape than it was in 2017. When I put out Shame, I felt like it was a really important message to go out at the time. I felt like this needed to be said and there wasn’t a ton of political music happening at that time. I think people really appreciated that, if they felt like they needed to be heard in that way. I have had a lot of women reach out and say that album has been really helpful to them. That is super meaningful to me.

Now I feel like we have spent four years screaming at each other and everybody knows the sides. We know the talking points, like everything has been said a thousand times. When I was writing the material for this new album I was trying to get below that layer of shouting and work through stories and people. I think generally people can empathize and understand each other as humans. It is just that we get immediately triggered by certain talking points and shut down. I’m not trying to say, “Kumbaya, we are all one.” There are some serious problems. It is about wanting to reach people on an emotional level. It is hard to disagree with someone’s personal experience.

You have been an advocate for mental health and the power of art and music to help out in times of need. How does creating help with your mental health?

It is a necessity for me in terms of my mental health. Some people have strategic ways that they work on their writing and I think that is great. I should probably do it. But for me it has always been haphazard. I have a really strong feeling or a really strong push and then I need to write it down. It needs to get out. It is very therapeutic. There is something about being able to create something new that feels important. I’m essentially a little bit addicted to that. There is so much negativity and destruction and bad news all the time. For me, my anxiety lives in the global news and politics. That is what triggers me. People have different things that get them down but for me it is very much the state of the world.

Creating acts as a real counterbalance when I feel like I can put something beautiful into the world. Especially when I get to do that with a band and go record it and see it come to its full realized potential. It is such a magical feeling because you are actually creating something instead of tearing something down or watching something or someone being torn down. Playing live shows and having that connection and being able to be a part of that magical moment that happens with live music, I didn’t even realize how much it meant until we got to play the first show after the pandemic and I was like, “WOW, I feel like a piece of me has returned.”

Photo credit: Natia Cinco

Hiss Golden Messenger’s ‘Quietly Blowing It’ Blends N.C. Warmth With L.A. Glow

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When M.C. Taylor decided to make another Hiss Golden Messenger album, he instinctively knew it needed to be done in real time, in an actual studio, in his adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina. Recorded in the summer of 2020, Quietly Blowing It reflects a joyful spirit even as a fog of anxiety hung over the sessions. And in some ways, Taylor believes that a sense of tension is what this album is all about.

But in contrast to the image of making a million minor mistakes, Quietly Blowing It may be his most accessible album yet. (His prior effort, 2019’s Terms of Surrender, landed a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album.) As he’s done for years, Taylor asks a lot of questions in his lyrics without filling in the answer. One could say that he positions himself as a moderator who introduces a conversation, rather than an expert who knows everything about everything.

“That’s always been the way that I write,” he tells BGS. “I’ve been talking for many years about this idea of making an album that’s full of questions with no answers. In a lot of ways, I’m less interested in the answer than I am in the question, if that makes sense. Because the answer might change from day to day. I find the question often to be the thing remains steady, more or less.”

Not long before heading back to his native California to finally visit his family there, Taylor caught up with BGS by phone about Quietly Blowing It, releasing June 25.

BGS: One of the reasons I like listening to “Sanctuary” is because you can hear the band in the groove, in the space between the verses. It makes it feel like a band record.

Taylor: I think for the type of music that I make, the best light that it can be shown in is when you can hear everybody working together. The music is a collective music and it thrives on the collective energy of the players. That’s why I was hesitant to jump into making anything totally remotely. If my options were to either record remotely or do nothing, I would have chosen not to make a record because that collective energy feels really important to this music.

The second time I listened to this album all the way through, I really noticed the drums. It’s like its own energy coming through. Did you feel that too?

Yeah, in a lot of ways the record was written around the drum parts. I spent a lot of time coming up with the way I wanted the drums to work, at home, and sketching out drum patterns and drum parts, and layering different percussive elements over that. Then I brought those ideas to the two people that played all that stuff: Matt McCaughan played the drum kit and a friend of mine named Brevan Hampden played a lot of the percussion. It was meant to feel like this churning machine, almost. You know what I mean? A lot of the parts are pretty simple, but they’re sympathetic to the songs. Simple in theory, but very hard to play in a way that swings as hard as Matt and Brevan do.

To me, “Hardlytown” is about people who are staying the course against a world that’s pushing back against them. Is that pretty close to what that song is about?

Yeah, that song is addressing this idea of the way that we set up the systems in order to live our lives the way we think we want to. And how, so often, what we give feels like more than what we get back. There are many ways to do that math, of course. When I started out being a musician, I spent way more than I made back. That was like the first 15 years of my life as a musician, playing out in public.

However, there’s the whole existential math. [Laughs] Where you start to factor in joy and spiritual payoff, and that becomes another set of equations that start to figure into it all. I was trying to work my way through that, “Hardlytown” being the place where maybe you don’t get back what you put into it, but you keep at it anyway. It’s meant to be a little salty around the edges but it’s meant to be a song of hope. It may not be unqualified hope, but I think the heart of that song is a certain kind of hope.

There’s a line in that song that says, “People, get ready / There’s a big ship coming,” and that reminded me of your love of Curtis Mayfield. Why does his music resonate with you?

He’s the whole package to me. He has an absolute command of groove. His arrangements are so elegant and affecting. He really knew how to make you feel something, and his writing is second to none, in terms of finding that sweet spot between the sacred and the everyday. I’ve said this a lot lately, but he was really good about singing about the potential of hope. You think about the time during which songs like “People Get Ready” were written. It’s hard to imagine there was an abundance of hope for him and the communities that he moved through. But they somehow continued to write these songs that feel anthemic, in the way that they talk about the potential of hope, and how important hope is to carry, even if you can’t fly the flag at the particular hope at that moment.

In the video for “If It Comes in the Morning,” you have Mike Wiley, a Black actor, lip-syncing to your track. Why did that treatment appeal to you?

It’s been interesting to hear certain reactions to that video. First of all, Mike Wiley is a friend of mine that I’ve been doing work with, off and on, for over a decade. He’s an incredible stage actor. And I knew that I wanted somebody to be looking directly into a camera as they lip-synced the words. So, my thought was, who can stare into a camera for the duration of the song without flinching? And not have crazy camera eyes? I can’t do that, I don’t have that skill set. You put a camera on me for more than three minutes and I start to look like George Jones or something. [Laughs]

So, my intuition was to get in touch with Mike Wiley. He’s an expert at that. It certainly was not lost on me that Mike Wiley is a Black actor, so there was going to be added layers of information with that video. And heightened interpretations because of the moments we are living through collectively. I’ve heard some people say, “I don’t get this video. What is this video trying to say or do?” And plenty of people have not commented either way, whatever, they like the song. Other people have been angry about it. But when I see the video, I see my buddy Mike Wiley lip-syncing the words and Mike happens to be an extremely gifted actor who is Black.

What does the word “it” represent in that title, “If It Comes in the Morning”?

I mean, it depends. “It” could be victory, defeat. If things go my way in the morning, how am I going to behave to people that were on my side, or people who were on the other side? If defeat arrives in the morning, how am I going to behave to people that I was working with, or to people who were working against me? I was thinking about how I might behave to someone that might be my adversary in some situation. Would I behave with respect? Or would I kick sand in their face? I like to think the former, but sometimes I think the latter. And that’s a “quietly blowing it” moment. [Laughs]

How would you describe the room where you wrote these songs?

It’s about 10 feet by 12 or 14 feet. It’s pretty small and it’s full of guitars, books, records, and sometimes a drum kit and amplifiers. Depending on my mood, it can feel like an oasis or like a prison cell. [Laughs]

During that time when we were all staying home, I spent a lot of time on the greenway. Did you get a chance to get outside, too?

Yeah, we got outside a fair bit. We have a pretty big backyard. Durham is full of green spaces, so yeah, I found the outdoors to be a balm over this past year. No question about that. We did a lot of camping this year, and that was fun also.

How did you wind up in Durham?

Many years ago, I went to grad school at UNC. This was back in 2007 and my wife and I just ended up staying. I don’t even remember what our intention was, whether we thought we were going to stay for a long time or move somewhere else. But this was pre-kids and over time North Carolina just started to feel like home. We bounced around this region a lot. We lived in Chapel Hill first and we lived outside of a small town called Pittsboro. Then we gravitated towards Durham. It’s a perfect-sized down in my opinion. Lots of incredible food, art, music, so this is where we ended up and it feels like home.

Before this band took off, I’m sure you were doing a lot of odd jobs. I think I read at some point that you were selling swimsuits over the phone?

Yeah, I did. That was a long time ago, back in college in California. I didn’t last. I was selling women’s swimsuits over the phone. Like, I was a 22-year-old guy and didn’t know the first thing about anything about that. [Laughs] I had no business answering those telephones. They should not have had me there. They didn’t have me there for long. They fired me after two weeks. They could tell I was the wrong person for the job.

You’ve said elsewhere that you still feel the pull of California. Is that why the video for “Glory Strums” looks the way it does?

Yes, it is. In normal times I would be in California many times a year. California is where most of my family still lives. Like many people, I haven’t seen them since this all started and my kids haven’t seen my parents in almost two years. I’m really pining for California in a way that I haven’t before. Because I’ve traveled to California so frequently, I’ve kept that homesickness at bay. It never affected me because I knew that within the next month or two months I would be out there again. I haven’t been out there for a year and a half and I can really feel it.

It made me think about this article in the New Yorker in 1998 called L.A. Glows. It’s about a native Californian meditating on the light in Southern California. I remember reading it at the time and thinking it was interesting. I understood this theory that different places could have different qualities of light that would affect people that knew that place. But now I can feel that on an emotional level.

How did that video come together?

Vikesh Kapoor is the director and he is someone I have known for many years. Back in 2013 or 2014, I was playing in Portland, Oregon, opening up for Justin Townes Earle, and I was traveling alone. I was looking for someone to sell merch for me, so I put out a call on social media, I think. Vikesh volunteered to do it and we met that night at the merch table, where he sold my stuff. We kept in touch after that. He’s a songwriter himself and he’s made a few great records. And he’s a pretty respected photographer.

I knew that he was living in Los Angeles now and I got this wild hair that I thought Vikesh could make a video. We talked a lot about the light – the hazy, Southern California quality of light that I was missing. I asked him whether he thought he could get that into the video and he did, to his great credit. He didn’t have a whole lot to go on. [Laughs] He made something that is really beautiful and it does speak to the place where the video was made.

During that time when you were touring solo, what did you like most about just you and the road?

I still do that kind of touring once in a while, just to get that feeling again. I mean, there’s something about being footloose out on the road that can be really exhilarating, even still. I’m one of those people that picked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Desolation Angels when I was 17 years old and read them. I was just like, yep, this is the life for me. And the older I get, it’s a complex life, living your life on the road. You’ve got to work to take care of yourself, which I don’t think a lot of those Beat Generation writers did very well. But there remains a romance of just traveling through.

One thing I’ve noticed about this record, though, is that there’s a lot of other voices singing with you. What do you like about that?

I love the human voice as an instrument. Just like instruments, every human voice is different and resonates differently. It affects a microphone differently. I think that voices singing in harmony can really elevate a melody. It adds a very important color to a record, for me. We did have a bunch of voices on this record. It’s a pretty magical sensation to be able to sing in harmony with someone. It’s like an electric jolt is running through you.

Photo credit: Chris Frisina

Kishi Bashi Finds a New Comfort Zone in Folk Music on ‘Emigrant’

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There’s a particular knowledge that is born only from a road-worn trek, like literature’s hero’s journey, where a protagonist adventures in pursuit of higher knowledge or power, someone like Captain Ahab or Tom Joad.

Kaoru Ishibashi, the musician known as Kishi Bashi, packed a camper during the pandemic and left his home of Athens, Georgia, wandering northbound through the American frontier that’s woven throughout the Western narrative. With newfound time and his daughter in tow, this journey was a personal exploration of Ishibashi’s own identity through the sprawling American terrain.

His trip took him to places like Heart Mountain in Wyoming, a World War II Japanese internment camp — a location he has visited many times during research for his upcoming documentary, Omoiyari: A Songfilm by Kishi Bashi, where he visits similar sites throughout the United States searching for the history that still persists today. The journey also carried him through the Ozarks and the Dakotas, and to small Montana towns like Emigrant — population 271 — just north of Yellowstone, and ultimately across the great expanse of the States to Oregon.

BGS chatted with Kishi Bashi about how this trip is intrinsically tied to his new EP, Emigrant.

BGS: What was the concept behind creating Emigrant? What drew you to creating the theme around the EP?

Kishi Bashi: I’ve been spending a lot of time in Montana the last several years — especially this year, since I had so much time. I took the camper out, took my daughter out, and we did this huge trip cross-country all the way to Oregon; we spread it out over a period of months. I got to enjoy nature in a way that I hadn’t in the past, to kind of imagine what it was like back then. A lot of rural places are pretty much intact; it pretty much is what it was like 100, 200 years ago. In Montana, it’s really cold, so there’s a reason not many people live there — but that’s changing. Emigrant is a town in Montana north of Yellowstone where a friend of mine had a cabin. I borrowed it from her family, and I stayed there for a few days and fleshed out a lot of the EP.

How is the title tied to the name of the town?

To be an emigrant is to leave somewhere in search of a better place to live. I found myself really searching my own identity, my own place in this country — as a minority or even as a musician in these COVID times — trying to find what makes me happy or what makes me a person. The symbolism was really great. [Emigrant] was a frontier town for a lot of people. It was literally the frontier of this violent place, both naturally from the weather, and it was a really cutthroat environment. I was also watching a lot of Deadwood before that — it’s up around there. It may not be historically accurate, but the vibe is definitely accurate. It was that frontier, settler, colonialism type thing. It was a really harsh place to live.

How did you plan your route? What were some of the lessons taken from the road trip?

With my daughter, we started in Athens, so we went up north, and there was a lot of driving. It was a good history lesson for her because we went to the Black Hills in eastern Wyoming — actually, that’s where Deadwood takes place — and how it was Sioux territory. We went to Mount Rushmore, and it was pretty unimpressive. There’s a Crazy Horse Memorial they’re building, which looks interesting and amazing. I was getting her to understand that this is a very complicated, nuanced, but violent history that existed in these lands.

I had the realization that if you live in a city — a town that’s been modernized over and over and over — you don’t feel what it was like back then. That paved road you stand on was a dirt road at one point. Before that, it was just a trail. You don’t really get to see that unless you go out to Montana or some rural area. We basically went straight up through Tennessee, Arkansas, South Dakota, and then cut over through Wyoming.

It sounds like this road trip was an American history lesson. Did you purposefully choose locations around Indigenous or Asian American histories?

Heart Mountain [in Wyoming] — where the internment camp was — I had been there many times. And my daughter as well; she has been there a couple times in the summer, because we’re filming there a lot for this documentary I’m doing. You can’t avoid Native American spaces in this place. It was interesting to see that a lot of the reservations were closed to outside travelers because their health infrastructure was so shoddy, and that people around them were bringing in COVID irresponsibly. That was heartbreaking to see; they were really desperate to keep it out.

Tell me about “Town of Pray.” Was it inspired by the actual town of Pray, Montana?

More by the name; the town of Pray is such a stoic name. I was reading this book — do you know who Jeremiah Johnson is? He’s this folk hero [also called John “Liver-Eating” Johnson], I think a real person, pioneer, Montana mountain man. I don’t know if you know the legend, but it’s such a violent place to exist. He had a Flathead [now known as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes] wife, and she was murdered by the Crows. Then he went on a murderous rampage against the Crows, and then they respected him, and he joined forces against a different tribe. We have a very narrow narrative of what history is. When you see this violent history, it just makes me grateful that I don’t have to, like, kill other people to thrive, which may have been the case if you lived around there back then. You’re always watching your back. You’re always susceptible to trauma.

What are some lessons you hope listeners take away from this EP? Or lessons you learned through making it?

If people have the opportunity to go out and visit nature, get outside of your comfort zone and explore this country. And even more social justice issues, if you wander into any of these small towns, like in Montana — Bozeman used to be like 20 percent Chinese. Now it’s like zero. There’s a reason a lot of towns are white. After they built the railroad, they drove everyone out of town. Wonder why this country is not being shared by everyone?

You included two covers on your EP, [Dolly Parton’s “Early Morning Breeze” and Regina Spektor’s “Laughing With”]. Why were those chosen, and how do they tie into the overall theme?

One of the reasons was I definitely wanted to showcase female songwriters, because I looked at the Rolling Stone top 100 songwriters, and there were like two women in there — like Madonna and Dolly Parton. And it’s embarrassing. So I made an effort to do that. Of course, I love Dolly Parton just like everybody else. I always liked that song, and I thought it fit the vibe. The Regina Spektor song — I used to play for her; I was in her band — I always thought she was underrated, especially amongst musicians and as a songwriter. Lyrically, she’s brilliant, and she’s a huge inspiration for me. For the next generation of people who may not know her music, I wanted to point out that I have the deepest respect for her songwriting by covering her song.

Why lean into the folk or bluegrass genre for this EP?

It’s something I always wanted to do. This is also a disclaimer: I’m not a bluegrass musician. I don’t have much of a bluegrass situation amongst me, but I’m bluegrass adjacent. I went to Berklee College of Music and I studied with Matt Glaser, who’s an Americana teacher. But I played jazz violin. Gypsy swing, that’s my thing. I always loved bluegrass music, but I never felt, culturally, it was something I could attach myself to. I had this whole stigma, like imposter syndrome, of not being from a rural place. I’m a city dweller. It took me a while to own up to a fiddle tune.

As I became more comfortable with my own identity of being an American musician — an Asian American musician — I was like, “What if I just want to play something folky?” It was something I always wanted to do. So there are a lot of fiddle elements, especially in “Town of Pray.” If you think about “What is American music?” There’s jazz, there’s blues. Fiddle tunes come from a lot of Irish and Scottish roots in the mountains. American music is this huge conflagration of all these different cultures melding into each other. I think that’s the beauty.

And where’s my place in that? I’m an Asian guy playing a European instrument — violin — playing jazz, which is from the South with African American contributions. I always felt like I didn’t have a real identity as an American, so that’s probably why I felt so comfortable singing bluesy stuff, or putting a fiddle tune in there — just because I want to.

Photo credit: Max Ritter

Shakey Graves Rolls Back the Clock With ‘Roll the Bones’ Deluxe Edition

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The very first fans to discover Alejandro Rose-Garcia — the musical mind behind the moniker Shakey Graves — admittedly didn’t have much information to go on.

“When I first snuck this record out, it was just a photo of me with a cow head,” recalls Rose-Garcia of his self-released 2011 debut, Roll the Bones. “All it said was Shakey Graves is a gentleman from Texas. It didn’t say whether I was a band or a solo artist. I didn’t promote it. I just let it be and believed in it.”

The album’s no-frills, garage-folk sound attracted a loyal following, varying between down-tempo, ominous poetry about hunting seals in Alaska; lighter, more carefree numbers about driving through Appalachia; and even the lone cover song, an edgy take on a Springsteen classic. In the decade since Roll the Bones’ quiet release, Shakey Graves emerged from the shadows, releasing two full-length albums via Dualtone Records as he built a strong live-performance resume, first as a charismatic busker and later as top billing on festival stages around the world. Still, until recently, Roll the Bones remained available only as a pay-what-you-want release on Bandcamp, its recognition a de facto litmus test for Shakey Graves superfans even as it’s sold more than 100,000 downloads.

“I always had the backs of the people who had the back of this record,” says Rose-Garcia. “Anyone who’s like, ‘Man, I just love that first record so much,’ I’m always like, ‘Me too! We have that in common. That’s our secret we share: me as someone who made it, and you as someone who found it.’”

This month, millions of new listeners have the opportunity to share that secret as Roll the Bones X, a re-issue of those original recordings, hit streaming services and sees a proper vinyl release complete with the bonus companion LP Odds & Ends, a 15-track collection of previously unheard Shakey Graves material from the same era. BGS caught up with Rose-Garcia to talk about the impact of this release on his development as an artist, how the songs’ meanings have evolved (or not) over the years, and his most cherished online feedback.

BGS: This album has been available for years on Bandcamp. What inspired you to release Roll the Bones in this new, wider way — and with so much additional material alongside it?

Rose-Garcia: It’s been really important to me that I put the record out for pay-what-you-want just on Bandcamp for all these years. It wasn’t on any digital streaming platforms. That was a pretty stubborn point I had, but I feel like I got to hold my ground with that. Now, I want more people to be able to hear it if they want to. My time of being so precious with it has run its course. When we put out “Roll the Bones” as a single, people kept being like, “Wow! Cool remix, but I really prefer the original.” [Laughs] The first version of “Roll the Bones” people usually hear is the live Audiotree version, so it’s a pretty common thing to hear. People say, “Cool, but it doesn’t hit quite like the OG!” I’m like, “Well, this is the OG…” Still, I’m also flattered that some people think that I just recorded it — that somehow it still sounds modern enough.

At the point that I put this out, nothing had really happened for me, musically, at all. [Laughs] I believed in myself, and I really liked this record when I made it: I was very proud of it, and I still am. Of all the records that I’ve made, it’s probably the only one that I go back to and listen to every once in a while. I can hear myself not answering to anybody and kind of shouting into the void –being like, ahh, well if this doesn’t work out, then maybe I’ll just live under a bridge somewhere! Now it’s the future, and in a way, it did work out. Nothing ever works out exactly the way you think it will, for better and for worse, but this sweet little bedroom folk record seems prescient somehow. It wants to come out, so I’m just gonna go ahead and let it.

As you mentioned, you’ve recorded different versions of several of these songs over the years. Fans can see when a song evolves in how you play it: They can tell when you strip it down or tweak a lyric or add new harmonies or whatever. But is there anything on this record that has evolved in its meaning to you, over the last ten years?

I remember reading fan theories about “Roll the Bones” — random people being like, “I’m pretty sure that this is what this song is about” — and I can neither confirm nor deny anything.

When I was 17, 18 or so, I had a manic episode and went to a mental institution for a little bit. I’d basically had this big matrix moment where I was like, oh-my-God-nothing’s-real-everything’s-real-oh-shit. A lot of those things ended up not being reality, but there were other things, too. I was like, I’m gonna be a musician! I’m gonna save the world! I started drawing that skull logo, with the arrow through it. My family and friends, for a little while there, were like, “Well, maybe you’ll just be crazy forever, and you won’t do anything.” And even I was sort of like, “Maybe I’ll be crazy forever and none of this is anything.” But now, in the future, there are people who have that [skull logo] tattooed on their bodies. And when I play that song, I can still hear a little bit of the crazy and the mystery that I found, that kind of started me on this thing.

So the song is still pretty mysterious, even to you.

I feel confident as the owner of that song, but I still don’t know what it means. [Laughs] So it’s maybe the opposite of your question: That’s been a constant. But this record did freeze-frame a lot of stuff. “Built to Roam” was a song about me wanting so badly to just escape around the United States, and it was a wish that came true. That’s just what happened to me: For the rest of my life, until this whole pandemic, all I did was travel around and live my dreams. I’m almost like, is this whole record just like a big spell that I put on? Some sort of big prayer-slash-witchcraft deal? Like, this is what I want for myself — and then it came true?

Another one that maybe answers your question more directly, is “To Cure What Ails,” the last song on the [original] record. I wrote it about the first girl that I had ever been in a serious relationship with, and you know, it fell apart in the middle of the writing of it. Half the song was me being like, “You suck!” And midway through the song, I kind of started writing this fantasy: “Maybe I’ll circle back around you’ll be there. I can’t help it. Maybe this is how it’s gonna go down.”

And now when I hear that song, I mean … I haven’t seen that person in so long. She’s the last person I would want to just magically appear. [Laughs] But what I actually hear in that song is that throughout whatever the rest of the album’s talking about, in the end, all of it is just about that need we all have to be loved — by anyone, by somebody, even just for a second. Even just being loved by yourself. “All roads lead to you,” that whole thing? Sometimes I hear that and I don’t even think of another person anymore: I think of it as you finding yourself one day.

What do you hope new listeners will take away from this album?

Playing music comes hand in hand with crippling anxiety about everything: “Am I doing the right thing?” What I hope people hear is a kid who felt the same way and put something out that he didn’t ever think anybody was gonna listen to. I don’t want to overthink it. My favorite review that I’ve seen of it so far was just some dude on Bandcamp that was like, “I listened to this record while tripping on acid in the back of my friend’s van, and it changed my life.” That’s all I want you to do: Do something stupid and put this on in the background, and let it become part of the story of your life.

Photo credit: Magen Buse

While Making ‘Strawberry Mansion,’ Langhorne Slim Learns to Be Still

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Langhorne Slim didn’t intend to make his new record, Strawberry Mansion, but he found a musical path through a crooked piece of time. He isn’t escaping the chaos of the era. Instead, we find him traversing it, soaking it in, and sharing a real-time creative reaction.

In “Sing My Song” he writes, “I’ll sing my song when my song appears.” By facing his own addiction and the many hardships the world has been dealt this past year, he cleared the path for the 22-song record to appear. With the support and musical collaboration of friends like Paul DeFiglia and Mat Davidson — as well as his family, label, and management — Strawberry Mansion stands as a fruitful monument to Slim’s hard work as a person and as an artist.

BGS: Will you talk a little bit about what you were experiencing leading into making this record?

LS: Well, I wasn’t writing music to write a record. I had been working for a long time trying to finish another project (the unreleased Lost at Last Vol. 2). I quit drinking and drugs about seven and half years ago and I relapsed with prescription medication that was prescribed to me and one thing led fairly quickly to the other, where I became dependent on that medication. That led me to about a year out West and a decision to come back to Nashville where I’ve lived for almost a decade. It is where I got sober the first time.

So the conversation in my head was, I’m going to go back home and get healthy. Right now, I’m actually in the apartment of my friend who came and drove me from Los Angeles back to Nashville and it was a brutal trip. And he’s a brother to me. He didn’t know that I was in bad shape and weaning myself off of these prescription pills. Prescription medication is a motherf***er and I have all kinds of thoughts and feelings about that. He found me in a place that he had not ever seen me in. I could see through his eyes that he did not recognize me and I don’t mean that poetically or metaphorically. My boy was clearly disturbed, frightened, annoyed, sad, and confused. When I dropped him off, he looked at me and I looked at him and I knew it was bad. He was just a mirror and I could see where I was at.

I called around some places and people and found some help. Shortly after I got home, the tornado hit. And then of course the pandemic. So energetically and physically, it was such a crazy wild time for everybody. On a deeply personal level, I think in retrospect, the slowing down and forced confrontation of things that needed immediate dealing with, there’s just so much that has been revealed in this. For me, who am I when I’m not a touring musician? Who am I when I’m facing my anxiety, my fear, whatever it might be? Some might say life on life’s terms.

For this record, I read that you had a friend that suggested that you write every day, which you had not done prior to that. Is that right?

It is right that you read that but it’s not the entire story… One of my friends, who I’ve known for many, many years sort of jokingly said, “If you just write a song every day, come over and we’ll record it.” As soon as the quarantine started, some songs started to come and at that point, it almost seemed like they were quarantine jingles. They were kind of on the nose for the situation but it felt good to have these new little songs. I would finish a song. I would not overthink the song. I would take it to my friend’s house in its rawest form. We would record it and I would post it and then I wouldn’t think about the song again. It was a cathartic thing. Catch, release, and on to the next one. And that wound up going on for a couple of months.

Were you interacting with fans over social media about the songs? And if so, did it wind up affecting the output?

Let me put it this way, I think what it was allowing me to do was to scratch an itch. I don’t know what would have happened if I wasn’t having some interaction, some connection in that way without being on tour. In this raw and intimate way, I was writing the song that day, making a little video, and putting it out to people who care or like what I do. It means a lot to me that other people not only relate but are feeling uplifted if only for the two minutes that they are listening to it. I’m sure that was a fuel and energetic force that allowed me to continue to do it.

When did you know that Strawberry Mansion was a record?

I’m superstitious and one time I told my good friend Jonny Fritz that there had been a black cat that was stalking my lawn and he laughed and rolled his eyes and said, “You know what is bad luck? Being so superstitious.” He’s a smart boy. When these songs were flowing, I didn’t want to call my manager or the record label because I thought it was taking it out of the spirit world and putting it into the more tangible physical one. After about 20-25 songs I had the idea for it to be a record, but wanted to keep writing and they finally called me and said, “We think that you should just record a stripped-down record,” which is what I wanted. A stripped-down, raw, immediate, and true to how the songs came about kind of record.

One of my favorite lines from the record is from “Panic Attack,” when you say, “I’m feeling things exponentially.” And that line can be for the good and the bad. What are you feeling exponentially right now in this moment?

I’m excited about the record. I’m proud of the record. I am looking forward to continuing to write songs and getting busy with whatever comes next. The feeling feelings exponentially can be positive. It can be negative. That was in terms of, obviously, a panic attack. I have been a sensitive boy my whole life so what I’m trying to do is to not let every feeling take me over or guide my next step, because if I’m not looking out for it, a certain kind of thought can manifest into an intense feeling very quickly.

There is going to be a lot of talk on this record about sobriety. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten sober and I’m not trying to market or promote my sobriety. I’m trying to take that very seriously. It is part of the real shit that is in my life and it had to stop before more songs came. It seems dishonest for me not to discuss it. I still feel feelings very exponentially and would be lying to say that by getting sober or by writing a record that that cures any of it. It is a daily practice.

What are you most looking forward to musically after the pandemic has passed, and what are some things that you might do differently from having had this quiet time?

I think I am going to realize how much I miss the live experience. I think because I have been so fortunate to be able to write a bunch of music during this time, it has really fed that need. If I hadn’t been able to do it, I think I’d probably be really missing touring and being on the road. It feels weird to say but I don’t have that craving to be back out on the road. I miss performing for people.

For me personally, I could absolutely see touring a lot less and continuing to practice some semblance of stillness, whatever that means for me. More home time, I think would be healthy for me. Perhaps because I haven’t been under the delusion that touring is coming back any time soon since the beginning of this, I haven’t been constantly disappointed. I’m just trying to keep my shit together and have a healthy attitude about it and not have any expectations for what might be waiting for me down the street.

Photo credit: Harvey Washington