Tag: Cover Story

Kacy & Clayton and Marlon Williams Find Two Versions of the Same Music

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Fans of roots music are likely already familiar with the work of singer-songwriter Marlon Williams and the folk duo Kacy & Clayton. Williams, who hails from New Zealand, released his self-titled debut in 2015, capturing listeners’ attention with his sepia-toned alt-country and his distinct voice, which drew comparisons to Roy Orbison. The Canadian duo Kacy & Clayton have been fixtures of the roots scene for more than a decade, with their most recent album, Carrying On, earning critical acclaim upon its release in 2019.

The acts combined their talents for Plastic Bouquet, a new album born from their mutual respect for one another’s music. Recorded primarily in Kacy & Clayton’s hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in late 2018, the album is a lively, intimate snapshot of three talented musicians who thrive on both playing off one another’s differences and digging deep to find common ground. BGS caught up with Williams and Kacy Anderson to talk about songwriting, learning from your collaborators, and just how cold it gets in Saskatchewan.

BGS: Before we dig into the new music, how have you both been doing this year, particularly with COVID-19 and how it’s affected the music industry?

Anderson: I’ve had to develop a personality and interests aside from music and touring. So that’s been trying. It’s actually been a great time.

Williams: We down in New Zealand have had a pretty lucky run of things, in terms of the actual impact of the virus. We’ve sort of been living in our fantasyland down here. It’s pretty easy to pretend there’s no such thing as coronavirus in New Zealand. I’ve learned how to cook a bit more and I’ve been going to the beach a lot. It’s been quite nice.

I know you’ve toured together in the past, but I’d love to hear, in your own words, about how you met and developed your musical friendship.

Anderson: We met in Saskatoon, at the airport.

Williams: Kacy picked me up in the middle of a cold night. And we started singing.

Anderson: Just right there in the airport.

Williams: To take it back further than that, I was on tour in Europe and was listening to music in the van, as you do when you’re on tour. I heard their music come up on Spotify and it was really exciting for me to hear. So I reached out to them and asked if we could make some music, so we did. Fast-forward to Christmas of that year and I was in Saskatoon and it was real cold and we made music.

Anderson: It was very cold for Canada, even. It was in the -40s. But I just pretended like it wasn’t so bad, and Marlon went along with it. I was gaslighting Marlon like crazy.

So was it during that initial visit that you decided to make Plastic Bouquet? Or were you just tinkering around, seeing what would come of some joint sessions?

Anderson: I think we wanted to just do a little bit of music together. But then it made more sense, since Marlon was already coming, to make a full-length album.

Williams: We just loved that sound. It was like, ‘Here’s two and a half minutes of music. And here’s another. And another.’ Eventually, after enough time doing that things start taking shape into an LP.

Anderson: ‘LP’ is short for ‘long playing.’

As far as putting the songs together, did you come together with your own songs to share with one another, or did you sit down and write them from scratch as a group?

Williams: We sent songs back and forth pretty much as they ended up on the album. We didn’t really do much real 50-50 collaboration. We came with nearly full-formed things, got approval from each other and then there were only a couple of moments that there was real songwriting collaboration. Kacy just kept writing bangers and I was trying to keep up. I had to reach deep into my kitty to find some.

Anderson: I really had nothing else to do.

With those moments that you did collaborate on songwriting, how did those experiences compare to writing your own individual material?

Anderson: I don’t know, but I do know that Marlon made me sing “baby” for the first time. I didn’t want to fucking sing it. It’s the only thing I remember wanting to change. Can we just get rid of this “baby” line?

Williams: We’re both used to collaborating. Kacy writes with Clayton a lot, and I’ve done a lot of collaborating with this guy Delaney Davidson down here. We’re both used to the give and take of the collaborative experience, so that made it a lot easier.

Marlon Williams and Kacy Anderson

When it came time to record the tracks, were you recording as you went? Was that part of that same December 2018 visit, or was it something you worked on after the fact?

Williams: We smashed out the bulk of it then and there. These guys have an amazing band so we just really leaned into it. The whole sound was within the studio. We did meet up the next year in Nashville during AmericanaFest and finished it up there. But we pretty much went song-by-song and plowed through it.

Anderson: Yeah, that’s the only way I can handle it.

Williams: Those guys do most of their stuff live, and for me I was like, “Let’s just take time.” But it was real nice for them, since they have the confidence in each other and the familiarity to be able to just work through them so naturally and organically.

Anderson: I was bossy with them.

What were you bossy about?

Anderson: I hate redoing things. Marlon is more caring and precise.


From what I’ve read about the album, a big part of the inspiration creatively for you was the fact that you come from such different roots, both musically and culturally, as well as living in different hemispheres. How did you find that your backgrounds were able to complement one another?

Williams: I think Kiwis and Canadians have a complementary sense of humor, which is most of the battle, really, especially when doing something like recording. You have to use humor as a way of navigating situations, so that was a nice thing. Then we have the same love for the same music. The joy of the process was finding two versions of the same kind of music, coming from different cultural spaces and geographical spaces. That’s the kernel of the album, that discrepancy and familiarity and where those two things meet.

Anderson: I think that was a perfect answer.

In the same vein, what are one or two things you each feel you learned from working with each other, whether it was about music or something else?

Anderson: Just some guidance in the singing department. Marlon is like, “Sing this instead, this one note.” And I’m like, “Okay, fine. I will do that.” I’m not so used to singing arrangements. I was spiteful, in a sense, but then listening to it I’m like, “Yeah, that makes sense. That’s the part that he wrote, so I had to sing it.”

Williams: For me, I’m used to being the main singer in a room. I think being the second biggest voice in the room was a really interesting and a very helpful experience for me, and one that I didn’t know I needed to have. Working out my own place in the background sometimes was a really valuable lesson, I think.

Anderson: You were flexible in the key department. That’s what I appreciated. You can sing in any key. So when I’m like, “I only know how to play this song in a certain key, so we have to use this key,” that made everything easy.

Given that it’s been a couple of years since you wrote the bulk of the album, and since you couldn’t have anticipated the world you would be releasing the album into, how has your perception of the project evolved, if at all?

Anderson: I’m just thrilled that it’s coming out. We tried very hard. Hopefully people can listen to it now and enjoy it. It’s nice to share it finally.

Williams: It’s been so long, in terms of where we’ve got to as a society in that time. The album feels like a little paper boat on a big ocean squall. But it’s all the more exciting for its fragility.

Anderson. The paper boat theory. I like that.

Photo credit: Janelle Wallace

Rescuing Her Musical Archive, Gillian Welch Reboots 2020 With ‘Boots No. 2’

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Fans of Gillian Welch have been rewarded for their customary patience with an abundance of albums released in 2020. During the earliest days of the pandemic, Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, stayed in and recorded songs from a collection of old songbooks. (The result, All the Good Times, received a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album last week.) And after literally rescuing an archive of tapes and instruments from a tornado in March — one that blew the roof off their East Nashville studio — the pair set to work on another major undertaking.

This time, the result is even more bountiful: Three albums, encompassing 48 rarely-heard songs written and recorded in 2002 to fulfill a publishing deal. Only a few compositions have seen the light of day, namely the recordings of Alison Krauss & Union Station’s “Wouldn’t Be So Bad,” Solomon Burke’s “Valley of Tears,” and I’m With Her’s “Hundred Miles.” The engaging, one-take performances remained tucked away until this year, but they’ll be compiled into a three-disc box set titled Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs in December, packaged with a book of photography and a songbook of their own. These unearthed tracks were recorded in between 2001’s Time (The Revelator) and 2003’s Soul Journey; meanwhile, Boots No. 1 was an equally satisfying 2016 collection of outtakes from her 1996 debut album, Revival.

BGS caught up with Gillian Welch by phone.

BGS: Prior to preparing these releases, how often did you revisit these recordings?

Welch: Not really, let’s see. They’re pushing 20 years old – they’re 18 years old. I’d say… twice? So, close to once a decade? What would happen is, somebody or an artist that we knew would come to us, asking if we had any songs nobody had heard. Did we have any unreleased songs? One time, Buddy Miller called us up, and I love Buddy. He’s a friend. And he said, “You guys don’t have any country R&B songs, do you?” And I said, “Funnily enough, we’ve got a couple of these that we just didn’t know what to do with.” And he said, “Well, I’m making a record on Solomon Burke!” So, that’s how Solomon came to record “Valley of Tears.”

And same, Alison Krauss heard “Wouldn’t Be So Bad” the day I turned in all these songs to the publishing company. My manager hadn’t even heard them, and my publisher was playing them for my manager, who also managed Alison. They weren’t even pitching her “Wouldn’t Be So Bad.” She was in there to listen to other people’s songs and she heard it through the wall, is what I heard, and came in and said, “What’s that one? It’s awful, that’s just pitiful, I want that one!” [Laughs] So, that’s pretty much how it went. And same thing with I’m With Her. They were looking for some tunes. But truly, man, that’s about it.

How were these recordings made? Did you record them originally on reel-to-reel?

Yeah, they’re on quarter-inch reel-to-reel. They were recorded on a portable Nagra. The old field recordings, when they would take tape machines out to people’s farms and record folk songs and whatnot, these were often the machines they were hauling around. They run on batteries. Just lovely tape machines. So, we had a Nagra at the house and I was singing into a SM57 duct-taped to a guitar stand. [Laughs] My guitar and vocal are going into one microphone. It was very, very minimal, because we didn’t think we were making records, honestly. We weren’t. That’s one of the things that sets this collection apart from our records, is these weren’t records! None of that self-awareness, or self-consciousness, was present. These songs were written in a marathon long weekend and each song was recorded a minute after it was done.

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch by Henry Diltz

All 48 songs were written in a weekend?!

Yes. The ideas, they had languished, unfinished, in writing notebooks. They’d been kicking around. It wasn’t like I had thought of all these things in a weekend. But, I had shortfall with my publishing deal. As we started putting out records and we started touring… I don’t write on the road. So I fell behind. It was like I was never going to be done with it. My life had changed so much, that particular deal had kind of run its course. I didn’t know what to do.

Dave was the one who had the courageous and crazy idea. He was like, “What if we just turn in all the songs?” I sort of laughed, like, “Really? 48 songs?” [Laughs] He was like, “Yeah,” and he started pulling out the old notebooks. I write in spiral-bound, college-ruled notebooks, and there were just stacks of them around. He started pulling them out and we would look for a song that had just never gotten finished.

And he said, “Whatever the song needs, to make it a song, here we go. Right now.” We’re going to do it. He would put this sheet in front of me, and I would try and finish it, and he would go try to find another. And as soon as he came back in, I was supposed to have finished the one he had handed me previously. Then we would turn the tape machine and sing it once, and then that was that. Then we would finish another one. So, yeah, all of these recordings are first vocal takes of me. And I hear it. There’s an off-the-cuff-ness.

As you were recording these songs, were you in chairs facing each other?

I was on the couch! [Laughs] It’s a funny thing, releasing these into the world. It’s strange timing, to have rescued them from a tornado, and to be confronted with them again after all these years. And to literally think, “Why are we saving these?” It was really shocking. You keep things like this, maybe notebooks or photographs or tapes, and you think, “Well, maybe I’ll do something with them someday…” Here’s the sudden realization that they may not always be available to you. A tornado could come along and pulverize the entire thing.

Now, when you say you saved them from a tornado, that’s quite literal.

Oh yeah! That is completely literal. I picked them up in my arms and ran them through a collapsing building, so yes, it is completely literal! In the dark, in cascading water and debris. We physically saved every one of our masters, and every one of our guitars and microphones and gear. … I don’t want to go through that again. It’s the closest window I’ve had to what people go through in extreme duress and trauma. It was really something. That was how our year started out.

As I was looking through some of your press materials, I saw a photograph of you – and the photographer was you. Are you interested in photography? Is that something you’ve taken up?

Yeah, actually, that’s what my degree is in. I have a Bachelor of Arts in photography that I got and promptly made no use of. But I have it! Funny enough, now that we all walk around with cameras on our person, in the form of a phone, at all times, I take more photographs these days than I have since I was an undergrad, you know? I think you’re referring to this record of folk songs that Dave and I made during lockdown, and they said, “Well, we need a picture.” [Laughs] So I took a picture of myself and I took a picture of Dave threading tape on the tape machine that lives in our bookcase.

Gillian Welch by Gillian Welch

I’ve been reading about people who have started to play banjo during the pandemic, to cheer themselves up. Has that been the case for you?

I’ve heard that too! It’s so interesting to see how people are dealing with this, and apparently guitar sales and banjo sales are way up. It’s heartening. Who would have seen that coming? People are learning to play instruments, or returning to ones that have been in the closet for many years, and it’s really a wonderful reaction. We all find our own ways. And for Dave and I, it’s been pulling out all these old folk songs book, flipping them open to a page, and singing all these folk songs. Somehow, that’s been our reaction.

How old are the books?

They’re anywhere from a hundred years old, to fifty years old, forty years old… You know, I like these folk songbooks. I started singing folk songs when I was very young and I came at them not from records, but from this tradition of songbooks and being taught them by teachers and other people. It was not a recorded medium, at first, for me. Strangely, though it sounds incredibly old-timey, it was an oral tradition. …

So, we’re just returning to it. It’s the only thing that made sense to me in April and May of this year, was to sing these songs that touched upon other songs of great upheaval and tragedy and loss. And yet, people came through it, right? It doesn’t matter how dark or tragic the material is. The fact that the song exists tells me that people made it through. That’s part of the great power of folk music. And I use folk as a really, really big word, to cover almost everything! [Laughs] As someone once said, “Folk music is just music sung by folks.”

If I have my timing right, these recordings were made between the O Brother, Where Are Thou soundtrack and Soul Journey. Looking back on that time in your career, there must have been so much happening, and so many commitments you had to honor. Where do you draw strength from, when you start to feel overwhelmed?

Well, that’s an interesting question. When I really start to get overwhelmed, and it has definitely happened this year… It’s been such a challenge to remember who we are, in the face of being separated so much from what we normally do, you know? It’s hard to remember who we are! And I found myself really, in my most dislocated moments, putting on the records that I love. And honestly, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I’ve heard it from other people, too, who have been putting on our music. Almost to fill the social gaps, to have another person inhabit your home, right? And I did that also. Because I’ve seen no one but Dave, really, and I found myself putting on records and almost communing with them like friends.

I see that there’s a box set coming on vinyl and CD, and there’s a songbook, and a lot of photos. It seems like all of your passions are channeled into one big project.

You know, it was really fun to make that book, that photo-music-lyric book that is a companion to the box set. I’ve never made a book before and it was a really interesting intersection of everything I’ve ever done, with all the photography. I’d say it’s about half [composed of] found photographs, and some photographs of mine, and some photographs of Dave. As it turned out, I realized doing this, there aren’t that many pictures of Dave and I from back then. We didn’t just always have a camera. There are so many pictures to document more current times, but we did find some.

When you listen now to this collection of songs, what kinds of emotions does it bring out in you?

When I listen to them, I think about the craft of songwriting. I think that there’s almost a humbleness to them. There’s not very much ego in them, because I wasn’t writing them to be “recorded by the recording artist Gillian Welch.” I was just trying to have them be songs, and we were so focused on their song-ness. And now 20 years later, I like that about them. We just put things that we were thinking about, and things that we were seeing.

Like in “Back Turn and Swing,” Dave is from New England, and every summer up there, you can’t sit down to a meal where there’s corn on the cob without a protracted discussion about past years’ corn, and how this corn rates against the other years’ corn. It’s funny, it’s hilarious! You just talk about different years of corn! So, I like that that made it in. I like it when these little things that we notice as we go through the world make it into the songs, and this collection has a lot of that. There are a lot of little moments in there.

I’m glad it exists, and it wouldn’t have existed — all of these things would have stayed in the notebook — if it weren’t for having to satisfy my publishing deal! So, I certainly had no hard feelings about any of it. It’s amazing that we did this, and given the timing of everything, I can’t believe in the year of 2020, with all this upheaval and pain and loss and isolation, that we had all of these songs sitting in a box, to say to people, “Here you go.” We rescued them. They are lost no more.

Photo credit (lead): David Rawlings; Photo credit (pair): Henry Diltz; Photo credit (middle): Gillian Welch

Weird (Or Not), Mipso Keep Exploring Their North Carolina Roots

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To hear Mipso perform, it’s hard to believe that Libby Rodenbough, Joseph Terell, Jacob Sharp, and Wood Robinson didn’t originally get together with the intention of digging into bluegrass history or starting a band. But as the self-described “indie kids” played around with vocal harmonies and playful strings as students at UNC Chapel Hill, the traditional sounds of their native North Carolina beckoned.

“I had a need for exploring my own roots — the places I’m from and the traditions that come from North Carolina and the Piedmont specifically,” Terrell, who plays the guitar, tells BGS. “There’s a lot of depth to the music that’s been made around here, and because a lot of those folks are still making music around here, it’s still passed down in neighborhoods, at jam sessions and orally.”

As Mipso’s audience grew, its sound evolved, integrating elements of pop with traditional strings and vocal harmonies, and the foursome reckoned with more than just chords and lyrics.

“I was trying to make sense of North Carolina and being a more long-term North Carolinian — not just by birth, but by choice,” says fiddle player Rodenbough, of the early days. “There was so much context and story behind this traditional music. Every song, even if it was a modern creation, had little threads that tied it back to words that had been sung for decades or hundreds of years. It just felt like… well, in a nice way, a bottomless pit. Or, what’s a nice way to say that?”

“A well! An inexhaustible well,” offers Terrell with a laugh. And they’re still drinking from it: Last month, the group issued their fifth full-length album, a self-titled effort that embraced the band’s quirks and their past experiences.

“We’ve been living together so closely for the last eight years, and for better or for worse, we’re us now,” says Terrell. “We had phases of the band where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to be this, we need to make a song this way.’ This record, it was like, ‘Fuck it, this is how we make music.’ We like it, and we’re weird if we’re weird, and if we’re not, we’re not, but this is how we go about it. Here’s Mipso.”

BGS: Plenty of songs on this album feel like they were born from one person’s memory or experience; “Let a Little Light In,” for example, has specific lyrics about childhood. How do you bring a song from one person’s brain or notebook to the band as a whole?

Joseph Terrell: The lyrics and the melodies are certainly an important part of what makes a song, but I think when we talk about combining our voices, we’re talking about making a presentation of a song that makes an emotional impact when people hear it. “Let a Little Light In” is a great example of a song that really transformed in the studio. The lyrics mostly came from me, but Libby and Jacob and Wood had more to do than I did with building this cool, playful soundscape of dancey noises to make up a kind of funhouse mirror of childhood weirdness.

Libby Rodenbough: A lot of the songs are lyrically one person’s, or maybe two people’s, work. But we talk about the meaning of songs when we talk about the arrangements because the delivery of it has so much to do with the emotional meaning. There’ve been songs before that we’ve vetoed or decided to leave off a record because they felt too specific to one person — the rest of the band was going to feel like a backing band. Part of our standard for what makes a Mipso song is that we all have to find an in-road somewhere, something we can sink our teeth into.

You see a lot of bands packing up and moving to places like Nashville or LA, but you’ve held tight to the community where you came up in North Carolina. What makes it such a special place for you, as people and as musicians?

Terrell: For me, North Carolina is where the music comes from, and Nashville or Los Angeles is where the business comes from. In as many ways as possible, trying to keep and hearth and home on the music side of that equation is going to be really healthier in the long run.

Rodenbough: I would say, too, that there’s a part of it that’s arbitrary: Because I was born here and went to school here, and because I believe that there are benefits that you can only reap after a certain amount of time spent in one place, this is the place where I still am. It could have been somewhere else. But it’s North Carolina, because I’m a North Carolinian. This is it.

Terrell: There’s a part of you, a Libby-ness, that’s because you’re from this place. It gets a little bit vague and spiritual on some level to justify it, but I do feel that that’s true somehow.

Rodenbough: We formed the type of connection to a place that we have here by having been born here and having come of age here — by having returned here from every tour for seven or eight years. I have a more intergenerational community of people in my life. I’ve known people when they’ve had babies, and I know their kids now. I’ve met their parents and grandparents. You just can’t really rush that process.

Terrell: I had dinner on the porch with my grandparents three weeks ago — they’re 92 and 94 — and my grandma gave me a CD of my great-grandmother telling stories. It was recorded in 1985. So I’ve just been driving around in my car listening to this CD, and it’s about all these places that I still go. I feel a spiritual connection here that I can’t exactly explain. Yet I would hate to think that this answer could be spun in a way that means, “If you weren’t born in a place, you’re not valuable to that place,” because certainly the reason I love Durham is because of the immigrant community. There’s lots of ways of being from a place.

 

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One song that feels especially prescient on the new album is “Shelter.” I think a lot of people can relate to the idea of seeking out a place to be safe and accepted. What do those lyrics mean to you?

Terrell: That song came from Wood, primarily. He had this great melody that reminded us of a British Isles folk melody. Some of his family in Robeson County in Eastern North Carolina had been really impacted by one of the bad hurricanes, and he had the idea of telling that as a snippet of a story. But instead of making this about one very specific scenario where you’d need shelter, you have four different scenes that land on the same phrase or message — kind of in the tradition of country songwriting. Whether you’re a kid, an immigrant, a person facing natural disasters because of global warming, or the richest person in New York City going up into some big tower, this is a human need for shelter. We all need it, and therefore, we should all think of ourselves as tied together.

Rodenbough: And I think that a lot of the strife — to put it really lightly — happening in the country right now comes from an anxiety about lacking shelter, lacking a feeling of safety. That applies to people who are very clearly lacking in physical shelter as well as people who seem to be lacking for nothing. Our country has failed to provide that for people from every walk of life for a long time now, and so I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s unfortunately especially relatable right now. We all feel untethered. We all feel like we don’t really have a home.

Mipso’s sound developed in part thanks to in-person communities at places like festivals and neighborhood jams. Do you feel like there’s a way to emulate that in online communities?

Rodenbough: For so many subcultures, the internet has given people the gift of knowing that others like them exist. It is very empowering, and in some cases, that’s a bad thing — there are a lot of internet subcultures that we wish probably didn’t have that vehicle. But, for better or for worse, it makes something that probably felt very geographically disparate, and therefore disconnected, feel really strong and unified.

One example during COVID has been a Facebook group called Quarantine Happy Hour: They do a concert every night, or even a couple of concerts every night, and I’ve watched more bluegrass and old time music since [joining] than I did probably in the couple of years prior. It’s like a who’s-who, especially of contemporary old-time players, with bluegrass too. Every concert, no matter how well-known the performers are, has a couple of hundred people, and folks are tipping like crazy. And it’s interesting that it took a pandemic to make that happen, because we could have done that all along.

Even before the pandemic, though, Mipso was really harnessing the power of the internet to reach new fans — even listeners who maybe never considered themselves fans of traditional music.

Terrell: I think we’re probably more like a gateway drug into bluegrass than a haven for diehard fans. We have played a good number of bluegrass festivals and traditional-oriented-type venues, but I think we’re on the fringe of what they consider to be part of that world. If people find our music and like it, they might say, “Wait… there’s something in this that’s leading me towards all these other artists.” But there’s certainly not, like, a big tag we’re putting on our foreheads to weed out bluegrass or non-bluegrass fans.

Are there any misconceptions you think people have about bluegrass or traditional music — things they really get wrong?

Terrell: I mean, I have two things. The first is the idea that it’s white music, which I think is a really pernicious and awful myth. So much of this, the only reason we’re doing this is because it came from slaves who were here, and it came from African American music.

Rodenbough: It’s one of the nastiest and almost most ridiculous perversions of the truth, that white supremacists have used this type of music as an example of anglo-cultural achievement.

Terrell: The other [misconception] is that it’s tame or like, “stripped down.” For me, the best way to understand bluegrass specifically is that it was rock ’n’ roll right before rock ’n’ roll. It was high-energy and rip-roaring — the banjo twanged right before the electric guitar. It was the head-banging music of its day. [Laughs]

Rodenbough: This was a wild music — bluegrass in particular was not an old folky hokey thing. The way that we divide up the genres of traditional music comes straight out of marketing. I think it can be useful to understand how one style of music informs another that came later chronologically or something, but it’s not necessary to draw hard lines between old time and bluegrass in order to love stringband music or to love fiddle-centric music. All the borders are so blurry, just like with everything in history and in our overlapping cultures. I think that’s so wonderful, and I wouldn’t want to try to clean it up. That would be missing what’s so special about not even traditional music, but vernacular music — music that non-professionals make in their lives, about their lives.

Photo credit: D.L. Anderson

With Hard Banjo Rhythms and Striking Lyrics, This Is the Kit Offers ‘Off Off On’

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Kate Stables, principal of alternative roots outfit This Is the Kit, didn’t intend to write a pandemic album to follow her acclaimed 2017 debut, Moonshine Freeze. In fact, she wrote the entirety of Off Off On well before the term “COVID-19” entered our collective consciousness.

In the way that great art often can, though, the songs Stables wrote for Off Off On anticipated the needs of our current moment. Across 12 tracks, Stables sings of growth-inspiring personal reflection, the “two steps forward, one step back” nature of processing trauma, and continuing to move forward in the face of grief, all explored with deeply felt empathy and sharp insight.

Stables and her band recorded the bulk Off Off On prior to the COVID-19 lockdown alongside producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady) at Real World Studios in the U.K. Sonically, the album builds atop the lush, banjo-driven alternative folk of Moonshine Freeze, with complex, often subtle arrangements that offer thoughtful soundscapes for Stables’ striking lyrics.

BGS caught up with Stables via Skype to discuss finding sources of inspiration, writing about difficult personal moments, and living as a musician during the COVID-19 lockdown.

BGS: To start us off, everyone has had their own specific difficulties resulting from the pandemic, but musicians, especially, have been dealt a tough blow. How has that affected you and how have you adjusted to being home more, and not being able to tour this record?

Stables: At first, it was kind of novel and a bit of a relief, almost. For the first summer in living memory, I didn’t have loads of festivals to do. So it was a summer I spent with my family doing family stuff instead. So that was nice, at first. Now that the time for actual touring would have been starting soon but it isn’t starting soon, it feels a bit weird. It’s the longest amount of time I’ve ever gone without playing gigs and without touring. So it feels really weird and I miss doing gigs so much. And I really miss my band. They’re in the U.K. and I’m in France. I’ve never gone this long without seeing them.

With regard to the album, you wrote and completed the majority of it before the pandemic started. What were the origins of the album and how has its meaning evolved for you since you first began plotting it?

I don’t usually have a pre-album vision. It’s normally just me writing songs as and when they come and seeing what kind of shape it all takes along the way. One of the earliest songs that was written for this album was “Started Again.” “Started Again” is almost a bit of a bridge song from the last album to this album, because I feel like it could have gone on either, in terms of what I was thinking about. It feels like it’s connected to my past life, in a way, because I feel like everyone has a new type of life now. The world has passed through this strange portal and we’re all a bit different and have to adapt to things. It’s not an obviously key song on this album… but it’s also a bit linked to my thinking about perseverance and getting through the difficulties and coming out the other side again and again. It’s funny because that’s also what the world seems to be dealing with at the moment. Those are themes that accidentally came out while writing the album, without knowing that COVID-19 was coming.

I read the track-by-track notes that you wrote for the album, and one line that stuck out to me was, “Listening through to these recordings, I hear new COVID-19 references every day.” Could you elaborate on that? I heard some myself when I was listening, but am curious as to which resonated with you.

Partly there’s the “we’ve all got to get through this” that I was dealing with in the album, which now seems like I’m talking about COVID. There are lines like, “Try not to cough.” That is too ridiculous and coincidental. There’s a song about a hospital and the breathing apparatus in the hospital; that felt spooky, now that so many people are in hospitals than ever before. Things that were written with one story in mind and now this new situation has given them another story.

I’ve talked to a few other artists who have had similar experiences. It’s interesting, because obviously no one could have predicted where we are now, but it does make you wonder if you were intuiting that we were collectively going down this road.

Yeah, are we all tuned into something that we don’t know about? It does feel weird. I think also with writing, and you may get this in your work, you do end up with funny coincidences and predicting the future accidentally sometimes. It’s just the way it goes when you’re working with words and language and storytelling, whether it’s journalism or fiction or songwriting. These weird cosmic moments do happen.

One of my favorite tracks, both sonically and lyrically, is “This Is What You Did.” How did you write that one?

Writing it was fun because it was an example of me playing with rhythm, which is my favorite thing to do. I tried to find a banjo-picking pattern that was quite hard, something I almost couldn’t do, and worked until I got it. I tried to find a pattern where I wasn’t using the same fingers every time, something as random as possible. The beats were regular but the strings I was picking were somewhat randomly generated. Then I tried to find vocal rhythms that were difficult for me to sing at the same time. I guess it was like brain gymnastics. I like it when you can’t tell where a pattern starts and finishes. … That repetitive, cyclical nature of the music lent itself to this mind-loop approach with the lyrics.

Reading through your notes about “No Such Thing,” you reference both Jack Kornfield and Jane Austen as inspirations. How do you find inspiration? Do you always have your antenna up?

Language is the material I work in and I really enjoy exploring other people’s work with language. When I hear a phrase that makes me laugh or that sounds pleasing to say out loud, I’m always noting down little quotes of things that make a spark in my brain, even if it’s something out of Bob’s Burgers or something… So I guess I do always have a bit of a radar up for rhymes, assonance alliteration; things like that make my ears prick up.

When you reach the point in your writing process when you’re ready to fully arrange a song, what does your collaboration with your band look like? They’re such fantastic players and it sounds like you’re all quite close.

Sometimes I have a bit of an idea of the vibe or the kind of pace that I was envisaging for a song, but it’s also nice to not say anything until they’ve tried something out. Quite often they’ll find something that’s better than what I had in mind. I’ve ended up with three of my favorite musicians playing in my band, which feels like a privilege and a real kind of fluke. So it’s nice to let them do their own thing as much as possible. I’d be interested to know, though, if they think that’s what I do. Maybe they think I’m really controlling. [Laughs] What I hope I do is let them have space to do their stuff.

Prior to lockdown, you got to spend a lot of time on the road with the National. How does playing as part of someone else’s project inform your work as a solo artist?

In a few ways, but it’s hard to put your finger on one. Traveling is nutritious for me in terms of writing and wellbeing and being inspired. The act of traveling, even just looking out the window while you’re going along the road, is inspiring. But also the fact that you’re going to different places and meeting new people and having these new experiences… Also just seeing how other people work. I found it fascinating to be part of this symbiotic ecosystem that’s going around on tour. Everyone plays an important part and looks out for each other and it’s really fascinating to see how other people tour.

It’s a bit tricky to look too far ahead right now, but, in addition to getting your album out, what are you looking forward to in the coming months?

Because the gigs aren’t there to be looked forward to, I think I’m looking forward to seeing what I can get done instead. There are a lot of musical projects that I’d love to get stuck into, and I hope that I just will. This time, we’re all learning how to be ready for anything and not to assume that something is going to happen, so, ideally, I’ll just be making music instead of touring. I really hope I’ll be able to make music with people, even if it’s long-distance.

Photo credit: Philippe Lebruman

Through His Music, Charley Crockett Speaks to ‘Hard Times’ We’re All Facing

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“Welcome to Hard Times,” the opening and title track from country crooner Charley Crockett’s eighth album is Crockett at his finest. He is pensive and pitch perfect, relevant and retro. “The dice are loaded, and everything’s fixed,” he sings. “Even a hobo would tell you this.”

It’s hard to tell if the 36-year-old Crockett is the hobo he references in that line, though it’s entirely plausible. As contemporaries cut their teeth at Belmont and Berklee, Crockett was busking on the streets of New Orleans and New York. While there, he learned how to entertain an audience in pursuit of a tip; perhaps more importantly, he learned the ways of this world, how we’ve all been ushered into a 24/7 casino where the house is telling lies and the gamblers are predestined to sin.

Welcome to Hard Times, comprised of 13 tracks of searing anguish set to slick, ’60s-style, country-western production, culminates with the particularly sorrowful “The Poplar Tree.” It’s a song that Crockett says has been received differently by different audiences, even as he — a man living somewhere between Black and white, privileged and not — feels that his message is obvious. “I have, many times, on this album cycle, said to press folks, ‘Yes, we’re all oppressed folks, but some folks just have it harder,’” he says. “And you have to recognize that.”

By phone, we talked to Crockett about his album, the role of artist as activist, and, of course, these very hard times.

Welcome to Hard Times sounds like you wrote it for this moment — in the midst of a pandemic, with widespread racial unrest — but you actually wrote it before everything went down. What inspired you?

You didn’t need this shit going on this year to know about these problems that we’re talking about. I don’t know how you could travel this world as an artist and not see it. I think that says everything about the nature of people. I recognize people are in different positions, but there are a lot of people who are in positions to not see what’s going on, and there are no consequences for them. Then there’s everybody else who’s forced to see it, who deals with it and suffers for it.

You’ve definitely been vocal in interviews and in your music. But even as you speak now, I get this sense that there’s a push and pull, or a toeing of some line that you’re subconsciously doing.

I’m trying to walk this line that is strange because I have been identified by a lot of my audiences as just a regular white man. Then there are a lot of people that look at me strangely as the complete opposite, as African-American. But I can’t speak for the Black community and I don’t really feel like I’m speaking on behalf of the white community either. I never saw myself as Black but I never liked my whiteness.

What does it mean when you say that you never liked your whiteness?

I dreamt of myself and viewed myself as not white from probably 5 years old. And then I look at myself now in videos and stuff, and I just… I feel like I look strange.

I guess what I’m saying to you is: My issues with my own identity tie to the kind of James Baldwin viewpoint that whiteness is just a metaphor for power, and that my identity as somebody who is uncomfortable in my whiteness says a lot about the relationship between Europeans in America and African-Americans and Natives. The romanticization of genocide is an unbelievable crime, but I think what is probably more savage and brutal is the assimilation through rape, through bondage, through [people like] my grandmother [who was mixed].

The easy thing for somebody to do is say, “Well, you can’t skip white responsibility for institutional and structural privilege.” I see that, so I’m not saying, “Hey, whiteness isn’t real, therefore nothing that’s happening to you is valid.” I’m saying you have to recognize that it’s happening, and then, if you truly wanna change it, at what point in the future do whites need to stop looking at whiteness as meaning anything? That’s the step that I feel is completely absent in the national conversation.

There are conversations happening though, right? And white people, at least some of them, appear to be really listening.

There’s a combination of white consciousness, and then there’s this other, fake, white virtue signaling. I just can’t stand some of that stuff ‘cause I see a lot of these people playing politics with their public image who are not doing anything in their life about shit. It’s whites signaling to other whites, and that’s what Martin Luther King was talking about at the end, you know? He really was. I think Malcolm X saw it at the end; I think James Baldwin, because he was so intellectual, was saying it to everyone, but he managed to get away with it because I think he seemed like he was mostly speaking within that kind of elite, intellectual world.

“Blackjack County Chain” is a song written in the ‘60s about a Black chain gang in Georgia that kills their supervising sheriff. Word on the street is that Red Lane, the writer, offered it to Charley Pride, but he passed on it because he didn’t want to stir up controversy. You covered it on Welcome to Hard Times, and it’s the only song on the album that you didn’t write. Why’d you decide to cut it?

I sung that song mostly ‘cause I listened to the words and identified with it. I feel like I’m dragging chains, you know? I just do. I always have. I think that that’s the other weird thing about America that is really hard to recognize, for a lot of us. It’s, like, no matter how much better a lot of these people have it, the insane thing that I’ve seen about America is, even among all these people in positions of power and privilege, they all view themselves as discriminated against and oppressed.

Your song “Poplar Tree” discusses lynching. Was there a concern about going too far when you wrote it?

I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about where that song was gonna go. It just went there.

Right, because you said this stuff dominates your mind.

It just does. And it’s who I am. I am in the public eye on some level and people got all kinds of crazy shit to say about that. And it is not lost on me that, for whatever reason, these people saying the crazy shit that they’re saying about me, they got nothing like that to say about these people that I’m getting compared to in the independent, Americana country scene. Even if I can sing ‘em under the table, they don’t criticize how they sound, but they criticize me up and down. And I’m not blaming them; I’m not mad at ‘em, I’m asking for it, in a way. I know that I’m asking for it, ‘cause I can just pack up and stop doing this shit.

 

Like, let’s talk about folk music. Let’s talk about blues, back in the day. When these guys were singing about their situation, it was all code. It had to be code because if it wasn’t, that might mean your life. So I’m stepping up and down to say this shit loudly, but I’m trying to build my audience to a place beyond where it is now. I’m just saying, I don’t exactly know who I’m speaking for, really, because of how completely outside of this society that I feel.

How did playing on the streets for so long shape you as an artist?

To me, that’s the best education I could’ve ever gotten in my life. It was unfortunate circumstances and difficult living that brought me there, but I would never wanna go another direction. It’s informed what I’ve done, and I learned about folk music, hip-hop, and everything else. I just absorbed it all on the street, and I made it into what it is now.

I have people in country who look at me like, “This guy’s an imposter! Look at this video of him on the subway train ten years ago! He’s wearing a beanie and tight pants; he’s not a real cowboy! He’s not country music!” And I’m like, who is more authentic than me? I never got a leg up in the business, period. I never opened up for anybody of note. I built my career out of the most unlikely of circumstances.

Do you think artists have a responsibility to speak up about social issues?

It’s like this: If your art isn’t saying shit, I don’t care about your political opinion. Like, if your art isn’t making an impact, your political opinion, to me, is little more than you trying to get ahead. And I mean that about white people; I mean that about everybody. If the art isn’t doing anything, then what’s the point?

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain. See the full photo story.

Marcus King: A “Young Man’s Dream” Come to Life

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A first encounter with Marcus King’s voice is nothing short of wondrous. The 23-year-old singer/songwriter/guitarist functions less like a singer and more as conduit for raw emotion, his dynamic, melodic singing grounded in soul, rock and roll and a preternatural sense of musical intuition. To boot, he is also one of our best young guitar-slingers, wowing legends and fans alike with his emotive, inventive take on modern, electric blues music.

On January 17, King released his first solo album, El Dorado. Produced by Dan Auerbach, it marks the first time King has offered a full-length project outside of his critically acclaimed Marcus King Band; accordingly, the project feels particularly intimate and honest, with King reaching new heights as not just a singer and player but as a storyteller and lyricist.

BGS caught up with King as he was getting ready to perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live to chat songwriting, working with Auerbach, and how it feels to strike out on his own.

BGS: It’s only been a couple of days since El Dorado released. What have the last few days been like for you?

MK: Man, it’s been a bit of a circus. But I always liked the circus when I was a kid. So it’s working out fine.

You had a couple of release shows in Nashville on Friday, too. What was it like getting the new music out to people?

It’s fun, man. Those solo acoustic shows can be a little nerve-wracking, just because there’s no one to share with. It’s a lot more vulnerable. I feel a little exposed during those, in a way. But it makes it that much more gratifying, you know?

Was there a particular song or idea you were kicking around that made plotting the album click into place for you?

It all started with “Young Man’s Dream.” We wrote that two years ago, almost to the day. It was right before I was going in to do [the Marcus King Band’s 2018 album,] Carolina Confessions. We already had plans to work with Dave Cobb, which was a surreal experience. Before that, Dan Auerbach reached out and asked if I could come do some writing sessions with him. I jumped at the chance. That’s the first tune we ever wrote together, “Young Man’s Dream.” Then the theme fell into place for this to be a storytelling album, a coming of age story.

Given that you and Dan had written that one song together and felt strongly enough about it to do this entire project, what would you say makes your creative partnership with one another so special and fruitful?

Working with somebody is a really intimate relationship. Writing is really personal. I had never really co-written before, and Dan was really particular about who we brought in to write with me on this record. He and I were able to write together two years ago and continue to do so over the past couple of years. Our friendship and our writing partnership led to a very organic process in the studio. Writing together [for the first time] is really kind of like a first date. It’s a little awkward and you really have to bare your soul and hope you don’t freak anybody out.

To that point, when you are writing, how heavily do you draw from your own life? Are you the kind of writer who puts it all out there or are you more inclined to share your personal experiences through metaphor and more universal stories?

I pull directly from my personal experience, because I feel like that’s what I want to hear from a writer and from my favorite singer/songwriters. I love a good metaphor and all, but I really enjoy the personal experience you can hear behind the words, and their conviction. If I like a song it’s because I feel a personal kinship to that music. On this record, everything we wrote came from personal experience.

With further regard to your songwriting, you’re such a dynamic, melodic singer. When you’re writing the vocal parts of your music, do you tend to have a melody first or a lyric first? Or does it vary song by song?

The melody comes first for me. Especially if I’m working with a keyboard player, like Bobby Wood, who played on the record. He comes up with these really beautiful, gorgeous parts and I’ll just start humming, and hum more and more until it starts to form words. I just allow my soul to fill in the blanks, as to what those notes are trying to say. I’ve found that to be a pretty different way to approach it, but it’s fun.

When you get to the point when you’re ready to record a song – and I know y’all recorded this album particularly quickly, over just three days – when you go to record a song, do you have a note-by-note sense of what you’re going to sing or are you more likely to follow your instinct, particularly with regards to ad-libs and runs?

It’s mostly on the fly. The only time I would ever change it would be if Dan and I thought it should go a little differently. Then I’ll go back and fix it.

I actually ran into someone last night and they complimented me and said there were a lot of well-thought-out [guitar] solos on the record which, to me, is shocking to hear, because I can’t write a guitar solo or a vocal melody. It just comes. It’s a natural thing. To me, that’s against what I know. I was almost offended – I wasn’t actually offended, obviously – but you know that’s my whole approach to the record, to free it up melodically.

You touched on this a minute ago, but you had an incredible roster of players who joined you in the studio while you and Dan were recording. What was your time together like?

The whole reason we work so well together is that their work ethic and mine really align. The only time I have to wake up early is if I’m working on new music or I’m working on something really important to me; otherwise I’m a late riser. On this record, I would get in around nine and all the cats would already be there. They’re all in their late seventies and early eighties, so they all get up at sunrise. They’d already have had their coffee and would just be waiting on me to get there. We’d get to work around 9:30 and go until 9:30, 10 at night.

Given that they’re all such seasoned players, did you give them free reign to write and play their parts, or did you have a firmer sense of what you wanted each player to do?

We had our work tapes of the writing sessions. We’d play the tape for them and they’d write their charts and give us the chart. We’d play the song and that would be the take. Everyone is writing their own parts on the spot, you know? It’s really a beautiful way to record. The stuff that comes out that way is really beautiful. Everyone added their own part and I never had any notes. The only note I had was at the end of “Wildflowers & Wine,” the outro is a little different. I recommended that change. That’s the only little note I had. Otherwise it was all great.

We touched on playing these songs live solo at the beginning of the conversation, but you’ll have your band out with you on the road in support of the album. What are you most looking forward to about playing these new songs live?

I’m excited to showcase it to people in a way that they’ve never heard it before. I always like to talk about the importance of having a studio version and live version. I think having the live version sound exactly like the studio is almost a farce. We stay true to form; we aren’t going like Radiohead with completely different versions. But we add more improvisation and play a bit with the structures of songs. We also have two horn players, so the songs have a different vibe. Why would someone want to leave their home and come all this way to hear it exactly the same? I like to offer up something different, you know?

Photos: Alysse Gafkjen

Joe Henry Surrenders to the Song

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Joe Henry is sitting and chatting in the living room of his vintage, Spanish-style home in Pasadena, California. The subject of the note that starts off his new album, The Gospel According to Water, comes up. He looks over his left shoulder and points to the corner.

“It’s that guitar right there,” he says. “It’s an all-mahogany Martin from 1922. It was the first guitar they made that was created for steel strings.”

Seeing this small, plain instrument, it seems impossible that it was from this that he conjured the note in question, a sound deep yet brittle, intimately resonant. It’s at once ancient and fully present in the now. And it’s a sound that serves as something of a motif throughout the marvelously moving, affectingly poetic cycle of songs. It was a sound from a specific source that was echoing in his head when he sat in the Los Angeles studio of his longtime friend, recording engineer Husky Huskold, to set a new batch of songs on tape.

“I played him one song from Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says. The song was “Mama and Papa Hopkins,” a 1959 recording from the point of view of young Lightnin’ getting his feuding parents to see the good they share.

“It was just vocal and acoustic guitar. And Lightnin’ is mostly singing to a single string that he’s playing. And yet the way it’s recorded, it’s so heavy. There’s such a sense of ominous space. And I said, ‘Look. I know I’m not him. I’m never going to be Lightnin’ Hopkins. But listen to what’s going on here. There’s something that’s making this so visceral in a way that I want to hear. Even if this is just demos, I want to hear a sense of drama.’”

You’d think Henry, who just turned 59 last week, would have had more than enough drama. A week before Thanksgiving 2018, he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasized to his skeletal system. (He is in remission now and feeling hearty.) When he went in to record, it was a week before Father’s Day. All but two of the songs had been written in an unexpected rush of expression that started at Valentine’s Day. He specifically references those poignant holidays when giving the timeline.

As he plucked that first note for “Famine Walk” (one of two songs on the album written during a two-month writing residency at a small art college on the west coast of Ireland, before the cancer diagnosis), he had no idea it would be how he opened the album. He had no idea he was making an album.

He just wanted to get these songs down while they seemed fresh, and that’s all he thought he was doing in the course of two quick days of recording with his son, as well as reeds player Levon Henry, pianist Patrick Warren and guitarist John Smith sitting in on some of the songs, and with David Piltch playing bass on “Book of Common Prayer.” At the end of the second day, he went home to listen to the recordings, sitting in his office with his wife Melanie Ciccone, Levon, and a friend. Only then did he really hear what he had.

“We just listened to the whole thing,” he says. “And it was so obvious to me and to everybody in the room listening back that it felt fully realized. I mean, it’s raw. It’s really spare. But emotionally speaking, I heard it and thought, ‘I don’t know if I’ll get closer to the intention of these songs.”

The only thing added later was the background vocals of Allison Russell and JT Nero, AKA Birds of Chicago, on the songs “In Time for Tomorrow” and “The Fact of Love.” He would have added his longtime drummer Jay Bellerose to some of this, but when he sent the tracks to him, Bellerose responded with a simple voicemail: “Um, not on your life.” His drummer’s instincts of when not to play, though extreme here, were exactly right.

In its sense of space, The Gospel According to Water is a perfect portrayal of the experiences that brought it about, mystifying and mystical in as personal a way as can be. At times it’s as elliptical and elastic as the engagingly playful folk-jazz that’s been a signature of his last several albums. But here that portrayal is stripped down to its essence.

At the center is the natural fragility of Henry’s voice as he lingers over key words and phrases in ways that can be enchanting and startling, sometimes both at once. While it’s instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with his work, it stands apart not only from his previous 14 solo albums, but also from his many production credits: for New Orleans titan Allen Toussaint’s final works (including the 2006 The River in Reverse, a collaboration with Elvis Costello following the city’s devastating flood), Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash, Bettye LaVette, the Milk Carton Kids, Joan Baez’s most recent album Whistle Down the Wind, and Rhiannon Giddens’ and Francesco Turrisi’s stunning there is no Other.

But he winces at this being considered his “cancer album.” He even considered trying to avoid the topic in interviews and promotion of the release. But ultimately he opted for openness.

“Whether it’s fair or not, it’s going to happen,” he says. “I lost a little bit of sleep over that, wondering how I can mitigate that. And then I just realized that I can’t now, more than I ever could, control how people respond to the music — if they respond at all — and rein that in… People are going to hear it like that, and there’s not much I can do about it. It’s an aspect of how this record happened and what it is.”

Indeed, as the music made its way out to the world, friends and fans alike started sending him notes, almost all mentioning his health issues. He came to accept that for the good intentions, too.

“I just believe in the songs enough,” he says. “They’re already moving out into the world without me. They’re going to have to make their own way. They’re going to have to straighten their own teeth, find their own job. I can only do so much and when I go out and perform these songs, I may or may not at times offer any framing context about how the songs occurred or when they occurred.”

He references a comment made many years ago by his mentor T Bone Burnett, who produced Henry’s 1990 album Shuffletown, when discussing his Christian faith in regards to his art. Burnett said that while some sing about the light, he sings about what he sees illuminated by the light. Henry addressed that, in his own way, when he first played a few of the songs in public, in a concert at the Los Angeles’s Largo theater.

“Part of my preamble was to say, ‘Look, I know I’m holding this shoehorn that would help you into the tight fit of a big batch of new songs. And if I have one reluctance to hand this shoehorn over it’s because I don’t want you to think, from what I’m about to say, that where a song comes from is what a song is,’” he says. “A song is not where it comes from. Just because my particular health crisis has invited me to receive these songs in a particular sort of way, that is not what the songs are.”

He thinks back to being with Toussaint, doing interviews right after New Orleans was flooded in 2005, his home among the many destroyed. In interview after interview, Henry saw Toussaint refuse to deliver the “heartbreak” stories journalists craved. Finally, when pushed by a CNN interviewer, he made his point.

“He said, ‘You have to understand something: More than a drowning, this was a baptism,’” Henry recalls. “And talk about something that silenced the room, myself included. I’ve thought about this so many times since this occurrence for me, the fact that Allen wasn’t in denial about what had just happened. He just had the ability to see, that his vision didn’t stop with this trauma. He was seeing beyond.”


Some of that is elusive on the album, found in shadows cast by the metaphorical light. The song “Orson Welles” is a good example, with its arresting chorus: “You provide the terms of my surrender, I’ll provide the war.” He’s still mystified how that one came about, the words written as he and Melanie flew from Burbank to San Francisco.

“That’s just something I found falling off my hand,” he says. “I open my notebook and I literally watched my hand write ‘Orson Welles’ at the top of the page. And I didn’t know what Orson had to do with anything. It’s just one of those moments where it felt spring-loaded. I didn’t believe I was writing about Orson, but I believe that somehow his specter was kind of directing, gesturing me on to something, somewhere I needed to go in that moment. And I just followed, because, you know, who wouldn’t?”

He found himself thinking about a part of Citizen Kane in which Welles’ title character wants his newspaper to have headlines from a conflict in South America that is petering out, so he cables his correspondent there, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.” (In real life, William Randolph Hearst instructed his staff, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”)

For Henry it took a different turn, though, with the idea of surrender — certainly tied to his health situation, and the ultimate lack of power over it, but extending far beyond that.

“I feel like I’ve written about surrender a good bit,” he says. “And I don’t mean surrender in terms of resignation, I kind of mean surrender in terms of radical acceptance, which is empowering, which is motivating, as opposed to the idea of collapse.”

Two titles stand out, though, for the clear view of the basics of life, the perspective brought by such things as loss, age, kids growing up and facing mortality. “The Fact of Love” is pretty much self-explanatory, but “Salt and Sugar” really captures it. “Everything is salt and sugar now,” he sings, boiling it down to things that make life possible and meaningful — though too much of either can kill you.

He explains that he and Melanie have been doing some “decluttering” in recent years, having left the large house in which they raised their two kids, and moving twice to subsequently smaller places. But the song definitely shows what he’s seen from the light brought by his health.

“It’s paring things down to salt and sugar,” he says. “Everything. What matters? How do you make a record? How do you express what you want to say? Who do you spend your time with? What do you spend your days doing? All that.”

He recounts many of the changes in his life in recent years, the moves, the attachments and the letting go of attachments. Finally, he sums it up in a way that gets to the heart of what he has done with The Gospel According to Water, and it’s just as on-point as that note he plucked to start the album.

“I mean, just, you know, occupy life.”

Photo Credit: Jacob Blickenstaff

Dori Freeman: From Appalachian Roots to ‘Every Single Star’

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Dori Freeman has been hurt and felt torn. We know because she’s told us so, always with unblinking frankness in crisp pop songs with deep Appalachian roots. But even if we couldn’t understand her words, we’d hear the pain in her soprano, which rings out with melancholy strength only gained from living.

In her new album Every Single Star, the Galax, Virginia, native pushes her blend of familial mountain grit and mid-century-inspired polish even further into its own creative territory. Never one to shy away from truth, Freeman writes about motherhood, expectations, and relationships from a distinctly female perspective.

BGS: In the songs on Every Single Star we seem to hear real contentment. While there’s still some conflict, especially when it comes to having to be away from your daughters, there is peace, too. Was writing these songs a different experience than writing your first two albums?

Dori Freeman: Definitely. I had recently been married when I started writing a lot of the songs on this record. It was the first time I’d been in a happy, stable relationship, which obviously will have an effect on the themes in the songs you write. I was in a different headspace. For the previous two records, I was in different phases. Whether it was getting over a particularly difficult relationship or looking back on that and thinking what I didn’t want to have. With this one, I was with someone that I really love. So the songwriting was different.

I did a lot of imagining scenarios, which I didn’t do as much with the first two records. Those were based more on very direct experiences. On Every Single Star, the songs about my daughter are very direct and personal, but some of the other ones, like “Of Me and You” — that was a song that I wrote for a friend of mine who’d had a relationship that didn’t work out so well. I’ve had to look for different sources of inspiration this time around. When you’re happy, it definitely makes songwriting harder. [Laughs]

I’m happy you have that problem.

It’s a great problem to have. [Laughs]

Do you have a favorite memory of playing one of these new songs live over the past several months?

Nothing too specific stands out, but one of my favorite songs on the record is “All I Ever Wanted.” One of the things that’s nice about performing that song is almost every time I’ve done it, I’ve had women come up to me afterwards and say how much they enjoyed the song. That was the intention: to write a song fully from a woman’s perspective that other women could relate to. So it’s nice to have girls come up and tell me they liked it.

You’ve said you admire Peggy Lee and the mid-century aesthetic. What is it about the ’50s and ’60s sound that you like?

Peggy Lee is one of my favorite singers of all time. I don’t know what it is. I think for one thing, they still recorded in a more live situation, in a bigger room, so everything sounded a lot fuller on records back then. I also like the style people sang in in that era. My dad played a lot of that music for me growing up. Actually, he just made a record with mandolin, playing a bunch of swing tunes, so he’s really drawn to that music too. I think that it’s that I always listened to it, and I can’t help but have it influence what I do.

You grew up in such a musical family. When you were a kid, did y’all just sit around and play music together?

Yeah, definitely. I was always in choir in school. I didn’t really start to play guitar and sing in front of people by myself until I was about 15 or 16, but even when I was little, I would go jam at parties and festivals with my dad and grandpa, and then sit around and watch people play music.

As I got older, I started to perform with my dad and grandpa on stage. They used to have a little show on Friday nights at the frame shop that my family runs. So that’s one of the first places I really got some good practice performing in front of people. We still do shows together. We still play together as a trio with my husband as well, who plays drums with us now. So yeah, it’s still very much a family thing.

You’ve said that people don’t really talk about motherhood in the music industry. Are there specific experiences you’ve had or witnessed that made the great motherhood omission personally more evident to you?

Yeah, I can think of one in particular, when my daughter was not quite a baby, but not quite 2 years old — so she was still pretty little and motherhood was still a pretty new thing to me. It was also around the same time I was putting out my first record, so it was hard to manage all those things and to figure out how to balance them. I was at a music conference. I won’t say which one. They had this thing where they wanted a bunch of women to get together and talk about problems they faced in the industry as women. So people were raising their hands, going around, and sharing their experiences.

There was a lot we’d all been through, with sexism and dealing with men being inappropriate in a whole variety of ways. That is obviously a huge issue too. But I remember raising my hand and saying, “You know, it’s hard being a mom on tour, especially if there’s no green room, or you don’t have a babysitter to look after your child while you’re playing and then figuring out logistics — you can’t just stay anywhere after a show.”

I just remember crickets in the room. It got overlooked so quickly — everyone moved on. No one really seemed to care. And this was in a group of women. I think most of them, if not all of them, probably didn’t have children. I can understand why it didn’t seem important. But it was not a good feeling to share something personal and important to me and have it seemingly immediately overlooked and dismissed.

I can imagine. You’ve said it was cathartic to write songs about your daughter for this album. What kind of healing do you experience when you write songs about her?

I feel like she becomes more a part of what I’m doing, especially when she’s not physically present. If I can perform on stage and sing songs that are about her, I feel like she’s involved in some way. That makes me feel better because sometimes I’m on the road for four or five days at a time, which I know is not that long, but when you have a child — especially a young one — it starts to feel like a long time after a while.

It was really important for me with this record to write a couple of songs about her, and also to make sure that people knew when I was performing them on stage that they were about her. I always introduce the songs as being about my daughter. I want the audience to know she is an important part of my life. I want to feel like my daughter is involved, even when she’s not there. I guess it helps me feel better about missing her.

It helps you, but it also seems like talking about it openly — just saying, “This song is for my daughter” — could go a long way toward normalizing motherhood in music. Many women artists are also mothers.

Absolutely. I feel like in most industries, it’s hard to be a working mother, but being a musician brings a very specific set of challenges. One of the questions I get so often — and it’s one of my least favorite questions — is, “Do you travel with your daughter?” or “How come your daughter’s not with you?”

I just think, “Well, do you bring your daughter to a board meeting? Do you bring your child on your business trips?” I realize that music seems like fun and not a lot of work, but it is a lot of work. It’s a job, as much as I love it. So it doesn’t always make sense to have my child there, and I don’t think it’s fair to be judged for that.

You’ve stepped confidently into this tradition of strong Appalachian women — strong Appalachian women artists, in particular. Instead of me assigning a definition to what that means, how would you describe the particular strength of an Appalachian woman?

Oh gosh. That’s a tough one. I can give you one example: When I think of a strong, Appalachian woman, I think of my great grandmother. She was from eastern Kentucky and had seven or eight siblings that were younger than she was. She raised them from the time she was 13 on. When she was an adult, she went right into having her own children. She took care of everything. She did the housework. She raised the children. She killed the chickens to cook. It was classic, what you imagine when you think of Appalachia 70 years ago.

If her life had been different — if she’d grown up somewhere else or maybe with more opportunity or more money — she would have pursued music in some way. I know she really loved music. She loved to sing and play guitar. She taught my grandfather how to play guitar.

I feel like in a roundabout way, she has some part in my choice to be a musician. My grandfather has been such a big influence on me musically, and if it wasn’t for her passing on her love of music to him, then it wouldn’t have made its way to me. Even though she couldn’t pursue those things in her own life, she wanted to make sure she passed them on so that someone eventually could.

Photo Credit: Kristina LeBlanc

Shawn Colvin Still Going ‘Steady On’ With 30th Anniversary Acoustic Album

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Shawn Colvin’s new album will be intimately familiar to fans who have loved her from the start. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Steady On, Colvin re-recorded the full album acoustically – and she’s posing on the cover with the same guitar strap she wore on the back of the original packaging, too.

Since her auspicious arrival on the scene, Colvin has sold millions of albums and won multiple Grammys, including her first one for Steady On, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. If you’ve seen her perform over the last 30 years, you’ve certainly heard these songs — “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “Ricochet in Time,” among them. She invited BGS for a hotel room conversation while she was in Nashville for AmericanaFest, where she’s performing the album in its entirety.

BGS: When you went into these sessions, were you hoping to capture a certain sound for this version of Steady On?

SC: No, just an acoustic tone, a stripped-down, non-produced, sort of bare-bones rendition of the songs.

Because you’re so familiar with these songs, were you able to work pretty quickly?

Even though I co-wrote a lot of them with John Leventhal, he would give me pieces of production and I thought, the way I need to figure out how to write is to strip all this production down to just me and a guitar. Almost every song on the record began that way. I stripped it down. It’s the beginning of what became the produced version of Steady On.

I was curious if you wrote most of those songs on the same guitar.

Oh, I think so, yeah. The Martin D-28.

What is it about that guitar that suits you so well?

I bought that guitar in 1974, and it was a 1971. I was 18 and it was my dream to have a Martin guitar. I think I paid $400 for it. And it was just my guitar. I mean, that was a big deal for me to spend that kind of money. I played that guitar on the road I don’t even know how many years. I still have it. It’s pretty beaten up. And I retired it, but yes, in 1988 or ’87 whenever that was, that’s the guitar I was still using.

How many songs had you written up into the songs that were on Steady On?

Maybe three or four.

Wow. So these are some of your earliest songs.

Oh, yeah.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Well, I wasn’t really a songwriter. I wanted to be and I practiced at it, writing lyrics to John’s fully-produced pieces, which were really pop. And I love pop music, but I wasn’t very good at writing lyrics to it. You know, my heroes were all singer-songwriters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joni Mitchell in particular. Very personal stuff, and that’s not what I had been writing. I realized, I think I have my own story to tell and I opened up to that and then I liked what I was doing.

Were you living in New York at the time?

Yeah.

How did that city shape you as an artist, do you think?

Oh gosh, the city shaped me personally and artistically in a huge way. I underwent a lot of personal changes there, a lot of growing up, a lot of waking up. It’s a dose, as Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz. But I met people I’m still friends with to this day that really nurtured me in my 20s and helped me grow up. My best friend Stokes is still there in New York that I met in 1980. And the music scene was so rich!

I started out in Buddy Miller’s country band. That’s how I got to New York. He hired me to come sing because Julie had left the band. And he needed another, what we called then, girl singer. So I was in a band like that. I played solo acoustic at places like The Cottonwood Cafe and The Bitter End and I did anything I could make a buck at. I was also in a country band with Soozie Tyrell. I did rockabilly bands.

We were just putting together bands piecemeal, you know “Hey, can you make this gig?” Everybody was up for whatever, all the musicians, and you cobbled together a band from gig to gig, whatever you could get, just whatever we could do. So I learned a lot. I played a lot, which is part of my advice to anybody who might want it,who is a young up-and-comer. Play live. Just do it and do it and do it, you know? I think it makes you confident and good and better your craft and you learn. You’re a student.

What was your live show like at that time? Was it just you and the Martin, singing solo acoustic?

Yeah.

You were never intimidated by that?

Nobody ever listened.

What do you mean?

When I was doing bar bands four hours a night in the city, sometimes they did. That was the goal, to play well enough that maybe someone would listen. It’s where I developed this percussive guitar style that I have, because I thought, what can I do to make it sound like more instruments and do something a little bit different? So I made more noise that way. Sort of a rhythmic thing.

I think of that as your signature sound because I haven’t seen a lot of artists doing that.

And that came partly from Joni Mitchell, who made progressive, clicky sounds on the guitar. And I always thought she was using the back of her hand to go against the strings, this fleshy part of your thumb in the back of your hand. I realized later she was using her nails against the strings to give that click. But I developed it my own way.

As a new artist, how did you find your audience? Or how did your audience find you?

I started to make a name for myself a little bit down the Eastern seaboard, Cambridge and DC, New York, and some other areas in Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. So I was getting finally to play listening rooms rather than bars. I had a little bit of a draw. I got to go on college radio stations and they would play cassettes of mine. It was really helpful, especially in Cambridge, so I got some fans that way that weren’t just the New York people. Then when I put out the record, I wasn’t prepared it for what was going to happen. It was on Columbia Records and it was time for the big push. I’m like, “Sure, no problem.” And it was a grassroots global push. So that meant drive-time and morning radio shows, if they’d have me.

And God bless the label reps in all these different cities, which you don’t have anymore. Their job was to take you around the radio and try to get them to listen to you. And they had a reputation so they could usually get you in. Whether the radio station was really interested or not was always sort of up in the air. And then I would do press, anybody that would talk to me, a magazine and a paper — local, big, small, whatever, other radio if I could — and then I’d do a show at night. Sometimes there were 10 people. And I did that a lot. It was a groundswell, I guess you could call it. Radio stations did start picking up songs from the album. And next thing you know, I’d go back to a town like Boulder and people would come.

That is grassroots for real.

Oh yeah, for real. But you know, those people that have been with me from the beginning have stayed. I have a loyal following. It’s fantastic, yeah.

When Steady On was released in 1989, how did you define success at that time? What did success mean to you?

I remember being in Boulder and I had a day off and I like to ski. I was in a rental car and I was driving to… I can’t remember if it was Keystone, someplace close to Boulder, and I heard myself on the radio and I almost went off the road. That was to me a measure of success. Then the Grammy Award of course was pretty cool. Who could have thought that up?

How do you define success now?

I’d say first and foremost, if I write a song that I like, that’s the best feeling. It’s gotten harder to do for me. There’s less time, because there’s so much roadwork. Less drama in my life, to force me to the paper. There’s really not a better feeling than finishing a song. Writing is hard, but the fact that I can still sell tickets, that’s success to me. Not everybody’s in that position. I think those two things — and I can still do it. Physically I can still play and sing as well, in my opinion, as I ever have. So it’s kind of longevity and luck.

Photo credit: Deidre Schoo

Courtney Hartman Steps Into a Solo Career With ‘Ready Reckoner’

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Courtney Hartman told only a few people about her plans. She bought a transatlantic plane ticket, packed a small bag of clothes, and flew to Spain to hike the Camino de Santiago. It’s a 500-mile hike along old pilgrimage routes in rural Spain, an arduous journey that often prompts a spiritual journey. During that 40-day trek she would step off the trail, pull out her specially-made, travel-ready guitar, and sing a few bars into her phone. Eventually those voice memos — those notes to herself, journal entries chronicling her trip — coalesced into songs that ended up on her solo debut, Ready Reckoner.

It is not, however, an album about walking or wanderlust. Rather, it’s about motion: the physical movement that propels oneself along a path, but also the spiritual motion it takes to gain a deeper understand of your place in the world — in particular, your place in the world as an artist. Drawing from the music she made as a member of Della Mae, Ready Reckoner forays into new territory: folk and pop, of course, but also jazz, avant garde composition, drones, even musique concrète. It’s often dark but just as often hopeful, as Hartman traces the both subtle and sublime changes that she is still going through.

BGS: What took you to Spain?

Hartman: I think anybody that I met on the trail had a similar story. There was something that started popping up on their radar[s] over and over until they couldn’t ignore it anymore. That’s what happened with me. I had friends who had gone over there and I was listening to several albums that were influenced by that region of Spain.

Also, two of my writing heroes are Anne Lamott and Mary Oliver. While I was teaching writing at different summer camps, I would talk about how they talk about writing and walking. In the books they’ve written, they talk about how good it is to go out and walk. That would be my assignment to students: Go take a walk in the woods and do some writing.

At one point I realized that I was giving this assignment, but I’d never done it myself. I wanted to know if that was something I could do, if that was a way of creating that would resonate with me. And then a cheap flight to Spain popped up and I bought. I had 24 hours to cancel and I didn’t. So I went!

How did you prepare musically and creatively for such a trip?

I called Dana Bourgeois, who has built a number of guitars for me. I said, Dana, I’m doing this thing and I haven’t told anybody. What do you think would be the sturdiest, most lightweight, best-sounding guitar I could take? And he said, well, what if we build you something? So they did. They weighed out every single component of the guitar and then I had somebody build a guitar sling for me. And then I walked and I wrote. I took me forty days. There’s something about the repetition and the movement, let alone being out in the open.

What did you learn from that experience?

I learned so much, but one of the things that kept occurring to me is that you’re carrying the weight of your belongings with you every day. It didn’t matter if I wrote anything or played anything that day. I still had to carry the weight. There was a point when someone helped me go through my bag and decide what was necessary.

You think you’ve really narrowed it down, and then you’re like, okay, I guess I’ll get rid of this extra layer of clothes. But every night I would think, no I need this or I need that. I need this because I’m afraid of what might happen without it. So I learned that our needs and fears are linked. But I didn’t need that extra layer of clothes, even though I thought I did. When that snow came — that’s what I was afraid of — I made it through.

Did that change your perspective on music?

I want to say that I need to be writing songs or I need to be making music, that they’re my life source. But I don’t need to write or play. Those are extra gifts. I would survive without them. I don’t want to. Don’t ask me to. But I think letting go allowed me to hold them a little more loosely or with a bit more gentleness, instead of clinging to them or gripping them too tightly.

Often, writing meant stepping away from the trail. It meant taking my guitar down or taking my pen out or singing voice memos. I have hours and hours of endless mumbling. You step away from the people you’re walking with, and you might not see them again for a few days or even a week. Or maybe never again. It’s very much like life that way.

That experience seems to inform this album in ways that are very explicit. Even just the sound of footfalls on “Too Much.”

About half the album came directly from songs I wrote on the trail. But it’s not a walking record. It’s just a shot of where I’ve been the last year. I worked on it while I was staying in a little wagon in Oregon for a couple of days, just trying to finish putting together takes and sequences. I would walk and listen. But the album pretty evenly spread out between songs I wrote before, during and after walking. The first track I wrote was “January First,” and I wrote all the other songs later that year. I don’t know that it always works that way.

Tell me about the album title. Why did those words resonate with you?

I was obsessed with the word reckon. I was reckoning with myself and my work, reckoning with the relationship to the music I was making, reckoning with whether I should even be doing it at all. That word felt like it had a lot of motion, so I looked it up and found that a ready reckoner was at one point the name of a hard-copy calculator. A merchant might have a ready reckoner, which is essentially a book of tables. I found one from 1905 for sale and ordered it on Amazon, as you do. I keep it in my guitar case. It’s this tiny, beautiful book with all these weird calculations for things. I felt like these songs were trying to calculate something, trying to get to a formula or an equation.

There was some trepidation on your part about recording this record and taking on the role of co-producer. How did you reckon with that?

Shahzad Ismaily, my co-producer, could have easily taken the wheel and produced this record himself, and I think I would have felt good about that. But he believed very strongly that that was not his role. He wanted mostly to be engineering. He was pushing me to make the decisions that needed to be made and to listen more deeply. Just by stepping away he became a guiding hand. I didn’t want to be producing this record but I’m grateful that he was able to ease me into that place.

And I realized that I really love it. It’s such a different space. I’ve produced one other record for a band since then, and I want to do more. There aren’t a lot of women in that role. The studio can be a very intimidating place for women who are trying to explore and learn and admit what often feel like deficiencies, but if I’m able to do that in the future, I hope I can make that space feel comfortable and gracious and open.

I remember I was so afraid to record this album, so when I went into the studio the first day, I was reading through some of my walking journals. I opened the first page, and I was writing about feeling terrified. It was the same feeling I had about going into the studio, but it’s exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. We learn the exact thing in so many ways over and over. Or we don’t learn it at all. Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I didn’t learn anything.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez