Tag: Cover Story

New John Hartford Set Shows Evolution of a Singular Figure

Posted on by Editor

Sum up the importance of John Hartford in one sentence?

That’s the challenge given to Skip Heller.

Five minutes later, after a stream-of-consciousness run of superlatives, analogies and tangents — songwriter, entertainer, transitional figure and simply great are among the terms employed, as is the declaration that Hartford was a “gateway drug to bluegrass music” — Heller finally sighs.

“You are talking with someone who, with money he got on his fourth birthday, bought a John Hartford record,” he says.

In other words, Heller is just too deep into all things of Hartford’s life and music to boil it down to one line. While that worked against coming up with a neat summary, it served him very well as compiler and producer of the new Backroads, Rivers & Memories album.

It’s an illuminating and lively collection of previously unreleased early- and mid-1960s recordings that pre-date and pre-sage Hartford’s soon-to-come impact as a major songwriter (the 1967 Glen Campbell hit “Gentle on My Mind”), a “newgrass” pioneer (the much-beloved, still-unique Aereo-Plain album), and a solo banjoist, fiddler, foot-stomper, noted wit and colorful chronicler of life on Mississippi (a St. Louis native, he piloted the steamboat Julia Belle Swain every summer for much of his life).

And it comes as the presence and adoration of Hartford, who died in 2001 at 63 of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, has had a resurgence, with a new legion of young fans discovering his music and prominent posthumous places on the soundtracks to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and 2017’s Lady Bird. For the latter his melancholy “This Eve of Parting” underscores a key scene, his sad baritone conveying the distress of the mother, Laurie Metcalf’s character.

But the genesis of the set can be traced to a fateful ’68 evening in Heller’s family’s Philadelphia living room, the TV tuned to CBS. It was a moment for the then-tyke comparable for him to what many experienced a few years prior watching the same network when the Beatles made their American TV debut on Ed Sullivan’s show.

On the screen was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, and Hartford, a regular on the show picking banjo and appearing in some sketches, was duetting with Glen Campbell on “Gentle on My Mind.” That appearance essentially previewed Campbell’s own variety show that would be inaugurated soon as the Smothers’ summer replacement, with Hartford a major presence on it as well — that was him each week standing up in the audience to pluck the same song’s intro on banjo to start the show.

“If you were inclined toward music and you were going to spend your money on a record, it was going to be that or a Monkees record,” he says, allowing that perhaps Campbell would have been the attraction here for most, “but my parents already had those records.”

The album in question was either 1967’s Earthwords & Music (which included the version of “Gentle on My Mind” that caught Glen Campbell’s ear) or the next year’s Gentle on My Mind & Other Originals (piggybacking on Campbell’s massive hit with the song). He had them both, one that he bought, the other given to him by his “cool uncle,” but he’s not sure which was which. Regardless, the boy’s path in life was set.

So let’s — pardon the expression — skip ahead to the present. Heller, an accomplished and respected roots-and-far-beyond musician based in the Los Angeles area, stands as perhaps the foremost authority on his hero’s life and music, and this new album came from that and from the close relationship he developed with Hartford (opening for him at a Philadelphia concert in 1996 remains a personal highlight) and with his family. The family, including Hartford’s son Jamie, a guitar ace and singer who has carried on some of his dad’s traditions, had already released some archival material and talked with Heller about other possibilities. Ultimately, Heller was sent an extensive digital library and set to assessing, quite the task as Hartford was an obsessive taper.

“He had a tape of pretty much any show he played,” Heller says. “He also had a tape of every jam session.”

After contemplating a compilation of live recordings, Heller hit on the notion of building an album from Hartford’s ‘60s songwriting demos, adding to that some airchecks from his regular radio show on WHOW in Clinton, Illinois (near St. Louis) and — a real treat for fans — the entire eight-song output of his early Ozark Mountain Trio, pretty straight bluegrass.

Overall, it shows an evolution of a singular figure, someone who took traditions and made them his own, infused them with his distinctive talents and personality, and in turn shaped sensibilities of others to come. Along the way there are demos of “Gentle on My Mind,” “Eve of Multiplication,” “This Eve of Parting,” and other songs he would record for his late-‘60s run of albums on RCA. And, as a tantalizing if brief and ephemeral bonus, there’s a 30-second excerpt from a rehearsal with a band of Nashville pros of what would become “Steam Powered Aereo Plane,” which a couple of years later would become a centerpiece of that forward-thinking album he made with fiddler Vassar Clements, guitarist Norman Blake, Dobro master Tut Taylor, and bassist Randy Scruggs.

“The Ozark Trio and radio things, those are the makings of John Hartford,” Heller says. “And you can hear how when he starts finding his own voice through this, Pete Seeger was the transitional figure who was around. He really gets clearer about who he’s going to be. His batting average as a songwriter gets much better, a combination of Pete Seeger and Roger Miller. He gets his elliptical words stuff from Miller.”

Heller found a lot of epiphanies and revelations in the course of putting this all together. One that may strike many is in the Ozark recordings.

“If you didn’t know that was John on banjo, you’d go, ‘Who is that?’” he says. “He’s amazing. Not doing anything J.D. Crowe or other of the ‘real’ guys would be doing, and you can hear Earl [Scruggs] on it, and maybe also Doug Dillard’s influence. One of the things in this album for me was to show how incredibly grounded he was in traditional bluegrass. He could have gone on and just done that, could have made a life of that, just be a banjo player. And on those radio airchecks, he is one of those old-time country guys. To hear that professionalism before he even got to Nashville was an epiphany.”

But even more so, Heller was astounded by how meticulous Hartford was in the songwriting process.

“The revelations to me were often how he would evolve a piece of material in the process of writing before he ever played it,” he says. “There are songs for which we had four, five, six versions. He really could get in the weeds. Any really good songwriters can.”

The biggest questions may revolve around the “Aereo Plane” clip. Why just 30 seconds? And what can we learn from that short passage?

“The whole rehearsal of ‘Aereo Plane’ is like 40 minutes,” he says. “You hear the band that’s on the RCA records rehearsing it — and not quite getting it.”

These are ace musicians, Heller notes, some of the top that Nashville had to offer. But Hartford’s vision has moved in a way that they couldn’t quite follow.

“Once he hits [the album] Aereo-Plain it’s all going to change,” he says, citing that later album’s fusion of old-timey string band gospel and progressive flights of fancy, spiked by touches of both heartfelt tenderness and witty Dada-hippie absurdities (including the two spellings of plane/plain) only hinted at in his earlier works.

“To me that feels like the natural cut-off point, the end of the RCA years. Why? The band he has can’t quite play the next thing he had in mind.”

Molly Tuttle: Confident and ‘Ready’

Posted on by Editor

Even before releasing her first full-length album, Molly Tuttle made history. She became the first woman to be named IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, a title she’s won twice, in addition to winning Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year, all on the strength of her 2017 EP, RISE. But to focus exclusively on Tuttle as a guitarist would be a mistake. She isn’t interpreting others’ songs. She’s writing and singing her own, and as her debut record When You’re Ready proves, she’s doing it not only with classically trained musicianship, but with an exciting willingness to explore and trust her own wide-ranging artistic instincts.

Tuttle talked with BGS about When You’re Ready, feeling optimistic about women in music, and why California’s Bay Area has her heart.

BGS: When You’re Ready is such a confident debut. Were you feeling confident from the jump, or did your confidence grow as you recorded?

Tuttle: I think it grew. As I was writing the songs, I got more and more confident just saying what I felt and what I was thinking in the songs. I remember feeling really confident in the studio in what I was saying and in the parts I was playing. Ryan Hewitt, who produced it, helped me feel confident. He wanted everything to sound really strong – it was a good experience.

A lot of these songs seem to explore relationships and how we interact with each other. Do you feel like there are some currents that run through thematically and connect all of these songs?

I think there’s kind of a theme of longing on the album, and also a theme of just being confident in who you are and what you’re feeling. When I was writing it, it was, “I’m just going to say where I’m at.” The theme on the album for me would be accepting your feelings and embracing them.

You’re from California, then you went to college in Boston, and now you’re living in Nashville. Do you feel like all of that geographic diversity changed the trajectory of your music?

I think so. I got exposed to lots of different kinds of music in California, and then especially when I was at Berklee, there were all sorts of different kinds of music going on all the time at school. Then, obviously, Nashville is one of the most amazing music cities in the world. I think living in California was influential, growing up there. I really relate to the Bay Area and a lot of my songs are still inspired by California. It’s where my soul is, still.

What is it about the Bay Area you love so much?

I really love the ocean. I love the nature there, the scenery. I think people are really open there. Everyone — well, not everyone, but a lot of people in the Bay — are just trying to be good people and trying to be accepting of other people. That was something I was taught in school a lot as a kid: that you should accept everyone as they are. Of course, nobody is perfect at that. But I think people are trying to do that there, and that’s a feeling I’ve tried to carry with me.

When you write, are you focusing on the guitar part first and then the lyrics, or does it vary?

There are times when I do the guitar part first, but for this album, I was really focusing on the lyrics and melodies. The guitar parts were the last parts that came with these songs — and I really wanted to have interesting guitar parts on this album. I thought it’d make it more interesting to have a singer/songwriter record with guitar lines that could weave it all together, so I worked on that after I finished writing the songs.

The guitar playing on “Take the Journey” jumps out: the percussion, the lead, the bass, the counter-melodies — that’s all you on acoustic guitar. How’d you come up with this song?

I wrote that with Sarah Siskind. We wrote it pretty quickly in a couple of hours, which for me is quick for writing a song. We had a song that was in that modal-key feel — you don’t really know if it’s major or minor. When we were writing it, I went into this different tuning: it’s an open G tuning, but you get rid of the third and tune the B up to C, which makes it like a Gsus4.

I like that style of guitar playing. When I was a teenager, I learned clawhammer banjo because I really liked old-time music. Someone showed me that you could move the clawhammer style onto the guitar and play a really percussive-sounding style. I went with that and created different rhythms that I like to use — more syncopated — and really worked on getting the bass notes to pop out, letting my hand hit the guitar so it’s percussive sounding.

Your vocals on “Don’t Let Go” move between smooth and comfortable verses to more of a staccato and breathy chorus. How’d you decide to approach the vocals this way?

Where the melody is in my range, I naturally had to go up to a breathy head voice, so we thought that could be a really cool thing, to make it sound really emotional. And on this one, when I was singing the chorus, I did get really emotional in the studio. That helped me get the quivers in my voice. I think you can hear it in the track. There are little things that came out in my singing that I hadn’t really done before recording this. I had to go to an emotional place to get the take that worked.

Do you have a favorite song on here or is that impossible?

I think my favorite is “Sleepwalking.”

All of that imagery on “Sleepwalking” – and on some other songs too – blurry screens, white noise, and even sleepwalking itself: it’s such a direct contrast to the specific, refined sounds you’re making. What is it about the hazy imagery that you’re drawn to?

Yeah, I think a lot of my songs have themes of trying to make a connection with a person or a place or a feeling. There are a few songs that talk about white noise or static or anything that’s kind of blurring the connection. That’s something I feel — like with technology, sometimes it makes me feel like I’m not actually connected to anything and not connected to myself.

I think that comes through in my songs. “Sleepwalking” is a song I wrote about that specific feeling of being disconnected from the world around you. Maybe you’re relying on one person or one place or feeling to be your connection. It’s kind of a love song, but it’s kind of a cry for help in a way. [Laughs]

Of the women who are widely known first as guitar players – a number that’s still too low – most aren’t acoustic, steel-string players. It’s also a physically demanding instrument, especially the way you play. Why were you drawn to it? Why do you think you’ve succeeded?

I’ve never really seen limitations on guitar for me as a woman. I remember, I was first drawn to it in a really natural way when I was a kid. I just liked the mellow sound of it. So I don’t remember specifically what drew me to it, but I remember seeing guitars around, and I told my parents I wanted a guitar. That was after I’d tried like three different instruments and failed at all of them. [Laughs] I tried to play fiddle, and I think I got tired of just not sounding good on it. Guitar is a lot less abrasive when you’re first starting out. I had a tiny guitar when I started, and my dad showed me some stuff on it.

I really liked that you could play it while you were singing. I never thought about it being a physically demanding instrument, even when I first played and my fingers got really sore. It felt pretty natural to me. Then, when I went to Berklee, I was 19 and all of a sudden there were no other women in any of my guitar classes. [Laughs] That was weird. It was definitely an uncomfortable experience at times.

But it was good because I’d walk into class and be the only one, and because all this attention was instantly on me, I thought, “Oh, I better practice and be good or they’re just going to write me off as some girl trying to play guitar.” It felt like there was some added pressure there, which is not really fair, but at least it made me practice more.

You’re not the “best woman guitar player.” You’re the best guitar player. Do you feel like the industry and culture in general are beginning to consider contributions of women more fairly – that you’re weighed equally?

I think it’s definitely changing at a rapid pace right now, especially with the #MeToo movement. Now that’s starting to affect the music world. I’m seeing so many women coming up and their careers are just exploding in new ways – like at the Grammys. There were so many women winning awards and playing.

I think women are feeling really empowered to just say, “No. I’m not a female musician. I’m just a musician.” Women are fully embracing feminism more and just feeling like we can say what’s on our minds. We don’t have to tiptoe around these issues anymore. I think that’s helping everything change. We are not accepting any crap anymore — like “you’re a female guitar player.” [Laughs] I certainly don’t want to be pegged as a female guitar player. My gender doesn’t have anything to do with my guitar playing. We’re talking about the issues more and that’s helping everything to change.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Greensky Bluegrass Capture the Live Jam on ‘All For Money’

Posted on by Editor

With their progressive mindset and undying faith in the power of the jam, the electrifying live shows put on by Greensky Bluegrass have captivated roots and rock fans alike for nearly two decades – but the Midwestern five piece has always been more than a group of gifted musicians. Layered, thought-provoking songcraft is also a big part of their DNA, and with their new album, All For Money, those two worlds come together like never before.

This month, the band – composed of mandolin player and primary songwriter Paul Hoffman, guitarist Dave Bruzza, banjo picker Michael Arlen Bont, Dobro player Anders Beck, and bassist Mike Devol – embarked on a milestone tour of listening halls that are well suited to showcase both sides of the Greensky Bluegrass double helix, and according to Hoffman, that everything-at-once approach is the next step of their journey.

“We don’t have any grandiose dreams or visions of things we haven’t accomplished,” he says, “and I think it’s been that way for the last 10 years. Being able to go out and play the right venue in all the right towns where we can put on a big show and present everything we do … it’s about getting that to happen everywhere now.”

BGS: You guys were inspired early on by The Grateful Dead, and I hear that improvisational spirit on the new album. Do you feel like All For Money is a return to your roots?

Paul Hoffman: We talk about this album being a lot more like a show than previous records because for us, [studio work and being onstage are] kind of two separate art forms. … With this record we went for the show aspect right from the get-go. It’s a little loose, and a little improvised, and we’ve succeeded with that more and more on every record – finding ways to capture that live spirit but still utilize all the tools available to us in the studio. Like for example, maybe there’s a place where there’s two mandolins at once. We couldn’t do that live, but if it sounds cool on the record, let’s do it.

Tell me about recording in Asheville. What kind of vibe do you guys get there?

We love that town. In the young days of the band we thought we should move there and maybe it would spark our career. We didn’t, and it was probably for the best, but the studio is really cool. It’s like an old church and it’s got a lot of room to work in. All our early records were done in Michigan in this studio that’s really small, and you don’t need a big room or an extra room downstairs with a ping pong table and video games and a kitchen and three couches. You don’t need any of those luxuries, but as soon as we went to [the studio,] Echo Mountain, to record the last record, it was like “Man, this is nice” … and now we probably do need them. [Laughs]

Digging into the live show versus studio album idea, you have a couple of really lengthy songs here. “Courage for the Road” is over nine minutes long, and I get that in a live setting, but why stretch it out for the album?

I think sometimes we’ve found that our fans are separate. Some of them are live music aficionados and don’t really enjoy listening to the records, and some people who like our records come to the show and are like “Why are all these songs so long and psychedelic?” I think there’s a part of us that figures those things don’t need to be separate, and maybe if we did a bit more from both sides of the equation, there’s something there for everybody.

The goal for that song is for it to remain interesting the whole time, and when I listen to it I feel like I’m listening to a well-mixed, well-recorded, live jam. It was so organic with how it happened that it kind of had to be left alone, and I think that translates to the listener as live energy. That’s the thing you sacrifice in the studio if you start overdubbing too much, and that’s when some people complain. What they’re really complaining about is that it loses some of that honest energy and integrity, so those jams should preserve that.

Tell me about the inspiration behind that song. Is this literally about being on the road, or more of a relationship thing?

It’s all of the things. I like to write about multiple things at the same time, and I think it helps. People are gonna read into it how they want anyway. So I’ll often start talking about something and then realize I’m talking about something else, too. It works really well as a simple song about being on tour, but it also works as a song about being in love with someone and not being able to let go, or being obsessed with something for the wrong reasons.

Why might you need some courage for being on the road?

It’s a lonely place sometimes, and that in itself is a paradox. You’re surrounded by people who love you every night, but then the lights go down and the crowd goes home and you’re all alone again. It’s hard to even have an argument for feeling lonely on tour when so many people are coming to see us and support us, but they are real things. And even in general, when you make that commitment to quit your job and leave your family for six weeks at a time, and maybe come home with little to show for it, it’s hard for musicians to keep sticking it out.

Tell me about the song “All For Money” and the interlude in the middle. When you were writing it, were you thinking, “It would be cool to do two minutes of jamming right here”?

Sometimes it comes up in the moment, but with that song it was real intentional. I wanted to explore this idea of the pressure of success and the whole “Be careful what you wish for” kind of thing. Back in the day when we were playing in a bar and all we had to do was win over some fans, in hindsight that’s almost easier than living up to the expectations of all these fans now, who travel and spend money to see us all the time.

They see us a lot so it’s like you’ve got to come up with new tricks and something happened in the last couple of years where it was like the pressure built up. That’s not to say it was too much or that we don’t love it, but it occurred to me that there was a real paradox of success happening where it was like “Man, this is hard!” Sometimes we joke around like “Why don’t they stop following us?!” … Which is absolutely not what we want.

So there’s a joke there, or at least a duality to be explored, and I wanted to set the song up in a way that it’s supposed to get creepy or disorienting, and to make you feel uncomfortable. I talk about being supported but surrounded, contained but captured, and then it comes around to that triumphant chorus that’s all about the love and the songs creating emotion and camaraderie. It goes on this journey of joking around and all these lies we were told in the beginning, and then it gets scary and uncomfortable on purpose. It’s almost supposed to be discomforting, more than a jam.

I love your lyrics, because as you explained there are lots of layers and you’re not afraid to question yourself. What were you trying to get at with “Do It Alone”?

I was trying to touch on this angst-y, rock and roll thing. I wanted something that had an anthem vibe, something a crowd would cheer along with, and again I was thinking about a couple of different things at once. One moment I’ll be thinking about a friend of mine who’s in love with a girl who doesn’t love him anymore, and the next I’m like “Man, I miss my dog.” [Laughs] Sometimes really specific lyrics about really different things can help you get some insight into that other thing.

Photo credit: Dylan Langille/ontheDL Photo

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Love Canon

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Love Canon
Song: “Islands In The Stream” (Originally recorded by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton)
Album: Cover Story

My first question is normally, “Where did you first hear the song?” But with a song as ubiquitous as this, how could anyone actually recall when they first heard it? So, maybe a better question is: How did you all decide that this was a song you wanted to record?

Jesse Harper: I’ve always loved the song, for as long as I can remember, but at a truck stop somewhere we got a Bee Gees greatest hits record and there was a live version of “Islands In The Stream” on it. I was like, “This is ridiculous! Why would the Bee Gees cover a Dolly Parton/Kenny Rogers number?” When we looked it up, it was Barry Gibb and his brothers who wrote the tune and he produced Kenny Rogers’ record, brought Dolly in on it, and pitched the tune to Kenny. It was the Bee Gees that brought the song back to my memory.

I worked it up when I was teaching at a fiddle camp in the summer, on an island, and it just happened that my friend Lauren Balthrop, who sings it with me [on the record], was on this island. I wanted to sing the song as a camp sing-along, because I was teaching a vocals/choir class and she was helping me out. I brought it back to the [band], like, “Man, this is an ‘80s hit, let’s do it.” That’s how it all came about.

What makes this song a good bluegrass song — or a good fit for bluegrass instrumentation?

There’s not much of a departure, music-wise, from what they had. The things that usually work about a song are whether or not we can transcribe the parts and work them out on our instruments. When we get into a song, we put it under the microscope and find every little detail. We try it on every instrument to see which should play which part. This one, in particular, there weren’t that many parts to it; the vocal part is what stands out. It’s more of a bluegrass jam than a lot of things that we do, towards the end of the song and it was more about the chords and the melody than the parts. In certain songs where there’s an instrumental hook, or a synth part — or think about “Africa” [by Toto] and how many parts are immediately recognizable. This tune, the recognizable part is the chorus and its melody.

One of the differences to our approach is that bluegrass music is typically a [2/4 time] feel or a waltz feel, and there’s a scripted role for every instrument, but we approach it with the instruments we already have and the music that already exists and the roles just need someone to fill them. Rather than just taking the chord structure and make it bluegrass, we take all the music that’s there and figure out how to deal with it. It always feels cheesy to me to take a song and just turn it into a bluegrass feel. “Boom-chick” works for disco, maybe, but it wouldn’t work for any of the other feels that we do.

There’s been this tradition since the early days of bluegrass of taking songs that were pop hits or radio hits and bringing them to bluegrass audiences–

Like Bill Monroe covering a Jimmie Rodgers tune.

Exactly. So I wonder how what Love Canon does follows that tradition — and why do you think this tradition still exists today?

I think that it goes beyond bluegrass. I would say that all musicians who are involved or dedicated to the craft of learning their instrument will almost always have to learn a piece, like in classical music — classical music is almost exclusively covers. The London Philharmonic, for example, is really a cover band, if you think about it in those terms. Jazz groups that are playing standards, well, standards are just covers. They’re tunes that become vehicles for improvisation. Bluegrass music and acoustic music that uses bluegrass instrumentation deserve to be elevated to the place where jazz and classical are, because of the technical aspect that’s required.

If you watch Bryan Sutton or David Grier play the guitar it’s every bit as impressive as seeing Eliot Fisk, or some amazing classical guitar player. It takes a lifetime of dedication to the craft. Or you see Béla Fleck play the banjo, or Jim Mills, and you realize, “Man that takes a lifetime of learning that craft.” I feel that ‘80s music is worthy of being played on these instruments. The melodies are great, the compositions are great. When we dig into the actual tune, as students of music, there’s so much amazing information, harmonically, in the chords and the melodies, that are sort of lacking in radio music right now. The popular music of today is not what it was in the ‘80s. What I wanted to uncover through what Love Canon — canon of course, being a body of work —  is, “We are studying the canon of this particular era.” There were just some great songs!

Similarly, “Islands In The Stream” is a great piece of music with great lyrics and a great chorus. That’s worthy of being studied by any serious musician, including bluegrass musicians.

What’s your favorite thing about performing it live?

Watching people unable to sing the verses, but as soon as the choruses come around, everybody knows it. It’s like, everyone remembers it, but they don’t know why they remember it. It happens with a lot of the songs we play. “Break My Stride” by Matthew Wilder is a perfect example. Nobody knows what the hell is going on. They’re like, “Why do I know this?” And if you look at their faces, they’re like, “Aaaah, I know what this is? I know what this is?” Then as soon as the chorus comes, they throw their hands in the air and they know all the words.

Now, you know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

I mean, I know that it’s not. Absolutely it’s not bluegrass. One response I have is that I love the old bluegrass. I love J.D. Crowe, I love Ricky Skaggs. I listen to that music incessantly, but I’m not Ricky Skaggs and I’m not J.D. Crowe. And I’m never going to be them. It’s never going to happen, no matter how much I want it to. The best I could do would be equivalent to me putting on a fake British accent right now. So the best thing for me to do is to use the voice that I have and play the music that I’m… you know, decently prepared to play.

I remember sitting at a festival not far from where I grew up — I could ride my bike there from my house as a kid. This festival is more traditional and I remember seeing Nickel Creek there years and years ago and there was a woman seated in front of me who turned to the person seated next to her and said, “They’re good, but I hate it.” [Laughs] I dunno if you’re going to win that conversation. Maybe the problem extends wider, into our entire culture, but it doesn’t do me any good to have that argument. I usually just say, “Yeah, it’s definitely not bluegrass.”

Live What You’re Singing: A Conversation with Sarah Shook

Posted on by Editor

Within the bounds of country music, pronoun play doesn’t come easy, but Sarah Shook believes listeners are more than capable of finding ways to see themselves in her songs. With her band, the Disarmers, she deals with gender in her songwriting as a means to challenge the heteronormative forms of representation within country music.

On “The Bottle Never Lets Me Down,” from the band’s new album, Years, she sings about becoming the man she used to be, while on “Parting Words,” she addresses a woman, her former lover, about the way things ended. Not only does she weave together traditional country, honky-tonk, blues, punk, and more, but she conscientiously flips country music’s perspective around in order to be more inclusive.

There’s a definite sense of who belongs and who doesn’t in country music, but that’s slowly shifting.

It’s a really very cool and exciting time for women making country music, especially the sort of throwback traditional country. There’s a lot of buzz centered around this new wave of women outlaw country artists. I think that’s a really good thing, and industry-wide it’s a lot more prevalent than you realize. One of the things that was frustrating for me last year when we put Sidelong out, I probably did 50-some odd phone interviews, and two of them—two of them!—were with women. I had a whole conversation with my manager, like it’s hard enough being a woman playing music, but it’s a tough field to be a woman in journalism. This year with this release, I feel like there’s been more of a balance as far as speaking with male and female journalists, and that’s been encouraging too.

You’ve been mentioned along with country outsiders like Sturgill Simpson and Margo Price. How do you see your relationship within the genre?

I think that we’ve been branded outlaw, and I feel like people interpret that in different ways. Of course outlaw country is the super old school Waylon Jennings beat, but I think the term is evolving pretty rapidly into something that is more inclusive to people doing it their own way. That’s one of the things that was really cool about country music in its heyday, when it was first starting out and all those classic artists were on the radio. As soon as the song started—a few bars in—you could tell whose band it was because all those bands had such a distinct sound. That is really hard to find today, everything sounds the same. It’s very clear that people are just looking for patterns that have achieved success and are popular. And then you have folks out there like Margo Price and Kelsey Waldon and Kacey Musgraves, and they’re kind of doing their own thing. Their bands have respective sounds that are unique and identifiable. That is really cool and very exciting.

You’ve been forthright about your sexual identity. How do you navigate your personal story within the larger scope of representation?

To a degree, I feel like there are certain points in time where it’s paramount to be very outspoken about that stuff. Most of the time, I feel like doing what I’m doing—touring relentlessly, putting out records, and being unapologetically myself—is a very powerful and political maneuver as well. Sometimes it’s more effective in a palpable way to live what you’re saying and be the person that you’re talking about. I think it’s a cool and different way for people to realize, especially within country music, which has a certain, specific demographic of people, that, yes, you can be a pansexual atheist vegan making country music, and does that affect the music? Sometimes lyrically, yes, but the overarching theme is just that I don’t necessarily have to have everything in common with my fans. We can have differences. It’s really cool to have interactions with people who are like, “I never felt comfortable with the idea of homosexuality or bisexuality, and I meet you and we’re talking and hanging out and having a good time. You’re just a regular person.” I’m like, “Exactly, we’re regular people, believe it or not.” [Laughs]

When you put it like that, it’s so depressing, but it rings true. Every time I meet someone who’s uncomfortable about anything outside heterosexuality it’s usually because they haven’t spoken to anyone who’s different from them.

Exactly. And that is such a big thing. We can play New York City and that’s a totally different experience than playing a small town in Alabama. I think consistently being the person who is always willing to talk to fans after a show and be real and be myself and form unlikely friendships, I think that’s a really cool way to create change.


I always thought action over verbiage is the way to go about it. But then looking back, we’ve seen from the Dixie Chicks how speaking your mind can be dangerous. Do the repercussions ever concern you?

You know, I’ve never been concerned about that because I feel it’s important to be honest and forthright as a human being, and as an artist and certainly lyrically as well. The other thing to me that’s really important, from the word go I’ve been very strategic about how I wanted to grow this band and how I wanted to see success. It’s never been my prerogative to go after the country music fan base—and certainly that’s the majority of our fan base. My thing was, “Yes, this is country music, but this is music for anyone who likes it.” It’s inclusive, and anyone that these songs resonate with, it’s for you. Taking that stance and being strategic about it has certainly helped. It’s really encouraging to be a country band playing outlaw country and have a very diverse audience, and I think that’s a thing a lot of traditional artists struggle with. They get pigeonholed. Being outspoken in an honest fashion but not a combative fashion, I feel that’s really helped push our music to demographics that it wouldn’t necessarily otherwise reach.

All this talk of the new outlaw makes me excited for a tour one day, or even a festival.

We need our own cruise. [Laughs] That would be amazing.

An outlaw lady cruise.

Exactly. Oh my god, that’d be a lotta fun.

Critics have referenced the underlying sense of menace in your voice, but your vocals on “New Ways to Fail” have such a biting, sarcastic note. Where does that darker sense of humor come from?

I’m very nihilistic. [Laughs] I’m one of those people that thinks life is way too short to take yourself too seriously. Within this world, there’s this huge danger of being, “I’m so and so, do you know who I am?” I’m just a person playing music and having a good time. Music should be fun, and, yes, it’s business too, but if it’s all business you’re going to get burnt out. You gotta have fun with it.

There’s also a tone of defiance in both your voice and music, which requires constantly stoking that fire inside you in order to stay angry enough to fight. How do you find yourself doing that?

I definitely have a lot of personal experiences that certainly stoke the fire. I have a lot of trans and non-binary friends here at home in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is a progressive little community, but even within the context of a progressive community, I’ve been out at bars before and had people give them shit about how they look. That’s a real thing. It’s so wild to me that the trans community is what’s being targeted because they’re already vulnerable to begin with and they’re probably the most non-combative people. They’re not putting up fights, they’re just trying to exist and have a life and be comfortable, like everyone else wants to do. You witness injustice like that firsthand, and you try and de-escalate situations like that. It’s a very real thing and there’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of showing people that we’re not the enemy, and yeah we’re kind of freaks but we’re not out to destroy morality.

Everyone can exist together.

Exactly, yup.

I noticed you play with gender a lot in your lyricism, either by not using specific pronouns or by flipping them in other interesting ways. Can you talk a bit about that process?

I’ve always liked pushing the boundaries with that. I think blurring gender lines is really important because it totally leaves the story open to listener interpretation. People can be like, “Well, I’m not really sure if this song is written from a man’s point of view about a woman, or a woman whose woman lover left her.” Leaving that open to interpretation and letting people wonder and figure it out for themselves and how it applies to them personally, I think that’s a cool way to let people arrive that their own conclusions, and also realize that they feel perfectly OK not really knowing.

Photo credits: John Gessner

Marching Songs for Defying Fear: A Conversation with Joseph

Posted on by Editor

Joseph, the harmonizing trio of sisters whose big voices are taking the stage on late-night shows and festival bills in an aggressive fashion, may have the kinds of pop hooks you might find at the top of the charts or in the latest radio single, but their sound is rooted in something bare-bones and almost primal, filling spaces like living rooms and small house shows around the Pacific Northwest with the kinds of performances that hang in the air and bounce around in the brain long after the final note. But their rich, three-part vocal harmonies began with one voice — that of Natalie Closner — in search of the kind of aural chemistry that might invigorate the music career she’d already begun to pursue in the studio and on the road.

She didn’t have to look far to find the inspiration she’d been seeking and, once sisters Meegan and Allison Closner began adding their voices to the songs, the trio knew they’d hit on something work sticking out. Their debut full-length, Native Dreamer Kin, was released in March of 2014 and, while the chilling vocals and poetic lyrics set the tone for their future successes, it was in the live setting where the three sisters really captivated new audiences. Playing small shows in unconventional settings gave way to bigger ones and, by the next year, they’d hooked up with ATO Records and signed on for another full-length. This time, though, the Closner sisters worked with producer Mike Mogis, whose résumé includes albums with Jenny Lewis and First Aid Kit and makes a solid case for his gift in pushing strong vocalists and compelling lyrics to their potential. Joseph took the writing process for the record outside the family, too, co-writing with the Belle Brigade’s Ethan Gruska and tapping into a sound that lent itself to more extensive production. The result is the forthcoming I’m Alone, No You’re Not — an album that bounces between contradicting emotions and employs a similarly varied array of sounds and instruments.

You’re sisters, so you’ve obviously all known each other your whole lives, but you haven’t always sung and written together. How did that begin?

Natalie: I was doing music by myself for a while, and I was just not that into it. I had a friend encourage me to think about ways that I would become compelled by my own music, and I had the idea to ask Meegan and Allison. I knew they could sing because I’d heard them harmonizing to the radio growing up and everything, but I didn’t really know to what extent, until we started doing this.

Meegan: Al and I were not thinking that we would do anything musically, at that point. I think we always probably dreamt that we would sing with Nat, but I would say we said yes to it not realizing exactly what we were signing ourselves up for. [Laughs] But it’s been a great experience, obviously. Life-changing.

You named the band after your grandfather and the town he lived in. Why was that important to you?

Allison: We grew up going out to Joseph [in Oregon] a bunch. Basically, we were out in Joseph a couple years ago with our grandpa for a trip, and it was just a really incredible trip. When we were coming home, we were right in the process of writing and recording the album we have now — which is Native Dreamer Kin and it’s been out for like two years — and, on the way home, I had made a music playlist of a bunch of artists. I was like, "What should I name this?" and I named it "Joseph." There was just something about the name, when I was thinking it in my head, that felt like more than just a boy’s name. I’d always thought it felt like it held so much more depth and story to it. I was like, "Interesting — that would be an interesting band name for somebody." But we already had a band name, so I was like, "Whatever — I’ll tuck that in the back of my brain."

We got back to Portland and we were in the middle of making our record, and our producer Andrew, who’s also co-written a bunch on our records, he was like, "Are you guys all married to your band name?" And Meegan and I said, "No." and Natalie was like, "What!?" [Laughs] Basically, he asked if we had any ideas and I sheepishly was like, "Yeah …  I have something." Once everybody forced me into saying what it actually was, it was like something just shifted completely. We sang a couple of the songs underneath that new name and it was like a completely different band. It was like the songs changed. I don’t even know how to explain it, except that everything just shifted.

You’ve made some big changes to your sound with this record. It’s a more of a step toward pop than your previous work, but it does stay true to a lot of the strengths of your previous work — strong vocal harmonies being at the top of the list. What were you going for on this record?

Natalie: The first feet that have been put forward on this album have been the most poppy tracks on the record. There is a lot of diversity on the album, as a whole, and the songs sound really different from each other. We’ve been thinking about that a lot. We really like pop music, and so it was really fun to get to play with that more straightforward pop form and melodies and things. Really, as the songs were being written, it wasn’t like, "Oh, let’s write a pop song." It was like, "Oh wow — that song is a pop song that we just wrote!"

We did a bunch of co-writing sessions, which was also really cool, and it really wasn’t a conscious thing [when it comes to deciding what songs or sounds made the record]. It was about which songs rose to the surface as the ones that we felt like we loved the most. And then, how do we — in production — make that song its best? Then it ended up that a few of them came out as just roarin’ pop music. [Laughs]

Speaking of production, you worked with Mike as producer on the album. How did that influence the way the final product sounded?

Natalie: We needed a guide for this album because, really, we’re singers. We’re not a band with a bunch of instruments. We needed a producer to kind of direct the tone and feel of the album, and to build out the other instruments and arrangements. We found Mike through our label — they suggested him — and when we got on the phone with him, we really connected and felt like he understood the vision for us.

We brought in songs that were pretty bare bones. He created the textures and the landscapes for it, because we would bring in pretty stripped-down demos — just melodies, the vocals, and guitar parts.

I particularly like “Honest,” which is where you plucked the title of the record. What about that line stuck out as a way to tie together the album?

Meegan: It just comes from the back-and-forth in your brain, I think, that all of us do between truth and lies. Just trying to discern what is true — oftentimes, the lie is the thing that feels the most true. That [line] was just from a pure moment of me actually thinking those thoughts in my head. Saying, "I’m alone." And then being like, "No, you’re not. You’re not alone." But I feel so alone, and that’s what feels like it’s true.

But you’re not alone. That is what’s true. I think that just mimics a lot of what is happening on the record, as a whole — just the back-and-forth and paradoxes and contrasting themes of feeling alone and knowing you’re not alone, feeling afraid and hopeful, morning and night, and thinks like this.

Natalie: The record holds a lot of tension, so that line from the song “Honest,” it really encapsulates that tension throughout the record.

“White Flag” is about facing things that scare you. What are some of the things you had to face that scared you when you were writing it, and what are the things you’ve had to face since then, tackling things as a band?

Natalie: At the time, it was really a response to that New Yorker article that came out about the earthquake that was supposed to hit the West Coast. It was really oppressive for us. You’re walking around like something’s going to happen at any second. At some point, we just kind of had to break that. What are we going to do, are we never going to go home? Are we going to move away? No, absolutely not. We’re going to keep living our lives and we’re not going to live in fear of these things.

It’s been really interesting. Since the song has been written, I’ve needed it, honestly, and sung it to myself so many times. There are so many things in our culture of fear in this country to be worried about. The world is scary. There’s a lot of tough stuff happening right now — even just getting on a plane, or being in a foreign country. There’s so much risk and so many possible [outcomes]. There’s this great quote that I love that I found in processing this whole idea of the world that we live in right now, where you could slink back into yourself and into self-protection and stay in your house and never go anywhere. A friend shared with me a statement made by C.S. Lewis during the time when the atomic bombs were supposed to potentially hit at any moment, anywhere. He basically says his response to living in an "atomic age" is, "If the bombs are going to come, let them find us drinking beers with friends and laughing and enjoying our lives, not cowering like scared sheep waiting for a bomb." Isn’t that good?

That’s kind of what it’s meant. There are so many daunting things that you face in this lifestyle, too, putting yourself in front of people all of the time. It has been exactly what it says — it’s just this marching song for living your life and defying fear.

 

Like Joseph? Check out our Cover Story on My Bubba.

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

Painting Sounds, Building Bridges, Eating Nachos: A Conversation with the Stray Birds

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The Stray Birds could have kept everything the same about their sound and their process and still have made an incredible record. The band — which revolves around members Maya de Vitry, Oliver Craven, and Charles Muench — had already hit number two on the Billboard bluegrass charts with their YepRoc debut, Best Medicine, in 2014, garnering praise for their rich harmonies and swift picking while building a name as songwriters, too.

But for the forthcoming Magic Fire, the Pennsylvania-based group willfully took steps in a different direction — not toward a different sound, but rather a growth from the straight-up string band they started with. Dabbling with a new percussionist and collaborating on songwriting in a new way, the band brought in Larry Campbell, the genre-jumping instrumentalist whose work specifically with Levon Helm and Bob Dylan made him the Stray Birds’ top choice for their first record with an outside producer. What resulted was a 12-song collection of commanding vocals led forward by a deftness on the strings that can only come from a tight-knit group that loves to play together. 

This album was a new experience for you guys in terms of the way it was recorded. Tell me about the decision-making when you were gearing up for this album. Did you have any specific goals in mind?

Maya de Vitry: We have always been a trio, a string band, trying to explore playing songs with string instruments. That’s the texture that we started out with — it’s what we were comfortable with, it’s what we knew. But it’s not the only sound that we love, and it’s not the only music we listen to; that has certainly never been limited to string bands, and certainly never been limited to those textures. When we started to get the songs together for this new record, it overlapped with us finding a percussionist who we were interested in recording with for the first time. We were never sure what instrument it would be that would pull us in the next direction, or who that person might be, or what the sound would be. But we met Shane [Leonard] and, as we were putting this new record together, we started to think about having drums on it — a more electric sound.

So we started putting those songs together and thinking about the person who might help us build that bridge. We thought that it would be somebody like Larry Campbell. I’d seen him perform a few times with Levon Helm’s band — he was the musical director for that — and I was familiar with some of [Campbell’s] work with [Bob] Dylan. Always it seemed like he was arranging music to really fit the song and to really communicate. Larry could live in all kinds of musical worlds, and we were excited to see what he thought. There were no limitations with what kinds of sounds we could paint with these songs.

Is there anything in particular that you’re most proud of now that you've tried something new?

I think this was our best singing on an album. I think we were relaxed, and we were inspired by Larry’s presence. We felt comfortable with him, and our singing, in particular — some of the phrasing, the tone, and the inflection that we have — I’m really proud of. It’s more free than it’s been in the past, and I’m really excited about that.

I’m really proud of the song “Mississippi Pearl.” It’s kind of tucked into the back of the record, and it’s the only waltz. But it didn’t start out as a waltz. It was in 4/4 time, and a totally different feel as a song. I was never totally in love with it, but I had the words and I had the melody and the chorus, so I had it on the table as a song that was possible to record. I wanted a waltz on the record and we didn’t have any, so Oliver suggested we turn that one into a waltz. Larry heard something in the melody of the song, the way that it opened up. It became much more spacious as a waltz. The story of the song fit better in that new feel. Larry heard something in the melody and wrote this whole melodic hook, this instrumental thing, and he just wrote this whole new part of the song, an instrumental bridge, right there in the studio in front of me. It was a new experience for me, to be open: to have this thing, and I don’t love it — yet — and for him to hear it and be like, "This thing that you don’t love yet? Listen to this idea." So Larry was my co-writer on that song and, in that moment, it was so inspiring. It’s like something cracked open — all of the ideas were available. The song lives as a waltz, and that’s the way it was meant to be. I couldn’t find that on my own.

You said something earlier about painting sounds, which brings me to another question I had about the album art. What inspired you to create that yourself?

I had no plan to do the artwork up until we got into the studio and we got inside of these songs. We naturally started talking about what we could possibly call the record. We wanted to find some words that captured the spirit of it without lifting them specifically from a single song. We didn’t want to have a title track; we just wanted to have a concept of a title. I sort of started dropping the idea to people that I might want to do a painting or some kind of cover art, but I really didn’t know how far into it I wanted to get, at that point. We were basically trying to find something to represent this music other than the three people who wrote it. [Laughs]

We finally came up with the name, which really drove the art forward, when Oliver and I were hanging out with his dad back in Pennsylvania, right after we had finished recording. We were just up late making nachos one night, and he was joking about how all you need to do to make nachos is to wave the magic fire stick around. My ears had been totally open for any word that someone was saying that could possibly fit for the title of this record — I wanted it to feel like it was kind of out on a limb, like it was up to the listener to build a bridge between the songs and the title. So we put the music on right away, the super-rough mixes, and we just listened to the whole thing in the kitchen.

We started drawing our own connections from those words, “magic fire,” to each individual song: “Oh, in this song the fire is love — it’s chemistry.” “In this song, it’s literal fire.” We’d find different meanings in each song that could be connected to it. If not just fire, at least connected to something with the elements, or something very old. We liked the idea of that because this whole record is something very new for us, and it’s nice to feel that juxtaposition. For me, where I started to love music was sitting around a campfire and sharing songs with people. Today, the way that most people have their musical intake is through their phone or computer or the soundtrack in a movie or on the radio. Still, for me, the most alive that I feel is often around a campfire with people. I think it’s less and less about the audience, but about taking things away and remembering what you liked to do as a kid and remembering how fun it is to build a fire and to do new things. That’s kind of what we were doing with this record: playing with fire.

So you had all of these songs before the concept brought them together?

We had it all written and recorded. We had these mixes, and we wondered what could possibly capture them. Then, it became a question of what visual thing could represent these words. Some of them were written collaboratively, but some of them were written individually — in many different settings and times and frames of mind. It wasn’t written as a concept album, but I do think that the inevitability of change is a theme that is there. From the first track to the last track, it’s a theme on the record.

Speaking of the writing, together and separately, tell me about how all of that began.

We started playing music together in 2010. Oliver and I got started at open mics, and also we would play at the farmers' market here. We would go in, and there’s a market master who we would get permission from to play at one of the empty stands at the market. We’d just play for tips, buy a couple of Italian subs, and call it a day.

That was how I started feeling comfortable singing my own songs and coming out of that shell. I had been a fiddle player for a long time, but would not have called myself a songwriter much earlier than those moments, so that was a pretty recent thing for me. Charlie and Oliver had been playing together a little bit in a band, a bluegrass band. I would go and see those shows and see those guys play, it was like four guys playing bluegrass and some original songs of Oliver’s. When that band parted ways, we became a duo and got Charlie, who was in River Wheel also.

It started as just a collection of songs we were doing. The harmonies sounded pretty good to us, so [we thought] maybe other people should hear them. Maybe we could have a CD release show in an art gallery in our hometown. It was not a very sculpted vision.

But we played a festival. We went up to Michigan, to Bliss Fest. It was the first thing. Jim Gillespie, who runs Bliss Fest, heard our little EP of five songs that Oliver and I had made back in 2010, and he hired us to come play Bliss Fest. So we said, “Charlie, do you want to go with us?” So we tried to scrape together enough songs to have another couple sets of songs that we could play throughout the weekend. We just drove to Michigan and we got to play on all of these stages in this beautiful festival. We met so many nice people, and we started loving life and thinking, "Maybe we should be a band. We should play more festivals." I think that experience — leaving home, playing for strangers in this beautiful new setting — was intoxicating. We thought, "We could do this together." Bliss Fest was the moment.

You mentioned something that I’m always curious about: that transition from being a musician, someone who’s comfortable performing, to being comfortable with playing your own music. Was that an immediate switch for you?

I think it was just a moment. I think I was so terrified that people would ask me to explain where exactly the song came from or what I was thinking or who the song was about. Not that I was afraid to answer or didn’t want to answer — I didn’t even know if I could answer that. Songwriting, to me … I was figuring out that it was this really mysterious and really kind of unexplainable thing. It kind of felt like magic!

And I didn’t want to explain it. I just wanted the song to be there and for people to take it or leave it and just listen to it and live in it with me for a couple of minutes, and have as their own. I think that was my fear, though: that I would have to explain something that I didn’t know. When I started actually playing my songs, I realized that people didn’t necessarily ask. That wasn’t a part of the job. I was scared of something that I didn’t have to be scared of, and I could just let the song be its own thing. [I realized] that it was okay for the inspiration to be from my dreams and my experiences and multiple people. It didn’t have to all come from a traceable point, and that was the huge earth-shattering realization for me.