Tag: COVID

A Musical, The Porch on Windy Hill, Tells an Impactful Story with Bluegrass and Old-Time

Posted on by Justin Hiltner
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A fantastic new off-Broadway play, titled The Porch on Windy Hill: A New Play with Old Music, has been performed across the U.S. in Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, before landing at Urban Stages on West 30th Street in New York City where it’s currently playing until October 12, 2025. Written by Sherry Stregack Lutken, Lisa Helmi Johanson, Morgan Morse, and David M. Lutken, and directed by Sherry Lutken, The Porch on Windy Hill was born during the pandemic, when Sherry Lutken found herself having extensive conversations with one of her closest childhood friends, one who happens to be biracial, about their personal perspective and experiences. Sherry Lutken’s formal idea coalesced around April 2021 and the first full performance took place that September in Ivoryton, Connecticut.

The show centers on Mira, a biracial Korean-American classical violinist, and her boyfriend Beckett, a Ph.D. student passionate about the history and connections of folk music in America, as the couple leave their isolated apartment in Brooklyn and head for the lively pickin’ parties and folk festivals in Atlanta, Georgia. When their navigations and a fussy van engine take them on a detour into the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a pit stop leads to a run-in with Mira’s estranged white grandfather Edgar, and Mira and Beck both find more than they bargained for. The encounter goes on to change the three characters in incredibly profound ways.

The music serves as a beautiful and powerful reflection of the many emotions that run high throughout the play, as well as a story-rich catalyst that fills in the blanks of who these people are, what they know and don’t know about one another, and, of course, why Mira and her grandfather grew apart after being so close during her childhood.

The boldness of The Porch on Windy Hill comes from its many contrasts and complements. The story unfolds entirely on the front porch of Edgar’s North Carolina home, which sits in the shadow of an unseen Mount Mitchell. David Lutken, Morgan Morse, and Tora Nogami Alexander – who play Edgar, Beckett, and Mira respectively – move in, about, and out of the setting in very natural ways. A tension rises between Mira and Edgar for most of the first half and the confined space only heightens the impact of the actors’ moods on the audience. The discomfort, though, isn’t just social anxiety. The core narrative mysteries and tensions of Porch are tied to its real world relatability around the ways different folks view race, politics, and in this story especially, folk music.

The first half of the play is also music-heavy, with an abundance of different folk tunes showcasing Lutken, Morgan, and Alexander’s skills on a potpourri of instruments from banjo to guitar to violin to the Chinese erhu, to dulcimer – an instrument that’s key to the story and one special aspect of the cross-generational bond between Mira, her mother, and Edgar. Over the course of the show, Edgar’s home becomes part pickin’ stage and part time capsule for Mira and Edgar to rekindle their long-lost connection. This isn’t without its thorny moments, which peak at the revelation that Mira and Edgar’s estrangement comes from trauma she experienced as a child when her cousin cruelly called her a racial slur, only for her grandfather to turn a blind eye to the incident. The subsequent chasm that formed left Mira and Edgar unsure of how to even begin addressing their discomfort, before their musical connection – and a bit of moonshine – helped to clear the air and start to mend decades-old wounds.

The Porch on Windy Hill isn’t about safe spaces. It isn’t about breaking into folk song to comedically cut the tension, and it isn’t about being a modern PSA for Asian-Americans. But what it does do is give its audiences a reminder of what it means to share space with people who don’t hold a carbon copy of one’s own views. It also gives permission to express anger, hurt, and confusion over the unique pain that comes with discrimination and ignorance of others’ lived experiences.

These characters think, react, question, demand, and forgive in wholly believable fashion. The Porch on Windy Hill gets and keeps you invested. From the first time Mira, Beck, and Edgar play “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” together to the moment Mira walks off saying, “Kamsahamnida” – “thank you” in Korean – to Edgar, before he goes inside to finally call Mira’s parents. It’s everything a stellar musical is: thought provoking, entertaining, emotionally stirring, and something that imparts a feeling of growth. The depth of personal stories that hold The Porch together make this play ideal for partnering with the legacy-laden nature of folk music.

David Lutken, Sherry Lutken, Morgan Morse, and Tora Nogami Alexander jumped on a group call and spoke with BGS about the multi-layered nuance behind The Porch on Windy Hill and how all the aspects of the play, from the conflicts to the specificity of the music utilized – even the story behind one made up fiddle convention! – had meaning and purpose to enhance the impact of the characters and the story.

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What drove the decision to set Porch on the Windy Hill in the mountains of North Carolina, as opposed to another part of Appalachia or even a completely different part of the U.S.?

David M. Lutken: [Porch on The Windy Hill] could be set in many different parts of the United States, but [choosing North Carolina] had to do with several things. The music that I have been most familiar with all my life kind of emanates from a little bit of bottleneck down in the southeastern United States. And also it had to do with the specific instrument – the dulcimer – being something that comes from the Appalachian region, even though its earlier ancestors come from different places as well.

But it had to do with that, with instrumentation, the draw of the entire Appalachian region of the United States, and the metaphor in the show of Mount Mitchell and the highest point in all of the Appalachian region of the United States and all of those things stated there. I have to say, the fact that North Carolina is a decidedly “purple” place these days also has to do with it, particularly Western North Carolina, where you have places like Asheville that are very, very liberal, surrounded by counties that are very conservative, which happens in many other parts of the United States. But all of those things together I would say, pointed me [toward choosing North Carolina as the play’s setting.]

Morgan Morse: I’ll add one last very silly reason that influenced our decision, which is just geography. We have this couple, which is traveling from the East Coast, and they’re on their way to Atlanta, [Georgia], and that’s their next goal. So in general, we were also looking to find a location that sat pretty nicely between those two places.

(L to R) Morgan Morse, Tora Nogami Alexander, and David M. Lutken perform ‘The Porch on Windy Hill.’ Photo by Ben Hider.

When it came to determining how the music of the show would not only link the characters and the scenes together but also keep them together, how did you discern the balance of realism, optimism, idealism, and cynicism in the pickin’ performance scenes – particularly the early ones when Mira hesitates to participate – especially given how uncertain and outright tense the characters’ interactions become over the course of the play?

Tora Nogami Alexander: That is the most difficult part of the play and that is the thing that we focused on the most, with me being sort of the new addition to this version of this play. We practiced a lot of this music before we really dug into how the performance would translate. And so, as we were in the real meat of the rehearsals, [director] Sherry [Lutken] was really, really helpful in crafting the balance of the emotional baggage that Mira has and that everybody has within the play.

For me, what’s awesome about doing this play and what’s really fun for me, is that I do think I discover something new every time I do it. Every night, I really listen to my partners and we all listen to each other. It might change every day – how certain things hit us, how we process things. The bones are there but it’s been really interesting to try and tightrope that every night because it is a little bit different every single night, which is exciting and cool. Working with Sherry, she was so helpful in translating it because she’s watching the play and so she’s able to give us tools to help tell a story in a way that people can understand.

MM: Because there are so many emotions sitting under the surface in the first act, especially the first half of the first act, you want to strike a balance of making sure that it’s coming through without feeling like you’re overselling everything that’s happening underneath. So, throughout the results of that – Tora said “tightrope,” that was a word that we used a lot during rehearsals – especially for the character of Mira, she is figuring out what she wants from this situation and she’s figuring out how comfortable she is, how much she wants to engage. It’s something that Tora [does] so beautifully and it’s so fun to watch every night to see exactly how [the emotions] are hitting her and how she translates that to the way she plays [her violin].

DML: Well, the interesting part to me has been Tora’s ability to convey things musically. We set out to make a musical play where the music is a part of the dialogue and the ability to express vulnerability and frustration and a spectrum of emotions without opening your mouth, just playing violin, or even the erhu, or the other things that we all play. But particularly for Miss Alexander, I think that’s a unique talent of hers, and a unique thing to this show, particularly the first half of the first act. That’s a big part of what is happening with the music; it’s [songs] that certainly [Morse and Alexander] are familiar with, and they’re having to play them in a really weird situation.

You all mention in another interview that you wanted music that was “intrinsic rather than performative.” That the songs “aren’t decorative.” That said, the folk songs selected for Porch On The Windy Hill seem like they aren’t exclusive in their ability to convey or heighten the specific emotions desired in a scene. As such, what is it about the songs in the play that make each of them essential in a way other folk songs are not?

MM: On one hand, I can tell you all the reasons why these particular songs ended up there. And I do think that they work very well and they serve very specific purposes. At the same time, you’re kind of right that there are a billion other folk songs that could also fit into those slots. To me, that’s actually the amazing thing: American folk songs cover so many themes and some of them are universal themes and that’s what was so cool about putting these songs into the show.

There’s consideration like, “We need a fast song here.” “We need a slow song here.” “We need a song with this particular mood.” “Okay, we want to break up the flow of things by having an instrumental, what instrumental can we have?” So there’s those kinds of nuts and bolts and there’s the little ways in which, even though these songs were not written for the show, they still managed to reference and inform the action within their lyrics as well, because we’re singing about these universal things like love and loss and family and travel and childhood.

The question is, “What’s going to move these characters in this moment?” Whether that’s moving them emotionally or moving them forward story-wise. And sometimes it’s something like the history or the context of this song that can lead to a really interesting conversation. There’s a couple moments like that in the show, where the history of the song [being played] then becomes a catalyst for conversation between the characters and that leads to explorations of the themes of the show in that discussion because they’re all intertwined: the music, the country, and all those various things.

At a certain point, Beck abruptly recalls from where he recognized Edgar’s name. It was on a specific live recording of the 1972 Charlestown Fiddlers’ Convention, where Edgar is credited as performing with the likes of Roscoe Holcomb, Ola Belle Reed, Lily May Ledford. What was the inspiration behind this fictional recording and why select Holcomb, Reed, and Ledford as the artists meant to be Edgar’s connection to the real world?

DLM: I had met Bascom Lamar Lunsford on a couple of occasions when I was a boy and went to the Asheville Folk Festival regularly in the late 1960s. The others, Roscoe Holcomb and Ola Belle Reed, I will confess they had partly to do with Edgar’s politics. I was trying to keep Edgar a bit ambiguous in his set-in-his-ways old guy [personality] and make him a little bit more open-minded.

The particular selections we chose for the fictional Charlestown Fiddler’s Convention of 1972 were to try to make something that sounded real and give it a little bit of a historical novel perspective, and also to raise Edgar’s banjo playing – elevate it greater than mine could ever be – and to make it so that he would have been in on something like that if it indeed had existed. And with West Virginia being a little bit different from Virginia in its history, and also the history of music there, we just tried to pile on the old-time music references without skewing too much in one direction or the other. In terms of picking for the Bill Monroe Bean Blossom Festival or the Newport Folk Festival, if you know what I mean. So it was really just to put all of that together in a little bit of a historical novel sense and also to paint things with a little bit of an open minded brush.

Over the course of scene five to scene seven, the show moves from the American folk song, “Mole in the Ground,” to the Korean children’s mountain rabbit folk song, “Santokki (산토끼),” and finally the murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” which brings the unique sound of the Chinese erhu from the former into the latter and prompts a conversation about musical traditionalism – which instruments “fit” in a pickin’ party and which don’t.

What are your thoughts on Edgar’s view on the sounds that belong at a pickin’ party or jam? Furthermore, what do each of you think of as the central quality that makes something “folk” music and, in what way do you think people who may share Edgar’s view might be persuaded to consider a wider scope of sonic acceptance?

DLM: Well, I wish you had been at our last post-show hootenanny. Morgan, Tora, Hubby Jenkins of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and a couple other folks were there and we all did a version of [Chappell Roan’s] “Pink Pony Club.”

It’s instrumentation, it’s sonic qualities of what’s going on, and it’s also the people who are doing it that are all part of how music becomes what it is. I personally am all for the erhu and the tuba and the bagpipes at a hootenanny all playing “Pink Pony Club,” because, it’s as Louis Armstrong said, “All music is folk music. I don’t see no horses listening to it.”

MM: I’m very much in the same boat. And it’s a very, for lack of a better term, fiddly question because it’s another one of these moments where it’s like, “Okay, [Edgar’s] got an open-minded streak about him but he still has limitations, you know?” Like, “Don’t bring an electric guitar, don’t play stuff out of your computer.” So there’s that technological line, which I think you could make an interesting argument for in this day and age, that this technological line maybe shouldn’t exist as much as it does.

You can make the argument that the kind of musicians who could really be considered to be making folk music at this point, and who definitely share a lot in common with the evolution of American folk music, are those who write hip-hop and rap. It’s the same kind of communal development where all of these different people are getting together for essentially, jams, where they’re taking things that they know and they’re remixing them, they’re learning from each other, and advancing with each other. So, you know, I’d be curious to have somebody come in with a little turntable to a hootenanny one time – that could be fun!

TNA: Folk music has to do with people and folk music exists everywhere, not just here. So yes, you know, mixing it up doesn’t seem too crazy to me, since organically it’s what would happen as our world gets more globalized.

Tora Nogami Alexander and Morgan Morse perform an intimate moment during ‘The Porch on Windy Hill.’ Photo by Ben Hider.

When Edgar, Beck, and Mira all exchange heated words with each other and Mira eventually picks up her mother’s dulcimer to play “My Horses Ain’t Hungry,” she’s obviously coming down from a tense and vulnerable place. What combination of emotions is Mira leaning into when she turns to the dulcimer and this song for a short reprieve and, as an actor, what kinds of thoughts and/or experiences are you calling upon to bring out the expression Mira is feeling at that moment?

TNA: In that moment, I think a lot about Elmira, [Mira’s grandmother]. I think a lot about her grandmother and the relationship of her grandmother and Mira’s mother. And I think about that relationship a lot during that song. For me, I think that moment is basically when all the shit blows up, it sucks, and Mira’s in this place where she’s finally alone and working through what happened. But [she’s] also realizing, through this song – one that was her mom’s favorite song and that maybe Mira learned from her grandma – that [it] wonderfully encapsulates the whole story. That [Mira’s] mom needed to get out of North Carolina and she chose the life she did for whatever reason. For me, that moment is sort of thinking about the mom-and-grandma relationship, how they got there. That also is why it leads to Mira calling her mom. She’s thinking through this song and then realizing that she needs to tell someone about it, someone who understands, and that would be her mom.

Sherry Lutken: I think for me, sort of what we talked about is that the dulcimer is the embodiment, in some ways, of Elmira – this sort of ghostly figure that hangs over the play and is there and ever present. They keep talking about her, they keep going back to her. That moment is very much about the matriarchy.

Mira’s surrounded by men the entire show and so the dulcimer and that line of women – of her mother, her grandmother, and the women before who are the reason for Mira’s birth – they mean that emotionally. That’s what I think Tora captures so beautifully and what that moment really embodies, that need to reach out to her mother even though she doesn’t really know what to say, even though she’s in a moment of flux, and even though she knows it’s going to be an upsetting thing. Still, she wants to talk. She’s not gonna let her mother evade the subject anymore. And she’s not gonna let Edgar avoid talking about it anymore – it’s time. That’s a wonderful moment of decisiveness. We get to see Mira’s decisiveness and this is a moment of the emotion really informing what she does next and the choices that she makes in the moment.

Given that the polarization of the U.S. has only become more aggravated since Porch On The Windy Hill was first performed in 2021, how much and in what ways would you say the impact of the story’s vision for self-reflection, forgiveness, and understanding has been affected?

DLM: When we were talking on opening night, Lisa’s [Helmi Johanson] husband was there with us at the party and he said it was ironic that what was written in 2021 has now become a period piece in several ways, because things have changed.

SL: Our relationship to the pandemic and to that time has changed. It’s amazing how quickly we forget that when we were in it, we thought we would never get out of it. We would never get to move forward because we were all stuck and it felt like forever. And now everything has changed. I think the thing for me is that, yes, the play rings differently now, but it’s still such a universal story. I think everyone can see themselves in each one of these characters in some small way, if they’re open to it. I think the play lends itself to self-reflection and also what we still want is the idea that there is hope and that there is a possibility of seeing each other’s humanity.

MM: I completely agree. I think it’s very easy right now to feel like there is no hope and that the wounds are just too deep. And whether it’s realistic or not, whether or not you think it’s idealistic or not, I think the thing that’s wonderful about the show is that it does open up a space where reconciliation is possible. Growth is possible. Forgiveness is possible. Owning up to your mistakes is possible, which is something that we’re missing a lot right now.

That and I think being really willing to admit that one is wrong and to take accountability for those things as well. I think stories like Porch on the Windy Hill do exist in the world and also I want more of them to exist in our world. So it’s a wish for how I think the world is in some ways and very much for how I wish the world could be.

The Porch on Windy Hill is showing off-Broadway at Urban Stages through October 12, 2025. Tickets and more information are available here. The official cast recording is available now via Bandcamp.

All photos courtesy of The Porch on Windy Hill and shot by Ben Hider.

Basic Folk: Kora Feder

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On this episode of Basic Folk, Kora Feder talks about her new album, Some Kind of Truth, and reflects on the incredible changes and growth she’s experienced since we last spoke in February 2020. One of the impacts of the pandemic on her music career was the necessity of exploring other artistic ventures – like crafting hats and lino-cutting. She relocated from Philly to California, finally settling in Detroit. Daughter of songwriter Rita Hosking, Kora went slightly viral during the height of COVID lockdowns thanks to her song “In a Young Person’s Body.” In the poignant composition she pays tribute to John Prine and old friends she hasn’t spoken to in years – and somehow still captured incredibly well.

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Elsewhere in our conversation, Kora discusses the passing of her grandparents, who she moved back to California to be with before they died. Their lives and deaths deeply influenced the new record. She opens up about the nuances of her gender identity, the importance of historical friendships that allow for unfiltered creativity, and her approach to writing both personal and political songs. We go through many of the tracks on the new project, including what I think is the best breakup song I’ve ever heard, “Paragraphs.” Kora Feder is a really incredible leave-you-breathless songwriter, particularly with her political writing. Here’s hoping that she doesn’t wait five more years to release a record, because we’re gonna need her.

Photo Credit: Anna Barber

The Lil Smokies’ Matthew “Rev” Reiger on Slowing Down for Their New Album, ‘Break Of The Tide’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

They may be called The Lil Smokies, but the bluegrass bangers birthed by the band originating from Big Sky country are anything but small.

Formed in the late 2000s when the group’s current sole remaining original member, Andy Dunnigan, began bringing his Dobro to picking parties during his college days in Missoula, Montana, the Smokies have gone on to become one of the West’s most captivating modern-day string bands, as they release their fourth studio album, Break Of The Tide.

Out April 4, the album is the Smokies’ first since 2021’s critically acclaimed Tornillo and features new band members, bassist Jean Luc Davis and banjoist Sam Armstrong-Zickefoose, for the first time. They’re joined by the core of Dunnigan, fiddler Jake Simpson, and guitarist “Rev” Matthew Reiger. According to Reiger, who joined the Smokies in 2015, his nickname stems from a life changing trip to California’s High Sierra Festival in 2007, where he earned the label for his love of the Stanley Brothers and gospel music. When he later joined the band, the name stuck, due to him sharing first names with their banjo player at the time, Matt Cornette.

“High Sierra changed the whole course of my life,” Reiger tells BGS. “It was at that festival that I made the decision to drop out of music school, grow out a band, get a band and most importantly, set out on a path to create a life where I really enjoyed the music I played instead of the academic pursuits. We made it back to the festival 10 years later to play it for the first time in 2017, so it’ll always have a special place in my heart.”

Ahead of the release of Break Of The Tide we caught up with Reiger to talk about the four-year process of bringing the album to life, recording in Texas, and the band’s separate lives while not together on the road.

What’s it been like for you, first joining an already well-established band and then welcoming two new members into the fold in recent years now with plenty of experience with the Smokies under your belt?

Matthew Reiger: It was a fast moving train when I jumped into the band. I had a decent place in Seattle at the time that I sublet to abandon everything I had and jump aboard. At the time we played and moved a lot faster. It was an incredible ride at the beginning and has been the whole way through, but what I love is the steady progression from runaway train to a rowboat on a gentle pond, which musically is more of where we’re at right now. This new record is as honest as anything we’ve ever recorded. Most of the songs were slowed down a bit, which is a good metaphor for how we are as people now.

Right now is about as introspective and pensive a time that I’ve ever experienced. A lot of people are making changes and finding a new path forward after COVID and the instability that ensued. For example, I recently started practicing with a metronome, not trying to play faster, but rather to see how slowly I could play a song. I want to see just how slow and deliberate I can play the song of my life. When you do that you find some challenging points where it’s not all bouncy, happy, and driving forward. The stillness is sometimes unnerving, but I’m happy we’re going through it on this record.

In that regard, [producer] Robert Ellis played a big role in slowing things down, especially on my songs. The way he heard the songs was perhaps even more honest than I heard them. It was quite a display of skill and artfulness on his behalf.

This was the second album in a row you’ve gone to Texas to record, following 2021’s Tornillo with Bill Reynolds at Sonic Ranch. What made y’all want to head back there to record with Robert at Niles City Sound this go around?

It was all for Robert. I’d fly anywhere in the world for the opportunity to work with him. He likes to produce the records he works on in Texas and I don’t blame him. We also recognized the impact of using a familiar place and equipment to a producer. On Break Of The Tide I probably played four guitars and there were a couple more involved beyond that. I think there’s a special alignment between instruments and the places where they live – they’re all there for a reason. It could be a big deal or seemingly innocuous, but there’s a reason they’re in that space and I think you can create some really cool things in those environments. That really came through on this record.

As we mentioned previously, Break Of The Tide is the Smokies’ first record since 2021. Was that four-year gap intentional and a byproduct of what you said earlier about slowing down, or is it due to something entirely different?

COVID, the resulting instabilities, and the band’s general desire to slow down were all factors, but if I had to pick a standout factor it’d be all the uncertainty within the touring music world. Just finding the time, money, and other resources necessary to continue doing that in the midst of a global shakeup was on our minds. It has taken every bit of determination and willpower I can muster – and I’m sure the rest of the guys would agree, too – to keep playing and stay together as a group. Adding an album to that was too much for us for several years and once you summon the courage to go do that you have the arduous process of working through the business side of things and everything that goes into making a record that’s non-musical.

You just touched on some of the struggles and the grind of being a touring musician, especially these last few years. Are those things y’all are singing about on songs like “Lately” and “Keep Me Down” from this new record?

You’re spot-on. I don’t think there’s any way to explain how challenging it is to juggle one’s personal life and touring. It is something I didn’t understand until I did it. The size and shape of the pieces you have to make the puzzle are always changing. It takes a radical toll on who you are at home, even when you’re not touring. You have this recovery period, you have this social adjustment, you have this relationship adjustment, and it’s sort of like you’re always jumping onto or off of a moving treadmill. Going on tour is like jumping on the moving treadmill since you often stumble because everything’s moving so fast, but then when you return home you have to slow down that uncomfortable pace and hop off the treadmill, which feels weird at first even though you’re hopping back onto stable ground since you’re so conditioned to running at full speed. Because of that there’s a lot of picking yourself up each time you go on tour and each time you come home, which is something both those songs touch on.

Similar to what we just talked about with “Lately” and “Keep Me Down,” it seems like “Break Of The Tide” and “Bad News Babe” are sister songs about being there for people you love while also knowing when to cut them off. Your thoughts?

I love the term “sister songs!” Like we talked earlier, touring takes a huge toll on personal relationships. I’ve said before that my first marriage isn’t to the Smokies or touring, but to music in general. It’s my first partner and has been for a long time. It takes a very special person to be in a relationship with someone who already has a partner, though it’s all very trendy in the coastal areas. [Laughs]

“Break Of The Tide” in particular is a song about feeling powerless, which is one of the biggest struggles we can face, and how it’s difficult to help those you love and even harder to walk away and recognize you can’t save them when those situations arise. Sometimes you just have to walk away to protect everyone involved, including yourself, which is oftentimes easier said than done.

We’ve been talking about the sacrifices of being a touring musician, but I’m also curious about your sacrifices within the band, particularly the miles between y’all being spread out in Seattle, Montana, Oklahoma, and Colorado. How has that affected how you operate together as a group?

It certainly makes it harder to get together and practice. [Laughs] I live just west of Seattle on Vashon Island, which is a 24-mile existence with a lot of retired folks. Everything’s a little slower than you expect and there’s a lot of hippie stuff going on – like I have a shower in my backyard. It’s super rural with a lot of farms, but it’s also just outside Seattle. Driving my car there is a little tricky, because I have to hop on a boat, but there’s ways to cross on a ferry and get to the city in 45 minutes to an hour. You have to put in some work to get there, which is what I love not only about this island, but the band as well.

It’s important for us all to feel like ourselves when we’re not on tour, because it’s a lot of costume-wearing when we are out on the road. Having that separation makes it easier to go back out on tour with more energy once it’s time to throw the costumes back on and jump in the van with a bunch of crazies for a while.

From the title of this record, Break Of The Tide, to songs like “Sycamore Dreams,” nature’s influence can be heard throughout the project. How would you say the outdoors informs The Smokies’ sound?

In some ways I think you could argue that nature is the only muse. There’s something so powerful about the ocean that I love. It’s the biggest thing in the world and connects nearly every point in it. In order to write in the way that I want to I have to be able to feel small and insignificant, and there’s nothing quite like an ocean to remind us just how small we all are and to be grateful for that. Because of that I’ve written very few songs that didn’t mention water.

What has music, specifically the process of bringing this new record to life, taught you about yourself?

I’ve spent most of my life trying to write music, but something that I’ve come to see – especially these past few years and what I hear on this record – is that the best art is not so much written, it is captured, and in order to do that you have to practice your listening. Writing and working on things is great, but in the end you have to turn off the metronome, stop thinking and just listen. That’s where you’ll find the beauty in every facet of life, not just in music.

Photo Credit: Glenn Ross

David Ramirez Shares His Dreams on ‘All the Not So Gentle Reminders’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first key to All the Not So Gentle Reminders, the sixth album by singer-songwriter David Ramirez releasing on March 21, is “Maybe It Was All a Dream,” the moody, elegiac song that opens his first LP in five years.

There are no lyrics to spell it out for the listener. It’s an instrumental, mostly a synthesizer riff over drums and a stately organ interspersed with a muffled, mysterious, and unintelligible voice. It’s more about mood – think Twin Peaks – than anything specific.

“The connection I have with it, which is a little too personal for me to share, it just felt right to open the record,” Ramirez said. “I had already gone into it knowing that I wanted some very long and dreamlike intros and outros to some of these songs. So it just seemed like a very fitting thing to have it all tie in by introducing the record with a musical number.”

The second key to the album is “Waiting on the Dust to Settle,” the second track, where Ramirez confides he doesn’t yet know where he’s headed.

“Amen, I can see it in the distance, the potential for a new beginning,” he sings. “I don’t recognize this place anymore … [I’m] waiting for the dust to settle.”

In our BGS interview below, you’ll learn the identity of the third key song on All the Not So Gentle Reminders, why it took so long to record and release the new material, and how the album’s lush string arrangements are a sign of the maturation of the artist.

The string arrangements on the album are very prominent, a counterpoint that duets with the lyrics. What brought that on?

David Ramirez: Yeah, for sure. I’ve never worked with strings before and just to kind of stay in the same lane of this dream world that I was trying to build, it made sense. … I’ve been doing this thing for a while now, but I feel like bringing strings into an album, I felt very adult for the first time. It felt good. It was really exciting.

Why did it take you five years to get this album out?

It was COVID and a breakup that kind of paralyzed me from being creative. I didn’t want to directly reference [the breakup]. There is one song on the album called “Nobody Meant to Slow You Down” that is direct from my last relationship. But the rest of it, I wanted to explore some other things.

You have Mexican heritage. Things are going badly for Mexicans and Mexican Americans — and immigrants and their families from many nations and backgrounds — in the U.S. now. Any reason you didn’t tackle that?

I have a couple of political tunes on past records and it’s something that I address during shows. This record for me, especially with the state of my heart recently going through a pretty big breakup that was extremely world-shaking for me, I didn’t want to put out for personal reasons a heartbreak record. … I did write some songs that were more social and politically heavy and I’m reserving those for an EP or my next album. I have this new song that I’ll release sometime later this year, called “We Do It for the Kids,” which is probably my most political tune to date and it’s a pretty heavy one.

To get the full effect of your songs, close attention must be paid to the lyrics. Is that a challenge during shows where people are also socializing?

I’m lucky enough to have people here in the states who’ve been following me for a while and they enjoy the lyrics. They enjoy how meditative it is. But the shows aren’t just that. I do not like going to see a songwriter and they sing for two hours and it’s just dark and depressing the whole time. So we mix in a lot of music from a lot of different records and make sure that there’s a dynamic and it’s fun and it’s funny and it’s upbeat.

Sure, there are slower and more contemplative moments. But we like to put on a show. … In Europe, they’re very polite and you can put on the most rocking show and they’re going to give you a golf clap. They’re there for the songs and the stories. So I generally have to curate a different set when I’m overseas.

You’re based in Austin, Texas. Did you grow up there?

I was born and raised in Houston, playing baseball growing up. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that I met these fellow students who were all in theater and choir, and those relationships led me to stop playing ball and join choir and join theater and pick up an instrument and start writing my songs. I went to Dallas for a brief time to attend [Dallas Baptist University], and that’s where I started playing out in front of people for the first time, whether it was just open mics or the midnight slot at a metal club where they allowed an acoustic songwriter guy to show up and close out the evening. I was just so desperate to play that I didn’t really think twice about it. In 2007 and 2008 I lived in Nashville and then I moved here to Austin, Texas, in December of 2008 and I’ve been here ever since.

A third key track on the album is “The Music Man,” where you credit your father for helping spur you to make music.

“The Music Man” is a song I wrote about my father who gave me a Walkman when I was 10 years old. There are many people I can thank and [to whom I can] attribute my passion and my love for not just music itself, but for writing and performing it. But if I’m really upfront and honest, I think it goes back to when my father gave me his favorite cassette tapes and how that led to this life as a 41-year-old where I make records and tour the world full-time.

Who were the artists on those cassettes?

The Cars Greatest Hits. That’s obviously a rock band, but the song that I was so obsessed with was [the downbeat] “Drive.” Then I went to the Cranberries, and then to Fiona Apple, and then I went to Sarah McLachlan and that led to Radiohead.

… There’s this melancholy nature and mood that all those records have that at such a young age made a deep impression on me. I didn’t start playing music till seven, eight years after that, but by the time I did pick up a guitar or pick up a pen or piece of paper and start writing down my feelings, I think all those influences from such a young age really started to show their faces.

Any one artist in particular that inspired you to take up songwriting?

When I was 21 I got Ryan Adams’ Gold and that was just a big, massive influence musically for me. … That really locked in for the first time how I wanted to tell stories and what kind of stories I wanted to tell. Ryan and I don’t know each other, but his records led me to folks like Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. He was the doorway to a lot of a lot of greats that weren’t really coming my way when I was in high school.

Are you comfortable with your music being categorized as Americana?

I don’t mind it, but I don’t really understand it either. If you say it’s Americana, people assume that it’s more country and I don’t feel that way at all. The more I do it, [I prefer] just “singer-songwriter,” because at least that offers freedom. Because every record I’ve released sounds different than the last. So at least with singer-songwriter, I can kind of have the freedom to evolve and change.

Photo Credit: Black Sky Creative

Max & Heather Stalling on Only Vans with Bri Bagwell

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Welcome to the first of four live episodes of Only Vans from the MusicFest at Steamboat 2025. Two of my inspirations and great friends, Max & Heather Stalling, helped us kick things off. We get into many topics such as ex-husbands, cassette collections, mortal vs. immortal musicians, skinny dipping – and they even perform a few live songs.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

Max and Heather Stalling are a staple of our music scene and these lovebirds are my favorite, you can tell. Heather is an accomplished singer-songwriter, incredible fiddle player, and I love that we had the opportunity for them to play three songs together live at our very first hour-long Musicfest podcast taping up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in front of a live (and rather large) audience!

Max is a Texas A&M Aggie graduate, but we don’t hold that against him, because he has multiple amazing records out. Heather’s project, Blacktop Gypsy, is awesome and also available wherever you get your music. On this Only Vans episode, Heather makes me cry with a lovely impromptu monologue that I will cherish forever and, after joking that I never go to the late night jams in Steamboat at MusicFest, I did in fact attend an epic jam this year with Max, Heather, the Braun Brothers, and many more.

We joke about drinking a lot of wine and I outed Paul on a hangover after our hilarious “marriage” story, sorry! I also talk about the Sequestered Songwriters, which is something that Courtney Patton and Jason Eady started over COVID and that really helped a lot of us get out to a really large audience. If you have not checked out the Sequestered Songwriters videos on Facebook, I think they’re all still up there. A lot of people have told me [those videos] really got them through COVID and that was a way for us all to keep in touch with one another and learn some new tunes.

Thanks again to Dirt Trail Entertainment for sponsoring our MusicFest episodes. And thanks to our show sponsors, Hand Drawn Pressing & CH Lonestar Promo!

Photo Credit: Allison V Smith

Find our Only Vans episode archive here.

Ben Sollee’s Renewed ‘Long Haul’ Perspective on Earth, Life, and Music

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Seven years have elapsed between Ben Sollee’s last studio release, his 2017 album with Kentucky Native, and his new one, Long Haul (arriving August 16). Much has happened in Sollee’s life since ‘17. His family has grown by two children. He worked on a number of soundtracks, even winning an Emmy Award in 2018 for his score on the ABC special, Base Ballet. The Kentucky born and based singer/songwriter/cellist, who has long been an advocate for environmental and other social causes, also helped launch a nonprofit named Canopy, which helps businesses in his home state positively impact people, the planet, and the future.

When COVID hit, it hit Sollee hard. “I was one of the early folks to get COVID in fall of 2020 and it stuck with me in a way that didn’t stick with other people.” During his prolonged recovery, he had to change how he ate, what he drank, how he slept, and how he exercised. “It turned into a journey of inward exploration and changing my external life. I really changed pretty much everything… It wasn’t until I started emerging from long haul [COVID], I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve got something to say about this.’”

While this album grew out of Sollee’s personal health crisis, it also was greatly affected by the death of his close friend and long-time collaborator, Jordon Ellis, who died by suicide in early 2023.

Always ready to blur genres, Sollee felt more free to expand his sonic palette on Long Haul, which includes a gospel-style choir, a Little Richard-inspired rock ‘n’ roll rave-up, West African rhythms, and Caribbean grooves. He purposely wanted to have lively, rhythmic melodies to balance deeply thoughtful lyrics.

“The same way,” he explained, “That Michael Jackson would have these big statements in the middle of these dance songs.” Sollee also recorded a special Dolby ATMOS Spatial Audio version for this album – a first for him – to underscore Long Haul’s immersive sound quality.

Part of what the title Long Haul refers to is your serious battle with long COVID and it also addresses life as being a long haul. How did the two interrelate for you, personally?

Ben Sollee: [COVID] definitely put me in relationship with my body in a way that I had never been before and once you start that relationship with your body, you realize just how interconnected everything is. I mean, we’re all on this long haul together… and I realized that maybe the most radical thing that I could do was to care for myself. That really shifted how I think of my live performances and really my purpose for being out on the road, [which] is to help people connect with themselves. Because once they connect with themselves, then they can have the capacity to be in relationship with nature, other people, animals, you name it. How I be in the world has shifted. It’s subtle from an external view, but internally it’s pretty profound.

How did this all affect your approach in making this album?

I realized that I had a very exploitative relationship with my creativity over the years, where it was just like: Here’s a project, just make stuff. And that was just really eye-opening.

I took a couple of different approaches in the making of this record. The passing of my friend and musical collaborator, Jordon, in the process of writing this record was really profound, because he was such a keystone to my creative process. It kind of forced me to think about how I was approaching music-making in the record without him.

So, I tried a couple different mantras, and one of them was “follow the resonance.” If it said something to me, I didn’t need to figure out why it said something to me, even if that is Polynesian flute playing or this sort of strange Tejano Caribbean groove – just follow it. In the past, I would kind of hedge; like I would hear something, I’d be really into that sound, but I wouldn’t feel like I could, for whatever reason. Like it’s not part of my cultural heritage. I would come up with a reason to be like, I shouldn’t make music with that sound or influence.

Another mantra was “show our fingerprints.” The way that we recorded the record – it was about hearing the hands and the strings and hearing the breath. I chose instruments that would really feature those human aspects of breath and touch. We incorporated woodwinds, which you can hear prominently on the first single, “Misty Miles.” We incorporated choirs in this record for the first time, because I really wanted that breath and sound. Much of the percussion is hand percussion. It’s a very tactile record… very high touch record.

You produced Long Haul. What was the recording process like?

It was a very intuitive, collective approach, and it meant that not only did the music turn out as a surprise to me and others, but it also meant that it was a very engaged, emotional journey. Adrienne Maree Brown [author of the book, Emergent Strategy] is really the inspiration for this – instead of having a singular artist’s vision, you really bring together a group of people in a facilitated way.

It made me maybe a little bit more brave and confident that wherever things went, we could execute that… I mean, musicians left the sessions crying, because they had such a good time and they felt seen and heard. And that, to me, means as much as the music that came out.

Did your experiences composing film soundtracks serve at all as an influence?

[Film work] also inspired me to explore Atmos. I really wanted this record to be an immersive experience, kind of like a sonic film. In keeping with that, there are a few songs that actually have sound design incorporated into them. It’s the first time I’ve done it in such an intentional and immersive way where we’ve got cars driving by with “Hawk and Crows.”

There is a real stylistic diversity to the sound of this album, like “Under The Spell” is one song with a funky dance groove to it.

[Laughs] I wasn’t trying to make a dance track. It started with that cello lick that you hear at the beginning. And it’s sort of this hypnotic West African loop of a lick that really began as kind of me trying to figure out some old-time banjo, like clawhammer music, on the cello.

The words are referencing this kind of duality… dealing with identity and self and how often we are under the influence of the stories that people tell of us. Every time I have this ambition, desire, and even just like the idea of me having something, it sets me down a path of being unsatisfied, which causes a lot of harm to other people and myself in the world. So, the words can go as deep as somebody wants to, but it’s also if people just want to release and have some sort of existential-like dance experience – then let’s go, let’s dance!

It touches on an evolution that I don’t expect anybody to notice in my music and career. My early records had a lot of direct social and political statements in the song. I realized that they were a little bit superficial and surface-y. They weren’t really getting it to the core of those issues. So, I’ve kind of moved into, I guess what I would call like a “post-activist” stance. My music has moved away from direct political commentary most of the time to more of a foundational, fundamental idea of togetherness, of connectedness.

“One More Day” stands out as a key song too.

I guess the original seed of that song emerged as I was beginning to travel again after Jordon had passed away – to places where he and I had traveled so many times. I started thinking about what would I have said had he called me in that moment of decision before he took his life? But the only thing that I would have really said to him is, “Listen, I hear you, I respect your decision, but what’s the rush? Like, if you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it, but you don’t have to do it right now. Just give it one more day, give it one more sunrise. Just get one last look.”

I think that’s what I would have said to him. And the song makes that case through different vignettes of our time together on the road. And, it does it over this Caribbean, Tejano groove that must have come from some jams that he and I did together. It must have. It just feels like a very Jordon groove. What I love about that is it has this real joyous, almost like early Police kind of vibe to it. There’s some really tough content in there and I just love the idea of people dancing at a festival – and just saying, “Give it one more day.”

The closing song, “When You Gonna Learn,” features a rousing gospel-style choir and addresses following your inner voice. It launches the listener out of the album and into the world in a very uplifting way.

I wanted to end with that message, because as a father I watch my four- and six-year-old who have yet to really settle into a sense of self or identity, and they are just so connected to their world and just basic truths about caring for things and protecting things and love and justice. And I think that it’s just more proof to me that there are things we know that get taught out of us. This song just is like: When are you going to learn that you already know?

You address a lot of tough issues on the album, but do so with a sense of humanism and spirited music that offer a hopeful way out of these challenging times.

I often reflect on that “Pale Blue Dot” image that Voyager took looking back at Earth and it’s just black and there’s just one little, tiny dot. And that dot really says it all, because it’s all there, as Carl Sagan says: every love, every heartbreak, every war, every church, it’s all on that one little dot.

So, we got to make it work here. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we have right now. How do we make this work? I get that we’re going to make some big mistakes along the way. I sure have in my life. That’s where the grace comes in, but we got to make it work here. We don’t have another spot.

Photos courtesy of Big Hassle.

LISTEN: Justin Hiltner, “1992”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Justin Hiltner
Hometown: Newark, Ohio; now, Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “1992”
Album: 1992
Release Date: December 9, 2022

In Their Words: “The title track for 1992 was inspired by survivor’s guilt. At the time I began writing it, I was reading And the Band Played On and spending a good amount of time studying the movement for queer rights in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. It dawned on me that I wasn’t born after the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I was born into it. And almost certainly there were gay men and queer folks dying of HIV in the very same hospital where I was born. If I had been born a mere ten or fifteen years earlier, there’s a good chance I would have died, too. We lost so much, an entire generation; we lost so many precious, incomparable, irreplaceable souls to HIV.

“When I was diagnosed with cancer and when the COVID pandemic hit, the meaning in ‘1992’ was further unspooled and complicated. While public officials touted HIV as a learning experience that would help fight COVID, I couldn’t help but feel immense anger and pain. HIV, like COVID, is not over. HIV infection rates are on the rise in many parts of the world and in the U.S., especially the South, my home for the past decade. While society races to leave COVID in our rearview — prematurely — endangering so many folks, we forget that we did the same thing with HIV, except with an even greater degree of cruelty, inhumanity, and callousness. We haven’t learned a single lesson. That’s what ‘1992’ is about.” — Justin Hiltner

Justin Hiltner · 5 – 1992

Photo Credit: Laura E. Partain

Joshua Ray Walker Closes Up the Honky-Tonk on ‘See You Next Time’

Posted on by Editor

For the last couple of years, Joshua Ray Walker has been living out the lyrics to a down-in-the-dumps country song. The Texas-born singer-songwriter lost his father, couldn’t work due to COVID, and was displaced from his home during much of that time, after a burst pipe led to a waterfall of misfortune.

But music has always been Walker’s saving grace, and with his new album, See You Next Time, he puts one in the win column. Marking the end of a country music opus that includes three imaginative albums, fully conceived and expertly executed, the set puts the finishing touches on a true honky-tonk opera. Walker’s debut album introduced a fictional bar set in his native South Dallas — full of quirky, charismatic characters and wild adventures — and after the second built on their stories, See You Next Time finds them saying goodbye as the bar closes down for good.

All delivered with a mix of shuffling, authentic trad-country style, soul-inspired horn blasts and Walker’s sympathetic vocal, often cracking at the moment of peak emotional intrigue, that’s a bittersweet thematic arc, to be sure — and one that has been mirrored in his personal life. But after making such a grand vision a reality, and earning the admiration that came with it, Walker’s optimistic about the future.

He spoke with BGS about where the idea for this trilogy came from, what kind of mark his fictional honky-tonk left on him and what it feels like to say goodbye.

BGS: How are you feeling right now? It’s been a difficult stretch for you personally, but you’re back on the road now and this album is something special.

Joshua Ray Walker: As far as my career goes, I feel great. I wanted to make these records for a long time. I had 10 years to think about it and put a plan together. I put out three records in three years, which was my goal, and this last one puts an end to this trilogy that I had in mind.

Ten years is a long time to dream of something. Where did the idea for the trilogy come from?

I guess it started because I found a pen in my grandfather’s drawer — it said, “I rode the bull at Bronco Billy’s.” I had been writing songs for a few years and it just sparked this idea, like what that place would have been like. Who would have been there? I started writing songs about those characters, and over the years my plan got grander and grander, and it turned into this trilogy. I had the artwork and the names all picked out before we ever started cutting the first record.

Did you ever actually go to that bar?

No, that bar closed when I was a baby, but it was a real place in South Dallas that my grandfather went to, I guess. His name was Billy, so I assume he picked up the pen because it had his name on it, and that was really it. It just spiraled out of control and I kept writing songs about these characters. I had dreamed this whole world in my head.

Where did the characters come from? Did you know people like this?

Yeah, I definitely hung out with people just like the characters. I grew up in a part of Dallas that’s pretty nice now, but when I was a kid it was pretty rough, and I grew up around bars and barflies because of the work my parents did. I just like to get to know people, I really like meeting new people, so whenever I go to a dive bar, I end up striking up a conversation with strangers, and all those stories make their way into the albums.

Over these albums, have you developed a favorite character?

Yeah, a lot of them are pretty sad or dark characters, but there’s one in particular I really find funny. It’s the character for “Cupboard” on the second record, who is also the character for “Welfare Chet” on the new record. It’s a song about that guy you run into at the bar and for the first five minutes of the conversation he’s funny and wacky and entertaining, and then 30 minutes in, you’re talking about Q-Anon or whatever. There’s a line in the song about talking with a mouthful of food, but they don’t serve food here, and I just feel like that’s happened to me so many times. Like I’m talking to some guy at the bar who won’t leave me alone and he’s got like a hot dog or something, and they don’t even have hot dogs here, like “Where did you get that?” So that’s one of my favorites. It’s a lighthearted character, but I feel like we’ve all dealt with that guy at some point.

Since you started describing this bar and these people, has your view of the story changed at all? Have you ended up with a different perspective over the years?

I don’t know, that’s an interesting question. I think I was trying to paint a picture that I had in my head, so in a lot of ways it hasn’t changed much, but there’s always a kind of story arc there. Even in the titles — Wish You Were Here, Glad You Made It, See You Next Time — it’s like this coming of age and then dying out. On this last album they’re saying goodbye to the honky-tonk because it’s closing, and I don’t know if the story has changed or the place has changed, but the way that it fits into my personal life has changed. It’s taken on real meaning, by accident, because my personal life has kind of followed this story arc.

Like, I wrote “Canyon” for the first record — that was a story for my dad about our relationship, and I wrote it right after he was diagnosed with cancer. And then four years later I was about to go into the studio to record the third record, and he passed away, so I wrote “Flash Paper.” So I’m coming to terms with loss and then on the last song, actually saying goodbye. That’s what the whole trilogy is about, and it ended up being mirrored by my personal life, just by chance.

So with “Flash Paper,” you were sort of processing everything through the song?

Yeah, that’s typically how I write songs. I mean, the first song I ever wrote is called “Fondly.” It’s on my first record, and my granddad had just passed. As I was leaving the hospital, I wrote that song in the parking lot and it all came out at once, so I think when I’m overwhelmed or whatever, I turn to songwriting. Some of the more emotional songs that come out all at once, like “Canyon” or “Flash Paper,” and “Fondly,” there’s not a lot of clever end-rhymes. It’s just straight forward whatever I was feeling at the moment.

You finish up with “See You Next Time.” You’ve said this project was about saying goodbye to the bar. What about you? Are you a little sad to close this chapter?

No, I wouldn’t say I’m sad. I’m excited to see what I write after this.

Do you have any idea what that might be? This project was so big that I bet it took a lot of creative energy.

I’ve written a lot of songs that haven’t ended up on these three records, so I still have a decent amount of that catalog to put out, and I’m writing all the time, so there’s always new stuff. It will still be country, I assume. I mean, these three records have a honky-tonk vibe because they’re set in a honky-tonk, but I have other aspects of music that I like as well. I think I’ve found a sound that represents what I like as a writer, so I don’t know if the sound will change too much, but the subject matter can be about anything. Now that the world is starting to open back up again, I feel like I need to go to do some living, so I have some experiences to write about. That’s the biggest thing, because most of my songs come from going and exploring places that most people don’t always find interesting. I need to go do some of that so I have some more material.

Photo credit: Chad Windham

With Life Turned Upside Down, John Smith Enlists Friends for Eloquent New Album

Posted on by Editor

John Smith is resilient. You have to be, when you’ve spent your 15-year musical career — by choice — unsigned to a record label. When you’ve arranged every gig, every tour, every album release yourself. When you’ve invested your own money in everything you’ve done. As Smith himself puts it he’s been “planning for the worst” his entire professional life.

So when catastrophe hit a year ago, he was ready, in his words, to roll with the punches. The pandemic had already necessitated the painstaking and anxiety-inducing cancellation of all his gigs and tours. His mother was diagnosed with cancer at a time he couldn’t visit her. His wife lost a pregnancy. “It was devastating,” says Smith, from his home in North Wales. “But all you can do is try and make sense of it and the way I do that is write songs.”

The result is The Fray, an album of searing honesty and lithe beauty whose songs amplify the emotions and experiences of so many of us this year — the reassessed relationships, the self-reflection, and the ultimate search for hope. It is, perhaps, something of a change of pace for the British singer-songwriter, who describes it as his most honest album yet.

“In the past I’ve been drawn towards mythic perspective and character-based songs and more fantastical references,” he nods. “This one I just wrote about me and what I was feeling.” In doing so, he has created a work of extraordinary emotional nuance. As he puts it: “There’s lots of color and dark and light in everyday life. ‘How do I get to bed tonight without cracking up?’”

The songs are deeply tender — “She’s Doing Fine” and “One Day at a Time” are poignant responses to the grief of losing a baby — but they’re not as spare as Smith’s 2019 folk record, Hummingbird. This one is a cashmere blend of guitar, piano and horns, with eloquent contributions from friends in the US and elsewhere. Sarah Jarosz and Courtney Hartman lend their ethereal voices to “Deserving” and “Eye to Eye,” respectively. Milk Carton Kids contribute, alongside Smith’s longtime collaborator Lisa Hannigan, to the rousing title track “The Fray,” which tips the hat to the West Coast stylings of Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, one of Smith’s favorite records.

For Smith, it was a delight to be able to sing and play with his friends, even if they couldn’t be in the same space. “I normally see Lisa, for instance, very often, and I haven’t seen her for a year. So in the absence of being backstage at the same festivals, drinking and laughing, I thought let’s all get on the same track, then it’s like we’ve all seen each other.”

It had been six months since he had played with anyone else at all. When the pandemic first began to spread, Smith was touring in Australia, about to play the Blue Mountain Festival near Sydney. “I woke up in my hotel room to a text saying that the festival had been cancelled,” says Smith. “I looked at local news reports and it was obvious everything was going to get pulled and they were shutting down the borders between Australian states — it was just time to get out of there.”

Having got himself home from literally the other side of the world, Smith undertook the soul-crushing work of cancelling all his gigs, including what would have been his first-ever headline tour in the US. “It had taken years to get to that point,” he adds, ruefully. But managing his own brand has made Smith resourceful and he quickly worked together an album of unreleased recordings (Live in Chester) and took them on a “virtual world tour,” playing dates in different time zones.

“That all went really well and after the last of those gigs, that evening, my wife started feeling really bad and we had to get her to hospital and she spent a week there. And within a few weeks of that I’d found out my mum had cancer. So suddenly everything in my life was upside down.”

New songs simply fell out of him, he says. Some came from ideas he’d worked up with others, such as the opening track, “Friends.” The chorus had been written with fellow singer-songwriter Paul Usher, before the UK went into lockdown; four months later, it found a new meaning. “When I sat down and listened back to the voice memo on my phone I started singing it and wrote all the verses in one go.”

Other songs were inspired by particular instruments. He bought a classical guitar and quickly wrote “She’s Doing Fine” on it. A ‘57 Telecaster replica he acquired — “just a piece of swamp ash with a neck on it really” — inspired a riff which stayed under his fingers for five weeks before it was followed with any words. The finished product was “Hold On.”

Britain’s strict lockdown laws, which have included stay-at-home orders with only an hour a day allowed for exercise, were partially lifted in the late summer and fall, giving Smith the opportunity to get inside a studio. He and Hummingbird producer Sam Lakeman both isolated ahead of the session, and so were able to work together freely and without masks. The other musicians, too, self-quarantined before they arrived: “We didn’t have anyone involved we didn’t trust completely,” he says.

Smith laid down his own tracks in the first couple of days — the bare bones of guitar and vocals — so that the sound could build organically with each additional contribution. “Since recording all together live logistically wasn’t possible, I had to take a slightly different route,” he says. “We went with a lot of first takes and kept a few mistakes in there and tried to allow it to breathe spontaneously and didn’t overthink it… I’ve been guilty of that in the past.”

There’s a lovely moment at the end of “Friends,” as the song finishes and is punctuated with a little applause. It feels, for just a brief moment, like you’re in the room with the band. Smith laughs and explains its origins: “I’d put down the vocal take and it sounded so good in the headphones I just started clapping. And Sam shot me a look as if to say: ‘You know we’re going to have to do that again now.’” But it was such a joyful and spontaneous sound, they decided instead to ask the other musicians to clap at the end of their takes, too.

The other contributions — from Hannigan, Jarosz, et al. — were recorded at their homes and sent in digitally (“You can catch a lot of horrible stuff over email,” smiles Smith, “but not COVID”). They include electric guitar from Bill Frisell, one of Smith’s heroes, whom he approached via their mutual friend, Joe Henry. It is clear, from Smith’s tone, that having Frisell play on “Best of Me” is one of the best things to have happened to him in a very long time.

The future remains as uncertain as ever. “I’ve just moved some gigs for the third time,” says Smith. “It’s going to be a while before I’m going out and physically playing these songs.” It’s typical, he says, with good humour — he’d lined up some great venues to play in, and with the social distancing requirements significantly reducing their capacity, he would even have been able to say he had sold them out.

But Smith is not one to dwell on what-might-have-beens. Instead, he’ll be launching The Fray with a collection of livestreamed gigs, knowing that they have proved successful for him before. He has been reading a lot, recently, into business and economics and financial strategies – as he very sensibly observes, “it’s important for any musician to understand how money works because there’s going to be less of it going around.”

Smith has always been one to live the simple life, and with full lockdown resumed in Britain since the start of 2021, there has been ample opportunity to do so. There is no doubt that The Fray’s themes of getting by in the day-to-day will resonate broadly. After all, never before have so many humans experienced such similar circumstances all at the same time. “Extraordinary, isn’t it?” says Smith.

Photos by: Elly Lucas