Tag: COVID-19

The Story Within Violet Bell’s New Folk Album Is More Than Just a Celtic Myth

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Americana duo Violet Bell‘s new album, Shapeshifter – out October 7 – tells a story of the mythological selkie, a mermaid-like creature from Celtic folklore that embodies a form that’s half woman, half seal. In their retelling and reshaping of this ancient folk narrative, they tease out its connections to the transatlantic journey of American roots music, to the cultural and social melting pot of the “New World,” and to agency, intention, and self-possession. 

A concept album of sorts, the music is remarkably approachable and down-to-earth, while the stories and threads of the record tell equally ordinary and cosmic tales. At such a time in American history, with fascism once again on the rise and attacks on bodily autonomy and personal agency occurring with greater frequency at every level of governance, Shapeshifter offers a seemingly timeless lens through which to engage with, understand, and challenge the overarching social and political turmoil we all face on the daily. Moreover, it’s an excellent folk record, demonstrating Violet Bell’s connections to North Carolina, Appalachia, and the greater communities that birthed so many of the genre aesthetics evident in the album’s songs.

Shapeshifter is a gorgeous exercise in community building, an artful subversion of societal norms, and a stunning folktale packaged in accessible, resonant music with a local heartbeat and a global appeal. Read our interview with duo members Lizzy Ross and Omar Ruiz-Lopez and listen to a brand new single from the project, “Mortal Like Me,” below.

BGS: I wanted to start by asking you about community, because I know it’s always very present in your music making. I feel it, definitely, in Shapeshifter. Not only because you’ve got Joe Terrell and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso), Joe Troop, and Tatiana Hargreaves on the project, but because I can feel that community is a tent pole of this record. What does community, musical and otherwise, mean to you in the context of this project? 

Lizzy Ross: It was such a wild time to be making the record because it was March of 2021, so vaccines hadn’t quite happened yet and we had all been on lockdown for about a year. We were obviously really missing our community and the live music community. There was also this strange thing, where our friends who would normally always be on the road all the time were at home. So we had an incredible opportunity to call up people, like calling up Tati and Joseph and Libby and Joe Troop – who lived in Argentina but came home because of COVID! The way that it worked out, people were around and we were able to convene and make this album in circumstances that probably wouldn’t have been possible, because everybody would have been on the road. 

Omar Ruiz-Lopez: Or, [we would have had them] recording remotely. Which is not the same. One of the reasons why I play music is because of the community. That ability to bring people together and share music and hold space together, the energy that comes from that is so vital to the human experience. Getting to create that space, to bring an album to life, there’s not much else in this world that I live for, besides that. Getting the opportunity to bring everybody together, especially after such a big isolation, was so life-affirming and helped bring me back to why I make music in the first place. 

That’s definitely palpable in the music itself, but also in the overarching viewpoint that y’all have within this record. I also find that it’s very grounded. You might have heard BGS just released our first season of a podcast called Carolina Calling, about North Carolina’s history through music. One of the through-lines that keeps coming up in all of our interviews is that North Carolina specifically has such a strong sense of musical community. Even though this is kind of a story record and kind of a concept record, it feels very grounded in North Carolina and in the South. 

LR: Omar and I are kind of mongrels from the non-South. But we’ve come and steeped ourselves in this land and these traditions and this community, so I think that what our music reflects is the internal sort of “musical diet.” Our musical diet is probably atypical when you consider what most people think of as North Carolinian or Southern music. The music we were listening to going into this even, we were listening to a lot of Groupa –

ORL: Groupa is a Scandinavian folk band that makes these albums based on music from different countries, like Iceland, Finland, and Sweden. I feel like anything that’s not from here is called “world music,” but their brand of folk music is very beautiful and out there and organic and grounded in the different traditions they represent on their albums. It’s mostly instrumental music, it’s pretty powerful. We were listening to that a lot, as well as Julia Fowlis, a singer who sings in Gaelic primarily. Those cultures – Scottish, Irish, Scandinavian folk – they’re related to the music here like old-time, bluegrass, and Appalachian folk traditions of fiddle and banjo. 

To bring it back to the question, I’ve been here for twelve years. I was born in Panama and raised in Puerto Rico listening to Spanish and Latin folk. When I say Spanish, I mean Spanish-speaking, the language of our colonizers. But there’s something still not-from-Spain in the native, Indigenous musical and cultural influences in that music. Like in Bachata and Cumbia. Then I moved to the States and fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll and more of the singer-songwriter tradition here. 

LR: Originally I came here for school. I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland, where I didn’t really find a musical community. There was one, I just didn’t find it. When I came to North Carolina it was the first time I saw people gathering together over a potluck and music, with like shape note singing and like the Rise Up Singing book. Having this experience of big, group harmonies I had this realization more and more that music could be a part of my daily life in a way it hadn’t been as a child. Or, rather, as a way of public, shared daily life. Because it was always part of my life, but it was part of community life here in North Carolina. That was a big element of how music and North Carolinian music in particular drew me in and captured my heart. 

Can you talk a bit about the central storyline of this album and how you picked up the mythos of the selkie and turned it into this project? 

LR: The story of the selkie came to us and it’s something that is in the culture, it’s floating around. Many folks have seen the movies Song of the Sea or The Secret of Roan Inish. The first song that came to me, Omar and I were at the beach one day and I was playing on the banjo and this song came out. It was “Back to the Sea.” We were in the Outer Banks of North Carolina at that time, at the ocean, and I was kind of just listening for who this character is and what they are saying. It was a selkie. It was a selkie singing of getting to return home. 

I would say that coming home to ourselves is one of the central themes of this album and one of the themes the selkie story really brings into focus. The whole myth is centered around a being, a mystical ocean being, who gets yanked out of her native waters and forced to live in a world that doesn’t understand her and wasn’t built around her existence. To me, there’s a really clear connection. That story is a medicine for the cultural wound of when we don’t fit into the prescribed paradigm of power. If we don’t fit into white supremacy or if we don’t fit into normativity or if we don’t fit into patriarchy. It’s the sense of feeling like we have to cut off parts of ourselves that aren’t compatible with those power structures so that we can be acceptable to the power structure at-large.

This story says, “No, don’t do that.” You can reclaim the parts of yourself that you’ve had to orphan in order to survive. You can reconnect to those pieces of you and you can come home to yourself. It speaks to integrating who we are, the characters of the land and the sea in this story are really powerful to me. The sea, to me, is this cosmic force. It’s a pervasive, creative, destructive, loving, mysterious force that the selkie comes out of. It doesn’t follow the rules of the land-bound world. To me, it’s like the structures and hierarchies of our culture – whether it’s capitalism or something else.

One of my questions was going to be about how queer the record is, and not just Queer with a capital Q, but also a lowercase Q, the idea of queerness as just existing counter to normativity. But it’s not just a story of otherness, it’s a story of otherness in relationship to embodiment. In the South right now especially, but in this country in general, embodiment is under attack. Whether we’re talking about COVID-19 or abortion access or trans rights. There’s something in this record that speaks to all of that. 

LR: I think one of my experiences [that informed this music] is that I’m in a female body. There’s a line in one of the songs, “I Am a Wolf” – that song is two parts. First is the fisherman speaking, he’s kidnapped the selkie, taken her out of her native waters, he’s made her come be his bride, and he’s like, “Why isn’t this working?” It sucks, he’s lonely, he thought things would be better. The second half is the selkie responding and she says, “I am a wolf, not a woman.” That’s the first thing she says. That was something I said at one point, when I was connecting with a sense of deep grief and rage within myself around what I felt were the prescribed cultural parameters of my existence. 

ORL: The people who made this album were mostly by BIPOC people and [people who fall outside those norms]. Joseph Sinclair and I are not white and Joe, Tati, [Lizzy], and I are not straight. I feel like a lot of different perspectives went into making this album. We didn’t just get white, straight dudes to make this album and it felt good that way, getting different musical perspectives on this. We could have just made it ourselves, that’s the other thing. I’m a multi-instrumentalist and Lizzy is a harmony singer, we could have overdubbed to kingdom come. Part of the reason why we got all these people together into the same room is because of their unique perspectives on the traditions they brought to the table. 

LR: This thread about embodiment is really important and by asking this question you’re helping me articulate something that I’ve been sitting with for months, a year, as I’ve been thinking about the writing and the words and characters in this story. And also, what is it for me in this story that I’m trying to unravel with this album. Also on a cultural level, what are we talking about here? 

The selkie, her skin is taken away from her in a moment of innocent revelry. The story starts with her dancing in the moonlight on a rock and that’s when the fisherman steals her skin. When I think about the people that I know and love, I think a lot of these systems are violent towards people whether or not they fit within the system’s perception of dominant power. When I think about the six-year-old version of a person or whatever version of a person was able to un-self-consciously dance or feel good or go into their mom’s closet and put on her clothes and makeup and not feel ashamed – there’s a different version of this for literally every person and what that means. That innocent revelry, it’s experiencing oneself not through the eye of an external observer but through the juicy presence of embodiment and joy and a sense of wholeness and rightness in your being.

Everybody’s had the experience of having their “skin” stolen from them. When you get yanked out of your sovereignty, your joy, your bliss. You get catcalled, you get shamed, you get this or that. There’s violence done to you, whether it’s physical or not, there’s that sense of losing your skin, when we start to separate from ourselves and regard parts of ourselves as less than. I think that dysphoria is a really important part of this story and this album. When we don’t experience ourselves or feel ourselves as the cultural perceptions tell us we’re supposed to be, whether it’s a question of gender or color, this feeling of not being at home in our bodies, I think that was a lot of what really resonated with me, even unconsciously, about the selkie. One of the ways that it took root and grew in my consciousness and eventually in our shared consciousness, between me and Omar and the folks who are on this music.

As a picker I have to talk about “Flying Free” and “Morning Girl,” because I think having instrumentals on this record makes so much sense. I have some ideas about how they fit into the story, not just based on the titles, but also based on how the tunes are so evocative like the rest of the project. Why, on a record that feels like a concept record, why instrumental tunes? 

LR: Words are our inheritance from so many of the same structures that can oppress us. And they’re also our freedom. Words allow us to develop and communicate concepts and they also contain hierarchies and power structures that we may or may not really need. The name of the song, “Flying Free,” and the fact that it’s instrumental, to me it’s like this somatic sensation of the selkie plunging back into the sea and the joy of being reunited with her home waters. Which to me is her sense of self, her sense of worth and safety and agency. 

ORL: Sound, organized sound inside of space, one of the powerful things about it is that we are able to attach emotion to it. It’s kind of beautiful how two people could feel similar things listening to one piece of music. When it came time to put together the songs for this album, there were a handful of tunes that came up that weren’t asking for words. But that totally helped paint the picture of the world of the selkie and what she was going through. 

Photo credit: Chris Frisina

WATCH: Ross Hammond, “Blue Hoodie”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ross Hammond
Hometown: Sacramento, California
Song: “Blue Hoodie”
Album: It’s Been Here All Along
Release Date: October 23, 2021
Label: Prescott Recordings

In Their Words: “This song is dedicated to the inner circle of friends and family that my wife, daughter, and I have relied on throughout the pandemic. As we maneuver and pivot through this time it’s a blessing to have a crew. This song, like all of the songs on this record, was made with a resonator guitar on a two track reel-to-reel recorder. All of these songs use a Freeport tuning (CGCGCD) and the themes are written to be improvised on. For the video I made a collage using a grocery bag and some Polaroid and Sprocket photos from the past year. I thought using physical photos in a video shoot would give the sense of vagueness to the faces, like anyone who saw this could imagine their own crew in a ghostlike, snapshot form.” — Ross Hammond

Photo credit: Lola Hammond

WATCH: Robert Finley, “I Can Feel Your Pain”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Robert Finley
Hometown: Bernice, Louisiana
Song: “I Can Feel Your Pain”
Album: Sharecropper’s Son
Label: Easy Eye Sound

Editor’s Note: Read our BGS interview with Robert Finley.

In Their Words: “‘I Can Feel Your Pain’ relates really to what is going on today. From people losing loved ones to the pandemic, all the marches going on, people being slaughtered by the police. Even if you don’t really know about the situation from a personal perspective you feel sympathy for that person who had to go through those things and this song is for them.” — Robert Finley

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

WATCH: Kristy Cox, “Person of the Year”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Kristy Cox
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee, by way of Mount Barker, Australia
Song: “Person of the Year”
Album: Shades of Blue
Release Date: February 4, 2022
Label: Billy Blue Records

In Their Words: “‘Person of the Year’ is such a special song that pays tribute to nurses and doctors who work tirelessly to save others. The last 18 months have been especially hard on them. Jerry Salley and Bill Whyte brought tears to my eyes with their lyrics that ring so true and we wanted to bring that to life in this video, in a way that was respectful to those on the front line. The producer Steve Kinney and team did an amazing job completing that wish. I am so proud of this song and video.” — Kristy Cox

Photo credit: Katrina Burgoyne

From the Scrap Pile, James McMurtry Crafts a Frank (and Fictional) Album

Posted on by Editor

Holding a conversation with James McMurtry is similar to experiencing his music. He is frank, eloquent, and gets to the heart of the matter with few words. On The Horses and the Hounds, his first album of new material in nearly seven years, he tells sometimes complicated emotional stories through his fictional characters, crafted within the limits of rhyme and meter. His deft chronicling of human nature woven with descriptions of place and scene give the listener context beyond the experience, almost like each song is the essence of a short story or novel. In “Fort Walton”, he describes a knotty internal conflict in three lines as his grumpy narrator admonishes himself for losing his temper at his hotel:

The internet’s down and they don’t know why
And I damn near made the desk clerk cry
And there wasn’t any reason for that

McMurtry dialed in to Zoom for this conversation with BGS.

BGS: You recorded this album in L.A. at Jackson Browne’s studio. When you went to do that, did you have a precise amount of songs ready? Do you overcut or undercut?

McMurtry: It depends on the record. I’ve never really overcut by much. This time it was the way I used to do it when I was in my 20s. I sort of metaphorically do my homework on the school bus. The way this one worked out is Ross Hogarth, the producer, knew Jackson and he found a window when we could get into his studio to track, but he said, “You gotta finish the songs by this date.” Most of the songs were finished within the last month before tracking. Some of them I actually finished in a Rodeway Inn in Culver City the night before we tracked it. Sometimes that works. That adrenaline rush of having a deadline will get you through. Very few of the songs were started and finished from scratch for this record. Mostly I work from a scrap pile. I have a laptop. I scroll through my notes app. I scroll through my writing programs and look for lyrics that go together or something that I want to work on right then. But there were a couple like “If It Don’t Bleed” that I wrote specifically for this record.

How often do you write?

Not very often at all. I write when it is time to make a record usually. And that depends on when my tour draw falls off. When I started making records thirty years ago the strategy was to tour to support record sales. The business model was that you were supposed to sell enough records to make royalties and to live off them. That never happened. My records were very expensive to make when I was on Columbia. They never came near recouping their production expense and so I wound up learning how to tour cheap. That came in handy much later when Napster and Spotify turned the whole business on its head. Everybody had to figure out how to do what I and some of my contemporaries were already doing. Which was just drive around in a van and keep everything cheap and profit on the tour.

I’ve read that you don’t consider your songs to be autobiographical. Where do you find your characters? How do you bring them to life?

I am a fiction writer. There will be a little bit of my life in a song but it is gonna get rearranged for the sake of a better story. Usually, I’ll hear a couple of lines and a melody in my head and I ask myself, “Who said that?” I try to envision the character who would have said those lines then I work backward to the story.

Speaking of melody, when you are writing, rhyme and meter are clearly important to you and you are masterful at both. But do you consider melody as you are crafting lines from the get-go?

Definitely. I’ve put words to music a few times. I have had jams with my band that I did off the cuff and years later I’d put lyrics in them, like “Saint Mary of the Woods,” which was the title track to one of my records. That came out of a jam that we recorded just for the fun of it. But it is very hard to put words to music. I don’t think I have ever tried to start with just words and then tried to put music to that. I usually have to get a little bit of melodic sense.

In terms of the song “Operation Never Mind,” you hone in on the lack of information we have about what war and conflict are really like these days. Can you talk about your inspiration for that song?

When I was a kid, Vietnam was still going on in full force. We only had three or four television networks and everyone listened to Walter Cronkite. He was the voice of the center and everyone right left and center listened to him. That war did not end because kids were marching in the streets. We pulled out because Walter Cronkite got enough of it. His generation decided it was a stalemate and we were never going to get out of it so we left. … One of the things that has struck me over the years is that we no longer have actual war coverage. Back in Cronkite’s day, we’d watch the 6 o’clock news and we’d see actual footage from battles and shots of the troops walking along and looking bored and lonesome on a hot dusty day. We got more of a feel for what that war was actually like. Whereas now, we get nothing.

Now they say there are embeds out there with the troops, some of whom are doing very good journalism but it is not front page, because there is no front page. Everyone has their own channel to go to hear their own opinions shot back at them. We just don’t have coverage. We don’t have any idea of what the actual war is like. Or what it is about or why we are there, really. War is big money. I think there are a lot of powerful people who would have just as soon stayed in. That’s kind of what I tried to do in the song. Just remind people, “Hey, we got people in harm’s way over there. As citizens, we are supposed to question why and we are not doing it. Nobody is pointing the way.

In lieu of being able to tour, you’ve been streaming performances, right? How has it been connecting to fans online?

It is a different skill. I have yet to really elevate it to an art form. But it needs to be done. People need to do more of this. A lot of people looked at streaming as a stopgap measure. I’ve gone into it thinking, this might be what I’m doing. I might have to be this twisted Mr. Rogers guy for the rest of my life. I better figure out how to have fun with it. And I have. I can sit here with six or seven acoustic guitars, all of them tuned and capoed for whatever song I’m going to do. It is easy. I don’t have to move a lot of stuff. I’d never carry that many acoustics on the road. They’d take up half the van.

You have a dedicated page to COVID-19 on your website and you’ve been vocal about the pandemic. Have you had any revelations about how the music industry works or things you would like to see changed?

I’ve never had a firm handle on the music industry. I work my little corner of it. I really can’t predict what is going to happen but I do think that Jason Isbell’s mindset will prevail in the concert industry. I’m trying to impose that myself. I don’t play indoors unless you’ve got a vaccination card and a mask. Outdoors I’ll be a little laxer. We can’t have big indoor gatherings with the delta variant going on.

Austin is just rife with breakthrough cases now, especially amongst musicians. Seems like the drummers and the singers get it first because they are breathing down to their toenails. Drumming is an extremely aerobic activity and the same with singing. If there is some viral load hanging in the air, a singer is going to get it probably. It’d take two hands to count the cases — fully vaccinated COVID cases — among Austin musicians. And that’s just this morning.

I’ve played a couple of outdoor shows and I’m going to New Mexico and Arizona in early September. I had to cancel a show in Phoenix because they wouldn’t agree to my safety protocol but it turns out another venue in Phoenix was fine with it. Jason Isbell has really taken a big stand and he’s had to move a lot of big shows. Overall the trend is going to be towards his state of mind. If we are going to have a concert business in the future, it is going to be mask and vax. It will take a little while for people to flip over or else nobody is going to play.

Photo credit: Mary Keating-Bruton

LISTEN: Ben Bostick, “Like Old People Do”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Ben Bostick
Hometown: Born in Beaufort, South Carolina. Currently resides in Lilburn, Georgia
Song: “Like Old People Do”
Album: Grown Up Love
Release Date: August 20, 2021

In Their Words: “My friend Pam Hobby, a great songwriter herself, came to one of my shows, and we were chatting between sets. She told me that she and her boyfriend had been down in the Keys doing nothing, sitting at the end of the dock on rocking chairs and watching the sunset ‘like old people do.’ My songwriter brain latched onto that phrase and immediately started writing the song. I think I had it mostly written by the time I played my next set. It was a perfect sentiment for my life.

“My wife Cari and I had been rushing around to doctor’s appointments, therapies, pharmacies, going sleepless with a newborn and also our oldest daughter’s Carmela’s terrible sleep disturbances (due to Rett Syndrome), and generally going at a hundred miles an hour. We needed to slow down just to maintain our sanity. We needed to take a page out of the old people’s book of love, and just sit still, saying nothing, holding hands like old people do. Of course taking a vacation to the coast with two babies during COVID wasn’t possible, because of so many different reasons, but this song helped us realize that we needed to take a breath whenever possible.” — Ben Bostick

Photo credit: Carey Hood

WATCH: The New Acoustic Collective, “Old Gray Coat” Feat. Wyatt Rice

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The New Acoustic Collective
Hometown: San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area
Song: “Old Gray Coat” Featuring Wyatt Rice
Album: Art of Acoustics
Release Date: September 20, 2021

In Their Words: “Tony Rice’s ‘Old Gray Coat’ has a special place in The NAC’s repertoire. This specific project came about when artistic director of Bay Area nonprofit Music in Place, Aaron Lington, contacted us and wanted to include us in the list of amazing musicians featured in a remotely-filmed music video production during the COVID-19 pandemic. I began to give Aaron some suggestions on song ideas and he really enjoyed ‘Old Gray Coat’ by Tony Rice. I thought if The NAC was going to record ‘Old Gray Coat,’ I’d like to feature a special guest, Tony’s brother Wyatt Rice. To have the opportunity to collaborate closely with both our NAC members and Wyatt Rice as a special guest was a dream come true!

“The fun and challenging part of this project was that it was all distanced and used with a click track, which started with me tracking my rhythm guitar part. Afterwards, Wyatt recorded his parts and then The NAC featuring Alonso Sanchez (double bass), David Boyden (fiddle), and Nathaniel Grohmann (cello) layered their parts and solos from there. Overall, the creative partnership between The NAC and Wyatt Rice was particularly rewarding and we are all grateful to work with him along with Music in Place, a nonprofit with an amazing mission!” — Jason Keiser, The New Acoustic Collective

Photo credit: Music in Place

These Members of the Roots Community Embraced Innovation Amid a Pandemic

Posted on by Editor

The roots music community, like the rest of the world, faced an uncertain future as the pandemic essentially wrecked everybody’s plans in 2020. However, a number of musicians and industry leaders figured out a way to navigate the uncharted waters with grace and bravery. The Bluegrass Situation invited five members of the roots community to share their thoughts on how they harnessed their creativity and embraced innovation over the last 12 months.

Billy Strings, Winner of “Breakthrough Artist of the Pandemic” at the 2021 Pollstar Awards:

It was almost kind of a welcomed break, you know? I was tired, man. We had toured our asses off and I was like, I don’t know if I can do this anymore. Then all of a sudden, this stuff happened and we got a big break. And now I realize how lucky I was. Now there’s nothing I’d like more than to be stuck in some hotel room somewhere after a gig with some random folks at 3 o’clock in the morning, just hanging out and having a good-ass time.

For one thing I wanted to get the quality [of livestreaming] better than what I could do at my house. It started with just me on my couch playing, and the next thing you know we’re doing that tour where we’re playing the Exit/In and gigs around Nashville. It was kind of cool and eerie and weird. I’m just thinking, I know there are people out there watching us, but they’re not here and I can’t see them. When you’re used to playing for crowds, it’s like, man, this sucks! [Laughs]

We did debut a lot of songs at the Capitol Theater when we did our gigs there in February. We played like 16 brand new songs when we were over there. … People will go on fan pages and say, “Holy shit, did you hear that song?!” I don’t want to pay attention too much to that, because it just feels like you’re playing for the internet, but then it is good to get a good little gauge on what songs they’re digging.

Mercy Bell, Singer-Songwriter and Cast Member of the New Documentary, The Sound of Us:

I think a fallow season is really important for everyone, or we’re producing from an empty well. Not of creativity, I think creativity is always there, but contrary to popular opinion of the tortured and manic creator, even artists need to sleep and drink eight glasses of water a day. Like all of us, I spent 2020 trying to survive. I had a nervous breakdown. I lost my job. I had a heartbreak. I turned to art, pop culture, movement, exercise, my cats, meditation, to keep me going. …

There was a period of time I didn’t know if I’d make it. I was in a pretty dark place before I got some new treatment for my mental health. I was obsessively walking 14 miles a day, really scared, really not wanting to be alive, in quarantine far from my family, unemployment wasn’t coming through. Scheduling livestreams gave me something to look forward to. Playing music to my supporters, all over the world, it made me feel less alone. I don’t know how any performance will ever beat that. We really needed each other. Singing to people gave me a reason to keep going in the most literal sense. And my supporters also kept me fed! All those $5 tips kept groceries in my fridge. And then Netflix and podcasts, Cardi B’s “WAP,” and my cat kind of saved me. It gave me something to look forward to. That’s the power of art and pop culture, and pets. It cuts through to places we can’t get to. It got me through each day, one day at a time.

Without giving too much away, The Sound of Us spotlights a variety of musicians and the incredible impact their work (or lack thereof because of COVID) has. Some of those highlighted include folks working to bring music to underprivileged neighborhoods, into prisons and hospitals, working on researching lost works of art from the Holocaust and other genocides, and of course, how musicians were affected by institutional racism and the pandemic. When I saw the screening, I cried all my eye makeup off. It’s an incredibly emotional and profound documentary. I am so proud to have been part of it.

Robert Meitus, Co-Founder and VP of Industry Development of Mandolin.com:

Roots music fans tend to have a strong connection with artists and a desire to connect frequently and deeply. Additionally, the nature of roots music itself is built around intimacy, vulnerability and honesty, so that desire for connection really runs both ways. Mandolin’s vision has always been to build a space in the digital world where the noise of the industry fades away; one where a musician and their fans can connect not only through a concert stream, but through other unique experiences like interactive/online VIP events, soundchecks and workshops with artists.

Specifically, Mandolin started with a name that is itself an acoustic instrument and a workforce full of people who had worked a lot with roots music, including among others: myself, representing as an attorney artists such as John Prine, I’m With Her, and Keb’ Mo’; Jason Wilber, longtime guitarist for John Prine; and Larry Murray, formerly of the Luck Reunion. The name and connections naturally led us to develop the roots music connections in our first year, although Mandolin’s technology and services are certainly applicable to all music genres.

I have been a bit surprised at the almost uniformly positive views about integrating streaming into the live festival experience. It helps that cameras have been in place on and around stages for many years already, largely for the IMAG projections on the sides of stages, so musicians are used to this. COVID introduced livestreaming technology and practices to the music world at a much faster rate than would have been the case otherwise, and we have all learned how technology can connect us around the world and accommodate those that may be challenged to attend an event in person. The result is that, coming out of the pandemic, I believe bluegrass and other festivals will be more interested in the hybrid livestream for all sorts of reasons. This may be a bold claim, but I would expect that almost every festival — roots or otherwise — will have a virtual experience component. Think about it: with a phone in hand, every single fan is a digital fan, whether they are streaming at home or on the festival grounds.

Jackie Venson, R&B/Soul Artist and Guitarist from Austin, Texas:

I was pretty well-versed in livestreaming pre-pandemic. I had a series called Jackie Venson Live on Thursdays, which was an effort to help sell tickets to my album release at the Paramount in Austin, Texas, in 2019. I saw the potential in it when it first came out in 2014. I attempted to livestream a concert from Berlin, Germany, but the technology just wasn’t there yet so it was a really bumpy experience. I remember feeling really grateful that the technology existed when the pandemic was ramping up so that I could keep performing once there was no option for in-person shows. There was literally nothing else to do, and when there’s nothing to do I lose my mind and default to the first thing I can think of, which in this case was filling the performance void with livestream performances.

I used my Austin City Limits TV performance as a platform for Black Lives Matter because that episode will be rerun and it’s important to me that this message doesn’t die. The response overall was positive; of course there were some naysayers but that’s why we need to keep repeating the message. During the pandemic I received overwhelming support and positive feedback from the Austin music community. Everyone was on the same page and it seems as though things are changing for the better. I will absolutely continue to stream from home when possible, and I plan to livestream some of my shows from the road for those who want or need to stay home. I think livestreaming will be a staple in the world of live music. It makes live shows accessible to those who are unable to come out due to economic, accessibility, or other issues. (Read the BGS interview.)

Aengus Finnan, Executive Director of Folk Alliance International:

Everything was upside down last year, but the greatest challenge was envisioning and delivering an event we had never done, with half the staff, all new software, no roadmap, and little sense of whether anyone would want to gather online 11 months into a Zoomed-out pandemic. Being able to offer a sliding scale registration fee, including free, was absolutely necessary given how hard hit our community was, and despite that approach, we exceeded our modest revenue goals to cover the costs of the new online systems we used. The most rewarding element was definitely having new artists and industry join us for the first time, and to see a sharp increase in BIPOC and marginalized community representation across all panels. That happened because we were able to extend invitations to participate in more accessible ways. We were also thrilled to finally provide honorariums to all panelists this year, which we are committed to continuing.

Personally, it’s a joy to see FAI play a part in curating, commissioning, and compensating artists for meaningful new content and partnerships, which is the central aim of our Artist In Residence program — playfully renamed Artists in (Their) Residences this year for the pandemic. There were certainly some artists we approached who simply don’t do co-writes, some for whom the online process felt odd, and others who, while flattered, were simply too busy with other projects or recordings. But for the most part, there was instant interest, especially when they knew that one of their peers had selected or recommended them. The cross-border collaboration as part of a bigger collective project, reflecting on a traumatic year, with the added element of raising awareness for The Village Fund to support the community rang a lot of “count me in” bells.

We are already full steam ahead with a hybrid event this year, and we’re not looking back. Our focus will naturally be on ensuring that the in-person event is top-notch and delivers the experience we all know and love, but there are thousands of people who can’t attend each year, for myriad reasons, and providing online content, as well as live-streamed and interactive content enables more community engagement, participation, and inclusion, and builds bridges and connections that folks will use as an entry point leading to the growth of our genre and industry. While daunting, we’re excited about the opportunity to innovate what we do and offer, and who we can reach.

Photo of Billy Strings by Emma Delevante

WATCH: Joyann Parker, “Out of the Dark”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Joyann Parker
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Out of the Dark”
Album: Out of the Dark
Label: Hopeless Romantics Records

In Their Words: “‘Out of the Dark’ is a very special song that probably never would have been written if COVID and the resulting quarantine hadn’t happened. I had named the album, but didn’t have a track named after it, so when we were forced to stop recording in the studio and I slowed down, I decided I really wanted to write it. The song reflects on the journey that I have been on over the last couple of years, working on healing things in my past like anxiety and emotional trauma and finally coming into the light of who I truly am, working to see myself as God sees me. I wanted to share my story in hopes that others who are struggling might be encouraged.” — Joyann Parker

Photo credit: Jeannine Marie Photography

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

Posted on by Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you wind up in Durham?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did that video come together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Chris Frisina