Tag: Drew & Ellie Holcomb

BGS Wraps: Roots Music for the Season

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In our eyes and to our ears, there’s no better family of musical genres to usher in the holiday season than roots music. Bluegrass, Americana, old-time, country, blues, and beyond – they’re all perfectly suited for the coziest time of year, for togetherness, for parties and gift giving and cookie icing. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Winter Solstice – or even if you feel like opting out of the ruckus altogether – there is roots music for you.

Each year, we like to share our picks for the rootsiest time of the year in BGS Wraps, a weekly collection of songs, videos, albums, shows, tours, and events that celebrate the season. We share a few of our favorites, mostly brand new but often classics and timeless selections, too. Plus, we collect all that we can into a running playlist so you’re ready when the family or party hands you the aux cable.

To kick off the season this year, we’ve got a BGS Wraps full of Good Country, jingle bells, Texas snow, holiday generosity, and plenty of glittering lights and joyous cheer. We hope you enjoy BGS Wraps and tune in the next two weeks as we continue our series celebrating the holiday season.

A Very Carper Christmas, Melissa Carper

One of our favorite purveyors of Good Country in the most legit old-school, Texas, Western swing, and outlaw styles, Melissa Carper has just launched her own album of holiday music, A Very Carper Christmas. It boasts quite a few originals and co-writes and a couple covers of classics, too. The collection is silky smooth and timeless, a perfect accompaniment to holiday cooking, decorating, gallivanting from store to store, or cozying up by the fire with your loved one of choice.

Starting December 4, Carper will join JD McPherson’s “Socks: A Rock & Roll Christmas” tour around the Southeast, East Coast, and Midwest. So don’t miss your chance to catch these Good Country seasonal songs live in person. Melissa Carper tour details here.

“When It Snows in Texas,” Chaparelle & Sierra Ferrell

Let’s keep it going with more Austin-based Good Country! Last month, alt-country supergroup Chaparelle announced a brand new co-write and collaboration with everyone’s current favorite old-time Americana goddess, Sierra Ferrell. “When It Snows in Texas” is the perfect seasonal holiday number, apt for each and every rootsy holiday playlist and certainly suited to occasions beyond just Christmas. With a languid, loping groove, it’s all wrapped up in alt sounds that remind of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and a casual sing-along sidled up to a shiny wooden bar all at the same time. This is the country & western (heavy on the ampersand western) vibe we all crave – this time of year or anytime.

Feels Like Christmas, Mickey Guyton

Singer-songwriter and country star Mickey Guyton is no stranger to festive song releases, but Feels Like Christmas is officially her first full-length holiday album. From the adorable “Sugar Cookie” to the classic pop trappings of the title track to her “Christmas Isn’t Christmas” duet with the Michael Bolton, Feels Like Christmas feels… well, grown up. Fully realized. Ready for your moody, ambient Christmas cocktail hour or a laughter-rich, full kitchen, too. Guyton makes some of the best crisp, modern, radio-ready country around today, and this holiday collection – like most if not all of her discography – feels made to last the ages, too.

Further leaning into the festivities of the season, Guyton will also appear in a brand new Hallmark movie, A Grand Ole Opry Christmas, which is premiering this year during Hallmark Channel’s 16th annual Countdown to Christmas programming event. Guyton certainly has our number, and we’ll be camped out in front of the TV with our hot ciders and sugar cookies ready and waiting for this incredible Opry, country music, and Hallmark crossover.

I’ll Be Home for Christmas, Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Drew & Ellie Holcomb have added to their deep-and-wide catalog of holiday and seasonal music with a brand new EP entitled I’ll Be Home For Christmas. The project adds three lovely covers of Christmas favorites to the stacked roster of selections the couple and their Neighbors trot out each winter for the season. This year, they’ll perform two “Neighborly Christmas Special” shows in Tennessee – in Memphis on December 5 and in Nashville on December 12 – before heading out on their next headline tour in February. Find ticket info here, then put on I’ll Be Home For Christmas while you make your holiday lists and check them twice.

The Greatest Christmas On Earth, Robert Earl Keen

Now this right here sounds like our kind of Americana Christmas circus! Robert Earl Keen kicks off his “The Greatest Christmas On Earth” tour this week, crisscrossing the South and Southeast through the month of December spreading cheer, joy, silliness, and light – and keeping the party going down the road forever, as he does.

The tour will kick off on December 4 in REK’s hometown of Kerrville, Texas, and you can be sure each night will feature his paean to the beauty and dysfunction of families at the holidays, “Merry Christmas From The Family.” Put all your own rowdy relatives in the van and don’t miss these shows. Ticket info here.

“Dream a Dream of Christmas,” Lydia Luce

Lydia Luce just released her excellent brand new album, Mammoth, in late October, but even before the project’s release she was looking ahead to the winter and holiday seasons with a A-side / B-side single release, “Dream a Dream of Christmas.” Like her songs in general, the A-side selection is contemplative, emotional, and rich with text painting and lush piano and vocals. Resonant strings play along with the contours of her vocal, punctuated by Christmas-y percussion and scoring, like Hollywood holiday offerings of the ’50s and ’60s. The track’s B-side is a delightful rendition of the beloved carol “Silent Night” that’s dramatic and rich – and features guest vocals by Caroline Spence. Both songs would be excellent additions to your themed playlists for the season.

OCMS XMAS, Old Crow Medicine Show

It’s hard to believe one of bluegrass and old-time’s longest running party string bands, Old Crow Medicine Show, have just released their first holiday album this year – but it’s true! OCMS XMAS is zany, rollicking, and unhinged. (As it should be.) It’s a collection of stories, songs, and tableaus that are just as fantastic and engaging as any of their rip-roaring live shows or any of their adored albums from their stacked discography. It’s a Christmas album as only Old Crow could make, and frontman Ketch Secor’s fingerprints are all over the track listing. From “Corn Whiskey Christmas” to “Breakin’ Up Xmas” to “Krampus Night” and beyond, this set of material will certainly be a Holiday Hootenanny on stage. Catch their Holiday Hootenanny on tour through December 20, before the band returns yet again to the Ryman Auditorium for their iconic annual New Year’s celebration performances to close out the year.

Sweet Relief’s Annual Holiday Auction

Sweet Relief is a non-profit organization with a mission that we all – in the music industry and outside of it – can get behind. For more than 30 years Sweet Relief has worked to provide financial assistance to musicians and music industry workers who are facing illness, disability, or age-related challenges. Just last week, they launched their annual holiday auction yet again, offering signed memorabilia and in-person experiences with a variety of artists in roots music and beyond, all of which benefit their important mission and vital work supporting music professionals’ mental and physical health.

Folks can bid on offerings from artists and musicians like Billy Strings, Hozier, Pearl Jam, Walker Hayes, The Decemberists, the Black Keys, Amanda Shires, Gregory Alan Isakov, and many, many more. If you’re planning your Giving Tuesday donations and also wondering what to get the music lover in your life who already has everything, perhaps you can check two things off your list in one go by supporting Sweet Relief. Learn more and view the auction items here.

Jingle All The Way Tour, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones

No holiday season would be complete without regularly returning to one of the best roots holiday albums ever made, Béla Fleck & the Flecktones’ Jingle All The Way. Released in 2008, the GRAMMY Award-winning album is beloved in and outside of roots music spheres – it even landed a mention in Oprah’s O Magazine back in ’08! Now, Fleck and the band – including Victor Wooten, Roy “Future Man” Wooten, Howard Levy, and special guests Jeff Coffin, Alash, and Sierra Hull (on select dates) – are taking their virtuosic cheer back on the road with a full slate of Jingle All The Way Tour shows. The tour kicked off in Nashville and will continue through December 20 hitting performing arts centers and theaters in the Midwest and across the Eastern U.S. To mark the occasion, Fleck & the Flecktones released their first holiday music since Jingle All The Way, a single medley of “The First Noel/Joy To The World.” If you can’t make the shows, put the original album and new single on the stereo – but we really recommend snagging tickets and seeing them live, with this superlative lineup, if you can.

Lead Image: Mickey Guyton, Feels Like Christmas; Melissa Carper by Lyza Renee; Old Crow Medicine Show courtesy of the artist.

LISTEN: Drew & Ellie Holcomb, “Bones”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Drew & Ellie Holcomb
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Bones”
Release Date: January 18, 2023
Label: Magnolia Records/Tone Tree Music

In Their Words: “We are not just the sum of our genes or the simple organization of atoms, we are the stories we have been told and keep telling, our love stories are songs and metaphors, ways of making sense of beating our isolation by cheating time and cheating death with the one we love. ‘Bones’ is a back-and-forth conversation between two lovers, sharing the way the stories they tell about each other are the ties that bind them together. This song is so many things to me. It’s love and play and truth and dare and gratitude that found a melody for the breath that’s in our lungs and for the life that we get to make together. Drew has been known to say that marriage is about beating death. I think he’s right. Love has a way of making meaning out of the time we have here, even in the midst of all the tragedies we experience. I hope this song reminds all who hear it that we really don’t have to do it alone.” — Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

Drew Holcomb, Bandleader and Bourbon Collector, Taps Into a New Golden Age

Posted on by Editor

Drew Holcomb writes and sings often about the comforts of home and family life, but don’t assume he’s setting his family and himself as role models.

The leader of roots-rockers Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Drew (who is the BGS Artist of the Month for January along with wife Ellie Holcomb) is quick to point out that the couple is “not trying to portray any sort of ideal.”

“We just write about our life,” says the singer-songwriter, whose most recent projects are a tour and compilation album with Ellie. “That’s sort of the season that we’re in. It would be disingenuous for me to try to write anything different than what I see and experience, the lens that I have.” Drew says he does have some narrative songs in his catalogue that are less personal, “but it’s not tended to be where I’m drawn to as a songwriter.”

Of nine songs on the new collection Coming Home: A Collection of Songs, the couple harmonize twice about the comforts of home, four times about their love for each other, once about their love for their “wild man” 3-year-old son Rivers and once about the need to “Love Anyway.” The collection concludes with a cover of Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” which is appropriate given their You and Me Tour, which launches February 4 in Jacksonville, Florida.

BGS called the couple for companion interviews; enjoy Ellie’s Q&A here.

BGS: Your band, Ellie’s solo work, and the duo each have a separate, unique sound. Do you purposely work to give each a different style?

Drew Holcomb: Part of that’s personality. When I’m recording with the Neighbors, it’s always the same players, who I’ve been playing together with for years. And then Ellie has worked with different producers and different musicians than me, and she has her own stylistic creative impulses and decisions. So those two roles are clearly differentiated, and then we get together. We decided to let each song sort of dictate itself. There’s some good variety in there, but it lends itself toward more of a singer-songwriter vibe with a little more atmospheric, sonic landscape kind of creativity.

After Ellie left the band (Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors), she eventually started a successful career in Christian music. Where did the idea of also working as a duet come from?

She was in the band and took seven years off from that, and is still not in the band, but we do this (You and Me) tour together every year. We thought we should write some new music. We had not written together in almost a decade. We just put them up on Spotify and stuff like that, and they actually performed really well. The music sort of became its own sort of separate entity from my work with the Neighbors and her solo work.

Your take on Sting’s “Fields of Gold” pares back the production for a comparatively sparse interpretation. You and Ellie also do that on your Kitchen Covers series. Why that approach?

I primarily see myself as a songwriter, maybe secondarily as a singer. And thirdly, as a performer, entertainer. The genius of a song can get lost in some of the ornate production and people just think about it as a pop song, right? They don’t hear the great songwriting at the bare bones of it. I’m not a theatrical, big singer. So I kind of quiet things down, take the dynamic down on an “Islands In the Stream.” It’s just an interesting approach.

You’ve mentioned Van Morrison and Bob Seger as influences in the past. Who else are your musical heroes?

I love Tom Petty for a lot of reasons. I love how he played with the same guys for the majority of his career, working with different producers, made different styles of records but always with the same sort of North Star. Springsteen. There’s so many. Carole King, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson. There’s like 100 persons.

Americana is increasingly the category of singer-songwriters in popular music, where in the past comparable artists like Jim Croce and James Taylor had big hits on the mainstream pop charts. Is that frustrating for you?

Yes, certainly it is, to some degree. But if I was starting out in 1971, I don’t think I was good enough to have gotten a label deal, the only way to get records released in that era. The era I was born in gave me that long runway to hone my craft. Yes, there’s not as much opportunity commercially for what artists like myself do. But if it ever is frustrating, it’s something I move on from pretty quickly, just because you can’t change when you were born. I do think it’s actually a really wonderful time to put out music because there’s a lot of space for a lot of artists. While there may be less of us on a large commercially successful level, there’s probably more of us doing it in general, at the “pay your bills and keep moving forward” level. There’s so many good artists making great records that it’s a different type of a golden age.

Can you be immodest for a moment and tell me which of your songs might have staying power and be covered years from now?

I don’t know. I’ll let posterity decide if that happens. We get videos all the time where people are out and they’re hearing some person in a restaurant playing our songs. It’s really cool to see other artists and songwriters giving it a go. I definitely have been surprised by “What Would I Do Without You,” from the Good Light album. It seems to have that sort of staying power. I hear from people that their grandparents love the song, and then their kids love the song. If I could get kids who grew up on my music that came out before they were born and they still like it, that would be a good barometer of the staying power of the songs themselves. I’m starting to see that a little bit, and I hope that continues.

Are you still in the whiskey business?

I am. Just a very small partner on a thing called Sweetens Cove Tennessee Bourbon. It’s been a fun endeavor for sure. My manager and I both are collectors of bourbons and various whiskeys. When I was living in Scotland in college, I started drinking scotch. I was a history major, so I always fall in love with the backstory of whatever thing I’m consuming. Whiskey is great for that because every brand’s got a good mythology story, a good origin story or creation story. It’s a fun thing to be a part of.

You’ve done some scattered dates since the coronavirus hit, but the February–March You and Me tour with Ellie is your first full-fledged tour since then. How do you feel about it?

It’s great. You don’t realize how much you love something until it’s taken away from you. We’re definitely going to play some new songs on the tour. We’ve been writing. I like to test new stuff out, tease it out a little bit.

Did you write a lot of songs while you couldn’t do many shows?

Maybe 40 and growing. I’m not proud of all of them. Half of them are worth taking into the studio to see what happens.

So you’ll throw out 20 songs?

Usually, I cannibalize them. I take the stuff I like out of them and start something new.

Do you have any particular ambitions for your music going forward? Is there somewhere you want to go that’s different than what you’re doing now?

I’m writing more than I’ve written in a long time. COVID’s been good for my writing in the last eight months at least. I’d like to probably increase the pace at which I release music, but maybe decrease the pace at which I tour. I’d love to get to that point where instead of every tour having to be connected to a new record, you just tour on and off all the time and put out music whenever it’s ready.

You’ve done collaborations with The Lone Bellow, Lori McKenna and Natalie Hemby. Do you see more of this cross-pollination in the future?

I did this thing with Johnnyswim. We did a collaborative EP (Goodbye Road). I have aspirations of doing more and more of that with other artists. I’ve been doing lots of co-writing. The older I get, the more freedom I feel to collaborate and hold my own creative rudder less tightly and see what happens. I think there’s some of that on the horizon as well. That’s also what’s been fun about working with Ellie, to do things differently, try to stretch different muscles creatively and challenge yourself in different ways and share the spotlight. That’s been a big thing for me.

Photo Credit: Ashtin Paige

With Clawhammer Banjo, Gregory Alan Isakov Covers the Lumineers

Posted on by Editor

Happy birthday, Dualtone Records! The Nashville-based indie music label is celebrating a tremendous milestone this year, commemorating the 20 years they’ve been in the business of bringing us beautiful albums from an array of classic Americana, folk, and indie artists. To mark the occasion, they have issued a compilation album cleverly titled Amerikinda: 20 Years of Dualtone. The album features many of Dualtone’s artists from the past and the present performing each other’s songs in a whimsical, jovial tribute to the work and achievements of the beloved record company. Upon announcing the album in April, the label released vice versa recordings by Gregory Alan Isakov and the Lumineers, each performing a song written and made famous by the other.

Isakov and the Lumineers are just two of the artists on Amerikinda; they share the liner notes with powerhouse names like Shakey Graves, Langhorne Slim, Drew & Ellie Holcomb, and more. In the video below, hear Isakov’s ghostly rendition of the introspective Lumineers number, “Salt and the Sea.” (The Lumineers also contribute a cover of Isakov’s “Caves.”)

“The Lumineers have been our friends and local comrades here in Colorado for years, and when Wes sent me the premaster of their last record, I was instantly drawn into every song,” Isakov said. “The song ‘Salt and the Sea’ particularly spoke to me, lyrically, along with that haunting melody. I collaborated with my bandmate Steve Varney to pluck out Jeremiah’s piano part with clawhammer banjo. What a beautiful song. I hope we did it justice.”

Upon the album reveal, Isakov added, “Not only are they incredibly good at table tennis, Dualtone is an astounding team of humans. I had never worked with a label before, other than my own label, and it’s been an absolute pleasure teaming up with Dualtone. They are such a hardworking, collaborative, kind-hearted group, and it’s an honor to be a part of their 20th anniversary compilation.”

Label co-founder and CEO Scott Robinson says, “From the very start, we’ve tried to build this safe, encouraging space for artists to experiment and create, and it’s just so cool to see how deeply these bands have connected with each other and to hear the influences and friendships that stretch across the whole history of the label. At the end of the day, there’s something special about the energy of Dualtone, and it’s not because of me or Paul [Roper, President/Partner] or any other individual. It’s because of the way that everyone, artists and staff alike, come together as a community.”

Photo credit: Rebecca Caridad

LISTEN: Drew & Ellie Holcomb, “Keep on the Sunny Side”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Drew & Ellie Holcomb
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Keep on the Sunny Side”
Album: Amerikinda: 20 Years of Dualtone
Label: Dualtone Records

Editor’s Note: The Amerikinda compilation features a slew of Dualtone artists and alumni all covering each other’s songs in celebration of the label’s landmark birthday. June Carter Cash won a Grammy for her recording of “Keep on the Sunny Side;” her version of The Carter Family classic was included on her 2003 album, Wildwood Flower, released by Dualtone.

In Their Words: “Congrats on 20 years Dualtone. Thanks for being one of the most artist friendly labels out there. You have a great team and we are honored to be a part of the family tree. What an honor to cover one of the greatest of American classic songs ‘Keep on the Sunny Side,’ made famous by the Carter Family. We tried to add some tension to our version, with the tough, real life lyrics of the verses, juxtaposed with the one of the happiest choruses out there.” — Drew & Ellie Holcomb

Photo credit: Ashtin Paige