Watchhouse Found New Rituals Amid the Push and Pull of Change

Chances are you’ve cultivated a few personal routines to help you navigate the world: one for daily life, one for weekly, monthly, and so on. There’s also likely a handful of individual habits that affect how you choose to go about your routine. The former, at times, can influence the latter, fitting within each other like a pair of nesting dolls, adjacent and similar in their roles.

Then there are rituals. Though these three recurring sets of actions – routines, habits, and rituals – would seem like easily overlapping bedfellows, rituals carry an intrinsic quality the other two lack: mindfulness. Rituals bear a sense of intention like the other two, but it’s often coupled with an element of symbolism or custom. It’s not just a matter of doing something and saying it’s done; there are other connotations or expectations that may influence why doing it matters.

Holding this notion in mind, it’s Rituals that Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz of North Carolina duo Watchhouse have decided to name their new album. Through its 11 tracks, the married musicians posit an abundance of questions and actions, their contemplations placed in settings that are as clear as a simple back porch and as abstract as a space “through the looking glass,” “beyond this to and fro.” Settings that exist outside of not only any kind of routine, but separate from time and space all together.

Though Watchhouse’s new writings don’t seem to present rituals in their conventional form, the title still feels wholly appropriate. Marlin and Frantz’s reflections, wistful pining, and open-ended ruminations don’t lead to a sense of clear, expected structure that rituals would traditionally provide, but each song is lined with an abundance of intention, mindfulness, and hope for various outcomes. Sometimes these are overtly stated – Oh, I’m dreaming of a life with you in the sun/ And I hope our time together has only just begun… – and sometimes they are dressed in metaphors: Go fire your cannonball, go and fire away/ When the ashes fall we’ll start a brand new day.

There are defined ideas that Watchhouse put forth on the album: identity and awareness, the distinction between patterns and truths, how to develop a positive relationship with change, and what it means to evolve. All the same, while our internal responses to these songs may change over time, the very act of revisiting, replaying, and reconsidering their meanings, and how we are affected by them, can be a form of ritual in its own way.

Amid an extensive tour that will take them all over the U.S. and into Canada through summer and fall, Watchhouse spoke with BGS about their collaborative dynamic, how their individual artistic instincts influence the direction of a song, and the prevalence of duality in the album – as well as in their lives.

It’s been about four years since your last album and eight years since both your lives changed from bandmates to family. Given that Rituals focuses on patterns and the perception of change on our lives, how has the ever-growing longevity of your union in marriage — and all the ways marriage transforms a relationship on its own — changed the way you perceive and interact with the music making process?

Andrew Marlin: When you hit the road and join forces with other people to play music, it’s kind of like stepping outside of the norm and stepping outside of the daily life to go up there and almost take on a role or take on a character in order to get inside the music. You kind of just forget everything that the day often requires of you, because all of a sudden those requirements aren’t there. It’s just the stage and the music and the people that are there rooting for you to go deep, you know?

I think finding that zone with Emily has had its challenges in the past, because we’re so closely tied to each other. We raise kids together and we live together, and so doing all this traveling together and playing music together too, it makes it harder – or made it harder for me at the beginning, I think – to leave the daily routine and expectations behind on stage and just shed all of that and take on that character. It’s one thing to look at your bandmates’ eyes and get a little nod or whatever’s happening during the music. It’s kind of like this understanding of, “I’m not here right now. This is just me playing music.”

Getting to that zone with Emily, now that we’re 16 years into it, has taken a while to get to that point to where it’s an acceptance of all of it, instead of just leaving things behind to get on stage. It’s like we’re carrying all of it with us at all points in time. People that come to see us get a real and honest version of ourselves, trying to go deep in the music but also being completely aware of each other too.

Emily Frantz: I was just thinking about how much things changed in 2020 and 2021, living our mundane day-to-day lives in our house, and the transition back into being on the road again and touring. We’ve obviously been doing that for a few years now since COVID, but that experience made us relearn what the relationship is between our daily life at home and touring and [figuring out] how can they coexist in a healthy way.

Ironically, the album’s opening track, “Shape,” avoids the traditional shape or structure of a song (all verses, no chorus) while the actual narrative of the song embraces ideas that lean into a sense of purgatory and a nebulous state of being — the very opposite of what would help establish a sense of shape, boundaries, identity, direction, patterns, or truths. What were the mental and emotional motivations that inspired you to take the song in this direction?

AM: It’s like establishing the shape or the pattern in order to separate yourself from it. That’s what a lot of those verses are doing, kind of outlining the things that often make me feel like I’m in a box and I’m trying to get outside of that box. The only way to do it – because there’s no real form to it – is to imagine the parameters, imagine the spaces that it ends up kind of confining you in, in order to step outside of those [boxes]. I think that was the intention with “Shape.”

EF: And the way that “Shape” came into its final form, at least final the way it appears on the record, was a lot of the things that you said about it: It didn’t ever really conform and it got rearranged and had things added and taken away from it so many times, a lot more so than other songs. But it always did feel like the backbone of this record in a lot of ways, which is why it felt really right as the opening track of this record.

AM: If there was a shape to define that song, I’d say it’s a spiral.

 

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How have you fit rituals into your lives and have they helped you maintain a sense of stable continuity as a family and as musicians?

AM: I feel like since having kids, the day has taken so much more form. Because I think that, and Emily [is] really brilliant about this, giving structure to the day is super helpful for them. So that they don’t have to wonder what’s happening, so that they can really pay attention to what is happening. I’ve watched both of our kids blossom in that environment. Emily’s really good about helping to create that and make sure we stick to it. Carrying that on the road has been really helpful, too and something that I didn’t realize I was going to benefit very much from. Because I definitely, when left to my own devices, am like a sheet left out to dry – just flapping in the wind. To have a little bit of structure to the day, and have to enter into these mental zones with the kiddos, has added a lot of mental structure to my existence. I think that’s the biggest thing for me.

And within that, it’s about realizing what the day actually requires of me, instead of what I imagined today to be expecting of me. Finding those real anchors and a little more gravity to the things I’m working on have helped me shed old expectations of myself and what I think I’m supposed to be doing. I think that’s what led us to be okay with changing the band name and changing up some of the sounds and approaching this thing we’ve been doing for a long time in a whole new way.

EF: I think the thing that we are [focusing on] 16 years in is finding where the balance is between freedom and artistic expression, and also just daily life and figuring out how to have those two things like coexist and make each other better and not be in a constant sort of push and pull.

The first verse in “Beyond Meaning” is intriguing. The statement of your “gentle” disposition is nice, but its seemingly conditional nature gives pause — particularly when considering that life is noisy and out of our control more often than not. What is it that you’re trying to say about your own identity and awareness of how you cope with the noise and bustle of everyday living?

AM: I feel like what I was getting at is to view it as though it’s external noise. But it’s actually internal noise. That’s often the thing that keeps me from my peace and keeps me from being gentle. It’s my own defenses and my own self-consciousness that end up creating all of this noise. It paints the external noise in a negative light. When I can control that and remember to keep my own defenses at bay and be open and actually present, the idea that maybe this external noise is not a malicious one keeps me gentle and then often what comes from that is a gentle interaction. So it’s more about controlling the internal noise in order to actually experience the external factors.

Out of the 11 songs on the album, Emily is the primary vocalist only for “Firelight.” Why was Emily the right fit to sing the story of this one song? And more broadly, what went into your shared thought process on when, and for how long, you two would sing together? Is it a purely harmony and arrangement-based decision, or do the emotions of a song influence how each vocal arrangement is structured?

EF: A lot of times it can be pretty cut and dry. If we’re deciding who should sing lead on a song, it might just have to do with the range or the key, where we think it sounds good. Sometimes that plays into it maybe even more than the lyrics or the subject matter. With Andrew doing the songwriting, he’s always been more of the primary lead vocalist. Oftentimes, by the time we’re arranging a tune and finding out how we want to present it, it’s very cemented in his voice. But then a lot of times, there will be tunes that we’re struggling with and we’re not quite finding it. By switching out who’s singing, it reframes the whole song and allows us to not just change the lead vocalist, but to find a whole different zone for the song in terms of what we hear and how it gets arranged and recorded. That was the case with “Firelight.” We had so many different versions of that song over the years leading up to recording – different time signatures, different instrumentation – and that was one of the last ones that came together for this album. Most of it got done after the initial tracking session because we were searching on it for a long time and I think I like it more and more the longer I sit with it, the more I hear it.

AM: Often people do want to know why Emily’s not singing more tunes or why the roles are what they are. But I think it’s really important to shine a little light on what Emily does behind the scenes when she’s not singing. The way she plays rhythm and plays violin or whatever instrument she’s on, it ends up being this anchor for everyone in the band. The way that offers complete structure to what we’re doing and allows everything else to sway around that a little bit, I feel like even when she’s not singing, her musical voice is such a strong presence in the music. I’ve heard her say this before, like when she’s playing violin, she’d rather not sing lead because it’s almost like having to sing with two voices. That became part of the structure of what we’ve been doing all along, not just with the lead vocal. The feel of the song and the rhythm and the chord structure and the flow of it all often is hinged on what Emily ends up doing. I think that’s just as important as her taking a lead vocal.

EF: I’ve really, over the years of us playing music together, come around to enjoying singing lead when we find the song that feels good in my range. But for the most part, I’d rather be singing harmony to Andrew and that definitely brings me just as much, if not more, fulfillment than singing lead on a song.

Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” and “Sway / Endless Highway (Pt. 2)” leave a much heavier state of reflection than that of “Patterns,” the song you chose as the album’s finale. Were the lighter tone of the music and the lyrics a driving factor for why these last three songs are in this order? Did you want to avoid an ending that leaves the listener with a more uncertain emotional state?

AM: I’ll start off by saying Ryan Gustafson, who produced this record with us, actually ended up coming up with this track order. Having not listened to it that way and then taking Ryan’s perspective on it, it was like being able to listen to these songs in their entirety for the first time. All of a sudden, I was getting feelings from these recordings that I hadn’t gotten yet.

“Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” is a heavier song and talks about a really traumatic event that Emily and I went through and that long drone at the end of it kind of dances around the dread of that. Then into “Sway,” it’s more of a coming out of that [feeling]. How do we peek our heads out of the hole once we’ve gone down and slowly crawl back out? To finally get into “Endless Highway (Pt. 2),” where it feels like a real revelation and a real triumphant part of the record? So, you get to the top of the mountain on this song. But I do believe that while those revelations come, we get to the top of those mountains, everything’s clear, and there’s so much lightness and clarity around us, we still have to wake up the next morning, make coffee, make breakfast, get kids to school, go and run errands and carry that little mountain of revelation with us everywhere we go.

I think that the heaviness and the profoundness of that idea ends up giving way to these smaller, mundane parts of our life. That’s what “Patterns” feels like to me. It’s an admission that if we can hold on to those little revelations and the clarity they offered us, hopefully it’ll keep us light by offering us that little reminder of hope.

EF: Going back to what Andrew was just saying about having these big events or these heavy, emotional things happen, and then having to go on with our lives, and the push and pull of that – there’s frustration and beauty in it. I love the order of those [last few] tracks, because I feel both the “Endless Highways” and “Sway” are songs that were written in the middle of this album being written and there’s a lot of anguish from a lot of different sources in those songs. And then “Patterns” was the last song that was written for the album before we recorded it, so it feels like it has a certain clarity to it. Going down in the trench and making your way back up, even though it’s still really just posing a lot of the same questions [as the beginning of the album], but from a more settled state of mind.

What truths about yourselves and how you view the world have you discovered and accepted since finishing Rituals? How many of the questions you’ve posed through these songs do you feel you’ve managed to settle on answers for?

AM: I don’t think I would often look closely enough at how I was making a person feel, as much as I would look at the way the person was. I think that’s becoming more of my truth these days, just to trust that showing up open-minded with awareness and consciousness, focused on experiencing rather than projecting, is probably the closest to any truths that have come out of writing these songs and getting to the end of this record. The takeaway is that it’s not like we found answers, necessarily.

EF: It’s all just a pursuit, always.

AM: You know, it’s not always about finding answers. It’s about finding out–

AM/EF: It’s figuring out what the question is.


Photo Credit: Jillian Clark

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GC 5+5: Southern Avenue

Artist: Southern Avenue
Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
Latest Album: Family
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): We don’t remember any rejected band names, but being from Memphis we definitely call everybody “mane.”

Answers have been provided by Tierinii Jackson, Southern Avenue lead vocalist and songwriter.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

It wasn’t one moment, it was the absence of one. I never imagined not being a singer and a songwriter. I grew up singing in church with my sisters and family and even when I ran away from all of that, the music stayed with me. Beale Street gave me my second education. That’s where I chose to be a full-time musician, even if the world didn’t choose it for me.

What is a genre, album, artist, musician, or song that you adore that would surprise people?

I love musical theater. It’s drama, it’s storytelling, it’s emotion on 10. I used to want to be on Broadway. Sometimes I still do. The song “Flying” on our new album is just about that. My mom actually turned the plane around mid-air so I wouldn’t fly to New York to make my dream come true. I do believe that it all connects and I have plenty of time to still do something special in that world.

What’s one question you wish interviewers would stop asking you?

People always ask how we met and how the band started. It’s everywhere online already. We just hope to get asked about new things now, go a little deeper. But it’s all good, no hard feelings at all. We love it when we have an interview where the person in front of us already has an understanding of who is in front of them.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

When we toured with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and John Mellencamp, it was already unbelievable. But then we found ourselves on stage at FarmAid, after two weeks on the road with them for the Outlaw Tour. I remember standing there thinking, “Am I dreaming?” It was one of those moments where everything just hits you, how far we’ve come, and how real it all is.

Genre is dead (long live genre!), but how would you describe the genres and styles your music inhabits?

We like to describe our music real simple. It’s Memphis music. That’s what raised us. We’re a mix of where we come from, how we grew up, and everything we dreamed of becoming. It all comes together in the sound.


Photo Credit: Rory Doyle

Ron Pope Chases His Dream On ‘American Man, American Music’

It may look rough around the edges, but Ron Pope’s journey through life encapsulates the American dream. He buffs out those spots, uncovering a hefty dose of humility, wisdom, and empowerment on his 11th studio record — American Man, American Music.

On it, the New Jersey-born, Georgia-raised singer uncovers moments from his childhood (like waking up before school to unload semi trucks) to the present day that have shaped him into the man he is and made his musical dreams a reality. But despite its title, the album is anything but exclusionary. Just like our nation’s diversity, American Man, American Music is a patchwork quilt of sounds, stories and experiences that serve to remind us that we’re all dealing with the same struggles and desires no matter what we look like or where we came from.

“I want to make music that other people can take and put into the moments in their lives,” says Pope. “The goal is that if I’m doing it right they’ll feel less alone. I want to put that back into the universe because I’ve taken so much of it out that it’s part of what buoyed me to get me to this point.”

This manifests itself in heartfelt vignettes centered around his family and recently discovered meaning of “home” on songs like the ode to his wife, “In The Morning With the Coffee On,” as well as “Mama Drove a Mustang,” an homage to his mom’s “let it ride” attitude that he wound up carrying into his own musical pursuits. But he’s also not afraid to get political on songs like “Klonopin Zombies,” a story about losing his grandmother that directly calls out the callousness of the pharmaceutical industry and sees him painfully pleading, “I swear there must be a heaven, ’cause where the hell else would someone like you go?”

Speaking by phone from his Nashville home between a mid-morning job and picking his daughter up from school, Pope spoke with BGS about home, family, platforming the next generation of artists and the experience that make up American Man, American Music.

You duet with Taylor Bickett on “I’m Not The Devil.” What spurred you to bring her aboard for it?

Ron Pope: Lately I’ve been finding so much inspiration in new artists. Growing up you tend to fetishize the stuff that came before you, almost like hero worship. Luckily I’ve come up in an era where so many of my contemporaries are masters, from Jason Isbell to John Moreland, which is really cool. But now I’m at a phase in my life where I’m getting more and more inspired by the artists coming in behind us. I remember first hearing Taylor’s songs, reading her lyrics, and seeing people making posts about sunsets and storms with her songs in them and was blown away. That’s what I love about music – you’re always finding new ways to be inspired.

What are your thoughts on the practice of platforming younger artists and what you stand to benefit from it as well?

If you make records your whole life, it’s going to be an ongoing challenge to find things that keep you engaged and excited about making music. It’s like a game that I’m always playing with myself. I want to find things about music that make me feel the way I did when I was a kid. Sometimes when people imagine an artist, they assume you’re only listening to people who sound like the same handful of songs that they know and that’s it, but I listen to all different sorts of music. Just the other night I was making pasta with my daughter in our kitchen listening to Dean Martin. On any given day I’ll move from that to some Tony Rice, Jason Isbell’s new song, Turnpike Troubadours, people like Taylor on Instagram, and then John Prine. I find inspiration everywhere and love that the music I make still feels fun and exciting because of it.

You just mentioned your daughter. I know family plays a big role on this record, from “In The Morning With the Coffee On,” to “Klonopin Zombies,” “Mama Drove a Mustang,” and others. Mind telling me about how that helps to serve as a through line on this project?

The central message is that we all share so many of the same sorts of experiences. For instance, in “Klonopin Zombies” I’m talking about this point in my life when my grandmother passed away eight days after my grandfather, leaving me wildly devastated. In life, we’re all going to experience powerful loss in that way; it’s just a matter of if it has happened to you yet or not. It’s the nature of living. My goal for doing that was to reach people on a more general level. If you are blessed enough to love people, then one day you will suffer because you lose people.

When I was first starting out, one of the complaints that music industry people would have about my music was that my songs were too specific and didn’t feel general enough, which was weird because for me those are the [kind of] songs that I always felt the most attached to.

Think about the Eagles’ – “Standing on the corner Winslow, Arizona/ Such a fine sight to see/ It’s a girl, my lord, and a flatbed Ford/ Slowin’ down to take a look at me…” or James Taylor’s – “Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone/ Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you.” You’re in the room, but you don’t know who he’s talking to or why. It’s like, how many times in your life have you watched someone struggle with the expectations people put on them? Even though he’s telling a very personal and very specific story, you’re brought in and it reminds you that there’s a human being on the other end of this.

We got to go to all these places and meet a lot of people, and what I have found as I have done that is most people want the same things – they want opportunities for themselves and for their children. They want to know that they’re safe, and that their kids are safe and are going to get educated. We have a lot more in common than we do that separates us, which can be hard to see when you’re just watching videos of people yelling or complaining about how differently they believe your neighbor is.

How does that idea tie into the album’s title – American Man, American Music?

It’s inherently political to say “I am an American man and this is American music.” It’s inherently political, but I didn’t want to make something to bash people over the head, because it’s hard to write stories that are both protest songs that feel like they matter and are actually good songs. So I decided to, with the exception of “I Gotta Change (Or I’m Gonna Die)” – which is a pretty open rebuke of the pharmaceutical industry expresses my anger towards it about the opioid crisis – I try to speak in more sweeping terms and not focus in on the things that I was angry about, instead focusing more on humanity and openness.

I’m following myself from when I was a child in these stories all the way to this moment in my life. I’m singing about the car my mother drove when I was six years old in “Mama Drove a Mustang,” then I’m singing a little prayer for my family that I wrote while I was out on the road in “The Life In Your Years” or how my wife and I have been together for almost 18 years on “I Pray I’ll Be Seeing You Soon.” It makes me realize that I have lived the American dream.

I’m just a regular person from a blue-collar family born to very good-hearted, well-intentioned teenage parents who didn’t have a lot of resources and did their best with the opportunities that were in front of them. There was no reason to believe at the start of my story that I would end up in this place. All of that is in there because I am an American and I am an American man, and I am making American music, but I don’t mean any of that to be exclusionary. So many people that are using all of those words do so to exclude others and I have lived the American dream and want others to be able to do the same. On this album I wanted to focus on telling great stories that highlighted my journey and my humanity and what it took for me to get to this place where I got to as a way of showing that I don’t think it’s something that we should hold hostage. We should want other people to be able to reach these things in a nation built by immigrants on stolen land.

What does “home” mean to you – both as a physical place and as an idea – in relation to this album?

My mom loved us a lot, but we also moved often, which can be destabilizing. When I got to the point in my life where I was out on the road I almost felt engineered to do it, because I never had a real sense of home growing up. When I went on tour it felt like I was supposed to be there, which made it easy to wake up whether I was in Lincoln, Nebraska; Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, or Pompano Beach. For a long time I thought you had to live that way to write songs.

At one point I was living in New York and hung out with my wife during a break from the road, who at that point I’d known since we were kids in Georgia, but had never dated. Suddenly everything changed and I started feeling her no matter where I was and yearned to be back in New York. I didn’t feel at ease unless I was with her, before realizing that she had become home for me. I’d never understood that homesick feeling that others get until then.

I feel that even more now with our little girl. It’s different, because my wife chose me and knew what I was and what I wasn’t, whereas we chose to bring our daughter into this world. Because of that I feel an even stronger pull from home than I have in the past because this little girl doesn’t care that I sing songs for people, and at the end of the day she doesn’t need that – she just needs me to be her father. It’s important that I’m able to make a living with my music, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that I wasn’t there to witness her losing her first tooth and other core memories. You have to grapple with that every day if you’re going to do this for a living. At the end of my life, if people say I’m a family man before they say I’m a musician, then I did it right.

What has the process of bringing American Man, American Music to life taught you about yourself?

There are points in the process of making any record where you look at yourself in the mirror and ask “Am I full of shit? Or can I actually land this thing?” The content on this album, what I’m talking about, it felt heavier and deeper than some of what I’ve done in the past. And I hate the idea of taking myself too seriously. At the end of the day, I’m an entertainer; everyone who makes music is supposed to be one, no matter how much they call themselves poets and stare at their expensive loafers oh-so-thoughtfully. Whether you’re Bob Dylan or Jackie Wilson or Tom Waits, at your core, you’re fundamentally the same as a clown or a breakdancer. Your job is to bring people joy, to entertain them. Walking around with this understanding has always made me sort of sick to my stomach whenever I find myself taking any of this noisemaking I do too seriously.

But on this album? I surprised myself. We are making music about serious things and I didn’t feel embarrassed or disgusted by it. It’s serious because it’s supposed to be serious; I’m not being a self-important asshole. Somebody needs to talk about the opioid epidemic and no one else was doing it in a way that I felt satisfied with. I did it because I felt like I had to, not to feed some inflated notion I had of myself as a capital A “artistè.” So I guess I learned that I’m not full of shit. Or at least, not entirely full of shit.


Photo Credit: Blair Clark

Kyshona on 50 Years of ‘Rags To Rufus’

(Editor’s Note: 50 years ago this month, Rufus released what would become a seminal album in American roots music, soul, and funk, Rags To Rufus, which featured Chaka Khan. To mark the 50th anniversary of this iconic recording, singer-songwriter Kyshona ponders the personal meanings of the project and how it relates to her own brand new album, Legacy.)

My mother is battling dementia, so car rides with her are the perfect time to play music from her younger years, when she was carefree, childless, and she and my Dad hosted an abundance of house parties for their friends and family. I have a playlist of songs from the late ‘60s and ‘70s I’ll put on when we’re shuttling her between doctors’ appointments.

On one of these car rides, I turned on Rags To Rufus. My mom was in the passenger seat, playing “brain games” on her phone to, in her words, “Exercise her mind and hold on to what she’s got.” I noticed she was singing, under her breath, the melodies and choruses of the first three tracks on the album. She turned to me and said, “I’ve never heard this before, who is this? I like it!” This got me thinking beyond personal family legacy and more about musical legacy.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Rags To Rufus, the album that transformed the trajectory of funk band Rufus and propelled Chaka Khan into the spotlight. Chaka Khan’s music is a soundtrack that has woven itself into the fabric of not only my work as an artist, but also into my personal life.

There is an expectation to conform, to try to categorize and compartmentalize music; I can’t imagine enduring the pressure from the industry, and even society as a whole, as it was nearly a half a century ago, artists and bands trying to squeeze themselves into arbitrary molds. To my ears, Rags To Rufus is the sound of a group of friends hanging out and having a good time – there is a sense of celebration, camaraderie, a sonic journey of Black joy. It feels like an album made for the thrill of being creative, for the sake of unbridled artistic freedom. I have always wanted my music to feel like this, telling stories, playing around with sounds and ideas. When I’m creating, that’s my goal. I write in the style that serves the story that I’m telling, without regard to genre constraints or others’ expectations.

The record begins with empowered swagger and affirmation – “You Got The Love,” which I interpret as, “You belong here.” The sentiment is carried through in “Walkin’ In The Sun,” a song that brings a comforting sense of nostalgia. I can hear my “aunties” in the hook: “Even a blind man can tell when he’s walking in the sun.”

The title track is a funked-out jam session, and then the band brings out old-time fervor in “Swing Down Chariot.”

Think about it – Rufus takes an old gospel song, adds Chaka Khan’s powerhouse vocals, blends it with blues, jazz, funk, soul, and takes it to an entirely new dimension! Forget genre, industry rules, or album cycles. Back in the day, it was just music that made you feel good, it was about that vibe.

As a music therapist, I recognize the profound impact music has on those grappling with conditions like Alzheimer’s and dementia – it encourages lucidity and presence of self. As a daughter, I see how music bonds me to my mother.

In the past, when I’ve done music therapy in nursing home settings, I’ve used songs from the early 20th century – like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” “Heart And Soul,” and “Sentimental Journey.” But now, the memory care songs I reach for are songs I grew up listening to in our house, at family reunions, on road trips. How fantastic is it that Chaka Khan’s work throughout her 50-year career can provide a generation-spanning conduit for a mother and a daughter to connect? We can experience that freedom in her sound as we listen together, regardless of the chaos happening around us.

I can’t begin to put into words how much I admire Chaka Khan; with my new album, Legacy, I tell the stories of my ancestors and my family. Chaka Khan’s legacy is intertwined with generations of music-makers.

Over the last 50 years, Khan has been a major influence on pop artists like Whitney Houston, R&B artists like Erykah Badu and Mary J. Blige, and on myself – and so many of my peers in the roots and folk scenes. I learned of her musical magic as a child, listening to my parents’ favorite radio stations, so being able to sing backing vocals for her at Newport Folk Festival a few years ago was absolutely surreal. I can’t imagine the journey she’s been on, but I hope she knows that her existence alone encourages artists like me to keep on being true to ourselves and our art.

Rags To Rufus is a part of my journey. For me, it’s the sound of “blackness.” I hope that 50 years from now, someone will listen to the music of myself and my peers and hear that same resonance of joy, love, and celebration of culture.

We all dream to leave a lasting musical legacy as deep and profound as Chaka Khan and Rufus.


Photo Credit: Anna Haas

Katie Pruitt on ‘Mantras’ and Letting Go of Control

Knowing how 2020 and the years that followed would unfold, the dynamism of Katie Pruitt‘s debut record is even more awe-inspiring. Expectations introduced the Nashville-via-Georgia singer-songwriter alongside her deepest aches and most intimate struggles as an openly queer individual raised as part of a devout Roman Catholic family in the conservative South. It would go on to earn a GRAMMY-nomination and ample praise for her lyricism, empowered performances, arranging, and instinct for production. In short, it’s undeniable that Pruitt set quite the high bar of expectations for herself and the music she would choose to share next.

Four years later, Pruitt has unveiled Mantras. While flashes of brilliance from a familiar autobiographical lens inform and inspire the 11 track recording, these aren’t simply more straightforward, memoir-style anecdotes. The truths and experiences Pruitt shares on Mantras feel more revealing than Expectations, as this time, Pruitt’s lens looks decidedly more inward at what she has lived through, reflected on, and learned from since writing her last album.

Not only is Mantras‘ thought process largely internal in nature, but each song leads to paths, stories, and developments that have yet to be fully resolved – if ever they will. The album showcases a great deal of inspiring perseverance in the self-contained conclusions of songs like “Self-Sabotage” and “Worst Case Scenario” and more generally, it unveils a journey of self-healing from start to finish.

However, while Mantras ultimately provides reassurance, peace, and closure, the takeaway isn’t meant to be one of permanent resolution or rigid perspective around anything Pruitt has seemingly conquered in each song. Like the recapitulating nature of a mantra, she is mindful of being continuously attentive and compassionate towards her inner struggles, rather than seeing them as singular moments of adversity.

Speaking with her by phone, BGS shared an insightful conversation with Pruitt about how her focus on inner-healing shaped the sound of Mantras, how her perspective around disagreement and connection has changed, how she cultivates inner strength, and much more.

How was it navigating the presence of expectations for Mantras, considering your intent to move away from a focus on external validation?

Katie Pruitt: On the first album, I was dodging different expectations, you know? I was dodging expectations of my parents or of how people in my hometown saw me and who I am now. I sort of accidentally set high expectations for this next record. I felt like I was competing against myself in a lot of ways and I really had to find moments to just surrender, come back to center, and just focus on the fun feeling in the present moment and talk about that, instead talking about things that I think people want me to say. I needed to focus on what I needed to say, which is maybe different than what other people expected or wanted to hear on this album.

Knowing this album is an expression of personal growth and a journey of sorts for you, what does it feel like to just now be talking about these songs after holding onto them for so long?

Coincidentally, I feel like everything on Mantras is lining up with my life as it’s coming out.

With me talking about my parents selling my childhood home [in “Naive Again”], yeah, my parents are selling my childhood home as we speak. And when I finished a lot of the songs about my partner slowly checking out and leaving, maybe a week after I turned in the record, we broke up. So I’m still experiencing a lot of these things in my life. It’s kind of a first for me, because when Expectations came out, I had kind of already patched things up with my parents and there were things in my personal life were kind of resolved. But then I was having to dive back into those issues every day on stage or whenever I sang those songs. This is different, honestly. It kind of feels good to be able to deal with what’s going on in my life with the songs in real time.

You’ve talked about building “the tracks from the ground up as opposed to cutting everything live, which gave so much more room to let the songs evolve and become what they needed to be.” What does that mean for you and what did those moments of full realization for the music feel like for you, and producers Collin Pastore and Jake Finch?

Jake and Collin’s workflow is very quick. And that was a challenge for me, but I felt like we challenged each other in the right ways. They move very fast and I was like, “Wait a second. Let’s take a look at this. Let’s sit with it for a second and make sure we like it.”

I think having the option [to record parts individually] instead of having all this pressure to be in the studio with a full band and having everyone play the right parts at the right time, was nice for us – to just build one part at a time and ask ourselves, “Is this correct? Does this fit?” And if it doesn’t, we’d say, “We can always mute it.” … There’s not necessarily a wrong answer. We’re just trying to evoke a feeling and if we feel it then other people will too.

What brought you together with Christian Wiman’s work, ultimately inspiring you to writing the album title track?

I was listening to this poetry podcast, [Poetry Unbound], I was really into that during the pandemic and that was obviously a tough time for a lot of people, [creating] a lot of points of contention, especially around beliefs and belief systems. I just felt like, my parents believe different things than me and my friends started to believe different things than me. So that poem, [“All My Friends,”] just really resonated as this “A-ha!” moment.

At the very end of the poem [Wiman] says something like, “My beautiful, credible friends.” In the first part of the poem, you almost feel like he isn’t mocking them, but like, he’s kind of poking fun at how many rabbit holes there are to go down, as far as spirituality goes or, finding yourself goes. Then at the end, he’s like, “And all of them are credible, all of them are valid.” And that really struck a chord for me and I just think that’s a really powerful statement.

Given the open and accepting mindset you impart through “All My Friends” and its juxtaposition with the piercing, personal insights you share in “White Lies, White Jesus, and You,” where would you say religion, particularly Christianity and Catholicism, exists for you now, compared to when you were writing Expectations?

I really try to make clear to my parents or to some of my friends who are still Christian, that [the song] is talking about people who take the Bible and abuse it for their own benefit – whether that be political or just to justify shitty behavior on their end, like saying, “Oh, well, it says that gay people aren’t allowed in heaven. So I’m allowed to say this.”

That’s the part of [Christianity] that really turns me off to it in general. And that’s a shame, because the dude in the Bible, Jesus, the version that I have kind of come to discover as I’ve gotten older, is a pretty progressive dude. And I don’t mean that in the political sense. I mean, in the sense of he’s accepting of everyone no matter what their background is. Like, Jesus himself never says anything about gay people. He’s friends with kind of some sketchy characters if you were going to look at it through a lens of today. So that’s the Jesus that I wish I were taught more about when I was growing up. I think “White Lies, White Jesus and You” was a way for me to process the [version of] Jesus that I have experienced as a closeted gay kid and how the ways that version hurt me and put that in the past and put that behind me.

In what way would you say your journey of self-healing helped you to stop seeing religion as having the power to dictate your worth?

I let go of religion dictating my self-worth a while ago. But then I let other things [take its place]. I used to seek external validation from the church or from my parents or from older mentors in my life. I let that go as I became a young adult and then I started giving other things power to do that. Like success and relationships. I let those things dictate my worth. But then I started delving into the power that intrinsic happiness has.

We really fully don’t have control over what happens in our life. We have some control, but very little. And if your worth can come from within, then those moving parts of life have less control over you or less effect on you … once I learned that, I was able to focus more heavily on, “Let’s have this voice in my head be kind and then I can go from there.” Just me practicing being kind to myself first kind of put this armor up around me and it helps me navigate the world.

What’s changed about your songwriting process since you’ve taken on more personal strength and inner compassion?

For a long time, when my inner voice was more critical and cutthroat and editorial, I couldn’t really write. I wasn’t able to get the thoughts just out of my head and onto the paper, which is the first step you know? Then you have something to work from when you’re able to just say what you feel. But I was just so scared to write a bad song that I wouldn’t write anything. And I think that’s the worst mistake you can make. There’s no harm in writing a bad song.

I think that it’s just about setting the bar, taking a chill pill and [remembering], “Oh yeah, songwriting is fun, songwriting should be fun.” It should be a way for me to get an outlet, a way for me to get this out of my head and look at it. So removing the critical voice is huge. And that was connected to therapy and to me slowly learning how to be kind to myself and slowly learning how to just enjoy writing songs again.

Where, with whom, or in what, do you find your hope and strength to persevere when life feels overwhelming or your inner reserves are running low?

The past or other people’s experiences really help me. I read a lot of Patti Smith and sometimes I’ll just open to a random page and it’ll be the piece of advice that I needed. So definitely words and art and poetry. Another thing would be when I’m feeling, “Okay, all hope is lost,” I have this urge to just run to nature and I just go to the mountains or go sit by a river for a long amount of time and think and meditate and try to put my problems and my fears and everything into perspective. I think, “Well, I’m on this planet right now and I’m sitting by a river. How cool is that?” Just kind of zooming out and not zooming in so closely – that helps me. And like, just good friends and just laughing and having buddies that you know you have a drink with or dinner with and just fuckin’ laughing about the crazy things that have gone wrong. Like, laughter is huge. I know it’s like, “Oh, laughter is medicine,” but it literally is.


Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Joe Pug Will Not Ossify

Joe Pug will not engage in the left-brained vs. right-brained debate. His artistry and pragmatic business sense have lived in actual parallel through his music career. His songwriting and creativity are fueled by passion and result in dramatic and exciting songs, as on his new album Sketch of a Promised Departure. He’s stayed ahead of the curve and created an ecosystem where self-reliance, growth and business thrive especially with his latest venture, The Nation of Heat Vault, that has every album, podcast, and newsletter up behind a paywall. In our interview, we dig into his creative process, family life and artistic balance while creating his latest project.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • STITCHERAMAZON • MP3

The album was made on his own time at his new home studio, which he’s been working on for a decade. His reflection on having complete control over the music production is one of relief and joy in that he was able to take as long as he wanted. In this episode, we go through several songs on the album, remarking on songs like “Then the Rain,” which shines in its simplicity just like many songs of Lucinda Williams’, one of his biggest inspirations. We also talk about his journey into adulthood when he moved to Chicago, a chapter in his life he writes about in detail on the new album. He talks about what he hopes for his own young kids’ futures and how parenting has changed since he first became a dad seven or eight years ago. And of course, we talk about his fantastic podcast, The Working Songwriter, and how being an interviewer has changed his attitude about being the interviewee.


Photo Credit: Ryan Nolan

LISTEN: Stoll Vaughan, “Fate”

Artist: Stoll Vaughan
Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky
Song: “Fate”
Album: Dream in Color
Release Date: February 23, 2024
Label: Commonwealth Artist

In Their Words: “When my daughter was born, I was reflecting on the distance my wife and I had covered, welcoming the next chapter of raising our child and finding ourselves surrounded by the demands of parenthood. I realized how fortunate I have been to have such a gracious spirit as my partner. I had known this, but the song was a rediscovery. She has always been the responsible one, always the kindest among us. She softly carries me as I dance in the darkness with my fears and ambition. She could hold me to the fire, but she never does. She loves me unconditionally. I know she could have done better than me, but that’s not how this universe works. I believe in Fate.” – Stoll Vaughan



Photo Credit: Effie Dozier

WATCH: Wood Belly, “Gone Are the Days”

Artist: Wood Belly
Hometown: Denver, Colorado
Song: “Gone Are the Days”
Album: Man on the Radio

In Their Words: “‘Gone Are the Days’ is a project we’ve been working on, well, for a lifetime. The video features some of Wood Belly’s childhood home movies interlaced with moments from the last few years playing music across the country. We wanted to pay homage to our roots and express our undying gratitude to the people that helped us get to where we are and will go. There’s a clip towards the end of a couple of our moms hugging during our set in Telluride, Colorado, which pretty much sums up the whole idea. Much love to everyone who made us who we are.” — Chris Weist, Wood Belly


Photo credit: Emily Sierra Photography

LISTEN: Sasha K.A, “Tall Grass”

Artist: Sasha K.A
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Tall Grass”
Album: Family
Release Date: February 21

In Their Words: “‘Tall Grass’ is about a musician friend of mine who got on the wrong path with drugs and alcohol. The ‘tall grass’ is a metaphor for hanging with the wrong crowd and making the wrong decisions. This guy is so naturally talented and so rich in spirit, but was snagged by the vices that haunt the music industry. Really fun experience bringing this song to life with Eric Harrison and Michael Ingber at Studio 601. Eric played bass, Michael played drums, we all produced the song. Incredibly collaborative and creative process.” — Sasha K.A.


Photo credit: Kush Mody