Bluegrass Gospel,
Arena-Style

This feature ought to start with a laundry list of our subject’s accomplishments, but rootsy country hitmaker Dierks Bentley’s résumé and inventory of accolades, awards, and trophies would be far too long to include. After 30+ years in Nashville, Bentley has more than made it and his particular brand of country – down-to-earth approachability, bro-ey (while remarkably non-toxic) good-time vibes, honeyed crackling vocals, an unwavering sense of humor, and fierce love for bluegrass virtuosity – has now gained such a strong gravitational pull, it continues to shift Music Row. (For the better, of course.)

In June, Bentley released his eleventh studio album, Broken Branches, and launched an eponymous continent-spanning tour with everybody’s favorite, fellow trad country lover Zach Top, and swampgrass North Georgia duo the Band Loula in tow. Broken Branches features guests like Miranda Lambert, Riley Green, John Anderson, and more and – like all of the albums in his expansive Dierkscography – quite a few string band- and bluegrass-inspired moments, as well.

The Broken Branches Tour, which has been clipped and shared thousands and thousands of times on social media over the past several weeks, includes many hits, striking sets and theatrical tech, cameos from the infamous Hot Country Knights, and, yes, plenty of bluegrass. On the set list, Bentley and Top duet on an incredible “Freeborn Man” – we’re leaving out spoilers here so you can catch the tour’s scant remaining dates yourself and still be delighted. Bentley also performs the title track from his hit bluegrass album, 2010’s Up On The Ridge, and Logan Simmons and Malachi Mills of The Band Loula join him elsewhere in the set for a delicious bit of church.

@thebandloula the broken branches tour is in fulll effectttt 🥹🤧 y’all come see us with @dierksbentley and @Zach Top ♬ original sound – The Band Loula

Singing a Bill Monroe bluegrass gospel number in tight, intricate three-part harmony may seem like an odd choice for a big mainstream country arena show, but longtime fans and listeners of Bentley will know this is no aberration. This is the norm. Whatever the sonics of his music, from the most poppy and radio-ready country to the more Americana-coded to straight-ahead bluegrass, classic rock, and New Orleans grooves (and back again), Bentley brings bluegrass with him everywhere he goes. He brings its pickers, legends, and unsung heroes, too, uplifting them for all to enjoy.

When Mills, Simmons, and Bentley step to the center stage of an enormous auditorium or amphitheater to sing “Get Down On Your Knees and Pray,” depicted behind them on towering LED screens is a little log cabin dive bar with a neon cross steeple and a flickering “open” sign. As they lead the audience in the stark, convicting, hair-raising number – with grit and heart and endless spirit – you realize, yes, this is church. This is gospel. This is country and bluegrass, front porch music and arena music. This is Saturday night and this is Sunday morning.

It’s hard to imagine all of these intricate roots music details not only being palpable in a show of this scale, but they’re also measured, vulnerable, and intimate – traits not known as hallmarks of either country or bluegrass. It’s here that we find exactly the conglomeration of reasons why Bentley retains such widespread appeal and adoration from fans of all entry points. While neither he nor any other artist is universally loved, Dierks Bentley accomplishes being the modern country “everyman” not by diluting himself and his personality beyond recognition, but by purposefully, creatively, hilariously – and spiritually! – putting all of himself on the line in his music.

Before the Broken Branches tour launched earlier this summer, Good Country sat down backstage with Dierks Bentley and the Band Loula during a break from tour rehearsals, after the trio had just run through “Get Down On Your Knees and Pray.” We spoke about what bluegrass means in a country context, the appeal of gospel to folks of any (or no) faith, tent revivals and camp meetings, the joys and vulnerabilities of singing harmony, and much more.

Obviously, Dierks, across your entire career you’ve had a relationship with bluegrass. And not just Up On The Ridge, which we just heard you rehearse a bit of for the Broken Branches Tour. You’ve got records and posters on the wall at the Station Inn here in Nashville, you namecheck Keith Whitley on the new album. You’ve worked with the McCourys over and over, Charlie Worsham, an excellent bluegrass picker, is in your band. There are so many more bluegrass touchpoints. Your bluegrassy CMA Awards show appearance last year was very popular with our audience.

And for y’all, the Band Loula, you call yourself “swampgrass.” The harmonies clearly have the grit and the gospel of bluegrass and the timbre of how your voices blend together reminds me of bluegrass.

It might be an obvious question to ask, but I figured we could go around the circle here and get each of your takes on what does the genre mean to you? What’s your relationship with bluegrass? What does bluegrass mean to you in the constellation of country music that you make now?

Dierks Bentley: When I think about bluegrass, obviously it’s the music and all that, but really it’s just people with acoustic instruments gathering to play and sing together. I never really did a lot of stints on my own, solo. Probably I’m not good enough, but bar gigs where I was just doing cover songs never really interested me. I always liked being in a band. I love the way this instrument talks to that instrument, this voice talks to that voice, and this voice gets added and– “Whoa!”

Like the Osborne Brothers, they’re switching harmonies. Sonny is singing the high tenor, then the next thing you know, he is on like a low baritone part. The voices, the way they move around. That’s the main thing, that’s what drew me in when I walked into the Station. And there were guys my age. I always thought bluegrass was kinda like Hee Haw stuff. I walked in and I was like, “Oh my God, there’s guys my age.”

It was about just playing songs together. And they were doing a lot of Merle Haggard songs, George Jones songs mixed in. Johnny Cash songs mixed in with Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and all that too. So it was just, “Wow.”

It’s more about the community of people congregating through and with their instruments. And using those to have fun – and drinks as well. [Laughs] Lotsa drinks, a lot of moonshine back then. The real stuff! No label on it.

Not 30 proof. [Laughs]

DB: That’s what it means to me and that’s what I hear in [The Band Loula’s] music, a lot of, if you want to call it, “front porch” picking music. Picking their roots – you know, deep, Southern gospel-y kind of roots, the mixing of that, and those voices together.

That’s what bluegrass has always been to me. It’s about the community as much as it is about the instrumentation and the bands. It’s the great community of people.

(L to R): Logan Simmons and Malachi Mills (of the Band Loula) confer with Dierks Bentley during rehearsals for the Broken Branches Tour. Photo by Zach Belcher.

Logan Simmons: I’ll say something that comes top of mind for me. I spent my whole life going to tent revivals. It’s not just, “I go and it’s summer camp, ’cause somebody made me.” It’s like the pinnacle of who I am.

I really believe that it’s the pillar of my family. We go for about 10 to 15 days every year. It’s beside my nanny’s house, and all it is, red-back hymns and bluegrass. The service happens every night and you go for about an hour and a half before service starts, before preaching starts, to hear bluegrass, gospel bands.

That’s how I learned harmonies, hearing all my godmothers and aunts sing the wrong ones around me. [Laughs] And you’ll hear somebody over there, Linda’s like [sings operatically and off-tune] and she’s not on it at all. But I was at least learning something and I feel like with my roots in general, it already infused that bluegrass sound into my life.

Then when Malachi and I became friends and started making music together. He has a lot of Motown roots. I think, blended together, the blues and bluegrass just made something beautiful. And, on top of that, the family harmony we have together. We’ve been friends forever, half our lives.

Malachi Mills: It all comes back to blues, yeah. And just like you said, that cross-pollination of the different genres. North Georgia is like the southern point of Appalachia. Like she said, it really influences the music we make by our harmonies. That’s the biggest thing we take from it. I love bluegrass music, but I’m not like a bluegrass buff. I would lose at bluegrass trivia. [Laughs] But it’s just in our bones and in the harmonies that she was talking about. Growing up in church and everything influences the way that we sing together and the notes that we pick whenever we’re singing harmonies. One of the biggest things that I love about bluegrass is the rhythm and pocket. And the intonation of the instruments. Bluegrass players choose to be intentional about [all of] it, the pocket, the timing, the tuning. It’s all so dead on. The details matter when you’re making records.

Dierks Bentley and band give Good Country and members of the media an exclusive sneak peek at their Broken Branches Tour set at rehearsals in May 2025 in Nashville. Photo by Zach Belcher.

I think that’s one of the reasons why it’s striking that y’all have this bluegrass song as part of this big, arena-sized stage show. Because for me, translating those details in such a big space and in such a broad format could be really hard.

Then I hear and see y’all singing in three parts with a neon cross behind you and suddenly yes, this is church. This is what it is. Any close-singing harmony vocals are great, but when it really sounds like bluegrass to me is when you can hear the reeds of your voices match up when you’re harmonizing. That was a really beautiful moment.

Could you talk a little bit about capturing those details for a big audience in big rooms like this – or even outside, in amphitheaters. How do you take a Bill Monroe gospel song and translate it to that space?

DB: Well, there’s “Bluegrass” Ben Helson out there walking the hallways. Ben and a couple other guys in the band have played with Ricky Skaggs. Ben played with Ricky and Tim [Sergent] still plays with Ricky. I always say, if you can graduate from the Ricky Skaggs school of bluegrass and country music, you’re probably a pretty good musician. He also played with Rhonda Vincent.

I’m a big Del McCoury fan. They did [“Get Down on Your Knees and Pray”] and Del has such a cool version of it. We were just kinda thinking of songs to do with these guys that would be great using their voices. Like [they] said, they’re the blues and bluegrass. I’m still trying to figure out their sound. It’s such a unique mixture; it’s so Americana in the way that in this country we have this melting pot of stuff. We thought it would be cool to do a little three-part thing, so that one came up.

Marty Stuart also did a really cool version of that song. But Ben [Helson], our guitar player really came up with that [arrangement], leaning into the swampy stuff they do. Gave it that feel, a little Southern – I don’t know what the vibe is there, but that telecaster is playing and it just has a cool kind of dirty, bluesy vibe to it. Then working up the harmonies, there’s just something about hearing a cappella bands.

I remember seeing Billy Strings at a bluegrass festival years ago and the band all stopped – no one knew who he was back then. Bryan Sutton had told me who he was, so I was where he was. He played like a Thursday set in the middle of the day. They had just done three songs and then they stopped and did a four-part harmony thing. There’s just something about it that’s so powerful. It goes straight to your soul.

The oldest version of entertainment there was was probably harmonizing. Finding people, seeing how your voices sound together, it’s a weird, cool thing. Singers talk about it all the time, in any genre of music about how seeing how we sound together is an intimate thing.

It’s vulnerable and it’s immediately establishing that community that you’re talking about. “We may not be a band, but now we’re a thing.”

DB: I feel like I blend well with anybody, because I’m like the condition. I sing it pretty straight here and allow the people around me to really do their stuff. I’m just gonna hold the line. There’s like nothing special about my voice, but it’s good to blend with ’cause other people have these amazing voices. They can do a lot of movement and a lot of great vibrato. I’m like the dumbest Del McCoury School of Bluegrass [student], just find that note and put everything into it. [Laughs]

Not to mention, introducing people to bluegrass as well – I love that. You have a chance to be a bridge to your heroes and that is always fun. People have been that to me, Marty Stuart probably the biggest. You get into Marty Stuart’s music and you find out who he likes, and then, whoa! He brings you back there. So [I hope] this turns somebody onto Bill Monroe. That’s pretty cool.

Dierks Bentley has a quiet moment on stage during rehearsals for the Broken Branches Tour. Photo by Zach Belcher.

Country – a lot like blues, R&B, and the early days of rock and roll – it has this often tempestuous and inspiring relationship between the fun of Saturday night and the conviction of Sunday morning. So seeing y’all sing that song in front of the depiction of a church as a dive bar, complete with a neon cross and a flickering “open” sign – to me that’s “a little bit holy water, a little bit Burning Man” epitomized. You guys are embodying that relationship between the sacred and the secular here. And that duality is all over your new album, too, Dierks.

MM: I’ll say, I think that one of the biggest things that contributes to that is the goosebump, hair-standing-up-on-your-arm feeling. It’s knowing that you have a part in something and whenever you sing and play bluegrass music together, you have to give way to one another on stage. So it’s the whole stage saying we’re doing this very intentionally in unity, in harmony.

And everybody in the crowd, whether they know that or not, they feel it. That’s what I think people feel. Even if you’re not a believer and maybe the message that’s being said [doesn’t apply], but you still resonate with serving each other. With being present, which is a strong energy. I think that’s what makes me excited about playing this song. I don’t know what’s gonna happen emotionally for me whenever that moment happens, ’cause it’s gonna be so much of that unified energy.

DB: Unified energy is a good way of putting it. It’s unified and it really is energy.

We’re pretty involved with the church. I have an older daughter who’s involved in the church and another middle daughter who doesn’t believe it like I did. But there’s something divine that you just can’t ignore, whether you believe it or not – just look at a sunset, look at a flower, look at a fish, look at so much unnecessary beauty in the world. There’s just some energy that exists and you can’t deny it when you sing a song like this. It just taps [something] on anybody. Recognizing how small you are in this world and the power of whatever version of prayer you do.

LS: I liked how you said it joins secular and holy together and that actually made me think of the tent revival, as well. I think growing up in Appalachia, like Malachi said – I wish I could just teleport you there so you could experience!

DB: That would be cool, a tent revival – I can’t even imagine.

I haven’t been to a camp meeting or revival in so long!

LS: Everybody’s invited to camp meeting. I don’t know if you’d love it. Our tent – I say tent, it’s like a shack on a square, it’s like a big square, four sides. So we’ll say, “Are you on the upper line or the lower line?” We’re on the upper line, which is not a good thing. It’s like you think upper line is like uppity people or something, but it’s not. Our shack is the oldest and [most] untouched of the whole campground. It was built in 1846.

DB: Wow!

LS: So there’s holes in the roof and like, my bunk bed, I get water drops on my head if it rains. There’s hay floors, there’s no air, and there’s a lot of us, so it’s all packed in there. But camp meeting is where I learned my first Bible verses and where I smoked my first joint. [Laughs] So it all marries together how you said, like holy and secular at the same time. I think of that picture of going to the gospel tent revival, going to camp meeting, singing those red-back hymns, doing all those things – but then also learning the grit of growing up.

I just loved when you said joining those things together, because that was such a representation of my upbringing. Yeah, it’s a little bit holy water, a little bit Burning Man. It’s definitely Saturday nights and Sunday mornings – and the tent revival is where I feel like those two worlds are so evident.

Dierks, in all you’ve done across your career there are all these bluegrass moments. The country that you “grow,” it’s mainstream, it’s radio-ready, but it’s like there’s bluegrass in the “soil” you grow it in, so you can always taste bluegrass in everything you do. Like on the new record, “Never You” with Miranda Lambert feels that way and “For As Long As I Can Remember”–

DB: There’s a little “Circles Around Me” by Sam Bush [reference] there at the top of that song.

Oh my gosh, yeah! Exactly what I’m talking about.

You said a little bit earlier turning people onto your heroes always feels great, but for you, from your own perspective being that guy that used to just hang out at the Station Inn and now being the Dierks Bentley and going on tour in sheds and arenas and amphitheaters… Why do you keep bluegrass with you?

Dierks Bentley: It is selfish in a lot of ways. I have such a great band and I just take so much joy watching them do cool stuff that I can’t do. It’s like our guitar player, Ben, he’s just an unbelievable flat picker. Charlie Worsham’s in our band and Charlie won the CMA Musician of the Year. He is just an incredible musician. Dan [Hochhalter] is an incredible fiddle player. Tim is so underutilized. Our steel guitar player – who plays banjo and everything else – he’s one of the best singers to me. Hearing him is like hearing Merle Haggard. He sings like nobody else, but he’s also so underutilized. And Steve’s been playing with me since 1999.

It’s just a great group and we love bluegrass music, featuring that, and having the music part of the show. I like being in a band setting, so just getting to be around it and hear these instruments swirling around me playing, I think it’s just cool.

I got a chance to play ROMP Festival last year and I feel lucky to be friends with guys like Jerry Douglas and Sierra Hull and have them come up on stage and play with us. I still think bluegrass music is the punk rock of country. It’s just the coolest genre of music there is.

It’s gotta be centering or grounding to a certain degree just to have that as something you can go back to, to feed yourself and fill yourself back up even while you’re touring.

DB: Absolutely. In the show we go from playing Tony Rice to John Michael Montgomery. We play bluegrass with the Hot Country Knights with costumes on. It’s just it’s all very selfish! It’s like, “How can I have a lot of fun in the next 90 minutes?”

I wanna do our radio country. I want people singing songs back, because that’s a great feeling. I want to get a little bluegrass in there. Just see if we get away with that. Then, can we try to get canceled on the way out? [Laughs] I dunno. It’s really fun for me. And having these guys [out with us] and getting to harmonize with them, it’s gonna be really fun. Check back in a few months, see how it turned out.


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All photos by Zach Belcher.

More Than A Trend

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Based in northern Alabama with deep, organic ties to so many sounds and styles of the “Americana Music Triangle,” the Secret Sisters have built a musical brand on a distinct iteration of Southern gothic songwriting steeped in familial harmonies. Their music is grounded, but broad, specific but infinitely relatable.

Over the course of five studio albums released since 2010 – including 2020’s Grammy-nominated Saturn Return, which was produced by Brandi Carlile – the sisters, Laura Rogers and Lydia (Rogers) Slagle, have strayed very little from the sounds that first entranced audiences all across the South and around the country more than 14 years ago. Still, while they occupy a distinct and confident sonic aesthetic, their catalog never reads as tired, weary, or redundant. Mind, Man, Medicine, their latest record, was released on March 29 and while it listens like classic, iconoclastic Secret Sisters, it also registers as brand new, vital, and innovative.

It follows that two women proud to be Southerners and proud to be from Alabama would not feel limited by maintaining a stylistic brand that is rooted in one particular vein. At times, their songs remind of the Civil Wars but without affectation, of Shovels & Rope but with a more quiet and genuine anger, and of so many other Americana duos – Gillian & Dave, the Milk Carton Kids, War & Pierce – where the focal point is two voices and creatives in dialogue, collective music. But the indelible throughline, that centering “vein,” is simply being true to themselves.

Mind, Man, Medicine, among the siblings’ handful of releases, all at once feels like a comforting and cozy continuation of everything we love about the Secret Sisters rooted in northern Alabama, while also demonstrating the dawn of a new era. In our conversation with Laura and Lydia, we chat about the distinctions between style and redundancies, about compassion and community, about grounding and intention. Throughout, it’s clear that the Secret Sisters know exactly who they are, how they sound, and why they do what they do – even, if not especially, when each of those truths becomes clouded by the intricacies and complications of life.

I wanted to start by asking you about your specific brand of country and Americana. You have always made music that’s mindful, connected to the earth, and connected to your community. It often feels a little witchy and a little gothic, but it also feels like musically wandering down a winding garden path.

That style, that y’all have had present in all of your albums, it feels like it’s so “in” right now. From the new Kacey Musgraves album, Deeper Well, to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, there are so many touches in country today that seem like something y’all have been doing for more than a decade. I wanted to see how you felt about this current landscape of Americana and country and how you feel your music relates to or fits into the constellation of this ongoing trend?

Laura Rogers: I have noticed that trend in a lot of ways. It seems like there are artists who are even more successful than we are who reach this point where, like you said, they reground or they just tap into something that’s maybe [been] suppressed by the other music that they’ve made. I don’t necessarily think that that’s a bad thing. I think that every artist has his or her own evolution, as far as what inspires them, whether it’s what they’re listening to or what they’re feeling or just what they want to sing. Some people don’t want to [tap] into their history or their community or their roots in any way.

I can understand that and sympathize with that, it’s just that’s who we are. It isn’t a trend for us. There’s no marketing scheme behind what we’re doing. I’m not implying that other artists who are doing that are just doing it for the moment, but for us, it’s always been [that] we don’t really know any other kind of music to play other than what you hear.

I don’t even know if it’s an intentional mindset. We want to be grounded and rooted and pay tribute to where we’re from. I don’t know if that’s like a conscious decision that we make. I think it just kind of happens naturally for us.

I know what it’s like to go through a journey of growing up and reconnecting to where you’re from and appreciating your history. I think it takes a minute sometimes, as an artist and a writer, to go back to that and see it as a good thing. Maybe other artists who are doing that, it’s probably a sincere moment in their life where they’ve reached a point of, “Hey, I want to go back to something that feels a little more like me.” I love that chapter of certain artists’ careers as much as I love the ones that maybe aren’t as rootsy and connected.

Lydia Slagle: I feel like some of that might be due to the pandemic. I might be taking liberties by saying that, but we were just home for so long and I think that probably grounded a lot of people in that way and made people get more in touch with their roots, musically.

I think you’re right. And you’ve both immediately grabbed onto the thread that I was pulling here, which is that there’s this trajectory that artists really enjoy bringing into their own art of “going back to basics.”

From the beginning of y’all’s career, from the first album, it seems like you always started “back” at the basics. I think what’s so interesting about that is how it never seems limiting to y’all. It feels like there’s always an entire universe for you to explore, even while you’re still remaining so close to that home base. You continue to showcase this sense of grounding and rootedness, highlighting where you’re from and who you are, but there’s still so much to explore.

LS: I think we can’t take credit for a lot of that, because we have had a lot of really great collaborators over the years.

We’ve had really good co-writers and great producers who are willing to stretch our limits of what we knew we were capable of. I think some of it is just our general involvement as artists, but a lot of it is who we work with and the people who play the instruments on the records and who produces them.

LR: I don’t know how Lydia feels, I’m sure she probably feels this to a degree, but it’s an insecurity of mine. I listen to other artists and I think, “Oh, if I could just write a song like that one.” I’m constantly doing that terrible thing that humans do, where I compare what I’m capable of producing to what everyone else is currently producing.

I’m so hard on myself about just wishing that I were better, you know? It’s nice to hear that, even after five records of writing music, that what we [make] is still the essence of who we are, but it isn’t overdone. I think that the fear of mine is like, how many more albums can we do before we have to venture into a crazy genre that we’ve never done before to keep people interested? [Laughs]

Thankfully, five albums in, it seems like people are not weary of what we do. But that is a total insecurity of mine, I hear so many songs and I think, “Man, I’m never going to be able to do that…” But then I also realize that there are people who hear our songs and think that they are works of art in ways that I think that was just a Tuesday afternoon!

LS: It’s also a struggle for me, but when I think of my favorite artists, I don’t get weary of the same stuff. I think of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, they don’t really deviate from their original sound and it is just as fresh and exciting for me. Hopefully some people can see our music in the same way.

I think that if we were to just derail and do something completely different, I’m sure that would be exciting, but I’m also sure there would be a part of us that would be like, “What are we doing? What are we trying to prove?” I don’t even know how to describe it, but it would be very hard for us. So, we do what we know and what we like and hopefully people stay on board.

LR: I do think a huge part of it [is that] we’ve had multiple people who have produced things for us and songwriters that we’ve worked with kind of reassure us in this. But, any time we decide to do anything that’s maybe a little bit out of the box for us and that kind of pushes our limits, they always remind us, “What you are is not the sound that you work within, it’s your harmonies together and it’s the way that your voices blend.”

I do think that anytime I feel nervous about new territory or repetitive territory, I just remind myself we are two sisters who grew up singing together, who harmonize together, and for some reason, people really love the way that our voices blend. That seems to be the crux of it. It’s great if that’s framed with interesting sonic landscapes or up-tempo, energetic songs, or sad minor chords. All of those things are interesting, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have that two-part sibling harmony that we are known for– I do think our sound hinges on that, to me.

I don’t ever foresee us having a record where only one of us sings. Period. There’s always going to be both of us, even if we’re both singing in unison together. There’s just something about that. And it’s so much more than what you hear, it’s an energetic thing. You can hear the shared chemistry and energy that happens when two voices that are really, really connected blend together. It doesn’t have to be people who are related to one another, but I think that there’s some unidentifiable, intangible sauce that comes over everything. It’s almost like hypnosis or something.

I think probably every artist that we admire would be like, “Yeah, I have days where I really don’t know what my sound is. I don’t know what my genre is. I don’t know what my style is. I just make it.”

I’m glad that you mention singing in unison, because it was something that really jumped out at me from this record. There’s some tasty ass unison singing on this record! What’s so interesting to me is that you can hear the space in the room between your mouths and the mics – and you can hear that space almost more than the space between your voices, since you’re singing in unison.

LR: Yeah, unison’s hard. I would say for me unison is harder than harmony, getting that blend and making sure that your voices are not rubbing against each other in a way that’s kind of cringy.

LS: We get some of that on the road, I feel like. When we’re performing live and we do unison, there are times when one of us is just maybe a tad sharp or a tad flat and it does not sound like good tasty unison. So finding that perfect sweet spot is a little trickier than you might think.

Shifting gears, I love how y’all always have such a strong sense of place in your music, drawing from Muscle Shoals, drawing from the “Americana Music Triangle.” And I have been obsessed recently with the idea that music always exists in a space, in relationship with place. It feels a bit “forest for the trees” to say it, but without air we wouldn’t have music – without sound waves, without air, without space.

I thought it was so perfect that you start the album with “Space,” it feels like a beautiful, spiritual moment where you’re asking folks to enter a space with you. You’re holding this space with your voices and with your songs, and inviting all of us to enter that space with you.

So I wanted to ask you about that song, writing it, but also deciding that it would be the first in the sequence.

LR: I didn’t even think about that at all! This is what I love about making records, there are always things that you discover about it after it’s out and you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even consciously decide to do that.”

But it makes so much sense. I never thought about having that song as the opening track of the record and it being an invitation of, “This is a space for you to enter and and it’s a safe place for you to feel.” I never thought about that and I love that you discovered that for us.

LS: I don’t feel like that was so much a conscious decision to frame it as this invitation into our record, but I love that perspective.

As far as sequencing, I think that it was more the production of that song and the sound that we approached it with that was pretty different for us. So we loved starting the record with a completely different sound for us. To let people know this is a little bit different from what you’ve heard in the past.

LR: We wrote that song with Jessie Baylin and Daniel Tashian, so when we got to Daniel’s studio to write with him, I just remember there being instruments all over the floor, all over the walls. It literally was like, come in and pick what you want to use. I’m not an adventurous instrumentalist at all, but he picked up this little tiny guitar that we plugged into this amp and we put this crazy effect on it. We just started strumming on it, and that was kind of the beginning of the song. I don’t even really remember what started the inspiration for that song, but I really feel like, timing-wise, where it landed was just after we had started writing with people after the pandemic. It was finally safe enough to sit in a co-writing situation in person. Coming from that place of the weird and divisive time of COVID, two songs, “Space” and “If The World Was a House,” were really just trying to capture that feeling that we gotta start being better to each other.

I think that there’s a quality in this album that you’re opening a space, you’re inviting folks into it, and then you’re kind of pointing out, “Hey, if the world was a house and that house was on fire, we would all do something about it, right?” I’m not sure if that message would feel as compassionate or as kind or as open if it didn’t come after this sense that you’re inviting us in, we’re on the same level, we’re in this space together. Then you can talk about these ideas and these songs that are challenging us to be in community, to be with each other, to make a better world. It doesn’t feel like you’re preaching.

LS: I hope people listen from that viewpoint. When we wrote that song with Ruston Kelly in Nashville, I think it was the beginning of 2022 when it was just starting to die down a little bit, but people were still very divided on COVID. It was ever present in our minds, so whenever we started writing “If The World Was a House” that day, it just came out. We could not get the words out quickly enough. I think it could have been a 10 minute song if we let it.

LR: “If The World Was a House,” now that I listen to it and process it as a finished product, I just keep thinking about how if you were passing by a neighborhood and there was a literal home on fire, it would not matter to you if they were Republican or Democrat or gay or straight or Christian or atheist or man or woman. It would not matter, you would do something! You would run in, you would call for help. You would make an effort, right?

When I feel the most dismal and depressed about humankind, I keep coming back to the thought that, if it’s really a matter of life and death, you’re going to step up for people. I do truly believe that most people have that sense of, “I got to do something.” I try to remember that it doesn’t matter that we have differences. The differences are always going to be there, but at the end of the day, would you fight for someone? Would you fight for someone who is different from you?

I like to believe that most people would. Once all the dust settles, of all the things that we bicker and separate ourselves over, I really like to think that everybody has a general sense of kindness that they could tap into. Maybe that’s a little naively optimistic, but…

I think that that message is so impactful coming from y’all, knowing that you place yourselves purposefully in your community in Alabama and in these parts of the country that people tend to write off as being “backwards” and not being capable of nuance. The South and rural places are always a scapegoat for the entire country and all of its problems. So, I think that it makes the message in your music so much more impactful, knowing that. You don’t see yourselves as outliers in the place that you’re from, you don’t see yourselves as exceptions to the rule or like you’re the only ones who think like this, who are “enlightened.”

LS: I think there’s more of us than people realize, there’s a lot of us in Alabama and Tennessee and Mississippi – we’re not the only ones. Hopefully we can represent that community of people a little bit better.

Another song I wanted to ask you about before we close is “Planted.” I love birdwatching, I love gardening and I feel like a lesson I learned – and so many of us learned – from COVID is that we need to have roots. We need to have nourishment and we need to be grounded, planted. I hear that song and I hear the love in it – the romantic partnership and the life partnership – but I also hear so much more. I love that I had already written down in my notes that this album is so “rooted” and then I got to “Planted” and I was like, literally!

LS: I think I wrote Planted in like 2015, a while back, and it had been sitting in my GarageBand for years and years. I think that when I first wrote it, it was about a year after I got married and my husband and I were going through a season where we were both traveling a lot, we’re both in artistic careers. So we were sort of rubbing up against each other, being like, “Whose job is more important? Which is more impactful?” I don’t know, we finally ended up in a place where we were like, it doesn’t matter. We’re in this together. We’re rooted together. It doesn’t matter if somebody is on a different trajectory, we’re in this thing together. I sort of tried to approach that song with that perspective, but yeah, I never thought that it would make it onto the record eight years later.

LR: There are songs you have for years and years that you think maybe there’s just not a place for it, and then all of a sudden it’s like, “This is the place!”

I feel like that song is very true to this record, even though it was written years ago about a romantic relationship, you’re completely right about it fitting into the narrative of this record, because I think so much of this record is about finally reaching a place in your life where you’re at peace with what you are and who you are and where you’re from. And, what your history is and what your sound is.

We have reached this point, hallelujah, where we are like, “What you see is what you get.” We are who we are and all we can really offer the world is a healthy, whole, self-satisfied version of ourselves.

We did the thing in our twenties where we said yes to every show opportunity, every appearance we could make, we said yes to everything. It was good in a lot of ways, but it was also just soul sucking, you know? I think one thing that I’ve really struggled with over the years is how I never thought that I was gonna be a professional musician. I’ve always just loved music for its therapy purposes. So it’s been hard for me to have my favorite hobby become a livelihood, because it feels like a lot of times the magic strips away and the comfort mechanism isn’t there anymore, because it’s your job. It’s like, “Well, this is what I do every day. This is how I keep the lights on.” And then it’s not what I want to do after hours. That’s been a hard thing for me to process.

I think that this record, in a nutshell for me, is about coming to a place of still loving what I do. I still want to make art that matters to me and that people respond to, but I do not have to kill myself in the process.

If I want to be home for someone’s birthday, I can say no to [an opportunity] for that. And, I’m finally at a place where I know I can always make money. I can always find a way to make money. But if I am going to sacrifice being home to watch my kid walk across his pre-k graduation stage, that’s not a fair trade for me anymore. Whereas years ago, in my youth – and I guess you would call it maybe ignorance or just immaturity – I would trade those for things that really mattered. Now I realize what I’m going to look back on in my life when I’m an old lady is not, “Did I play every show? Did I fall in bed exhausted? Did I come home and completely dissociate from everything around me, because I was so overstimulated by life on the road?”

I feel so happy to be in a place where music feels healthy again, because sometimes I think it’s easy for it to not feel healthy.

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Photo Credit: David McClister