Grab tickets to the rest of the festivities at the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, with de Groot and Hargreaves participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount and traditional dancer Nic Gareiss on March 17 as well as a headlining show from Blount and Gareiss on March 18.
Know any banjo-and-fiddle tunes inspired by and dedicated to Clarice Lispector, an obscure Ukrainian-born and Brazilian-raised mid-20th century novelist?
Here’s one: the title piece from Hurricane Clarice, the upcoming second album by the duo of clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. The tune is a melancholy, wistful instrumental waltz, paired here with the old fiddle tune “Brushy Fork of John’s Creek.” It’s perfectly in keeping with the bluegrass and Appalachian traditions that brought the two together when they were teen folk camp attendees a decade ago and have informed the music on their 2019 duo debut and in appearances everywhere from festivals and music workshops to house concerts.
Hargreaves says she wrote the piece after finishing Lispector’s 1946 novel, “The Chandelier,” enraptured and inspired by the “abstractness” and even “spaciness” of the highly distinctive, involving writing.
“I mean, it’s very loosely connected,” Hargreaves says of how the writing sparked her. “It’s not inspired by a specific thing. It’s more just what I was feeling a lot after reading one of her books. And when Allison and I were working up material for this record, I brought it to the table and it was just feeling really good.”
The album is full of loose and unexpected connections, taking some seemingly circuitous routes. Rachel Carson’s 1962 environmental primer Silent Spring, for one, is cited in the liner notes as being evoked by their choice of opening song, “The Banks of the Miramichi.” The song come from New Brunswick, dating to the turn of the 20th century, but came to Hargreaves and de Groot via a recording from around the time Carson was writing about DDT imperiling that river.
There’s “Every Season Changes You,” a touchingly sentimental Roy Acuff song that de Groot became obsessed with after hearing a bluegrass version by Rose Maddox and, in the context of the album, relates to both climate change and the dislocation of life in the pandemic.
There’s “I Would Not Live Always,” a hymn from a poem by William Augustus Muhlenberg. Hargreaves came to that song while helping folk pioneer Alice Gerrard digitize photos for a book project and being charmed by a picture of Tennessee fiddler Clarence Farrell and his wife — accompanied by their dachshund — holding a scroll with shape-note scale. That spurred Gerrard to play her a Mike Seeger field recording of Farrell playing this song.
And that song, in the duo’s interpretation, has another unlikely thread: While crafting a banjo interlude, de Groot was directed by producer Phil Cook to listen to the Velvet Underground’s somber, dreamy “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” of all things, for inspiration.
But the Lispector nod is the one which led them to find the most significant, and personal, threads that run through the album — and in some ways, the one that ties them together.
“We started to make the connections with family that tie the album together,” Hargreaves says. “Lispector is originally from Ukraine, and Allison has family that’s Ukrainian. And then [Lispector] was Jewish and her family fled from Eastern Europe in the 1920s, which is in my family background as well.”
“We’ve talked about this a lot, the idea of family, whether that’s family that you’re connected with at childhood or your musical community, which definitely feels like a continuation of that,” says de Groot. “We both work with a lot of musicians that are from different generations.”
That sense, for these two young musicians, really came to a head in the isolation and disconnection of the pandemic, heightened some by it then having to cancel a couple of attempts over the course of a year before they were able to get together to make this album. That itself played into the nature of the music they made when they finally were able to do it last summer, and in some non-music elements that provided threads for the music. The latter stemmed from conversations in the fall of 2020 with Phil Cook, who produced the album sessions in Portland, Oregon, where Hargreaves grew up.
“He started being in on sharing of tunes,” says de Groot, who was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. “He made an offhand comment that he was getting ‘grandmother energy’ from one of the instrumental tunes. And that led us down this rabbit hole, and he was asking us, ‘Do you have any recordings of your grandparents?’ We started looking around, which was a really special experience, because it put me in touch with some of my family about getting recordings.”
They got them. The voices of Hargreaves’ grandmothers Sylvia (born in 1925 in Brooklyn) and Jean (1930, Detroit) and de Groot’s grandmother Shirley (1929, Winnipeg, though sadly she passed away in March 2020) all are heard on the album’s penultimate song, “Ostrich With Pearls,” an otherwise instrumental written by Hargreaves. (The title? “It came from a poster that a friend had sent me,” Hargreaves says, laughing. “It’s an ostrich wearing a pearl necklace.”)
Sylvia talks about the house in which she was raised and how her grandfather converted the basement into a giant bird cage. Jean, recorded by Hargreaves’ uncle and limited due to dementia, reminisces that her favorite bird is a cardinal. And Shirley tells of her childhood car rides with her grandparents around Lake Winnipeg, having to roll up the windows due to the dust and gravel kicked up by the tires.
And while de Groot’s other grandmother died some years ago, “Hurricane Clarice” starts with a recording de Groot’s cousin made of her great-aunt Tillie speaking in Ukrainian — a language she had not used in many years.
“I asked her to tell a story about my Nana, so that she would be represented on the album as well,” de Groot says. “And she sent me this tiny clip where she just said, I think it translates to, ‘Sophie was a very good sister.’ It’s really sweet.”
While that emotional core of the album took shape during the separations of recent times, the seeds for it were planted some years back. The two met briefly in the late 2000s as adolescents at a festival in Victoria, British Columbia, when Hargreaves and her brother Alex were playing with multi-instrumentalist and multiculturalist Bruce Molsky, a mentor to both her and de Groot.
They started playing together regularly in the mid-2010s in the Boston area, where de Groot was attending Berklee School of Music and Hargreaves was at Hampshire college in Amherst, studying ethnomusicology — her thesis was about fiddle camps. Today, Hargreaves lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she is a fiddle teacher and graduate student in library sciences at the University of North Carolina.
“We had a really strong musical connection,” says de Groot, who just moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, this year. “Pretty soon after we reconnected in Massachusetts, we ended up being at a festival together. And there were all these festivals and we were both with different projects, but we were always excited to find each other and play for hours and hours. And then we decided to record an album and started doing some live shows.”
The first album captured the excitement and spontaneity of the nascent partnership, but for this one they wanted to take that further — once they were able to get into a studio together. The sessions happened during the Portland’s historically brutal heat wave last summer. That put climate change very much on their minds as they created Hurricane Clarice. And that, in turn, further intensified and illuminated the connections running through the album.
“It’s the whole feeling of apocalypse, and I think highlighting family and community within the setting of climate apocalypse,” Hargreaves says. “We connected this album to different notions of family, like our grandmothers, and thinking about what we can learn from our ancestors and also being together. And this project really helped me through the pandemic, meeting [on Zoom] with Allison every week and feeling like our duo as a family. Adrian Maree Brown, who’s an activist and author, asks the question about what compels us to survive climate change. I don’t know if I have an answer for that, but I think about it a lot and definitely community and family is what it all comes down to in the end.”
Editor’s Note: Hargreaves and de Groot will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount and traditional dancer Nic Gareiss on March 17 as well as headlining the event’s closing night March 19. Enter the giveaway to win a pair of tickets.
Photo Credit: Tasha Miller
Artist: Rakish (Maura Shawn Scanlin, fiddle & Conor Hearn, guitar)
Hometown: Boston-Based (Conor is from Washington D.C., Maura is from Boone, North Carolina)
Song: “New Shoe Maneuver”
Album: Counting Down the Hours
Release Date: February 4, 2022
In Their Words: “This tune formed during a phase in which I was exploring the possibilities of three-part tune writing. There’s something about adding a third section that opens a tune up to more melodic and harmonic variety that is so hard to beat. The tune stems from the language of the bagpipes; it draws on much of the compact and cyclical melodic ideas that are at the center of the piping style. The idea for the name came about when I went over to Conor’s place to play some music and discovered that we’d both bought pretty much identical new running shoes without talking to one another about it. The title is a reflection of that coincidence. We had a really special time getting to make the live video of this track, which is the first single off of our upcoming album, Counting Down the Hours. It was filmed at a great neighborhood gallery near us called Gallery 263 on one of the last hot days of the summer with Dan Jentzen filming and Peter Atkinson audio engineering.” — Maura Shawn Scanlin, Rakish
Photo credit: Dan Jentzen
Artist: Laurel Premo
Hometown: Traverse City, Michigan
Latest Album: Golden Loam
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?
For me dance is such a huge influence. I’ve spent quite a few years as a dance musician for square dances, being a traditional fiddler. That role of being more the motor for the good time, as opposed to being the focal point, has always resonated deeply with me. But beyond that, I know that just my experience as a participant in social dance in both American old-time and Nordic traditions has given my body a vocabulary that comes out in my music. I’ve found a through line in my voice that, no matter the tempo of the music, I always am wanting to make these larger slower pulses, make longer groups of beats, tap my foot at a slower frequency. I’m certain that that longer embodiment of phrases, and the pull, and balance, from dance have played into my nature there.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
I have a really early memory, I’m not sure what age, but before I was big enough to hold any instruments. I was in my bedroom, standing next to the door, and I could hear my folks playing music on the other side of the wall in the living room, my mom really tearing it up on some fiddle tune. In that moment, alone, I remember that I started air-fiddling and kind of marching around or dancing in the little corner. I just wanted to be part of whatever was going on there.
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
I took a while composing this lap steel track, “Father Made of River Mud,” from the new record. For a bit, it was separate pieces, in different tunings, that I didn’t know if I’d be able to fold together as one. It’s a really beautiful moment for the maker of a piece, when some kind of grace math helps everything line up in your head, and then you get to hear the thing for the first time in its full form. That tune is like a circle, it doesn’t really have to end at any one point.
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
I try and spend some time ruminating with memory that reflects back at me the elements of my personal experience that I want to embed in the performance, to make more vibrant what I’m laying down there for listeners. It’s almost a way of remembering myself to myself, because there are a lot of possible distractions when you’re recording or performing. Every little step of the setup could be something that takes you away from your body and the meaning you’re trying to imbue in the work. So, I just real quickly try to go into the wilds to try and counteract all of the civilization that I’m traversing through.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
In the last two to three years, my wild haunts have been woods, dunes, and rivers. I grew up in the woods, so shadows and green, what reverb the places with a great amount of life growing have, and the scents of being real close to the ground — those are all deep in me, and as an adult I go back to similar places to find quiet, and to kind of listen beyond that quiet. Walking rivers for the past few years, learning fly fishing, has brought about a whole other set of turns, including just a beautiful sideways weight from the gravity of the river flowing against you. I definitely take gestural impulses from my time spent in the wild, and work to keep all my senses open to what rhythms lay in front of me.
Photo credit: Harpe Star
Artist: Marcel Ardans
Hometown: Prescott, Arizona
Song: “Pencil Pusher”
Album: Traitor
Release Date: October 8, 2021
In Their Words: “Nearing the end of high school, my great-grandfather Stephen Carkeek filled out a survey for his senior yearbook. It simply asked for his hobby, ambition and fate. Stephen’s answer was wrought with truth. He responded, ‘harmonica, banjo tickler and pen pusher.’ The rest of his life was spent working behind a desk. Inspired by his inability to live out his ambitions, I wrote this fiddle tune after attending my grandfather’s funeral and finding Stephen’s yearbook in a now empty house.” — Marcel Ardans
Photo credit: Nick Pagan
Ah! There’s a chill in the air, color in the leaves, and a craving for the spookiest songs in bluegrass — it must be fall. Bluegrass, old-time, and country do unsettling music remarkably well, from ancient folk lyrics of love gone wrong to ghost stories to truly “WTF??” moments. If you’re a fan of pumpkins, hot cider, and murder ballads we’ve crafted this list of 13 spooky-season bluegrass songs just for you:
The Country Gentlemen – “Bringing Mary Home”
THE bluegrass ghost story song. THE archetypical example of “What’s that story, stranger? Well, wait ‘til you hear this wild twist…” in country songwriting. (Yes, that’s a country songwriting archetype.) The Country Gentlemen did quiet, ambling — and spooky — bangers better than anybody else in bluegrass.
Cherryholmes – “Red Satin Dress”
Fans of now-retired family band Cherryholmes will know how rare it was for father and bassist Jere to step up to the microphone to sing lead. His grumbling, coarse voice and deadpan delivery do this modern murder ballad justice and then some.
One has to wonder, though, with so many songs about murderous, deceitful women in bluegrass — the overwhelmingly male songwriters across the genre’s history couldn’t be bitter and misogynist, could they? Could they?
Zach & Maggie – “Double Grave”
A more recent example of unsettling songwriting in bluegrass and Americana, husband-and-wife duo Zach & Maggie White give a whimsical, joyful bent to their decidedly creepy song “Double Grave” in the 2019 music video for the track. Just enough of the story is left up to the imagination of the listener. Feel free to color inside — or outside — of the lines as you decide just how the song’s couple landed in their double grave.
Alison Krauss – “Ghost in This House”
Come for the iconic AKUS track, stay for the impeccable introduction by Alison. Equal parts cheesy and stunning, if you haven’t belted along to this song at hundreds of decibels while no one is watching, you’re lying. Not technically a ghost story, we’re sliding in this hit purely because a Nashville hook as good as this deserves mention in a spooky-themed playlist.
The Stanley Brothers – “Little Glass of Wine”
Ah, American folk music, a tradition that *checks notes* celebrates the infinity-spanning, universe-halting power of love by valorizing murdering objects of that love. Kinda makes you think, doesn’t it? Here’s a tried and true old lyric, offered by the Stanley Brothers in that brother-duet-story-song style that’s unique to bluegrass. What’s more scary than an accidental (on purpose) double poisoning? The Stanley Brothers might accomplish spooky ‘grass better than any other bluegrass act across the decades.
Missy Raines – “Blackest Crow”
A less traditional rendering of a folk canon lyric, Missy Raines’ “Blackest Crow” might not feel particularly terrifying in and of itself, but the dark imagery of crows, ravens, and their relatives will always be a spectre in folk music, if not especially in bluegrass.
Bill Monroe – “Body and Soul”
The lonesome longing dirge of a flat-seven chord might be the spookiest sound in bluegrass, from “Wheel Hoss” to “Old Joe Clark” to “Body and Soul.” A love song written through a morbid and mortal lens, you can almost feel the distance between the object’s body and soul widening as the singer — in the Big Mon’s unflappable tenor — objectifies his love, perhaps not realizing the cold, unfeeling quality of his actions. It’s a paradox distilled impossibly perfectly into song.
Rhiannon Giddens – “O Death”
Most fans of roots music know “O Death” from the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and the version popularized by Ralph Stanley and the Stanley Brothers. On a recent album, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi reprise the popular song based on a different source — Bessie Jones of the Georgia Sea Island Singers.
The striking aural image of Stanley singing the song, a capella, in the film and on the Down from the Mountain tour will remain forever indelible, but Giddens’ version calls back to the lyrics’ timelessness outside of the Coen Brothers’ or bluegrass universes and reminds us of just how much of American music and culture are entirely thanks to the contributions of Black folks.
Johnson Mountain Boys – “Dream of a Miner’s Child”
Mining songs are some of the creepiest and most heartbreaking — and back-breaking — songs in bluegrass, but this classic performance from the Johnson Mountain Boys featuring soaring, heart-stopping vocals by Dudley Connell, casts the format in an even more blood-chilling light: Through the eyes of a prophetic, tragic dream of a miner’s child. The entire schoolhouse performance by the Johnson Mountain Boys won’t ever be forgotten, and rightly so, but this specific song might be the best of the long-acclaimed At the Old Schoolhouse album.
Oh daddy, don’t go to the mine today / for dreams have so often come true…
Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch – “Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby”
A lullaby meets a field holler song on another oft-remembered track from O Brother, Where Art Thou? The disaffected tone of the speaker, in regards to the baby, the devil, all of the above, isn’t horrifying per se, but the sing-songy melody coupled with the dark-tinged lyric are just unsettling enough, with the rote-like repetition further impressing the slightly spooky tone. It’s objectively beautiful and aesthetic, but not… quite… right… Perhaps because any trio involving the devil would have to be not quite right?
AJ Lee & Blue Summit – “Monongah Mine”
Another mining tale, this one based on a true — and terrifying — story of the Monongah Mine disaster in 1907, which is often regarded as the most dangerous and devastating mine accident in this country’s history. AJ Lee & Blue Summit bring a conviction to the song that might bely their originating in California, because they make this West Virginia tale their own.
Jake Blount – “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”
“In the Pines” is one of the most haunting lyrics in the bluegrass lexicon, but ethnomusicologist, researcher, and musician Jake Blount didn’t source his version from bluegrass at all — but from Nirvana. That’s just one facet of Blount’s rendition, which effortlessly queers the original stanzas and adds a degree of disquieting patina that’s often absent from more tired or well-traveled covers of the song. A reworking of a traditional track that leans into the moroseness underpinning it.
The Stanley Brothers – “Rank Stranger”
To close, we’ll return to the Stanley Brothers for an often-covered, much-requested stalwart of the bluegrass canon that is deceptively terrifying on closer inspection. Just who are these rank strangers that the singer finds in their hometown? Where did they come from? Why do none of them know who this person or their people are? Why are none of these questions seemingly important to anyone? Even the singer himself seems less than surprised by finding an entire village of strangers where familiar faces used to be.
For a song so commonly sung, and typically in religious or gospel contexts or with overarchingly positive connotations, it’s a literal nightmare scenario. Like a bluegrass Black Mirror episode without any sort of satisfying conclusion. What did they find? “I found they were all rank strangers to me.” Great, so we’re right back where we started. Spooky.
Artist: Clinton Davis
Hometown: Carrollton, Kentucky
Song: “Curly Headed Woman”
Album: If I Live and I Don’t Get Killed
Release Date: September 10, 2021
Label: Tiki Parlour Recordings
In Their Words: “‘Curly Headed Woman’ is a rare version of one of the most common American folk songs: ‘The Hesitation Blues’ or ‘If the River Was Whisky’ as most people call it. My version is most directly inspired by a 1928 recording of Kentucky banjoist Dick Burnett and fiddler Leonard Rutherford. Their version contained some common folk lyrics — anyone with any exposure to folk and blues music has probably heard the line ‘If the river was whisky and I was a duck, I’d dive to the bottom and I’d never come up’ sung with a hedonistic, ‘let the good times roll’ kind of sentiment. But this version also held more unique lines about a curly-headed woman that had brought great pain and misfortune on the singer. And in that context, it occurred to me that the famous lyric about a river of whisky could also be a cry of pain. This thought became the center of my interpretation and my arrangement became a kind of dreamy balm. The video, shot on a beautiful spring day in an urban canyon of San Diego, features Erin Bower, who sang on the recording, and Aaron Brownwood.” — Clinton Davis
Photo credit: David Bragger
We’re just over a week and a half away from the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual awards show held in Raleigh, North Carolina. Bluegrass being a technical, virtuosic genre, the awards have always included efforts to note, encourage, and honor instrumental music and instrumentalists. Each year five bands or acts are nominated for Instrumental Group of the Year, as well as individual songs nominated for Instrumental Recording of the Year. Today we’ll spend a little time with each of the nominees in the latter category, a collection of five instrumentals that showcase collaborative, exciting lineups, some acrobatic mandolin picking, and the exciting depth and breadth of the musical talent evident in the bluegrass community.
Appalachian Road Show — “The Appalachian Road”
Appalachian Road Show is Barry Abernathy, Jim VanCleve, Darrell Webb, Zeb Snyder, and Todd Phillips, kicking off the Instrumental Recording category with our first supergroup of the bunch. Their titular tune, from the 2020 album, Tribulation, feels like an exciting, galloping journey with twists and turns and a slight darkness, like evening creeping over an Appalachian holler. Appalachian Road Show is the second-most nominated band this year at the IBMA awards, also up for New Artist of the Year – but don’t be fooled, this group has been making fiery music like this centered on VanCleve’s signature sawing for several years now.
Bluegrass 2020 — “Foggy Mountain Chimes”
Scott Vestal reprised his Bluegrass ‘95, Bluegrass ‘96, and Bluegrass 2001 records in 2020 with a new generation, filling out the band with IBMA Award winner and fiddler Patrick McAvinue, guitarist Cody Kilby, Hawktail mandolinist Dominick Leslie, and his brother Curtis Vestal on bass. His ‘95 edition included Wayne Benson, Adam Steffey, Aubrey Haynie, Barry Bales, and Clay Jones, while the ‘96 record featured Mark Schatz, Jeff Autry, and Rob Ickes – in addition to Haynie and Benson. In 2001, Autry and Benson were joined by John Cowan, Randy Kohrs, and Jim VanCleve.
It’s easy to tell, from this 2020 rendition of “Foggy Mountain Chimes” or from any sample taken from this series of recordings helmed by Vestal, that his commitment to traditional bluegrass, that constantly pushes the envelope, is matched only by his commitment to crafting recordings such as these, where the most tangible throughline – perhaps the only throughline, besides Vestal himself – is the community and the music-making first and foremost.
Bluegrass at the Crossroads — “Ground Speed”
And, another supergroup! Mountain Home Music Company, an imprint of Crossroads Label Group in Arden, North Carolina, has been releasing a series of recordings featuring crackerjack bands of artists and musicians from across their label community and friends. This lineup includes Kristin Scott Benson of the Grascals, Darren Nicholson of Balsam Range, Jeremy Garrett of the Infamous Stringdusters, Skip Cherryholmes of Sideline (and yes, Cherryholmes), and professor, bassist, and musicologist Kevin Kehrberg.
It’s not uncommon for this IBMA Awards category to include traditional numbers from the bluegrass canon but it’s certainly a treat to have two such thoughtful – and downright fun – Earl Scruggs numbers up for the trophy this year.
Industrial Strength Bluegrass — “Mountain Strings”
If you haven’t had the good fortune to stumble upon it yet, scholar Neil V. Rosenberg has been taking BGS readers down memory lane, describing the 1989 Dayton Bluegrass Reunion that went on to inspire not only a book, Industrial Strength Bluegrass, but this new Joe Mullins-produced Smithsonian Folkways compilation album by various artists, too. This track features Sierra Hull with a band including Ben Isaacs, Kristin Scott Benson, Glen Duncan, Josh Williams, and the rarest of rare, bluegrass drums by Phil Paul. “Mountain Strings” was originally recorded by Red Allen and its composer, mandolinist Frank Wakefield. The album’s in-depth and museum-like liner notes get it right when they describe Hull’s rendering of the tune as inhabiting “rock and roll swagger,” much like the song’s originators. The ear-puckering cross tuning will stick in your craw, executed with a precision Hull accomplishes universally and deftly.
Justin Moses with Sierra Hull — “Taxland”
The Instrumental Recording of the Year category is always great at showcasing bluegrass’s endemic talent, but this year it really confirms and reconfirms the skill of many pickers, several of whom are nominated on more than one recording in this category, as you will have read already! Sierra Hull appears once again, this time on a track with her husband and musical compatriot Justin Moses, who assembled yet another Instrumental Recording supergroup on his Fall Like Rain project released in January of 2021. “Taxland” – a Tunesday Tuesday feature when it was released as a single in October 2020 – was inspired by all self-employed musicians’ least favorite time of year and features some of Hull and Moses’ signature double mandolin stylings, backed by Michael Cleveland’s jaw-dropping fiddle, Bryan Sutton on guitar, and Barry Bales on bass. It’s a tune that feels rollicking and impressive, but entirely musical, too – a quality not all bluegrass instrumentals share.
Congratulations goes to all of this year’s Instrumental Recording nominees, every one a deserving finalist for the award.
Artist: Tammy Rogers & Thomm Jutz
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “I Surely Will Be Singing”
Album: Surely Will Be Singing
Release Date: September 21, 2021
Label: Mountain Fever Records
In their Words: “We wrote this song at the beginning of the pandemic. We both noticed how much more we paid attention to bird life when everything slowed down. We also talked about the fact that while music is a career choice, it is important to continuously find joy in making music, without the need for outside approval — like a bird that sings to himself, with no regard for applause. This is a hymn to nature, and to the spirit of human resilience in the face of adversity.” — Tammy Rogers & Thomm Jutz
Photo credit: Anthony Scarlatti
Artist: A Tale of Two
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “The Letter”
Album: A Tale of Two EP
Release Date: September 17, 2021
In Their Words: “‘The Letter’ is a very important song for us. We wanted to capture the romanticism behind writing a letter to someone and it feels as though the song took on a whole new meaning during the pandemic. The main essence of A Tale of Two is focused on live performance. We want to bring a record to life on the stage every time we perform. This video was special to us, as we were lucky to have Nashville fiddler Kyle Pudenz on board, who is a spectacular musician and person.” — Stephanie Adlington and Aaron Lessard, A Tale of Two
Photo credit: Nathan Zucker
