LISTEN: Fort Frances, “Fits and Starts”

Artist: Fort Frances
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Song: “Fits and Starts”
Release date: February 5, 2020

In Their Words: “The past year has been stuck on pause. Before the pandemic, time traveled on a superhighway at a million miles an hour, but since March, we’ve all been in a traffic jam. There have been plenty of huge challenges in that standstill, but the break from a consistent surge of momentum has actually been good in some respects. It’s been a chance to reflect and recognize that we’ve all been fooling ourselves as we speed through life seeking somewhere new. ‘Fits and Starts’ is a song about making the concept of time meaningless so that it feels okay to keep holding that pause button.” — David McMillin, Fort Frances


Photo credit: Esther Sullivan

Guitarist Jackie Venson Charges Down a Path of Joy, Vulnerability, and Shredding

Jackie Venson, Austin, Texas’s resident singer, songwriter, guitar shredder, and joy dispenser, took a couple of months to restart the locomotive momentum of her career after it was halted by the coronavirus pandemic in March of 2020. A summer of stepping up her touring and festival appearances trashed, she had to purposefully and intentionally consider a way forward. 

She chose the path less traveled, but she never trekked it alone. By the end of 2020, Venson’s totally independent team had landed her at number 10 on Pollstar’s Top 100 livestreamers chart for the entire year — higher than superstars Luke Combs, Brad Paisley, and even K-pop, heartthrob boy band BTS’s stream counts, with streams totaling more than 2.8 million viewers. 

“It felt like the train stopped and then I created work for myself,” Venson admits, describing an intentional pivot to virtual, streaming shows and alternative programming that never felt like she was giving up the most important parts of her art and expression. Just the opposite. Venson is a rare example of a musician who has utilized the pandemic to not only discover a new, novel way forward in an industry that promises burnout, extractive power dynamics, and the commodification of selfhood even in the best, most profitable cases. She also grew her fan base, her community, and found enough time to release five projects in the last calendar year, as well. 

Jackie Venson’s Shout & Shine livestream (viewable in the player above or here) — which highlights many of the entrancing, charming, entertaining aspects of Venson’s music, creativity, and most of all her stunning improvisation — will debut on BGS on Wednesday, February 3, at 4pm PST / 7pm EST. We began our interview talking about joy, which is not only present in every note of Venson’s playing, but is the first song of her Shout & Shine concert and the title track of her 2019 album. 

I wanted to start by asking you about joy. It feels so obvious and palpable in your music, especially in your playing style. Not just in how you’re so engaging and charismatic, and not just because it’s the title of your 2019 album, Joy. On “Surrender,” for instance, you sing, “Feet are so tired, but I keep running/ Heart is so heavy, but I keep singing.” That sounds like the radical act of choosing joy, to me.

JV: Well, it’s literally what I’m feeling while I’m actually playing the music. It’s just really cool to be able to play the guitar. I worked really hard to be able to play the guitar and when I look in the mirror I see the same face who started guitar, I guess ten years ago now, except this person can play the guitar! This person can play the guitar, and everybody likes listening to this person who can play the guitar. Not only is this person having a really good time doing something she set out to do ten years ago, but everybody else is enjoying it and having a good time on a base level — and by base level I mean, often they’ve just walked in the room. [Laughs] They weren’t there ten years ago! They’re enjoying it, objectively, and I’m sitting here looking at the depths of [the music] and then I’m watching other people, who don’t even know the story, just having a good time. That is pretty awesome and actually, I’m pretty sure that’s why most people set out to play instruments. They see somebody having fun doing it and they want to have fun, too. 

It sounds like gratitude is equally important to you. You’re clearly expressing so much gratitude for being able to do this thing that creates so much joy in your own life and in others’.

Well, absolutely. Gratitude is the foundation of joy. You can’t really have joy if you don’t have gratitude. 

One thing that jumped out at me from your livestreams and performances is the way you sing along with your guitar lines, the way you’re constantly in dialogue with yourself and your own voice. It made me think of the age old tradition of fiddling and singing along with yourself — and of course, it makes me think of jazz and bebop solos as well — but I wondered where singing along with the line in your head came from for you? 

My dad told me the best way to learn how to improv solos. I had been working on trying to improv from even the time I played piano from when I was like fifteen. I remember getting another piano teacher who knew jazz so that they could teach me how to improvise. Obviously, [Laughs] that’s the wrong angle. I was four years into playing guitar before I learned that I was approaching improvisation the wrong way. The funny thing is that my dad told me, when I was fifteen, he was like, “All you need to know about improvising is that you just think of a melody and you play it, and after you play the melody you thought of a few times, you start messing with it.” So you play it, and add a note here or subtract a note there, and he’s like, “That’s all you’ve got to do and then it’s a great solo!” Because a melody isn’t just playing notes randomly, it has purpose. You want your solos to have purpose. My dad told me that fifteen years ago and I just didn’t hear him. I wasn’t ready to hear him. It took the guitar and years and years of singing, as well, to put it all together and arrive at the destination my dad tried to usher me to. 

I’m a picker and a teacher as well, and I’m sure you’ve had this happen, you’ll get students who are so intimidated by the idea of improvising, I’ve had students just cry when you say, “Can you try improvising something?” 

It’s a touchy subject! It’s like singing, how people are way more sensitive about their singing. They’ll show you their drum licks all day, but you ask them to sing and they’re like, “Noooo!!” 

It’s the vulnerability! 

It’s a new level of vulnerability. But here’s the thing, it’s not very hard, all you have to do is just listen to a crapload of music, stuff a bunch of melodies into your brain, and then, just think about all of the melodies you know and think about them a lot. Always listen to music. Keep listening to the music you already have listened to and listen to new music. If you’re constantly listening then you’re going to be sitting on stage and everyone’s going to point to you to solo — say Cm going to F — BOOM! All of a sudden you’re playing, [Sings] “They smile in your face/ All the time they wanna take your place” on the guitar. You’re playing “Back Stabbers,” because suddenly  you’re going from Cm to F7 and you know it will sound good. You know? [Laughs] Because you’ve heard that melody and it’s not very hard! A beginner could play it. [Hums line] But you’re crushing it with some tone and everybody in the audience is thinking you’re a master. When really, what you’re playing is not that hard. It’s just musical. 

My jaw literally dropped when I was doing my research for this interview — you released five projects in 2020. Two double, live albums, the two volumes of Jackie the Robot, and also Vintage Machine. You also landed in the top ten of Pollstar’s livestream chart for the entire year. I hear you say “the train ground to a halt,” and I see a new train that didn’t just start up, but is roaring. I’m sure you see that, too. What does that pivot feel like now that you’ve got some retrospect. 

In that moment, it felt really busy, but it also felt kind of maddening. I was busy, but I was never leaving my house. Then it felt crazy. And in the next moment after that, the numbers started to juice. For a couple of months it was full stop, for a couple of months it was maddening like, “Wow, these numbers are really rad, maybe this is the way.” A couple of months after that I knew this was definitely the way. I stumbled upon the way. I was walking along on a path and then that path had like, a giant tree fall over it and I couldn’t go down it anymore. I saw this side path — you know when you’re in the woods and you see a path but you’re not sure it’s a path or if your eyes are just tricking you? 

“Is that a deer trail or is that actually a trail?”

Right. Is that really a trail? It’s like, “I don’t know… but there’s also a giant tree over the path I was on. Can’t go that way. I guess I’m going to go down this path, I hope there’s not too much poison ivy…” [Laughs]

That was the livestream path. There was maybe one creature that walked down this path, one way, one time. It appears there’s a path, but it clearly hasn’t been followed very often. That’s what it felt like, to be on this uncertain path, which then ends up opening up and it turns out I was right the whole time. The way I feel now is not the way I felt when it was all happening. The way I feel now is all because of having retrospect on my side. And the development — the direction things are going in. It’s a lot more clear than it was six months ago. 

 

I have found myself repeating throughout the pandemic that we should be building the world we want to exist after the pandemic while we’re in it. To me that’s what it sounds like you’re describing, finding this other path. Looking to the future, what will you be bringing with you from this time, into whatever a post-COVID reality looks like? 

The thing I’m taking with me is the fact that there’s never any need to be desperate, there’s never any reason to act out of desperation. There’s no person or contract to be signed that holds the “keys to the kingdom.” There is no kingdom. We are IN the kingdom. We just exist within different perspectives of it. Maybe your perspective in the kingdom right now is that you’re a baby band, you’ve just established yourself. You’re in the same kingdom as Beyoncé! You’re just standing in a different spot than her. There are thousands of spots you can stand in this kingdom. Beyoncé’s spot isn’t the only one that’s good. There are lots of places to stand! Millions of artists, that you don’t know about, are standing in pretty sweet spots in this kingdom that we all exist within, together. 

There’s no person that’s going to give you her spot. She got to her spot by her own weird, twisty trail to get there. Maybe a deer walked down it once! She took her own path. You’re not going to be able to recreate that, but she just took a path to get to a spot, not the kingdom itself. You consider that spot the kingdom, but we’re all in the kingdom already. The way we used to live had this weird illusion that we all had to climb these ladders, but really you just need to get where you want to be. You don’t need to climb that same ladder just because someone else climbed it, and they’re famous, and you’ve got to do what they did. It doesn’t make any sense, it’s completely futile, and you’re going to just be spinning in your hamster wheel, stuck in the same vantage point. There’s not one guy or gatekeeper who can unlock everything for you. There are people who will say they can, but what happens? You end up stuck at one spot, one vantage point. There’s no one person, one artist who has it all.


All photos: Ismael Quintanilla III

LISTEN: Annie Mack, “Shadows of a Kingdom”

Artist: Annie Mack
Hometown: Rochester, Minnesota
Song: “Shadows of a Kingdom”
Album: Testify
Release Date: January 29, 2021

In Their Words: “Two years ago my daughter was fighting for her life, for her voice to be heard. No matter how much I loved her and wanted to go through it for her, this was her journey and beast to kill. And she did. I wrote this song for my daughter, but it’s really a love letter to all Black women, giving voice to the defining moments that we can use to step into our power and sovereignty.” — Annie Mack


Photo credit: Shelly Mosman 

WATCH: Teddy and Richard Thompson Swap Songs on ‘Woodstock Sessions’

As we begin to roll into a new year, it is important to remember the important things in life and to be thankful for the goodness around us, like health, family, and music. In this edition of Friends & Neighbors, father and son Teddy Thompson and Richard Thompson grace the camera and perform a lovely set of songs for a Woodstock Sessions crew. With familiarity and comfort that only kinship can produce, the two share laughs, smiles, and charming songs that have decorated each of their respected careers.

The sessions kick off with the title track from Teddy Thompson’s new album, Heartbreaker Please. It’s his first solo release since 2011 and a complete representation of what he describes as a catholic taste in music, enjoying sounds and styles from many eras and genres. In addition, this Woodstock Session includes two of Richard Thompson’s landmark songs, as well as a cover of “Cut Across Shorty.” The fun and joviality this duo has while performing together is enough to warm the heart and kindle the flames of thankfulness and reflection. Watch these British icons share the frame here.


 

LISTEN: Randall Bramblett, “Never Be Another Day”

Artist: Randall Bramblett
Hometown: Athens, Georgia
Song: “Never Be Another Day”
Album: Pine Needle Fire
Release Date: November 13, 2020
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “I started this song thinking about my granddaughter and the struggles that young people face when they’re trying to separate from their families and find their own identities. It’s not really biographical, because she’s barely a teen and not thinking of running away or anything like that. Importantly, my wife, Lenore, changed the perspective on the song after I had gone down a lot of rabbit holes where the person was running away and stealing the family car. … She brought it back to the feelings of confusion and ambivalence that are at the heart of breaking away. I really just needed to write something that said, ‘I know it’s a confusing time. You’re a beautiful spirit and you’ll be OK.'” — Randall Bramblett


Photo credit: Ian McFarlane

LISTEN: Ashleigh Flynn & the Riveters, “The Lion and the Lamb”

Artist: Ashleigh Flynn & the Riveters
Hometown: Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles
Song: “The Lion and the Lamb”
Album: The Lion and the Lamb (Digital 45)
Release Date: October 20, 2020
Label: Home Perm Records

In Their Words: “‘The Lion and the Lamb’ draws from Bible stories as an overlay for the situation we find ourselves in today — enveloped in the COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest/peaceful protests, the rise in domestic terrorist groups in the US, the devastating impacts of climate change/fires that are destroying our communities… things feel hopeless…. While I am not a religious person, I am a spiritual person, and believe the goodness in the hearts of Americans translating into benevolent action is what will heal us as a nation; that ‘savage and cruel beasts’ find their kind and gentle nature, and work to restore of the world to peace and ‘righteousness.’

“This song (with lyrics by Ashleigh Flynn and Virginia Cohen) and the Digital 45 were recorded remotely, with our guitar player Nancy Luca at the helm of arrangement and production from her home studio in LA. She says this about the song, ‘When Ashleigh sent me her song a few months ago, and as we are all locked down because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked hard to bring life to this endeavor despite the distance. The Riveters recorded their parts safe at home on their iPhone or DAWs and I mixed it all in the sonic blender of my session. My hope is that you hear the musical emotion of this wonderful and poignant song. Ready world? It’s ready for you.'” — Ashleigh Flynn

https://soundcloud.com/smashedflynn-1/the-lion-and-the-lamb/s-bI67cGnOGMZ


Photo credit: Kate Flather

LISTEN: Joan Osborne, “That Was a Lie”

Artist: Joan Osborne
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “That Was a Lie”
Album: Trouble and Strife
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Womanly Hips/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “I get so enraged watching these polished, camera-ready mouthpieces for our government just straight up lying to us. And journalists seem unable use the word ‘lie’ when talking about this: their coverage is full of euphemisms like ‘falsehoods’ or ‘misstatements.’ But these are just blatant lies, and I think it’s important not to sanitize them, to call them what they are. People in power are abusing the public trust, whether it’s government officials or the insurance industry or the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and I believe we need to call them on it in no uncertain terms. To quote Bob Dylan, ‘I just want you to know I can see through your mask.'” — Joan Osborne


Photo credit: Jeff Fasano

The Byrds’ Chris Hillman Reflects on ‘Laurel Canyon’ and Why He Had to Leave

Splitting off from Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon Boulevard runs a circuitous route through unkempt mountain acres, past the Laurel Canyon Country Store, weaving and curving for miles before finally spilling out in Studio City. Along the way small roads split off into the mountains like tributaries from a river.

Up these narrow, twisting mountain byways lived many of the musicians who, in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, exerted an incalculable influence on popular music: the Byrds chief among them, but also the Mamas & the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Love, James Taylor, the Monkees, and Crosby Stills & Nash. Together, they transformed folk music into folk rock and singer/songwriter fare, transforming it with new sounds, new ideas, new priorities, and — it can’t be denied — new drugs.

This strange, paradoxical place — a rustic mountain paradise nestled within the purgatory of Los Angeles — is the subject of a two-part documentary on EPIX, directed by Alison Ellwood and produced by Alex Gibney. Across two 90-minute episodes, Laurel Canyon traces the comings and goings of several generations of folk rockers down the boulevard and up into the hills.

Ellwood depicts this place as something like a bucolic community that enabled and encouraged romantic and musical collaboration among its denizens. A struggling musician named Stephen Stills flubbed an audition for a TV show called The Monkees, but suggested his roommate Peter Tork try out for a role. Mama Cass introduced Stills and David Crosby to a British musician named Graham Nash, and the trio became one of the most successful groups of the 1970s. A band of freaks from Phoenix, Arizona, calling themselves Alice Cooper showed up at Frank Zappa’s cabin at 7 a.m. — about twelve hours early for their audition. The stories go on and on, too much for even a lengthy documentary to contain.

Laurel Canyon didn’t just offer a sense of community along with unobstructed views of the city at night. It also gave these musicians access to the city itself — in particular, the happening Sunset Strip clubs like the Troubadour, Pandora’s Box, Ciro’s Le Disc, and the Hullabaloo Club. It was a neighborhood galvanized by the riots in 1966, when young clubgoers protested a police-imposed curfew — a pivotal moment in ‘60s radicalism and the inspiration for Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

The popularity of the music written in the hills above the Strip meant that Laurel Canyon’s most famous residents spent more time away from the canyon, spending weeks in the studio recording their next albums or months on the road playing their songs in front of growing legions of fans. Elwood’s documentary strays from the locale in its title, traveling as far away as Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock music festival in 1969, which demonstrate how deeply these new musical ideas were taking across the country.

There are, refreshingly, few talking heads in these two episodes. Rather than the usual musicians rhapsodizing about their youth, Ellwood frames the documentary with remembrances by a pair of photographers, Nurit Wilde and Henry Diltz. Their archival images and films make up the bulk of Laurel Canyon, which makes it all seem more immediate, as though fifty years ago was just yesterday. In that regard it’s closer to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood than Jakob Dylan’s Echo in the Canyon.

But that also makes this historical moment seem more fleeting. Around the time that Charles Manson sent four of his followers to a house he thought belonged to producer Terry Melcher, drugs started to infiltrate Laurel Canyon, puncturing what Graham Nash calls a “beautiful bubble.” Grass and booze are quickly displaced by coke and heroine, and the scene chills a bit in the 1970s, as a new wave of musicians moved in to these houses and crash on these couches.

There are many stories from Laurel Canyon that don’t get told in the documentary, as well as many songs that don’t get played and many artists who don’t get mentioned. There’s no trace of Van Dyke Parks, the eccentric L.A. arranger who affectionately satirized the community on “Laurel Canyon Boulevard,” off his 1968 album Song Cycle. “What is up in Laurel Canyon?” he asks, quixotically, like the most ironic tour guide. “The seat of the beat,” he replies to himself.

On the other hand, the film can only hold so much. And the stories that Ellwood does tell add up to something larger: Laurel Canyon is less about a place and more about an idea. It’s about how different strains of traditional and popular music commingle and mutate, how they point to an infinite set of possibilities for voice and guitar (and drums and bass and amps and keyboards and synthesizers and so on).

On the eve of the documentary’s premiere, BGS spoke with one of Laurel Canyon’s early and most famous residents, Chris Hillman.

BGS: You moved to Laurel Canyon in 1965. What took you there?

Hillman: First thing on the list was, I needed a place to stay. The Byrds were getting going and starting to gain a little ground, and I had already known about Laurel Canyon. It was purely by accident that I’m up there one day by the country store, and I run into a guy who had a place to rent. It was wonderful. It was up on this road overlooking the entire city of L.A. You can imagine how beautiful it was at night, with all the lights on and everything. Shortly thereafter, David Crosby moved up there, and then Roger McGuinn. I’m not sure where Mike [Clarke] and Gene [Clark] were. They were probably up there, too. The Byrds were very early occupants of the area.

To what degree was it like a small town in the middle of this big city?

It sorta was. But it was trying so hard not to be that. We were literally four minutes away from the Sunset Strip. So you went from this incredibly energetic, fast-moving madness of the Sunset Strip clubs, you go up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, and in four minutes you’re up in this pristine, quiet environment with all these beautiful old houses. We weren’t the first ones to discover this place. People were living up there in the ‘40s and ‘50s — some actors and a lot of artists. It already had this reputation as a bohemian beatnik enclave.

There was the famous legend that Houdini had a house up there. People would be driving around and point out a place and say, “That’s where Houdini lived.” They’d point out some old wreck of a place, some ruins of an old structure. There were a lot of good legends to the place. I think that’s where Robert Mitchum got in trouble at a party in 1949 or 1950. He walked into a party and then the police came and arrested people for marijuana. He just happened to walk in at the wrong time. But he had a hell of a career after that, though, so he must have struck a deal. The musicians didn’t start moving up there until the ‘60s, and by then it seemed like a quiet mountain town that just happened to be minutes away from the heart of the city.

I always thought of it as the Woodstock of the West Coast — this retreat from the rigors of the big city.

Well, in Woodstock you’re a good long ways from Manhattan. But in Laurel Canyon you’re minutes from the Sunset Strip and maybe ten minutes from Beverly Hills or Hollywood proper. A lot of people don’t know this, but the Sunset Strip was part of Los Angeles County. It was a mile long, from La Cienega I think to Doheny. It was county instead of city, so it was run completely differently. It was patrolled by the L.A. County sheriff, as opposed to the LAPD.

Is that why they imposed that curfews that led to the riots in ’66?

The whole thing with the kids rioting had to do with the small business owners, whose businesses were being infringed upon by foot traffic. The kids were running around, goofing around, and it was killing business. I didn’t get involved in that. I just saw it on the news. I remember seeing that footage. I still lived in the Canyon then. I was there until ’68, then I moved to Topanga Canyon.

Why did you leave?

Things changed. I was still in the Byrds and I just bought a house in Topanga. No, I’ll tell you why I left. I completely forgot the most important part of the story. I’m getting older. The reason I left was, my house burned down in Laurel Canyon.

I was renting this beautiful house, and you could see the whole city. It was all wood, and I remember it was fall, then the ferocious Santa Ana winds hit. They always come around in the fall. They’re very dangerous. It was real hot that day, and the winds were kicking up, and I had pulled my motorcycle out. I was going to kick it over, but it was leaking gas and the wind blew the fumes into the water heater. It was an open-flame heater and it just ignited. It made the same sound you hear when you light an old-fashioned gas range. I literally caught on fire. Instinctively I rolled on the ground. I think I lost a bit of hair and some eyebrow before I got out of there. I jumped in my car and pulled into the dirt road. I had nothing. I had my car and that was it. I lost everything I owned.

David Crosby had just been visiting me at my house. He’d been there for an hour and left just 20 minutes before my house burned down. I think we can connect the dots! I’m kidding. I love David dearly, but I still poke him about that one. Roger McGuinn lived across the canyon from me and saw the fire. He said it looks like where Chris lives, so he starts filming it. Somehow the footage got on the local NBC affiliate. I was living in a hotel for a few nights, and I remember watching my house burn down on the TV. That was ’66.

Is that why you left for Topanga?

Well, it was starting to be the place to live. More groups were moving up there: the Turtles and Frank Zappa and Mama Cass and Peter Tork. Everything was changing. Drugs entered the picture. I ended up buying a house in Topanga Canyon, which is about 25 miles north of Los Angeles. It’s also very pristine and quiet — a little bit bigger than Laurel Canyon. A lot of people moved there, too, like Neil Young. And it was a very similar scene, with everybody interacting with each other. That should be the next documentary.


Photo of Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman playing cards: Courtesy of Nurit Wilde
Photo of Crosby, Stills & Nash at Big Bear: Henry Diltz

WATCH: The Harmed Brothers, “All the Same”

Artist: The Harmed Brothers
Hometown: Ludlow, Kentucky via Portland, Oregon
Song: “All the Same”
Album: Across the Waves
Release Date: June 5, 2020
Label: Fluff and Gravy Records

In Their Words: : “‘All the Same’ is a traveling song. It’s about life from inside the tour van. It’s about chasing a dream, even when you lose sight of it from being strung out on the road and missing home. It’s about our daily lives as an American touring band. Something I’m sure a lot of musicians can relate to.” — Ray Vietti, The Harmed Brothers

“The Ludlow-Bromley Swim Club in Ludlow, Kentucky is a cherished and beloved summer hangout spot, a classic American neighborhood pool — and our good friend and neighbor Matt ‘Catfish’ Williams presented us with the idea of shooting a video there. With his help, along with the pool owner and our fantastic community, we got to do something really fun and special. When initially presented with this opportunity, we felt ‘All the Same’ has this undeniably beachy, summertime vibe that perfectly fit that idea.” — Alex Salcido, The Harmed Brothers


Photo credit: Michael Wilson

For First Solo Album, Sam Doores Opens the Map of Musical Influences

Sam Doores cut his teeth as a Bay Area-born teen troubadour busking around the U.S. before he got his first real break with a steady gig at an Irish pub in New Orleans. In that same city he co-created some of the last decade’s most arresting socially-conscious anthems with Hurray for the Riff Raff and made sparkling folk- and country-derived excursions with his own band, the Deslondes.

And now he’s got his first solo album, Sam Doores, recorded primarily in Berlin and filled with echoes of everything from Tin Pan Alley to the Mississippi hill country, from French Quarter jazz to California psychedelic-folk-rock.

So, let’s talk about Cambodian rock ’n’ roll. “Cambodian Rock n’ Roll” is, in fact, the title of one of the songs on the album.

“No one’s asked me about that!” he says, excitedly, on the phone from New Orleans, where he’s lived now for 14 years. “Do you know the compilation, Cambodian Rocks?”

It’s a 1996 collection of recordings made by a wealth of artists in Cambodia who embraced American surf, garage-rock and psychedelic styles and gave them scintillating Southeast Asian twists, before the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge, in which many of those performers were killed or imprisoned.

“A friend played it for me one time on a road trip and I fell in love with the style and sound,” he says, adding that he then watched Never Forget, a documentary about that time. “So heartbreaking, and after watching it the music hits on a deeper level.”

Now to be clear, the song doesn’t sound like Cambodian rock ’n’ roll, but rather is a “tip of the cap” to it, in a somber reminiscence about listening to it with the friend who introduced him to that music. The songs on Sam Doores aren’t tinged with that tragedy, yet there is a wistful, muted melancholy and sadness throughout. “There’s some darkness, for sure,” he says.

Well, there’s going to be. It’s a breakup record, after all, largely coming from the end of a long-term relationship. The album explores various shades of that darkness, of unsettling loss and longing. There’s often light shining through, with residual and resurgent hope and joy. To some extent it all comes together, brutally, midway through the album with the song “Had a Dream,” born out of two losses that happened in his life over the four years in which the material on the album came together.

“That came to me when I knew I was losing someone who had been one of the closest people in my whole life, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get that person back,” he says. “And a friend of mine was dying. It’s about eventual letting go. For a long time I thought my friend was going to pull through, beat his sickness, and I thought I was not going to lose my love. Both ended up getting lost. I wrote about that time. Wanted the music to have the frantic, desperate feeling on the verses, but also the melancholy of the choruses.”

The sensibilities tie together seemingly disparate emotions, and disparate musical tones. On one end is the upbeat, generous and genuine “Wish You Well,” one of several songs featuring members of Tuba Skinny, a leader of a vibrant wave of young bands enlivening traditional New Orleans jazz. On the other, the very downcast acoustic guitar “Red Leaf Rag,” evoking a “dark dream world” that he says really should have been called a “drag” rather than a “rag,” or maybe a “dirge.” It’s all no less a factor on songs occupying the middle ground, including “Other Side of Town,” co-written with and featuring lead vocals of Doores’ longtime musical partner, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s dynamic leader, Alynda Segarra.

They also tie together, or perhaps are tied together by, the two cities in which the songs were shaped: New Orleans and Berlin. In many ways the album is the story of his 14 years in the former, having arrived when he was just 19.

“I was hitchhiking on my way [here] when Hurricane Katrina hit [in August 2005] and ended up in Austin for a while” he says. “Met some New Orleans musicians who had relocated there and they talked me into coming to JazzFest in 2006. I felt like I’d left the country. By far the most exciting place I’d been. Been to Havana, Cuba, once before. My high school jazz band went there. Reminded me more of that than anywhere. Was just going to be here one weekend.”

New Orleans has a way of changing people’s plans. That first day he stumbled upon an unannounced small-stage set by Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint warming up for their later big-stage show, and later saw the incredibly powerful performance in which Bruce Springsteen debuted his folky, New Orleans-esque Seeger Sessions Band, a show that had tens of thousands in the devastated city shedding tears of both sorrow and hope — and turned Doores from a Bruce doubter to a fan. He also had his first encounter with the colorful, beaded-and-feathered Mardi Gras Indian troupes, and he was smitten with it all.

“It totally felt like the beginning of the rest of my life that day,” he says.

Having spent all of his money, he went to busk on Bourbon Street, the owner of the now-gone Kelly’s Irish pub saw him and hired him for a regular gig. “He said, ‘Want to try your luck on a real stage?’” Doores says. “I thought, ‘Wow! Playing inside?’”

Soon he met Segarra and formed a musical partnership that evolved into Hurray for the Riff Raff. As that band took off, he launched the Deslondes (named after the street on which he was living) as a second creative outlet. Through it all, the love and loss captured in Sam Doores took place.

It was in Berlin that he found the environment in which he could shape that into the album; that took place over the course of four years in a studio built by producer Anders Christopherson.

“I actually didn’t know Anders until we started recording,” he says. “He wrote me and Alynda one time out of the blue. Had heard a record of a band we were in together, Sundown Songs. Wrote and said if you are ever coming through Berlin I’d love to record you.”

Not long after, as it happened, the Deslondes were doing the band’s first European tour, so he arranged to spend a week in Berlin and by the end of that time he determined to make a full record there, though it would have to be done in four different stretches over several years. Christopherson put together a “house” band to bring Doores’ ideas to life, primarily himself and a Spanish keyboardist named, yes, Carlos Santana. A lot of experimentation happened with combinations of instruments — vibes, autoharp, an electronic “disc” organ, glockenspiel, and so on. And realizing Doores’ long-standing ambition, strings were added to some songs in arrangements by Manon Parent.

Somehow, it all works as an integrated whole.

“I think there are some core instruments we tended to use in the arrangements that sonically thread the record together,” he says. “In terms of influences, a lot of different tones. Some old New Orleans R&B, some of the opposite — psychedelic folk experimental soundtrack music.”

In some places it might remind of the “vintage” touches associated with such figures as Harry Nilsson and Van Dyke Parks. Doores loves those comparisons, then observes, “We listened to a lot of Nina Simone and early reggae — a lot of Upsetters, early Studio One stuff, early Wailers. Anders has an incredible record collection. Wherever we weren’t recording, we were in his kitchen listening to that stuff. We didn’t do any straight up reggae, but it influenced us in some ways, the bass lines and the organ.”

That was just part of the musical and personal oasis he found there, a space that let him find the full expression for his New Orleans stories. The importance of that is so profound that he wrote an instrumental impression of that environment, “Tempelhofer Dawn,” a gentle, muted, nostalgic waltz — and ultimately chose it to open the album, to serve as a curtain-raiser on the song cycle that follows.

“Tempelhofer is the name of the street the studio is on,” he says. “A lot of moments after late nights going out, or early mornings waking up, I spent a lot of time there with the birds or children playing and that gave a feeling that matched the song.”

He recorded it live in studio, with himself on piano joined by Santana on organ and Parent and Mia Bodet on violins. “It’s a nice way to ease into the record,” he says.

In many ways, given the breakup at the heart of the album, it sounds like both a beginning and an ending.

“It felt like the first track,” he says. “Or the last track.”


Photo credit: Sarrah Danzinger