Tag: Folk

STREAM: Kacy & Clayton, ‘Carrying On’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Kacy & Clayton
Hometown: Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan
Album: Carrying On (produced by Jeff Tweedy and recorded by Tom Schick.)
Release Date: October 4, 2019
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “Jeff and Tom have taught us a lasting lesson on what’s important and not important when making music. I can recall moments when their suggestions caused me to feel panicky and vulnerable, but I can see now that they were encouraging us to let go of unnecessary fixations. And those moments have all ended up being my favourite parts of the two records we’ve made with them. It’s easy to cling to your own ideas out of insecurity but trusting someone else’s judgment can allow you to be very free.” — Clayton Linthicum

“Making this record felt purposeful. The songs came together nicely and we integrated them into our live set with Mike Silverman and Andy Beisel leading up to recording. Returning at The Loft in Chicago seemed like, ‘Hey guys! We’re back again and we’ve been practicing so let’s make a better record now.’ It was three or four days and the whole thing was tracked and marked with a B. Working with Jeff Tweedy has been a mystical and Midwestern experience for Clayton, Mike, Andy and I. He shies away from seeming authoritative and that style of leadership has strongly resonated with us.” — Kacy Anderson

Photo credit: Mat Dunlap

The Show On The Road – The Lone Bellow

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks to the founding trio of one the most respected and sought after folk-rock bands in the country, The Lone Bellow.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Their hedonistically heavenly harmonies have lifted them from playing tiny bars around their founding home base of Brooklyn, New York to adoring audiences at venerable venues like Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the Apollo, and The Ryman Auditorium, in their new home of Nashville, Tennessee. The Lone Bellow have a rapport that is intimate, hilarious, and — when it calls for it — deadly serious. The band is full of so much heart and genuine insight that you can’t help but lean in and listen.

WATCH: Carrie Rodriguez with Wood & Wire, “Edge of the Colorado”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Carrie Rodriguez with Wood & Wire
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Edge of the Colorado”
Label: The Next Waltz

In Their Words: “I love the idea of making something out of nothing. That’s the magic of songwriting. I came to Bruce [Robison] one morning with some phrases and melodies that had been bouncing around my head, and by the end of an hour we had written ‘Edge of the Colorado.’ It’s a song about a yearning for a bygone era; an era when personal connections ran deeper because we weren’t so damn CONNECTED every minute of the day!

“After listening to our demo a few times, the song seemed to be begging for some high lonesome harmony vocals and bluegrass instrumentation. I had recently seen the Grammy-nominated bluegrass band, Wood & Wire, perform at The Next Waltz SXSW party and was completely blown away. So Bruce called the guys up and before I knew it we were all in the bunker together recording the song live to tape. What a gift to get to see the creative process fully realized …from some words and melodies stuck in my head to this track which I’m thrilled to be sharing with you!” — Carrie Rodriguez

Photo provided by The Next Waltz

The Show On The Road – Anna Tivel

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Anna Tivel – the Portland-based singing poetess who builds mountain ranges of rhymes with her colorful, impressionistic perspective of a world still shrouded in endless beauty and mystery.

LISTEN: APPLE MUSIC • MP3

Anna Tivel is one of those folk singers who is passed between friends and long-time listeners like a secret talisman; a tiny gemstone that you polish in your pocket when you need a reminder that the earth is vast and the smallest things you pass on the side of the road are beautiful if you look at them from the right view.

As soon as the needle hits the wax on her latest record The Question, Anna’s hushed, sharp-edged voice begins slicing angular verses that build and build until the words flow out in blinking mini movies that sear themselves on your eardrums and then are gone in a flash. It’s like she’s a sonic cinematographer waiting for the scene to be shot in our minds.

Where Business Meets Banjo, Alison Brown Prepares IBMA Keynote Address

Posted on by Editor

The first time Alison Brown gave a keynote address at IBMA’s annual conference in 2002, the bluegrass industry gathering was still held in Owensboro, Kentucky. So much has changed since then, but not everything. Asked about memories from those early conferences, she replies, “Oh, it was like it is now. I always kind of think of it as a family reunion. It was just a slightly smaller family then, but no less enthusiastic or supportive, as far as I’m concerned.”

Brown is one of bluegrass’ most prominent figures, adept as an artist, a producer, and co-founder of Compass Records. She’s also won a mantle of IBMA awards in multiple categories, including Banjo Player of the Year in 1991 and a Distinguished Achievement Award in 2015.

This year she will present a new keynote address, “Four and a Half Things I’ve Learned,” on Tuesday at IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in Raleigh, North Carolina. She spoke with BGS by phone.

BGS: What was it about this opportunity to present the keynote address that appealed to you?

AB: I was thinking about the fact that this is Compass Records’ 25th anniversary, and so I thought that, personally, it would give me an opportunity to reflect a little bit on where we’ve been and what we’ve learned in the process of doing what we’ve been doing over 25 years. And maybe share a few things with folks that could be edifying for them.

You’re seeing this bluegrass world as an artist and producer, as well as a business owner. What do you hope that the creative side of the bluegrass community will take away from your presentation?

Hmmm, maybe a better understanding of the landscape that we’re all trying to navigate. And how to better position yourself for success. I think some of the idiosyncrasies of the business, from the view of the record company — I wouldn’t expect that most creatives would be as immersed in that as we are, running a record label. And so I think if you know the challenges that you’re dealing with, you’re better able to position your music and your career to take advantage of the opportunities that do exist, and stand a better chance to succeeding.

What are some of the bluegrass community’s greatest strengths right now, do you think?

I really mean this — I think that we are incredibly fortunate to have an organization like IBMA that’s kind of the centerpiece of our community, that’s looking out for all of us and keeping the community together. I really think that’s incredibly valuable, even more than people know. Other roots music genres that don’t have that are not as fortunate as our community, in my opinion.

What are some things that the bluegrass community can really take pride in?

I gave the keynote address back in 2002, so this is actually my keynote redux. You know, looking back at that keynote, a lot of what that was about was embracing diversity, and musical diversity. That was 17 years ago and that was a rallying cry at that point in time, but it’s not like it was a revolutionary idea. I’m really proud of our community for the strides that we have made. Expanding the envelope conceptually, welcoming in people whose music may be more on the fringes of bluegrass, and not exactly emulate what Earl and Lester and Bill did in 1945.

So there’s the musical aspect, but there’s also the demographic diversity, like gender diversity and racial diversity. Those are things that are community is still grappling with — but we are grappling with them and I’m proud of us for that.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last 20 years in bluegrass is that the music videos are better, the websites and album covers are modern, and the band photos are more contemporary. How important are visuals, do you think, for a bluegrass artist to get attention from press, festivals, and audiences in general?

I think visuals are more important than they’ve ever been. It’s my experience that people can’t just listen to music anymore. They have to see music. We have people in the studio all the time and you want to play them a new track, and I can just see their eyes wandering around the room, looking for the screen. “Where do I look while I listen to this?” So, I think it’s more important than ever.

I’ve also noticed that some bluegrass labels are choosing not to put their new music on Spotify. Why is it important for Compass to be represented there?

That’s where the audience is moving. Granted, the traditional bluegrass music audience is slower to adopt a new technology than a more youthful pop audience would be, but still we’re seeing our audience move there and it’s a great place for people to discover new music. It’s one of the new revenue sources for selling music. We’re seeing the music industry move more and more into the streaming arena. It would seem to be crazy not to be there, as frustrating as the economics may be.

It hasn’t really been our experience that having bluegrass on Spotify has meant that we sell less bluegrass in physical form. And it only really supports the artists’ efforts because maybe the older audience is used to consuming physically but the young audience is used to consuming through streaming and digital. So if you’re not present in that space, you’re never going to expand your audience into that younger demographic, and obviously an artist needs to grow their audience. You need to keep trying to make the average age of your audience younger, rather than older, just in terms of your own longevity as an artist.

So many bluegrass musicians are friends with each other, as well as colleagues in a sense. In bluegrass, it’s pretty rare to send a business-related email to someone you don’t know. How do you think that familiarity shapes the business side of bluegrass?

I completely agree with you but I’m not really sure how to answer the question, though. I guess I can really only answer it personally — that that is part of what gives me a lot of joy, to be in the business of the bluegrass world, because this community has meant a tremendous amount to me personally. I’ve been in the bluegrass community since I was 12, which is crazy to think about, and there are people that I see at IBMA that I have known since I was 12 years old. I think about how much others have given me as I’ve come up in this music. So to be able to have a hand in making this music stay healthy, and paying it forward, is very meaningful to me.

Looking back, is there advice you wish you’d been given in 2002 that you had to learn the hard way?

That’s an excellent question. That’s probably something I should ponder for my keynote and see if I can come up with a good answer. I guess the one thing that I would say is, big things can happen in small steps. We’ve been pedaling this bike for 25 years, building this label, and it’s amazing to look back over a quarter of a century and see how something that you literally started at the kitchen table can grow into an entity that some would consider to be a significant force in bluegrass music. I mean, I think I might have known that going into it, so it’s not really a revelation. It just takes a long time, but if you continue to do the work to the best of your ability, over that long period of time, at the end you can stand back and you will have built something that is amazing to see, and that it did really happen.

Photo courtesy of IBMA

Lakota John Laces Native Lineage with North Carolina Roots

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Born and raised in North Carolina, of course John Locklear (AKA Lakota John) could draw from strong regional and cultural influences to create his sound: old-timey, down home, acoustic blues. But his North Carolina roots aren’t his only connection to the Piedmont, and the vast, richly diverse musics that come from his home state. His Lumbee and Lakota lineage most certainly have an equal influence on his picking, his songs, and his style — especially given the huge impact Native and Indigenous Americans had on the creation of American roots music in general. It’s an impact that continues to this day, despite constant erasure and attempts at exclusion.

Ahead of Lakota John’s performance as part of BGS and PineCone’s fourth annual Shout & Shine: A Celebration of Diversity in Bluegrass — at IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, on September 27 — we had a chat about why old-time blues isn’t just time capsule music and what folky magic must be in the water in North Carolina.

BGS: So many folks view this style of down home, old-time blues as antiquated music, as “throwback” music. What do you think blues, especially of the kind that you make and play, can bring to this modern era? What value is added to it if we allow it to be in the present?

Lakota John: Awareness of the genre itself and the fact that without roots music, many other types of music wouldn’t exist. Roots music is the foundation of other music and by bringing it into today’s musical conversation, younger generations can embrace its importance as a foundation and use it to innovate and create new styles of music.

What was your own entry point to this style of folky, vernacular music?

I grew up listening to the music of the ’60s and ’70s, because that’s what my parents listened to. Around 10 years old, I became curious about the earlier influences on the artists who produced music in the ’60s and ’70s, which led me back to blues, bluegrass, and roots music. I could see the correlation between the earlier music and later music in so many ways and found it really interesting how the music evolved.

Erasure is so prevalent in American society, many people — including historians, journalists, and ardent fans — don’t realize how fundamental Native and Indigenous influences were (and still are) to American roots music. Who influenced you? Who do you point to, to help reduce and eliminate that erasure?

I feel Jelly Roll Morton, Rev. Gary Davis, and Charley Patton are just a few of my influences who approached music with a percussive and syncopated style which is something Native and Indigenous people have always shared through their music and traditions. With later musicians such as Muddy Waters, Link Wray, The Allman Brothers, Jesse Ed Davis and many more, the basic structure remained but they incorporated an electric sound into the blues along with other styles to create their own unique sound.

Part of that erasure is simply because most colonizers and descendants of colonizers, immigrants, etc. do not realize that Indigenous people are still here. What do you say to folks, even the most well-intentioned and progressive among us, who have this very common blind spot when it comes to Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, and Indigenous rights? 

Native peoples walk in two worlds, the traditional and contemporary; we’ve always been here and always will be. We’re more than the stereotyped “Hollywood Indian” and definitely not museum artifacts. Hopefully to clarify this common blind spot I’d say, “I had some difficulty finding my keys and a parking space for my buffalo this morning.”

Shout & Shine returns for its fourth year at the IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass Festival at the end of September. What does bluegrass mean to you? What, if any, of its influences have filtered into your music and art?

That’s awesome. I grew up listening to bluegrass music and I definitely incorporate some elements of the bluegrass style into my own music. Bluegrass is an interesting art form and a very important category of roots music.

IBMA being hosted in North Carolina, in Raleigh, for the past number of years seems like a perfect fit. What is it about North Carolina that makes it such a hotbed for roots music? What do you get out of living and performing in this richly musical area? 

Man, I really think there’s something in water here. The south has always been a hotbed for roots music, possibly because of the many trials and struggles the south has been through in our country’s history. Because I’m from North Carolina, I’m connected to the community and music that has been an influential piece to what I do. This place is one of the richest musical areas where I have been fortunate enough to have access to artists and mentors who were and continue to be pioneers in the development of roots music in America.

Photo courtesy of Music Maker Relief Foundation

Ten Years After ‘Crazy Heart,’ Ryan Bingham Comes Around to “The Weary Kind”

Posted on by Editor

When Ryan Bingham accepted an Academy Award in 2010, he looked like he was on top of the world. Amanda Seyfried and Miley Cyrus announced that his song “The Weary Kind,” from the film Crazy Heart, had beaten two compositions by Randy Newman, and he took the stage with producer/co-writer T Bone Burnett, thanking his wife (“I love you more than rainbows, baby”) before showing gratitude to the cast and crew. It was a modest and heartfelt speech, not to mention a rare moment when roots music is given a prominent platform and one of the most prestigious awards in any art form.

A decade later, however, Bingham admits he was in a dark place, unable to enjoy the honor or the opportunities that came with it. “It was pretty tough when that film came out,” says the New Mexico-born/Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter. “A lot of people didn’t know that my mother had passed away just before it came out, and my father passed away soon after. People kept asking me to play that song all the time, and they kept saying, ‘Aren’t you happy about winning an Oscar? You must be having the best time of your life.’ But it was actually one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through. I didn’t know how to talk about it, and I was depressed.”

A downcast tune that captures his mood at the time, “The Weary Kind” is one of those songs that doesn’t sound like it was written; rather, it sounds like it’s been haunting dive bar jukeboxes for decades, even if it dispels any romance that might cling to such locations. “This ain’t no place for the weary kind,” Bingham sings, his voice tender as a bruise. “This ain’t no place to fall behind.”

There’s a danger to this place he’s describing, which might be one of the cramped bars depicted in Crazy Heart or might be something more figurative, like down in the dumps, but the song isn’t exactly grim. Bingham manages to locate a small, precious kernel of hope: “Pick up your crazy heart and give it one more try.”

When asked by the press about the inspiration for the tune, he didn’t talk about his parents or their hard lives. “I would just tell them it was the film and the character,” Bingham says, referring to the main character, a washed-up outlaw country singer named Bad Blake. Played by Jeff Bridges (who won the Best Actor Oscar), Bad drives his trusty Suburban to shows around the Southwest, playing to a handful of aging fans while trading off the notoriety of a few dusty hits from decades ago. A barely functioning alcoholic, he bristles against all opportunities to crawl out of his rut, convincing himself that his knockabout life is somehow noble. In the novel he meets a tragic end, but in Cooper’s film Bad finds a possibility of salvation.

“The Weary Kind” is a remarkable piece of songwriterly ventriloquism, not only showing the obstacles Bad faces but how he feels about them. Cooper devotes several scenes to showing Bad writing those lines, picking out the melody on his guitar, searching diligently for the perfect rhyme. Rarely do movies give so much time and attention to the mundanities of the creative process, but the act of writing that song in the film is a transformative endeavor, a means of confronting his demons and embracing a future that has scared him for so long.

Bingham, however, could find no such solace in the tune. “I was trying to find my place in the world, and I’ve always struggled with my identity — where I was from and what I wanted my music to do. I hadn’t figured that out yet, and I was afraid of getting pigeonholed. I was young and rebelling against notoriety and fame and all that. It was all too heavy for me to bring up without breaking down. People just didn’t know, and that wasn’t their fault. How could they have known?”

Crazy Heart was a modest hit at the box office and a major hit during awards season, but it has proved surprisingly durable and influential over the last decade, too. It provided the template for Bradley Cooper’s remake of A Star Is Born last year, in which the actor-director played a much younger, somehow more grizzled version of Bad Blake. It also put outlaw country in front of a mainstream filmgoing audience, creating a space for such similar fare as Ethan Hawke’s Blaze (about the singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, who was partly an inspiration for Bad Blake).

Since winning an Oscar, Bingham has released four albums, including this year’s roadhouse-ready American Love Song. And he has continued acting, with a role in Cooper’s 2017 western Hostiles and a recurring part on the Paramount Network series Yellowstone, starring Kevin Costner and Wes Bentley. As Crazy Heart’s influence has grown, Bingham’s relationship with its theme song has softened, and he’s learned to embrace “The Weary Kind” and to appreciate its impact on his fans.

“I’ve grown up and grown more comfortable in my own skin. I’ve dealt with family stuff, so it’s been easier to get back into playing that song for people,” he says. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the film, Bingham spoke with BGS about his impromptu audition, the film’s original downer ending, and growing up in the pool halls and dive bars of New Mexico.

BGS: When you think back on that time, what stands out to you most?

RB: The thing that always stands out to me is the script. I hadn’t written any songs for TV or film before. In fact, the songs that I’d been writing tended to be very personal — about things I’d gone through in my own life. But reading this script and looking at this other character allowed me to get out of my own skin and put myself in the shoes of someone else. I got to live vicariously through them and tell their story through the songs, and at the same time I was able to relate some of my own experiences as well.

And you’re not just writing for a character, but you’re writing for a character as he goes through this ordeal and tries to get his life together.

When I first read the script, the ending was different. They found him dead in a ditch outside some bar. It was really gloomy, so when I was writing that song, I was thinking about this poor son of a bitch dying by the side of the road somewhere. Then they changed the ending later on. I think the original ending was in the novel that Thomas Cobb had written, but I’m glad they changed it.

What kind of direction did you get from Scott Cooper or music supervisor T Bone Burnett?

None at all. I had met Scott just one time. He contacted me and said he was looking for some songs, so I met him for lunch and he told me about the project. I hit the road right after that, and he told me to read the script and let him know if I was inspired to write anything.

When I got home a few months later, I recorded this tune I’d been working on, and I called him up to ask where I should send it. I was just looking for an address, but he said he happened to be in L.A. visiting T Bone Burnett and asked if I could just bring it by.

So I drove over there to drop it off, and T Bone answers the door, all seven feet of him, and says, “Why don’t you come in and play it for us?” It was him and Scott and Jeff Bridges and Stephen Bruton and some other people. So I play him a little bit of the recording, and T Bone says, “That’s cool but can you play it for us yourself?” He gave me a guitar and sat me down on the couch, and I’m like, “Aw fuck, here we go!”

That sounds like a trial by fire.

It was. I wasn’t even sure I could remember it! But they liked it and unanimously decided to use it. I ended up hanging around with them and working on more songs for the film. I think from that point on I was over at T Bone’s house every day writing with those guys.

Did you have people in mind while you were writing? I see Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley in the character of Bad Blake.

I had a ton of people in mind. Where I’m from out in Hobbs, New Mexico, right on the Texas border, there are a lot of those characters out there, and one of them in particular was my father. He was very much a character like Townes or Bad, so I wrote the song thinking about my father and his situation.

When I was growing up, he would drag me into these old pool halls and bars. I was barely old enough to see over the bars, but he and his friends would give me quarters for the jukebox or the pool table. They’d all get drunk during happy hour and then I’d drive them all home. I grew up in those rough roadhouse places, and then when I got into writing songs, I discovered all these songwriters from that area, like Townes and Guy Clark and Joe Ely and Terry Allen and Billy Joe Shaver.

Those guys took me under their wing in a big way. I don’t know how many times I’d go see them play a show and they’d invite me up to play a song and introduce me to their audience. They really helped me out a lot and encouraged me to play. I was this young kid from a little town in the middle of nowhere, and I had no direction or any kind of formal lessons. I didn’t have anybody to teach me anything, so those guys were really important to me.

Was your father a musician?

He wasn’t. He was just a straight-up ol’ boozer who worked in the oilfields. My dad and uncles were all cowboys and roughnecks. When I was a kid, I used to go to these junior rodeos. My dad would haul me around on weekends, and it was always long drives on desolate roads. There was always the piss jug in the van. That translated into my own music later on when I started playing in a band and spending a lot of time on the highway. It was a lifestyle I had lived as a kid. So I could relate to that aspect of Bad Blake when I read the script.

Is that why you were cast as his backing band in those early scenes? How did that happen?

I had a show in Los Angeles at the Troubadour, and Scott came out to see me and my band the Dead Horses play. He said, “You guys gotta be in this thing!” He wanted to cast us as the backing band in the bowling alley. We were really just a bar band playing around in these roadhouses and honky-tonks in Texas, but we had just started coming up to the West Coast to play. We would play at bowling alleys, bars, backyard parties — anywhere anyone would let us play.

Did you ever work as somebody else’s pickup band?

I’d never done that before. I didn’t get into playing music until later on, and for the longest time it was just me and a guitar. Once I started getting gigs in these bars, they wanted you to have a band, so the whole experience of playing in a band was still new to me. I’d never been a side player for anybody or played in a backing band. That was new to me.

But some of my friends who were playing with me in the Dead Horses had been in backing bands, so they knew the deal. And I thought about those guys who’d mentored me when we did that scene where Bad Blake was giving advice to his band. He’s not passing down the torch, but those guys were always giving a little bit to the younger guys, showing them how you do it. There was a bit of that in those scenes.

It almost felt like he was trying to warn them away from that troubadour life.

You bet. I think about guys like Townes who lived a very hard, sad life, and that’s something I’ve always been cautious about. You don’t have to do it that way. You don’t have to be sad to write a good song. I’ve known a lot of songwriters who felt like they needed to live that lifestyle in order to create, and I grew up around that with my old man and my mother as well. That was something I knew I didn’t want to do, and I’ve always tried to get away from that stuff. There’s gotta be a better way or else you’re going to end up in a ditch somewhere.

Crazy Heart seems to suggest that that’s the easy way out. It’s easy to embrace that self-destructive side of it.

And that lifestyle too is so easy to slip into when you’re in a bar every night. You’ve always got people bringing you drinks and wanting to party with you. It’s hard to get away from it when it’s always around you.

Did writing for this character and this project change the way you write?

It didn’t really change the way that I approach songwriting, but it definitely exposed my music to so many people who might never have even heard it. It opened up a lot of doors for me to play in other places. We were this bar band from Austin, and a lot of those places we played early on… people went there to get drunk and dance and have a good time. They didn’t go to sit down and listen to a folk singer performing sad, quiet songs.

We were caught in between some of those things, with a lot of people coming out to our shows to hear that one song they knew from the film. But the rest of our set was full of loud rock ‘n’ roll and barn-burning honky-tonk songs. Our fanbase grew, but some people didn’t know what it was all about. So it was an interesting time, with fans getting to know what I was doing and me trying to figure out what they wanted. It was an interesting challenge because at the same time I just wanted to be myself and grab hold of whatever identity I had.

That has to be even tougher when you’re writing songs about your own personal experiences.

I had been around these older people who’d been playing for a long time, and they told me constantly that you have to have something to say in the song. You have to be truthful with people and be truthful about how you feel. So I’ve always felt an obligation to wear my heart on my sleeve when I’m writing songs. I need to be vulnerable, which is a way of carrying on that tradition.

“The Weary Kind” has started showing up in your sets recently. What has it been like to revisit the song?

I’ve been playing it a lot more these days. I’ve managed to deal with my family stuff, so it’s been easier to play that song for people. It’s still very emotional for me, but it’s different now. I think what brought it back for me was hearing stories from all these fans who have their own experiences and tell me how they relate to the song, how it’s helped them deal with certain things.

That was really inspiring, and now I sing it because I realize how much it means to people who come to the shows. I try to be respectful of that. If that song means something to them, then that’s a good thing for all of us — and a bit of a healing process for me as well. I can sing that song and not suppress all those emotions. I can get it all off my chest.

It makes for some heavy shows, especially when it’s just me and a guitar. I’ve played that song with four or five people in the front row just bawling. I’ve come to realize that the more I can give them, the more they give back to me. And they understand when there’s a rough night and I can’t play song. They know why.

 

WATCH: J.S. Ondara Sings “Lebanon” on ‘CBS This Morning’

Posted on by Editor

American folk music truly has a global audience, and J.S. Ondara is proof. This young singer-songwriter is from Kenya, and in a relentless pursuit of the music he loves, Ondara moved to Minnesota in 2013 to be close to Bob Dylan’s roots and to get a taste of what shaped America’s finest folk singer. (Read the BGS interview.)

Since then, Ondara has been making a name for himself across the country, earning himself a recording agreement with Verve Label Group and a nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year at the 2019 Americana Honors & Awards. Performing “Lebanon” from his 2019 album Tales of America, here is J.S. Ondara on CBS This Morning‘s Saturday Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Tell All Your Friends PR

Letting Go of Time: My Soundtrack for a Year with Cancer

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Many of the facets of the music industry are the way they are simply because they are the way they are, but there is one pillar of melodic and lyrical art-making that remains extraordinarily arbitrary.

Time.

Records are released on Fridays now. Except when they aren’t. Some release days are packed with albums and others are desolate. Festival season coincides with the weather-outside-is-bearable season — except when it doesn’t. Holiday records are recorded in the summer. Lead time is inflexible, though ever-changing. Deadlines are always drop-dead… until they aren’t.

Time has gone from being regarded as something that inevitably passes to being framed as a commodity that can be “spent.” Time is money, especially in this gig economy era and in creative spaces where sentiments like “If you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life!” rapidly devolve into a workaholic culture. We’ve seen the dissolution of boundaries between professional and personal lives, and made constant comparisons to those we perceive as more productive and ambitious.

My relationship with time — from each basic, incessant twitch of the clock’s second hand to my holistic understanding of existential time — changed fundamentally and cataclysmically in August 2018 when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. In the earliest days my doctors told me that I would “lose a year of my life” fighting the disease. Being naive, new to the realms of life-threatening illness and the omnipresent physical, mental, and spiritual alterations of such diagnoses, I believed them.

Over the months that followed, time passed not linearly, but as if it were a roller coaster operating in many more than just three dimensions, with twists, turns, and corkscrews I never considered possible. The associated cognitive impairments of cancer — from chemotherapy, an inordinate amount of prescription drugs, and the related traumas of fighting the disease — exacerbated my willy-nilly tumble through the twelve months that landed me here, writing this. Now, just over a year post-diagnosis and almost four months in remission, I am free of cancer (though not technically “cancer-free”).

Cancer is an arbitrary demon in and of itself, and as such, it’s very good at reminding: If something need not be arbitrary, perhaps it ought not to be. A rectal cancer diagnosis in an otherwise healthy 26-year-old is a perfect example. Humans cannot help trying to force such a thing to make sense, to have a direct cause and effect, but in this case and in many, many others it doesn’t. And it never will.

Before the final months of the 2010s elapse and we find ourselves reliving the year — and the decade — in music; while I find myself emerging from the fog of a year of pain, loss, and grief, a year fighting for my life and coming out ahead, I offer you this year-end wrap up. Not of 2019, but of a year fighting cancer. This is a soundtrack. For a few more than 365 days (and many more to come) of a queer banjo player, songwriter, and music writer holding onto life and letting go of time.

“Soon You’ll Get Better” — Taylor Swift feat. Dixie Chicks (2019)

In my eyes, the single most resonant line of any song released in the past year must be, “You’ll get better soon, ‘cause you have to.”

There’s this general, almost universal understanding of cancer, from a societal standpoint, that often does more harm than good. Almost everyone has a simplistic, rudimentary handle on what cancer is, what it means, and how to operate in relation to it. We’ve been fed countless narratives on the subject in the media, in fiction, non-fiction, through science, by the Hallmark Channel — you name it. One of the most frustrating outgrowths of this well-intentioned, though often tactless and somewhat misinformed understanding is that fighting cancer is noble. That it’s a holy war, a righteous baring of the teeth in the face of mortality and abject suffering and the quickened unraveling of existence.

But that is not how it feels. At least not to this survivor. Fighting cancer isn’t honorable. It’s necessary.

There is no choice.

It is exist or cease to exist. Because we romanticize storylines, dynamics in which “pulling the plug” seems like an actual option; because of faith systems that predicate moral truth on the existence of an afterlife; because we have heartbreaking, gut-wrenching tales of friends and family who opted for less pain, without treatment, than more time in misery with it; because there are all too many folks who shine, choosing joy against the odds, facing terminal diagnoses with bravery and aplomb, we think that the battle is wholesome, good, and virtuous.

I can tell you it is not. We get better because we have to. Sadly, there are too many who don’t. Because they can’t. Not because they are any less “noble” than those of us who “win” the fight. Not because they made a choice to give up the fight.

Choosing between being and ceasing to be is not a choice.

“The Capitalist Blues” — Leyla McCalla (2019)

Besides pain, discomfort, fear, and grief, the most present phenomenon to accompany cancer is bills. Piles and piles and piles of window envelopes. Emails. Push notifications chiming, “YOU HAVE A NEW STATEMENT.”

Each time my health insurance denied a claim on the grounds of some aspect of my care not being “medically necessary” — is the contrast used in my CT scans truly not necessary? — each time a prescription fell outside of coverage, often to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of dollars, my body and visage would grimace as if twisted from the pain of a 5cm mass in my colon.

To know, to see in plain daylight, that other human beings are getting rich off of my fight for life, causes such visceral anger and, in the wake of that anger, something that can only be described as the capitalist blues. Leyla McCalla’s wonky, off-kilter, Big Easy sound herein is a perfect wry smile in the face of a daunting, insurmountable task such as holding capitalism accountable. We’re all swimming with sharks and it’s a cold, cold world — even at the doctor’s.

“Anyone at All” — Maya de Vitry (2019)

As if to mock me, the electric guitar joins the band with a tick-tocking hook. Maya de Vitry’s narrator (however autobiographical) hasn’t been seeing anyone at all, hasn’t been drinking much at all, hasn’t been crying in the mornings, and she’s tired of hearing folks tell her it’s going to get harder.

Believe her. (Believe me.) It’s always been hard.

I spent the majority of a year at home, in my apartment, in bed, alone. Which is not to say I haven’t been supported throughout this journey by my friends, family, peers, colleagues, et cetera. It’s just that cancer is isolating in many, many more ways than one, and each of those sly, constituent methods of enforcing solitude conspire together to relegate us to these lonely spaces. Hearing de Vitry rejoice in them, embracing them, laughing in the face of what others, outsiders, might perceive as weakness and wallowing is not only redemptive, it’s liberating. I’ll see your “Have you been seeing anybody?” and raise you an “It’s been a couple of days since I’ve seen anyone at all!”

“Fixed” — Mary Bragg (2018)

The world teaches us how to regard ourselves, our bodies, our minds, our personhoods. We often don’t even realize this dictation is happening, but it is. Let me tell you, cancer brings out the worst in these tendencies, these trained reflexes. While Bragg’s message seems geared toward a childlike listener faced with society’s beauty standards, with dynamics of insiders and outsiders, cool and uncool, conformist and eccentric, I found myself returning to that refrain, “You don’t have to be fixed” over and over.

While my body image issues and low self-esteem run amok, fed on a glut of internalized ableism and materialism and superficiality and shame, the reminder in those lyrics that there is no one right way to be human, to be embodied, to be hurt or to be healed, was simply uncanny. Packaged with Bragg’s pristine, orchestrated arrangement and her powerfully tender voice, it’s a mantra in a song that we could all add to our quiver of weapons with which we face the world.

“Bad Mind” — Erin Rae (2018)

This song sounds like Ativan feels. Glossy and ethereal. The panned, double-tracked vocals, just distant enough in the mix, giving the impression that her voice is nearby, but out of reach. I was prescribed Ativan after being hospitalized due to complications from my first round of chemotherapy, namely that my nausea medications didn’t seem to be effective — until we brought Ativan on board.

That’s right, Ativan is prescribed for nausea. It’s also an effective anxiety medication, a strong benzodiazepine that’s often taken recreationally, but it’s a depressant. A strong, unyielding, psychoactive drug that guarantees dependency as a result of regular use. For months I was on an astronomical dose, without knowing it was considered high, to curb my incessant nausea.

I took two “cancer break” vacations during treatment. During the first, a country music cruise in the Caribbean, I cried myself to sleep every night. On the first night of the second trip, a solo getaway to the Bahamas, I wrote in my journal, through tears, “Perhaps I’m too depressed to enjoy an island paradise?”

As the lyrics in verse two reference indirectly, growing up gay in a conservative — and in my case, evangelical — family teaches you quite rapidly that your mind is bad. Very bad. Which, in quite a predictable turn, caused an anxiety disorder and clinical depression that I’ve been battling for more than a decade now. At times I was convinced that the problem of my erratic and burdensome mental health was simply due to my bad mind.

Ativan sank me to depths beyond those that I thought were possible. At its worst, beneath every word I spoke, beneath every layer of my thoughts, there was a constant suicidal hum. My prior struggles with suicidal ideation couldn’t even prepare me for the surprise of realizing, in some deep, hidden catacomb of my psyche, that I was fantasizing about taking my own life.

After chemo and radiation, when my nausea began to subside, I made getting off of Ativan my number one goal. I didn’t want to have a bad mind anymore. After seven months of three pills a day and after weeks of titrating, lowering my dose bit by bit to wean my dependent body and brain off of the potent, depressing, stomach-settling drug, I took my last Ativan in the hospital, after surgery to remove the mass.

It’s worth mentioning, for my sake and others’, there is no such thing as a bad mind.

“Sleepwalking” — Molly Tuttle (2019)

This year truly felt like sleepwalking. Through a world that disappeared.

In the Bahamas, after a month of daily radiation sessions and a mere handful of weeks before my operation, I walked straight into the Atlantic until the cold, steel blue water covered my head. I pleaded, I begged the sea to carry me away. To be allowed to float away with my fears. I cried into the saltwater.

Each time, as I listen to Tuttle’s voice — not angelic, no, but cosmic — grasping for the highest altitudes of her breathy vibrato, I hear my own personal flailing. My desperation to find an anchor, to not be woken up, to be left fantasizing about drifting away on the waves and the sounds of a voice that is that anchor, that is the one thing coming in clear through the static.

Another lesson learned from cancer: sometimes, you have to be your own anchor.

“Sit Here and Love Me” — Caroline Spence (2019)

My own helplessness over the last year was somewhat expected, but I was surprised that it wasn’t simply typified by the inability to help myself. There’s a deep, despairing helplessness found when you wish you could help others help you. To alleviate their helplessness. And I couldn’t. So often all I could do to help others help me was to ask them, with all of the kindness and compassion I could muster, to just sit here and love me.

I did not anticipate the hot, searing pain of telling my mother — a kind, generous, selfless woman who would admit time and time again, “If I could take your place, I would in a heartbeat” — telling her not merely once, but time and again, “This isn’t a problem you can solve. I just need you to hear me and love me.”

I know you hate to see me cry… and to hurt, and to fade into the nothingness of a round of chemotherapy, and to face doctors telling me my life and my body will be forever changed, and to know that there’s nothing you can do to step in, to interrupt the deluge pouring over me.

… But I just need you to sit here and love me.

“Keep Me Here” — Yola (2019)

Going through cancer when you’re single is difficult and complicated, but especially so as a young, gay man experiencing colorectal cancer. In the darkest moments, in the loneliest hours, when I craved physical affection, a hand to hold, a big spoon to lull me to sleep, a shoulder in which I could hide my eyes from the world — and with them, all of my worries and cares — I had nowhere to turn. Hook-up culture and the apps that have come along and monopolized queer entry to romantic and sexual relationships aren’t built for finding a security blanket for a battle with a lethal illness.

And so, in those moments, I turned to my ex. The reasons for our relationship ending notwithstanding, I think we’d both readily volunteer that we don’t think we’re a match. At least, not with a capital M. We live in that strange, queer space of happily being more familiar than platonic friends in that precipitous, somewhat intangible realm of deep connection — predicated on almost three years together — and unspoken boundaries.

He’s an entertainer, traveling the globe for work, ducking back into my life between contracts, each time leaving me with an ex-shaped chasm in my heart. My visceral yearning for closeness, for affection physical and emotional and spiritual, is a cacophony in my head each time, defiant against being denied these needs after having them finally fulfilled. Even if by someone who was not mine, nor could be, nor really should be.

Every time he left, I would love him a little more. It’s a strange thing to give love to someone so dear without being in love with them. So, I cried along with Yola, led by her expressive, assertive, grief-stricken vocals. I shouted along with Vince’s harmony in my car, trying to drown out the maximum volume. I waited a long time, for the right time to tell my ex how much I needed him, how much I wish I didn’t have to need him, I wish cancer didn’t require me to, but it did. I’m not sure the right time has happened yet, but I’ve tried — and I’m still holdin’ on.

“You’re Not Alone” — Our Native Daughters (2019)

Context matters. Circumstances matter. Privilege matters. It’s nearly impossible to listen to the stunningly timeless music of Our Native Daughters without considering these things. Songs mined from the experiences of women of color, of enslaved peoples, of folks categorically and systematically oppressed might seem like the last place a cisgender, white man like myself could seek comfort, but the salve here is twofold. First, to see and be seen. “None of us is here for long / but you’re not alone.”

Second, even in the extreme misfortune and despondency I’ve faced through my journey back to health, I ought to be reminded — I want to be reminded — of my privilege. Of how fortunate I am. Of the ample opportunities and advantages afforded to me by my race, my income level, my geography, my access to world-class medical care, my ability to work and continue working through my diagnosis and treatment, my support system, and on and on.

Yes, we all face our own trials, our own sorrows, and they are no less valid or troublesome because someone else in the world may have had it much, much worse. But the reminder is helpful, it’s cathartic, it’s therapeutic. And, while these injustices continue, while thousands and thousands of others are left in the shadows, we mustn’t take our privilege for granted.

Our Native Daughters use their platform to remind us of this, and no set of circumstances — no, not even cancer — is such that any one of us ought not hear that message. In the process, we might just uncover something limitlessly resonant that we didn’t expect to find.

“Everything’s Fine” — Jamie Drake (2018)

Maybe tomorrow we’ll find / everything’s fine.

Maybe tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow…

Maybe tomorrow…

For 365 days. And more. Longer. And longer. And looooooonger. But you know what, the cinematic feel of this exquisite, arty folk-pop isn’t coincidental. It’s a deliberate tease. It’s dangling the carrot, leading you toward the conclusion that this is just part of the story. There is a tomorrow. You can hear the future in the sigh of the background vocals, in the whimsical harps, and it sounds good. It sounds like we might just find that everything is fine. And if we don’t (we won’t. At least not always), that’s fine too.

I hope in that future I’m able to option the rights to this story of mine and make a movie, if not for the sake of monetizing the misery I’ve endured, at least so that we can include this stunner on the literal soundtrack. Because that’s where it belongs.

Roll credits.

Photo courtesy of the author

Shawn Colvin Still Going ‘Steady On’ With 30th Anniversary Acoustic Album

Posted on by Editor

Shawn Colvin’s new album will be intimately familiar to fans who have loved her from the start. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Steady On, Colvin re-recorded the full album acoustically – and she’s posing on the cover with the same guitar strap she wore on the back of the original packaging, too.

Since her auspicious arrival on the scene, Colvin has sold millions of albums and won multiple Grammys, including her first one for Steady On, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. If you’ve seen her perform over the last 30 years, you’ve certainly heard these songs — “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “Ricochet in Time,” among them. She invited BGS for a hotel room conversation while she was in Nashville for AmericanaFest, where she’s performing the album in its entirety.

BGS: When you went into these sessions, were you hoping to capture a certain sound for this version of Steady On?

SC: No, just an acoustic tone, a stripped-down, non-produced, sort of bare-bones rendition of the songs.

Because you’re so familiar with these songs, were you able to work pretty quickly?

Even though I co-wrote a lot of them with John Leventhal, he would give me pieces of production and I thought, the way I need to figure out how to write is to strip all this production down to just me and a guitar. Almost every song on the record began that way. I stripped it down. It’s the beginning of what became the produced version of Steady On.

I was curious if you wrote most of those songs on the same guitar.

Oh, I think so, yeah. The Martin D-28.

What is it about that guitar that suits you so well?

I bought that guitar in 1974, and it was a 1971. I was 18 and it was my dream to have a Martin guitar. I think I paid $400 for it. And it was just my guitar. I mean, that was a big deal for me to spend that kind of money. I played that guitar on the road I don’t even know how many years. I still have it. It’s pretty beaten up. And I retired it, but yes, in 1988 or ’87 whenever that was, that’s the guitar I was still using.

How many songs had you written up into the songs that were on Steady On?

Maybe three or four.

Wow. So these are some of your earliest songs.

Oh, yeah.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Well, I wasn’t really a songwriter. I wanted to be and I practiced at it, writing lyrics to John’s fully-produced pieces, which were really pop. And I love pop music, but I wasn’t very good at writing lyrics to it. You know, my heroes were all singer-songwriters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joni Mitchell in particular. Very personal stuff, and that’s not what I had been writing. I realized, I think I have my own story to tell and I opened up to that and then I liked what I was doing.

Were you living in New York at the time?

Yeah.

How did that city shape you as an artist, do you think?

Oh gosh, the city shaped me personally and artistically in a huge way. I underwent a lot of personal changes there, a lot of growing up, a lot of waking up. It’s a dose, as Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz. But I met people I’m still friends with to this day that really nurtured me in my 20s and helped me grow up. My best friend Stokes is still there in New York that I met in 1980. And the music scene was so rich!

I started out in Buddy Miller’s country band. That’s how I got to New York. He hired me to come sing because Julie had left the band. And he needed another, what we called then, girl singer. So I was in a band like that. I played solo acoustic at places like The Cottonwood Cafe and The Bitter End and I did anything I could make a buck at. I was also in a country band with Soozie Tyrell. I did rockabilly bands.

We were just putting together bands piecemeal, you know “Hey, can you make this gig?” Everybody was up for whatever, all the musicians, and you cobbled together a band from gig to gig, whatever you could get, just whatever we could do. So I learned a lot. I played a lot, which is part of my advice to anybody who might want it,who is a young up-and-comer. Play live. Just do it and do it and do it, you know? I think it makes you confident and good and better your craft and you learn. You’re a student.

What was your live show like at that time? Was it just you and the Martin, singing solo acoustic?

Yeah.

You were never intimidated by that?

Nobody ever listened.

What do you mean?

When I was doing bar bands four hours a night in the city, sometimes they did. That was the goal, to play well enough that maybe someone would listen. It’s where I developed this percussive guitar style that I have, because I thought, what can I do to make it sound like more instruments and do something a little bit different? So I made more noise that way. Sort of a rhythmic thing.

I think of that as your signature sound because I haven’t seen a lot of artists doing that.

And that came partly from Joni Mitchell, who made progressive, clicky sounds on the guitar. And I always thought she was using the back of her hand to go against the strings, this fleshy part of your thumb in the back of your hand. I realized later she was using her nails against the strings to give that click. But I developed it my own way.

As a new artist, how did you find your audience? Or how did your audience find you?

I started to make a name for myself a little bit down the Eastern seaboard, Cambridge and DC, New York, and some other areas in Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. So I was getting finally to play listening rooms rather than bars. I had a little bit of a draw. I got to go on college radio stations and they would play cassettes of mine. It was really helpful, especially in Cambridge, so I got some fans that way that weren’t just the New York people. Then when I put out the record, I wasn’t prepared it for what was going to happen. It was on Columbia Records and it was time for the big push. I’m like, “Sure, no problem.” And it was a grassroots global push. So that meant drive-time and morning radio shows, if they’d have me.

And God bless the label reps in all these different cities, which you don’t have anymore. Their job was to take you around the radio and try to get them to listen to you. And they had a reputation so they could usually get you in. Whether the radio station was really interested or not was always sort of up in the air. And then I would do press, anybody that would talk to me, a magazine and a paper — local, big, small, whatever, other radio if I could — and then I’d do a show at night. Sometimes there were 10 people. And I did that a lot. It was a groundswell, I guess you could call it. Radio stations did start picking up songs from the album. And next thing you know, I’d go back to a town like Boulder and people would come.

That is grassroots for real.

Oh yeah, for real. But you know, those people that have been with me from the beginning have stayed. I have a loyal following. It’s fantastic, yeah.

When Steady On was released in 1989, how did you define success at that time? What did success mean to you?

I remember being in Boulder and I had a day off and I like to ski. I was in a rental car and I was driving to… I can’t remember if it was Keystone, someplace close to Boulder, and I heard myself on the radio and I almost went off the road. That was to me a measure of success. Then the Grammy Award of course was pretty cool. Who could have thought that up?

How do you define success now?

I’d say first and foremost, if I write a song that I like, that’s the best feeling. It’s gotten harder to do for me. There’s less time, because there’s so much roadwork. Less drama in my life, to force me to the paper. There’s really not a better feeling than finishing a song. Writing is hard, but the fact that I can still sell tickets, that’s success to me. Not everybody’s in that position. I think those two things — and I can still do it. Physically I can still play and sing as well, in my opinion, as I ever have. So it’s kind of longevity and luck.

Photo credit: Deidre Schoo