Tag: Folk

The Small Glories Share Canadian Stories in Song

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When it’s mentioned that the word “ambassador” comes to mind when listening to the Small Glories’ new album, Cara Luft starts to cheer. Along with her singing partner JD Edwards, the Small Glories see themselves as Canadian storytellers, like troubadours going from town to town singing about the world around them.

Truly, the Manitoba-based folk duo’s latest, Assiniboine & The Red, gives special insight into their unique worldview with songs like “Alberta,” “Winnipeg,” and “Don’t Back Down.” Chatting by phone, Luft shared a few more stories with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: It’s been a few year since you’ve made a record. What was the vibe in the studio when you were making this one?

CL: It was interesting in that we got everybody back together again. The only thing that changed was our engineer — and he’s a friend of ours. We had the same producer (Neil Osborne) and the same rhythm section, which was great. We actually recorded it in Winnipeg, and it was nice to be in our hometown. You know what was so funny? It was April but it was freezing cold. It was one of those moments like, “Oh my God, we live in Canada.” It’s April 15 and it’s minus 15 degrees, which is ridiculous! It was freezing! So, I remember being very cold!

This is for the Bluegrass Situation, so we have to talk about the banjo.

We do! [Laughs]

Tell me what attracted you to the banjo in the first place.

I grew up in a folk-singing family. My parents were a professional folk duo and played music when they were younger, too. My dad is a wonderful clawhammer banjo player. He’s been playing for close to sixty years now. So I grew up listening to the banjo, never thinking that I’d actually want to play it, but I did love the sound of it. I think it was kind of inevitable that I would pick it up. And of course it’s not the three-finger bluegrass style, even though I love that style. I don’t really play that but I do love the sound of the banjo.

And I love writing with it. It’s such a different instrument than the guitar. I really was guitar-focused for most of my career. I picked up the banjo nine years ago and I found it really fascinating to change the way my right hand worked, because it’s a different movement than if you’re doing fingerstyle guitar. And just having that drone string, I find that it’s like no other instrument that I’ve ever attempted playing. It’s this beautiful string that just rings out. I found it a very interesting way to write. I write differently on the banjo than I do on the guitar, so it’s brought me into a wider perspective of songs to write, I would say.

How are the songs different that you’re writing on banjo?

I would say I’m writing more tune-based songs on the banjo. As a guitar play, I am a really strong rhythm player and I would do the odd lick here and there, you know, coming up with something, but I wasn’t really a lead player on guitar. I would do some fingerstyle stuff, in more of the realm of those folkie fingerstyle guys like Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, but not really tune-based. The banjo is definitely much more tune-based for me. I write melodies on the banjo, where I never really wrote melodies on guitar before. I would sing a melody but I wouldn’t necessarily play a melody, so it’s been really beautiful to explore this melodic writing on a banjo.

I read an interview about how you loved the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken as a kid. I was curious how that might have impacted your music.

Yeah! For me, growing up in a folk-singing family, there was music all the time in the house, whether it was listening to vinyl or listening to my parents rehearse, or listening to people play house concerts, or musicians who were traveling through town and rehearsing in our living room. So I was steeped in acoustic music from a very, very young age, whether it was live or recorded.

I remember listening to Will the Circle Be Unbroken, with the Carter Family and all these phenomenal people. There’s a track on there, “Soldier’s Joy,” with two banjo players, and one is playing clawhammer and one is playing three-finger, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite songs to listen to. I think it’s just the beauty of acoustic music and the history of acoustic music, whether it’s bluegrass or folk – and to me, the lines are a little blurred there. But that album in particular, I remember listening to it all through high school and even into my early 20s.

When I listen to “Don’t Back Down,” I can hear a sense of strength in there. What was on your mind when you wrote that song?

I wrote that with Bruce Guthro, who’s a great singer-songwriter, but he’s also lead singer of a group called Runrig, a great Scottish band, even though he’s from Canada. We wrote that as part of a collaboration where we were given the theme of writing around “home,” or what we would consider calling “home.” Bruce is from Cape Breton Island, which is in Nova Scotia, way out in the Maritime Provinces. It’s known for its musical history, but it’s also known for communities that are dying because either mining has stopped or fishing has stopped. So these people would be moving away from their communities, trying to find homes and work in other locations.

I was talking to him about being from the Canadian prairies, where there are quite a few areas in Saskatchewan that are full of ghost towns, where people have uprooted and moved to cities like Calgary or Edmonton, or Fort McMurray where the oil sands are. We were comparing notes about these communities that are dying, and what is it like for those who decide to stay? They don’t want to give up on all the things that hit them, right? They stick around during the dust bowl or when the fires come, when work has dried up and people are trying to find a way to make a living. So we thought, “Let’s write a song to honor those people who have decided to make it work in their home communities.”

Speaking of home, your song “Winnipeg” is such a love letter to your hometown. I noticed as that song progresses, there is another voice that comes in. Can you tell me more about that?

Yes, we have two guest vocalists on that track. Winnipeg has a huge indigenous population and a huge Métis population, which is a combination of people who have come from both an indigenous and a French background, and we also have a large French population, and then the English, and then everything else under the sun is in there, too.

We felt that in order to really honor our adopted hometown of Winnipeg, we needed to involve the French and the First Nations people in the song. We have a wonderful singer and songwriter who is Métis and she ended up writing a French portion to the song and doing a call-and-response with us on the track. And we invited a First Nations chanter and drummer to come and sing at the end of the song. We felt it wrapped up this beautiful multicultural community that we have in Winnipeg.

To me, “Sing” captures the spirit of this record. It lets people know about you and what you stand for. Is that important for you to share your own experiences with an audience?

Yes, I think it is. I think we’ve been more aware of bringing stories from other places that we’ve been, too, so it’s a combination of our experiences and also other people’s experiences. And with this record being released on an American label, we feel very privileged to be able to share about Canada with our American neighbors. It’s a very Canadian-focused album, with a strong sense of location. We want to bring stories about the people in Canada, and what things are like for us, and share that with the States, and Europe, and Australia, and the markets we get to go to.

It’s so great when people hear a song like “Winnipeg,” like, the people who come up to us in England and say, “Wow, I never thought I’d want to go to Winnipeg!” It cracks us up. We’re happy that we live in Winnipeg and we’re lucky that we live in Canada. We feel very privileged to live in Canada and we want to share some of the love, and some of the stories, of who we are and where we’re from.

Photo credit: Stefanie Atkinson

Jamestown Revival Find Their Sound on ‘San Isabel’

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There are more trees than people in San Isabel, Colorado, where the Wet Mountains poke the sky and Jamestown Revival’s Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay set up a makeshift recording studio in a cabin. The Texas natives emerged with San Isabel, a gorgeous new album that marks both a return to Jamestown Revival’s acoustic roots and a bold step forward into more topical lyricism.

While addressing the unease now shaping the country’s collective mindset is a first for the pair, the record maintains Zach and Jonathan’s anchors of empathy and hope – along with their now-signature Southern folk harmonies that are woven together with that unexplainable richness usually reserved for families.

With a day off from touring, Jamestown Revival called in for a conversation with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: Location seems important to you guys. Take your album titles, for example. Utah was your first, and now, with San Isabel, you’ve returned to an album title that documents where you recorded. You’re not from or living in Utah or Colorado, but you sought them out. Why?

Jonathan Clay: Colorado is a place we’ve always loved. Long story short, we had access to a summer cabin in Colorado, and we thought, Gosh, we should take advantage of this.

Zach Chance: It’s kind of twofold. It was access to those places and trying to record in a guerrilla fashion. We enjoy the adventure of it — going and setting up in these settings, being removed — it just makes for a really fun process for us.

JC: For us, the city is not really conducive to creativity. It’s just not where I feel compelled to create.

ZC: The city has its own flavor of inspiration. It does inspire us at times, but it’s not really where we like to record, so…

JC: We have a habit of getting out into the woods when we’re ready to make an album.

Why did you guys decide to return to a more acoustic sound this time around, compared to The Education of a Wandering Man?

ZC: We weren’t touring as much as we had been the past couple of years. We’d been writing for some other things, and we just really wanted to go back to two voices – to write songs that could work with one guitar and two voices, back to the roots of what we were doing. I don’t know if it was all the noise of the time we live in right now, but we wanted something more centered around traditional folk storytelling. We were listening to a lot of Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young – stuff like that. We felt compelled to live in that world.

Do you have favorite songs on the new record?

ZC: I don’t know. As soon as we start talking about them, I’ll tell you all the reasons I love them. Maybe I’m too diplomatic. I love “Harder Way” and “Who Hung the Moon.” That was a song we wrote in Colorado and recorded in a day. They’re like children. We love them all equally but differently. This might sound really dumb [Laughs], but there have been times playing “Crazy World” that I get kind of choked up. I start thinking about everything, and I get a little sad. The first few times we played it out, I got really emotional. We want to write stuff that ages like we’re aging — that matures a little bit.

JC: I think that’s a good point. We want our art to grow with us and mature with and without our listeners. I really like “Who Hung the Moon.” “Harder Way” is a pretty special song. I’m actually pulling my three-year-old boy on the scooter right now, humming melodies that I don’t know. It’s a special thing. When I sing the line about my boy, it’s coming from a real place. I have to hold back emotions sometimes because I think, I’ve got an audience to perform to. I can’t get choked up because that makes it hard to sing.

It seems like more and more artists feel obligated to address the uneasiness in the country right now. San Isabel does it – not necessarily explicitly, but it is still more topical than your previous work. Did you feel obligated to do that?

JC: I don’t think it was out of obligation more than it was just compulsion. We just felt compelled. It’s on everybody’s mind –everybody’s consciousness. As an artist, I think your consciousness manifests in your songs. That’s what happened with us.

First, you take a beat to acknowledge the despair a lot of folks are feeling in “Crazy World.”

JC: Zach and I have always been careful not to speak from some place of moral high ground. We don’t want to be just one more person preaching to somebody, as if we’ve got all the answers, because I think the problems plaguing our country are very complicated. If you oversimplify them and place blame, you’re falling victim to the very thing you’re proclaiming to rally against.

In a lot of our songs, we just point out what we see. It’s almost a lament rather than a judgment. We’re all in this together. All of our countrymen and women, we created this – we all played a hand in it. We’re trying to point out our observations and underscore the fact that we’re all on the same team, when you really get down to it. We all do care about each other. I feel like we’ve got more in common than we realize sometimes. It seems like sometimes the world is wrapped up in greed and malice and angst and vitriol rather than peace and — not to sound cheesy, but — harmonious things, the things that really give us happiness.

ZC: Yeah, it’s funny. “Crazy World (Judgment Day)” and “This Too Shall Pass” are back to back on the album. And those are like two sides of the same coin, you know? “Crazy World” is the day you wake up and think, I have zero hope for humanity. The idea was you’re sitting in a bar, and you’ve had a few to drink. Stuff is coming across the news, and you’re just discussing the state of affairs, like, “Yeah, man. It’s still a crazy world. Not much has changed.”

I love that you just brought up that it’s like those two songs are two sides of the same coin because it does feel like “This Too Shall Pass” offers some comfort.

ZC: Yeah, as dark as I can get, I recognize that I’m probably a glass is half full person. John, I think you are too.

JC: Oh, I’m a hopeless optimist.

ZC: [Laughs] So, that song speaks to that. No matter how dismal it is, we have to find a silver lining. Friendships and family are where the true joys in your life come from, more often than not.

What’s the best thing you’ve encountered or experienced back on the road this time?

ZC: Oh gosh, I have so many good ones. Eating dumplings in New York in this little shop in Chinatown. We crammed in with all our people, sat with strangers, and the beers were flowing. Those nights are fun. The camaraderie of being on tour again: You’re just living together, and you come home with a million new inside jokes and phrases.

JC: One thing that was really cool about this tour is we brought somebody out in our crew as a roadie who had never been out of Texas. We saw the world through his eyes. His parents brought him here from Mexico when he was six years old. He hasn’t had the opportunity to do much traveling. I met him and thought he seemed like a cool dude, so we gave him a job as a roadie.

ZC: We’re all a bit more advanced in age and have made a few more laps around the country, so in some ways, you can be jaded by that. But he’s 21, and experiencing all these things for the first time. It was really fun to relive some of this stuff through his eyes.

On this album, it feels like you have found your sound, at least for now. Comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel are inevitable, but ultimately, you don’t sound like anyone else out there right now.

JC: Well that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that.

ZC: We definitely look up to Simon & Garfunkel and the Everly Brothers and would gladly take a comparison, but humbly say those guys are masters. We’re trying to figure it out.

JC: Yeah, those guys are masters, but we want to be masters. Somebody’s got to carry the torch. I’m not saying that in a cocky way, but I would love to be somebody that attempts to carry the torch. It’s what we love to do, and it’s what we love to sing. Singing without harmony — I don’t enjoy it half as much. When I sing with Zach, my voice feels complete. So it’s almost like a musical necessity for us.

If it were just the harmonies, the comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel would still come, but it’s your writing too, which is so strong.

JC: A lot of people still ask, “Are y’all brothers? The way y’all harmonize, I feel like you have to have grown up with each other.” Well, we’re not brothers, but we have been singing together since we were 15 years old, so I guess that’s about as close as you can get without being blood-related. It’s like a vocal marriage.

As far as the writing goes, we try to be thoughtful and not say things in a way that’s been said before. We knew early on that we wanted to be the kind of writers who are not overly esoteric or hard to understand. We wanted to speak in a way that’s plain and understandable but at the same time, maybe put in a way that you haven’t quite heard it put before.

Photo credit: Paul Pryor

LISTEN: Lisa Bastoni, “Walk a Little Closer” (Feat. Lula Wiles)

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Artist: Lisa Bastoni
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Song: “Walk a Little Closer” (featuring Lula Wiles)
Album: How We Want to Live
Release Date: September 20, 2019

In Their Words: “One day a couple of winters ago, Sean Staples (How We Want to Live‘s producer) and I were writing at my kitchen table and he said, ‘Well, maybe they don’t all have to be devastating.’ Which I thought was an excellent point. We wrote this in 45 minutes, based on a Lynda Barry-inspired writing exercise around the word ‘adore.’ It was refreshing to write something so lighthearted, just a simple bluegrass song that tells the story of a first date. The first time I played it out was at a little bar in Cambridge, with Isa Burke on fiddle and harmony. That was the seed of the new album — to record locally, with some of my favorite musicians and people. I’m so happy to have Isa, as well as Eleanor Buckland and Mali Obomsawin (aka Lula Wiles) playing on this track!
— Lisa Bastoni

Photo credit: Love and Perry Photography and Film

Kauai Folk Festival Will Celebrate Music of Hawaii and Beyond

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Even for knowledgeable fans of folk music, the lineup of the Kauai Folk Festival offers plenty of artists to discover from Hawaii and beyond. Along with headliners like Taj Mahal’s Hula Blues Band and Peter Rowan’s My Aloha Bluegrass Band, the two-day roster also features Hawaiian music from Puka Asing, Wally Rita y Los Kauaianos, and more representing the diversity of Hawaiian traditional music.

With five stages running continuously, the lineup also includes Jonny Fritz, Blaine Sprouse, Ed Poullard, Reeb Williams & Caleb Klauder, Mike Bub, and many others. Meanwhile, Kauai Folk Workshops will offer instruction on guitar, fiddle, banjo, ukulele and mandolin, in addition to dance instructors teaching hula, square dance, swing, and two-step, and voice instructors teaching harmony singing, ballads, and Hawaiian song.

Festival director Matt Morelock fielded a few questions by email about the festival, slated for September 28-29 at the historic Grove Farm Museum in Lihue, on the southeast coast of Kauai.

BGS: What inspired the idea to create a folk festival in Kauai?

Morelock: For decades, Hawaiian music has stood on the periphery of the ‘folk’ genre. Its undeniable and indelible influence on all forms of American music deserves to be celebrated. We created the Kauai Folk Festival for such a celebration and invited all of our favorite performers, both local and continental, to sing, pick, dance, and meet one another in this tropical paradise.

When you are selecting artists, do you have a certain audience in mind? In other words, is there a common thread that runs through your lineup and/or your ticket holders?

We’ve attempted to represent the broadest swath of ‘folk’ music and musicians that we could find. From bluegrass to blues – from Cajun to country – we chose the best performers in as many genres as possible to illustrate the diversity of American folk music. The common thread is diversity. Artists were chosen for their enthusiasm and skill.

What have you learned about the process of booking festivals that has really surprised you?

We’ve learned that a worthwhile festival is one with a purpose. Hawaiian music and musicians are fighting against the expense and logistical complication of geographical separation as well as the mass perception of their music and culture as ‘foreign,’ when in truth Hawaiian music and culture is both a product of and strong influence on what we consider ‘American’ culture and music. We’ve learned that a higher purpose can confound the typical challenges that festivals face in finding an identity and audience.

For someone who has never been to Kauai, how would you describe it to them?

In addition to being GORGEOUS BEYOND BELIEF, Kauai is rural and cosmopolitan at the same time. There are more wild pigs than human beings living on this island. The natural beauty and local hospitality are legendary. You can book a hotel and rent a car here just like you can anywhere else in the U.S. Flights aren’t as expensive as you think. Beer is cheap. Fresh food and clean air are abundant. There’s really no reason NOT to visit!

In addition to interest from the locals, you will be hoping to attract people from the mainland as well. What are some of the amenities or unique qualities that will make this festival a destination event?

We’ve opted to keep festival admission affordable rather than spending time and resources on lodging and flight packages. We trust that Kauai Folk Festival attendees from the mainland won’t have trouble booking a flight, renting a car, and finding a hotel room. Kauai itself is a uniquity. The festival and the astounding Grove Farm Museum are an amenity. There’ll be a broad selection of spectacular local cuisine (plenty of accommodations for vegan/vegetarian/gluten-free diets), and extremely creative beverage and local juice options. We’re also ‘on call’ via www.kauaifolk.com to assist with any travel questions or complications!

What do you hope that attendees will take away from the Kauai Folk Festival experience?

We hope that Kauai Folk Festival fans will leave the event with a deeper understanding of the historical interconnectedness between Hawaiian culture and ‘mainland’ culture. In the production process, we are finding similarities and cross-influences on a daily basis!

MIXTAPE: The Steel Wheels’ Music for Your Community Gathering

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Building community is part of what music, and all good art, does. It brings us together. Music is a common rhythm, a poetic notion, an underlying common language for us all. A good mixtape grabs hold of that commonality and builds on it, with a few surprises along the way. As a band, The Steel Wheels curate a music festival each year, and a mixtape, or playlist, is kind of the digital version of that venture. So, let’s stop talking about it, and start building community with a PERFECT mix. – Trent Wagler, The Steel Wheels

Fruit Bats* – “Humbug Mountain Song”

Let’s start with a groove anyone can get behind. It’s accessible for the pop music lovers who wandered into this gathering — they didn’t know they liked the banjo at all until the second half of this intro kicks in. But now they’re engaged. And why can’t the piano, banjo, and drums live together in harmony? Stop closing your mind.

Kristin Andreassen* – “Get Together”

A good mixtape needs to establish that everyone is included. Loading things up with all your favorite new and rare songs isn’t always inviting. A cover song is common language at the very best. A little freshening up of a classic song will get us all swaying together in time. And what better theme than coming together? Now we’ve got everyone in the room in tune and we can introduce more variance in the mix.

The Wood Brothers* – “Sing About It”

The foundation of community is the strength we have together. Nothing better exemplifies this than the tight grooves and sweet harmonies of the Wood Brothers. And their message here is spot on. No matter where we are in our journey of pain, loss, trouble, or fear, singing a song just might help it pass.

Kaia Kater* – “New Colossus”

Now that we’re all in this, let’s tie the knots tighter. This song is like a sweet honey that helps stick us tightly. The way the melody veers and twists through literary verses encourages your conversations to dig a little deeper.

Jerry Garcia & David Grisman – “Russian Lullaby”

I think it’s more than nostalgia that brings me back to these late Garcia recordings, when he teamed up with longtime friend and musical pioneer David Grisman. The loose nature of these recordings makes you want to sit crisscross applesauce and share most embarrassing moments with a new acquaintance. If the ice wasn’t broken earlier, Jerry will rockabye you, baby. Collaborations are community building at their core.

River Whyless* – “All of My Friends”

Now that we’re all floating together in a musical high, don’t pull away. Leave the phones in your pocket. Let’s be here together fully. River Whyless is a band that simultaneously indicts and playfully dances with the information-overwhelmed age we live in.

Cedric Burnside* – “Hard To Stay Cool”

What is more true blue than these dyed in the wool Burnside family blues. Cedric Burnside’s whole album is full of these tasty grooves. It’s not hard for him to stay cool.

Tim O’Brien* & Darrell Scott – “With a Memory Like Mine”

Here’s another one of my favorite collaborations. The album Real Time by Tim and Darrell has had such a musical impact on me. To hear two great songwriters, who sing and play any instrument they pick up with such mastery, is humbling and inspiring.

Bahamas – “No Wrong”

I’m obsessed with Bahamas’ music right now. The guitar, the groove, and the vocals. The presence of this recording is also so immediate and direct. When you’re among your people, it feels like you can do no wrong.

The Steel Wheels* – “Road Never Ends”

I couldn’t help but include one from our new record. The love and joy of the road is bittersweet. This song puts words to the difficulties of transience while acknowledging the beauty of the strange kind of mobile community it creates.

Ana Egge – “Rock Me (Divine Mother)”

There are few songwriters who tap into deep spiritual depths without cliché like Ana Egge. She’s a treasure. And this song has slayed me every single time I’ve ever heard it.

Tinariwen – “Imidiwan Win Sahara” (feat. Tunde Adebimpe)

All music conjures up a sense of place. Tinariwen was introduced to me by our drummer, Kevin Garcia, and I’ve regularly wanted to go to where their sound takes me. As a songwriter and specifically a lyricist, it’s helpful to reset your listening ear and turn off the language centers of your brain by listening to music with lyrical content in a language you do not speak.

Dr. Dog – “Listening In”

A good mixtape has some curveballs. Dr. Dog has been a sonic companion for me since I first saw them live 10 years ago at Bristol Rhythm and Roots. The lyrical tapestry is so full and always connects through some kind of thought-lightning striking through your brain. I love the line, “I can hear the fear in me…talking.”

David Wax Museum – “Time Will Not Track Us Down”

We’re getting towards the end of our little mixtape. Like the Sunday afternoon lazy picnic, we are starting to wind it all down. David Wax is known for his high energy original Latin-inspired masterpieces, but this simple paired down guitar/vocal really calms my spirit and prepares us to part.

Robert Ellis & Courtney Hartman* – “Up On The Hill Where They Do The Boogie”

One more cover song for good measure. Let’s celebrate the most wacky and wonderful souls among us, and let’s boogie like John Hartford.

Josh Ritter – “Homecoming”

Remember that curating music for your gathering is a privilege. You are setting the sonic table for everyone in your presence. It’s also a responsibility. Everyone wants to feel at home at the end of the day. Everyone wants be at their best and be reminded that they are capable of their best. Music replenishes the various ways daily life drags us down. A mixtape is a good refuge and stand-in for when music festival season is slow.

Photo credit: Josh Saul

*2019 Red Wing performers. Red Wing Roots Music Festival takes place in Mt. Solon, Virginia, on July 12-14, and is hosted by The Steel Wheels

UK’s Black Deer Festival 2019 in Photographs

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

With Band of Horses headlining, and Billy Bragg getting all protest-y on us, the second of year of the Black Deer Festival more than lived up to the promise of the first. From its gloriously eclectic line-up – including brilliant sets from Fantastic Negrito, Kris Kristofferson, Yola, The Sheepdogs and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton – to its special partnership with Nicolas Winding Refn, screening restored vintage Americana films handpicked by the director of Drive, this was an event ready to flex its creative muscles. It even introduced a new Livefire stage, dedicated to cooking demos and BBQ contests.

Walking around Eridge Park you couldn’t get over spacious feeling, with the beautiful green hills of Kent rolling away in every direction. Despite increasing capacity to 10,000, Black Deer still feels like one of the most pleasant and laid-back festivals on the UK circuit. This should be no surprise given that its creators, Gill Tee and Deborah Shilling, worked on the late lamented Hop Farm Festival, which always put music first and commercial considerations second. Here’s hoping Black Deer will be around a long time — and in the meantime, revisit the fest in photographs.

 

Lede photo: Ania Shrimpton

LISTEN: Matt Woods, “Drive-Thru Town”

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Artist: Matt Woods
Hometown: Knoxville, Tennessee
Song: “Drive-Thru Town”
Album: Natural Disasters
Release Date: June 28, 2019
Label: Lonely Ones Records

In Their Words: “After spending the better part of the last decade criss-crossing this country, I feel like I have watched many towns literally start to dwindle to little more than a corporate box store and fast food restaurants. Meanwhile, the people living there struggle to navigate their new reality, out of opportunity and resources. I have met those hanging on to hope and those who feel like there is little hope left. This song attempts to capture that reality.” — Matt Woods

Photo credit: Chad Cochran

Courtney Hartman Steps Into a Solo Career With ‘Ready Reckoner’

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Courtney Hartman told only a few people about her plans. She bought a transatlantic plane ticket, packed a small bag of clothes, and flew to Spain to hike the Camino de Santiago. It’s a 500-mile hike along old pilgrimage routes in rural Spain, an arduous journey that often prompts a spiritual journey. During that 40-day trek she would step off the trail, pull out her specially-made, travel-ready guitar, and sing a few bars into her phone. Eventually those voice memos — those notes to herself, journal entries chronicling her trip — coalesced into songs that ended up on her solo debut, Ready Reckoner.

It is not, however, an album about walking or wanderlust. Rather, it’s about motion: the physical movement that propels oneself along a path, but also the spiritual motion it takes to gain a deeper understand of your place in the world — in particular, your place in the world as an artist. Drawing from the music she made as a member of Della Mae, Ready Reckoner forays into new territory: folk and pop, of course, but also jazz, avant garde composition, drones, even musique concrète. It’s often dark but just as often hopeful, as Hartman traces the both subtle and sublime changes that she is still going through.

BGS: What took you to Spain?

Hartman: I think anybody that I met on the trail had a similar story. There was something that started popping up on their radar[s] over and over until they couldn’t ignore it anymore. That’s what happened with me. I had friends who had gone over there and I was listening to several albums that were influenced by that region of Spain.

Also, two of my writing heroes are Anne Lamott and Mary Oliver. While I was teaching writing at different summer camps, I would talk about how they talk about writing and walking. In the books they’ve written, they talk about how good it is to go out and walk. That would be my assignment to students: Go take a walk in the woods and do some writing.

At one point I realized that I was giving this assignment, but I’d never done it myself. I wanted to know if that was something I could do, if that was a way of creating that would resonate with me. And then a cheap flight to Spain popped up and I bought. I had 24 hours to cancel and I didn’t. So I went!

How did you prepare musically and creatively for such a trip?

I called Dana Bourgeois, who has built a number of guitars for me. I said, Dana, I’m doing this thing and I haven’t told anybody. What do you think would be the sturdiest, most lightweight, best-sounding guitar I could take? And he said, well, what if we build you something? So they did. They weighed out every single component of the guitar and then I had somebody build a guitar sling for me. And then I walked and I wrote. I took me forty days. There’s something about the repetition and the movement, let alone being out in the open.

What did you learn from that experience?

I learned so much, but one of the things that kept occurring to me is that you’re carrying the weight of your belongings with you every day. It didn’t matter if I wrote anything or played anything that day. I still had to carry the weight. There was a point when someone helped me go through my bag and decide what was necessary.

You think you’ve really narrowed it down, and then you’re like, okay, I guess I’ll get rid of this extra layer of clothes. But every night I would think, no I need this or I need that. I need this because I’m afraid of what might happen without it. So I learned that our needs and fears are linked. But I didn’t need that extra layer of clothes, even though I thought I did. When that snow came — that’s what I was afraid of — I made it through.

Did that change your perspective on music?

I want to say that I need to be writing songs or I need to be making music, that they’re my life source. But I don’t need to write or play. Those are extra gifts. I would survive without them. I don’t want to. Don’t ask me to. But I think letting go allowed me to hold them a little more loosely or with a bit more gentleness, instead of clinging to them or gripping them too tightly.

Often, writing meant stepping away from the trail. It meant taking my guitar down or taking my pen out or singing voice memos. I have hours and hours of endless mumbling. You step away from the people you’re walking with, and you might not see them again for a few days or even a week. Or maybe never again. It’s very much like life that way.

That experience seems to inform this album in ways that are very explicit. Even just the sound of footfalls on “Too Much.”

About half the album came directly from songs I wrote on the trail. But it’s not a walking record. It’s just a shot of where I’ve been the last year. I worked on it while I was staying in a little wagon in Oregon for a couple of days, just trying to finish putting together takes and sequences. I would walk and listen. But the album pretty evenly spread out between songs I wrote before, during and after walking. The first track I wrote was “January First,” and I wrote all the other songs later that year. I don’t know that it always works that way.

Tell me about the album title. Why did those words resonate with you?

I was obsessed with the word reckon. I was reckoning with myself and my work, reckoning with the relationship to the music I was making, reckoning with whether I should even be doing it at all. That word felt like it had a lot of motion, so I looked it up and found that a ready reckoner was at one point the name of a hard-copy calculator. A merchant might have a ready reckoner, which is essentially a book of tables. I found one from 1905 for sale and ordered it on Amazon, as you do. I keep it in my guitar case. It’s this tiny, beautiful book with all these weird calculations for things. I felt like these songs were trying to calculate something, trying to get to a formula or an equation.

There was some trepidation on your part about recording this record and taking on the role of co-producer. How did you reckon with that?

Shahzad Ismaily, my co-producer, could have easily taken the wheel and produced this record himself, and I think I would have felt good about that. But he believed very strongly that that was not his role. He wanted mostly to be engineering. He was pushing me to make the decisions that needed to be made and to listen more deeply. Just by stepping away he became a guiding hand. I didn’t want to be producing this record but I’m grateful that he was able to ease me into that place.

And I realized that I really love it. It’s such a different space. I’ve produced one other record for a band since then, and I want to do more. There aren’t a lot of women in that role. The studio can be a very intimidating place for women who are trying to explore and learn and admit what often feel like deficiencies, but if I’m able to do that in the future, I hope I can make that space feel comfortable and gracious and open.

I remember I was so afraid to record this album, so when I went into the studio the first day, I was reading through some of my walking journals. I opened the first page, and I was writing about feeling terrified. It was the same feeling I had about going into the studio, but it’s exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. We learn the exact thing in so many ways over and over. Or we don’t learn it at all. Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe I didn’t learn anything.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

The Show On The Road – Richard Thompson

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with British-born folk-rock rebel and underground guitar icon, Richard Thompson.

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With his signature grimace, that seems to dare you to look at his album covers, his salty slam poet vocal delivery, his slashing fingerpicked guitar style, and imposing black beret — which makes him look more like a hardened revolutionary than a kindly grandpa who just turned 70 — Richard Thompson is a true icon of rock and folk music.

Grand Ole Opry at Bonnaroo 2019 in Photographs

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The Grand Ole Opry returned to Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival this year to headline the festival’s opening night. The Opry carried on the festival’s long-standing tradition of representing country, bluegrass, and roots music with performances by Old Crow Medicine Show and fellow Opry members Ricky Skaggs and Riders In The Sky, plus special guests Steve Earle and the Dukes, Morgan Evans, Ashley Monroe, Wendy Moten, Molly Tuttle, and even the Opry Square Dancers and Opry announcer Bill Cody came along for the ride.

BGS handed off the That Tent torch to the Opry in 2018, after five years of the BGS SuperJam. You can revisit our years of BGS x Bonnaroo goodness here: 2017; 2016; 2014.

All photos: Chris Hollo