Tag: Folk

LISTEN: Tanbark, “Châtelet”

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Artist: Tanbark
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Châtelet”
Album: Tanbark
Release Date: Fall 2018

In Their Words: “Immediately after finishing a biography about Voltaire’s tumultuous relationship with his lover, Madame du Châtelet, I felt compelled to write them a love song–they were so perfectly suited for each other and also so terrible for each other. But beyond that, I wanted to focus on Châtelet as the subject. She is often treated as just a footnote, but she was a respected philosopher in her own right. She was a translator and a scientist, obsessively gambled, was fiercely maternal, and had lovers when she shouldn’t have.

This is our homage to her, both the real person and our partly-imagined version. As I developed the song, it departed from the strictly biographical. She was becoming a relatable, complicated, modern woman. ‘The way you hold your pen/ you make the men go crazy.’ To us, at least, she still does.” — Tanbark

Photo credit: Zoe Prinds-Flash

STREAM: Great Aunt, ‘A Mess That I Left’

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Artist: Great Aunt
Hometown: Melbourne, Australia
Album: A Mess That I Left
Release Date: August 31, 2018

In Their Words: “It was important that we engineered and produced the songs ourselves, so that we could ensure we captured the right moment and vision we had for each song. We wanted to make a record that was honest, sincere, and intimate, not just from a songwriting and performance perspective, but also by translating that into the technical production of the EP. There’s a lot of deliberateness in small details.

A Mess That I Left is a living, breathing thing: a palpable moment in musical time.

Each song is about a chapter of significance in my life; largely about finding a positive path forward when past traumas still haunt you. I feel like I have left all that mess behind now – although it’s still close, and I can still see it. I wanted to share it in hope to normalise it for me, and for others.” — Megan Bird

Photo credit: Great Aunt

LISTEN: Bill and the Belles, ‘DreamSongs, Etc.’

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Artist: Bill and the Belles
Hometown: Johnson City, Tennessee
Album: DreamSongs, Etc.
Release Date: August 24, 2018
Label: Jalopy Records

In Their Words: “DreamSongs, Etc. captures the sound we’ve worked tirelessly in developing over the past three and a half years incorporating influences from a variety of times and places that were once representative of country music. We think listeners will find these songs refreshing in their simplicity and delivery, and hope the joy we experienced in creating this record transcends to their listening experience. We hope timelines become blurred… that the music can speak for both the here and now yet remind us of our past bringing listeners a sense of comfort and familiarity in a time that’s anything but. The voices and songs of America’s past float around all of us up in the ethos and we do our best to remain conscious and aware of those sounds when they call. We try and take those sounds to turn them into something that will resonate with people today. More than anything we hope these songs lift your spirits.” — Bill and the Belles

Photo credit: Josh Littleton

Wild Things: Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis

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Linda Gail Lewis was never destined to be the most renowned member of her family — or second, third or fourth-most famous, for that matter. There’s not a lot of oxygen left in the shotgun shacks of Ferriday, Louisiana or the public mindset when you have original rock wild man Jerry Lee Lewis for a brother and your cousins are Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart. But unlike her early-starter kin, Linda Gail has come more into her own later in life. The 71-year-old little sis has emerged as a heroine to the rockabilly crowd not just because she trades off the trademark style of the Killer but because she has slayer instincts, too.

Still, she’s traditionally benefitted more from being a duet partner than a solo act. She recorded and toured with Jerry Lee in the ‘60s and ‘70s — the sibling duo had a Top 10 country hit in 1969 with “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” — and then she reentered the consciousness of the music intelligentsia in 2000 when no less a fan than Van Morrison asked her to make a joint album and tour together. Now, she’s on to her third partner in musical crime: the alt-country great Robbie Fulks, who joined her for Wild! Wild! Wild!, an album he produced all of, wrote most of, and participated on as an equal vocal partner only with some urging.

So how does Fulks stack up against his two famous predecessors in the duet partner’s seat?

“I was the best of them all, I would say,” Fulks says. “Oh, sorry, go ahead.”

“Absolutely!” Lewis agrees, although when it comes down to it, she may not quite be ready to declare new Bloodshot Records partnerships thicker than blood. “Singing with my brother and Robbie, I love one as much as I do the other, which is saying quite a lot. And I don’t mean to say anything bad about Van. I appreciated doing the album [You Win Again] with him, and it was good for my career, and… I wouldn’t say it was actually fufn in the studio, but I did get through it, and I lived to tell the tale,’” she says, laughing. “It was impossible to really match up with him on the recording, because his phrasing is so different from my brother’s. But Robbie’s is similar enough that it was easy for me. You’re every bit as great as those other two, Robbie. And don’t tell my brother I said that.”

“I’m not telling anybody you said that,” Fulks says. “Maybe my wife.”

Wild! Wild! Wild! includes five true duets, two Fulks solo vocals, and six that feature Lewis alone as frontwoman. If that math leads you to suspect that the project might’ve started life as a Linda Gail Lewis solo album Fulks was producing before it became co-billed, your guess would be right.

Says Fulks, “The idea was a little bit imposed on us because the label said, ‘Well, we’d rather have a duet record,’ and that wasn’t what I originally had in mind. Duet singing with her, nobody would say no to that. And I think male-female duet singing is just about my favorite kind of country music. So to be able to write to that and then to perform with her was just a whole other level of fun over, you know, sitting in a chair and listening to people play.” Lewis, too, was happy it became a duo project, and cites “I Just Lived a Country Song” as her favorite track on the album, even though that’s one of the two tracks that Fulks sings without her.

To the extent that it’s partly a Robbie Fulks record, it’s an old-school Robbie Fulks album, which should tickle a lot of long-time fans who’ve charted his changes. It harks back to early- to mid-period records like 1996’s Country Love Songs, 2005’s Georgia Hard and 2007’s Revenge! when Fulks was the master of classic country pastiche, writing severely clever tunes with tellingly witty titles like “Goodbye, Cruel Girl,” “All You Can Cheat” and “The Buck Stops Here” (as in Buck Owens, of course).

There is certainly some pure country on the album to go with the more snare-smashing stuff, like their duet on “That’s Why They Call It Temptation,” which he wrote rather overtly in the George-and-Tammy mode. (Sample lyrics — Robbie: “I tried to keep my hands from where they longed to go.” Linda: “And I did all I could to help you, short of sayin’ no.”)

Meanwhile, there’s a Tennessee-meets-New Orleans horn section on a Fulks-penned tribute to Lewis’ adopted hometown, “Memphis Never Falls From Style,” which has Linda singing the lines, “Thank you Memphis for the great insight/That music is a drag if it’s too f—in’ white.” They went back and forth over whether to keep her singing the F-word; “I grew up on the road with a bunch of musicians, and I have no problem with a little profanity,” she says. But ultimately Fulks decided that a loud bleep was called for, out of nostalgia, if not bashfulness. “I remember being 8 years old and hearing ‘Johnny Cash at San Quentin,’ and those bleeps would come on real loud, and it reminded me of being a kid and the joy of bleeped-out profanity, which you don’t get to hear anymore.” For Lewis’ part, “I was worried about being in trouble with my brother. So I was happy to have the bleep,” she laughs. “And I plan to tell him that I didn’t really say it.”

Jerry Lee Lewis was into his country period — having fallen out of favor as the British Invasion superseded America’s pioneer rockers — when he started enlisting his little sister to join him on records and at shows. (For example, a 1973 performance of “Roll Over Beethoven” on the Midnight Special program.) Their sole hit together was a cover of the Carl and Pearl Butler song “Don’t Let Me Cross Over.”

“Jerry was a big fan of theirs and they were good friends of ours, and we never felt right about covering their song,” Linda admits. “But still we did it, and it was Kenny Lovelace’s idea,” she adds, mentioning her brother’s long-time sideman — and one of her ex-husbands. “Jerry and I had trouble getting through it because we were singing a love song and we’re brother and sister. We were on the same microphone, and we would look at each other and start cracking up. We only were able to get through it once.”

“That’s a little like Nancy and Frank Sinatra singing ‘Something Stupid’ together,” says Fulks, “although that was a lot creepier, I think.”

The sibling duo act came to an end out of jealousy, she says. “My sister-in-law at that time hated me and didn’t want me to be around, so I had to go,” Linda says. “And you know, sometimes even your enemies will help you. Because had she not done that, I would never have left my brother, and I would never have had my own career, and I never would have learned to play he piano. All the things my brother had shown me through the years helped me when I started playing rock and roll and boogie-woogie piano in 1987. My brother’s fans were coming to see me, and they wanted to hear ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ so I had to make sure that I could play it, especially because the piano player that I had in my band in Memphis had no feel for it.

“And I’ve had such a wonderful career, and now of course, with, this great album that I have with Robbie, I feel so blessed. To me it’s the highlight of my career, and life. I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy. And I just looooove my ex-sister-in-law that hates me, because she did this wonderful thing for me.”

Before they made the album, Fulks once blogged that hearing Linda Gail play piano put him in mind “of a cotton field with a candelabra in it.” He sounds embarrassed to be reminded of the phrase now. “Oh my God,” he says. “I didn’t realize I said that. It’s alliteration, anyway. It sounds like literature. ‘Cotton fields…’ I better stop blogging.” Lewis offers him a sharp retort. “Don’t you dare! I loved that. I actually saved that in my iPhone so I can just go back and read it over and over.”

In a separate conversation, Fulks talks about how his appreciation for Lewis developed. “You just say Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister and then go on to say yes, she plays like him and she’s a great singer, and she’s been doing it for 50 years or whatever, and that gets people interested. … With Linda, her voice and her career are so tied into his, it would be hard to separate it out too much, and a good deal of her act is a tribute to and an expression of love for him. But to me she’s interesting partly for the fact that she’s a woman in that family, and just as I’m interested in what it was like for people like Jean Shepard to get along on the road with Ferlin Husky and those guys in the ‘50s, I’m interested in what it was like for her to be part of that clan in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and to be holding her head above water.”

And he’s fascinated by the nature-versus-nurture aspects of the playing she picked up later in life. “She’s a great piano player, and it doesn’t really doesn’t boil down to the notes that she’s playing,” Fulks says. “It’s kind of a family style and a genetic style, and there’s something that’s unlearnable about that style. Anybody could read this off of a sheet and make the moves, but nobody could sound like that. I looked at her the other night when we played together, lifting her hands a foot and a half above the keyboard and banging down on two notes repeatedly, and you just think, well, that’s ridiculous! It’s a real mystery, and it’s thrilling to hear.”

Photo credit: Andy Goodwin

The War and Treaty Bring Their Love to ‘Healing Tide’

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More often than not, it seems, the telling of the story of the War and Treaty begins with the war, specifically a piano in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. It is a tantalizing tale, and we’ll get to that.

But this time, let’s start with the Treaty: the moment Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount first met and two formidable talents took hold in life and in music.

“We have probably two different accounts,” Michael says by phone from Nashville, Tanya audible in the background, laughing as she agrees with the prediction.

Spoiler alert: There is to be much laughter in the ensuing chat, from giggles to hearty peals, and much weighing in from whoever doesn’t have hold of the receiver. And some tears and choking up too. It’s a real delight, everything up-front and on the table, just as anyone who has seen them perform would expect, and every bit of it captured in their new debut album, Healing Tide, a wonder of gospel-soul-country-rock-folk carried on their from-the-heart vocals, both of them capable of gale-force belting and whispered-breeze tenderness, sometimes, somehow, both at once.

It’s a love story through and through, evidenced in song titles along: “Love Like There’s No Tomorrow” (the album’s foot-stomping gospel invocation), “Are You Ready to Love Me?,” (swampy Southern soul), “Here Is Where the Loving Is” (fiddles and guitars and Emmylou Harris!) among them. And a belief that love is contagious, that it can repair the world — the boisterous title song (a bit of Ike and Tina and a lot of Delaney & Bonnie, perhaps), the steamed-windows twinkle of “Jeep Cherokee Laredo.” And in “One and the Same” they have given us unity anthem for the ages. All of the ages. And in album-closing “Little New Bern,” Michael wrote a vivid ode to Tanya’s large, loving family and the former plantation land where it began and at which all the cousins still gather with her grandparents (73 years of marriage!) every summer.

But back to that meeting: “I remember going to Laurel Lakes Park for an event, the Love Festival, Aug. 28, 2010,” he says of a day of music in Laurel, Maryland, near where each lived at the time, at which they were both scheduled to perform. “I was led under this awning and I saw this most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life.”

A “wow” is heard in the background, as if she’s never heard this before.

“And she did what any beautiful woman would have done with a slouch like me. She ignored me,” he says. “We introduced ourselves and she thought nothing of me. I thought everything of her. So I got on stage and performed, and then after I saw this woman running across the field in heels toward the stage, and it was her. She just wanted to know about my songwriting. The rest is history.”

Tanya grabs the phone: “He’s kinda telling the truth,” she allows. “Mine is the part where he says I ignored him. I was out there with some friends and a young lady working with me at the festival kind of whisked me away and said, ‘I want you to meet Michael.’ Which kind of came as he said it. It may come off as I was ignoring him. But I wasn’t. I was trying to do two things at once.”

As to her reaction to his songs, well, on that she agrees wholeheartedly.

“Oh my goodness! I lost my mind!” she says. “After he finished performing I ran over and bought six of the CDs he had and was a crazy person handing them out to people — ‘This is the best thing I’ve heard!’ He was amazing.”

And then?

“We exchanged numbers — and he would have a different account here,” Tanya says. “He lost my number! Threw it in the trash can. So I proceeded to call him and ask him if he could write songs for my brother and I. We were working on a project. I invited him over to the house. He wrote 10 songs in about two hours. He had songs ready, came over and sang them to me and we became friends, inseparable friends. And after I had a birthday party, that was September of 2010, and from there, the next day, we never separated. He moved into my house the next day.”

Michael’s take?

“You know? That’s accurate.”

Okay, then. Now let’s skip ahead to March this year, when the couple, having made their home in Albion, Michigan, found themselves in Nashville, being produced by Buddy Miller at his house — “We wanted to give Buddy Miller a chance to be discovered,” Michael says, barely containing silly giggles. “Just wanted to help him out” — and surrounded by such stellar musicians as drummer Brady Blade, fiddler Sam Bush, pedal steel and banjo player Russ Pahl and multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke, realizing the love-filled vision they’d been honing tirelessly in the intervening years.

Oh, and there’s Emmylou Harris climbing the porch stairs, not only to add her voice to “Here Is Where the Loving Is At,” but to deliver a batch of birthday brownies to Michael one day.

“Another lady who might need to be discovered,” Michael says, not succeeding at holding back the giggles, before adding, “Everyone knows her for her singing, but people don’t know she makes the BEST BROWNIES EVER.”

The sound is a realization of an array of influences and passions, some shared ones including Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, the gospel icons the Gaither Singers and James Cleveland. A big influence when they started performing together, Michael says, was the Civil Wars — he sheepishly notes running into that act’s John Paul White and, tongue-tied, blurting out that his act was called the Civil Wars. But what the War and Treaty draw on together is distinctly their musical DNA.

“We really have different backgrounds,” Tanya says. “My mom was from Panama. I grew up listening to Calypso and opera. My dad was from New Bern, North Carolina, and we also listened to Christian music, gospel, but also secular music — Whitney Houston. A plethora of sounds growing up. My dad loved western, so some country songs. We would have a guitar player in church, or sometimes just foot-stomping and clapping. ‘Love Like There’s No Tomorrow’ comes from that. Michael comes from a Seventh Day Adventist background and grew up listening to incredible harmonies and some of his writing comes out of that. His uncle Zilbert Trotter plays organ like no one I ever heard before. We took all that and married it together and it came together with the help of Buddy Miller as a beautiful piece of art.”

Though they’d made a well-received EP, Down to the River, spawning some viral videos to match the word-of-mouth from their dynamic concert performances, this was a whole other world for them, with new expectations, intimidating ones.

“When you get those musicians in the room, they know that no matter what accolades they have, they say, ‘Lead us,’” Michael says. “I had to learn to lead. Buddy Miller is not going to let you escape that responsibility. You come in and have a vision, he’s going to hold you to it. He’s a sweet man, but he has a way to make sure you stay authentic. He’s not going to do take 17, take 18. We did two takes of everything. We had it in the first one. Did the second one because Buddy felt guilty that we had it in the first one.”

He continues, “They all wanted to see where I wanted to go — show us what you’ve got. The intimidation factor was sky high. I don’t consider myself of the caliber of those giants, but then you have to believe you belong there. I remember playing my minor 7ths and diminished chords and this and that and they were laughing, had to explain to me what I was doing. Russ Pahl said, ‘How does it feel to have millions of dollars of education, and never gone to school a day in your life?’ I said, ‘Feels pretty good, Russ.’ He popped me on the head with a wad of paper and walked away.”

The closest he had ever gotten to a music education was under the most unusual circumstances, which brings us back to Saddam’s piano. Michael, having enlisted in the Army in 2003, was sent to Iraq, scared and unprepared. He found himself in a platoon stationed in one of Hussein’s abandoned palaces. A captain heard him sing, heard the inspirational power of his voice and took him to the basement where there was a piano and told him to go at it, learn to play, make music. Not long after, the captain was killed and Michael was asked to sing at his service, the first time he ever sang a song he wrote in public.

But as he talks here, that wasn’t the part of the Iraq story he wanted to tell.

“No one knows this,” he confides. “This is special. I was singing in Baghdad once, and it was probably two in the morning, singing to the troops. And they were singing and clapping with me. And one of the soldiers on guard duty said, ‘You all gotta come see this!’ And when I looked over the gate, the Iraqis with their tea were sitting down at the gate, listening to me sing. And they were clapping and patting their thighs with me. That’s the power of music, the power of songwriting. The war stopped for at least 30 minutes.”

That’s the kind of thing he remembers as his and Tanya’s life accelerates, as success builds and the demands grow — not least being having to spend more time away from their child.

“I’ve cried on the road and broken down,” Michael says. “We travel with our son, but time has now come where we have to leave him with someone for two or three weeks at a time, all for the call of the mission and honoring our life.”

That mission. That call.

“I’m singing with my wife, songs I wrote for us, and we’re on the road and helping bridge humanity in our way. Toughest thing we have to deal with is leaving our son. But no one’s calling us derogatory words.”

He cites a couple of rough epithets that in past have been hurled at many from various directions.

“No one is doing that. There are no signs that you have to drink from the black water fountain. That’s not happening,” he says. “We are blessed that we have not faced it that way. We have a multi-cultural band that reminds folks of what we have overcome. I’m not here to promote the black race or white race, but am genuinely invested in unifying the human race. I do believe there ain’t no better thing in life. I’m almost coming to tears just thinking about if Dr. King’s dream can be a reality daily. We make sure at every concert that everyone hugs each other and tells each other they matter, black or white, foreign or domestic. We are all human beings.”

As the song says, with equal grace and power, we are all “One and the Same.”

Tanya puts it simply and profoundly: “This project is an act of love.”

Photo credit: David McClister

LISTEN: The Devil Makes Three, “Pray For Rain”

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Capturing your band’s live sound in the studio is right up there with writer’s block as one of the most common challenges you can face as an artist—particularly if, like The Devil Makes Three, your live shows are your bread and butter.

The California trio, whose high-energy tours and festival appearances attract a fiercely dedicated fan base, have already released a couple live albums. But as they were writing Chains Are Broken, Pete Bernhard, Lucia Turino and Cooper McBean made a conscious effort to further capture their live instrumentation in the studio by inviting their touring drummer, Stefan Amidon, to record with them.

“We recorded with a [session] drummer who we really liked on our last album, Stranger, and it was just fun,” Bernhard says. “It gave us a lot more, I dunno, freedom I guess. There’s a certain freedom in playing as a string band too, but it was a different kind of freedom. But yeah, we’ve been playing with [Stefan] for years. Sometimes people see us play and they’re really shocked that we have a drummer, but that usually means that they haven’t seen us in like three or four years.” He laughs. “So we wrote a lot of the songs including drums, so when we went into the studio, it seemed like the natural progression to have him play.”

However, that doesn’t mean drums are a permanent addition to the band’s setup.

“I don’t like to predict the future,” he says. “I think that maybe we’ll use him if we think the song is appropriate, and if we write a song that’s just like a guitar and a bass, then we’ll do that. The main thing I like to do is just approach it like there really aren’t any rules, you know? And if the song wants drums and it wants a bass clarinet, then that’s what we’re gonna do. And if it doesn’t want that, if it wants like an electric guitar and standup bass and vocals and nothing else, then that’s what we’ll do.

“We still play without a drummer sometimes, it just really depends on the gig. But for us it was really exciting to do it and just try it because we hadn’t done it before. But yeah, for the next record, maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll use drums on some songs like we did on Stranger and not on others; maybe we won’t use them at all. I think it really depends on what we’re excited about writing. There are no hard and fast rules.”

That lack of rules when it comes to their recording process led them to venture out to Texas for a new sort of studio experience as well, working on Chains Are Broken at the Sonic Ranch, the largest residential recording studio complex in the world.

“I’d never been to a recording studio like that before,” Bernhard says. “I’d never done like a live-in sort of studio. It was really cool. It was a very strange experience. You live at the studio, and there’s a lot of other people recording there too, so it’s kind of like—I don’t know, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like band camp or something. Because while we were there, there’s like a jazz artist next door who’s recording, and there’s a rock group, and then there was Tito & Tarantula, which is a little more on the punk side of things, and it was really cool and very, very different. We’re used to sort of going into a city and recording in a studio and kind of spending a lot of time someplace in the middle of everything, and this could not be further away from that.”

He adds, “It was incredibly isolated. It was down by the Mexican border. It was really, really pretty and really quiet and really peaceful, and we just focused on playing every day for a couple of weeks and before we recorded the record, we sort of hung out and played the songs and talked about how we wanted to change them, things we liked, things we didn’t, and it was like we got so much more space and time to work on the record than we ever have before. It was really cool. It’s kind of creepy out there though…It’s the desert, you know? And I think that kind of influenced the sound of the record too. Just sort of the environment is very kind of empty and really pretty but also a little bit lonely.”

You can hear that influence on tracks like “Can’t Stop,” a deceptively upbeat song with dark lyrics that only reveal themselves if you’re listening closely. Bernhard says it’s about the pitfalls of being an artist.

“I think mainly for me it’s just a song about being an artist of any sort—a musician or a visual artist—and what I think is sometimes necessary to be an artist. When I wrote the song I was thinking a lot about how a lot of artists kind of finish their lives in a terrible way, you know?” he says. “Like someone like Hemingway, he was given electroshock therapy and he basically drank himself to death, and somebody like Townes Van Zandt also met with a sad end. I was reading James Baldwin and he was talking about how being an artist is one of those things where instead of you choosing to do it, it’s one of those things where you can’t help doing it. You have to do it. And you don’t have a choice whether you do it or not, and you do whatever’s necessary in order to make that happen.”

He continues, “And sometimes that’s kind of not that great. But people who are artists and feel they have a vision that they want to see happen and that they’re driven to are willing to do that. And I think that was the inspiration for the song, you know, really not being able to stop. You might want to, but you can’t. And I think that’s sort of a part of the life of being an artist or a creative person in any way, and it is kind of dark sometimes. I think it’s a really great thing and it’s a wonderful gift to be given, but at the same time, yeah, it can be kind of a dark thing. And just that feeling of not being completely in control, I think that that’s part of being an artist of any kind. You kind of give yourself over to that, and it takes you wherever it’s gonna take you, and sometimes where it takes you isn’t that great, but that’s part of the ride.”

Sonically, Chains Are Broken is a heavier record as well—a natural progression stemming from the band’s live show.

“I think it actually sort of unfolded in the live show over the years, playing with a drummer, and everybody in the band is really into heavier music,” Bernhard explains. “It’s pretty funny, actually, if you like go around the room and ask the band what kind of music everybody’s listening to right now, the answers you get back are really hilarious for the kind of music that we play. We all started out in the punk scene, and as we’ve gotten older, I think Cooper especially got really into sort of slow metal and a lot of experimental music, like drone music.

“So yeah, we definitely made the album heavier just out of our music getting heavier over the years onstage. I think it’s just kind of happened naturally. And it’s also so fun to play like that. I think we’ve always tried to emulate that, even when we were just three people playing acoustic instruments. We always tried to play as fast and hard as we possibly could, so it’s sort of a continuation of that.”

But like their live show, no Devil Makes Three record is immune from being tweaked with and evolving, and Bernhard says the group is eager to see how Chains Are Broken shifts as they take it on tour.

“I think the thing that happens for us, you know, we write a record, we’re excited about it, we go out on the road, and then a lot of times we change it.” He laughs. “We change how we play the songs. We like to do them in a different way, we might change the tempos of them, it’s like things evolve and we find a certain way that we really like to perform stuff. I mean, I think that’s part of why you want to see a band live, too. Just sort of to see the different songs and see how things evolve.”

Photo credit: Jay Westcott

Baylen’s Brit Pick: Elles Bailey

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Artist: Elles Bailey
Hometown: Bristol, England
Latest Album: Wildfire

Sounds Like: Mollie Marriott, Jo Harman, Bonnies Tyler and Raitt, with a touch of Amy Winehouse.

Why You Should Listen: I love a husky voice and Elles Bailey has it in spades. Of course a voice that sounds like it’s had more nights out than me and smoked more cigarettes than Maggi Hambling (art school reference for you there) isn’t enough to make a great album, as wonderful as that voice may be.

So it’s good news that Elles combines that voice with sharp-edged lyrics, a soulful bluesy sound, country roots sensibilities, and top notch musicianship. Combine all that with a contemporary edge and you’ve got yourself a great new hope of British music. The smokey voice, by the way, doesn’t come from either cigarettes or art school; it’s the result of a stint in hospital when she was a child. Elles doesn’t dwell on that though and neither should we. It’s just another reminder of how sometimes light comes from darkness; she’s embraced it, turned it to her advantage.

I’d known of Elles for awhile and played her on my radio shows plenty but I only got to catch her live at the opening party for last month’s Nashville Meets London festival, and she blew the roof off the place. She has an easy, engaging stage presence and is the only artist in three years of the festival to start her set at a grand piano. A grand piano always adds a bit of oomph doesn’t it? She’s also a dab hand at a self-deprecating story, which makes you love her all the more.

All that aside, she could just stand stock still centre stage and sing her songs and that would be plenty, they are that good. Her latest album Wildfire was produced by Brad Nowell, tracked in Nashville, and features Grammy Award-winning guitarist Brent Mason and Musicians Hall of Fame keyboard player Bobby Wood, so all the boxes are checked in the Real Deal category. She’s appearing at The Long Road festival in England in September, thank God it’s an outdoor festival, I don’t think the insurance would cover another roof blown off by Elles Bailey.

As a radio and TV host, Baylen Leonard has presented country and Americana shows, specials, and commentary for BBC Radio 2, Chris Country Radio, BBC Radio London, BBC Radio 2 Country, BBC Radio 4, BBC Scotland, Monocle 24, and British Airways, as well as promoting artists through his work with the Americana Music Association UK, the Nashville Meets London Festival, and the Long Road (the UK’s newest outdoor country, Americana, and roots festival). Follow him on Twitter: @HeyBaylen

Photo credit: Alex Berger

WATCH: The Unseen Strangers, “Church Street Blues”

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Artist: The Unseen Strangers
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario
Song: “Church Street Blues”

In Their Words: “We are massive Norman Blake fans in the Unseen Strangers and are always working up different songs of his. I started listening to this one when I first got into bluegrass guitar and digging into the music of Tony Rice, so there’s quite a bit of his version in there. ‘Church Street Blues’ is certainly a flatpicking classic and we are excited to share our arrangement with this video. It was recorded live in the Back 40 forest at the Tottenham Bluegrass Festival in Ontario. When we can’t agree on what song to play next we always just play this one.” — Adam Shier

Photo credit: Emma-Lee

Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher: Finding Narratives

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Gabe Witcher, the fiddle player – and some might say secret weapon – in Punch Brothers, has been a performer for nearly his whole life. As a kid, he toured the Southwest playing bluegrass with his family’s band; that’s how he met Chris Thile, forming a musical friendship that has spanned more than three decades. Though his stage presence is low-key, his musicianship is undeniable, playing as joyously or mournfully as a song requires. This is also true on Punch Brothers’ newest album, All Ashore.

In this interview, Witcher kicks off a five-part series as the Bluegrass Situation salutes the Artist of the Month: Punch Brothers.

I love the fiddle part you play on “Three Dots and a Dash.” I was wondering, how much of your music is arranged when you go in to record, or how much of it unfolds by feel when you’re in the studio?

Yeah, this record is a lot different than our previous records. We really had the bare minimum amount of time to get it done. Historically, there is a good deal of improvising on all, throughout our music, and so that’s always spontaneous every time we play – in the studio, out of the studio, whatever. But there is a good deal of highly-arranged stuff as well and historically that stuff would have been written and rehearsed for months leading up to getting into the studio … and we just didn’t have that luxury this time. So, while there’s a good deal of arranged things on the record, it all kind of came together in the studio anyway.

“Three Dots” is a good example where we had the form, we had the melodies, we knew “this is how the arrangement is going to unfold, this is who plays when, this is what the song’s going to do” when we got into the studio and played it a few times – and didn’t like it. So, we put the brakes on recording and went and huddled up in one of the corners of the studio for three or four hours and completely reworked the entire middle section of the song. From post-middle-solo until when the melody returns at the end.

It’s just one of those things: “This isn’t good enough yet, so let’s make it good enough.” When we did, when we finally got something we liked and went back in and recorded it, a lot of that section, I’d say it’s about 50/50 arranged and improvised. Solos are improvised, but we got something that we absolutely loved and that all happened in the moment in the studio. That is a new thing. That has never happened to us before because we had always historically gone in super prepared with, “This is the music, this is what it’s going to be.”

One of the things I love about this record is that what you’re hearing on the record is the first time any of these songs were performed to our satisfaction. You’re getting the excitement of us discovering this music and playing it for the first time. That’s always an exciting thing to hear.

Yeah. So you said bare minimum. What was the timeframe for this?

Oh, let’s see. I think we wrote the record in about four weeks. Not all together. We had three days in October, we had eight days in December and then two weeks in February to get it all situated. Then we recorded it over the course of three weeks in March. And then mixed in April.

The Phosphorescent Blues took almost three years to write. We had the luxury of writing it over the course of three years not work every day, of course. We might have worked twelve weeks total on it, but we had the chance to sit with things and revise, and change, and live with it. This one was more of a “Let’s just get it out.” And I think it worked to our benefit because everything feels super fresh on the record.

I read that you played on the score for Brokeback Mountain and Babel – and they both won the Oscar for best original score. Do you think there’s a cinematic component to Punch Brothers’ arrangements as well?

Yeah, absolutely there is. That’s a comment we get quite frequently. It’s not intentional, but I think everyone is in love with trying to find narratives that can happen instrumentally along with a lyrical narrative. We’re always trying to find textures and new ways to approach presenting musical ideas and finding interesting ways of getting you from point A to point B. I think there’s a definite classical music influence in that regard. Not only is the music supporting the lyrics in a vocal as it would in folk-based or pop music, but the music itself is also helping to create the narratives.

You in particular have a bluegrass background, from playing in your family’s band. How did that prepare you for this experience of touring with Punch Brothers?

Surprisingly enough, doing that is how Chris and I met. We met at a festival called Follows Camp Bluegrass Festival that happened in Southern California. My family would always go up and camp and play and my dad would emcee a lot of the time at that festival. There was a contest and our family band got booked to play it. I think it was the second year or the second time it happened. A 5-year-old Chris Thile just happened to be there that time. As he tells it, he saw me playing onstage with my dad and was like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. Another kid plays!”

After we got done, we were introduced and immediately became friends. I think we played baseball in the road that ran along the campground, then spent the rest of the time playing tunes with each other. Doing that led directly, a couple decades later, to this band becoming a thing. Of course, you can’t discount the years and years and years spent learning the craft of playing, and playing in an ensemble, and performing. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a unique way to grow up.

The good news is, I got all the … well, not all, but a good portion of the dues-paying out of the way before I even knew I was paying any dues, so by the time I was out of high school I had a level of proficiency as a professional that most people don’t have the luxury of gaining until they are well into their 20s. I was able to hit the ground running. I went to college as well, for music, but I’ve got to say: music was there all along. The only thing that changed was that I finished school. So that went away but the music continued.

You were able to play with Bill Monroe as a kid, too, right?

Yeah, when I was 6, we were at the Strawberry Music Festival. This is the thing that launched the family band. My folks decided that we were going to go up to the Strawberry Music Festival, which at that time happened in Yosemite, California. I had been playing for almost a year at that point. We just went to camp and hang out and check it out. One of the days my dad and I were jamming at the campground, and people wandered around the campground, so people were coming in to listen. Then they’d wander off.

Monroe was playing that night at the festival. He was headlining the show that night and they had gotten him to do a workshop during the day, a mandolin workshop. My dad took me over to that. I didn’t know who that guy was. He was just some old guy up there playing. There were a couple hundred people at this workshop listening to Monroe, and right towards the end, and my dad would probably remember better than I do, but somehow, someone pointed me out and said, “Have you heard this guy play? You should pick a tune with him, Monroe.” And so Monroe got me onstage and he and I played a tune called “Gold Rush.” It’s actually one Byron Berline wrote when he was in Monroe’s band.

So Monroe and I played that tune and I got a pretty cool picture with Monroe afterwards. Then, later that day, probably because of that, the Strawberry folks asked if my dad and I would do what they call a ‘tweener set, where you go up and play two or three songs in between the main stage bands. So, Hot Rize was playing and then New Grass Revival was going to play after that. I think this was the day after Monroe played. So my dad was like, “Yeah, sure! Yeah, we’ll work up three songs.” So he grabbed a bass player and a guitar player and also asked Byron if he would sit in on the solo. And so we got up and played three songs, and Byron came out, and we played “Gold Rush” together. And it was so much fun, my dad said, “Hey, do you want to do this more?” And I said, “Sure!”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Photo: Courtesy of Red Light Management

Canon Fodder: Fairport Convention, ‘Liege & Lief’

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It was inevitable: If Fairport Convention hadn’t added rock guitars and a rhythm section to centuries-old folk tunes about bedeviled knights and fairy queens, someone else would have invented English folk rock. Released in December 1969, Liege & Lief sounded like a culmination of a scene that had been in resurgence for most of the decade, spilling out of pubs and social halls to offer an alternative to the frivolity of rock and roll as well as a sense of national identity at a time when the idea of British-ness seemed to be changing, even diluting. As such, it was a scene that was extremely guarded about its many centuries of source material and extremely suspicious of any innovation, whether it’s Davy Graham adding raga filigrees to his folk instrumentals or the Pentangle pushing the form into jazzier territory.

Earlier in that fateful year, Fairport Convention had taken a small step toward English folk rock while recording their third album, Unhalfbricking. It’s a varied album, one made by a band only just realizing its power but not yet shedding its American aspirations. It includes three Dylan covers, including a French-language version of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” as well as a Cajun number and a stunner called “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” penned by singer Sandy Denny. Side One ends with an eleven-minute track called “A Sailor’s Life,” adapted from a 19th-century broadside and recorded in one take by the band. As Rob Young writes in 2011’s definitive Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, the song contains “a historic few minutes: the first recorded use of drumsticks and drum kit on a rendition of an English folk song.”

Fairport Convention almost died before the album was even in stores. In May 1969, during a trip back to London from a gig in Birmingham, the band’s tour bus flipped down a ravine, killing drummer Martin Lamble and Jeannie Franklyn, girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson. Bass player Ashley Hutchings was thrown from the vehicle and spent a month in the hospital. Guitarist Simon Nicol was nearly crushed by their gear. Thompson suffered broken ribs. How does a band continue after such a tragedy? How do you make musicians when you’ve seen your instruments and your bandmates scattered across the highway?

What should have been the happiest moment of their career—the release of Unhalfbricking, their first charting album—was instead a time of misery and uncertainty, as Fairport Convention nearly went their separate ways. Instead, they retreated to the Hampshire on England’s remote southern shore, where their producer and friend Joe Boyd rented a crumbling manor called Farley House. There they grieved and recovered, played football in the yard, busked at the local cathedral to pay the milk bill, and rehearsed for hours and hours every day.

Given the trauma they had endured, it’s remarkable that Fairport Convention knew exactly what they wanted to do musically. Where once they wanted to be in Britain what the Byrds and the Band were in America, they wanted to build off the experiment of “A Sailor’s Life” and explore the intersections between rock and folk. More generally, they wanted to see what England’s past might have to say to its present and what its present might have to say to its past. Finally released from the hospital, Hutchings threw himself into the project, spending hours at the Cecil Sharp House in London, the famous repository of all things British folk. There he pored over handwritten journals, songbooks, cylinders, records, and documents to uncover songs like the magical-realist Scots ballad “Tam Lin” and the grisly murder ballad “Matty Groves.”

Pounding out the arrangements at Farley House, the band added a few originals, including Denny’s opener “Come All Ye,” which plays as a statement of renewed vigor and purpose. It’s a rousing number, loose and gangly and inviting, with Denny calling out each of the instruments and explaining their roles in this new music. Everyone joins in on the chorus, gregariously inviting the listener to join them on this journey: “Come all ye rolling minstrels and together we will try to rouse the spirit of the earth and move the rolling sky.” The song heralds something different and radical in the music: a new way to play old songs. It’s the drumsticks and drum kit, of course, but something else.

Replacing the sadly departed Martin Lamble in Fairport Convention was Dave Mattacks, whose biggest gig till then had been an Irish dance band. He plays for movement, emphasizing the bounce in his rhythms, making it less about how the stick hits the drum but what happens immediately after: the upswing of the stick, that sense of jubilant motion. He peppers his bright, buoyant beats with unexpected fills and rolls, pushing “Matty Groves” and “Tam Lin” along at a crisp clip. The innovation isn’t simply the introduction of rock drums into a folk context; instead, he’s thinking about how the instrument fits in this new setting, how it interacts with the other instruments, how he can mimics the jigs and reels of Thompson’s guitar and Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle. Somehow on Liege & Lief he makes his drum kit sound like a folk instrument.

And that’s an important aspect of this album’s enduring appeal. These songs are excitedly and boldly conceived, but they’re also beautifully executed: loose, casual, seemingly unrehearsed, messy in places but all the livelier and more spontaneous for it. All are deft and distinctive musicians: Denny a commanding and expressive singer, Hutching a bass player who emphasizes rhythm and melody equally, Thompson already a guitar hero on par with the overblown blues soloists of the era. There is between them a sense of elated and grateful collaboration, a sense of relief that the others are still there to play these songs together.

Ironic for a band that had survived such a tragedy, their greatest success marked a kind of breakup for Fairport Convention. Denny, featuring she would enjoy fewer opportunities to write new songs for the band, left the group for a too-brief solo career, dying in 1978 at the age of 31. Hutchings exited for the opposite reason: He felt Fairport would not continue to explore folk music as deeply and as persistently as he wanted, so he left to form Steeleye Span (whose 1970 debut Hark! The Village Wait picks up where Liege & Lief left off). Fairport soldiered on throughout the 1970s, shedding and absorbing new members, but the Farley House crew is considered the classic lineup.

Liege & Lief casts a long shadow over the band, however. They never quite topped it in terms of popularity or influence, perhaps because the questions they raise on these songs sounded so new and bold in 1969: How should we treat the past? How does it define us as citizens and as a collective? One of the joys of folk music is how it allows every generation to imprint itself on the music, which means that Fairport Convention might have been looking to the past but they were commenting on the present. The album may seem removed from the pop music of the era, from the end of the Beatles to the beginning of Zeppelin, from the ascension of the Stones to the first notes of heavy metal and prog, from hippies and rebels.

But they are very much a band of their moment. They transform “The Deserter” into a powerful anti-war anthem, and it doesn’t matter that the “Queen” in the lyrics is Victoria instead of Elizabeth. “Matty Groves” is a tale of sexual treachery, about a woman who rejects her husband’s riches to bed a younger, poorer man, but as Denny sings it, the song’s sexual politics are surprisingly progressive. The woman becomes a hero and a sexual martyr, her jealous husband a brutish villain: the establishment, a square, the Man.

Fairport Convention approached folk music from a distinctive generational vantage point, one with new technology, new pop culture, new attitudes toward England. Liege & Lief marks a very specific point in the history of folk music; it sounds deeply rooted in the late 1960s, yet it serves as an evergreen reminder that we are never beholden to history. Rather, the past is the raw material from which we fashion our future.