Tag: Folk

LISTEN: Masontown, ‘Rainy Day’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Masontown
Hometown: Denver, CO
Song: “Rainy Day”
Album: In This Time
Release Date: October 13, 2017

In Their Words: “I wrote this song late one evening while dealing with some leftover emotions from a unexpected breakup. Just when you think you are over someone, it can take only the slightest reminder to flood you with loneliness and take you back to what once was. To capture the mixed emotions of healing, I played with the concept of having long notes that soar above a quick, nervous tempo, giving an unsettling feeling of longing. We are so grateful to have guest artist George Guthrie’s driving banjo on this track.” — Natalie Padilla

Photo credit: Russ Dixon

LISTEN: Donna Ulisse, ‘Back Home Feelin’ Again’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Donna Ulisse
Hometown: Lebanon, TN
Song: “Back Home Feelin’ Again”
Album: Breakin’ Easy
Release Date: September 22, 2017
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “It’s an incredible mixture of excitement and calm that I have about this album. I have a new label and some new team members, and I enjoyed the remarkable experience of having Doyle Lawson as my producer. I have felt so free to concentrate on artistry, and the result is an album that makes me so happy to share.” — Donna Ulisse

Art Achieved and Abandoned: Charlie Parr in Conversation with Gina Clowes

Posted on by Editor

Charlie Parr and Gina Clowes both have a thing for banjos and dogs.

Parr’s new album is actually called Dog, and the title track argues that even man’s best friend has a complex inner life: “A soul is a soul is a soul is a soul,” insists the furry one as the Minnesota human picks out an acrobatic acoustic blues riff. Parr is an especially deft and intuitive player who jumps from old-time to bluegrass to blues to folk faster than a greyhound, but Dog is first and foremost a songwriter’s album. Parr inhabits various points of view — a dog, a hobo, another dog, a hoarder — as useful projections of his own depression.

Clowes’ new solo album, titled True Colors, isn’t canine-themed, but it similarly presents her as an exceptionally well-rounded artist. After dominating banjo competitions for 20 years, the Virginia native (perhaps better known under her birth name, Gina Furtado) joined the ace bluegrass outfit Chris Jones & the Nightdrivers last year, so it’s no surprise that her songs would showcase her swift and graceful picking. But songs like “Good Old-Fashioned Heartbreak” and “The Wayward Kite” reveal a graceful singer and an insightful songwriter.

And she has farm animals.

Gina Clowes: I’m battling my frisky little goat. She’s been jumping all over the place and following me around as we talk. Charlie, I think with that song “Dog,” you’re asking the question we all have in our hearts. I grew up with a border collie by my side all the time. Now I have a boxer mix. It’s actually my son’s dog.

Charlie Parr: Reuben is a miniature schnauzer, so she’s not a very big dog, but she’s an enthusiastic walker. One of our cats died, and we ended up getting this little dog, and she’s just an amazing addition to the family. She’s very dedicated to the notion of not taking walks that have much to do with where you, the human, want to go, but with what she’s interested in and the smells she smells. My idea of a walk is very different, and I used to make her take the routes I wanted to take. Suddenly it occurred to me that it’s cruel if the only time you get to go for a walk is when somebody else lets you and then they make you do what they want to do. I felt like, “Oh my God, that’s so terrifying.”

What did you do?

CP: I started following her around town and letting her stop and do whatever she wanted to do. And the walks took on this epic strangeness where I would find myself in parts of town that I had no idea existed. She would take me to these odd places that I’d never seen before. I live on the shore of Lake Superior, and she would take me to new parts of the shore I had never seen before. You think you have a handle on where you live, but you don’t at all. I felt like I owed her a debt of gratitude for reminding me that it’s not about me. It’s not even really about her. It’s about something else. We did this together, not to sound too crunchy about it.

GC: Growing up with my border collie, Maggie, I feel like I came across so many more adventures than I ever would have without her. We spent all of our time out in the woods. She would find these injured animals. She had a very different view of the world that we don’t have.

Is the time you spend with these animals good for writing?

CP: The way I write songs is weird, because I end up writing stories and distilling them into songs. Those walks with Reuben are always good for that. Some weird story will come out of them, and I jot down stuff when I get home. Three-quarters of the time I throw it away, but that last little bit of time, it will turn into something that I think is not too bad.

GC: Part of it, too, is getting away from listening to music. You get out in nature and your brain has a chance to put together whatever influences it’s been absorbing when you’ve been in the car or in the kitchen listening to music. It’s a quiet time, and that’s when I come up with some of my better ideas.

CP: I listen to a lot of music. Obviously you do, too. But I have to spend a certain amount of time each day deliberately not listening to music. When I’m walking with Reuben, I never listen to music, partly because I don’t like things in my ears. When I do long drives, I listen to music. I’m a child of the ‘70s. We’re album-oriented people, so I will listen to a record and then I will stop for about the length of a record. I listen to music and then not listen to music about as much time.

That seems like an interesting idea. It gives you time to absorb and think about what you’ve heard, rather than just cramming even more notes into your ears.

CP: When I was growing up, I had my father in the front of the house. He grew up in the ‘30s, so his primary listening was around songs. He was interested in songs. His record collection was weird and shambolic, and he had a lot of 78s and old LPs from the ‘50s. He wasn’t into album-oriented anything. My sister, on the other hand, was listening to album-oriented rock from the ‘60s and ‘70s. The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart were playing in the back of the house. So I got interested in both of those things. But I find it hard to stop listening to an album after I’ve started. I have to let them play through, because you feel like you haven’t finished it somehow.

GC. It’s like an opera. You miss part of the story. I’m the same way. I’m just behind the times, and I would rather just pop in a CD rather than listen to Spotify.

CP: I’m part of that generation that was not raised with that technology. We had just enough technology to be spoiled, but not enough to be weird about it. I hate to be that way. I end up being that way around my son a lot, starting a lot of sentences with, “In my day …”

GC: So, Charlie, I noticed you’re using a slide on your left hand. Are you doing that with the banjo, too?

CP: Sometimes I do. I play a fretless banjo, so it can be hard to tell. But I do like using a slide. When I started playing, I had an interest in slide guitar, so the very first thing I did, when I was eight years old, was try to play slide guitar. I’m completely self-taught, so I’m doing everything upside-down and backwards. The slide adds something like two tones to every fret space, so it becomes really interesting. I’ve played a lot of slide on the banjo. Lately I haven’t been playing much banjo, but I’m trying to get back into it.

GC: I love the slide on the banjo. You don’t hear it very often, but one of my favorite players, Tony Furtado, does that sometimes. Last week, I went to the music store to pick up something really small, just a button for the guitar strap. When I tried to pay, they said, “Sorry, we can only accept a credit card if it’s over five bucks.” So I grabbed one of the bottle slides because it was sitting on the counter there. Might as well. Somehow that makes me more inspired to give it a try.

CP: It’s a unique sound. Banjos are a lot like resonator guitars: The attack isreal swift and the delay is real swift. So you have to do some stuff to keep your tones going, and bottleneck is a really an answer to that. I borrowed a friend of mine’s banjo that had a magnetic pickup installed in it. I wasn’t really into the sound of the pickup, but what I was into was the fact that I could take an E-bow and play it on the banjo. It works on the magnetic pickup, and the tones I got out of that were otherworldly. I was completely fascinated. I really like a lot of experimental music. Paul Metzger plays a 23-string banjo and used a lot of electric manipulations with it.

GC: I feel like the banjo has been boxed in, maybe because it’s relatively new to be doing it three-finger style.

CP: I think you’re right. It has been boxed in. People have decided that there’s only one tuning that’s associated with the banjo. I asked Dock Boggs about that. He would re-tune his banjo for almost every song, and I asked him about it. He said something to the effect of, “The song comes out of the tuning.” I thought that was fascinating.

GC: Yes. If you listen to a lot of old-time banjo playing, they change their tuning so much more, and it really does open up the spectrum of moods you can get out of it.

CP: I use a lot of open C, except I end up pitching the D string all the way up to E. I really like that a lot. It’s a little tight, but it’s a cool chord.

GC: Just make sure you point it away from your eyeball when you tune that one!

Is that something you’re actively pursuing? Are you always looking for new ways to play this instrument?

GC: For me, it’s not so much about trying to find a new sound. It’s more about just trying to find a better way to evoke a particular feeling. I like Scruggs-style banjo playing. Earl was awesome and he created this super-cool style that was him expressing something. It works out as a great template for players to use now, but I’m looking more at trying to figure out different methods of explaining the mood that I’m going for. There are many more ways to do that.

CP: It’s a bit of a mixture, sometimes, between manipulating the mechanics of the instrument and manipulating the technique. In 2006, I developed a brain disorder called focal dystonia, which completely destroyed my picking hand. I had to re-learn everything from scratch because I could only use my index finger. I used to use my middle finger a lot, but now it’s like a trigger finger — it just sucks up into my palm. I spent about a year looking at players like the Reverend Gary Davis and Elizabeth Cotton and Roscoe Holcomb to get some inspiration for how to do everything with just thumb and index finger. I had never had to do anything like that in my whole life, but at the end of the day, it turned into … well, it had to turn into a good thing or it was going to turn into a truly bad thing. It forced me really rapidly to change things about the way I played, even the way I sit and the way I hold the instrument. I found some places that I didn’t think I would ever find, and I had a little more power in my picking than I had before. Some of the frilly stuff had to go away, but I found other things to replace it and developed some self-confidence I didn’t have before.

GC: I can’t even imagine going through that. Is it physical or psychological?

CP: It’s repetitive stress syndrome in your brain. That’s what I’ve been told. I started playing guitar when I was eight and became very quickly obsessed with it. I tried to play all the time, but I didn’t have any lessons. No one every told me, “Don’t do that or you’ll end up with a problem in your future.” I did everything wrong for a long, long time. Now I’m 50 years old and I’m playing a little catch-up to get things to sound right. But it’s made me develop some different ways to look at things. When I want to get certain sounds, I have to work within the parameters of what I have. Sometimes that means manipulating instruments. I’ve added strings to guitars or taken strings away. I’ve put snares on the banjo head to get that buzzy sustain out of it. I try to do whatever I think needs to happen to get where I want to go. Half the time, I don’t even know what I want, and then something will come out that I like and I’ll amplify that a little bit more.

You’re both playing in traditions that can be very conservative, very restrictive. But on these new records, it sounds like you’re very consciously trying to find new ways to play.

GC: I love bluegrass. I was raised on it. I’ll always love it. But it does put you in a small box. There’s a specific form to every song — two A parts and two B parts and so on. That’s part of what makes it so great. It’s easy to get up on stage and jam. There’s a big repertoire that everybody knows, so you can all play together. But I don’t like the idea of genre, because it’s always going to be too small for all the ideas you want to use. You can’t use them all, if you’re trying to stick them all into a very small box.

CP: Musicians didn’t make up genres, anyway. It was record companies and radio stations and furniture stores that decided what the genres were. I don’t like them, either. All of the most exciting music that I’ve heard — including bluegrass music — has come from that weird in-between space where somebody did something slightly different, like Bill Monroe or Captain Beefheart. It’s happening now with a lot of groups, like Megafaun, for example. They blended a lot of electronic sounds with accordion and clawhammer banjo and came up with a couple of brilliant records before they stopped. It’s hard to say what genre they’re in because they’ve added so much stuff. I think that’s brilliant.

It gets back to an idea we were discussing earlier of how you listen to music. You don’t just listen to one style of music. You listen to a lot of different stuff. So why would you play just one narrow kind of music.

GC: Something I latched onto early: When I was learning to play the banjo, I was told I should imitate my banjo heroes. But someone else told me, “Why don’t you imitate other instruments? Why not imitate the guitar or the saxophone or whatever? Try different forms of imitation.” That opened the door for me to try new ideas and come up with new things.

CP: I had a conversation with Dakota Dave Hull, a player in Minneapolis who told me, “Don’t listen to so much guitar music. Listen to piano music. Listen to horns. Listen to jazz. Listen to a lot of different stuff.” You end up taking those voices back to the instrument you’re playing, and it adds a lot. I was also inspired by Spider John Koerner, who was constantly messing with his own songs and with other people’s songs. At one point, I was talking to him about an older song, and he pointed out that we wouldn’t be talking about that song if people had messed it and forced it through that folk process. Without that, it would have died. We’re only talking about it because people loved it enough to screw with it.

GC: Everything I put on True Colors turned out to be so very personal that it was a little uncomfortable. I had this idea that I could blame it on a friend: “Oh, a friend of mine went through that experience, not me!” But those songs are based on real feelings that I had, real experiences, and it was therapeutic for me to write about them. It helps to process everything that I go through. It’s what we talked about earlier — spending some time in quiet and working things out. Last summer, when I was writing everything for the album and getting ready to record, I stopped writing in my journal and I stopped listening to music. I just stopped cold turkey. My husband was worried, but I was just processing things and writing about them. And there they are now.

CP: That sounds familiar. I had a lot of bad internal stuff that kept getting recycled and regurgitated and, after a while, I needed to write the songs and get them away from me. I only really broke loose of them when I got other people involved. I was going to make this a completely solo record, but then I thought that would be devastating. The songs are already horrifying and way too personal, so I need to bring in other people and let them become an influence on the music. It changed stuff a little, but it also didn’t sound so dark anymore, I guess.

GC: I know what you mean about bringing people in. I was nervous showing my songs to people, but they came in and they’re happy and they played the living daylights out of the songs. Everybody just got the mood. It helps to get out of that space in your mind.

CP: There’s a certain amount of lightness that’s created by playing with other people. I’ve played mostly by myself, but when I play with friends, it’s a massive relief, just the amount of joy it creates. It’s hard to explain that kind of lightness that comes into even the darkest music, when you have other people there.

You both talk about getting these songs out of you and away from you, but then you record them and take them out on tour. You have to live with them every night. Is that difficult?

CP: I don’t ever regard songs as being finished. I’m not writing a book or painting a picture. I’m creating something new every time I sit down to play a song. In a weird way, I’m rewriting the song, which is now influenced by the audience and their energy. It’s not the same song as it was when I first came up with it. Now it’s something different. It’s not a song about A or B. It’s a song that includes something else. It becomes easier to deal with, because it’s no longer my burden alone. I’m sharing it with a lot of people who have all these different interpretations.

GC: That hits the nail on the head, Charlie. I write to distance myself from something. I write to let it be free and do whatever it will, so it doesn’t feel very personal when I share the song with somebody. It doesn’t have the same sense of being a deep, dark secret anymore. Now it’s out in the world. I’m free from it.

CP: Exactly. For me, it’s all about process. When a song feels finished, I just quit playing it. It’s not interesting to me anymore. You can’t work on it anymore. It reminds me of Simon Rodia, a folk artist from Los Angeles. He created the Watts Towers out of cement and junk, broken pieces of porcelain. He took 34 years to build them. He would come home every day from his job and he would cement little bits of pottery on these weird sculptures. Then, one day, he came home and there was no more room to add anything else. So he went next door to his neighbors and gave them the keys to his house and then he left and never came back. You can go and visit those towers, and there’s a sign out front that reads, “Art achieved and abandoned.” His art was all in the process. It’s not the finished product. That’s what the song is. It’s a process. When a song is finished, I have a tendency to just leave them behind. Even if I’m just learning a song, I usually won’t ever play it again because the process of learning is over.

Charlie Parr photo credit: Nate Ryan

The War on Drugs, ‘Strangest Thing’

Posted on by Editor

My mother just doesn’t get the “electronic” songs, as she puts it. Never did, really, especially when things started getting really wispy, super synth-y, shoegaze-y to the nth degree: Growing up on Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones, she likes her music with an emotional drive that makes the bones rattle, not one that shoots you into the clouds. And it’s true that, sometimes, heavily electronic music can be difficult to make a visceral connection with, especially if you are used to the organic reverberation of real drums and wood instruments — or especially if you don’t have any hallucinogenic substances to nudge you along on the way to submission.

Part of what has always made the War on Drugs so powerful is the way they bridge that modernity — particularly dreamy splashes of synth — with the organic core of rock and folk (Bruce Springsteen and ’80s Bob Dylan are common references). Lead by the voice of Adam Granduciel, the band’s newest single, “Strangest Thing,” sounds like a song made for those who enjoy being both grounded to the earth and united with the air. Rolling in to a slow, plaintive beat with synth and keys that ring like darts of sunlight, Granduciel asks questions that transcend those generational splits: “Am I just living in the space between the beauty and the pain?” he sings. From their forthcoming release, A Deeper Understanding, it’s the perfect swirl of acoustic and electric to reflect a time obsessed with the past but raging fast into the future.

STREAM: Whetherman, ‘This Land’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Whetherman
Hometown: The Open Road
Album: This Land
Release Date: June 16, 2017

In Their Words: “This record came about because of many musical interests. Through many miles traveled, my sound has become a blend of American-made music spanning folk, blues, soul, country, and bluegrass. It represents the beautifully different aspects of our culture, the current political and social climate, and conserving the amazing landscapes across this great nation, with respect to the message of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in ‘This Land was made for you and me.’” — Nicholas Williams

Canon Fodder: John Hartford, ‘Aereo-Plain’

Posted on by Editor

In September 2016, I did an interview with banjo player and producer Alison Brown for the now-dormant Producers column, and she told me a little bit about her studio in Nashville. Compass Records is headquartered there now, but 40 years ago, it was known as Hillbilly Central, where numerous outlaw and outlier country albums were recorded. “If I’d known John Hartford recorded Aereo Plain here, I would have been even more intimidated than I already was,” she confessed. “You could set the bar so high for yourself thinking about the other music that’s been recorded in the room, but, at the end of the day, you just have to look at it as there’s great energy in the room, great vibes in the walls, and you have to tap into that.”

I had to admit I didn’t know the album or much about the man. I knew the name, but that had more to do with the namesake music festival near my home than with any of his actual music. With minimal research, I learned that he was most famous for writing the song “Gentle on My Mind,” a late ’60s hit for Glen Campbell that was covered by everyone from Dean Martin to Aretha Franklin to R.E.M. to (most recently) Alison Krauss to (most strangely) Leonard Nimoy. I learned that Hartford was influential in the Newgrass trend of the ‘70s, and I learned that two of his songs had been included on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, the Big Bang of roots music in the 21st century. I learned that he was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist who clashed with celebrity of any kind. He died of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2001.

It’s always instructive to fill in these odd gaps in your musical knowledge, and the experience got me thinking about the roots canon, if there is such a thing. It’s a broad term that covers a wide range of styles and traditions and formats, from old-time field recordings to blues and gospel performances to the latest folk and country album releases to bluegrass classes in Appalachia. It’s almost impossible to connect all the dots, but it’s interesting to think about: Which record should every roots fan know about? What would a canon tell us about roots music in the 21st century? What would it say about American traditional music at a time when the entire notion of America is up for grabs?

Those questions became the foundation for this new column called Canon Fodder, so named because I like obvious puns. Each month we’ll examine a new album by an influential artist and explore its impact across generations. Hopefully this will allow us to approach some old artists in new ways, to hear familiar songs with fresh ears. If you have any nominations for albums to consider in this column, please leave them in the comments section below. I can’t promise we’ll get to each and every one of them, but I’ll definitely add it to the list.

In the meantime, it seems worthwhile to kick things off with Aereo-Plain. Brown is right: It does sound intimidatingly magnificent. There are only a few instruments on these songs, but they’re mic’d beautifully to capture the minute grain of Hartford’s banjo and the vibrations of every string on the strummed guitar. Even the goofball vocals at the end of “Boogie” — sung low and phlegmatic, as though making fun of the song that just played — are recorded lovingly and carefully, as though every mucus rumble were important. What makes the album remarkable isn’t so much the sound of the instruments, but the way they interact with one another. They’re alternately genial and hostile toward one another, supportive and undermining. The banjo plays a practical joke on the guitar; the guitar reciprocates. Especially on “Symphony Hall Rag” Hartford evokes a parallax quality in the production, with the rhythm guitar so deep in the background of the song that it sounds out of focus, which makes the song sound slightly askew.

Actually, all of Aereo-Plain sounds slightly askew … most of all Hartford himself. He comes across as something of a mad hatter on these songs — a Frank Zappa parodist for the roots set, pushing bluegrass as a countercultural force. He understands there’s power in wackiness and, even more than Pete Seeger, he believes the banjo can be a weapon against capitalism, complacency, the mainstream, the music industry, electrified instruments, or even conventional song structures. “With a Vamp in the Middle” is a meta song about itself: “I wrote this song with a vamp in the middle,” Hartford declares, but he never really gets to that vamp. He just keeps playing and singing.

If loneliness pervades these songs, it’s largely an effect of the times, an inescapable by-product of living in America during the early 1970s, when the hippie dream was curdling into something of a nightmare of violence and regress. Nixon was already a crook, but hadn’t been impeached yet. Altamont had killed the ‘60s, but the ‘70s hadn’t quite defined itself yet (at least not in America; in England, glam was already starting to define the era). Singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Cat Stevens were starting to make inroads into the mainstream, but no sound or movement defined the pop or country landscape.

Hartford sees not a land of promise or possibility, but a society gone to seed, eaten alive by progress: “It looks like an electric shaver now where the courthouse used to be,” he sings on “Steamboat Whistle Blues.” “The grass is all synthetic, and we don’t know for sure about the food.” It’s not that he wasn’t made for these times; it’s that the times aren’t made for human beings. “We’ll all sit down at the city dump and talk about the good old days,” but it’s the way he sings “city dump” that makes you think the phrase is redundant. He may decry the commodification of country & western on “Tear Down the Grand Ole Opry,” but Hartford understands that music may be our last connection to a more fulfilling past, and Hartford is content to sit down there among the refuse just pickin’ and strummin’ and singin’ and fiddlin’ while Rome burns.

These songs long for a return to the American pastoral, an escape from the pressures of progress and politics to a pre-industrial ideal and, for that reason, the album sounds alarmingly current. “Sittin’ on a 747 just a-watchin’ them clouds roll by. Can’t tell if it’s sunshine or if it’s rain, rain, rain,” he sings on the title track, his voice rising into a comical falsetto. “Rather be a-sittin’ in a deck chair high up over Kansas City on a genuine ol’ fashioned authentic steam-powered aereo plane.” It’s a dream and a mission statement — one that knows the very idea is an innocent impossibility.

Perhaps Hartford knew, or perhaps he didn’t know, that tinkerers and inventors had been trying to build such a contraption since the 1840s, when an aerial steam carriage was patented by the British inventors William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow. Even before the Wright Brothers went airborne at Kitty Hawk, they had managed to fly a small craft on a steam engine, but they couldn’t reconcile the power of the steam with the weight of the engine. It was folly, and maybe that’s why Hartford longs for the freedom of such a fantastical vehicle. There’s power in folly, an unbridled joy in whimsy that sounds like an intense form of dissidence and defiance.

In Countering Melodies: Molly Tuttle in Conversation with James Elkington

Posted on by Editor

As soon as I get Molly Tuttle and James Elkington on the phone, the conversation immediately turns to who is the better guitar player. There’s no showboating or bragging. On the contrary, each insists the other is much more accomplished, much more refined in their technique. “I hadn’t actually heard much of your music until a couple of days ago,” Elkington admits, “but I have to say that you are the far superior guitar player.”

“No way!” Tuttle insists. “I love your guitar playing.”

Their mutual demurrals stem partly from modesty, but also from the fact that both Tuttle and Elkington practice such different folk traditions that there’s very little overlap in their playing styles. A bluegrass picker who grew up in California and made her stage debut at 11 years old, Tuttle attended the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston and formed the Good-Bye Girls. On her solo debut, an EP titled Rise, her playing is rhythmically complex, technically precise, and remarkably fleet, as though there are two sets of hands running up and down the frets, yet the guitar remains secondary to her evocative songwriting.

Elkington, who originally hails from a small village outside of London but currently lives in Chicago, is a self-taught guitarist with a background in indie rock, most notably with the Zincs, the Horse’s Ha (featuring members of Eleventh Dream Day and Freakwater), and Wilco. However, his new solo debut, Wintres Woma, leans more toward folk music — specifically, the British folk revival of the 1960s, when players like Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, and Richard Thompson were melding early music, rural folk, jazz, and rock.

Their albums couldn’t sound more different, despite the shared combination of voice and guitar, yet both bluegrass and folk music value technique in service of interpretation; more important than the fluidity of notes or the deftness of picking is how the artist updates, refines, and furthers the musical ideas of the past.

One of the reasons I wanted to get you two on the phone is because I’m fascinated by the very different strains of folk music that you represent. Both of your albums strike me as using something — bluegrass or British folk revival — as a jumping-off point for something very different, very current, and very personal.

James Elkington: I didn’t really grow up in much of a folk tradition, outside of the fact that we sang those songs at school and they always seemed to be around. It seems like it’s probably part of my DNA. When I started writing my own songs, which was comparatively late, other people told me that I sounded like that. I didn’t really know that it was in there, and it’s one of those things that I’ve subsequently found I have quite a deep connection to. But that’s why I don’t perform an awful lot of traditional music, although subsequently I have gone back and arranged those tunes just because I love playing them. Now it’s part of what I do. That’s where I’m coming from.

Molly Tuttle: I grew up listening to a lot of bluegrass. My dad is a bluegrass music teacher who teaches all the bluegrass instruments, so I always heard him playing traditional songs. They seeped into my brain, I think, so that when I started playing, I was learning all these bluegrass songs and old traditionals. That was my background and, as I got older, I started listening to other genres and styles. I started writing songs and still had the bluegrass form in my head, so it was definitely a starting point for me.

JE: You know, funny thing that I’ve found actually … I find that somehow the physicality of playing folk music demands a certain technical ability. It feels good to play, as well as sounding good, and when I started writing my own songs, I wanted that to factor in somehow. In some ways, it adds not a limitation exactly, but something like that. It sets up a nice boundary to work within, if you use those traditional forms as a jumping-off point.

MT: It does make it accessible for other people to learn the songs and join in, too.

JE: And to actually know where you’re coming from.

What other music informs what you do?

MT: A lot of singer/songwriters, actually. I listened to a lot of Bob Dylan, when I was starting to write songs. Before that, I had heard a lot of bluegrass songs and felt limited by that. But when I heard Dylan, lyrically and musically, he was just breaking so many boundaries and that opened up my songwriting a little bit. I was just really inspired by that. Joni Mitchell and Gillian Welch are big heroes of mine, too, and Dave Rawlings, who plays with Gillian Welch.

JE: He always plays the right thing at the right time. The way he thinks of arrangements is …

MT: Yeah, he’s doing a counter-melody sometimes, just always putting the perfect piece in. What about you? I’m interested to hear about where your playing style comes from.

JE: I started playing guitar when I was about 10. There are vaguely musical people in my family, but no one who really plays anything. And the guitar was something that was just for me — something I could do privately, sort of like my own private little island to go and visit. And when I started out, I was just really into chords. This was in England in the 1980s. I don’t know if you can have any conception of what that was like, but it was a lot of really jangly guitar bands. It was like this Renaissance of underground bands, like the Smiths and the Cure. When I was learning the guitar, I was really into those groups — particularly Johnny Marr, who was the Smiths’ guitar player.

MT: He’s one of my favorites.

JE: That’s great to hear, because he’s like really the last great British guitar hero. His guitar playing on those records is amazing. The strange thing about it is that I found out subsequently that a lot of what he does, in terms of using other tunings and his approach to finger-style guitar, is really from people like Bert Jansch, Martin Carthy, and Joni Mitchell — all this stuff that I didn’t grow up listening to, but somehow it filtered through him in a way.

MT: I listened to the Smiths so much in high school. I was obsessed with Morrissey’s lyrics, and then the guitar playing was a second thing that I got really into, but I’ve never tried to learn any of his parts to figure out what he was doing.

JE: When I was a kid, I thought that’s really how you had to play the guitar. What changed me was that, when I was in my late teens, I started working in a music store, and there was a guy there who was really into bluegrass. He wanted me to come and play tunes with him, and for some reason, I had no interest in playing the guitar in that setting. But I had this strange attraction to the five-string banjo. I never got very good at it, but I learned the basic rules. Then, when I’d been doing it long enough to realize that I couldn’t play it well, I just applied all of that to the guitar, and that was the start of me doing finger-style stuff.

MT: I play three-finger banjo, so when I play finger-style guitar, I feel like I’m using some banjo stuff, as well.

JE: So you play banjo and guitar? Do you play anything else? Any fiddle or anything like that?

MT: I’ve tried to play fiddle, but I can’t get the hang of it. I play a little bit of mandolin, but not very well. I saw that you play a lot of different instruments.

JE: To a medium-low standard, I would say. I started out playing drums, which I loved. The drums are my favorite instrument, but I didn’t ever seem to get any better at it. For some reason, guitar is somehow easier for me to play. I do play some other things, but it’s not to the point where I could actually say, “I’ve really got this down.” I think I have a really short attention span, is what it is. I tend to move around a lot.

But you played most of the instruments on your album, right?

JE: Yes, but the arrangements are pretty sparse. My friend Nick Macri plays all the upright bass on it. I’ve been playing on and off with him for a long time. And I have some string players who are part of the jazz and new music scene here in Chicago. But mostly it was just me. It’s some fairly simple stuff. I’m mostly self-taught on most instruments. I really took the slow way round. I learned mainly just from trying to play along with the record. Molly, I saw some footage of your band playing, and they all seem equally amazing. Where did you meet those people? Do you always play with the same people?

MT: It’s a little bit of a rotating cast. For the most part, I’ve been playing with Wes Corbett, who’s a banjo player I met in Boston when I was studying at Berklee College of Music. He was teaching there, and we started playing together after I graduated. Right now, I’m on the road with Joe Walsh, who’s also currently teaching at Berklee. He’s an amazing mandolin player and singer. And then Hasee Ciaccio is playing bass with me right now for the summer and fall, and she’s a great upright bass player who lives in Nashville. We’re actually neighbors. What made you gravitate toward Chicago?

JE: It was a few different things. When I was in my later teens and early 20s, all my favorite music was coming out of Chicago — the underground and experimental rock stuff. I had a chance to come and visit here with friends, and I found that it was almost exactly what I wanted it to be. I’m sure, when you moved to Nashville, it was because you wanted to be around that music and be part of that community. I felt exactly the same thing with Chicago. I felt immediately at home here, like this was the place where I wanted to be. It actually all worked out, too. I really did end up playing music with people whose records I had. It’s really a “Hey, let’s all pull together and make something” type of place. I lived in London before, and I never really felt like that there.

MT: That’s how I feel about Nashville.

JE: Did you make your record in Nashville?

MT: I did. It’s my first solo release, so it’s all original stuff that I’ve been working on for years. I did it in Nashville with producer Kai Welch. It has some of my favorite musicians on it. It was great to finally make something of my own, because I’ve done stuff with other bands before but never released anything under my own name.

JE: That’s something I wanted to ask you: Have you played in other people’s bands a lot? Have you ever been just a guitar player in someone’s band?

MT: A little bit, with different bluegrass people. When I was living on the East Coast, I used to play a little bit with this banjo player Tony Trischka, who is like a great …

JE: Oh my God! Really?

MT: You know him?

JE: Let’s briefly go back to 1989 here. When I thought I was going to be this banjo ripper, Tony Trischka wrote THE best books. This friend of mine was really into that resurgence of bluegrass that Rounder Records were putting out — Tony Rice, Hot Rize. He would give me all these records — Béla Fleck records, stuff like that — and Tony Trischka was one of two people who had written sensible, up-to-date books on how to approach the five-string banjo. So you used to play with him?

MT: I did a few tours with him. I always have a lot of fun playing in someone else’s band and being more of a sideperson. I find that a really fun role. And I have another band called the Good-Bye Girls that I play with. It’s all people I met when I was in Boston. We do a couple of tours a year, but that feels more like less of a lead role to me. I like stepping into different roles and not always doing stuff where I’m the lead.

JE: I’ve found exactly the same thing. I’ve found that actually being able to play in different bands and have the focus be different each time means I never need to take a vacation from it, because it’s different enough each time. If I was just a singer, I think I would need to take a break from time to time. But I never really feel like that, and I think it’s because I have enough plate-spinning that I’m always mixing it up. I can tell from the way that you play that you have a deep knowledge of the bluegrass songbook, that when people call tunes, you can just play them — which is not something that I can do. I can’t even play my own songs sometimes when someone asks me to do that. That’s always something I admire in other people.

MT: Oh, thanks. It’s a really nice tradition, because once you have learned enough bluegrass songs, you can make it through most of the standards, even if you don’t know them. A lot of the songs have similarities, and you can jump in, which makes it fun. Even people who are new to the genre can jump into jams and find their way through songs they don’t know very well.

JE: I stopped listening to bluegrass for a while, but then, a few years ago, a friend of mine who has a band called Freakwater was doing a tour to celebrate an album that came out 20 years ago [Old Paint]. This album had a lot of dobro on it, and they wanted me to play dobro. I play a little bit of lap steel, but I’ve never really played dobro before. So I bought a cheap dobro and really got into it! It totally took over for about a year. That’s all I was doing. But now I don’t get asked to play it very much. I played it a little bit on my own record and I’m planning on playing it more, but I think you actually have throw yourself more into the bluegrass community.

MT: Was it a steep learning curve for you, or did you find it similar to lap steel?

JE: It was not too bad. I could already play some lap steel, and I’ve played bottleneck slide, so I had a little bit of understanding. But I had to watch a lot of Jerry Douglas YouTubes! You don’t even think some of that stuff is possible unless you actually see and hear and do it.

MT: Is this your first solo album?

LISTEN: Kelly Marie Martin, ‘Your Rockin’ Bow Don’t Roll No More’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Kelly Marie Martin
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Song: “Your Rockin’ Bow Don’t Roll No More”
Album: The Last Kind Word
Release Date: May 23, 2017
Label: Questionable Records

In Their Words: “This song is from upcoming solo album, The Last Kind Word. The 15 original songs and sound interludes are a reflection of what happens when a broken-hearted girl who used to write songs but has been playing old-time back-up guitar and clawhammer banjo for some years, meets back up with her songwriting and sound design self. A little folky, old-time string trio; a little blue, strange travel sounds and beats; some spoken word; and, like the song here, a good ol’ heartbreak honky-tonk!” — Kelly Marie Martin

Photo credit: Jessie Gentry

WATCH: Jenni Lyn, ‘Are You Ok Alone?’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Jenni Lyn
Hometown: Nashville, TN
Song: “Are You Ok Alone?”
Album: Burn Another Candle
Release Date: April 7, 2017
Label: Katherine Street Records

In Their Words: “I was watching an episode of Twin Peaks when the idea for the video came to me. There is this scene where a white horse appears in a living room with nothing but a spot light on it. The thought of spotlighting a person alone in a bedroom, trying to get someone off their mind popped in to my head, and I started humming ‘Are You Ok Alone?’ I think most people can relate, especially the ladies. I shared the idea with producer Dycee Wildman and she brought the vision to life.” — Jenni Lyn

Photo credit: Dycee Wildman

The Mile Markers of Music: A Conversation with Ketch Secor

Posted on by Editor

It’s not a stretch to say that Old Crow Medicine Show is intrinsically linked to Bob Dylan. The country-roots band has never shied away from voicing their admiration for the seminal singer/songwriter, and the story behind the infamous “Wagon Wheel” is common musical fodder at this point: Old Crow’s Ketch Secor filled in the verses to an incomplete track titled “Rock Me Mama” from a Bob Dylan bootleg his bandmate Critter Fuqua found during a trip to London. After Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel” hit number one on the Billboard chart in 2013, Dylan’s camp reached out to Old Crow. They offered another song fragment Dylan dreamed up around the same time as “Rock Me Mama,” and wanted to see what Old Crow could do with it. Old Crow cut the track and after incorporating a couple of suggestions from Dylan himself, “Sweet Amarillo” became the first single from the band’s 2014 release, Remedy.

Now, Old Crow Medicine Show is paying homage to Bob Dylan with the release of 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Dylan’s first Nashville record. The live album features Old Crow’s performance of Blonde on Blonde in its entirety, recorded last May at the CMA Theater, located in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

“As somebody with such deep respect for Bob Dylan, I hope that he likes what we did with the songs,” Secor says. “We really tried to go, ‘What if the Memphis Jug Band had come up with “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat?” What if the Mississippi Sheiks had figured out how to write a song like “Visions of Johanna?” And what would it sound like if they did?’”

As Secor puts it, Blonde on Blonde was “the shot heard ‘round the world” – the record that changed the landscape of country music and split Nashville’s sound wide open.

Do you remember the first time you listened to Blonde on Blonde ?

The first time I heard Blonde on Blonde, I was probably 14, 15 years old and I was headed down a sweeping Bob Dylan kick and ingesting as much Bob as I could like it was water or wine.

Dylan has such a vast catalog. What was it about Blonde on Blonde that made the band want to take this particular record on? Why did you pick this record to celebrate for the 50th anniversary?

Well, it’s true we could have picked any of Bob’s records ’cause we’re at that point in a lot of history where we’re at milestone marks for many of the seminal musical efforts of the past 50 years and more. This one made a lot of sense because it was made in Nashville and it’s the first of Bob’s Nashville records. And this was also recorded at a time when Nashville had yet to have a rock ‘n’ roll record. This was kind of the very beginning of the ever-expanding Nashville sound, so it’s a real milestone in that regard and, with it, in the wake of Bob Dylan’s trip to Nashville, everybody from Leonard Cohen to Joan Baez to Ringo Starr and Neil Young were in Nashville in the next five years making their own records.

In recording and releasing this project, what are you hoping to communicate about the Nashville sound? Are you hoping to preserve that Dylan and post-Dylan time? Or how do you see Nashville as changing or staying the same in the last 50 years?

Well, one of the sentiments that seems active here in Nashville right now is this feeling of, “Wow, everything is changing.” You look at the skyline and there’s something new going up every day; it’s full of cranes and boom shafts and towers. So much development, so many people moving to town. So I think it’s easy for Nashvillians to think, “Wow, things sure are getting different.” My argument, with this record, is that 50 years ago is really when things started getting different, and that’s the shot heard ’round the world that the Nashville music community and its spectrum of sound became so much wider beginning with the making of Blonde on Blonde and that it’s very wide today.

Now, with country music, as it’s heard on the radio and viewed upon the charts, that has actually become very, very narrow in its scope. So I think, with a record like this, we’re hoping to kind of shine a light on a time in which that very thing was happening and somebody like Bob Dylan came in and said, “Hey, I belong to country music, too! I’m from a mining town just like Loretta Lynn. I’m the fringe of America, just like Charley Pride. And I’m an outsider.” So to make an outsider record in Nashville at that time was a really powerful turning point for our state.

Can you walk me through the prep for this project? How long did you all work on learning these songs or what did you do with the arrangements to make them your own? What was your approach?

We started this project about two months before we went in and recorded it — maybe two or three months — and just started learning the songs. That was the biggest challenge — getting all the lyrics down. This is probably Bob’s most intensely lyrical album in well over 50 years of record-making. So to be able to recite it was a real challenge. It’s such a kaleidoscopic collection of lyrics, so the real challenge is being able to differentiate at every moment in live performance whether you’re supposed to sing about the “sheet metal memories of Cannery Row” or the “sheet-like metal and the belt-like lace.” You know, it’s all this impressionistic poetry or Beat poetry or whatever it is, post-modernism or something, and trying to be able to find form and meter in it when Bob so deliberately created it to be formless and without meter.

I watched a promo video for this project — it was an interview with you in the studio where Bob recorded this album and you said something I loved: “These songs, Bob wrote them, but they belong to all of us.” I was wondering if you could expand on that sentiment?

Well, I think we all know what folk music is and I think we all know the term public domain or the idea of a statute of limitations by which copyrights run out and they become part of a common vernacular. I think it’s less obvious to apply that to something that’s so clearly Bob Dylan’s. But my argument is that “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” belongs to America, no matter who wrote it. And that’s the same … like Elizabeth Cotten wrote “Freight Train,” but I didn’t learn that song from Elizabeth Cotten. I learned it from my mother. And when music becomes the property of everybody, when it’s on everybody’s tongue and when it’s streaming out of a guitar instead of out of your little pocket telephone, computer, when the folk music muscle takes hold, that’s when songs cease to become so much about their origins and rather about them existing on their own. I really think it’s all folk music, everything — Beyonce’s Lemonade.

I think a better example of how pop music can be everybody’s is, you listen to the opening lines of “Beat It” or “Billie Jean.” “Billie Jean,” I mean, that’s basically “Knoxville Girl” without the murder. It has all the same intensity. Or like on our album, or on Blonde on Blonde, “4th Time Around,” the sort of lover’s duet. These are songs that are archetypal and they belong to whoever the singer is singing ’em. So, when you think about bluegrass music … bluegrass music is always exploring between the public domain or contemporary bluegrass songwriters. You know, Blonde on Blonde makes for pretty good bluegrass music, too.

You all also released a Best Of album earlier this year and, if I’m doing my math right, next year — 2018 — will mark 20 years as a band for Old Crow Medicine Show. What does it feel like to hit that milestone?

You know, it’s been a little while. About half of my life now, I’ve been signed up playing music for the Old Crow Medicine Show. I kind of feel like … well, the Yankees wouldn’t be a good metaphor because I don’t actually like the Yankees. I’m more of a BoSox fan. I kind of feel like Carl Yastrzemski — like a guy that has come to personify the Red Sox as much as the Red Sox themselves. You’ve gotta do things to keep it fresh and that means musical exploration can never cease. You can never get too good. Fortunately, for our band, when we started out, we could barely play our instruments. I mean, I remember when I learned to play the fiddle. I had been playing for two weeks before I was playing on the street corner with the one tune I figured out how to play. And I just played for 10 minutes and then I’d take a break, and play for another 10 minutes.

So the vista for Old Crow has been sort of endless because we started out at the very beginning of the trail. We started on street corners and we weren’t trying to get that much bigger. We were just having a good time doing it, and then the trail just kept unfolding and we just kept hiking up it. So, I think the 20-year mark, it hasn’t really sunk in yet because we’re still very much in 19, but you don’t really think about. When I think about 20 years, that kind of scares me, moreso than celebrates it. I think about this: When Blonde on Blonde was 20 years old, it was 1986, and I was a kid listening to Michael Jackson and was about to discover Bob Dylan about a year later. It’s funny the way that you find yourself being a part of the very time that you would celebrate. You know, 50 years of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde … that’s about 38 years of my life, too.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain