Tag: Folk

Basic Folk: MayaFest (Maya de Vitry)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Lancaster, Pennsylvania-born, Nashville-based songwriter Maya de Vitry has been on Basic Folk a half dozen times (she’s only second to our fave man-bestie Mark Erelli) because we are so obsessed with her songwriting perspective, from her time in the Stray Birds to her solo work. Every time she’s on the show, we try and do something special. She’s been on with her siblings (Nina & Lyle), her partner (Ethan Jodziewicz), and her musical besties (Shelby Means & Joel Timmons).

When we heard about her fifth studio album, All My Faith, we knew we had to raise the Basic Folk bar on one of the best working songwriters today. When I (Cindy) first heard Maya play these songs live, I thought they were next level. Even though I’m not a musician or songwriter of any kind, I really wanted to know why they were so incredible. I thought it would be a cool exercise to get other songwriter friends of Maya’s together to dig deep and explain what’s happening with Maya’s writing. What is it about the lyrics, the phrasing, the melodies that is really outstanding?

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Maya was down with this idea and invited Ana Egge, Caitlin Canty, John Craigie, Kristin Andreassen, and Oliver Wood on this episode of Basic Folk, so we could hear from some of her favorite writers about these new songs. We had everyone here listen to the record a few times before recording the podcast; Maya shared the lyrics, album credits, and a track-by-track write up for the songs. She chose three songs for each person to specifically dig into, but of course everyone is free to share comments on any songs. We knew it was going to be a great experience, but it turned out even better than we had hoped. The insight these writers share intensify Maya’s new songs and give an even greater understanding of why they make such an impact.

Photo Credit: Ana Egge by Lorenzo Wolff; Oliver Wood by Alysse Gafkjen; Maya de Vitry by Ethan Jodziewicz; John Craigie courtesy of the artist; Caitlin Canty by Noah Altshuler; Kristin Andreassen courtesy of the artist. 

Jobi Riccio Believes Sensitivity is a Superpower

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When it’s time to recharge her creativity or reconnect with herself, Jobi Riccio goes back to nature. The mountains and hiking trails of her native Colorado were integral to her childhood and adolescence. Today, the trees, plant life, and paths of Nashville help bring her back to center.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that all things natural life and climate factor into her songwriting. Personally and professionally, Riccio has become a spokesperson for our global environment and its future. “Wildfire Season,” from her latest release, Face The Feeling, addresses these issues. Written in the aftermath of the 2020 Colorado wildfires, the song stands out in its unfiltered message, while at the same time slotting in as a perfect fit within the album’s context.

Face The Feeling was produced and engineered by Riccio’s longtime friends and colleagues Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard. The album leans on her folk and bluegrass roots while injecting them with her passion for indie and punk rock. Riccio takes on mental health, grief, self-doubt, past and present hurt, and the long road to recovery and autonomy. It’s a lot of what is now commonly known as “big feelings,” and entirely the only walk that she knows and wants to take. All of this is served up with a healthy dose of fierce guitars.

Riccio last spoke with BGS in 2023, following the release of Whiplash. Phoning in this time to talk about Face The Feeling, she was days away from a June 9 performance at Wolf Trap as part of Songwriters Celebrate John Prine joining Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Patty Griffin, I’m With Her, Lucius, Allison Russell, Hayes Carll, Fancy Hagood, and Tommy Prine.

Riccio’s connection to Prine dates back to her early musical influences, reaching a high point in 2023 when she was awarded the Newport Festivals Foundation’s John Prine Fellowship. The Wolf Trap concert was in some ways bringing her full circle, sharing a stage with colleagues, each playing one original and one song of Prine’s.

“I’ve done some stuff in the past with the Prine family,” she remarks. “They have welcomed me into their circle and they’ve been really sweet. It’s been a real blessing of life in Nashville, that whole experience. I’m honored and excited to get to do that show.”

Let’s start a little differently. Tell us about your day so far.

Jobi Riccio: Okay. I woke up and had breakfast on my front porch. I just moved neighborhoods in Nashville – I moved to Madison, Tennessee, and I have a nice front porch now, so I’ve been enjoying coming out and having coffee in the morning. And then I went to therapy, I came back and had a meeting with my manager, we did some co-working stuff together over Zoom, I had lunch, and now I’m doing this.

This album was written between Colorado and Nashville. How did both environments and both communities help shape the new music?

In terms of the lyrics, I feel like I have a lot of references to nature in Colorado and western nature, mostly because I’ve been speaking that language and speaking those names longer. I’m just learning the names of the trees, bushes, daylilies, and all the stuff out here now. I’ve lived in Tennessee… it’ll be five years in September, so I’m just learning everything that’s here.

Any time I’m feeling reflective, I call upon my past, thinking about my family or where I’m from. It’s a big part of my identity. But I definitely identify as an artist both from Nashville and Colorado. Nashville played a really big role in the writing of this record. I started playing a lot more electric guitar when I moved here. I started spending more and more time in my room playing. I was listening to a lot of country electric guitar, but for some reason it became this more indie-rock singer-songwriter kind of thing.

I think I wrote about Nashville and the community more. You hear that on “Love of the Song,” just kind of struggling to find my footing here, because it does take a while to figure that out. I was really lucky to know a lot of people before I moved here. I say this in the song – I was set up in all the right places, with all the right people, and I still felt a sense of “Damn, do I belong here?” The impostor syndrome of doing music for a job is really hard and I think women and femme people in general really struggle with impostor syndrome and living in our heads and second-guessing ourselves a lot more than men do. I address that in the song “Doesn’t Matter,” which closes the album.

So I think it’s a record where I come into living in Nashville and am also like, “I am worthy of doing this job and this job is such a big part of what makes this town this town.” Despite all the new development and changes that everyone’s always talking about, Nashville is and will always be Music City, and the community is what makes it great.

Where were you, mentally and emotionally, when this creative process began, and where are you now?

I was in a hard place when I started – and in the middle of it. I think it’s a brave thing that you really have to do in life, whether or not you want to, which is to own up to your shit. It’s a very crass way of saying it, but basically I was trying to outrun some shadows, trying to outrun some trauma, trying to outrun things that needed to be dealt with that were coming out in my life.

I was still pretty young when I started writing this record and [when I moved] to Nashville. I moved here almost five years ago and I started writing this record about three years ago. It’s been such an up-and-down experience. I feel like it’s mirrored the experience I’ve had with getting my sea legs as a touring musician, too. They’ve been very much in tandem.

Despite what you see online, it’s not this constant upward, “Everything’s great and it’s always getting better all the time, the gigs are always getting better.” Some nights you’re playing for 3,000 people, opening for Lucinda Williams – which I got to do – and the next night you’re in Utah playing for 50 people headlining. It’s a total rollercoaster. It’s about learning how to find the tools to ground yourself. I really needed to learn how to do that intrapersonally first, for myself, and I’m glad that I did at the beginning of writing this record. But it definitely chronicles a long journey of growth. I feel like it’s a weird time to do this job. And also growth is… you’re never done. It’s not linear. So I’m always doing my best every day, and that’s all I can ever expect of myself. And every day is different.

Were the songs finished when you began recording?

Most of them were, but not all of them, which is a new experience for me. I’m used to having all of them done and buttoned up and being like, “Okay, here we are. Let’s go record them.” But when we first started talking about what this album could be, I had the song “Doesn’t Matter,” just the idea of it, the guitar part, and the beginning of it, and I was like, “I don’t really know if this is any good.”

I played it for my co-producers, Jesse [Timm] and Isaiah [Beard], and they were like, “This is really cool. You should finish the song.” They basically watched as I finished it. I was writing stuff down actively in the studio, which I’ve never had that experience. I wrote more songs, too, that didn’t make the record. Whether or not those will go on another project or ever see the light of day, I don’t know. But I was open to seeing what would come.

Tell us about your working relationship with Jesse and Isaiah. How did it begin and how has it grown over the course of your albums?

I met Jesse at Berklee. We met on the first day of college. We were in the same dorm. They’re from Northern California, I’m from Colorado, they’re from a weird hippie town, I’m from a weird hippie town – we immediately understood each other. I feel so incredibly lucky to have met them, because not many people get to have someone who is so encouraging of their music alongside them at any stage.

Not everything I wrote in college was very good, but they were always very invested in it and also [in] finding their voice as an arranger and composer and writing string parts. I would come up with a song and they’d be like, “Oh, I came up with a string part for it. Do you like it?” That’s such a spoiled experience to have, because it would be a gorgeous thing. We’ve played together and been collaborators and friends for ten years now.

I met Isaiah through Jesse. Isaiah also went to school with us, but I didn’t know him. He was a few years older and worked the same student job with Isaiah in project bands. It’s where kids have their stuff recorded for different school projects. They both did admin work for these project band things, so they became friends. I had a friend from the songwriting program at school who had a record produced by Isaiah in Nashville. He moved here a couple of years before me, and he said it was an amazing experience. I listened to it and I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. I heard so much creativity in the production and the mix. Also, Isaiah has his own solo project and he’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. I reached out to him and that’s how we ended up working on Whiplash. It felt like a very organic trio and through that we became really good friends.

I moved to Nashville, he lives close by, and I feel like I’m very spoiled for having people who love and understand both me and my music. I feel truly blessed. I don’t know how else to say it. I hear how all three of us have grown as musicians on this project versus the last project. I’ve grown a lot as a writer, the mixing and production work Isaiah did is outstanding, and Jesse wrote all the string parts. I can hear all of our growth and development as individual creative people. My name is on the record, but it does really feel like a collaboration.

You play acoustic, electric, and baritone electric on this album. Tell us about your guitars – which ones you play on the album, which ones are going on the road, any backstories you’d like to share.

I only have three guitars in my personal possession, but Isaiah had a lot of guitars lent to him by our friend Jake Byrne, who works at Carter Vintage Guitars. So nice of Jake! We had a vintage Mustang that Isaiah played on “Buzzkill.” He played some very Green Day-esque type things on that song. It was just the most fun little guitar.

Isaiah owns the baritone guitar that I played. He won it in a guitar raffle at a benefit concert that I played when the Asheville, [NC] flood happened. We had a big fundraiser here in Nashville. We collaborated with some folks in Asheville to raise money and a guy out of Asheville who ran a guitar store put together this raffle. I was one of the artists on the bill, Isaiah and his partner came and entered the raffle, and he won this baritone electric with a metal neck. It’s the craziest guitar ever.

I have a Martin D-35 from 1993 that’s my baby acoustic guitar that you’ll see me playing all the time. I bought it at the Pickin’ Parlor, an acoustic guitar store in Arvada, Colorado. I was with my friend Al out around Denver looking for a guitar. I wanted a dreadnought because I was really interested in playing bluegrass. I was in college, 21 at the time, and interested in digging into flatpicking. I was like, “I need a dreadnought. There’s no other way.”

I played a lot of different guitars, and other Martins, and I fell in love with this one. It reminded me a lot of a friend’s guitar that I had played throughout the years at this bluegrass festival, RockyGrass, I grew up going to. I was like, “Oh, this feels like the twin guitar to my friend’s guitar.” That’s why I ended up buying that guitar. I’ve written so many songs on it, and it’s interesting, now that I don’t play bluegrass consistently, it’s got this whole other life and character to it as a guitar for songs. Sometimes I start writing on electric, but oftentimes I still write on that guitar, too, and transition over to electric.

I have a Fender Telecaster that Jake at Carter Vintage helped me [rig] so that it takes the flatwound strings that I like. It’s a certain sound I really enjoy that I heard Margaret Glaspy champion back in the day, and I wanted to figure out how to do that. We’ve done a lot of little mods to it over the years. I love that guitar, too. I bought it in 2021 off of a guy on Facebook in Denver. It’s not worth a ton of money, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

I have a Gibson Songwriter that I got through winning the John Prine Fellowship. Gibson Guitars gave me a 2024 Songwriter. It’s a beautiful guitar that lives at home on my couch. My amp that I have at home is a Fender Blues Junior. I bought it from another Berklee student for $400 on Facebook Marketplace during my senior year of college because I needed an amp.

You’ve talked, in this interview and others, about how being outdoors is important to you. Do you write when you’re out in nature? Do ideas come to you then?

Absolutely. A lot of times, if I’m stuck on something, getting out is good. I think there’s some science behind this, too – the dual motion of walking is really helpful to our brains. So I definitely find myself coming up with ideas while hiking or walking. I’ve always been that way. I’m always writing things down on my phone. Or while I’m in transit on airplanes, trains, in an Uber, or someone else is taking me somewhere, some other vehicle, in the back of a van on tour. Looking out the window, watching scenery go by, can be a regenerative, reflective place for me as well.

I probably write the most when I have a guitar in my hands, but I edit a lot and I have a lot of lyrical ideas while I’m out in nature, walking.

Phone, voice memos, pen and paper?

All three. If I’m out and about, I use my phone. I grew up writing in my journals and then I went to my phone. Everything was in my Notes app for a few years and then I was like, “I want to go back to having a journal and having handwritten lyrics. I miss going back into my journals and looking at my embarrassing little couplets of lyrics from eighth grade.” I want to be able to do that when I’m older, and look back and have more tangible objects in my life. I don’t want everything to be owned by my phone and put into my phone.

So I got several different notebooks of different sizes. I have a little notebook for journaling and writing more personal things, I have a big notebook, I have a legal pad for writing lyrics, and I have a little gratitude journal that I keep on my bedside. I have journals of all sizes now.

Are you particular about your pens?

Yes. I really like this one pen, the brand is Lamy. It’s the best pen I’ve ever owned. You can easily and accessibly buy them online, but I found it at a pen shop in Stockholm, Sweden. I think the romance of that experience also made me fall in love with this pen. They sell a lot of fancy ones that you use for calligraphy, but the one I am obsessed with is their ballpoint model. Occasionally I meet other people who love this pen. I see them with the pen and we’re like, “Oh, you like this pen too?” There’s a little cult following.

I’ve been getting into pencil recently, too. I got these free pencils at an Americanafest event, I think, and I have to figure out what brand they are, because I really like them. I’ve been enjoying having the ability to erase versus just crossing things out. It feels good. Tactile.

You write and speak openly about climate, ICE, politics, the state of the world, and of course about being an openly queer artist. You have received media attention for “Wildfire Season,” which has been called a protest song. Some people think musicians should make their music, share their art, and keep their opinions out of the spotlight. Other people, including quite recently Joan Baez, believe in using that platform to take a stand on issues. Discuss.

In the hardest times in my life, and I think this is true for most people, I’ve turned to music to process things. That was always the hope for this new record – that it could be a processing tool for anyone who needs it.

There’s so much hurt being done to people systematically right now, and I don’t think I could not talk about it. I think it feels very cathartic to attend shows where it is addressed within the lyrics, or in the banter when the artist is talking between sets. My friend Nathan Evans Fox has a great new record and he had a release show here in Nashville. He has a lot of great political country music and I felt such a sense of exhale being in that room. There was so much energy. To be in a room where it felt like church, the catharsis of release, there was such healing. It gave me a feeling of strength.

It’s a really hard time. Harm is being done to so many of us. I know that no matter what side of the political spectrum people are on, I’ve heard it said around here that everything is too expensive for most people and it’s too hot every year for most people. People are feeling the change in the air. There’s a lot of climate denial that still goes on, and yet people know that something isn’t right. Even extremely wealthy people who think they’ll be able to escape the effects of climate change, trying to shield themselves away from it, are being touched by it.

Tennessee is such a gerrymandered state. If you’re familiar at all with the political climate here, it’s really bleak, with the redistricting of Memphis and the current events that have gone down here recently. But going to protests in Nashville, showing up, is empowering. Why shouldn’t music be a space for people to feel through what’s going on, or to at least feel a little bit less alone, to feel stronger, to feel braver, to feel angry, to let that shit out? Because if you don’t let it out, then you continue to let it happen.

I feel that music is one of the most powerful tools of healing and understanding ourselves. People deserve to not feel alone, and they deserve to feel connected. If it’s upsetting to some people that I speak out about politics, I would rather call in people who are really hurting during this time and give them comfort and strength. That matters more to me than alienating people who think I should just sing songs about whatever. I really believe in the power of political songwriting, songs that do work.

When we started this interview with “Tell us about your day so far,” your list included breakfast, went to therapy, came home, met with your manager on Zoom, had lunch. You said, “I went to therapy” as casually as someone might say, “I went to the gym.” Was it a process for you to be able to say it so openly? There’s still so much stigma around mental health.

I think it’s two things. I have been described as sensitive for as long as I can remember by everyone in my family, and that used to be something that made me feel so shameful and embarrassed. I went to therapy for the first time when I was very young. I was in middle school and I was embarrassed about it at the time because this was the narrative I had around it when I was a little kid and things were very different. It’s crazy how much has changed. I think the pandemic changed a lot of things around mental health for the better. Back then I felt like, “I can’t get my emotions under control, so I have to go sit in this office and cry for two hours and it’s so weird, because I’m the most sensitive person in the world. I don’t know what it is.”

I came to songwriting as a teenager, and I found this channel of, “I can put everything in this place, and sometimes I create something that is so bad, and sometimes I create something that’s kind of good, and sometimes I create something that is totally neutral.” I used to go home after school every day and write. It was my confidante. It was what I turned to in hard times and in good times. It was how I processed my life. Once again, music as a way of processing life. Songwriting and creativity was that for me as a young, really sensitive person.

Once I wrote what I felt was actually a good song, I felt brave enough to show it to someone, and I played my first gigs, I was like, “Oh, people connect with this.” I got older, I went to music school, and I was like, “Man, maybe I really have something to say and people want to hear it.” And I met Jesse – going back to talking about them – and they’re a very sensitive person as well.

I’ve always had this thing about sensitivity is a superpower. You’re in tune to certain things that other people miss. I think most people who write songs are keen observers of the world. Sometimes you’re observing more negative things and that’s really hard, it’s painful, it requires tending to, and that’s what therapy is. I think everybody is deserving of taking care of their mental health. Now I’m in a city of songwriters, and every single person I know is a songwriter who does therapy, so I’m very much not in a stigmatized place with it because it’s been normalized to me.

I’m so much older, but it took some time for me to get there. I remember being embarrassed as a child doing it. But it’s been so many years off and on that I have done therapy, and I have seen the gifts and the fruits of my labor. So many of my songs have come out of the work I’ve done in there and the growth I’ve had. I don’t know if my therapist listens, but there’s a lot of inspiration taken from things we’ve talked about, and realizations and connections. I’m proud of myself for being able to get to that place, and I’m proud of others in my life who have had to overcome stigma about it. I’ve seen it open them up, and that’s beautiful to see.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

BGS 5+5: Creekbed Carter Hogan

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Creekbed Carter Hogan
Hometown: I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but before that I spent most of my life living in Austin, Texas. I wasn’t born and raised in either, but they are the places that have shaped me the most and I think that counts for something.
Latest Album: PEASANTS REVOLT! (out July 24 2026)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Creekbed, Creeky, Peepaw Creekbed

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

Like a Catholic cliché, my life has been changed forever by two women named Mary.

The first artist is Mary Chapin Carpenter. Watching your mom sing along to “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” with her eyes closed while she presses folded laundry to her chest, both wistful and hopeless… that does something to a person. In a family so Catholic, so conservative, so isolated – not just because of rurality, but also because of my difficult, isolationist father – Mary Chapin Carpenter was one of the few non-Christian rock-related musicians that scored my childhood, and her ferocious form of empathic songwriting has never left me.

The second Mary is Mary Gauthier. I remember the intersection I was stopped at in Austin, late at night, my now-girlfriend putting her on the aux. The first lines of “Slip of the Tongue” hit me like a gut punch: “Honey sit down, I got something to say/ Last night I drowned. I got carried away.” I remember gripping my girlfriend’s hand, crying and laughing and brimming with new, terrifying love as I listened for the first time to one of the few publicly queer Americana artists to really break through. Mary Gauthier made my life as a trans country artist possible. Nobody can see through to the soul of something like she can. It was an honor to release my cover of “Slip of the Tongue” this year, and it’ll be an honor for the rest of my life to know that my songs are in a lineage that includes her.

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

Man, I just really love art a lot. I’ll watch anything, read anything, listen to anything. I don’t think you need any special schooling or whatever to look at something bold and wrestle with how it makes you feel – you just need a lot of curiosity.

I’m putting out a new record in July called PEASANTS REVOLT! and in my liner notes I credit two books as inspirations: Fernando A. Flores’s Texan magical realist novel Brother Brontë and Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind, a beautifully rendered examination of how word-of-mouth led to the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in all of human history. Those two books gave as much to my new album as Hazel Dickens, Bobbie Gentry, Tracy Chapman, and ANOHNI did.

So did a whole library! The East Side Freedom Library in Saint Paul, which makes formerly private collections of union organizers, activists, thinkers, and artists available to the public. The Twin Cities United Performers, a musicians’ power org I’m a member of, helps me explore the art of organizing with fellow musicians for better conditions. Picket lines are an art form, and I remain inspired every day by the people who hold them. And my songs would probably sound completely different if I weren’t spending so much of my time watching movies like John Sayles’s Matewan and Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.

Before I could leave my small rural community, art was a way of exploring the world. Now that I can live on my own terms, art is a way of understanding the world. As an artist, why wouldn’t I try as many forms of understanding as possible?

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

This is a long answer, but it’s a story worth telling:

This past winter, as ICE invaded the Twin Cities and abducted and killed our neighbors in our streets, I received a grant from the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis to write new labor and union songs. It was a jarring juxtaposition: how could I justify research and writing songs in my room when I needed to be out on the streets with a whistle in my hand, standing my ground with my neighbors against the federal government? But the truth is, I’d already cashed half the money and it had been a lean winter, so I had to make something to show for it. I went to the East Side Freedom Library, did a boatload of research, and then I wrote songs about regular Minnesotans who’d fought the government for dignity for all. From the 1910s miners of the Mesabi Iron Range to the Indigenous founders of the American Indian Movement in the ’70s to the Willmar 8 who held a two-year picket line every single day in every single kind of weather to an Appalachian-styled ballad that tied in the history of labor resistance to what we were all doing now to protect one another, as our own mayor and governor left us in the ice and the snow to fend for ourselves.

On February 20, I took the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis with a four-piece bluegrass band and presented my grant work to 250 Minnesotans. I was terrified that what I’d written hadn’t done enough justice to this incredible place that had taken me in, given me lifesaving healthcare, and taught me new things about what it means to show up for your community – and even more worried that my performance wouldn’t be good enough to raise rent money for my neighbors who were trapped in their apartments, hiding from ICE. But when I started playing these songs, the reception filled me with awe. All 250 of these people sang with me, clapped with me, cried with me, felt pain and joy and despair and hope together, out loud, with me. After the set, we got a standing ovation – and then at the merch table, the line went out the door as neighbor after neighbor came up to me to tell me about the picket lines they were holding or had held, the Minnesotans they’d recognized in my lyrics, the pain they felt and the hope that sat right beside that pain that they could now feel because of what we’d just sung together.

I’ve played a lot of incredible shows to incredible audiences, many of them much bigger and “much bigger deals.” But that show on February 20 this year was the single most important performance of my life. It meant everything to me. And it taught me, again, why I’m still here, writing songs, doing something every single day to take my place in a lineage of resistance and make a new, better world for all of us.

If you didn’t work in music, what would you do instead?

Way before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a nun. The nuns I’ve known work really hard for the liberation of all people, even from within the confines of a restrictive, colonialist, organized religion. The Sisters of the Holy Names were the ones who first taught me about protesting at the School of the Americas, for example, and the Catholic Workers movement introduced liberation theology to me,and taught me about fighting for a dignified life for every living thing. I’m not a Catholic anymore – Catholicism remains closed to me as a trans person – but then again, secular convents existed in medieval Europe for people who didn’t want to convert to Catholicism, but still wanted to live in community. So maybe being a secular, liberationalist nun is still an option?

What would a perfect day as an artist and a creator look like to you?

I would wake up and every single person in the United States would have universal basic income, healthcare that serves all of our needs, and the knowledge that our taxes are funding public services instead of wars and genocides and detention centers. I’d get up to eat vegetables from our garden and groceries I could afford, in a house I share with my friends that isn’t owned by a landlord or a bank, in a neighborhood where everyone has the housing they need. I’d pick up my guitar and head out the door to a park or a third space where other people would be playing music, sharing skills, and enjoying rest for free without fear of the cops or some arbitrary law that regulates who gets to rest where. And we’d all get to that space on free public transportation that runs well and doesn’t contribute to climate change.

We’d sing and play in the heart of a food forest and then we’d take a break to swim in water that’s clean in a park we all care for. I’d go to the library and read a book about moss or something, just because it sounds interesting, while people around me use public resources to sew quilts or study or listen to CDs, our phones nowhere in sight. In the evening, I’d go to a show with my girlfriend at a venue that receives funding from the government so they don’t have to rely on alcohol sales to make their business work, and I’d happily pay money that I know goes entirely to the bands playing that night. I’d dance and dance and dance, surrounded by all kinds of people who all have the basic things they need to thrive in the bodies they have, whose bodies are no longer regulated or targeted for state violence or kept out because of a disregard for accessibility. The bands would be shit hot, because they’d know they were making a living wage and that no one was gonna come into the venue to gun us all down.

And when I’d leave the venue with my girlfriend to get on our bikes and go home to sleep, the night air would feel clean. There’d be no wildfire smoke in the air. The stars would be out, and I’d be able to see them all. I’d pass neighbor after neighbor, grinning, happy to go home to a safe place, knowing that Palestine was free and Cuba was free and Puerto Rico was free and that “Land Back” had supplanted capitalism as our guiding principle and that every worker was treated fairly. And while nothing would be perfect, because there’s always work to be done, things would feel possible. Hope would feel tenable. Every living creature would feel valued. That would be one hell of a day, I think.

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen

Folk Files: I Got the Blues

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

According to many textbooks, the blues is a genre that was born in the rural Mississippi Delta with roots in the “sorrow songs” of enslaved people. It’s easy, however, to poke holes in this origin story and instead start to see the blues as a joyful, rebellious musical expression that formed in an urban environment.

In this episode of Folk Files, we’ll take a look at different theories about the origin of the blues, separate fact from fiction, and uncover the reason why the Mississippi Delta narrative was promoted so strongly.

(Content warning: this episode has occasional explicit language and sexual references.)

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For a list of all musical excerpts used in this episode, click here.
Visit the Delta Blues Museum.
Support Folk Files by joining our Patreon.

Host: Olivia Harding
Assistant Producer: Aaron J. Morton

The Other 22 Hours: Amy Grant

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

What does it mean to inhabit a creative life when that container itself changes? We sit down on The Other 22 Hours with GRAMMY-nominated, multi-platinum crossover superstar Amy Grant. Having shaped the landscape of pop and contemporary Christian music for over four decades, Grant found herself navigating an unexpected wilderness following a series of medical setbacks – including a traumatic bike accident – and a rewritten relationship with her own processing speed. In this soulful, luminous conversation, she explores the deliberate art of slowing down, the creative sanctuary of “Craftopia,” and why she now views aging not as a loss of identity, but as a continual invitation to let go.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

In This Episode:

– Vince Gill
– Eagles
– Mac McAnally
– Jimmy Buffett
– Coral Reefer Band
– Barefoot Republic
– NPR’s Wildcard podcast
– Ray Charles
– Cicely Tyson
– Roots (miniseries)
– Viktor Frankl
– Man’s Search for Meaning
– Gene Miller
– Dr. Jim Netterville
– Suleika Jaouad

Go Deeper: 

Watch: View this entire conversation above or on YouTube.
Explore: Find similar conversations in these themed playlists.
Connect: Join the conversation on Instagram.

The Other 22 Hours is hosted by Aaron Shafer-Haiss (producer, mixer, musician) and Michaela Anne (songwriter, artist, creative coach). More about Aaron’s work. More about Michaela Anne’s work.

Produced by Aaron Shafer-Haiss. Original music written, performed and produced by Aaron Shafer-Haiss.

Photo Credit: Ed Rode

You Gotta Hear This: New Music From Lindsay Lou, Rising Appalachia, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Another week, another roundup of excellent new roots music for you to enjoy! You Gotta Hear This…

To get us started, JM Clifford premieres a performance video for “Hard Luck Man,” a contemplative song inspired by his experiences walking the streets of New York City, encountering veterans panhandling and down on their luck. It’s a song of compassion built around his observations and the idea that no one should be invisible or alone. Then, we go to Chicago, where singer-songwriter Elizabeth Moen reckons with another kind of man, “Renaissance Man” – or, as she puts it, the proverbial “fuckboy.” Anger, justice, and comeuppance ooze out of the acoustic-yet-rockin’ track. You can watch a new music video for the song below.

In bluegrass, Lindsay Lou has announced a brand new album, Bluegrass Women, celebrating the vibrant and supremely talented community of women that surround her in music. The first single from the album (which will release next month) is “All I Ever Loved Was You,” a beloved song in the bluegrass canon written by Ricky Skaggs’ mother. Tatiana Hargreaves, Laurie Lewis, Maddie Witler, Alison Brown, and Hasee Ciaccio join Lou on the track; the album boasts a star-studded rotating lineup of incredible women. Plus, Jaelee Roberts of Middle Tennessee has a new bluegrass single out today, “Memories On The Moon.” She first heard the track at a song swap at a bluegrass songwriting camp. Immediately impressed, she knew she had to record it. You’ll also immediately see why.

Rounding us out, Asheville-based folk and Americana group Rising Appalachia unveil a new track and video, “Chance at Wholesome.” Picking up on the thread laid down by Elizabeth Moen, Rising Appalachia also take big-talking men to task. As Leah Song puts it for BGS, “This is for the man who shows up all talk and no action.” Watch the brand new video below as you look ahead to their fall album, Trade My Troubles, out in October.

It’s all right here on BGS, and we hope you enjoy. You Gotta Hear This!

JM Clifford, “Hard Luck Man”

Artist: J.M. Clifford
Hometown: Allendale, New Jersey
Song: “Hard Luck Man”
Album: Things That We Can’t Change
Release Date: July 10, 2026 (video); October 16, 2026 (album)

In Their Words: “I’m an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn. I do a lot of my songwriting before my first class of the day. One morning I sat down to write and the lines, ‘Light a candle for the hard luck man/ Left his mind in the mountains of Afghanistan’ popped into my head. It felt like the rest of the song wrote itself. Living in New York City, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a person on the street holding up a sign that says, ‘Veteran. Please help.’ These days, it seems like we can’t agree on much, but taking care of our veterans should be something we can all get behind.” – JM Clifford

Lindsay Lou, “All I Ever Loved Was You”

Artist: Lindsay Lou
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “All I Ever Loved Was You”
Album: Bluegrass Women
Release Date: July 10, 2026 (single); August 14, 2026 (album)

In Their Words: “Written by Dorothy Skaggs, mother of Ricky Skaggs. I’ll never forget hearing Ricky and Keith Whitley sing this duet while playing in Ralph Stanley’s band. The harmonies and tenderness of it blew me away. Like many of these songs, I sang it for years before I knew who wrote it. I recall one time in particular singing it with Billy [Strings] in the kitchen at a party. Neither of us had an instrument in hand and there weren’t any around, so we just sang it. It’s such a strong harmony song it stands on its own powerfully.

“There’s nothing lacking in the instrumentation though on the Bluegrass Women arrangement of this track! The twin fiddles and harmonies by Tatiana Hargreaves and Laurie Lewis (cross-generational iconic players and women in bluegrass) and a strong groove held down by Hasee Ciaccio on bass and Maddie Witler on mandolin, give it a feeling like being in an old-time honky-tonk dancing with your darlin’. Add Alison Brown on banjo for a classic, rolling, poppy bluegrass sound and I’m not sure what more a song like this could want. When I reached out to Ricky to comment on his mama as a songwriter, he clarified that his parents had a very loving relationship, but she hit on a real good one anyway when she came up with the lyrics for ‘All I Ever Loved Was You.'” – Lindsay Lou

Track Credits:
Lindsay Lou – Guitar, vocal
Tatiana Hargreaves – Fiddle, harmony vocals
Laurie Lewis – Fiddle, harmony vocals
Maddie Witler – Mandolin
Alison Brown – Banjo
Hasee Ciaccio – Bass

Elizabeth Moen, “Renaissance Man”

Artist: Elizabeth Moen
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Song: “Renaissance Man”
Album: Fields on Fire
Release Date: July 10, 2026 (video)

In Their Words: “I wanted to write something that I’d hope people would want to sing along to real loud in the car. It’s fun, cheeky, and a song to heed the warning of or find solace in after a bad situationship. Good luck out there this summer! It’s the Renaissance Man’s (or woman’s or person’s) prime season I fear!

“This character song is written in the perspective of the many individuals who inspired it. Though the epidemic of f*ckboy is not constricted to the confines of Chicago’s city limits, there seemed to be, especially in my 20s, a considerable amount of them in town. The one time they admitted the truth was when they’d say, ‘I’m a bad idea for you, really.’ Lesson learned that if someone says that to you, run.” – Elizabeth Moen

Track Credits:
Elizabeth Moen – Nylon-string guitar, lead vocal
Tristan Huygen – Electric guitar
Gus Martini – Bass
Spencer Tweedy – Drums
Gus Martini – Background vocal

Video Credits:
Alexa Viscius – Photographer
Grace Coudal – Assistant photographer
Anika Ladero – Stylist
Kelsey Denvir – Assistant stylist
Grace Makuch – Graphic design

Rising Appalachia, “Chance at Wholesome”

Artist: Rising Appalachia
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina
Song: “Chance at Wholesome”
Album: Trade My Troubles
Release Date: July 10, 2026 (single/video); October 2, 2026 (album)

In Their Words: “This is for the man who shows up all talk and no action. Says you are his queen and then buckles his knees once the chase is over. The one who speaks the game, but doesn’t have the backbone to show up and do the work. For the man that still sees a woman as a second-class citizen. For the narcissists, the broken poets, the dreary addicts who will gladly drag you down with them before they will lift you up and see you shine. Oh the wounded masculine (and thank God they aren’t all wounded). This one is for you.

“Heartbreak is timeless and we have all danced its messy dance. Shattered and stoic. Unkempt and wildly alive. The battered soul doing its best to revive after the storm comes through. I fell in love with a man who was a weathervane in a tornado – a broken man who toted his scars as trophies and would rather spin into patterns of harm than simply lean into care; a chaos worshipper at the altar; mercurial and magical in his fire and poetry. What else can we do but turn the page and sing?” – Leah Song

Video Credit: Earthbased Media

Jaelee Roberts, “Memories On The Moon”

Artist: Jaelee Roberts
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Memories On The Moon”
Label: Mountain Home Music Company
Release Date: July 10, 2026

In Their Words: “‘Memories On The Moon’ is honestly one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever recorded. Last year, I was at Donna Ulisse and Jerry Salley’s songwriters’ workshop – all of us sitting in a circle sharing songs – when ‘Memories On The Moon’ co-writers Keith Barncastle and Rebekah Speer played a song demo (sung by third co-writer, Billy Droze) through a little speaker in the room. From the very first listen, I knew I had to record it. I didn’t know when I’d get the chance, but I remember looking at them and saying, ‘I want this song.’

“The lyrics hit me immediately. What makes this song so special to me is how deeply personal, yet universal, it feels. It was originally written from the perspective of losing a partner and learning how to live with that kind of heartbreak and absence. But I think it can also speak to anyone who’s experienced loss in any form – a breakup, distance, change, or simply missing someone you love. To me, that’s what makes a truly great song: when people can hear it and find pieces of their own story inside of it.

“When we got into the studio, it honestly felt like magic. Tony Wray on acoustic guitar, Alan Bartram on bass, Justin Moses on mandolin and Dobro, and Ron Stewart on banjo brought so much heart and depth to the track. Zack Arnold added harmony vocals that elevated everything even further – his voice and ideas were truly the finishing touch. I have fallen completely in love with this recording, and I’m beyond grateful that I got to be the one to bring this song to life and share it with all of you. I truly hope that it touches your hearts the way that is has mine.” – Jaelee Roberts

Track Credits:
Jaelee Roberts – Lead vocal
Ron Stewart – Banjo
Tony Wray – Guitar
Alan Bartram – Upright bass
Justin Moses – Resonator guitar, mandolin
Zack Arnold – Harmony vocal

Photo Credit: Lindsay Lou by Sawyer Gieseke; Rising Appalachia courtesy of the artist.

Michaela Anne Finds Tranquility and Clarity in Parenthood

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Michaela Anne’s life underwent a cosmic shift over the last several years. She had two kids and quickly learned how “physically taxing” parenting can be, she says. That physical transformation directly feeds into her latest album, These Are The Days, a creatively bold, poetic, and profound set of songs about getting older, fading beauty, and music’s connective tissue.

While out on tour, years ago, Anne stopped by a friend’s house and witnessed several young kids playing, laughing, and making a whole lotta noise. Admittedly, she didn’t know if she’d ever have kids herself. “My friend said to me, ‘Yeah, but this is going to feel like a high for you, like falling in love with these children,’” she recalls.

“I remember the first year of being a mother, texting her, ‘Oh, I know what you’re talking about now.’ And that has really surprised me, that exhilarated feeling that I’ve gotten just from the experience of having children and getting older,” Anne reflects. “What has also surprised me is that you hear people talk about it all the time, how, especially in your 40s – I just turned 40 – you don’t give any fucks anymore. And it’s just whatever. And I’m like, ‘Does that just magically happen?’

“And I have been surprised to feel the progression of ‘it does.’ You start to care less because you just get so exhausted from the energy you’ve spent caring about the things that mattered a lot [before], like status, what people thought of you, or inclusion. That has been very delightfully surprising and freeing.”

These Are the Days swirls with a kind of knowledge you only acquire when you hit your 40s. The changes it reckons with have almost a baptismal effect. Songs like “We’ve Got Bigger Plans” and “Will You Still Love Me with a Broken Heart” reflect her ever-changing self, whereas “Two Pianos,” a song co-written by Caroline Spence, and “B-Sides” capture the magic of music in Anne’s life. “If Your Body Fails You” finds Anne bottling up both her mother’s deterioration post-stroke and our society’s obsession with youth.

The album, produced by her husband Aaron Shafer-Haiss, emerges as a timeless ode to the ephemeral nature of human existence. Letting go, relishing the mundane in busy everyday life, and embracing middle age echo throughout the nine tracks like a starling bobbing and weaving across a rosy sunset. Something is calming about it, and you trust that you’ll get to where you’re going soon enough.

What has been your journey of learning to let go?

Michaela Anne: It is continual. It’s such a common thing to hear people say – and this is kind of woo-woo new age-y saying – “just surrender.” But the actual practice of surrendering to all that is, I have found, incredibly challenging and essential to really being open to what life presents to us. I’m a millennial, and I feel like the way that we grew up is, “Dream big, you can be anything you want.” That was so ingrained in me. I have a song from a previous record called “By Our Design.” It was this whole thing about writing it down, manifesting it, and making it happen. And it didn’t take into account that nothing is actually within our control.

So things happen, like global pandemics or your mother has a stroke. [Or] friends that I witnessed in this age group who want to start a family desperately and can’t get pregnant or deal with pregnancy loss. There are so many things that we cannot control that determine a lot of factors in our lives, and a lot of things about whether or not we can have the life that we envisioned. And accepting it is a daily practice, and really keeping my eyes open to what all that is here, rather than continually looking in my mind to the places I thought it should be, is painful.

There’s also the element of not caring what other people think. I imagine that’s even more difficult as an artist.

I try to consciously reconnect to why I make music all the time. Inevitably, there is an element of wanting to be seen when you’re sharing art that you make and wanting to be loved, wanting to be received and affirmed. And that is beautiful, but it can also be really tricky and detrimental. If we’re looking at it in this transactional way, or also career success– I’m also a military kid. I grew up moving every other year. I was socially conditioned to try and make friends fast and be well-liked, and just fit in and survive the next couple of years before we moved on to the next town. I have to constantly remind myself: it is okay to not be liked by everybody. But I always go back to, “Am I doing my best to show up in kindness and in love and openness?” And you still might not be liked by everybody.

Social media certainly doesn’t help either.

No, it’s corrupting our brains. Now, we have this false sense of metrics to measure ourselves that we translate to our worth. How many likes we get, how many followers, how many streams, and it’s really unhealthy.

Have you ever found that affecting your creativity in any way? Have you ever thought, “Oh, this song has this many streams, maybe if I write something like that, it’ll take off?”

I think I would be lying if I tried to say, “Oh no, it’s separate.” I’ve found that whenever I do try to make something, I don’t actually know what people want from me. And what one person wants from me is different from what the next person wants. Collectively or culturally or music industry-wise, that’s changing so fast all the time that it’s fruitless to try to morph myself into that. I’ve definitely gone outside of the box that I think I was seeing, fitting into, and not seeing the response that I hoped for and have had to do the work of, “Well, that’s okay.”

We can confuse streaming numbers with a measurement of artistic purity. They’re very different things. I always go back to, “Did that feel true to me?” I can only write the songs that feel true that come out. Sometimes that’s well received, and sometimes it’s not. It’s always a gamble.

Another essential piece of the album is enjoying the mundane things in everyday life. What things have you come to appreciate more?

Routine. I used to think I hated routine. I loved being on tour all the time, because there was sort of chaos within a routine. You knew where you had to be every day, but then every show is different and every place was different. I’ve really come to love the routine of waking up around the same time–I have two children, depending on when they wake up. I have a morning routine, that first cup of coffee, just all of that stuff has become really enchanting to me.

When you’re addicted to something, you need more and more to feel the high. I used to need a lot to feel excitement. It’s almost like I’ve come down to stasis, where now, to be totally honest, I sometimes open my compost bin and it’s all these different colors. I think it’s so beautiful. [Laughs]

I don’t go out and get drunk and meet new people all the time. It’s a different high. It’s the calm. Now, bouts of excitement are way more exhausting to me than they used to be. Maybe that’s also just middle age. Kids being asleep, getting a couple of hours to myself or a cup of tea and maybe a bath and a book – that is so exciting.

The wonder of music also comes into play on the album, such as with songs such as “Two Pianos” and “B-Sides.” What moments in your life do you cherish most around music?

Music has always been my companion, my way to cope and understand things. The very first song I ever wrote was called “When Daddy Comes Home.” My dad was a submarine captain and he was out to sea for long months at a time. I always say music was my way of processing longing and sorrow. But it is such a companion for joy. I think about every big moment of my life, there’s a soundtrack, you know? Getting married, there are songs that were part of our wedding. Giving birth, there are specific songs that were the soundtrack that we were playing when both of my children entered this world.

Music is everywhere in our lives. Sometimes, I think when it becomes a career, it can taint it a little bit. I have had to remember this is a relationship on my own that doesn’t need to be influenced by outside forces. Some of the bigger moments are those when we put on songs and just dance in the living room with our kids.

Another thread in the album is the idea that beauty always fades. In your song “If Your Body Fails You” you ask a series of questions about why we avoid the mirror and continue to uphold youth on a pedestal. Why do we do those things?

Capitalism. That song is rooted in watching my mom lose many physical abilities from her stroke. As well as the way that her body looked changing and witnessing her experience that, grappling with my own experience and my own relationship to my mother’s body. It was not something I really thought about. While also experiencing so many changes in my own body, growing a human for the first time. And that paired with this idea that it feels like it’s getting to a fever pitch of this expectation, especially for women, to look preserved, to look frozen, to look so smooth, and not aged at all. And noticing that infiltrates my mindset.

I don’t know why we are obsessed with that, literally, other than powerful marketing campaigns have convinced us to spend a lot of our money trying to freeze our faces and our bodies. But it’s something that I really want to resist, which genuinely feels challenging sometimes, because of those messages.

Numerous celebrities, from Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep to Barbra Streisand, have opposed plastic surgery for just that reason: to resist body standards. Hopefully, that leads to a cultural change eventually.

I hope so. It’s really helpful when public people put that out there in a really positive way, so that we don’t think, “Oh, this unrealistic expectation is what we all need to do.” When I see people owning it, it inspires me and builds my courage to also own it in the same way. When I see women rocking gray hair in their 40s, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to skip my next hair appointment.” [Laughs] I don’t want to dye my hair.

“Two Pianos” is lyrically hopeful but musically somber. That’s an interesting dichotomy.

The strings were written, arranged, and performed by Kristen Weber, who’s one of my really close friends and has done strings on almost all my records since 2019. I wrote the song with Caroline Spence, who is also a very good friend. Both of those women have been really intimately witnessing my life over the last several years – and vice versa. Some days it’s really hard to recognize all that we have. And I’m going to be honest, sometimes I compare. Sometimes I feel really sad. For what reason, I’m not sure.

But how do I sit in gratitude and keep this kind of, you know, remember to remember – how we say in the song. I actually got it from Chris Wood from the Wood Brothers. He said that in a podcast that I host with my husband. We were talking about all the things in life and how to stay healthy. He said, “Some days, we just need to remember to remember.” Musically, we wanted it to feel expansive, but also be an intimate experience of being really close at your kitchen table, but how universal that experience is for everybody.

The lyric “I never trust my own point of view” stands out. To both remember that you can be an unreliable narrator and to trust your gut.

At least in my experience, my mind can play tricks on me. It can tell me stories that maybe aren’t actually true. Sometimes, it’s good to be distrustful of my own point of view and try to get grounded in what’s reality. Other times, it’s dangerous to ignore my point of view, but that continual challenge and journey to know who I am. And it’s really hard to ground our individual selves in this world.

Other than music, how do you ground yourself?

I have to move my body. Every morning, I work out for a short amount of time, like 15 minutes. Since having a second child, it’s something my husband and I support each other [in]. Every morning, we take turns while the other person is doing breakfast and packing lunches. Fifteen minutes to do yoga, or a little dance video, or go on a run. That stuff is really essential. My ideal would be to be able to meditate and go on hikes more often. Nature really grounds me. But it’s really hard to find the time. And therapy.

“We’ve Got Bigger Plans” reminds me of the saying that “when you know better, be better.” Whether that’s with social issues or in our relationships with others, it’s about actually learning from the past.

That song is very personal, about my experience [over] the last several years of becoming a mother and having a lot of dreams. The first verse opens up with, “I used to be a dreamer who would dream things you couldn’t see.” I stopped believing, and my husband, partner, the producer of my record, Aaron Shafer-Haiss, was the one who was like, “Life is not over. What are you doing?” We can still have so much beauty and opportunity. We can always make art.

The inspiration for the second verse comes from our daughter, and how mystical and magical it was to witness this little child coming to life, and greeting the moon and stars at night. The kind of ritual of seeing the world really opened up my eyes and my heart in a new way. It’s about not getting pulled into unhelpful, unhealthy belief systems and trying to fill your cup where it doesn’t need to be filled. Looking beyond some of these little things that we can get tripped up on and knowing that we’ve got a bigger view.

What’s it been like adding a podcast to your professional life?

It has been so enriching. It is challenging, like balancing the time. But the conversations that we get to have, and the caliber of artists that we get to meet, it feels like such a gift. And I’m constantly like, “This is so cool that we get to do this and that we get to talk to people who create things that mean so much to other people and us.” Then, really get to dig in on what the human experience of it is. And it’s a great source of comfort to me to know that people I admire have a lot of the same anxieties and hopes and fears. And it just reminds us that we are just human beings.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Basic Folk: Outlaws’ Almanac (Kimaya Diggs & Lizzie No)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Lizzie No, Kaia Kater, Nathan Evans Fox, Olivia Ellen Lloyd, Tray Wellington, A.J. Haynes, and more are featured on the new compilation album Outlaws’ Almanac, a response to the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. Led by executive producer Lizzie No, the project features a diverse range of songwriters and storytellers working in broadly defined folk, Americana, and roots traditions. Lizzie envisioned the compilation as an opportunity to be in conversation with the American project, taking an oft-overlooked perspective. Their curation centers Black, brown, Indigenous, queer, rural, and women’s voices, with traditional and contemporary music melding in a manner that brings to mind America’s promise of being a melting pot.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

Lizzie No and Kimaya Diggs (who also appears on the album) join Basic Folk for a candid and vulnerable conversation about the project and its inspirations. We talked about how they each relate to outlaws and the difference between them and those tasked with protection within the law. We also talked about the significance of the album art by Mia Kristen, a folk art-inspired painting of a woman with a guitar riding a donkey surrounded by corn and flowers. I get into the details of some of the bungled celebrations of America’s major birthdays (namely the 100th and the 200th) and why those celebrations continually leave out marginalized and overlooked voices. We talk about how there are Black people in the future and why that is actually a radical idea in 2026. We end with a lighthearted Lightning Round called “IS THIS OUTLAW?” Thanks to Lizzie and Kimaya for being so open and honest in this intense and special conversation.

Photo Credits: Lizzie No by Mandi Fountain. Lead image of Kimaya Diggs courtesy of the artist. Alternate images of Kimaya Diggs by Jo Chattman. 

BGS 5+5: Sweet Undertow

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Sweet Undertow
Hometown: Alphabet City, New York, New York
Latest Album: Days Without Names (releasing July 17, 2026)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Fast Eddy; Slow and Steady Eddy

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

I read a lot – like a lot a lot. Language is such a strange thing: these agreed-upon movements of our mouths and these little scribbled symbols allow us to build civilizations. New York and Paris are built out of words way more than they are brick and steel.

And make no mistake, speech and the written word are the same thing as singing. When you order coffee or curse the guy who cut you off – you are singing. There’s melody and rhythm and all that in speech. So listening to some author build castles inside your head. It’s the same thing as song. Listen to Marx here: “You have nothing to lose but your chains.” Put it on a loop in your head, you’ll start to groove to the rhythm. The 4-on-the-floor beat marches like a dialectic. Or take Christ, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s music – you can imagine Kurt or Aretha or anyone else singing that line.

In fiction especially, narrative and voice and imagery and sound – it’s all there. You get to dig around inside of these lunatic genius minds all from the comfort of your own home for like 10 bucks a throw. And they don’t even really charge more for longer books – you can’t say no to that kind of bargain these days.

Read these and tell me I’m wrong:

One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
2666
Infinite Jest
Blood Meridien
Never Let Me Go

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

It;s tricky. The word “artist” suffers a great deal of abuse from global culture writ large and the music industry in particular – from Subway’s sandwich artists to most of the “artists” you hear on the radio. But for artists, you’re born an artist and it’s a matter of how quickly you can find your medium. It’s long been said that the most dangerous thing in the world is an artist without a medium, and for me it’s hard to say when I found mine. I sang in a punk band in high school, then stole a guitar at 19 and taught myself to play from Muddy Waters records. And I’d play gigs from time to time, but it just never occurred to me to be a musician.

This is the important thing – it never occurred to me to want to be anything. I didn’t think about things in those terms. The best way I can describe my thinking at the time is this: Every year was so totally different than the year before that even the thought of making a long-term plan sounded laughable. Hubris in the face of the capricious gods of time. But I never even really had the thought. Being anything just didn’t occur to me.

So I didn’t have money or stuff or a home, but I traveled the world. Lived in half a dozen countries. There was love, adventure, terror, sickness, laughter, lonesomeness. Damn near got eaten by alligators and, later, a leopard. I worked as a firefighter, a garbageman, a teacher, a student, an organizer, a newspaper reporter, a salesman, and a security guard. Mainly a rambler, Odysseus-ing around, but not trying to get anywhere exactly.

But I guess if there was a moment when I realized I was a musician it was in Singapore. I was playing tunes at this bar in Geylang and this pilot named Spinks came up to me after, grabbed my shoulders, and said, “Brother, you’re a musician.” And like a punch to the chest I realized he was right.

Genre is dead (long live genre!), but how would you describe the genres and styles your music inhabits?

Genre is 99% marketing speak – so it isn’t dead in as much as it has essentially nothing to do with music at all.

That said, Sweet Undertow makes country disco, outerspace Americana, hardcore folk, and babymakin’ rock ‘n’ roll.

What is a genre, album, artist, musician, or song that you adore that would surprise people?

People’s sense of surprise is their own business, so far be it from me to try and influence that, but here’s some fun facts:

When I get the blues (surprise surprise, I get the blues!) I put on the Rebirth Brass Band, Dr. John, the Meters, Curtis Mayfield, and Parliament. And while it doesn’t cure the blues, per se, it is definitely harder to be sad when you’re dancing.

And for the lightning round:

1) Marvin Gaye is maybe the greatest musical genius of the 20th century.
2) Django Reinhardt is the greatest guitarist player who ever lived.
3) Ella Fitzgerald is some kind of goddess who briefly took mortal form.
4) Standards by Tortoise – chef’s kiss.
5) My favorite band for a goodly while was Los Crudos.

If you didn’t work in music, what would you do instead?

If I couldn’t play music I’d jump off a goddamn bridge – it’s the only thing I like.

Photo Credit: Jessica Lee

Basic Folk: Alela Diane

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Back in the mid 2000s Alela Diane‘s The Pirate’s Gospel album was ringing my bell and, apparently, it was ringing a lot of other people’s bells, too – especially Europeans. Her debut album, it went gold in France and she’s been able to maintain a pretty decent audience and career across the Atlantic ever since. Meanwhile, at home in the States – she’s based in Portland, Oregon – after 2013, she remained relatively unknown and undiscovered. That was just fine with her. She worked on her music, occasionally flew over to Europe to tour, played local gigs, and raised her two daughters with her husband in their 1892 Victorian mansion. While they were renovating their crazy old house, they also got their daughters a landline and a CD player each, along with their gifting them their old CD collections. Everything was pretty chill and great. Then her friend and mentor Michael Hurley, “the godfather of freak folk,” died last year at the age of 83.

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After playing a tribute show to Michael, she started connecting more with her Portland music community. She would go to shows, invite people like Anna Tivel over, and started collaborating with others in town. This all led to her new album, Who’s Keeping Time? This time around, she is going full bore on a huge tour, traveling roughly 40% of the time from May through December of this year. It feels like a huge return for the singer-songwriter who is feeling so inspired by creating, collaborating, and being in community again.

Photo Credit: Lead image by Caleb Gaskins. Alternate images by Camille Bruya, and Kelsey Gallagher.