Upon relaying my artistic moniker to people, I’m usually met with one of two reactions: 1. “Oh, weird…that’s interesting” or 2. “Oh, weird… I don’t get it.” (I guess a third option would be, “Well, that’s stupid.”)
My process of finding a moniker came out of a desire for artistic freedom in my writing, as I felt constrained performing under my government name, the far less interesting sounding “Matt Longo.” Within a moniker, my writing (in my mind) could be uninhibited despite me being, you know, the same human.
Originally, I was thinking I’d go by “Tin Ear,” as I simply liked the sound of the way the words sat together, but I quickly discovered that was already a glam band from the ’70s. Then, around the time of my name hunt, I had a very strange dream wherein I sat on a subway car across from a gaunt, regal-looking king. I awoke with the words “Thin Lear” in my head, no doubt the result of my brain privately re-working “Tin Ear” and conveniently giving me a dream origin story to go along with it.
What a journey, I know. So, to celebrate the release of my new EP, A Shadow Waltzed Itself, I’ve put together a Mixtape of some of my favorite solo artist monikers, for various reasons, all paired with choice tracks. Enjoy. – Thin Lear
“Maybe I’m the Only One for Me” – Purple Mountains
A sad and beautiful song from a modern master, David Berman. The moniker is pitch perfect; it conveys majestic sadness, like so much of his art.
“Golden Wake” – Mutual Benefit
An underrated moniker for an underrated artist, Jordan Lee. It’s off Love’s Crushing Diamond, which is really one of the finest complete albums of the 2010s, with its homespun warmth.
“Come Down in Time” – Bedouine
The thoughtful moniker of Azniv Korkejian, whose music is equally as carefully considered. Her take on Elton John’s track from the classic Tumbleweed Connection really rivals the original and wraps the melody in an achingly delicate arrangement.
“Beauty of the Shifting Tide” – Thin Lear
Oh, hey, would you look at that? It’s me. How’d that get in there?
This tune is the closing song off the new EP, A Shadow Waltzed Itself, and also the most personal, unfortunately. I had been walking along the beach in a bad mood for seemingly no reason one day, so removed from my surroundings, watching my partner and daughter enjoy themselves ahead of me. I began to envision myself as this sullen entity that was just kind of trudging behind joy – and the uselessness of that role in a family. This isn’t a place I find myself in all the time, but it happens; I wrote the song later that night as I was so disgusted with my default settings. In the song, my narrator acknowledges his envy of the tide, how it can change on a dime with all its might and that his own will “breaks in half the time.”
It sums up my greatest fears in a few minutes and is my least favorite song I’ve ever written, as I depict myself in such harsh lighting, but it felt like I needed to put it out for that very reason.
“Tyrant Destroyed” – Twin Shadow
A cool, catchy moniker for an artist who makes cool, catchy music. And what an opening track this is off his debut album, Forget. It’s such a sure-footed, fully-realized artistic mission statement to kick off a career.
“Noon” – Twain
I really can’t express why the moniker of Mat Davidson is so perfect. Maybe it’s because the arrangements and vocals in his music are so careful and delicate that the whole thing feels like it could split in two at any moment.
“Honey” – Drugdealer & Weyes Blood
Two excellent monikers for the price of one. Michael Collins & Natalie Mering doing a pitch perfect ’70s pastiche.
“Hood” – Perfume Genius
Maybe the most brilliant moniker on the list, achieving a level of poeticism we can only all aspire to with our monikers. “Hood” is one of the best songs ever written that clocks in at under two minutes, delivering a devastating gut punch in no time at all.
“The Mermaid Parade” – Phosphorescent
Matthew Houck’s music does indeed sound like a radiant glow in the dark. A killer breakup song from 2010’s Here’s to Taking It Easy.
“Only Son of the Ladiesman” – Father John Misty
Well, you knew this one was coming. Truly a perfect moniker for Josh Tillman, as it conveys a mystical sleaze and it’s funny, mysterious, and inviting.
It’s been a decade since Doni Zasloff and Eric Lindberg became musical and life partners, melding her background in musical theater and singer-songwriter music together with his blues, jazz, and banjo-picking roots. Now, with a new double album, Beacons, their band Nefesh Mountain dives deep into the myriad ways music can serve as a light in dark times.
The album’s eighteen tracks across two discs convey not only a ferocious command of numerous roots styles, but also a level of compassion and empathy lacking from so much topical music.
“We’re always trying to … walk that high wire between trying to provide an escape … and not neglect[ing] what’s so clearly happening day by day to all of us, as we watch the news and look at our phones and feel this fear and anger and depression,” says Lindberg. The news, he adds, has become “this thing that we can’t run from.”
For many artists on the folk/roots continuum, this desire to comment on the state of the world might mean focusing entirely on our current political leadership. For Nefesh Mountain, though, it means relating with their audience on an even more personal level than usual.
“That’s really part of our job, I think, as artists right now,” Lindberg says.
This echoes a message of “revolutionary love” that many other artists have gotten behind, courtesy of author Valerie Karr.
“Wonder is where love begins,” Karr wrote in her 2020 memoir, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. “When we choose to wonder about people we don’t know, when we imagine their lives and listen for their stories, we begin to expand the circle of who we see as part of us.”
This notion is what inspired Ani DiFranco’s 2021 album Revolutionary Love and seems to be echoed on Beacons, with Nefesh Mountain’s determination to weave radical love into their approach to progressive bluegrass and Americana music. Indeed, Beacons seems to strive toward illuminating our common humanity.
Granted, this mission of “radical love” began with the name Lindberg and Zasloff chose for their band in the first place. “Nefesh” is a Hebrew word denoting life force, the sentience that pervades all living things. Radical love requires as much vulnerable expression as it does being open to the array of scary, emotional, dark trepidation so many people have in common. Among the topics Lindberg and Zasloff breach on Beacons: coming clean about a history of substance use, discussing the hard truths around their seven-year fertility journey, and their shared determination to maintain a sense of wonder in a world that can feel relentlessly staid. (“If we’re looking for some heaven, babe/ There’s some right here on the ground,” Lindberg sings in “Heaven Is Here.”)
The first disc of Beacons features a deft exploration of the group’s Americana tones. Though Lindberg and Zasloff are from the Northeast, their Nashville connections and twang-centric improv skills deliver a set of songs that could play just fine on say WSM, the radio home of the Grand Ole Opry.
The set begins with “Race to Run” – a radio-friendly country song about overthinking the struggles of the creative life (“I’m tired of trying to stay out in front/ But you remind me … it’s your own race to run”). “What Kind of World” is a rumination on a sense so many folks share these days, of powerlessness in the face of climate change. (“Is it just me? Can you feel it too?”) But, the song’s lyrics extend into geopolitics and the sense of divide that leaves so many feeling unstable.
Asked about the song’s vulnerable and rather personal honesty, Lindberg notes: “Remember, it was a year and a half ago when the fires from Canada kind of made their way down. We live in the New York area … so the line in the song is, ‘I saw the golden hour at 11 a.m./ They say it’s from the fires, it’s not us or them.’
“Now, a year later or so,” he adds, linking last year’s fire headlines with those of 2025, this time in California. “We had to sing this in Orange County a few weeks back while they were [still seeing smoke].”
As Lindberg’s proverbial camera pans out, the song considers the role of the average citizen in the face of such behemoth powers as climate and politics. “What’s it all for if we’re not all free,” the lyrics ask, shifting from fear about climate disasters to a purpose of climate justice. This ability to move from complaint to action item in a single verse, all couched in infectious twang, is what sets Nefesh Mountain apart from many others in the country space.
The Americana disc’s finest moment, however, is “Mother,” a song written by Lindberg that addresses so many of motherhood’s side effects. “I’ve lived many lives,” Zasloff sings. “…It’s all part of the job as a mother.”
Zasloff notes that her first two children – from a previous relationship – were practically grown when she and Lindberg began trying for a child of their own. What ensued was a seven-year fertility process that echoes what so many women encounter when they discover becoming pregnant is not always as easy as it seems.
“I burst out crying when [Eric] first shared [‘Mother’] with me,” she says, “because it was so personal and so empowering and beautiful for my husband to write that about me.”
In addition to the way the song tackles their infertility journey, it also reckons with Zasloff’s history with alcohol – something she chose to leave behind in order to become a mother. “I decided in that moment of having that song come into the world,” she says, “that I was wanting to talk about something personal that I had never talked about publicly, ever. Which is the fact that I am sober. I’m an alcoholic and I just celebrated 20 years of sobriety. And I actually became sober to become a mother. It’s part of my whole story.”
Livin’ with that drink, Lord, Always left me wanting more But I was saved When I became a mother
After that high point, the group moves into the traditional “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning,” which Lindberg notes has long been a part of their live show. “We’d always mess with the arrangement,” he says. “I kind of just called it in the studio. We had a little bit of extra time. I didn’t know it was going to be on the album, but it’s one that the band knew when we were down in Nashville and we kind of arranged it on the fly.”
“We’re all New York guys and jazz players,” he adds. “So we wanted to lean into that a little bit and bring this real Americana spiritual into a different sonic space, really let improvisation take over, and help that add to the obviously beautiful meaning of the song.”
Nine tracks in, Beacons switches to bluegrass, bringing in giants of the form to round out the band. Of course, anytime Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Rob McCoury, Cody Kilby, and Mark Schatz come together in any room, the sound is bound to slap. Toss in Lindberg, whose pre-Nefesh background is jazz improvisation, and something truly special crops up.
“Regrets in the Rearview” opens this second disc, feeling like a bluegrass answer to the Americana set’s opener, “Race to Run.” Its instrumental section sets a high bar for the rest of the collection, as the band hands around lead duties, featuring some of the finest bluegrass instrumentals in the biz.
But it’s “This Is Me,” coming in at bluegrass track number three, that delivers one of the double album’s finest moments. Capitalizing on the band’s commitment to building connections and “radical love,” “This Is Me” tells the bluegrass side’s most personal story.
“A question that’s been thrown at us for years now, and especially to Eric,” says Zasloff, “is: How did a Jewish kid from Brooklyn get into bluegrass? … He came to me and he said, ‘I think I wrote a response song so that people will stop asking me that question.”
“I was thinking about it,” Lindberg says. “How did I get into bluegrass? [“This Is Me” is] more about if we’re lucky enough to find that thing that really makes us come alive and makes our soul kind of catch fire –whether it’s writing a song … or painting or sculpture or any trade anyone does. If that’s the thing, then it doesn’t matter, geographically, where we’re from.
“I’m of the belief, nowadays especially, with what we’re trying to do in the roots world, [that it’s important to] try to break down all the barriers,” he continues. No matter where people are from, he adds, “there are people that find this music and go, ‘Wow, that is lighting me up!'”
With that, Lindberg hearkens back to the title of the album. That music might be a light in dark times is, of course, no new concept. (Consider “This Little Light of Mine.”) But the fact that the idea has been floated before doesn’t mean it’s not worth mentioning. At a time when so many folks feel powerless to the onslaught of news and information coursing through the internet and the real world alike, it can be easy to feel like none of us are enough to meet the moment. But Beacons is a reminder that there is no darkness without light.
“No one knows how we become who we are,” Lindberg says, before offering a word of advice. “Everyone just be yourself –regardless of the questions you get or the pain or the hate that you see. You’ve just got to stay true.”
Rose Cousins and Edie Carey‘s friendship has blossomed for over two decades. On the occasion of Rose releasing her new album, Conditions of Love – Vol 1, the pair appear on Basic Folk to discuss the new music. They reflect on their early days and their first meeting as well as the ways they’ve influenced each other’s careers and personal growth.
To witness Rose’s new album through the eyes (and ears) of her best friend feels like a huge privilege, a front-row seat looking into what the human heart and mind are capable of. Edie prompts Rose to expand on the challenges of balancing love and freedom, the complexities of navigating midlife, and why the piano is her soulmate. With humor and depth, they tackle the big questions of life, love, and the creative process, revealing the layers of their artistic identities.
“I just had a really moving, hilarious, enlightening conversation with my best friend Rose Cousins,” Edie reflects. “We talked about vulnerability, middle-aged gardening, accidentally putting in one another’s eye contacts, and befriending our own mortality. We also talked about her stunning new record, Conditions of Love – Vol 1.”
Explore more of our Artist of the Month coverage of Rose Cousins here.
One day, as a favor for a friend who was building a recording studio, Rose Cousins wandered through a piano showroom. She had no intention of buying anything for herself, but then she came upon a 1967 Baldwin baby grand. She asked the salesperson about it and was told it already had a buyer. She asked to put her name on a waiting list, though, just in case.
“A few days later,” she said in our recent Zoom interview for BGS, “they called me and said, ‘It’s become available.’ So then I went [back to the store] … and they pulled it into a room so I could play it. I spent a couple of hours with it and then freaked out over the next month. And then ended up buying it as my first real piano.”
Piano had been an early acquaintance for Cousins, when she was first finding her voice as a musician. Growing up on a Prince Edward Island farm, the second of five children in a tight-knit family, Cousins was both poet and athlete. The piano was an early friend to her empathic insides as she began to find her voice amid the bustle of a busy household.
More than twenty years and nine releases into her JUNO Award-winning career, Cousins has long since migrated to Canada’s mainland. Based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is one of her country’s finest contributors to her generation of singer-songwriters. Across her career, she has mostly recorded her own songs, often on guitar, but the piano has been a constant presence, both in the studio and her live performances. She has turned to it for pulling the feelings forward in cover songs like Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” and Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” She has relied on it for original songs that are especially emotionally demanding, such as the devastating “Go First” from 2012’s We Have Made a Spark and “Grace” and “Like Trees” from GRAMMY-nominated Natural Conclusion (2017).
Now, Cousins has reached her tenth release, Conditions of Love – Vol. 1. For it, she has laid her Martin acoustic guitar to the side. From the album’s opening instrumental overture, “To Be Born,” to its final rumination, “How Is This (the last time),” we hear Cousins playing that beautiful old Baldwin. Taken in its entirety, Conditions is a collection of songs that is even more deeply vulnerable than usual, with good reason.
“The sensation of playing a full, real piano of my own and having it in my space,” she says, “it’s kind of like a zone I go into. It’s a very intimate relationship.”
These are strong words coming from an artist who has sold T-shirts at her shows that read “Feelings Welcome” and “Rose Cousins Made Me Cry.” That there might be some deeper well of emotion available to her than she has been willing or able to access on previous projects, might make some listeners nervous. But there is no need for a wellness warning on Conditions of Love – Vol. 1.
Once the listener is “Born” into this album, the first song with lyrics is called “Forget Me Not.” It’s delivered in list form, an ode on spring and, perhaps, a nod toward rebirth.
In 2020, Cousins says, the pandemic lockdown saw her moving neighborhoods. “I got a dog, and that meant I was walking outside multiple times a day. I was walking through, particularly, the spring and summer.” Free of the administrative tasks that pile up when she’s planning for another show or tour, she adds, “It’s like my peripheral vision widened and my top vision heightened and my noticing was so much sharper. I was just noticing things blooming – and when they were blooming. It seems ridiculous, because I’ve lived many, many springs, but I actually haven’t experienced spring in the same place multiple times in many, many years. And here I was experiencing it. … It really was this, like, holy shit [moment]. Like oh, snowdrops are the first thing you see. You see them come up and there’s still snow on the ground.”
For an artist – a poet – who had grown up on an island roaming the woods and the beach and playing outside with her siblings, this return to the city oddly necessitated a return to nature. As the rest of us watched YouTube videos of mountain goats and bears roaming urban neighborhoods the world over quiet from COVID lockdowns, Cousins was developing a kinship with those wild things reclaiming their natural environment, even if just for a moment.
“Sweet fern and knapweed,” she sings. “Lavender and rosemary.”
Perhaps an accident, perhaps a nod to the album’s theme, the flowering plants come in pairs. There is some kind of partnership between, say, the “buttercup and poppy,” though it would take a gardening expertise beyond this writer’s own to specify why. And yet, the casual observer, rekindling a relationship with the earth, can sense it.
“Forget Me Not” shifts when Cousins begins listing trees. “Dogwood and gingko,” she sings as the lyrics evolve into sentences. “The poplar leaves clap as the wind blows.” Nature is spreading its roots and branches. There is more space for more observations, more developed ideas, more potential.
The blossoms open. The bees arrive. The eye draws upward.
By the end of the song, Cousins is simply imploring, “Don’t forget me,” but there is a sense that she is not speaking to a lover or even a friend. This is a dialogue with the earth, with the seasons and sky. She is speaking for and to them as much as she is speaking for and to herself.
“Dogwood was one of the trees that I absolutely fell in love with,” Cousins continues. “I planted one on my property two falls ago. The fall dogwood. I just couldn’t even believe how beautiful it is. … I probably would have seen the dogwood before, but didn’t know that it was called dogwood, you know. I didn’t have a relationship with that tree.” But now she does.
Perhaps one condition of love is first knowing what it is.
Here is where the idea of love’s conditions immediately turns. After all, love is one of the most commented upon musical subjects. Contemporary music typically focuses on the romantic sort – particularly brand-new or just ending. But that is not all Rose Cousins is here for. (The album is not called Conditions of Romantic Love.)
From the first set of lyrics on this album, we are handed an implicit definition of love: It is small and big. It is colorful and everywhere. It is where you may not expect it. It is of the self and of the earth. It emerges at the right time. It withers and hibernates and invisibly readies rebirth.
Perhaps love is always – even when it is not. Yet it can feel so elusive, so impossible to pin down. “Love makes us insane,” Cousins says, while discussing the album’s third track and its first single, “I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard).”
“We’re kind of told that we want it. We kind of do want it. We get into it. We struggle with it. It’s ridiculous. … And it’s like, ‘I want to have this. I’m doing my best out here to try and have this love thing.’ … But then [there’s] the choice between being in a relationship with somebody and working through all the ridiculousness – or being wild and free.”
Which brings us back to the mountain goats and bears wandering cities during lockdown. Back to Cousins walking her dog, noticing flowers and trees. Reacquainting with oneself is part of love, whether it comes in the throes of a long connection with another human, or after such a relationship has come to an end.
Indeed, this juxtaposition between endurance and ending is among the running themes on Conditions. In reality, love does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It is not a story we tell as much as it is an ongoing pursuit of life itself. “There [is] a cycle to every relationship where you come in close, and then you move back, [and then] you come in close,” Cousins says.
“Denouement” is another sort of list song. “Dissonance,” she sings in its final verse. “Elephants. Vigilance. Grand defense.” And as she lists these rhyming words, the inclusion of “Elephants” feels so ridiculous. She is recounting a lovers’ spat, which ends with “dinner mints” as her protagonists presumably leave the restaurant together.
All kinds of love relationships can turn on what we tend to call “elephants in the room.” There are the things we decide to not bring up over dinner – with our families or our lovers or our friends. The times we hurt one another, the grief and fear, the secrets between us. The willingness to hold these things, to let the elephants stand as we take our dinner mints and move on, that gives love room to persist.
“There’s this movie I watched on an airplane on my way back from Calgary in 2023,” Cousins recalls. “It’s just this small Canadian independent film called Wildhood. … There [were] a couple characters who come from tough homes. One of them says, ‘Love has conditions, I guess.’ … And I was like, fuck, it’s exactly that. Does it ever, you know?”
Cousins is careful to clarify that she doesn’t understand her album’s theme as merely a push-and-pull between conditional and unconditional love.
“Conditions, in all of the definitions of ‘conditions,’” she says. “It’s like – what is the weather in this relationship today? What are the guises under which I’m going to be loved and that I belong, or that I will be accepted, or, you know, that I can be vulnerable? There’s no one [condition]. There’s just so many.”
While many of the songs are clearly circling around an understanding of romantic love, there is also the love that exists within a family of origin. Love that is perpetual and yet can feel as though it rests on one or more people behaving a certain way. This love can feel more like a barrier than a connection. Like reaching toward a wall, unable to even see whether the person on the other side is reaching too.
The places where this image resonates most – “That’s How Long (I’ve waited for your love),” “Wolf and Man,” “Borrowed Light” – come in the second half of the disc. If we are to take Conditions as a birth-to-death exploration of love, these are the songs that come with middle age. When we have the same amount of time behind us as we do in front. When we begin to wrestle with familiality and community and our own identity in relation to both. The balance of love between self and others.
“I am borrowing light from the moon, who is borrowing light from the sun,” she sings in the album’s penultimate track.
Perhaps another condition of love is connection and disconnection, the way we use each other, the choice to depend upon another body.
“As we age,” she adds, “if you choose it, there’s a lot of facing oneself that can be really fruitful and deeply painful. And I think that the pandemic did that for me. As glorious as it was to have the ‘Forget Me Not’ experience of … [a] revisited relationship with nature. It also was really arresting in the way that it was holding up a bunch of mirrors.
“Like, where are all these mirrors coming from? I was able to kind of ignore [them before], or didn’t know that they were there, that I needed to look into them, because I was just so busy with work and motion and the next thing. So, as painful as that was, it was a rich ground for growth. And growth is most often painful. I definitely learned a lot about myself during the last four years.”
Cousins pauses before continuing: “I don’t really know how to talk about this.”
Fair enough. The music she’s created, as usual, speaks plenty.
Artist:Rose Betts Hometown: London, United Kingdom Latest Album:There Is No Ship (released March 7)
What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?
When I lived in London, my parents would often come to my shows. Right before I’d go on, my mother would say, “Tell me a story.” It seems so simple to put it that way, but really it was such a wonderful gem of advice, a steady light, a root to hold onto. It’s easy to get caught up in other things, when I’m playing live I have to fight against the problems of not hearing myself, the lights, raucous crowds. When I’m singing a song to my phone to share on TikTok I’m thinking about the lighting, or whether its engaging enough. Even when I’m in a room with executives and they’re trying to figure out if I’m worth investing in – keeping that line of “tell me a story” in my head and my heart ties me to the old and beautiful tradition of what songwriting is and, when you take all the egos and the money out of it, what everybody wants to be a part of. We are born storytellers, all of us, and that is the thing that ties us together and helps us grow.
What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?
I actually turn to other art forms for inspiration much more than I turn to music. Literature has always been important to me and totally informs more songwriting. Melody is a gift from the air, it isn’t something I overthink, but words, and everything that can be poured into a melody through them, are so magical to me. Authors like Tolstoy, Turgenev, Austen, and Emily Brontë, poets like Keats, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney – they all inspire me in different ways to become a better songwriter. I love the challenge of finding new ways to say old things. It offers me and also the listener a chance to look afresh at the world and at themselves.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
Nature is my church, it is where I go to free my mind. Living in LA, I’ve become acquainted with a different kind of nature and I’m not sure it suits me. England is lush, the greens are abundant, the air is rich and full of moisture, it weighs the sky down, bringing it nearly within touching distance. None of this is in LA. So my favourite thing to do here is to drive to San Bernardino, up into the mountains, to Crestline. Being around those trees fills me up, I can feel it nourishing something in me.
Nature roots me to the simplicity of what it is to be alive. It is passive and without pity – a witness. I feel like songs need what human beings need: air and light and water. But everyone has feet that touch the earth, so all songs need to have a part of themselves in contact with the ground, the roots, the stone.
If you didn’t work in music, what would you do instead?
I’d like to think I’d have some quiet job somewhere which gave me lots of time to read, maybe as a librarian or a translator of foreign literature. Or perhaps something in costume or fashion – I love making clothes and I love film costume, so being someone who brought the world of film to life through costume would be pretty wonderful.
Does pineapple really belong on pizza?
Surely trying to police pizza is like trying to say that a violin only belongs in an orchestra and you can’t have pancakes for dinner. Think about all the wonderful things we’ve made because we broke the rules. I love when cultures mix together and make something new and unexpected, it happens all the time, and should be celebrated. That said I don’t have pineapple on my pizza.
Our partnership with our friends at Real Roots Radio in Southwestern Ohio continues as we move from Black History Month to Women’s History Month! This time, we’ll bring you weekly collections of a variety of powerful women in bluegrass, country, Americana, folk, and elsewhere who have been featured on Real Roots Radio’s airwaves each weekday in March, highlighting the outsized impact women have on American roots music.
You can listen to Real Roots Radio online 24/7 or via their FREE app for smartphones or tablets. If you’re based in Ohio, tune in via 100.3 (Xenia, Dayton, Springfield), 106.7 (Wilmington), or 105.5 (Eaton).
American roots music, historically and currently, has often been regarded as a male-dominated space. It’s certainly true of the music industry in general and these more down-home musics are no exception. Thankfully, American roots music and its many offshoots, branches, and associated folkways include hundreds and thousands of women who have greatly impacted these art forms, altering the courses of roots music history. Some are relatively unknown – or under-appreciated or undersung – and others are global phenomena or household names.
Over the next few weeks, we and RRR will do our best to bring you examples of women in roots music from all levels of notoriety and stature. Radio host Daniel Mullins, who together with BGS and Good Country staff has curated the series, kicks off March featuring Dottie West, Girls of the Golden West, Donna Ulisse, Gail Davies, and Cousin Emmy. We’ll return next week and each Friday through the end of the month with even more examples of women who blazed a trail in roots music.
Plus, you can find two playlists below – one centered on bluegrass, the other on country – with dozens of songs from countless women artists, performers, songwriters, and instrumentalists who effortlessly demonstrate how none of these roots genres would exist without women.
Dottie West (1932 – 1991)
She was a trailblazer, a storyteller, and a country music legend. Dottie West – born Dorothy Marsh in the small town of Frog Pond, Tennessee – rose to fame with her rich voice and heartfelt songs. Her childhood was heartbreaking, due to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her alcoholic father. As a teenager, she testified against her father, aiding in his conviction and sentencing on charges resulting from his continued sexual abuse of her and her siblings.
After high school, Dottie received a music scholarship to pursue her passion. It was her songwriting that really helped build in-roads for her in the music business, particularly after Jim Reeves had a top three hit with Dottie’s song, “Is This Me.” In 1965, she made history as the first female country artist to win a GRAMMY with her original composition, “Here Comes My Baby.” Its smash success also led to her becoming a member of the Grand Ole Opry.
From then on, Dottie became a force in Nashville, penning hits and performing alongside legends like Jim Reeves, Don Gibson, Jimmy Dean, and Kenny Rogers. Her duets with Kenny melted hearts, but her solo career soared, too, scoring twenty-five Top 40 country hits as a solo artist spanning three different decades. Songs like “A Lesson in Leavin’” proved she was unstoppable.
Part of Dottie’s legacy is that of friend and mentor. Pointing to Patsy Cline’s encouragement of her own career, Dottie West would help build up aspiring performers like Jeannie Seely, Steve Wariner, and more. She also helped transform the image of the female country star, with a sexy wardrobe full of flash and glamour. Dottie would be one of the first country artists to find success in writing commercial jingles as well, most notably, Coca-Cola’s use of “Country Sunshine.” But tragedy struck in 1991 when a car accident on the way to the Grand Ole Opry cut her life short at the age of 58.
Though gone too soon, Dottie West’s voice still echoes through country music. She was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
Before there was Dolly or Patsy, there were the Girls of the Golden West! Sisters Mildred and Dorothy Good burst onto the country music scene in the 1930s, blending sweet harmonies and cowboy spirit into radio gold on Chicago’s WLS, home of the National Barn Dance. Alongside early radio stars like Gene Autry, Patsy Montana, and Bradley Kincaid, Girls of the Golden West were one of the most popular country acts of their era.
Taking their name from a popular opera, these Illinois farm girls also developed a compelling backstory for audiences – telling radio listeners they were from Muleshoe, Texas. Embodying the “western” in “country & western,” their cowgirl stage clothes helped add some girl power to the infatuation with cowboys and the Wild West at that time. Their signature song, “Will There Be Any Yodeling in Heaven?,” showcased their angelic voices and signature yodeling style, making them fan favorites on The National Barn Dance.
By the late ’40s, they would relocate from Chicago’s WLS to Cincinnati’s WLW, where they would be part of such iconic programs as the Renfro Valley Barn Dance and the Boone Country Jamboree. Unlike many country acts of the time, these trailblazing women wrote much of their own music, proving that female artists belonged in the spotlight. Their songs, filled with adventure, heartache, and the open range, paved the way for generations of country music legends, including Kitty Wells, Jean Shepard, and The Davis Sisters. Though their fame faded after World War II, their influence never did. So next time you hear a classic country duet, remember – Mildred and Dorothy Good were there first. The Girls of the Golden West were true pioneers of country music.
Donna Ulisse is a powerhouse singer, songwriter, and storyteller whose music blends traditional bluegrass with heartfelt country roots. Originally from Hampton, Virginia, she made her mark in Nashville as a country artist before fully embracing her love for bluegrass.
Donna arrived in Nashville in the early ’80s, working as a harmony vocalist. Her first recording session when she hit town was on a Jerry Reed album. By 1990, she was signed to Atlantic Records, where she released her debut album, Trouble at the Door. This great country album yielded two charting singles for Donna and landed her guest spots on Hee Haw, Nashville Now, and more. But Donna had a knack for mountain melodies – heck, Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys played at her wedding (her husband, Rick, is a Stanley after all).
Donna began gaining traction as a songwriter and released her first album of original bluegrass in 2007. Since then, she hasn’t looked back. With a voice as rich as the Appalachian hills and lyrics that paint vivid pictures of life, love, and faith, Donna has penned songs for top artists like Del McCoury, The Grascals, Darin & Brooke Aldridge, and more. Her song, “I Am a Drifter” was recorded by Volume Five and was named Song of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association in 2017. Donna has multiple Bluegrass Songwriter of the Year honors under her belt, as well.
But it’s her own albums – filled with soul-stirring melodies and award-winning songwriting – that truly showcase her artistry. Hits like “Back Home Feelin’ Again,” “Come to Jesus Moment,” “When I Go All Bluegrass on You,” and “Livin’ Large in a Little Town” have made her a beloved mainstay on bluegrass radio and at bluegrass festivals nationwide. Whether she’s performing on stage, writing timeless tunes, or inspiring the next generation of songwriters, Donna Ulisse is a true gem in bluegrass music.
She wasn’t just another voice on the radio, she was the first female record producer in country music history. Let’s tip our hats to a native of Broken Bow, Oklahoma and a trailblazer in country music: Gail Davies!
Originally a session singer, Davies sang on records by Glen Campbell, Hoyt Axton, Neil Young, and more. Through this experience she befriended Joni Mitchell, whose producer taught her about record production. In the mid-’70s she worked alongside Roger Miller and started her songwriting journey. Her song, “Bucket to the South,” would be covered by Lynn Anderson, Ava Barber, Wilma Lee Cooper, and later recorded by Gail herself.
In the late ’70s and ’80s, Davies broke barriers. She released her self-titled debut album in 1978. Though successful, she was dissatisfied with the production, changing labels in order to produce her own records – much like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings had done earlier in the decade. This made Gail Davies country’s first female record producer. The result was stellar, yielding her first top ten hit, “Blue Heartache.”
Gail crafted a unique sound that blended traditional country with fresh, innovative production. Hits like “Grandma’s Song” and “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)” put her on the map, proving she had the talent and the vision to shape her own career. But Gail wasn’t just making music – she was making history, paving the way for women in Nashville to take creative control of their work, inspiring hitmakers who would follow in her wake like Suzy Bogguss, Kathy Mattea, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Pam Tillis.
Davies would also produce albums for others as well, being hired as the first female Music City staff record producer in 1990. Over the years she would record with Emmylou Harris, The Whites, Ricky Skaggs, Dolly Parton, and even Ralph Stanley. With over a dozen albums and a career spanning decades, her impact still echoes through country music today. So here’s to Gail Davies – a pioneer, a hitmaker, and a legend.
Have you ever heard of Cousin Emmy? If you haven’t, you’re missing out on a true legend of the Appalachian music scene. Born Cynthia May Carver in the heart of Kentucky, Cousin Emmy was the daughter of sharecroppers and a pioneering force in old-time radio and country music.
In the 1930s, her voice rang out across the airwaves captivating listeners with her mountain spirit and stunning talent. She became the first female to win the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in 1935 and fronted her own band and radio show by the end of the decade. A true trailblazer for women in bluegrass, she didn’t just play – she performed. Known for her skillful banjo playing and unforgettable voice, Cousin Emmy brought Appalachian culture to the masses on major radio stations in Wheeling, Knoxville, St. Louis, and Chicago, leading her to be signed to Decca Records.
Cousin Emmy was featured in Time magazine in 1943, informing its readers that her popular St. Louis radio program drew an average of 2.5 million listeners every Sunday morning. From live shows to classic radio broadcasts, she influenced generations of musicians, including Grandpa Jones (whom she purportedly taught how to play old-time banjo) and Bobby Osborne, who heard her recording of “Ruby” on jukeboxes when he was a youngster. It would later become the debut single for The Osborne Brothers, and remained one of their signature songs, solidifying its status as a bluegrass standard.
Emmy would eventually move to L.A., where she would raise the children she adopted while continuing to perform locally. As the Folk Revival emerged in the early ’60s, the New Lost City Ramblers heard Cousin Emmy performing at Disneyland and encouraged her to join them on record. That session introduced her to a new generation of fans and led to appearances on the folk circuit, including the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival. She passed away in southern California in 1980, at the age of 77. Remember the name: Cousin Emmy — a powerful personality and hillbilly star.
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Photo Credit: Dottie West courtesy Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum; Gail Davies courtesy of the artist; Donna Ulisse courtesy of Turnberry Records.
The music release cycle marches on, bringing us to our first premiere roundup of March!
Below you’ll find new tracks and videos from artists like Big Love Car Wash, who take us on a tour of our collective subconscious with a bluegrassy-folky track, “Dream Journal.” Plus, mandolinist Danny Roberts – who you may know from The Grascals – pays tribute to two of his mandolin heroes with his new instrumental, “Lawson Sizemore.” And Dallas Ugly bemoan a bit too much indulgence and “sweets” with “Sugar Crash,” a deliciously saccharine number produced by Justin Frances from their upcoming album, See Me Now.
Country rocker Joel Timmons returns to his recent release, Psychedelic Surf Country, with a lyric video that tells the story of his dad burning piles of Christmas trees on “Just a Man,” complete with vintage 8mm family footage. Don’t miss singer-songwriter Grayson Jenkins turning over aging, mortality, and the constants of life on “Taxes & Time” with a charming video and a clean honky-tonk sound.
It’s all right here on BGS! Scroll for more, because You Gotta Hear This.
Big Love Car Wash, “Dream Journal”
Artist:Big Love Car Wash Hometown: Austin, Texas Song: “Dream Journal” Album:Daydream Release Date: March 14, 2025 (single); June 6, 2025 (album)
In Their Words: “For me, ‘Dream Journal’ is about a fork in the road, about making a pivotal decision. The decision that inspired this song was between attending law school and dedicating myself to music. At its heart though, ‘Dream Journal’ is about really listening to yourself. When you’re dreaming peacefully, where are you?” – David Rabinowicz, songwriter, guitar, lead vocals
Track Credits: David Rabinowicz – Guitar, lead vocals, songwriter Sol Chase – Mandolin, harmony vocals Everett Wren – Fiddle, shaker Taylor Turner – Double bass Joseph Holguin, Arlyn Studios – Recording, mixing engineer Andrew Oedel – Mastering engineer
Dallas Ugly, “Sugar Crash”
Artist:Dallas Ugly Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Sugar Crash” Album:See Me Now Release Date: March 6, 2025 (single); April 18, 2025 (album)
In Their Words: “This song was inspired by the reliability of a low showing up after a high, specifically in a romantic setting. You know if you keep playing with fire you’re going to get burned, but it’s just so much fun. Besides, even when things are going well, falling for someone is a mix of fear and excitement. Sonically, we wanted to make this a sweet little candy bop and our producer, Justin Francis, nailed it with the warbley synth sounds he added. We also went for some cheekier arrangement choices to just really drive the playful aspect home. Hope this little twangy, twee song makes you dance!” – Libby Weitnauer
In Their Words: “‘Taxes & Time’ spilled out onto my notebook page early one morning after a restless night of sleep spent on an air mattress at a family member’s house. Nine times out of ten, those things go flat in the middle of the night – no fault to my hosts. This time, though, it also happened to be in the middle of the pandemic and one of the first times I had left home and my own bed in many months. I woke up at 5:00 am or so thinking about my grandfather, including a very distinct memory from my childhood of someone saying something to the effect of, ‘Papaw doesn’t travel outside of this many miles from home, because he has to get back to sleep in his bed.’ In about five minutes, I’d written the whole song with no melody or instrumentation in mind. This all happened around the time I turned 30 and it was cathartic to put my thoughts on paper about getting older, feeling and looking older, and thinking about what the important things in my life should be moving forward.” – Grayson Jenkins
Track Credits: Grayson Jenkins – Songwriting, acoustic guitar, vocals Paddy Ryan – Drums Aaron Boehler – Bass Jesse Aycock – Dobro Fats Kaplin – Fiddle Kevin Gordon – Backing vocals
Danny Roberts, “Lawson Sizemore”
Artist:Danny Roberts Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee Song: “Lawson Sizemore” Release Date: March 7, 2025 Label: Mountain Home Music Company
In Their Words: “While I was putting together songs for this record I knew that I wanted to salute two of my favorite mandolin players – Doyle Lawson and Herschel Sizemore. Both of these men not only had an impact on me musically, but personally as well, and I wanted to pay tribute to them by writing a song that would show their influence on my playing and ‘Lawson Sizemore’ is it. I really enjoyed writing this tune and I hope I did two of my mandolin heroes justice with ‘Lawson Sizemore.'” – Danny Roberts
Track Credits: Danny Roberts – Mandolin Andrea Roberts – Bass Tony Wray – Acoustic guitar, banjo Jimmy Mattingly – Fiddle
Joel Timmons, “Just A Man”
Artist:Joel Timmons Hometown: Folly Beach, SC Song: “Just a Man” Album:Psychedelic Surf Country Release Date: February 7, 2025 (album); March 7, 2025(video)
In Their Words: “‘Just a Man’ is the true story of my early childhood introduction to pyromania. The lyrics tell the story (fairly accurately) of my father gathering a pile of Christmas trees in our backyard and setting it on fire, nearly burning down our house and neighborhood. Woven through this humorous recollection is the realization that my dad is ‘just a man.’ Though he seemed like a flame-wielding mythical god to me as a little boy, he was full of his own dreams, doubts, questions, hubris, and fears. I edited together the lyric video with some vintage 8mm movie film footage that my mother shot. The final result feels like an intimate home movie night and it’s a visual love letter to my dear dad, Clyde. The recording features fantastic fiddling from another sweet man that I love, Jason Carter.” – Joel Timmons
Video Credits: Videography by Carlin Timmons. Edited by Joel Timmons.
Photo Credit: Danny Roberts by Sandlin Gaither; Dallas Ugly by Betsy Phillips.
Jacob Ware is a bit of a weirdo. Known onstage these days as Rapt, the singer-songwriter has a way of coming up with an album title and writing the entire record around a central sentiment. His fifth studio album – titled Until the Light Takes Us – serves as a direct response to a 2008 heavy metal documentary of the same name.
“I just thought, Until the Light Takes Us is such an evocative title. A few people have commented on that over the years as being unhinged – that I come up with the album name first and then write the album,” he says, adding that the documentary details “all the horrible shit in the ’90s of the black metal scene in Norway.”
From the gentle trickle of one-minute opener “Over Aged Borders” to the dreamy “Fields of Juniper,” Rapt’s latest album drenches in the notion of endings and existence. Heartbreak. Death. Suffocating blackness. Each song, as heavy as it might be, seems to coat the album with both dark and light – stemming from his confrontation with the end.
Rapt’s delicately-spun indie-folk is awash in luminescent piano, aching between flaky layers of acoustic guitar. Ware finds himself scattering like a tumble weed, squeezed somewhere between the throaty ache of Carrie Elkin and scratchy pangs of yearning (akin to Bonny Light Horseman in their rawest form). His head swims in thoughts of death, leading his writing to root around in the afterlife. It’s a far cry from his heavy metal days, a sharp red underline to this chapter of his life. “I’m always slightly aware of mortality because I’ve had a lot of health issues, in my teenage years and early twenties, like epilepsy. It’s wild. It pulls the rug out from under your life daily, and you don’t know when the next seizures come in,” he says.
“I haven’t had a seizure for eight years now, so I’m blessed. But that shapes you on a subconscious level,” he adds. “It sets up your foundation to be ready for the next thing to happen. In a way, the next thing that happens is an end of something, so I think my subconscious has always thought about the finality of things. That’s probably where that sort of writing interest has come from. In a way, every single song I’ve ever written is about that. I don’t really know how to move away from that.”
Hopping on a Zoom call, Ware spoke with BGS about the afterlife, how the album grew, and the varied creative fulfillment compared to heavy metal music.
Does writing around a title help you stay focused on what you want the album to be?
Rapt: I think so. I’ve definitely done this where I write that phrase and put it up around wherever I’m living. Even if I’m not listening to music, I’ll walk past the album title a few times a day. The edge of my wardrobe is visible and the title I’m responding to now is written on it. One of the last things I look at at night and one of the first things I wake up to in the morning is… I don’t want to reveal it.
[Until the Light Takes Us] is not a breakup record by any means. I’ve noticed a few bits of press here and there, which may have lent it to being that, but it absolutely isn’t that. I feel like a completely different person to my music. I don’t relate to my own music. I would say it’s an album of endings, really. More so than a sort of breakup album. By the time I’ve finished one thing, something else is usually well on its way. And it’s always been like that for me.
What is your feeling about the afterlife?
I tried to look into religions a few years ago, but I have no faith system. I was brought up in a house without a faith system. It’s very hard for someone to start to believe in something unless it was in their very formative years from a caregiver. I expressed it in the title track. I’ve always thought that the afterlife is a sort of peaceful black. I have a sneaky suspicion that the afterlife is a hell of a lot like what it was like before we were born. I quite like to imagine this sort of sizzle reel, where you hang out with your highlights. That’s what I hope is going on.
Science doesn’t ask, science doesn’t answer everything. There are things that science gets pretty fucking close. But there are things that science can’t touch. I try and be mindful of that; I would call myself an agnostic. I think being 100 percent atheist is actually ignorant. We don’t know – we’re 99.9 percent sure. There’s just that 0.1 percent that I think is worth thinking about sometimes.
That’s touched on in the title track. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know that I’ll see my neighbor and my loved ones. I like to think that there’s a highlight reel. And that’s it, really. I’m talking about this as if I planned to write it. I didn’t. It’s the only successful time I’ve ever managed to just write something without thinking about it and letting my subconscious go. I cannot just open my subconscious.
I find lyric writing takes me months. The title track probably took a year to write. Very occasionally, I can get half a song written in an afternoon, but that happens about once every three years. The song “Until the Light Takes Us” is quite insular, and it’s almost says everything that you could say within a song about the afterlife.
“Until the Light Takes Us” is one of the seven-minute songs on the album. Did you have that intention or did it sort of grow by itself?
I just think I couldn’t make it any shorter. I don’t think I really tried to fight it being seven minutes, but I’m sure that there’s been a longer version of it. I just whittled it down and down, until I couldn’t whittle it down without doing it disservice. And I knew it would suffer for that. I just think that song is destined to be heard when it’s needed.
With endings, there’s always grief. Does that grief still linger with you or has songwriting helped you exorcise that?
That’s hard to answer for me, because I don’t recognize the human that wrote a lot of the songs. I think it might be an epilepsy thing. The medication I take for epilepsy gives me very odd memory and I remember weird little things. I have no memory of so much of my life, and I mean that in the present, as well. The word “remember,” if I really think about that, it’s just like a blur of things. I don’t remember things vividly.
One big thing for me is I cannot paint images in my head. If I shut my eyes and try and picture my best friend’s facial features or a partner’s facial features, or even a fucking apple, at best it’s a Van Gogh-looking painting, so I think it’s quite hard for me to answer that question.
I’m sure it does happen on a subconscious level. I’m sure I do successfully process things through creativity, but it doesn’t help that much. I’ve still got my shit in my head, but a lot of the record is very positive for me. I had depression up until my mid-twenties. I don’t have it anymore. I just don’t. I think life is a beautiful thing. And I think there’s a lot of positive in the record. I think it’s a very odd record in that it’s not… I don’t think it’s depressing and negative. “Until the Light Takes Us” is a positive song. It starts and ends with a letter to myself.
That song is about growing apart from someone because you bonded with them through a shared depression and when one of you isn’t depressed anymore, that bond breaks. That’s what that song is about. But all of this is hindsight. I wrote this in 2022 to 2023. So this all feels very considered and fucking artistic and it’s not. I’m just looking back and trying to work out what the fuck was I was thinking.
Now that you’ve been sitting with the album for a while, what is your takeaway from the creative process?
I guess, just to trust my instincts. I didn’t write it consciously… I think, in a way, I never cared about this record, because I had a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. This was just me keeping the engine going creatively, and then I turned around one day and had a record done. I didn’t know what it was about at the time. I sat on it for a year until I was ready to release it. My biggest takeaway is probably just I don’t fucking care anymore. Just don’t overthink it. If I had to give a tagline to that question: I’m too old to make it as a fucking fresh-faced person and I’m too young to be wise.
I’m right in the middle and when you’re stuck in the middle, you either quit or you just don’t care anymore. And I think I’m in the “don’t care anymore” phase. I’m not going anywhere. The only other takeaway is that I’m not going to do an album for a while. I never thought I’d say that, but I’m going to just do singles for the next two years. I say that, but I’m excited. It feels liberating. When you’re in album land, you’re there at least a year and a half. It’s interesting. I think that might change my writing a bit because I’m not trying to fit a song into a collection of songs.
With your past work being metal, how does the creative fulfillment differ from your current style?
I think metal is very good for connecting with people’s frustrations in life. And it’s good anger management shit. When you’re playing some real heavy fucking music and you slow it right down and you get a groove going, then you look up and the audience are like throwing each other around the room. There’s something cool about that. I think the biggest difference with metal is that the ceiling is a lot lower and reachable with metal. And I think there’s something really special about that.
My biggest thing I enjoy is my audience is far wider in this genre. Metal is very male-dominated and you get used to just looking up mostly at a room full of dudes, beards, and black shirts head banging long hair. And that’s great. That’s a beautiful thing. But I think I slightly prefer the more diverse crowd that I’ve played to. My last thing is also the age thing. There’s a huge age range in the people that turn up at the shows I play now. And that’s a really beautiful thing as well. In France, I had a very elderly lady come up to me and she said, “‘Fields of Juniper’ made me think about something I’ve not thought about in 50 years.” If there’s a reason to keep going, then that’s it.
Rose Cousins is nothing if not intentional. With her new album Conditions of Love – Vol 1 (out March 14), Cousins demonstrates a controlled discipline as she considers the most unruly of our emotions. The JUNO award-winning artist is a student of love, from the sweet certainty of “One Love” from her 2016 album If You Were For Me to the entirety of her 2017 masterpiece Natural Conclusion to “The Agreement,” a consideration of the liberties and drawbacks of a long-distance open relationship from her most recent prior full-length project, Bravado.
Over the years, Cousins has honed her approach to her craft as carefully as her music, even taking a five-year break between albums to recover from burn out and focus on songwriting over performance. That commitment to her art is just one small part of what has earned Cousins the recognition of being named BGS’ Artist of the Month.
Conditions kicks off with “To Be Born,” an instrumental channeling of the rural Prince Edward Island where Cousins grew up. Buzzing wonderment introduces us to a song cycle of love in all its forms: romantic, platonic, a sense of one-ness with the universe – and what causes them to grow and die. At the beginning of it all, Cousins tells us, is that sense of wondrous possibility.
“I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard)” harbors a desire that Cousins hinted in a 2012 interview with No Depression – a fascination with songs that are upbeat and poppy, but communicate something serious. The song is a catchy thesis statement for this album: that as much we depend on our bonds with others to survive, we crave our individual freedoms and yearn for balance.
I know in love it’s hard to be Everything that someone else could ever need While holding onto “wild and free”
Wild and free Wild and free Wild and free Wild and free
But there are certain types of love that require obligation. “Needed You” weaves bitterness and compassion together with the opening salvo,
Yeah I turned out fine It’s what we do I spent my time looking for clues So I became a wishing well And I don’t need water Is what I tell myself
In this moving piano ballad, Cousins considers both the person she’s become and the inner child who needed nurturing. While the song seeks to find reconciliation between that vulnerable inner core and the people in our past who make us lock that core away, the song also invites us to empathize with the legacies of intergenerational trauma that can lead to a family’s failure to meet a child’s emotional needs. It’s an astonishing track, one that efficiently wraps years of therapy into four minutes.
“Denouement” is even more precise – an airy collection of word associations that invite us to fill in the blanks in the arc of a relationship.
Happenstance Vast expanse Circumstance Second glance Take a chance New romance Take my hand Can I have this dance
Cousins’ abstraction is delightful, a wry acknowledgment of how cliche love can be, even as we revel in its glorious highs (and pray that the lows stay away as long as possible – forever, ideally.) But the cycle eventually starts again – after all, we’re only human – and the dance can feel as familiar as it does wondrous.
That feeling extends to another shade of love: gratitude. “Borrowed Light” asks us to reflect on the ways we connect with everything around us, and to appreciate the all-too-brief length of time we have to experience it.
I am borrowing light From the moon, who is borrowing light From the sun who comes back every time Every time
“Borrowed Light” is anchored by a questing piano line, an instrument that Cousins feels is her first love. As the instrument – a 1967 Baldwin grand that Cousins and long-time collaborator/producer Joshua Van Tassel fell in love with immediately – traverses the cosmos, Cousins is buttressed by a backing chorus momentarily, sublimely, at the song’s apex.
Conditions of Love – Vol 1 doesn’t offer many answers and, of course, the title hints at further dives into the topic. However, Cousins does offer one example of how to live, a waltz dedicated to her late friend and colleague, Koady Chaisson, “K’s Waltz.”
Your heart It did not give out or give in It gave everything It gave everything It gave everything It gave everything
As hard as it is, Cousins begs us to be as open as possible, to feel all of it – love and joy, yes, but also grief at partings that are inevitable, no matter what. It’s only when we push through our defenses to embrace radical openness, when we “give everything,” that we can say we have lived well.
We are so very excited to name Rose Cousins our March 2025 Artist of the Month. Dive into our exclusive interview with Rose all about the new album here, listen to Rose in conversation with her longtime friend Edie Carey on Basic Folk here, explore our Essential Rose Cousins Playlist below, and follow along on social media all month long as we go back into the BGS archives for anything and everything Rose Cousins.
Artist: Amy Irving Hometown: San Francisco, California Latest Album: Always Will Be (out April 25, 2025)
What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?
I’ve been an actor all my life. I began on this new path, making music with the band GOOLIS, a few years back. And I’ve been learning so much from them, especially our band leader Jules David Bartkowski.
I remember going into the studio to record our sophomore album, Always Will Be, and Jules suggested I improvise some. Well, let me tell you, as an actress, I had been traumatized in acting school improv class. I was never comfortable acting without a script. I’ve always considered my gift was in interpreting playwrights’ words. So, when I sang, I followed the notes exactly. But Jules and Aaron, our keyboardist, insisted that I try. I complained my mistakes would be so loud and they replied, “Oh yeah, Amy, we never make mistakes here.” Okay, I got it. I did it. And now you can’t keep me down on the farm.
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
Before every show, after sound check, I retreat to my dressing room, to meditate and rest my voice. It’s a time to conserve my energy. I eat some protein that will not talk to me on the stage. Half a beta blocker keeps my hands from shaking. I do a vocal warmup, either alone with a taped class or over FaceTime with my wonderful vocal coach, Celeste Simone. Gabriel Barreto, my son and manager and record producer and photographer, then digs his elbows into my tight shoulders. When it’s five minutes to showtime, I usually run to the bathroom and have to throw up (yes, I get terrible stage fright), knock back a shot of tequila, then Jules leads us all in an exercise of shaking all the tension from each part of our bodies.
Genre is dead (long live genre!), but how would you describe the genres and styles your music inhabits?
Working with bandleader Jules is a thrill, because our music covers so many genres, once he decides on his arrangements. He has taken the songs of Willie Nelson and transformed them from punk rock to samba.
Broadly speaking, Jules was going for a kind of golden age of mid- to late-century global pop/rock approach. To offer a more specific example: the first song of the record Always Will Be, “Dream Come True,” was, for Jules, an attempt to channel 1960s Italian rock acts like Mina and Adriano Celentano, while throwing in some Vegas-style late Elvis maximalism and some doo-wop baritone sax. On the song “Getting Over You,” he was trying to find an intersection between The Clash and The Supremes. On “Everywhere I Go” he was trying to mix the Mexican influence of the original with the connected worlds of Klezmer and Balkan music and 1970s Ethiopian jazz.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
I’d like to eat foie gras and fig jam on a baguette with a glass of pinot noir while Édith Piaf sings to me “Non, je ne regrette rien.”
Does pineapple really belong on pizza?
I think anything goes. I remember a long time ago when Wolfgang Puck first opened Spagos on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, I was appalled to see “Jewish Pizza” on the menu. Well, it was smoked salmon and cream cheese pizza and I’m here to tell you it was delicious!
Photo Credit: Gabriel Barreto
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