Tag: guitar

The Inspirations and Issues Behind Molly Tuttle’s ‘City of Gold’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Over the course of her lifelong career in bluegrass, Americana and roots music, we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing and connecting with Grammy Award winner Molly Tuttle on quite a few occasions. When we selected Tuttle and her band, Golden Highway, as our Artist of the Month, we wanted to open a space to discuss her career and music in a fresh light – and we could think of no better context for such a conversation than Basic Folk. 

We asked Basic Folk podcast hosts Cindy Howes and Lizzie No – who featured Tuttle on the show once prior, in 2022 – to sit back down with the International Folk Award and Americana Award winner to discuss her brand new album, City of Gold, and to dig deeper into the creative output of this buzzworthy guitar player, songwriter, and business woman. 

Watch for the full podcast episode to drop later this month, but for now enjoy these excerpts from Cindy and Lizzie’s conversation with Molly Tuttle. 

Cindy Howes: Molly Tuttle, welcome to Basic Folk again. It’s so great to have you back on the podcast. 

Molly Tuttle: Thank you so much for having me back. It’s great to be here with you guys.

CH: Before we start our interview, I want to set the tone for our conversation. Molly Tuttle is being highlighted as Bluegrass Situations’ Artist of the Month, which is so awesome. The tone of our interview today is LYLAS. Do you know what LYLAS is?

Lizzie No: It’s spelled L-Y-L-A-S.

MT: LYLAS. Okay. I don’t know that.

LN: What it means is: “Love you like a sister.”

CH: Oh yeah. So we are total LYLAS. This is like a fun trip to the mall. This is like a really fun cruise around the harbor with your gal pals.

MT: Oh my gosh, that’s so fun. Well, it’s perfect because I’m actually in a hotel outside of Missoula. And there’s a strip mall nearby. So shopping has been on my mind today. Great.

CH: We’ll all get mani pedis together.

LN: Yes. French tip.

CH: So, when approaching the writing on City of Gold, you asked yourself, “How do I tell my story through bluegrass?” Which I can relate to, as somebody who’s sort of tried to distance themselves from folk music for a really long time. And now I am fully leaning into it. So, I take [it as] you asking that question of yourself, like “How can I fit my Molly Tuttle-ness into a world that can be rigid, patriarchal, and maybe different from what you stand for.” So how true is that? And how have these songs helped you take control of the bluegrass narrative and tradition?

MT: I think that’s something I’ve always kind of struggled with. I remember when I first started writing songs, I just thought, “I don’t know how to write a bluegrass song.” I can write a song, but they never ended up sounding like bluegrass to me and I just didn’t feel like my story fit into the bluegrass narrative of the songs that I grew up singing. 

I always loved songwriters like Hazel Dickens, who wrote bluegrass songs from a woman’s perspective, wrote songs about the struggles that she had as a woman in the music industry and as a working woman, and songs about workers’ rights and things she believed in. I grew up with two really strong role models, Laurie Lewis and Kathy Kallick, out in the Bay Area. I remember early on I would go out to [Kathy Kallick’s] house and she would make me tea and listen to my songs. She always told me that when she was first getting started writing bluegrass songs, she kind of felt the same way as me. Like, maybe her story didn’t belong in the genre. But she met Bill Monroe, and he encouraged her, “Don’t try to write a song that sounds like a song I would have written, write a song from your own perspective.” 

So she wrote a song called “Broken Tie” about her parents getting a divorce. She said every time she was at a festival with Bill Monroe, he specifically requested that song. That was an inspiring story to me. But when I started writing songs for Crooked Tree, it was suddenly like a floodgate opened. I think I just found my people to write with, found my groove, and ended up with a collection of songs that kind of told my story, [told] about things I believed in, and [told] my family history and personal experiences. And then other songs that were just, you know, from a woman’s perspective, or from a perspective that I resonate with. 

For [City of Gold], it was fun to kind of continue that and also expand it to be songs that I felt like were inspired by my band members, or inspired by experiences we’d had on the road. This felt more like a collective vision in a way.

LN: Okay, let’s talk about Crooked Tree. The title track from your last record was partly inspired by your experience living with alopecia. You’ve said that as a kid you would wear hats and then wigs, and then you learned to talk about your wig. Eventually, you started to get more comfortable going without. Now that you’re touring with Golden Highway a ton, you sometimes take your wig off when you play that song, which is such a powerful moment of joy, courage, and vulnerability. As a performer, I can relate to those moments where you bring a little bit extra of yourself and you share a part of yourself that you might normally keep private. How do you get to that right mood? How do you gauge if the crowd is like the right crowd to share about your alopecia experience?

MT: It’s also based on how I’m feeling. I took off my wig a few times last year. But I didn’t do it as much as maybe I wanted to, or maybe I should have, just because I wasn’t always sure what to say. I’ve had so many experiences of trying to explain alopecia to people and they still think I’m sick or still feel bad for me. And it’s so hard sometimes to put it in words that aren’t going to bring the mood down at the show, you know, I want people to be having a good time. I want it to be this fun, inspiring moment, not a moment where people can go, “I feel so bad for you.”

Recently, I performed and told my whole story [for] a keynote speech at this alopecia conference out in Denver, Colorado. I think that was such an important step for me. Just getting to share my story and reflect on the pain of growing up having this really visible difference, but also like, the joy and why it’s so important to me to share that with others and share the message that it’s okay to be different. It’s okay to be a “Crooked Tree.” This last weekend, we played in Michigan, and I did take off my wig and I felt like I finally nailed what I said and the perfect mood. Everyone was cheering and it was just a moment of celebration. I think I’m gonna just continue doing that more and more, but I find that it’s so helpful for me to check in with the alopecia community and feel that support from other people who know exactly how I feel. That makes me feel confident to share my message with the world and maybe sometimes be like, “I don’t care how it’s received, maybe I’m not sure how it’s gonna be received, but I’m going to do it anyway.” That just comes with time. And I guess I’ve had to grow kind of a thick skin. It used to be a lot harder for me.

CH: The new album, City of Gold, the songs were mostly written by you and your partner Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. What is the writing process like with you and Ketch? Like, how do you bring out the best in each other’s writing?

MT: We’re both quite different writers. He’s very fast paced. He throws out ideas and lines. [While I’ll] think it over. I’m kind of more internal. I think about the lines. We balance each other out in a way where I might think a lot about what exactly we are saying, and then he’s good. If I get stuck on something, [he can] kind of keep it moving. But our writing process is always different. It’s nice, because we’re together a lot. So we can write in a lot of different circumstances. Some of the songs we wrote in the car, like on a road trip, just throwing lines back and forth. Maybe he’d be driving, I’d be writing the lines on my phone. Maybe we’re talking about something at home or listening to music and sitting down with instruments, kind of more the conventional way of writing. I find it so hard to fit writing into my life, especially when I’m on tour and I’m on the go so much. [It’s so nice that] we got into a groove with it, where we were just doing it all the time, and it felt more naturally intertwined into my day-to-day life.

LN: The bluegrass community was a huge source of inspiration for you. Of this record, you said, “One of the things I love most about this music is how so much of the audience plays music as well.” And that you hope that people will sing along and maybe play those songs with their friends, almost like we’re all a part of one great big family. Now, how do you walk the line of making a sophisticated, bitchin’ bluegrass record, while keeping it simple enough for others who might not be musical geniuses to play along?

MT: The beauty of bluegrass music is that most of the songs have like three or four chords. You can play them really simple, you can just strum along and play as slow as you want. Beginner bluegrass musicians might go to a jam of people at the same level as them and play these songs in a lot simpler of a way. Then, as you get better and better you can play it faster, you can play more complicated solos, you can really play with the dynamics. There are infinite ways to make the songs more and more complex and sophisticated as you progress in your musical abilities. 

On City of Gold, I did kind of stray away from that “three chords and the truth” format a little more than I did on my last record. It was fun, because we were working on these arrangements as a band, which was a lot different process than I’ve ever done before in the studio. I’ve always gone in with my songs and gathered musicians that I don’t normally play with on the road – studio musicians. I have a lot of my bluegrass heroes on the record, and you’re kind of learning the songs and playing them by a chart, but for this album, we really took the time to develop more complicated arrangements and add in new sections that stray away from the key. These songs are a little less accessible to the standard bluegrass jam. But I think there’s still a few that people could learn to play at any level.

• • •

CH: Okay, now we’re going to talk specifically about some of the songs on the new album, City of Gold, starting with the first song, “El Dorado.” Right now I am rewatching Deadwood, so I am super into this song. As a kid, you took a field trip to Coloma, the site of California’s first gold strike and it was the first time you heard about the legendary El Dorado, the City of Gold. In the song you sing, “El Dorado, city of gold, city of fools.” You said, “Just like gold fever, music has always captivated me.” So who are the characters in the song – like gold rush Kate from the Golden State – and how do you connect with these fools?

MT: I wrote the song with Ketch and I don’t know [exactly] how it came about… [But I told him,] when I was a kid, every school would send the kids off to gold country. You’d go to different places. The person who taught my class how to pan for gold, for some reason I have like a very vivid memory of him. He had this gold nugget on a chain around his neck and he showed us how to pan for gold. He was like, “You might find a flake of gold, but if you find an actual nugget of gold, we’re not gonna let you keep that, you have to give it back to us.” [Laughs] I remember being like, I really want to find like a nugget of gold and just squirrel it away and not tell this guy about it. So that kind of stuck with me. 

CH: Literally every kid in your class thought that!

MT: Yeah! Like, we’re gonna strike it rich at this goldmine!

We were kind of doing some research on Coloma and found that it’s in El Dorado County. That seemed like a good place to start with a song just inspired by that character, but also thinking about all these characters who came together and we’re all trying to strike it rich. I feel like that is such a theme in our society. You know, we have these like little, mini gold rushes – everyone being like, “This is the next big thing. We’re all going to make so much money off of this.” But for me, I didn’t get into music thinking this is gonna make me rich, but it is something I’ve chased after for many years now.

CH: What do you think is the current gold rush? Is it dispensaries? Vape stores?

MT: The thing that just popped into my head, it’s a couple years old, maybe like a year past its prime, is crypto currency. I think I don’t know where that stands. But I think we’re a little bit past that.

• • •

LN:  The second track on this album is “Where Did All the Wild Things Go?” Which is a song about gentrification’s corrosive effect on the character of once-vibrant neighborhoods nationwide – which I can very much relate to living in Brooklyn. I’d love to hear about your neighborhood where you live now. Is there a specific tradition or neighborhood institution or restaurant or store that is so special about your neighborhood? That you’re passionate about preserving? And how are you and your neighbors trying to keep your neighborhood weird and wild?

MT: Well, my neighborhood is East Nashville, and before I got there, it was totally different. It’s just in constant flux. It really changed so much when we had the tornado hit [in 2020] that took out tons of the local businesses that never returned. A lot of people moved out. The pandemic just kind of sped all of that up. Coming out of lockdown I was like, “Whoa, this is so different. Like, where do I even live anymore?”

I don’t really know how to answer how I’m trying to preserve it. I feel like I’m living in a different city every time I come back from tour, basically. Nashville’s always changing, just constantly growing, so many businesses are moving here. I do feel like there’s this constant sense of everyone missing the old Nashville. I don’t think that I was even around for the like “old Nashville” as many people who grew up in the city know it. So maybe I’m part of the problem in a way, really. I moved there just eight years ago…

• • •

CH: The next thing we want to talk about is “San Joaquin,” a new, old-style railroad song. There’s such a romance surrounding trains in song. You’ve always loved singing about trains. There is that long tradition of trains and folk songs. What do you think it is about trains that have captured artists’ hearts since they’ve been around?

MT: I think as artists, especially as musicians, we kind of have this roving spirit, where we want to see the world, we want to travel. I feel like a lot of musicians, myself included, we romanticize trains as this early way of getting across the country. And still, you’ll see musicians from time to time doing a train tour. Of course you have buskers who might hop on a train across the country and play all over the place. Now, I’ve never done that, but I think it’s just this thing that’s romanticized, especially by musicians. I’ve always loved singing [train songs]. There’s so many bluegrass train songs, but I didn’t know a specifically California bluegrass train song, so I felt like it was time to write one.

CH: What’s your favorite train song?

MT: That’s such a good question. The first one that popped into my head was Larry Sparks’ song, “I’d Like To Be A Train.” He doesn’t just want to ride a train. He wants to be a train.

• • •

CH: The song “Next Rodeo” you say, “…Reflects the miles I’ve put in with my band, Golden Highway, which has clocked in well over 100 shows.” That’s in the press release, so it’s probably 200+ shows at this point, and we’ll give a shout out to Bronwyn Keith-Hynes. Let me know if I’m mispronouncing anyone’s name–

MT: We have so many nicknames for Bronwyn in the band. We saw a YouTube comment on one of our videos where I introduce her and someone said, “What’s the fiddle player’s name? I couldn’t catch that.” Someone wrote “Ron Winky Pies.” We often call her Ron Winky Pies.

CH: Yes, that sounds right. Well, she is a hell of a fiddler. Also Dominick Leslie on the mandolin, Shelby Means on bass, and Kyle Tuttle, who is playing banjo. Can you talk about the ease and connection you feel with Golden Highway? What’s the feeling that you get when you’re on stage – and, when did it start gelling for everyone?

MT: After I made Crooked Tree, first I started thinking about who I wanted to take the songs on the road with. On the record I had the band name Golden Highway, but I didn’t actually have a band yet, so it’s kind of funny. I did it in reverse a little bit. 

Dominick played on the whole record. I called him and I was like, “Hey, do you want to play with me next year?” And he said yes. So I had one band member. I was just trying to fill in the rest of the band thinking like, “Who’s gonna bring the most personality to this project? Who’s gonna bring a unique voice?” The whole record was all about being who you are, [about] individuality. I wanted to choose people who I felt like their personalities really shine through – and their music and their playing and their stage presence.

I got my dream band. We’ve all been friends in one way or another for like the past decade, so it was a cool experience. I’ve never had that before where I have this band in my head, I imagine the people playing together, and then it happens and it’s better than I could have imagined. It felt really cool. In the past I’ve had wonderful bandmates, but it’s never been this kind of brainchild where I’m trying to concoct my dream bluegrass band that will have this unique personality to it. 

We all got together and everyone already knew each other and already played together in different configurations just through the bluegrass scene over the years. It all kind of started gelling really quickly. Our first couple shows we’re just kind of like, “Wow, this is something special!”

• • •

CH: We do want to ask a question about Jerry Douglas, who co-produced the record with you and is the master of the Dobro. How has your relationship with him as a producer shaped how you think about your own recordings?

MT:  On this record, especially on “Stranger Things,” I just felt like I needed to hear him play on it. We had this funny thing we’d say in the studio, “Make us AKUS” – make us Alison Krauss and Union Station – cause they’re like our heroes. [Laughs]

When we got to that song we’re like, “We need that iconic Jerry Douglas dobro part.” It’s such a spooky song and he just knows how to accompany a song [like that] so well and that’s part of why I felt like he was the dream producer. He understands the musicianship side of things. He’s such a master of his instrument, but then he also has this deep connection to songs and vocalists and just knows exactly what to play behind the vocal.

That’s something I really kind of leaned on him for, just getting the best performance out of everyone, instrumentally. He has just the greatest ear. He hears a pitchy note here or like a wrong note there and really pushes everyone to do their best performance, but then he also has this side of him that’s extremely tasteful and he knows how to get behind a song and not overpower it.

LN: I want to talk about “Down Home Dispensary,” which is such a fun song. I’m fascinated by the way you’ve framed this issue, which is very hot in the news… legalizing marijuana. The way it’s framed in “Down Home Dispensary” is like a very fun political pitch about how Southern culture can evolve and is evolving. Why did you feel it was really important to frame this as a “Down Home Dispensary?” And do you notice an evolution in the way that Southerners and your audiences, more broadly, are relating to marijuana use? 

MT: I think like the South is still the holdout. It’s not legal in most places in the South, but I feel like it’s become almost a bipartisan issue, where people are getting behind it. We play it and we’ve been playing it live and people are cheering no matter who they are. They’re like cheering for the “Down Home Dispensary,” because it’s this thing that’s become normalized in our society, but it still is technically not legal. That was one that Ketch and I originally wrote to be an Old Crow [Medicine Show] song and then they didn’t cut it. It’s so much fun!

CH: It’s sort of like a book end to “Big Backyard.” The world can be your down home dispensary, your  backyard. You can make home and freedom anywhere. 

MT: I thought it was like a funny angle to to go about it. You’re talking to a politician and just being like, you should really do this, because you’re gonna make a lot of money like this is in your best interest.

LN: How has living and working in Tennessee changed how you see your responsibilities as a feminist artist?

MT: I’m confronted with things in Tennessee that I never imagined would happen. Where I live, abortion is not legal in Tennessee at all, it was one of the first states to basically ban it for any reason.

That was really like a dark moment in our history as a country to just be going backwards completely. It’s something that I’ve feared since I was a teenage girl, like, what if this got taken away? And what if I couldn’t make decisions for my body? I can’t [access this healthcare] in the state where I live, I could maybe travel somewhere else if needed, but who knows if [someone else] could. They could make it more and more impossible to have access to this. It just breaks my heart for all the people who now don’t have that choice and don’t have the privilege of being able to go somewhere where they can get this health service.

[When writing “Goodbye Mary”] I was thinking about a story my mom told me growing up of my grandmother, whose name was Mary. She had a friend who was in an abusive relationship and she wanted to leave this relationship, but she ended up getting pregnant. So my grandmother and her friend, she would push her friend down the stairs, they would try anything to get rid of the baby. It’s a really, really dark story. But it’s somewhere that we’re going again, as a nation. When we were writing it, we were talking about my grandmother. That’s not something that happened to my grandmother personally, but it’s something that her generation had to deal with.

LN: I think it’s so important to link abortion access to women’s experiences of intimate partner violence. A lot of people who claim to be pro-life don’t want to admit that access to abortion is also access to freedom and the ability to leave an abusive situation. It’s just one more way of actually having freedom in your own body. That’s a really powerful story. It’s just so important, I think, for musicians to be talking about this issue, especially those of us that live in Nashville or are working in country and folk and bluegrass.

MT: It’s really scary to talk about, I was so scared to put that song on my record. Jerry was the one who was like, “We have to.” It was his favorite song. He was like, “If we’re gonna record one song, it needs to be this one.” And I was like, “I’m scared.”

This issue is one I care about so deeply. And it’s one of the most important social issues to me. But it’s also like, you get kind of the most backlash for it.

LN: Have you played this live yet? 

MT: We haven’t, no. We’ve worked it up. And once the record is out, I think we will start playing it. But we haven’t tried it live yet.

LN: You got this. 

MT: Yeah, totally. Thank you. 

LN: Thank you. Thank you for this telling this story. I think that the bluegrass community needs to hear it and the world needs to hear it. I think it’s really important.

• • •

(Editor’s Note: This conversation has been abridged and lightly edited for flow and grammar. Cindy Howes’ and Lizzie No’s full Basic Folk conversation featuring Molly Tuttle will be available next week on BGS – or wherever you get podcasts.)

Photo Credit: Chelsea Rochelle

WATCH: Amanda Fields & Megan McCormick, “Wild As A Flower”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Amanda Fields and Megan McCormick
Hometown: Madison, Tennessee
Song: “Wild As A Flower”

In Their Words: “We started writing ‘Wild As A Flower’ almost two years ago, not knowing how the story that the song reflected would progress. After we lost one of our beloved animals in January, we were finally able to finish the song. It’s been refreshing to allow ourselves to explore new territories in our songwriting together, especially the spiritual elements that come up often in our conversations — we get pretty deep into the existential a lot of times and it’s opened up our writing a lot.” – Amanda Fields & Megan McCormick

Photo Credit: Lindsey Patkos
Video Credit: Rebecca Branson Jones

After Nearly 50 Years in Music, Tim O’Brien Is More Comfortable With Himself

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Over his celebrated career, which has now spanned nearly half a century, Tim O’Brien has gained notoriety as an instrumentalist and singer with the bluegrass band Hot Rize, and for his original songs, which have been recorded by Garth Brooks, The Chicks, Nickel Creek, and many more. In recent decades, the Grammy Award-winner has recorded as a solo artist and in collaboration with Darrell Scott, Dirk Powell, Sturgill Simpson, and most recently with his wife, Jan Fabricius. 

We caught up with O’Brien on the heels of his annual trip to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, where he is considered an institution, to discuss his new record Cup of Sugar, which sees him taking on the role of a societal elder. Throughout the collection of songs, O’Brien takes on the perspectives of several different animals as a way of learning from the natural world, as well as characters such as Walter Cronkite. In our conversation, O’Brien explores what it means to be comfortable with your role and direction as an artist, and clarifies his artistic goal – to continue being more and more himself.

BGS: You have a lot of animal references on this album, what do you think is bringing you to those themes right now? 

Tim O’Brien: You know, it’s funny, I had actually written a song with Thomm Jutz called “Old Christmas Day” on January 6th.  January 6th was Christmas in the Julien Calendar before they changed it to be more in line with the solar system. Anyway, the legend was that on Old Christmas Day, the animals all talk to each other. After writing that song I was actually thinking about trying to do a whole record of animal songs… but I went to a bunch of stuff I had already, so I decided to split it up. I think that’s what inspired the direction.

I love “Shout LuLu,” the song about the Tennessee border collie, who inherited the wealth of her owner Bill Dorris. Dorris was the subject of controversy because of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and leader of the KKK, which was displayed prominently on his land facing the highway. How does the story of Lulu relate to the story of the KKK statue in your mind? 

Well, a dog probably doesn’t see black or white, or understand discrimination. It’s just a dog, and maybe we all wish we could be that way… it’s hard to be innocent in this world, but a dog doesn’t care, and that’s what’s great about it. 

The natural world can teach us a few lessons, that’s kind of like a running message through time. Human beings, since the first cave paintings, have commented on animals; they are interesting to us, and they represent different things. We study them and try to learn from them. I like what Lulu teaches us about the beliefs of her owner. 

“Took Lulu to Hogan Road where Nathan Forrest’s statue stood/
She didn’t shout she didn’t beg, stood next to Forrest with lifted leg/
Statue covered with paintball pink, now it has a Lulu stink/
Don’t know from white supremacy, just knows a place she likes to pee/” – “Shout Lulu” excerpt

You talk in your record notes about having the perspective of an elder who has seen a lot of changes both in the world at large and in the music business, can you talk about this viewpoint and what you’re trying to say in these songs with regards to that specifically? 

I’m closing in on 50 years doing this, I’m about to turn 70 this year, and so many things have changed. But the music still goes on, and people still make it for the same reasons; they want to express something, they want to tell a story, they want to connect with people… but the changes get harder and harder to adapt to as you get older.

Social media is so important now and it’s something I don’t really interact with at all. I’m lucky that Jan [Fabricius] does all of that, but it just doesn’t really occur to me. I probably won’t ever do it. These days you’re in charge of promoting your shows, because the clubs are kind of cutting corners, and they’re hurting financially, and that’s just the way it is. I’m just watching all of those changes and I’m kind of indifferent to them mostly. I try to keep my head down and just try to make my music.

Being an elder, well we lost two great mandolin elders this week, Bobby Osborne, and Jessie McReynolds. You just realize how much our music helps us define our lives.

Nancy Blake said once, “Ya know, people wonder why we sit around and practice our own material, but it’s kind of the way we define our lives.” I feel like that is true for me. 

But you see these guys going, and it’s the last of the first and second generation going away… and you wonder who else is going away… I go watch Chris Thile and I say, “Take that baton and run with it, I’ll follow up on the rear!” I like to learn new things all the time, but mostly I’m trying to do the best I can in the direction I’ve already established and faithfully follow that.

I love the song “The Anchor,” which is told from the perspective of Walter Cronkite. What made you want to write about him? What does he represent for you?

Well, the way that the news is disseminated today is in a million ways. They shape it to a certain audience, and they shape the news to that, so you get a million different versions of the news. If you get happy with a certain outlet, maybe you don’t notice a lot of things going on… I think the same thing happened back when there were only three news outlet. But they weren’t selling it, they were propped up by other shows. They weren’t really competing for advertising dollars in the same way, mostly the networks realized they had to have a news thing. I was just thinking about that difference. 

Cronkite was the trusted guy and when he made a telecast one night and said, “It looks to me like this Vietnam conflict, we can’t win it.” President Johnson said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite then I’ve lost the nation… I won’t run for president again.” Cronkite had a lot of power, but he was trying to remain neutral. It’s really hard, it’s hard to remain neutral about the news, and if there’s a truth in the news, it’s hard to reach it. 

I’m addicted to the New York Times and I read it every day, so I’m just as much a part of this as anyone. I have my one outlet and I stick to it. 

There are a lot of songs on this album told from a perspective that is not your own, was that intentional? 

Actually, Danny Barnes brought it up to me, he said, “Do you ever write a song that’s not from your own perspective?” It was helpful to aim from that direction, but I think your own perspective kind of comes through regardless. It’s just the reverse of reading a novel and identifying with one of the characters, you kind of bring some of your own personality into it. Sometimes you have to trick yourself into writing songs, and I think trying for a perspective other than your own is one technique that helps.

How have you seen your songwriting or approach to songwriting change throughout your career? 

When I first started writing, I was at sea about what to start writing about, and what’s good and what’s not good. Do you imitate others? Then you get some experience, and you get some good reactions, and you trust yourself more.

One thing that’s kind of more true for me now, in the last 10 years. I realize that in a certain way, I kind of write about the same things over and over, just different versions. Like, I’m always talking about, or trying to get people to see, the bigger picture and include everyone in my world. I used to worry that writing the same songs, [topically], was a problem, that I need to break it apart and start over… but then I realized that everyone I admire has their own thing that they do, and you just get better at it. Maybe you just continue to go deeper…

Thelonious Monk said that the genius is the one who is most like himself.  That’s hard to find. I think maybe I found it and I don’t like it…

Just kidding.

Was there anything important about this record that was different from the way you’ve worked in the past? 

Jan [Fabricius] and I have a cottage industry here, we have a cottage, and an industry. [Laughs] We’ve also been writing songs together. I think one of them is one of the better ones on this release, “She Can’t, He Won’t and They’ll Never.”

We also have a record label… and for the last record and this one, I’ve used artwork that I’ve drawn myself. I showed something I drew to [Danny] Barnes and he told me, “That’s so much better than anybody else could do it.” That kind of inspired me to do more of my own drawings. A lot of this is just continually becoming more and more comfortable with yourself.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • STITCHER • AMAZON • MP3

(See our full post on Tim O’Brien’s episode of Basic Folk here.) 

Photo Credit: Scott Simontacchi

Artist of the Month: Molly Tuttle

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Folks in the bluegrass world have been watching Molly Tuttle’s star rise since long before her Grammy-winning 2022 album, Crooked Tree, has added even more momentum to the award-winning flatpicker’s career. Though we first crossed paths much earlier, we spoke to Tuttle initially in 2017 for an edition of Deep Sh!t that put her and guitarist James Elkington on the phone together. Even then, Elkington went out of his way to laud Tuttle’s playing, placing it on the same level as his own. (Tuttle, in a turn of mutual admiration, praised Elkington’s picking above hers, of course.)

This is a consistent phenomenon in musicians, songwriters, producers, and instrumentalists who encounter Tuttle’s work: They are all astounded by it; They all feel and hear genius within it. Tuttle is sometimes – no, often – your favorite musician’s favorite musician. Certainly your favorite musician’s favorite flatpicker.

At numerous points over the years since that first interview, the BGS team has latched onto songs and recordings by Tuttle. We’ve had the privilege of inviting her to join BGS lineups and stages and we’ve published more than a handful of interviews, as well, watching and documenting a career and creative output that continue to enjoy rapid-yet-meaningful growth. From our earliest premiere of “Good Enough” all the way to anchoring a BGS Cover Story, as Tuttle has advanced through the music industry, we’ve watched and written about those changes and the distance she’s traveled.

It’s fitting, then, as Tuttle and her band, Golden Highway, ready a second album on the heels of the wildly successful Crooked Tree, that they should at last be named BGS Artist of the Month. We know listeners and fans, whether brand new or veteran, will understand and appreciate how much pleasure and joy we have gained over the years from Tuttle’s songs, her creative vision, her passion, and perhaps above all, her fiery picking. It makes naming Tuttle our Artist of the Month that much more gratifying, highlighting the real reason we make BGS in the first place: our community.

After having a star-studded roster on Crooked Tree helmed by producer (and guest artist) Jerry Douglas, Tuttle has focused her vision slightly for City of Gold, which releases July 21 on Nonesuch Records. Douglas returns as co-producer. The new album, like the former, drips with the imagery, mythos, and mystique of California, drawing on West Coast influences like the Grateful Dead, Laurie Lewis, Kathy Kallick, and folk revival, troubadour singer-songwriters. But, instead of a rotating cast of characters and besides a stout handful of featured artists, this record centers Tuttle and her full-time road band, Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass), and Kyle Tuttle (banjo).

This lineup and the material of the Golden Highway era all seemingly mock the rare critics and naysayers of Tuttle’s music, who, especially in the earliest days of her career, could sometimes be heard describing her songs and singing as toothless or lacking energy or grit. At their sold out theater and club headline shows or in front of thousands at music festivals, Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway’s performances are jaw-dropping, electric (literally and figuratively), and enormous – fully realized. It’s jamgrass without valorizing toxic masculinity; it’s “MASH,” but with taste; it’s a shredfest, but it’s also emotive and vulnerable and theatrical.

That Tuttle’s found her stride while “returning” to bluegrass – whether intentionally, subconsciously, or merely as a framing and narrative device – is striking and impressive. There are many songs, stages, and Artist of the Month features yet to be conquered down the Golden Highway.

Watch for a special Artist of the Month episode of Basic Folk later in July featuring Tuttle as well as an interview with her band, Golden Highway. For now, enjoy our Essential Molly Tuttle Playlist.

Photo Credit: Chelsea Rochelle

WATCH: Gary Brewer, “Old Brown Case”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Gary Brewer
Hometown: Louisville, KY
Song: “Old Brown Case”
Album: House of Axes
Release Date: May 26, 2023 (single); June 30, 2023 (album)

In Their Words: “This is the main axe I’ve carried on the road with me all these years. It’s a 1941 D-28 Herringbone. All-original. You can see she’s got quite a bit of wear on it. One of 183 ever made and she’s still doing good. A good and strong guitar. Going to see if I can go way back and do an old Norman Blake song I recorded a number of years ago. It’s called ‘Old Brown Case.'” – Gary Brewer

Photo Credit: Alyssa Brewer

This Fort Worth Music Festival Has a Niche Mission but Expansive Sounds

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

A small, enthusiastic audience of first arrivals chat in excited, hushed tones as they listen to Hubby Jenkins soundcheck into a pair of Ear Trumpet Labs microphones in the ballroom at Fort Worth, Texas’s Southside Preservation Hall. It’s an unseasonably cool Saturday afternoon in March, with crystal blue skies and wispy clouds backgrounding the historic Fairmount-Southside district. Over the next nine hours, ten musical acts will grace the stage. Many of them are already in the room, contributing to the light buzz and chatter; this already feels like a generative space. 

In its third year, the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival (known lovingly as FWAAMFest) has a very specific vision within the Americana/folk/old-time/bluegrass festival space: to highlight the depth and breadth of contemporary African American roots music and, by doing so, underscore the seminal, vital contributions of Black folks to every single roots genre in this country. Presented by Fort Worth-based non-profit Decolonizing the Music Room (who BGS has collaborated with on multiple occasions), the event carries forward the organization’s mission, explained artfully and succinctly by DTMR founder Brandi Waller-Pace as she kicks off the day introducing Hubby Jenkins: “To center Black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices in music and related fields.” 

“There are so many eyes and ears on culture and the arts in Fort Worth,” she continues. “And I want Fort Worth to be at the forefront of the conversation…” 

Hubby Jenkins began the day’s many conversations with a couple of banjo tunes, because, he admitted, “I’m a little nervous and [banjo tunes] make me feel cozy.” It was indeed a lovely, cozy easing into the day’s marathon lineup of music and presentations. During his set Jenkins picked guitar, banjo, bottleneck slide guitar, and played bones. And, he plays the festival’s first of many gospel numbers, “Jonah in the Wilderness,” inviting the audience to sing along, grounding his performance in the history of the Southside Preservation Hall space and these rootsy genres’ origins. 

Kicking off the day with a gospel-filled set in a historic former church made so much sense, calling each of us as listeners to be active participants in the day’s festivities and also in its mission: to recenter these community-based musics on the folks who gave rise to each of them, reminding us we each have a role to play in telling a fuller, more just history of these musics. 

Next up on the lineup is Justin Golden, who jokes that he and Hubby run into each other on gigs constantly and have the same repertoire, but from the outset his similar-seeming act couldn’t have felt more different. Working within the same vernacular and with such broad overlap, Golden and Jenkins are each still so distinct and unique – and illustrate the wide variety intrinsic to Black and African American roots musics, even within one form. Golden’s first number is an original, “I Hate When She Calls.” 

He peppers older, classic Texas blues numbers – though he admits this is his first time in Texas – throughout heartfelt, poetic, and direct originals. His music’s foundation is fingerstyle blues, but with modern crispness, timeless touches, and a crystalline, focused singing voice. 

Festival-runner and founder Brandi Waller-Pace stepped back on stage, this time as performer, for the next set of the day with songwriter, composer, and banjoist Kaïa Kater as the debut performance of their duo, Sable Sisters. They swap out banjos and guitars and a bass, singing folks songs and originals with nearly familial harmonies. A double clawhammer banjo cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Happier Than the Morning Sun” is their set’s highlight, with the legendary Justin Robinson’s guest appearance to play a set of old-time tunes ranking an honorable mention. Other festivals would be wise to consider booking Sable Sisters; if duo supergroups were a thing, this is one. Superduo? You get my meaning. 

Between each set of music, as the stage was changed over, representatives from partner organizations, sponsors, and community leaders spoke to the audience, which slowly grew from a couple dozen into a small-but-mighty one to two hundred attendees. Tables in the lobby featured literature, information, and calls to action for DTMR, FWAAMFest, and these partner orgs – and from the back of the ballroom wafted the tantalizing aromas of Lil Boy Blue BBQ. (If only all music festival barbeque offerings were this legit.)

After Sable Sisters’ set concluded, the next event was a live podcast taping featuring a collaboration between Rissi Palmer, of Color Me Country Radio on Apple Music, and Garrett McQueen of Trilloquy Podcast. The conversation was titled “Redefining ‘Classic’” and featured Palmer, McQueen, and their FWAAMFest lineup-mates Jake Blount, Demeanor, Hubby Jenkins, and Dr. Angela Wellman. Palmer and McQueen took turns prompting their panelists to consider ideas around canon, genre lines, what terms like “classical” really mean, and so much more. 

A theme that emerged throughout the taping was how often there aren’t hard, fast, concrete answers to these big, zoomed out questions about justice, representation, art, creation, space/placemaking, and community building. The panelists and hosts encouraged and challenged each other and themselves, reminding all of us that engaging in these kinds of conversations is part of the process and having the space – like FWAAMFest – to engage, build, and hold community like this is so important. 

It’s not lost on myself or perhaps anyone else in attendance just how much gratitude each of these participants have at being enabled to be in this FWAAMFest space. Each of the performers and speakers, in their own way and in their own words, effortlessly carried the event’s mission with them as they brought themselves to the space, wholly and vulnerably and powerfully. 

The podcast recording gear struck, rapper and banjo player Demeanor took the stage for his first ever full-band set – and it was revolutionary. During the Trilloquy x Color Me Country conversation Demeanor (given name Justin Harrington) stated so eloquently that “Rap is folk music, because hip-hop is an indigenous Black American art form… From the porch to the stoop.” 

He and his band immediately and indelibly illustrated his point with an energized, powerful set based on sometimes spitfire, other times free flowing rap lyrics with poppy, sung verses and choruses. It’s lyrical, content rich, witty and sharp. Demeanor’s writing and production style are full of forward motion, punctuated by arena rock guitar and Wooten-like bass lines. While often centered on banjo, the five-string is not the only way roots music oozes from these songs. Their lyrics and hooks are sharp and the vocals are strong – his singing isn’t an afterthought or simply in service of a hook. Several songs were from an upcoming unreleased album, including one stand-out track said to feature Rhiannon Giddens (his aunt) and Charly Lowry.  

The delight of Demeanor gave way to the delight of dance and musical dialogue, as longtime friends and jaw-dropping collaborators Jake Blount and Nic Gareiss took the stage. Blount began the set solo, accompanied starkly by low, droning synth sounds gently, languidly warbling through half tones as he sang, dirge-like, above the sound bed, commanding silence. Blount brings us back to gospel, again looking backward to look forward, and in just a couple numbers the droning synth gives way to droning fiddle. 

Gareiss and his singular approach to percussive dance and traditional step-dancing injects energy and joy into the crowd, who’ve been listening and engaging for almost six hours now. Audience members are on their feet, often with phones out, disbelieving the stunning musicality of Blount and Gareiss together, sixteenth notes perfectly, bafflingly in sync.

Nic dancing to Jake’s fiddle recalls the interconnectedness of Irish step dance and Black percussive dance traditions. Where cultures, practices, and folkways overlapped at the lowest of classes in America’s urban centers, dance flourished and Irish step dance cross pollinated with Black movement traditions and Appalachian and southern steps. Over the past century and more, movement and roots music have often been compartmentalized, privatized, and sequestered from each other. Bringing them back together in this intentional way is not just a radical act given the identities represented – in this duo and in this day of programming – but simply by existing together, with intention, Blount’s and Gareiss’s talents underline what these musics were initially created to do, say, and be. 

The vibe in the Southside Preservation Hall ballroom at this point was reaching “full blown party,” and when the first of the festival’s headliners, Tray Wellington Band, took the stage the energetic momentum was raised further still. For all intents and purposes a straight-ahead bluegrass band, Tray Wellington’s four-piece group demonstrated this IBMA Award winner has found his voice. His critically-acclaimed album Black Banjo certainly feels mature and fully-realized, but this was the first this writer had caught Wellington’s band since long before that record was released. The growth they’ve sustained, musically and as a unit, in the interim is remarkable. They execute chamber music level virtuosity, but with bluegrass bones. With Katelynn Bohn (bass), Josiah Nelson (mandolin), and Nick Fallon Weitzenfeld (guitar), Tray references Dawg, Béla, New Grass Revival and many more, but with an underpinning that feels as bluegrass as Appalachia – say Johnson City, TN, where he’s from.

They play a Kid Cudi cover, which is promised to be on an upcoming release, and the audience descends into mayhem as the melodic hook is slowly recognized in ripples throughout the crowd. Whether covering hip-hop or playing an old-time tune, these pickers demonstrate amazing soloing: modern, in-the-moment musical ideas without ego or self-absorption. And with Tray’s right hand anchoring all of the above, it reminds of Earl Scruggs in his Revue days – solidly bluegrass, but intimating musical ideas that come from so far afield, way beyond what we consider bluegrass territory.

Chambergrass, or whatever you want to call it, is seen as more “high-brow” or “intellectual” given its adjacency to conservatories and storied music schools, but this style of virtuosic playing is so well placed within the musical vocabularies of people from the region that birthed string band traditions. And in this context it can be executed with equal ease, aplomb, and athleticism, and with a much more grounded approach. 

A quiet, slightly exhausted euphoria tingles through the stalwarts of the crowd who remain for Jackie Venson’s no-holds-barred FWAAMFest finale. Waller-Pace returns to the stage one final time to introduce the night’s last headliner, with her daughter Sparrow (who waits patiently to get her Jackie t-shirt signed at the end of the night.) 

Venson is accompanied only by drummer Rodney Hydner – and her signature DJ sampler that allows her to play along with tracks, sound beds, background vocals, and play solos over loops. Even with just a two-person act, her trademark joy immediately washes over the entire room and re-energizes the crowd. Venson’s songs are soaring, anthemic, and huge, matched only by her broad grin as she smirks and laughs at herself and her own playing like it’s an inside joke. 

Perhaps the best guitarist of her generation, certainly the best rock-blues guitarist of the past thirty years, the internet is in a four to six week feedback loop of discovering and rediscovering Venson’s playing at the moment, with her Tweets and TikToks seemingly going wildly viral about once a month. She’s been retweeted and signal boosted by a who’s who of Twitter personalities and musicians, and it’s all because hers is a singular voice, perspective, and skill. 

Watching her improvise over each song recalls Nic Gareiss’s dancing from earlier in the evening. When you’re watching something so visceral and in the moment, you can’t help but inhabit that moment with them. And many of us do inhabit these moments with Venson by moving, standing, dancing, reveling in the ever-present joy of her music. 

Venson’s brand of modern blues is unconcerned with divorcing itself from the blues of the past (and of the present) that some feel is stoic, stuffy or dusty, and out of step with modernity. Her brand of blues, no matter how distant it has traveled from its roots, still honors the sounds of old-time and ragtime and down home blues, because it knows where it came from and to what it’s connected. Venson’s connections to Texas and Austin further reinforce this point – and help place Venson and her style of playing squarely within “guitar culture,” too.

At one point during her performance Venson marveled at how the FWAAMFest gathering was, in her words, “Pretty legendary!! You’re going to be talking about this in 10 years, telling people you saw everybody on this lineup here today.”

It was a feeling that began creeping up much earlier in the festival, that what we were present for wasn’t just a community music festival, it was so much more.

Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Disabled folks – artists and creators and movers and musicians – continue to offer and model ways to hold the past within ourselves while looking ahead to the future, a duality that modernity and westernism struggles to acknowledge or inhabit. What’s striking about this conglomeration of creators and musicmakers on this lineup at this festival is that they make it look easy. It seems effortless to understand, uplift, and uphold a mission like FWAAMFest’s. Partly because the participants all are stakeholders in that mission to begin with! With their music, their insights, and their storytelling these musicians and thinkers demonstrate the past is the future and the future is the past. Roots music – the kinds that center the experiences, stories, and seminal contributions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks – can spotlight and move through this dichotomy better than so many art forms, while remaining grounded firmly in the present. 

FWAAMFest’s success wasn’t simply because it’s a festival with a novel, substantive mission. It was a soaring, generative, forward-looking success because it focuses on what “the mainstream” perceives as a niche within a niche within a niche – African American roots music – and shows all of the possibilities, all of the many universes of artistic expression endemic to such a niche. The specificity here is not prohibitive or exclusive, it’s unfailingly, infinitely expansive. In sound, genre, content, tradition, and beyond.

As Jackie Venson said, we all will still be talking about 2023’s Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival for many years into the future. 

Editor’s note: Follow Decolonizing the Music Room on social media to catch footage from FWAAMFest 2023 as it’s released and make sure to DONATE to support their mission and future FWAAMFests!

Photos by Ben Noey Jr.

The ‘Anarchist Gospel,’ According to Sunny War

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Sunny War’s stunning new album, Anarchist Gospel, is never preachy, because it doesn’t need to be. War’s evocation of both anarchy and gospel in this context is strikingly grounded, blossoming from everyday understandings and interactions with each concept. And deeper still, in these sweeping, grand arrangements built on sturdy bones of fingerstyle, folk-informed right-hand guitar techniques, she indicates actions really do speak louder than words. 

These songs are active. Bold, resplendent, and broad with dense, fully-realized production leading to tender, contemplative, and microscopic moments, War draws from her lived experiences, her days and years navigating poverty, living unhoused, sheltering in abandoned buildings, relying on and offering mutual aid, to direct messages of hope, resilience, resistance, and joy, not just to us, her listeners, but also to herself. 

Perhaps that’s why, in this collection of songs born out of a harrowing and challenging emotional, spiritual, and mental period of Sunny War’s more recent past, there is so much hope in hopelessness, a constant – though sometimes minute – light shimmering at the end of the tunnel. Anarchist Gospel isn’t preaching at us, because she is compassionately, kindly, and tenderly talking to herself. And we all, as listeners, audience members, and fans, are just so fortunate enough to be brought into this internal dialogue, from which we can learn and challenge ourselves, and each other, to make a better world for everyone right now. 

It’s a record whose underpinning moral-to-the-story is never burdensome or heavy, but rather uplifting and soaring, exactly as an Anarchist Gospel ought to be. We began our Cover Story interview connecting with Sunny War at home in Chattanooga over the phone, discussing how anarchy is not simply an academic concept, but a real, everyday practice.

I know that in your life, anarchy isn’t just a concept, it has a very real, concrete application in your day-to-day. I think first of your work with Food Not Bombs and the mutual aid work you’ve done in Los Angeles – and wherever you’ve lived. A lot of people right now, especially in younger generations, have frames of reference for anarchy and collectivism and mutual aid work, but usually in the abstract. As if these concepts can only be for some imagined future. So why is anarchy something you wanted to represent in the album and its title, and what does the concept of anarchy mean in your life?

Sunny War: The album title isn’t really political, to me. I felt like the big choruses [on the album] felt gospel in a way, but it wasn’t religious so I felt like it was Anarchist Gospel. It was really because of the one song, “Whole,” where I just felt like the message of the song was kind of about anarchy, in a way that most people could understand. I guess I’m more of a socialist now, but it’s the same sentiment. I just want people to have what they need. That’s more what anarchy means to me. It seems like it’s government that’s in the way of people getting what they need. 

For me, it’s more personal. When I was homeless, a lot of times we would be living in abandoned buildings and we’d get arrested for that. Anarchy, to me, means, “Why can’t we be here? Nobody else is going to be in here. Why are you keeping us from this?” It feels weird that we don’t get to claim where we live, but other people do. Why do they have more rights to the same places? I don’t know if that’s anarchy, so much as I just think people have a right to everything. 

It feels like there’s this agnosticism to the album, this come-togetherness, as something we can all feel and inhabit without necessarily being called to by a higher power. We really can all realize, whatever our starting points, that all we have is each other.

I’m not against people that need God, or whatever. I’ve been in places where I’ve felt like I wanted to believe in that before, so I can relate to where that comes from. But then, I don’t know… [Laughs] Whether it’s religious or spiritual, I don’t know. 

This sounds like a record where we’re all supposed to be singing along. Part of that is the gospel tones, the title but also in the genre and production style, but part of it is also the messages here. Uplifting people from darkness, hope in hopelessness – so to me, so many moments on this album feel like church! 

I love church! I grew up in church – well, I don’t love church, but I love gospel. I still listen to gospel and I guess I’m being nostalgic, but also it just slaps. That’s just good music. If you like original R&B, it’s the basis of so much of American music. I wish it was a little more, I dunno… I guess I wish it wasn’t religious. [Laughs] Then I’d really be into it. But it’s cool how it is. 

In the moments in this record that feel like they’re at the lowest point, I still hear so much hope. I hear surrender in this album, not the kind that’s giving up, but the kind that feels generative and hopeful – especially in “I Got No Fight” and “Hopeless” and “Higher.”

This record was a lot of me talking to myself. It’s definitely the loneliest I’ve ever been writing something. Every other album I’ve ever made, I was in a relationship. This was different. After me and my ex broke up, I wasn’t even really socializing with my friends, because we had the same friends and I was embarrassed about our break up. I was so bitter, I didn’t want to be around anyone. I felt like I couldn’t be around anyone. I was barely leaving the house, I was isolating myself and got really morbid. I wasn’t turning lights on. [Laughs] I would sit in the dark a lot, I was lighting candles – [Laughing] I don’t really know what was going on, but it was mostly bad, I would drink a lot, and then I’d be like, “I’m drinking too much, I gotta get sober.” It would just repeat over and over again. But I was desperately trying to finish the album, because I was broke. I had the deal with New West, but I still had to produce the album before anything could get rolling. It was just what I had to do, but I was also going insane at the same time, and really angry. 

Do you feel like making the record brought closure to any of that for you? I feel like I can hear a release of tension in this album, but I wonder where that comes from, because so many of the songs, individually, have these big, emotional releases. How does it feel to be at this point, looking back with the clarity you have now?

The second I wrote “I Got No Fight” I remember immediately feeling better. I made the demo, and afterwards it made me feel like I was just having a tantrum. But it was like I had to make the song to really understand what I was going through. After making the demo, I realized, “I am just freaking out, I think I’m having a panic attack.” After hearing this song, it helped me understand like, “This is not real, this is just a temporary feeling.” But I couldn’t really feel anything else until after that. 

I have spent so much time over the past couple years trying to teach myself that the point of feelings is to feel them.

Yeah, but they suck most of the time. [Laughs] I don’t want most of them. 

The line in that song, “Sometimes the end is the only light I see,” might be my favorite line on the record. There’s nihilism and existentialism in it, but it doesn’t feel hopeless or despairing. It’s kind of a cheerful, “Oh right! Nothing matters!” Where did that line come from for you? 

That gets me through the day, a lot. Sometimes I think of life as just a jail sentence and I always think like, “Well, I probably am only going to live fifty more years at the most.” Sometimes that helps me get through the day. [Laughs] I know that that sounds negative, but that can really be uplifting if you chose for it to be!

It feels a lot lighter, to me at least, once you realize that nothing matters. Suddenly you can laugh a little bit more, improvise more – like lately, I’ve been trying to accept that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m trying to get comfortable with it. In my twenties, I felt like I was trying to make plans all the time, planning so far into the future and just getting disappointed with stuff. It’s better to [recognize] – which is almost like religious people – you’re just powerless. Just try to eat something, drink some water. [Laughs] 

Let’s talk about your guitar playing. I love your right hand so much. I think what’s entrancing about your guitar on this album is that it’s holding these songs together, but not as much as a rhythmic instrument or comping instrument, like in your past records. It’s more textural, to add depth and complexity, but your playing is still so hooky, melodically. Your personality comes through the guitar on top of all of these tracks. How did you accomplish that balance, having the guitar front and center and immediate, but it’s also not necessarily the centerpiece of these songs?

I think it’s because this is the first record where I knew how to use Logic, so my demos were almost full tracks already. I was adding keyboard and bass and programming drums to things before even going into the studio. A lot of the songs are all based on riffs that I’ve had for a while, that I couldn’t figure out how to use. Before, a lot of my other stuff, I was just writing a song. Now, I just collect guitar parts and I try to make them work in something, but I don’t really have a [plan for them, initially.] I’m basing it more off the guitar parts now. 

How do you like the banjo? Is this the first time you had banjo on a record? 

Yeah!

What do you think writing on the banjo leads you to that a guitar or keys or writing on another instrument wouldn’t lead you to?

Anything that’s tuned differently makes me have to think differently about stuff. I still don’t really “get” the banjo, it’s weird because I have had a banjo for over 10 years now, but it still seems like something I’m trying to learn about. I just recently got okay with being like, “I’m just going to make sounds with it.” I’m not going to try to “learn” it. [Laughs] I definitely want to make more songs with the banjo – and maybe even without a guitar, and see what that’s like. Some of my favorite buskers I’ve ever seen are just a singer with a banjo. I think it makes people sing different. I gotta get my banjos out now… 

Guitar culture – guitar shop culture, guitar show culture – it’s such a toxically masculine scene, and it’s so competitive and punishing, that I kind of have realized over the past few years that the people helping me realize I still love the guitar and guitar culture are all women and femmes. Like, Jackie Venson, Molly Tuttle, folks like Celisse and Madison Cunningham, or like Kaki King and Megan McCormick and Joy Clark – I can think of so many guitarists who aren’t just really good, but they’re also pushing the envelope, they’re innovating, and they have really strong perspectives and voices on the instrument, like yourself. So I wanted to ask you about your own relationship with guitar culture and the guitar scene, because as a queer banjo player who loves music, I kinda hate people who love guitar. But I’ve been so grateful that all these women are reminding me I can love guitar and it’s not just a patriarchal, toxically masculine instrument and scene.

I just try to stay out of it. Sometimes at shows, guitar guys talk to me and I just tell them, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” [Laughs] Because I don’t want to get into any discussion about it. I know a lot of people who can really play, but [guitar guys] make it so you have to be kinda crazy, kinda obsessive. And it’s so competitive. That doesn’t sound fun to me. I don’t get how that’s fun anymore. It’s not art, at that point. It’s almost like a sport. Which you can, go ahead and practice scales all day so you can play the fastest, but then a lot of times people can be really technically good, but there’s no soul in it. They’re just trying to cram as many riffs into something as possible. They take all the art out of it, they’re technically playing perfectly, but I don’t feel anything. 

I would much rather be listening to my favorite guitar player, who is Yasmin Williams. It’s not just because of technical ability, but because it’s progressive. I’m like, “That’s outta the box, I don’t know where that’s going.” That’s what I like about it. 

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Basic Folk – John Calvin Abney

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

A lot of people like to claim the title “Hardest Working Person In Music” but John Calvin Abney might take the crown from them all. John has made a name for himself as a shit-hot guitar player, accompanying John Moreland, Samantha Crain, Margo Cilker, and many others (including Lizzie No herself!) But the reason we wanted him to join us as a guest on Basic Folk is that his own catalog is poetic and beautifully produced.

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John grew up in Nevada and Oklahoma, and you can hear the restless desert highways in all the soundscapes he creates. His latest album, Tourist, asks the question of how a person can feel at home when they spend their life on the road. It also finds resolution after the death of John’s father, through found recordings and thoughtful lyrics. Listening to Tourist feels like catching up with an old friend. You might hear Elliott Smith in “Good Luck and High Tide” or J.J. Cale in “Call Me Achilles,” but the stories are John Calvin to the core.

We dug into recording techniques, John’s high school identity as “guitar guy,” touring with Hanson, Christian camp, and how running off to Europe as a romantic gesture helped launch John’s career.

Editor’s Note: Basic Folk is currently running their annual fall fundraiser! Visit basicfolk.com/donate for a message from hosts Cindy Howes and Lizzie No, and to support this listener-funded podcast.

Photo Credit: Rebecca Sarkar

Bluegrass Memoirs: The First Canadian Bluegrass Festival (Part 2)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

[Editor’s note: Read part one of Neil’s Memoir on the First Canadian Bluegrass Festival here.]

On Wednesday, August 2, 1972, after an overnight ferry voyage, I arrived in North Sydney, Nova Scotia. A four-hour drive brought me to Fred and Audrey Isenor’s mobile home in Lantz, 50 km (30 miles) north of Halifax. It was just after 7 pm, and they already had company, including gospel singer Lloyd Boyd, known as “The Radio Ranger,” and Charlie Fullerton, a dobroist and bassist whose sound system was to be used at the Jamboree.

Other friends of Fred’s dropped in that evening – men and women active in the local country music scene who shared his interest in bluegrass. I was the center of attention, the imported expert on the eve of Nova Scotia’s first homegrown bluegrass event. In my diary I noted:

Immediately I was quizzed on my knowledge of instruments, principally, D- series 45 style Martins but other things as well. Fred’s F-5 pulled out, my F-4 and Mastertone looked at.

Owning a prewar Gibson or Martin was a mark of serious interest in bluegrass. The big fancy Martin D-45 was the top of that guitar-maker’s line. Only 90-some were made from the early ‘30s to 1942; these were owned by famous country stars, including bluegrass great Red Smiley. In the late ‘60s Martin began making the D-45 again. Lloyd had one. 

I noted another visitor: 

Carl Dalrymple, a C&W bassist and guitarist about to go on the road with his sister-in-law [Joyce Seamone] who has a number one Canadian Country hit, “Testing, One, Two, Three,” came [by]. He’s a D-45 owner, too.

Carl’s son Gary, then three years old, already introduced by his father to bluegrass, became one of the second generation of musicians nurtured at the Festival which grew out of the coming Friday’s Jamboree. In 1993 Gary, a mandolinist, joined The Spinney Brothers, one of Nova Scotia’s most successful bands. I was honored to have them play during my 2014 induction into IBMA’s Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame.

By the early ‘70s, bluegrass in the Maritimes had been embraced by the young, working-class, rural country musicians who formed most of the “spread out” Canadian bluegrass community Vic Mullen had told me about. This night at the Isenors’ was my introduction to a new world of musical friends and acquaintances.

As the evening wore on, the focus shifted from instruments to music making. We jammed; I noted:

We played lots of gospel songs, few bluegrass standards, I did requests for Peggy [Warner, a budding banjo picker]. Tempos were slow generally.

This was not like bluegrass jams I’d experienced during the 1960s working and hanging out at Bean Blossom. In a sense, it was a step back in time for me. In my college years, fifteen years before, I’d first learned about bluegrass through recordings. It was a distant thing.

Then I moved to Indiana, met Monroe at Bean Blossom. By the time I moved to Canada the festival movement had attracted new audiences. Mid-’60s youth had embraced folk music; that drew some of them into bluegrass — the beginning of a process of gentrification that I’ve written about in Bluegrass Generation (pp.240-42). In 1972, this hadn’t happened yet in Atlantic Canada. 

The next afternoon, Thursday the 3rd, Fred took me into Halifax. Knowing I was a professor of folklore, he wanted to show me a new shop in town, the Halifax Folklore Centre. He introduced me to the owners, the Dorwards, who, I noted:

Looked at my F4 (fret wire needed, if they are to do a fret job). I got the J&J instrumental LP. Lots of blues records. Fred and Tom Dorward, the owner, get on well.

I don’t recall much talk about the Jamboree. Months later, Fred confided to me that in promoting the event, they’d failed to connect with the Halifax university students who were into folk music. Dorward would play a role in that regard at the Festival, which grew out of the Jamboree. Next, I noted:

…we went to CBC to see about placing ads, and then to an electronics distributor for a mike.

Later I added to this note:

…a local fiddler who was supposed to play in Friday’s festival — Russ Topple — had unexpectedly gone to the U.S. (Wheeling) so when we stopped at the CBC … Fred put my name on the ad as visiting banjo picker. Everyone knows that I worked with Monroe, most think that means as a banjo picker. Lots of questions about the banjo (“old Mastertone”) etc.

After supper we went to farmer John Moxom’s place out in the country at Hardwoodlands, the festival site, about 14 km (8.7 mi) east of Lantz, to help Charlie Fullerton set up his sound system. I noted:

Farmer J.M. has built outdoor covered stage about the size of and dimensions of that at Roanoke. On 4 posts 6’ high; 18’x10’ floor with covered sides (except for the last 4’ at front). Roof slopes from 10’ at the front to 7’ at the back. Rough steps off the left corner rear. We end up setting speakers on Fred’s ’66 Chrysler roof beside the stage for separation. See map of festival site on the following page.

 

A hand-drawn map of the layout of the first Canadian bluegrass festival. Excerpt from Rosenberg’s personal journals.

 

The evening ended with a rehearsal at the home of Don and Joyce Peck, Fred’s bandmates. I noted:

Charlie subbed on bass for Fred’s partner (in his Lantz music store, Country Music Sales), Bruce Beeler, who works as a chef on the CN RR.

After dinner the next day (Friday the 4th), Fred and I returned to his home after visiting more of his musical friends, to find The County Line Bluegrass Boys had arrived. They would be playing at Jamboree that evening. They were from Lunenburg County, down on Nova Scotia’s South Shore. I noted:

The mandolin player and the banjo player (Mel Sarty) are the central figures in the group — first got into Bluegrass when they were 11-12 years old in the early sixties, when a relative bought the Bluegrass Gentlemen LP by chance. Have learned entirely by records. … They do quite a bit of four-part singing. 

Vic Mullen, Nova Scotia’s best-known bluegrass musician, was the emcee that evening at the Jamboree. The audience was mainly in cars, parked in front of the stage. Applause came in the form of honks and flashed lights. Three Nova Scotia bands appeared.

The Pecks with Fred and Bruce on bass opened. Vic and I helped add a bluegrass touch to their sound with fiddle and banjo. A number of other singers and pickers joined us for guest appearances. Next came the County Line Bluegrass Boys. 

The Boutilier Brothers closed the show. They came from a musical family; their grandfather was a well-known old-time fiddler in the region, and the two oldest brothers, Bill and Larry, began their professional career with their father, also a noted fiddler. They were inducted into the Nova Scotia Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999.

By the early 1960s they were singing brother duets and appearing with Vic Mullen on banjo. With the help of Mullen, they made four LPs (all had “Bluegrass” in their title) on the Rodeo label between 1963 and 1967, by which time a third brother, Ken, had replaced Vic on banjo. The brothers had retired several years before, but came out of retirement specially for the Jamboree. 

When Fred and Vic surveyed the results of the Jamboree, they decided to try another the following year. This time they would announce it as “the second annual BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL at Hardwoodlands, N.S., July 27, 1973.” The Boutiliers and the Country Line Bluegrass Boys appeared again; more widely advertised, it was successful and drew enough bluegrass enthusiasts that in 1974 Fred and Vic brought Tom Dorward into their planning and began working on a two-day event.

 

John Moxom, Neil Rosenberg, Vic Mullen and Fred Isenor at Hardwoodlands, N.S., July 1973

 

For the next five years, I traveled to the Festival annually from Newfoundland to help Fred and the gang, running instrumental workshops, emceeing, and appearing with our St. John’s-based band, Crooked Stovepipe.

As the Festival took off, young musicians began appearing. Eventually a fourth generation of Boutiliers became involved. In the 1980s these young pickers added Vic Mullen to their band, and, with his encouragement, took on his old band name, calling themselves Birch Mountain Bluegrass Band. In 2001, 2002, and 2004 they won the East Coast Music Association’s “Bluegrass Album of the Year” award.

Another second-generation band developed out of the County Line Bluegrass Boys. In 1973 banjoist Mel Sarty’s brother Gordon joined the band as bassist and in the 1980s he and his three daughters created a new band, Exit 13. Lead vocalist, songwriter, and banjoist Elaine Sarty fronted the group. They won the ECMA “Bluegrass Album of the Year” in 1997 and 1998. Here’s a profile of the band that appeared in the ‘90s on a national prime time CBC show, “On The Road Again.“

This, of course, was all to come! I knew nothing of the Jamboree’s bluegrass festival future when I left the Isenor home on Saturday August 5, 1972, continuing my research trip. Heading west on the Trans-Canada Highway, a half-day’s drive brought me to Woodstock, New Brunwick, near the Maine border. There I visited a student and her family who’d invited me to see the Don Messer Jubilee at Old Home Week, Woodstock’s annual fair.

The event was held in a large building in Connell Park, the fair site. It had three components: the Jubilee concert, a fiddle contest, and a dance.

The concert followed the format of Messer’s television broadcasts, with fiddle tunes prominently featured along with songs by the band’s remaining vocalist Marg Osburne. Her singing partner, Charlie Chamberlain, had died less than a month before. This was one of the Jubilee’s last public performances; Messer would pass in March 1973.

The fiddle contest, which Messer judged, was won by Mac Brogan, a fiddler from Chipman, NB. Here’s a sample of his fiddling, very much in the Don Messer style, from his 1984 album:

Finally, chairs were cleared away and Messer and the Jubilee orchestra played for dancers. Although Messer continued on the fiddle, several of the other musicians switched to wind instruments. The music was mainly a sentimental reprise of popular songs from the big band era that they’d played for dancers during their salad days in the ’40s and ’50s.

After the dance I introduced myself to Mac Brogan, telling him I was interested in researching old-time and country music in Canada and asking if he would be willing to talk to me some time for an interview. He consented and gave me his address. It would be over a year before I’d have time to do the interview, but this, along with my conversations with Fred and Vic, marked the start of what would become a decade of studying the connections between country and folk music in the Maritimes.

On Monday the 7th I was off again, heading into New England, en route to southern bluegrass scenes.

Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee, and co-chair of the IBMA Foundation’s Arnold Shultz Fund.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg by Terri Thomson Rosenberg, all other photos by Neil V. Rosenberg. 

Edited by Justin Hiltner

Willi Carlisle’s ‘Peculiar, Missouri’ is Both Extraordinary and Simple

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Musician, folklorist, and instrumentalist Willi Carlisle is a bona fide troubadour in genres often populated by mimics and pretenders. But even so, and quite strikingly, his professional and artistic persona is not at all cast through a “greater than thou” light – or through the self-righteousness with which most creators stake their claim to the outlaw fringes of roots music. His debut album on Free Dirt Records, Peculiar, Missouri, is a testament to this dyed-in-the-wool road dog’s commitment to a populist, accessible, and identity-aware brand of country music. 

Peculiar, Missouri is all at once intimate and grand. Brash and rollicking radio-ready singles intermingle with raw, “warts and all” tracks that sound live and visceral, tender and ineffable. Stories of cowhands and wagon-train cooks and circus performers and legendary figures are peppered with queer text and subtext and underlined with a class consciousness. The result is not only inspiring, it will stop a listener dead in their tracks.

But the pause that this album supplies is not due to Peculiar being demonstrably extraordinary. Just the opposite. The simplicity, the downright everyday-ness of this record is its shining accomplishment. The seemingly infinite inputs that Carlisle distills, synergizes, and offers to the listener – regional roots music, old-time country, queerness, vaudeville showmanship, folklore and storytelling, the Ozarks, poetry, and so on – are perfectly synthesized in a remarkably simple and approachable format. Peculiar, Missouri is fantastically free, but not scattered. It’s extraordinary in its refusal to be anything other than ordinary. 

We spoke to Carlisle via phone ahead of his appearances this week at AmericanaFest in Nashville, where he’s excited to continue to grow the community that centers around the small business of his music. “I want to play a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty shows a year. I want to work my ass off,” he explains, excited for the weeklong conference and festival. “I’ve got a small business and it’s built on this group of people that I really love and that I really trust. Now I get to bring them together. It feels like a really unique and positive situation in a pretty garbage industry, sometimes!”

Our conversation began with Peculiar’s extraordinary simplicity.

BGS: I think the most extraordinary thing to me about the record is that it kind of refuses to be anything other than ordinary. And I hope that that doesn’t seem like a backhanded compliment, because to me the music feels so grounded, raw, and authentic – but in a way that doesn’t just propagate antiquated ideas around what “authenticity” is. So, I wanted to ask you how you crafted the vision for the project, because it did end up so simple, but I know that simplicity doesn’t necessarily mean building the concept for the album was simple at all. 

WC: Simplicity is hard to do and I’m the kind of person that has forty ideas and maybe a couple good ones in there, so I had a lot of songs. I give a lot of credit to friends and family in Arkansas and the folks at Free Dirt for helping me figure out how to try to nail [my vision] to the wall. I wanted to play old-time music on the record. I’ve been really lucky to do square dances and play old-time music in the Ozarks for a long time. I want to be old-time music and I want to be country and I want to be queer and I want to be a poet. I want [the album] to be grounded in American literature, and also want it to be grounded in American old-time music, so that it feels like the songs are highly regional and from specific traditions that I’ve learned from. 

This might make it sound like getting to simplicity was simple, but it really came down to a series of checkmarks. I want to be able to learn from Utah Phillips forever and his legacy and the legacies of the people that worked with him. So I knew I wanted to do a Utah Phillips song. I wanted to do something that felt more like a square dance call than like a capital S “song.” So we did “The Down and Back.” I’ve been setting poems to music for fun for a long time and that was why we did that song, “Buffalo Bill.” I’d always wanted to just tell a story, too, so we set a story to my own fingerpicking, because there’s a lot of that style in the ‘70s and from people I admire the most, like Steve Goodman and Gamble Rogers. It also came down to what traditions we were working in. “How do we evoke these different traditions in a way that is diverse but is unified?” At the end of the day, it might just be my voice and limited capacity instrumentally that unifies it. [Laughs]

The record feels “agnostic” to me in so many ways: The genre aesthetic (or lack), agnostic. The songwriting perspective, agnostic. The identity narratives, agnostic. The regional qualities, too. And when I say “agnostic” I mean, they all feel very defined and tangible, but not that you’re professing any one of them as traditional or as truth. You’re placing this music so specifically within a longstanding tradition of old-time country and string band music, but you’re doing it in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to ensconce a “correct way” to make music. 

Carl Jung, who writes the best shit [Laughs], writes about some kind of “spiritus mundi,” some kind of larger idea of the world that can bind us all together, psychologically. In a lot of these things about America, we receive these overarching stories about what it is to be an American, what it is to be free, what it is to be this, that, or the other. These stories have identity concerns, but they have to be agnostic, because they’re too general to ever be specific. Which is to say, it’s all sort of false. 

I guess as I was looking at all of the historical moments that I wanted to underline, I found that the overarching narrative was that there was not going to be one. The title track is about traveling for a long time and having a panic attack in a very specific place, but also a very non-specific place, which was a Walmart. It may be the most unifying place in the country, now. I wanted to take the idea of this universal American spiritus mundi and locate it within as many specific voices that were inspiring to me. And usually those are people that tried to do folk music or vernacular music in this big, all-encompassing way.

That agnosticism, that acceptance of the duality of all things, that’s such a queer perspective. And it’s not just because of the pink album cover. [Laughs] It feels like the undercurrent and overcurrent of this record.

Yeah, it’s designed to be, it has to be inclusive. [The album] also includes voices that are on the very edge of slipping out of existence. It also sort of includes failure and incompetence and foolishness and folly. I think a lot of our “sad bastard,” dude country – which is really one of my favorite genres, it ain’t me ragging on sad, sad country. [Laughs] “Tear in my beer,” I’m 100% behind that! But for some reason we’re willing to valorize those feelings, but not valorize historical discomfort and the total dissipation of huge groups of feelings. And [we valorize] money. 

Like, if I was going to do a Utah Phillips song, the one to me that fit the most was “Goodnight Loving Trail.” One, because it’s stone cold banger and two, because it’s about a cook on a wagon train. And if I think that somebody is going to get the idea that I’m going to talk about rootin’ tootin’, gunslinging, and stuff, I wanna fight that with, “Here’s a song about the emotional condition of a pissed off cook who stays up all night playing melancholy songs on his harmonica.” That’s it! There’s nothing else, the only message of that song is we get old and we die. We outlive our youthfulness, and to what end? 

“Sad bastard” or, as I like to call it, “sad boi country” – sad boi anything is so, so hot right now. Especially this kind of idea of “sad boi” or “dirt boi” country, and it’s really prevalent in Americana. But I feel like this record is turning that new-ish trope on its ear. Something about straight, cis-, white, privileged men self ascribing “sad boi” or “dirt boi” always rings untrue to me as a listener. But Peculiar, the sadness intrinsic in it doesn’t seem like “sad boi country” to me, because it does have that queer thread. Do you agree or disagree? 

Well, the title of the record is intended to be a pun: “Queer sadness, peculiar misery.” I guess I would include that. I think there are perfect sad boi country songs out there. Formally, I don’t really have anything against the form, I just want to do my own version of it. If I’m totally honest, that’s mostly the way it comes out. That tends to be the way it comes out, in this format. I have written songs that go in circles around, I guess, a more normal sort of self-indulgent sadness, but I’ve never felt them to be my best work. It’s nice to lean into the thing that hurts you, I think that there’s power in that. 

I think that a lot of that sad boi country is angry at women, or is saying, “I’m no good and women hate me.” Or, “I’m no good and my mama knows I’m no good.” Or there’s “I’ve tried to be good and I can’t.” Instead of like, looking inward and being like, “I want to be better, I need to be better. My problems are my own.” 

I want to talk about production, because one of the things I love about the record is that you’re playing with sonic space so much. Some of the songs are placed very close to the listener, like a radio mix. Others are really quite distant and you play around in that space, kind of mischievously at times. Where did that production quality come from and why was it important to you? 

Well, I don’t want to take credit after the fact. It was the idea of the producer, Joel Savoy, who essentially was like, “Hey, I’ve got this old vaudeville theater, I’ve never gotten to use it, but I think that you could spread a couple tracks out in this old theater.” It’s like hundreds of years worth of people dancing in this theater, it’s just gorgeous. I also told him, “Look, I want a couple tracks ready for the radio. I want to be able to take a real shot.” 

On the other level, it’s just me and an instrument. I want it to sound like I’m sitting on the edge of somebody’s bed and they’re sitting with the covers pulled over them. That’s pretty much what I said [to Savoy]. A lot of the production is me having an interest in the record reaching some kind of minimal commercial viability, I want to say pretty clearly that that’s an intentional move. I know that I can make a record that will never reach commercial viability. I just got nominated for an award in outlaw country and that really just means I’m not ever going to reach commercial viability, but they do agree that I’m country. [Laughs]

I wanted to be able to share the project and create a couple of things that would invite people in that might never normally hear the message on the record. But, if I was only known for the tracks that were radio-produced, I wouldn’t like that at all. The idea is to invite people into the whole record. 

I’ve said quite a bit, what’s more outlaw country than being anti-normative, anti-idyll (in this case, read: queer) in country music? That’s what I feel like is coming through in “I Won’t Be Afraid,” because it’s not outlaw country in that it’s professing that you must forsake emotion and forsake heart and forsake these sort of non-masculine, anti-normative ideals to be outlaw. It’s outlaw in a way that embraces otherness and any form of the other can be outlaw. To me, it’s not a song that’s just a personal declaration, but also an industry-wide one. And it’s more than that, too.

The song came out all at once. It was one of those crying fit songs. I was like, “Okay, that’s a crying fit song, I know what that is. That goes deep in the drawer and we don’t really bring that one out.” Well, I did share it with a couple of people and they liked it. At the point I recorded it, I’m still, I’m just… I almost used the phrase “a sack of shit,” but I guess I wanna say I was an absolute mess in that place. I was not able to contain the feelings I was having in order to play a G chord. I think that does give it a quality that I like, but also gives it a quality that I wish I could, oh, slap a little tape or a little rouge or something on it.

As far as outlaw stuff goes, I made up this saying that outlaw shit is kissing your buds and dancing like your grandma is proud of you. [When I came up with that,] I was thinking about how hard it is to do. And what kind of risk it entails, to actually feel happy with yourself and happy with where you come from. … I do agree, on some level, with the maxim from the outlaw country guys early on that it’s about doing things your own way and it’s about not doing what the institution tells you to do. But that’s also a marketing scheme that’s appeared on T-shirts at Spencer’s in the mall ever since I was a kid, right? It’s not going to work for me. I want to revise it. I’ve gotten some kickback over the virulence with which I might be revising it, but we’ll see how it goes. I don’t think my career’s over or anything. [Laughs]

What’s more outlaw than people saying you’re not outlaw? 

It’s a snake eating its own tail!

Photo credit: Lead photo by Tim Duggan, square thumbnail by Jackie Clarkson.