Tag: harmonies

The Secret Sisters’ Laura Rogers: From Separation to ‘Saturn Return’ (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

Laura Rogers and Lydia Slagle are best known for doing things together. As sisters, they’ve celebrated birthdays, graduations, and many more of life’s big milestones together. As the Secret Sisters, they’ve made a name for themselves singing together, with intuitive harmonies that lend a honeyed sheen to folk tunes, country anthems, and the occasional murder ballad, too. But for their latest album, Saturn Return, the duo tried things a little differently.

At the suggestion of Brandi Carlile (who co-produced Saturn Return with twins Tim and Phil Hanseroth), Laura and Lydia recorded their vocals separately for the first time, integrating lengthy solo segments in addition to their trademark harmonies. The resulting record reveals two women at the top of their crafts, reveling in their independence while cherishing the inimitable depth of their voices together.

In tribute to their recording individually for the first time, BGS spoke to each sister separately, too. In part one of our Artist of the Month interviews, Laura talks about the influence of her hometown, self-inflicted career pressure, and how Carlile introduced the sisters to new sides of themselves — both individually and as a group.

BGS: You sang separately from your sister on this album for the first time. What did that feel like at first, and how did your feelings about it evolve?

Laura Rogers: I was very uncomfortable about it at first. I play off of Lydia, and I choose my notes based on what Lydia chooses. We read each other so closely when we sing together. Singing without her felt like driving a car for the first time without your parent in there. But when Lydia sang by herself, even though I know she was uncomfortable, I sat there listening to her and thinking, She is so good. She’s so good. I remember thinking about how glad I was that her voice was finally going to get a chance to be heard without mine, because her voice has so much beauty to it.

I thought, It’s time for people to hear what Lydia sounds like without me distracting them. But I was super scared to sing by my self, just because I … Well, I just don’t feel like I sing as well without Lydia. I’m more critical of myself, and I don’t have her to kind of pick up the slack that I need. [Laughs] So in the moment, I remember thinking, I don’t know if this is the right thing. How are we going to pull it off live? But then of course, after the record was done, we would listen back to it, and Brandi’s theory about it was so… right. And so beautiful.

How so?

While we were recording, Lydia and I really were in really separate places for the first time in our lives. I was pregnant and Lydia was trying to get pregnant. We felt this chasm, the two of us. We felt like we were in different places. Brandi could see that, in her bird’s-eye view of our circle. She knew that she needed to capture that moment.

Lo and behold, a few months later, we found out that Lydia was pregnant too, and we were back on another path together. We had been separate for only a moment. So I’m really thankful. I feel like Brandi is a really good photographer who caught the perfect moment with the perfect light and the perfect ambiance — this really special moment that will never come again.

You’ve recorded murder ballads and darker songs, and “Cabin” on this record — which you’ve said grew out of coverage on the Kavanaugh hearings — touches on a crime that was never brought to justice. What are the challenges and nuances you have to consider when broaching topics like those?

That’s a good question. “Cabin” can really be about a pretty broad range of crime. But we were specifically writing about sexual crime: abuse, harassment, and mistreatment of people by those in places of power. We had a message that we wanted to convey, but it felt like we had to tiptoe around some things to try to avoid any sort of heavy political slant.

Lydia and I are not political songwriters. We just aren’t, and don’t want to be. But there are certain elements of that that do come up in our writing that we feel like we have to kind of carefully craft in order to express ourselves, but not isolate. That’s also true with murder ballads. It is a sensitive subject matter, and our protection — up until we wrote “Cabin” — was the fact that those songs that we had written were mostly fiction.

When [our songs] talk about getting your heart broken, or going through bankruptcy, or being done wrong by someone who is supposed to be your friend, those are actually based in truth. We would never specifically mention anyone by name, but if they hear the song, they’ll know that we’re talking to them. If you feel like we’re singing to you, we are.

That’s the way that we view our music — as therapy. The murder ballads have always been about us challenging ourselves to write songs about things that we didn’t experience. On the flip side of that coin, there are a lot of songs that we went through firsthand and had to process through writing.

You sing about the push-pull of success in “Nowhere Baby.” What does that song mean to you, and how do you fight back against the low moments?

I hope that people can find their own story in a song like that. For us, “Nowhere Baby” is about constantly feeling like we’re arm wrestling the music industry; feeling the need to say yes to everything that comes along, because you’re afraid that if you say no you’re going to set yourself back or miss an opportunity; feeling like you need to prove yourself. As artists, creative souls, and women, sometimes we put that on ourselves. We make these ridiculous schedules that we think we have to stick to. “If we don’t go do this show, what’s gonna happen? Are we gonna miss something that could be really important, could get us to the next level?”

We are so hard on ourselves about our careers. We love music, and we love that we’ve gotten to make a lifestyle of playing our songs on the road, but it’s a hard life. You sacrifice more than people on the outside ever realize. You miss the birthday celebrations and the holiday events. Through experience in the ten years that we’ve been on the road, we’ve learned that it’s OK if you need to just be a person for a minute. It’s OK if you want to just sit at home for a few weeks. Nobody’s gonna forget about you, you’re not going to lose your edge.

You’re from just outside of Florence, Alabama, and started singing harmonies with your sister at church. Did your hometown have any impact on the artist you are today?

Oh yes, 100 percent. We grew up pretty close to Muscle Shoals, which is obviously a legendary place for music. But we weren’t exposed to the music of Muscle Shoals as much as you might think. We listened to more folk music, bluegrass, gospel, and country. And where we are geographically had influence on us as musicians — I mean, it’s this weird little place that’s so perfectly located. It’s close to Nashville, so you get the country music influence. It’s close to Memphis, so you get a little bit of the blues. It’s close to the mountains, so you get some Appalachian music. You get gospel music, because we’re in the middle of the Bible Belt. It’s this perfect spot where these little genres of roots music all began.

I think living in a rural place, and growing up where there isn’t a lot to do other than hang out with your family or do sports or play music, is why we are the way that we are, and why we’ve become the musicians that we’ve become. We are so spiritually tied to our hometown. When I leave, I become a different person, and it’s almost like I have to go back to regroup and establish myself again. I come home and I’m like, oh, that’s who I am. [Laughs] I may get to go to all these great places, but when I come back, I’ve still got to scoop up chicken poop off my porch.

Read our interview with Lydia Slagle here.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

22 Top Bluegrass Duos

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Everyone knows that in the early days of bluegrass, before that term was even coined, all you needed to make a “band” was two people and two instruments. Fiddle and banjo? Sure. But in those days, they’d take whatever they could get. Duos are still a strong presence in the music today, in brother/sibling duos, spouse-led bands, and legendary collaborations.

Check out these twenty-two bluegrass pairings — and their accoutrement — on BGS:

Bill & Charlie Monroe

Before Bill Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, made his indelible mark on the genre (quite literally giving it its name), he was already a popular performer with his brothers Charlie and Birch. Birch left The Monroe Brothers in the mid-1930s, and Charlie and Bill went on to enjoy success on the road, in the studio, and on the radio — until rising tensions and a fateful fight in 1938 caused them to split ways. But, without that fight, we may not have “bluegrass” at all.

Flatt & Scruggs

December 1945. The Ryman Auditorium. Nashville, Tennessee. Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys stepped on stage for the Grand Ole Opry with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs among their ranks for the very first time and bluegrass as we know it today was born. Flatt & Scruggs left Monroe in 1948 to join forces and went on to become one of the few ubiquitous, household names of bluegrass.

Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard

Undeniably trailblazers, Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard are widely regarded as the first women in bluegrass to capture the “high lonesome” sound popularized by Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and others. They toured across the U.S., often supporting causes that benefited forgotten, downtrodden people from all backgrounds and walks of life. They were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017.

The Stanley Brothers

Natives of the music-rich southwest corner of Virginia, Carter and Ralph Stanley were prolific recording artists and touring musicians in bluegrass’s first generation. Countless songs written and/or popularized by the Stanley Brothers and their backing band, the Clinch Mountain Boys, are staples of the genre today. Carter passed in 1966 and Ralph continued until his death in 2016 with the Clinch Mountain Boys — who still tour today with Ralph’s son, Ralph II.

Don Reno & Red Smiley

Unsung trailblazers of the first generation of bluegrass pickers, Reno & Smiley were tireless innovators with a jovial, sometimes silly flair to their songs and instrumental prowess. Their duets are simply some of the best in all of bluegrass. The duo performed together off and on from the early 1950s to the 1970s — but both passed away much too young, Smiley in 1972 at the age of 46 and Reno in 1984 at the age of 58. Reno’s frenetic, electric and pedal steel guitar-infused licks remain unmatched in banjo picking today.

Jim & Jesse McReynolds

With matching suits and impeccable pompadours brothers Jim and Jesse McReynolds often brought rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll, mainstream country and pop sensibilities to their take on sibling harmonies and bluegrass brother duos. Jesse’s crosspicking on the mandolin was — and continues to be — absolutely astonishing. Jim passed in 2002, Jesse continues to perform on the Grand Ole Opry to this day. At the time of this writing, he is ninety years old.

Laurie Lewis & Tom Rozum

Laurie Lewis often takes top billing — as leader of the Right Hands and before that, the Bluegrass Pals, and others — but since 1986 her musical partner Tom Rozum has almost constantly been at her side on the mandolin and harmonies. Their duo recording, The Oak and the Laurel, was nominated for a Grammy in 1995. Here is the album’s title track:

Bill Monroe & Doc Watson

What is there to say? Two of the folks who paved the way for this genre, laying a foundation so strong and far-reaching that we still can’t fully comprehend its impact. Bill and Doc collaborated on more than one occasion and we, as fans and disciples, are lucky that so many of these moments are captured in recordings and videos.

Del McCoury & David “Dawg” Grisman

At face value, an unlikely combo, but their friendship goes back to the early 1960s and their musical endeavors together began soon after. As Del slowly but surely became a bastion for traditional bluegrass aesthetics applied broadly, Dawg embraced jammy, jazzy, new acoustic sounds that sometimes only register as bluegrass-adjacent because they come from the mandolin. Opposite sides of the same coin, their duet makes total sense while at the same time challenging everything we think we know about the music. In this clip, Dawg sings tenor to Del — not many would be brave enough to try!

Ricky Skaggs & Keith Whitley

They got their start together in the Clinch Mountain Boys with Ralph Stanley, making some of the best recordings in the history of the band’s many iterations. Before they both struck out on wildly successful, mainstream careers they recorded a seminal duo album together, Second Generation. It remains one of the most important albums in the bluegrass canon — especially as far as duos/duets go.

Norman & Nancy Blake

Norman is well known for his flatpicking prowess, which has graced recordings by John Hartford, Bob Dylan, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and so many others. He and his wife, Nancy, were married in 1975 after having begun their musical forays together a year or so earlier. Nancy’s command of many instruments — cello, mandolin, and fiddle among them — balances neatly with Norman’s jaw-dropping, singular style on the flattop. Their inseparable harmonies and timeless repertoire are merely icing on the cake.

Jimmy Martin & Ralph Stanley

How their first album together, First Time Together (cough), is not more well-known is truly impossible to understand. The King of Bluegrass and the Man of Constant Sorrow twining their extraordinary voices must have been ordained by a higher power. It’s a good thing they answered the call. Be careful, Jimmy’s percussive G-runs feel like a slap in the face — in the best way.

Darrell Scott & Tim O’Brien

Their live albums together and their co-written masterpieces belong in every museum and shrine to roots music around the world. Both of these triple threat (Quadruple? Quintuple? When do we stop counting?) musicians are rampantly successful in their own right, but together they are simply transcendent. Their cut of “Brother Wind” deserves a listen right this instant and “House of Gold” gives you the harmony acrobatics gut punch you need every time. It was nearly impossible to choose just one, but here’s a hit that was recorded once by a little group called the Dixie Chicks.

Ricky Skaggs & Tony Rice

Again, words fail. Skaggs & Rice is a desert island record. Each and every time these two have graced a recording or a stage together, magic has been made, from their days with J.D. Crowe & the New South and on. We only wish that they could have done more together.

Vern & Ray

Vern Williams and Ray Park were California’s original bluegrass sons. Though they were both born and raised in Arkansas, they relocated to Stockton, California, as adults. They’re often credited with “introducing” bluegrass music to the West Coast. They disbanded in 1974 (both passed in the early 2000s), but their influence is palpable to this day, even if they’re sorely unheard of east of the Mississippi. This deserves correction! Immediately!

Eddie & Martha Adcock

Eddie is a pioneering banjo player who’s a veteran of both Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and The Country Gentlemen, two decidedly legendary and influential acts. His style is somewhat wacky, certainly singular, but effortlessly bluegrass and traditional as well. He married Martha in the late 1970s and the pair have toured prolifically as a duo. In 2008, Eddie underwent brain surgery to correct debilitating hand tremors. He was kept awake, playing the banjo during the procedure — and there is jaw-dropping film of this online!

Dailey & Vincent

When Dailey & Vincent burst onto the scene in the mid-aughts after both having notable careers as sidemen, the bluegrass community rejoiced at the reemergence of a wavering art form within the genre — traditional duo singing. However, Jamie and Darrin, whether they knew it at the time or not, had their sights set much higher. Now more of a full-blown stage show than a bluegrass band, their recordings and concerts are a high-energy, charismatic, and downright entertaining mix of classic country, Southern gospel, quartet singing, and yes, bluegrass.

Kenny & Amanda Smith

Husband and wife Kenny and Amanda first recorded together in 2001, going on to win IBMA’s Emerging Artist of the Year award two years later. They’ve now cut eight albums together, all clean, clear, crisp modern bluegrass that centers on Amanda’s impossibly bright vocals, which maintain a personal, country hue alongside Kenny’s fantastic flatpicking. SON!

Tom T. & Dixie Hall

Two of the most recent inductees into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Tom T. and Dixie Hall wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs cut by country, bluegrass, and Americana artists alike. Tom T.’s reputation and chart-topping originals tend to eclipse Dixie, but he is unyielding in his efforts to point that same spotlight at his beloved wife instead, who passed away in 2015. Though she never performed — definitely not to the extent that Tom T. did — the marks she left on bluegrass, country, and her partnership with her husband are indelible. This number was co-written by the pair:

The Louvin Brothers

Recipients of IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 1992, the Louvin Brothers are another example of early bluegrassers who enjoyed the amorphous, primordial days of the genre before it became more and more sequestered from mainstream country and country radio. Their duets are iconic, with counter-intuitive contours and lines that bands and singers still have difficulty replicating to this day. Their most famous contribution to the American music zeitgeist, though, might not be their music, but the spectacular cover art for their 1959 album, Satan Is Real. If you haven’t seen it, Google it right now.

Delia Bell & Bill Grant

Natives of Texas and Oklahoma, respectively, Delia Bell and Bill Grant met through Bell’s husband, Bobby, in the late 1950s. Between their band, the Kiamichi Mountain Boys, and their duo project they recorded more than a dozen albums together through the 1980s. Famously, Emmylou Harris became a fan when she heard their cut of “Roses in the Snow,” which Harris went on to record on her eponymous bluegrass record. Bell died in 2018.

The Osborne Brothers

Though they popularized a style of three-part harmony that had never been heard before — the infamous “high lead” harmony stack — their band, no matter who it may have included over the years, was undeniably helmed and anchored by Bobby and Sonny. (Which does explain the name.) You may remember “Rocky Top” and “Ruby” first and foremost in their discography, but the hits they’ve contributed to the bluegrass songbook are innumerable. Here’s one such classic.

Mountain Man: The Magic of Women in Harmony

Posted on by Editor

The splendor of women’s voices raised in harmony has found fresh spirit in the modern folk era. From The Wailin’ Jennys to The Secret Sisters, groups built around visceral vocal blends — whether backed by instruments or a cappella — have continued the powerful legacy formed by the Carter Sisters, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, and other tenacious singers.

Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Molly Erin Sarlé discovered their harmonies while studying at a liberal arts college in Vermont, and turned their quick and fast friendship into the 2010 debut album, Made the Harbor. Then life pulled the members in different directions (Meath, for starters, co-founded electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso), and their next project took much longer to arrive than anyone anticipated.

Magic Ship, the trio’s sophomore album and their first on Nonesuch Records, finds the group experimenting with rhythm and cadence to give their original tracks a pop and flourish that doesn’t always exist in such partnerships. As friends who have found a kind of family in the way their voices blend, Magic Ship is about celebrating that bond and all its magic.

I saw you perform at Eaux Claires last year. Did you already have plans to record again, or did it take that set to see the bigger possibility?

Amelia: The Eaux Claires set was kind of a tester just to see if it felt the same to sing together, and what it would feel like to do that. After that set, we were immediately like, ‘Oh of course we’ll do a record. That’s a great idea.’

The audience was rapt.

Alexandra: That felt like such a special time because we had no idea after seven years, or whatever, how many people were going to show up—to have people continue to arrive and fill out the woods, and stand in places where it was not comfortable to stand just to try and hear a little bit. … I think festivals can be a tricky thing for a largely a cappella band, and that stage is the perfect festival translation for [such] a band.

In describing a trio of women’s voices, I feel like some people have resorted to hackneyed descriptions based on myth—like sirens. How do you see yourselves pushing back against that stereotype, or trying to do something within that image?

Molly: I imagine when we’re singing together, we’re not trying to do anything other than be ourselves, so I don’t see us as pushing back against it in any other way besides not trying to play into it.

Amelia: I think like with most things you do while you’re a woman, if you do it without thinking about it, you are being subversive in a lot of ways.

Alexandra: You’re just saying, “Fuck all of that, and we are who we are. Here we are.”

Molly: There is that thing that I like about this, other than the fact that sirens are people that pull men to their death, which is also funny. I do like the assignment of magic, which I think is something we get to live in when we sing together.

It’s interesting that you use the word “magic,” because harmonies that close are almost familial, like you only get it from sisters or brothers. How do you explain your closeness?

Alexandra: I feel like magic is the way that we commonly explain it to ourselves. When we first started singing together it did feel like powerful magic, like, “Whoa, this feels like nothing else has ever felt. It’s really cool and I want to do it more.” It feels like a really honest form of connection, and it’s a special, wild thing that we all happened to meet each other at the same time and discover this thing. Magic is part of the definition.

You cover Ted Lucas’ “Baby Where You Are,” and you’ve retained that to some degree. What was the recording process like for that particular track?

Amelia: For me, I learned about that record from our friend William Tyler who had something to do with its release in general, so I didn’t even know that he’s a Midwestern artist, but I like that. Recording it was really fun. It’s always so great to sit down and figure out a song with your pals.

What does the arranging process look like when you’re dealing with an original song?

Amelia: It looks like us singing it about five times and making suggestions, and that’s about it. Usually we’re like, “Ok, well uh we’ll do that. That sounds good.”

Molly: Similar to the way we work on the songs that we write as individuals and then bring together in that usually when we choose a cover, someone is holding down the main framework of the song, and then the other two are working around that to complete the feel.

So the lead always switches?

Alexandra: Yeah. And usually the notes we hit are kind of up to whoever has the idea of what part to hit. Sometimes we’ll be like, “Oh, there’s this note up here that we like. Will I just abandon my bass part and go up higher?” And then what harmony makes sense with that first initial, intuitive idea?

“Stella” and “Rang Tang Ring Toon” feel straight out of a traditional songbook. What inspired those songs? What was your composition process like?

Amelia: I wrote the song “Stella”— or I wrote the lyrics and the melody, and then we did the arrangements together, like we do with all of our songs — but I never really thought of it as being plucked from the past. At the time that I wrote it, I was thinking that we were going to be writing a children’s record, so I wanted to write a song about a kid playing outside in New York. That’s where it’s placed for me, in Manhattan in the 1980s.

Molly: It always reminded me of a Paul Simon song. Our manager Martin thought it was a song about a cat.

Situated next to “Stella,” you’ve got “Underwear,” which—and I mean this in the most loving way possible—is such a beautiful weirdo of a song. What inspired that?

Amelia: That was about dealing with turning into your parents in some ways, and also inspired by the search for the perfect pair of underwear, which is a real struggle.

Have you found one that you like? Is it a brand or a cut?

Amelia: No, and I keep on doing this thing where every time I find a pair that I think might be it, I’ll buy 30 of them and be like, “This is my underwear forever,” and then three weeks later, I’ll be like, “I don’t like this underwear anymore,” and I’ll have this sea of underwear.

Alexandra: I didn’t know you did that with underwear!

What do you do with the leftovers?

Amelia: I keep them and wear them out of guilt.

How do you decide which songs are best serviced by instruments and which are best left as an a capella affair?

Alexandra: I feel like often, Molly and I will write songs with a guitar, and those are the songs that have guitar. I don’t think we’ve ever retroactively added instrumentation to anything.

How have your other projects — Molly and Alexandra, your solo work, and Amelia, your work with Sylvan Esso — informed this new collection of songs?

Alexandra: I feel like so much of our music is about feeling, and where we are in life and I think having lived our lives in different directions from each other just informs it in a subconscious way. We have years of life lived to draw on, and years of experience in bands, or doing whatever that we’ve been doing, so I feel like we’re bringing more varied things to the table than we were when we were 20.

It’s brighter, too, even though the themes aren’t always!

Amelia: Yeah, bringing in the joy.

Alexandra: Bringing in the joy!

Necessary in this day and age.

Amelia: Darn tootin’.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

WATCH: The Wailin’ Jennys, ‘Wildflowers’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Wailin’ Jennys
Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba
Song: “Wildflowers”
Album: Fifteen
Label: Red House Records

In Their Words: “We’re so excited to release our fan-sourced video for our version of Tom Petty’s classic ‘Wildflowers.’ It ended up more beautiful than we could have imagined thanks to our fans submitting gorgeous and meaningful images and video. All of them clearly illustrate each person’s concept of love and freedom. It is a video full of pure joy and we couldn’t be more proud to release it to the world! We hope you love it as much as we do.” — Nicky Mehta

Photo courtesy of Red House Records

All the Things: A Conversation With The Milk Carton Kids (2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

In the second half of our conversation with the Milk Carton Kids, Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan openly shared their disagreement over some pretty serious issues. The pre-release publicity for their new album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, revealed some of the life experiences the two have been through since their last album. Pattengale dealt with cancer and the painful end of a seven-year relationship; Ryan had a child. And they have a real difference of opinion on whether those things should be brought to listeners’ attention as the subject of these new songs. But beneath the bickering, you may still sense the milk of human kindness.

[Read the part one of our conversation with Milk Carton Kids.]

The fact that you guys live in different cities now [Pattengale has moved from L.A. to Nashville], does that help or hurt the relationship?

Kenneth: The jury’s still out on that one. [Laughs.] It seems to be fine, for now.

Obviously a big part of why people love you on stage is the rapport you guys have on stage. It must feel a little strange now when you have a band on stage and suddenly there are other people there waiting for you to talk.

Kenneth: It’s become such a part of our identity, and I’m kind of confounded as to why. Anything that anybody’s ever laughed at on stage that we’ve said, it’s just what we do in the car or on the phone. And sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s not, and we’ve learned how to make it read a little better for an audience with the timing, but it’s how we always are.

With you guys being in such different places geographically as well as probably emotionally, was it easy to sort of come together and write on the same page? There’s a pretty consistent mood to a lot of the album, or at least some sort of thematic undertow, despite your different experiences.

Kenneth: I think that just might reflect a commonality of vision. Because truthfully the songs on this album are the most singular Joey and I have ever written. Outside of “One More for the Road,” which we wrote together in a different era before our band existed, every single song on this record was written by one or the other of us, lyrically. It was not like our song “New York” on Prologue where we sat down together and wrote lines and talked about what would happen to the story if we changed this or that. I showed up with that song “All the Things,” and Joey said, “Would you consider changing this word?” And I said, “Nope!” The same thing for “Unwinnable War,” “Blindness,” and “Just Look at Us Now” when he wrote those.

Joey: The thing that I’m really proud of in terms of the album having a commonality amongst the songs is the thing that the band brought to bear on it. I have a real fondness for albums that sound like they’re played by a band in a room, and where the whole album is sort of treated conceptually, not necessarily from a writing standpoint, but from a recording and production standpoint. And while we did have some musicians come in and out for certain songs, the core of the band that was there for the 11 days that we recorded gives such a strong identity to the record that ties songs together that could feel very disparate… as opposed to something where everybody said, “Okay, let’s take it one song of time. What does this song need? What does that one need?”

There are some very stark, end-of-relationship type songs in here, or maybe the ends of things that aren’t even relationships — looking back on the past, or doing something for the last time. Was it daunting to write in a really direct fashion where there is pretty emotional stuff happening?

Kenneth: Not daunting. Maybe where there existed more insecurity or preciousness in years past, there’s just maybe less f—s given, and maybe some confidence that’s come with artistic, if not financial, success. We seem to have an audience that’ll listen to us. I think that that engenders a specific amount of courage in digging deeper and being more honest, and it was maybe time to do that anyway, so the stars aligned on that front.

And as a songwriter, the hardest thing you can ever search for is honesty. And when you have these sort of traumatic events that happen, that’s a real easy way to sort of cherry-pick some relatable honesty. You don’t ever want to have to suffer to do that. That would be silly. But while it’s there, you might as well take advantage, you know, when you get dumped after seven years.

Joey: It’s true. There was some real stuff that happened.

Kenneth: But with Joey, when Joey had kids, it’s so funny — they write in the press release about him having kids like it’s some seismic shift that nobody’s ever gone through and experienced before. [Laughs.] It’s literally the basis of human existence, and somebody in our organization said, “Man, people are going to be really shocked that Joey had kids!”

Joey: I know. [Sarcastically.] I wish we would just focus on the unique heartaches, like, you know, a breakup.

Kenneth: I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about beating cancer.

Joey: Oh, yeah, that’s true. That’s something almost nobody’s ever done. [Long pause, followed by awkward laughter.] The whole point that you were making was that they’re relatable! That means that everybody goes through it. But some shit happened in our lives.

Kenneth: Yeah, but having kids…

Joey: My favorite part of Kenneth is when he talks about having kids — either like birthing them, or taking care of them. It’s really cute, Kenneth. Keep going.

Kenneth: Joey went from just wandering around life aimlessly with all this free time to then having kids and having a bunch of people hired to take care of ‘em so that he can just wander around aimlessly with all the free time, but having kids at home that somebody else is taking care of. Just a seismic experiential shift! Everything changed!

Joey: Anyway, to get back to the truth of it all, some shit happened in our lives over the course of the last few years, and there was something to write about. And…

Kenneth: I don’t know.

Joey: We’re not going to argue about this. It’s unquestionably true, and we can list them if you want, but they’ve already been listed in our press release, and…

Kenneth: I would argue that all that happened is we just became better writers.

Joey: Before you finish interrupting me…

Kenneth: You’re interrupting me, technically.

Joey: All right, well, let me finish interrupting you then before you jump back in. It’s the decent thing to do. I mean, you only have to listen to the songs to know what we’ve gone through, which is the whole point of the record. … A lot of things which were actually profound shifts in our lives and ways of perceiving reality happened, and so for me it became easier to write more directly and truthfully than it had been at least on the last record. It’s the reason that I like to write songs, to process things.

Kenneth: I have trouble seeing it, because… Sorry, I know Joey thinks I’m just sandbagging everything now, but I’m not. This is my honest take on it. I think Joey’s always written some really nice songs, and he’s writing them better than ever, and I don’t actually see a very different change. The same thing’s true with me. I’ve always written the best song that I’m capable of.

So whether or not I’ve gotten better at songwriting over the last few years, or if it needs to be contextualized for people to understand that it comes out of some life event, I call bullshit on it, because that to me is just a formal, contextualizing sales pitch for what’s actually just a collection of the best songs that we could write over the last three years. And I think it happens to be better than the ones that came before it, and we’ll see if everybody else agrees.

Joey: It’s interesting for you to reject that sort of attachment to it. But (the closing track) “All the Things” is about your breakup, as is “You Break My Heart,” and there’s no other way to say it than that’s you processing your breakup. I mean, that is a song that you wrote that’s about your breakup. So whether it’s better or worse than others…

Kenneth: Well, I have an issue with that, because it’s not that… Why are you laughing? I’ve being very serious here.

Joey: I’m excited to see how you’re going to say that your song “All the Things” is not about the ending of your relationship.

Kenneth: Because it’s exactly the opposite of that! It has nothing to do with the breakup. It’s about chronicling six years of my life that I look back on very fondly. It has to do with trying to say something that is maybe not able to be said out loud unless you put it in poetry and song. I don’t think that it resounds with people because the human experience is all about breaking up…

I mean, in some ways, yes, maybe it took the trauma of a breakup to put it into words, but it’s about celebrating what was a really beautiful relationship between two people. And frankly, if I’m half the writer that anybody thinks I am, I could have written that song at any moment during the six years, even before it all ended. That song is about reflecting the human condition as I see it and how it relates to me personally, and to couch it in some breakup thing seems like a headline that a publicist thinks would grab some attention. I think that’s crazy. [Pauses.] Did I do a sufficient job?

Joey: I think that was the best you could have done.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Dismissing the Suits: A Conversation With The Milk Carton Kids (1 of 2)

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The Milk Carton Kids have been about nothing if not duality. That’s down to their very name, which evokes both comedy and tragedy, and their stage presence, in which some of the stateliest and most delicate songs possible are broken up by riotously deadpan banter. They’ve always been about duo-ality, too — two voices and guitars, gathered around a single microphone, contemplative Everlys for the 21st century, unaugmented by anything that would have seemed rank or strange to the Stanley Brothers back in the 1950s.

But now, suddenly, almost everything you know about the Milk Carton Kids is wrong — at least the formal elements. They’ve dropped the formal suits and picked up separate mics… and a full band, too, while they were at it. Could this be their Dylan-goes-electric moment? Not to worry — there probably won’t be any cries of “Judas!” greeting their fifth album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, or a touring ensemble that no longer fits in a single front seat. It’s not just that the new material is superb — although that never hurts — but that the fuller arrangements sound like a natural progression in what is still scaled for intimacy.

Before we get to the Kids, we queried producer Joe Henry for his thoughts about how necessary or smooth the transition was, going from duo to band configuration. He admitted there was at least the fleeting consideration of a backlash — “I don’t imagine it possible that the Kids weren’t individually and collectively pondering the response of an audience that has been so steadfast in their devotions to the band’s brazen and brave duo commitment to date.” But, Henry says, “I saw no evidence that the looming question gave them any pause… And no one involved that I’m aware of had any doubt that such a shift was now not only timely but imperative: they’d reached a point where the color of the light, so to speak, needed to reflect their growth as musicians and songwriters––this batch of songs being so particularly strong as to invite, nay, insist on a presentation equal in its evolution.”

The producer adds that the Kids are “still very much a duo in ethos and execution. There is real drama in the intimacy of Ken and Joey pushing up to a single mic in symbiotic solitude, and it was important to all three of us going in that that image remain intact ––even as new sonic weather kicked up and swirled around them.”

When we sat down with Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan at a Van Nuys coffee shop in June, we found that off-stage they’re just like they are on-stage… only more so.

As part of changing things up, you’ve decided this is also the right time to go for street clothes in concert, right?

Joey: Talk about decisions that were never actually made.

Kenneth: Yeah, that one’s still TBD. I mean, we get on the tour bus tonight. Joey’s near his closet, but I didn’t bring anything from Nashville, so if I’m wearing a suit tomorrow, I’m gonna have to go to the Men’s Warehouse in Tucson. The advice I’ve gotten from literally everybody on earth is that they’re gonna be saddened to not see me in a suit, and that we should be wearing them. But… f— ‘em. [Laughs.]

Joey: Well, I never wanted to wear a suit. The reason that we wore suits in the beginning was as a part of a collection of survival techniques.

Kenneth: Given your druthers, you’d dress like an ass-clown, that’s why. And you can quote me on that!

Joey: [Sighs.] See, how can people not love us? No, it was a part of a suite of survival techniques that we developed when we were playing in very…

Kenneth: Techniques or tactics?

Joey: Techniques.

Kenneth: There are survival techniques? I think they’re mostly tactics. It’s interesting to hear you’ve developed survival technique. It sounds like something they’d sell in the Valley.

Joey: Those words are synonyms. It’s a survival tactic and a technique. In any case, in the early days, we were playing this really sonically fragile show, and the only places that would book us were like the smallest rock club or bar or coffee shop sometimes in town. In a dive bar, we would wear suits to visually indicate that it was just something different than what they would maybe expect to see in that room, so that you could have some chance for the first couple minutes of people taking note and going, “Alright, what is this gonna be? I’m going to shut up and listen for one song.” You at least have a song. You have that chance to get ‘em to stop talking loudly in the bars that they’re used to talking in and maybe pay attention to the show, because our show required that.

It’s not like an attention-seeking preciousness. It’s like a physical, sonic fragility that we had, because we mic-ed our guitars, and you just can’t turn it up that loud. The perfect example is how we played at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, many times. It’s a great place but the beer fridge is louder than we could get the PA, so we had to ask the bar to unplug their beer fridge, and they were so accommodating. I don’t know what happened to the beer. And they would also bring in rows of folding chairs, which literally no other band would ever even ask them to do. But we always wanted to be in a theater where people would be able to receive what we were trying to present, and the suits were just part of that. Now, with the band…

Kenneth: You’re gonna go back to flip-flops!

Joey: With the band… [Long, exasperated pause.] See, people always say we’re antagonistic. I think it’s just him. No, with the band, we don’t have the sonic fragility that we had before. … And so the whole misdirection of wearing a suit in unexpected places is not required. That was a long way of saying: I’m excited to not wear suits.

How early or late in the process did you decide to go with a band for this album?

Joey: We decided three years ago in Dusseldorf, Germany that we weren’t going to make the next album as a duo… It was just a moment. It wasn’t like we even talked it out. [To Kenneth:] You were like, “I think we should probably do the full-band thing next.” And I was like, “Oh, thank God you said that, because I’ve been worrying about how to bring that up.” But you always break the ice.

Kenneth: Yeah. I’m a talker.

I’m always interested in how people who are identified with a very specific thing decide to change it up… or not. A lot of times, people back away from giving up the thing that people identify as unique.

Kenneth: It’s always risky to go down these philosophical rabbit holes in interviews like this, because invariably they come out not reading exactly as intended, but I’ll go anyway, because who gives a shit? One of our blind spots -– and I think it’s a common blind spot for artists specifically — is that Joey and I for a long time had a complete inability to understand what was good about our band, while also knowing it in our core. And it’s necessary. If we knew what that was, I think that we would lean into it, and it would get tired very quickly and wouldn’t mature and evolve.

But for the first year and a half of our band, Joey and I didn’t realize that we were good just because when we sang together, it sounded like something that people either had never heard before or hadn’t heard in a while, or it bore a trueness that was just apparent in its physics. Joey and I thought that it was a result of all the hard work we do about making sure our harmonies are tight or about phrasing or about all these marginal things that we quibble over. You really lose sight of what the fundamental thread is that actually is the reason the whole thing exists. And we still have that blind spot. There’s something that’s just innate in what you do from the beginning that we take for granted.

So what is the thing you have the blind spot about, that your audience totally gets?

Kenneth: To put it really simply, when Joey and I sing together, it reminds people of Simon and Garfunkel, the way they actually physically combine, like alchemy in the air, or the way the Everlys did it, or the Louvin Brothers. When Joey and I sing together, there is some physical chemistry that is actually, like, we have to try hard to f— it up. And we have from time to time, but we’ve got an advantage coming out of the gate to other people singing harmony together, in that there’s something that just works about it.

And then there’s a similar shared vision in our writing and stylistic choices, and even essential life administration, where, outside of a few blowouts where we figured out what the problem was, the way they rub together results in this strange band that people haven’t kicked out of life yet.

Read the second half of this interview.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

That Ain’t Bluegrass: Flatt Lonesome

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Artist: Flatt Lonesome
Song: “Where Do You Go” (originally by Glen Campbell)
Album: Silence in These Walls

Where did you first hear this song?

Charli Robertson: I actually found this song on one of those days where I was just driving around, running some errands, riding around town. When I’m home, I kind of just ride around — it’s funny how you get out of the van and you want to immediately get back in the car, when you’re home. I was on a Glen Campbell kick, so I went back to all the really old albums. I listened to several of his songs and then this one came on and, as soon as I heard the first line, I knew I loved this song. Glen Campbell could sing the phonebook and make you want to sing it, he is such a good singer — the lyrics in his songs are simple, but so good.

What do you think makes it a good song for a bluegrass band?

I always said, from the first time I heard this song, that the lyrics and the song itself are so good that anybody of any genre could listen to it and appreciate it. Not only that, but you can do as little with the song or as much with the song as you want to do. You could make it a huge song with tons of instruments outside of bluegrass, or you could do it very acoustic and still make it sound good, as well. I just thought it would work. I hope that people enjoy it as much as I have.

How did you take it from Glen Campbell’s version and arrange it to be within Flatt Lonesome’s aesthetic?

This song was a little bit harder because of the range of the song — it’s got a huge range. Paul [Harrigill], our banjo player, he’s really good at that stuff, so I told him to check it out, see what he thought about an arrangement. I’m pretty sure Glen Campbell modulates like three times, which we couldn’t do because of the high harmony and the low harmony; it just wouldn’t be possible. It’s pretty impressive that Glen does that. We just got together, sang it in a few different keys, and sang through it a few different ways. We always know what works for us. We’ve been singing together forever, for as long as we’ve been breathing, so we usually know pretty quickly what works.

Bluegrass has always had this tradition of reworking and revamping popular songs — Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, Reno & Smiley all did this — why do you think this is still present in the genre?

I think that people love to be able to do songs that they have always loved, their own way. I have always loved to pick a song that I love and put my own spin on it. To do a big song, a very well known song from a big artist, I think it still needs to acknowledge the song the way that artist did it, but with enough of a unique spin on it that it’s not copying the person who did it.

You cannot recreate a song exactly the same. We’ve done this several times, with Dwight Yoakam’s “You’re the One,” and we do “Ramblin’ Fever” on stage, a Merle Haggard song. These are people are our heroes, and we will always want to do their material. Even if we don’t record it, we want to do it on stage. As long as you’re still appreciating the song the way someone else did it, and not completely changing it, it’s always cool to be able to do that. I think the fans appreciate it, too, because it’s a song they’re familiar with and something that they’ve heard before.

What’s your favorite thing about performing “Where Do You Go?”

As soon as I heard it, I knew I’d like to perform it live. I like to sing songs that are real songs. The lyrics are simple and real. I like to sing songs that the crowd can listen to one time and get it. I love the vocals. I like how I get a little bit of a solo and then it’s a trio. Any song that has a lot of harmony, I’m going to like it. I like a lot of things about it! I like the double guitar — I like pretty much everything about it. It’s going to be a favorite of mine for awhile.

Now you know that ain’t bluegrass, right?

I do know! How dare us, right? [Laughs] On our last album, there are some different things — a lot of people don’t even like it if there isn’t a banjo. I think that acoustic music can be a lot of different things. One of the reasons that I love bluegrass music is because it’s acoustic, and you can do so much with it. Real fans, people that love this music, will appreciate a very toned-down song with just guitar and a bass. For the few fans that you might lose for doing something a little different, you’ll gain more. I would encourage artists to just do what they love to do. We still have banjo. We play banjo in every set. It’s full of it. But for the one song that it’s not in, we will probably always get, “That’s not bluegrass!” But that’s okay! It really is okay for there to be a song without banjo, because we want to give the song what the song needs and it may not need a banjo. We’re fine with that.

LISTEN: The Coffis Brothers, ‘You and Me’

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Artist: The Coffis Brothers
Hometown: Santa Cruz, CA
Song: “You and Me”
Album: Roll with It
Release Date: Fall 2017

In Their Words: “This song felt good the first time we played it, back when we were recording demos in Bass Lake. The melody, the groove, the arrangement … it didn’t take much work. It’s a song about being alright with what you’ve already got, but also being hopeful about what’s ahead. I hope it’s relatable on a few different levels. Beyond that, it’s sung in two-part harmony for a majority of the song which is something my brother and I love doing. It’s a lucky thing to get to sing with your brother. There’s nothing else like it.” — Kellen Coffis

Photo credit: Connor Qunto

WATCH: T Sisters, ‘The Road’

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Artist: T Sisters
Hometown: Oakland, CA
Song: "The Road"
Album: T Sisters
Release Date: October 7
Label: Three-Headed Sounds

In Their Words: "Family runs deep through our music, and it shows in our harmonies. To create a great blend, you have to hear yourself as part of a whole, being mindful of volume, how you say a word and where you end it. A lot comes down to listening — giving up some of your ego and individuality for a moment, and finding places where each one of us shines. It's for the sake of that harmony that we compromise." — Erika Tietjen

Photo credit: Elena Kulikova

WATCH: Misner & Smith, ‘Lovers Like Us’

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Artist: Misner & Smith
Hometown: Davis, CA
Song: "Lovers Like Us"
Album: Seven Hour Storm
In Their Words: "'Lover's Like Us' is about that state of being in a relationship with someone at a time when every direction seems fraught with heartache, misunderstanding, and confusion. Even talking about it all can seem to amplify the struggle and miscommunication — yet there's still love there, biding its time. Two people trying to find their way and feeling like they just can't quite get their balance back, no matter how hard they try — and yet even in the despair there are moments of clarity." — Sam Misner

"I think this song is such a great example of what we're known for: Two voices become one. The experience of the song is enhanced by the fact that there is no 'lead singer'  — we build the story of the song in harmony, weaving the narrative together with the close friction and energy of the voices. And the voices reflect the conversation of the characters within the song.” — Megan Smith

Photo credit: Caitlin Smith. Video by by Pint of Soul.