Tag: helen forster

Turning 30, eTown Plans b’Earthday Show and Enters Colorado Music Hall of Fame

Posted on by Editor

The long-running radio series eTown is famous for its finales, but upon reaching its 30th year, the focus is shifting to an upcoming all-star virtual b’Earthday concert on April 22 and the program’s deserving induction into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. Of course there’s also an eagerness from everybody involved — staff, artists, and audience alike — to get back to staging shows at the beloved eTown Hall, a repurposed church that stands as a centerpiece of Boulder’s cultural community.

Community is key to Nick and Helen Forster, the founders of eTown. Their marriage has proved to be as sustainable as the environmental causes they support, and by never wavering from musical integrity, they have created a destination for musicians and music fans of every stripe. Helen carried a love of theater to eTown following her work with the early years of Telluride Bluegrass Festival. Nick Forster, who found acclaim in the band Hot Rize just before eTown launched, can recall browsing through microfilm in the library to do research for his guest interviews. Now, thanks to the internet, the whole world can feel part of the eTown tribe.

Calling in from Boulder, the Forsters filled in BGS about their ongoing creative venture, the common thread that all eTown artists share, and the warm family feelings behind the scenes.

BGS: What was the musical landscape of Colorado like back 1991?

Nick: In ’91, there were a lot of things that had come into their full power, including Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which is where Helen and I met. There was a pretty vibrant music scene in both Boulder and Denver, but if there was such a thing as the sound of Colorado, it was something around that lineup of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival or RockyGrass or Folks Fest. A loosely defined Americana vibe, with a little bit of a hippie slant. Colorado has always had that progressive, acoustic [feel]. … From John Denver on down, there has been a sense of Colorado being a place where a natural approach to music makes sense.

Helen, what drew you to bluegrass music?

Helen: You know, everything back then in Telluride was so organic that if you didn’t have a radio station, you got together and you started one. The festival started because these guys came back from the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas, and they loved it and said, “Why don’t we do this here?” So they did a Fourth of July celebration and a couple hundred people came. I think there were two or three local bands, and from that it grew into become an actual festival. By the second year of that, a couple of the founders had pulled out and I jumped in to just help, I guess. …

When I first got to Telluride, there were very few places to go, other than the bars. And there were some local bluegrass bands. That’s how I first discovered bluegrass. I was in my early 20s and we’d all jam into these basement bars and listen to the bluegrass. It caught my heart. It’s a beautiful form of music and I was so impressed with the talent and the ability of the players. Not only to play, but to jam. It was almost like jazz, in a sense, and it caught my attention then.

Nick and Helen Forster, 1991. Credit: Laura Lyon

Nick, around this time you had made your mark in Hot Rize, which was the first IBMA Entertainer of the Year back in 1990. So, with your background as a performer, how did you make touring artists feel at home at eTown?

Nick: I was in a unique position being on the road with Hot Rize for years. I had an understanding of what it was like from an artist’s perspective. We’d been lucky enough to play on the Grand Ole Opry, Prairie Home Companion, Austin City Limits, Mountain Stage, and all these shows. I was really enamored with live radio in front of an audience. And when I thought about all the gigs I played with Hot Rize, there were four things that I usually remembered: How was the sound? Was there a decent place to stay? Was the food good? And did the crew have a good attitude?

So, we started with that at eTown, recognizing that we were trying to do two different things. One, we were trying to help these artists basically promote their new records, because everybody who came to eTown was out there with a new record. But we also wanted to have the mission of why we were doing eTown be something they would connect with. And to be inspired by, or at least informed by. So the piece of our show that included conversation about climate change or community or sustainability was another thing that most musicians were really into. Musicians who were traveling have a good world view. A lot of them are avid readers and up to date on world affairs. This was not a giant leap for them to connect with the mission-related part of it.

Tell me about the spirit of collaboration at eTown. What do you like about having more than just the two of you putting a show together?

Helen: It’s interesting, because when I was a little kid, I was doing a lot of theatre. I came from that model that it’s not just the performers; it’s the stage manager, and the props mistress, and the person who manages the set changes. Everybody works together. It’s like a team experience when you do theatre, and having the great crew that we’ve had, I think it’s a great testament to eTown and the model that we created there of being open and [receptive] to our guests. …

That’s what a lot of artists would mention: “My gosh, what a breath of fresh air! We’ve been on the road dealing with disgruntled monitor mixers, then we come here and it just feels like family,” like you’ve been welcomed in. And quite frankly, since we closed the eTown Hall temporarily, now for over a year because of COVID, we all miss each other. Nick organized a Zoom call a couple of months ago so we could catch up and see each other. I know that our crew is really anxious for the hall to re-open so we can all come together again. It’s like a big, extended family.

What are you looking for when it comes to booking artists for eTown?

Nick: We’ve always tried to aim for music that is soulful. That’s music that has integrity, good songwriting, not too many bells and whistles. Not stuff that is overproduced, so you can feel the personality of the songwriter and the singer come through. Our booking philosophy was always, from the very beginning, about featuring some diversity. But for the first 600 or 700 shows that we did at the Boulder Theatre, that’s 800 or 900 seats that we tried to fill. So, sometimes it helped when we had people with name recognition as one of our guests.

We always tried to have one artist with name recognition and one artist that was emerging, and beyond that, maybe one band and one solo. Or one person is playing Americana music, and the other one is playing Celtic or Hawaiian or Afro-Cuban music. The diversity of artists was really important to us, particularly because of our finale. The end of the show was always a joint effort between our musical guests and a lot of times they didn’t know each other. They didn’t have a lot of common ground.

I come from the bluegrass world where, yeah, you’re just going to pick and jam and find a song and play. But particularly for songwriters who have been hiding in their bedrooms writing songs for three years, and then they come out and say, “I don’t know any other songs….” But the finale was always, in some ways, not just an opportunity to have something in real time. It had to be created that day, with those people, under pressure, to find a song, find a key, arrange it, split the words up, and rehearse it, then perform in a few hours later. It was pretty intense! But the other part of it was, eTown’s goal has always been about using music as a way to build community, and to remind people that our community is larger than we might think it is.

Over the last 30 years, music and technology have changed so much. When it comes to eTown, what would you say has remained the same?

Helen: There’s been an agreed goal of maintaining a certain amount of integrity and a certain amount of quality in the ultimate product that we have been putting out all these years, which is the radio broadcast and now podcast. Whether it’s the technical sound end of it, all the way to the content itself. I think that’s what’s kept it going as long as it has. There is this underlying devotion and striving toward excellence.

Lead photo of Nick and Helen Forster by Tim Reese

eTown: Come for the Music, Stay for the Message

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Wife/husband duo Helen and Nick Forster have experienced first-hand how music can facilitate a connection. Both performers, they met backstage at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado 30 years ago. While Helen had served as the co-owner and co-producer of the festival from its inception, Nick was a founding member of the acclaimed bluegrass band Hot Rize, which was on the precipice of a long-term hiatus. The couple bonded over music and shared values — including a concern for the environment. In 1991, they launched eTown, a nationally syndicated, independent, nonprofit radio show integrating conversations with community organizers and researchers along with performances and Q&A sessions with musical guests.

“If you imagine what happens at a bluegrass festival, there’s something very fundamental, which is that everyone comes together from disparate backgrounds and walks of life and there’s no vetting of philosophy or political party or socio-economic alignment or anything like that,” Nick says. “They have a shared experience … [and] a common focus … their hearts are being opened by music, which is a very real and palpable and powerful thing … There is that sense of connectedness which means that, by Sunday night, as things are starting to wrap up and people are thinking about heading home and going back to their jobs the next day, going back to their normal concerns and cares, there’s a wistfulness. There’s a little bit of sadness about, ‘Man I was part of something this weekend.’ I think, to a large extent, a community that’s connected like that is also going to do a couple of other things, including looking out for each other. And they also tend to look out for their space … and so all of those things are a part of the DNA of eTown.”

The program’s tagline defines eTown as a place where people come for the music and stay for the message.

“We wanted to give people a place to go where the music brought people together, where everybody was welcome, where the music would be both the connection point and uplifting, but more importantly, we would also stimulate dialogue in conversation about how do we take better care of each other and the planet,” Nick explains.

eTown is recorded weekly in front of a live studio audience at eTown Hall, a 17,000-square-foot converted performance space in the middle of downtown Boulder, Colorado. Once a church, the building features state-of-the-art recording studios, production rooms, and camera and lighting equipment, allowing Nick and Helen to navigate the shifting media landscape. eTown films the performance portion of each show and posts the videos on their website. When deciding which musicians they will feature each week, Nick and Helen say diversity is key.

“We wanted to have musicians who were soulful. We didn’t necessarily want to have any from a particular style. I think we do tend to focus on vocal singers, you know. We don’t do as much instrumental music, for example, because I don’t think it really fits with our show as well as others,” Nick says. “We’ve always tried to feature one well-known act and one less well-known act, so that people can get excited about hearing the person they know, but then get more excited about the discovery piece … We try to mix it up further, so we have one band, one solo, maybe one male, one female, maybe one from one musical tradition and one from another, because at the end, everybody plays together for the finale and so we want to make sure that the finales are kind of like, ‘Wow that’s a weird combination.’ You’ve got a singer/songwriter and a hip-hop artist, or you’ve got a bluegrass musician and a blues guy, or you’ve got a Cajun band playing with a Latina band from Los Angeles or whatever it is.”

The other segments of the show address social and environmental issues — from homelessness and hunger to air pollution and compromising the oceans. But in 1991, eTown was ahead of the curve when it came to these discussions. Climate change and global warming weren’t even concepts at the forefront of public or political discourse.

“There was a lot of apathy at the time, and people are not apathetic because they’re bad people. It’s usually because things seem overwhelming and you don’t feel like you have any power to do anything,” Helen explains. “So we wanted to bring people in and give them some food for thought. We wanted to inform them and, most of all, we wanted them to be inspired to get involved. We wanted to bring our skills together in order to create something that was really welcoming across the board: Wherever you were, you’re in eTown.”

This idea led to the creation of the eChievement Award, which Helen gives to one winner each week, inviting them to speak about their work on the show. Nominated by other listeners, eChievement honorees are citizens who are actively trying to improve their communities. “We’ve tried to be solutions-oriented,” Nick says. “We’ve tried to highlight the problems but also think about things that are working and things that are positive in the age of Trump and those things are welcome. We hear from listeners that are like, ‘Thank God, there’s something positive out there in media.”

After 26 years, Nick and Helen believe eTown is just getting started.

“The reason for doing eTown, I think, is more important now than ever because we are entering into this time in our nation’s history where politics have become so divisive and so violent, frankly, and the idea that we need to come together particularly around some core issues that are relevant and important for all of us. I mean, it is absolutely critical that we find some common ground,” Nick says. “And we are more committed than ever to making sure that we can use music to bring people together — but not gloss over the details — and talk about what’s important and talk about what we can all do, each of us, to try to address these issues that are absolutely critical for our future. So I’m super pumped about both our history and our legacy, but especially about our future.”