Tag: indie

Mumford & Sons Continue to Matter, In Americana and Beyond

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“Well, we’ve been here before…”

When Rushmere was released in March of this year – Mumford & Sons’ first album in seven years – critics noted its homecoming feel. The songs, the sound, the oh-so-yearning lyrics; they all combined to take the listener back to the beginning.

Tracks like “Malibu” and “Caroline” do not, perhaps, hit the wild highs of “Little Lion Man.” There’s a subtler expression at play in the album, reflecting an evolution from youthful exuberance to the quiet wisdom that only comes with experience. But a decade and a half on from Sigh No More, the band have clearly doubled back from their more experimental forays – 2018’s Delta; Marcus Mumford’s solo project, (self-titled) – to celebrate what brought them together in the first place. In Rushmere they had returned to their rootsy roots, and found peace there.

This month, the band heads back out on tour to Chicago, Philadelphia, Montréal, and more. In November, they’ll return to Europe, and ultimately to the UK, where their final leg will climax at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 arena. Months on the road this year and playing to sold-out venues have proven one thing: people still can’t get enough of them.

And yet the world is a very different place to when their debut album hit the shelves in 2009. When Mumford & Sons first toured Sigh No More, Barack Obama was President of the United States. In the UK, the biggest question on people’s lips was what Kate Middleton would be wearing at her royal marriage to Prince William.

Today’s social backdrop feels meaner, more fractious, less optimistic. Widening rifts in society have made it harder for people to celebrate shared values, even cherish the same moments together. Mumford have split with one of their own band members as a direct consequence of our rapid political polarization. What is it, then, that felt so fresh back then – and that still appeals today?

Matt Menefee first encountered the Mumford sound when his progressive bluegrass band, Cadillac Sky, were at their peak. “We were heading up out of Texas to play Telluride in 2010, and we played some gigs en route,” says Menefee. “So we’d stopped at a hotel, and there was Marcus on MTV, and someone said, ‘Oh, this band’s headlining the festival.’ Our lead singer already had the record and so we listened to it all the way up there.”

For a group of musicians that favored a raucous, punk rock vibe, Mumford’s gleeful-yet-soulful energy was something new. “We were like, ‘Oh man, this is something else!’” Menefee recalls. “To hear these cohesive, in-your-face anthems… it was raging. The melodies and the lyrics were beautifully crafted as well. It was a force that blew our guys away.”

Mumford’s Telluride set became an instant classic (it’s still spoken of in awe today). “It was just a party,” remembers Jerry Douglas, whom the band had asked to join them on stage. “The guys looked so excited. I’ve been to that festival so many times and you can get jaded. But I’m watching them jump up and down and I’m going, this is what it’s supposed to feel like.” He describes that electric closing set as one of the best he’s seen in Telluride’s 51 iterations.

Douglas is one of the many Americana musicians that Mumford and bandmates Ben Lovett, and Ted Dwane sought out to learn from in their early years and have built enduring relationships with. They included Douglas in their performance at the SNL 50th anniversary show, after he had recorded lap steel for Rushmere track “Caroline” – although he laughingly points out that it didn’t make the final mix. “It changed it, it took the band away from just sounding like themselves. I kind of Jackson Browne-ed them a little bit…”

Those collaborative relationships are one of the reasons that Mumford & Sons continue to matter, not least to the musical communities they’ve done so much to elevate. After their first meeting, Menefee became a regular guest artist with the band and has been their go-to banjo player since Winston Marshall’s departure. “You watch them interact with people,” says Menefee, “and they’re so humble, so sweet, so encouraging. They really look after everybody. They’re good, good dudes.”

In August, Mumford & Sons relaunched their Railroad Revival Tour, whose 2011 iteration involved travelling the Southwest in vintage trains alongside Old Crow Medicine Show and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. This summer’s rolling festival picked up where that one had left off, traveling between New Orleans and Vermont. The long list of musicians joining them on board ranged from Nathaniel Rateliff and Ketch Secor to Lainey Wilson and Molly Tuttle to Trombone Shorty and Chris Thile.

Lucius’s Jess Wolfe was one of the musicians sharing the stage with Mumford, after forging a bond with Marcus at celebrated, now infamous jams arranged by Brandi Carlile in Joni Mitchell’s living room. “Sitting listening to our hero sing – that’s such a humbling experience, it’s going to bring people close quite quickly,” laughs Wolfe. She describes Mumford & Sons as “natural collaborators – they feel like brothers from the minute that you step foot in the room with them.” It’s that comforting familiarity that expresses itself in their music and forms a major part of their appeal.

Having first heard their sound while working on the Brooklyn open mic circuit, Wolfe was struck by how it reflected the songs that her peers were writing, “except that these were songs that everyone could suddenly, with ease and without thinking, just sing along to. It was like a conversation you were having with an old friend.”

Their pulsing, anthemic melodies, underlaid with a signature stomp, quickly became an in-demand and much replicated sound in the industry. Banjo and mandolin players found themselves getting far more calls for session work. For musicians like Menefee who had spent years justifying their choice of instrument and trying to persuade a sceptical mainstream of its charms, the change was remarkable. “When Mumford hit, it was like, banjo’s cool!”

“I’d go do demo sessions for songwriters on Music Row and for years the publishers would ask you for ‘like, a Mumford thing,’” Menefee continues. “And I should say that’s not all they do – their Delta record is one of my favorites, with its beautiful marriage of electro pop and effects. But I witnessed the success of the other bands that followed in Mumford’s wake. They had a huge influence.”

Douglas believes it’s no exaggeration to say they changed the sound of the musical landscape. “And people either liked it or they didn’t. But it’s a heartbeat, you know? That’s the thing about it. It gets people excited and it makes them feel good. That endorphin rush happens and everybody goes to their happy place. And we need that right now. We need to go to our happy place.”

There, perhaps, lies the key to their successful return after seven years away from the limelight. Every night they play, Menefee sees crowds “losing themselves” in the singalongs. “There’s an anger and a vulnerability that really pierces the heart,” he says. “And it’s so freaking singable.”

The band themselves have admitted to be “stoked” to be headlining festivals in the UK again and there’s little sense of ego at their appearances. Instead, they host shows that have the feel of a party at which they themselves are enthusiastic guests. “It’s just so much fun,” says Menefee. “There’s a real joy in it, a rest from all the chaos.”

Perhaps, right now, we all need a bit more Mumford in our lives.

Photo Credit: Marcus Haney

How “Guidelines” Made Madison Cunningham’s Ace Feel Totally Free

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It is no news that Madison Cunningham is among the top tier of artists and musicians doggedly pursuing their craft; her newest record, Ace, casually echoes this. Soberly confronting a mountain of grief at home and transmuting its impressions through her open-minded, mature songcraft, the record encourages listeners through a seamless track list whose performances take on the form of open letters to its subjects. She treats an album as the dignified platform it once was and should be and this stance feels radical in today’s streaming-focused world.

A most striking feature of Ace (released on October 10, 2025) is the presentation of her vocals in a more expansive and spacious light, putting aside her much-associated – and anticipated – guitar for the piano, a more than suitable vehicle for this new terrain. Cunningham returns to her native instrument, the keys, as a “lost sojourner,” using it to strip away all but the most critical aspects of the record’s narrative, while highlighting its grooves and timbres.

All the songs played on piano started on guitar and later migrated to it. This practice seemingly grew out of her fascination with embracing the uncomfortable, like the open tunings she is known to use in her celebrated approach to the guitar as an instrument to be challenged and played with. From a new-to-her tuning, to the piano, and then to her band, this game of telephone still allowed Cunningham to sound more like herself.

The game doesn’t stop there. At a lair in Woodstock, New York, in the fall of 2024, Madison and her band committed themselves to a few simple principles: No demos. No vocal comps. “Do the thing that feels most musically true and curious.” And, “Don’t give a shit about what people have known you for.” These rules, in many ways, allow the anthropology of the moment in time during which this record was made to speak loudest. It goes without saying that this path is impossible to tread without a rigorous knowledge of oneself, trust in the folks around you, and, most centrally, the chops to back it up. The consequence of these choices is a record with a narrative “spine” throughout, animating what Cunningham likens to a ballet in its transitions – something she has been working toward both in the studio and on the road since her triumphant, full-length debut in 2019, Who Are You Now.

The song “Wake,” a duet with Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes, evokes the kaleidoscopic nexus of Alison Krauss & Robert Plant’s Raising Sand, the orchestration of Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, and the cinematic flair of Gustavo Santaolalla on top. More stripped-down performances, such as “Take Two” and “My Full Name,” demonstrate Madison’s subtle confidence as both a devoted curator and a fearless innovator. Woodwinds underscore and bookmark this collection’s ethereal climate, thanks to the work of Jesse Chandler. Taken as a whole, Ace brings the listener into the same trenches Madison found herself in and onward toward truth in the face of its hardships.

BGS reached Madison Cunningham via Zoom in mid-September to discuss Ace, its making, and the guidelines and rules by which she brought these songs into the world.

I noticed that you described the record as “light” when making it, despite its sober depiction of difficult subject matter. Which aspects were light to you?

Madison Cunningham: That’s a great question. The mission for making the record was really clear and all the “guidelines” were set up well in advance, which was something I had never done before. In the past, my process has been more about figuring it out as we go. This time, my band and I were very prepared. I used the touring band that I’ve been with for the last five years, and the deep collaboration and shared language we’ve developed over that time made everything feel so fluid.

We were all “cracked open” in this special way and we laughed the whole time. That’s probably what I mean the most about the record being “light,” how joyful it felt. I didn’t feel much fear while we were making it. I just had a picture of how I wanted it to sound, and it already was sounding like that. That felt like a relief.

Did you feel like you had less to prove in a superficial sense?

I guess there’s always something to prove. I don’t mean to erase the feeling that I had, which was, of course, a certain amount of pressure or wanting it to level up in some way. But, in light of being quite devastated in my personal life, everything else felt so small compared to the mountain I felt like I was climbing at home.

And maybe that was the gift and that’s why everything felt like it. For whatever reason, everything felt like green lights. It just couldn’t have been easier. Also, I’d never had a more fluid relationship with my label; there was no argument about how this was going to happen. It just was like, “Go. Do it.”

How would you describe the guidelines you had in place for this record and how did they differ from your usual process? Also, did playing the piano more for this record affect your writing style, perhaps making it more expansive in some ways?

I started as a kid on piano first and it had a resurgence in my life in the last three years. I fell back in love with it and I enjoyed the feeling of being a lost sojourner on it, just being like, “Oh, I’m finding all these things that I now am – I found a style here that I’m injecting into my guitar playing.” I wanted to play guitar more like a pianist.

One of my guidelines was, “Just don’t give a shit about what people have known you for, what they might expect. Do the thing that feels most musically true and curious.” And that sounds a lot like permission, but it was also a guideline. Another guideline was, “Make sure that there’s emotional delivery over anything that sounds too perfect. And don’t compromise on that.”

The other set of guidelines were between me and my band: we did a lot of rehearsal beforehand, but we didn’t record anything, so there were no demos. That was a huge rule. I also said, “I don’t want to do any vocal comps. I just want to sing the songs live.” That was helpful. It was another way of being like, “Okay, focus, and be in the room for the moment that these songs are being captured.” So, yeah, there was no previous, “Ah, but shit, we gotta out-beat that one demo we made.” Because that slate was so clean, I think everything was clearer.

During the recording process, do you listen to other music for comfort or do you stay entirely within the feedback loop of your own project? I’m also curious if the recording period was a continuous block of time, which would obviously influence your ability to listen to music.

We did record it continuously, and I don’t usually listen to music while I’m making a record. Honestly, destination recordings help so much with that, because you’re just immersed in the physical and spiritual environment of the whole thing. We were up at a lair and it was fall – it was this time last year – and there’s this beautiful hike that allowed you to look over the reservoir and the golden, brown, red leaves. I felt so romantic that whole time. Even if there was something that wasn’t working, I just had such faith it was going to get there.

We also had a crazy sort of work cycle, which was [that] we would start the skeleton of the song in the morning and then we would record until 2:00 AM and finish it. Again, I think because we all had the guidelines, we were like, “We want every song to have woodwinds pretty much, unless it doesn’t call for it, so we’re going to try and flesh it all out in the same day.”

Jesse Chandler did all that. He’s a genius. We would both talk through things we were both hearing, and then he would just play it all. It was like building a puzzle in real time, and it felt so wonderful to be able to see it all and to feel moved by it. We barely did any overdubs. We did another session in LA a month later after those two weeks up at Woodstock and did a few little overdubs, but we had mainly done everything while we were there.

Ace feels like a return to the “record” as a dignified format. In the lead-up to making it, did you think about the songs as individual tracks – as it relates to streaming culture – or did you focus on creating a cohesive narrative for the entire album?

There are so many examples of records that feel like a full statement and we’ve lost that. That feels radical now. I feel like I’ve made records that have been molded to the current format and I was so disinterested in that this time. I am so over the, “Hey, let’s just do what everyone else is doing,” and, “It’s guaranteed to work.” I really mistrust people when they say that to me, and that mistrust has usually been right.

Even if I see the “format” working for someone else, I’m like, “But that’s not me. That’s not my music, so we can’t say that’s the target, that’s the answer.” I was so interested in making the record feel like a ballet and feeling like the transitions were seamless. It was the first record I felt like I made that had a spine that connected the whole thing and I still find such value in that.

To be honest, we also made efforts to make sure that the songs were not too long. They were separated from their instrumental tracks so that it could work for playlisting. We weren’t, like, fully in protest.

When working on a song like “Wake,” where did that start? How different does it look from when you’re playing it on the couch, versus sitting down with Robin [Pecknold] to record it? Could you walk me through how that song got made? I love how active the guitar parts are, the closeness of the vocal harmonies, and how relaxed everything feels in the recording.

MC: I love that. I really appreciate that it comes across that way. That was the goal and the way that it was written. I wrote it with another songwriter named Will Taylor and we were both just playing these counterparts. And that’s where the seamlessness of it kind of took place; on the recording, that’s the direction I wanted it to go in. Then I just added some different flavors.

All those guitar parts you hear were added and layered, but I didn’t do very many takes of them, so that’s how it might feel live. I didn’t get in there and try to overly correct things. I wanted it to breathe. That has to be one of my favorite songs on the record because we wrote it in a Nashville blizzard and it sounds like that. The guitar part sounds like snowflakes falling in different directions to me, and Robin’s voice is just like a warm fire.

Did you record that in Nashville, or did you just write it in Nashville?

Wrote it in Nashville, recorded it in Los Angeles a year later, and we did all of that, everything that you hear, in one day. I recorded the main guitar and sang at the same time and then Robin sang in the other room. And once we figured that out, we added all the guitars, then Daniel Rhine added upright bass, and then we did the foot stomps at the end. And that was the song.

For the guitar-centric people, is “Wake” in an open tuning, and do you mind sharing what that is?

No, I always forget it, but I’m going to pull it up on my “favorite tunings” column.

It is C-G-D-F-A-C, from low to high. It’s basically an open suspended chord and it’s so tricky. At first, you’re like, “There’s no possible way through this tuning.” And that’s the tuning I wrote all the record on. Every guitar here, it’s in that tuning.

Your music contains rhythmic feels that seem to be informed by drums or percussion, outside of the guitar. I know you’ve played percussion – does your drumming experience influence your songwriting on other instruments? Do you workshop things back and forth with your drummer, Kyle [Crane] in this way?

I feel like if I were to show you the original demos of these songs, there was already such a strong, informed rhythmic thing, more than in the past for me. And Kyle, I think he was playing into, “How do I make this feel like we thought of this at the same time? Or, “How can it feel like that?” For example, “Break the Jaw” came out of a band jam. I wrote the lyrics to it, but the feel of the song wasn’t something Kyle tried to figure out after the fact. We were figuring it out in real time and I think that’s why it came out so cool. Everybody put their stamp on it.

The whole process was us trying to figure out the skeleton of rhythm and how to make it feel like it wasn’t fighting with itself.

I’m wondering how you approach sequencing an album. When you consider the interludes, the streaming world, live performance, and recording, are there specific ideas, people, or records that have helped you learn how to think about the flow and energy of a record from start to finish?

Ooh, yeah, I’m sure. Radiohead is a big one for me. I think the sequencing of their records is so specific. Their opening track is always perfect to me and their closing track is always perfect. From the beginning of making this record, before all the songs were written, I knew which was going to be the first and which was going to be the last. And then Robbie Lackritz – who made the record with me – and I spent a lot of time delineating over sequencing.

The story of the record is important. Obviously, the tempo arc, and the keys melded together. The story has a plot, so that was a big thing. I wasn’t trying to write it like that, but from an aerial view, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is how it connects.”

In the song “Take Two,” you mention a fear of writing simple songs. Did this perceived fear influence the guidelines you set for yourself when writing the album? Also, were the initial ideas for the songs primarily written on guitar or piano?

For every song that ended up on piano, it actually started on guitar – with the exception of the instrumental pieces, which were formed from the piano.

For example, “Shore” started on guitar and so did “My Full Name,” but they felt like piano songs to me because I was doing a lot of transposing between instruments to see if the song was good. I would transfer it between instruments and say, “Yeah, it still has a message.” In doing that, I fell in love with “My Full Name” on the piano.

“Take Two” also started on guitar, and I was like, “I don’t like this song very much. I love what it’s saying, but I find it to be so boring.” It was a song that everybody on my team was attached to. When we got to Woodstock, the song came together on the piano before we were going to record it and I was like, “I love this song.” Something made me say, “Hell yeah.”

On a more technical note, I’m curious about the guitar sound for “Skeletree.” It sounds like a low-tuned nylon string guitar with a contact mic. What was it?

Killed it. That’s exactly what it is. There was this big bedroom with a tall ceiling and that’s where we stored the amp. The contact mic was also sitting in a really big room, which contributed to the fairy dust.

Very cool. Were there any other notable guitars on the record that were new to you or were just lying around the studio?

I used a hollow body for the bridge of “Break the Jaw.” I think it might have been a 330 or something. I really love that you can hear a crunchy, kind of reverb thing just break out for a second. I also used my Collings acoustic. I know I had that for a few, but mainly it was just that nylon string that I stuck with. A little bit of the Collings, and then that electric guitar once, for one section of a song, and then all piano after that.

I did play electric bass for “Golden Gate” and “Mummy” too.

Do you ever write on bass or play along with records on bass?

I do, and I wrote “Golden Gate” on bass. That line that you hear at the beginning, it started with that.

Do you have any advice for people who want to feel like they don’t have anything to prove, especially if they are working toward a platform in the process?

I feel like the thing that I’ve learned the most from is, even if you don’t fully have your sound yet, make it a mission to just make music you like the sound of. Even if you haven’t fully found yours yet, you will, by way of learning what it is that you love and what you like coming out of your own body and mouth and fingers.

I think the things that have spoken the most to people is going, “I can tell that you love what you’re doing.” And even though in my earlier years, you could definitely see a lot of comparisons, I needed those because those were the things that made me believe in music and what I was doing. And then I think those faded away and now this record is the first time I’ve ever been like, “This is what I’ve always wanted to make. This sounds like me.” It just took a minute, but I enjoyed the whole ride.

I also feel like I was never not myself. Everything that I did, I felt was a risk in some way or stretched me as an artist. … What I loved the most about making this record was that all of it felt in balance. Finally, my voice was the loudest.

That’s just because I finally, like you said, trusted myself, trusted the process. I knew enough to know that even if something isn’t working the first time, there’s always a second, third, or fourth to try. So, trust your curiosity and do whatever it takes to make sure your curiosity is above the fearful, negative self-talk.

Photo Credit: Sean Stout

BGS 5+5: Elexa Dawson

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Elexa Dawson
Hometown: Emporia, Kansas
Latest Album: Stay Put (released September 12, 2025)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): A lot of my friends call me Lexy

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

“Music is Medicine.” My songs and the ideas behind them are almost always in response to a heartache or mental puzzle that I find myself working out through lyrics and music. Some of my most positive and uplifting songs were written during times when I was experiencing a lot of hopelessness and depression. The songs are medicine for me, first, and then it’s a privilege to get to share these songs with people who reflect that healing effect back to me.

The most common comment I get from audiences is that they were able to cry during my set and, while that’s not what I set out to do, I lean into it, because in our Potawatomi traditions, tears are healing waters that need to flow through our bodies to help us move on beyond difficulties. So really, it’s an honor to be able to guide someone through an emotion like that.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do they impact your work?

I’ve always been obsessed with food, foraging, and natural medicines, so I’d have to say plants. They are older than us humans and they remember how to survive through experiences that haven’t happened to them, but happened to generations before them, which is fascinating to me. They work with mycelium, the fungal strands that transmit messages and food through the soil network between their roots.

“Roots Grow” is all about how roots support life in darkness, and how important compost is to life, which teaches me what to do with the dead and decaying parts of myself that need composting. Plants are one of my greatest teachers.

What’s the most difficult creative transformation you’ve ever undertaken?

This is an interesting question, because the creative transformations that I’ve already undertaken are in hindsight. The obstacles have been overcome and the one I’m currently staring down is always the one I’m having the most difficulty with. The perennial theme is that there is always a tense relationship between the creation of music as a cathartic human exercise and the presentation of the music to the music industry and fans.

I think there’s always an insecurity that the artist feels when they put out new things. With Stay Put being released, I’m feeling simultaneously on edge about reviews and immensely proud of this really unique and singular moment in my creative process where Peter Oviatt (Moonflower Sounds) and I were able to create something that I think stands out, whether the response is as big as I think is deserved or not. I create for myself, but who doesn’t want to see their name on a chart?

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

I’d be working with the land more and hopefully not alone. I’ve got a degree in sustainable agriculture and while I love my messy garden outside my house, I would love to work with a team on a farm. I started a nonprofit called Good Way Gardens where we produce a monthly lawn concert series that’s free and open to the community and provides access to our educational garden spaces where we grow a lot of pollinator-benefitting plants, as well as a lot of native plants like the four sisters (corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers). It has been on a very small scale and we are working to increase our capacity for next year. So really, I found a way to put music and gardening together, which is a dream come true.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I’m a big Walnut Valley Festival evangelist. I’ve been attending this bluegrass festival in Winfield, Kansas, for 27 years. My all-femme bluegrass-adjacent vocal group, Weda Skirts, is performing on the main stages for the fourth year in a row. That’s where Heyleon, another group I’ve had the pleasure of recording a lot of material with, was born.

Food and music are all over that place there and one of my campmates is famous for his smoked meat. At the time of my writing this, the festival is approaching and I have to say my perfect pairing is Dusty’s bacon and a jam session at my campsite, which is home to Weda Skirts and also members of The Dewayn Brothers, Bad Chuck and the Bad Dreams, The Bennett Brothers, and Cowgirl’s Train Set. I am also really looking forward to sitting in the grandstands, eating a big plate of greek salad and dolmas, and watching John Depew Trio on Stage 1, who are friends and also phenomenal players. It’s their first time on the big stages and I’m ecstatic that more folks will be able to hear their genius. Winfield is home, and I can’t wait to go back.

Photo Credit: Jordan Storrer, Lifeleak Visuals

Fruit Bats’ Eric D. Johnson
Loves a Left Turn

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The road less traveled is always the road most traveled by singer-songwriter Eric D. Johnson, better known under the performing name of Fruit Bats. Johnson thrives in a world of creative dichotomy: he loves deadlines as much as he cherishes random twists and turns in his process.

He’s been making music this way for years, since time spent on the Chicago music scene, through his days with Califone, The Shins, and the creation and continuation of Fruit Bats. There’s also Bonny Light Horseman, the indie trio where he partners with renowned musicians and songwriters Josh Kaufman and Anaïs Mitchell. Their most recent album, Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free, was released last year.

Johnson’s latest Fruit Bats project is Baby Man, a full-length album recorded earlier this year with longtime producer and friend Thom Monahan. The album is a reunion of sorts, after Johnson self-produced 2023’s A River Running To Your Heart.

Baby Man, which is his voice, guitar, piano, and little else, was an unexpected project – another deviation from original blueprint onto the less-traveled road. And one that called for Monahan’s expertise and sonic touch. The outcome, says Johnson, is “intimate and yet big. There wasn’t a lot of fuss over arrangements. Everything you hear came out of my hands or mouth earlier that day or the day before.”

It was early morning on the West Coast when Eric D. Johnson settled in to speak with BGS. “This is my second interview on this,” he noted about Baby Man, “so you’re hearing me work this out in real time in my brain.”

You have detailed this many times: iPhone voice memos, demoing, writing, the studio as a writing tool. You like a deadline, you like mistakes, you like left turns. Was this album true to method?

Eric D. Johnson: Yes. This was the leftiest of all left turns you could possibly take, because the original plan was a very lo-fi hair-metal covers album. [It was] basically a midterm project between album cycles.

During the pandemic I had done this full album cover of Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. I had no real expectation for it other than a pandemic exercise/fun sort of bedroom thing and it hit a little bit. Everything I do is ambitious in some way, but this was a “throw something at the wall” idea originally and not a big deal.

I was talking to Thom Monahan, my producer/mentor. We hadn’t worked together in a few albums, although we’re still dear friends. I always talk to him before I make something, which is like, “What microphone do I put on this?” I’m asking all these questions, we ended up chatting for an hour and by the end of the conversation I was like, “I think you should do this record.”

This was all over the course of a very short amount of time in February. I started writing songs and I realized I was starting to do what I do, which is write a diary. Most of my records, songwriter-wise, are what’s happening now.

This record turned into something that was me and Thom working for probably a week and a half. It wasn’t a mandate I laid down, but the whole record was written and recorded in that space, which I almost never do. It’s usually fragments of things I’ve been putting together from notebooks or demos or sketches that are a year or more than a year old. So everything you hear is a week in the life.

When we delivered it to the record label [Merge], again thinking it was a midterm project, they were like, “This is really good. This is a real album.” So the hair-metal covers record will happen someday, but instead you get Baby Man.

How has your working relationship with Thom grown and developed?

If I had a breakthrough album, it’s probably Gold Past Life [2019], which was my last thing with Thom before this. I think that was us at the height of our language with each other in some ways.

I’ve learned everything from him. When we were first starting to work together, on Tripper [2011], I was just learning how to use Pro Tools and how to use the studio as a tool for writing. I would make demos and Thom would come in with a blowtorch on them, because I didn’t really know what I was doing yet.

We made a couple more records, and by the time you hear the stuff on Absolute Loser [2016] and Gold Past Life, if you went back and listened to the original demos, they’re surprisingly not that different. That’s Thom trusting me more, being like, “This sounds pretty good.” Obviously he adds an incredible boost to them. There are songs on that record, too, where Thom completely dismantled them and was like, “This sucks,” because he’s not afraid to tell me he thinks something sucks. Which is good. You need the extra pair of ears. So we kind of have a shared mind when we’re working together.

What have you learned from Thom that applies to your own production work? For example, Sarah Klang’s Beautiful Woman album.

I don’t do tons of it, but when I produce other artists, it comes from that demoing process I learned from Thom, where you go from skeleton of song, to demo, to studio project, to finished product. With Sarah, we worked together as writers first. When you write with me, and this has happened a couple times, we’re making demos and we realize, “We’re making a record now.”

That was what happened with Sarah. It was very similar to what Thom and I do together, which is me building a demo and then giving it to him. But in this case, you build a demo, you keep building it, go into a nice, big studio, and all that. So that was what that was about. It started off as a writing session and it snowballed into a record.

You’re taking Baby Man on the road. Alone. Could you strip it down any more than that?

It’s terrifying. I have no idea what to expect. Fruit Bats concerts have become big, rollicking rock shows. The audiences have grown and people have a good time. I think of it as a very intimate experience, but as much as we’re in the folk-rock realm, they’re big rock shows.

I’m nervous about this. I’ve obviously played solo shows, and I think I know how to do it, but there is a certain contract you have to have with the audience for that. You can’t just close your eyes and push through it. You have an extra responsibility to connect.

I’m always concerned with that, and not in a bad way. But if I’m playing to 1800 people, in my mind I still want to make eye contact with every single one of them, even though I know that’s not possible. So with the solo show, where it’s a little more intimate, you probably are going to make eye contact with however many people are there. It’s going to be very exposing and I don’t know what to expect.

You’ve said before that Fruit Bats is half your life and each album is like a chapter, a piece of an autobiography. Which chapter is this?

This chapter is … I am hesitant to say midlife, because I don’t know. My cliché answer is, “I’ve gotten better at making myself understood, but I care less about ma king myself understood.” When you’re a younger writer, you’re like, “You don’t get this!” Now I’m like, “You’ll get it, or if you don’t, that’s cool.”

I think I’m writing really well now. The very early Fruit Bats records are enigmatic because I didn’t know how to write yet. I came from indie rock. I came from Pavement. I loved Stephen Malkmus, and he wasn’t writing about feelings. And I had played in Califone, and those are impressionistic lyrics, very visual, so I was doing that.

When I accidentally wrote a love song with “When U Love Somebody” [Mouthfuls], in 2003, it kind of hit. I was never emo. Even though I’m from the emo generation and from Illinois, where all the emo dudes came from, I wasn’t doing emo. Maybe this is my emo period, I guess you could say. With Baby Man, there is that kind of feel. I’m writing some pretty direct stuff, but I still have my impressionistic side that gets smeared in.

Where does Bonny Light Horseman fit into that?

My work with them is not unlike my work with Thom, which is to say, it’s been an education. Josh Kaufman, as a producer, has been influential on my production and the way I approach albums, too, because he’s totally different from Thom.

Of course Anaïs, as a writer, has had a massive effect on me because she’s meticulous. She makes you be like, “What did you mean by this line?” So I’ve learned writing from her, and production and writing from Josh because he writes as well. Like with everything, you take things from it as you move along. I’m definitely “the guy in a band” in that band, the professional guy in a band.

On “Creature From The Wild,” you address pet loss and grief, which is too often met with “Just get another one,” as if the can opener stopped working, so just buy a replacement. Tell us about Pinto and the song.

Pinto was my first dog and, obviously, once you get a dog, the joys, the familiarity of it, and the relationship is really special. And Pinto was a unique dog. He was sort of a person, sort of a cat, but also a dog.

You raise pets and it’s such a foolish endeavor for us; it’s such a horrible thing that we do to ourselves, because we raise them like our children, but they have a lifespan of 15 years and so you have to understand that. You’re right – some people are like, “Get another one,” but I do think a lot of people get it, if they get it.

That was a song I wrote completely while on a run, into a voice memo, at about 10 a.m. The recording you hear is at 1 p.m., three hours later. The notion that they save you, the “for a while” part, is that these love relationships are destined to be fleeting.

I also wanted to write directly about him. He was a Mexican street dog, so I wanted to write a hero story and think of him as a little heroic hobo and it was a little bit of a hero’s journey for him. I was just trying to write what I know. It’s a love song. Grief really is love. My publicist Colette and I had a Zoom call over it and we both cried.

A portion of sales from the track and pre-orders are going to the Baja Street Dogs rescue.

Yeah. Pinto was a Baja street dog, not from that rescue, but there’s tons down there. This guy, this rescue, is like a shepherd. He has a flock of dogs. He rescues so many; the breadth of his work is really impressive. It’s his life’s work, which is fascinating to see somebody do something like that.

We have a lot of big problems in the world right now, which I totally get, and there’s probably bigger fish to fry in some ways than rescuing dogs. But there’s a certain eye-level universality to loving a dog, for me. They help us. There’s always the cliché of “We don’t deserve dogs.” And I’m like, “Fuck no, we don’t.”

You have spoken about music and mental health in the past. You’ve said that while you find your music riddled with anxiety, people say they find it comforting.

In the press materials, quoting, “Again and again, Baby Man sees Johnson ask a central question: Is any of this worth it? The album is the answer, a resounding ‘yes.’” But some of the lyrics … in “Let You People Down, ” it’s “days that I’ve wished that I cease to exist.”

I can say, with all honesty, that’s not suicidal ideation I’m writing about necessarily, even though it sounds like it might be butting up right against that and I’m trying to speak to it. If someone wanted to take that as that, I would allow it, but that’s not… my other publicist, Jim, really loved the record, but his first question was, “Are you okay?”

I’ve lost friends who ended their lives – Neal Casal and Richard Swift, who died from alcohol. In many ways it was a slow suicide, when you drink yourself to death in that way. So it’s some big, grownup shit, but that specific line isn’t about that per se. It’s “This world is hard.” It’s more like, “I wish I’d never been born,” but that’s not a direct nod to ending one’s life, either. It’s about the burden of living, which, like I said, certainly could butt up against something like that. I’ll let people take what they want from it. It’s a song about wanting to love and be loved.

Then there’s “That’s why I’m trying so hard not to die.” [“Moon’s Too Bright”]

Yeah. Again, the line, “I’ve never been good with goodbyes,” and death is the biggest goodbye, so I’m not singing about killing oneself. I’m saying, “Wouldn’t it be sad to leave? Isn’t it sad to leave? Isn’t it sad to say goodbye?”

I’ve always written a little bit about this stuff, but usually there’s a disco beat, which I love. I love the happy/sad nexus, like “A Lingering Love” [Gold Past Life], which has become this kind of pop hit. It’s really sad, but it’s got the “Dancing Queen” beat behind it. It’s the total cliché of “I’m laying myself bare lyrically.” I always have, but I think because of the production, you’re hearing it more.

I’m not afraid to answer you on those [questions], nor am I denying that I’m talking about some pretty heavy stuff in there. People can hear what they want to hear from it, but the central song of the record in some ways is “Baby Man,” which is some sort of Buddhist notion where I wasn’t alive before 1976. I was gone. I was dead before 1976. “Where were you during the Renaissance?” Those types of questions. “Baby Man” is this cyclical kind of Buddhist song – not to get too heady about it.

So my sad stuff always has an undercurrent of hope, and this record there’s a little bit of that in there, too. But the hope is sometimes buoyed by disco beats, and this one doesn’t have that.

Let’s end on a high note with a lightning round on a topic that comes up in many of your interviews: The Beatles. A Beatles song that always makes you feel good.

Ooh, this is real lightning round! I’m circling back on early Beatles, so “Please Please Me.” I probably would’ve said a Paul song from the White Album, if you’d asked me that not long ago, but I’m into older Beatles. Smash Hits has been my jam lately.

Most underrated Beatles album.

Is there an underrated one? Once again, I’ll say probably the early ones, like Help, but I don’t know if there’s an underrated one, because people who don’t like The Beatles will say they’re overrated, so you can’t say there’s an underrated one, but probably the early ones. Let’s say Help.

Beatles album you most would have liked to be a fly on the wall in the studio while they recorded it.

I probably would’ve said Let It Be, but then we got to be with that movie, which was one of the most astounding pieces of documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it. It was like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls. So I’m going to say White Album, because that’s the one that sounds the most like four solo records and I know it was a really fraught process, too. For a long time, in high school and stuff, that was my most influential Beatles record, so I’m going to say White Album.

The throughline from bluegrass to The Beatles.

Oh, that’s easy! A lot of people don’t realize how young bluegrass is of a genre, but the throughline from early American folk and country music to early rock and roll to The Beatles seems pretty simple to me – bluegrass obviously being its own little split-off in the 1950s… not to get all ethnomusicology on it!

Photo Credit: Chantal Anderson

Your Favorite Artists and Songwriters Love Caroline Spence

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Caroline Spence knows better than anyone the importance of community in the roots music scene. Since her 2015 debut album, Somehow, the singer-songwriter has risen through the ranks with four additional solo albums including her latest, Heart Go Wild. Stylistically, Spence fits within the realm of Natalie Hemby, Aoife O’Donovan, Lori McKenna, and Mary Bragg, with a smattering of Mary Chapin Carpenter sensibility. She has garnered praise from both direct peers and industry giants alike. From signal-boosting her work online to recording her songs, many musicians and artists have used their platforms to give Spence a well-deserved spotlight.

Throughout the past decade, Spence has used these moments to nurture friendships within a thankless industry. “The acknowledgement and validation from artists that I respect have been vital in keeping the fire burning under me when parts of the industry have threatened to put it out,” Spence tells BGS.

“No ‘suit’ can convince me I’m not good enough when I have worked with my heroes and have the respect of artists I admire.”

Lori McKenna and Caroline Spence after recording “The Next Good Time” together. Photo by Jordan Lehning.

Reciprocated applause and mutual admiration prove essential to building relationships, in addition to contextualizing an artist’s music within the scene for those fans who may not be familiar. For example, Miranda Lambert has enlisted countless lesser-known artists for her tours, including Gwen Sebastian, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley. These placements introduce her loyal audience to talent they might not have discovered elsewhere, thus giving those artists more name recognition.

Even more importantly, Spence finds these shout-outs and promotional spots to be her “life force” in keeping her inspired to push through trying times. “My primary goal has always been to be good at my craft and to get better at it,” she says. “To me, the most important judges of that are those who are masters of theirs, and it’s been deeply meaningful every time someone I admire has paid attention to, let alone praised, what it is that I do.”

In her career, Spence has tumbled into the orbits of countless artists who have shown unwavering support for her work. A big Hayes Carll fan, she covered his song “It’s a Shame,” from his 2002 album, Flowers & Liquor, early in her career and later toured with him in 2021 – a moment Spence describes as coming “full circle.” She’s also toured with John Moreland and Madi Diaz. In addition, she wrote “Heavy” with Carl Anderson for Andrew Combs’ album Worried Man and another song she wrote, “We Don’t Know We’re Living,” was recorded by Lucie Silvas, Brandi Carlile, and Joy Oladokun. “[Brandi] called it ‘a once in a century song,’” notes Spence.

Madi Diaz performs with Spence as special guest and opener on tour in 2022.

Despite not having a “game-changing platform,” as she puts it, she pays it forward by sharing “the work of my peers and what I am loving listening to. I think word-of-mouth from trusted personal sources is still the best way to get someone to pay attention to music.”

She takes a moment to shout out others, beginning with Ken Yates & Brian Dunne before mentioning several other artists she’s been listening to, including Angela Autumn (“Her song ‘Electric Lizard’ is intoxicating and reminds me of some of the tracks that made me fall in love with music in high school,” she says), Brennan Wedl & Mariel Buckley, and Danny Malone, “an incredible songwriter out of Austin that I recently saw at a house show in Nashville and was absolutely floored by.”

In our conversation, Spence names an additional six artists, from Miranda Lambert to Tyler Childers, who have uplifted her music over the years.

The National

 
“The fact that I have a duet with Matt Berninger is still completely insane to me. When I was in college in Ohio, falling in love with The National, I could have never even dreamed that I would cross paths with Matt, let alone have him sing words I wrote. I love that band, and his voice is legendary. It still feels unreal.”

Miranda Lambert

 
“[She] posted about my first record back in 2016, and that totally blew my mind. I had just been in the studio making my second record [Spades and Roses] and was questioning a lot, and that really felt like a sign to keep doing what I was doing. Part of my dream when I moved to Nashville was to write songs for her, so that was an incredibly validating moment.”

Miranda Lambert shared a Spence original, “Last Call” on her Instagram in 2016.

Lori McKenna

 
“Lori added my music to her monthly favorites playlists that she makes. She featured on a song we wrote together called ‘The Next Good Time.’ One of my biggest heroes and one of the people who inspired me to start pursuing this work.”

For our Artist of the Month feature, Spence joined McKenna for an intimate and engaging conversation. Read here.

Clare Bowen

 
“Clare recorded my song ‘All The Beds I’ve Made’ on her self-titled album.”

Tyler Childers

 
“I’ve known him since 2014 and he opened for me in early 2016 – a month after Miranda posted about my record, and she actually came to the show. I toured opening for him in 2017 and 2019. At some point, he posted about my album on his IG.”

Spence and Tyler Childers backstage together on tour in 2019. Photo by Jace Kartye.

Mary Chapin Carpenter

 
“We connected on social media and she eventually invited me to open some shows for her. A treasured memory was performing in the round with her at the Edmonton Folk Festival and her asking me to play ‘I Know You Know Me’ and her singing it with me.”

Continue exploring our Artist of the Month coverage of Caroline Spence here.

Photo Credit: Caroline Walker Evans
Inset images and screenshot courtesy of Caroline Spence. 

Dar Williams Follows the Hummingbird Highway

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Dar Williams toured a spice farm in Belize amid pristine jungles and primordial Mayan ruins. At a bumpy junction, the driver told the passengers that there were three possible options: steering east, veering west, or sticking to the middle road, which he called the Hummingbird Highway. The instant wholly seized Williams’ attention. Something about the trail choices resonated, especially the enticing description of the middle one, striking her as a vivid metaphor of human life.

Williams, one of folk music’s most cherished gifts, titled her newest LP Hummingbird Highway (her 11th album). It’s an homage to the interdependence of boundless getaway and eternal return and another impressive offering from someone whose heart first journeyed to music long ago and whose emotional vigilance and poetic vigor seems to only intensify with age.

Indeed, the more Williams thought about the variety of roads, the more similarities she hit upon between herself and the hummingbird. “Hummingbirds have these fantastic migrations and hummingbirds need constant fueling,” said Williams.

Shortly after her Belize trip, Williams met a woman who had a matching hummingbird tattoo with her daughter, which the woman described as symbolic of distance and closeness, departure and arrival, the desire to fly in each and every direction with an understanding that the lucky ones can always ground again at home. Williams treasured the richness of all of this imagery. Once again, she contemplated the hummingbird, finding scores of analogies to the human experience and extracting her own correlations.

“Curiosity, love, longing, we’ve got all of these ways of getting around,” she said. “And it’s not always going forward. Like an artist, the hummingbird goes upside down and goes inside out… Flexibility, creativity, fastness, travel – they all make for a complicated person and parent. Hummingbird Highway was written from the perspective of a child, one with a peripatetic, depressed – perhaps bipolar – frenetic, creative, generous, loving parent.”

In a recording career that began with a demo tape in 1990 titled I Have No History, Williams has long leaned on songwriting and other forms of writing (she has written several travelogues and non-fiction books) to cast off and expose her blood and beauty to the world. Her creative journey was nurtured early in childhood bolstered by the support of parents who, as she said, “leaned into the commons culturally.” Born and raised in Westchester County, New York, music was always in the air at home. So, too, was love and praise.

Her mother was a preschool teacher who believed in letting her students and children choose their instruments first and then take lessons to learn how to play them, not the other way around. Her parents always backed their community’s arts programs, on one occasion selling grapefruit to raise funds for the local orchestra.

“I think that that influenced my love of working with coffeehouses,” said Williams. “It has influenced my love of things like art spaces that somehow figured out how to run a complex sound system, places that were community crowdfunded by a bunch of people who retrofitted it themselves from an old shoe store.”

Most of the music shaping Williams’ preferences she first heard long ago in her parents’ vinyl collection. At age 17, home from school one afternoon, she pulled out a couple of Judy Collins’ records. She fell in love with Collins’ Wildflowers (1967), which featured powerful orchestral arrangements by Joshua Rifkin and included her nourishing tone on songs by Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. She remembers lines to “Sons Of,” a track from the 1970 album Whales & Nightingales as if she had just heard them moments ago.

“On these two albums by Judy, there were songs about lost sons and going to war and never coming back and brilliant, classical arrangements by Rikfin. There was poetry, peace. Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel. A song with whales in it… Music made around that time, the musicians literally considered themselves to be turning the wheels of life and death, of culture and civilization. I wanted to be a part of that fabric.”

Williams treasured the pomp and flaming fire of Marvin Gaye, his charged, sexualized characteristics, and his Motown expression, as well as his connection to the wider world of society and humanity. Because of him, music became more to her than just what was present in her home and town. Music could represent the fullness of the planet. She was no longer merely listening to voices and sounds, but comprehending human dignity. Simon & Garfunkel were key early influences, too.

“Paul Simon’s iconography of urban life and ordinary things, buildings, people, and food, influences me to this day,” she said. “The idea of trying to create a sacred landscape from our daily lives comes directly from Simon & Garfunkel.”

Hummingbird Highway is classic Williams, a fresh supply of drink from the ever-flowing spring, exemplifying all of the strong points that make her music enjoyable. Spot-on humility supplies the nourishment of every song. Some express gladness, some are heavy, some are weightless, and others reflect her attempt to reconcile everything in her person. Breadth and beauty reside in all of them, displaying and epitomizing a songwriting mantra that Williams has practiced for a while, which is to allow each song the latitude to grow and shine on its own terms.

“My personal motto is to stick to writing the song that you are writing,” said Williams. “You shouldn’t just bat away a perfectly delightful song about a dragonfly landing on your shoulder, right? You can get to the bottom of a song whether it is a lighthearted or not-so-lighthearted song. Just keep yourself in the shoes of the characters, and find out what’s really happening. Songwriting is committing to the world that you find yourself in.

“We go to music that makes us cry, helps us laugh, helps us bang our heads around and makes us forget things, or makes us be in the ecstatic moment and escape from the murky depths. Feel that first inspiration and keep on going. It ends up being deeper than you thought anyway, even if it’s a flaky song. It’s a way into your inner blueprint and there is a reason it surfaced at that moment. Who are we to say what’s deep and what’s not deep?”

Williams doesn’t journal or write every single day. She does, however, seek to be inspired daily, constantly looking for something surprising or special in the ordinary flashes of day-to-day life, a need that she can satisfy sitting at a museum or on a park bench.

“That’s part of the honest struggle between pedestrian things and poetic things,” she said. “The artist decides all of that on a personal level and decides what in their life it is that they would like to turn into poetry.”

The deeper that she dips into her career, the more that Williams realizes that there is a holy motion guiding each and every recording, pushed forward by an intention that’s both specific and accumulated.

“Music is like archeology, where there are a lot of layers,” she explained. “And each album is a layer and an album is an eon of my life. Looking back, I can pinpoint times of my life, depending on what album I was writing or touring with, and what issues were coming up. Like archeology, it all sort of seems to make sense in its own world, even though it doesn’t at the time [the album] comes out. There is a certain palate, a certain feel, a certain personality, and a certain neuroses attached to each album. It is another way to keep a chronicle of a life and another way to gauge a life.”

Many of the songs on Hummingbird Highway were written during the pandemic and hold numerous references to birds, indicative of a point when Williams spent hours alone staring at and refilling the bird feeder in the garden. There’s also “Tu Sais Le Printemps,” a French bossa nova tune, and “All Is Come Undone,” a piece of writing which came to Williams as she was breaking up earth in the backyard, attempting to convert an idle plot of dirt into a thriving meadow, listening to Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Later Autumn.” Williams’ stab at modern Americana, “Put the Coins on His Eyes” was inspired by the storied history of early labor unions, movements, and revolutions in the U.S., and all of the agitation, suppression, and violence marking their expansions and downfalls.

The joy of taking a batch of new songs on the road is still compelling to Williams, who approaches every night with an alchemist’s urge for transformation, worship of experimentation, and spiritual curiosity about the core quality of things.

“It is a great thing to walk out and feel the energy of the people,” said Williams. “It’s best when there is no skepticism and no suspicion. But some audiences are tentative. You can feel it within the first couple of songs, like a massage therapist who feels tension; you feel the accretion of awareness for what kind of energy field you are walking into. The goal is to get to another place musically together with the audience.”

Photo Credit: Carly Rae Brunault

For Tift Merritt, Time and Patience Have Made the Difference

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Tift Merritt never thought she’d end up back in her hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. For about 15 years she toured through America and Europe to support a number of exceptional albums, particularly 2004’s Tambourine. Released on Lost Highway Records, that R&B-influenced LP earned a GRAMMY nomination and elevated her profile among audiences who admired the detail in her songwriting and appreciated her hard-to-define musical style.

After nine years of living in New York City, Merritt wrote her ticket home in 2016 and welcomed a daughter, Jean, that same year. Following the release of a studio album in 2017, Merritt largely stepped away from performing to pursue other ambitions, including the renovation of a historic hotel called the Gables Motel Lodge in Raleigh and working as a practitioner-in-residence at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

“I think we have this sort of unnatural expectation of what performing life is, what creative life is, and you can’t flower all the time,” Merritt tells BGS. “So, it’s been really nice to be away. And it feels really fun to be doing some gigs and be back.”

Merritt’s new album, Time and Patience, gracefully shines a light on her musical moments from two decades ago. Most of the recordings are homemade demos; four others are studio outtakes from the Tambourine sessions. A 20th anniversary edition of Tambourine has also been reissued on vinyl.

Ahead of her first AmericanaFest appearance in more than a decade, Merritt reminisced about writing the title track of her new collection, hearing Dolly Parton’s music as a kid, and the personal decision she considers “one of the best things that ever happened.”

I’ve read that your dog, Lucy, was watching you as you recorded these demos in your kitchen. What was it like to have her with you? Was it a little bit of companionship?

Tift Merritt: Oh yeah! At the time, I lived on a farm outside of Chapel Hill in North Carolina. My boyfriend went on a trip and I stayed home to get down to writing, because I’m a Capricorn in that way. [Laughs] At that point, I had had Lucy for almost 10 years and she was used to staring at me and staring at my notebooks. But she was such a good girl and we had a lot of years where I had a great writing routine when I wasn’t on the road. I’d be writing, then taking walks, then writing… It’s interesting to think back about those days when that’s all I had to do. [Laughs] I didn’t have somebody else to take care of! What did I do with all those hours?!

What was the goal in recording these demos? Were you trying to get someone to listen, or was somebody interested in you already?

I had already done Bramble Rose [in 2002] and the label told me to go home and write a hit. But they didn’t want to spend any money for me going to the studio. Those recordings are what I sent my label and my manager. That was the big audition.

Wow, that’s a tall order: “Go home and write a hit.” How did you receive that?

You know, I was 27 years old and I realized the precarity of the position that I was in. Someone had ambitions for me, which was a really good thing. It’s a lot better than people not having ambitions for you. At the same time, I was very determined to keep my integrity. I always wanted to be a career artist. I didn’t have aspirations to have big hits. I didn’t have aspirations that were purely commercial.

I would try to be very determined to just do excellent work in my own voice. They also told me that I was not allowed to be an Americana artist, because that didn’t really exist at that time and there was no money in it. You know, it was just a weird time. It was a weird time to be a woman in that industry. It still is, it always is. And certainly, a young woman. I mean, nobody trusted me.

What did they not trust?

My judgment, my writing, my band, how I dressed myself, that I knew how I wanted my picture to appear. None of it. It was always a struggle and part of that is because I have strong artistic opinions, I’m sensitive, and I’m not stupid. I came out of a very rigorous writing program and to walk into Nashville where it’s like, “Oh no, it’s not a hit,” I’m like, “That’s not criticism I can do anything with.” Again, I was glad that people had ambitions for me, but [I was told] my songs aren’t good enough. My band wasn’t good enough. And that sort of added up to, I’m not good enough.

The label would trust [the album’s producer] George Drakoulias, but they wouldn’t trust me. And this is not an unusual story: “You don’t trust an artist! And you certainly don’t trust an artist who thinks they’re a writer!” I think there was very much a power dynamic at that time, where you separate the singer from the band, and you separate the singer from the song, and you can get them to do what you want to do. I didn’t want to do any of that.

Your band was such an important part of your sound. How did you put them together?

Well, I was married to the drummer and I didn’t want to be slick Nashville. We were all North Carolina people. We came up together, cutting our teeth in clubs. The label did not want my band to play on Tambourine. And so that band was Mike Campbell, Neal Casal, Maria McKee, and Don Heffington. I trusted George enough to surround me with people who were all friends of Maria McKee, basically, and spoke the same language as I did.

Being from North Carolina, did you grow up around bluegrass? Or did that influence your musical direction at all?

I think the Everly Brothers and harmonies and acoustic instruments did. I wasn’t totally into bluegrass. I was more into songs. My dad had an extremely eclectic record collection, a lot of which was influenced by the radio, which was eclectic at that point. He had Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton and all sorts of stuff. He was real song-oriented and kind of a folkie himself. Lots of Dylan songs, lots of finger picking. So, in some way, I would say that I’m more of a folk musician because I learned to play from my father by ear and he learned by picking out the songs that he heard that he loved. They were all that sort of “touch your heart” kind of thing.

Were there any musicians whose melodies inspired you?

I can remember singing Dolly Parton songs with my dad, driving carpool. And she always has such amazing melodies. There were some amazing pivotal records for me, like Emmylou Harris’ Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town and Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Raitt. Also, as a writer, those early Joni Mitchell records. She is so creative, melodically and with the guitar. It’s never boring.

I always think I’m a much better writer than I am a musician. I try to bring, first, a rigor to what I’m trying to say in words, that it’s something worth saying. And then I try to do the same to the melody, so it’s something worth hearing. It’s not necessarily something fancy, but it’s something interesting and layered.

How old were you when you picked up the guitar?

I started picking it up from my dad, probably at 12 or 13, when all the boys were starting to do it. It was like [in an unimpressed voice], “Oh my God, I can do that, too.” Probably in my middle teens is when I really got into it. I didn’t think I could sing. I didn’t think people would come to a show or anything like that. I just loved doing it and I thought I would be a writer.

When did that shift for you?

In my early 20s. I started a band and we had some sparks kind of quick. That was really lucky. We were in the right place at the right time in Chapel Hill. And then I just didn’t stop getting gigs… until I did!

Have you played a lot over the last nine years?

I toured with my daughter for the first two years and then I said, “You know what, kiddo? This isn’t enough for you.” I thought she deserved roots. At the time, that felt like a big failure, like I hadn’t turned a corner where I’d get a bus and a nanny and make all of that doable. Seven years later, I think it was one of the best things that ever happened. Because I was able to – for the first time in my adult life – not be on the road and not be trying to fit into the creativity that is pretty narrow that the record industry offers. I mean, it’s the “three minutes and 30 seconds.”

So, I ended up doing a lot of other things that made me feel like I was more of an artist, rather than less of one. I’ve also had this incredible time raising my daughter. We actually just did our first real tour together in Europe and she loved it! I mean, I’ve jumped out here and there and done shows, but my focus has been on other things, mainly my daughter and figuring out how to take care of us.

On the song “Time and Patience,” there’s a glimmer of hope. It’s like you’re saying to yourself, “Hang in there. You can do this.” And there’s a verse where you’re telling somebody else, “I believe in you, too.” Do you remember what was going on in your life at that moment?

I do! I remember very, very much so and I do remember writing that song to myself about how frustrated I was, that nothing I was writing was a hit. I often get insomnia, especially when I’m writing. Like, I can’t get it out of my head. And I really did see the sun come up and I got up and I wrote that song, and then I made grits. Grits are such a good thing when you’ve had insomnia and go back to bed!

It’s funny because my dad has always loved that song. I am not somebody who looks back a lot. I’d much rather look forward. But it’s funny to hear that song now, where I was kind of trying to get myself through something really specific. And now, I’m in a place where my life is not at all what I imagined it to be. But it’s actually better than I imagined it to be and I couldn’t have imagined it. That feels like the timing is special. Maybe that was one of those songs that I didn’t really understand then that I understand a lot better now.

Photo Credit: Morgane Imbeaud

Josh Ritter’s Muse
Is Like a Honeydew

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Idaho-born singer-songwriter Josh Ritter has released a dozen studio albums over the past quarter-century, crafting an elegant body of work. A few years back, he earned the ultimate compliment in tunesmith circles when Bob Dylan covered one of his songs, “Only a River,” co-written with Bob Weir.

By now Ritter is well-acquainted with the wisdom of following the muse wherever it leads. Recently, however, he was moved to take a step back and focus more on the muse itself rather than the destination. That inspiration began with “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding),” a visionary song from his latest batch of compositions. Beautifully simple and unadorned, it’s just voice and guitar as Ritter summons up myths and memories surrounding “the one who got away.”

“Truth…” turned out to be one of the 10 songs making up studio LP number 13 for Ritter, the whimsically titled I Believe in You, My Honeydew, which releases today followed by widespread touring well into next year. Along the way, he’ll be posting regularly on Josh Ritter’s Book of Jubilations (one of the better artist Substacks out there) and at some point he’ll get back to working on his in-progress third novel. Fiction writing has turned out to be yet another thriving subset of Ritter’s career.

“I have a rough draft done,” he reports. “My wife Haley reads all my first drafts because she’s my best reader, so she’ll tell me the problems I need to fix. I’m excited about this one. I’ve written two other full novels since the last one came out, but they don’t have the spark this one does. It’s nice to have an ongoing project you can work on a little at a time, take a break and let it marinate.”

In the meantime, there’s lots to be excited about regarding I Believe in You, My Honeydew. BGS caught up with Ritter by phone from his home in Brooklyn.

You recently wrote a Substack post about first drafts, which you likened to a sculptor’s “acquisition of the stone” that will eventually be carved into a statue. An elegant way to visualize the slog of writing a book.

Josh Ritter: My true writing journey began through songs, which was the first form I really connected with. Writing songs, you can edit very quickly and on the fly. But after years and years of that, I was really struck by the different pace of editing when writing a novel. It takes no big effort to change things in songs. But with a novel, there’s just no getting around that you’re heaving big lumps of stone around – paragraphs that you have to haul from one place to another.

That makes it a lot heavier, but it can also be a joyful act. Pulling the rock is so exciting, that initial spark of inspiration and desire to heave this impossible stone. It’s beautiful when the story is exposed for the first time, all these rich characters. Same as a song.

Your first novel, 2011’s Bright’s Passage, actually started out as a song. Does that happen often, where a piece of writing starts as one thing but becomes another?

As a writer, what I have is water that will fill whatever container I put it in. Songs have a shape that can hold a whole story that could be a novel – like Springsteen’s “The River,” that could be a novel. At the same time, it’s fun to have novels as a different mountain to climb in your mind. Songs are something you can get to quickly, but you might also want to do this other kind of writing that takes a long time and a lot of love. Then you have to decide the economy of that: Is it important enough to you to be worth it?

I’ve always thought songs are like corridors where there are doors but not rooms. Turn on a song, listen to it, and you’re walking down that corridor. And off the corridor, the rooms are your own thoughts and memories, wondering about everything from what to make the kids for dinner to the nature of God. You can hear stuff on the radio that leads to profound questions that are not about that moment, but would not happen without the song. It’s really beautiful. Sometimes you just want to follow songs behind the door, wherever they go.

From your new record, “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding)” is such a beautiful, heavy, heartbreaking song. Listening from the outside, it feels like the heart of I Believe in You, My Honeydew. Does it feel that way to you, too?

There are certain songs I feel fortunate to receive, which is what that one felt like. It unfolded in such a quick and finished way, with such clarity, and it gave me so much to draw from. Not just the subject matter, but this idea I became obsessed with about truth becoming changeable. There’s a metaphysical aspect, but also more physical than we give it credit for. And as I was writing it, I realized I was writing this with a muse. Had to be.

Afterward, it occurred to me that this was not something I could’ve done by myself. Hemingway used to say that we all get lucky sometimes and write better than we can. But it all depends on who you’re writing with in your mind. Helps to have a third party in there, between the head and the heart.

That was the first song I wrote for this record, and the rest unfolded out of the same general idea. What I hoped to do was perceive a muse as something fuller than what I had appreciated in the past. To assume that a muse is a spiritual acquisition, that didn’t feel right. And to have “lost” one’s muse implies you had it to begin with. No one likes to be “had,” you know?

The bittersweet vibe of that song reminds me of one of my favorite songs and videos of yours, 2010’s “The Curse.”

That’s another one I fell into. A lot of the story songs are like a trance, with the song unfolding as it’s happening. The song is only as long as the trance lasts, and when it’s over it’s really done. I’m almost glad it doesn’t happen all the time. That sense of revelation is so powerful, and I don’t want it to wear off. I imagine it’s the same feeling as hitting a golf ball really, really far.

On that song and others, you really have an affinity for waltz time.

Oh, I love it. Waltz time is such a beautiful architecture that feels like a Viennese street, really fundamental and blocky. It’s a stone you can build on, a lot of melody can go on top of a waltz. So sweet and dark. If I could do it every time, I probably would.

So with the muse, do you have an actual mental picture of what it looks like? A visual manifestation?

It’s not something I can anthropomorphize, but the closest I’ve found is honeydew. It’s familiar and weird, almost self-luminous. Cut it open and it’s this mess of wires and biology in there. It tastes strange but also good when you eat it, unearthly but also familiar. Music is my way of exploring the euphoria and unexplainable elation of experiencing that vision. Sometimes it seems like ideas and feelings from other worlds are fearful, and I’m comforted by the idea that they can be communed with.

So, how to communicate with this thing? Because when you come right down to it, I couldn’t even assume it knew English. It could read my mind without knowing the language. So I had to teach it about things I love, invite it into this experience of being a 48-year-old man who writes songs for a living and lives with his family in Brooklyn. I had to be open to this other life force, show gratitude and offer it a place at the table.

The songs came out of that and I like playing these songs we worked on together. I wanted this record to be fun. I liked the idea of it being high-flying but also earthy. Like seeing something celestial at a Friday night bonfire party with Solo cups, one of those occasions with friends listening to music together and looking up at stars. That’s as holy a moment as can be found. I wanted to write about that moment as the setting for a soundtrack of that liminal passing as dusk comes on.

What other songs on this record do you like best?

I’m proud of “Noah’s Children,” which I remember as just a marvelous fun time to make in the studio. You could just feel it develop. I brought it in with that strum and quickly realized that Rich Hinman’s amazing guitar-playing really gave it the percussive slink I wanted it to have. It became something I really wanted to be singing at that moment.

“Kudzu Vines” was fun as well, just turn everything way up. And starting the record with “You Won’t Dig My Grave” was intentional. Records are about a moment in the time and life of an artist, and that song’s definitely about surviving bullies and forces that seem dead set against humanity, dragging us downward from our potential. Sometimes the only way to defeat someone like that is to outlive them.

You mentioned that this record was fun to make. Have some of your other records been more of a struggle?

In different ways, every record is never separate from the lives of the people making it. I’m sure every member of my band would have a different answer but [2023’s] Spectral Lines was very difficult to make. It was during the pandemic and also following my mom’s death – like [2013’s] The Beast In Its Tracks followed my divorce. Those were moments of personal crisis, living in that moment and what came out of it. Often there was not joy. But there was need and there’s some joy in that.

So yeah, some records are harder to make than others, but that almost doesn’t make it into the equation as soon as it’s done. You’re proud of it and that bad feeling goes away. I guess there’s a reason we do things twice. Whatever mountain you climb, the hurt is forgotten if you love it enough.

Now this one was all recorded in a way that’s the most fun for me, everybody together in a room, just a great time in Minnesota way out under the stars. No reason for it not to be a good time. I’m very proud of the story and its conclusion.

Long ago, you started out intending to follow your parents into the field of science – until taking organic chemistry in college at Oberlin. Maybe they were disappointed at first, but given your successes they must be pretty sanguine about your career choice.

I always say, never let college get in the way of your schedule! On the one hand, I was really disappointed not to be whatever idea I had at that time. At the same time, I was profoundly impressed with how many of my peers were doing things of just magical intent of purpose. And I was left there thinking, “Okay, this is going to change some things. I have to think about this because I’m not going to be who I thought I was.”

But my parents took it well. My mom died a few years ago and my dad is living in Minnesota with his new wife. It’s been fun, he comes out to the shows. When your mom dies, suddenly you don’t have someone to show your booboos to. I’ve been fortunate that he has become that for me, someone to share both victories and griefs with. Seeing parents go on to new lives and loves is a beautiful thing. It’s one reason why this is such a happy record.

Photo Credit: Jake Magraw

You Gotta Hear This: New Music From Mon Rovîa, Brennen Leigh, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

You Gotta Hear This! Our weekly new music collection is yet again full-to-bursting with the best in country, bluegrass, Americana, and beyond. It’s another week for popcorn and Milk Duds, too, as most of our featured artists have brought us music videos to enjoy.

Son of iconic and beloved troubadour Jim Croce, singer-songwriter A.J. Croce brings a soulful and plaintive song, “Didn’t You Want That Too,” packaged in a brooding and passionate performance video. Croce tells us he wrote the song while heartbroken on a cross-country flight. South Caroline’s Jennie Arnau showcases an adorable stop-motion music video today for “Mabel,” a lovely and heartfelt Americana track inspired by her beloved cat and the idea that when you need connection and joy, one ought not forget the comfort and light we carry with us as we move through our communities and the world.

In the bluegrass realm, one of Western North Carolina’s favorite mandolinists/bandleaders Darren Nicholson drops a new single today, “Get Me Down the Line.” Written with Charles Humphrey III, it’s deep-pocketed and grooving modern ‘grass, an anthem for all the folks who might be chasing the next best thing. Plus, Josh “Jug” Rinkel returns with another solo performance video from his Live from Reverb and Echo Studio series. “Lonely and Free” came to Rinkel like a jolt in the middle of the night; he wrote the song sitting on the side of his bed at 4 a.m.

A Good Country purveyor of the first degree, Brennen Leigh has a new single that released last week, “Tell Me,” so we’re excited to share the new music video for that fine track. The video is a bit of an aesthetic time machine, a stylistic rewind that pays tribute to the ’60s on Music Row and “country business casual,” which we love. Boston-based artist Robin Young also shares her new video for “There’s a Part of Me,” below. Featuring a loping, energetic beat and plucked banjo, it’s the first song Young wrote for her upcoming album, Letters to a Ghost, and it artfully balances country and bluegrass grit with a lush, glossy polish.

Rounding us out, an indie folk singer-songwriter who’s almost universally beloved by the internet – and IRL – Mon Rovîa has announced his debut full-length album today with a new track, a single from the project, “Whose face am i.” Bloodline, the upcoming LP, arrives in January 2026. “Whose face am i” shows Mon’s captivating, contemplative sort of writing that has charmed millions of indie and roots fans around the globe. It’s a song about generational trauma, history, family, interpersonal connections, and the strife and turmoil that can stand between these facets of identity.

We hope you enjoy another exemplary round-up of roots music, ’cause You Gotta Hear This!

Jennie Arnau, “Mabel”

Artist: Jennie Arnau
Hometown: Greenville, South Carolina
Song: “Mabel”
Album: A Rising Tide
Release Date: September 5 (single); September 12 (video); November 7, 2025 (album)

In Their Words: “When I wrote ‘Mabel,’ I was reflecting on a time when I craved more connection and joy. While I was traveling alone, it occurred to me that my cat, Mabel, my constant companion and quiet soulmate, reminded me of the comfort and light I carry with me. That thought brought into focus how much I thrive when I’m traveling, meeting people, sharing a glass of wine, and exploring new ideas and places. That’s when I feel most alive. The idea for the video came to me immediately after. I found Adrian (the videographer) and asked him to capture a character on a journey – discovering light, warmth, and happiness along the way. In many ways, Mabel represents the brighter version of myself, the part that chooses joy and moves forward and he was really able to translate that in what I think is an amazing video.” – Jennie Arnau

Track Credits:
Jennie Arnau – Vocals, acoustic guitar, songwriter
Alan Lerner – Drums
Pete Levin – Keyboards
Binky Griptite – Electric guitar
Brett Bass – Bass
Greg McMullen – Pedal Steel
Kendall Sherman – Background vocals
Jacob Joliff – Mandolin
Mike Savino – Banjo, tenor guitar

Video Credit: Adrian Venti

A.J. Croce, “Didn’t You Want That Too”

Artist: A.J. Croce
Hometown: Born in Bryn Mawr near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Song: “Didn’t You Want That Too”
Album: Heart of the Eternal
Release Date: September 12 (video); March 7, 2025 (album)

In Their Words: “This is the most personal song on the album. Some songs I’ve written are fun to analyze, because in looking back I see that there was a deeper meaning than I realized at the time. In this case it’s too painful for me to look any deeper than the surface. I wrote it, heartbroken, on a flight from California to Tennessee.” – AJ Croce

Brennen Leigh, “Tell Me”

Artist: Brennen Leigh
Hometown: Moorhead, Minnesota
Song: “Tell Me”
Album: Don’t You Ever Give Up On Love
Release Date: September 3 (single); September 12 (video); October 3, 2025 (album)
Label: Signature Sounds

In Their Words: “When our producer Kevin Skrla built Wolfe Island Recording Co., it was with Nashville’s legendary RCA Studio B in mind. Many of my favorite albums were made at RCA in the ’60s, so when we recorded the video for ‘Tell Me,’ we were imagining some of the magic that occurred in that world… when Nashville A Team studio musicians might have gone in for a day of work in the studio. We played dress up, imagining folks like legendary producer and musician Chet Atkins and visionary engineer and vocal group leader Anita Kerr, what they might have worn – country business casual – and the charts they may have made.

“I’ve always been a musician first and a performer second, so the world of working session players in the ’60s holds a special mystique for me. Georgia Parker, Rebecca Patek, and Josh Artall (some of my favorite musicians) portrayed the original session band, Dave Biller, Matty Meyer, Josh Hoag, and Damien O’Grady. Kevin Skrla and I portrayed ourselves. We’re saving up for a time machine.” –Brennen Leigh

Video Credit: Directed by Oceanna

Darren Nicholson, “Get Me Down The Line”

Artist: Darren Nicholson
Hometown: Canton, North Carolina
Song: “Get Me Down The Line”
Release Date: September 12, 2025
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “‘Get Me Down The Line’ is such a fun song! It’s another one that I co-wrote with Charles Humphrey III and it’s without a doubt the best response I’ve ever had to a song when performed for our live audiences. It’s a jukin’ little anthem for the person who is chasing the next best thing – another take on the human condition and how we are constantly looking for something to fill the void, looking for whatever ‘it’ is to make us feel better temporarily. I am laughing as I write this because I’m very familiar with this notion. I love writing songs about my own human experience, and I hope maybe others can relate to them from time to time. Thanks for listening! I hope you find yourself groovin’ along as well. Have fun and enjoy the quest for whatever ‘it’ is that gets you on down the line.” – Darren Nicholson

Track Credits:
Darren Nicholson – Mandolin, lead vocal
Tony Creasman – Drums
Kristin Scott Benson – Banjo
Mark Fain – Upright bass
David Johnson – Acoustic guitar, resonator guitar
Kevin Sluder – Harmony vocal
Avery Welty – Harmony vocal

Josh Rinkel, “Lonely and Free”

Artist: Josh Rinkel
Hometown: Mount Eden, Kentucky
Song: “Lonely and Free”
Album: Live from Reverb and Echo Studio
Release Date: September 12, 2025 (video)
Label: Reverb and Echo

In Their Words: “I’ve always heard songwriters tell stories about how a song came to them in their sleep, how it woke them up and they just had to write it… I never believed them until it happened to me. That’s how ‘Lonely and Free’ came about. I wrote that song sitting on the side of my bed after waking up out of a dead sleep at four in the morning. I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that they’re lonely and they write it off as being free or independent – not needing someone in their life to slow them down. To me, that’s the meaning behind ‘Lonely and Free.'” – Josh Rinkel

Video Credits: Video by Carter Brice; audio by Dan Deurloo.

Mon Rovîa, “Whose face am i”

Artist: Mon Rovîa
Hometown: Libera-born, Tennessee-based
Song: “Whose face am i”
Album: Bloodline
Release Date: September 12, 2025 (single); January 9, 2026 (album)
Label: Nettwerk Music Group

In Their Words: “A lot of life is about your history. The search for understanding what has happened, what is, and what isn’t. The Truth lies at the epicenter of the case. For many adopted children, or those who have lost parents when young or never knew theirs to begin with, there can be an unspoken weight. We all long to know who brought us into this world, and at what cost. Relief releases sweetly as answers come to light. Know you aren’t alone in your search for your story. Many seek with you.” – Mon Rovîa

Robin Young, “There’s a Part of Me”

Artist: Robin Young
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Song: “There’s a Part of Me”
Album: Letters to a Ghost
Release Date: September 17 (single); October 17, 2025 (album)

In Their Words: “‘There’s a Part of Me’ is the first song I wrote for my debut album, when my emotions were truly raw. I was in the beginning stages of a relationship with someone new while a large part of my heart stayed stubbornly loyal to someone from my past. He’d made me feel a depth of emotion that I just couldn’t seem to access with anyone else and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to move past it, though many years down the road I now thankfully have.

“The major chords during the chorus represent a momentary glimpse of what moving on might feel like, but then drift back into minor chords in the verses like a slide back to reality. Rather than sounding upbeat, the faster tempo is meant to feel almost frantic.

“The music video shows me trying to enjoy the beautiful scenery of Western Massachusetts in the present, while being continually pulled back into memories of the past. The one shot taken indoors is meant to evoke a confession booth as I express the guilt of retaining feelings for someone while in a relationship with someone else.” – Robin Young

Track Credits:
Robin Young – Vocals, acoustic guitar, songwriter
Charlie Burket – Electric guitar, mandolin, banjo
Carter Sanders – Piano
Russ Sternglass – Drums
Joe McMahon – Upright bass

Video Credits: Directed and edited by Chris Bartlett. Color grading by Jefferson Rosa.

Photo Credit: Mon Rovîa by Zayne Isom; Brennen Leigh by Lyza Renee.

You Gotta Hear This: New Music From Katie Boeck, Ben Garnett, and More

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

You’ve reached the end of the week and, for your reward, we’ve collected a superlative handful of brand new videos, visualizers, and songs from roots music spheres.

Kicking us off, actor and indie-folk singer-songwriter Katie Boeck puts yearning “almost-love” in the spotlight with “Dust.” It’s a lovely, contemplative track that showcases that Boeck is equally at home in indie-tinged Americana as she is on a Broadway stage. Continuing in a similar context, with tender harmonies and fingerpicking as a sound bed Canadian folk duo Ocie Elliott also consider the messy, uncertain, shifting sands of loving someone and the circular nature of giving of yourself to another in that most intimate way.

Guitarist and composer Ben Garnett announced his upcoming sophomore album earlier this week. Kite’s Keep arrives in October, heralded here with the first single, “Look Again,” and a live performance video of the bustling, prismatic track featuring Brittany Haas on fiddle and Ethan Jodziewicz on bass. It demonstrates the consistently thoughtful and outside-the-box approach Garnett takes in crafting solo acoustic guitar music that bridges jazz, bluegrass, new acoustic, and more.

The Far West, Los Angeles-based country strutters, tapped Dave Alvin as a guest for their brand new track, “Hope I Don’t Bleed.” Dropping next week on August 22, you can get a sneak preview of the vibing, psychedelic LA-canyons-via-swampy-bottoms tune below. And, wrapping us up, singer-songwriter Jon LaDeau draws inspiration from a long New York City to Bristol, Tennessee, drive with “East Tennessee Wrecker.” He’s joined by Emily Jackson on the new single and performance video, which features a lovely stripped down version of the track, unadorned and shining.

Whatever your favorite flavor of country, folk, and roots music, there’s something for you to enjoy herein. You Gotta Hear This!

Katie Boeck, “Dust”

Artist: Katie Boeck
Hometown: San Luis Obispo, California
Song: “Dust”
Release Date: August 15, 2025

In Their Words: “‘Dust’ came out of the ache of almost-love – the kind where someone lingers near your heart, but never fully arrives. I was thinking of the tortoise and the hare, but as a metaphor for emotional pacing between two people. It began as an ultimatum, but ended as an acceptance of what is – without clinging to what could’ve been. I recorded it with Shane Leonard (Anna Tivel, Humbird), a producer I’ve long admired, at his studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, live to tape, which was my first experience in that setting. Creatively, it was also an exercise in letting something be what it was in that moment, without all the modern temptations and expectations of perfection.” – Katie Boeck

Track Credits:
Katie Boeck – Vocals, guitars, songwriter
Joe Westerlund – Drums
Pat Keen – Bass
Paul Brandt – Keys
Shane Leonard – Drums, producer, mixing, mastering

Video Credit: Bella Mazzola, Twin Lantern Productions

Ocie Elliott, “By The Way”

Artist: Ocie Elliott
Hometown: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Song: “By The Way”
Album: Bungalow
Release Date: August 15, 2025 (single); October 24, 2025 (album)
Label: Nettwerk Music Group

In Their Words: “‘By The Way’ is a song about the beautiful mess of loving someone – choosing love not just in spite of challenging dynamics, but because of them. It’s a recognition that no matter how fleeting and uncertain the unfolding of a story may be, love is the constant that it always circles back to. The song was written after many months away on tour and it was one of the first melodies and chord progressions that came to me once I delved back into writing. Sometimes songs take a while to come into being, but this was one of those tunes that arrived almost fully formed.” – Jon Middleton

The Far West, “Hope I Don’t Bleed”

Artist: The Far West
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Song: “Hope I Don’t Bleed” featuring Dave Alvin
Album: Everything We Thought We Wanted
Release Date: August 22, 2025 (single); September 26, 2025 (album)
Label: Blackbird Record Label

In Their Words: “I’d been kicking this one around for years, but could never find the arrangement I wanted to suit the lyrics. Aaron, Robert, and Brian really found the swampy vibe I couldn’t seem to. The bass puts this right in the pocket it needed to be, and having Dave Alvin tear a white-hot solo through it made it complete.

“Dave played this solo though my amp, which is a special little factoid for me. The amp is now blessed. My little Fender only has a volume and tone knob, and I used to tape the volume knob down at shows because the vibration of the amp would cause it to turn itself up as it rattled. I took the tape off in the studio. Dave likes things loud and either the amp turned itself up to 10 or he did, either way each take got louder.

“You can hear the amp being pressed to its absolute limit. I know he’s blown some bigger amps on stage, I was surprised my little amp survived. A few months after he laid down this solo, I saw him at the Astro Diner and mentioned we were listening back and ‘we think the amp turned itself up on you during the session’… he just looked at me and said, ‘No it didn’t.’ Anyway, this one is simply about being afraid of experiencing pain at death.” – Lee Briante

Ben Garnett, “Look Again”

Artist: Ben Garnett
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Look Again”
Album: Kite’s Keep
Release Date: August 12, 2025 (single); October 10, 2025 (album)
Label: Padiddle Records

In Their Words: “‘Look Again’ is the first track on my sophomore studio album, Kite’s Keep. The album title loosely refers to this idea of a child’s inner world – a dreamscape where each song represents a different vignette of imagination.

“With ‘Look Again,’ I wanted the music to feel prismatic. As if to suggest an imaginative universe emerging from an ordinary one. I was interested in exploring, in musical terms, the idea that perception is never fixed. Like the old saying goes, ‘You never step in the same river twice’ – one also never sees the same thing twice. Any time we return to anything, it’s always different, with all things constantly in motion.

“On top of this, I had the immense joy of working with two musicians I deeply adore: Brittany Haas on fiddle and Ethan Jodziewicz on bass. Their performances brought the track to life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.” – Ben Garnett

Track Credits:
Ben Garnett – Guitar
Brittany Haas – Fiddle
Ethan Jodziewicz – Bass

Video Credits: Tessa Cokkinias – Cinematography
Ben Garnett – Video

Jon LaDeau, “East Tennessee Wrecker”

Artist: Jon LaDeau
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “East Tennessee Wrecker” featuring Emily Jackson
Album: Chateau LaDeau
Release Date: August 22, 2025
Label: Adhyâropa Records

In Their Words: “‘East Tennessee Wrecker’ is a song that has been picking at me for a long time. Several years ago, I was traveling with my band from Brooklyn, NY to Bristol, TN to play at the Bristol Rhythm and Roots Reunion. It’s about a 10-hour drive and for some reason our navigation system was counting down the hours until we arrived at East Tennessee Wrecker. We didn’t know what that was, but discovered upon arriving in the area that it was a towing service that I believe has since changed names. For some reason that title got imprinted in my mind and as time went by the structure of a song began to reveal itself.

“I recorded the guitars, bass, and drums in my studio in Brooklyn and when the music felt right, I was lucky to have Emily Jackson come by and sing a duet with me to tie it all together. We sang together live into one mic and that’s what you hear on the album. I brought this version of the song to David Butler and he fleshed out the arrangement by adding a second drum set, a drum machine, and some sparse keyboard stuff. I’m really happy with how this one came out and I feel lucky that D. James Goodwin was available to really bring the performances we captured to their full sonic potential by mixing and mastering.

“At the heart of the song it’s really just acoustic guitar and vocals, so I wanted to capture a stripped down version as well. Aaron Cassara filmed Emily and I singing it at The Scratcher here in the East Village, NYC. I’ve been very fortunate to work out a lot of my songs here over the years during their Sunday night music series so it felt natural to capture a version of the song in the same way you would hear it live in a room that means so much to me. This song seems to reinforce the feelings of connection I have to my community. I hope that it lifts up anyone who gives it a listen.” – Jon LaDeau

Photo Credit: Katie Boeck by New Norm Studios; Ben Garnett by Natia Cinco.