Artist: Hey, King!
Hometown: Ontario, Canada and Tucson, Arizona
Song: “Get Up”
Album: Hey, King!
Release Date: April 2, 2021
Label: ANTI-
In Their Words: “I feel like every serious, emotionally raw album can use a breath of lightness. When Taylor dared me to write a song from our dogs’ perspective I thought it would be a fun experiment, but we fell in love with the track and are so happy it made it on the record!” — Natalie London, Hey, King!
Photo credit: Richard Fournier
Artist: Beth Lee
Hometown: Houston, Texas, now residing in Austin
Song: “Birthday Song”
Album: Waiting on You Tonight
Release Date: February 12, 2021
In Their Words: “I wrote this just before my birthday in 2018 for a songwriter game I am a part of, given the prompt ‘close my eyes.’ I sent it to Vicente Rodriguez, my friend and eventual producer, on his birthday a couple weeks later, and he loved it. It seemed apropos that we ended up booking studio time the week of his and guitarist James DePrato’s birthdays the following year. The song came together quickly in the studio with some minimalistic percussion, James’ guitar magic, some hand claps, and my favorite finishing touch, the glockenspiel. It was the first song we really finished and I remember thinking, yeah, this is going to be a good record.” — Beth Lee
Photo credit: Eryn Brooke
Artist: Andrea von Kampen
Single: “A Midwest Christmas”
Release Date: November 6, 2020
In Their Words: “When I sat down to write my first-ever original Christmas tune, I felt at a loss for what to even write about. This year has been tough and disappointing in so many ways for everyone. I wanted to lift spirits of people, but I didn’t feel like sleigh bells, ice skating, or any of the other quintessential Christmas topics were relatable right now. I started to think about what really makes me happy and feel at peace during the holidays. It hasn’t ever been the shopping or the big light displays, but the simple moments that show human kindness. That’s what ‘A Midwest Christmas’ is really all about.” — Andrea von Kampen
Artist: Darlingside
Hometown: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Song: “A Light on in the Dark”
Album: Fish Pond Fish
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: Thirty Tigers
In Their Words: “The lyrics open with the question, ‘Are you swimming with the fish pond fish, looking for oceans in the saltlessness?’ When we wrote that, we were thinking about social atomization and the idea that people become trapped in these false enclosures — fish ponds of our own making. The world outside one’s home or even outside one’s self can become a darkness to be warded off and shut out, and I’ve certainly been guilty of turning inward and making the world even darker as a result. But I’m desperate to break that cycle and I think a lot of people are; a light can’t shine only on itself. When the pandemic started, suddenly that idea of shutting out the world became in one sense much more real, and we really did become trapped in our own physical little fish ponds — but I think it also heightened our desperation and willingness to turn outward, to really connect with one another wholeheartedly.
“The second verse pulls some ideas from a writing exercise in which I was given a prompt to write about being a ‘cellar master’ and so I wrote a sort of open love letter to my plumber, who embodies a number of traits and competences that I lack. The tune itself has been around since 2016 and was originally sung over an arpeggiating line from a little synthesizer called a Septavox. We ended up stripping away that synth part in favor of more traditional instruments, with the exception of one section where Auyon meticulously recreated the synth line using sped-up, plucked violin.” — Dave Senft, Darlingside
Photo credit: Robb Stey
Artist: James Elkington
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Song: “Sleeping Me Awake”
Album: Ever-Roving Eye
Release Date: April 3, 2020
Label: Paradise of Bachelors
In Their Words: “The lyrics of this song have to do with that moment in the middle of the night where you’re briefly awake, but trying to bat conscious thoughts away in the hopes of getting back to sleep. In my case, these thoughts can usually be collected under the heading ‘What should I be worried about right now?’ Some of these concerns are real, some are imagined, and some are a combination of the two. I accidentally sang the wrong backing vocals on the second chorus and it’s one of my favorite parts of the whole record.” — James Elkington
Photo credit: Timothy Musho
Sometimes you have to be willing to make sacrifices for your art. Sometimes you spend extra hours rehearsing or extra days touring; sometimes you have to become a martyr for a larger cause. Sometimes all you have to do is wax your chest.
On the cover for his latest album, the cheekily titled My Finest Work Yet, the Chicago-raised, LA-based multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso whistler Andrew Bird lies in an old tub, his head hanging askew: the poet on his deathbed, expiring after scribbling his final testament. He recalls, “A few days before the shoot, the photographer said, ‘OK, you have to wax your chest!’ She wanted me to be as smooth as a dolphin. My first thought was, ‘Oh lord, is she just testing me? Is she just seeing how committed I am to the concept?’”
Bird’s chest hair. “We just ran out of time,” he says, no small amount of relief in his voice. Despite his hirsute torso, that image is startling, beautiful yet gruesome, and strangely fitting for an album that examines in a roundabout way the artist’s responsibility to his audience.
The cover is based on Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting The Death of Marat, on view at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. “I stumbled across that image in a book called Necklines, which is a funny title for a book about the French Revolution. I had already decided to go with My Finest Work Yet for the title, and I was trying to find an image that would make that title work, that would make it funny. When you don’t know the history of that painting, you just see the suffering poet on his deathbed penning his last words with his dying breath. I thought it was pretty tongue in cheek,” he says.
The more research he did on David’s painting and its subject, the more it revealed a slightly more serious, slightly less self-deprecating undercurrent running throughout these new songs. Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist during the French Revolution and one of the leaders of the insurgency against the Crown. He took frequent medicinal baths to soothe painful skin infections, and he wrote most of his most famous works while soaking in his tub. That’s where he was assassinated by the conservative royalist Charlotte Corday; shortly after, David painted him as a martyr, a stab wound to the chest stained his bathwater red. “We went to great lengths to re-create the painting,” says Bird. “There’s a lot of detail, but we drew the line at blood. It felt like if I had the wound and a bathtub full of blood it would go just a little too far.”
An album that might actually live up to that title, My Finest Work Yet, makes clear that we are living in revolutionary times, that we are at the precipice of some great calamity, some great upheaval. “The best have lost their conviction, while the worst keep sharpening their claws,” Bird sings on “Bloodless,” a sober, even scary examination of American factionalism. “It feels like 1936 in Catalonia.” That last line might sound cryptic, but it is a reference to another revolution – not the French uprising, but the Spanish Civil War. “There’s a lot to unpack in these songs,” Bird admits. “Maybe you don’t know what happened in Catalonia in 1936, but you’ve got Google and three minutes to figure it out. I think that makes people a little more invested, maybe not quite knowing what the references are but hopefully thinking, ‘I need to find out.’”
His lyrics have always been brainy, often bordering on merely clever, but the allusions to the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War — not to mention to Greek mythology, J. Edgar Hoover, Japanese kaiju, and whoever Barbara, Gene, and Sue are — lend the album weight and timeliness, as though we might better understand our current political predicament simply by looking to the past. And the artist in 2019 might understand his duties by looking to past examples like Marat. “The flipside to music being devalued as a commodity these days is that it can maybe make even more of an impact than any other medium can. Everything is commodified, but music is slipping away, but it’s still this thing that is very powerful. It helps people get through hard experiences,” Bird says.
Released back in November following the midterm elections, “Bloodless” was the first song on which he found just the right vocabulary to sing about issues that he and so many other artists are pondering. It was also the moment when a sound gelled alongside his lyrical strategy — a sound that incorporates bits of folk, pop, gospel, even jazz. Bird was fascinated with what he calls the “jukebox singles of the early ‘60s,” when jazz vocals were popular, when the piano was a prominent pop instrument, when bands worked out songs and recorded them live together.
“The piano contains so many references, a couple centuries’ worth,” he says. “Our ear gets taken in certain directions, but something was happening during that period in terms of not overly complicated jazz and gospel. I knew I wanted to make a piano-driven record with Tyler Chester, and I knew I wanted to make a jazzier record with a good room sound. And ‘Bloodless’ was the first time we got it right.”
Bird and his small jazzy combo recorded live in the studio, which wasn’t easy. It involved rehearsing heavily and using only a handful of microphones. He says, “There is so much work before you record the first note, so it’s risky. But if you spend the time, you end up with something that I think is weightier and has more value, even if it goes against the last 34 years of production trends.”
There is a lot of bleed between the instruments, which creates an intimacy even when you’re listening over your computer speakers. However, it means you have almost no opportunity to make changes after you’ve recorded a song. “If you want to change the vocal sound, you have to change the drum sound. If you want to change the drum sound, you have to change the bass sound. Everything is connected,” he explains.
It became a house of cards. Remove one and the whole thing tumbles. That meant Bird had to surrender his usual self-criticism to focus on other things besides listening to his own voice. “When you record, you have to have something to fixate on and fetishize — something that has some ceremony to it. Maybe it’s a certain microphone that gives you a certain sound, or a tape machine. It helps you remember who you are,” he says. “I tend to forget who I am when I’m recording. I know exactly who I am when I step onstage, but you have to trick yourself into being yourself in the studio. I liken it to hearing your voice on an answering machine, and you’re like, ‘That doesn’t sound like me.’ Same thing happens when you’re recording: You hear yourself back and you don’t recognize yourself.”
During the sessions for My Finest Work Yet, Bird focused on the piano and more generally on the live-in-studio approach to keep himself centered. Rather than make him more prominent, however, it only makes him one musician among many: the singer and creative force, certainly, but only one member of a lively band. That connectivity — that sense of musicians joining together in a common artistic goal — is “philosophically important,” says Bird, as are the pop references he’s making with that approach. “The music I’m referencing was deep in the Civil Rights era, the beginning of all this activism and turmoil. I wasn’t thinking about that when we were in the studio, but I think it makes sense,” he says.
In other words, those connections weren’t planned, which means My Finest Work Yet lacks the self-seriousness of a concept album or the self-righteousness of a political album. Instead, Bird wrote and arranged and recorded intuitively, as though posing a question to himself that would be answered on this album. “I’ve always had a tendency to say, ‘Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about,’ but I’ve always trusted that the listener has the curiosity and intelligence to think about what I’m bringing up.”
Photo credit: Amanda Demme
Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Artist: Wild Rivers
Hometown: Toronto, Canada
Latest album: Eighty-Eight
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Wolf Island, Chancey Shoegaze (Andrew’s guitar pedal obsessed alias), Cortez the Killer (Khalid’s wannabe cowboy persona)
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc. — inform your music?
The primary influences that inform our music are really our musical heroes. Many of the songs I write come out of listening to some piece of music, getting inspired by one part of it and examining and working around that. Film and TV are other inspirations that I think find their way into the songs. I’m intrigued by movies and TV that examine a specific character. There are so many movies right now that do an amazing job of showcasing a complex, flawed character, while allowing the audience to empathize with them. I think a lot of songwriting is doing just that, telling a story while unapologetically showing both the good and ugly sides of it. — Khalid Yassein
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
There have been many tough times writing songs. Not so much in an emotional sense, often the most difficult songs emotionally songs are the easiest for me to write. A lot of times in the last few years we’ve written songs where one part of it is really strong, so writing the rest of it to live up to that standard can be exceptionally hard. I’ve got some songs that have been in the works for a few years now, and you can absolutely hit a wall. It can be a lot of frustration, and sometimes 90% [of your time] can be spent toiling and thinking, and then in the span of a few minutes it suddenly becomes perfectly clear what you have to say. It’s about persistence and trying not to put too much pressure on what should be an organic experience. — KY
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
We start every show with an off-stage huddle. We get into a circle, and whoever is feeling the most energetic will say a few words to pump us up. Then we count to 3, bonk our heads together and say “team!” It sounds pretty ridiculous, but it really gets us focused and in tune with one another. We haven’t developed many studio rituals yet, other than consuming lots of coffee and making Khal drink some whiskey when we want him to sound more raspy. — Andrew Oliver
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
Living in Toronto, we experience the extremes of each season. From harsh winters to hot summers, and the beauty of mild springs and falls, it’s easy to be inspired by the changing landscape. Having distinct seasons also allows for memories to be tied to a specific time of year. I think this definitely informs my songwriting, as it creates a sort of nostalgia associated with each season. I know I definitely write more sad songs in the winter when I’m longing for a little sun. — Devan Glover
Getting away to spend time outside of the city is something we all love to do. Clearing your mind by spending time in nature can be very therapeutic, and always helps to put me in a creative headspace, so it probably indirectly informs a lot of my music and writing. Sometimes when I’m feeling stuck creatively, I’ll drive up to my cottage for a change of scene. — KY
How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?
I usually write in first person, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone with a sneaky pronoun change. If you think switching up “I” and “you” is going to protect yourself you’re probably in the wrong business! Most of our songs are really about us and our lives so we have to accept being vulnerable in a very public way. It can be difficult and scary but I think people can tell if you’re being authentic or if something is contrived. Some of my favourite writers say things in songs that are so raw and unashamed, and it’s incredible. Those are the lines that stick with you forever, they make you feel something. — KY
Photo credit: Laura Partain
Nicki Bluhm is venturing out on her own with her newly-released solo album, To Rise You Gotta Fall. The aptly titled album chronicles her life since her split from her husband and musical collaborator, Tim Bluhm, and subsequent departure from the Gramblers two years ago. Seeking a change of scenery and a new challenge, the lifelong California resident acted on impulse and made a cross-country move to Nashville in 2017.
To Rise You Gotta Fall, produced by Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price), features a collaboration with Ryan Adams (“Battlechain Rose”), as well as a Dan Penn cover (“I Hate You”). It was recorded in the legendary Sam Phillips Recording studio in Memphis and captures the raw emotion she poured into her writing over the two-year period. Each song is a different phase in a process of grieving and letting go — a testament that sometimes something beautiful comes out of our darkest times.
When you’re paying homage to that Memphis sound, you get something that’s tinged with nostalgia, but also totally its own and new. Did recording at Sam Phillips Recording play into that sound?
Yeah, I think so, for sure. Matt Ross-Spang produced the record and he’s a Memphian. He basically started working at Sun Records when he was a teenager. His parents got him a session for his birthday to record there. He quickly realized that he wanted to be on the other side of the experience, in the control room, and he started working at Sun as a young teenager.
Then when they started to understand his commitment and passion, and love of that era, and all of the gear that they were using at that time, the people at Sun were like, “Well, we’ve got Sam Phillips Recording Service.” which Sam built in 1958. It has really been left untouched. I mean, it looks the same. All of the decor is the same, everything short of the cigarette butts in Sam Phillips’ office. Sam’s office is exactly the same. So Matt has really been like a steward of reviving Sam Phillips.
How did that factor into you working together?
His love of that era of music is very pure and real. We have so much overlap of the things that we love in music. From my first meeting with him, I knew that we were going to agree on a lot sonically, and also pull inspiration from similar places. One of the records that he sent me to listen to was a Bobby Charles record, which, unbeknownst to him, is one of my favorite records. It’s just like, “Okay, we have a lot of commonality.”
Your record was all done analog, too, right?
Yep. We did it all to tape. We recorded it live and we tracked, I think, everything in five days. At the time, I didn’t really think – I thought that the band would get the songs and I would sing scratch. But I realized I had never met the band before. I entrusted Matt to choose the players and he did a spectacular job. I was beyond happy with the guys who played on the record but I hadn’t met a single one of them. They really hadn’t heard any of the demos either. Maybe Matt had shared the demos with them but it was really day-of stuff.
I realized really quickly that I was going to have to sing for real, because I needed to show them where I wanted the energy and where I wanted the arc of the song. It was a really cool experience. I had a straight sight line to all of them. Particularly Ken Coomer on drums. There was a realness to it. That was really inspiring. It made me fall back into that time where I knew I wasn’t going to, nor did I want to, overanalyze or bring out the microscope. I just wanted to capture the moment, and not get in my head about all the small details and nitpick stuff. So it was a great space, and a great group of people to make that happen.
Obviously, you’re a songwriter, so all songs are personal in some sense, but these are especially personal. Is there ever a fear when you’re writing that something is too personal? Or is it more of a relief that those thoughts and feelings are going to be out there for people to relate to?
Totally. It’s super vulnerable. I felt like I didn’t really have a choice. I tried not to be cruel, but I had to speak my truth, and that was important to me. I didn’t have the opportunity to have a lot of closure or conversations towards the end of this relationship that ended. So this was kind of my way of getting through that, and coming to terms with it, and getting those ruminating thoughts out of my mind, because I knew the toxicity of keeping them in. You have to allow those feelings to happen, you know?
Definitely.
They’re going to happen. And I felt like this was a healthy way for me to move through it. Now, singing them on the stage in front of a bunch of people — I’ve had to do that for the last six months by myself, because I’ve been on these solo tours, and I have solo tours opening for Lukas Nelson, and Josh Ritter, and just recently, the Wood Brothers. I’ve definitely felt what that was going to feel like.
Is it more difficult to do it in a live setting?
It was super vulnerable but at this point it’s almost like a service. It sounds weird but it’s almost like a service I’m providing because we all go through this stuff. For me, music has gotten me through so many hard times. It is comforting to know you’re not the only person that’s suffering and struggling.
While it’s really vulnerable and scary to get up and voice that in front of strangers, it’s really inspiring and comforting when, after the show, I go to the merch table, like I do every night, and people come up with tears in their eyes because they’re going through something similar. Or something has helped them.
For sure. One of the songs on the album that got my attention, and I think it’s because there’s such a cool juxtaposition, was “I Hate You.” It’s not what you expect it to be.
It’s a fantastic song. I didn’t write that. I wish I did. But it’s so good.
Your vocal on it is fantastic because it’s just so raw. But then, you’ve got that Hammond organ in the background, and it reminds me of walking into a Southern Baptist church or something. There’s such a cool contrast there, and that it could be such a melancholy kind of song, but it’s got this odd optimism behind it, too.
It’s interesting because there were definitely many conversations over that song between the creative and the business roles within my camp. The business side was like, “Oh, this is really harsh. This is really harsh language.” And from the creative side, we were like, “You’ve got to listen closer.”
It sounds at first listen like it’s scathing, and by the title, you might think that. But it’s not. It was written by a guy named Dan Penn. When I got together with Matt, he suggested we put a cover on the record. I was like, “Well, if we’re going to do that, I want to pay homage to Memphis. I want to do something that is of that area.” Matt is obsessed with Dan Penn. I heard that song, and I was like, “Wow. That’s it.” So we recorded it, and a month later, I was at my friend AJ Croce’s album release show, which turns out Dan Penn produced, and Dan Penn was there.
So I was introduced to Dan Penn and his wife, and my friend was like, “Dan, I want you to meet Nicki. She just put your song, ‘I Hate You,’ on her record.” His wife’s face just lit up and she was like, “I love that song so much.” She goes, “It sounds mean but he said, ‘I’m trying to hate you.’ And I should know, because that song’s about me.”
It was just so cute, and such an amazing moment to have recorded that song — and to meet the very person who it was written about, and written by. It was this really amazing, full-circle Tennessee moment for me. It’s true. Emotions aren’t always straightforward. You can love someone and hate them at the same time, and that’s confusing. Human emotions are very complex. I think that song does a great job of displaying that in a really simple way. But you have to be open to hearing that juxtaposition.
The first thing that struck me listening to the title track was that it’s probably not one of the first ones you wrote. Was that one that came toward the end?
It did. I had moved out. I had moved into what I call my healing nest, which was this amazing studio in Sausalito, California, owned by my dear friend. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Sausalito but it’s beautiful and it’s on the water. I had this gorgeous view from where I lived, and it was just me and my cat. I was really feeling the support of my girlfriends and my family.
I had come out of such a dark place. Again, not that I didn’t return back to that dark place after I wrote that song, but it was definitely a respite in time, or a part of that process where I saw some blue sky, which was a huge relief. When you’re deep in it, any relief from that darkness is so welcomed, and for me, that song was a gift because it just made me feel better. I remember the day I wrote it. I was literally smoking a joint on my deck with my cat, and I got into that groove, and it just happened. It was one of those songs that happened quickly, and it just made me feel good.
This is a record that a lot of people could pull off the shelf and use it to make themselves feel better about anything they’re going through. What are some albums that you pull out when you’re going through a hard time?
Oh, well always Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, because I love her. Talk about articulating feelings and situations and scenes. She is a master of that. And then, I will just go and binge on J.J. Cale. I’ll listen to J.J. Cale for like a month straight. I love Stan Getz. I love a lot of jazz. I don’t know if it makes me feel close to my dad. But like, you know, a glass of white wine and some Coltrane or Getz, or something like that, always makes me feel relaxed and good. I mean, the list just goes on and on.
Photo credit: Noah Adams
Devendra Banhart has given fans three years of anticipation for new music since 2013's well-received Mala, but his return this week with Ape in Pink Marble blends hushed, lo-fi tracks with looser, lyrically outlandish numbers to make his return to the studio an exciting one for listeners with a wide range of expectations. He also stuck with collaborators Noah Georgeson and Josiah Steinbrick once again, lending a certain level of familiarity to the release from the very beginning.
"Middle Names" was the first taste fans received of Ape In Pink Marble when the album was announced this summer, and you'd be forgiven for letting yourself be lulled into a hazy, sleepy state of consciousness by the gentle strum of its opening notes. Banhart's voice has a slight echo as windy ambients craft a peaceful landscape for the listener. It's a pleasant, ambling track that showcases Banhart in a more subdued light than you might find on other tracks on the record, and it's a reminder that the experimental folkie doesn't need frills or heavy production to make an impression. The song clocks in at more than three minutes, but somehow the end still feels abrupt — like you've been sung into a hazy oblivion you're not quite ready to leave.
"My love belongs to no one," he sings mid-song, and by the tone of the music, it's difficult to tell if that sentiment is bred of disappointment or quiet triumph. Does it matter? "Middle Names" views multiple phases of love with the same level of reverence, making it a moving soundtrack regardless of the listener's state of mind.
Artist: Run Boy Run
Hometown: Tucson, AZ
Album: I Would Fly
Release Date: September 2
Label: Sky Island Records
In Their Words: "The songs on Run Boy Run's new EP, I Would Fly, follow an emotional arc, resting in moments of desperation ('Who Should Follow Who?'), longing ('Lay These Stones'), triumph ('I Would Fly'), and optimism ('Hello Stranger'). The three original songs that kick off the EP lead into a forward-looking take on the Emmylou Harris vis-a-vis Carter Family song, 'Hello Stranger.'
Trading lead vocals between each song, the EP has an emotional depth and range that should be familiar to fans of Run Boy Run's previous two albums and EP. This collection is tied together by beautiful three-part harmonies and string playing, a respect for the tradition and heartfelt storytelling.
I Would Fly also includes the addition of percussion to Run Boy Run's sound, tastefully and comfortably rolling along just below the surface, giving the group room to explore new string and vocal arrangements. The new sound keeps the EP moving forward, and nudges the listener to focus in on the story and images of each song." — Bekah Sandoval Rolland
Photo credit: Luke and Mallory Photography
