Tag: Interview

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, as 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 cliche answer is, “I’ve gotten better at making myself understood, but I care less about making 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

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

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

Finding Lucinda: Episode 7

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In the most exciting moment of the Finding Lucinda road trip thus far, Ismay hears from interviewee Wolf Stephenson that there is some archival material he wants to share from the concrete tape vault. After sitting on the shelf for 40 years, Wolf has finally brought three boxes down to review. He finds that there is something mysterious and unexpected in the third box, so Wolf and Ismay try to get to the bottom of what in the world this mystery box contains. This piece of never-before-heard material gives Ismay insight into Lucinda’s musical development and the choices she made as a creative person. But most importantly, discovering this treasure gives Ismay an opportunity to see themself in a way they never have before.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

Produced in partnership with BGS and distributed through the BGS Podcast Network, Finding Lucinda expands on the themes of Ismay’s eponymous documentary film, exploring artistic influence, creative resilience, and the impact of Williams’ music. New episodes are released twice a month. Listen right here on BGS or wherever you get podcasts.

Finding Lucinda, the documentary film that inspired and instigated the podcast, is slated for release in the fall. Both the film and podcast showcase never-before-heard archival material, intimate conversations, and a visual journey through the literal and figurative landscapes that molded Lucinda’s songwriting.

Credits:
Produced and mixed by Avery Hellman for Neanderthal Records, LLC.
Music by Ismay.
Artwork by Avery Hellman.
Jackson, MS Recording: Recorded at Malaco Studios.
Sound Recordist: Rodrigo Nino
Producer: Liz McBee
Director: Joel Fendelman
Co-Director & Cinematographer: Rose Bush
Special thanks to: Mick Hellman, Chuck Prophet, Don Fierro, Jacqueline Sabec, Rosemary Carroll, Lucinda Williams & Tom Overby

Find more information on Finding Lucinda here. Find our full Finding Lucinda episode archive here.

Sho-Bud Steel Guitars Relaunches, A Family Business Once Again

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Tone: it’s the Holy Grail for musicians, and it’s the cornerstone of Sho-Bud, the iconic pedal steel guitar company founded in 1955 by Harold “Shot” Jackson and Buddy Emmons. When Emmons moved on, Jackson continued with sons Harry and David, handcrafting instruments integral to the sound of country music.

In the early 1980s, Sho-Bud was acquired by Fred Gretsch. In 2005, after twenty years away from the business, Harry and David Jackson, joined by David’s daughter, Dawn Jackson, resumed building instruments. As Jackson Steel Guitar Company, they introduced new pedal steel, lap steel, resonator, and slide guitars.

In December 2024, the third generation of Jacksons, siblings and co-CEOs Dawn and Will Jackson, reacquired the company name and family legacy. “We knew that the name carried a lot of weight,” says Dawn Jackson. “It’s our heritage, and we wanted to bring it back while Dad and Harry were still building.”

“I want to acknowledge Fred Gretsch, his wife Dinah, his family, and his team,” says Will Jackson. “A lot of people approached him to acquire the Sho-Bud name over the years, and he didn’t do it. He saved it for us. We very much appreciate what he did in terms of preserving the name, keeping it intact, and not selling it to someone else. We’ll be eternally grateful to him for that.”

Sho-Bud relaunched this year with new and classic gear, plus several projects across platforms and generations. The reach stretches from traditionalists devoted to the classic instruments they saw on the Opry stage, to young musicians incorporating steel in everything from country to metal.

Central to all of this, of course, are the instruments, which include the high-level, traditional, maple cabinet Pro V; bender-equipped, stand-up SlideKing LS lap steel; and best-selling Maverick II.

“It’s not the Maverick of old,” says Will Jackson of the Maverick II. “The original Maverick was designed to be a low-cost, entry-level, beginner guitar. With the Maverick II, our objective was to build one of the sweetest-sounding guitars. We developed a front and rear extruded aluminum panel that has a hard rock maple soundboard that sits between them. On top of that, the one-piece aluminum neck now binds the key head and tail plate together.

“When you sandwich all that together, this particular guitar, as Dawn describes it, cuts through all the other noise. It’s distinctive, it’s clear, it rings and resonates. It has that Nashville sound because we still utilize the exact same pickup design that Shot developed back in the ’50s. When you marry that to this modern design cabinet, it is incredible. The Maverick II definitely stands out in terms of its tonal qualities. It’s pretty much unmatched. It’s quite an advancement in terms of pedal steel guitar technology.”

Sho-Bud plans a reissue of the signature Lloyd Green model, the LDG, which the Jacksons describe as “a continuation of the original classic design,” and a limited-edition LDG, cut with modern components and updated mechanisms, each one signed by Lloyd Green, David Jackson, and Harry Jackson. Other reissues will follow, including Jimmy Day’s Blue Darlin’.

Sho-Bud co-CEOs and siblings Will Jackson and Dawn Jackson.

 

“Relaunch,” in Sho-Bud vernacular, is all about name recognition, product reputation, and upholding a decades-old legacy. “We built steels for the past twenty-five years under the name Jackson Steel Guitars,” says Dawn Jackson. “So the relaunch, for us, circles around the Sho-Bud name.

“What’s happened in the months since we secured the name again, the outpouring of support from the guitar industry in general has been overwhelming,” she says. “That lends itself to the weight this brand carried around the world, and how throughout the years of its ‘dormancy,’ it maintained a true following, and not only from older generations. Younger people love the brand too. When we mention Sho-Bud, every door is open. So that’s really the relaunch. We maintained building these amazing instruments during our Jackson Steel era, but the [Sho-Bud] brand itself has the leverage and momentum behind it.”

“A lot of people have asked, ‘Is this just a rebranding of Jackson Steel Guitars?’ Definitely not,” says Will Jackson. “We’ve been sitting on a few patents that we’ve obtained over the last couple of years. They’ve got about fifteen years or so left on them while we fine-tune these components.”

Those components include a tunable vibrato, on-the-fly D Drop, The EDGE® multi-bending system, and Core-Over™ strings, all of which they’ve introduced to Sho-Bud artists with positive response.

“When a traditional, fretted-instrument guitarist is, say, holding a chord, when they use an old-school vibrato — let’s say a Bigsby, for example — when they hit that thing, all those strings are falling out of tune,” says Will Jackson. “Our tunable vibrato doesn’t destroy the chord. When they’re holding a chord and they go down, all those strings fall in tune now.

“We’ve got a Drop D tuner that allows an artist, again on a fretted instrument, to simply roll their E down to a D while they’re playing. They don’t have to take their fretting hand off and adjust anything on the key head. They don’t have to stop and tinker around with their picking hand to adjust anything. They’re able to use the palm, the heel, of their hand, roll it right down to a D, and roll it right back up to an E. So it’s very novel, very easy to use.

“With our Core-Over strings, we take the winding off up to where it passes the bridge and on the pickup side of the nut, so it’s just the core of the string going across those two touch points. It creates incredible amounts of sustain. The sound profile of the string is much rounder, bigger, fuller. It’s amazing.”

(L to R) Kyle Ince, Bob Sheehan, Slash, Ted Stern, Andrea Whitt, Skunk Baxter, Dawn Jackson, Pavel, Hexx Henderson, Mark Tucker, Rocco DeLuca, and Will Jackson pose for a group photo at the Sho-Bud Showcase Live at the Desert 5 Spot in Los Angeles.

 

On April 24, in Hollywood, the company celebrated the return of Sho-Bud Showcase Live, national concerts spotlighting steel-centric artists in all genres. The series kickoff, Sho-Bud’s first live event in over forty years, included, among its many participants, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Robert Randolph,
Andrea Whitt, Rocco DeLuca,
Hexx Henderson, Hatfield Rain, Shooter Jennings, and Slash.

Sho-Bud Music is a record label and publishing company originally established by Dawn Jackson to release an album by her band, the aforementioned Hatfield Rain. “Around that time, I started working with Dad and Harry on Jackson Steel and never did anything with the [album] mixes,” she says. “It’s getting ready to come out after all this time, so I’m super-excited.” Along with that recording, Sho-Bud Music is promoting other Sho-Bud artists.

Coming soon is Shot Jackson’s Sho-Bud Showcase radio program, which will now become a podcast featuring music, interviews, and over 150 digitized reels from the original 1970s and early 1980s WSM broadcasts. “We have all the reels and we’re going to start releasing them,” says Dawn Jackson. “The podcast will also include interviews with today’s Sho-Bud artists and, of course, our dad and Harry.”

Harold “Shot” Jackson built Sho-Bud on a foundation of superior instruments, customer service, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. Those values remain at the core of Dawn and Will Jackson’s goals, whether putting instruments in the hands of internationally renowned musicians or newcomers learning their way around pedal steel.

Sho-Bud CEO Dawn Jackson poses with Slash and a Sho-Bud Steel Guitar.

 

“These instruments are not like traditional fretted instruments,” says Will Jackson. “Fretted instruments don’t have moving parts per se. But these do. Because they have those linkages and mechanical pulling mechanisms, as they’re used, they wear. Anytime you make a change to these instruments, you have to be careful, because in the interest of trying to maximize performance or life on one end, you can impact tone on the other end, and that is something we can’t sacrifice.

“Sho-Bud has always been known for that Nashville sound, the tone that we got. The story I recall as a kid was Shot sitting there on a pickup-winding machine, which was made out of an old sewing machine motor. He had apple bushels next to his workbench. He would wind a pickup, plug it in, and if it gave him the tone he was after, performed the way he wanted it to, it went in the keeper bushel. If it didn’t, it went into the discard bushel.

“That is how our family has built these things. There are no Rhodes Scholars over here or MIT graduates in engineering. These guys developed these instruments through pure trial and error and using their ears to develop that tone. Again, we can’t sacrifice mechanical advantages over tone. Some guitar companies do, but we cannot do that. For us, it is about tone, tone, tone. We live and die by that.”

“We’ve always maintained the tradition and look of our guitars — the beautiful cabinets, our certain inlays, the finishes,” says Dawn Jackson, “but aesthetics are second. Tone has always been number one for us.”

“These instruments require maintenance,” says Will Jackson. “If there is a nut, a screw, a bolt, it will get turned by someone. When these things leave the shop, they’re set perfectly. People will start adjusting things, and that’s what they’re for. You need to fine-tune things ergonomically to make it fit. But, because these things can be very sensitive, sometimes they overdo it, or they have trouble chasing the tuning back to where they wanted it.

“We are here to support them in terms of Zoom calls, where they can show us exactly what they’re doing, what the instrument is doing, or what it’s not doing that they would like it to do. We can help walk them through that, using a blend of modern technology to help them fine-tune some of these traditional instruments. We’re always looking for ways to make it easier for them to keep these guitars maintained.”

As a family-owned and operated company, versus a multi-department corporation, the Jacksons are front and center when phones ring, texts chime, and emails arrive – no call centers, AI assistants, or being transferred through a half-dozen departments and hold times. They field calls, walk customers through setups, stay active via social media, keep up with forums, provide instructional videos, and cherish human-to-human relationships.

Slash plays a Sho-Bud Steel Guitar.

 

“Will and I have been a team since we were kids playing football in the backyard,” says Dawn Jackson. “We really believe in team efforts, and that’s why we’re so big on using the words ‘Team Sho-Bud.’ The dynamics between us, our father, and our uncle – we’re all creators and passionate about the things we do.

“We have the same objective in mind, which is to maintain our family heritage,” she says. “I am so proud that Sho-Bud is still a family business, and that people love and respect that. We work together, play off of each other, and it just works and works well.”

“I’m proud of my family – our dad, our uncle – for the sacrifices they made over the years to build these instruments, and to deliver the tone and the sounds that everyone enjoys,” says Will Jackson. “I’m very proud of the work they put into this, and of Dawn for rolling up her sleeves and helping them. I’m proud of the way Sho-Bud has evolved. It’s fun to be a part of the rebirth of Sho-Bud. These instruments, these new components, are going to be total game changers. I’m very proud to represent these products and wear the old brand. It’s exciting times.”

All Photos: Ashley Marie Myers, courtesy of Sho-Bud. Lead and alternate images: Slash plays a Sho-Bud pedal steel guitar.

The Many Journeys of I’m With Her’s Second Album, ‘Wild and Clear and Blue’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

More than eight years since the February 2017 release of their acclaimed debut album See You Around, Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, and Sara Watkins have come back together with an abundance of history, both individual and shared, on which to reflect as they began to craft I’m With Her‘s second full length album, Wild and Clear and Blue.

The three multi-instrumentalists and songwriters are beloved in folk and bluegrass circles and known cumulatively for a treasure trove of work as solo artists, in ensembles, and as co-writers and producers. Internationally renowned live performers, they were most recently celebrated under their collaborative moniker as part of the 62nd GRAMMY Awards, when their original single, “Call My Name,” was awarded Best American Roots Song. This accolade alone showed just how creatively in sync these women continued to be, even as time marched forward and each turned their focuses toward individual projects and significant personal life changes – marriage, next generations, moving homes, passing on of family – all while discerning unique perspectives about the broader transformations of society around them.

Once they felt the spark to start a second album, finally reuniting in 2024 to write and record, the embers of Wild and Clear and Blue grew not only from Watkins, Jarosz and O’Donovan’s pool of collectively evolved musicianship and artistry, but from their sharing of experiences and emotions as they cheered each other on from afar. The candid nature of the trio fully reuniting opened new paths of empathy and resonance between them – paths which go beyond their stunning musical chemistry and into a deeper space of what Jarosz earnestly calls “chosen family.” The songs tell assorted stories, nodding to the familial bonds and identities the three women hold dear in their respective lives but as a unified album, Wild and Clear and Blue is also an eloquent expression of the profound appreciation O’Donovan, Jarosz, and Watkins have for each other, as well as for the support and understanding they have realized and embraced in their ever-evolving bond.

Continuing our Artist of the Month coverage, O’Donovan, Jarosz, and Watkins spoke with BGS about the organic spirit of creativity built into Wild and Clear and Blue, how the preciousness of different relationships in their lives is embodied in the music, the one-of-a-kind nuances that make the experience of listening to the album especially distinct, and more.

You mention the album providing a focus on “connecting with your past and figuring out what you want for your future.” How did each of you decide what parts of your past you felt most inclined to explore and what feels most important to you going into the future?

Sara Watkins: When we came together to write the album, there was a time of just reconnecting. We haven’t seen each other or really been with each other for a couple of years and we wanted to reconnect in a way, [asking ourselves] “Who are we now?” You know, now that we’ve all gone through so much since our last record. A lot of things that we were talking about and processing in our personal lives were overlapping with each other and so it felt clear to us. The things that came up in the songwriting process all felt like it was self evident that that’s what we wanted, or desired, to share and to mine [through] a little bit.

And so it’s less of an abstract strategy of, “I’m going to share this about myself. I’m going to open up this chapter of my life for this album,” and more like, “What’s coming to the surface right now that’s affecting me and that I’m sorting through?” We found that a lot of what we were sorting through overlapped or that we related to each other, and that was the stuff that we ended up writing about.

You express that there’s an “ease to letting go when something isn’t working.” What does it look like when things are “working,” versus when something doesn’t fit and you collectively decide to move on?

Aoife O’Donovan: I think when we’re in the writing room, it’s always such an exciting moment when something starts to click and we start jamming on it and we start figuring out the groove and figuring out the melody. Then we’ll maybe get into a vibe [where] we’ll all kind of put our heads down on our laptops and be typing out words and be like, “Okay, let me try something.” When you sort of bring a line or change your melody note here, or add a harmony part, or it says this – it’s an exciting sort of burst. It’s like the champagne bottle pops and you’re like, “Okay, yes! Let’s keep going, let’s keep going!” It really fuels the next thing. And I think that with this trio, one of my favorite things to do is write music with Sarah and Sara. It doesn’t feel like a chore in the way that sometimes writing [solo music] for me can feel like a chore. When we’re together writing, it’s almost like you get to the party and you see what’s going to happen at the party.

Sarah Jarosz: The songwriting process has always felt like an extension of the vocal arranging process in a way, because I feel like that’s how we started out before we ever tried to write together. We arranged songs together. We arranged “Crossing Muddy Waters” together and that was a really cool precursor to know how we communicate with each other with a pre-existing song. Then that sort of carried over into the songwriting process to be this amazing, like Aoife said, light bulb movement. When it’s flowing, it’s just flowing so well and things that don’t work are just sort of easily falling aside. It’s really special. We’ve all worked with a lot of other people, so I think we all know how rare that is when it does just flow.

The way you all talk about the dynamic of working with each other has this very uplifting, very, “it’ll all work itself out in the end,” kind of mentality, which I think speaks a lot to your collective experience with each other.

SJ: Just to add to that, the three of us, I think, have pretty similar work ethics. It’s not just, “Oh, well, this is all free and easy and breezy.” I think part of the reason that it feels easy is that we put a similar amount of effort into it. Really showing up for each other, energetically giving each other the attention and the love. A lot of these songs start out as conversations, like Sara said, just that shared energy.

SW: I think it’s important to note that, yes, it’s magic and it works. We are so compatible. But part of that work ethic that Jarosz was talking about is staying at the table and not giving up on something completely. Maybe putting something aside and coming back to it later while you work on something else.

I love working with with these two who, if something’s not right, if any one of us isn’t completely excited about something or feels confused about the direction of a song or lyric, we all are very willing to stay at the table until things come together, until we’re all happy, or it’s really clicking on all sides. I think working and staying with it while it’s not working is what makes those beautiful moments [happen] when things are all yesses and when we are in flow. It shows the magic, because it doesn’t always happen but we were able to work through it in a way that’s crucial, I think, for ultimately getting something that we’re really proud of.

AO: It also gives a really unique sense of ownership over all of the material in this band, for each of us. I feel like when we finish a song and when we finish this album, we really can listen to the entire thing and be like, “Yep, I stand behind it” – at least that’s how I feel. Like, “I stand behind all the decisions, and I fully support how every single song turned out. And I really feel like this is our thing, and it’s not just one person’s thing.”

Sarah Jarosz mentions there’s something “beautiful” about having “Ancient Light” start the album, because it’s “addressing the heavier themes of the album in a way that’s more a celebration of life rather than grieving what’s been lost.” Yet,“Wild and Clear and Blue” was the first song written for the project and it establishes your shared embrace of generational connection as the inspired theme. These two songs feel like they could be fraternal twins of introductory tracks. To that end, how was the process of deciding track sequence, particularly given how it can significantly affect the trajectory of an album and how it’s received?

SW: We were at Outlier Studio, listening back to a couple of things and one of us started writing, maybe it was Jarosz, a sequence. We were passing this little paper back and forth. I still have this paper that has like, three separate sequences that we were considering as initial ideas. I think that it ended up somewhere close to what we came to, that first day of writing sequences, because it is so, so important. One thing that I really love, that I think we all really love, starting with “Ancient Light,” [it’s] a little bit more produced. It’s one of the more produced songs on the album or, it’s in the more produced half of the album. We wanted people to hear that. Going to “Wild and Clear and Blue” afterwards, it felt like we were letting people come back to a sound that felt more like the live shows we did on the last tour and more like the first album. It was a nice way of connecting the projects, I think. But we really wanted to have an arc, in terms of the content, and to consider all those things that then make an album feel more like a unit than a series of segmented songs.

SJ: I feel like sometimes making records, I have a sense much earlier on of what should be where, but I feel like this one it took until that last day or so to have this feeling of the arc. But, with that being said, I feel like a lot of us were saying, “Oh, ‘Ancient Light,’ it’s kind of an obvious opener for setting the stage.”

AO: I think also the opening lyric of “Ancient Light,” to me, is the biggest reason why I love that the song opens the record. “Better get out of the way/ Gonna figure out what I’m gonna say/ It’s been a long time coming…” – I just love that idea, that it has been seven years since our last record. Maybe it’s too on the nose, but I think it’s a great opening to bring people in, to sort of invite people back into our world.

You talk about a sense of unspoken synergy but conversely, how much would you say you lean into individual qualities of your writing that make each of your styles memorable?

SJ: I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot of conscious effort going into thinking, “How would each of us represent our own style?” I think that just largely happens naturally. At the end of the day, we’re trying to incorporate musical and lyrical decisions that make us stoked, that get us excited.

When we’re writing, it’s just the three of us. So I think we’re trying to utilize musical tools. That sounds really sterile, but [we’re trying] to make it interesting within the confines of just three people. And then, kind of figuring out, “How do you make a song come alive?”

This album totally feels so, so deeply visual. I feel like we were more tapped into that with this record than with the first. Utilizing those [visual ideas] in a way throughout the songwriting process that make us have a chill moment or maybe a moment where you’re moved to tears, or just doing the thing that gets you excited about the song.

Family, motherhood, and sisterhood make up prominent undercurrents of the album, but especially the latter. As you’ve formed these different bonds and have related to one another in these different ways over the years, how have these identities impacted your shared experience as a group, especially while working on Wild and Clear and Blue?

AO: Two of us are mothers and Sarah Jarosz is not a mother at this point in her life, but I think what’s been really beautiful about this record and about the themes that you brought up – the themes of sisterhood, motherhood, and the themes of being an only daughter – something that I’ve loved to point out to people is that Sarah Jarosz is an only daughter and Sara Watkins and I both have only daughters. When I was listening to this album for the first time with my daughter Ivy Jo, she was listening to it and when the song “Only Daughter” came on she said, “Mommy, is this about me?” It makes me almost cry, retelling that story, because in many ways, yes, it’s this universal experience that our daughters share with our dear friend and bandmate as an only daughter and I love that sort of circle of being.

We’re at different points in our lives within this band. Over the last several years, there’s been a lot of things that we’ve experienced – like huge life events since our last album came out. I lost my father. Sarah Jarosz got married. There have been many big moments that we’ve walked through alongside one another and I think those experiences have definitely shaped who we are, who we were when we went into the studio, and who we continue to be.

SJ: As this band has evolved and grown, those kind of shared family moments have absolutely drawn us closer as a band and allowed the music to reach this deeper level. I think one of my favorite memories as a band was actually in 2018 at Telluride, when all of our families were there. I think it was the only time when everyone was in the same place. Just getting on stage and seeing my parents, all of our parents and children, it was incredibly special and kind of rare. I feel like it has inevitably affected the music in a truly beautiful and full circle way.

In “Sisters of the Night Watch,” the verses mention things about personal sinfulness, being forced to crawl in the mud on your knees, and running into ghosts, with respite from all these things only being found in sisterhood. What inspired these particular images and personal trials?

SW: A lot of this song is about getting through the wilderness that is life and finding your respite, finding your people, or your place – even if it’s not a final destination and just along the way. I think that could take any form in someone’s life. But it does feel sometimes like we’re crawling through the mud in life, making very little progress, like everything is just wilderness around you, and you’re trying to make sense of it all. I think we’ve all felt like that at various times and are just looking for a moment or a day, where you feel safe. It could just be emotionally safe or it might just be some rest – just a break from feeling like everything is hard. I think it’s trying to find those people and trying to find that thing that makes you feel like you can rest for a little bit and you’ll be okay.

SJ: This also feels slightly related to “Only Daughter” in a way, at least for me, this idea of “Sisters of the Night Watch” that was sort of emerging in the writing process. For me, I am an only child and daughter and this band is the closest thing I’ve felt to having sisters, something we talked about a lot. I believe Aoife’s beautiful statement about our shared deep connection with our families is so amazing in this band. But also, your chosen family, as you go through life and who you walk and processes and choose to do life with, I feel like we’re this band of sisters, but then it can be so much more than that as well.

Much the same way you connected with particular artists and songs that your families shared with you in the past, what do you hope that younger generations and generations yet-to-come will connect with through this album?

AO: I hope that people will listen to Wild and Clear and Blue and be able to see themselves in these songs. This album is such a journey – I hate to use the word because it’s so overused – but it really is. There are so many songs, even when you guys are talking about the lyrics of “Sisters of the Night Watch” and crawling through the dried out river on your knees, that song is a journey. It’s one character on that journey. “Find My Way to You” is maybe a different character on the same on the same journey, but maybe experiencing it from a different perspective. Even in “Ancient Light,” you’re trying to get to that clearing and you’re trying to say that when you get there, you’re not going to put up a fight.

It’s sort of like, what is the end goal here? I think that listening to that, people who are young, old, people who are yet to come, I hope that this album does stand the test of time and that people can pick it up in an apocalyptic world, put it on, and be able to relate to it.

Find more of our Artist of the Month content on I’m With Her here.

Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Little Blue

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Patience and persistence have long been traits embodied by the music and songwriting of Kristina Murray, but with her new album, Little Blue, she can add another “P” word to the mix: perseverance.

Now a decade into her time in Nashville, Little Blue (out May 9 on New West Records) is poised to be her “ten year town” breakout moment. Through its blend of old school country twang and swampy southern R&B she ruminates on everything from the grind, pursuing her honky-tonk dream, to finding love, and the unseen burdens placed on women. She shows off her formidable knack for storytelling in the process. The project is also direct evidence of the inroads she’s made in Music City, with artists like Erin Rae, Logan Ledger, Sean Thompson, Miss Tess, Frank Rische, and John Mailander all lending a hand.

Originally from Atlanta, Murray was introduced to country as a child via a cassette of Patsy Cline’s greatest hits in her mother’s car. She eventually got her first guitar in high school, but didn’t play it anywhere outside of open mics and church camps until she moved to Colorado in the mid 2000s to pursue a degree in recreational therapy. While there, she became immersed in the regional bluegrass scene and began playing out more, slowly gaining confidence and building toward her eventual move to Nashville in 2014. While she was only in Colorado for six years, Murray still looks back on her time out west as foundational for her direction in life and the art she’s pursuing now.

“I’d never lived outside the South before and had a couple mentors of mine tell me I should give it a try for a little bit,” recalls Murray. “It was out there where I realized that being a musician is what I wanted to do with my life. Once you get bit by the playing-on-stage bug, there’s no going back. It’s so much more than just playing for people, too. It’s also being in sync with your band and performing at a high level and the energy feedback loop that can come from that.”

Since relocating to Nashville, Murray has become a linchpin of the city’s dive bar and juke joint scene, frequently popping up at places like Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge and Bobby’s Idle Hour, and became one of the first women to front a full band at Santa’s Pub. But despite all this, she was starting to feel stuck as the pressure of things like her father’s sudden death, car wrecks, watching others have the success she’d been waiting on began to weigh her down. But in that darkness she was able to find a glimmer of light, and Little Blue was born.

Leading up to the album’s release, Good Country caught up with Murray to discuss imposter syndrome, expectations in the music business, the healing power of music, and more.

If going from open mics and church camps in Georgia to diving into Colorado’s bluegrass scene was a big step, then moving from there to Nashville must’ve felt like being on another planet. What was that transition like?

Kristina Murray: My time in Colorado was foundational in some ways. I learned the Nashville number system, how to play with a band, and how to execute a bunch of different songs really well while I was there. But, eventually, it got to being a big fish, small pond kind of thing. You can make a living out there just by playing cover songs in bars, but what I wanted was to write songs and be around people my age who were also writing the kind of songs I like, wanted to listen to, and wanted to write. Moving there was a big step because Nashville is the place where the music I love was and is still being made.

You’ve been grinding away in Nashville for a decade now as an independent musician, but this new record marks your debut with New West. How’d that partnership come about?

Southern Ambrosia [was] the first record I put out after moving to Nashville and, quite frankly, I didn’t know what I was doing. I had seen a lot of my peers kind of take off and naively I thought, “Well, this is a really good record full of great players and good writing and I’m in this kind of circle community; because all those things are true, then this record should get me to the next place that I wanted to go.”

It was actually on the radar of Normaltown and New West back in 2018, but things fizzled out because I didn’t know how to go about having conversations with business people about my music – I’d never done anything like that before. Fast forward a few years, this record was done in 2023 and by early 2024 I was talking with them again about picking it up. Their support means a lot, because it’s really difficult to get your record and your career to the places that you want to go without it.

New West and Normaltown are also based out of Athens, Georgia, and I’m from Atlanta, so it means a lot to be involved with them on that level as well. I was a huge Drive-By Truckers fan in my 20s and can’t get enough of Jaime Wyatt, Lilly Hiatt, Nikki Lane and others. There’s just a lot of people that I love and respect on that record label and I’m happy to be a part of the family.

Better late than never, I suppose! You just mentioned the feedback for Southern Ambrosia not meeting the lofty expectations you had for it. I imagine seeing friends and colleagues having success with their music – from signing with labels to getting on bigger and bigger shows to nailing down high-profile writing sessions – doesn’t help to keep the imposter syndrome at bay.

It’s funny, because during my decade in Nashville I really have seen so many people just skyrocket, and it’s all been so deserved, like Erin Rae – nobody sings or writes like her – or Sierra Ferrell, I mean who else sings like that? Logan Ledger, who also joins me on this record, is one of my favorite singers and songwriters around. During my time here there’s been so many times when I’ve thought that something must be wrong with the way I sing or write to not be getting all those opportunities for myself. But I’ve come to realize that having all that isn’t what will validate me as a musician, writer, performer, and person who simply loves this music, because at the end of the day, if I still get something out of it, shouldn’t that be enough? It’s something I’ve grappled with a lot through the years and continue to do on this album.

Speaking of expectations in the music business not always being reality and the illusion of success, are those things you’re tackling head on in the song “Watchin’ the World Pass Me By”?

What’s funny about that song is it started out as me just trying to see if I could write a basic “outlaw” country song. It obviously evolved a bit from a writing exercise parody to a commentary on getting “so tired of watching ‘em livin’ my dreams” and “daddy’s bankroll to make the rules” nepotism and suddenly being a country singer, because you threw on a cowboy hat. But I also poke a bit of fun at myself, too, with lines like “She’s just a bitter, jaded, helpless fool.”

Another tune I’ve really enjoyed is “Phenix City.” In many ways it seems like an outlier on the record, a story song amid a sea of deeply personal, autobiographical tales. With that in mind, what was your intention for including it here?

Most of this record is autobiographical or composite sketches of me and those around me, but that one specifically is a story song. It very much paints a picture of small-town circumstances in Phenix City, a small town in Alabama along the Georgia border. One time I was driving down to a gig in Columbus, Georgia, and instead of going through Atlanta I decided to head straight down from Nashville through Alabama. I rented a car because my van was out of commission, and about a half hour outside Columbus I broke down after running out of gas because I had my music so loud I couldn’t hear it beeping. I eventually got it to a mechanic shop in Phenix City where the man told me I just needed some gas, which was both a relief and a moment that made me feel like the biggest idiot around, but briefly getting stuck there did inspire the song in a roundabout way.

Similar to “Phenix City,” another outlier of sorts on Little Blue is the lead track, “You Got Me,” which seems to revolve around the early, butterflies-fueled stages of love. Mind telling me a bit about it and the mood it sets for the remainder of the project?

I’m not one for writing love songs too much. The only other real love song I have is “The Ballad Of Angel & Donnie” from Southern Ambrosia, which is another story song about a meth dealer and his girlfriend. I wrote “You Got Me” early on in my relationship with my now-partner. It’s a very true-to-life song and I knew if it was going to be about him that it had to be a really cool-sounding song. My guitarist, James Paul Mitchell, came over one night when I was writing it and helped to come up with that signature lick you hear on it right at the beginning, which I loved. I really wanted it to be like a Band song with the Clavinet sounds that they twin throughout the song. My partner, Corey [Parsons], also plays percussion on this one, which is really sweet that he got to put some of his touch on a song about him.

The song also starts with the word “and,” which came from a writing exercise after listening to Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” It begins with “And I followed her to the station.” I thought it was so cool to start a song with “and,” because it’s like you’re just dropping someone into the middle of a story.

While “You Got Me” is a bright spot, a lot of this album leans more toward the somber and dark. What are your thoughts on the catharsis and healing that can come from writing through difficult times such as the ones you’re encountering here?

The album is titled Little Blue for a reason. We are remiss to forget how significant the pandemic was and how devastatingly sad that period of time in our collective human history was. A good chunk of these songs were written during that two-year period along with general ruminations about the sad and unjust world we live in that even the music industry isn’t immune from. It feels silly at times to whine and cry about the music industry when there’s so much other crazy stuff happening, but that’s the world I live in so I have to write through that.

I wouldn’t say that writing songs is cathartic for me as much as sharing in the collective. What grabs me about music is when it feels real and is relatable to me and I hope that I’ve done that here with what I’ve written about. Music is magical, so the fact that I get to do this at all is amazing and continues to drive me. I’m never not going to be amazed by music. For instance, I took a harmonica lesson the other day with Ilya Portnov, who also plays on the record. I’ve done a little bit of Bob Dylan-esque singer-songwriter harmonica, but I really wanted to understand the harp a little bit better. It’s a magical feeling when the music and notes and scale are all working together. I feel endlessly humbled by it and very proud that I get to be a small ripple in the river of music.

What did the process of bringing Little Blue to life teach you about yourself?

That I’m gonna keep doing it regardless of if it makes any sense at all. I didn’t get my record deal until after everything for this album was done, meaning that I funded it all myself. It was a lot to handle, because making records isn’t cheap, especially if you’re paying people what they deserve to get paid. I feel very lucky and grateful for all the folks that lended their talent to this record. It made me realize that the more I keep pushing ahead to more everything will begin to make sense around me. It’s a mix of perseverance and understanding that good things take time and intention. I feel really good about this record and even though it’s only my third, and first in six years, I’m glad to put it out in the world because we need art now more than ever.

Photo Credit: Schuyler Howie

Bringing ‘Arcadia’ to Life, Alison Krauss Saw Its Songs Like Movies in Her Head

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

From her early days as a young fiddler picking up prizes at youth fiddle competitions, accomplishment has defined Alison Krauss’ career. She’s cleaned up on trophies from the Recording Academy, the International Bluegrass Music Association, and numerous other acronymned institutions, and earned the highest civilian honor in her birth state of Illinois last year. She continues to rack up the achievements at an easy clip: Arcadia, her newest album with Union Station and their first together in 14 years, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s bluegrass chart.

Amid a return to themes of yearning love and rich storytelling, Arcadia marks a new chapter for Union Station with a changing of the guard. Dan Tyminski, the group’s longtime vocalist and himself a heavily decorated picker, revealed his departure from the band late last year. The ensemble – with Jerry Douglas, Barry Bales, and Ron Block still in the fold – enlisted bluegrass veteran Russell Moore to step in with them to sing, along with fiddler Stuart Duncan joining them on the road. Krauss recalls first encountering Moore and his singular voice at a Kentucky Fried Chicken bluegrass festival as a 14-year-old, and she’s been a devoted fan ever since. As a part of Union Station, Krauss sees Moore as an enlivening addition, and her admiration for her colleague hasn’t waned. “He’s like a nightingale!” she exclaims.

The time between Union Station records has manifested both another solo album, 2017’s Windy City, and the more recent Robert Plant reunion, 2021’s Raise the Roof. In the years prior, Krauss had to recuse herself from singing due to a bout with dysphonia, which had stricken her hero, Tony Rice, too. Her fight, in turn, inspired Rice to rally his voice in her honor when he was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2013 (Krauss was inducted herself in 2021).

As she stares down a strident tour schedule that extends through the end of the summer, Krauss remains careful to protect the instrument that has connected her to millions of people over her decades in the bluegrass business. Pausing amid Union Station rehearsals ahead of their run together, Krauss unravels some of her thinking around Arcadia, and how songs transport her through time and memory.

What made you feel like the time was right for another Union Station record?

Alison Krauss: ​​It’s always a process to get the right songs together. I’ve been looking for songs since we made Paper Airplane. I’m sure if COVID wouldn’t have happened, we probably would have been in there sooner. I sent out a group message in the beginning of 2021, like, “I think we’ve got some good songs here, we want to get together and listen.” Whenever we record, we find the first song that sounds like the opening to the record and have one that feels like that for a while. Then you find another one that might feel that way. When I heard “Looks Like the End of the Road,” it really felt like, for a listener, an introduction to new music.

You’ve talked about the record snapping into place around “Looks Like the End of the Road” elsewhere, too. What about it made you feel that way?

When you hear them, you just see [them], it’s like a movie. They just come alive. You see the story, and it’s spontaneous thought. You know you can’t control it and you’re a passenger to the story, and that’s what happens with things. It happened with that tune, “Looks like the End of the Road,” the first half, the first verse, when I heard it, I was like, “Oh boy, here we go.”

I think I wrote [the band] the next day. But then everything, all the stuff I’ve been holding on to, just fell into place. It was great. Luckily, when we played everything for the guys, they felt good about it. If they were in disagreement, it wouldn’t have worked.

On Arcadia, you’ve got “The Hangman” about resisting evil, “Granite Mills” about workers dying in a factory fire, and the lament for a young soldier in “Richmond on the James.” To what extent did these songs come from a sense of historical resonance with our present day?

It’s strange, you find you gravitate to certain things, and then you go, “Well, here’s the pattern.” It’s not beforehand, at least for myself. The songs find you and then you kind of find a pattern within them, how they fit together.

I’m not a songwriter. A songwriter, they’re writing how they feel, and if you gather tunes from when they’re writing during a certain time in their life, there’s going to be similarity in there. After we’re collecting these things, you do find a thread.

As a listener, what makes a song stick in your memory?

Anything that makes you daydream. You automatically go there. It’s so personal, those thoughts that you have regarding music, regarding any art. It makes one person feel some certain way, another will feel another. The things that come into your mind that are only for you. I love that private, personal experience you have with these things. I always think about what makes a person who they are, what they daydream about. Songs are more powerful than political people, when you look at it—they start movements, they change the way people see themselves.

It’s been like that throughout history. It has a way of changing the atmosphere, how you feel in three minutes, and the way your day goes. The whole thing is important to people and how they get around. You may need joy. You may need to have someone sing your story for you. You may not have known that this was your story.

It’s a magical thing, music in general, and to be a part of it is a really powerful experience. I find it – I don’t know what other word to use, other than magical. It’s costly to your emotions. Done well, you’ll feel it. That’s what we’re here to do.

Why does daydreaming hold such importance for you, when we’re so often discouraged from it as adults?

It has possibilities in every area of how you see yourself, how you see others, how you see the world. You may have an understanding of another person you didn’t have, because some musical moment took you some place you didn’t think it would. You have things you’re familiar with that will take you to the same place.

I’m careful with certain records because, when I hear them again, I don’t want them to change where they took me as a kid. I’ll go, “I’m gonna listen to this today, and I’m gonna put it away again, because I want to keep that place that it takes me for myself.” I don’t understand why it works that way, but it does. I always feel like you’ve got to be really careful with the words that come out of your mouth when you’re singing, because they’re powerful. You know you have to be in agreement, in your mind and in your heart, about what words are coming out of your mouth, because you are in agreement with them.

I’ve felt that way about records, where it’s like I don’t want to “tape over” whatever memories or feelings I already have associated with them.

It’s the same with me: “I’d love to hear that, but I’m gonna wait.” I don’t want to mix my life up with what that [music] did back then. I go watch YouTube, which is the greatest invention. Just the other day, I watched Nashville Bluegrass Band from 1985 or something. You watch that stuff, and it’s just so emotional. It’s costly when you remember hearing something for the first time, and you go back. It’s so bittersweet, so inspiring, and sad, because you can’t go back. The only thing that lets you go back is hearing these tunes again.

Looking back on your experience with dysphonia, and the time you took away from recording and public performance, what do you see about that period now that you couldn’t see while you were going through it?

Years ago, the only time you thought about your voice, really, is if you got the flu or something. I had never had that happen, where the throat would tighten up. It was disturbing. I went to the same voice teacher I see now, who helped me through that. He said, “You’ve got to clean off your desk,” which was really funny, because anytime I’d go to the studio, I used to literally clean the desk off. He’s like, “No, you’ve got too many other things on your mind. It has to be free.”

When there’s grief or too much stress, your throat tightens up, like if you want to cry or you’re angry, and it stays like that. How can you move through it? I try to stay on it, try to find other ways to make sure I don’t get bogged down. But you can’t always control it.

My voice teacher says some really funny stuff at times that I probably can’t repeat. I go see him pretty regularly to get ready. When you count on [your voice] and it goes away one time, you don’t feel so secure anymore. It’s maintenance. I went back to him one time, like, “I’m worried, why is this happening again?” And he goes, “Well, you don’t sweep the floor one time and it’s done forever. You gotta keep sweeping the floor.” That helped.

I’ve got to keep sweeping the floor.

Continue exploring our Artist of the Month content featuring Alison Krauss & Union Station here.

Photo Credit: Randee St. Nicholas

Marlon Williams’ ‘Te Whare Tīwekaweka’ Is a Homecoming Like Never Before

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When he was in his early twenties, Marlon Williams watched a series of major earthquakes flatten Ōtautahi/Christchurch, the largest city in Te Waipounamu (the South Island of New Zealand). In the wake of that tragedy, the Māori New Zealand artist ascended onto the national and later international stage as a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor with a million-dollar smile and a golden, heaven-sent voice.

As a narrative device, it would be easy to enshrine his experiences during the earthquakes as a baptism by fire, a star emerging from the flames. However, as he puts it, “It’s tempting to say that experience fostered the folk scene here, but we’d been building something for a while before the earthquakes. When you look backwards through the haze of time, it’s easy to start telling yourself stories.” It’s a fitting reminder that things are never as simple as they look on the surface.

Now, fifteen years on, Williams is on the brink of showing us how deep things go with the release of his fourth solo album, Te Whare Tīwekaweka (The Messy House). In a similar tradition to the outdoorsy, range-roving sensibilities of his previous three records, the album represents an antipodean blend of country and western, folk, rock and roll, and mid-to-late 20th-century pop, connecting the musical dots between America, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand).

This time around, however, Williams – a member of the Kāi Tahu and Ngāi Tai iwi (Māori tribes) – made the decision to step away from English and sing in his indigenous tongue, te reo Māori. Therein, his guiding light was a traditional Māori whakatauki (proverb), “Ko te reo Māori, he matapihi ki te ao Māori,” which translates into “The Māori language is a window to the Māori world.” As displayed by the album’s lilting lead singles, “Aua Atu Rā,” “Rere Mai Ngā Rau,” and “Kāhore He Manu E” (which features the New Zealand art-pop star Lorde), he’s onto something special.

During the reflective, soul-searching process of recording Te Whare Tīwekaweka, Williams found solidarity in his co-writer KOMMI (Kāi Tahu, Te-Āti-Awa), his longtime touring band The Yarra Benders, the He Waka Kōtuia singers, his co-producer Mark “Merk” Perkins, Lorde, and the community of Ōhinehou/Lyttelton, a small port town just northwest of Ōtautahi, where he recuperates between touring and recording projects.

From his early days performing flawless Hank Williams covers to crafting his own signature hits, such as “Dark Child,” “What’s Chasing You,” and “My Boy,” Williams’ talents have seen him tour with Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles, entertain audiences at Newport Folk Festival and Austin City Limits, and appear on Later with Jools Holland, Conan, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and more. Along the way, he’s landed acting roles in a range of Australian, New Zealand, and American film and television productions, including The Beautiful Lie, The Rehearsal, A Star Is Born, True History of The Gang, and Sweet Tooth.

From the bottom of the globe to the silver screen, it’s been a remarkable journey. The thing about journeys, though, is they often lead to coming home, and Te Whare Tīwekaweka is a homecoming like never before.

In early March, BGS spoke with Williams while he was on a promo run in Melbourne, Australia.

Congratulations on Te Whare Tīwekaweka. When I played it earlier, I thought about how comfortable and confident you sound. Tell me about the first time you listened to the album after finishing it.

Marlon Williams: It was that feeling of nervously stepping back from the details and seeing what the building looks like from the street. I felt really pleased with how structurally sound it was.

What do you think are the factors that allow you to inhabit the music to that level?

I’ve spent my entire life singing Māori music. No matter my shortcomings in speaking the language fluently and having full comprehension in that world, the pure physiology of singing in te reo Māori has been my way in. There’s a joy and a naturalness that has always been there. That gave me the confidence to take the plunge and really enjoy singing those vowel sounds and tuning on those consonants.

We’ve talked about this before. Part of what facilitated this was singing waiata (songs) written in te reo Māori by the late great Dr. Hirini Melbourne when you were in primary school (elementary school). 

Those songs are so simple and inviting, especially for children. They really help you get into the language on the ground level. A lot of what he did for this country can feel quite invisible, but most of us have some knowledge of the sound and feeling of the language as a result. It feels like a really lived part of my upbringing. His songs gave me a push forward into something that could have otherwise felt daunting and deep.

For those unfamiliar, could you talk about who Dr Hirini Melbourne was?

Hirini Melbourne was a Tūhoe and Ngāti Kahungunu educator and songwriter from up in Te Urewera [the hill country in the upper North Island of New Zealand]. He was born with a real sense of curiosity about the world and a sense of braveness and self-belief about taking on Te ao Māori [the Māori world] and bringing it to people in a really straightforward way. Hirini decided the best way was writing songs children could sing in te reo Māori about the natural world around us.

If you listen to his album, Forest and Ocean: Bird Songs by Hirini Melbourne, you’ll also see a lot of Scottish influence in terms of balladeering, melodies, and instrumentation. Later, he started collaborating with Dr. Richard Nunns. They’d play Taonga pūoro [traditional Māori musical instruments] and go into some very deep and ancient Māori music. Hirini’s whole career was this beautiful journey that was tragically cut short [in his fifties].

When I think about your music, I think about historical New Zealand country musicians like Tex Morton and John Grenell, who emerged from Te Waipounamu before finding success in Australia and America in the mid-to-late 20th century. 

I wasn’t super aware of that tradition until I learned about Hank Williams and completely fell in love with country music. After that, I realised there was a strong tradition back home. I guess it gives you a sort of reinforcement, a sense of history, and a throughline you can follow to the present moment.

I also think about New Zealand’s lineage of popular singers. People like Mr Lee Grant, Sir Howard Morrison, John Rowles, and Dean Waretini, who I see as antipodean equivalents to figures like Roy Orbison, Scott Walker, and Matt Monro. What does it say to you if I evoke these names around your album?

A lot of the celebration around this record is the celebrating the ability of Indigenous people – in this case, Māori specifically – to absorb what is going on in the world and make something from it. You can think about it in other terms, but I think about it in the sense of creativity. If you think about Māori religions like Ringatū [a combination of Christian beliefs and traditional Māori customs], there’s this willingness and this sort of epistemological elasticity to be able to go, “Oh, these things make sense together.” I can wield this tool. I’m going to come to it with my own stuff and create something unique and strong that is a blend of worlds. The main energy that was guiding me on this record was that tradition of synchronisation.

When do you consider to have been the starting point for Te Whare Tīwekaweka?

The literal start point was May 2019. That was the first time I sat down, had the melody and the structure of “Aua Atu Rā” and realised there was an implication in the music of what the song was about. This lilting lullaby was emerging. I’d say it was boat stuff. That was the first moment when I realised I was writing a waiata. I didn’t quite have it yet, but the phrasing was in [te reo] Māori, and I knew where it was telling me to go. At the time, I had a [Māori] proverb in my head, “He waka eke noa,” which means, “We’re all in this boat together.” I’ve always struggled with it. I believe it’s true, but we’re also completely alone in the universe.

From there, everything locked into place.

It strikes me that feeling connected could be considered an act of faith. You have to believe that it’s more than just you.

If I think about faith, I think about surrender, being humble, having humility, and going to a place I can acknowledge as new ground. I think faith is a useful word here.

Tell me about the conditions under which Te Whare Tīwekaweka came together.

It was pretty patchy in terms of the momentum of it. Once I had “Aua Atu Rā” loosely constructed, I took it to Kommi [Tamati-Elliffe], who helped me make sense of the grammar. After that, it sat there for a bit.

Kommi is a writer, rapper, poet, activist and lecturer in Māori and Indigenous Studies and te reo Māori. They perform te reo Kāi Tahu, the dialect of the largest iwi (tribe) within Te Waipounamu (the South Island of New Zealand). How would you describe them?

Kommi is a shapeshifter. I can’t work out how old they are. I found it hard to work out what they thought of me, but I knew there was this lovely softness there that belies a lot of deep thinking and some real sharpness. They’re very enigmatic as a person and a creative entity. One time, we got drunk at a party and talked about some work they were doing on phenomenology through a Te ao Māori lens. We were talking about that and making the most crass puns imaginable. There was this dichotomy of high-level and low-brow thinking that felt really playful.

What you’re telling me is you felt safe with them?

I guess. That’s all I can hope for in a collaborator.

Let’s get back to Te Whare Tīwekaweka. 

After I’d been sitting on “Aua Atu Rā” for a while, my My Boy album came out. In retrospect, you can also hear a lot of the direction that eventually went into Te Whare Tīwekaweka was already starting in My Boy. That took off for a bit, but all the while, I was back-and-forthing on songs in [te reo] Māori with Kommi. They’d send me lyrics all the time and I’d play around with them without really committing anything to paper.

Once I was near the end of touring My Boy, I started to turn my attention back to Te Whare Tīwekaweka. Then I agreed to let the director Ursula Grace Williams make a documentary about me [Marlon Williams: Ngā Ao E Rua – Two Worlds]. I thought, “Right, they’re filming me, so I better do what I’m saying.” Part of the intentionality was that the documentary would frame it into a real thing and make it happen. There was nowhere to hide.

Across the album, you sing about living between worlds, love, the land and sea, the weather, solitude, and travel, often through metaphors that invoke the natural world. Why do you think you gravitate towards these themes?

On a very basic level, I’m a very sunnily disposed person in terms of the way I comport myself. I feel desperately in love with people in the world and feel terrified of losing people, situations or understandings. These are the things I think about. The fact that I write songs like this is my outlet for ngā kare-ā-roto [what’s going on internally] and my darker side. I like to be warm and friendly in how I deal with people, but a little bit more severe when it comes to matters of the heart.

What do you think it has meant to make an album like this right now in Aotearoa and Te Waipounamu (New Zealand)?

Personally, I have a sense of achievement from having built something in that world. It also does something for my sense of family, in terms of representing a side of them very publicly that hasn’t always been accessible to them. There’s a lot of Kāi Tahu dialect on the album, so in terms of iwi, it feels good to put something on the map that speaks directly to the region. At the same time, this all sits within a very heated and fractious national conversation. On one level for me, it’s by the by; on another level, it’s great to have Māori music accepted into the mainstream. Whatever the political conversation going on is, if you can compel people with music, you’re really winning the battle on some level.

Taking things further, what do you think it means to be presenting Te Whare Tīwekaweka to a global audience?

Most places I go overseas, there is a sense of goodwill and excitement about marginalised languages being platformed. There’s a broader appetite due to people having instant access to a range of music through the internet. The threads you can draw together now are so vast and ungeographically constrained that I think people’s Overton window of what they’ll sit with and take in, even without knowing they’re not fully comprehending it, has shifted. I think people are generally either really open to that or completely shut off, which is something I don’t personally understand.

We can’t get around talking about Lorde singing on “Kāhore He Manu E.” It felt like she really met you where you were standing.

This speaks to the album in general. It was about bringing things to where I was standing. I didn’t want to jump into anyone else’s world. I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted her to sing on it. In the past, she kindly offered, “If you ever want me to sing on something, I’ll do it.” I could hear her on it from the moment I started writing it. There have been a few songs like that which have been very easily labored. They don’t take much writing and are always my favorite songs. It was important to me to get her involved in a way that wouldn’t be a post-hoc addition. She had to be part of the stitching of the record itself.

How do you feel in this moment, as you prepare to see what happens next?

I’m just excited to get these songs out into the world and see what they morph into when I start getting on stages and seeing what they do in a room. That’s going to change the way they feel and the way they want to be played. The second creative part of it is getting to the end of the tour and realising that the songs have become completely different from on the record. That can be a fun thing. Sometimes, it leads to remorse that you didn’t record them in the way they’ve gone. Other times, you realise you’ve completely ruined the song and gone away from what was good about it. I’m excited for the deployment.

Well, there’s always the live album.

Exactly.

Photo Credit: Steven Marr

GC 5+5: Rebecca Lynn Howard

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Rebecca Lynn Howard
Hometown: Salyersville, Kentucky
Latest Album: I’m Not Who You Think I Am (out May 2, 2025)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): My family and friends call me Aunt B

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

The best advice I’ve ever received is to tell the truth, no matter how hard, no matter how messy. People don’t connect with perfection, they connect with honesty. When I started writing from that place, everything changed. Music became more than just a craft. It became a way to heal, not just for me but for my fans too.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Honestly, the hardest songs to write are the ones I need to write the most. There was a time after my dad passed away when I couldn’t write at all. Every time I tried, it felt like I was staring into this giant void of grief and I didn’t have the words to make sense of it. Eventually, I stopped trying to force it and just let myself feel everything. When I finally sat down to write again, the song came out in one sitting. It was like the words had been there, waiting for me to be ready.

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

Water, hands down! There’s something about being near water, whether it’s the ocean, a river, or even just a hard rain that takes away the noise in my head. It’s where I think the clearest and where my best lyrics come from. It helps me know that everything moves in seasons, especially the hard things.

If you were a color, what shade would you be – and why?

I’d be a deep blue… the kind that’s somewhere between dusk and the ocean just before a storm. That kind of blue is my favorite color cause it holds a lot of depth, beauty, a little bit of sadness, but also an understated kind of strength.

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

I’d love to sit down to a slow, home-cooked Southern meal. Something warm and comforting, like my mom’s homemade biscuits and honey butter, with a side of conversations about Jesus. And the perfect soundtrack? Probably someone like Johnny Cash or Brandi Carlile. Something raw – and real – and full of stories.

Photo Credit: Allister Ann