Tag: Interview

Kishi Bashi Finds a New Comfort Zone in Folk Music on ‘Emigrant’

Posted on by Editor

There’s a particular knowledge that is born only from a road-worn trek, like literature’s hero’s journey, where a protagonist adventures in pursuit of higher knowledge or power, someone like Captain Ahab or Tom Joad.

Kaoru Ishibashi, the musician known as Kishi Bashi, packed a camper during the pandemic and left his home of Athens, Georgia, wandering northbound through the American frontier that’s woven throughout the Western narrative. With newfound time and his daughter in tow, this journey was a personal exploration of Ishibashi’s own identity through the sprawling American terrain.

His trip took him to places like Heart Mountain in Wyoming, a World War II Japanese internment camp — a location he has visited many times during research for his upcoming documentary, Omoiyari: A Songfilm by Kishi Bashi, where he visits similar sites throughout the United States searching for the history that still persists today. The journey also carried him through the Ozarks and the Dakotas, and to small Montana towns like Emigrant — population 271 — just north of Yellowstone, and ultimately across the great expanse of the States to Oregon.

BGS chatted with Kishi Bashi about how this trip is intrinsically tied to his new EP, Emigrant.

BGS: What was the concept behind creating Emigrant? What drew you to creating the theme around the EP?

Kishi Bashi: I’ve been spending a lot of time in Montana the last several years — especially this year, since I had so much time. I took the camper out, took my daughter out, and we did this huge trip cross-country all the way to Oregon; we spread it out over a period of months. I got to enjoy nature in a way that I hadn’t in the past, to kind of imagine what it was like back then. A lot of rural places are pretty much intact; it pretty much is what it was like 100, 200 years ago. In Montana, it’s really cold, so there’s a reason not many people live there — but that’s changing. Emigrant is a town in Montana north of Yellowstone where a friend of mine had a cabin. I borrowed it from her family, and I stayed there for a few days and fleshed out a lot of the EP.

How is the title tied to the name of the town?

To be an emigrant is to leave somewhere in search of a better place to live. I found myself really searching my own identity, my own place in this country — as a minority or even as a musician in these COVID times — trying to find what makes me happy or what makes me a person. The symbolism was really great. [Emigrant] was a frontier town for a lot of people. It was literally the frontier of this violent place, both naturally from the weather, and it was a really cutthroat environment. I was also watching a lot of Deadwood before that — it’s up around there. It may not be historically accurate, but the vibe is definitely accurate. It was that frontier, settler, colonialism type thing. It was a really harsh place to live.

How did you plan your route? What were some of the lessons taken from the road trip?

With my daughter, we started in Athens, so we went up north, and there was a lot of driving. It was a good history lesson for her because we went to the Black Hills in eastern Wyoming — actually, that’s where Deadwood takes place — and how it was Sioux territory. We went to Mount Rushmore, and it was pretty unimpressive. There’s a Crazy Horse Memorial they’re building, which looks interesting and amazing. I was getting her to understand that this is a very complicated, nuanced, but violent history that existed in these lands.

I had the realization that if you live in a city — a town that’s been modernized over and over and over — you don’t feel what it was like back then. That paved road you stand on was a dirt road at one point. Before that, it was just a trail. You don’t really get to see that unless you go out to Montana or some rural area. We basically went straight up through Tennessee, Arkansas, South Dakota, and then cut over through Wyoming.

It sounds like this road trip was an American history lesson. Did you purposefully choose locations around Indigenous or Asian American histories?

Heart Mountain [in Wyoming] — where the internment camp was — I had been there many times. And my daughter as well; she has been there a couple times in the summer, because we’re filming there a lot for this documentary I’m doing. You can’t avoid Native American spaces in this place. It was interesting to see that a lot of the reservations were closed to outside travelers because their health infrastructure was so shoddy, and that people around them were bringing in COVID irresponsibly. That was heartbreaking to see; they were really desperate to keep it out.

Tell me about “Town of Pray.” Was it inspired by the actual town of Pray, Montana?

More by the name; the town of Pray is such a stoic name. I was reading this book — do you know who Jeremiah Johnson is? He’s this folk hero [also called John “Liver-Eating” Johnson], I think a real person, pioneer, Montana mountain man. I don’t know if you know the legend, but it’s such a violent place to exist. He had a Flathead [now known as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes] wife, and she was murdered by the Crows. Then he went on a murderous rampage against the Crows, and then they respected him, and he joined forces against a different tribe. We have a very narrow narrative of what history is. When you see this violent history, it just makes me grateful that I don’t have to, like, kill other people to thrive, which may have been the case if you lived around there back then. You’re always watching your back. You’re always susceptible to trauma.

What are some lessons you hope listeners take away from this EP? Or lessons you learned through making it?

If people have the opportunity to go out and visit nature, get outside of your comfort zone and explore this country. And even more social justice issues, if you wander into any of these small towns, like in Montana — Bozeman used to be like 20 percent Chinese. Now it’s like zero. There’s a reason a lot of towns are white. After they built the railroad, they drove everyone out of town. Wonder why this country is not being shared by everyone?

You included two covers on your EP, [Dolly Parton’s “Early Morning Breeze” and Regina Spektor’s “Laughing With”]. Why were those chosen, and how do they tie into the overall theme?

One of the reasons was I definitely wanted to showcase female songwriters, because I looked at the Rolling Stone top 100 songwriters, and there were like two women in there — like Madonna and Dolly Parton. And it’s embarrassing. So I made an effort to do that. Of course, I love Dolly Parton just like everybody else. I always liked that song, and I thought it fit the vibe. The Regina Spektor song — I used to play for her; I was in her band — I always thought she was underrated, especially amongst musicians and as a songwriter. Lyrically, she’s brilliant, and she’s a huge inspiration for me. For the next generation of people who may not know her music, I wanted to point out that I have the deepest respect for her songwriting by covering her song.

Why lean into the folk or bluegrass genre for this EP?

It’s something I always wanted to do. This is also a disclaimer: I’m not a bluegrass musician. I don’t have much of a bluegrass situation amongst me, but I’m bluegrass adjacent. I went to Berklee College of Music and I studied with Matt Glaser, who’s an Americana teacher. But I played jazz violin. Gypsy swing, that’s my thing. I always loved bluegrass music, but I never felt, culturally, it was something I could attach myself to. I had this whole stigma, like imposter syndrome, of not being from a rural place. I’m a city dweller. It took me a while to own up to a fiddle tune.

As I became more comfortable with my own identity of being an American musician — an Asian American musician — I was like, “What if I just want to play something folky?” It was something I always wanted to do. So there are a lot of fiddle elements, especially in “Town of Pray.” If you think about “What is American music?” There’s jazz, there’s blues. Fiddle tunes come from a lot of Irish and Scottish roots in the mountains. American music is this huge conflagration of all these different cultures melding into each other. I think that’s the beauty.

And where’s my place in that? I’m an Asian guy playing a European instrument — violin — playing jazz, which is from the South with African American contributions. I always felt like I didn’t have a real identity as an American, so that’s probably why I felt so comfortable singing bluesy stuff, or putting a fiddle tune in there — just because I want to.

Photo credit: Max Ritter

The Show on the Road – Ani DiFranco

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we bring you a truly inspiring talk with the activist, author, and free-spirited feminist folk icon Ani DiFranco, who just released her lushly orchestrated twenty-second album: Revolutionary Love.

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Many things have been said about the music Ani DiFranco has created for the last thirty years since she burst on the scene with her fiery self-titled LP in 1990. With her shaved head on the cover, fearlessly bisexual love songs, dexterous guitar work and hold-no-prisoners lyrics sparing no one from her poetic magnifying glass, DiFranco’s persona became almost synonymous with a rejuvenated women’s movement that blossomed in the late-1990’s Lilith Fair moment. And yet she was always a bit more committed to the cause than some of her more pop-leaning contemporaries, who faded away as soon as their hits subsided.

Framing herself somewhere between the rebellious folk-singing teacher Pete Seeger and the gender-fluid show-stopping rock spirit in Prince, (who she recorded with after he became a fan,) DiFranco was always just as passionate about raising awareness for abortion rights, ensuring safety for gay and trans youth and bringing music to prisons, as she was promoting her latest musical experiment. She began playing publicly around age ten, and as a nineteen-year-old runaway from Buffalo, NY, she started her own label, Righteous Babe Records, that allowed her to operate free of corporate (and overwhelmingly male) oversight. Indeed, despite gaining a wide international fanbase she has released every album herself since the beginning — as well as championing genre-defying songwriters like Andrew Bird, Anaïs Mitchell, Utah Philips, and others. It was DiFranco’s encouragement that helped Mitchell’s opus Hadestown become a Tony-winning Broadway smash. DiFranco may have been deemed a bit too left-of-center for pop radio, but her beloved 1997 live record Living In Clip went gold.

Let’s get something out of the way real quick: was this male podcast host initially a bit intimidated to dive into her encyclopedic album collection after admiring her work from afar and believing the songs were not meant for his ears? Indeed. I grew up with girlfriends and fellow musicians who rocked Ani’s Righteous Babe pins and patches on their jean jackets like they were religious ornaments. What I found during this mind-bending conversation, and after listening to her polished and mystical newest record especially, was that DiFranco has never tried to push away people that don’t look or talk like her — or tried to mock or belittle conservative movements she doesn’t agree with or understand. There is a deep kindness and empathy in her songwriting that I never expected and in her 2019 autobiography, No Walls And The Recurring Dream, she acknowledges how lonely and exhausting it can be trying to fight against a societal tide that doesn’t want to stop and give you space to be who you are.

What became increasingly clear during our conversation was that DiFranco wants to make music for everyone. She prides herself on her quirky, multi-generational fanbase — with grandparents and kids, dads and sons, daughters and aunties alike singing along to favorites like “Both Hands,” “Untouchable Face,” and covers like Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at packed shows across three continents.

I had my own goosebumps-inducing moment singing with Ani that I’ll never forget. The oldest folk festival in America, The Ann Arbor Folk Fest, once put me on stage to sing harmony on “Angel From Montgomery” with DiFranco at the acoustically perfect Hill Auditorium. I attended the University Of Michigan years earlier and I saw John Prine sing that classic in that same room, and it felt like a full circle moment. Seeing how DiFranco transfixed the crowd that night, and how the women songwriters and musicians offstage especially watched her with such admiration made me want to see what her music — which I had never fully listened to — was all about.

If you have a chance, listen to Revolutionary Love start to finish, and stick around to the end of the episode to hear DiFranco read lyrics as poetry.

Photo credit: Daymon Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helen, what drew you to bluegrass music?

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

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

Nick and Helen Forster, 1991. Credit: Laura Lyon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead photo of Nick and Helen Forster by Tim Reese

Harmonics with Beth Behrs: Fiona Prine

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on Harmonics, we kick off our Americana April series with a conversation with Fiona Prine, President of Nashville’s Oh Boy Records, and wife and former manager of the late great songwriter John Prine.

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Fiona and Beth talk about John’s recent posthumous Grammy wins (and Fiona’s experience accepting the award on his behalf) as well as their love story, mental health, growing up in Ireland, her work with non-profit Thistle Farms, and so much more.

Fiona is undoubtedly a well-respected figure in the Nashville community in her own right: As a role model in the music business, as an activist, in fostering community, and in her loving spirit, and as an extremely successful manager and industry professional. She has also been able to keep the spirit of John’s incredible legacy alive a year after his passing.

Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow Harmonics and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!

This episode of Harmonics is brought to you by BLUblox: blue light blocking glasses, backed by science. Reclaim your energy and block out the unhealthy effects of blue light on your mental and physical health. Take 15% off your order with code “HARMONICS”

The Show on the Road – Caroline Spence

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature a conversation with an admired and sharp-witted singer-songwriter in the fertile Nashville Americana scene, Caroline Spence.


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A sought-after lyricist who mines her own vulnerabilities and lovelorn past to tell delicately crafted story-songs, Caroline Spence’s voice seems to always hover angelically above the page, bringing to mind new-wave country pop heroine Alison Krauss or her vocal hero, Emmylou Harris.

Growing up in Charlottesville, VA daydreaming to Harris’ signature twangy honey-toned records like Wrecking Ball, Spence admittedly was a bit starstruck when the silver-maned lady herself came on board to sing harmonies on the title track of Spence’s newest LP, Mint Condition. It quickly became a critic’s darling and an Americana radio staple nationwide.

As a conversationalist, she usually leads with cheerful southern modesty, but beginning with her 2015 debut, Somehow, Spence wasn’t afraid to push at country music’s guy-centric boundaries. She brought aboard a talented group of genre-defining collaborators like blue-eyed soul hero Anderson East and pop-folk favorite Erin Rae to give the songs new heft. Her follow-up Spades And Roses brought more lush atmospherics to her yearning acoustic stories, elevating the clear-eyed feminine power behind emotive songs like “Heart Of Somebody.”

While Spence will tell you she is just furthering the empowered spirit of roots songwriter pioneers who came before her, during this time of high anxiety, her deeply felt love songs like “Sit Here and Love Me” and “Slow Dancer” seem especially fitting, touching on her bouts of depression and her inability to connect with the ones who are trying to help her through.

Sometimes sad songs truly do make people happy, and if you’re feeling a bit low, maybe pop on her newest single “The Choir,” about finding your people when you need them most.

Photo credit: Angelina Castillo

The Show on the Road – Bettye LaVette

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week on The Show On The Road, we feature an intimate conversation with beloved soul and R&B singer, Bettye LaVette.

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Covering her remarkable six decades in show-business, we dive deep into LaVette‘s beginnings as a Detroit hit-making teenager during Motown’s heyday (her neighbor was Smokey Robinson), to her early career touring with Otis Redding and James Brown, and the hard times that followed, as a music industry steeped in racist and sexist traditions largely turned its back on her.

While other soulful song stylists like Sharon Jones, Tina Turner, Mavis Staples and others saw their status and popularity rise with time, LaVette remains an underrated, best kept secret on the Americana circuit, with younger listeners just discovering her remarkable work covering anyone and everyone from The Beatles to Neil Young to Billie Holiday.

After nearly dropping out of music, her remarkable comeback began in 2005 with a string of acclaimed records — bringing her from half-filled bars to singing “Blackbird” at The Hollywood Bowl with a 32-piece orchestra, being nominated for five Grammy awards, and being inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame.

One thing you’ll notice immediately is her fiery laugh, which punctuates the episode — even when telling the darkest stories, like her early manager getting shot and her 1960s hits being recorded by white artists, leaving her versions largely forgotten. Her Grammy-nominated newest LP Blackbirds, produced by legendary drummer Steve Jordan, shows her at her most vulnerable best.

Photo credit: Mark Seliger

BGS 5+5: Esther Rose

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Esther Rose
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana, and sometimes Taos, New Mexico
Latest album: How Many Times
Personal nicknames: Dayfire, Wild Rose

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Seeing as how there haven’t been any stages as of late, my favorite recent performance was singing “Handyman” with my nephew Cedar. Cedar is three years old and he knows every single word.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

The moment that I knew I wanted to be a guitar player/songwriter was on my 28th birthday when I wrote a song called “The Game” on piano. ‘Til then I had been a supporting member of my partner’s band, but that morning I wrote a breakup song. I remember thinking I need to learn how to play the guitar immediately and I did.

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

In the studio I set up a good-luck altar with little treasures from the past year; pretty rocks from significant places, jewelry, photos, whatever has been close to me for the past year of songwriting I will take off and turn it over to the altar. It is grounding to look over and be reminded of why I wrote the songs, or where I was, or who I was with. I keep a candle burning the entire time. It gives me great satisfaction to blow out the candle at the end of a long day, signifying that the work is over.

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

Writing “When You Go” was tough. My songwriting golden rule is “no bullshit.” I will write and scratch out lines to get closer to what’s really going on. With this song, I wrote the first verses and then froze. The song starts as this kind of self-assured, “I’m getting over you” song. I was scared to go to the no bullshit place to see what was below the surface. I sent it to my best friend and songwriter soulmate Julia and she urged me to finish it. The next day I wrote the chorus and I remember crying, crying, crying and then crying some more. It’s a very primal feeling; please take me with you.

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

I want to have a glass of wine and a cigarette with Joni Mitchell. I don’t even smoke anymore.

Photo credit: Akasha Rabut

With Life Turned Upside Down, John Smith Enlists Friends for Eloquent New Album

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John Smith is resilient. You have to be, when you’ve spent your 15-year musical career — by choice — unsigned to a record label. When you’ve arranged every gig, every tour, every album release yourself. When you’ve invested your own money in everything you’ve done. As Smith himself puts it he’s been “planning for the worst” his entire professional life.

So when catastrophe hit a year ago, he was ready, in his words, to roll with the punches. The pandemic had already necessitated the painstaking and anxiety-inducing cancellation of all his gigs and tours. His mother was diagnosed with cancer at a time he couldn’t visit her. His wife lost a pregnancy. “It was devastating,” says Smith, from his home in North Wales. “But all you can do is try and make sense of it and the way I do that is write songs.”

The result is The Fray, an album of searing honesty and lithe beauty whose songs amplify the emotions and experiences of so many of us this year — the reassessed relationships, the self-reflection, and the ultimate search for hope. It is, perhaps, something of a change of pace for the British singer-songwriter, who describes it as his most honest album yet.

“In the past I’ve been drawn towards mythic perspective and character-based songs and more fantastical references,” he nods. “This one I just wrote about me and what I was feeling.” In doing so, he has created a work of extraordinary emotional nuance. As he puts it: “There’s lots of color and dark and light in everyday life. ‘How do I get to bed tonight without cracking up?’”

The songs are deeply tender — “She’s Doing Fine” and “One Day at a Time” are poignant responses to the grief of losing a baby — but they’re not as spare as Smith’s 2019 folk record, Hummingbird. This one is a cashmere blend of guitar, piano and horns, with eloquent contributions from friends in the US and elsewhere. Sarah Jarosz and Courtney Hartman lend their ethereal voices to “Deserving” and “Eye to Eye,” respectively. Milk Carton Kids contribute, alongside Smith’s longtime collaborator Lisa Hannigan, to the rousing title track “The Fray,” which tips the hat to the West Coast stylings of Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, one of Smith’s favorite records.

For Smith, it was a delight to be able to sing and play with his friends, even if they couldn’t be in the same space. “I normally see Lisa, for instance, very often, and I haven’t seen her for a year. So in the absence of being backstage at the same festivals, drinking and laughing, I thought let’s all get on the same track, then it’s like we’ve all seen each other.”

It had been six months since he had played with anyone else at all. When the pandemic first began to spread, Smith was touring in Australia, about to play the Blue Mountain Festival near Sydney. “I woke up in my hotel room to a text saying that the festival had been cancelled,” says Smith. “I looked at local news reports and it was obvious everything was going to get pulled and they were shutting down the borders between Australian states — it was just time to get out of there.”

Having got himself home from literally the other side of the world, Smith undertook the soul-crushing work of cancelling all his gigs, including what would have been his first-ever headline tour in the US. “It had taken years to get to that point,” he adds, ruefully. But managing his own brand has made Smith resourceful and he quickly worked together an album of unreleased recordings (Live in Chester) and took them on a “virtual world tour,” playing dates in different time zones.

“That all went really well and after the last of those gigs, that evening, my wife started feeling really bad and we had to get her to hospital and she spent a week there. And within a few weeks of that I’d found out my mum had cancer. So suddenly everything in my life was upside down.”

New songs simply fell out of him, he says. Some came from ideas he’d worked up with others, such as the opening track, “Friends.” The chorus had been written with fellow singer-songwriter Paul Usher, before the UK went into lockdown; four months later, it found a new meaning. “When I sat down and listened back to the voice memo on my phone I started singing it and wrote all the verses in one go.”

Other songs were inspired by particular instruments. He bought a classical guitar and quickly wrote “She’s Doing Fine” on it. A ‘57 Telecaster replica he acquired — “just a piece of swamp ash with a neck on it really” — inspired a riff which stayed under his fingers for five weeks before it was followed with any words. The finished product was “Hold On.”

Britain’s strict lockdown laws, which have included stay-at-home orders with only an hour a day allowed for exercise, were partially lifted in the late summer and fall, giving Smith the opportunity to get inside a studio. He and Hummingbird producer Sam Lakeman both isolated ahead of the session, and so were able to work together freely and without masks. The other musicians, too, self-quarantined before they arrived: “We didn’t have anyone involved we didn’t trust completely,” he says.

Smith laid down his own tracks in the first couple of days — the bare bones of guitar and vocals — so that the sound could build organically with each additional contribution. “Since recording all together live logistically wasn’t possible, I had to take a slightly different route,” he says. “We went with a lot of first takes and kept a few mistakes in there and tried to allow it to breathe spontaneously and didn’t overthink it… I’ve been guilty of that in the past.”

There’s a lovely moment at the end of “Friends,” as the song finishes and is punctuated with a little applause. It feels, for just a brief moment, like you’re in the room with the band. Smith laughs and explains its origins: “I’d put down the vocal take and it sounded so good in the headphones I just started clapping. And Sam shot me a look as if to say: ‘You know we’re going to have to do that again now.’” But it was such a joyful and spontaneous sound, they decided instead to ask the other musicians to clap at the end of their takes, too.

The other contributions — from Hannigan, Jarosz, et al. — were recorded at their homes and sent in digitally (“You can catch a lot of horrible stuff over email,” smiles Smith, “but not COVID”). They include electric guitar from Bill Frisell, one of Smith’s heroes, whom he approached via their mutual friend, Joe Henry. It is clear, from Smith’s tone, that having Frisell play on “Best of Me” is one of the best things to have happened to him in a very long time.

The future remains as uncertain as ever. “I’ve just moved some gigs for the third time,” says Smith. “It’s going to be a while before I’m going out and physically playing these songs.” It’s typical, he says, with good humour — he’d lined up some great venues to play in, and with the social distancing requirements significantly reducing their capacity, he would even have been able to say he had sold them out.

But Smith is not one to dwell on what-might-have-beens. Instead, he’ll be launching The Fray with a collection of livestreamed gigs, knowing that they have proved successful for him before. He has been reading a lot, recently, into business and economics and financial strategies – as he very sensibly observes, “it’s important for any musician to understand how money works because there’s going to be less of it going around.”

Smith has always been one to live the simple life, and with full lockdown resumed in Britain since the start of 2021, there has been ample opportunity to do so. There is no doubt that The Fray’s themes of getting by in the day-to-day will resonate broadly. After all, never before have so many humans experienced such similar circumstances all at the same time. “Extraordinary, isn’t it?” says Smith.

Photos by: Elly Lucas

The Show on the Road – The Tallest Man on Earth

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we take The Show On The Road to the countryside of Sweden for an intimate talk with Kristian Matsson, a poet-songwriter and masterful acoustic multi-instrumentalist who has released five acclaimed albums and two EPs over the last decade and a half, performing as The Tallest Man on Earth.


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Growing up in the small hamlet of Leksand, a three hour trek from Stockholm, Mattson was in rowdier indie-rock outfits like Montezumas before breaking out with his own dreamier acoustic material and gaining international notice with his breakout solo offering Shallow Grave in 2008. Tours with Bon Iver across North America gained Matsson an adoring audience in the states, where he ended up setting up shop in Brooklyn.

Most often performing solo even on the biggest stages, Matsson is known to have seven or more intricate tunings for his guitars and banjos, and with his high, cutting voice and cryptic, nature-inspired lyrics, he has been compared to some of his heroes like Roscoe Holcomb, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon, but with a Swedish-naturalist touch. Songs like “Love Is All” or “The Gardener,” while gaining tens of millions of steams on folky playlists, pack quite a punch, often detailing how the cold cruelty of the animal kingdom filters into human life with its many frailties.

In 2019, Matsson found his marriage to a fellow Swedish singer-songwriter ending and he holed up in his Brooklyn apartment to write, produce, and engineer his newest Tallest Man On Earth LP, I Love You. It’s A Fever Dream. Like Springsteen’s eerie and emotional Nebraska, Matsson’s collection is a clear-eyed view of our current state of interpersonal (and even societal) isolations. Standout songs like the warm guitar and echoey harmonica opener “Hotel Bar” — though written before he knew what would happen with our current pandemic — seem to capture the lost closeness and romance of our very recent past, where one could fall in love with a new stranger every night in a new town and think nothing of it.

Sequestered in a small house in the middle of Sweden since the world shifted last year, a new Tallest Man On Earth album is sure to be on its way. Admittedly Matsson is going a bit stir-crazy away from the road, but really he’s grateful to be able to have the time to explore and create new sounds without any distractions. A fall tour of the states is in the works (fingers crossed), including an opening slot at Red Rocks joining Mandolin Orange and Bonny Light Horseman.

Photo credit: Kaitlin Scott

Harmonics with Beth Behrs: Jewel

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Welcome to Season 2 of Harmonics! On episode 1 of our new season, we’re kicking things off with the incredible, four-time Grammy-nominated folk singer-songwriter, Jewel.

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Jewel joins host Beth Behrs for an insightful conversation about her experience with mindfulness throughout her life as a response to anxiety. She presents multiple tangible skills she has developed along the way that hopefully anyone can easily apply to their own lives to expand their mindfulness.

Throughout her career, Jewel has brought these skills to struggling children as well, having been an avid advocate for mental health awareness and using her platform to lift others up. Her work through her own Jewel Never Broken program, in conjunction with the Inspiring Children Foundation, has supported so many children with mental health support resources, mentoring, education, and equipping kids with important life skills and tools to earn college scholarships, becoming forces for good in the world.

Jewel’s honesty regarding her own struggles, and how it informs her creativity, her art, and her life, is incredibly inspiring.

In case we haven’t yet convinced you of the wealth of knowledge and wisdom present in this episode — Jewel also gives Beth a personal lesson on how to yodel!!

Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow Harmonics and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!

Photo credit: Dana Trippe