Tag: Interview

A Blues Sensation, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram Tells His Story on ‘662’

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Christone “Kingfish” Ingram seemed to come out of nowhere with his 2019 Alligator Records debut Kingfish. At 20 years old, the native of Clarksdale, Mississippi, emerged as a fully-formed guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter and was quickly hailed as a defining blues voice of his generation. Since then, he’s toured the nation, performed with acts ranging from alt-rockers Vampire Weekend to Americana star Jason Isbell to blues godfather Buddy Guy.

In the midst of all this success, just as his career was taking off amidst over a year of non-stop touring, he lost his mother, Princess Pride Ingram, a devastating blow that the young man had to overcome.

“She was the biggest supporter that I had,” says Ingram, who is now 22. “She took care of all my business and she didn’t mess around about her baby. She was everything: she was the bodyguard, the manager, the handler. She christened the people who she wanted me to look after me, a few people who had already taken me on as their own, so she knew we were gonna be all right.”

All of this life experience is reflected on Ingram’s second album, 662, named after the area code for his North Mississippi home. Like his debut, 662 was co-written and co-produced by Tom Hambridge, who also collaborates with Buddy Guy. The joint connection is no coincidence.

“I met Tom in 2017 through Mr. Buddy Guy,” says Ingram. “Mr. Guy is the one who fronted the first record and he put us with Tom. Our first writing session together went so smoothly that we got six songs done that day. It was very cool. He’ll spend time listening to the stories that I tell him and we will put our heads together on a groove. We basically bounce ideas off each other until we have a song. The main thing is we’re trying to tell my story.”

Ingram’s story shines through on 662 songs like “Rock and Roll,” which directly addresses his mother’s passing. He says that transferring his emotions into a song was a key part of his grieving process.

“It definitely helped because music has always been my out,” he says. “I never had been a big talker, but I’ve always been able to get my fears and thoughts out through music. There are times when music doesn’t work and tears just have to fall, but most of the time, music is how I get it out. It was a big relief for me. Big time relief.”

Ingram’s personal story about growing up in the Delta, home of the blues, and picking up the torch is also told explicitly in the song “Too Young to Remember,” where the chorus states “I’m too young to remember, but I’m old enough to know.” The song also includes the evocative line, “When you see me play my guitar, you’re looking back 100 years.”

“That’s me representing all the greats that I studied,” says Ingram. “Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Johnny Shines, Robert Nighthawk, Albert King, Otis Rush, B.B. King, Buddy Guy… all those guys that I soaked up, including stuff I’ve gotten from my local blues players. All of that represents way more than 100 years of our history and tradition — maybe 300 years — and it’s important to me.”

Ingram was first exposed to the blues by his father, who showed him a Muddy Waters documentary that drew him in, and then showed him B.B. King’s cameo appearance on Sanford and Son, an underrated moment in the history of the blues. Young Christone was also inspired by the blues band that lived next door to him. But what really turned Ingram from a passive fan of the blues into an active participant was his enrollment in a music education program at the Delta Blues Museum.

“That was the foundation for me,” he says. “When I went there, not only did they teach me how to play but I got a chance to understand more about the blues, where it came from and the history of great blues men and women, many of whom were from the same part of the world as me. Not only did we study songs and instruments and whatnot, but they had these file cabinets they would open up and take out files where we’d read blues stories and have conversations about them. It was a full-on arts education program, a very important part of my development. Before the Blues Museum I sort of knew about the history but I didn’t know it was that important.”

Kingfish focused mostly on hard-driving blues shuffles, though it also included a wider range of material: “Listen,” a gorgeous, upbeat, melodic duet with Keb’ Mo’; “Been Here Before,” an acoustic deep blues that explored his own outsider status as a kid digging an ancient musical form; and a couple of aching slow ballads, highlighted by “That’s Fine By Me.”

662 continues to dig deeper into a wider range of material. “That’s All It Takes” is a beautiful ballad punctuated by surging horn charts and Ingram’s sweet guitar fills framing his aching vocal. “Rock and Roll” and “You’re Already Gone” feature gentle, nuanced singing and swinging, non-blues-based acoustic picking. Indeed, while Hopkins, House, and Shines are the acoustic blues players that Ingram says were his primary influences, they’re not the first unplugged players who come out of his mouth when asked who’s currently inspiring him the most. That would be Tommy Emmanuel and Monte Montgomery, two virtuosos conversant with the blues, but certainly not wedded to the genre.

Ingram considers his acoustic playing essential to his music, featured on stage every night, with him playing duets with the keyboardist. “I love playing acoustic and switching up the dynamics,” he says. “I like to bring the energy up real high and then bring it down.”

As rooted as Ingram is in the roots of the blues, he has also been a proponent of bringing the music into the future, collaborating with peers and with hip hop musicians. Even before his first album was released, he recorded two songs for the streaming series Luke Cage with hip hop artist Rakim, with whom he performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

“I always wanted to do something with blues and hip hop, because hip hop is like the blues’ grandchild,” he says. “We have something like that planned down the road that I can’t discuss yet but I’m really excited about. Working with Rakim was the foundation of me wanting to play real instruments behind rappers. That’s a really great path.”

Working with older musicians from Rakim to Guy also allowed Ingram to observe how to be more professional. When he first started, he was playing covers and took pride in not making setlists, instead just following his instincts.

“In order to have a structured show, you have to have a setlist, so I started to make them and to really work on arrangements instead of just playing,” he says. “All of that worked and then playing all these shows, now I feel like I have more confidence up there. I still get nervous but I have confidence behind it.”

Part of Ingram’s growing confidence is due to simple maturity. Part is due to the reaction of fellow musicians. And part is just watching the crowd and seeing their enthusiastic response. As his touring has grown ever wider, his crowds ever larger, positive reinforcement is the natural consequence of seeing positive response.

“In that moment it really does give me more confidence to see the crowd enjoying it,” he says. “It gives me a sigh of relief and makes me say, ‘Maybe what I’m doing is all right. Somebody likes it.”

Photo credit: Justin Hardiman

With New Music and Rock ‘n’ Roll Spirit, Jakob Dylan Revives The Wallflowers

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Dedicated fans of the Wallflowers weren’t the only ones eager to hear new music from Jakob Dylan. Leading into the sessions for the new album, Exit Wounds, the band’s front man showed up with a batch of new material that even producer Butch Walker hadn’t heard yet.

“I don’t usually play my stuff before I get in the studio,” Dylan tells BGS. “If you have some rehearsals, yeah, you’ll work it up, but that’s one of the most exciting things for me. It’s like, I’ve got a secret here. I can’t wait to show up and show it to people I’m going to play with. I can’t wait to see the expressions on people’s faces — and I’m usually right. When something lights me up, it usually lights up other people.”

So far, the music from Exit Wounds has already been lighting up the late-night circuit. Next up is a national tour that begins in August. A few days before the album release, Dylan called in to BGS to talk about singing with Shelby Lynne, the music documentary Echo in the Canyon (for which he served as executive producer), and why he’s a better singer now, 25 years after “One Headlight” was the band’s inescapable radio smash.

BGS: What do you remember about the vibe in the studio as this record was coming together?

Dylan: There are all kinds of different situations that can birth a good record. I think starting out, you believe that things are supposed to be difficult and maybe even combative in the studio to get good things out of everybody. But I can confirm that I don’t think that is true. I don’t know that I ever thought it was true. On this record, the energy and the vibe was good from Day One and it persisted throughout. It was one of those things of having simultaneously what I considered a joy-making record but feeling like we were stretching out and doing great things.

You have a refreshed lineup in the band, too. When you are auditioning for the band, what are you listening for?

Well, I’m not sure that it’s a new lineup. It never has been a lineup, to be honest. The band made its first record in 1992 and that disintegrated pretty quickly by the time we got to Bringing Down the Horse [their 1996 breakout album]. That was already a new group of people and it continued on that path ever since. It was always designed to be my group. I always knew that was going to be the case. It’s been an evolution since then. There hasn’t been one lineup of this group that’s made two records, so it just continues on in that fashion.

But what am I looking for in players? Well, it’s not technique. It’s not technical abilities. I mean, I play rock ‘n’ roll music, [Laughs] so there’s just a little bit of room for that. But you’re just looking for the spirit in people, you know? A lot of people play great. There’s loads and loads of good musicians out there. I’ve worked with lots of them and we don’t have chemistry together sometimes. That’s disappointing, but first and foremost you look for people who listen to the same kind of music as you do, who have the same kind of shorthand in conversation. Then it’s really not that complicated afterwards, once you get that together.

It surprised me hearing Shelby Lynne come in on that first track, “Maybe Your Heart’s Not in It No More.” And she makes a few more appearances on the album, too. What does her voice bring out in this record?

I’m really grateful that she almost became a member of the group on the record. Butch Walker and I thought of her singing on the song, “Darlin’ Hold On.” But everything felt so good when she got there, and honestly, she finished that song in about 15 minutes. We said, “Well, you’re here. We’re just going to keep throwing songs at you if you’re OK with that.” And it just turned into, like, wow, she kind of became a member of the group, which I’m really glad about. I’m not the biggest fan on guest vocalists, necessarily. I mean, it is good at times but if you can get that person to be singing throughout, they’re part of the sound and the blend. I’m glad we were able to work that out with Shelby.

Let’s talk about songwriting a little bit. When you go to write these songs, is it just an acoustic guitar and a notebook? What does that look like as you’re writing?

Yeah, just like you said. The beginnings of it come from anywhere but the good ones come when you least expect it. When you actually make the effort to sit down write a song, that can be very frustrating and disappointing. But the good ones, you could be in your car or walking your dog. You don’t know. It comes from a conversation you heard and you can tell that is the germ of a song and it will nag at you until you can figure it out. And usually the best ones do come at once. I’ve had plenty of pages without lyrics without melody and it’s very hard to find places for those. Words themselves have melody in them — they have inherent melody. That’s why it’s best when they follow a simple chord pattern. When you’re younger, you’re hung up on trying to find interesting chord structures and patterns, “let’s put a minor here….” At the end of the day, there’s some use for a lot of that but keeping it simple and shooting straight is usually your best option.

Would you consider yourself to be influenced by country music?

For sure. I think we’re all a little confused about what country music is right now — and for a while now. When you say country music now, we all think of different things. George Jones for sure. … Not unlike Shelby, that voice is just special. They gave him all the awards for being the singer that he was, and the records were great, but I have to say I got to see him play one time, out here in L.A., and I was knocked off my feet. A lot of people modulate on that last verse, but I watched him take a breath and move it up a whole step in the middle of the song, which I was unfamiliar with. I thought it was pretty cool. You know, I can’t define to you what country music is. Is it hillbilly music? Is it the Louvin Brothers? I don’t really know what that term means so much anymore. I don’t know that it’s what we see on TV so much. But I tip my hat to everybody who’s doing it, either way.

When the Wallflowers were right out of the gate, vinyl wasn’t really around anymore, but this new record is coming out on vinyl. Are you a vinyl collector?

Yeah, I am. I’ve got a good turntable and I’ve got a tube amp, and always have. You’re right, though. That’s a complicated market. What gram of vinyl — there’s a lot of marketing going on. But I do like the act of doing it, as we all say. There’s a different mindset when you choose that record and put it on. But at the end of the day, as far as the quality of music, I just want to hear the music. Yeah, vinyl does sound the best, but I’ll listen to MP3s and I’ll listen to YouTube.

But there is something special about vinyl. When we started out, they weren’t making vinyl. They were making CDs with that big cardboard piece. Remember that? I think a couple of our records were on cassettes and that’s a long time ago. I just want to hear the song at the end of the day and I’m highly suspicious of the ways they keep making us buy the same music we have over and over again. [Laughs]

It’s clear you have a reverence for music from that vinyl era when you watch Echo in the Canyon. Looking back, what surprised you the most about putting that movie together?

I didn’t know documentaries took so long, I’ll tell you that. They’re a lot of work! But it’s interesting because you don’t have a script, you just have an idea. As you’re interviewing people, they say something interesting and you find yourself going down another path. It unfolds as you go. That’s exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some things don’t make the cut because they don’t fit the story that you were developing. Not that I didn’t have a fond appreciation for people putting films together, but it was good to see how that works and how it functions.

It was a good experience and obviously I got to talk to a lot of people. Some I knew a bit, some I knew a lot, and some I didn’t know at all. But it was a good opportunity to step out my own shoes and sit on the other side of the glass like you guys do. Sometimes it was a little daunting. I didn’t want anybody to be uncomfortable and regret showing up. That was the main mission, to be honest, but there wasn’t anybody that we tried to get involved that wasn’t interested. At the time, you’re just piecing it together and you’re appreciative that it’s going well. But I look at it now and I think it was pretty remarkable that we were able to get all those people together.

I think the melodies are a big reason those songs will live on. After spending so much time with the music of that era, did that influence the way you wrote for this record?

It just reconfirmed what I already knew: Don’t go to the studio if you don’t have good songs. It’s simple. That is why those records and those songs are so everlasting. They’ve got good bones and everything’s together. … They’re just great songs. They’re very pliable. I got to explore being a singer [in the film], which I hadn’t really done before. I sing my songs great because I wrote ‘em. I don’t consider my voice an instrument but I had to learn to do that with this big chunk of songs that were mostly done by really great singers. I discovered that I could do more with my voice than I imagined.

Your voice still sounds great, though. Twenty-five years or more into this, you still sound like you.

I appreciate that. I think I sound like myself, but I think I’m a better singer than I was because of Echo. I hear some of my earlier stuff and I can tell how limited I must have been. I can hear myself avoiding notes that I probably couldn’t get to, and it’s interesting to hear that. I can do more things now. But I am aware that people, after doing it quite a while, do start sounding quite different, whether it’s stylistic choices or just age. Sometimes for the better and often for the worse. But I don’t think I’m far enough along yet where you can say, “He doesn’t sound like he used to.” Maybe eventually. [Laughs] I try to treat my voice well and it’s mostly always been there for me. I’ve been very fortunate. I can’t say I treat it as well as I could but it hasn’t failed me yet.

Photo credit: Andrew Slater

Hiss Golden Messenger’s ‘Quietly Blowing It’ Blends N.C. Warmth With L.A. Glow

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When M.C. Taylor decided to make another Hiss Golden Messenger album, he instinctively knew it needed to be done in real time, in an actual studio, in his adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina. Recorded in the summer of 2020, Quietly Blowing It reflects a joyful spirit even as a fog of anxiety hung over the sessions. And in some ways, Taylor believes that a sense of tension is what this album is all about.

But in contrast to the image of making a million minor mistakes, Quietly Blowing It may be his most accessible album yet. (His prior effort, 2019’s Terms of Surrender, landed a Grammy nomination for Best Americana Album.) As he’s done for years, Taylor asks a lot of questions in his lyrics without filling in the answer. One could say that he positions himself as a moderator who introduces a conversation, rather than an expert who knows everything about everything.

“That’s always been the way that I write,” he tells BGS. “I’ve been talking for many years about this idea of making an album that’s full of questions with no answers. In a lot of ways, I’m less interested in the answer than I am in the question, if that makes sense. Because the answer might change from day to day. I find the question often to be the thing remains steady, more or less.”

Not long before heading back to his native California to finally visit his family there, Taylor caught up with BGS by phone about Quietly Blowing It, releasing June 25.

BGS: One of the reasons I like listening to “Sanctuary” is because you can hear the band in the groove, in the space between the verses. It makes it feel like a band record.

Taylor: I think for the type of music that I make, the best light that it can be shown in is when you can hear everybody working together. The music is a collective music and it thrives on the collective energy of the players. That’s why I was hesitant to jump into making anything totally remotely. If my options were to either record remotely or do nothing, I would have chosen not to make a record because that collective energy feels really important to this music.

The second time I listened to this album all the way through, I really noticed the drums. It’s like its own energy coming through. Did you feel that too?

Yeah, in a lot of ways the record was written around the drum parts. I spent a lot of time coming up with the way I wanted the drums to work, at home, and sketching out drum patterns and drum parts, and layering different percussive elements over that. Then I brought those ideas to the two people that played all that stuff: Matt McCaughan played the drum kit and a friend of mine named Brevan Hampden played a lot of the percussion. It was meant to feel like this churning machine, almost. You know what I mean? A lot of the parts are pretty simple, but they’re sympathetic to the songs. Simple in theory, but very hard to play in a way that swings as hard as Matt and Brevan do.

To me, “Hardlytown” is about people who are staying the course against a world that’s pushing back against them. Is that pretty close to what that song is about?

Yeah, that song is addressing this idea of the way that we set up the systems in order to live our lives the way we think we want to. And how, so often, what we give feels like more than what we get back. There are many ways to do that math, of course. When I started out being a musician, I spent way more than I made back. That was like the first 15 years of my life as a musician, playing out in public.

However, there’s the whole existential math. [Laughs] Where you start to factor in joy and spiritual payoff, and that becomes another set of equations that start to figure into it all. I was trying to work my way through that, “Hardlytown” being the place where maybe you don’t get back what you put into it, but you keep at it anyway. It’s meant to be a little salty around the edges but it’s meant to be a song of hope. It may not be unqualified hope, but I think the heart of that song is a certain kind of hope.

There’s a line in that song that says, “People, get ready / There’s a big ship coming,” and that reminded me of your love of Curtis Mayfield. Why does his music resonate with you?

He’s the whole package to me. He has an absolute command of groove. His arrangements are so elegant and affecting. He really knew how to make you feel something, and his writing is second to none, in terms of finding that sweet spot between the sacred and the everyday. I’ve said this a lot lately, but he was really good about singing about the potential of hope. You think about the time during which songs like “People Get Ready” were written. It’s hard to imagine there was an abundance of hope for him and the communities that he moved through. But they somehow continued to write these songs that feel anthemic, in the way that they talk about the potential of hope, and how important hope is to carry, even if you can’t fly the flag at the particular hope at that moment.

In the video for “If It Comes in the Morning,” you have Mike Wiley, a Black actor, lip-syncing to your track. Why did that treatment appeal to you?

It’s been interesting to hear certain reactions to that video. First of all, Mike Wiley is a friend of mine that I’ve been doing work with, off and on, for over a decade. He’s an incredible stage actor. And I knew that I wanted somebody to be looking directly into a camera as they lip-synced the words. So, my thought was, who can stare into a camera for the duration of the song without flinching? And not have crazy camera eyes? I can’t do that, I don’t have that skill set. You put a camera on me for more than three minutes and I start to look like George Jones or something. [Laughs]

So, my intuition was to get in touch with Mike Wiley. He’s an expert at that. It certainly was not lost on me that Mike Wiley is a Black actor, so there was going to be added layers of information with that video. And heightened interpretations because of the moments we are living through collectively. I’ve heard some people say, “I don’t get this video. What is this video trying to say or do?” And plenty of people have not commented either way, whatever, they like the song. Other people have been angry about it. But when I see the video, I see my buddy Mike Wiley lip-syncing the words and Mike happens to be an extremely gifted actor who is Black.

What does the word “it” represent in that title, “If It Comes in the Morning”?

I mean, it depends. “It” could be victory, defeat. If things go my way in the morning, how am I going to behave to people that were on my side, or people who were on the other side? If defeat arrives in the morning, how am I going to behave to people that I was working with, or to people who were working against me? I was thinking about how I might behave to someone that might be my adversary in some situation. Would I behave with respect? Or would I kick sand in their face? I like to think the former, but sometimes I think the latter. And that’s a “quietly blowing it” moment. [Laughs]

How would you describe the room where you wrote these songs?

It’s about 10 feet by 12 or 14 feet. It’s pretty small and it’s full of guitars, books, records, and sometimes a drum kit and amplifiers. Depending on my mood, it can feel like an oasis or like a prison cell. [Laughs]

During that time when we were all staying home, I spent a lot of time on the greenway. Did you get a chance to get outside, too?

Yeah, we got outside a fair bit. We have a pretty big backyard. Durham is full of green spaces, so yeah, I found the outdoors to be a balm over this past year. No question about that. We did a lot of camping this year, and that was fun also.

How did you wind up in Durham?

Many years ago, I went to grad school at UNC. This was back in 2007 and my wife and I just ended up staying. I don’t even remember what our intention was, whether we thought we were going to stay for a long time or move somewhere else. But this was pre-kids and over time North Carolina just started to feel like home. We bounced around this region a lot. We lived in Chapel Hill first and we lived outside of a small town called Pittsboro. Then we gravitated towards Durham. It’s a perfect-sized down in my opinion. Lots of incredible food, art, music, so this is where we ended up and it feels like home.

Before this band took off, I’m sure you were doing a lot of odd jobs. I think I read at some point that you were selling swimsuits over the phone?

Yeah, I did. That was a long time ago, back in college in California. I didn’t last. I was selling women’s swimsuits over the phone. Like, I was a 22-year-old guy and didn’t know the first thing about anything about that. [Laughs] I had no business answering those telephones. They should not have had me there. They didn’t have me there for long. They fired me after two weeks. They could tell I was the wrong person for the job.

You’ve said elsewhere that you still feel the pull of California. Is that why the video for “Glory Strums” looks the way it does?

Yes, it is. In normal times I would be in California many times a year. California is where most of my family still lives. Like many people, I haven’t seen them since this all started and my kids haven’t seen my parents in almost two years. I’m really pining for California in a way that I haven’t before. Because I’ve traveled to California so frequently, I’ve kept that homesickness at bay. It never affected me because I knew that within the next month or two months I would be out there again. I haven’t been out there for a year and a half and I can really feel it.

It made me think about this article in the New Yorker in 1998 called L.A. Glows. It’s about a native Californian meditating on the light in Southern California. I remember reading it at the time and thinking it was interesting. I understood this theory that different places could have different qualities of light that would affect people that knew that place. But now I can feel that on an emotional level.

How did that video come together?

Vikesh Kapoor is the director and he is someone I have known for many years. Back in 2013 or 2014, I was playing in Portland, Oregon, opening up for Justin Townes Earle, and I was traveling alone. I was looking for someone to sell merch for me, so I put out a call on social media, I think. Vikesh volunteered to do it and we met that night at the merch table, where he sold my stuff. We kept in touch after that. He’s a songwriter himself and he’s made a few great records. And he’s a pretty respected photographer.

I knew that he was living in Los Angeles now and I got this wild hair that I thought Vikesh could make a video. We talked a lot about the light – the hazy, Southern California quality of light that I was missing. I asked him whether he thought he could get that into the video and he did, to his great credit. He didn’t have a whole lot to go on. [Laughs] He made something that is really beautiful and it does speak to the place where the video was made.

During that time when you were touring solo, what did you like most about just you and the road?

I still do that kind of touring once in a while, just to get that feeling again. I mean, there’s something about being footloose out on the road that can be really exhilarating, even still. I’m one of those people that picked up Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Desolation Angels when I was 17 years old and read them. I was just like, yep, this is the life for me. And the older I get, it’s a complex life, living your life on the road. You’ve got to work to take care of yourself, which I don’t think a lot of those Beat Generation writers did very well. But there remains a romance of just traveling through.

One thing I’ve noticed about this record, though, is that there’s a lot of other voices singing with you. What do you like about that?

I love the human voice as an instrument. Just like instruments, every human voice is different and resonates differently. It affects a microphone differently. I think that voices singing in harmony can really elevate a melody. It adds a very important color to a record, for me. We did have a bunch of voices on this record. It’s a pretty magical sensation to be able to sing in harmony with someone. It’s like an electric jolt is running through you.

Photo credit: Chris Frisina

Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn Join Forces for ‘Lost in the Cedar Wood’

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It was a week into lockdown last March that Robert Macfarlane got in touch with Johnny Flynn. The pair were already good friends. Macfarlane is a Cambridge University academic and a bestselling author; his many books, such as The Old Ways and The Wild Places, have helped shape a renaissance in nature writing. Flynn – as well-known for his acting as his albums – writes songs that reverberate with an inescapable yearning for the rural and the pastoral. Britain’s landscape is a place of solace and inspiration for both.

The early days of the pandemic were disturbing, disorienting, frightening. They were also quiet. The nation stayed home and traffic all but ceased: towns fell as silent as the countryside, birdsong had never sounded louder. Macfarlane asked Flynn if he’d like to write a song together and the act of creating together was something to cling to amid the tumult. “It started as just a song,” said Flynn, “and then it became a few songs… but it held me in place and kept me from completely spinning out.”

This May they released the result of their labours: an album, Lost in the Cedar Wood. The combination of Flynn’s folk sensibility with Macfarlane’s sense of place is so sympathetic that you can’t quite believe it’s their first collaboration. But then, Flynn had been reading Macfarlane’s books long before they first met. And Macfarlane was listening to Flynn’s albums like A Larum and Country Mile as he wrote. The author, in fact, thanked the musician in the acknowledgement pages, “because they were the songs I was listening to when I was out walking, and I knew every chord by heart.”

Eventually, a mutual friend introduced them; their first meeting was, in the most English of ways, at a friendly game of cricket. Their shared love of nature and passion for conservation sparked instant bromance. All three of those things manifest in the music they’ve made together.

“Rob was sending me articles about the pandemic being created by deforestation,” says Flynn, “but we were also talking about all the literature that people were reading with a new interest or perspective – Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, or Shakespeare’s King Lear.” Thinking of Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown, based on the Orpheus myth, they wondered what other stories might be worth exploring. Flynn looks at Macfarlane and laughs: “And you said ‘There’s always Gilgamesh’ – as if that was too obvious.”

A 4,000-year-old poem about a Sumerian king, written in cuneiform and discovered on tablets in the ruins of an ancient Assyrian library, might not seem that obvious a starting point to everyone. But it is, as Macfarlane points out, “the oldest story in world literature,” and its potent themes cast extraordinarily contemporary parallels. In the poem two warriors, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, defy the gods by cutting down a sacred forest, bringing calamity upon themselves. “The most powerful myths have a prescient as well as a retrospective vision to them,” says Macfarlane. “And that combination of ancient and urgent pushed us on.”

The songs were written back and forth via WhatsApp and voice memos: “There’s an incredible ease to writing with Johnny,” says Macfarlane. “I never worry much, and we trust each other to say if something isn’t working. I call it the Johnny Flynn song machine. I type out a bunch of words, send them over and they come back as this unbelievable song.”

Macfarlane would like to make clear, at this point, that he can’t play a note; he describes himself as having “all the musical abilities of a deckchair” (“Not true!” says Flynn). When it comes to collaboration with musicians, however, this deckchair has an impressive résumé. He has written a libretto for a jazz opera, had his poems turned into protest songs, and worked with a supergroup of British folk talent – including Kris Drever, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart – to create Spell Songs, a musical adaptation of his and Jackie Morris’s book The Lost Words.

Those experiences taught Macfarlane a great deal. “I’ve learned that good lyrics are about letting go, about cutting out order,” he says. “My teacherly prose writer’s inclination to bring grammar to everything has to be left at the door. And a year working with Johnny has brought me to the point where I’ve learned to let the light into language.” He’s particularly pleased with the song “Uncanny Valley,” to be released on seven-inch later this year, “about how things don’t join up with each other in the year we’ve just lived through.”

That sense of dissociation permeates Lost in the Cedar Wood, where melodies expand and contract like our perceptions of time during lockdown. The album doesn’t retell the Gilgamesh narrative – it’s more a series of meditations inspired by it – but Flynn and Macfarlane aren’t shy of tackling its epic themes like death and rebirth.

This should not imply that listening to it is a heavy experience: quite the opposite, in fact. What’s astonishing about the record is how much delight there is in it, from the instantly catchy resonator riff of the opening track “Ten Degrees of Strange” to the modal funk of “Bonedigger.” It often manages to be moving and funny at the same time, as in the plaintive lyrics of “I Can’t Swim There”: “My friend Harry’s got legs to spare/But I can’t find my body, I’ve looked everywhere.”

That sense of light and dark is beautifully mingled in “The World to Come,” which begins with an owlishly haunting melody and ends in a mighty accelerando, gathering speed until it’s a wild, whooping chorus of multiple voices – including Macfarlane’s. “In his wonderfully inclusive way Johnny did recruit me into some distant backing vocals,” he laughs. “And that song is effectively a party — not at the end of the world, but maybe at the beginning of a better world to come. So Johnny was encouraging us into the kitchen — whack the taps! jump up and down! There’s a cutlery basket that goes down at the end and the rawness of that in the record is wonderful to hear.”

The majority of the tracks were recorded in an off-grid cottage on the borders of Dorset and Hampshire, the recording equipment run off batteries powered by solar panels. “I love those albums like Music from Big Pink and The Basement Tapes,” says Flynn, “where you’re feeling the room where it was recorded. And for this one we were in the middle of forestry land, so there was the sound of chainsaws cutting pine trees coming through the windows, and we’d jump out of the window to record birdsong, and we were really in the sonic universe of the stories we were telling.”

Also singing on the album is Flynn’s nine-year-old son Gabriel. That inclusion was important to Flynn – not just because Gabriel is a promising young musician, but because parenting was such an intrinsic part of Flynn’s life, and even his creative process, in the past year.

“I was getting up before the kids in order to write and I’d be halfway through an idea when they piled down for breakfast,” he grins. “Often Rob would get a phone demo of me trying to sing a song and halfway through I’m shouting at the kids…”

“Daddy, where’s the marmalade?” says Macfarlane, recalling the interruptions.

“It was intense,” adds Flynn, “worrying about three kids, but the lovely thing about having them at home was getting to really go into every aspect of their thought process and their day.”

Macfarlane nods. “Stepping out of work into the arms of my eight-year-old, as he runs down the garden, that’s a nice commute.” He pauses. “I hope something like that stays, after lockdown.”

Because that’s the real question behind this album: what have we learned from humanity’s most recent crisis, and how will it change us? When Gilgamesh loses Enkidu as a result of their sacrilegious actions, he begins a new quest for the secret of eternal life. It’s no spoiler to reveal that he doesn’t find it: appreciating what he already has is more to the point.

It is not lost on Flynn and Macfarlane, for instance, that Gilgamesh is a story of close male friendship – even if, as Macfarlane jokingly points out, one of the characters dies horribly and the other’s a brutal despot. You can picture them together, Flynn and Macfarlane, on their much-prized walks through the English countryside, talking of this and that, and coming up with their next creative ideas.

It has, they agree, been a joyful process, and this joint project is surely the first of many. It may have forced them to confront some of their greatest fears for the natural world and the planet on which we live, but it has also endowed them with fresh hope.

Macfarlane also hopes that people don’t feel they need to know anything about Gilgamesh to enjoy the songs – or treat it as a pandemic album. “The days and months of lockdown do soak through its pores but they’re never named,” he says. “I hope in five years time anyone can put their ear to it and not feel they need a key to understand it.”

Photo credit: Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz

On ‘American Quilt,’ Paula Cole Wraps Herself in Music That Reflects Her Life

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Paula Cole has long explored the musical territories that inform her work, making it nearly impossible to define her. Singer-songwriter? Yes. Pop star? Yes. Interpreter of jazz standards? Yes. She’s collaborated with country legends, toured with internationally acclaimed artists, and occasionally dropped completely out of sight. Because she’s so hard to pin down creatively, Cole has managed to transcend her commercial zenith of the ’90s, when songs like “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and “I Don’t Want to Wait” were inescapable.

Twenty-five years later, Cole is in the spotlight again with American Quilt, which sets her impressive vocal range to standards like “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” It isn’t quite a jazz album, and although her writing skills are on display in “Steal Away/Hidden in Plain Sight,” it isn’t quite a folk record either. Instead it’s a reflection of the influences that shaped her musical direction early on.

“Even when I explore jazz, I like it to be a little more raggedy and raw and rootsy,” she says. “I just wanted the album to reflect all that I am, and I realized, gosh, all of these songs are different from another. How do I unify it? That’s when I remembered my mom, who is a visual artist and she’s a quilter. And I realized that the quilt is the perfect metaphor for the album, that they’re all patches of an American quilt. That’s how the title was born.”

The metaphor works for the spectrum of songs on the album, yet it’s also appropriate for the warmth and comfort it provides. Some songs are more familiar than others – and her rendition of “Shenandoah” is particularly exquisite – but it’s an album best enjoyed as a whole. By dismissing the expectations of how long a song should be, and by showing reverence without replicating what everybody else has already done, Cole has produced a sweeping and immersive listening experience. She called in to BGS from the music room in her Massachusetts home, with a photo of Dolly Parton smiling over her shoulder.

BGS: Your version of “Wayfaring Stranger” is beautiful. What made you want to record it for this album?

Paula Cole: I learned of it through listening to Emmylou Harris, and loving and adoring her. Her Roses in the Snow album was really important to me developmentally. We were on Lilith Fair together in the ‘90s and would sing on each other’s sets. And I’ve been on a few benefit concerts that she’s asked me to play. I love her so dearly. I think she’s an important American voice and we should all be talking about her much more. She kind of saves music because she brings it back to the traditional aspect of it. She keeps us whole and she keeps us real by bringing integrity back to the music.

The song came to me very intuitively and I thought, “A ha!” I can reveal some of my influences and also bow to someone who was important to me. Also I was so fed up and traumatized by the music business and it was Emmylou who told me, “Don’t quit.” You know, I took a seven-and-a-half year hiatus and thought about leaving the music business, but she was the one who said, “Hang in there.” It just happened too fast. She had this motherly wisdom for me and it made sense, and I’ve thought of her so much over my life. I love her very much.

Roses in the Snow is a familiar bluegrass album for a lot of our readers. Are you a bluegrass fan?

I just love music. So, if you asked me, “Do you like jazz?” I would say, “I love music.” [Laughs] My dad played bass in a polka band on weekends when I was little, then he would go home and play Duke Ellington on the piano or he would play obscure folk songs on banjo in my house growing up. It was always a mixture. I love all music. I love bluegrass. I love acoustic music. I love music where musicians are playing real instruments, so that’s one defining factor to me — real instruments! I’ve been touring with upright bass now for several years and I can’t go back.

Did your dad teach you how to play banjo?

No, darn it! [Laughs] I guess I could have picked it up. I mean, he played everything. He could do hambone and play nose flute and upright bass and guitar and banjo and piano. Just really a renaissance man. He exposed me to all music and there were no classifications. That was something more that non-musicians did. Musicians would fluidly move from music to music and just find the joy in all of it. He taught me that.

When I was listening to “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out),” I was curious, does that mirror your own experience to some degree? Like, you’re living the good life as a millionaire, then you find that your friends vanish when the circumstances change.

Oh sure, I’ve known that. False friends, false fans, false everybody comes to you when you’re successful. They’re flattering and they’re obsequious. They have ulterior motives, so it’s hard, and of course I’ve experienced that because I’ve been up and down and side to side…. [Laughs] All over the business! And I wanted to come back home and have a personal life and have truth and family and let the trappings fall, and to be honest.

So, I chose to walk away in a sense from that shiny pop world because it wasn’t me. I was introverted and shy. I didn’t feel like this big pop star. I was very much a musician of integrity that wanted to have a long career and a rich catalog. I had to walk away to reset and reinvent myself. So, yes, of course I relate to that song. Also I relate to Bessie Smith, and so many fantastic singers are coming from the river of Bessie Smith. You hear Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin — Bessie Smith was their favorite singer. She combines all of that beautiful roots music. And the songs from the Prohibition era speak to me, those hard times, they speak to me.

Sometimes I will ask musicians about their first guitar, but for you, I’m wondering, do you remember your first piano?

Yeah, I remember the first piano, oh my gosh. It was covered in chipped, baby blue paint. I grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, and my dad was a teacher at a state college, and we did not have much money. I wore hand-me-downs and we got things at Goodwill. In New England — freezing cold New England — we would really skimp on the heat to save money, and they put the piano in what they called the cold room. It was like a mud room. You walk into that room and take off your coat, and the piano was in the back. And it was cold! It was cold-ass cold! And there’s my first piano.

I was quite dedicated to music, to be playing in a freezing cold room in New England. Literally, we had some fish at one point and they froze! That’s how cold our house was. We had a potbelly stove and it was just hard. We were looking for ways to save money. It wasn’t always that hard. My dad ended up changing jobs and doing better, but my childhood was formative for me. I started working at a really young age. I was waitressing at 14 and I’ve always worked. It’s not nice, struggling like that, but that piano is indelibly etched in my mind with the back of the cold room. The chipped blue piano, out of tune! [Laughs]

Did you grow up with a lot of songbooks around?

Yes, and one of my missions while my father is still alive on the planet is to comb through his fake books and real books, especially of his folk standards. He has some really interesting, cryptic and eclectic, folk books that I would love to go through. That’s on one of my do lists of life.

To me, “Good Morning Heartache” sounds like it could be a sad country song, but it was made famous by jazz singers. How did you learn that one?

It’s in the real book of standards. Those books were around, and I have a real book of standards on my piano now. Even when I was touring, or had hits, or didn’t have hits, or mothering and not being in music, I would go back to the real book just for comfort and learning. I’d let my hands go on the piano and the shapes of the chords and learn songs. I first learned “Good Morning Heartache” by reading it out of a book but then I heard Billie Holiday and even modern singers do it. A lot of people have done it. But I love it because it feels to me like one of those songs that crosses genre, just like you said. It feels to me like it could be a jazz ballad, a country ballad, a soul ballad – and often it’s recorded by R&B singers. I love that it’s universal, and I love sad music. I’m not very good at happy music. [Laughs]

You close this album with “What a Wonderful World,” which offers a lovely and optimistic message. Was that an intentional decision for you to wrap up the album with that song?

Sequence is extremely important to me, so I probably spent at least a month listening to heads and tails of the songs, and all the different possibilities and combinations. And yes, it is the perfect punctuation of the journey of an album format. I love albums – I think in albums. I don’t think I’ll ever be a singles releaser. I’ll always be an album writer and album producer. I love the art of sequence.

Again, this is a song that transpires over genre and it appeals to all audiences. It unifies people. And it was written specifically for Louis Armstrong because he unified Black and white audiences. He was a genius if ever there were one. His ability to improvise within chord changes was profound. He was joyful and elevating. I play it in a somber way, and I hear sadness in my voice, and I think it’s melancholic and ironic in a way, but yeah, we must hold on to hope. We must hold on to that thread of hope for our children and our grandchildren to make this world better.

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

Harmonics with Beth Behrs: Abby Wambach

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

For our final episode of Harmonics season 2, we bring you a conversation with two-time Olympic gold medalist and FIFA Women’s World Cup champion, Abby Wambach.

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Wambach and host Beth Behrs have an honest and open conversation about sobriety, religion, and Abby’s youth in the Catholic church — and her relationship to it as she accepted her sexuality at a young age. She explains the importance of sports for all kids to develop an ability to take care of themselves, discusses the necessity of exercise and movement for maintaining her mental health, and the disparity between men and women’s earnings and treatment in professional sports. Plus, she relates a huge realization she had while standing onstage between Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning as they were all three honored upon their retirements.

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

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

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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”