Tag: Interview

Grace Potter Sets the Scene with Dramatic ‘Daylight’

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Grace Potter possesses one of the most commanding voices in popular music — which is a good thing, because on Daylight she’s got something to say.

Potter co-wrote much of the new solo album with producer Eric Valentine, with whom she fell in love while still married to a member of her band — which is now broken up, too. After their divorces, Potter and Valentine married, started a family, and now live in Topanga Canyon, California.

The overwhelming emotions of these dramatic life changes are channeled into Daylight, with many of the songs written with Valentine, and on occasion, his longtime buddy Mike Busbee, who died in September.

“Love Is Love,” a potent opener to the project, grabbed immediate attention as the first single, but in this interview with BGS, Potter goes deeper into musical pathway that ultimately led her to Daylight.

“Release” is about the aftermath of the breakup. Who was the first person you played that for when you finished it?

Grace Potter: Eric. Busbee actually texted it to Eric but it was only half the song. Our voice recorder cut off before we finished. But he just wanted Eric to hear where we were at with the writing and Eric had to pull over the car because he was bawling listening to it. And Eric doesn’t cry easily. So that was a really important moment and one that I didn’t expect.

That song, I’d started it myself in the bathtub and it had sat in my voice memo bank for like a year and a half before Eric had heard it and was like, “Let’s not sleep on that one. Let’s pursue that and see where it goes.” Obviously it went and went and went and it’s definitely the one that gets under my skin, every time. It’s hard to play live actually.

And you’re setting yourself up as the character that set this all in motion, too.

Yeah. “I know that I caused this pain…” And that really is the full taking ownership and being accountable for your choices and knowing that those choices are not always this self-righteous, “I can do no wrong” thing. Humans are vulnerable. Humans do make mistakes. Humans change their mind. Lives and careers and happiness and financial fortitude – it all shifts and changes over the time that we live. And the more I’ve lived, the more I realize that it’s okay to give yourself permission, to be that vulnerable.

You quoted the opening line to “Release,” and the opening line on “Shout It Out” sets up that song’s storyline, too. I’ve always thought that those opening lines are something you do really well, but I didn’t realize until researching for this interview that you went to film school.

Oh yeah.

So I’m curious, do you think there’s a correlation there? Because when you make a movie, you have those establishing shots in the beginning, and in your songs you have those establishing opening lines.

And sometimes I like to mislead. I like that opening line to take you in, like, a Quentin Tarantino direction. But it’s actually like a Nora Ephron romance. But I really love storytelling. It’s the same thing I do when I’m writing my sets too. Every single song and every musical experience has to take you on an emotional journey. So there’s a launch point and there’s a revelation, which you know, within the first 20 minutes of a movie, you’re always supposed to basically set up the premise of the movie and potentially introduce one twist. For me, my life was full of so many twists while I was writing Daylight that it wasn’t hard.

After the Nocturnals ended, you had to start a band again. What’s an audition process like to be in your band?

I just want to be around people I like first. Then hopefully they’re good at music. For real. Life is too short to be in a band with people that don’t fit into your ethos or feel, or just don’t feel right. You get these feelings, you get a sense when you’re in a room with someone, if they suck the air out of the room and they have that negative energy, it really changes your entire life and your entire demeanor.

You can feel yourself going kind of gray. I call it the Eeyore effect. You know, it’s this “uhhhhh” feeling. So I generally avoid Eeyores. Although an occasional well-balanced, calm person who doesn’t talk all the time is a wonderfully welcomed part of the road because we can’t all be psychotic extroverts. It’s enough with just me and my baby. But I really enjoy finding musicians who specialize in something that’s just one step quirkier than what you would expect.

Busbee, what I loved about him was that not only was he an amazing songwriter, he played the trombone. Just randomly, like, “I studied trombone.” Really? Eliza Hardy Jones, my keyboard player and singer in my band, is a next level, Olympic champion quilter. Quilting is her thing. She’s actually got a huge show in 2020. She’s doing a massive exhibition in Nebraska at the quilt museum.

Our new drummer, Jordan West, was working for Roland demoing the audio equipment, but actually was hiding in plain sight for so many people. I was looking for a female drummer who could sing, or a female bass player who could sing, or a female guitarist who could sing. I just wanted two female voices that could do all the Lucius parts. So it was fitting the puzzle pieces together for me. Instead of auditioning a bunch of people saying, “I know exactly what I’m looking for,” I just waited until I found a flow of people that felt right. And if they happen to play an instrument I needed, then you’re hired.

Kurtis Keber, our bass player, who’s been with us since last year, came into our world through my previous drummer, Matt Musty, who is now out with Train. We miss him all the time, but these happy accidents happen where you find your people. I saw Kurtis the other day. I was like, “Kurtis, what are you doing? Are you in the studio?” He goes, “No, no, I’ve been building. I’m helping do some carpentry.” My longtime guitarist [Benny Yurco] is now becoming obsessed with recording and becoming one of those crazy studio guys — from the humble beginnings of not even using one guitar pedal to this mad scientist lab they have in Burlington, [Vermont] now.

I like jack-of-all-trades people who like doing lots of things. Those are the things that attract me to people. Their strangeness. Their idioms, their specific obsession with just the tiniest little thing. You know, loose leaf tea. You can talk for an hour and a half about loose leaf tea? I’m in, count me in.

I read the lineup of your Grand Point North festival this year and you did an acoustic set on that Sunday night. What is it about that presentation that you enjoy?

Well, Warren Haynes from Gov’t Mule has been a longtime collaborator and it’s been something that we have talked about doing because we share a joy of being musical and not really knowing what’s going to happen. And not having the stakes be so high that there’s an entire band behind you train wrecking. You know what I mean?

Usually you have to rehearse and really gain a mastery over every single song and arrangement, but when you’re doing an acoustic set, there’s so much freedom to explore. Warren’s musicality and my musicality are complementary to one another where we can take it in a lot of different directions and kind of wring out the towel different every night.

We’d done it a lot backstage and not in front of people, but we felt like it would be a cool thing to share because so many musicians, they just get out there and they run the Ferris wheel, they crank the thing up and they do the same show night after night. There’s been nine years of my festival. People have seen me play with my band. They’ve seen Warren play. He’s played three times in my festival. So I really wanted to treat the audience to a different experience.

Is part of that perspective because you went to a lot of festivals growing up?

Yeah. I came from the jam band world. Warren really ushered me into it. I was very much standing in the shadows of some amazingly talented people who paved the way for me. The festival circuit is really the only way that I was able to break out on my own and be noticed and stand out. I think it’s because of those festivals that I have the sense of diversity. I can take it in a lot of different directions and it’s more fun that way.

And if you’d go to a music festival, you’re going to hear seven, eight, ten genres of music in one place and love every single one of them. I think my instincts took me in that direction, to continue on in my career through creating in the moment, more than creating for a forever thing. …

I think none of my records have ever done my musicality justice because it’s like a high school photo album. It’s this one moment — and maybe it was a very manipulated moment that isn’t even the real reflection of what I was feeling in that moment. So Daylight was the opportunity to completely break that down, take away that premise, take away this idea of having to bottle lightning, and package it and sell it to the world. And instead have an experience. Be vulnerable and open to it and see where it takes you.

As you were talking about festivals, I was wondering, did you ever get an ear for bluegrass?

Absolutely. I grew up listening primarily to Appalachian and Celtic music, which have so many deep connections. And from my family’s record collection, I was obsessed with traditional English, Irish, and Scottish songwriting because the storytelling has these archetypes in it. It’s like the Brothers Grimm. There’s these really intense, very dark stories of women that are shape-shifting and there’s these evil goblins, and then they turn into a beautiful woman. This is a combination of fantasy and reality and love and lust and danger and war. There’s all these amazing cinematic storytelling moments in those songs.

So I grew up around that, but then bluegrass came into my world because in the festival scene, there was so much crossover. I got to meet and be in a songwriter circle early on in 2006 with Béla Fleck, Chris Thile, Jim Lauderdale, and Buddy Miller. It was such a cool lineup, pulling all these people together from all these walks of life and just playing. And it was very humbling. It made me realize I got to get my shit together, my instrumentation, because these guys know how to hold it down.

I understand that you’ve moved from Vermont to Topanga Canyon, which must’ve made your inner hippie very happy.

Oh man! My inner hippie became my outer hippie. I walked to the store two days ago in a pirate shirt with a Burberry trench coat, sweatpants, Doc Martens, and a flower crown. And I didn’t even think about it until somebody sent me a photo of it and I was like, “I did what?” That was just my usual day-to-day getup. That’s Topanga. I live and breathe that lifestyle and those people really get me.

It’s a real community too. It’s a small, small group of people. And again, I think the thing I’ve been finding that I want in life is accountability. And in a big city like L.A., you can hit someone with your car, drive away and never see them again and not really ever worry about getting caught. But if I, or anyone in town, sees anything out of the ordinary, we check in on each other. That’s how tight-knit we are, and how much we care about one another. And it’s a really, really wonderful community to be a part of.

What do you hope that fans will take away from the 2020 version of Grace Potter on tour?

You know, everything about my life has been unexpected, even to me, so I certainly can’t tell people what to expect yet because I just — every bit of it has been this ride. And as I’ve gone on as a musician, I realized that my favorite part of being a musician is inviting people into that ride with me. Instead of presenting them with a packaged thing, that is what it is, I don’t know what it is! I don’t know how this is all going to work. I’ve got a baby now and my life has fundamentally changed in so many ways. I can’t wait to see how it manifests onstage. I guarantee you there will still be headbanging, that’s for sure!

Photo credit: Pamela Neal

As an Author and Musician, Allison Moorer Writes About Her Tragic Past in ‘Blood’

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Allison Moorer has always loved words and it shows in her new memoir, Blood. Expressed in a literary voice that’s both erudite and intimate, her writing goes well beyond the devastation of the 1986 incident where her father shot and killed her mother, and then himself. Surveying Blood as a whole, her childhood stories will be familiar to anyone who has grown up without money, who has relied on other family members to help raise them, and who has found an identity through music.

This fall, Moorer has been touring behind the book by presenting on-stage conversations with music-minded moderators, such as her sister Shelby Lynne (they affectionately call each other “Sissy”) and her husband Hayes Carll. During these events she performs music from her new album, also titled Blood. While that project is inspired by her family trauma, it is not a direct re-telling of it. Longtime producer Kenny Greenberg gives it a sonic texture that fits perfectly in a catalog that now spans two decades.

She caught up with the Bluegrass Situation by phone in between her travels.

BGS: I really admire the research you put into this project. You were willing to try to fill in some gaps. One of the passages that I thought was interesting was the email from your father’s friend, Leon, who wrote this line: “I’ve never figured out if Franklin was two people in one body or if he was one person who made a change into someone I did not know.”

AM: Yeah. That’s pretty powerful, isn’t it?

Do you remember the emotions you felt when you read that message from him?

I felt like I had been seen. Because that’s often how I felt about my father. One of the reasons I wrote to Leon in the first place was because very often I had heard about this great guy that my father was. So many people had admiration for him and the person that they described was not who I knew.

He was a teacher at Leroy High School. This was when I was very small but I remember him being the shop teacher, and he taught English. That’s how he was introduced to my mother in the first place, because he was a teacher where my aunt went to high school. He was a juvenile probation officer. His last job was overseeing the vocational school. And so he had an effect on a lot of people.

But at home, what I had in my mind was not matched up with this person that I heard people outside of our house describe. I spent probably too much time trying to reconcile that and what I know about that is we all are many things. Who we are on the outside is not always who we are on the inside, and we can be more than one thing at the time. So I think in some ways I came up with more questions than answers, but sometimes the questions are more important than the answers.

One thing I found interesting is that he seems to have passed on a love of music and a love of literature to you.

Absolutely.

Have you always been in love with words and storytelling?

Yeah. I don’t think that I knew when I was a kid that I was in love with words. I just knew I liked to read and I had an affinity for them. I somehow kind of knew how to read before I went to school. I went to first grade when I was 5 — funny thing about my momma, she decided that I didn’t need kindergarten and she forged my birth certificate and put me in first grade when I was 5.

It probably had something to do with her work schedule because kindergartners had a shorter school day I think. But they found out that, “Oh, well, Allison at age 5 goes in the advanced reading.” [Laughs] That’s a little revealing about who I am. But I definitely found solace in books and in music when I was a kid and still do, still very much do.

Your father was writing music and lyrics even before you and Shelby came along, but I didn’t know the history of “I’m the One to Blame” on your record. I heard the music before I read the book, then found out later that he wrote those lyrics. I was curious, how did the melody come about to that song?

Sissy wrote it. She found that lyric in his old briefcase, not long after they died. We were definitely in the throes of shock and grief, but I love that she was still able to go, “Hmmm, that’s pretty good. I think I’ll put tune to it.” [Laughs] She did, and she did a fantastic job. So that song’s been around all this time, and neither one of us had ever recorded it. I thought this album was a really good way to do that and to share that with the world. It was important to me that be heard and that he could finally get a song out there. I wanted to do that for him.

I think “The Ties that Bind” is one of the most eloquent songs you’ve ever written.

Thank you. I’m proud of that one, too. I think that’s something that every person asks themselves.

What was on your mind when you were writing that? Did you have to go to a certain frame of mind to get that song out?

Wrestling with the question of inheritance is a big deal for me. How do you take the good and not the bad? How do you make sense of where you come from, and from whom you come? And not drag all of the baggage with you? It’s a tough thing and it’s a never-ending question, right? It’s the theme of a lot of psychological exploration and family therapy and individual therapy. It depends on what school you come from, but a lot of things in people can be traced back to how they were raised, and by who raised them.

We inherited these qualities from our parents whether we want them or not. That’s what “All I Wanted” is about as well. It’s about that same thing – I really am sorry that I inherited your ability to argue with a fence post. But I’m really glad that I got, you know, whatever, this thing or the next thing. I think that’s something that we have to work at as people. I’m fascinated by families and by inherited traits.

There’s a passing reference in the book about how you can feel at home by putting books on the hotel nightstand. That struck a real visual with me. As you’ve moved over the years, you carried all your books with you?

Oh my God. You would not believe how much it cost to move those fuckers. Of course I did! And I’m sure you have the same problem. My books are my prized possessions in a way. I’ve got some guitars, I’ve got a kick-ass shoe collection, and my books, and my heirlooms from family and my little things… I don’t hang on to much. I’m not a hoarder of any kind. I like to keep things pretty sparse but it’s really difficult for me to get rid of a book.

You must feel very comfortable in a bookstore then.

I do. My dream job is to be a librarian.

I am curious about the book event that you just did in Mobile. Because so much of this book is set near there, what was it like for you to go back to that part of Alabama and tell the story?

Well, I played Birmingham on Wednesday night and Mobile on Thursday night, so I had family at both of them, and I have to say I was nervous about talking about this book in front of them. I didn’t ask permission from anybody, and I don’t have to, and I know that, but I still understand that some of these memories are painful. I also realize that some of the things that happened to my sister and me when we were kids might’ve still been unknown to some of our family members and our friends.

So, I’m aware of that and there’s part of me that wants to make sure everybody’s OK. But I also know that’s a trap. And taking care of people is not why I wrote this book. My desire to take care of people is not at all why I wrote this. I think that that’s worth mentioning because I think that not talking about these things is part of what perpetuates the cycle.

So I did feel very much that because I had family in the audience both nights, the instinct is to not say it, to not expose the secrets, to keep hiding because it makes everybody feel better. But what I know is that’s exactly the opposite reason of why I wrote this book. So I had to balance that with myself, and I was aware of it, and I just talked myself through it.

What caught me off guard in this book was the passage titled “What Happens When You Hit Your Daughter.” I felt that deeply.

A lot of people are feeling that.

What have people told you about that passage?

I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they’re going to hang it up in their office because they’re therapists. And I am no therapist. [Laughs] Or any sort of professional. I wrote that passage because I had done so much reading and research on the family and cyclical violence and what the effects of abuse are. On an intellectual level, it’s interesting, but on an emotional and personal level, it’s devastating to me. I have seen to varying degrees all of those things I talk about in that passage applied to my sister, I think. So I wrote it for us.

Look, it’s like this. I recognize that this book has done a lot for me in terms of me coming to terms with my childhood and in realizing what the fallout has been on us. It showed me to myself as art does. We reveal ourselves to ourselves through making art. And the wonderful thing about art and the purpose that it serves in the world is it serves as a mirror for other people. The job of the artist is to reflect the world.

And what I’m getting back from the world about this book is that it is encouraging other people to look under their own rocks and to look at themselves and look at where they came from. They want to then tell me their stories, which is a lot to absorb but I’m also honored and I’m happy about that because so much of these sorts of things are made worse by the shame that they put on us, because we’re told not to talk about Daddy’s drinking or Mama’s violence or whatever’s going on at home.

When children are told to deny what they see and hear and feel, they become distrustful of themselves. I have noticed that in myself. Because growing up we were always told, “Don’t say anything about this. Don’t say anything about that.” In essence, “This isn’t happening,” because you have to deny your feelings. I think that’s absolutely the wrong path. So if someone is able to speak their truth because I spoke mine, then it means I did a good thing.

Photo Credit: Heidi Ross

String Cheese Incident, Jim Lauderdale Share “Stories For Another Day”

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Colorado-based jamgrass troupe String Cheese Incident turned 25 this year, and although they’ve already established themselves as one of the most accomplished groups in jam music, they show no signs of slowing down in the next quarter-century. The band has spent their 25th year touring the country and releasing new music on a regular basis, their most recent single featuring the country-music-great Jim Lauderdale. (See the premiere below.) We called up SCI’s lead singer Bill Nershi to discuss the history of the band, how they’ve managed to stay so productive, and more.

BGS: Thinking about the fact that you’ve been a band for a quarter of a century has got to be awe striking. How have you managed to continue doing things your own way for so long?

Bill Nershi: Ever since we started, which was really 1995, we decided we were going to actually go for it. We met and played some local shows for a while, and then we moved out here to Boulder in ’95 and really started getting after it as far as touring. All these bands used to look for record deals and when we talked about it with other bands who had been through that we heard a lot of negative stories about dealings with record labels, so that’s when we decided to start our own label.

Twenty-five years ago, that must have been a big decision to make. How did the band come to the conclusion that music is what you were going to commit to?

We’ve always been trying to achieve things and get the best results we can from playing together. We work hard on rehearsing. Trying to improve our weaknesses as a band and trying to promote the positives. But really, when we first started, we were encouraged by the audiences that we were playing to and that really motivated us.

I had been playing a long time, and other people in the band had played music with different people, but that was the first time for me that I got together with a group that clicked right away. Even before our skills were really developed musically, there was a chemistry that we could feel — mostly that the crowd had picked up on — and that encouraged us to go for it. From then it was just “How are we going to go about this?”

We’re not going to be the band that has the hit single. So, we looked at some of the bands that had paved the way for us a little bit. How did the Grateful Dead do it? They didn’t have a hit for a really long time but they developed a following. And Phish of course was already successful. So we decided we were going to have to start traveling around and playing lots of shows in lots of different areas of the country to hit all the regions. We had two years where it seemed like I was gone almost the whole time. I think we played 450 shows in two years, and that gave us a lot of momentum for developing a bigger fan base.

It sounds like you approached this very methodically and really thought about how you were going to fit into the grand scheme of music.

Yeah, it needs to be thought out. Especially when you’re out that much and making sacrifices. You know, not seeing your family, or even just not being able to be at home. The idea for us was always, “We want to make every gig count.”

We were going around the country playing these clubs. Some of them had good sound systems, some of them didn’t, but we were carrying our own sound system. Money that we were making touring, which was not a lot back then, we put back into the band. We bought a sound system. We bought a bus from Crested Butte Mountain [Resort], and it was a good transit bus. We gutted it and put in bunks, so when other people were driving around in those little vans, which were just kind of torture chambers on wheels, we had our bus that we were driving around the country with.

We had a trailer with the sound system and our back-line amps and stuff, so we were going into places and sounding a little bit better than the last band sounded, you know? Trying to make it count when you’re making a lot of sacrifices. You don’t want to be wasting shows and wasting the ears that you do get in the room.

And that hits on another point: You’re perhaps best-known for your live performances. How does performing a song live contribute to its development before you hit the studio to record it?

Sometimes you have a new song that you play the same way for months, or even a year, and then you discover a different part or a way to open up a section of a song and go a little bit of different direction. Or you decide, “Hey, this would be better if it had one more verse here.” Things happen that change the song. It’s a bit of a quandary whether that’s better, or whether it’s better to release a song, let people hear it, and then play it live, which is what we’ve been doing mainly lately.

Sitting down and arranging a song in the studio before you play it live — what does that process look like for you?

You want to try to look at the song at some different angles and play it with some different approaches to see if there’s anything there that you may have missed or you might be able to add to the song, or what parts are expendable if you want to make it a little shorter.

The thought in the back of your head is, “I hope I don’t put this out and decide that part of it would be better played a different way, because then we’ll have to change the song and it’s going to be different than what the recording is.” You’re trying to exhaust some different ideas to make sure that you’re not missing something, and at the same time thinking about what are the crucial things that make this song tick so they can be brought the forefront when you record. Build the songs around the best ideas in the songs.

Moving on to this latest single with Jim Lauderdale. I hear very clear elements of his sound along with very clear elements of your own sound. What did that collaboration process look like?

I’ve written, and other members in the band have written, with Jim Lauderdale before and we’ve always had good results. You never walk away from sitting down with Jim empty-handed. He’s like a stream of ideas. You get done with one idea and he’s already singing some melody into his recorder, or some lyric from your conversation with him. And he has this whole chain of ideas going at all times.

I like to show up when I write with Jim with some different ideas of my own. Whether it’s a chord progression, or a lyrical idea, or a concept. Just an idea for a song. So I went out to Nashville and spent a few days out there with him, and you don’t want to go into a project like that and be sitting around going, “Uh….” So you come in with some ideas.

For this song, “Stories for Another Day,” I had this melodic chord progression with all these different parts. I played with a few different ideas and I played this one thing in D minor that I had been working on. I had been trying to think about how to make it work as an instrumental, or with lyrics. I played it for him, and he picked three chords out of one of the three different sections and said, “Let’s just write a song with that chord progression right there. Those three chords.”

So I had a lot of stuff that was maybe gratuitous in this concept that I had and he plucked this one simple idea out of it. We sat down and started writing some lyrics to that. It’s great writing with Jim.

Looking at some of the artists you’ve collaborated with in the past 25 years, the list is seemingly endless. How much of your own sound has sprouted out of collaborating with so many different kinds of artists?

Everybody’s contributing, so you get this blend of different styles and you can come up with something you definitely would not come up with on your own. You also learn things from the different people that you write and play music with. They rub off on you either consciously or subconsciously. Co-writing and collaborating is really important.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Old Crow Medicine Show: “Time to Start Doing Exactly What We Feel Like Doing” (Part 1 of 2)

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I can still remember the first time I saw Old Crow Medicine Show live. It was a sweltering summer night in Nashville around 2008 (back before the bachelorettes and Bird scooters) and they played from a massive barge moored at Riverfront Park. The thing was huge — far too big for six skinny street musicians to budge — but I swear it moved while they stomped and hollered, the Cumberland rolling by lazily behind them.

I was familiar with the band and already loved the unapologetic mix of tradition and edgy intensity, but that live show was revelatory. It gave me a new appreciation for the sense of community Old Crow was trying to forge, so it’s always surprised me that they didn’t record live albums. That has finally changed with this month’s release of Live at the Ryman.

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House on another hot summer night, front man Ketch Secor spoke with BGS about the project, why Old Crow is just now getting around to a live album, and what their style of music needs most right now.

BGS: Part of the idea of this album is that Old Crow has played the Ryman over 40 times. For a band that started out busking in the Northeast, how does it feel wrap your head around that?

Ketch Secor: Actually, I wish I had a real count because Lord knows I’ve played there more than 40 times. I think that’s how many times we’ve headlined, but if you add them all up I bet it’s a triple-digit number. We’ve been openers there for Dolly Parton back in 2002 for, like, a daytime show. We’ve done a lot of film and television there, all kinds of awards shows. It always felt like the place to shoot for — it’s the moon, the Ryman Auditorium, and we were always a shoot-for-the-moon kind of band because we figured “Well, we’re not supposed to be here anyway, so we might as well try and go as far with it as we can.”

You self-released one live album in 2001, and then nothing else until now. Why did it take 18 years to do another, since the live show has always been the foundation of what you guys do?

Oh, I think because we’ve always tried to put out a new studio record every couple of years, and here at the 21-year mark it’s probably time to start doing exactly what we feel like doing.

You haven’t been doing that the whole time?

Nah, not with those studio records. There’s a lot of stuff you’ve gotta do. Yeah, we always did it “our way” in the fact that we always played our own music. But just being in the music business means doing it everybody else’s way.

So you had to make a few compromises here and there?

Oh yeah, there was a lot of playing the game in ways that never seemed to pan out, but it never stopped us. That was just the way it was, and we were impressionable, so that’s what we did. We did it the way we were advised to do it.

Can you elaborate a little?

Like playing Napster. Doing shows for radio programmers in L.A. who never played us. Trying to make videos for CMT that were never in rotation, ever. …Opening up for Carrie Underwood at [Country Radio Seminar], it’s like, “What were we doing there?” Those guys, they might have liked it, but they were never gonna play it. And I don’t care if they like it, I want them to fucking play it, or I don’t want to play that show.

So now that you feel freed up to do it your way, what’s that look like?

Live at the Ryman. Here we are singing a Merle Travis song! Here we are singing our songs or selling popcorn and tickets and people brought their buck-dance shoes! I mean, we’ve set beer records at the Ryman. I’d rather sell beer at the Ryman than sell records! …I’d rather sell beer at the Ryman than digital streams! What’s the fun in that?

“Tell it to Me,” “Methamphetamine,” those are interesting songs to present because rural America has a new drug problem going on with opioids. Why is it important for you guys to sing songs like that, especially at the Ryman?

Well, “Tell It to Me” was recorded in Johnson City in 1928 I think. The band that brought that song to the studio had been an original backing band for Jimmie Rodgers… Anyway, I’m just saying this because if you like country music, you should probably know that drug songs have been part of the canon since recording studios first illuminated a red light bulb and said, “You’re on.”

I don’t think people do know that. We’re just now starting to get radio songs with pot references that people don’t flip out over.

Yeah, I mean it was blow in the ‘20s and now it’s pot in the 2010s. And then “Meth” is a really different kind of song because it’s more topical. We recorded it a long time ago but it seemed important to bring it back and revamp it, make it more intense, and Charlie Worsham plays some really great electric guitar on it. It just feels like it’s knocking on your door, like a hurricane.

Tell me about doing “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” with Margo Price.

We were down in Oxford, Mississippi, doing a show with Margo. She was opening up for us down there near Ole Miss, and we were looking for a song that seemed to fit, so we tried that one. Our duo thing felt really good, and I feel like I’m a little bit in the Conway range — and she’s definitely in the Loretta range — so it worked out pretty good. We heard the playback we thought it sounded great so we wanted to put it out. I saw her at the grocery store the other day and she said she loved it.

Why did you include a song like “C.C. Rider,” which has Lee Oskar playing harmonica?

I really love his band War. We did “Lowrider” onstage at the Ryman, too, maybe that will come out on Volume 2. But what I really loved about that moment on the Ryman recording is that it has twin harps. You know the old guys don’t have their pictures up here [gestures at photos of Opry stars on the dressing room wall]. …But the story of the twin harp playing of the Crook Brothers — Herman and Louis Crook — lives a long time, because Herman and Louis lived, like, into their 90s. What they were great at was two harmonicas playing in unison.

That’s interesting. In your music you’re often looking to the past for inspiration, but what do you think is the future of string bean …. er, string band music, Americana?

You just answered it, man. We need a new Stringbean. Nobody’s acting like that and that’s what’s missing. Who’s gonna be the clown? What happened to the kind of entertainment that’s self-effacing? Everybody on this wall loves the clowns, but none of them are. They’re “the vocalists” and we’re supposed to take them seriously. I’d love to see this genre — whether it’s country or Americana or whatever — just not take itself so damn seriously. Let’s just have a grand ole time. Let’s poke some fun at each other, and especially at ourselves. I’d love to see that.

Editor’s Note: Read part 2 of our interview with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.

Illustration: Zachary Johnson

Vince Gill Looks Back on His Bluegrass Years (Part 2 of 2)

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In the second half of our interview with Vince Gill, the country legend reflects on his bluegrass history, explaining how he became interested in the music, what he learned by listening closer, and why it led to one of his most famous songs.

Editor’s Note: Read the first part of our Artist of the Month interview with Vince Gill.

BGS: “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” in my opinion, is going to live forever. And I think the bluegrass audience loves hearing Patty Loveless and Ricky Skaggs sing with you, too.

Gill: You know, I wouldn’t have been able to write that song if I hadn’t played bluegrass music and learned the structure of that music and how it works — and the emotion of it. Bluegrass music is so honest and so real. Some of those morbid murder ballads and the saddest of the sad songs are what I love most. Give me “Mother’s not dead. She’s only a-sleepin’. Patiently waiting for Jesus to come.” That’s about as good as it gets. “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake.” I could just go on and on and on.

All these tortured songs, but you know they’re real life. They’re not somebody going, “How can I slip one up on the world and make a bunch of money having a big hit record?” They’re so honest and real. And the fact that my past had so much to do with Ricky and Patty, they were the only two people that I would’ve consider it singing on that song.

I still love it when Patty comes to do the Opry.

There’s a really unique thing that happens when our voices sing together. It’s so… obvious. I sang on her very first record in the early ‘80s. I sang on her first hit record and she sang on my first hit record. So it’s my little sis.

Tell me about how you found bluegrass. Was there an entry point for you?

Yeah, I knew of it because my dad played the banjo a little bit. He never could figure out the three-finger, Scruggs-style banjo. He cussed Earl his whole life because he couldn’t figure it out. He played more of a folky banjo. Not drop thumb, not old-timey, but more of a frailing kind of banjo. So I was always around the music, as best I can remember, forever. There were obviously the Flatt & Scruggs things from The Beverly Hillbillies that were in everybody’s DNA. Then I was playing mostly in rock bands in junior high school and high school.

A kid named Bobby Clark was the one that really got me pointed towards bluegrass. He had a little band in Oklahoma City and his father was a repairman. I had broken the string on my dad’s banjo, messing around with it, and I didn’t know how to change it. So I took it to Charlie and he put a string on it pretty quickly and everything was fine. I wasn’t gonna get my butt kicked. Then I started talking to Charlie, and he says, “You play music, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah, I love to play. I play electric guitar and play in rock bands and stuff.” He goes, “My son Bobby is a really fine mandolin player and plays bluegrass. You ever played any bluegrass?” I said, “No.”

They stuck an acoustic guitar in my hands and Bobby said, “We just had our lead singer leave the band and we’re looking for a singer.” So they did a pretty good job of raising me and teaching me and showing me how bluegrass worked. I played in their band for the last couple of years of high school. Then in another bluegrassy kind of band called Mountain Smoke. And I started playing all the festivals down around Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas. And ran into all the people that I’ve known in my whole life since I was 15, 16 years old.

Wasn’t that how you met Cheryl White [from The Whites]?

Yeah, I used to carry her bass around the festivals. I always had a thing for the girl bass players for some reason. There was another family band from Missouri called the Calton Family. Got sweet on Brenda. Then I got sweet on Cheryl. And she says I should’ve picked a harmonica player. [Laughs]

Those were such fun days and innocent. I loved the camaraderie that went on in that music. Not only with the people that came to the festivals, but the musicians. Everybody jammed together. There wasn’t a whole lot in it for anybody. Everybody was just kind of getting by. It was amazing, as I look back, what it did for me in the way that I respected other musicians and listened to other musicians. It was really important that I had a lot of that in my past. I haven’t forgotten it.

When I first heard bluegrass, I was just blown away by musicianship of it.

Yeah, I mean Stuart Duncan was as great as he was at 12 or 13. So was Mark O’Connor when he was 12 or 13. And Marty and Ricky and Jerry and on and on and on and on of these wonder kid pickers. Unbelievable. I kind of squeaked in because I could sing a little bit and figured out how play as I went. I kind of played whatever was left over in a lot of the bands I was in, and that was fine.

I saw you play mandolin on quite a few songs when you played Bluegrass Nights at the Ryman. What is it about that instrument that you really enjoy?

I think the mandolin is the most important drive of a bluegrass band. The banjo and that are the two most definitive sounds. In bluegrass, mandolin players are like the drummer, even more so than the guitar player to me. It’s that backbeat and driving it. Sam Bush was a great teacher of how you drive that music, you know? I loved the ferocity and intensity that he played with. When he played, that was powerful to watch as a 15- or 16-year-old kid.

That’s what I like. I like making it dance. I liked the importance of playing that instrument in bluegrass. I’m probably a much better guitar player in bluegrass than I am a mandolin player. But in some bands I had to play banjo. Sometimes I had to play, unfortunately, fiddle on a few things. Terrible! I played Dobro, I played everything. I played bass with Ricky’s band for a minute and then got to play some other instruments, but had a love for all of it. I still do. Probably I love it more now because it reminds me so much of my early days, and those first forays into learning about playing music.

Did Dobro come naturally to you?

It all kind of did. I mean, I put in the hours and I practiced hard. The neat thing was, you had such good people to learn from. I always had big ears and could always hear well and find what I was hearing in my head, figuring out how to play it.

There are so many brother duos that came up in bluegrass. Do you think that rubbed off on you with your harmony singing now?

Absolutely, yeah. I was trying to either be Ralph Stanley or Phil Everly or Ira Louvin or whoever. Don Rich and Buck Owens should’ve been brothers. I was a high singer so bluegrass was a natural fit. There have always been predominant high singers that were the focal point. Whether it was Ralph and Carter or whoever, man, that was a blend. You didn’t understand it when you were 15 or 16, what it was that made that blend so beautiful. It was the blood, you know. The DNA was the same.

I didn’t get to experience that until my oldest daughter was 18, 20 years old and we started singing together. I started calling her my little Everly because I’d spent my whole life trying to be Phil. You know, singing the high parts for everybody else, and blend perfectly, and every nuance they did, I’d do. And I’d just want ‘em to think I was related to ‘em. She wound up naming her daughter Everly because of that, because I called her my little Everly.

But yeah, I love sharing music. I love the collaboration of music more so than I like it by myself. It’s not as interesting by yourself, but when you get to play off somebody, and play with somebody, it’s very powerful.

Photo credit: John Shearer

Dalton Domino Emerges Intact from His Exile

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Dalton Domino had pretty much ticked off everybody he knew, prompting one friend to remark, “Looks like you’ve been exiled.” That off-the-cuff comment inspired the title of Texas musician’s rugged new album, Songs from the Exile, which he wrote in a year fueled by anger, addiction, and a desire to figure out exactly why he was making so many bad decisions.

“I have a really good knack of shooting myself in the foot, talking shit when I shouldn’t talk shit. It’s one of my biggest character flaws that I have,” he admits. “I’ve driven off a lot of people because I think that I’m right sometimes. And what that does, some people just stopped answering the phone.”

Disconnected from all but a few friends and striving to sort out his worst demons, Domino resurfaced with the autobiographical material that comprises Songs from the Exile. Surrounded by highly-regarded roots musicians chosen by producer Justin Pollard, Domino placed these hard-won songs against a live, in-the-room arrangement, which stands in stark contrast to the orchestration of his prior album, Corners. Not long after wrapping the sessions at Dauphin Street Sound in Mobile, Alabama, Domino checked himself into rehab — again.

More than once, his sobriety has helped him reconnect with his family, whose strong presence is felt throughout Songs from the Exile, particularly on tracks like “Half Blood” and “Hush Puppy.” His grandmother even kept him company as he drove from Dallas, where he lives, to Memphis, where she stopped off to see her son. Domino then detoured to Huntsville, Alabama, to catch up with his dad before swinging through Nashville for a gig and a chat with BGS.

BGS: There was a whole lot that happened leading up to this record, it sounds like.

DD: It was, man. It was a lot of falling off. I was sober for a little while and hitting meetings, and I just got in this rut. I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t paying attention and started drinking again. I thought I was fine and started drinking a little bit, and started doing some other stuff. It just started snowballing.

I cut this record and I was really confused and I had a lot of questions. And it was knee-deep in self-medication with questions. There were moments of clarity and then moments of, “What the fuck is going on?” I don’t know, it was like a quarter-life crisis. But yeah, it was a weird spot. That week getting away [to Mobile], it was nice to do that. It was nice to clear my head a little bit.

So you were using these songs to sort out what was going on with you?

Yeah, man. I was just angry at stuff. In hindsight, I thought I knew what I was angry about. In the same breath, in hindsight now, the stuff I was mad about wasn’t stuff you should be mad about.

It seemed like there was a breakup that threw you way off.

There was a breakup, then it was like, “Well, looking back in my life, they always leave this way. So what did I do?” And then it led to, “It’s me. I was the problem.” I was the asshole in the situation. Not them. I always place blame on them, then that led to, “Well, why do I act this way?” And then that looped into all these other questions I had about myself. That’s where a lot of the songs came from.

“Half Blood” seems like it was ripped from a page of your life. Is that pretty much how it went, where you were in the driveway going, “This is my fault that this is all falling apart”?

I think that every child of divorce at some point thinks that the reason that their family split up is because of them. I think it’s because that always happens with everybody. But that specific story, I set out wanting to write a song about my sister. We have different moms, that’s my half-blood sister. But I took it into a friend of mine, and she was tinkering around with the idea. She goes, “You know, you guys don’t really have too much to complain about, because your family does love you despite their flaws.”

These songs are very introspective, but it seems like you wrote them with an audience in mind, or at least produced them that way.

Yeah. That’s Pollard. I was trying to work on melody a little bit more, in the actual writing process of it. I know I needed to work on melody a little bit more. So, going into sitting down and writing the songs, I knew that I wanted them to be more melodic. I think that you can say whatever you want to say and you can put a good melody on it. At least for me, whenever I sit down to write a song it’s always to share with other people. It’s never just like, “This is mine. I wrote this for me to get off my chest.”

I wanted to ask about “Hush Puppy.” Is that based on something you overheard as a songwriter?

That’s a true story. That’s about my grandfather. He had this hush puppy recipe and he would never let anybody in the kitchen while he cooked it. And we thought he was always going to be around forever. We never did think to have it. But I made sure after writing that song, I sat down and got my grandmother’s cornbread recipe because I don’t want that want that to go the way of the buffalo. But, yeah, it’s a true story. It’s about how he died. He died alone in a V.A. hospital in Memphis.

What was the response when you played that song for your family?

My grandma liked it. You know, they all liked it. Yeah, they thought it was funny. I always tell a story about him. He was a character of his own, man. He was funny. I wish he was still around. He would enjoy all of this because he loved country music. He would enjoy coming up to Nashville and seeing stuff about Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. When he was alive, I wasn’t into country music. I just kind of ignored it. I loved punk music and I still love it, really hard stuff. My grandfather would love all this.

What was it like to see your dad again?

Dude, it was awesome, man. I hadn’t seen him in about a year and a half, or two years, and it was cool seeing him again. We talk on the phone and stuff but I hadn’t seen him in person in forever. He still is the same. I’ve got to drive back to go sign papers because I bought a car. He’s a car salesman. I asked him about a certain car and he was like, “Well, let me show you one. Why don’t we just go ahead and put you in this one?” And, “You know you’re qualified for a trade-in right?” I was like, “Goddamn it.” He said, “Go to your show, I’ll have the paperwork ready.” So I got to go back down there.

He made a sale.

Yeah, he made a sale, man! He’s the finance guy though. But, man, it’s always good seeing him. I saw my little brother last night, but I’m flying him out for a big show out in Lubbock on the 31st. So he’s going to come out there. The show’s 18 and up, and he just turned 18. So I’m going to show him Lubbock. Lubbock is my stomping grounds. That’s the place where I picked out to move to, so I consider Lubbock home. It’s his first time out there, and his first time at one of our shows.

I’ve not been to Lubbock.

Goddamn, it’s a blast!

So for those who read about what you went through, and they’re curious about how you’re doing now, what would you say about your frame of mind and how things are going?

I feel a lot better than what I did this time last year. This time last year, I was miserable. It was weird when we started this record, a friend of mine passed away. And I had a lot more questions. This time last year it wasn’t okay. It wasn’t good, but I still just kept digging in. And finally, this past year, this January, I asked for help with all those questions that I still had from writing the record, and what I thought about over the past year. I sought treatment and got help. I guess what I’m saying is, if somebody comes across this and hears this story, all I can say is, if you’re going through some shit, it’s OK to ask questions. It’s OK to feel bad, but go get some help. Help is out there. Help works.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Tanya Tucker Just Might Prove Her Dad Right (Part 1 of 2)

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Although her voice is instantly identifiable to even a casual country listener, Tanya Tucker has perpetually reinvented herself in the public eye since she debuted with “Delta Dawn” in 1972. From a mature teen singer in the ’70s, a scandalous star of the ’80s, and an award-winning vocalist in the ’90s, it’s never been easy to define her.

Now she’s back with While I’m Livin’, a stunning song cycle that shows her tender side as well as her rowdy, ready-to-party personality. It’s her first album of new material in 17 years, and by working with producers Brandi Carlile and Shooter Jennings, she’s made the most striking album of her career. Here’s the first of our two-part interview with Artist of the Month, Tanya Tucker.

BGS: I’m sure you’ve been approached to make a record over the last 17 years. What was it about this situation that made you say, “Yeah, let’s do it”?

Tucker: I’ve been working on other projects that I’m doing on my own. I’m really proud of those things and I hope that they see [a release]. I feel like this album, for some reason, is going to open that door. It seemed like before it was low interest. I don’t feel like there was a lot of interest. Maybe there was, I didn’t know about it, but when Shooter said something to me about it, I was like, “Yeah, great, great…” I went off and did Tucson and forgot all about it.

But I came back and it snowballed, and before I knew it, I was in LA doing some recordings on songs that I really didn’t know. I do my deal. I’ve done it all my life. When a song is pitched to me, I put my own something on it — I’ve changed a lot of ‘his’ to ‘her’ and made it my own. That’s one of the biggest compliments I’ve gotten from songwriters. I’ve heard from many of them that I can take their song and make it my own. They’ve always told me that, so it’s a very big compliment to me and I think that’s important. But this kind of came out of nowhere. I really can’t explain it. It kind of just happened and I don’t know how it happened. It did though. I’m pretty sure.

I’ve heard it, it’s real.

I think it is real. I’ve listened to it a few times and the good news is that the more I listen, the more I like it. Because it started out not that way.

What was your first impression of the final product?

I said, “No! Absolutely not.” I just didn’t hear it. I didn’t hear the songs as being anything I could really get into, or put my heart into. I really didn’t think it was going to be that good. I was wrong, and I love being wrong. I mean, I’m wrong a lot, but I was really wrong about that.

What was the relationship like in the studio with Shooter, and what’s he like as a person?

Well, Shooter’s great. I’ve known him before he was Shooter. But if you really would concentrate the time we spent together — very little time. But we spent more time probably on this project than we ever had, and we’ve become best friends. I wouldn’t say I had any better friends. He’s as good as any friend I’ve got.

Good. How about Brandi?

Oh, Brandi. She’s not even right. She is not local. She’s not of this world, she’s just in it. Yeah, she’s very exceptional. Something about her communication skills — maybe it’s just me, I don’t know, but I’ve watched her with everybody and you see the respect people have for her. … That’s the way that you want it to be. The way we made that record — I wish they were all that way. Brandi’s the same way [as Shooter]. I feel like she’s my best friend, totally. And I’d never heard her sing. Not until the Grammys and we were already done with the album.

What did you think when you heard “The Joke”?

I was blown away. Yeah. Blown away. And I loved “That Wasn’t Me.” I think I’m going to learn that one. I may not record it but behind closed doors I may learn that song. If anything, to just say thanks. Hell, she knows all of mine, I should probably start learning a couple of hers, you know? I’m way behind.

Well, it’s important who you surround yourself with. I mean, I don’t have to tell you that.

It used to be really hard for me to see anything bad about anybody. My dad was real good at seeing it before they even knew they were. He was very good about that. I hope that I am acquiring his skills. I’m still not as good as he was.

About a week ago, I read Nickel Dreams [Tucker’s 1997 memoir] and he was like your co-star in that book.

Yeah, well, he is the star, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never read the book, but they’re on to me about writing another book. I really think that’s the real story. If there was a movie, I believe it should be his life. And then when I get started, that would be the end of the movie. Sequel! I plan ahead. But I think his story is phenomenal and it really needs to be told. His life was pretty unbelievable.

Your childhood is pretty interesting, though, too. Living in Utah…

Arizona, Nevada, and Arkansas.

It is a very dramatic life.

Yes.

It would work well for a script.

Yeah, well, I lived it, so it’s not so interesting to me, but maybe it is. And if it is, then that’s great.

What do you think your dad would say about this record if he had a chance to listen to it?

Oh wow, that’s a good question. Wow, oh wow…. Well, I’d have to say I believe he would love it because there’s two or three songs in there about him. The Twins [Carlile’s longtime bandmates, Tim and Phil Hanseroth] and Brandi actually wrote and custom-fit those songs to me, which is a real talent right there. One that I do not have, among others. But they have the talent. I don’t know if they have it all the time or if it was just this one time. They brought it all together. I don’t know. But I know that it’s unusual.

In fact, Brandi said, “God, I’d give anything if I could’ve met your dad.” And I told her, “Well, he didn’t like many people, but I do believe he would’ve liked you. I really do.” … I think he would like those songs but I think he would definitely be proud of “Bring My Flowers Now”. Because he always told me — Oh my God! You know what? I just figured something out.

What’s that?

My dad told me once, he said, “Let me tell you something.” He said, “The biggest record you’ll ever have, it’ll be the one that you wrote.”

How old were you when he told you that?

Oh, he told me several times. I was already started. I mean, it wasn’t when I was a kid, but many times he’d tell me that. “That’s what you need to do, is write.” But he didn’t like the association that I had to associate with to write. Because back in the day, party party party. Stay up all night, write a few songs. Stay up for a few days and something’s going to come out of it. He didn’t like that part of it. Now it’s become like a business. Meet me at 8:30 and we’ll write until 10:00, we’ll be done before noon.

But you had the Song House, which I read about in your book. You lived there, and then all the songwriters would come over.

Yep, right. Yep, that’s true.

So you love that association.

Oh yeah. I love to party, too, so it all kind of went hand in hand, like alcohol and cigarettes, or cocaine and cigarettes, and alcohol. And blackjack, throw that in there.

Read the second part of the interview.

Lede photo: Derrek Kupish

Ranky Tanky Takes Gullah Culture Around the Globe

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You don’t need to know the first thing about Gullah culture to appreciate Good Time, the second album by the South Carolina quintet Ranky Tanky. But each song provides a short lesson on this little-known corner of American music.

Take “Sometime,” an absolute jam that’s so fast, so breakneck that you have to wonder how the musicians can keep up with it. The rhythm section sets the white-knuckle pace, with drummer Quentin Baxter playing his snare like he’s an entire fife-and-drum band and Kevin Hamilton’s nimble bass adding a percolating low end. Vocalist Quiana Parler instigates a boisterous call and response with her bandmates, hitting high notes like she’s in church. Charlton Singleton’s trumpet snakes fluidly around the other instruments, while Clay Ross interjects a quick guitar solo that sound like New Orleans by way of Mali.

Delirious and joyous, “Sometime” presents all the individual elements of Gullah music, tracing a lineage through the U.S. and back to Africa. Never as popular as zydeco in Louisiana or rural blues in the Delta, it nevertheless has a unique sound, at once fresh and familiar as the instruments interact energetically with each other. Gullah culture developed along the South Carolina coast and on the Sea Islands, extending down into Georgia where it became known as Geechee culture.

It is a culture weighted with history, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ranky Tanky is how they work around that history, taking it into account but never letting their music settle into a revivalist vein. Good Time lives up to its title by sounding perfectly present tense. “We have a good time, as a band,” says Quiana Parler. “When I deliver these songs, I’m having so much fun onstage.”

They have taken that joy around the world, too. When they spoke to the Bluegrass Situation, the band was sitting in a hotel lobby in Madrid, where they were enjoying a day off from touring and getting ready to take in the sites of Spain.

BGS: Do audiences respond differently to your music in Europe than they do in America?

Clay Ross: Our experiences at festivals in Europe have probably been among our best gigs ever. The audiences are engaged on a different level. They’re really invested. We’re a band that maybe they’ve never heard of or seen, because in a lot of cases it’s the first time we’re playing that city. But when we do a crowd participation thing in our show, you can see every person engaging with the music, from the front of the stage all the way to the back of the room. It might be 5,000 people, but they’re all right there with you. It’s been a pretty powerful thing. I don’t know if there’s a greater cultural appreciation for music here or perhaps we’re more novel here than we are in our own country.

Quiana Parler: The support at home has been unbelievable, but overseas it’s completely different. They appreciate you differently. We don’t take any of it for granted, though. We’ve played only five or six times at home in the past five or six years because we’ve been so busy. What a blessing.

CR: By far the vast majority of our performances have been in the U.S., so we don’t have as much to compare it to. But the two dozen concerts that we have done over here, every single one of them has been sold out. And every single one of them has been met with an overwhelming response. We try to make our live shows exciting. We’re a touring band, after all. We’re live performers and improvisers, so every concert is a different event.

That seems to make the music very urgent and immediate. The new album doesn’t sound like a revivalist project.

QP: That’s our duty, I like to say. It’s a way of life for us. We went into this with good intentions — to get the message of the Gullah people out there internationally — and I think when you go into a project like this with something positive, you really get what you put into it. When Clay brought the idea for this band to us, we decided that we had to figure out a way to get the message across and have it be relatable. It couldn’t get lost in translation. So we had to remain true to the Gullah culture. We couldn’t sugarcoat anything. We had to make it very authentic.

CR: One thing I think is very special about this band is that we have different perspectives on that culture. Four of the group members are descendants of the culture and have their own unique cultural experiences growing up. I myself grew up around it and consider myself a disciple of the music, but I’m not a Gullah descendant and I’m not integrated into it the same way. I think that process has been special for us, because it allows us to see things in fresh ways and to qualify those ideas against actual experiences. But most of all we just want to make sure we honor and respect the Gullah culture.

Do you find that people are familiar with Gullah culture? Do they know where you’re coming from?

QP: Not really. People know about zydeco and other cultures, but we’ve never had much focus on the Gullah community, which is the root. But people are very open to it and very intrigued by it. They want to know more, which is a good thing. It’s been received very well, thank you Jesus.

Why do you think Gullah culture has been ignored?

QP: I have no idea. I don’t know. It’s not in history books either. I didn’t learn about this in school. Somehow it got put away. It’s sad.

On both of your albums, you’re going back and finding older songs to add to your repertoire. What is that process like?

CR: I brought a lot of that repertoire to the group for their consideration. I’ll bring in a field recording or some ideas based on research that I’ve done. We’ve studied the music of Bessie Jones, the field recordings of people like Alan Lomax. He and other folklorists visited the Sea Islands in Georgia and South Carolina and created books and recordings of that material.

Those places were so remote, so geographically isolated, so those songs and traditions would have been passed down through a hundred years or more of oral tradition. Now things are changing with technology and those places aren’t so isolated. It’s become a little more difficult to preserve those traditions, so we want to honor the people who passed this music down through so many generations while adding our own voices.

What is your background with Gullah music?

QP: It’s the church! It’s all embedded in the church. Most of us grew up in church and that’s where we learned a lot of these songs. There might be a few differences in the words or the rhythms of a song from one church to another, but it’s still the same. That’s how it’s been for generations and generations, and I’m still passing it down to my children. My son is 11 years old and playing drums in church. They’re playing the same songs that we grew up singing. It’s a little different with the millennials, but it’s the same thing. It’s in their DNA. My son was born into Gullah culture on his dad’s side, so it’s in his blood.

CR: When I came to the band members three or four years ago, it was maybe more of an academic idea: Let’s do these specific public domain songs with these unique arrangements and put our own spin on them. It was very specific material. What I think has been the most special thing about evolution is that with this new album, we’re writing our own songs inspired by just spending time together and playing concerts together. Our goal in the writing process is to create a seamless bridge between the traditional material and our original material. If you hear it and you think something doesn’t fit, that would represent a failure on our part artistically. We’re very conscious of that during the writing process.

What is that process like? Is it something where one of you brings ideas to the band, or are you working these out together?

CR: A lot of the material — I would say the frame of the house — might start with Quiana in soundcheck. Maybe Kevin [Hamilton] starts a riff on his bass and Quiana sings a line, then from that point something that just feels good can be the flame that starts a fire. We start to shape it, and everybody contributes. Everybody designs their own parts and everyone contributes to the shape of the songs. I end up writing a lot of the words, but that’s just something I’ve always liked to do. It’s a way I can contribute.

What can you tell me about the song “Freedom”?

QP: The idea for “Freedom” is something I came up with because of something I was going through personally. And it just so happened to coincide with adversity that other people have had to deal with. African people have always dealt with adversity. We all want the same thing at the end of the day. We all want freedom. That’s something Clay emphasizes in the lyrics—that struggle for freedom.

CR: When Quiana came up with that idea for “Freedom,” I went home and wrote ten verses about that idea. Then we ended up picking up three or four that worked the best. It’s a bit like that. But everybody contributed, and that’s something I’m grateful for. We’ve had this amazing opportunity to align our powers.

Dealing with adversity and struggle seems to be a theme on the album. “Beat ‘Em Down” is a good example. It sounds like a violent phrase, but the song clarifies: “Beat ‘em down with love.”

QP: Kill ‘em with kindness. Hate is such a strong word, and I’ve always [believed] that you love someone instead of hating them. You love the hell out of them! You don’t fight fire with fire. You reciprocate with love and compassion. That’s the only thing you can do.

Lede photo credit: Sully Sullivan for Garden & Gun Magazine

Church photo credit: Peter Frank Edwards

Rod Picott Feared This Might Be His Final Album

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Rod Picott writes from the heart, and that’s particularly true on his new album, Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil. A frightening heart condition – mercifully caught just in time – shifted his songwriting perspective inward, resulting in 12 news songs recorded with merely an acoustic guitar, a harmonica, and a storyteller’s voice.

That’s a familiar set-up to anyone who’s seen Picott perform over the last 20 years. The Nashville-based songwriter released his first album, Tiger Tom Dixon’s Blues, in 2001, and he’s toured almost constantly since then. While most of his albums are fully produced, Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil is almost whispered in places, inviting listeners to lean in.

Lately, Picott has turned his attention to writing fiction, poetry, and a screenplay, but music remains a central theme of his life and career, clearly evidenced by a conversation in a Nashville coffee shop.

BGS: I’m curious about the song “Ghost,” because it describes somebody who seems to be at the end of his rope. What was on your mind when you were writing that song?

RP: I was in the middle of [the health scare] when I wrote that one. I did feel there was a time during the making of this record where I thought it’s possible that this will be the last record that I get to make. And if that’s the case, what do I want to say? How do I want it to be? I realize that sounds dramatic, maybe overdramatic, but when you’re in the middle of it, it sure doesn’t feel like that.

Because you thought you weren’t going to live? Or you weren’t going to be able to sing?

Didn’t know. I mean, I knew something was wrong and I knew it had something to do with my heart. My blood work came in. The doctor called me at night. Of course they don’t do that. He’s the on-call guy and he basically said, “You need to stop whatever you’re doing right now. You need to drive to the pharmacy and pick up this prescription. I’ve already called it in. They’re waiting for you.” He said, “You need to do it right now or you might not make it through the night, because your potassium level is so high, it’s messing with the electrical signals to your heart.” A simple thing like that — potassium levels. Who would know? They eventually got it figured out.

Did it affect the way you sing, or your singing voice in general?

I was weaker when I was recording, to be honest with you, which might have played a role in how intimate the recording sounds. I’m singing pretty quietly on most of the songs. Not all of them, which is counterintuitive because the quieter I sang, the bigger it sounded, which is very strange. It’s like cinéma-vérité, like I’m actually living the thing that I’m singing about, and it’s playing a role in how I’m singing.

I can hear some of that, but it’s not like this album has 12 songs from the brink of doom.

No, no, there’s a range. And there’s one song from 20 years ago, “Spartan Hotel,” which never fit in any of the other records, but it felt right for this record. There’s a handful of songs I still like from back then, but they just haven’t fit on a project.

On “Mama’s Boy,” you’re singing about boxing and it reminded me of “Tiger Tom Dixon’s Blues,” from your debut album. What’s your relationship with those older songs now? Do you still like to play those songs from the early records?

I’m still proud of them, yeah. I still play those songs from that first record. I wish I could redo the performances now, because I think I’m a better, more honest singer than I was then. But when I moved to Nashville, or even before I moved, I promised myself I wasn’t going to make a record until I had 10 songs I thought were worth people hearing. So that served me well, even though it took me a long time to get there. That first record, the songs themselves still hold up. I still play them all the time.

What was it like for you to move to Nashville in that era? What was your impression of it here?

I was married at the time and obviously my wife came with me. I’d never been to Nashville. I didn’t know anybody that lived in Nashville. I didn’t even know anybody who knew anybody who lived in Nashville. So it was completely blind. We got a hotel downtown and went for a walk. And of course, in 1994, half of downtown was boarded up, old porno shops and stuff.

At one point on the walk, we were looking for a restaurant. You couldn’t even find a single restaurant. We couldn’t find any place to eat. She just stopped and started sobbing: “Why did you bring me here?” [Laughs] But over the next six months or a year, I figured out the lay of the land. Playing a lot of open mics, and meeting other writers and really working hard at trying to decode how the town worked.

How did you found your tribe? Just going out to open mics?

Yeah, for sure. That was a big part of it. And writers nights where they would have a little 20-minute spot, as opposed to just getting on the list. Those were better, kind of playing a mini set. It was a huge learning curve. I loved to go into the Bluebird Café. I used to go to the early shows at the Bluebird right after work and sit at the end of the bar. I was one of those classic guys with a notepad, which is really annoying to other songwriters, because they feel like you’re stealing the song. Which I wasn’t, I was just making notes about what worked and what didn’t. It was wonderful. Soon after that, I realized Nashville had John Prine, Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Guy Clark, and I thought, OK, this gives me a marker to shoot for.

In your work, there’s often a theme of your family and a theme of a work ethic — and a lot of times they’re in the same song. Is that something that was instilled in you?

I think it’s just you write what you know. That really defined my childhood. My father was a solid, blue collar union guy, in the pipefitters union. He was a welder and surrounded by other really hardworking men. So I’ve always been really interested in that, because I was a slightly unusual kid. I was very sensitive, which didn’t work with my father’s personality. I don’t think he really knew what to do with me. Now I can look back and see the kid that’s me, and I can think, “Well, now I understand it. I was an artist.” But I was just a kid. I wasn’t there yet, so it was a very uncomfortable relationship for a long, long time with my father.

I’ve always been interested in those themes. Also I was in the construction world for a long, long time, for almost 20 years. I was a sheetrock hanger and finisher. Having an artistic nature and working in the construction world is a very, very tricky balancing act. I had to learn how to be tougher, which wasn’t my nature, really. I learned when you had to stand up for yourself and not get run over, but it was uncomfortable. I always felt like I had one foot in the arts and one foot in this working world. I took it seriously and I was really good at it. I loved walking out of a job and seeing those clean lines and knowing I did the best I could, and that the painter was going to have a really easy time with the job.

That’s pride in your work.

Yes. And that’s part of your inner makeup. That’s either there or not. It’s not something you can fake or create.

You’ve been doing making music as you’re living for a while now. What’s your secret?

You almost have to be in a state where you can’t not do it. I do remember having a really specific moment before I put the first record out. I was 35 years old and I had been in Nashville for six years then, I guess. I did have an afternoon where I had this sort of “come to Jesus” moment where I thought, “Man, if you’re not going to do it now, you’re not going to do it. Like, today. You start today.” I remember the feeling coming over me, and it was almost like panic, realizing that I hadn’t started yet, not really. I was learning and I was working hard at it, but I wasn’t really committed to it. I was sort of testing it to see if I could do it. That afternoon, I committed to it and I never looked back.

Photo credit: Stacie Huckeba

Joe Pug: From Family Roots to ‘The Flood in Color’

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Joe Pug rises to the occasion on The Flood in Color, his first new album in four years. Recorded in Nashville with lightly textured production from Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids, the quiet collection conveys a man willing to look back on his life. Meanwhile, Pug relocated from Austin, Texas, back to his home turf in Maryland, and started a family. The Flood in Color is not filled with songs about domesticity, however. Instead, there’s a folk flair – and occasionally a topical perspective – that Pug’s longtime fans will immediately embrace. So will listeners of his podcast, “The Working Songwriter.”

Corresponding by email, Joe Pug answered these questions for The Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: This album feels like a body of work that’s intended to be taken as a whole. Do you see it that way as well?

Pug: Yes. There’s been a decade of talk about how the album is dead, about how everyone is going to switch to putting out singles willy-nilly, about how the format for an album was just a consequence of a vinyl record’s physical limitations. And fair enough. Maybe when my kids come of age and Spotify is the only thing they’ve ever known, that will be the case.

But for the time being, you have a whole generation of artists who grew up with that format and who still conceive their creative works within its boundaries. More importantly, you have a generation of listeners who are expecting and desiring to hear songs in that format. So I did intend for these songs to be heard together, and heard in the order that they’ve been sequenced.

In the song “Exit,” there’s a reference to a highway west of Davenport and Kansas – that’s an interesting choice for a lyric. What sort of imagery does that line bring to you?

There was a period of time in my early 20s when I was living in Chicago and working 9 to 5 during the week as a carpenter. At night, I would play open mics in the city. And on the weekend, I would self-book these mini tours across the Midwest. They’d go through Sioux Falls, Des Moines, Eau Claire, and Maumee, Illinois. The imagery in this song comes from that time when I was young, on the road in America, completely alone, close to broke.

It was a completely insane idea. It was like going over the entirety of our huge country with a magnifying glass. In fact, when I’d get pulled over by cops for speeding and they’d ask why I was in their small town at 2 in the morning, they would never believe that I had left Chicago to play some hole-in-the-wall in their town. To their credit, they were right, it made no sense.

Why did The Flood in Color fit well as an album title for this particular project?

Very rarely, an idea will come to me in my sleep. Or to put it more specifically, in the very last moment before I drift off to sleep. It’s a cruel joke. I will have been working on some damned terrible song for hours one day and going to bed empty-handed. And then some completely unrelated idea — a phrase, a lyric, a melody — will suddenly appear in my head as I’m lying prone and waiting for sleep. I have to drag myself out from under the covers and write it down.

“The Flood in Color,” that phrase came to me one night like that. And I knew it was the album title. Right before we went into the studio, I took a swing at writing it as a song. It came out to our liking, so it became the title and the title track.

This record feels intimate and meaningful, especially with the spare production. When you had the final mixes back, who was the first person you played them for? What was the reaction?

I played them for my father. And he really liked them. I know that because I’ve always played him my rough mixes early on, for every album. He never gives me in-depth critiques, but if he doesn’t like something he just keeps his mouth shut. These were the first songs in quite a while where he didn’t keep his mouth shut. I could tell it really moved him.

What is that experience like for you to bring a complete, new song into the world?

My process takes a really long time. From the initial writing, to the editing, to the recording, mixing, mastering, and finally the release. So some of these songs are two years old. I’ve spent countless hours with all of these. So by the time they come out, I feel a strange distance from them. They feel like someone else’s songs to me. And I can finally appreciate them or critique them on their own merits rather than songs I have an intimate connection to.

I understand that you are living in Maryland now. Why is that?

My wife and I started a family three years ago. We’re both from Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is a very special place right outside of DC. We wanted to be around family. Plus if I had spent another two years living outside of Maryland, then I would have spent more years of my life living elsewhere. There was always an internal clock in my head that was ticking towards moving back home. I wanted to go out and see the world, I wanted to do my own small version of Campbell’s hero’s journey. But I also wanted to end up around my family and I wanted my kids to grow up around family.

To me, “The Stranger I’ve Been” feels like a lost treasure of country music. Who are some of the country artists who have shaped your work?

Oh, a ton, but not necessarily anything obscure or surprising: George Jones, Harlan Howard, Gillian Welch, Tom T. Hall, Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, The Louvin Brothers.

Are you a vinyl collector? If so, what kind of records do you always keep an eye out for?

I am not. Only a vinyl seller. Haha.

On another topic, what are some of the most impactful books you’ve read lately?

Oh man, I’ve got two kids under 3 years old, I’ve taken a pause from my reading regimen. I’ve been using podcasts and audiobooks to fill the gap. Because I can listen to them with what you might call “found time”… driving the car, doing the dishes, mowing the grass, exercising. My favorite podcasts to spend time with are “Hardcore History with Dan Carlin,” “Duncan Trussell Family Hour,” “Henry and Heidi” (with Henry Rollins), and “The Lowe Post” (for basketball).

You have a podcast dedicated to songwriters. What has surprised you the most about that project?

How often songwriters, especially very successful songwriters, think that they’re finished, that they’ll never work again, that they’ll never find another inspiring tune. It’s inspiring on one hand to think that these people I admire have to go through the same tribulations. It’s frightening on the other hand to learn conclusively that there is no final creative plateau that you can reach and just build your house on. You can’t ever stop moving forward because you’ll turn to stone. You have to keep moving forward creatively or time will pass you by. And that is a positively exhausting lesson to learn.

Has there been a common thread among your guests so far?

The show began as only people who were in my phonebook, people that I could get a hold of directly. Now as the show has grown and we’ve had a history of good guests, we’re starting to branch out and pitch the show to bigger artists that I don’t have a personal relationship with.

This is your first album in four years – and it’s a record to be proud of. What are you now looking forward to the most?

For people to hear this damned thing! I don’t know if people will like it or not, but this took everything I had creatively for three years. So I’m at peace with however they feel about it. I happen to really like it, so at this point I’m looking at everything else as gravy.

Photo credit: Dave Creaney