Tag: Interview

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

Jamestown Revival Find Their Sound on ‘San Isabel’

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There are more trees than people in San Isabel, Colorado, where the Wet Mountains poke the sky and Jamestown Revival’s Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay set up a makeshift recording studio in a cabin. The Texas natives emerged with San Isabel, a gorgeous new album that marks both a return to Jamestown Revival’s acoustic roots and a bold step forward into more topical lyricism.

While addressing the unease now shaping the country’s collective mindset is a first for the pair, the record maintains Zach and Jonathan’s anchors of empathy and hope – along with their now-signature Southern folk harmonies that are woven together with that unexplainable richness usually reserved for families.

With a day off from touring, Jamestown Revival called in for a conversation with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: Location seems important to you guys. Take your album titles, for example. Utah was your first, and now, with San Isabel, you’ve returned to an album title that documents where you recorded. You’re not from or living in Utah or Colorado, but you sought them out. Why?

Jonathan Clay: Colorado is a place we’ve always loved. Long story short, we had access to a summer cabin in Colorado, and we thought, Gosh, we should take advantage of this.

Zach Chance: It’s kind of twofold. It was access to those places and trying to record in a guerrilla fashion. We enjoy the adventure of it — going and setting up in these settings, being removed — it just makes for a really fun process for us.

JC: For us, the city is not really conducive to creativity. It’s just not where I feel compelled to create.

ZC: The city has its own flavor of inspiration. It does inspire us at times, but it’s not really where we like to record, so…

JC: We have a habit of getting out into the woods when we’re ready to make an album.

Why did you guys decide to return to a more acoustic sound this time around, compared to The Education of a Wandering Man?

ZC: We weren’t touring as much as we had been the past couple of years. We’d been writing for some other things, and we just really wanted to go back to two voices – to write songs that could work with one guitar and two voices, back to the roots of what we were doing. I don’t know if it was all the noise of the time we live in right now, but we wanted something more centered around traditional folk storytelling. We were listening to a lot of Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young – stuff like that. We felt compelled to live in that world.

Do you have favorite songs on the new record?

ZC: I don’t know. As soon as we start talking about them, I’ll tell you all the reasons I love them. Maybe I’m too diplomatic. I love “Harder Way” and “Who Hung the Moon.” That was a song we wrote in Colorado and recorded in a day. They’re like children. We love them all equally but differently. This might sound really dumb [Laughs], but there have been times playing “Crazy World” that I get kind of choked up. I start thinking about everything, and I get a little sad. The first few times we played it out, I got really emotional. We want to write stuff that ages like we’re aging — that matures a little bit.

JC: I think that’s a good point. We want our art to grow with us and mature with and without our listeners. I really like “Who Hung the Moon.” “Harder Way” is a pretty special song. I’m actually pulling my three-year-old boy on the scooter right now, humming melodies that I don’t know. It’s a special thing. When I sing the line about my boy, it’s coming from a real place. I have to hold back emotions sometimes because I think, I’ve got an audience to perform to. I can’t get choked up because that makes it hard to sing.

It seems like more and more artists feel obligated to address the uneasiness in the country right now. San Isabel does it – not necessarily explicitly, but it is still more topical than your previous work. Did you feel obligated to do that?

JC: I don’t think it was out of obligation more than it was just compulsion. We just felt compelled. It’s on everybody’s mind –everybody’s consciousness. As an artist, I think your consciousness manifests in your songs. That’s what happened with us.

First, you take a beat to acknowledge the despair a lot of folks are feeling in “Crazy World.”

JC: Zach and I have always been careful not to speak from some place of moral high ground. We don’t want to be just one more person preaching to somebody, as if we’ve got all the answers, because I think the problems plaguing our country are very complicated. If you oversimplify them and place blame, you’re falling victim to the very thing you’re proclaiming to rally against.

In a lot of our songs, we just point out what we see. It’s almost a lament rather than a judgment. We’re all in this together. All of our countrymen and women, we created this – we all played a hand in it. We’re trying to point out our observations and underscore the fact that we’re all on the same team, when you really get down to it. We all do care about each other. I feel like we’ve got more in common than we realize sometimes. It seems like sometimes the world is wrapped up in greed and malice and angst and vitriol rather than peace and — not to sound cheesy, but — harmonious things, the things that really give us happiness.

ZC: Yeah, it’s funny. “Crazy World (Judgment Day)” and “This Too Shall Pass” are back to back on the album. And those are like two sides of the same coin, you know? “Crazy World” is the day you wake up and think, I have zero hope for humanity. The idea was you’re sitting in a bar, and you’ve had a few to drink. Stuff is coming across the news, and you’re just discussing the state of affairs, like, “Yeah, man. It’s still a crazy world. Not much has changed.”

I love that you just brought up that it’s like those two songs are two sides of the same coin because it does feel like “This Too Shall Pass” offers some comfort.

ZC: Yeah, as dark as I can get, I recognize that I’m probably a glass is half full person. John, I think you are too.

JC: Oh, I’m a hopeless optimist.

ZC: [Laughs] So, that song speaks to that. No matter how dismal it is, we have to find a silver lining. Friendships and family are where the true joys in your life come from, more often than not.

What’s the best thing you’ve encountered or experienced back on the road this time?

ZC: Oh gosh, I have so many good ones. Eating dumplings in New York in this little shop in Chinatown. We crammed in with all our people, sat with strangers, and the beers were flowing. Those nights are fun. The camaraderie of being on tour again: You’re just living together, and you come home with a million new inside jokes and phrases.

JC: One thing that was really cool about this tour is we brought somebody out in our crew as a roadie who had never been out of Texas. We saw the world through his eyes. His parents brought him here from Mexico when he was six years old. He hasn’t had the opportunity to do much traveling. I met him and thought he seemed like a cool dude, so we gave him a job as a roadie.

ZC: We’re all a bit more advanced in age and have made a few more laps around the country, so in some ways, you can be jaded by that. But he’s 21, and experiencing all these things for the first time. It was really fun to relive some of this stuff through his eyes.

On this album, it feels like you have found your sound, at least for now. Comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel are inevitable, but ultimately, you don’t sound like anyone else out there right now.

JC: Well that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that.

ZC: We definitely look up to Simon & Garfunkel and the Everly Brothers and would gladly take a comparison, but humbly say those guys are masters. We’re trying to figure it out.

JC: Yeah, those guys are masters, but we want to be masters. Somebody’s got to carry the torch. I’m not saying that in a cocky way, but I would love to be somebody that attempts to carry the torch. It’s what we love to do, and it’s what we love to sing. Singing without harmony — I don’t enjoy it half as much. When I sing with Zach, my voice feels complete. So it’s almost like a musical necessity for us.

If it were just the harmonies, the comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel would still come, but it’s your writing too, which is so strong.

JC: A lot of people still ask, “Are y’all brothers? The way y’all harmonize, I feel like you have to have grown up with each other.” Well, we’re not brothers, but we have been singing together since we were 15 years old, so I guess that’s about as close as you can get without being blood-related. It’s like a vocal marriage.

As far as the writing goes, we try to be thoughtful and not say things in a way that’s been said before. We knew early on that we wanted to be the kind of writers who are not overly esoteric or hard to understand. We wanted to speak in a way that’s plain and understandable but at the same time, maybe put in a way that you haven’t quite heard it put before.

Photo credit: Paul Pryor

LISTEN: Willie Nelson, “My Favorite Picture of You”

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As one of country music’s greatest interpreters, Willie Nelson has put his indelible stamp on Guy Clark’s late-career masterpiece, “My Favorite Picture of You.” It is a stunning centerpiece of Nelson’s latest project, Ride Me Back Home.

“What I remember most about recording the song was the reverence and respect with which all the musicians showed the lyrics and melody as we were recording it,” says producer Buddy Cannon. “I chose to present this song to Willie because, from the moment Guy Clark sang it for me at his home one morning a few years ago, I have not been able to get the song and the photograph the song was written about out of my head. As Guy was getting ready to sing the song for me he reached behind him and took the photograph of his wife off the wall and told me the story of where the song came from. The song is timeless, just like Willie Nelson is timeless. A perfect marriage of singer and song.”

In the exclusive video below, Nelson shares his own thoughts on Guy Clark and “My Favorite Picture of You.”

Photo credit: Pamela Springsteen
Video courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

Brandi Carlile: An Interview from Doc Watson’s Dressing Room

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Give or take, it’s about 2,800 miles from Brandi Carlile’s native Seattle, Washington, to Wilkesboro, North Carolina, home to the renowned music gathering known as MerleFest. (See photos.) And as the Saturday night headliner this year, the award-winning singer-songwriter took to the Watson Stage during the 32nd annual MerleFest, surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains and an overzealous audience in the neighborhood of 30,000.

Backed by her rollicking Americana/indie-rock band, which includes founding members Phil and Tim Hanseroth (aka: “The Twins”), Carlile held court during an unforgettable performance that led to one of the festival’s finest moments — Carlile around a single microphone with North Carolinians Seth and Scott Avett for an encore of the Avett Brothers’ “Murder in the City.”

But a few hours before that performance, Carlile found herself standing backstage alone in the dressing room of the late Doc Watson, the guitar master who founded MerleFest. Gazing around the small square space, she looked at old photos of Watson and other legendary Americana and bluegrass performers that have played MerleFest over the years: Earl Scruggs, Alison Krauss, Peter Rowan, Rhonda Vincent, Tony Rice, and so forth.

Carlile smiled to herself in silence, truly feeling humbled in her craft and taking a moment to reflect on her wild and wondrous journey thus far, all while possessing a once-in-a-generation talent — something broadcasted across the world during her staggering performance of “The Joke” in February at the Grammys, and amid a standing ovation from the music industry. Remarkably she also picked up all three Grammys in the American Roots Music categories.

We met Carlile in Watson’s dressing room before the show for our interview and surveyed the steps she’s taken from Seattle to the MerleFest stage.

BGS: It seems as big as your career has gotten, the humble nature of where you came from still remains within you, as a headlining performer now.

Carlile: It does. Part of that reason why I feel that is part of who I am is because of the people that I’ve surrounded myself with — The Twins, our families, our kids, and our folks. They’re not going to let anybody get too heady or too ahead of themselves. Everybody puts you right back in your station if you’re getting there.

Growing up around Seattle, was Kurt Cobain’s songwriting or specifically the Unplugged in New York album by Nirvana ever a big influence on you as a performer?

It was later in life. It’s so funny, like when you live in the [Pacific] Northwest, the intensity that was directed towards country music for me was big because I didn’t have proximity to it. I was so far away from it. People in the South, I think so often they love country and western roots music, bluegrass, folk, and Americana music. It’s not that they take it for granted, but they don’t realize sometimes that they’re so close to it — it’s right here. And we don’t have that proximity, so I think we love it a little more intensely in the Northwest.

Because you’re seeking it out maybe?

Yeah. And [it’s] even more concentrated in the [United Kingdom]. I mean, if you want to meet some of the most potent country music fans, you go to the UK. And Seattle is kind of that same vibe. So, when I discovered grunge music and rock ‘n’ roll music, it was after it had already happened in my city, which had its own grief period with it, but also kind of an intense celebratory thing because I had missed it. I wanted to know everything about what happened in my city. And what I came away with was realizing we came up with something new. We didn’t repeat anything. We didn’t throw back to an era. We didn’t put on a Halloween costume. We did something brand new.

So, how does that apply to where you are today, in terms of what you want to create with your art?

I’m kind of a hybrid thinker, in general. I like putting ideas together and posing thoughts, things like that. I’ve never really been a great or very successful genre person.

You don’t want to be pigeon-holed…

It’s not that I don’t want to be pigeon-holed, it’s just that I don’t know if I’m able to be. Unfortunately I’ve always wanted to fit in, but I don’t know if I ever will.

Well, to that point, this last year, at least from an outsider’s perspective, has seemed like a whirlwind in your career, with the trajectory it’s on now. Has it been a slow burn to this point or is this a whirlwind, and how are you dealing with all of that?

That’s a good question. It’s both. It’s been a slow burn to this point. I’ve been working for a long time. But it was a really big change. That Grammy moment changed my life, and in a really, really big way. I can’t even catch up to it yet — I don’t even know how to catch up to it yet.

Or if you even want to embrace it. I mean, how do even wrap your head around something like that?

No, dude, I want to embrace it — I love it. I’ve always loved everything about music and the music business since I was such a little girl. I sat in my room wanting the biggest and the best of opportunities for myself, my family, and my friends. And so I’ll find a way to embrace it. And I want to — I’m really insanely grateful for it.

What do you remember from that moment? I was thinking, the stunning way your voice and the energy was going up and down, any frustration, any love or sadness you’ve experienced was put out through that microphone at that moment…

Yeah. I think I’m going to live to be 100 because that is how I do it, you know? I just let it all out. And in that moment, I don’t know — I was just so ready for it. I’m 38. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not going to get too nervous or too excited and come undone. But, I am going to enjoy it while it’s happening. Like so many big things in your life you don’t really get to enjoy it.

Or maybe in hindsight you realize how important it was…

Yeah, man. Like loving everything in retrospect, enjoying everything in retrospect. And I was just so right there, right in the moment at the time — more so than maybe ever before while performing.

So, does that mean you subscribe to the idea of “the now,” to learn to be present, rather than worry about what was and what could be?

Yeah, but I’m horrible at it. But for some reason, that day I was able to get there. And I think it’s because I had been so nervous and then I won those three [Grammys]. I was like, “What do I got to lose? I’m just going to do this. I’m just going to show everybody [who I am].”

What is the role of the songwriter in the digital age, in all this chaos that is the 21st century?

To try to be as permanent as you can in a temporary environment.

In all the years you’ve created and performed music, traveling the world and meeting people from all walks of life, what has it taught you about what it means to be a human being?

Well, it’s taught me so much. I think you need to travel, in general, in life. You cannot stay put and not see the way that people live and then try and create an assumption about the way the world works. Travel, in general, has taught me so much about social justice and empathy. It’s enhanced me spiritually as a person, and that’s the thing I think I’ve garnered the most out of it. But I’ve met some really wise and special people as well. And to get to meet your heroes, people that you’ve admired – to find out if you were completely wrong about how much you admire them or being completely right — has been so enlightening.

And what about being in Doc Watson’s dressing right now, being at Merlefest?

Being in Doc Watson’s dressing room is really moving. I’ve been looking around at the pictures and the gravity of it. And when you’re here at this festival, you feel the reverence and you understand what it’s all about. And it’s something I’m coming to later in life. Just like I missed the greatest rock ‘n’ roll genre of all-time — grunge — in my very own city, I missed this experience, too — and I’m looking forward to diving in with both feet.

All photos: Michael Freas

JJ Cale’s Unheard Songs Collected on ‘Stay Around’

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When it came to guitars, gadgets and such, JJ Cale bought plenty of stuff and more often than not wound up giving it away eventually. When it came to his music, however, Cale was not one to cast anything aside. Over the decades of his long and storied career, he amassed hundreds of recordings of songs, fragments, alternative mixes and other sonic ephemera. Fifteen songs, all complete and finished by Cale himself, have been rescued from his hard-drive vaults for the posthumously-released new album Stay Around.

“I wanted to make sure everything on this was really ‘new,’ songs that people hadn’t already heard,” says his widow, Christine Lakeland Cale, who oversaw the project. “You know, you go on YouTube and there’s a bad-sounding grainy video from a gig somebody recorded on their phone. I tried to find things that hadn’t even been out that much. I was looking for the most Cale I could give people.”

Cale, who died from a heart attack in 2013, was a marvel of consistency as a recording artist. Well beyond “After Midnight,” “Cocaine,” and his other signpost compositions, he left behind more than a dozen albums long on relaxed, amiable grooves. So it should come as no surprise that Stay Around offers that same level of quality, even though it consists of recordings spanning more than three decades.

The album’s tracks range from solo recordings to full-band arrangements, with highlights including the loping ode to road life “Chasing You” to the title track’s romantic crooning. Christine compiled the material in collaboration with her late husband’s longtime manager Mike Kappus, who was well-versed in Cale’s working methods. It wasn’t unusual for Cale to leave songs sitting around for years, or even decades, before releasing them. “Roll On,” the title track of Cale’s final 2009 studio album, was a song he’d had in the bag since the mid-1970s.

“I was kind of in on the complete evolution of it all,” Kappus says. “He would send me cassettes, with something like a picture of his driver’s license as artwork, just this private little clever thing between us. We’d be talking about the next album and not everything he sent would make it. At one point I told him, ‘Man, you’ve got a couple of really good, solid records here.’ But the temptation for any artist is to do what’s fresh and that’s what would happen. So there was all this material left over.”

Christine admits it took her “a couple of years of walking around foggy and not all there” until she felt up to diving into Cale’s recorded archive, which was not stored on a pile of tapes. Instead, Cale left behind about 50 hard drives on Alesis HD24 machines, a format Christine says has been obsolete for years. But Cale didn’t upgrade beyond that because the format worked and he was comfortable with it.

“He used to joke to people, ‘I’m too old to learn something new, I like what I have and I use my ears, not my eyes,’” Christine says. “So he never made the transition to Pro Tools. He could hear peaks of distortion that had to come out, instead of seeing a line on a screen to edit. He liked the familiarity of his home studio because he didn’t have to spend any time setting things up — just flip the switch and get creative.”

But just because Cale’s recording methodology was to set it and forget it, one shouldn’t conclude that he was any sort of behind-the-times Luddite. Cale was a skilled studio technician who “loved engineering more than anything else,” according to Kappus, and he had a lifelong fascination with the tools of his trade. After buying new gear or instruments, Cale would usually take them apart and rebuild them. He’d do the same thing with records, after a fashion, going to record stores and buying the entire top 10 bestsellers to study.

“He’d want to check out whatever people were buying,” Kappus says. “Not to try and copy, but to check the engineering and production aspects. We were at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Los Angeles once, where most of the people working were pretty into acoustic or folk music. And Cale starts talking about the mixes on ‘Back That Ass Up’ and some new Britney Spears record. Everybody there was going, ‘What?!’ They figured he’d only know about Willie and Waylon. But he had a lot of curiosity and he’d appreciate the mixing and recording of that stuff in a very true, knowledgeable way. It was the furthest thing from snobbery.”

Of particular note on Stay Around is its one song that Cale didn’t write, “My Baby Blues” — which Christine calls “my nod of self-indulgence,” because she wrote it herself. “My Baby Blues” is a song she and Cale recorded in 1977 at the first session where they met. Cale’s version here dates back to 1980 and Christine considers it a real find. But her favorite cut on the album is the title track, a meditation on the pleasures of being with the one you love (“Stay around, stay around, girl/And let’s make love one more time”).

“That one just floored me when I found it,” Christine says. “I couldn’t believe that one, and the guys at the label came up with the idea to make it the title because, ‘We hope his music stays around.’ That’s brilliant, how come I didn’t think of it? But I was too close to it. It takes a village.”

Some of the solo recordings are particularly intimate, especially “If We Try,” which comes by its kitchen-table feel honestly. That was one of his favorite places to record when he was home alone, and the track feels “as if you’re right there sitting at the table with him,” Christine says.

While Christine isn’t yet thinking about a follow-up, there’s more than enough material still in the vaults to make another album, which could be 100 percent previously unheard material the way this one is. And she thinks that the spirit of her late husband, who would have turned 80 last December, probably approves.

“I have had a lot of weird things happen,” she says. “Probably more so during the foggy period. But even now, things happen where I think, ‘Somebody’s just making sure things go this or that way.’ This world can’t just be it. I do think there’s something once we leave here, I just don’t know what. There’s got to be another level of intelligence in the universe because we’re such a flawed species. Without sounding too much like an old hippie, it seems like there’s the ability to let somebody know it’s okay. And he has.”

Photo credit: Stephane Sednaoui

Over the Rhine Hold on to Hope in ‘Love & Revelation’

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In the 30 years since Karin Bergquist and Linford Detwiler made their debut as Over the Rhine, the husband-and-wife duo have established themselves as thoughtful storytellers painting cinematic scenes with their poetic lyrics, pastorally beautiful soundscapes and Karin’s sultry vocal delivery. On Love & Revelation, Bergquist and Detwiler take a nuanced approach, exploring grief as it relates to saying goodbye to loved ones and questioning what it means to hold on to hope as an American in 2019.

BGS: Love & Revelation begins with “Los Lunas,” a song about saying goodbye to a longtime love. That theme of dealing with loss seems to open up and run throughout the album.

Detwiler: A lot of what we’re processing on our new record is this idea that certain things are carried with you for a lifetime. The record opens with the words “I cried.” It sort of tips our hand to the fact that there’s a fair bit of grief on this record. When I mentioned that to my 87-year-old mother, she said, “Well, Linford, that sounds like the Psalms.” All of us like to sort of tout our roots and older music that we’re listening to. I like the fact that my mom immediately went to the oldest songbook that I know of, which would be The Psalms in the Old Testament and immediately began talking about how so many of those songs and poems begin with some kind of lament.

The lyrics of “Los Lunas,” like so many Over the Rhine songs, have a cinematic quality, though the specific details of what led to these two people parting ways in that song isn’t clear. Other songs’ meanings seem to open up after repeated listens. They paint pictures that don’t necessarily solidify into something that can be explained using literal description. How do you pull that off?

I don’t like listeners to feel lost and sort of at sea when they’re listening to our songs. I like them to have some sense of what they’re participating in. [Laughs] That being said, our friend Joe Henry talks about “abiding the mystery” and sort of welcoming and recognizing the mystery that’s part of the process and art of songwriting. There is something on an intuitive level that’s sometimes being communicated.

As somebody that’s marking 30 years of writing, recording and life on the road now, I do find myself trying to simplify my writing. What is the most concise, direct way I can break a heart wide open? [Laughs] I hope our songs are like that. There’s something immediate that invites anybody on any level to enter in and begin participating, but I hope there’s some fine print in there, too, where you have to work a little harder.

There’s a line in “Let You Down” that describes grief as “love with nowhere to go,” which really stopped me in my tracks. What inspired that concept?

I was thinking about some friends and family members that were struggling. So many of us have been called upon to lay loved ones to rest. We have friends who have lost children or friends and family that are facing chronic illness or some kind of daunting cancer diagnosis. Just from my perspective now, I realize it’s so much more important just to show up and be with somebody and listen. I don’t necessarily come from the orientation that everything can be fixed.

So, that concept of grief being a kind of love with no place to go, that’s a conversation I’ve had with people that have lost children. There is this sense of holding this love for somebody and not knowing really what to do with it. At this point, if you lose a child, that’s not something that you should get over. You should carry that with you. That’s part of your life experience. That’s something that you’re going to think about every day.

Another thing about “Let You Down” is you, Linford, are singing a full-on duet with Karin, which I don’t think I’ve heard before on an Over the Rhine album. You’re also singing together on “Betting on the Muse.” What led you to step out as a vocalist after all these years?

I had a real stumbling block about singing. I didn’t like my voice. I’m sure some smart therapist could help me figure out where the seed of that was planted. It’s not like I didn’t want to sing, necessarily. I just didn’t enjoy it, and it didn’t feel good. So, Karin was very patient with me and encouraged me for years to remain open to the idea of singing more.

I remember five or six years ago, there was a little bit of a breakthrough, and I said, “Well, actually, when I sing for any extended period of time, I have some physical pain.” She said, “Well, why don’t you try singing through that and just see what’s on the other side?” I accepted the fact that maybe something painful was part of this process, and at some point, I began to let go of some of that and began to tentatively sing some harmony with Karin. It’s so amazing to sing harmony with somebody.

Karin wrote the title song, “Love & Revelation,” which has a very propulsive feel to it. Lyrically, it conveys a belief that even with all this grief, hope can still break through. Tell me about creating the music to complement those lyrics.

When Karin and [drummer] Jay Bellerose began sort of leaning into the song in the studio, we all just sort of backed away slowly because it felt like something so vivid and complete was happening, which is the voice, acoustic guitar and drums. So, I thought it was a powerful moment on the record. It’s very unadorned. It’s kind of that righteous parade and Karin’s voice, and that’s it.

I think a lot of Americans are feeling a little off balance, to put it mildly, and feeling the need to be sort of vigilant and a very necessary instinct to sort of stand against almost a daily tide of cruelty and deception that’s coming at us. We’re looking around and saying, “Well, this is not who I believe we are.” In this kind of environment, sometimes I think we forget to circle back to what it is we actually do stand for, or believe in. So, Karin sort of planted this reminder that actually it comes back around to love and revelation. I like that idea of remembering what we’re for.

That’s a pretty evolved way to look at what’s going on in America in 2019. How do you get to that point of making an album that goes beyond just running around screaming with your hair on fire about injustice?

I was not opposed to recording a protest record. Maybe on some level it is, but it’s interesting that the record we really ended up making was a record that acknowledged that we are grieving. It’s a record that acknowledges that people we love are hurting, and it’s engaging that on a heart level. It’s a little bit less about being on the street corner with a megaphone. I did write some megaphone songs, and maybe they’ll come back around. At some point, speaking softly can be just as powerful as yelling.

As always, you and Karin are credited as solo writers on most of your songs, but you seem to be on the same page in grappling with these ideas of grief and hope. Does that through-line in the theme happen organically because you’re living and working together as husband and wife?

We are sharing a lot of these experiences, and our lives feel pretty integrated. After two or three decades of trying to write a good song, eventually I begin to think, well, what I’m really trying to write is a good life. It becomes kind of inseparable. So, Karin and I, yeah, she’s a trusted editor. It’s a real gift to have somebody close by to bounce ideas off of and process ideas with. We are one of them there musical couples. It’s too late to turn back now. [Laughs]

2019 marks the 30th anniversary of your debut album. What conversations is that milestone bringing up for you and Karin?

We’re thinking a lot about sustainability. One thing we’re working on is restoring a historic barn on our old property, and we’re hoping to open our own 200-seat venue in the next couple of years. We’ve begun hosting our own music festival, and sort of inviting this community that have found our music to begin coming to us more. One nice thing about this possibility of owning our own music venue is we could offer some concerts throughout the year where we go back and take a fresh look at some of these records we made 20 years ago or whenever.

Some of the songs we still carry with us and play on a pretty regular basis, but we’re not really a nostalgia act. We’ll be very focused on Love & Revelation this year, and that’s the way people who engage our music want it. They are hungry for more.

Photo credit: Kylie Wilkerson

Jeff Scroggins & Colorado: Over the Line and Across the Divides

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Bluegrass is barely older than rock and roll, but it’s a lot smaller. The problems that small size can engender are obvious, but there’s also a bright side, where a fan seeking to understand how the music has grown can more quickly see musical lineages, trends, and tendencies — for the same reason it’s easier to see the trees in a sparser forest. Even today, the influences of most artists are pretty easy to trace, no matter how creatively they’re built upon.

So it is with Jeff Scroggins & Colorado, whose new release, Over The Line, offers a delicious update of one long-running bluegrass strand. Produced by the band’s occasional bass player, Mark Schatz, Over The Line’s folk-leaning material gets a treatment that isn’t afraid to invite comparisons with the sounds of the Country Gentlemen, a group that navigated its way through the bluegrass and folk revival scenes of the late ‘50s and ‘60s (and beyond) so successfully that they were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame years ago.

Even so, the pronounced individuality and musicianship of banjo man Scroggins and each of his band members (Greg Blake, guitar; Ellie Hakanson, fiddle; Tristan Scroggins, mandolin) ensures that the sound is fresh and unique — and it’s that sort of double vision, where you can see at one glance how these artists relate to those who came before and what new, distinctive things they’re bringing, that is one of bluegrass music’s most endearing characteristics. In that respect alone, the album is a triumph.

Another consequence of bluegrass’s small scale is the persistence of geographical variety. I’m not talking about bogus efforts to claim that only those from a certain area have the capacity to play “real” bluegrass, but rather about variations that range from the attitudinal to the climatic to the economic, all of which combine to make the experience of bluegrass surprisingly different from one part of the country to another — most broadly, from east of the Great Plains to the Front Range and points west.

Whether for cultural, economic or musical reasons, there are plenty of bands that stay on their own side of the divide, so although he’s been a staple of the western scene for a long time, Jeff Scroggins’ name is just now starting to ring in the ears of the rest of the country. With that in mind, gathering a little background seemed like a good way to start our conversation.

I suspect that for a fair number of readers, this is probably the first time that they’ve heard much about you and the band, so let me jump back to the beginning — you’re a westerner by birth?

I was born in Oklahoma, I suppose that’s pretty far west.

It is from the Nashville perspective! How did you come across bluegrass music?

Probably the first time I heard it was when my parents would take me on little vacations in the Ozarks; I didn’t know anything about it, but I always liked it. And then, when I was 20, I bought a banjo at a garage sale. I was playing heavy metal music at the time — but six months later, I liked it so much I sold my Les Paul and my Marshall amp and bought a better banjo. So that kind of ended my rock and roll career.

So how’d you learn to play?

The guy who had always been my music store guy, he was a bluegrass guy. So when I brought the banjo in, he kind of fixed it up a little, and he sold me the Earl Scruggs instructional book and record, and he sold me a Peter Wernick book and a Tony Trischka book, and I went home and started figuring it out. Then a couple of years later, I ran into Alan Munde, who was teaching lessons in a music store in Norman, Oklahoma, which was about 20 minutes from where I lived. That was my real first serious connection to bluegrass, seeing him do it correctly.

I started playing in some local bands, around where I grew up, and I ended up moving to Irving, Texas, to be in a band — which was short-lived. But I moved into the Dallas area, and it was an amazing scene for a short time there. There were a lot of people who were really good who were all there at once; I was seeing people like Brad Davis and Greg Davis, Scott Vestal — in fact, I replaced Scott Vestal in a little family band. And that was sort of my learning, going there and being around a lot of people who did that; I was learning it all as I went.

And you’re a contest winner, too, right?

I grew up in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t that far to Winfield, Kansas. I started going to the big festival there, and decided I wanted to win that banjo contest — and I did, and won a bunch more along the way.

Talk about the difference between what you think about and focus on when you’re playing contests, and what you think about and focus on when you’re playing in a band.

Well, it certainly is different. For me, I watched the contest, and I tried to figure out what I needed to do to win the contest. I think the most important thing is to be a good Scruggs style player, because if you’re not doing that, I don’t think the rest of it is going to help you much in a contest, honestly. So I really focused on that, and I also tried to get the melodic and single-string; I specifically started getting the single-string stuff because people who were winning contests were doing that.

But yeah, I think when you’re doing contests…I was recording everything every few days and listening to it, and just trying to really perfect these tunes. And it ends up being reasonable training for doing the other thing, but it is certainly different. I felt like I developed the techniques I was going to need to play bluegrass, but I didn’t really know how to do that.

People who have played a lot of contests have told me that there, it’s all about you and not much else, but in a band, you’re playing backup. You learn that the space you make for other people is at least as important as what you’re doing — that it’s a real mental adjustment to not be the center of attention.

I found for myself that I didn’t really want to be the center of attention. I was pretty shy. And to this day, if people compliment me on my backup playing, it’s sort of the thing that makes me the happiest. Because I figured out a long time ago, that’s what you’re going to be doing 90 percent of the time. So I decided that if I was going to do it 90 percent of the time, I was going to try to get really good at it. And obviously that really is one of the main differences, is learning how to work without the ball, as they say in sports.

I think I first saw your name with the Blue Canyon Boys. Was that the last thing you did before you got Colorado started?

It was. I was getting divorced, and coming to Colorado, and I was looking for some sort of musical thing to do. That was the thing that fell in my lap. I had known the bass player for a long time — in fact, he went back to my Texas days — so it was based on friendship. I didn’t necessarily feel that it was an awesome fit for me, but they were looking for a banjo player and I was looking for a band, and so I did it for a few years. And by then, Tristan — he was 14 at the time — was becoming pretty amazing, so we decided to start a band.

Who else did you have in the band?

Greg Blake, Tristan and I were the founding core. And then we had Annie Savage playing fiddle, and a guy playing bass who had a business, and he was the first one to bail when it started to get busy. It’s funny, we’ve had one banjo player; one guitar player; one mandolin player; three fiddle players and 37 bass players.

How did you meet Greg?

I met him in 2011, at a mutual friend’s wedding where he was doing the music. The reception was a bluegrass jam, and we jammed for seven hours until they threw us out of the place. Sort of played every song we knew. At the end of the night, I said, “I’m starting a band, and I think you should join it.”

So you’ve been working pretty hard since then, putting four albums out.

I had written out a business plan, and written goals five years before this, when I first decided I was going to get serious about this. I had a very specific idea of what I wanted to accomplish, and so when I asked people to join the band, I just handed them these pages and said, “Read this, and if it seems like something you’d like to do, then join this band.” But I was out of work and looking for a way to make a living. I had applied for a million jobs, and none of them came through, and I took that as a sign from somewhere that I was going to do this. So when we started, I started out immediately trying to make it pretty serious, and within a couple of years we were working full-time.

When I was younger, I hadn’t been very smart about it; I’d never thought about doing that sort of thing, so I never tried to make a lot of connections with promoters. But over the few years that I was playing with the Blue Canyon Boys, I made connections and kept them. I also had a lot of older connections, too. When I had been younger, I’d been in a lot of bands, but I’d never called in all the favors I’d had, because I figured that at some point I was going to have a project that I was going to pull out all the stops on. So I called everything in all at once, and that got us working really fast.

Photo credit: Clyde Clevenger

STREAM: Maya de Vitry, ‘Adaptations’

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Beginning in 2016, The Stray Birds’ fiddler and vocalist Maya de Vitry found herself writing songs that didn’t fit with the band’s aesthetic. At the time, the prospect felt confusing, even a touch frightening. “It was really scary because I didn’t know what that meant,” she says over the phone from Pennsylvania. “The band was all consuming.” De Vitry had been performing with the The Stray Birds for nearly a decade, releasing — at the time — four albums and an EP. What were these songs, if not for them?

As it turns out, her solo debut Adaptations moves away from the sound — and structures — that defined her folk and traditional inclinations with The Stray Birds. Producer Dan Knobler and a backing rock band layer each song with flourishes of electric guitar phrasing and soft brushes on the drum, all of which open the door for de Vitry’s strikingly deep and at times stately voice to infiltrate new spaces. (Stream Adaptations at the end of this story.)

Writing for herself rather than a group, de Vitry’s lyrics lean towards inclusivity, humanity, and other unitive concepts. There are also themes of love, but not exactly the romantic kind. On “The Key” de Vitry writes about the necessity of friendship at a time when romance felt burdensome (she and The Stray Birds’ Oliver Craven had broken up following the release of the band’s 2016 album Magic Fire). Whatever misgivings de Vitry had about walking her own path, Adaptations showcases a remarkable voice set to scale new heights. As she sings on “Wilderness”: “It’s time to leave the trail behind.”

BGS: You’ve said that these songs emerged from a period of self-exile. Can you tell me a bit about that time?

de Vitry: When I first started songwriting when I was younger, it felt extremely vulnerable and scary to me. Around 2010, when I started playing with Oliver and Charlie and we made The Stray Birds, that was a really natural place for me to put my energy at the time.

You had the protection of the group.

Yeah, and I had the camaraderie of the group. I’m trying to figure out how I want to navigate telling the story because it’s hard. The group broke up, and I’m still processing how much I want to share.

So what was it like to write outside the bounds of the group?

In a way, making this record was revelatory to me. Writing these songs, being alone, insisting on space, and insisting on stopping the motion and commotion of being on the road with that band, that’s what I was craving. If you just keep moving, you think that’s the way you’re going to survive, that maybe things will change and you’ll find yourself in the right place. But writing the record and that self-exile took realizing that you can’t just keep moving. Sometimes you have to stop and look inward.

The exile was… I felt like I was doing something wrong by stepping away and doing something creative outside the band. Ultimately, it was a cocoon that needed to be exited. Now I feel really bright and strong — about the record and the place that I’ve come to. At the time, I felt I needed to escape. I was going to a land that was really unknown, which was myself.

There’s a sense of serendipity surrounding this project: You were supposed to go to Nashville and instead retreated to your grandparents’ cabin; then you were supposed to make a demo and instead recorded half of the album. What’s the most important takeaway you’ve learned as a result?

What I’m continuing to learn is that our bodies are at least a few steps ahead of where our brains are. Our instincts and our gut feelings — the way that we’re sometimes physically pulled towards things — you can’t explain it. It sounds kind of out there, but I think I’ve learned to trust intuition a little more. That’s important to me in thinking about being. Paying attention to that.

It gets distilled into that opening line on “Wilderness”: “It’s time to leave the trail behind.”

As much as society or careers or trajectories—the dreams that we have for achievement—might be linear, I don’t think we can get away from the fact that we are actually a part of nature, so therefore we are sort of beholden to cycles, and we might have cycles of rest.

 

You share beautiful and necessary messages on “Anybody’s Friend,” “Slow Down,” “The Key,” etc. Why did these in particular register for you?  

“The Key” I wrote while I was up at the cabin, for that first writing retreat session, and that one was really personal. It was a love song to a few friends of mine. I was feeling really thankful for friendship. It’s a heralded kind of love, but I was forgetting how important it had been to me. With friends you can grow apart and grow together. There’s a lot more gray areas that are accepted in friendship. At the time, I was really disenchanted with any kind of romantic relationship.

I went to Cuba in January of 2017. It was around the time of the inauguration in the U.S. and I was seeing this divisive language and leadership, and power over people. One of my friends [in Cuba] was so patient with my Spanish. I asked him why, and he was like, “I want to know you.” I think the temporariness of that, and “Take a deep breath and try to tell me what you’re trying to say in this language,” was such permission. I felt like I was experiencing the power of listening and the power of vulnerability. I was like, “That divisive power has nothing on this.” I think that’s how I was interpreting the world, in a hopeful way.

That makes sense. Even on “Go Tell a Bird,” it seems like the current political climate influenced those lyrics.

Yeah, and it’s not like I’m a perfect person. I guess I just wanted to challenge the language, and challenge the boxes, and challenge the idea of freedom.

Every song has such a different kind of soundscape compared to what we’ve heard from you before with The Stray Birds. When you got into the studio with your producer Dan Knobler, what was it like building each one?

Working with Dan was probably an interesting choice on my behalf. It wasn’t like I was really attached to some catalog of work that he’s done, though he’s got a great catalog of work as a producer and engineer. I was really just operating on this feeling I’d had. Before I’d asked him to produce, I was doing a compilation CD and The Stray Birds were a part of it. I was singing and the way he spoke to me about my voice and my phrasing, and the way we interacted while I was singing, I felt really heard in a new way. I never forgot that feeling.

How did he push your voice on this album?

I felt freer. The Stray Birds, as much as they weren’t strictly tied to a genre like folk or bluegrass, I think there was a certain dialect of singing that we did. Especially with harmony singing, the blend is dependent on how everyone is singing. With this, I felt the more I stepped into feeling free, the more Dan would be there to encourage that.

Also, with the sonic palette — the fullness that’s around it — that’s not an idea I had going into this. That is something I would really thank Dan for hearing. I was surprised when he said, “I think we should get some strings, and see what Russell Durham has to bring to these songs.” The band that we tracked it live with was pretty much just a rock band—upright bass, drums, and two guitars. Anthony da Costa has really tasteful electric guitar playing.

But there was no genre. There was nothing I was trying to prove. I wasn’t even really trying to make a record — it was supposed to be a demo. So it was very playful. Dan and I are really particular about songs, and I feel more and more if I can trust the song 100 percent and if the song feels indestructible to me and also very flexible then we can go play with it and it’s going to be fun. The studio was such a joyful time.

With The Stray Birds, endings themselves are naturally fraught, and obviously you’re still parsing through a lot of what took place there, but what are you proud of as you begin a new phase of your career?

I’m really proud of what we learned together, and our willingness to take risks together, and our willingness to just show up. Sometimes there was less reflection in what we were doing — there was more action. I’m really most proud of the last record that we made together.

It sounds like it was immensely collaborative.

Yes, that’s what I’m most proud of in that band. It’s a beautiful record. It was so difficult to write it, but it was so fulfilling to write it. Everyone’s voice is present in all the songs, melodically and lyrically. I think that record was the most empowering experience for everyone in the band.

Photo credit: Laura Partain

Huck Finn Jubilee Makes Big Return for 41st Year of California Bluegrass

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For bluegrass fans in Southern California, Huck Finn Jubilee has been a destination for more than 40 years.  After a two-year hiatus, the long-celebrated family event returns to Ontario, California, on Oct. 5-7. This year’s lineup features headliners such as the Infamous Stringdusters, Yonder Mountain String Band, and The Lone Bellow, and BGS will be on site all weekend to present the BGS House Party jam after the main stage sets wrap up…

Leading up to next weekend, the festival’s new owners, Roger and Nikki Malinowski, chatted with The Bluegrass Situation.

Don’t miss our special video sessions highlighting some of the acts you’ll see on the lineup below!

Fans can discover music in so many ways now. What is it about a music festival that is special?

The wonderful thing about music festivals is that they’re shared experiences. They bring people together. Those moments when the audience sings together with the artist, and each other, or when you literally feel the music move you – times like those can’t be beat. Music festivals create communities where neighbors can meet, families reunite and spend time together, where we can get away from it all for just a little while.

What have you learned about the process of booking festivals that has really surprised you?

We’ve been surprised by the amount of love and support from the Huck Finn audience. The festival has a 40-year-plus history, yet it almost ceased to exist. I remember when we made the announcement on Facebook that Huck was back, the messages of gratitude were overwhelming. We’ve also found that putting on a festival of this size is a significant amount of work. The time, energy and effort behind pulling off an event of this size is enormous. The support and love from the bluegrass community and fans of Huck Finn continues to motivate us to create the best experience we possibly can.

When you are selecting artists, do you have a certain audience in mind? In other words, is there a common thread that runs through your lineup and/or your ticket holders?

Absolutely. We want to take our audience on a musical journey. It is important that we honor the traditions of bluegrass music while ensuring that we give space for the evolution of the music. Our hope is that our younger audience gets exposure to the roots of bluegrass and appreciates the amazing musicianship, harmonies and tradition of the genre. We also hope that the entire audience will enjoy how the music itself is progressing, exploring the unique textures and sounds of acoustic instrumentation in more modern takes on the style.

For someone who has never been to Ontario, California, and the area, how would you describe it to them?

Ontario is essentially a suburb of Los Angeles. It has all the amenities one might want in traveling to a new place: great places to eat, drink, shop and stay. It has a small airport and a great number of hotels in the area. The park where Huck Finn is held is a little oasis tucked away within the city. It is absolutely beautiful with two stocked lakes for fishing, a zero-depth splash play area, a sizable playground for kids, and plenty of quiet shaded areas to relax and unwind. There is ample parking, great spots for tent camping and expansive area for RVs. It’s easy to get to, yet far from the busyness of LA. Ontario provides all the conveniences for anyone looking to spend a single day or the whole weekend with us.

People get hungry! How did you choose the vendors for Huck Finn?

The word that has driven all of our decisions this year has been ‘balance.’ We want to accommodate for all tastes, simple and more refined. We wanted to provide the types of foods you might expect at a festival, but also provide some more elevated offerings as well.

What do you hope that attendees will take away from the Huck Finn experience?

We hope to forge connections, ultimately. Connections to the music and the artists performing. Connections to each other, and to their families, neighbors and friends. We hope that people come with an open mind, enjoy a great lineup of music that spans the bluegrass genre, and get to put the stresses and worries that they might have behind them. I hope that they smile at each other and meet new people during the show, eat great food, spend undistracted time with their loved ones and make it something that they will want to bring their friends and family to for years to come.

You can still purchase tickets to HUCK FINN JUBILEE here.