Tag: Joe Henry

BGS 5+5: Chely Wright

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Artist: Chely Wright
Personal nickname: Chels

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

I don’t mean to sound like I’m too cool to acknowledge that books, films, and paintings affect me (of course they do), but I think the single biggest influence on the work I do comes from human interaction and my observations of it. I absorb communication (spoken and non-linguistic) between people — whether it’s firsthand or from the sidelines — in the ways that one might go to the Met to see their favorite Degas. I do think, at times, that the way people interact is a form of art, because the composition matters and because it requires context and begs for interpretation.

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

When I was just a little kid, I’d sit in front of stacks and piles of my parents’ vinyl record collection as my mom would curate the playlist of the day. Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris, Bobbie Gentry, Conway Twitty, Hank Williams Sr., Elvis, and The Beatles… those were some of the artists in heavy rotation in our household. I remember being four years old and all I wanted to do was listen to those records. I was learning to read at that time too and my mom would help me as I sounded out the words written in the liner notes. I recall saying to my mom, “I want to do this. I want make my own records.” To which she replied, “You can.” And in that moment I really believed that I could and that I would.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

Mission Statement: Find joy in every part of the work. The music. The people. The solitude. The airports. The chaos. The struggle. The triumph. The songs. Find The Joy.

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

I try to walk a lot wherever I am. I’ve always cherished the experience of putting my feet down on dirt, gravel, pavement, and stone in places where I’m pretty sure I’ll never walk again. There’s something profound about it for me. Like most folks, I do my best thinking on my walks. Usually, on these walks, I don’t think about melodies or lyrics, but rather, I think about characters. The characters I consider (mostly fictitious) have free reign of my imagination for 1-2 hours to share their monologues or dialogues with me. I remember being a kid on my paper route and doing the same thing. I don’t know why I enjoy it, but I do.

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

I’m not a big foodie and I’ve never answered questions about the intersection of food and art with any style or substance, to be honest. I can say this though– if you give me a night of Rodney Crowell and Joe Henry together on stage, I’d be pretty damn happy with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Photo credit: Matthew Rodgers

Rising Appalachia Tie Worlds Together with ‘Leylines’

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Just weeks ago Leah Smith of Rising Appalachia, the harmonizing duo with her sister Chloe, stood on a high peak and sang the old traditional tune “Across the Blue Ridge Mountains.” She was at the end of a stay in a remote village, and some local women surrounded her for a send-off.

“They circled us up and did traditional music with drums and flute,” she says.

Smith’s song was in appreciative answer, a thank-you for their hospitality. It was a perfect encapsulation of Rising Appalachia, connecting through music with people and the land that nourishes them.

This mountaintop, though, was in the Andes, not the Appalachians, perched above Peru’s Sacred Valley. Leah, Chloe and the four musicians of their band had just finished a six-week concert tour in South America. The others had gone back to the U.S., but Leah stayed behind for a little extra experience. And what an experience it was.

“To close my eyes and receive this absolutely magnificent mountain range in front of me, and these women who are community weavers and medicine keepers around me, and singing this song from my mountains to them in their mountains was a deep offering,” she says, speaking from the Atlanta house in which she and Chloe grew up.

This chat comes on the eve of the release of Rising Appalachia’s seventh album, Leylines. The title is a word for perceived connections and alignments of natural features around the globe, often used in a mystical sense. And that’s exactly what the album, and Rising Appalachia itself, are about.

Here they illuminate lines connecting gospel, fiddle tunes (some learned from their mom, Jan), African and Irish roots and interpolations of contemporary urban folk and soul. Joining the sisters are their regular colleagues David Brown (stand-up bass) and Biko Cassini (percussion and the West African stringed n’goni), plus two new members, West African native Arouna Diarra (also n’goni) and Irish musician Duncan Wickel (fiddle, cello).

The South America jaunt has already sparked “Agua de la Madre,” a new song that Leah wrote in Spanish, inspired by water-rights concerns of the region. But the focus now is on Leylines, made in a seaside studio in Northern California with producer Joe Henry. Leylines marks the first time the sisters have put their art in the trust of an outside producer, but it resulted in mutual appreciation.

“Leah and Chloe are fearless artists, as well as fierce activists,” he says. “They arrived with a sharp and committed point-of-view, yet were wildly open to what might otherwise transpire. I felt the same when I worked with Baez and [Harry] Belafonte — as well as when I produced their hero, Ani DiFranco, many years ago.”

In this BGS interview, Leah Smith explores a multitude of musical influences from around the globe and close to home.

BGS: Before we talk about the new album, tell us about South America.

Leah Smith: It was the band’s first time touring there. We’ve always preferred that our music is a vehicle of cultural exchanges. That’s the primary goal of Rising Appalachia. We’re building bridges and learning other people’s traditions and showcasing ours, and using that as a language. I lived for six years in Latin America — not consecutively. I moved to Mexico when I was 18. We have a really amazing fan base in South America and went to some places none of us had been. We learned about the music traditions and farming traditions, a lot of sustainability practices. We did our due diligence of what we think of as troubadours — musical ambassadors and students of the world.

Leylines was made before this trip, but will certainly impact your music to come, as other travels have before.

The name of the band really indicates what we do. It’s called Rising Appalachia. Appalachia is the foundations roots and culture we were born into. Rising out of it, using that foundation to grow wide branches. I always say about our work that we will never run out of material to study, to learn, to be influenced by. It’s impossible to run out. Every conversation on every trip adds to the fabric of our songwriting and goes into the lens that we view music through.

You start the album with traditional gospel in “I Believe in Being Ready.” Was that a big part of your musical life?

We grew up with so much of the Southern music in our home. Everything from jazz to gospel to old-time Appalachian roots music — and everything in between. This album is such a journey and departs in so many directions from the real simplicity that started our project 15 years ago. But we felt it was important for us to get the first breath of the album in the foundation of where our music came from. It’s got that old, archaic sound, very simple sister harmonies and a bit of the apocalyptic sense of the world coming to the end, in the gospel sense.

That’s a thread that runs through the rest of the album?

That’s what we wanted to do. I feel like every album is a chapter in our story, in a book of our lives. This to me is really exciting. Whether you’re remotely interested in the roots of music or not, this album holds all the roots of Appalachian music. We’ve always been influenced by that — the African roots of it, the Irish roots, the urban presence of Southern music, all the ways a very diverse and broad community has influenced Southern music. But we’ve never really presented it like this.

There are a couple of fiddle-tune pieces on this one, drawing on some of your first music experiences.

“Cuckoo” is one of my favorite songs on the album. We learned it from our mother and I just love that. Her version of this old traditional Appalachian song. I feel like we’ve probably known versions of “Cuckoo” since we were little kids. She has a beautiful trio, the Rosin Sisters. They recorded this version a few years ago and we said, “We’re gonna learn that version.”

Your dad is a musician too?

He’s primarily a [visual] folk artist, but also plays blues guitar.

Do you all still play and sing as a family?

We do all the time! Every now and then we get them up on stage, but they are reluctant. I don’t know why. I would love for them to join us more often. I think they don’t want to be assuming that it’s okay.

On the song “Sadjuna” you explore African sounds.

That’s a song that Arouna Diarra brought to us, a traditional West African song. We do several different songs that are Arouna’s. This one had an incredible surreal dreamlike state to it. The song in its origin is very much about people that leave the world too young — when families lose young people in war or strife, or when parents see the passing of their children. So Chloe and I wanted to write two verses to accompany it that held the same space. I don’t like to be over-literal. But we wanted to bring that to people, a balm for people who had that passing in their lives.

For “Make Magic” you cite Erykah Badu and André 3000 of Outkast as influences. It still sounds like folk music, though with some different aspects. How does their impact figure into it?

That is our folk tradition, as young women growing up in the ‘90s in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. That’s where the genre [labels] don’t serve us. Hip-hop and soul are urban folk music, storytelling music.

More expected is the influence of Ani DiFranco, particularly on “Speak Out,” on which she guests.

Ani had such a potent influence on me as a young woman from the urban South. My folk traditions were a lot of underground hip-hop and blues and soul, and the folk music our parents were playing felt very distant to me. Ani was a bridge, this young, folk-rock, righteous babe, but she was playing Woody Guthrie songs and had a banjo in her hands. I was so inspired to see a radical young woman carrying these traditions that I did not have access to. And to top that off, using the stage, using her platform to be talking about really important issues — voting, women’s rights — with no apologies. Wasn’t polite, wasn’t tidy, was in your face and made you think.

What would you consider your mission?

What’s our signature mission? We don’t have one, really. We believe our roles are as public servants. It’s a public service job. We are collecting the joys and sorrows and struggles of ours and of our community. We want to know what the community is talking about and that has to be part of our show. Different every night. Water rights and human rights. Our role is to provide the stage for the people who show up night after night. We have to listen. That is an important thing.

Photo credit: Chad Hess

BGS 5+5: John Smith

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Artist: John Smith
Hometown: Essex, UK
Latest Album: Hummingbird
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Smitty (Joe Henry and The Milk Carton Kids started calling me this around the Invisible Hour recording sessions and it stuck. I like it). Johann Schmidt (when on tour in Germany and Austria). When I first started gigging I had a little outfit of bass, cello, and violin. I called us The Wooden Ducks for about five gigs. Since then it’s been the John Smith Trio. I’ve always admired jazz musicians and to me, the words Trio and Quartet are innately very cool words to use, even for a folkie like me.

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

I remember it took almost a year to write “Great Lakes.” I had the first verse and the chorus but I spent months trying different ideas, looking for the right path and tripping over myself the whole time. That’s what got me into co-writing. I started to share ideas with others which opened up my creative thinking in a new way. Suddenly I felt more receptive even to my own ideas. I finished writing “She Is My Escape” with Joe Henry and then “Great Lakes” revealed itself to me. I’ve been into co-writing since then.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

I used to play electric guitar with David Gray. There was a moment during a slide solo at Red Rocks when the band went quiet. I had a very brief moment of very loud guitar heroism with the sun going down over the mountains and I didn’t screw it up! It’s so easy to screw up a guitar solo though. I think they are often best avoided or attempted alone at home. I played a bum note in the Royal Albert Hall around that time and half the crowd laughed. I had to die a little inside before I was able to see the funny side. My classical musician friend told me, “Darling, you’re no one until you’ve whacked out a spare at the Royal Albert Hall.”

In Amsterdam a guy in the audience asked if he could play and sing a song on my guitar, and he performed a beautiful rendition of one of my own. That was a kind of magic. It’s one thing seeing it on YouTube but another entirely when it’s onstage at your own gig. That would be my current favourite memory.

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

When I was 11 years old I had already passed a few grades on the piano. I thought nothing of it beyond the fact that I was simply playing piano in school. I enjoyed music of course but I don’t think I knew that I could live my life through its lens.

So my dad sat me down one day and put on the Physical Graffiti LP and I heard “Kashmir” by Led Zeppelin for the first time. It completely blew my mind, a totally definitive experience. I saw a different world on the other side of the needle. Doors opened in my mind and I felt alive in a very different way to before. It might sound a little hyperbolic but it’s true. I knew right then that I wanted to make music and I actually needed to play guitar. My dad gave me a Stratocaster and that was it for me.

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

I learned early on from Joe that if you’re going to work you need to dress the part. Not just for yourself but for the people around you. When I’m in the studio I make sure to iron my shirt and comb my hair. I work harder and concentrate well if I’m holding myself to a reasonably high standard. The same goes for being onstage. I believe you should look good for the people who’ve paid to see you.

In the dressing room, or maybe it’s just a corridor or a bathroom, before a show, I warm up with a song or two and write a couple of notes. I don’t believe in carrying much around with me. I try to use what’s in my guitar case.

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

I once ate a bowl of olives at an Allen Toussaint concert and those were the best olives I ever tasted. I like to listen to Ry Cooder when I eat. I reckon Bop Til You Drop is the record I’ve listened to the most in my life. My dad used to put it on every time we had friends over for dinner, and he cooks Indian food. Therefore I like to cook curries and play Ry Cooder records for my friends. I don’t know a better way to do it. If ever I have a clear day off at home, I’ll spend it cooking and listening to Freddie King, Joni Mitchell, Keith Jarrett. Sometimes I’ll crank up Mastodon to help chop the onions.

About the Playlist: Songs and interpretations by the artists who have influenced my life as a folksinger, not only in the musical sense but in the way I think about the bigger picture; each of these records has helped to guide me to where I am now.

Photo credit: Rose Cousins

Dismissing the Suits: A Conversation With The Milk Carton Kids (1 of 2)

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The Milk Carton Kids have been about nothing if not duality. That’s down to their very name, which evokes both comedy and tragedy, and their stage presence, in which some of the stateliest and most delicate songs possible are broken up by riotously deadpan banter. They’ve always been about duo-ality, too — two voices and guitars, gathered around a single microphone, contemplative Everlys for the 21st century, unaugmented by anything that would have seemed rank or strange to the Stanley Brothers back in the 1950s.

But now, suddenly, almost everything you know about the Milk Carton Kids is wrong — at least the formal elements. They’ve dropped the formal suits and picked up separate mics… and a full band, too, while they were at it. Could this be their Dylan-goes-electric moment? Not to worry — there probably won’t be any cries of “Judas!” greeting their fifth album, All the Things That I Did and All the Things That I Didn’t Do, or a touring ensemble that no longer fits in a single front seat. It’s not just that the new material is superb — although that never hurts — but that the fuller arrangements sound like a natural progression in what is still scaled for intimacy.

Before we get to the Kids, we queried producer Joe Henry for his thoughts about how necessary or smooth the transition was, going from duo to band configuration. He admitted there was at least the fleeting consideration of a backlash — “I don’t imagine it possible that the Kids weren’t individually and collectively pondering the response of an audience that has been so steadfast in their devotions to the band’s brazen and brave duo commitment to date.” But, Henry says, “I saw no evidence that the looming question gave them any pause… And no one involved that I’m aware of had any doubt that such a shift was now not only timely but imperative: they’d reached a point where the color of the light, so to speak, needed to reflect their growth as musicians and songwriters––this batch of songs being so particularly strong as to invite, nay, insist on a presentation equal in its evolution.”

The producer adds that the Kids are “still very much a duo in ethos and execution. There is real drama in the intimacy of Ken and Joey pushing up to a single mic in symbiotic solitude, and it was important to all three of us going in that that image remain intact ––even as new sonic weather kicked up and swirled around them.”

When we sat down with Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan at a Van Nuys coffee shop in June, we found that off-stage they’re just like they are on-stage… only more so.

As part of changing things up, you’ve decided this is also the right time to go for street clothes in concert, right?

Joey: Talk about decisions that were never actually made.

Kenneth: Yeah, that one’s still TBD. I mean, we get on the tour bus tonight. Joey’s near his closet, but I didn’t bring anything from Nashville, so if I’m wearing a suit tomorrow, I’m gonna have to go to the Men’s Warehouse in Tucson. The advice I’ve gotten from literally everybody on earth is that they’re gonna be saddened to not see me in a suit, and that we should be wearing them. But… f— ‘em. [Laughs.]

Joey: Well, I never wanted to wear a suit. The reason that we wore suits in the beginning was as a part of a collection of survival techniques.

Kenneth: Given your druthers, you’d dress like an ass-clown, that’s why. And you can quote me on that!

Joey: [Sighs.] See, how can people not love us? No, it was a part of a suite of survival techniques that we developed when we were playing in very…

Kenneth: Techniques or tactics?

Joey: Techniques.

Kenneth: There are survival techniques? I think they’re mostly tactics. It’s interesting to hear you’ve developed survival technique. It sounds like something they’d sell in the Valley.

Joey: Those words are synonyms. It’s a survival tactic and a technique. In any case, in the early days, we were playing this really sonically fragile show, and the only places that would book us were like the smallest rock club or bar or coffee shop sometimes in town. In a dive bar, we would wear suits to visually indicate that it was just something different than what they would maybe expect to see in that room, so that you could have some chance for the first couple minutes of people taking note and going, “Alright, what is this gonna be? I’m going to shut up and listen for one song.” You at least have a song. You have that chance to get ‘em to stop talking loudly in the bars that they’re used to talking in and maybe pay attention to the show, because our show required that.

It’s not like an attention-seeking preciousness. It’s like a physical, sonic fragility that we had, because we mic-ed our guitars, and you just can’t turn it up that loud. The perfect example is how we played at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, many times. It’s a great place but the beer fridge is louder than we could get the PA, so we had to ask the bar to unplug their beer fridge, and they were so accommodating. I don’t know what happened to the beer. And they would also bring in rows of folding chairs, which literally no other band would ever even ask them to do. But we always wanted to be in a theater where people would be able to receive what we were trying to present, and the suits were just part of that. Now, with the band…

Kenneth: You’re gonna go back to flip-flops!

Joey: With the band… [Long, exasperated pause.] See, people always say we’re antagonistic. I think it’s just him. No, with the band, we don’t have the sonic fragility that we had before. … And so the whole misdirection of wearing a suit in unexpected places is not required. That was a long way of saying: I’m excited to not wear suits.

How early or late in the process did you decide to go with a band for this album?

Joey: We decided three years ago in Dusseldorf, Germany that we weren’t going to make the next album as a duo… It was just a moment. It wasn’t like we even talked it out. [To Kenneth:] You were like, “I think we should probably do the full-band thing next.” And I was like, “Oh, thank God you said that, because I’ve been worrying about how to bring that up.” But you always break the ice.

Kenneth: Yeah. I’m a talker.

I’m always interested in how people who are identified with a very specific thing decide to change it up… or not. A lot of times, people back away from giving up the thing that people identify as unique.

Kenneth: It’s always risky to go down these philosophical rabbit holes in interviews like this, because invariably they come out not reading exactly as intended, but I’ll go anyway, because who gives a shit? One of our blind spots -– and I think it’s a common blind spot for artists specifically — is that Joey and I for a long time had a complete inability to understand what was good about our band, while also knowing it in our core. And it’s necessary. If we knew what that was, I think that we would lean into it, and it would get tired very quickly and wouldn’t mature and evolve.

But for the first year and a half of our band, Joey and I didn’t realize that we were good just because when we sang together, it sounded like something that people either had never heard before or hadn’t heard in a while, or it bore a trueness that was just apparent in its physics. Joey and I thought that it was a result of all the hard work we do about making sure our harmonies are tight or about phrasing or about all these marginal things that we quibble over. You really lose sight of what the fundamental thread is that actually is the reason the whole thing exists. And we still have that blind spot. There’s something that’s just innate in what you do from the beginning that we take for granted.

So what is the thing you have the blind spot about, that your audience totally gets?

Kenneth: To put it really simply, when Joey and I sing together, it reminds people of Simon and Garfunkel, the way they actually physically combine, like alchemy in the air, or the way the Everlys did it, or the Louvin Brothers. When Joey and I sing together, there is some physical chemistry that is actually, like, we have to try hard to f— it up. And we have from time to time, but we’ve got an advantage coming out of the gate to other people singing harmony together, in that there’s something that just works about it.

And then there’s a similar shared vision in our writing and stylistic choices, and even essential life administration, where, outside of a few blowouts where we figured out what the problem was, the way they rub together results in this strange band that people haven’t kicked out of life yet.

Read the second half of this interview.

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

Joan Baez: Turning the Glass Upside Down

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Joan Baez admits there’s a gaffe in “Civil War,” a harrowing song of uprisings, both personal and public, on her new album, Whistle Down the Wind. “There are a couple of words that come out funny,” she says, “and there’s one where I sound like I have a big lisp.” It’s hard to catch that particular mispronunciation, especially as the lyrics are littered with sibilant S’s (“… this civil war”) that might blur her words together, and those mistakes may not be apparent to a casual listener or even an obsessive fan. But Baez hears them every time.

Partly, those blemishes are the byproduct of the recording process, which was loose, casual, and largely unrehearsed. Baez made the trip from her home in the Bay Area down to producer Joe Henry’s studio in Los Angeles, where she worked with a band of session musicians who have become regulars on the albums he has helmed for Solomon Burke, Lizz Wright, Bettye LaVette, and Over the Rhine. She would play a song a few times for them, enough to give them a sense of the piece and the ideas she wanted to convey. “I didn’t stop to say, ‘Listen, we’re going to hold this note for this long and do this thing here,’” says Baez. “I just didn’t know any of that. We just pieced everything together.” As a result, “We’ve got mistakes all over the place, and we didn’t bother to fix them, because the feeling was right. We didn’t want to sacrifice that feeling in the song for some technicality.”

Henry agrees, arguing that a mistake isn’t a mistake, if it actually strengthens the song: “To me, it’s only a mistake if it breaks the story and takes you out of the trance. I don’t hear that happening anywhere on the album, because people are playing together. They’re in a real-time conversation, musically speaking. They’re in a moment of discovery together, in real time. Nobody is playing anything by rote.”

Least of all Baez. Sixty years into a storied career, she is still searching, still discovering. Whistle Down the Wind is her first album in 10 years, and she has intimated that it may be her last. If so, it will be a remarkable swan song: a collection that gauges the tenor of 2018 just as intuitively and authoritatively as her self-titled debut did in 1960 or Diamonds & Rust did in 1975.

Baez speaks through the songs of other writers, bending them to the present moment or finding new implications buried in the lyrics and melodies. There are two Tom Waits character studies, odes to personal stubbornness, whose melodies and sentiments fit so well with Baez’s delivery that you’d think he wrote them specifically for her. She covers Zoe Mulford’s “The President Sang ‘Amazing Grace,’” about President Obama’s impromptu performance of an old Sacred Harp hymn at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Josh Ritter’s “Silver Blade” sounds like a response to the traditional ballad “Silver Dagger,” which has haunted Baez’s set lists for half-a-century.

Whistle Down the Wind is not interested in replaying old glories or indulging any nostalgia for the heyday of folk music. And that’s why those technical mistakes matter so much. Even if you don’t hear them, they nevertheless act on your subconscious. They increase the intimacy of the recording, making these songs sound more direct, more forthright, more urgent. Moreover, they speak to the messiness of what has become Baez’s truest subject: the times. Certain ideas and issues — whether it’s civil rights in the 1960s or gun control in the 2010s — are much more complicated and unwieldy than the means by which we choose to address them. It is less the fault of the song than the singer. As well intentioned and as righteous as an artist may be, the implication is that she or he remains an imperfect vessel for the song and the ideas contained within. Leaving that lisp in “Civil War” is Baez’s way of acknowledging that fact.

The miracle of her long career is that she still believes mightily that such songs are still worth singing, that they can speak to their historical moment, that music still has a function in the everyday life of a community or a nation or a planet. “It’s community building,” Baez says. “It’s empathy building.”

In the 1960s, that belief placed her at the epicenter of the folk revival, when she played demonstrations as routinely as she booked concerts. Like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, she was armed with a guitar, an encyclopedic history of folk music, and a strident sense of mission. Unlike those two influences, she had a high-flying voice, one that swooped playfully around her upper register. In recent years, age has robbed her voice of its former agility, but on Whistle Down the Wind, it has grown deeper, taking on a slightly rougher texture, yet retaining its original authority and compassion.

Her peers might have taken determined steps away from the responsibilities of protest music, but Baez simply expanded her scope and subject matter. Especially in the 1970s, she found new ways to mix the personal and the political. Never a confessional singer/songwriter — at least not in the way the West Coast folkies were — she still put a lot of herself in her songs, whether they were about her own personal relationships or those between communities. “I don’t know how I would have done that stuff back then without the music,” she says. “That was such a big part of it.”

Few folk musicians of her generation managed to keep the audience rooted in the foreground of her music. Her songs speak to “you,” but in most cases that “you” is plural. On her cover of “Another World,” by Anohni, who previously performed as Antony & the Johnsons, Baez bangs softly on the frets of her guitar, creating a gently frenzied pulse for lyrics about leaving this world and finding a new one. Her version is an ecological warning, a life-size take on a planet-size woe.

“I’m gonna miss the snow,” Baez sings. “I’m gonna miss the bees.” As the song continues, that guitar thrum becomes a timer counting down the end of a life or possibly the end of all life. “The song is as dark as it is beautiful and as beautiful as it is dark,” says Baez. “It’s spellbinding. [Anohni] turns the glass upside down. It’s not half-full or half-empty, but upside down.”

Baez changes the song in one crucial way. In her original, Anohni sings, “I’m gonna miss you all.” Baez adds a new word: “I’m gonna miss you all, everyone.” It’s a small change that doesn’t disrupt that melody or change the song in any dramatic way, but it does give an idea of the audience Baez (and Anohni) imagines for herself. She is addressing that “everyone.” “Joan understands very well that music is about community,” says Henry. “It’s about gathering people in real time to a pointed moment. It’s always and only about community for her.”

That idea is ingrained in her vast catalog, although it grows more poignant now that her career appears to be winding down. “When I go tootling around the world, I’m seeing so many different audiences,” Baez says. “I’ve played a lot of festivals in Germany and adopted France as a second country. I do five songs in French for them. I have a song for each country, or sometimes it’s just a line. It means so much to people, if you sing something to them in their own language. It’s hard work, but it’s a way to thank people for showing up.”

It’s also a way of speaking to them more clearly. In 2009, she recorded a simple YouTube clip of herself, presumably seated in her kitchen, singing a version of the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome.” It’s a song she’d sung countless times, but this version was both in English and Farsi, and she dedicated it to the people of Iran, who were protesting the contested election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The lyrics were written out phonetically. I couldn’t possibly remember them. And they don’t have the same scales, which meant I couldn’t get the notes right. They just didn’t exist in my vocabulary of notes.”

For Baez, music not only speaks to these communities; it binds them together and can, in some ways, define them. Every movement demands a soundtrack, and Baez is under no illusion she can provide one for March for Our Lives or Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. “We need a brilliant anthem so people have something to sing, so they don’t have to shout so much. I wish I could write that kind of thing. But it’s so hard. Still, I think it will come.”

Illustration by Zachary Johnson

The Revolutionary Act of Grace: A Conversation with Lizz Wright

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Lizz Wright admittedly wasn’t thrilled when her label approached her about doing a covers album to follow her gospel standards release in 2015, Fellowship & Surrender, but she charged herself with a task: Find a message and use other people’s voices to help convey it. To that end, she turned to a musical past ripe with the bold, brazen truth-tellers who stood against their respective times and shared a greater meaning. The resulting tracklist for her new album, Grace, reads like a who’s who index: There’s Ray Charles, Allen Toussaint, k.d. lang, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and, of course, Nina Simone. That last voice, in particular, presented Wright with a charged political call, though Grace isn’t overtly political in the traditional sense. The politics she presents — if indeed they can be called that — are the notion that grace offers a way forward amidst troubled times.

The idea for Grace coalesced before she discovered what would become the album’s title track — a cover of Canadian singer Rose Cousins‘ song “Grace” (off her 2017 album, Natural Conclusion). A songwriter at heart, Wright intended to pen her own take on grace, but producer Joe Henry (who also produced Natural Conclusion) played her Cousins’ song, and the resulting thunderclap was too powerful to ignore. Where Cousins’ reckoning with grace takes place internally, Wright sings as if she’s doing battle on behalf of a community largely craving but failing to find that very gift. Grace, as Cousins suggests in her writing and Wright executes in her performance, isn’t something merited or earned. It’s the simple — at times astounding — act of acceptance. In Wright’s hands, that last, loaded word is a revolutionary act, and a potent message for the present.

You drew inspiration from the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and, of course, her repertoire encompassed politically charged songs. How does Grace stand as a revolutionary statement?

Every time I make a record, I check in to Nina’s catalogue, and I also check in to Roberta Flack’s catalogue. But the beautiful thing that happened this time around is, it’s also Ella Fitzgerald’s centennial year, so it was all this saturation coming from different ends. I kept thinking about these women, and how they all lived through times where they had to step into their full humanity and express their genius, express their opinion, onstage. I thought about the grace of who they are — especially Nina Simone, in this case — because I think all these women who inspire what I do have exemplified grace as embodying the possibility that’s not realized around them. It takes a lot of strength to become something that your environment might not embrace or support. In my own way, I’m returning to their wisdom and to that gentle, very deep strength of singing from a place of belonging and understanding.

There’s a lot of music coming out nowadays that attempts to make a political statement responding to the times, but “Grace” feels like a loaded idea in its own right, because it’s an adherence to love.

I really believe it’s love that changes us. I really love the earth a lot. I really love growing food — I come from a line of really serious gardeners and, even in times of slavery and sharecroppers, we were providers. I’m so proud of that. I’m also really moved by the kind of communication the earth helps us to have; there is a mirror activity or natural phenomenon that reflects everything that we are trying to figure out as human beings. Seriously, everything nature is trying to sort out, we’re walking on it, we’re breathing it, we’re drinking it, we’re relying on it for life. That’s where the wisdom is. I also got to work with my brother Joe Henry, who I really love. We’ve been friends for over 13 years.

He’s so great at building in space to any album he works on. I love how he was able to let both your voice and the arrangements breathe. It makes sense that he’s worked with Rose Cousins, because I know he’s done similar techniques with her.

Joe is so relaxed. This was definitely the most relaxed session I’ve had — from pre-production to recording. I really enjoyed it.

Also, I forgot to say a minute ago, I’m really inspired by my neighbors. When I got my property in North Carolina, I was the only Black person for miles, renting or anything. It was kind of a bold move, but I really love the area so much, and it spoke to me. I told the family who owned the property that I have an interest in this area because I’m a minister’s daughter and I’m a recording artist, and I just want a place to pray and be quiet. I just want a place in nature to do that — I’ve always wanted it. Between the way I got this property, and the way my neighbors teach me how to take care of things, and the fact that almost everyone on my little road has a childhood story in my house makes it clear that I wake up every day in sight of what’s possible. I can’t be the one who gives up on other people. I can’t do it. I don’t have the right to. It was nice to capture the sweetness of that, and the faith of my actual life in this record.

You’re from Georgia, and now you reside in North Carolina: How has your connection to these places been a source of sustenance to navigate these times?

I was in Dresden, Germany, when the election results came in.

I heard you were overseas! That’s wild.

It really was. That was a sleepless night.

Oh, I bet.

But the direction of the person I choose for leadership doesn’t make my life. What makes my life is the tide of society — what the people are really doing, what the people are really feeling. I’m like, “I’ve gotta go home right now, while I’m most uncomfortable, and touch down. I’ve gotta see people. I’ve gotta listen to them and let my own ears and heart and body receive what’s actually happening,” because it seemed like, all of a sudden and even now, there’s been this projection of the South that has scared its children. To be able to make this record with North Carolina-born Joe Henry is a really sweet way to extend the real present. I wanted to make sure that spirit was captured in this project. I was really blown away by how hard a few people are working to make it look like a different time than it is.

Isn’t it? They’re putting so much energy into it.

It breaks my heart, because the candle of life is something that’s vulnerable, and it took so many miracles to stand in this realm together. And we’re so blessed with so much liberty and opportunity and everything. Even the limitations bring strength. I’ll say this: I had a really interesting conversation with a cab driver in London. I don’t know why this man opened up to me, but he said to me, “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person, but I understand how Brexit happened. I understand how your president happened. There are a lot of old folks looking around at where we grew up, and we don’t recognize the people there. They don’t seem to recognize us, and the actual culture and the story of who we are and where we came from, and we don’t know what else to do but resist.” I thanked him when I got out, because he gave me a real warm hope about the other side of what I’d been seeing and experiencing. It’s about a terrible exercise in negotiating power and influence between generations, not just cultures. People aren’t asking questions of one another: “What does it feel like to be you?”

Right, listening is a critical skill we’ve really lost touch with.

One day, I was working with one of my neighbors; he brought me a bunch of tools and came over. We’d been working for almost four hours when it started to rain, and he’s carrying bushels of trimmings and stuff in his arms. He barely speaks — he’s extremely shy — but he said to me, “We have our family get together the last week of this month every year, and we’d love it if you came.”

Oh, wow!

I was like, “What?” It’s so crazy. My horrible little childish mind with no experience of that kind of openness totally went to “Your boat is lost at sea, and you’re stranded on an island, and you’re on a pig-roaster by nighttime,” you know? [Laughs] I showed up to their gathering, and it totally changed my life. Yes, it was a little bit awkward, and yes, I was surrounded by Trump supporters, and yes, I was welcomed, and yes, I cried and I played and I ate, and I went home in a state of wonder that informed everything I’m trying to do on a larger scale.

Bless you for hanging out with Trump supporters for a whole evening.

In an hour, they meant so much to me. They are so much like my family that I felt ridiculous for ever thinking anything else.

There’s clearly nuance involved — or should be — with how we consider opposing political parties. But I have to ask, how did you decide what voices to cover in this? You’re pulling from Allen Toussaint and Nina Simone and all these people who have shared such powerful lessons in the past?

I was turned off when the label was like, “We want you to do covers.” There’s no writer who ever wants to hear that. But going into the project and thinking about how to thoughtfully use other people’s music to make a statement, and doing that with another writer? That got interesting.

This maybe isn’t a fair question to end on, but why no “Amazing Grace” on an album titled Grace?

You know what? I’ve already recorded “Amazing Grace.” It’s such a huge, pivotal song in my life and in my history as a singer that … I don’t know. The working title for this record before I knew anything about Rose Cousins was “Grace.” Just to get us somewhere. And then that was the first thing I heard during pre-production and I lost it, because I thought, “Oh my God, someone has taken the time and done the work to find a new way to speak this.” I love that she didn’t have to repeat it. It’s so beautiful. I thought I was going to write a song called “Grace.”

Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t.

No! When it’s done, it’s done. The thing about being a writer is to recognize when the word has happened, and to give voice to it. She did this beautiful thing, and I was very excited that we still have people who take time and think and process life on a level where they can write something like that. I was just like, “Oh, I gotta serve this.” It was a great.

Well, it’s a beautiful rendition and, if we ever get a duet out of both of you one day …

Oh my gosh, I’d be so undone. We’ve been sending these goofy emails of mutual admiration, but I really appreciate her for writing that piece, and I wish her all the best. I’m excited to meet her at some point on this tour.

Photo credit: Jesse Kitt

A Life in Motion: A Conversation with Rose Cousins

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Like many an artist who has given much over to their craft, Rose Cousins reached a place in 2013 where she felt overdrawn. The Canadian singer, who was born among the deep primary colors of Prince Edward Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, needed to find her creative footing again after the business side of her profession threatened to upend her spirit. So she took a break. But that break didn’t simply involve time off. It meant approaching her songwriting from a different angle.

Cousins dove headfirst into co-writing and attended several songwriting camps — in Nashville and beyond — where she partnered with artists and producers. As with a creative writing class, the assignments she fulfilled inevitably fed her more personal songwriting as she began work on what would become her new album, Natural Conclusion. It’s as though the imposed limits she experienced at those sessions — with succinct songwriting prompts that extend the mere hint of an idea — helped push her own.

Natural Conclusion blends a handful of songs from those co-writing sessions, such as “Chains” and “White Flag,” with original compositions. The album is full of space, exquisitely stitched into each lyric and musical arrangement. Cousins isn’t in a rush and allows her worldly voice to carry the weight of each struggle to its necessary conclusion. But that doesn’t mean she pushes things beyond their (forgive the tie-in) natural conclusion. “My Friend” is a short breath of a song, a palette cleanser full of meaning and recognition. “It’s short because that’s all that needed to be said,” she explains of the song’s 1:33 length. Natural Conclusion (produced by Joe Henry) offers a new turn for Cousins, who displays a beautiful, breathy vulnerability that grapples with personal, romantic, and at times even professional growth.

How does Canada’s gorgeous natural landscape get under your skin as a songwriter?

I think my inner landscape looks like Prince Edward Island. I’m definitely inspired and I feel the best when I’m near the ocean. However that might directly or indirectly transfer into my music is sometimes blatant but sometimes not. The Atlantic Ocean, of course, is my home so it’s my favorite, but anytime I can be near a body of water, for some reason it feels like it just opens my brain up. It helps me relax; it helps me feel like I’m getting a little bit of meditation.

You’ve described these new songs as containing “forward motion,” and I know you traveled a great deal these past few years. What was it about movement that helped yield these songs?

I actually think a lot of the songs are not necessarily from my travels. I think the forward motion I’m referring to is in life, in the evolution of songwriting.

And relationships?

It’s relationships, it’s the processing of things that happen in life and the sophistication of the recording process, and really feeling the forward motion in my career.

You participated in songwriting sessions during your break. What interested you about that approach as opposed to simply writing on your own?

I think my whole purpose was to get myself into situations I hadn’t been in before, and you never know what the chemistry is going to be like, when you’re in a songwriting situation with a bunch of other people. It can go any of many ways, but I think the point is like finding a partner in anything: It takes lots of practice. “Chains” was a scenario where I was paired up with a couple of people — an artist and a producer — and we were given a theme and a feel and wrote to that.

You shared the prompt on your website, and it’s almost comical in its paucity.

I think that’s what funny about most of these songwriting camps you go to: The prompts are absolutely generic. It’s hilarious. Every time you get a brief, it’s kind of like, “Slow but not too slow, sad but with an undertone of hope.” The point is, the more generic you keep it, the wider use it will have or the more people it will hit, and that is a different approach to writing than Rose Cousins, the artist, has ever taken.

It’s fun to have “Chains” on this record because, after I wrote it, I was kind of like, “Oh man, I wonder if I could sing that? I wonder if myself, as an artist, could pull that off?” and I kept that question in my mind and then decided to do a version of it. I think it’s awesome. I think it takes my stuff into a grittier moment, but also I was one of the writers on it and so I can absolutely empathize with it deeply. I was really excited about the couple of co-writes that got on here, because it is a new thing for me, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to write something I could sing with somebody else, which I did.

Did it shift the way you write on your own?

I find I’m always patiently waiting for a song to come, and there are a few times where I’ll set aside time to be in a creative space. But it’s, ironically, the thing that doesn’t get to happen most of all in a career that’s built on making songs. So much of the touring and the motion of that is not the place where I’m creative, which is why I’m really excited about this introduction into the next chapter of having deliberate co-writing stuff scheduled in. It’s absolutely creatively inspiring and exciting because I’m going to a place to do a thing that’s actually my job. As a performer, you make an album and you go and you play that album, and then, if you get some time off, for me, maybe I’ll be able to write some songs in between. I like the addition of the co-writing thing because it kind of assures me that I will remain creative and, in fact, these last two years that I have been co-writing while gathering songs for my own record have been the most productive in the sense of increasing my catalogue.

It’s so interesting because it seems to go against this notion of, “When the muse strikes, you can’t ever know,” and “You can’t schedule creatively.”

Totally. For me — for Rose Cousins, the artist — that’s still true. If it’s going to be a song that’s coming from me and that I’m writing by myself, I can’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write a song today.” That’s never how it’s been for me. The contrast of being put together with people or organizing with people who I like to write with, or to write for an unintended purpose, or to write to have songs to be able to use as tools — which are not necessarily ones I would perform — I was able to pull a couple and put them on my record. Not thinking it would be that, it ended up feeding me, as well, in different ways

Turning to the original songs, there’s a languishing quality throughout Natural Conclusion. Not languishing as though you’re attached to the subject, but it comes across melodically and rhythmically and vocally. Was that intentional or a happy accident?

Everything is intentional and unintentional. I wasn’t like, “Let’s put more space in there.” I brought the songs as they were and the arrangements were not altered. The spaces that live in those songs were maybe accentuated by the band, who are honoring them. It’s interesting to hear you say that because I don’t listen to it in the same way or listen to those spaces. It just supports that, whether it’s melancholy or the struggle within it, the space provides some moments to digest what was just sung, or a thought that is uncomfortable in some way. I imagine that’s supporting what’s going on.

And “My Friend” is such an interesting length.

It’s like a small summary of a feeling that was a whole bunch of feelings, but since I can’t influence the way something turned out anymore, it’s like accepting it. I made a mistake, and so “my bad” and on we go. You know? Sometimes you get betrayed and it feels like shit, but you’re fine and it sucks the way that something ended up, but onward, and that’s kind of what it is. I definitely sat with it for a bit to see if there was anything more there. I sent it to Joe [Henry], and I was like, “I don’t really know. There’s something to this, but I’m not really sure.” And then we both were really excited about it at the end. It’s a random 1:30 song, but it absolutely fits.

You’re also a photographer. How does that creative medium shift the way you approach music?

I’ve been a photographer for a really long time. I used to just take photos for myself. Music is something I never used to share; I used to write my own music and never used to share it. I would do either one of them regardless of whether it was attached to my career. Photography is another interpretation of how I see the world. The same could be said for all mediums. We’re just interpreting. It’s just a visual interpretation of the way I see the world, just as songs are an interpretation of a feeling or a moment of a relationship or an experience. I love photography deeply and I’m hoping to find more ways to share more of it that I’ve done. There are polaroids I took during the recording process within [the album’s] artwork, which I’m excited about sharing. I’m a film photographer at heart, and that’s how I learned and can develop my own and print my own, which is exciting. It’s a meditative process. It’s a quiet solo journey, and I think I really enjoy spending that time kind of by myself and making things. It’s similar to music in that way. It’s a solo venture, meditative and cathartic.

You talk about doing film, which has always hit me as requiring care and consideration, unlike digital photography with its thousand storable shots and instantaneity. You have to be thoughtful about what you approach and how you approach it.

I see film photography as, every time you take a photo, you can do the things that you know — you can apply your knowledge — but you still don’t know if the photo’s going to turn out. I love that about it. I love taking that risk. I’ve developed a few films where there’s nothing on the roll and I’m like, “Ah shit. What did I do or not do?” It’s building a relationship with the camera and knowing that within any of the processes you can do all the things, but there’s still a chance that it may or may not work. The film slows you down because there are processes to make the film, to develop the film, and if you’re going to print the photos, it takes that much longer. I love the way that it slows me down.

For more conversations on creativity, read our Cover Story on Josienne Clark and Ben Walker.

Photo credit: Vanessa Heins

3×3: Levon Henry on Red Cedar, Richard Brautigan, and Rain for Days

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Artist: Levon Henry
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Latest Album: Sinker
Personal Nicknames: "Brother of Lulu” is new and shiny, though Lee has gained some momentum over the years.

If Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, and Mohammed were in a band together, who would play what?
Jesus on tambourine, Buddha on Juno. I’ve seen Krishna depicted here and there with a flute, so it’s hard to imagine anything else taking its place. And Mohammed on zither. That’s a configuration I’d like to hear, anyway, I guess … regardless of who was playing.

If you were a candle, what scent would you be?
I was in a room with a red cedar candle once and definitely felt some resonance there.

What literary character or story do you most relate to?
There's a Richard Brautigan story about a first romantic encounter that ends: "She's got her clothes on, and the beginning is over." I think that pretty much sums it up, at least a certain lump of humans, anyway. That stunted perspective. That funereal view of birth we can't seem to wake up from no matter how much we have.

How many pairs of shoes do you own?
10 pairs … just counted and it’s news to me, as well.

What's your best physical attribute?
I was voted “Best Eyes” in high school, so I’m still riding that wave, but I definitely peaked early, as their color has definitely faded and nine years old was prime-time.

What's your go-to karaoke tune?
The secret here, to avoiding breaking into a cold sweat, is to avoid karaoke-related acitivites, because people like to sorta sneak karaoke into other things and — boom — all of a sudden, you’re doing karaoke you didn’t sign up for. In that unfortunate situation, Brenton Wood’s “Gimme a Little Sign” is the only card I’ve got.

Animal, mineral, or vegetable?
Mineral.

Rain or shine?
Rain … for days.

Mild, medium, or spicy?
Medium.

With Headphones on the Floor: A Conversation with Chely Wright

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Though singer/songwriter Chely Wright made her name on the country charts back in the ’90s, her new album’s quiet confidence showcases what is probably the truest side of her: a conscious and caring, creative and compassionate woman rooted in faith and family above all else. Produced by Joe Henry, I Am the Rain features 12 tunes written by Wright, along with one Bob Dylan cover that feels right at home in the set. It also continues the artistic recalibration Wright began with her 2010 Rodney Crowell-produced release, Lifted Off the Ground.

Congratulations on a hell of a decade you’re having. Can I just say that?

[Laughs] Yeah. It’s been pretty crazy. I’ve been really contemplative in the past few weeks as I’ve been doing some press about, “Gosh, what has happened in the past decade?” It’s been pretty action-packed.

Check my timeline. I was just putting it together. In 2010, you came out publicly, Like Me was published, Lifted Off the Ground was released, and the LikeMe Foundation was established.

Yeah.

In 2011, you got married … happy anniversary, by the way.

Thank you! Yep.

And the Wish Me Away documentary … which, kudos. That was so brave.

Thank you. I’m really happy with it.

Then 2013, the boys.

Yeah. Wait. Hold on. Got knocked up in 2012.

Okay. We’ll put that in. [Laughs]

Well, I mean, being a lesbian, it’s a little bit more than a back-seat of a Pontiac and tequila. It takes some getting done. [Laughs] So that’s important for the timeline.

Indeed. Then, 2014 was your huge Kickstarter campaign. So did you make the record last year or this year?

We made it in 2015 — 2014 was Kickstarter and my mother died in May. That really was a seminal moment in the process of the itch. You’re a creative person, you know. If you’re thinking about a piece you want to write, you write a lot of it in your head, I’m sure: “What am I going to say? What does it mean? What’s the point? What’s the art?” Then you get an itch when you know to sit down and start typing. My mom’s death in May of 2014 was the itch that caused me to go to my pile of songs and start taking inventory of what I had.

Got it. That Kickstarter campaign must’ve made you feel REALLY great. Did you write the songs and plot the record after that? It probably directed a lot of how you went about things, yeah?

I’ll answer both questions: Did it make me feel great, the Kickstarter? It made me feel things I didn’t know I needed to feel. When my managers and I discussed crowd-funding, at first, I was like, “That sounds like something other people do. I don’t really think I want to do that.” But Russell [Carter] was like, “You have to pay attention to the way history is changing. It’s not begging for money. It’s, essentially, a pre-sale.” He said, “More importantly, it re-engages you with your fans.”

I didn’t really hear that, when he said it. So, in my mind, when we kicked the whole thing off, my thinking was that a successful campaign would be to get funded. I quickly understood that the success of it, for me, was to reconnect with fans that had been following me for 20 years and new fans that I could connect with. More sentimentally, I was reminded that I didn’t lose all of my fans. I didn’t even lose half. Maybe I lost 30 percent of my fans because there were people saying, “You don’t know my name, but I love your records.” Or, “I saw you in Bagdad.” Or, “I saw you at the Nebraska State Fair in 1996.” It was emotional for me, in that regard.

But you probably picked up just as many from the documentary and all the other stuff, I would assume.

Here’s the thing about those new fans coming aboard: More people, in other demographics, became aware of me because I’m the new lesbian on the street, right? And they would go to my Facebook page and hit “Like,” I think, out of support for my coming out. But there’s a big chasm between somebody who doesn’t typically like what we think of as country music and their clicking “Like” on Facebook. They’re like, “I’m going to click ‘Like’ because I like what she did, but I’m not going to buy a country record.” So, a lot of those new people aware of who I am because of coming out — it doesn’t necessarily translate into record-buying, concert-going fans. In some cases it did, though. And that’s great. I love it.

And, to answer your second question: Did I write the songs before or after the Kickstarter? I think 70 percent of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote before. And 30 percent after.

This record, it’s polished and pretty, but it’s not slick, I guess.

Ding, ding, ding! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah. It continues to stake your ground in the more roughly hewn Americana world, which may be surprising to people who only know you from the way-back radio hits. What would be your message to those folks, in terms of getting them to keep listening, or re-listen, or start listening?

I love that you say that it continues to stake a claim there in the Americana world. It’s not slick. When you make a record with Joe Henry, if you want to make a slick record, you might as well put your guitar back in the case and leave.

And go on home.

[Laughs] And go on. Because Joe Henry … I mean, I learned a lot on my last record with Rodney Crowell, and I learned a lot with Joe. It was terrifying, frankly, the notion of working with Joe because I know what he does. And what he does is, he brings in everybody and demands that they bring their A-game for every second that they’re in there. There’s no going back and fixing. There’s not a “We’ll do this, then put a real guitar overdub on later and you can tidy up your vocals.” You have to get it when the band gets it. That’s scary for a person who’s made 20+ years of records that you can make them slick.

Punch-ins and vocal comps galore, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I had to unlearn a lot. I wanted to unlearn a lot of that stuff. You know when you go play golf and everyone’s watching you hit the ball? You don’t want to use your new grip, you just want to go back to that old one you know you can hit it with. But, if you want to change your game, you really have to go out there and swing with your new grip.

[Laughs] Ummm … a golf reference?!

[Laughs] I know, right? That’s how I equate it. There’s that temptation to use your old grip. But I went in fully trusting Joe and, frankly, fully trusting myself that this was worth being courageous. For that, I feel like we have a record that sounds like somebody hit record at a really good live show.

Working with Joe and some of my favorite players ever … plus your voice … other than the nerves, that’s a recipe for success, right there — that combination.

Well, one would hope. Our intention, with this record, was that it’s a narrative. It’s not meant to be listened to on your computer speakers while you’re emailing. You put your phone down. You put your favorite headphones on. You lie flat on the floor. You hit play. And you take in … I don’t even know how many minutes the record is. Do you know?

Let’s see … 13 x four-and-a-half …

I’ve got some long songs on there, friend.

Yeah, you have that fiver at the end, but you have some fours and three-and-a-halfs …

Alright. Yeah. Well, what we intended and hoped for people to do is put their favorite headphones on and hit play and follow along and absorb it. I’m guilty, even these days … I bought somebody’s record the other day and had the nerve to listen to it on my iPhone speaker. Halfway through the second song, I was like, “Shame on me! What am I thinking?!” [Laughs] Isn’t that awful?

Headphones on the floor … with maybe a little wine or … something … that’s my favorite way to listen to a record. It just is.

[Laughs] That’s how you do it! That’s what I want. If you glean anything from our discussion today, please pass along that that’s what I really want is for people to take a moment and absorb it in the spirit it was intended. Because Joe and I are really proud of it and we hope people find something in it that moves them.

How did those groovy little cameos come about with Emmy, Rodney, and the Milk Carton boys?

Well, first of all, Rodney … I call him Shep because he’s my shepherd and he has been for a long time. He and I co-wrote one song on the record called “At the Heart of Me.” It’s a song I had written and I brought Rodney in on. It was completely finished and we decided to let Joe join us. We never shared with him the actual music of it. We gave him the lyric, and he helped re-shape the lyric and the new melody. So Rodney was on the record, but it didn’t seem like that was a song to put him on.

But Joe and I had written a song called “Holy War” and Joe called me about five days after I got home from the sessions and said, “Hey, I called Rodney. I’m going to have him come in and see what he can render on ‘Holy War.’” I said, “Of course! Why not?! That makes sense.” What I love about Rodney on the record, it really does sound like … Rodney and I have done a lot of shows together and we end up around one microphone in the middle just singing … and it really sounds to me like a live take of a show.

What’s funny is that I get press releases all the time claiming “This record features Emmylou Harris,” “This one has Rodney Crowell,” and “This one has Milk Carton Kids.” You got the trifecta!

[Laughs] I did! I’m telling you: I’ve always been the luckiest person I know. I don’t know why, but I’m like Forrest Gump. I walk into these really great situations.

So Joe called me, again, about a week or so after I got back, and said, “’Pain’ is really raising its hand. It’s really standing up for itself, wanting to be seen. I think I’d really like to get somebody special.” We did some talking and who doesn’t agree that Emmylou Harris is just about as special as it gets. What made me so happy about her vocal is that she said, “I just want to match where you are. I just want to match the emotion of what you’re singing.” Hearing Emmy’s heartbreaking voice, her haunting voice, on a record of mine … not to mention a song I authored … I made up these lyrics and SHE’S SINGING THEM! What?! [Laughs]

[Laughs] Yep!

And it gets better when you know that, shortly after I moved to Nashville in 1989, I chased her around a Kroger at midnight one night. [Laughs] I came from a place where we didn’t have 24-hour grocery stores. When I got to Nashville, I worked at Opryland, and I got off my shift and needed groceries, so I went to Kroger. I’m buying my stuff and I see this beautiful woman that looks a lot like Emmylou Harris, so I start trailing her a little bit — like eight cart lengths behind her. Chased her down a couple of aisles and finally she turned around and said, “Yes. It’s me.”

[Laughs] Perfect.

[Laughs] I just nodded and turned around and ran the other way. So … 27 years later that she’s singing on a song I wrote … Isn’t that the American dream? Isn’t that what everyone wants?

I read in a Rolling Stone interview where you said, “Who doesn’t want to grow up to be Emmy or Loretta?”

Well, that’s true.

Did she pass along any advice to get you there?

Not directly. But one only has to watch what she’s done. That’s the perfect advice. When Rodney and I made Lifted Off the Ground, that was part of the discussion: I want to be a 55-year-old, 60-year-old woman sitting on a stool with 200 people showing up wherever I decide to play singing songs that I can believably sing. And say something. And feel good about saying something. She’s the gold standard — she and Loretta and Dolly. That’s as good as you get.

And then those crazy Milk Carton Kids … Joe Henry has a relationship with them. It was his idea to make the Bob Dylan song really jump off the page and I think they did magical work on it.

Speaking of … watch what I do here: Same Rolling Stone piece, you talked about how the pronouns in your songs wouldn’t suddenly go gay. But on the Dylan song — “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” — you sang it like he wrote it, which I always appreciate. I hate it when singers flip it so they don’t come off as … whatever. The beauty of storytelling is setting yourself aside and allowing space for listeners to insert themselves into the story. Is that your thinking, too?

First of all, I just love the craft in that sentence. That was really beautiful, a really great couple of sentences that you just spoke there. [Laughs] That is, I think, the beauty of storytelling. If you listen to my last record, there’s nothing on there, except for the song “Like Me,” where it’s clear I’m talking about a woman with whom I’m having a relationship. It’s not clear, in the other songs, if I’m singing as a straight woman or a gay woman. For this record, I’m singing a song called “Mexico” and I’m not singing as me. I’m the waitress in the song.

But, as far as the Bob Dylan song, I didn’t want to change it … for a couple of reasons. Bob Dylan is perfect and how dare I alter anything. But I really loved … it’s so intimate and it’s so truthful for me to say, “If only she was lying next to me, I could lie in my bed once again.” To me, it would’ve felt too cheeky to change it.

It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? Like, Patty Griffin, her pronouns are all over the place and nobody ever brings anything up. But as soon as you or Brandy Clark sing something either way …

The thing about Patty Griffin — which, by the way, when I say her name, I sign the cross on my chest — she was never part of the commercial machine that would dare question something so trivial and small. … Patty is the ultimate … she is the character singer. We don’t know anything about Patty Griffin, the person, really.

No. And she won’t give it up in an interview, either. I can tell you that.

She won’t. That, to me, is just a different way of approaching her art. And, boy, it’s paying dividends for her listeners. We love it, right?

We really do. Talk to me about the difference in feeling you get from impacting someone’s life with your activism or your charitable endeavors versus your music.

That’s another … you’re on fire today!

Thank you!

Without a doubt, receiving a letter or speaking to somebody … I got a beautiful letter today from somebody in Washington state, a young person, that said my book saved their life and my film helped start a repair with their parents. There’s no comparison. That’s it. That’s the most gratifying, the most heart-warming, the most invigorating, humbling thing I can experience.

And you wouldn’t have that platform without the music, so they are really kind of inseparable, in a lot of ways.

That’s a great point. That’s a really great point. There was criticism, when I first came out. I remember seeing a few things. People’s rants about “She did this for attention” … which is ridiculous. I don’t know of anyone … that’s obviously spoken from a straight person. Or people who say, “I didn’t get an award for coming out as straight!”

Yeah, because did their family disown them for that? Did they contemplate suicide for that? Really, guys?!

Right. Yes. When people have been critical, and I don’t hear it so much anymore, but when people have been critical about my coming out publicly the way I did, my feeling is, “I’ll tell you what: You go move to a city, from a podunk Kansas town, with thousands of other people who want the job that you want. You get the publishing deal. You get the record deal. You go on all the radio tours. You do all it takes and work with the record label and bust your tail end and you get a couple of hit records and then you decide what you’re going to do with that.”

I made my decision and it was the best thing I ever did — not just to come out, but to come out the way that I did. I look at my life now … my wife and I are celebrating five years and I just know I wouldn’t be alive, had I stayed in the closet. So, life is good.

 

For more on country singers going Americana, read Kelly’s interview with Wynonna Judd.

Keeping the Door Open: A Conversation with Hayes Carll

Posted on by Editor

When last the world heard from Hayes Carll, he was stomping and hollering his way through 2011's KMAG YOYO (& Other American Stories). But five years can change a man. Hell, five minutes can change a man who has the heart of a poet that Carll does. That's why, on his new Lovers and Leavers release, he eschews the pomp and circumstance of records past. In their stead, he and producer Joe Henry gently placed honesty and honor, introspection and intention. The result won't rise above a barroom din, but it'll certainly sink into a listener's heart.

Between KMAG and Lovers, a lot has happened in your own life and the world around you. What's the one thing, though, that made the biggest difference in you and your music?

I don't know if there's one thing. I can just say that I changed. [Laughs] A lot happened in a lot of different parts of my life. My personal life had a lot to do with it. My marriage ended. That sort of forced me to take stock of where I was in my life and what was going on, and that influenced everything around me. I turned 40, which felt significant, in a way, in that I'd been living a certain kind of life for a really long time and kind of looked up one day and asked myself, “Is this how I want to live? Is this the kind of artist I want to be?” and just took stock of all that. That all influenced the record that I made.

Outside of that, in the world-at-large, I don't know that it influenced anything that I did, but it feels like people are appreciating an honest, sincere songwriter in a way that … that sounds really boring, but … [Laughs] “I don't know if I want to go to that show. He's honest and sincere. Yuck!” [Laughs]

But there's so much bullshit in the world right now that, when you find something that's a little bit True … capital “t” True …

Yeah. Yeah. Something with some authenticity to it. I do think that goes a long way. And maybe people are responding to it in a way that they haven't of late. I see a lot of writers and singers who are doing really well, and I think people are connecting with how they put their work out into the world.

Jason Isbell pops immediately to mind.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like him on Southeastern, you didn't give yourself a whole lot to hide behind on this one, sonically or lyrically.

That was a real conscious choice. I always had given myself something to hide behind. I always kind of couched my serious moments with humor or with musical pomposity. I never felt comfortable being that exposed. I think it had a lot to do with how I came up playing to crowds … you start out in these bars where, if you didn't get their attention, if you couldn't make them laugh or get them dancing, you didn't get the gig or you got something thrown at you.

So I always had this mix, as a performer and as a writer, that I was aware of both things. I aspired to be Townes [Van Zandt] or [Kris] Kristofferson and be able to capture people in a certain way, but I also felt a real need to make sure that people didn't lose interest. I think I was always a little insecure about whether my words and voice, alone, were enough to keep people there. So I always felt that — whether it was onstage and connecting to them through stories or jokes, or in the music being as super-varied as my limitations would allow.

I've seen you in a few different settings, and a song like “Beaumont” always goes over really well. So I think your fans have been with you on the poet side, as well as on the cowboy side.

Yeah, I've been lucky. I have a pretty broad fan base. I've tried to never pigeon-hole myself. Whether it was playing the Texas country scene or honky-tonks across the country or going over to Europe or playing the listening rooms and folk rooms or working with people outside of my respective genre, I never wanted to feel like, career-wise, that I was stuck somewhere. I always wanted to have options. The job is too cool to go out every night and feel bored or feel like you have to do the same thing every night. So I always wanted to be able to keep that door open.

With this record, I realized that, if I wanted to make a record like this, now was the time … because, if you don't do it and show that side of yourself at some point, then it gets harder and harder for people to accept it. It was where I was at in my life and where I was at creatively, and it just made sense to me. I thought, “Whether anybody likes this or not, it's the record I need to make and it will change where I'm at, and it's reflective of my search for connecting onstage every night and what I want my life to be like.” So, for this moment in time, that was what I needed to do. It feels weird. It feels naked.

The obvious way to look at songs is that they reflect their writer. But you can also turn that lens around, right? Do you sometimes feel like you want to reflect — or maybe even live up to — something you've written?

I think I've, at times, written to a certain audience. I've written mostly just for myself about where I was at, but I've also written individual songs or just a style that I wanted to keep open for myself. I think I've written, at times, for what I wanted my performances to be and what I wanted my career to be.

I love playing honky-tonks. I love having 1,000 people at a rock club going nuts. But I very much value my ability to go play solo in a listening room and have a completely different experience. That's kept me engaged, kept me alive. That's, honestly, how I feel most connected and comfortable as a performer, because I don't need to rely on a bottle of whiskey. I don't need to rely on volume. It's me, a guitar, and these songs. They either hold up or they don't, but I have a much more immediate understanding of whether it's working or not when I'm in a more stripped-down setting.

And to make a record that reflects that … yes, it's emotional and it's creative, but it's also a little bit practical because that's job security, if you know you can always go out and play your songs solo or you know that you can make a pretty simple recording. Those are the records that stand up and become classics for the generations.

A couple of years ago, I realized that, whatever happens — whether I become a big alt-country star or whatever — that I've got a collection of songs and I'll continue to write, and worst case — and it's not all that bad of a case scenario — I can go do house concerts and folk rooms and there will be some group of people that is drawn to that music. I think maybe even more than the financial side, I just wanted to keep that open for myself. And I needed to do it now or it might not ever happen.

I always talked about having a sonically cohesive record that was a songwriter record, that was sparse, and I'd never quite done it. I'd make attempts at it, but then I would cover it up with a joke or some bombastic rock and never just let that stand on its own. I'd always, I guess, been scared to put that out there. Maybe I didn't have faith that that was enough for me, and I needed to prove to myself that it was.

So that's why I'm excited about this record. There's no single on there. It's not going to get any radio play. It's not anything people are going to play at a party. There's nothing to dance to — all these things that I could kind of peg, like, “Okay, I've got that covered and that covered and that covered.” It's sparse and emotional and personal and intimate. But listening to that and not pulling people off in other ways can get you into a headspace, as a listener, that you can't get, necessarily, if you're jumping all over the place. I'm trying to have trust that this can work. So I did it. And, whether anybody likes it or not, I'm proud of the record. That probably doesn't sound like that big a deal to a lot of people, but for me, it was important to be able to take that step, creatively and artistically.

As you were writing, instead of checking off the things you wanted, were you checking in with yourself and checking off the things you didn't want? Like, “Oh, I just habitually took this song there and I need to pull it back.”

I don't know, as I was writing, how conscious I was of that because I wrote a lot of stuff that is completely incompatible with this record. I had a lot of those things that are funny or rocking or even were more subtle but just didn't feel like they were part of this story. There are very few songs I can think of where I sat down and said, “Okay, I'm going to write for this record.” I was just writing.

And they emerged as a group?

Yeah. Themes started showing themselves. I've never been able to sit down and write thematically. I've never had the attention span to stay consistent about it. There were definitely things I was writing about in my life, here, that came out. But there were also songs I'd written before a lot of this happened that sort of fit that narrative and that part of the story, though that was not my goal when I wrote them, initially. But I'd look at them and go, “I thought it was this one thing, but it actually fits really well with what I'm doing here.”

Setting aside music as your own artistic outlet, what role does it play in the Life of Hayes? Friend? Therapist? Pastor?

It's been all of those things — and none of them — at times. It sort of depends when you catch me. Certainly, growing up, it was my teacher, my inspiration. It was my joy. It was this very mystical, foreign thing. I grew up in the suburbs and these people I was listening to, particularly the songwriters — [Bob] Dylan, Kristofferson — they took me to another place, far from where I was, and that was something that I really needed. I struggled to find my identity and an ability to articulate some of the things that I had on my mind. A lot of these guys did all that for me. They gave me some kind of identity. I felt a connection with them. I felt, “These are my people.” And it moved me. I got into Townes. There's music that can affect your life in such a deep and powerful way that everything else seems trivial.

Something I've struggled with a little bit over the years is that I have that connection to writers like that and, then, I have a connection to Chuck Berry and Jimmy Buffett. There are a lot of different elements and that hodgepodge has kind of made up my style, for most of my career. But, yeah, it can turn my day around, for sure, and keep me going.

When I interviewed Lee Ann Womack last year, she commented that sometimes she feels guilty connecting herself to you through recording “Chances Are,” and she thinks, “I hope Hayes doesn't mind that I cut his song.” Various award nominations later, may we assume that you, in fact, do not mind too much?

[Smiles] Yeah, we're talking again now. [Laughs] I was honored that she recorded it.

It's done pretty well for the two of you.

Yeah. To have the life that it's had with the Grammy nominations was completely unexpected for me. It was very cool. It took a lot for it to set in when I got the news. I thought, “Okay. Yeah. Fine.” I had sort of trained myself to not care about these things. I didn't even know when the Grammys were being announced. I had no idea it was a possibility. I have tried to distance myself from needing those things. So, when it happened, I was like, “Oh, yeah. It's no big deal.” Then, as I started getting congratulations from family and friends, and seeing the reaction that this news had on them, I started feeling like, “Oh, this is significant.” And not that it validated me for myself, but it was important to a lot of people who are important to me.

So, anyway, I'm honored that Lee Ann cut it and couldn't have been happier with its life.

So maybe you'll let her have another one at some point?

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I just did a tour with Aubrie [Sellers, Womack's daughter]. Hopefully, Lee Ann and I can play together some day.

I met Lee Ann up in Colorado in Steamboat Springs. There's a little country festival up there. I remember I was sitting in this room, like a suite, and a bunch of my friends were up there playing and picking. I played “Beaumont,” and there was this little person with a hat pulled over, in a chair, legs up in the chair … I had no idea who it was. And she goes, “That's a really cool song.” Or something to that effect. I went, “Thanks … whoever you are …”

[Laughs] “… little hidden troll in a hat.”

[Laughs] Yeah. I didn't put it that way! Then it was, “Hayes, meet Lee Ann.” And we got to do a thing here in Nashville with Sirius XM and [Bobby] Bare, Jr. and Bobby Braddock and Lee Ann, which was super-cool. He played “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Lee Ann sang “Chances Are.” It was the first time I got to hear it, sitting right next to her.

Photo credit: Jacob Blickenstaff