Tag: Kris Drever

Nobody Tells It Like It Is, Except Perhaps Anna Tivel

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“Nobody tells it like it is,” Anna Tivel sings on “Disposable Camera,” the first single from her new album, Living Thing. The song radiates with the joy and pain of reality, climaxing with the lines:

That big black train is rolling
And that deep down scream is growing
A hurricane come howling
A shot heard from the mountain
A blessing and a burden
I swear this will be worth it…

Which are followed by a melodic and cathartic yell. I don’t know how I first came across Tivel’s music, but when I found the song “Blue World,” I got stuck on it. I listened to it over and over, trying to take in every aspect of it, break it into pieces, open it up like a watch so that I could understand how this perfect song ticked. It is still the most beautiful meditation on dying that I’ve ever heard. “You come to the heavy gate and you open it all alone…” is a line I think about often. To me, it sounded like she herself was telling it like it is.

A few weeks after discovering “Blue World,” I was on tour with Kris Drever, who is one of my favorite folk musicians from Scotland. We were trading new music discoveries and I played him that song, after which he became obsessed with it. We traveled around listening to “Blue World” and talking about death for the rest of the tour. Giving someone a new song to love is a special kind of transaction. It’s a gift for the new listener, but also a point of pride to have found something that someone else also finds meaning in – especially when the recipient of said gift is a musician you admire. New song discoveries are an unmatchable currency, a communication beyond words.

“Blue World” sent me on a journey through Tivel’s catalogue, with hours spent listening to Small Believer, The Question, and Outsiders, before the release of her latest record on March 31. With Tivel’s latest collection, I have to come to the conclusion that someone does tell it like it is and that person is Anna Tivel. I spoke with her over the phone for BGS about the inspiration behind her songs and the unique circumstances that led to her production choices on Living Thing.

I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time and I’m curious to know what feels new and different about this record than your past work?

Anna Tivel: I think there are two main things. I’ve worked with Shane Leonard before [who produced Outsiders and The Question], but this is the deepest collaboration we’ve ever done. There is so much of his heart and his sonic experimentation in these songs.

We made this squarely in the pandemic years, so there was no way to call upon a band for live tracking. It was just me and him in his studio. He went insane trying all kinds of sounds, playing all different instruments, and I scribbled extra verses on napkins as I heard what he was coming up with. We worked all day, every day and I slept on his couch for a month. I tried to say yes to everything and I learned so much. I really feel like the sounds feel different than what we’ve worked on before.

The other thing is that going through that year, I was craving soaring choruses… more melody and rise and rhythmic happenings that I normally do. Maybe it was a result of just sitting and looking at the same window for so long. I usually write long and dark monotonous stories with no chorus at all, but I think I craved a little more hope and joy. In general I feel like less people died on this album than usually die my albums… it’s still melancholy as fuck though.

Knowing that these songs were written and recorded during that very existential time, and now that they are being released into a different time, do these songs feel different to you than they once did?

Yeah, it’s interesting, the whole process of putting out a record. I really got stuck in the machine for a little while so it took quite a long time for this album to come out.

They are older songs now in my soul, but the project still feels really fresh. I think because Shane drew them into this more alive, sonic world. It was really exciting and fun to explore joy and rhythm and movement, especially in that isolated time. It felt good to have some hope and just wiggle around and try to feel the good parts of being a human.

So coming back to it now, it feels new and exciting to take them out on the road with a band. It’s making me realize it’s fun to have some songs that we can really move into, rather than building up from the ground.

One of my favorite tracks from your new record is “Desperation” – “Real life is far from fair, you tried and tried and got nowhere/ It’s like somebody rigged the whole damn thing/ Bloody knuckles, empty hands, you want to fight, but all you ever had/ Is desperation.” Can you tell me a little about what led to that song?

I think that one came out of the heart of that pandemic time, watching people, and having an awareness of how close many folks are to the edge, simultaneously knowing how the people pulling the strings aren’t the ones close to the edge.

Maybe your kid gets sick, and you miss work, and then that’s that, you’re evicted, and into the car. You don’t choose what you’re born into and if you’re born with the short end of the stick, it’s so hard to imagine anything but that reality.

You can see getting stuck, because that imagination isn’t generously shared by the people that own it. But if people that are living in a different world reach out to help it can really change the situation. Sometimes that means helping people believe that a different reality is possible. You have to go into your mind to create what you need. It’s sort of the same idea as representation, in the sense that if you’ve seen people that feel like you in very different situations than you, you can imagine yourself into a different situation.

I want to work on making that imagination more widely available.

That’s an amazing point, and a great one to keep in mind especially for artists. Artists can and have played that role for people, I believe. Does this same idea carry through for the song, “Disposable Camera?”

I like songwriting because you’re sort of always looking inward… You think you’re reflecting the world, but so much of yourself gets in there and the things that you’re learning into. A lot of this album is about getting free, getting loose of the way that you’ve  taken in that it “should be,” the way that you should express yourself or the way you should move…

A lot of friends in the pandemic were having kids or trying to have kids and I was thinking about how, when we were all born, our parents were these people. [I was] realizing that everyone making babies has no idea what is going [to happen] and it’s kind of beautiful that it’s this big wheel of nobody knowing what they’re doing. Everyone is kinda hoping that someone else will be like “this is what it is,” but maybe the not knowing is actually a freedom. It feels scary to think you’re supposed to be certain, but you aren’t yet. The freedom is that nobody actually is certain and that’s not going to change.

I was listening to your song “Kindness of a Liar” and thinking about how important escapism was in 2020 and 2021. How badly I needed books and TV shows to get lost in so that I could come back to the present and have energy to cope with what was happening. Is that what this song is about to you?

In this batch of songs I was thinking a lot about what is truth, what is honest, what is listening, and what is being able to have nuance in all of those realms. You don’t just stay certain. To be able to move and shift and read situations and try to be learning in real time, messily, is very different from saying, “This is a fact and I’m going to hit everyone over the head with it until I’m proven wrong, and then I’m going to pretend I never said it.”

To try and tell stories to one another that are compassionate and messy – sometimes telling a story that might not be true is the most gentle and kind thing you can do while something hard is happening.

I think it’s about recognizing how much we crave each other’s stories and being really aware of how we paint the world for each other. The more artfully and more compassionately we tell each other’s stories the more we connect, and it’s not about trying to prove our point.

The most loving thing you can do is to share your mind and heart with people in the most nuanced way. And maybe there’s some fiction and lore in that.

Photo Credit: Kale Chesney

WATCH: Hildaland, “The Selkie of Sule Skerry”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Hildaland
Hometown: Portland, Maine
Song: “The Selkie of Sule Skerry”
Album: Sule Skerry
Release Date: October 25, 2023 (single); November 3, 2023 (album)
Label: Adhyâropa Records

In Their Words: “‘The Selkie of Sule Skerry’ is an old folk tale of which there are many versions. We love a rendition sung by Kris Drever in the band Fine Friday on their 2002 record, Gone Dancing. We took inspiration from this, wrote our own melody, and had a lot of fun with the arrangement. Ethan played both mandola and the electric mandocello on this one, we worked up a string arrangement together, and had Dan Klingsberg record some double bass for us, and Sam Kassirer laid down some synth.” – Louise Bichan

Photo Credit: Louise Bichan

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

Posted on by Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Hanna-Katrina Jędrosz

The BGS Radio Hour – Episode 203

Posted on by Amy Reitnouer

Welcome to the BGS Radio Hour! Since 2017, the Radio Hour has been our weekly recap of all the great music, new and old, featured on the pages of BGS. This week, we’ve got music from CeeLo Green to Loretta Lynn! Remember to check back every week for a new episode.

APPLE PODCASTS, SPOTIFY

Loretta Lynn feat. Margo Price – “One’s On The Way”

Loretta Lynn’s original cut of this song made it to No. 1 on the charts in 1971. When Margo Price teamed up with Lynn to celebrate the latter’s 50th anniversary of “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Price chose this song specifically, suggesting how legendary it was for Lynn to have sung about women’s rights and birth control in the country music of the ’70s. It’s still legendary today.

Todd Snider – “Turn Me Loose (I’ll Never Be the Same)”

“Turn me loose, I’ll never be the same!” is a phrase that rodeo cowboys used to yell when they were ready – something Snider first heard from Jerry Jeff Walker, but fitting himself perfectly. He asked the cosmos to provide a rock to put is foot on, and so the story goes, the new album from Todd Snider: First Agnostic Church of Hope and Wonder. 

DL Rossi – “Tumbling”

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, DL Rossi brings us a song from his upcoming album, Lonesome Kind. It’s a kind of youthful innocence, warming up to the harsher realities of life. And while we can’t opt out of our hurtful experiences, as Rossi suggests, we can share them to encourage one another.

Aaron Burdett – “Arlo”

North Carolina-based singer and songwriter Aaron Burdett compiled this song by noting quotes that his friend Arlo would say, collecting them for over 10 years. Arlo isn’t necessarily the character in the song, Burdett says, but a character, someone who always has a bold thing to say.

CeeLo Green – “Slow Down”

CeeLo Green brings us a video for “Slow Down” from his latest album, CeeLo Green is… Thomas Calloway. From the writing of the song, to the recording and then making of the video, it was a completely expressive process for Green, who called it an “out of body experience.” Ironically titled, the song pulls the listener even closer into the climactic height of the record.

Natalie D-Napoleon – “Gasoline & Liquor”

Driving through the rural Mojave, D-Napoleon passed a sign that read “Gasoline and Liquor.” While she knew it would be a song, she thought it sounded like a man’s song, one written via passing lines back and forth with her husband. The video reflects the landscape of the “Wild Wests” of both the American desert and Western Australia, the places between which this artist splits her time.

Danny Paisley and the Southern Grass – “Date With an Angel”

Danny Paisley is the current reigning prince of Baltimore-D.C.-area bluegrass, a scene with rich history dating back to the 1950s. This week, Paisley and his band the Southern Grass bring us a song from their upcoming release, Bluegrass Troubadour. 

Aoife O’Donovan feat. Kris Drever – “Transatlantic”

Aoife O’Donovan is no stranger here at BGS, or anywhere in the roots community for that matter! Her work with artists like Crooked Still, I’m With Her, and the Goat Rodeo Sessions proves why that is. This week on BGS, she teams up with Scottish artist Kris Drever to bring us a message that we’ll all be together again.

Brigitte DeMeyer – “Salt of the Earth”

BGS caught up with Brigitte DeMeyer from San Francisco this week on a 5+5 – that is, 5 questions, 5 songs. We talked musical inspirations, songwriting techniques, and her mission statement: being herself.

Will Orchard – “Rita”

For Boston-based Will Orchard, this song is about trusting impulses, and the constant questioning of whether or not those feelings are valid. Written on tour in two parts separated by almost year, Orchard was able to combine them with the perspective of time, earning a place on his newly released album, I Reached My Hand Out. 

Helena Rose – “What’s Killing You is Killing Me”

Helena Rose wrote this song while struggling to tell a loved one how she felt about their addiction. Rose offers this song to others who have loved ones battling addiction, giving hope to the struggle, and showing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Valerie June – “Smile”

As March has slipped away and we welcome April, we bid farewell to our March Artist of the Month, Valerie June. This song comes from her latest album, The Moon and the Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.

The Bones of J.R. Jones – “Bad Moves”

In celebration of his latest album, A Celebration, we caught up with the Bones of J.R. Jones for a 5+5, talking about performance memories, art forms, and songwriting techniques. Jones’ curated playlist brings us everything from Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen to the White Stripes.

John Smith – “Friends”

The pandemic was hard on us all, no doubt, but for Wales-based John Smith, it just kept bringing the punches. Trying to make sense of it all, Smith brings us The Fray, his latest album in a 15-year career, teaming up with artists and friends like Sarah Jarosz and Bill Frisell.

Photos: (L to R) Margo Price by Bobbi Rich; Aoife O’Donovan by Rich Gilligan; Todd Snider by Stacie Huckeba

WATCH: Aoife O’Donovan, “Transatlantic” (Feat. Kris Drever)

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Aoife O’Donovan (featuring Kris Drever)
Hometown: Newton, Massachusetts
Single: “Transatlantic”
Release Date: March 17, 2021
Label: Yep Roc Records

In Their Words: “I started writing ‘Transatlantic’ many years ago after one of my frequent trips across the pond. The lyric started as a classic love song, but when I dusted it off to complete it for this project with the Irish Arts Center, it became something different. I felt strangely moved by the nostalgia and longing for camaraderie, innocently described by my pre-pandemic self. As I finished the tune in January of this year — feeling certain of nothing but the uncertainty of these times — I immediately began to hear the voice of Kris Drever, a friend based in Glasgow. Kris enlisted his trio mates Euan Burton and Louis Abbott to be the rhythm section, and layered the recording with the inimitable strings of Jeremy Kittel. The refrain references the old classic ‘Loch Lomond,’ a ‘song from another time.’ Raise a glass. We will be together again.” — Aoife O’Donovan

Photo credit: Rich Gilligan