Tag: lgbtq

Singing Through Dark Times:
Willi Carlisle Finds Hope in Roaming and Reckoning

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

We are in a moment of extreme distress. Especially, but not limited to, the formal politics of America’s dying empire. Living in its wake, it’s easy to collapse into hopelessness. Hopelessness seems reasonable, considering the criminalization of trans voices, or ICE raids, or the tariffs that wipe out hard earned income, or climate change, or any of the other myriad disasters we are in the middle of. There has to be some way forward – a full understanding of how bad the situation currently is, but also that there might be a small amount of hope; that it has been worse than this, but it has also been better.

Willi Carlisle released an album of traditional songs, called The Magnolia Sessions, in December 2024 and will release Winged Victory June 27 via Signature Sounds. Winged Victory includes original songs and covers of Utah Phillips, Richard Thompson, and Patrick Haggerty, among others. These songs are about the delicate negotiation between historical understandings, current realities, and the possibility of a progressive future; about carving out small moments of pleasure against melancholy; of building a small paradise against these impending crises.

I reached Willi Carlisle by phone on Good Friday, the saddest day of the Christian calendar. On the first Good Friday, no one thought Christ would return. I have not been a believer for a while, but I remember sermons in college which warned against racing through Friday to get to the hope of Sunday. So when I call this album a hopeful one, it is hopeful with a full acknowledgement that it might not get better. The work needs to be done with the assumption that there is no intervention, divine or otherwise.

When asking Carlisle about optimism, or about hope, he makes his choices sound purposeful, mentioning that he had been wanting to make this kind of album for more than a decade and that these two albums are “more just like musical moments that continue to say the things I want to say, as opposed to saying the things that I want to get off my chest.” This is not a manifesting energy, or an optimism despite all odds, but one which is well earned after decades of performing.

Those decades of performance tile with decades of listening, each working together mutually. Winged Victory has several moments which cross cosmic time – decades or centuries – looking backwards or seeing what is possible in the futures of our children’s children’s generations. The collection begins, for example, with the Utah Phillips standard, “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years.” Its chorus states baldly:

Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!

This album is one of reckoning, of refusing the standard moments. In the original song, “The Cottonwood Tree,” a slow waltz, Carlisle talks about a “place where nobody lives, and everyone is free.” He is singing in first person while he plays a concertina, mentioning how he is part of nature now and how he will be part of nature in his own rotting. He is happy to die trusting people, but even after dies, even when he is buried under “the cottonwood trees,” he will be heard.

He concludes the song, believing that he will meet his friends six feet under the cottonwood tree. In a subtle moment, his friends are “the tall grasses rustling between his ears,” or the forget-me-nots in a parking lot, and maybe even other humans. Here time collapses, between the immediacy of the moment and the length it takes a body to absorb fully into those cottonwood trees.

Carlisle’s album of traditional songs, The Magnolia Sessions, has moments of this cosmic time as well – a much eerier version of “Leatherwing Bat” than the one made famous on Peter, Paul and Mary’s children’s album, as well as the last song, a version of “Jubilee,” a moment which reminds us again that the joy will come, after working and waiting.

Conversation between original tracks and new work is central to Carlisle’s practice. His reckoning, which occurs over and over again, is also about the complex matrix of listening and performing other people’s songs. When asked about the covers, he talks about working together – that he had a “strong relationship to the material…”

“I see my whole project in folk music is hearing history with all of its interpretations, its historicity, back to the lives of actual human beings. It’s time to take off the cowboy hat and put on the work gloves.”

The strength of the relationships between material, is partly due to how the original songs on this album work in conjunction with the old songs. For example, how the waltz of “The Cottonwood Tree” leads into the harder, faster waltz of the Patrick Haggerty-penned “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears.” That Carlisle includes a Patrick Haggerty song at all is remarkable, even more so that he makes it full of joy and he considers it as part of the tradition of folk and country music. It’s a cult song in queer folk circles – the mainstreaming of this work is a foregrounding of queer desire, another tradition and another culture. Carlisle sings it with horns and an accordion which sounds like a circus calliope (between this and Lucy Dacus’ “Calliope Prelude,” the instrument is having a moment).

Collapsing of time can again be seen in his version of Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing.” Also running a little quicker than the original, it’s a song about lovers who cannot be kept and immediacy about “the price you pay for the chains you refuse.” But the next song, “Big Butt Billy” – a comic riff on possibly hooking up with a non-binary server at a diner in the midwest – makes other arguments, models other kinds of hope (for an immediate pleasure).

Other versions of “Beeswing,” meanwhile, take the side of the narrator and have a misogynist tinge against the person who roams. Having these two songs back to back argues in favor of roaming and typifies desire as a kind of roaming – Haggerty wants, the Romany wants, the server wants, and at the risk of thinking he might be a little autobiographical, Willi wants. Throughout these two albums, the hunger is palpable.

Roaming is central to Carlisle’s music, not only on this album, but as a theme. Roaming through time and space, through the cosmos, and on the very real roads of California, Texas, or Wisconsin. The first thing that Carlisle and I talked about was BBQ and about Kansas City, where he is staying on Good Friday when we connect. That could be seen as a kind of metaphor – having strong feelings about a very local meat & three and about the history of a song that is brand new; having thoughts about the place where he is landing and a song that is centuries old.

Roaming is a way through this mess, through catastrophe and disaster as a way of finding community, against despair while not naively thinking things will get better without labor. This pattern of Carlisle’s interpretive skill is top notch throughout both of these albums, because of that curious hunger, that roaming, and that possibility of a way forward, even in the darkest era.

The last question I asked Carlisle was about theater – he had worked at Fringe shows in his 20s. He said that he wanted to direct or act again, especially Brecht. I keep returning to Brecht’s “Motto,” which reads in its entirety:

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

This poem was the epigraph to a book written when Brecht had moved to Denmark, escaping German fascism.

Winged Victory reveals there is great beauty in darkness, that singing itself is an act of optimism, and that exile creates its own narratives. Therein, Carlisle has found a way of singing through dark times.

All photos: Whit Stone

Country Star Chely Wright Brings All of Her Life Experiences to a New Corporate Role

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

From growing up on a Kansas farm, to building an award-winning country music career, to a groundbreaking coming out in 2010, to now. As Senior Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility and New Market Growth at global workplace experience and facilities management company ISS, Chely Wright has followed a simple but effective mantra: “Plan your work and work your plan.” Her parents instilled this ethic in Wright and her siblings, and to this day it guides her trajectory.

“My parents raised all three of us kids to be problem solvers,” she says. “When you live on a farm, you’re poor, and you have to fix things with duct tape, you get really good at problem-solving. It’s in our DNA, and I love that they raised us to do that.”

A singer and songwriter, she moved to Nashville in 1989. Awarded the Academy of Country Music’s Top New Female Vocalist of 1995, her steady ascent led to over fifteen chart singles — including her first hit, “Shut Up and Drive” (1997), first number one, “Single White Female” (1999), and “The Bumper of My S.U.V.” (2005) — and eight studio albums.

Wright came out in 2010, making history as the first country star to publicly do so — at great personal and professional risk. At that time, she could not have anticipated that her courage and authenticity would not only reverberate and empower countless others, but would eventually lead to a high-level position.

“When I came out, I wanted to do it well,” she says. “That included embedding myself with organizations that could inform, educate, and help me be a good voice in the LGBTQ community. In doing that, I gained tremendous understanding of the power of storytelling and, essentially, culture work. I began having opportunities to do that work with corporate organizations, higher education, and faith communities. It became what I called my ‘side hustle,’ in addition to my work as an artist.”

When COVID-19 lockdowns brought touring to a halt in 2020, Wright continued her “side hustle” through virtual events and workshops. One of her clients, global design firm Unispace, brought her on full-time as chief diversity officer, working in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). This year, she joined ISS, whose international reach includes over 320,000 employees worldwide.

Moving into corporate social responsibility was an organic transition, as CSR intersects with DEI. “We think about creating access and opportunity for Black- and Brown-owned businesses, women-owned businesses, locally owned businesses, LGBTQ-owned businesses, veteran-owned businesses,” she says. “We think about procurement, sustainable sourcing, and ethical supply chains. Our clients have their eye on mindfulness around who works for them. They know there’s an employee value proposition. Those employees want to know that the company they work for is not only being good corporate citizens, but also ‘What are they doing for my community? What are they doing within a twelve-block, twenty-block, hundred-block radius of where I go to work?’

“Especially in the past five to ten years, companies are seriously asking themselves, ‘How do we not only protect our shareholders, our stakeholders, but how are we making sure that the people who work here know that not only do we need and want to give them health insurance, and economic security through a 401k and a paycheck, but what are we doing to use the monies we are making as a company to make the communities outside the four walls of this business, this office, better?’ That’s how I see the shared space between DEI and CSR.”

Wright works in the ISS New York office, sometimes telecommuting from home, and often traveling to meet with clients onsite. “I keep having opportunities to use my story,” she says, “and I cannot think of a single thing more gratifying than doing that now in a corporate space, in a global organization. I get to use that on their behalf and on behalf of our clients.”

In time for Mental Health Awareness Month, Chely Wright spoke at length with BGS about what she calls a move “from C-chord to C-suite,” how the landscape on Music Row and beyond has and hasn’t changed in the fifteen years since she came out, and how she balances fear and caution about the current climate with innate hope and optimism.

So many of us, especially women, experience impostor syndrome in our careers. Did you experience this as you moved into corporate spaces?

Chely Wright: Yes, a hundred percent. “Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Do I belong here? Do I actually have the goods to deliver?” Making a dramatic life pivot, impostor syndrome bubbled up and it wasn’t my first bout. I dealt with it when I came out. I dealt with it when I left Polygram and went to MCA Records. I dealt with it in 1989, when I went to Nashville to get a record deal. I know now that when impostor syndrome scratches at my back, I just turn around and say, “Okay, I have things to learn.”

There is nothing more exciting than taking on a new skill set and dipping my toe in a body of water that I never thought about being in before. I have 10,000 sunrises left, if I’m lucky. So it’s not “What can I do?” It’s “What do I get to do?” Why wouldn’t a person like me have a second and third life, take the leadership/communication/radical listening/storytelling/execution skill set, and go into corporate spaces?

We take a myopic view of the music business, but it’s business. The artists who have staying power and choices are iconic not just because of their talents. They do open their mouths and something magical comes out. But when you look at what they’ve done with their business and marketing and the protection and stewardship of their brand, it is business.

When Rodney Crowell produced Lifted Off the Ground [2010], he asked me, “What is your goal as an artist?” I said, “My goal is to be able to make music as long as I want to, when I want to, where I want to.” Because I’m in a corporate role right now does not mean in any way, shape, or form that I’m not going to make more records. I know I will. I have the choice to do that when, where, and how I want to, and having that choice is a blessing and a gift.

What changes do you see in the music industry? How does the big picture look today compared to when you came out?

It looks different than it did fifteen years ago. The music industry, as a whole, obviously is making progress. And I think it would be safe to say that the country music industry is making its own progress at its own pace.

All I know is this: change happens, whether we want it to or not, and there will never again have to be someone who says, “Do I jump first?” I jumped and several others since then have joined me in raising their hands, owning their narrative, and saying, “I am a writer, a producer, a picker, and I happen to be a queer person.”

That said, a lot has changed in the world that makes it more difficult to raise your hand and say who you are. Certainly in the last few years, politically, it’s gotten, in some ways, more dangerous to do that. In some ways, the stakes feel higher right now. But change happens. That’s the thing about time: you can’t slow it down. It’s coming.

Does country music have quite a ways to go to be known as a bastion of equity, fairness, justice, and safety for all? Of course. So does banking, construction, and tech. They’re all on their respective journeys and it takes courage. It takes courage to be a holder of a unique story that people might not be ready to hear. It takes courage, tenacity, and a sense of self. God bless those who raise their hands and say, “I am also this.”

 

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Change is not always a forward or positive step. Change is happening now, but in ways that many of us feel are going backward and becoming increasingly frightening.

Change is happening in some terrifying ways. I won’t gaslight and say, “It’s not as bad as it seems,” or, “It’s just rhetoric,” because even if the thing itself doesn’t happen, the terror that it might is the damage.

Some of these things we fear might not come to pass for certain populations, but we look at our brothers and sisters who are in the fight as well — Black and Brown people, immigrants, trans people — they are my family, and very real things are manifesting for them that aren’t just rhetoric. My wife is Jewish, we are an interfaith family, we are two moms, we are women, and we feel under threat in a lot of different ways. People in our family, and in our circle of love and trust and chosen family, are under threat.

American democracy is, by all intents and purposes right now, very close to being disabled. When we hear we’re in a constitutional crisis, in farm terms, we’re hogtied. As a mother of Jewish babies, as a queer person, as a person who has traveled the world and believes America is the greatest nation on the planet, the importance of America and democracy surviving this — it’s not just America at stake. It’s everyone. It’s the human population. We need to find a way to become un-hogtied, because democracy and freedom, real freedom for all, has to stand. I shudder to think what the world would look like without an American democracy.

In a 2010 interview with Entertainment Weekly you said, “It’s the secret haters who do the most harm, historically.” Those haters are now loud and proud. Is that better or worse? Knowing the enemy versus not knowing who and where they are?

Yes. They’ve become unburdened by any concern of being seen as homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic. The power of gang mentality is real and negative gang mentality scares me a lot. There’s danger in it and people are very easily pulled into the vortex of those energies. When these people group together, form coalitions, lock arms, and move, they take on a new and exponential energy that can suck others up into it.

That scares me. I almost wish they would stay in their closets. But it’s also helpful to know who’s with us and who’s against us. That is really powerful information to have.

You said earlier that you have 10,000 sunrises left, if you’re lucky. There was a point in your life when you no longer wanted those sunrises. The Trevor Project’s 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People cites, among other things, that 39% seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. What is your message – and how is your mental health today?

Coming out as gay when I did was the only way I could survive. On the morning after I didn’t end my life, on that cold winter day in my house in East Nashville, I was afraid I was going to go back downstairs, grab that gun, and do it. So I got on my knees and said, “God, if you have a way for me now, I need to know it.” Hand over my heart, in an instant I knew, “You’re going to come out, you’re going to come out well, and you’re going to tell the whole story.”

I had a responsibility to my maker to tell that story, which included a successful, relatively well-positioned person who always had a ton of confidence, love, friends, health, and resources. I had all those things, and I found myself with a loaded nine-millimeter gun in my mouth – a gun my parents bought for me for protection.

I had a responsibility to say, “This is how bad it gets when you don’t get to be who you are.” It was important, and I’ve said this many times, for the 14-year-old kid at the foot of their bed with their dad’s gun in their hand. It was important because we have to raise our hands in spaces where representation does matter, like in country music. Somebody needed to say, “I love the Grand Ole Opry, I love our troops, I love having grown up in a farm town in Kansas, I’m a person of faith, and I am a queer person, always have been, and always will be.”

My mental health, ever since that morning after I didn’t end my life – I’ve never had another thought of doing it. I’m often asked if the day I came out was the best day of my life. It wasn’t. The best day of my life was the day I decided I was going to come out, because for the first time since I was 9 years old I had hope that I could be me – the whole me.

So my message … I don’t say “It gets better.” I never liked that campaign of “Just survive junior high. Just make it through being bullied in high school, because once you’re an adult and have resources to change your zip code, it gets better. Just hang on through the shit because it’s going to get better.” I don’t like it. Our job as grown-ups is not to ask young people to survive the shit until it gets better. Our job is to roll our sleeves up, reach out, go to the shit, and fix it for young people right now. It’s incumbent upon those of us who have power, position, and resources to make it better now.

What can each individual, those of us who don’t have “power, position, and resources,” do to help make it better?

What I realized after coming out and having conversations with thousands of other queer people, whether it be on the phone, or they’d write a letter, write to me on Facebook, or stand in line after an event and talk to me and share their story, I understood that everybody has a fan club. That fan club may be your neighbors, your colleagues, your family, your congregation. It may be one person or a collection of people that notice what you do, what you say, how you express yourself. Everybody has their own personal story and presence. How will you use your respective power, position, and resources to do good?

Power means your personal influence – and it may just be with one neighbor or coworker. Position means, for example, if you’re really good at swinging a hammer, then do a little work with Habitat for Humanity. Use your skill. Resources might be, “I’ve got some extra ‘this,’” so use it.

Everybody has power. How will you wield it? How will you use your skill set? How will you use your unique resources, your influence, to make things a little bit better for an organization or a single person? That might mean swinging your hammer, or it might mean helping someone in a crosswalk when the light is about to change. There are a thousand ways we can use our power, position, and resources every day.

You wrote your autobiography Like Me: Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer “to tell the story of who I am.” Who are you now?

I’m exactly the same. I have new experiences to add, my CV looks different, but I am exactly the same person. Still a person of faith, a person who loves country music and the Grand Ole Opry, who loves to meet and talk to people. I’m still really curious, proud of who I am, and as hopeful as I always have been.

And I’m still strategic, as evidenced by the way I came out. If you look at the way I’ve lived my life and evolved my career since then, it should surprise no one how strategic I was in how I came out. I wanted to come out well, and that required strategy, because the people who will and do malign people like me, the Focus On the Family [kind of] organizations and the far-right fringe, who want to tell stories that aren’t true about people like me — you better believe they’re strategic.

I’m going to meet and match their strategy with how I tell the real story of me and people like me. It goes back to what [my parents] Stan and Cheri Wright told me: “Plan your work and work your plan.” I did that when I came out, and I’m doing that now.

Photo courtesy of Shorefire Media.

Dualities & Disorientation: Olive Klug is Older, Wiser, and Still Feels Like a ‘Lost Dog’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“If the world is my oyster I’ve been poking at it with a plastic fork,” sings Olive Klug on “Taking Punches from the Breeze,” the first track off their second album, Lost Dog, which released April 25. Klug writes with a mesmerizing combination of levity and intensity about a slightly off-kilter world. Through closeups on minute, funny, and revealing moments in life, they illustrate how schisms can be beautiful, too, if you see them right.

Though often joyful and whimsical, Lost Dog isn’t always rosy. On it, Klug works through immense life and perspective shifts. Their takes on breakups – “The butterflies have all got broken wings” (“Cold War”) – and depression – “When my friend hangs up / and my mind turns gray” (“Opposite Action”) – are refreshing not for their angst but for their realism. But nowhere is their combination of playful, revealing storytelling more evident than on “Train of Thought,” their love letter to their neurodivergent brain.

There’s a train in the sky in the middle of my mind and it’s flying off a one-way track
And they try to button up my suit and tie in an attempt to hold me back
But I’m this strange old conductor wearing pearls and a backwards baseball cap…

Klug grew up in Oregon and studied psychology in college, intending to work towards a master’s degree and career in social work. Not long after graduation, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and they lost their job. Like so many others, Klug ended up at home, on TikTok. There, music took off fast, and their song “Raining in June” scored them an audience. From there, life hit warp speed – a record deal, a move, a music career, a new relationship – and then it fell apart.

Now older and recalibrating, they’re releasing their second album, Lost Dog (their Signature Sounds debut), about aging with a neurodivergent brain, leaning into their differences, and coming to terms with not having everything figured out.

Your first album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded, came out in 2023 and now we’re talking about your new album, Lost Dog. You’ve lived a lot of life between recording the two albums and you’re clearly writing from a different place this time around. What’s changed for you between those two projects?

Olive Klug: I was 23, 24 when I really started to pursue music as a career. I was not particularly young, but I was kind of naive in the music industry world. I blew up pretty quickly after giving it a go and then moved to LA and signed a record deal. When I look back, I had a lot of hubris, I was very self involved. I was living in LA. It was very exciting. I thought “I’ve made it.” I was making all my money off of music. [But] I was dropped from that record label directly after the release of that album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded, which I think now is kind of like funny and ironic and is hilarious.

That’s funny, “Damn, I said don’t.”

So I was dropped from that label and I also went through a breakup. I had these two years of riding this crazy high and then everything came tumbling down at the same moment. I realized that that whole era of my life was a little bit gilded; that relationship wasn’t right for me, that record label wasn’t right for me. But I looked like I had it together on the outside.

All of that made me dig pretty deep into what I wanted out of my life. It was a moment of soul searching and a moment of having to believe in myself, understand who I was, and motivate myself to keep going in music, because there was nobody around me believing in me anymore.

The past two years have been this wild journey of figuring out what I want, figuring out who I am, and maturing and leaving that hubris behind – and [leaving] that life behind. Since that happened, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, I recorded a bunch of songs, I wrote a bunch of songs. I bought a van. I now live in my van, but I still don’t really have things totally figured out. I’m still lost at times. I think that’s the reality for a lot of people my age.

I’m in my late 20s now and I think that this album is really about the moment that I woke up. I was 27 and things were less figured out than they were when I was 24. That’s where the Lost Dog title comes from, feeling like I am getting older yet I am still feeling like a lost dog, wandering around the country.

There is so much pressure in this world to have it figured out or to be one specific way, and it feels like you’re pushing back on that and saying you don’t have to do that if it’s not right for you.

I’m not really trying to make a statement. My first album, I tried to tie all of my songs up in this neat little bow to be like, “Here is the message that I want to send with this song.” This next album is much more unfiltered. It’s just what came out of me. This is my experience. I’m not trying to reassure anybody with these songs.

You’ve said that this album is about aging as a neurodivergent free spirit. Particularly talking about “Train of Thought,” where you’re leaning into the chaos you feel inside your brain sometimes, instead of trying to hide it. What about that experience felt like what you needed to write about on this album?

I spent my adolescence trying hard to fit in. I had my little secret moments at home. But at school and in my regular life, I got good grades. I dressed up in a way that I thought would be rewarded [at] school. I still was very [much] conforming to my gender, and I tried really hard to be “normal.” I was scared of what would happen to me socially if I did not try to fit in, even though there was this part of me that really wanted to be different.

It wasn’t until my adulthood that I felt the freedom to experiment more with my identity and experiment more with rejecting those norms. I think that’s totally the opposite of what a lot of people experience. A lot of people, when they’re a teenager, they rebel and they dress really crazy and they try to be as weird and challenge the norms as much as possible. I didn’t start doing that until maybe even slightly after college. Since then, it’s been a deep spiral down into allowing myself the freedom to really be myself.

I didn’t understand that I was neurodivergent. I didn’t understand that my brain worked a little differently than other people. Now I’m like, “Well, what do I have to lose? I’m just going to be totally myself.” Having this community of people who are my listeners and fans who really like that about me, and who really celebrate that about me, has been really healing. I think that a lot of artists and writers are neurodivergent in some way and the superpower of it is that’s what allows us to write the way that we do. That’s what [“Train of Thought”] is about, allowing myself to stop trying to put myself in a box and let the chaos of my mind roam totally free.

I’m curious about “Taking Punches from the Breeze,” which is you letting yourself wander in a different way. There are these great lines in there like, “…If the world’s my oyster I’ve been poking at it with a plastic fork.” I don’t think anybody has ever presented that concept before in that way.

I wrote that one living in an apartment in LA by myself. And I love living alone. It’s like the best for my creative flow. But I was really sad. It was in the aftermath of that breakup and being dropped from the record label where I wrote these songs. “Taking Punches From the Breeze” was one of the first ones I wrote. That and “Cold War” were the beginning of this Lost Dog era, so to speak. I got really high one night, to be so honest with you. I was in my apartment and I had just gone on– you know when you have your first date after a breakup? I was on this first date after a breakup. I feel like I am pretty good at asking other people questions and I was asking this person all these questions. Then they would turn around and ask me those questions and I’d be like, “God, I don’t know what I’m doing right now.”

When I’m doing shows, I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Gemini. That’s why this album is the way it is.” I think it’s true, it’s about holding a lot of dualities. A constant disorientation is what I’ve really felt for the past two years. But there’s a lot of fun and joy and possibility in that constant disorientation. It can be hard at the same time.

The other side of the duality, or another part of the duality, is “Opposite Action,” where you’re really pretty down in the middle of the album. Tell me about writing that song.

That was also in that time. I think it was late summer, I was in my apartment in LA feeling weird. I was a psychology major, and I learned about DBT [Dialectical Behavioral Therapy]. That song borrows from a DBT concept called opposite action. I remember having questions about it when I learned about it. But it’s basically the concept that you do the opposite of what your instincts are telling you to do: If you are feeling particularly depressed, you’re supposed to take a deep breath and try to do the opposite. So if you wake up and you want to lay in bed all day and do nothing, you’re supposed to force yourself to go out and be social, go to the park, go to the beach.

I was like, “I’m gonna go to the beach, even if it’s by myself. I’m gonna try to plant things in my backyard.” It was all these things that I was trying to do to make myself feel better, but then feeling really frustrated, because I was taking good care of myself and I still felt bad.

How the song really started was, as a touring musician, so many of the things that people tell you to do to establish some sort of stability and happiness are just impossible to do. Growing plants is something that I would love to be able to do. I can’t do that, because I’m not at my house most of the time. I came back from a trip or a show or something and I had tried to grow jalapeños and tomatoes in my little back patio area. They had died.

That to me is one of the things that really sticks out about your music. You have this way of dialing in on these minute observations. Is that how your brain works all the time? Is that how you’re seeing the world?

I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know how people see the world differently or not. But my writing does feel sort of matter of fact to me oftentimes. So maybe that is how I see the world.

It’s matter of fact, but it’s really joyful.

I think a lot of Lost Dog is coping with those decisions I can’t really take back. If I had gone down that traditional path, if I had gone to grad school, become a therapist, I would have health insurance right now, I would have job security right now. There would be a lot of things that I would have right now that I lack in my life. It is scary to be even a semi-successful musician. I have no certainty. It’s really, really hard to feel any sense of stability or certainty. And to not have any health insurance and to not have any benefits, and all of that stuff, it can be really scary. I wish that small working artists had that. It makes me feel like I’m never going to be able to really have a family, if I go keep going at this rate, I am never going to be able to go to the dentist.

That’s the thing that I really wish more people understood. You’re looking at this artist on stage every night and you relate to their music, they’re still on the road maybe 200 days a year. They don’t have that personal life stability. They don’t have that health insurance often. Even if you think they’re well known, the margins are so crummy and what it takes is so intense.

But if I had not taken this risk, I would always wonder what would have happened. I’m really glad I took the risk. It’s such an incredible payoff. One thing that I can always feel when I’m on stage every night is I have the most fulfilling career ever. That is something that I will never question.

People are like, “I want to have a job that has meaning and that feels aligned with what I’m good at and who I am.” Every night I go on stage, I’m getting paid to do the thing that I feel like I am meant to be doing and that is really worth it. Maybe one day that will include some stability.

And just like that, we’re back to dualities.

Yes, exactly.

Photo Credit: Alex Steed

Basic Folk: Mary Gauthier & Jaimee Harris

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris talk to Lizzie and Cindy for Basic Folk onboard the Cayamo cruise in front of a live audience. We get down to business in addressing nice things by asking Mary what kind of shoes she’s wearing – as she has a reputation for enjoying the good stuff, especially on her feet. After that, we asked and Jaimee enthusiastically answered the age-old question: What is the correct number of shoes to bring on tour? They generously share about their relationship, which began two years after they met as teacher (Mary) and student (Jaimee) in a songwriting workshop. Interestingly enough, both Harris and Gauthier have been playing music for about the same amount of time, despite their age difference. Jaimee, mid 30s, and Mary, early 60s, are also both sober and expand on what it’s like to be students of their own patterns.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

We also talk about their touring life, songwriting processes, and the alchemy of transforming personal trauma into art. We get to hear the very cute story of how Jaimee first heard of Mary Gauthier, by way of Ray Waylie Hubbard’s song “Name Dropping.” Mary, in turn, talks about her first impressions of Jaimee’s songwriting (spoiler alert: she was completely floored). They share their future plans with us, where they say there will be a Harris-Gauthier album, right after Jaimee completes the three records in her head and Mary writes her second book. They also share what it’s been like when they are together and around people who know Mary (who has a higher profile in the Americana world), but don’t know Jaimee. Each comment that they feel for partners in relationships with people who are “actually famous.”

We end with a great Lightning Round, a game we like to play with partners called “Which One.” We think they might have enjoyed that, because on the last day of the cruise Mary, getting off the boat, shouted, “Thanks for the interview! The Lightning Round was a real moment!!”

Photo Credit: Will Byington 

Out Now: Jaimee Harris

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Jaimee Harris is a thoughtful songwriter, a kind and quirky human, and an insightful individual. It was an honor to speak with her about her upcoming tour, the inspiration behind her songs, and how she takes care of her mental health in a demanding industry. Our conversation touches on everything from her daily routine – right down to crafting the perfect cup of coffee each morning – to how she stays grounded on the road, to the process behind her songwriting.

We dive into her haunting song, “Orange Avenue,” written about the tragic shooting at the Pulse LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida – a thoughtful and chilling track. We also explore the details of the title track of her 2023 album, Boomerang Town, a story song rooted in both fact and fiction. It follows intriguing characters with intricate pasts, the restless ache to escape small-town limits and achieve something big, and the soul-crushing realities of a harsh world.

I hope you can feel Jaimee’s humor, intellect, and warmth through this interview.

You have four months of touring coming up. You’re playing shows across the U.S. and you’re also headlining a tour in the Netherlands and Belgium. How does all of that feel and what are you most excited and anxious about?

Jaimee Harris: Mary [Gauthier] and I just got home from being on this incredible thing called Cayamo, which is like a floating music festival on a cruise ship. We were on that boat for seven or eight days and just got home last night. We leave again this weekend for tour. So I’m trying to pretend I’m not home right now. Because if I switch into this mentality of, “I’m home now,” then that just disrupts the system. So I’m looking at this week as if I’m still on the road. With just like a couple days off.

I’m so excited about touring the Netherlands. It’s one of my favorite places to play. It’s one of my favorite places to be. I love the people there. I love the culture there. And it’s been cool because I’ve been over there many times as an opening act, but I’ve never done my whole set there. And it’s been my experience that the people in the Netherlands can really handle and really enjoy the dark songs.

How do you find constantly being on the road? And, how do you balance that with mental health?

Well, I’ve learned that I need to have a couple of things in place to make me feel comfortable and it doesn’t take much, but one of them that is so important to me is my coffee, which might seem silly. But there’s this coffee I love from Austin, it’s called Third Coast, and Mary Gauthier, my partner, used to run restaurants in Boston and one of the only things she kept from her restaurants when she sold them to move to Nashville to become a songwriter is this industrial coffee grinder.

Every morning we grind it and make espresso and that’s like a huge part of my joy. And we bring it on the road with us. I bring a little kettle and my Hydro Flask, I’m a Hydro Flask girl.

Me too! Mine is right here! [Pulls up Hydro Flask]

Amazing! I love them so much. So the water bottle is a huge deal on the road.

Every morning when I start my day with that coffee, it sets me up for success. Having a little bit of routine to keep me tethered to something while we’re on the road is really helpful. I’ve found that I can always find 15 minutes throughout the day to move my body. Making that a priority for me helps everything while I’m on the road. I love being on the road. Today, since we just got home yesterday, I’ve just been on the couch all day. Re-entry is always hard for me. So today I’m just watching movies and being a weirdo on the couch.

Could you tell us about your recent interactions with Emmylou Harris?

I think coming off this thing we just did on the boat was incredible and Emmylou Harris is my number one hero of all time.

Her guitar tech, Maple Byrne, gave us a heads up a few weeks ago that Emmy might want me to play guitar and sing with her for this [songwriters] round we were in. I literally was driving a car in the Hill Country in Texas and I had to pull the car over and scream. I was like, “There’s no way! That’s my number one hero!” And I didn’t even believe it was gonna happen until it happened.

Earlier that day [during Cayamo], I played a show as me on the boat. Twenty minutes before I played, security walked Emmylou Harris and her friend to my show. I literally had to run to the bathroom! I was like, “I’m gonna be sick. I can’t handle this. This is crazy! THIS IS CRAZY!” I literally forgot the first two lines of the first song, because I was so in shock. I just couldn’t believe that happened and then I got to play with her later that afternoon. My wildest dreams have come true!

You’ve mentioned Mary a little bit. What has it been like for you to find a partner, Mary Gauthier, who is both a partner in life and also a partner in music, playing shows and touring together?

It’s been incredible. I have learned so much from her about what it is to be a troubadour from the business side of things. She’s so wise, because she came to music after running three restaurants. She has a lot of business experience that she’s been able to apply to the world of being a troubadour, which is incredible. She’s been able to do what she does inside her own integrity in a way that’s really beautiful to learn from. And I get to live in a house with one of the greatest living songwriters. I truly think she’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and it’s made me a better writer. Just getting to watch her, how hard she works on songs. She is a real hard worker. I mean, she’s got a lot of natural talent, but she chisels and chisels and chisels songs out of the marble. And so it’s made me up my editing game.

Your song “Boomerang Town” is so beautiful and relatable and intimate; it’s a story-song format. How did you come up with the idea for “Boomerang Town” and what does that song mean to you?

It came in different stages. I’d always wanted to write a song about where I grew up. I’m from a small town just outside of Waco, Texas. I remember being in my early twenties and trying to explain to people where I grew up and I came up with the phrase, “It’s a boomerang town.” People try to leave, they end up going back there pretty quick. That phrase had been in my mind for a while.

In 2017, I got asked if I wanted to sing a verse of “This Land Is Your Land” during this 4th of July celebration. The songwriter hosting the song said, “What verse do you want?” I said I want the steeple verse. The verse is: “In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people/ By the relief office, I saw my people/ They stood there hungry, and so I stood there asking/ Was this land made for you and me?” In my hometown, there’s an interstate, I-35, that runs through the center of it and on the east side of that interstate there’s a steeple from the Truett Seminary in town and on the west side there are two relief offices. The interstate creates a bridge and there’s been a community of people living under that bridge for decades, like my entire life.

When I saw those words, I saw my hometown. The songwriter said, “I always thought Woody got it wrong with that verse.” I couldn’t believe that he would have such a different take on that verse; that planted a little seed for me. I worked on that song for years. I tried a bunch of different perspectives. I initially started with myself and I couldn’t find a way for the song to move forward if I was the narrator. I tried it from the perspective of a veteran. Then I tried it from the perspective of a woman who worked at a cafe. I decided her name was going to be Julie, because I’m a huge fan of Buddy and Julie Miller. I finally landed on the perspective of the 17-year-old boy who worked at Walmart that knocked up his girlfriend. Which is a combination of me when I worked at Walmart and somebody else I knew. That’s when the story started to take off.

I’ve had so many experiences where people came up to me and said, “Hey, you got that song perfectly right.” Like, “My brother died under that bridge, I know all about that scene.”

Also, being a woman from Texas, with the way things are going there – nationally and politically, that song, how it ends, has a way deeper impact than I could have imagined when I wrote it in 2020. The choices women had in 2020 are more than we have now in 2025. There’s no way I could have known that when I was writing it.

You’ve just passed 11 years of sobriety. Is there anything that you’d like to share about your sobriety, your support system, and addiction in general?

Well, I couldn’t have done it without 12-step recovery. I’m very active in 12-step recovery. That’s been my lifeboat, doing it with other people. Someone in recovery said this thing that has stuck with me: “At five years, you get your marbles back. And at 10 years, you get to play with them again.” I feel like that’s true. I’m learning every day.

I remember when I first got into recovery, people would say this thing that I could not understand, “I’m so grateful to be an alcoholic.” When I got there, it was through the criminal justice system, so I was going there to get a paper signed. I was like, “What are these people talking about?” I can’t tell you how many times over the last six years I’ve said, “I’m so grateful, because I have a support system in a time when a lot of people feel really isolated.”

You spent some time in Florida in 2022 and you wrote a song called “Orange Avenue” about the 2016 shooting at the Pulse LGBT nightclub. What does this song mean to you, and what was the process of writing it?

I decided to visit a bunch of spots in Florida to collect stories and write and record a song in each town. I spent a month traveling the state. I wasn’t even gonna go to Pulse, and then somebody mentioned it and I said, “Okay, I’ll check that out.” Everything about it really floored me. I was imagining this bar being in an entertainment district, where there are a bunch of bars. It isn’t like that, it’s a neighborhood bar. So it’s just house, house, house, house, a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street, and then Pulse. Of course it was a gay bar, but it was also a bar that you could get into if you were 18 and up. So it’s also a place where younger kids could get in and just go dance and have a good time. Which is why the youngest girl that was killed was 18 years old. She was there on vacation with her family.

Now it’s been deemed a national monument. When I was there, it was kind of makeshift. There are pictures of people, notes to loved ones, poems, just all sorts of tributes. Then there’s this one kind of official-looking plaque. It has the names of 48 people that died in the shooting. To the side of it says at the request of a family, one name has been left off this list. I was wondering, what’s the story there? I looked it up and it turns out there was a man of Middle Eastern descent and his family didn’t know he was gay until he died in the shooting.

They were ashamed of that. It took quite a long time for anyone to agree to come pick up his body. That’s how deep the shame was. At the time, I believe the police chief of Orlando was a lesbian and because of the element of it being a neighborhood bar, because there were people that were there just because they could get in because of their age, they weren’t necessarily going to come out and say, “Hey, this was a hate crime.” When they found out that that family didn’t want to come pick up their family member, they said, “We have to tell the world that this was a gay bar. This was a hate crime.”

I tried the song from my perspective, but it didn’t really have the impact that it did until I put it in a perspective of that man and his ghost and what it would be like to embody that man’s experience. It was an honor to write that song.

Photo Credit: Brandon Aguilar

Palmyra Shakes Off Anxieties With Oh Boy Records Debut, ‘Restless’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Palmyra is a bit restless. Their emotions knot into a mangled ball, almost suffocating them.

“Early hours in the morning, tossing and turning/ Everyone else in this house is asleep,” Sasha Landon pours into the microphone. “Palm Readers” emerges integral to the band’s new musical chapter. Aptly titled Restless, this album marks their debut with Oh Boy Records. It’s like reintroducing themselves to the world.

The trio – rounded out with Teddy Chipouras and Mānoa Bell – pounces from the get-go. Similar to The Lone Bellow’s tightly wound vocal work, their harmonies exude a vintage richness throughout as they do on the title track and opener. It’s quite evident that they take their work seriously, down to the lilt of their voices as they glide through the air. Palmyra makes you believe they’ve been singing together for decades, their harmonies are so electric and full of life.

“We definitely put a lot of effort into our harmonies. It’s something that always feels super important when we’re arranging a song,” shares Landon. “The three of us weren’t people who sang with others a lot before this band. When we formed, we learned a lot from old recordings of other bands and all sorts of stuff. We did a lot of transcribing harmony early on in the lockdown. The record needed to start with our voices and we wanted that to set the tone for the album.”

Perfectly performed harmonies underpin the album’s emotional currents. The trio builds guilt, frustration, and hope into the project’s backbone to create a coming-of-age story. “There was a moment when we understood what the album was about. There were separate songs that we found homes together through playing them live,” says Chipouras. “‘Palm Readers’ feels great right after ‘Restless.’ And those songs then became a pair. Their energies matched. The coming-of-age narrative emerged from the time period that the songs were written.”

Restless sprouts from the cracks between each song. Where “No Receipt” meanders through sun-caked uncertainty, the cheeky “Dishes” sees the band accepting domestication and finding peace. Along the way, they agonize over being present while time yanks them this way and that – the pressure that comes from being a working musician crushes their shoulders. The album, based on a “period of leaving college, going out on our own, starting a band, going out on the road, and just trying to figure out what the life of a musician looks like,” captures brutal truths of living, loving, and losing time.

Hopping on a Zoom call, Palmyra spoke to BGS about feeling restless, reenergized creativity, and mortality.

What is it about the title track that made sense to be the opener?

Sasha Landon: It made a lot of sense for us to have this song that starts with the three of our voices kicking off the record. Also, it is a song that has a through line to the record from the jump. The emotional center for this record is pretty heavy. And that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of light in the record. I think there’s a lot of fun on it, as well. But the overall emotional center is pretty heavy and restless, felt like a good way to jump into that.

In “No Receipt,” you lament that there just isn’t enough time. As you’ve gotten older, what’s your relationship with time been like?

Mānoa Bell: That’s the central theme of, not only the record, but questions we’re always asking ourselves. Specifically, the last line there about finding those quieter moments has proven to be such a challenge, to put it all to the side. Being an artist is such a consuming experience. Every moment of your day is a part of that journey and it can be hard to have separation from it, which is a really beautiful thing, but frustrating at times as well. You can’t get away from it.

“Can’t Slow Down” deals with a similar thematic thread. How did this one come together?

Teddy Chipouras: This one was a song that I wrote after a couple of years of not writing songs. I don’t think I wrote hardly any songs during COVID. This tune kind of came out all at once after being fed up with not writing anything for a while, and I think we had just gotten off the road. It was kind of like just throwing words at the page of how I was feeling at the time, just feeling exhausted.

That one’s funny, because it was a really big moment for me and I felt very accomplished that I had written something and finished something. I remember being nervous to send it to the band and then really not thinking anything would come from it. I did not think we would be playing that song every night. It’s one of those tunes that has changed meaning, or it means more to me now than it did when I wrote it.

“Buffalo” roots itself in a phone call during a show in Buffalo after one of your friends had taken their own life. Was this song a necessary cathartic exercise?

MB: There are songs that you try to write and then there are songs that you just have to write. I remember very clearly writing the beginning of it and immediately feeling better. It was a very therapeutic experience, not feeling good but feeling better. It’s a song that’s still hard to play. I feel a responsibility to try to connect emotionally with it every time we play it and not just phone it in. Sometimes, when you’re on stage, you’ve done something so many times, there’s a muscle memory aspect to it. But that song never really feels like muscle memory.

When someone dies, you begin questioning your mortality. Did that happen to you?

MB: I think suicide, specifically, when it’s someone who you see yourself in, and someone who you grew up with, makes you wonder what life would be like without them. It’s not just suicide. It’s just about loss and grief. There was never a point where I was like at such a level of grief that I didn’t want to continue living. But it definitely makes you wonder what life will be like moving forward.

The closing track, “Carolina Wren,” feels like a big sigh to let all the things on the record go. Why does it appear as primarily the demo you recorded?

SL: [Producer] Jake Cochran did such a great job of trying to make sure that the songs sonically matched their emotional core and that the version of the song that we were putting out felt really authentic to the lyrics and our live performance of it. This was a tune that I hadn’t played for anyone in the band yet. I wrote it right before we went to the lakehouse [to record] and played it on a whim. I think Teddy was out getting groceries or something and Jake pressed record. Mānoa is holding the bass and I think plays one note on it, and I am playing guitar and singing. We just felt, after hearing it, there was a consensus that that’s how the song is supposed to exist. It’s how it’s supposed to sound.

And Jake helped us get there, too. With some songs, like “Shape I’m In,” for example, we had to be mindful of how many performances we gave it before we exhausted it and weren’t going to get any more. When you have a song that takes a lot emotionally to perform, you can only do it so many times before it loses its meaning, or becomes muscle memory, or just wears you out from overuse. We had one take that felt earnest. It speaks to the song. It honors the song in a good way and it belongs as it is. Then we decided that it made sense as the last tune on the record. It is a nice little breath at the end.

What have been the biggest realizations you’ve had of being working musicians?

MB: I think maybe for me, I’ve learned that there’s kind of an endless amount of resilience needed. You’re constantly faced with just things you need to get through, to solve. I don’t even know if I would call that a music thing, though. I think that’s just like a growing-up thing.

TC: One thing for me is I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find creative time when you’re a full-time creative. We are full-time musicians, we’re on tour a lot of the time, and then we get home and there’s a lot of work to do. It’s almost harder to schedule the creative time than it is to schedule the work. I never thought it would be hard to find that balance.

Did this album change you in any way?

MB: This record showed all three of us that there was another level to get to and that there are endless places of growth that we will find. I think we dug deep as a band and it has continued to be rewarding for those reasons. The further we dig, the better it is. It does just keep getting better.

With the release, the songs no longer belong to you, but the world. What’s that experience?

TC: It will be interesting to see how this one feels, because this one feels bigger than our previous projects. We talk about this a lot with our songs going through different phases of us letting them go. I think the biggest one for me of letting songs go is starting to play them live. We’ve played all of these songs live before for a while. That moment, for me, is the biggest in terms of feeling like releasing full control of it, and it becoming the world’s and not ours anymore.

MB: We haven’t released something at this level before, so I don’t know. I’m excited to see how it feels releasing the whole project. Last year’s release was an EP. I think that if I’m defining what feels different about an EP versus an album, it’s like Teddy saying that this feels bigger than anything before; it’s the amount of energy we put into creating the music – the amount of energy we’ve put into getting it out to people. It’s just like we’re putting so much behind it.

SL: I’m so excited to see, to know that a listener’s first experience of Palmyra could be Restless, that the first thing that they hear is something that of all of the music we’ve put out, we have been proud of, and has been a really good snapshot of where we are at the present time.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

BGS 5+5: Crys Matthews

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Crys Matthews
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest Album: Reclamation
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Papa Bear to my future-wife, Uncle Bear to our youngest nieces, and just Bear to my chosen nephew, River.

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

Without question, the song that took me a while to get ‘right’ is my song “Suit and Tie.” This song was written in response to the drag ban being rolled out in Tennessee. Nashville is my home now, so having a front-row seat to the fallout from that bill definitely weighed on my heart. [The ban] was intentionally loosely worded so that law enforcement could have cause to harangue anyone who they saw fit, even a singer-songwriter like me who happens to dress in suits and ties more often than not.

Gender and gender expression are both deeply, deeply personal – they are nobody’s business and certainly not our government’s business. As a social justice songwriter, I take tremendous care to avoid “speaking for someone” or inadvertently appropriating something that I only meant to appreciate. In “Suit and Tie,” only one of the verses is about me directly and offers my perspective as a Butch-identified lesbian who has been wearing clothes that bucked the patriarchy since I was four years old. The other verses are about a nonbinary person, a femme-identified gay man, and a trans woman.

My friend Holly [Near] once called my songs “truth-telling journalism,” which I took as a badge of honor. The notion of being a faithful steward of the truth means a lot to a PK (preacher’s kid) like me, and so it took me about seven drafts before I felt like I had done that with this song.

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

My mission statement is: To amplify the voices of the unheard, to shed light on the unseen, and to be a steadfast reminder that hope and love are the truest pathways to equity and justice.

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

Unsurprisingly, so much of the best advice I have received during my time on this planet is from my mother. One gem in particular that has seemed more and more profound is, “Babygirl, you better remember whose you are, so you don’t forget who you are.” It was (and still is) her way of reminding me that this industry and this world can try everything in its power to try to change the things about you that make you special, those things that, so often, are the very things that drew them to you in the first place.

You have to be steadfast and secure in who you are at your core. You have to remember your ancestors and your community and the people who knew and loved you before anybody who thought they could help you ‘make it big’ even knew your name. That advice from her is why I have managed to have an actual career that centers my ideals and values. And I think it is why the people in my corner seems to also reflect that ideals and values.

Does pineapple really belong on pizza?

Absolutely not! I keep telling my future-wife that, but she keeps insisting that I’m wrong.

What is a genre, album, artist, musician, or song that you adore that would surprise people?

Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” – before I realized I could write songs, I was fairly certain that I was going to be a high school band director. I have a deep love for classical music. I can conduct the 1812 like nobody’s business!

I know some musicians hope they get famous enough to sing the National Anthem at a Super Bowl or play at the GRAMMYs, but I’m just hoping that I get to conduct the 1812 with a philharmonic at least once before I die.

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen

Sugar in the Tank

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

We’re not always promised earnestness and raw talent from musical guests who show up on late night talk shows, but Julien Baker and TORRES brought both during their energizing joint television debut on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last week.

Donning brightly colored western suits embroidered with flowers and wielding an eclectic mix of acoustic and electric instruments, Baker, TORRES, and their sprawling backing band are vital and promising in their four-and-a-half minutes on stage. It feels like stepping into a slightly altered version of reality, one where past and future bleed into one another.

Together, the seasoned songwriters blend elements of ’90s-era alt-country, western, and indie-rock; their energizing harmonies feel so riddled with life they couldn’t possibly be defined by genre. Baker and TORRES are returning to the root of something honest, vulnerable and nostalgic with their sound. But they’re also acting as alchemists, creating a secret third space, almost inexplicably, using familiar, common elements. There’s just something about this performance that words can’t quite capture.

“Sugar in the Tank” starts out slightly subdued. Baker sings in a characteristic restrained-yet-emotive voice as she plucks the banjo. TORRES starts a twangy conversation between their Fender Telecaster, the fiddle and the pedal steel. But as the song builds, the energy of the performance becomes electric and infectious. When TORRES first comes in with their rich vocal harmonies and the band kicks into full gear, the song becomes bigger than the sum of its parts. But even as it becomes raucous and expansive, the performance still manages to feel tender, personal and heartfelt.

At one point, Baker sings, “I love you now, already and not yet,” and this trepidation, this confusion matched by conviction, feels deeply fitting for the energy the musicians bring to this performance.

Baker is best known as the founder of indie/folk-pop supergroup boygenius, while TORRES has been trodding a steady path as a solo artist for over a decade. The two just recently started recording and performing together, and it looks like there’s plenty more to come. While “Sugar in the Tank” is the only single Baker and TORRES have released so far, rumor has it they have a full-length country album in the works. The two will be performing in select cities throughout the U.S. this coming spring and summer, and you can check out their full list of tour dates on their website.

Photo Credit: Ybru Yildiz

Embrace the Past,
Move Forward

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Music has and continues to be a form of healing for Fancy Hagood. The Arkansas-raised singer who takes his forename from the Drake song – not the Bobbie Gentry and Reba McEntire hit – first began writing songs as a queer junior high student struggling to fit in before dropping out of school at 17 to chase his newfound dreams in Nashville.

Despite growing up listening to everything from contemporary Christian music to The Chicks, Shania Twain, Tim McGraw, Destiny’s Child, and Missy Elliott, it was choir and theatre that brought Hagood’s own creative aspirations to life.

“I really found myself in those classes,” Hagood tells Good Country. “I was dealing with a lot of bullying at the time and writing music became one of the few ways I could truly express myself.”

But upon his arrival to Nashville, Hagood was told that a career as a queer country musician was unlikely. This was followed by a move to Los Angeles, coupled with a transition to pop, that led to him to opening for the likes of Meghan Trainor and Ariana Grande as he juggled a day job at Forever 21. Those opportunities coincided with a decrease in creative control over his own work, something he’s taken back for himself on 2021’s Southern Curiosity and his most recent project, American Spirit, which released October 25.

“I was hell-bent on this album not being a breakup record, but instead one about healing, moving forward, and finding yourself,” Hagood says of American Spirit. “I don’t want to be on the road singing songs about my ex, but I do want to sing about reclaiming your story, bouncing back, and that being the most powerful thing after experiencing something like that.”

Speaking on the phone from his Nashville home, Hagood detailed his ambitious Music City move, experiences with gatekeeping, his work with Apple Music, and more.

What was it like for you moving to Nashville so young? I imagine on one hand it’s quite empowering, but it can also be overwhelming too.

Fancy Hagood: On my song “Fly Away” I sing, “You were scared as hell to take the highway/ You barely knew how to drive…” and that’s the truth. I got my driver’s license when I was 16 and I never drove on the highway until I moved to Nashville, so it was very much a culture shock. I know a lot of people don’t view Nashville as a big city compared to New York or Los Angeles, but when you’re coming from small-town Arkansas it felt like the whole world had opened up for myself. There were parts of it that were really intimidating, but for the most part I had so much enthusiasm that you couldn’t really tell me anything. I had this idea that I was going to be a country superstar and you couldn’t tell me otherwise.

I know things haven’t always been easy for you though. You’ve dealt with some gatekeeping and other hurdles along the way. What’s that been like?

Before I moved to LA, I was getting all this attention in Nashville, selling out shows on my own. A lot was going on for not having any music out in the world yet. I quickly got a publishing deal, but instead of things taking off from there I started getting a bunch of people putting their own opinions on me and putting their own stuff into my music, thus limiting me because of their own fears. That was something I never had going into all of this – fear. It’s a complicated thing when you start mixing art and commerce. The powers that be recognize you have talent, but in figuring out how to make money from it they start thinking of Middle America and who’s going to buy it, leading to a fear game rather than just letting the artist be an artist.

When I moved to LA and got a record deal, that’s where other people’s fears began sinking into my own train of thought and my delusion began slipping away. I was accomplishing all these things, from performing on Dancing With the Stars to hitting the road with Ariana Grande, but on the inside I felt miserable. I realized I’d sacrificed so much of myself and my art to get to a place where other people found it comfortable for me to be successful, but a year and a half into it I just imploded and lost all the deals.

It wasn’t until moving back to Nashville in 2016 that I was able to shake all that off. In 2018 I signed a new publishing deal and began work on my album Southern Curiosity, a slow burn that didn’t release until 2021. It was a really difficult transition having [to go from] a Top 40 hit and everyone treating you like you’re the king of the castle to no hits, no deals, and nobody wants to touch you with a ten-foot pole. It was a humbling experience that taught me that the industry in place was not set up for someone like me to be successful. Because of that, my train of thought stopped being about how do I fit into the industry to thinking about how to create my own, which is exactly what I’ve been doing since Southern Curiosity.

One way you’ve been building that community you speak of is through your role as the host of Trailblazers Radio on Apple Music. What’s that gig meant to you?

I’ve never experienced a company that puts their money where their mouth is quite like Apple. They were supportive of me and my first record before hosting a radio show was even a thought. They first came to me after I guest-hosted on the late Leslie Jordan’s Apple Radio show, which I did three or four times with him. After that, they approached me with the Trailblazers idea and threw me into the deep end. When they offered it to me in 2021 I’d never done radio before and just recently we were picked up for our fourth season. My idea is to feature artists who don’t typically get those opportunities, allowing country music to be for everyone. If you look at our playlist you’ll see all kinds of artists on there, not just what country radio suggests Nashville is.

It’s also been meaningful getting to sit across from actual legends and people who have shattered the glass ceiling in country music. Each artist that’s come through our doors has taught me that not one artist’s journey is the same, which has done a lot for inspiring, motivating, and informing me as an artist.

Are there any particular moments or guests from the show that stand out?

I’d never met Jelly Roll before he came in for his interview and his heart just blew me away. Who he is at his core is so full of joy and his philanthropic side was really inspiring to me. He had just sold out Bridgestone Arena and donated all the money to an organization that helps incarcerated youth. Even when we weren’t recording he was wanting to know more about me, my art, and what I do. He’s just a stand-up person.

A moment ago you mentioned Leslie Jordan, whose loss you touch on (along with your grandmother’s) on the song “Good Grief.” I guess that goes back to songwriting being a method of healing?

Yeah, it came about during a writing session with my friend Jeremy Lutito on a particularly solemn day. We were both in sad moods, but in typical fashion when two guys are alone in a room the last thing they’ll do is ask, “What’s on your heart?” We got to talking about a situation with his family where their dog had passed away the night before, which led to a conversation about grief and having to walk his kids through it for the first time. As he was telling me this I just fell apart thinking of how grief is such a hard thing to come to terms with and reckon with, but sometimes it’s ultimately a good thing. We’d been struggling all day, but that song came about in only an hour or so. It was pure magic.

I’ve seen you refer to this album as a “breakup record,” and I feel like one song that really captures that essence is the title track, “American Spirit.” How’d it come about?

I wrote that with Gina Venier and Summer Overstreet. It started with this idea of cigarette season or a time in your life where you’re smoking and stressed. But with Gina, who’s also a queer artist, it evolved into a song about becoming someone else’s vice. It’s not an unheard-of story in the South, people not being able to fully speak to who they are or how they feel – there’s a lot of closet cases among us. I’ve dealt with that a lot in my time in Nashville and I know others have, too. The song is mostly a nod to those experiences and being an openly queer person dealing with others who aren’t open but are addicted to your openness and freedom and not being able to let that go.

What has music taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me that I’m resilient and can get through anything along with the power of believing in yourself. I’ve gone through a lot in this industry, but I keep coming back. This is what I love and I’m never going to stop.

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Photo Credit: Natalie Osborne

Julie Williams’ Star Rises

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“I like to say my music is mixed, like me,” laughs Julie Williams, a queer, biracial Nashville-based songwriter who happens to be one of the strongest new voices to emerge in country music this decade. “I grew up loving ‘90s country, but before I moved to Nashville I didn’t necessarily think I could make that music. I didn’t think I had a place in the genre. I had so many other influences too – like the Indigo Girls, James Taylor, and other folk music – so I thought that would be more my world. But the song that changed everything for me was ‘Southern Curls.’ I was like, whoa, this is undeniably a country song, and it feels more like me than anything else I’ve ever written.”

Released back in 2021, “Southern Curls” was a breakout single for Williams and continues to inform her subsequent work in a lot of ways. Like many of the best country songs, the track flirts with an existing trope while flipping it entirely on its head, invoking the texture of her own Black hair as a foil to disrupt the traditional image of coiffed ringlets favored by white southern belles. Williams uses her hair as a gateway to discuss the still prevalent differences between how Black and white women are treated in this country, particularly in the South, and opens the conversation with a matter-of-fact account of her personal experience.

It’s a simple, riveting song, intimate and singular, but also broad enough to provide desperately needed representation for a whole diaspora of Black female artists who, like Williams, have had a hard time making space for themselves in the predominantly whitewashed genre of mainstream country. Almost immediately, the track earned the attention of fellow Black country artist and Apple Music host Rissi Palmer, who named Williams to her 2021 Color Me Country cohort, and also caught the ear of the Black Opry, who invited the young artist to join the collective on stage and on tour in 2022.

Following this up with a self-titled EP in 2023, an appearance on a PBS special about Black women in country, and a performance at Newport Folk Festival, Williams joined the CMT Next Women of Country Class of 2023. Now, she’s touring behind another new EP, Tennessee Moon, which includes a new version of the impactful song. Williams is excited about the prospect of expanding her sound – and her writing voice – even further.

“‘Southern Curls’ gave me the bravery to write songs that feel authentic to me,” Williams says. “From there, I’ve been really lucky to work with some incredible people, like my partner Jonathan Smalt, who produced my new EP, Tennessee Moon. This is a big release for me in that it feels like an arrival.”

Another part of that feeling? Williams and “Southern Curls” were featured prominently as part of a new documentary on Hulu, It’s All Country, which features legends like Luke Combs, Wynonna Judd, and Sheryl Crow, plus a never-before-seen performances from Williams herself.

While out on tour behind Tennessee Moon, which released in October, Williams called in to speak with Good Country from the road. She talked about her experience shifting from the world of public policy to the music industry, all things ’90s country, navigating the bounds of folk and other genres in her sound, and those deeply felt, close friendships that might have always been more than… just friends.

What was your relationship to country music like when you were growing up?

Julie Williams: My mom used to play a lot of ‘90s country in the car, artists like The Chicks, Shania Twain, Trisha Yearwood, and Sara Evans – but especially The Chicks. I’ve been thinking a lot about them recently, especially in the last few weeks [since the presidential election]. A huge part of my musical introduction was around the time when The Chicks were kicked off country radio. Their song, “Not Ready To Make Nice,” I remember my mom explaining the lyrics to me. That was really where my love for storytelling and lyrics came from.

I noticed the lyrics in your songs right away, they’re not filler or frivolous, they’re stories.

I always thought people would only want to listen to me if I was playing the songs they already knew and loved. Once I started writing, I realized my stories have value. Growing up in Florida, I’d sing covers of Jimmy Buffett and Tom Petty, whatever songs I thought would get me the tips from the snowbirds. I didn’t go to school for music, I went to Duke University and studied public policy. I wanted to work for a non-profit and become a lawyer. But we had a student record label I was a part of, Small Town Records, and that was the first time I got the chance to start writing my own songs. I started to see the power in my own story.

How did you make the jump from studying public policy back into music?

I wanted the work I did to make somebody’s life just a little bit better, but I didn’t realize I could do that with music too. Some of the things I cared a lot about, too – issues of race, queer issues, and women’s issues – how do you get people to care about them? Part of it is through telling stories that move people. I soon realized I didn’t have to sit behind a desk all day and be a policy analyst. Music can also get me in spaces and in front of people that I wouldn’t be around.

Is there an artist who has a career path that you’d like to follow in the industry?

I’ve always been such a fan of Kacey Musgraves and the way that she’s always stood up for what she believes in. She’s never backed down in that, and she’s always put herself in her songs. Part of it is about love and heartbreak, but it’s also about following your arrow, and being yourself. Even the ways in which she’s created a whole new sound in country and in folk with Golden Hour. I fell in love with that album when it came out. I’ve always looked up to the way she can capture the simplest feelings of being a human in her songs.

How do you feel about your music as country or as folk? There are so many other elements to it, and you have a very layered, textured sound.

I have so many influences that aren’t from country, but pairing all of those things creates that mixed sound that really feels like me. As an artist, I’m constantly thinking about “How am I going to market this?” or “What genre is this going to be in?” and that can sometimes feel limiting. I don’t think my music would fit into a traditional pop-country radio sound, but I don’t think it fully fits into other genres either. I’m just trying to make what feels good for me.

How does Tennessee Moon fit into your current discography? It feels like another level.

It’s definitely a big release for me. That’s a testament to being here in Nashville for a few years and trying things out. Every time I put out music or write a song, I hope there’s going to be better ones that keep coming. “Tennessee Moon” was a really special one for me. It started with a film photo that I took of an ex while we were kayaking at Percy Priest lake at sunset. That relationship didn’t work out, but I took the photo to a co-write with a friend of mine, Melody Walker. I said, “I want to write a song that feels like this picture,” and I knew everything else was going to be around that song.

“Just Friends” is another one of my favorite songs on Tennessee Moon, and it seems like so many people relate to the experience of the blurred line between best friends and something more. How did it feel to address that?

I wrote this one with Melody Walker as well and it’s also one of my favorites. I love women, and I realized that I can love anyone regardless of their gender identity. I came to that realization in my twenties, but now that I know who I am – and who I love – I was looking back at a specific friendship of mine. Retrospectively, I realized I had a crush on this person. I was in love with this person. But getting the chance to create a pretty sapphic music video felt like ripping the band-aid off as far as talking about my queer identity in my songs. I hadn’t done that before. I’m really excited to write and put out music freely now.

Photo Credit: Chase Denton