Tag: lgbtq artists

BGS Top 50 Moments: Shout & Shine

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

It was late 2016 when the world first learned of North Carolina’s HB2 – the “bathroom bill” – prohibiting trans folk from using bathrooms and locker rooms that aligned with their gender identity. The International Bluegrass Music Association was having its conference in Raleigh that autumn, and we at BGS were feeling restless about wanting to do something at the conference to create a safe space for marginalized artists who were already not feeling welcome at the annual event. And thus the first ever Shout & Shine was conceived and held at the Pour House in Raleigh on September 27, 2016.

In the years since its inception, Shout & Shine has taken on multiple forms – from a one-night showcase, to a day-long stage, to an ongoing editorial column and video series on the BGS homepage, Shout & Shine continues to create a dedicated space for diverse and underrepresented talent in the roots music world.

“Shout & Shine began with a simple mission, to create a space for marginalized and underrepresented folks in bluegrass to be celebrated for who they are, unencumbered by their identities,” explained Shout & Shine co-creator Justin Hiltner. “Since 2016, it’s grown into so much more but above all else, it continues to be exactly what we created it to be first and foremost: a community. Our Shout & Shine community demonstrates that these roots music genres are for everyone; they always have been and they will be in the future, too.”

Past lineups have included Amythyst Kiah, Nic Gareiss, Kaia Kater, Alice Gerrard, Jackie Venson, Lakota John, The Ebony Hillbillies, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Yasmin Williams, and many more.

You can read about the first Shout & Shine event from 2016 here and more Shout & Shine video sessions and features here.

The Show on the Road – Brandy Clark

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we bring you a conversation with one of Nashville’s supreme songwriters: Brandy Clark.

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Born in a logging town in Washington state, Clark started playing guitar at age 9 before setting it aside and getting a scholarship for basketball. Music kept tugging her back in though. Like a modern Patsy Cline, she has a knack for nailing a heartbreaker. Reba recorded two of her songs in (“Cry,” “The Day She Got Divorced”) and Brandy soon found a valuable mentor in Marty Stuart, who helped her make her Opry debut in 2012.

While you may just be learning about Clark’s stellar solo work, which mixes old school and witty new school country with some of the tightest pop hooks in the game, Clark has been co-writing for some of country and rock’s leading ladies for years, like Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves, LeAnn Rimes and Sheryl Crow to name a few. But it was with her lyrically masterful, lushly-orchestrated 2020 LP Your Life Is A Record that doors started opening in a whole new way. 2021 saw an extended deluxe version drop.

In this unearthed conversation (blame a faulty hard-drive), we go through her darkest breakup songs, hear about her tastiest kiss-offs and discuss her unique perspective of Nashville’s Music Row Boys’ Club.

Don’t miss the end of the taping when Brandy discusses teaming up with her songwriting hero Randy Newman on the cheeky tune “Bigger Boat” and she plays an exclusive acoustic performance.

This episode of The Show On The Road is brought to you by WYLD Gallery: an Austin, Texas-based art gallery that exclusively features works by Native American artists. Find unique gifts for your loved ones this holiday season and support Indigenous artists at the same time. Pieces at all price points are available at wyld.gallery.

Garrison Starr’s ‘Girl I Used to Be’ Makes Peace With the Woman She Is Now

Posted on by Editor

For the last decade, many queer singer-songwriters have doubled down on laconic melancholy, so it’s pleasant to hear Garrison Starr’s new album, Girl I Used to Be, has the ease of Dave Matthews or Sheryl Crow, but Starr is more open about her sexuality on this album than her previous work. At 45, she is older than a cluster of younger generation of performers (some queer, some writing about queerness) who are still working through experiences of gender, sexuality, and religion.

Listening to her new album, one can hear connections to work like Semler’s “Youth Group,” a small, pointed folk song about discovering that you are queer after a youth group lock-in, or Stephanie Lambring’s lacerating attack against homophobia, “Joys of Jesus.” There are also echoes of the joyous call for selfhood in some of Katie Pruitt’s best work. Starr has written with Pruitt, and “The Devil in Me” from Girl I Used to Be was at first intended for her.

“I was sure that would be a song for Katie’s upcoming record,” Starr tells BGS in an email interview. “But she didn’t take to it like I did, and truthfully, I’m happy because I realize how much that song really is a biography of my experience and of my questions as well. I love the curiosity in it and the sense of breaking away from something that doesn’t serve me anymore. I’m not sure where I fit in with Christianity at this point and even if I’m drawn to it, really. The hypocrisy and elitism, at least in the evangelical church, is repulsive to me, and though I think the story of Jesus’ love and redemption is the best thing about any of it, I’m still searching. I believe in a power greater than myself that I choose to call God — that’s all I really know.”

Lyrically there are places where Girl I Used to Be points to the woman she is now, while still drawing on the memories of her childhood in Mississippi, trying to fit in. This merging of past and present give Starr an authority which leads to a commitment to declarative sentences via a voice that is often plainer and clearer than younger queer performers. She is most declarative about issues of sexuality and geography, particularly on her best West Coast songs.

On “Downtown Hollywood,” Starr tells the story of a runaway that gradually shifts from third-person into first-person. She sings about how “they were raising and they were failing” and trying to “cash it all in.” It has a jab against kids with so much privilege that they didn’t need to grow up, and thus, is a grown-up song, almost burnt out, almost jaded about a town Starr still claims to love.

“My only advice to anybody is to find your authenticity, lean into it and never look back,” she says about her adopted hometown. “Los Angeles is a funny place… it’s changed so much and it hasn’t changed at all. The homeless situation here is definitely worse since I came in the late ‘90s. Some of my favorite old haunts aren’t there anymore, but new stuff has popped up in its place. The hustle, the funkiness, the freedom and the hills haven’t changed, and that’s really what made me fall in love with it in the first place.”

Starr grew up in the Deep South, spending some of her undergrad years at Ole Miss, where she was in a sorority. Feeling restricted in that environment, she moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Her major label debut, Eighteen Over Me, was released by Geffen in 1997, and the sudden attention was complex for this queer songwriter. She has mentioned in an interview with Mississippi Today that in her mid-1990s heyday she was told by handlers not to butch it up too much, to avoid the tomboy aesthetic.

Her subsequent career was as an independent touring artist and a successful jobbing musician. She has sung back up for Mary Chapin Carpenter, worked with Josh Joplin, covered the Indigo Girls, and ended up on the soundtrack to multiple television shows, including The Fosters and Grey’s Anatomy. In 2019, her song “Better Day Comin’” was featured in a trailer for the Oscar-nominated Mister Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In addition, her production credits include Margaret Cho’s Grammy-nominated comedy album, American Tragedy. “Margaret is one of the most generous and down to earth people on the planet. I am grateful to know her and have had the opportunity to work with her,” Starr says.

Girl I Used to Be builds upon all of this complex history, while at the same time, provides a way into the future.

“I’ve spent a lot more time in my studio, working on production and mixing, and I’ve been able to continue to create content,” she says about the past year. “My business hasn’t been dependent on touring, thank god. I realized a while ago that if I want to make a living in this business, I gotta figure out how to diversify. So, I write a lot of songs with a lot of people, and I make sure some of them make it into TV and film so I can afford to be an artist for a living.”

Like many contemporary singer-songwriters, a paradox exists between the authority she shows in her music and the helplessness she felt about the political situation as she was writing the record. She says that the song “Dam That’s Breaking” is a response to the administration of the 45th president. He was, she says, “empowered and embraced by evangelicals, even though they knew it was wrong. It’s definitely about religious hypocrisy as well as greed and power, cowardice, selfishness and everything else that makes you feel like the walls are closing in on you and you are powerless to stop it.”

What Starr has to say about long-won battles, about landscape, and about power, through the lens of knowing, has something to teach younger queer artists, and can be an example for a young artist striving to write with a strong sense of place, delicate emotion, and a talent for observation. For example, her song “Train That’s Bound for Glory” is inspired by a remark by her late grandfather at his birthday party.

“He loved to goof around and he loved to pick on you,” she says. “They were singing him ‘Happy Birthday,’ and he carried on about not being around for his next birthday and that it was ‘probably gonna be my last birthday. … He ended it with, ‘Yep, I can hear the whistle on the train that’s bound for glory, calling me home.’ I knew of the Guthrie song, but I had honestly never heard it until after I wrote my version.”

As a whole, Girl I Used to Be answers the question of who the girl is now: a queer woman attempting to reconcile her history and her present. She embodies a queer desire to reinvent oneself in another space. You can have a career anywhere these days, and stories of the Midwest and the South have become central to new LGBTQIA stories — and so the exile motif in Starr’s work might be another kind of lived-in quality. Her experience shows that finding home does not mean exile.

One such example is “Make Peace With It,” among the album’s most trenchant moments. Starr says, “Well, the lyric is, ‘If I’m ever gonna live this life, I gotta make peace with it.’ I was thinking in that moment about how much I was struggling to hold onto blame for the rejection I experienced in the church, for the way I felt like my career wasn’t working like I wanted it to, and name whatever else I felt victim to for a long time in my life. I finally got to a place, through what I’m calling grace, and I’ll explain that in a second, where I realized I’d rather be happy than be right. (Thank you, Alanon.).”

She concludes, “What I mean by grace is that there have been so many times in my life where I have been accepted, as I am, by people who truly love me, when I’ve been at my absolute worst. That is what I mean when I say grace. Grace is love, no matter what.”

Photo credit: Heather Holty-Newton

WATCH: On Acoustic Guitar, Katie Pruitt Covers Brandi Carlile’s “Turpentine”

Posted on by Editor

Katie Pruitt may be a new kid on the roots music block, but she is quickly making a name for herself as a gifted writer and gripping vocalist. Her debut record, Expectations, was released on Rounder Records in 2020, and although the year didn’t allow for touring, she remains hard at work sharing her music. Last summer Pruitt began a series of cover videos to pay homage to the gay women whose careers fueled her own hopes and aspirations. Titled the “Out of the Closet Series,” the videos offer Pruitt’s renditions of songs by Tegan and Sara, Indigo Girls, and in this final installment, Brandi Carlile.

About the cover series, Pruitt says, “I picked a collection of songs by gay women in particular who have inspired me to be transparent in my music. I think representation is huge… If it weren’t for people like Indigo Girls, Brandi Carlile, Courtney Barnett, and Tegan and Sara, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to be as honest as I was on Expectations.” Pruitt’s bravery and honesty are exactly what have earned her acclaim from outlets like NPR and Rolling Stone, just to name a couple. If you haven’t yet heard it, treat yourself to Katie Pruitt’s Expectations, and watch this lovely performance of Brandi Carlile’s “Turpentine.”

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Nic Gareiss: The Subtle Art of Queering Traditional Dance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American music and dance have always gone hand-in-hand. Immigrants, bringing their folk traditions, art, and music to North America, combined and cross-pollinated with and stole and borrowed from the art and music of Native Americans, African Slaves, and African Americans. In that beautiful, conflicted, human, melting pot way we arrived at the incredible roots genres of our modern time. Dance had always been an integral part of that reckoning, of the growth, adaptation, and molding of our country’s vernacular music, but at the advent of the recording industry and the commercialization of music, musical dance and percussive dance were left by the wayside. They fell from ubiquity and popularity, largely relegated to preservationist, folklorist, familial, and rural niches.

Nic Gareiss doesn’t believe that dance belongs in those shadowed corners of our musical realms. A percussive dancer, scholar, and ethnochoreologist (think ethnomusicologist, but for dance — choreography), Gareiss devotes his creativity to bringing dance as music back into the traditional and vernacular genres that have slowly but surely lost nearly all of its influence. In the process, he explores greater ideas about his listeners’ and audiences’ expectations about the relationships of dance and melody, dancer and musician, dance partner and dance partner, song and singer, and performer and audience. Not only does he “queer” dance, by stripping it of its normative trappings, and laying its essentials bare, he also queers its heteronormativity, its patriarchal tendencies, and its binaryism — in a fashion that’s supremely gorgeous to both the ears and the eyes.  

A good starting point would just be that we’re a music site, right? We cover music, not so much dance. Some readers might need a quick briefing on your mantra that “dance is music.” Can you give people a quick 101 on your worldview that dance is something that’s essential to music, not just tangential to it?

I work as a dancer who makes sound. The traditions that I study and continue to study — and love — are dance traditions that are percussive. Whether that’s Appalachian clogging, Irish step dancing, or step dance from Canada, all of these dance forms have as their impetus rhythm-making with the feet and body. Also characteristic of these styles is the fact that they occur in environments where traditional music is being played. One might actually argue, and I would probably puckishly argue, that the soundscape that’s created by dancers is actually as much a part of the soundscape of traditional music as someone playing a fiddle or a banjo.

It’s interesting that that is an extant truth about vernacular music — especially American vernacular musics — but the way that American music has grown and evolved, it’s extirpated dance from itself, and then brought it back in, in different ways.

I think that because of the commercialization of music over the years, especially because of recording technology, dance hasn’t had as prominent a role, sonically. For some reason people didn’t think that the sound of a moving body was worth recording as much as the sound of another moving body, but holding a guitar. [Chuckles] What I’m interested in doing as I work mostly with musicians, and usually musicians that come from folk music backgrounds of some kind, is creating dance for listening. That manifests in mostly concerts, but also in some recordings, some teaching, some lecturing — there are a lot of things that make up my year along those lines.

One of those things is Solo Square Dance, a show that you’ve worked up, which strips away all of the old-time music and folk music that’s a part of these forms of dance and just showcases the actual, physical dancing — the part that had been lost, perhaps due to that commercialization, like you were just saying.

Exactly. In Solo Square Dance there are no musicians, except for me! [Laughs] There are no sounds except the sounds that I create myself, using my voice, using my feet, snapping my fingers, whistling. The idea is to reference and pay homage to traditional music and dance as a symbiotic entity. Because I don’t play instruments in that show, that means that traditional music shows up almost as a specter, or as a concept of something that’s been erased, so you can still feel a trace of it. It’s not just the idea of traditional music as a nebulous canon of the music writ large. Instead, there are actually specific pieces of music that come from, say, the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell or a traditional Irish dance tune that shows up in a tribute to one of my Irish dance teachers. There is various music in the show, it’s just music as made through a sounding body without a prosthesis, without an instrument.

Something that you’re also digging into with Solo Square Dance is leaving behind a whole host of presuppositions and expectations about dance, but you specifically call out heteronormativity. There are so many layers here, because you have to unpack that dance is music, and that it’s always been an integral part of these musical styles, but then you have to unpack that dance is inherently heteronormative, too. That’s a lot of ground to cover!  

The interesting thing for me came out of these video clips of Bascom Lamar Lunsford dancing on the porch, in this film by David Hoffman that was shot in 1962. [In the film] Bascom is demonstrating what it would be like to be in a square dance, but he only has one body to do it, instead of the usual eight people that it takes to make up a square. I saw that and thought that that was kind of inherently lonely and beautiful. But also, it somehow simultaneously was merry and celebratory. I think Bascom’s reimagining or demonstrating of the square dance is kind of a queer thing — and by “queer,” in this moment, I mean a set of stylistics that are somehow “beyond,” somehow an outsider, that have that “crooked” or critical relationship to the normative. Making that first piece a solo square dance and building the rest of the show around it, I tried to think so much about the way that dance possibly enacts some kind of revolutionary potential. Through touch, through interaction of sound and gesture, through [considering] what it might be like to have communities that move together, and what it might be like to have an individual that a community watches.

In all those things, I kept coming up against this idea that there are, indeed, heteronormative facets of that. Like [in square dancing] when we say, “Gents, swing your corner lady.” We say only “gents” and “ladies.” We say only, “Gents do this.” So there’s also a patriarchal power there, in who does what to whom. There’s also a binary that doesn’t allow for, perhaps, the existence of something like polyamory, where there are multiple people involved in a romantic or physical connection. I started thinking about what it would be like, if instead of singing, [Sings] “I’m gonna get that, get that, get that, I’m gonna get that pretty little girl,” what is it like if someone who performs the gender that I perform sings about someone who has a similar gender as themself? That subtle switch turns more than I ever could’ve imagined. It didn’t take putting on heels and a feather boa to queer square dance, just the simple expression of speaking about intimacy, thinking about the gender dynamics of that special social form, and then creating that little shift in the reiteration of that call. Which, I’m really happy about! At first, to decide, I’m gonna “queer” traditional dance — it’s a little bit of an arduous project. I’m finding that it’s these subtle nuance shifts that maybe make the biggest strides to imagining anti-normative futures as well as pasts.

I read an interview of yours, years ago now, in which you mentioned so succinctly that straight people have always let their identities shine through their art, so why wouldn’t queer people do that, too? That was a groundbreaking moment for me, realizing that my identity has an equal right to being included in my art, because no one else is filtering out their identities, their identities just happen to be the norm. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, like you were just saying, it just takes a change in perspective to open that paradigm up. How do we help all kinds of folks to realize that anti-normative future that you see?

I think it’s important to remember that queer people are not a facet of postmodernity. Queerness has always existed.

That’s such an important point! It just hasn’t always been visible.

Right. When we think about traditional music, oftentimes we relate that not only to a particular place, but a particular time. It’s important to remember that there have always been LGBTQIA+ people in those historical moments, again, whether those people were allowed to visible or whether it was okay for them to be visible is another question. Now, some of what we’re starting to see is nascent queerness beginning to whisper, or to sing, or to dance. That feels like a very exciting time, but we’re not inventing that. Queerness [has] been around for a long time.

For example, people who sing ballads, who maybe keep the pronoun of the song the same, or maybe switch pronouns to express a sexual object choice that is somehow other than straight, this is a simple, subtle way people have always enacted some kind of queer performance. And for a long time! I don’t only think that it’s always related to romantic connections, to be honest. I really like the idea of queerness as a critical set of stylistics. For instance, my relationship to percussive dance is a little queer — or bent — because I had a teacher who always said, “There will be no scraping in our class.” That means, in percussive dance, good technique is a sharp, short, adroit connection to the floor, where you strike your foot against the ground, but you don’t leave it on the ground. That, for me, sort of became a provocation. It made me want to slide my foot, to whisper, to create this foot-to-floor fricative, for many reasons: One, it got me closer to a fiddle’s bow, sliding slowly across the strings, but secondly, simply for the pure joy of transgressing! It opens this world of other tambours I didn’t have access to before.

So then, in conclusion, if a reader and roots music fan is looking to have their ideas about traditional and percussive dance queered, where will they be able to find you in the near future?

Solo Square Dance will continue to tour, there are shows in Ireland and Scotland lined up. I have a new project called DuoDuo with cellist Natalie Haas, guitarist Yann Falquet, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and myself. That project is out on the road. Also, my band, This Is How We Fly, is getting together to make our third record starting in November, which is very exciting. Then, in the fall, I’m touring with this incredible tap dancer, who is also interested in vernacular dance forms, vernacular jazz and swing — his name is Caleb Teicher. We have a duo dance project, again a project without any instruments! Just us, making the music with our bodies and voices.

Because dance is music, damnit.

Exactly! And, to be honest, music is dancing as well! [Laughs] I found, in my collaborations with musicians, when there’s a moving body on stage, musicians begin to consider their own bodies a little bit more. They start to think about where they stand and how they move. It’s actually an interesting metamorphosis to witness and be engaged with. It reminds everyone that if one person can cross the sound/movement divide, if a dancer can be heard, maybe a musician can be seen!

Editor’s Note: Gareiss will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount, clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves on March 17 as well as a headlining performance with Blount on March 18.

Photo credit: Darragh Kane

Canon Fodder: k.d. lang, ‘Ingénue’

Posted on by Editor

For better or for worse, k.d. lang’s 1992 breakout album Ingénue will always be associated with her coming out. Throughout the late 1980s she had established herself as an unlikely country star, a traditionalist who sang like Patsy Cline and worked with Owen Bradley but whose short punk haircut and androgynous persona branded her as an eccentric like Lyle Lovett. Also, she was Canadian—not a roadblock to country stardom (see: Anne Murray, Shania Twain), but certainly another way in which she was an outsider in Nashville. Nevertheless, she made a place for herself in the country mainstream, winning a Grammy for “Crying,” her 1989 duet with Roy Orbison, and the album Absolute Torch and Twang, released the same year, proved a more-than-modest hit, peaking at No. 12 on the country charts.

And yet, there were rumors that lang was… well, you know. She had come out to her family, but had not made that an explicit part of her public persona, despite playing a lesbian in the independent film Salmonberries. So the media pried into her personal life, posing uncomfortably direct questions to which she carefully measured her answers. lang was going to be made a spokesperson for the LGBTQ+ community whether or not she wanted that responsibility. The pressure came from within that community as well as from without. According to Newsweek, Queer Nation, an activist organization founded in 1990, put up posters around New York with photos of entertainers branded with the words Absolutely Queer. The Advocate outed a top-ranking military official at a time when gays were not welcome in the military, just prior to President Clinton’s infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” waffle.

To preempt being forcibly outed—essentially, to take control of her own story rather than let someone else come out for her—in 1992 lang gave a lengthy, at times very tense interview to The Advocate. Her sexuality was discussed only generally throughout the exchange, with lang officially calling herself a lesbian near the end of the article. “I feel like it’s a part of my life, my sexuality, but it’s not—it certainly isn’t my cause. But I also have never denied it. I don’t try to hide it like some people in the industry do.” This was largely unexplored territory for any artist, especially one in a traditionally conservative genre and especially one who was going to so radically change her sound.

In retrospect it’s hard to convey just how chancy and therefore how pivotal Ingénue was for lang, who rejected absolute twang for torch songs rooted in jazz and pop, in chanson and klezmer, in Gershwin and Weill, Holiday and Dietrich. She described it at the time as “postnuclear cabaret.” Especially in the 1990s when changing your sound or courting a wide audience could be viewed as selling out, the album was a calculated risk, a means of shedding a long-held persona that might alienate old fans without attracting new ones. Gone were the fringed Western wear and the Stetsons; what remained was that haircut and, most crucially, a voice that sounds like a starry midnight.

The personnel didn’t change, but her approach certainly did. lang worked with co-producers and co-songwriters Greg Penny and Ben Mink, the latter a member of her backing band the Reclines. But this is not a case of treating country songs to new arrangements. The change happens at a conceptual level. Ingénue is lang’s first collection of entirely original material. She and Mink wrote songs outside the country format to find new ways to use her voice and new emotions to express. “Season of Hollow Soul” sounds like a Weimar torch song, as though the singer is playing both Annie Bowles and Cliff Bradshaw in Cabaret. “Miss Chatelaine” is an exuberant love song that cheekily references lang’s own iconography, in this case the cover of Chatelaine magazine, which in 1988 named her Woman of the Year. To contrast the photograph’s Nudie suit glory, lang toyed with her own androgynous look, even performing in a formal gown on Arsenio Hall.

Deep into the twenty-first century, of course, country music seems by nature a porous genre, one which artists drift into and out of constantly, whether it’s a pop star looking for a career renewal (Darius Rucker), a tourist taking snapshots of Music Row (Sheryl Crow), or a country star looking to broaden their audience (Taylor Swift). But perhaps no artist has made that transition with more grace and finesse—with more sense of the inevitable—than lang, whose voice was so much bigger than one genre could contain. Ingénue not only showed how artfully she bend that voice and suppress that twang, but also demonstrated how she could use it to inhabit a very different desire than the pop charts typically allowed. For that accomplishment she’ll receive the 2018 Trailblazer Award at the Americana Music Honors & Awards in September.

The album has been tied to her coming out, a vehicle for her ascension not merely as a pop star but as a gay pop star. This is, of course, not the only interpretation of the album, but it’s one that lang herself reasserted in interviews. She was forthright about the inspiration for the album, confessing that it was inspired by the end of an affair with a married lover. lang was still in love, but accepted that the relationship was impossible; that contradiction became the spark that illuminated these new songs. No names were given, but the implication was that this married lover—the subjects of the lyrics, the object of desire—was a woman. This seems even more radical than the Advocate interview, a means by which lang insisted these songs were personal, first-person, and grounded in gay desire. “Can your heart conceal what the mind of love reveals,” she sings on “Mind of Love,” and if you miss that she’s talking to herself, she calls herself by name: “Why do you fight, Kathryn? … Why hurt yourself, Kathryn?”

Yet, Ingénue is about desire, not orientation. These songs express a sexual, physical, and emotional yearning that is specific to her as an individual, specific to her as a lesbian, but she conveys it in such a way as to be universal on some level: something that might resonate with any listener, regardless of their orientation or even their opinion on orientation. In 1992 this might have had a humanizing, normalizing effect, because the risk paid off and then some: Ingénue was an immense crossover hit, anchored by the smash “Constant Craving.”

That song in particular has stuck with lang ever since: her signature tune, a mainstay of every concert she performs. “I knew it was a hit, and I was mad at it for that. I felt that it was a sellout at the time,” she told the New York Times earlier this year. But it’s not hard to see why the song would resonate with her audience, as it expresses a resilience in the face of prejudice or suspicion. “Even through the darkest phase, be it thick or thin,” lang sings in that voice, which sounds neither angry nor outraged but observant, matter-of-fact, as though a “darkest phase” was natural. “Always someone marches brave, here beneath my skin.” lang draws out those syllables in the chorus, pushing against the backing vocals, putting her words on the off-beats, drawing out those syllables—the consonants in “constant,” the long vowel and sensuous V in “craving”—to hint at possibilities: Craving for what or for whom? Constant as both heroic and burdensome, never satisfied?

Whatever it might mean to any one potential listener, it “has always been.” This craving is natural, lang insists, coded deep into all humanity, as constant in 2018 as it was in 1992.

Gaelynn Lea: Taking Away the Lens

Posted on by Editor

Before she won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest, Gaelynn Lea was a member of the music community in northern Minnesota, where she had been playing and performing for most of her life. She never thought of her music or her songwriting as an activist statement; she simply focused on her haunting fiddle — deftly and creatively orchestrating ethereal playback with a loop pedal — and her timeless voice, using her lyrics to shape the amorphous tracks she had created. The stark, raw duet of strings and vocal hearkens back to folk and vernacular sounds from the hollers of Appalachia and the hills of Ireland and Scotland. But, as her style evolved, she realized it was something distinct and new.

Her unexpected sonic aesthetic wasn’t all that surprised the viewers of her Tiny Desk Concert, though. Lea has a congenital disability called Osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. She uses a wheelchair and holds the violin vertically like a cello, while operating her loop station with her foot. In a split second, as the Tiny Desk title card faded from the video, revealing the the artist who was creating those mystic-sounding bow strokes, one by one, the presuppositions of 1.5 million people were shattered.

What does a musician look like? What do they sound like? How does someone’s identity or background impact their art? Most of the time, our automatic, subconscious answers to these questions go unchallenged, existing happily corroborated by the largely homogenous media that we incessantly consume. It takes someone like Lea to remind us that we are taking the identities of creators for granted and, in doing so, we are further marginalizing artists who exist on the fringes of our communities, artistic and otherwise.

Now on the cusp of releasing her third album, Lea has embraced the positive aspects of those shattered expectations, using her visibility to champion disability rights and causes. But she refuses to be taken for a novelty or utilized as a token. Like any of us, she does not reduce her entire perspective to one facet of her identity. And, like all musicians, at the end of the day, she wants it to just be about the music.

I wonder what it’s like making and performing music that’s constantly shocking people out of their preconceived notions?

It happens on two levels. Obviously, part of the reason is that it isn’t that common to see someone with a disability playing the way I play the violin. My goal is to keep doing it so that it’s not something that’s so uncommon. In terms of the actual music I play, what I really like is a lot of people come to the show and don’t really get it. Unless they really understand looping — it’s done pretty subtle-y — they just have to suspend disbelief and listen, since they don’t really know how it’s happening. It’s kind of a fun experiment. I guess I like to try a sneak attack, in terms of the layers. I don’t want it to be super obvious when [the loops] come in and out. So yeah, it’s kind of two-fold.

Were there specific artists that gave you the idea to loop with a fiddle?

In some ways, yes. I think what was exciting for me and maybe why I don’t have a great answer for that question is that, when I realized you could loop fiddle music and make it sound orchestral, I was like, “I don’t think I’ve seen that before.” It probably exists, I’m sure that it does, but I, personally, didn’t know if I had ever heard it. When I started writing my own songs and trying to find ways to loop them, that was kind of out of necessity, because I don’t play guitar.

Every time I write a song, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to loop it or not. I just have to figure it out later. I write it first, then I’m like, “Okay. Is there a way to do this with a few chords and ambient loops.” What’s nice about this new album [with a full band] is that some of the songs, I can’t loop, but I don’t have to play them by myself. It’s neat to have a full band and to be able to explore new sounds. Definitely, at the beginning, the way I laid down the layers had to do with necessity.

One of my common questions for this column is about how and why each interviewee’s identity filters into their art, but people of color, or people with disabilities, or queer people — anyone who visibly doesn’t fit into any given societal norm — don’t really have the privilege of choosing how much or how little of themselves comes across in their music. Just being themselves is a political act. Do you feel that, as a performer?

I do, and it’s something I’m still figuring out. I’ve been playing for 24 years and I’ve been performing for 10. But, before I won the Tiny Desk Contest, I was just performing in my local community, so it didn’t really feel like that was a statement, because everybody knew me. When the Tiny Desk happened, all of a sudden I was like, “Holy cow. This is something that people are going to associate with me.” So I decided to try to figure out a way to balance it for myself. I definitely want to talk about disability rights issues — for the new album, I even wrote a song about the disability rights movement. Usually I don’t write explicitly about disability, because it’s not what happens, it’s not what comes out. I think the current political situation probably spurred some thoughts on it that needed to come out.

For me, I know that people are going to come in and have their own ideas and, hopefully, view me and my performance in a positive way. In terms of my actual show or the songs I write, I like to be able to choose when I talk about [disability], because I know, no matter what, just standing there is going to make people think. That’s an unavoidable thing and that’s good, I suppose, but I also just want to be seen as a musician, too. I realized I’m in a very privileged position to be able to talk about it, so when I can, when I think it fits, and I think it’s being used for the right reasons, I do like to connect my disability identity to the art and talk about what I think needs to change in our society.

How do you feel about that? I mean, I don’t really talk to anyone else [who faces this]. Do you have an answer on that?

I present very masculine, right up until I open my mouth. The way I talk and my mannerisms are pretty queer-coded, so I always do this cost/benefit analysis — and sometimes it’s subconscious — of how queer I present in any given situation based on how safe I feel in that situation and how vulnerable and how real I can be. You don’t realize you’re carrying that burden around until you’re in a situation where you don’t have it anymore.

Yeah!

When I’m able to sing my queer songs and not not worry about it, I realize that that is how it feels for every privileged person who gets up on stage and can just live their truth without actively thinking about it. I try to take that approach myself, but it’s so hard. And it’s so exhausting.

That’s the interesting thing because, listening to what you’re saying, I think we come from slightly different spots. I don’t feel unsafe, but I do feel that my story isn’t safe. There are some people who are more in line with me, who think [disability] is a natural part of the human experience. All of us are going to be disabled, at some point, if we live long enough. It’s not the biggest deal. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum where they’re like, “I don’t even know how I could live if I had a disability!” And, “I feel so bad for that person. What do I have to complain about? They have a disability and I don’t. I’m a whiner.”

Especially in interviews, I can’t force people to interpret this in a certain way. If I had a magic wand, I wouldn’t want people sitting there thinking, “Oh, man, I can’t believe someone with a disability can do this!” Because that doesn’t factor into my playing that much. I learned [to play] that way a long time ago. The whole “inspirational” idea, or pity, or whatever lens they’re viewing it from, I wish I could take that lens away.

It’s not like I wouldn’t want to talk about activism because, to me, we are so far behind. I don’t know how you feel about gay rights. I’m assuming you feel similarly.

Oh, yes.

There’s so much work to do, it would be silly for me not to talk about it. The one thing I do get weary of is realizing halfway through that someone is viewing me with a lens of pity rather than as a musician. That’s unfortunate because I’ll be thinking we’re having a regular conversation and then I read an article later and it’s like, “She didn’t think she’d be able to do anything with her life until she found music.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God. That is not what I said!”

That’s so shitty!

It’s really shitty! That happens a lot, too. That’s the kind of thing that bothers me. I try to give people, especially random people, the benefit of the doubt. What bothers me about journalism is that, obviously, they think about what they’re about to write beforehand. It’s just sad that there’s not more education on disability. You would never write a story like that, if you even had a day’s worth of education on the appropriate ways to talk about it.

It’s kind of a final frontier of intersectionality in this inclusion movement coming through the bluegrass, folk, and Americana scenes. People with disabilities are largely forgotten in that picture.

I know. Yep.

It’s everywhere. If you go down a list of showcase venues at a conference, how many are ADA compliant? Maybe one. Or festivals are often not ADA compliant. Promoters, festivals, venues, artists, conventions … it seems like every wing of the industry overlooks the importance of representation of people with disabilities.

I think there are two problems. One of them is definitely lack of awareness. I was on a panel with some festival organizers talking about accessibility once, and I was saying, “We need to represent artists with disabilities on festival lineups. I want to be able to see people with disabilities on the bill.” They were like, “Of course, we wouldn’t reject someone because they have a disability. Of course, we would accommodate them.” I said, “No. You need to seek them out. If someone had an all-male, white lineup, they would be raked over the coals, but nobody even notices if there’s no one with a disability on the lineup.”

Exactly.

I could see the light bulb go off. It was an important moment for me, realizing that they really just don’t know. That’s why I do so much speaking about it, to be honest. If they can’t even hear it, they won’t change. If they don’t know it’s a problem — and I wish they did — someone needs to tell them that it is.

I have such a hard time describing that feeling when you see yourself represented on stage. It’s more common now than it has been, for me, for LGBTQ people, but when you have that feeling, “This person gets it. This person knows what I go through,” it means the world. But most people can’t get out of their own heads to realize this is the key.

Yeah. [It’s the key to] social justice as a whole, actually. When are we going to make changes unless we realize there are people who need change? One thing that’s unique to people with disabilities that might be different for other people, like LGBTQ, is that it costs money, sometimes, to fix the things that are wrong. That is a frustrating thing.

There are creative ways that it wouldn’t cost money that people aren’t talking about. Obviously, it would cost a lot of money to build an elevator or to build a ramp. This happens a lot at small venues. Usually bigger venues can find ways to accommodate me, but the small ones are like, “Man, I wish we had enough money to build a ramp.” For a small room, with a 50-person capacity, why not just take the stage down? Is it really that big of a deal for performers to be four inches off the ground?

If you can’t afford to be accessible, you got to find a way to do it for free. It’s not like there’s suddenly no responsibility to modify at all. People aren’t thinking outside the box enough. Maybe, if you want to host a show, but your venue isn’t accessible, partner with a venue that is accessible and do it together. There have to be better answers than what we’re seeing most of the time.

So before we close, I want to ask you about looking ahead — what are you excited for in 2018?

I’m excited because I’ve been writing more than I have been in the past and playing with this [upcoming record’s] band. I’m really excited for people to hear them. I have a lot of respect for everyone I’m playing with on this project. We’re all from Minnesota, and a couple of them grew up in the same town as me. It’s a lot of fun for me. I love looping and, obviously, I’m going to continue performing that way, but it’s also fun to have this other branch where I don’t have to think about the loops. I can just sing and be really present with the music.

I’m really excited for the disability rights song, I recently played in San Francisco, and a ton of people from the disability community came out. It was kind of the first time a show like that had happened. I got to sing that song for people, and it was exactly what you’re saying, seeing someone on stage that gets you. It was neat to connect with the audience in a way that wouldn’t happen if they were able-bodied. I’m excited to release that and hopefully keep connecting with other artists and activists. It’s going to be fun to see where this new album goes.

Mary Gauthier: Finding Each Other in Song

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When singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier plays the Grand Ole Opry, she knows the crowd can sense that she doesn’t quite fit the mold. “I can tell that the audience can tell that I don’t look like Carrie Underwood,” she laughs. “I’ve got a gay look. I don’t mean to have a gay look, but I’m gay!” The stage where country music was born wouldn’t be the first place to come to mind when considering where an LGBTQ+ person might belong, but the Opry house’s response to Gauthier isn’t cold or forbidding; in fact, it’s the opposite. “I’m going to stand up there. [My queerness is] going to be obvious. Some people will accept it, but some people will struggle with it. I’m going to talk to them as if they’ve already accepted it, and I’m going to send love out to them. My fear of rejection will not supersede my intentional effort to connect and be loving.”

Connection and loving are core values, a strong and sturdy backbone, through Gauthier’s music and life. She’s faced abandonment, addiction, and otherness, but through the struggles of her own life, she realized that loving others, seeing others, listening to others, and putting empathy out into the world are surefire ways to find healing within. Her new album, Rifles & Rosary Beads, is a perfect continuation of these practices. Gauthier has co-written an album of absolutely poignant, heart-wrenching songs with veterans of the armed forces, all the while focusing on not just loving, seeing, and listening, but propagating these skills, as well. The record is a sorely needed standard for how to traverse the divides and chasms that seem to criss-cross our country, society, and globe. Whether they exist between gay and straight, civilian and military, or left and right, the only bridge we need is empathy.

There’s this cliché or this stereotype that LGBTQ+ people and the military are diametrically opposed, whether this comes from issues such as the trans military ban or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, so it might surprise people that you took on this project. It must challenge the assumptions of some people who might not expect a progressive, LGBTQ+ person to collaborate with veterans.

I think the idea of the straight white guy soldier is a dated stereotype. That’s really not who our military is any more. In my experience working with members of the military over the last five years, the soldiers I’ve worked with look like people you’d see walking down the street in Manhattan. Our military is very diverse. It’s made up of all segments of society, including gay, lesbian, and trans people, people of color, Hispanic folks, and a whole lot of women. So we need to update our visuals around what we think a veteran is.

Today’s military scans 55 percent Democrat. People don’t know that. It’s a younger military. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq are being fought by a group of people that are much younger than what you would think. We have to match our visuals to the reality of who’s wearing those boots on the ground.

I’d like to speak to the unsuccessful and failed trans military ban. The reason that it probably became an issue is because there are quite a few transgender people in the military. I don’t know the numbers, but it’s in the thousands. These are people who are volunteering to serve and are serving well. Our justice system has done the right thing in upholding their right to serve. Judgment about whether or not someone is worthy of service has not a thing to do with sexuality or gender.

Yes! Absolutely.

It’s irrelevant. It’s parallel. It has nothing to do with any of the requirements around the ability to serve. The justice system and the judges are upholding the current law because it’s the right thing to do.

When I listen to the album, I wonder how those veterans’ feelings — of loneliness, of facing a forbidding world that can’t really understand, of walking through life and not seeing oneself or one’s experiences reflected back by society, of coming home to a place that they don’t recognize anymore, to people who don’t recognize them anymore — these feel like they relate pretty easily to the queer experience.

I never thought of that. I don’t know. I’d hate to generalize. [Pause] What I do know is that an awful lot of our veterans are experiencing trauma — traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. The trauma that they carry becomes a life and death issue for them. It doesn’t heal itself. It doesn’t get better over time. It holds its own. We’re dealing with somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 suicides a day by military members.

There may be a parallel between that and the trauma a gay kid feels, being beat up. It’s a different trauma, but trauma is trauma. There’s been, as we well know, a huge problem with suicide in our gay kids. Now in our trans kids. The way that we’ve dealt with it, the way that works to help ease people’s burdens, is to tell them that we love them. We see them. They’re valuable. They matter.

I feel that message when I hear you singing these songs. I feel that emotion. I feel you, yourself, living through each of these co-writes with each of these veterans. I love that this is a testament to the fact that the “divisiveness” we hear about every single day is not actually a barrier between all of us.

Here’s what I know for sure: We’re in an empathy crisis.

Yes!

And this empathy crisis, from what I can see, has created a divide. The divide, politically, is between the left and the right, but we’re also in a civilian-military divide. Civilians don’t understand or even know people who have served in our military, particularly in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But this divide started in Vietnam, after our soldiers came back really rejected and treated so poorly.

I think the divide can be bridged through empathy. The way I know how to create empathy is through song — not preachy songs, not songs that tell people what to think, but songs that tell the story of what people are going through, so that we can see inside and know how they feel. This is the job of the artist and the job of art — to generate connection and empathy. That’s my belief.

So [when writing for Rifles & Rosary Beads] we stayed away from ideology. We stayed away from policy. We stayed away from lecturing. All politics is off-limits. These are songs that tell important stories. If you want to come up with policy after you empathize, that’s whole different discussion. In my years of writing with soldiers, I have never gone to politics ever, because it’s not going to get us a good song! It’s just going to be a rabbit-hole, and we’re not going to get where we need to go to get to a good song, which is connecting and feeling each other, knowing each other’s heart. Whether or not we agree with the politics that got us into the war — wars — is one thing, but I think we can agree that those who served, who are hurting, who are struggling, who are in pain, who need our hand, we can reach out to them.

That makes me think about roots music’s transportive quality. These genres came out of very downtrodden, forgotten places as a vehicle to take people out of the harsh realities of their everyday lives. I’m convinced that that quality of roots music really is available to everyone, whether we’re talking about someone who’s LGBTQ+ or these veterans.

There’s a couple of big thoughts in there. One is, roots music is the best place for story songs. The best music always comes from the worst pain, from the soul howling in pain. “Does anybody see me?” “Am I alone here in my sorrow?” The response to that call is, “No, you are not! We see you! We feel you!” This is why singing the blues together makes you feel better. There’s an alchemy that happens when you’re able to sing your sorrows inside a group, singing not alone.

At the end of the day, the important thing about writing with people who are dealing with trauma, particularly veterans, is giving voice to something that is very, very hard to talk about. It may even be ineffable. There may be no way to talk about it, but we can sing it. We know it, when we sing it. We feel it. That is, I think, one of the most important uses of songs — to reach the ineffable. Melody helps move meaning into people’s hearts.

On the song “Brothers,” I felt the Venn diagram between the LGBTQ+ experience and the military experience overlap the most. The line, “Don’t that make me your brother, too?” Coming from the perspective of a female soldier, it is such a distillate of what we’re trying to accomplish with empathy, reaching out to people who have opposing views. Where did “Brothers” come from?

It came from these two women’s experiences. They lived it. My co-writers lived it. They were of the first generation of females in our military sent to combat. At the time, all of the language was male. They served with valor and courage in a situation that was really, really hard for them. What the females went through is a whole lot like what people of color went through when the military was integrated. It was very difficult.

There was a moment, after [one of the women] got home, when one of their friends raised the flag on Facebook on Veterans’ Day for “all the men who served.” She was shot at. She was in combat. She would’ve died for her brothers. She felt very excluded by the sexist language. The statement [in the song], “Say it for me. Say it for your youth. Your sisters are your brothers, too,” is a howl. “Don’t you see me? What do I have to do to be seen?” Of course, every marginalized community has had that howl. “What do I have to do to get your respect? I’ve done everything within my power, and I’m still invisible. I am hurt and I want to be respected.”

Honestly, in the five years I’ve been doing this, the language has been changing. Now people in the military, when they speak of the kinship, I’m hearing more and more “brothers and sisters.” It’s expanding. The first generation of female combat veterans had it hard, but it’s changing because people like them are brave enough to stand up and say that it hurts. It’s not “servicemen,” it’s “service members.” It has to be updated. They’re going to get there, but it takes time and people get caught up in a culture that doesn’t see them.

I want to ask you about that. You were recently on Sarah Silverman’s Hulu show, I Love You, America, and the overarching message through the show, which is somewhat radical these days, is seeing people — seeing people for who they are, accepting people for who they are. You being a guest felt so natural, because this is kind of the backbone of what you do as an artist, as well. Like you said, empathy first, empathy through song. How do we spread this idea? How do we translate and illustrate this intensely personal and individual reality of being on the fringes of society to help others understand the importance of empathy, of choosing to see people?

It’s a big question. No easy answer. What we can do, for example, is what I’m doing. To come out, to be seen in the truth of who we are, and to challenge people’s prejudices through loving, through kindness and tenderness and love. I’m working with veterans because I love them. Because I love them, it would be very difficult for them to reject me because I’m gay. They’re in a place, most of them, where they’re so grateful to be seen and loved that they open their arms and bring me into their family. I couldn’t have imagined five years ago, starting this, that it would lead me here. There’s a place for going in the streets and protesting, but there’s also a place for what Sarah [Silverman] is doing, what I’m trying to do, what Brené Brown is talking about, what Father Gregory Boyle over in Los Angeles is tackling with the gangs. What we’re talking about is sitting down and listening.

We may not agree on a single thing, politically, so let’s not talk about politics. Tell me how you feel. Tell me how it was for you, coming back from the Middle East. Tell me what it’s like now. Where does it hurt? I’m listening. I’m not in judgement. I think that empathy and listening is a big damn deal. What maybe happens when we’re young — I’m older now, you know? — when we’re young, we want to be heard. I wanted to be listened to. I felt as though what needed to happen was people needed to hear me. I’m older now, maybe it’s emotional maturity, but I realized what might be even more transformative, instead of me demanding that I be heard, is that I sit down and listen to other people. To give them the empathy that heals me. This is cliché sounding, but what I get from this work far, far surpasses what I give.

I love that. It’s one of my favorite things about these conversations. If we’re open and vulnerable and real with each other, we will constantly be surprised by each other in the best way.

Yep. And we find each other.

Photo credit: Laura E. Partain

Crys Matthews: Driving Out Hate with Love

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After she describes her multi-faceted identity, Americana and country soul singer/songwriter Crys Matthews laughs with a slight trace of self-deprecation, “I’m the poster child for intersectionality, right?!” She is.

While each and every day, on each and every media platform, we’re reminded of the division, alienation, marginalization, and divisiveness rampant in our country (and our world), we’re not often enough met with people like Matthews who exist as reminders of what beauty can occur when we bridge those divides.

A native of the South and the daughter of a preacher, this Americana-creating, Black lesbian — who is in an interracial marriage — understands and appreciates the myriad ways her background informs her ability to help others empathize with those with whom they might assume they have nothing in common. With her recent full-length album, The Imagineers, and her compassionate, politically charged EP, she is recruiting an “Army of Lovers,” despite all of the divides — real or perceived — that come between us, driving out hate not with hate, but with love.

Country or Americana or roots music fans might not expect someone described like you to fit into this music. How did you come into roots music? What’s your background in it?

I was born and raised in North Carolina — I live in Virginia now — and I went to college at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, which is a bluegrass Mecca. I never set out to really create [within] any specific genre of music or anything like that. My songwriting process, it’s very organic. The songs just come out how they come out. Living in Boone all that time, I just fell in love with the Blue Ridge and with all of that. I guess osmosis is what you would say — it just fused its way into my music and into my songwriting style. It seems like every year it just gets country-er and country-er, which is hilarious to me. [Laughs] Listening back through the newest album I was like, “Oh, my God, my grandpa would be so proud!”

Did your grandpa get you into country music?

Oh yeah, we’re so Southern. Like I said, born and raised in North Carolina, but in the southeastern part of North Carolina. It is so country over there. [Laughs] I grew up watching The Dukes of Hazzard and other stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. I guess it feels foreign to people when they think about, okay, “A Black lesbian isn’t going to be watching Dukes of Hazzard with her grandpa.” But, if you grew up in southeastern North Carolina, I’m pretty sure almost everyone watched The Dukes of Hazzard no matter what, no matter who you were. I’ve never lived my life trying to fit into any specific thing. I just am who I am, and the things that I’m into are just the things I’m into. The things I think about, think are beautiful, and love in the world center so heavily around my home state.

The title track of your EP, Battle Hymn for an Army of Lovers, is an upbeat, hopeful number. It’s looking to the future and outward-facing, but it’s also very realistic and grounded. It’s not denying the realities of this moment in time. Why did you strike that balance?

I always try to be like that in life. I feel like every big moment that has ever happened in this country has happened, at the root of it, because of love. And because of somebody loving somebody else and/or not being okay with the person that they love not having fair treatment, in some regard.

My worldview is that love is always the thing that moves us forward. It always is and it probably always will be. It’s super important to me. As frustrating and hard as this moment is for me, obviously, as a triple-minority, it is terrifying for me living in this time, I trust and believe so deeply that love will move us forward. It was very important for me to use that song and use that message for rallying the army of lovers, mobilizing the army of lovers, and believing wholeheartedly in trying to live that notion of Dr. King’s, that hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

I appreciate in your music that you’re including specific calls to action. In your song “Paris Is Burning,” you sing, “Dark days call for more than profile picture overlays,” and that line resonates so much with me because we’re in a time when just showing up doesn’t really count for much anymore. You aren’t letting listeners and fans feel like just putting on your EP is taking action.

Again, growing up in the South, the history of activism, what it means, and how important it is is not lost on me. Being a singer/songwriter, having a platform, and with people actually listening to what I have to say, it would be so hypocritical to not use that platform, in some regard, to actually have a call to action, to let people know what’s happening in the world beyond their possibly limited view, let them know things that they can do to help. And people who aren’t them, who may not have whatever privilege they may have, need them to help. It was super important to have the mindset of the soundtrack of the resistance.

I went into it hoping that it would come out in a way that would motivate people, and inspire people, and make them do something. It’s so hard feeling so powerless, and I think so many of us are so frustrated right now, because we feel powerless, but we’re not. It’s important to remember that. I hope that these songs remind people that there are things that we can do. We cannot be complacent. We have to act.

As a triple-minority, like you said before, you don’t exactly have the luxury or privilege of choosing how much or how little of your identity is visible through your art, but I wonder if you think about how much you present in your songs, or if you just let that happen organically, as well?

It depends on certain songs. I have this song from my album, Come What May, called “You Remind Me,” that [was inspired by] the Lovings of Virginia [of the U.S. Supreme Court case on interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia] and Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer [of the case United States v. Windsor on same-sex marriage]. It’s about how we keep having to learn the same lesson in this country about love, and how we can’t seem to let people love who they want to love. It’s a parallel of those two things and, of course, my wife and I decided we wanted to piss everybody off and be an interracial, lesbian couple. [Laughs]

The love songs, for me, I feel like those things are just so universal. Only people who don’t realize how universal they are think that they’re different and weird. People are like, “Oh my God! Gay marriage!” And I think, “If you could just see us sitting on the couch with our cats and dogs and bunny, being like, ‘Are we going to watch TV? What are we doing?’” It’s so boring! [Laughs] It’s just what everyone else is doing on their couch at the end of a work day. It’s crazy that we even have any kind of distinction between the two, because it is literally so boring.

Me, personally, I’ve been married for four years. In general, we’re just as mundane as every other person who’s been married for four years. In the love songs, I don’t try to make an effort to make them any more “normal” or any more heteronormative. That’s just the reality of it. I think that people would be better served to actually realize and know that. It’s always fun for me, when I write a song that’s about my life, and somebody’s like, “I feel the exact same way about my husband!” or “I feel the exact same way about my wife!” Because inside I’m like, “Yes. That’s the point.”

That’s what it means to be human.

Exactly. The best line I think Jason Mraz ever wrote was in regard to humanity. He says, “Our name is our virtue.” That’s so much it. If we could just be more human, that’s all we ever need to do.

How do you think we can bridge the gap that divides all of us right now? Do you think it’s just playing these songs and letting it filter in for people?

I do. I really do. The hard thing for us to do is engage one another. It’s a scary thing — rejection is a scary thing, being the butt of somebody’s anger is a very scary thing — but we have to engage each other. I sing the songs that are a little more difficult in places where it’s not necessarily the most advisable thing for me to do. Ultimately, if I don’t make those people think, if I can’t make them feel something or think something, they’re not going to do it on their own, because they’re only going to be hanging out with the same type of people. I feel like we have a responsibility to put ourselves in those uncomfortable situations for the good of the whole. We have to do it.

It’s very difficult traversing this world with a limited worldview. It’s so easy, for so many of us, to just be comfortable. If you’re a 30-year-old white guy, with all of your 30-year-old white guy friends, it’s not that you’re a bad person; it’s not that you don’t care about anyone else’s issues or their daily life. It’s just not your reality because it’s not something you see every day. Worldviews are so different. Simple things can help people think, but it’s so much easier to be comfortable. Whereas, with me, I don’t really have a choice. I’m always in various multi-cultural situations. If more of us did that, it would just be second nature to realize what somebody else’s walk through life looks like because you aren’t just having to imagine it; you’re literally standing there watching it.

Photo credit: Sarah Stuart

Hardened & Tempered: From the Inside Out

Posted on by Editor

Shout & Shine conversations revolve around expectations: expectations about roots music and its constituent genres and to whom they belong; expectations about what artists and fans want and need; expectations about representation, visibility, community, tradition, history, politics, and so on.

One of the aspects of these interviews that is most compelling is how, even among just the artists of marginalized and underrepresented identities, a relatively small group of people in roots music, the variety of expectations — and perspectives and approaches — is astounding. Each interview has the potential to remind us that we all bring our own presuppositions, biases, and expectations into every conversation we have, even when we are doing our best to be cognizant of them.

Kristin Davidson and Carolyn Phillips, the folk/country duo Hardened & Tempered, most certainly illuminated the baggage of expectations brought to the table, but it also put a spotlight on how all human beings would benefit from stopping to appraise our assumptions from time to time. We could all stand to loosen our grips on our beliefs and dogmas, on the stereotypes we feel are valid, on the narratives we cling to — whether consciously or subconsciously. After all, the strongest steel isn’t rigid, unwavering, and hard. It’s flexible, it’s malleable, it’s giving. That kind of softness makes it stronger. It can make us stronger, too.

Your name, itself — Hardened & Tempered — and the first line of your bio, “Hard enough to hold an edge, soft enough not to break,” sounds like the LGBTQ+ experience distilled. How much of your identities went into the name?

Kristin Davidson: There are a couple of different meanings that went into the name. One is, quite literally, the reference to steel. Because I play the pedal steel, one of my favorite pastimes has been rebuilding old motorcycles, and I also know how to weld. So there’s literally a steel reference in that. But we also liked it as …

Carolyn Phillips: … a metaphor.

KD: Yeah, a kind of metaphor for the balance that we always try to aspire to. We’re both pretty intense individuals, and we do intense things, but certainly, learning how to soften up over the years has taught us to be a little stronger, too.

CP: We were actually talking to one of our close friends in Sante Fe, as we were trying to figure out our name, and he mentioned how he thought of us in this way (hardened and tempered) as individuals, but also as a couple. “Soft,” tempered steel is actually stronger than the hard stuff. That softness makes us stronger. I think that it’s a life lesson from growing up, in general. I think, in every aspect of my life, that rigidity hasn’t been a strong point. When I can meet others with kindness, I actually get that back.

What did your individual journeys to roots music look like?

KD: My deep dive into music, especially lyrically based music, started as far back as I can remember. As I grew up playing the guitar, I always had guitar teachers pointing me in the direction of blues. I definitely gravitated towards folk as a genre. I probably became most aware of it in my early 20s. Lucinda Williams was a culmination of that journey — she was a gateway for me, in a lot of ways. That sophisticated simplicity in her writing, with the blues and the roots influences, led me to explore the different sub-genres that supported her in a more detailed way.

CP: I was more of a late bloomer to all of it. I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska and graduated with a class of 19 people. My music exposure at that time was pretty limited. I didn’t start getting into roots music until I met Kristin, which was in my 20s, as well.

The first song on your album, The Trailer Sessions, is “My Wildest Ride” and, in the first verse, we hear a woman singing female pronouns, “… The prettiest girl I’d seen.” What’s the story behind that?

KD: I like to step into the shoes of whoever the character is, regardless of gender. “My Wildest Ride” is a song I wrote for a friend and his wife, so they’re actually male and female characters in the song, because I wanted to write a song that honored them. What I think is fun is my voice giving voice to both characters.

In my experience in bluegrass, women will sing classic songs without changing the pronouns, and no one bats an eye at it. But if a man happens to sing a song from a female perspective, they’re almost always changing the pronouns. I like that you’re keeping the song central there.

KD: That’s one of my pet peeves! When I hear a male song covered by a female artist, it always irritates me if she were to change the pronouns. Occasionally, you run across artists who don’t. There’s something more magical that happens when the pronouns don’t change. I don’t know — it’s more fun and it’s transcendent, in a way.

Do you feel like queerness makes you more likely to appreciate that or to do that in your own music?

CP: I think so.

KD: Yeah, sure!

CP: We never want to be boxed into anything. That’s how we both live our lives. We just let “us” be who we are. Because we’ve had to explore that all of our lives, we’ve gained this freedom to live this way.

So the songs on your record range from being total story songs to totally personal.

KD: Oh, definitely. The first song, like we said, is about friends of ours. But then, going into track two, with “Heartbreak Transit Line,” that is a character and a set of circumstances I imagined, versus “Centerville,” which is very much written from my experience. I think, even when I have a movie-like image that develops in my brain, when I’m invested in developing a certain character, I always ask myself, “What about this character is something that I can relate to personally?” That’s a great exercise, because usually I create these characters in circumstances that I have not lived myself. I guess it’s an exercise in empathy.

Where does “Family Secrets” fall on the story song to personal song scale? I hear that line in there, “I can’t fall in love without reminding you of your regrets.” It makes me think of my family — and the families of so many LGBTQ+ people out there — who will never be fully supportive of queer love and the happiness we gain from it.

CP: [Laughs] That’s a loaded question!

KD: [Laughs]

CP: This came from, quite literally, a family secret that we’re not sure we should tell, because it involves a still-living family member. [Laughs]

KD: But yes, you’re absolutely right. Those couple of lines and down through the hook, “You can’t deny what you won’t confess about the family secrets …”

See, that sounds like the closet to me.

KD: And part of it is. That factored into it. But I had been reading a lot about epigenetics and considering my own family secrets. My mom found this old newspaper article about some great-great-great grandfather of ours that committed a triple murder/suicide type of situation, and it made national news in like, 1906. You could probably mine I don’t know how many country songs from it. That was one of the things that I grew up knowing, because my dad didn’t consider it something to keep secret from me, but then I’m not sure my cousins knew.

Then, of course, our own experiences falling in love factored in — that’s an intense enough thing on its own, to be falling in love without adding in the external dynamics and reactions. You don’t always know where that external influence is coming from or why. It could have something totally different driving it. Like a family secret. There was a whole bunch of information bouncing around in my head [while writing “Family Secrets”]. But I have to say, that chorus was one of those things that just popped out, and I’m not sure how.

I think the important thing here is representation. LGBTQ+ people who listen to your music see themselves reflected in it — where they don’t normally see themselves in Americana or country at all. For instance, I keep finding these bits and pieces of your songs that I can relate to as a gay man, that may or may not be coming from a LGBTQ+ starting point at all, but your visibility allows listeners to connect those dots, if they so wish. Do you consider that while you write and perform?

KD: I don’t think I think about it overtly, but I take what you just said as a tremendously high compliment. It’s such an inside-out process, to start with the seed of creation and then watch it launch into something that can exist on its own. When I first started writing, I didn’t sing, so I was used to writing words that were brought to life by someone else’s voice. I’m more grounded with the songs now, but it’s still such an inside-out experience for me. I just hope people listen and like the songs. I’m always so complimented by the fact that people relate to them.

What is the dynamic in Austin, Texas, and in the music scene and in your communities? How does it feel playing regionally, going from the progressive echelon of Austin to the deep red areas surrounding it?

KD: We haven’t been in Austin that long, so it’s hard to provide any sort of global context to it, but Austin has been very good to us. I’d say it’s a very relaxed and open community.

CP: It feels pretty fluid to me. That’s been our experience even on tour.

KD: In, like, rural Nebraska.

CP. Yeah. Again, I take it back to, you know, how I have survived in this world is by just being myself and being kind, and that’s usually what I’m met with, fortunately. Being out there, being in different rural communities, playing music, and being gay gives [our audiences] exposure to different types of people that they maybe otherwise wouldn’t have had. I hope by us being out there, being who we are, and being good people, we can continue to help represent and show who our community is. There are fewer barriers in place than we hear about sometimes.