Tag: lilith fair

BGS Class of 2025: The Year in Roots Music

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Roots music was everywhere this year. It’s time we decide once and for all: Is roots music enjoying a “moment”? Or are these genres and sonic stylings always this foundational to popular and mainstream music?

Maybe roots is just at the center of everything we do here at BGS, but we’re inclined to the latter option. Roots music, folk music, whatever you want to call it, these styles are at the root – pun intended – of everything we love, not just in our scenes and spaces, but what we love about pop music, radio hits, and the musical mainstream, too. It’s no wonder, then, that roots shows up in albums and offerings by Bad Bunny and Sabrina Carpenter. That roots music finds its way across the globe in the fight for justice. That banjos and fiddles and the blues and bluegrass can be seeds by which entire resplendent artistic universes can be birthed, whether festivals or films or documentaries or albums or songs.

For our final year-end retrospective list of 2025, we asked our BGS contributors to reflect on the roots music and moments that stuck with them over the course of this year. Instead of setting strict criteria for what qualified as “roots music,” we did just the opposite, leaving our year-end “best” prompt as loose, open, and broad as possible. The results reaffirm our central belief that roots music isn’t a niche, it’s everything. There’s no limit to what it can touch on, impact, and transform.

We look forward to continuing to celebrate all things roots music and roots culture with you in 2026. In the meantime, enjoy our BGS Class of 2025. Roots music below, bluegrass here, and Good Country here.

Bad Bunny, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Last year, the most mainstream and far-reaching roots album was most certainly Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. The project has amassed billions of streams and listens, millions of sales, and has been certified Platinum by RIAA. This year, the most prominent roots album has received little to none of the controversial discourse of “belonging” and genre and roots-adjacency that Cowboy Carter attracted. Bad Bunny’s 2025 masterpiece, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, is perhaps a bit sneakier in its rootsiness – or, being that it was made by a Puertorriqueño and is delivered entirely in Spanish, perhaps the same sorts of racism that put Beyoncé under the crosshairs may have relieved Bad Bunny of such targeting.

DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is jaw-dropping in its artistic and sonic accomplishments. Reggaeton and pop, hip-hop and house are grounded and contextualized by roots music, which does incredible heavy artistic lifting across the album. Interludes and intros reference many of the Latin and Caribbean folk styles that would birth the genres Bad Bunny currently inhabits. Calls of endemic frogs are mentioned alongside varied sounds of the diaspora, gentrification decried while advocating for self-determination. The album successfully does the work of so many solely folk and/or roots projects, but given its mainstream appeal and A-lister creator, that fact seems to have been lost in the glitz, glamour, and Super Bowl Halftime Show of it all. Make no mistake, though, for all the things that it is, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS is obviously roots music. – Justin Hiltner

Carsie Blanton

Singer-songwriter Carsie Blanton gave the most fun performances I saw on folk stages this year. Whether solo in the round or with frequent collaborators Sean Trischka, Joe Plowman, and Isa Burke, a Carsie show feels like a block party. People pack in corners to see what she will cook up next: a saucy tale, a power pop-influenced anthem of revolution, a quiet moment that demands reverent attention. Blanton has a gift for translating history into sing-alongs without softening any of her political edges. It takes an expert vocalist and arranger to sing “I guess America’s coming untied/ Half of my neighbors are living outside” without the audience feeling gloomy or preached at.

It helps that Blanton embodies the kind of working-class swagger that only a bad bitch from New Jersey can pull off. An outspoken feminist and member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, this past October she brought the revolutionary hope of her songs to Global Sumud Flotilla to Gaza, where she risked her life as a member of the humanitarian coalition. Blanton, along with many of her comrades, was detained when the Israeli military intercepted their boats. Her bandmates were waiting at the airport when she got home. – Lizzie No

Brooklyn Folk Festival

Celebrating its 17th year, the Brooklyn Folk Festival is the best of the independent roots music community incarnate. Each November, the festival brings together members of the New York folk music community with musicians from across the country (and sometimes the world) for one weekend of homegrown joy, hosted in the Saint Ann and the Holy Trinity Episcopal church in Brooklyn. Musicians swap instruments and stories and audiences pack church pews and sit cross-legged on the floor to listen, intently.

The festival fosters space both for old-timers and young musicians; each year students from the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, which hosts the event, perform. This year, the mainstage audience waited patiently, giving grace to 91-year-old folk legend Alice Gerrard (of Hazel & Alice) as she remembered the lyrics to one of her songs. Friends, lovers, and children waltzed together to Black string band New Dangerfield. And when musician Nick Shoulders invoked folk music’s long history of protest and compared old-time music to public lands – dubbing both worthy and precious resources, which should be protected and preserved as free for all – the entire room cheered. Community uplift at its purist and sweetest. – Meredith Lawrence

Sabrina Carpenter’s Sneaky Roots

They say the Germans have a word for everything. Do you think there’s one for how good it feels when roots music sneaks into the pop mainstream? Maybe… Beyoncénfreude? There should be some term for it, because it’s a special kind of satisfaction, and this year the good vibes continued with Ms. Short n’ Sweet herself, Sabrina Carpenter.

The superstar had already shown a genuine appreciation for country when she teamed up with Dolly Parton on “Please, Please, Please” (even changing explicit lyrics to better suit the mild-mannered icon) and with the dreamy country-folk of “Slim Pickins.” But in 2025 two important things happened. 1) She made her Grand Ole Opry debut in October, beaming with pride and lavishing the institution with praise. “Please, Please, Please” and “Slim Pickins” were both part of her set. And, 2) “Man Child.” Beneath the disco pulse ran an undercurrent of country twang, with a rhinestoned electric guitar hook dripping in her signature campiness.

This alone would be a prime case of Beyoncénfreude, but the best part was how Carpenter felt no need to call attention to the matter. It wasn’t a play or statement. She just wanted some country in there and knew her fans would accept it. What that says about roots music and the mainstream is definitely a 2025 highlight. – Chris Parton

Neko Case, “Winchester Mansion of Sound”

The late great Flat Duo Jets guitarist Dexter Romweber, who died at a too-young 57 last year, was an inspirational figure to generations of artists, Neko Case among them. The Americana siren repaid that debt with a cameo on Dex Romweber Duo’s 2009 LP Ruins of Berlin, and goes one better with this eulogy from her latest album, Neon Grey Midnight Green. Over spectral tack piano plinking away, Case paints a picture of kindred spirits bound together by music:

I still think of you
And your wild, recurve guitar
Only you can play so far out of tune
And still kick me in the heart.

By the end, shortly before the full band kicks in for the outro, Case concludes, “Only music is forever.” Perfect.

This has been just one of 2025’s Romweber afterlife artifacts, including posthumous induction into the North Carolina Music Hall of fame and depiction in the teen drama TV series, The Runarounds. But this one is the best of all. – David Menconi

Chatham Rabbits, Be Real With Me

Despite its general lamenting about growing older – something I can relate to all too well – I can’t get enough of husband-wife duo Chatham Rabbits on Be Real With Me. But instead of focusing on the aches, pains, and other changes that come with the passing of time, Sarah and Austin McCombie also reflect on the wisdom that accompanies it as well.

This manifests itself in missives like “Matador,” where Sarah sings about trusting people too fast and ignoring red flags along the way, and “Gas Money,” which touches on overcommitting to relationships with others before first looking after yourself. The duo also navigate everything from falling out with longtime companions (“Childhood Friends”) to wanting freedom while also having desires to build and nurture a family (“Collateral Damage”), painting an understandably complex web of stories in the process.

The result is a very millennial-leaning record that puts a positive spin on aging as a young adult and will leave any 20-something listening ready to do what Austin describes on the album’s lead track, “Facing 29” – “Grabbing 30 by the strap of its boots.” – Matt Wickstrom

Michael Daves, Early Morning Sun

2025 has been a bang-up year for new releases and one at the top of my list is Michael Daves’ five song EP, Early Morning Sun. Daves’ music is always inspiring, but this EP differs from his past releases. Unlike Orchids and Violence, which was a two-part album with one side being bluegrass covers and the other being electric covers of those same bluegrass songs, Early Morning Sun is just Daves and his guitar.

All recorded on a low-tuned Kay guitar in an old church in Brooklyn, the EP has a rough, thrashy bluegrass and somewhat country feel. It’s an album of covers that, if you live in Brooklyn, you’ve probably heard Michael play around town, especially at the Jalopy Theatre or in the old days at Rockwood Music Hall. What’s special about this EP is that you can really feel the energy of how it was recorded. The slight echo of the church compliments the songs in a unique way, bringing a lot of oomph to the songs both in his vocals and his guitar playing. – Emma Turoff

Flock of Dimes, The Life You Save

Feeling weighed down by life? Tired of propping up others who can’t (or won’t) get their act together? Friend, have I got a record for you.

Jenn Wasner has been telling survivors’ stories through exquisite, deeply textured music for two decades. Her third Flock of Dimes LP, The Life You Save, leans into the atmosphere of Wasner’s voice over instrumental theatrics. Its songs find her in the deeply wearying role of reluctant savior, trying her best to heal her little corner of the world – or at least herself. The album’s money shot is “Long After Midnight,” which sounds like it could be about anything – from trying to save a friend from a drug problem or a parent sliding into dementia. The video shows Wasner sitting on the floor singing as every piece of furniture behind her is removed, finally directing attention to herself near the end:

I live my life among the lucky ones
When things are bad I never let them know
When you come from where I come from
There’s only so far you can go…

But if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need. – David Menconi

Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow

Rhiannon Giddens reunites with former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson for what is essentially a crash course in the music of North Carolina. What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow contains 18 songs – a healthy mix of instrumentals and tracks with lyrics. The music comes alive in the pair’s very capable hands and invites the listener to take a 44-minute stroll through Appalachia and North Carolina’s Piedmont. Their late mentor, Piedmont musician Joe Thompson, taught them all he knew, which is quite evident on selections such as “Hook and Line,” “Little Brown Jug,” and “Old Molly Hare.” Together, it’s like no time has passed between Giddens and Robinson, and they reach new heights in their work with some of the most propulsive and emotive string work of the year.

What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow demonstrates that learning and growing never end. String work is best served when untethered to strict structures, but rather fluid and gently gliding, they evoke both a sense of whimsy and raw emotion. – Bee Delores

The History of Sound

I was in a cab going up the mountain to see Bugonia, and I was talking to another queer friend about The History of Sound. Specifically, about Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal singing “Pretty Saro” and “Silver Dagger” to each other as a method of seduction. We talked about other versions of both songs – especially “Silver Dagger” – about how tender the song is in general, how O’Connor makes it softer, and about how his halting, half-good singing was effective in ways that, for example, Joan Baez wasn’t.

I thought a lot about the “Silver Dagger” scene, with a heat and a hunger, more than anything else in that film; a song which was too formalist to fully represent the erotic lives of the main characters. The movie made me sad and aroused, and what else can you ask for from a film? But it also made me worry about what songs we absorb from which traditions, and that the trading of these two famous songs as signifiers of a kind of melancholic, cock-blocked Appalachia only considers one kind of desire, one kind of hunger, and one kind of aesthetic. One marked by loss, and one which never completes except in death.

I wondered what it would mean, instead of “don’t sing love songs,” to sing every possible love song for every possible kind of love. In that too-short scene in the tent, Mescal and O’Connor sing to each other as a mode of seduction, but we get an incomplete song and an incomplete seduction. If we are listening to folk songs for their ardor, then the tradition must allow for all kinds of ardor – all kinds of desire. Sure, we have their version of “Pretty Saro” (the movie convinced me that nothing would be sexier than hearing that song post-coitally), but what about everything from “The Money Comes Rolling In” to “The Wanton Seed” to “The Two Magicians”? – Steacy Easton

I’m With Her, Wild and Clear and Blue

Right from the get-go, 2025 was a hard year. The Los Angeles wildfires ripped through homes and communities in January, displacing thousands of people, including many of my friends and music industry peers. Even for those of us whose homes were unscathed, everything suddenly felt untethered and dangerous, like it could disappear at any second.

For me, nothing captured that unnatural feeling quite like I’m With Her’s “Standing on the Fault Line.” “Is it when the reservoir runs out/ And the birds stop flying south/ Are we gonna know it’s time to flee?,” questions Sara Watkins. Many of us did have to flee, loading our cars with whatever we could grab; evacuating to anywhere that seemed remotely safer. But as climate change and economic and political upheaval continuously flip our world upside down, is anywhere really safe?

The rest of I’m With Her’s beautiful album, Wild and Clear and Blue, has been a soothing balm amidst these strange times. Each song captures a different aspect of womanhood, family, home, and the slipping of time – a testament to the shared songwriting duties of Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins, and Sarah Jarosz. Their harmonies ring out like an old friend offering words of comfort on the other end of the line. – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery

One of the highlights of the late 1990s was Lilith Fair, a popular music festival co-founded by Sarah McLachlan and featuring the talent of such acts as Fiona Apple, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, and The Chicks over three years (1997-99). Director Ally Pankiw, known for I Used to Be Funny and two episodes of Black Mirror, pulls from a remarkable 600 hours of never-before-seen footage that cuts to the core of what Lilith Fair meant – and continues to mean – for women and female-identifying people. Interviews with Emmylou Harris, Brandi Carlile, and Jewel, among others, give new insight into the landmark festival and the tough-as-nails artists who stormed its stages.

Pankiw pulls back the curtain and offers the audience a peek into the blood, sweat, and tears that festival planners and the talent endured for the sake of the art and proving to the world that women artists were far more valuable than as tokens in a sea of men. Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery is raw, honest, and probing. For any casual music fan, it’s a must-watch of the year. – Bee Delores

Jess Sah Bi, Jesus-Christ Ne Deçoit Pas

Seven years ago, I worked on the reissue of Our Garden Needs Its Flowers (1985) by the West African country, folk, and afro-pop duo Jess Sah Bi & Peter One. Back in the 1980s, they were one of the most popular musical acts in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), entertaining stadium-sized audiences at home, and later on, throughout Benin, Burkina Faso, and Togo.

When I first heard it, Jess Sah Bi & Peter One’s music was a revelation. In a sense, it offered a whole new lens through which to view country and folk music, while unlocking an entirely different set of African musical histories to learn from. Afterwards, Peter One scored a deal with Verve Records, culminating in his celebrated comeback album, Come Back to Me (2023).

Earlier this year, Awesome Tapes From Africa, the label that gave Our Garden Needs Its Flowers a second wind, reissued Jess Sah Bi’s rare early-1990s gospel, folk, and country solo album, Jesus-Christ Ne Deçoit Pas (Jesus Christ Does Not Disappoint). Written and recorded after recovering from a mystery illness and relocating from Côte d’Ivoire to the United States, the album’s seven songs, sung in French and Gouro, are soaring, transcendent, and undeniable. – Martyn Pepperell

Caroline Spence, Heart Go Wild

For me, 2025 has been typified by abject, all-encompassing grief. Singer-songwriter Caroline Spence’s past albums are certainly also heartfelt and lean towards tear-jerking and raw emotion-inhabiting, but Heart Go Wild feels particularly primed for a good, cathartic, therapeutic cry. Spence processes quite a few life and career changes within these songs, but the specificity by which these tracks and lyrics were born don’t hem them in or limit their relatability. On the contrary, by Spence opening up her own particular introspections to all of us, yet again, she enables each of her listeners to find our own healing, growth, and redemption in the same way she has. Through song.

Tracks like “Fun at Parties,” “Confront It,” “Why the Tree Loves the Ax,” and “Where the Time Goes” – really, the entire collection – have been remedies I didn’t know I would need so deeply when the album was first announced. Spence never needs to rely on tropes or platitudes to handle these sorts of topics. She rises above gratuitousness or melodrama, even while she acknowledges the sorts of grief, pain, and change she’s reckoning with aren’t aberrations from the human experience, they are the human experience. She’s reminding herself as much as each of us, and I suppose that’s where the magic of her particular skillset truly lies. – Justin Hiltner

Billy Strings at IBMA World of Bluegrass

When it comes to the International Bluegrass Music Association, two big things happened in 2025: the annual conference, festival, and awards show found new digs in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Billy Strings finally returned to where it all began for the star. Taking home his fourth Entertainer of the Year award this year, Strings made a genuine, heartfelt effort to appear at the IBMA events. Not only to accept his recognition, but also to hang around the festivities all week.

Strings kicked off the conference with a stunning keynote address, only to then perform two shows in Chattanooga (one with his full band, one with guitar wizard and mentor Bryan Sutton). Throughout the week, Strings casually popped up all over the city, either jumping in on jam circles or merely stopping to chat with fans and fellow musicians alike, including a memorable jam with 90-year-old bluegrass icon Paul Williams. Strings’ presence was a well-received thing for a bluegrass community not only indebted to the six-string ace for what he’s brought to the scene, but also to remind everyone he hasn’t abandoned bluegrass — it’ll always be the essence of his melodic core. – Garret K. Woodward

Molly Tuttle, So Long Little Miss Sunshine

Molly Tuttle’s So Long Little Miss Sunshine actually comes loaded with sunshine and it’s evident from all angles. The empowered and fearless lyrics start on the first track, “Everything Burns,” and continue through “No Regrets” and “Story of My So-Called Life,” showing Tuttle standing proudly in feelings, intentions, and reflections that are true to this chapter in her life.

Whether she’s basking in a seemingly perfect headspace (“There’s no valley I can’t cross, or mountain I can’t climb/ I’m in a golden state of mind”) or making a messy choice and owning it without self-abasement (“Don’t try to fix it when you break my heart/ Knew when you hit me with your poison dart”), every moment is deliberate and delivered with confidence. That includes the sonic side of things, too – despite judgmental heat coming from folks who think Tuttle is trading in pickin’ parties for pop(ularity).

First: There’s plenty of Tuttle’s prodigious musicianship shining on this record. Second: take a cue from Tuttle herself and embrace what’s new as we go into the new year! Because for Tuttle, not all the personality on this album is new. It’s just new to us because she’s finally letting it out and letting it breathe. – Kira Grunenberg

Cristina Vane, Hear My Call

The Italian-born, Nashville-based singer and multi-instrumentalist Cristina Vane has long been at home playing bluegrass, country, blues and everything in between, but on Hear My Call she’s finally at home with the most important thing of all — herself.

Across the album’s 13 tracks Vane embraces the cultures and sounds that have shaped her, from finding joy in everywhere she’s been on the rock anthem, “Little Girl From Nowhere,” to relating to the stories of someone born an ocean away on the banjo ballad, “My Mountain.” While many songs on the record lean heavy into introspection and the strength that comes from it, others find power in everything from fun and sensual moments (“Shake It Babe”) to moving on from people who don’t value your presence and time (“You Ain’t Special”).

On top of Vane’s clever songwriting, I also can’t get enough of her playing on this album. Throughout, she moves effortlessly from banjo to slide guitar without skipping a beat, further reinforcing her staying power. This is someone to watch from 2026 onward. – Matt Wickstrom

Lead Image: Justin Robinson & Rhiannon Giddens by Karen Cox; I’m With Her by Alysse Gafkjen; Carsie Blanton by Bobby Bonsey.

Lilith Fair Was Its Own Kind of Revolution

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The ’90s might be cool again, but there was more to the era than Friends and Seinfeld. In the shadows of the dot-com boom and bust, NAFTA and off-shoring, life wasn’t as slow or quirky as those shows made it seem. American women had more independence than ever before – but they were still waging battles for gender equity from kitchen tables to C-suites to recording studios.

Sarah McLachlan was just reaching the peak of her powers in 1997, enjoying international success but frustrated by radio programmers’ limited ideas of how their audience received women. McLachlan and other women were constantly pitted against each other, told that no one would listen to two songs by women in a row – and certainly no one would want to see women tour together. So, McLachlan set out to prove the world wrong, reshaping popular music in the process.

Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery is a new documentary produced by ABC News and released in September 2025. Available to stream now on Hulu, the project captures the festival’s revolutionary three years with pride and exuberance, encapsulating Lilith Fair’s confident strength and joy. Archival footage of shows and interviews with some of the hundreds of thousands of fans who flocked to the event are resolute testaments to the festival’s enduring impact – if only people remembered it.

The film, directed by Ally Pankiw, premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival in early September. Dan Levy (of Schitt’s Creek fame) co-produced the film under his Not a Real Production company. The documentary follows the story of Lilith Fair from its genesis, examining the festival’s place in history, the misogyny women artists faced at the time, and the trails it blazed for women artists today. Featuring McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, and more in interviews, the film explores how McLachlan’s forward-thinking vision animated Lilith Fair into something much more than a package tour.

Lilith Fair’s Place in History

“The cultural memory of Lilith is clearly very skewed,” observes co-producer Cassidy Hartmann, who spoke to BGS. “There are a number of reasons for that. Women’s achievements in history have often been overshadowed or skewed in some way and there’s often been backlash against that.”

The documentary opens with a series of TikTok videos featuring half a dozen Gen Z-ers breathlessly recounting the massive package tour devoted solely to women artists of all genres. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, Lilith Fair main stage featured McLachlan, Badu, Cole, Crow, Tracy Chapman, The Indigo Girls, Jewel, Missy Elliot, Bonnie Raitt, and many more – while the “village stages” featured then little known up-and-comers like Christina Aguilera, Dido, and Nelly Furtado.

McLachlan and her team led the massive undertaking with a steady hand and, as the documentary shows, a willingness to learn from critiques. By the festival’s third year in 1999, the event boasted artists of many genres, cultures, and ages – though the sound leaned predominantly folk.

“I don’t think that any genre classified us,” Paula Cole demurred when speaking to BGS.

“I think that everyone was so unique and had their own music, and we fall into different classifications. I personally hate genre classification, because it’s limiting. Great music is usually a blend, anyway.”

Cole, who was nominated for three GRAMMYs for her 1996 album This Fire, would know about great music. Yet, a half hour into Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, you’d be hard-pressed to miss her twang and carefully crafted lyrics forming the backbone of, well, Good Country.

But Cole has a point. While Lilith is often remembered in pop culture as a collection of (white) folk-inspired dryads, the festival featured an array of talent across all genres of music. As the documentary illustrates, McLachlan received feedback that the tour’s first year was too racially homogeneous, so she sought to build a tour that encompassed the totality of women working in music: Badu, Missy Elliott, and Queen Latifah all played the festival. (The documentary details a hilarious anecdote about Missy Elliott’s ride to the show after her tour bus broke down – we won’t spoil it here, but it’s the kind of thing that simply doesn’t happen in the age of smartphones.)

According to Badu, her time with Lilith Fair inspired her to create the Sugar Water Festival with herself, Queen Latifah, and Jill Scott in 2005 and 2006. Like Lilith, that event brought together community orgs that addressed women’s (and in this case, Black women’s) concerns.

Rippling Energy

Cole was a part of Lilith’s story from the very beginning, joining McLachlan on short, experimental runs to see if an all-woman lineup could indeed draw a crowd.

“It was uncommon for women to open for women. Every night I would tell the audience, I want to thank Sarah for having me here because this is uncommon,” Cole says. “This doesn’t happen. And audiences would erupt into applause when I would tell them that. It felt like a zeitgeist. You could feel the energy ripple.”

But Lilith Fair did not happen in a vacuum. It stands as one chapter in a long-ignored legacy of self-made movements among women in music. In the ’60s and ’70s, there was, in fact, an entire movement-turned-genre known as “women’s music.” The folk-inspired sounds were championed by queer record label Olivia Records and Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was one of the scene’s organizing forces from 1976 to 2015. MichFest, as it was known, was an annual convergence of feminist women across the sexual and gender spectrum. But, the festival’s refusal to admit trans women in 1991 contributed to its decline. (The silver lining here is the subsequent organizing of trans rights groups and cis allies, but that’s a story for another time.)

While the Indigo Girls and Chapman performed at both Lilith Fair and MichFest, the headlining artists on Lilith’s lineup already had major label backing and widespread commercial success by 1997. Yet, history has collapsed and often conflated the two.

“A lot of people think Ani DiFranco was at Lilith,” executive producer Hartmann observes. “Clearly there is some overlap there. I think all of these women had a righteous anger and were super blunt about it.”

Indeed, while DiFranco has earned her reputation as that decade’s feminist iconoclast, Cole’s This Fire would certainly belong right next to DiFranco’s records on the shelf (likely much to the dismay of ’90s rock critics.)

Lilith Fair received quite a bit of criticism from women critics – certainly, McLachlan’s gentle forcefulness may have been more palatable to record labels than, say, riot grrl, but with time sanding down the edges of the record bins, it’s easy to see how they all form part of a whole.

“Women often don’t get to hear and understand the stories of generations of women before them, because culture has a tendency not to platform those stories. That lineage is often broken,” explains Hartmann. “Another thing that Lilith did really well was it had multi-generational artists. Emmylou Harris and Bonnie Raitt were there, bestowing their own wisdom and experience to these younger women. I think that’s also a really powerful element to keep in mind and hopefully replicate in the future.”

Building a Documentary

According to Hartmann, the documentary was inspired by Jessica Hopper’s Vanity Fair article “Building a Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair.” Co-produced by Dan Levy and directed by Ally Pankiw, the film draws upon footage from MTV News, band members, and festival staff – plus a trove of 600 unreleased tapes gathered by Lilith on Top, a 2001 documentary that was only released in Canada.

There were plenty of reasons to resurface the story.

“Many of these people are at a point in their lives and careers [now] where I think they can reflect on that moment and have some perspective on it as well,” Hartmann says. “Unfortunately, I think the themes of the Lilith story are as relevant as ever, in terms of what’s happening in our society and culture at the moment with women’s rights being rolled back. It’s a moment to be reminded of what’s possible.”

Cole echoes that sentiment.

“Politically, things are so frightening as we’re witnessing the formation of autocracy without checks and balances and a lot of backlash [to liberalism],” she says. “I think Lilith is needed now more than ever. Anytime that someone’s talking about it is important. The conversation must go on, must go on, and we must keep telling people about it. It just gives hope, it gives breath, it opens doors, it lifts the ceiling.”

Indeed, if the film’s archival live footage conveys just a micron of the incredible energy in those venues, then Lilith was a revolution indeed.

Passing the Baton

McLachlan has repeatedly stated that, while the world needs something like Lilith Fair again, she is not the one to lead it – and that it would need to be very different than Lilith Fair was.

“I think Lilith was its own unique entity,” Cole reflects. “There are artists that, you know, sell a lot more tickets than Sarah that could drive this and that could do such a thing. I’m calling on the younger women of today to create their own version of Lilith Fair.”

But one message should still resonate: that quiet defiance Lilith Fair proudly bore – proving conventional wisdom wrong.

“When someone tells you something’s not possible, If you believe in it and you commit yourself to it, look what can happen,” Hartmann observes. “If it comes from a true organic place, the sky’s the limit.”

“Culture change, feminism, fresh thinking, intersectional thinking, it takes time,” says Cole. “It’s like a slow, long, quiet revolution.”

Images courtesy of ABC News Studios; Paula Cole photo by Merri Cyr. 

Watch Sarah McLachlan Perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Last week, GRAMMY winner and renowned Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan performed on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the first musical guest on the show after its controversial short-lived suspension and return to the air. McLachlan performed “Better Broken,” the title track from her brand new album – her first in 11 years – which released September 19. In her signature style, simple unadorned piano and vocals in duet, McLachlan reminds the Kimmel audience exactly why she’s so beloved all around the world. Her voice is rich and plaintive, leaning into the sadness and reckoning in the lyric. It’s immediately clear a decade-plus is too long to wait for new music from McLachlan.

Not only was she appearing on late night television to promote Better Broken, but also Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery – The Untold Story, a new documentary directed by Ally Pankiw that celebrates, explores, and canonizes the enormous impact the Lilith Fair all-women festivals had on folk, indie, and popular music in the late ’90s. (Watch the official trailer below.) An excellent and moving documentary, Building A Mystery is available to stream now via Hulu, a film and television streaming platform that, like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, is owned by ABC / Disney. At the documentary’s Los Angeles premiere, McLachlan and several of her artist colleagues refused to perform music from the film as previously planned, standing in solidarity with Kimmel as he was mid-suspension for his comedic remarks on the murder of Charlie Kirk.

On Kimmel’s historic first night back on the air, just a few days later, it was a perfect full circle moment as McLachlan performed as if honoring a raincheck for her refusing to play at the documentary premiere in protest. With Margo Price as the final musical guest before Kimmel’s suspension and McLachlan the first after its return, it was a mighty pair of activism-minded artist bookends to help reinforce the importance of freedom of speech and expression for creatives who work in any/all media and formats. From Lilith Fair to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, these rights are vital for everyone in this country and around the world – and for the art that they create.

Photo Credit: Randy Holmes for ABC

Basic Folk: Dar Williams (Reissue)

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

(Editor’s Note: Welcome to our Reissue series! For the next several weeks, Basic Folk is digging back into the archives and reposting some of our favorite episodes alongside new introductions commenting on what it’s like to listen back. Enjoy!)

Dar Williams, originally from Mount Kisco, New York, grew up in an era and a household where everyone was tearing down the old ways of doing things, and learning new ways of expressing themselves. For Williams this meant participating in theater and learning to play instruments. She attended Wesleyan University where she studied theater and religion. A deep engagement with matters of the heart and spirit continues to permeate her work today.

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After college Dar found herself in Boston, immersed in the singer-songwriter scene. She wrote and released her album The Honesty Room, which changed everything. That album started her on a path to becoming a venerated performer in the folk space. She was on the original Lilith Fair lineup, which included too many musical legends to name here. It was a dream come true to talk with Dar about that experience, about what it might take for another Lilith Fair to happen, and about the current climate for women in the music industry.

Dar’s latest album, I’ll Meet You Here, was released on October 1, 2021. This beautiful collection of songs was mostly recorded pre-COVID, but then hit a number of road bumps on its way to release. It deals with time, acceptance, places, and small towns, topics about which Dar Williams is a master storyteller.

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

Writer Ann Powers Discusses Her Acclaimed Joni Mitchell Book, ‘Traveling’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Journalist, author, and cultural critic Ann Powers released her latest book, Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, in June of this year. A thought leader in pop and pop culture criticism – and an occasional BGS contributor – Powers considers this legendary figure in folk and American music with deliberation and intention. Traveling isn’t merely a biography or a retelling of well-known and oft-repeated Mitchell lore; instead it’s a careful consideration of the artifice and sincerity, publicity and privacy, myth-making and universe-building of this iconic musician, songwriter, and celebrity.

“I wanted to think about how Joni Mitchell became JONI MITCHELL,” Powers relays in her conversation with BGS executive director Amy Reitnouer Jacobs. “How she fought against that in her own life, and how she reinforced the legend as well.”

And how well-timed is this book and conversation, with Mitchell’s mythos at perhaps its lifelong peak? With Brandi Carlile’s assist, Mitchell has been enjoying a “Joni-ssance” of late, with jaw-dropping public appearances over the past couple of years after an extended hiatus and star-studded Joni Jams delighting fans and acolytes from the Gorge in Washington state to Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.

Fresh off Mitchell’s headline-grabbing appearances at the Hollywood Bowl on October 19 and 20, we’re sharing our recent conversation with Powers about Traveling, its inception and writing, and how a truer telling of Mitchell’s life and creative journey requires a degree of skepticism – and may just result in becoming an even deeper fan of the one-and-only Joni Mitchell.

Right off the bat, I really connected with your hesitation to write this book, because I find that I have a complicated relationship and love of Joni, and I’ve never been able to put it into words. So when you start your introduction with that exact sentiment, I felt that really deeply.  What was your thought process in committing to the book?

Ann Powers: Well, Amy, you understand more than most the thorny relationship we as writers and as lovers and supporters of music have with not artists in particular, but kind of the edifice around the art, or as Joni herself says, “The star-making machinery.” I’m very aware of how artists exist in one space and then there’s like a room where the artist lives, and in between is this space where a lot of misconceptions can happen. A lot of fetishization can happen. I was kind of trying to walk between those rooms and think about her as a public figure, as a legend.

And then, also what I could know of her from a distance. I say from a distance, because I did not interview her for this book – which is not unusual for biographies, by the way – but I foreground that because I wanted to say, “Look, I’m also a stand-in for maybe not the average Joni fan, but for those of us who are kind of considering these people that we’ve made immortal through our love and adulation.”

I wanted to think about how Joni Mitchell became JONI MITCHELL, how she fought against that in her own life, and how she reinforced the legend as well. That was the strong thread for me and an attraction to the project. My hesitancy was that I wasn’t going to be able to overcome the legend.

You say multiple times in the book how you’re not a biographer, but despite the chronological order, the book felt almost like a guide to being a critical fan. How have you developed as a fan in this writing process? Are you still a fan?

I’m definitely more of a fan than I ever was before. I would count myself among those people who took Joni Mitchell for granted before I was approached to do this book. And part of it, I think, is my self-styled “outsider” status. That’s a weird thing to say, but [I say it] as a misfit or someone who came from punk. When I was at the right age to have my “Joni phase,” my idols were Kate Bush, Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, women who I now realize were deeply influenced by Joni themselves, but at the time who seemed almost like an alternative to her and Dylan and Neil Young.

The ’90s [were] the natural time for me to go through another Joni phase and then I did. I did get to see her at that amazing show at the Fez [in 1995] with Brian Blade. I had some prime Joni moments and definitely was listening more than I had in the past, but that was sort of like that moment when Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, PJ Harvey, and so many amazing artists were breaking through the Lilith Fair generation.

And here’s Joni in the press, bad-mouthing them or saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.” So again, I’m like, “Oh, who is this person? Why is this person so hostile?” It’s like all these moments that would have been the one where I stepped onto that path turned me away from it – until much later, when I had an occasion, this book, to go beyond the surface of my fandom. Then I just went completely, fully in. So deep. And every step I took that was closer to her actual music and her actual words, not just her song lyrics, but interviews she’s given or the circumstances of her life, I became more and more of a fan.

In that way, this book is the story of me becoming that defender in the end, even if I’m still a skeptical defender, but I believe that that is something Joni teaches us to be – to yourself and as a skeptical defender of those people she admires.

The funny thing about Joni is that she took every step she could to stay off of that pedestal throughout her career. Sometimes I think her desire to not be encased in amber came from her own anxieties, like her own unhappiness with what fame wrought. It’s a very delicate thing.

This is such an important part of her music and her songs as well, especially an album like The Hissing of Summer Lawns, which is basically a critique of Hollywood. She’s living in Bel Air. She’s hanging out with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty and the glitterati. She is of the glitterati. But then she’s also the one who runs away, who goes, “I’m living a monk-like existence outside Vancouver for a while.” Or, “I’m getting in my car by myself and driving across the South and using aliases and checking into hotels and hanging out with whoever’s in the lobby.”

This is something she kept doing in order to check herself and check the mechanisms around her and not become complacent with where she was. Same in terms of her collaborators. Instead of just doing what you’re advised to do in the music industry, which is just stick with the formula, she just kept blowing things up. She’s like, “I want to play with these jazz guys. I want to bring in like Brazilian percussionists.” That’s her curiosity, as I say in the book, but it’s also her refusal to be a conventional pop star. She’s always kind of trying to keep that at bay.

There’s something that you mentioned about the women you did look up to. When I think about Kate and Chrissie and Debbie, these women stand on their own; holding their own in a male-dominated scene and being surrounded by male collaborators and bands, but not necessarily lifting up other women. I’m trying to think of a female collaboration that Kate Bush ever did and I can’t think of one. 

Well, when we look historically at the place of women, particularly in rock, there were labels attached to women who primarily collaborated with women – “women’s music,” right? That was lesbian music. And I think there was a lot of fear, and frankly, internalized homophobia, among a lot of women and people in general in the more mainstream music business.

So you didn’t want to be associated with too many women or people might think you don’t like men, you know? Read any interview with a woman star from 1967 to probably like 2020 and you’re going to see that phrase. “I love men,” you know, “I like male energy,” all this stuff. And there’s no shame in liking to work with male collaborators, but it’s amazing how fearful so many women and their teams – the people guiding their careers – were of female collaboration and female affinity. It was like a forbidden zone.

Of course, I also love the Go-Go’s and the Bangles, but girl groups were [their] own kind of zone. They were taking on these personae. These are great musicians, why did they have to dress up like ’50s pin-ups? It’s like they’re saying “Look, don’t worry! We’re real women! We can play instruments, but we can be girls too!” And despite what we think, that’s still so alive and well today. Though I do think there’s been a shift in the mainstream recently with artists like Chappell Roan and boygenius. There’s definitely younger millennials and Gen Z fighting against being confined by gender roles.

I have also noticed that younger artists are more eager to welcome their women heroes on stage and older women are more comfortable embracing it. Olivia Rodrigo is constantly pulling her heroes on stage. Katie Crutchfield from Waxahatchee is like, “Where is Lucinda Williams? Let’s bring her out.” And that was something you actually didn’t see even during the Lilith Fair years. It didn’t happen. You didn’t really see older artists on the lineup.

I loved the line in the book, “A map maker must be open to new routes.” Were there any new routes that surprised you, or unexpected people that came out of the woodwork?

Definitely the whole Florida thing. When I found out she had spent time down there and met Bobby Ingram – who’s since passed away. And, I didn’t really know there was this whole kind of mirror folk scene in Florida to that in New York.

But I also didn’t know about how diverse the early folk revival was. This is something [for which] I give a lot of credit to Dom Flemons. He’s been doing the work on this, but it’s still so under-explored. When Joni started out, she wasn’t just seeing Pete Seeger wannabes. She was also seeing Caribbean musicians and people doing musical theater and jazz rock or jazz folk, and although it was still a predominantly white scene, there were very important nonwhite artists on that scene.

In my early days [of writing], I just wanted to write a book about that. Uncovering the stories of other musicians who we forget when we only talk about Guthrie or Seeger or Dylan or whatever. It’s like, how white and boring can it get? If it’s just that, it’s that same story every time and yet it was so much deeper and richer and more interesting. And it’s so important to understanding Joni’s music, because her music was never pure folk.

Somewhere in the last seven and eight years of putting this book together, Brandi Carlile kickstarted the “Joni-ssance” as you put it. How did that change your process?

I thought Brandi would stop at her Blue concerts [at Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2021], but suddenly it was like, “Oh wait, there’s so much more!” It’s been such an exciting story in and of itself that goes beyond music. It’s really the story of recovery, healing, and having this epic return. So on that level, it’s a like beautiful human story that’s been edifying to watch.

But I made the choice to stand apart [from the Joni Jam concerts] so I could continue to keep my perspective focused. Now with the book out, I can finally just enjoy this woman who gave us so much and is receiving her accolades. There’s a world of elders – and especially women elders – that I want to continually acknowledge. And if this project could be helpful in that, then I’ve done something positive for the world.

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen

BGS 5+5: The Deer’s Grace Rowland

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Deer (answers by Grace Rowland)
Hometown: San Marcos/Austin, Texas
Latest Album: The Beautiful Undead
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): We used to be called Grace Park and The Deer, when I was using that stage name and it was more my folk songwriting project. We have many silly names for Noah, our fiddle/mandolinist, including Nugiel and Space Nug. Our guitar player Michael goes by Deenyo.

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

They don’t always come easy, and the muse is ephemeral, like a Whac-A-Mole. We strike when the iron is hot and write independently as much as we can, but we also have to force ourselves to get together and record every now and then whatever comes to mind, even when in a drought. These “drought” sessions are some of the toughest because they are so open-ended. But a lot of good can come from them — the song “Six-Pointed Star” comes to mind right now. It started as a simple song we made in the woods, but when we took it to the studio we had the worst time trying to make it sound right. We must have made four different versions until we finally hit it, but now it is one of our favorites to play.

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Gillian Welch’s rustic realism
John Hartford’s wordsmithing
Depeche Mode’s moody chord progressions and deep bass
Pink Floyd’s subtle layering and studio techniques
Tori Amos’ outspoken poignancy and fearless lyricism

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

For me, it’s often the other way around. I will write from a first-person perspective to make it sound like it’s me, but the person is actually someone else in another body, and the events are imaginary, or real but in another time. In this way I feel like I can transcend time and space lyrically, perhaps to sound a call for mystical encounters that would be otherwise impossible, or to set the stage for events that have yet to happen. One example is the lyricism in “Like Through the Eye,” a billowing romp of a dream that never actually took place, but an experience that I have always envisioned and desired to happen to me. Songs are a way of bringing these things to me. Jesse, however, does this all the time. For instance in our new single “Bellwether,” the original lyrics were “I am falling farther into Me.” As a narcissistic ode to ourselves it served a purpose, but for our greater audience we decided to soften it into a palatable love song.

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

Bodies of water would be our main way of connecting with nature as a group. We make it a point to visit rivers, oceans, hot springs, and lakes wherever we can, and take in Earth’s most valuable essence, and all the plants and animals they gather around them. In lyrics we often reference the sea and the river, flora and fauna, and interspecies relationships, because they reflect the cosmological order that governs our bodies and our feelings. Our complex emotions can be understood better when we zoom out and realize that we are not only driven by this order, but a vital part of it.

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

I was really into musicals as a kid, watching VHS tapes for hours on end and learning every song. My first concert was Lilith Fair in 1997. I was 12, and it was life-changing. However, my decision to actually pursue music as a career didn’t come until my early 20s, when I met a large swath of working musicians at Kerrville Folk Festival in 2006. Seeing so many people my age who were writing their own songs and touring independently, traveling with freedom and spreading their art, was enough to set my intent upon making that dream real.

Whether we got started later or earlier in life, as a group the media we consumed as kids was probably 100% responsible for illustrating an applied use for the gifts we knew we possessed. MTV (back when they played music videos), the Grammys, Saturday Night Live, the Super Bowl halftime show, and yes, even church — these mainstream outlets showed us at an early age what it looked like when someone was giving it their all to entertain their community, and the world. It was enough to inspire each of us to hone our skills, and bring our talent to people on our own scale.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1N6SuTPadcfEYWC8l5gRqw?si=zp3dc_rGQKOkpL6k3vlhmA&nd=1

Photo credit: Barbara FG

On ‘American Quilt,’ Paula Cole Wraps Herself in Music That Reflects Her Life

Posted on by Editor

Paula Cole has long explored the musical territories that inform her work, making it nearly impossible to define her. Singer-songwriter? Yes. Pop star? Yes. Interpreter of jazz standards? Yes. She’s collaborated with country legends, toured with internationally acclaimed artists, and occasionally dropped completely out of sight. Because she’s so hard to pin down creatively, Cole has managed to transcend her commercial zenith of the ’90s, when songs like “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone” and “I Don’t Want to Wait” were inescapable.

Twenty-five years later, Cole is in the spotlight again with American Quilt, which sets her impressive vocal range to standards like “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” It isn’t quite a jazz album, and although her writing skills are on display in “Steal Away/Hidden in Plain Sight,” it isn’t quite a folk record either. Instead it’s a reflection of the influences that shaped her musical direction early on.

“Even when I explore jazz, I like it to be a little more raggedy and raw and rootsy,” she says. “I just wanted the album to reflect all that I am, and I realized, gosh, all of these songs are different from another. How do I unify it? That’s when I remembered my mom, who is a visual artist and she’s a quilter. And I realized that the quilt is the perfect metaphor for the album, that they’re all patches of an American quilt. That’s how the title was born.”

The metaphor works for the spectrum of songs on the album, yet it’s also appropriate for the warmth and comfort it provides. Some songs are more familiar than others – and her rendition of “Shenandoah” is particularly exquisite – but it’s an album best enjoyed as a whole. By dismissing the expectations of how long a song should be, and by showing reverence without replicating what everybody else has already done, Cole has produced a sweeping and immersive listening experience. She called in to BGS from the music room in her Massachusetts home, with a photo of Dolly Parton smiling over her shoulder.

BGS: Your version of “Wayfaring Stranger” is beautiful. What made you want to record it for this album?

Paula Cole: I learned of it through listening to Emmylou Harris, and loving and adoring her. Her Roses in the Snow album was really important to me developmentally. We were on Lilith Fair together in the ‘90s and would sing on each other’s sets. And I’ve been on a few benefit concerts that she’s asked me to play. I love her so dearly. I think she’s an important American voice and we should all be talking about her much more. She kind of saves music because she brings it back to the traditional aspect of it. She keeps us whole and she keeps us real by bringing integrity back to the music.

The song came to me very intuitively and I thought, “A ha!” I can reveal some of my influences and also bow to someone who was important to me. Also I was so fed up and traumatized by the music business and it was Emmylou who told me, “Don’t quit.” You know, I took a seven-and-a-half year hiatus and thought about leaving the music business, but she was the one who said, “Hang in there.” It just happened too fast. She had this motherly wisdom for me and it made sense, and I’ve thought of her so much over my life. I love her very much.

Roses in the Snow is a familiar bluegrass album for a lot of our readers. Are you a bluegrass fan?

I just love music. So, if you asked me, “Do you like jazz?” I would say, “I love music.” [Laughs] My dad played bass in a polka band on weekends when I was little, then he would go home and play Duke Ellington on the piano or he would play obscure folk songs on banjo in my house growing up. It was always a mixture. I love all music. I love bluegrass. I love acoustic music. I love music where musicians are playing real instruments, so that’s one defining factor to me — real instruments! I’ve been touring with upright bass now for several years and I can’t go back.

Did your dad teach you how to play banjo?

No, darn it! [Laughs] I guess I could have picked it up. I mean, he played everything. He could do hambone and play nose flute and upright bass and guitar and banjo and piano. Just really a renaissance man. He exposed me to all music and there were no classifications. That was something more that non-musicians did. Musicians would fluidly move from music to music and just find the joy in all of it. He taught me that.

When I was listening to “Nobody Knows You (When You’re Down and Out),” I was curious, does that mirror your own experience to some degree? Like, you’re living the good life as a millionaire, then you find that your friends vanish when the circumstances change.

Oh sure, I’ve known that. False friends, false fans, false everybody comes to you when you’re successful. They’re flattering and they’re obsequious. They have ulterior motives, so it’s hard, and of course I’ve experienced that because I’ve been up and down and side to side…. [Laughs] All over the business! And I wanted to come back home and have a personal life and have truth and family and let the trappings fall, and to be honest.

So, I chose to walk away in a sense from that shiny pop world because it wasn’t me. I was introverted and shy. I didn’t feel like this big pop star. I was very much a musician of integrity that wanted to have a long career and a rich catalog. I had to walk away to reset and reinvent myself. So, yes, of course I relate to that song. Also I relate to Bessie Smith, and so many fantastic singers are coming from the river of Bessie Smith. You hear Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin — Bessie Smith was their favorite singer. She combines all of that beautiful roots music. And the songs from the Prohibition era speak to me, those hard times, they speak to me.

Sometimes I will ask musicians about their first guitar, but for you, I’m wondering, do you remember your first piano?

Yeah, I remember the first piano, oh my gosh. It was covered in chipped, baby blue paint. I grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts, and my dad was a teacher at a state college, and we did not have much money. I wore hand-me-downs and we got things at Goodwill. In New England — freezing cold New England — we would really skimp on the heat to save money, and they put the piano in what they called the cold room. It was like a mud room. You walk into that room and take off your coat, and the piano was in the back. And it was cold! It was cold-ass cold! And there’s my first piano.

I was quite dedicated to music, to be playing in a freezing cold room in New England. Literally, we had some fish at one point and they froze! That’s how cold our house was. We had a potbelly stove and it was just hard. We were looking for ways to save money. It wasn’t always that hard. My dad ended up changing jobs and doing better, but my childhood was formative for me. I started working at a really young age. I was waitressing at 14 and I’ve always worked. It’s not nice, struggling like that, but that piano is indelibly etched in my mind with the back of the cold room. The chipped blue piano, out of tune! [Laughs]

Did you grow up with a lot of songbooks around?

Yes, and one of my missions while my father is still alive on the planet is to comb through his fake books and real books, especially of his folk standards. He has some really interesting, cryptic and eclectic, folk books that I would love to go through. That’s on one of my do lists of life.

To me, “Good Morning Heartache” sounds like it could be a sad country song, but it was made famous by jazz singers. How did you learn that one?

It’s in the real book of standards. Those books were around, and I have a real book of standards on my piano now. Even when I was touring, or had hits, or didn’t have hits, or mothering and not being in music, I would go back to the real book just for comfort and learning. I’d let my hands go on the piano and the shapes of the chords and learn songs. I first learned “Good Morning Heartache” by reading it out of a book but then I heard Billie Holiday and even modern singers do it. A lot of people have done it. But I love it because it feels to me like one of those songs that crosses genre, just like you said. It feels to me like it could be a jazz ballad, a country ballad, a soul ballad – and often it’s recorded by R&B singers. I love that it’s universal, and I love sad music. I’m not very good at happy music. [Laughs]

You close this album with “What a Wonderful World,” which offers a lovely and optimistic message. Was that an intentional decision for you to wrap up the album with that song?

Sequence is extremely important to me, so I probably spent at least a month listening to heads and tails of the songs, and all the different possibilities and combinations. And yes, it is the perfect punctuation of the journey of an album format. I love albums – I think in albums. I don’t think I’ll ever be a singles releaser. I’ll always be an album writer and album producer. I love the art of sequence.

Again, this is a song that transpires over genre and it appeals to all audiences. It unifies people. And it was written specifically for Louis Armstrong because he unified Black and white audiences. He was a genius if ever there were one. His ability to improvise within chord changes was profound. He was joyful and elevating. I play it in a somber way, and I hear sadness in my voice, and I think it’s melancholic and ironic in a way, but yeah, we must hold on to hope. We must hold on to that thread of hope for our children and our grandchildren to make this world better.

Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz

The Show On The Road – Dar Williams

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin’s conversation with revered singing songstress and deeply wise wordsmith, Dar Williams.

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Coming out of the Hudson Valley outside New York City, Williams has released over thirteen albums across a quarter century as one of America’s touchstone folk poets, first bursting out of the famed Lilith Fair folk rock scene in the mid 1990s with contemporaries like Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls and gaining a devoted following. She has toured with luminaries like Joan Baez and Patty Griffin, written a book about what makes communities resilient, she runs her own songwriting retreats, and has inspired generations of women to fearlessly embrace their creativity and exercise their limitless potential. Z. was able to catch up with Williams in the green room at the historic McCabe’s Guitar Shop before her second show of a sold out weekend in Los Angeles. A new album is on the way.