Tag: martha scanlan

As the Newest Supergroup in Bluegrass, Mighty Poplar Goes Back to the Classics

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At your average live music event on the folk and bluegrass circuit, the stage isn’t the only place where great performances are happening. There’s the campfire and parking lot picking scene at the big outdoor festivals, of course. But a lot of it goes on out of sight backstage, too, when musicians who don’t often see each other come together to play with and for each other. A close approximation to listening in on that is Mighty Poplar (Free Dirt Records), the self-titled first album by the group of the same name.

The bluegrass world’s newest supergroup, Mighty Poplar is a five-piece band centered around three virtuoso players from the Punch Brothers orbit — banjo player Noam Pikelny, guitarist Chris “Critter” Eldridge and original Punch Brothers bassist Greg Garrison, currently in the band Leftover Salmon. Out front as primary vocalist is Watchhouse mandolinist Andrew Marlin, with well-traveled fiddler Alex Hargreaves (currently knocking ’em dead in Billy Strings’ touring band) filling out the lineup. Over the years, various subsets of this quintet would cross paths out on the road and jam, generally falling back on the old numbers everyone knew as a common language. That’s how Mighty Poplar began to coalesce.

“There’s a pretty complex web of relationships between all five of us that began with a lot of hanging out,” says Pikelny. “There’s this beautiful thing about bluegrass, the amazing music and all the shared songs. There’s a great social component that can exist with the music if you let it, and it became a reason to get together and have fun.”

While none of Mighty Poplar’s members come from acts you’d really call “bluegrass,” you could say they’re all at least bluegrass-adjacent. And none of them have ever come down as top-dead-center old-school bluegrass as on Mighty Poplar. The album’s 10-song tracklist draws material from A.P. Carter, Bob Dylan, John Hartford and Leonard Cohen, with songs made famous by the likes of Hazel & Alice, Uncle Dave Macon and Bill Monroe fiddler Kenny Baker.

Monroe, the Father of Bluegrass, also figures into the proceedings in terms of inspiration for the ensemble’s name. Proposing Mighty Poplar as a moniker was Marlin, someone who definitely knows his way around names involving wordplay (witness the original name of Watchhouse: Mandolin Orange).

“I was listening to a Bill Monroe and Doc Watson live recording where they were about to kick off ‘What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?’” Marlin recalls. “Bill said he and Charlie recorded it in ’19-and-36’ in Charlotte and it had been ‘mighty poplar down through the Carolinas.’ We had a huge text thread already going about band names, where my phone was always going BING at 2:30 a.m. So many names we considered, but everybody thought Mighty Poplar was a good awning to stand under.”

While Mighty Poplar is only now coming out in the spring of 2023, the album has actually been in the can for a couple of years. It might never have happened without the Coronavirus pandemic shutdown of 2020-21, which took everyone’s regular bands off the road for an extended period of time.

In isolation, everyone felt drawn toward bluegrass as the musical equivalent of comfort food. So they took this on as a pandemic project, convening with engineer Sean Sullivan at Nashville’s Tractor Shed for a brisk three-day session in October of 2020.

“There was a sense that we were getting away with murder, traveling across the country and podding up while everything was closed up,” says Pikelny. “There were logistical hurdles and we had three days, so we had one shot to get it all at once. So we worked out as much as we could ahead of time, even the sequence. The concept, if there was one, was that this was the closest thing to a real-deal, traditional, classic bluegrass project any of us have done in a long time, maybe ever.”

As lead vocalist on six of the album’s 10 songs, Marlin is the primary out-front voice of Mighty Poplar. But he felt like he had to step up his game on the instrumental side, to keep up with his bandmates.

“It was intimidating, but not because those guys are intimidating,” Marlin says. “As a musician, I’ve had to figure out how to feel like I can express myself in front of people I look up to. But that’s on me for projecting my own shit onto them, because they don’t wear that. So ‘Grey Eagle,’ an instrumental fiddle tune Alex brought forth, I was kind of sweating that one in the studio. That kicked off at 150 beats per minute and everybody else is just looking around, casually exploring the nooks and crannies of the tempo while I’m popping a vein and kind of being drug behind the horse. But I managed to keep it together. Ultimately all those guys still love a great song as much as anyone. There’s something about simple songs that leave it up to the player to bring whatever they want. I love it when the song’s not telling you how to play it, and I feel lucky that they were down to explore that approach.”

Song choice was pretty casual, mostly in favor of material from a bit off the beaten path. Even with a Hall of Fame list of songwriters, they focused on less-well-known songs from the repertoire of each — Dylan’s take on the A.P. Carter tune “Blackjack Davy” rather than “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” or Hartford’s Mark Twang riverboat song “Let Him Go On Mama” rather than “Gentle On My Mind.”

“It all happened pretty organically,” says Eldridge. “In the initial text volley about what to do, there were a lot of songs we would’ve been happy to cut. It’s hard to say why we landed on these particular songs other than that they felt right. I would not say there was an overarching concept beyond good songs that felt right.”

While they considered including some originals, ultimately they decided to stick with covers, mostly of older vintage (the most recent song on it is Montana singer/songwriter Martha Scanlan’s “Up on the Divide,” from 2012). In that way, Pikelny looks at Mighty Poplar as a classic folk record.

“In other genres, people might call this a ‘covers album,’” says Pikelny. “But if you record solo Bach compositions, that’s not ‘Bach covers.’ It’s repertoire, reinterpretations of classics to pass down. It was born of a desire, almost a need for all of us, to gather around a bluegrass project. And it was such a joyous process. It felt like coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas and being around family you’ve not seen in a while, in the home you grew up in with a turkey in the oven. It was that kind of comfort, the warm fuzzy feelings of gatherings like that.”

It went so well, in fact, that they were in no hurry to get around to the detail work of mixing and mastering the record after they finished tracking. Pikelny says they felt almost paranoid about not wanting to touch it, for fear of messing up a good thing.

“We’ve been sitting on this for so long because it felt like such a special session,” Eldridge says. “So effortless and deeply joyful. Magical, even. We didn’t want to let it go because it felt like all we could do was ruin it. But I kept coming back to it, listening now and then and thinking, ‘I really like this. We have to share it, plus it’s a good excuse for us to get together again.’ It’s ironic that we’ve not actually played it live yet, and we’re already kind of getting the next batch together.”

Indeed, Mighty Poplar’s first real touring commences in May. With Hargreaves busy playing arena-sized venues with Strings for the foreseeable future, John Mailander will stand in for him on the first leg of touring. And all the principles are cautiously optimistic that Mighty Poplar’s first album won’t be its last. Pikelny likens their hoped-for trajectory to Tony Rice and J.D. Crowe’s Bluegrass Album Band, which periodically convened to make albums and tours through the 1980s and into the ’90s.

“Bluegrass Album Band was never a full-time group for any of those guys, it was a very sustainable side project whose records served as homecomings,” says Pikelny. “They’d go off to do whatever else and then come back for another edition. It’s a celebration of our love for bluegrass. As long as it stays as effortless as this felt, I think we’ll keep doing it when we can.”

Photo Credit: Brian Carroll

Martha Scanlan Explores the Depths of ‘The River and the Light’

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Growing up, Martha Scanlan says she equated music with “belonging and family and home.” The Montana-based folk singer-songwriter has woven those elements into her fourth album, The River and the Light, but, for Scanlan, home doesn’t exactly signify hearthfire. There’s a wilderness brooding about the album, as she moves throughout the landscapes that shaped her. She’s found her place in the natural world as much as those vistas have found their place in her.

Longtime friend and creative partner Jon Neufeld produced The River and the Light, continuing a collaboration that spans back to her 2011 album, Tongue River Stories. The two blended an array of brooding and beautiful timbres — with fiddle and accordion from Dirk Powell — that speak to those natural landscapes: The expansive skies and pressing quiet of Montana (“Only a River/True Eyed Angel”), the weathered mountainscapes and ancient tones of Appalachia (“West Virginia Rain”), and even, at times, the lush forestry and friendship she’s found in Oregon, where they recorded the LP.

Scanlan herself has described The River and the Light as a journey, which makes sense when you consider that journeys are as much about leaving as they are arriving home. She joined Neufeld on the phone during this interview with the Bluegrass Situation.

Looking back to Tongue River Stories, elements of place and belonging and journeys have always informed your songs. If you look at The River and the Light as a new chapter, what have you learned in that interim?

Martha: There’s this old cowboy saying that just jumped into my mind: “A horse will make a liar out of you.” As soon as you say a horse is one way, like, “This horse never bucks,” it’s going to buck you off. As soon as I say that a song is about something, it’ll end up being about something else. One thing that was interesting in terms of Tongue River Stories, which was such a collaboration with the landscape itself, is we were recording songs outside and the sound between the notes was the actual landscape. This record feels like its own landscape.

You both seem quite interested in atmosphere. I couldn’t get over the timbres on “Too Late.” How did you build those colors into that song?

Jon: Well, I know we got Dirk Powell’s fiddle part. He wasn’t able to make it to the studio, but he sent us a rough mix — he played some fiddle and accordion parts in that. I added some baritone guitar and acoustic guitar. There may have even been omnichord on that one. I ended up sneaking the omnichord on quite a few songs. And then near the end, I was thinking we needed something more, and Martha was back in Montana already, and she sent me… How did you even record that?

Martha: I had this really lame zoom video recorder that I got eight years ago or something, but it has a pretty good microphone. I recorded some brushes, like playing brushes on tambourine, and some harmony parts.

Jon: [Laughs] So she sent that. And I added that to it.

Martha: I think that song is probably the most layered one on the record. Or the most that had an afterwards. What was interesting to me about Jon’s production, I don’t know another musician that’s so in the moment and improvisational when we’re playing live or in the studio or anything. It’s fun because to watch him putting on different layers or overdubbing something because it’s that improvisational. It’s not contrived, it’s not overworked; it tends to feel really alive.

Dick Powell has said about you, “Martha feels the natural world…to such an extent that the stories transcend themselves.” How do you view your relationship with natural space?

Martha: I think there’s an openness, for me, about working and living so close to landscape that’s very much like music. I lived on this small ranch for seven or eight years in southeastern Montana. Doing Tongue River Stories, we recorded most of that outside and we could do that because it’s that quiet — there aren’t cars or planes overhead. To me, writing is more about listening than it is about planning or thinking. I’ve never been good about like, “I’m going to write a song about this.”

It unfolds on its own.

Martha: Yeah and seeing what shows up. As far as a theme in writing and in the music, I think that there was an element of this record that was an exploration of rivers, or different currents that run through and wind together. For both Jon and I, that’s something that occurred early on when we were passing ideas back and forth.

Are you thinking specifically about a certain river or more metaphorically about them?

Martha: Kind of both. I think I’ve always been fascinated with rivers and I’m around rivers a lot.

Jon: Yeah, I remember that back and forth. The theme of rivers was on the last track, “Revival.” I was like, I think it’d be really cool if you were going along a river and this thing pops up. All of a sudden, there’s an acoustic guitar solo for no reason; there’s no acoustic guitar until then. Just the way you go down a river and something appears and is gone. That was a very real theme, like visualizing the river and making a sonic imprint of that.

What keeps this partnership between the two of you so worthwhile in your minds?

Martha: It’s a hard question to answer because it feels really easy and congruent. What would you say, Jon?

Jon: I feel like in the first five seconds you can tell if you’re going to jive with somebody or not; I think it’s especially so with artists and musicians. When we first started playing together, it’s an obvious feeling. It’s obviously not wrong.

Right. You wouldn’t have worked together so many times if it weren’t working.

Martha: Something I really appreciate about working with Jon is there’s this constant sense of improvisation on stage and in the studio. Everything is very alive. We don’t practice a lot. [Laughs] We usually show up on tour and the first time we play together is, like, a radio show or at the sound check. But it keeps things very fresh and alive, I think.

Speaking of being in the moment, I read that “Brother Was Dying” was done in one take.

Jon: That’s probably the truth about most of the album.

Martha: That one, I had just finished putting the words together — I had written most of it, but it was still in this place where I wasn’t sure how it would all stitch together — and we went in and recorded it. I hadn’t sung it as a complete song; that was the first time we’d really played it.

What does your writing process look like nowadays?

Martha: For this record, I had started playing electric guitar; I was pretty psyched about that. It’s a really different animal: It’s a wash of sound, the physicality of it is really different, there’s a lot more fluidity in it. So I think messing around with that influenced some of the writing. It’s still to me such a process of discovery, writing songs. Some things just kind of show up, and then it becomes an inquiry, and sometimes that process continues for years after I write the songs. I feel like I go out and interact with whoever is listening to it and come back changed. I really enjoy that part of it. I think my last record, which Jon also produced, was so much about the current that moves through things, and this record felt even more whittled to the current that’s flowing through.

Photo credit: Yogesh Simpson

Woody Rolls On: Cahalen Morrison in Conversation with Jon Neufeld

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The Great Depression was just sputtering to a close, Europe was a mess, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was still several months away when Woody Guthrie moved his family from New York City to Portland, Oregon. He’d been hired by the Bonneville Power Administration to pen a series of songs for a documentary film about various engineering projects in the Pacific Northwest — namely, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State and the Bonneville Dam across the Columbia River. Spearheaded by the Public Works Administration and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, these feats of American ingenuity would bring water and power to areas that had previously seemed uninhabitable or unfarmable.

The film was never completed, but during the month he and his family lived in the Pacific Northwest, Guthrie wrote 26 songs — which itself seemed a feat of American ingenuity. The populist folkie extolled the achievements of industry, as well as the heroic fortitude of the common American worker. Some of the lyrics never made it off the page of his notebook, while others became … well, Guthrie never had what you might call hits, but “Pastures of Plenty” and “Grand Coulee Dam” and even “Roll, Columbia” became popular tunes within his catalog.

To mark the 75th anniversary of Guthrie’s short but productive tenure with Bonneville, Smithsonian Folkways is releasing a rambunctious double album of new covers called Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs, featuring mostly musicians based in the Pacific Northwest and still affected by these engineering projects. Contributing their own interpretations of these tunes are members of the Decemberists, R.E.M., the Minus Five, Timberbound, and Dolorean, along with Orville Johnson, Martha Scanlan, David Grisman, and Michael Hurley, among others.

(The album follows the excellent book, 26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest, by KEXP radio DJ Greg Vandy and journalist Daniel Person.)

While neither Jon Neufeld nor Cahalen Morrison are Pacific Northwest natives, they both have lived there long enough to call the region home and have been active in the Portland and Seattle folk scenes, respectively. A veteran of Dolorean and Black Prairie, Neufeld oversaw nearly every aspect of Roll Columbia, while Morrison covers two songs: the rip-roaring industrial cautionary tale “Lumber Is King” and the majestic “Ballad of Jackhammer John,” which rolls along like the Columbia itself.

What is your experience with Guthrie’s Columbia songs? How familiar were you with them before you started this project?

Jon Neufeld: Well, my initial experience was, “Oh, I recognize some of these songs.” Nothing further than that. I didn’t recognize them as being songs that he wrote after he was hired by the Bonneville Power Administration or any of the specific history that goes along with it. My dad’s a folk singer, so I grew up on Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and all that classic folk music — a lot of the peace-and-justice songs. A lot of Guthrie’s songs were familiar to me, but when [executive co-producer] Joe Seamons approached me about doing the project, I started listening further and could see a thread through these songs that had been somewhat invisible to me. That made me think about the music a little differently because it seemed so obvious, in retrospect, that they were all connected.

Cahalen Morrison: I had a similar introduction, I guess, in that I was familiar with a handful of the songs, the more well-known ones — “Pastures of Plenty” and things like that. But I wasn’t familiar with the majority of it. I’ve never been a huge Woody-head or anything like that. Joe approached me, as well, and offered me the gig, which turned out to be fantastic. I’m not originally from the Northwest, but I’ve been living here for quite a while now. It was fun to hear all this music written so specifically for the area. I’ve done a lot of touring and traveling around, so I’m familiar with the countryside around it and really enjoyed digging into these songs and seeing how they represented this part of the world. That it was all bought and paid for by Bonneville was a funny thing to discover, but it didn’t make it any less cool or discredit the songs in any way. I find it impressive that he did what he did.

JN: Twenty-six songs in 30 days is a lot.

CM: I’m a songwriter and a fairly prolific one, I suppose, but that is pretty insane. I can’t even fathom that.

Did this project change the way you see this area that you both moved to?

JN: I’ve lived here for 20 years now, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, and these songs described the area pretty much to a tee. They reminded me of the beauty that’s around here, but also of this issue of self-sufficiency. You want to provide your own electricity and jobs, but at what cost? Harnessing the environment around you, in order to derive your own power initially seems like a good idea, because you can be self-sufficient. You can have light and power and jobs and you don’t have to borrow them anybody else. It’s right here in this rushing river, and the feats of engineering were really celebrated at the time. But you end up losing sacred land of the Native Americans. You have erosion in places that never had it before. But you also have water coming to places that were never able to grow wheat before. Basically, you’re changing the landscape and, at first, I think that was seen as a good thing. For some places, it certainly is. But overall, maybe not so much.

CM: You can look at it from both an environmental perspective and from a social or humanistic perspective, and it’s a double-edged sword. It does give water to places that weren’t getting water, which allows people to grow food and attract jobs. But, at the same time, it does take away from the natural beauty of the area and it does completely change the habitat for people and for wildlife. So you can look at it as thing that was great for humans and culture and society, at that point in time, but it has swung the other way now. Now we’re trying to get rid of dams.

JN: We’re still discussing these same issues right now in the same places, but back then it must have seemed like uncharted waters. They were a lot more excited about it then; these are songs of hope. They’re historical documents about that time.

CM: I had a similar experience. The songs sound really accurate and contemporary even though, at this point, they’re historical documents. None of these issues have changed. In fact, I feel like it’s only gotten more severe, so maybe it’s even more poignant now than it was then. Guthrie is more famous now than he was then, but I don’t feel like he has the reach he had then and the gusto that came along with being a current icon. Now, people are more able to write off historical songs like these as some cute thing that happened long ago and don’t really apply to anything going on right now.

That was one thing that struck me about Roll Columbia. It walks a fine line between celebrating these songs and exploring the consequences of the Bonneville Power Administration.

JN: I strongly believe that, if Woody were alive today, he could still sing these songs. He might have to change a word or a turn of phrase here and there. I recently read a biography of him and, during this time in his life, he was looking for work. He had a family, three kids, and he would go back and forth between being completely broke and having a job. So this place wants to hire me to write these songs and move the family up there and I’ll have work for a month? Sure. In some ways it was just another gig for him, but just another gig for an artist with his perspective turned out to be another batch of great songs. I think the beauty of the Northwest really overtook him and was the catalyst for these songs, but it’s interesting when you look at it in the context of his life: This was only 30 days out of all those years.

Cahalen, you address some of these issues in your version of “Lumber Is King.” What drew you to that song?

CM: Lyrically I thought that song was fantastic. I love the lyrics. It goes back to what I was saying about the double-edged sword. It’s all about these booming lumber towns that were making all this money. People were happy and prosperous. But then it all dries up and everything is gone: the jobs, the money, the land. It just destroys everything. As a piece of art and as a political statement, I thought “Lumber Is King” was really powerful. Woody did a great job on that one.

That was a set of lyrics that he had never set to music, much less recorded. What was it like taking it that next step?

CM: I did that for both of the songs I sing on here. It’s another reason why I chose them, because they didn’t have music. Being a songwriter, I thought it would be a fun thing to take a whack at. For “Lumber Is King,” I wrote this romping bluegrass waltz sort of thing, and I was inspired by a town called Darrington, up north of Seattle. It has a big Tarheel population, from when people relocated from North Carolina for logging. There’s a big bluegrass festival there now and there’s a funny pocket of bluegrass culture there. I liked the continuity of arranging this song in a fast bluegrass style. It felt natural to me, even though — and I don’t mean this in a negative way — it was written in a very obvious cadence that fits well within whatever kind of tune you wanted to write to it.

And you both worked on your other song, “The Ballad of Jackhammer John.”

JN: There’s a funny story behind that one. Some of Woody’s titles are really similar, and I was in the studio with [Montana-based singer-songwriter] Martha Scanlan and Joe Seamons working on a song together. I thought, “Wow, this is really working. It sounds great.” Totally different song than the one we were supposed to be doing. It wasn’t “The Ballad of Jackhammer John,” but “Jackhammer Blues (Jackhammer John).” Completely different song. I got a call at 8 o’clock the next morning, about an hour before we were supposed to start the next day’s session. It was Joe saying we had a problem. Martha had recorded a song that we had already recorded with another artist [Orville Johnson]. Well, that is a problem because Martha just left for the airport. We had to figure something out. Was it your idea, Cahalen, to record it yourself?

CM: It was not my idea, no. I remember the initial idea was that we were going to trying to get everybody to sing a verse, but we were still trying to figure out the lyrics. Talk about not an easy cadence! With that one, I felt like Woody was like, “I gotta get 17 more verses,” so he just sat down and pounded them out. There’s some really awkward phrasing and strange words in there. So I sat down right before I left, figured out how to sing all those verses, and recorded myself reading off the lyrics sheet. It was just to have a blueprint for everybody to follow, but later I found out it’s just me on the final recording!

JN: I don’t remember how we came up with it, but it was Joe Seamons playing banjo and I was playing a guitar. It’s an eight-minute song and we didn’t have any vocals to play to, so he had to develop a system of signals for when we would change. Joe would turn his head to the left, and we would switch to the minor chord. If he put his head down, we went to the 5-chord. We did it all in one take — about nine minutes’ worth of playing. Then Cahalen went in there and did all the verses in one take. After he had gone home, I remember listening to it and thinking, “Hey, this really works!” The song is this eight-minute monster with all these complicated verses, but it ended up being the simplest one of them all.

When did you find out that they were using your take, Cahalen?

CM: I don’t remember. I think it was when the mixes came. “Oh, okay, I guess we’re doing it that way.” I would have done another take or two to get some of that squirrelly stuff figured out, but hey, at least it was organic.

JN: That was one of the things I was aware of most during the production. There was zero polish on Woody’s songs, so I felt we should lean toward grittier takes. That seemed to reflect where the songs came from. And “The Ballad of Jackhammer John” is a perfect example of knowing how you’re going to do it and just doing it.

At what point in the process did you decide that you wanted to emphasize regional musicians?

JN: That was from the very beginning, the first conversation we had. The songs are about the Pacific Northwest, and there are a lot of great musicians in the Pacific Northwest, so let’s do that. It’s not like we were only going to use musicians from this area; if we thought someone on the East Coast could be great, or from the South, or from wherever, we’d consider them. But when you live out here or on the West Coast, in general, there are just so many great musicians that you meet but never get to hang out with until there’s a project to do. So it becomes a perfect reason to reach out and say hello. I met Pharis and Jason Romero when I was on Vancouver Island touring with my friend Kristin Andreassen, so I thought of them for this project. They recorded all the way up in Horsefly, which is way up there in northern British Columbia, and they sent the tracks back to me. There are all these little connections between different people, even though it’s a big area up here. It starts to seem pretty small when you tour for a long time.

CM: That’s true. It’s good to hang with people you don’t get to see very often. When you hear other people’s takes on their tunes, even though I didn’t get to see them, it can have a nice effect and make it seem like a community project. It’s good to have friend along for the ride.

That’s an enormous amount of territory to seem like a small community.

JN: The Pacific Northwest is Montana all the way down diagonally to California and up into Canada. It’s all different kinds of music, too. Not just folk or old-time or bluegrass, although those are some of the most tight-knit communities I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why there is so much music out here. It may have a lot to do with the land because, when I go out to the East Coast, it feels very different. There are tight-knit communities in certain boroughs of New York, but those people wouldn’t necessarily be tight with people in Boston, even though that’s the equivalent of us going to southern Oregon. On the East Coast, though, you cross a couple of states. So I think it has a lot to do with landscape.

How does the landscape inform the music you make?

JN: Cahalen, do you find yourself pulling from the things around you that are outside the realm of relationships?

CM: I would say it’s equally inspiring, even if it just reminds you of your relationships and experiences with people. Not to sound cheesy, but being out there in the wilderness and seeing those big vistas really does open your mind up. It has a very strong effect on me, and that’s mostly what draws people to the West. You get a lot of likeminded people who have chosen to be here. Outside the West, I think people just live where they live because they live there. It’s maybe not as intentional. I know there are communities like that outside of the West, but I would say it’s a prevailing thing that the West has in common with the Southwest, which is where I’m from. People move to New Mexico because they want to live in New Mexico.

Photos courtesy of the artists.