WATCH: Charlie Parr, “Last of the Better Days Ahead”

Artist: Charlie Parr
Hometown: Duluth, Minnesota
Song: “Last of the Better Days Ahead”
Album: Last of the Better Days Ahead
Release Date: July 30, 2021
Label: Smithsonian Folkways

In Their Words:Last of the Better Days Ahead is a way for me to refer to the times I’m living in. I’m getting on in years, experiencing a shift in perspective that was once described by my mom as ‘a time when we turn from gazing into the future to gazing back at the past, as if we’re adrift in the current, slowly turning around.’ Some songs came from meditations on the fact that the portion of our brain devoted to memory is also the portion responsible for imagination, and what that entails for the collected experiences that we refer to as our lives. Other songs are cultivated primarily from the imagination, but also contain memories of what may be a real landscape, or at least one inspired by vivid dreaming.” — Charlie Parr


Photo credit: Shelly Mosman

WATCH: Joyann Parker, “Out of the Dark”

Artist: Joyann Parker
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Out of the Dark”
Album: Out of the Dark
Label: Hopeless Romantics Records

In Their Words: “‘Out of the Dark’ is a very special song that probably never would have been written if COVID and the resulting quarantine hadn’t happened. I had named the album, but didn’t have a track named after it, so when we were forced to stop recording in the studio and I slowed down, I decided I really wanted to write it. The song reflects on the journey that I have been on over the last couple of years, working on healing things in my past like anxiety and emotional trauma and finally coming into the light of who I truly am, working to see myself as God sees me. I wanted to share my story in hopes that others who are struggling might be encouraged.” — Joyann Parker


Photo credit: Jeannine Marie Photography

WATCH: Luke LeBlanc, “Same Blues”

Artist: Luke LeBlanc
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Same Blues”
Album: Only Human
Release Date: July 9, 2021

In Their Words: “It was October 2018 and I’d just moved to Nashville. I didn’t know I’d only live there six months, but as proud as I was to have been born and raised in North Minneapolis, I knew I had to explore the Nashville music scene: the songs, the stories, the mystique. It had been a long day, but I had to make my first move. So I called Roy August. I had met Roy about six years prior when I was 16 and visiting Nashville for the first time, playing an open mic near Music Row. Now in his 80s, Roy had co-written the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Fancy Free,” their first #1 on the Billboard country chart back in 1981. He happened to be in the audience and he loved my music. We kept in touch every so often through Facebook.

“Roy told me to meet him at the Hardee’s for brunch in Lebanon, Tennessee, just northeast of Nashville. We didn’t have a goal in mind, just to catch up and say hello. At the end of our conversation, he pulled out a folded piece of paper and told me it was something he’d been working on. ‘See what you can do; we’ll co-write it.’ I went home and wrote the rest of the lyrics, changed some, added others, and put music to it. With regards to the video, we tried to capture what the song is about: the tug between the status quo and what you’re currently doing versus that thing you really want to do. It portrays someone who has ‘fooled himself into working all day,’ knowing that deep down, the ‘fever won’t die young.’ Cody Hansen at Exist Media filmed and edited the video and John Cleve Richardson appears in the video playing piano.” — Luke LeBlanc


Photo credit: Exist Media

LISTEN: Joyann Parker, “What Did You Expect”

Artist: Joyann Parker
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “What Did You Expect”
Album: Out of the Dark
Release Date: Feb 12, 2021
Label: Hopeless Romantics Records

In Their Words: “This song is a cheeky response to an experience that my musical partner, Mark Lamoine, relayed to me once about his daughter, who was then around 9 years old. The story goes something like this: Mark’s daughter was invited to play soccer with some boys in the neighborhood. When she went out to the park to play, they then decided against playing with her, saying they ‘didn’t want to play with a GIRL.’ She ran into the house, crying and very upset, of course. Her mother, seeing her in distress, asked what happened and when she found out, got down on one knee in front of her daughter and said something to the effect of, ‘Get used to it, Honey, men lie.’ This was great inspiration for a song for me, so I took it, twisted it so the female narrator was the villain in a relationship and being dishonest with her partner about her intentions, saying, ‘Well, what did you expect?'” — Joyann Parker


Photo credit: Jeannine Marie Photography

LISTEN: Luke LeBlanc, “All My Love”

Artist: Luke LeBlanc
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “All My Love”
Album: Better Now EP
Release Date: January 12, 2021

In Their Words: “‘All My Love’ came about while I was scrolling through some year-old voice memos on my phone. It was one of those song ideas that I recorded quickly in the moment and then left alone for a while and almost forgot. The lyrics came pretty quickly, but musically it took awhile to figure out what I wanted to do with it. I’m happy with how it turned out; it starts small and builds consistently the whole way through. All the fingerpicking is done on a Les Paul electric which gives you the option to really highlight certain notes louder than others while you’re playing.” — Luke LeBlanc


Photo credit: Mark Walentiny

LISTEN: Annie Mack, “Shadows of a Kingdom”

Artist: Annie Mack
Hometown: Rochester, Minnesota
Song: “Shadows of a Kingdom”
Album: Testify
Release Date: January 29, 2021

In Their Words: “Two years ago my daughter was fighting for her life, for her voice to be heard. No matter how much I loved her and wanted to go through it for her, this was her journey and beast to kill. And she did. I wrote this song for my daughter, but it’s really a love letter to all Black women, giving voice to the defining moments that we can use to step into our power and sovereignty.” — Annie Mack


Photo credit: Shelly Mosman 

Brennen Leigh’s ‘Love Letter’ to the Musical, Magical Prairie

Nearly twenty years after leaving home, striking out to make a living in the bluegrass and country scenes first in Texas and now in Nashville, singer-songwriter Brennen Leigh is still longing for the prairie. Born in North Dakota and raised in rural Minnesota, Leigh’s brand new album, Prairie Love Letter, lives up to its name in all but the stereotypical, assumptive ways implied by its title. 

Produced by Robbie Fulks, Prairie Love Letter idealizes Leigh’s harsh, forbidding homeland — as paeans to the prairie are wont to do — but not without the nuance a nomadic, troubadour lifestyle affords, and Leigh’s perspective as a woman in 2020. It’s all underscored by the ever-growing distance between her and the grassy plains for which she pines, marked by months and years, continually ticking by.

Being that the sum of Fulks’ and Leigh’s musical comfort zones lands squarely upon the intersection of old country, bluegrass, Americana, and what we’ll call “alt-roots,” the album cheerfully denies genre ascriptions while reinforcing the Great Plains states’ propensity for birthing country music forged in the furnaces of hard living, firmly-held values (though not necessarily strictly conservative), and a desperate need for the distraction and diversion music brings. 

BGS reached Brennen Leigh by phone at her home in Nashville and began our conversation with the album’s seemingly pugnacious, yet perfectly apt lead track.

There’s something particularly resonant about the album’s opener, “Don’t You Know I’m From Here,” because you’re talking about rural life and how these authenticity signifiers are so important to rural life and identity, but they’re also really important to roots music. There’s a really interesting symmetry to “Don’t You Know I’m From Here” where it seems you’re simultaneously asking that question of the region you’re from — Minnesota, North Dakota, the plains — but also asking that question as a woman in roots music and country. What do you think?

I honestly never thought about it in that specific way, but when you put it that way, that is how I feel. Obviously, the going home, the rural element — what did you call them? Signifiers. That’s huge. We’re all in a sort of “countrier than thou” battle all the time. I try to just write what’s true to me as much as I can, and be affected by that as little as possible. When you talk about country music, it’s something I do feel secure in. I don’t need to show or tell anyone — nor have I ever been accused of lacking that authenticity. However, I’ve struggled just as much as the next independent artist. Sometimes it leaves one feeling, “Well, why has this other person been pushed to the top of the pile?” They say not to compare, but you know. Why is this other person edified, when they’re not country, so to speak? [Laughs] It’s hard not to compare yourself to others and get into that mindset.

Also what you said about women — we women, it’s like there’s only room for one at a time. We all have to fight each other. That’s not how I really feel, but your lizard-brain would make you feel like you have to fight with other women for that one slot they give us. This year, one of the silver linings of this pandemic has been that it’s given me some time to appreciate a lot of my peers in ways that I couldn’t before. Or that I didn’t take the time to before. My fellow performers, that are kind of my same age or similar level of fan base, exploring their catalogs has made me feel more like I’m part of that bigger Americana community. 

I think that’s an interesting way to get at the crux of this question, because on one hand just talking about authenticity is kind of make-believe, right? “Authenticity” is not a concrete thing, we ascribe authenticity. We perceive it. So talking about it is almost propagating the problem, and to step outside of it and look at it objectively is the real question. I think the nugget in “Don’t You Know I’m From Here” is that the speaker in the song isn’t seeking external validation in asking that question, but rather validating themselves internally. 

That’s exactly what it is. I don’t need to go home and have everyone at home validate me for being from there. It’s something that comes from inside. I know where I’m from. I know I’m a Minnesotan and I was born in North Dakota. And yet, I get questions cause my accent has changed and I’ve lived in the south now for I think eighteen years. It’s funny, when I moved to Texas I had a little bit of this fear that my music wasn’t going to be “southern” enough. [Laughs] That people were going to think I was inauthentic. But it hasn’t come into question and up north, that was one of my fears, that people would go, “Who is this person from Nashville singing about our part of the country?” That hasn’t happened either, because they’re starved for people to sing about it, because there aren’t a lot of people singing about it. 

The album is really flexible with which genre aesthetics it aligns with, it feels like the exact kind of country that comes out of the Upper Midwest. That hardscrabble, bootstraps mentality that we all are used to being attributed to the south, that’s how the plains survives, too. The album’s themes feel really similar to the way that southern country music speaks about life and work and pleasures, but it’s still different. To me, the way that’s most tangible is in how the record playfully denies any genre label. How did the bluegrassy, Americana meets old country quality come together and how is it tied to Minnesota and North Dakota’s music?

For one, we didn’t really plan it in a specific way. Robbie Fulks produced it — Robbie and I talked about how to treat each song. We both are believers in stories. The literature of stories. How do I present this little three- or four-minute story in a way that the listener is going to hear and feel what’s going on? We treated it case by case. 

As for the genre… “ambiguity” that you mention, I think it just comes from my influences. I come from old country and bluegrass. The part of the country where I grew up, it’s popular music, but not in the same sense that it is here or in Texas. It’s not as much a part of the culture. It depends on the family. In my family, bluegrass and old country is what we did. We played on the porch and we sang and we went to bluegrass festivals and we went to country music concerts when we could find them. That’s kind of always been in my roots and it came naturally. I’d be curious to see how people would classify it, because we weren’t like, “By golly we’re going to make a country album!” We just did what we knew how to do. 

A song like “Yellow Cedar Waxwing,” that one feels so bluegrassy. What was the balancing act like, with Robbie, whether to lead you to bluegrass or away from it on a song? 

I think we more or less talked about instruments and how they were appropriate to each song. That one is a very vivid memory in my imagination of being a kid and going with my grandmother to pick juneberries on a specific occasion. Here we were, on a gravel road, with buckets over our arms, and we were gonna pick juneberries. Maybe that song was written with thought of the Carter Family, that pre-bluegrass kind of feel. We thought we needed to put a little banjo and stuff on it. The story kinda had a little bit of a bluegrass thing; Grandma, picking berries, it lent itself to that. I’m comfortable with being fluid between the more classic country thing and the more modern thing and the bluegrass thing. I’m not thinking about how it’s going to be taken, I’m not even worried about it too much. But I am interested to know [what listeners think]. 

There’s a striking theatrical quality to these songs and their characters and their stories. Do you feel that as well in this set of songs? Do you see them as something of a soundtrack or a musical in their own way?

That’s an astute observation, because some of what influenced me growing up was old westerns and musicals, like Oklahoma! That western landscape, where you could just see for miles, always had a symphony and horns. Musicals are kind of in my background. I’ve even thought about writing a musical sometime about something. Originally I was thinking, “Oh maybe I can make these songs fit into a musical!” But I made a record instead. [Laughs]

It was something I kind of wanted to do for a number of years. I always thought there was something musical and something magical about that area. I used to eat up those episodes of Prairie Home Companion that had the “News from Lake Wobegon” stories. Those were my favorite part. I remember when I was painting my apartment in Nashville when I first moved here, I binge-listened to a bunch of those stories from Lake Wobegon. Then I read My Ántonia for the first time. It knocked me over. Something about Willa Cather’s writing about the prairie.

To kind of return to the ideas we began with, this record feels like, almost more than anything else, that it’s examining ideas of what it means to be an insider versus an outsider and how the line between each of those positions is often much more blurry than we think. 

I’m coming around to that now. I think in my first few years gone I felt hurt when I would come home. When someone would say, “Well you don’t sound like you’re from Minnesota.” That hurt my feelings, because I wanted to have that stamp of belonging. Now I’m older and I realize that everything that has made me who I am to this point is valid. Living in Texas for fifteen years? I’m proudly part Texan now. I can claim part-Texan. I have some of the same feelings about certain places in Texas [as places in the Upper Midwest.] 

That feeling of belonging, that’s what everybody wants. I mentioned My Ántonia, it takes place in Nebraska on the prairie. The reason I tie that book to the album and give it so much credit for inspiring me is because they do have a lot of the same themes. These characters are homesick, they just want to belong somewhere. There’s a part earlier on in the book when the main character feels blotted out. It’s his first time on the prairie and he looks out and he can’t see any mountains and he feels blotted out. What a beautiful and devastating way of putting it… The funny thing is I never really felt like I fit in that well when I lived there. 

As someone who idealizes this place and loves it and returns to it not only literally, but also with these songs and this album, what is it like to be from there, away for eighteen years, and writing about now?

When you’ve lived away, you realize there’s some beauty in it. Like my mom says, “Brennen, you just don’t remember how cold it was.” It was so cold in the winter. She’s right, I have forgotten! Putting on your long johns and two pairs of socks and snow boots every single day and freeze in a car on the way to school. I have forgotten those things and it has changed a little bit. North Dakota is very conservative, Minnesota is a swing state last I checked, but even the cultural geography of Minnesota has changed since I moved.

There are a lot more immigrants and things have changed politically. Obviously, Minneapolis — I don’t touch on Minneapolis very much [on the record] — but there’s been the unrest there. That’s pretty far from where I’m from. Where I’m from, I guess it’s kind of mixed in terms of politics. There are just a few things, like the pipeline issue, I couldn’t leave that alone. It made me so mad! [Laughs] Mostly because I knew they had chosen that area because it was worthless to them. That area is not worthless. It’s god’s country. I know a song can’t do very much, but I felt angry enough to write it.


All photos: Kaitlyn Raitz

LISTEN: Peter Himmelman, “Truth Proffered in a Hard Time”

Artist: Peter Himmelman
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Truth Proffered in a Hard Time”
Album: Press On
Release Date: July 31, 2020
Label: Himmasongs/Six Degrees

In Their Words: “I wrote this just before dinner. I knew my wife was going to be waiting for me in about twenty minutes, therefore I had exactly seventeen minutes to get something down and another three to get back in the house. It would seem that kind of pressure might inhibit the birth of a song, particularly one like this, which is so inherently strange. But sometimes it’s quite the opposite. The time limit often pushes aside the intellect and allows the — whatever you might call it: the subconscious mind, the dreamer’s mind — to take over. I got it all done in that short space, even the melody that comes after each verse. I think we had rice, black beans, and fried eggs that night.” — Peter Himmelman


Photo credit: Jim Vasquez

Dave Simonett Offers Clarity and Community on Solo Debut, ‘Red Tail’

Dave Simonett has proven himself to be a man no genre can hold. Some days the Minnesota-based singer/songwriter is fronting prominent Duluth string band, Trampled by Turtles. Some days he’s playing with a full rock band behind him as Dead Man Winter. Now his latest project comes in the form of his first full-length solo album, Red Tail. In a phone conversation with BGS, he discussed his freedom from expectations, the project’s emotional clarity, his love of musical diversity, and more.

BGS: Tell me about making this album. What’s memorable or special about it for you?

DS: Well, I started out just making it by myself. That was kind of what I had in mind for the whole thing, initially. I have a studio in Minneapolis and I was working there. I recorded pretty much all of the songs that ended up being on the record and thought I was done, but at the end of that process I thought I’d like to expand a few of them with some other players.

So I ended up going down to Pachyderm Studios outside of Minneapolis with a small band and re-recorded about half of it down there. Still used some of the stuff from my studio, some from Pachyderm, and just kind of smashed it together. This happens to me pretty often. I’ll have what I think is a concrete idea of what I want to do at the beginning of a project, and then it evolves from there. I’ve learned over the years to let that process happen.

You mention that Red Tail benefited from a freedom from expectations because you recorded it without really knowing if anyone would ever hear it. How do you think that freedom helped flavor the album?

I do think there’s a freedom to that and I think it’s the first time I’ve ever done that. Normally when I started to record anything there was an end product in mind: “We’re going to go make a Trampled by Turtles record,” or something like that. That carries with it a certain amount of pressure, which this didn’t really have. I just had these songs and I wanted to record them. I didn’t know what it would be, I just wanted to record them. So I had a little bit of time on my own doing it, and then I thought, “Well, let’s see what they sound like with the other people and a little bit of time in the studio.”

The whole time I was thinking, “You know, this could be something or not. Maybe this is just demos for another band.” But as the process went on, it started to fuse together into something that felt like a record to me. It ended up being a really easy and natural feeling, and that came from the thought process at the outset when I thought, “This doesn’t have to be anything.” I didn’t have a deadline. I didn’t have anything like that. It was really open, and in a weird way it took away a lot of stress.

From the point that you realized this album was something that you’d be releasing, did the songs change in any way from an arrangement or textural standpoint?

Yeah, definitely. Both of those. They even changed from a lyrical standpoint, and I think that a lot of times when I’m working on a record it will do that throughout the process. It’s something as simple as adding some different people in there. That in and of itself just changes it so much.

We recorded everything pretty much live, which is how I generally like to work, so there wasn’t a whole lot of forward thinking in that way. It was more like, let’s get these guys in a room and see what happens when they play the song however they feel like it. And then maybe a couple little adjustments, but that was really all of the arranging we did. Just the fact that there were other people contributing stuff from their own creativity was enough to change it quite a bit.

You say that recording this album was the best you’ve ever felt in your personal life while recording. Do you think that helped give you the clarity to better examine some of the darker subject matter on the album?

Yeah, and I generally get the same vibe from other writers that I’ve talked to. I think that maybe depression, or hard times in general, get a little bit romanticized in music. It might be like the whole Townes Van Zandt myth or something like that; that you have to be super messed up to write music. In my life, in periods where I’ve been like that, I can’t make anything. I feel like creativity and the drive to go make something are at their peak when I’m feeling good.

I think that’s a pretty simple equation when you think about it. Sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed, let alone go to a studio and write all day, along with all of the stuff that goes into making a record. I do think that “clarity” is a good way to put it. Everybody has rough patches in their life. Being at a point to look at some of those and examine them, I think the best way to do that is from a different place. For me it is.

A healthy mindset keeps you from being sucked down an emotional rabbit hole that can end up impacting the entire album and recording process.

Yeah, that’s a good point. You can look at it and almost have a sense of humor about it instead of taking it, and yourself, too seriously in that subject matter.

You talk a lot about how special it is when the listener can apply a song to their own life. At the same time, this is your solo album and sort of a vulnerable look into your life. How do you write in a way that’s specific enough for these songs to mean something to you, but also broad enough that any listener can apply it to their own lives?

I have no idea. [Laughs] I don’t think it’s very intentional. I feel like most of the time I’ll just write, and once in a while I’ll see a line and recognize that from some experience in my life. Instead of thinking about an experience and writing towards that, I just write and then I can look back on it and say, “Oh, I know what that was about.” Most of my work has been that way. It starts like that for me. It starts kind of ambiguous.

It all comes from inside. All the stuff that’s jumbled up in my brain comes out as this, so it’s by its own nature personal. I’ve never really been good at writing stories about things that didn’t happen to me. Some other people are really good at that, but I can’t do that. It all comes from me, but very rarely does it get very specific, and I think that’s just my general style. Maybe a comfort level thing.

“There’s a Lifeline Deep in the Night Sky” strikes me as one of the purest representations of the community and fellowship that surrounds roots music. For somebody who may not know anything about this music, what would you want them to know about the community that surrounds it?

I don’t know if I can think of anything that specifically applies to roots music. This might be a roundabout way to say it, but when I started playing music in Duluth with Trampled, and a couple other bands before that, the music community was really tight. It was also really diverse. There wasn’t another string band in that town. The scene was small and creative enough to sort of only allow for one or two bands who sounded similar, and then nobody else would want to start something like that because it’s already being done. So my sense of musical community comes more from the diversity of the scene.

[Trampled by Turtles] didn’t really start out in an Americana scene. We’ve grown in that world since then, but I think community applies to music in general. I think a lot of people divide stuff up into genres a little too harshly. The people who came down and sang with me on “There’s a Lifeline Deep in the Night Sky” were just a gathering of people who happened to be at the studio. These were people, a lot of them musicians and a lot of them not, who were from all over the place musically. It was more like, let’s all get in a room together and sing a song. I feel like you could probably find that in hip-hop, metal, or anywhere. I hope so, anyway.

I felt really lucky to grow up musically in Duluth in the early 2000s. Every show we played would be with two or three bands. It would be us and a punk band, a hip-hop band, a straight-up rock ‘n’ roll band, but we were all friends. It was celebrated that we were all different from each other, and that’s why we were all doing this together. That’s one of my favorite things about local music scenes across the country. Finding that stuff. You’re right, we do have a great roots and Americana scene around here in the Midwest, but there’s great everything. When people get too caught up in one thing it can get a little poisonous. I feel like music itself brings communities together.

Recording a song like “There’s a Lifeline Deep in the Night Sky,” we recorded it with one microphone onto a cassette player. It was about as informal and unrehearsed as it gets. It was just fun. Nowadays, especially with the modern recording process, it’s easy to make a perfect song. You can make the tempo perfect, the pitch perfect, and everything. Still nothing compares to getting a bunch of people in a room and playing a song live. Embracing the little imperfections that happen as part of the uniqueness of the recording.

Playing with punk bands and metal bands, how does coming from a place like Duluth impact your scope? Does coming from a scene with so many different types of music open your borders and give you some freedom to explore new ideas?

Absolutely. If nothing else, it helped me get out of my own head. If I wanted to go see some live music I would see so many different kinds of music. It wasn’t like it is in some places, where I could go see a folk act every night. I can’t go see a bluegrass band every night in Duluth. It forced me, and hopefully a lot of other people, to celebrate all these different bands.

To me, the genre doesn’t matter at all. A song could be on a banjo or a laptop, but if the song connects with me then I’m into it. I don’t really give a shit which instruments are played. It’s about the song, or if you can see some kind of art in the performance that you really connect to. To me, that’s the most important part. That’s what I want to celebrate. When I record, this is how I like to do it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to go see Atmosphere some time. Just because I can’t play that music myself doesn’t mean I don’t love it.

I try to be honest with myself in the recording process, where if something comes up that I want to try I’ll give it a shot. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But to your question, I really am thankful for that diversity in my music growing up. That’s helped me keep an open mind. I feel like the older people get, and the older I get, it’s even more important to keep your mind open.


Photos: Zoe Prinds

LISTEN: Chris Castino, “Duluth”

Artist: Chris Castino
Hometown: Minneapolis, Minnesota
Song: “Duluth”
Album: Brazil
Release Date: March 13, 2020

In Their Words: “When you come out of a fog of drugs or bad love or any addiction, everything seems raw for a while. I guess the truth is raw sometimes. This song is that time where you beg God not to feel this way again, but this time something feels different. Like a new morning; blurry yet full of hope.” — Chris Castino


Photo credit: Storied Life Pictures