Tag: Nashville

New Singer, Same Edge: The SteelDrivers Deliver on ‘Bad For You’

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The SteelDrivers’ new lead singer, Kelvin Damrell, already grasps the driving force behind the band, which is marking its 12th year with a brand new album, Bad For You.

“You couldn’t play our songs if you weren’t passionate about what you were doing,” the Berea, Kentucky, native believes. “It wouldn’t sound right at all, in any position in the band. From the mid-range harmony part to the hardest-playing guitar riffs, to the hardest-playing fiddle, it wouldn’t sound nearly as good as it does if you didn’t love what you were doing, and playing with as much passion as you could.”

On Bad For You, Damrell steps into a role once filled by Gary Nichols and Chris Stapleton for the group’s first album since winning a Grammy with 2015’s The Muscle Shoals Recordings. All five of the SteelDrivers — Richard Bailey, Damrell, Mike Fleming, Tammy Rogers (whose daughter discovered Damrell on YouTube), and Brent Truitt — invited BGS over for a chat.

Kelvin, how long had you been in the band by the time you went into the studio?

Kelvin: Goodness, how long has it been now? I joined in October 2017. I was just so looking forward to the release date of the album that I’d forgotten when we went in.

Mike: He had to go to boot camp first. [Laughs] Bluegrass boot camp! We had to take him out of Kentucky. He had his first airplane flight. You saw the ocean for the first time, right? You left a lot of things laying around. [All laugh] You went through airports with knives when you shouldn’t have. But listen, it was good! We all got comfortable with each other, and we needed some time just to feel that, and it got to that point.

Kelvin: When I joined the band, I was really unsure about what was going on, about my position. I had made the cut as far as getting to be in the band, but Brent kept telling me we needed a couple of months to see how we jibe together. I thought that was just him saying that, but it was the truth. We switched vehicles pretty regularly and I rode with different people. We really saw how we jibed together before we made a full decision on whether we were going to keep me, or if I was going to go back to sweeping chimneys.

The song “Bad For You” has such a cool groove. You sent it out as your first single and you named the album after it. What is it about that song that is special to you?

Brent: To me it was the perfect fit for this band. It was the song that hit me right out of the chute. It encapsulates the sound. It’s really edgy, and we’re a little bit on the edgy side of bluegrass.

Mike: It was one of the strongest songs, as far as that kind of feel. It’s like a “Here we are!” kind of song. You know, “Look out!” The way Kelvin sang it, Tammy told him, “Sing it like a rock ‘n’ roll singer.”

Kelvin: I almost got emotional when we played it for the very first time. I really did, that’s the truth. The first night we debuted it, after we hit that last big note, I almost did get a little emotional because it’s like something is finally coming to fruition with my position in the band. I’d done all this other stuff that vocally belonged to Gary and vocally belonged to Chris, and now this one vocally belongs with me at the lead. And man, that three-part harmony! Everything about it was good, and it really did make me emotional.

I’m glad you mentioned harmony because that’s a really important component of this band that doesn’t get talked about enough — how well you can stack those voices.

Tammy: Thank you. But you’re exactly right, I think that’s always been a really strong facet of the band. It’s this rock ‘n’ roll lead singer with this really strong three-part harmony coming in on the chorus. From a writer’s perspective on this album, I thought about that a lot, and how that was still a big part of the sound, and to keep that consistent because I think that does set us apart.

Brent: In our live set, I’m thinking of one or two songs that end with the vocal trio by itself, doing the swell and bending into a note, and the crowd loves it every time. It’s a big part of bluegrass, period, but it’s a big part of our music too.

Brent, how would you describe the SteelDrivers’ sound?

Brent: For me, personally? It’s gritty, grind-y bluegrass. With a lot of soul.

Tammy: Think about the Rolling Stones if they were to play with bluegrass instruments. That’s us.

Mike: With a blues/rock ‘n’ roll singer. … It’s intense! I’m tired after our set. It’s a workout. We keep the emotion and the intensity going quite a bit, but we let up occasionally and do a nice song.

On this record, you do have that slower moment on “I Choose You,” which brings out another side of the band.

Tammy: Yeah, we’ve always had a song or two like that. On the first record, “Heaven Sent” has always been one of our most-requested and popular songs, and it has that great, easy, rolling feel to it. We call it the hippie dance. And when Thomm Jutz and I wrote “I Choose You,” that was definitely musically where I wanted to go with that, to have that feel to it. But it’s still a very serious lyric, even though it has a positive message, in a way. It has a lot of depth and meaning to it.

Richard, do you have a favorite track on this album?

Richard: Umm… “Forgive.”

What do you like about that one?

Richard: I like what I played on it. [All laugh]

Tammy: See, it’s all about the banjo! We joke about it but people love the banjo!

Mike: It’s got a great groove.

Brent: It’s one of my favorite songs too.

Kelvin: It’s funky. It’s like “Bad For You” is rock ‘n’ roll and “Forgive” is funky!

Kelvin, what were you listening to about three years ago, before joining the band?

Kelvin: Three years ago I was on a really big Cinderella kick. [All laugh] I’m still on the kick. I still listen to mainly rock ‘n’ roll when it’s just me in my truck, driving for hours on end.

Did the band prepare you for the honesty of bluegrass fans, and how they’ll tell you what they think?

Kelvin: I was ready for it before I started! I knew how much of a following they had. I know how much people loved Gary. I know how much people loved Chris. And I was ready for it – I prepared myself for people saying, “This guy sucks. You need to get somebody else.” [I’ve heard that] twice, I think, the whole time I’ve been with the band. It’s been great — because I was expecting it at every show!

Tammy, do you have young women coming up and telling how cool it is to see a woman on stage?

Tammy: Yeah, it’s really awesome and I appreciate it a lot. Because when I was growing up there were very few women playing, and the ones that did were usually bass players. Mama might be back there thumping on the bass or whatever. There were very few women role models for me, of that generation. There were a couple — I remember Lynn Morris was playing and Laurie Lewis was playing a few years ahead of me in those circles. Not many in the country world. I was a huge Mother Maybelle fan and part of that was because she played the guitar. That was fascinating for me as a kid.

And now in the generation after me, there’s just unbelievably talented women – not just singers, but instrumentalists. It’s phenomenal, the jump from mine and Alison Brown’s ages, to Sierra Hull, who is a genius on the mandolin, and Kimber Ludiker and all the Della Mae girls we love, and Molly Tuttle is absolutely slaying it on guitar. Sara Watkins, I’m With Her, Sarah Jarosz … it’s just on and on and on. If I in any way influenced any of those players, I am deeply honored.

What would you want bluegrass fans to know about this new record?

Tammy: We’re excited this year to get out and we’ll be playing a lot of different kinds of venues. We don’t play that many traditional bluegrass festivals anymore, but it’s my hope that people hear the music and still see the thread that’s in there. The subject matter that we choose to sing about is not as cleaned up as some other stuff, but to me it’s just another facet of the music, and I think we’re hopefully carrying it forward and carrying a torch.

Photo credit: Anthony Scarlatti

LISTEN: Dom Flemons, “Hot Chicken”

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Artist: Dom Flemons
Hometown: Phoenix, Arizona; now living in Washington D.C.
Song: “Hot Chicken”
Album: Prospect Hill: The American Songster Omnibus
Release Date: February 28, 2020
Record Label: Omnivore Recordings

In Their Words: “In 2012, I was in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, doing a tintype photo session with photographer Bill Steber. Knowing that I was in the area for a few days, Bill recommended that I try one of the best-known regional dishes, hot chicken. After the session, I made my way over to the strip mall in East Nashville, Tennessee, where Prince’s Hot Chicken, the original restaurant, was located. I was fortunate to have my friend Bill prepare me for what I was about to encounter with this amazing dish. He explained that it would take me on a mystical journey if I ordered the extra hot. So, I decided to indulge in the medium-hot flavor and I was instantly inspired to write this song.

“This hokum song is reminiscent of the 1930s era of music that was developed by songsters like Thomas A. Dorsey, Tampa Red, Bo Carter, and Papa Charlie Jackson. Songs like these use small lyrical vignettes to frame a chorus that has a free changing meaning throughout each verse. The vignettes I’ve created incorporate a lot of animal imagery and parables, which is a strong part of early African American music and folktales. This version from What Got Over (a 2015 EP released for Record Store Day) features my vocals and harmonica accompanied by a muscular guitar vibe from Guy Davis. Here’s something I shared in my podcast about the song in a special bonus episode of American Songster Radio.” — Dom Flemons, The American Songster

Photo credit: Timothy Duffy

William Prince Sparks Joy on ‘Reliever’

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When Canadian songwriter William Prince cites his influences, there’s one that is particularly surprising: The Mighty Ducks, a feel-good hockey film from 1992. In one pivotal scene, the kids on the down-and-out team get all-new equipment — a cinematic turn of events that Prince has never forgotten from his childhood.

“It moves you in an interesting way. I’ve always gone back to that,” Prince says during a conversation over coffee in Nashville. “That’s one of the first feelings of joy for another that I remember taking on as a young person. Like, ‘Oh, man! That’s great for the disenfranchised hockey team to get that!’ I was a hockey player and loved it – I knew that feeling, I shared that. And from then on, it was about creating similar encounters with people. That’s what these songs are.”

Raised in the community of Peguis First Nation, Prince grew up listening to Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, as well as the gospel records his father recorded independently. For years Prince barely skated by with an unwavering dream to make it as a performing songwriter. By the end of 2015, he’d released the album, Earthly Days, which led to a Juno Award for Contemporary Roots Album of the Year in 2017, and ultimately the opportunity for an American reissue in 2018 with a new track, “Breathless.”

Five years after Earthly Days, he’s currently in a good spot after grieving the death of his father, getting over a breakup with the mother of his young son, and settling into a stable life in Winnipeg. A keen sense of maturity and perspective informs his newest album, Reliever, but the overwhelming emotion in lead single, “The Spark,” is quite simply love — a reflection of his new relationship and a still-burning passion for making a connection through his music.

BGS: It seems to me that you are writing from a lot of your personal experience throughout Reliever. How much of your own life is in these songs?

WP: Ah, it’s everything. I say it’s just a presentation of different thoughts while going through a plethora of things. Change, transition, all of this. The ever-changing landscape of this adventure we’re on now, making music all the time.

What was that transition like, from wanting to be a musician to now being a musician?

I think I was always a musician, always an artist. People tend to make it become about the album itself: “If I just had a record, I would sell CDs and be an artist.” Or, “If I just had more shows, I would be a musician and artist.” The thing I’ve learned now is that it’s all the time off of the stage. It’s all the time working on the stuff, building it, and the moments in between those short 45 to 90 minutes on the stage. That becomes the smallest part of the whole artist/musician illusion. You are living it all the time. That’s the thing — you will become what you put your greatest effort into. Just writing songs and wanting it that much, you eventually end up with what you dream about.

What took up the most time for you, do you think?

I was going to university for a lot of years, trying to find a path into medicine. I took my entrance exam for college and didn’t get in for the first round of the med school applications. I ended up working on the radio as a morning host on an Indigenous radio station that runs across the country. I was kind of staying alive while working on the songs. I was still finding my voice and how I wanted to build the songs, in a way. It’s all the time spent building. I knew there was going to be one chance for one good first impression, so it was important for me to collect the right things. I’m glad now that it didn’t work out back then. I don’t think the record I made at 20 would have been the record I made at 29.

I’m curious about your First Nations background because I’d think it would give you a different perspective than other songwriters. How has that shaped your musical approach, do you think?

I grew up on a reserve where the conditions are as bad, and sometimes worse – and sometimes better – than what you hear the conditions are for First Nations people in Canada. I was always just singing songs about my family, you know? I never really considered our heritage, in a way. These are songs about loved ones, and that transcends everything – who we are as a family, who we are as a people.

Things can be pretty rough in this living situation, like a house without running water or going to shower at your brother’s, or borrowing jackets because we just couldn’t afford certain things sometimes. When that [burden] is taken off your shoulders, like worrying about how to pay for the place you’re living in, to having groceries and an abundance of things now, it’s been the greatest perspective [going from] the quiet reserve life, to living a life that’s prosperous and doing something you love every day. So that influence and perspective is what it’s given me, for all things.

I don’t have kids, but the songs where you reference your son are very touching. How old is he?

He’s three and a half, and that’s a delicate line to walk. You can get “aw shucks” and then it doesn’t resonate with people who don’t have children. For you to say that is an affirmation of a job done in a direction that I hoped for. You don’t have to have children, but you can see that [the character in the song] takes really good care of what he cares about. That’s the message that I was trying to get across.

And the lessons that you want him to learn are the lessons that you would want your friends to learn, too.

Yeah. A manual for being the kind of person that I’m trying to exit this world as — good and caring and thoughtful and empathetic and conscious of all things around you. People are quite fascinating to observe. That will never go out of style. That will never change in season. There will always be people living life and experiencing great things, and going through things. I understand that’s general, but I get asked this more and more: Where does it come from? What is this thing I’m doing? I’m trying to quantify it for people in a more satisfying way, but the truth is, I’m breathing every moment of it, all the time. Everything is a collection, planting and harvesting, I’d say.

I hadn’t realized that your dad made some records, too.

Yeah. I traveled with him when I was 13 to 17, setting up the amps and we sang songs at all the funerals and wake services, all those traditional hymns. Which is essentially Hank Williams music — it comes from that kind of place. So having that in the center taught me basic structure. Somebody once said there was antiquity within my songs, which is a cool feeling, like you appreciate an old kettle that’s lasted 60 years. That frame for songs is in my life because of that gospel music.

Did all of these songs come to you over the last four years?

Funny enough, after writing through a number of things like grieving my dad passing, and a separation from my partner, and being a new dad and feeling that joy, and finding validity and success in this music thing that I’ve been trying for some time. So, all that is a wild blend to be taking in. I did my best to work through those things. I was writing in real time for a long time and those songs, as they aged, became reflective. They would blend with the songs I was writing in a period where I was past the grief and hurting a little more.

“The Spark” is one of the first half-dozen six songs I’ve ever written in my life. I kept it away because it used to be six minutes long and had this whole other side to it. I got a little nervous coming down to work on this next record with Dave, like, “I don’t know if I have any real love songs like ‘Breathless.’” I wanted something like that to share, and I thought of ‘The Spark.’ I quickly gave it a bit of a haircut and brought it in. Dave made his suggestion to save one lyric for the final line — “You’re the flame, the fire, and most of all you’re the spark.” And we had a song. Funny, too, how things start with a spark. Let’s get it going, now that people are looking. Let’s make it count.

Photo credit: Alan Greyeyes

How the Wood Brothers Made an Album out of a Print Shop Jam Session

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The Wood Brothers have been together as long as they were apart. For fifteen years or so Chris and Oliver Wood pursued separate careers — Oliver out of Atlanta as a blues/rock guitarist and singer, and Chris out of New York as the bass player with the uncanny jazz/jam success story Medeski, Martin & Wood. Then they sat in together and felt a pull energized by family ties and musical curiosity, and their folk duo was born, about fifteen years ago.

Chris jokes that over seven studio albums and uncountable miles on the road, they’ve been on “a slow rise to the middle” but that’s far too self-deprecating. Their last opus, 2018’s One Drop of Truth, was nominated for a Grammy, and not long after it was released the band headlined the Ryman Auditorium and Red Rocks Amphitheatre (their hometown shrine, as they grew up in Boulder, Colorado). In September, they released their fourth live album, culling songs from a two-night stand at the Fillmore in San Francisco, where their highly developed musical telepathy — between the brothers and with drummer/keyboard player Jano Rix — was on vibrant display in a warm sonic atmosphere.

Newly minted is Kingdom In My Mind, an 11-song collection inspired largely by the feel of a new studio. The band and their sound engineer Brook Sutton had to move out of the old church-like studio where they’d made One Drop of Truth, but they found a new place nearby on Nashville’s west side. The brothers spoke to BGS about how that new destination shaped the sound of their latest project.

BGS: I understand that shaking down your new recording space produced proved unexpectedly productive?

Oliver: In our downtime we’ve always had some sort of rehearsal space, whether it was Chris’s basement or something, where we would just improvise and come up with musical ideas. I think all of us enjoy the art of improvising and playing music without thought and without purpose. We’re not trying to write a song. We’re not trying to sound good even. We’re just trying to play something new. Chris and I will react off each other, or off Jano, and do that musical communication that can happen if you just listen. We’ve always done that. And we’ve always recorded it on a phone or on a laptop just to remember. Whereas this time we set up and did the same process but we had a professional studio and an engineer miking everything up so it was usable.

Chris: Yeah, we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know this was going to be the beginning of a record. We’d got a studio and put a lot of work into getting it up and running and sounding how we wanted it with baffles and things like that. But then it was, well, this is a huge room. Where do you set up? Where do you put the drums? Let’s put them over here. Let’s see what that sounds like. And we set up near each other and threw some mics up intuitively. I think we were struck immediately as soon as we heard playback. Even with that haphazard setup, it sounded great. Something about the room made us play a certain way. It felt magical and inspired. So immediately we looked at each other and said, “Maybe this is how we make this record.” So we did maybe five sessions where we set up and improvised in different parts of the studio. There’s a big A room, which you could almost fit an orchestra, and then a smaller, dryer room. So we had fun with all kinds of different variations.

Can you give us a visual and the background of the place and why it became home?

Chris: It’s an old print shop. So what we call the B room is smaller. It’s probably where people came in and got stuff photocopied.

Oliver: And then the back room — after it was a print shop and before we got it — was a dance studio with a dance floor and high ceilings. It was probably a warehouse at some point. This is not a fancy building. It’s cinder block.

So you had to look at this print shop/warehouse/dance studio and imagine a plan?

Chris: It was easy, and it had to do with the layout. It was very clear immediately. The control room goes here. From that room you have access to both tracking rooms. There’s even a lounge. There’s a room with a loading dock that can also be an isolation room. And it’s all in a circular layout. Everything about it was easy to imagine how we could be up and running quickly once we got our stuff in there.

Oliver: It was luck. And it was cheaper than we expected. But I’ll add to that process that Chris was talking about. The improvising we like so much, almost never can you use that stuff on an album. Normally you perform songs to make albums. So Chris got really good at editing these improvs. These are just jams, maybe in the key of A for 20 minutes. Maybe we switch chords every once in a while. Maybe we don’t. But Chris started chopping them up (in audio software). And we realized that we could arrange these improvisations.

And the beautiful thing — which usually gets lost — is your first impression of things. Like when you’re inspired. You play something, and you’ll never do it again. But we actually captured those moments and were able to use them on the album. And so the things that all of us love about albums are these anomalies, little mistakes or weird things that bleed together — things that if you were thinking about a song you’d never have played. To us, that had a freshness that Chris was able to chop up, and we were able to write lyrics over these new collage-y things.

Chris: Like Sly Stone said, there’s a rhythm when you don’t know what you’re doing. And we really take that to heart. I think that’s why a lot of musicians who have been doing this a long time really cherish first takes. Because before all the musicians really know the song, they’ll play things that they’d never play once they really know the song. For a lot of us, I mean for me certainly, it’s always a red flag when we do a take and I feel like I really nailed (it). It’s almost a guarantee that that’s not the take. Not the good one. The good one was the one before, when I was searching and didn’t quite know what was happening next.

Oliver: Discomfort is good.

Chris: A little bit, yeah. You don’t want to know too much.

Right out of the box on “Alabaster” there’s this over-driven sound like a Rhodes piano and I wonder if maybe that was just an accident that worked?

Oliver: Absolutely. That was recorded the first day we set up. Jano was playing drums and keyboard at the same time. He had this keyboard rig with a crappy little amplifier and it just sounded like that. And again, we weren’t thinking about a song at all. We were all in one room in a circle, and it just happened to be cool.

Chris: We were thinking sounds more than anything. Oliver had this great Stella guitar that he recently got set up. I’m sure Jano played that sound on purpose because he liked it. It was very intuitive and in the moment. So he didn’t have to worry if it was fitting a song or not. He just liked the sound. That’s kind of what we were going for.

You both come from improvised music backgrounds, one jazz and one blues-based. When I heard these tracks, I felt like the Medeski, Martin & Wood approach and the Wood Brothers approach have never been closer. Also, Jano plays with even more freedom. This feels like a jazz record in many ways.

Chris: I absolutely agree. This is the most meshed those worlds have ever been. It was definitely a long-term goal to get to this point. Little by little, not only integrating the MMW background with the songwriting, but also, just as you said, Jano is such a talent and can do so many things. Great drummer. Amazing keyboard player, percussionist. Great singer and producer. So to integrate all of his talents into what we were doing as a duo took some time, you know?

I think that’s why it works. When you improvise, all your knowledge, all the music that’s inside you, can come out. It’s not restricted by a song that’s been written already. Jano’s drumming and all of our playing is featured more because we were improvising to create the source material for the songs and were able to keep that. In the past I loved all the songs, but there’s a lot more that we can do. Improvising is a way to showcase that.

Oliver: It does inform how you play live too. We learned that you don’t always have to be right on the money. It’s fun to pretend like you’re in a punk band for a minute or something and kind of let loose and try something different.

Here it is about 15 years into this journey. Maybe it’s been an even bigger force in your lives than you thought. What have you learned, as musicians and family?

Oliver: I bet we take it for granted doing it all the time and being busy with it, but certainly in the last 15 years I feel like Chris and I were slightly estranged in that we were living in different places and playing with different people. We had sort of lost touch. So initially, yeah, the music brought us back together and we were able to combine our shared interests and experiences. That was awesome, and it was how we reconnected as brothers. And it’s nice to have a family business, especially a creative one, where we get to do that together and make a living too.

Chris: Yeah, people usually frame the beginning of this band as if it must have been a casual side project. But I never thought about it that way. It was exciting from the beginning. And for both of us, in different ways, coming full circle. We grew up with our dad playing music live around the house, you know, folk songs. Playing and singing. And that was, we realized, a huge influence.

I always liked singing when I was younger and ended up in Medeski, Martin & Wood, an instrumental band, for 20 years. I hadn’t been singing, so it was scary, but it was something I was really excited about getting into again. And just the way we write songs and composing with my brother is really fun and different. Whereas MMW was, as you said, a lot of improvisation, I also like writing. It was nice to get into that too.

Pulling back, MMW was a band that took real jazz to the jam band audience. And I feel like there are bands that hover between the world of the jam audience, which loves freedom and surprise, and the songwriter audience, which focuses more on the lyrical emotion. And maybe those bands never quite get totally accepted by either camp. How have you all mapped that?

Oliver: That’s well put, and I think we ride that fence, and enjoy it for the most part. It’s a nice balance. Personally I like to hear somewhere in the middle. I like to hear a good song, but I also like to hear some musical interplay. I think a balance of those things is really cool.

Chris: Yeah, one of the things that can be amazing about music is when there’s some mystery. You don’t quite understand what’s happening up there but it still is engaging. And how do you do that? There’s no formula. Nobody knows. Which is why we never get tired of this job. You know, you can’t figure it out. You stumble upon it sometimes, but it’s not always obvious how you get to that magical balance between the two.

Oliver: It’s always a fun challenge for us to take a good simple song but set it apart and give it its own sound. So use a weirder guitar. Use a broken thing. But make it something you haven’t done before and you haven’t heard somebody else do before. That’s kind of what we’re always doing.

We talk about this all the time. Sometimes we’ll write a song and use just cowboy chords and write it like a country song. Then [we’ll] mess up the music completely and make it our own thing somehow. So it’s a combination of all this classic stuff we love. And then, how can we make a new classic?

Craig Havighurst is host of The String from WMOT Roots Radio in Nashville and a longtime journalist covering roots music.

Photos: Alysse Gafkjen

John Moreland Figures Out How to Love Music Again

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Turns out there are drawbacks to any career – even when it’s your dream job – and you can confirm that with dark-folk favorite John Moreland.

After winning widespread acclaim on the strength of his devastatingly direct songcraft, often by casting an unflinching eye toward himself, it’s a truth the prolific writer and soul-mining vocalist has been forced to accept in recent years. Almost a decade into his solo career, rising expectations and a grueling tour schedule weighed so heavily on him Moreland even admits he “fell out of love with music” for a while. But the Oklahoma talent has fought his way back with his fifth solo album, LP5.

“It’s just that when you go from music being your passion and your hobby … to the point where it’s your job now, there’s an adjustment period where you have to figure out, ‘How do I do this?’” Moreland explains. “So I think that’s what the past five or six or years have been for me.”

Moreland feels like he finally has some of it figured out now — or at least is on the right path. He accomplished that partially by exploring new sonic territory with the help of producer Matt Pence (the first time he’s entrusted someone else with his songs), and also through hard-won personal growth, eventually deciding to treat himself a little better. Building off that foundation with tasteful drums, quirky synth embellishments, and whirring beds of B3 organ, what emerged on LP5 preserves the thought-provoking beauty of his stark songwriting, but adds a layer of intrigue … and perhaps, hope.

BGS: Music is such an outlet for you. How much did it bother you that you basically didn’t enjoy it anymore?

Moreland: Well, it was definitely a bummer. Writing music has always been the way I express myself, but it started to become harder and harder to do. It was like, if it’s just me sitting down with an acoustic guitar, there’s only so much I can do before it starts to feel like “OK, I’ve written this song 10 times already.” So it took messing around with some other instruments to get the creativity flowing again.

Did that feeling creep up on you, or come all at once?

I think it kind of crept up gradually. It just got more and more difficult to write and be creative, and then all of a sudden one day it was like, “Wow, I hate everything I’m coming up with.” I just needed a new context to see it in.

For LP5, you ultimately teamed up with a producer for the first time, and the textures and layers you and Matt Pence created are really interesting, but they don’t overwhelm the songs. What was the approach going in?

When I was writing the songs, like I said it got to the point where I needed to mess around with some other instruments in order to give the acoustic guitar and my voice a new context to live in. I was messing around with different drum machines and samplers, different pedals, getting different sounds at home, and that’s how we did the demos. … [Then in the studio] it was all pretty intuitive. We didn’t really talk about anything. We recorded the basic tracks like guitar, bass and drums together, and then we had a few days where me and Matt and John Calvin went crazy on overdubs. It was just flying by the seat of our pants, like “You wanna play synth on this song?” Or “You wanna put the Wurlitzer on this?”

Have you always played a lot of different instruments? If so, why haven’t we heard it in your previous work?

I actually started making hip-hop music when I was a teenager, so I’ve always done that as a secondary creative outlet. Then I stopped doing it for a few years when I started touring more and was busier with my career, and I got back into it when I needed that extra creative outlet. In the past, there were times I thought I’d like to incorporate it into what I was doing with my songwriting stuff, but maybe I wasn’t sure how to do it yet. I think because I feel a lot more comfortable with myself now I’m more open to whatever. If I like it, then it’s good enough to go on the song.

Is any of that hip-hop stuff out there?

No, not really. It’s just kinda my little home-studio hobby that I do.

I’d love to hear what kind of flow you’ve got, John.

[Laughs] Well, I’ve never actually rapped. I just make beats.

You say you’re feeling more comfortable with yourself, and I know these songs were written during a time when you were trying to be kinder to yourself. What does that look like in your everyday life?

I think it’s just in your thoughts and how you see yourself. I think there’s ways that we’re taught to be cruel to ourselves when we’re kids, and we just do it and think it’s normal. So I feel like I’ve been gaining more of an awareness of that and being able to catch it when I’m doing it, just being more careful and more mindful of how I talk to myself in my head. So it’s not like a big, visible change in my life I guess, but privately I’m in a better headspace because of it.

In “A Thought’s Just a Passing Train,” the central line begins with “I had a thought about darkness.” What were you going through at the time?

That just goes back to being kind to yourself and how it’s all in your thoughts and the way you talk to yourself. I think we place a lot of importance on our thoughts, but they’re not necessarily that important – they’re always just kind of coming and going. I wanted to try to talk about that.

I love the idea of a train as a metaphor for this, since that’s such a part of the country and folk canon. But you’re using it in a very modern setting.

Yeah, thanks. It’s funny, I don’t know if would feel comfortable doing a train-type song unless it was kind of a weird one, you know? [Laughs] I think it would feel a little too traditional to me otherwise.

“I’m Learning How to Tell Myself the Truth” is another interesting one, because to me, your songs have always been about exploring the truth around you. But maybe that’s different than telling yourself the truth?

You know, I think songwriting has always been my attempt to tell myself the truth — or to uncover the truth. So I guess I meant it in more of a personal, everyday life kind of a way. Like, I want to see things the way they are and not delude myself.

Are you getting better at that?

Yeah, I think so, and I think that’s another thing that comes with age and maturity. Hopefully you begin to see things as they are more, and not let things be as colored by your emotions.

The album ends with “Let Me Be Understood,” and that seems important. Why was that the way you chose to go out?

That’s a song that when I wrote it, it just felt like, “Yeah, that should be the last song.” And again, kind of like “Learning How to Tell Myself the Truth,” I think “Let Me Be Understood” is just what the impulse to do this is for me. I just want to understand myself and I want to be understood in the larger context.

To that end, I think this album is at least asking the right questions.

Thank you, that’s all I want to do.

It seems like you’ve learned something about life over these five albums …

Maybe. [Laughs] I don’t know what it is, but maybe I have.

What do you want listeners to get out of this project?

Whatever they can take from it is fine with me. I think I made it because it made me feel good, so I hope it can make somebody else feel good in whatever way they need.

Photos: Crackerfarm

LISTEN: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, “Be Afraid”

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Artist: Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Be Afraid”
Album: Reunions
Release Date: May 15, 2020
Label: Southeastern Records/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “There are a lot of ghosts on this album. Sometimes the songs are about the ghosts of people who aren’t around anymore, but they’re also about who I used to be, the ghost of myself. I found myself writing songs that I wanted to write fifteen years ago, but in those days, I hadn’t written enough songs to know how to do it yet. Just now have I been able to pull it off to my own satisfaction. In that sense it’s a reunion with the me I was back then.” — Jason Isbell

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Aubrie Sellers Lets Her Music Breathe in ‘Far From Home’

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With her new album Far From Home, Aubrie Sellers is living up to its title. Raised in Nashville as the daughter of musicians (Jason Sellers and Lee Ann Womack) and now living in Los Angeles, she absorbed bluegrass and country while still exploring genres with a harder edge. That spectrum of influences is apparent in her new music, which ranges from the softer sounds of the title track to the electrified vibe of “My Love Will Not Change,” a duet with Steve Earle.

Adding another meaning to “Far From Home,” Sellers wrote much of the album in Texas, and she’ll launch her national tour by opening for Tanya Tucker in New York City. BGS caught up with her just before she hit the road.

BGS: You recorded Far From Home at Sonic Ranch in Texas. What made you interested in working there?

Sellers: I was listening to a lot of what I call “desert music.” Tarantino soundtracks and The Ventures and stuff like that. I had taken my camper out to Marfa, Texas, and wrote some of the songs on this record there. I was very inspired by that vibe. My whole family is from Texas, so that kind of feels like my home.

Also I wanted to get outside of Nashville and I loved that idea that the whole band stays there while you’re recording. You immerse yourself in the making of the music. It’s really important for me to focus on making a record and having a cohesive experience. I feel like all that stuff tied together.

Why did you feel like you needed to get out of Nashville, do you think?

It’s nice to have no distractions. It’s nice to have a new environment. Your environment affects what you’re doing and I felt like it was important to have that vibe, since that’s what was in my brain already. It’s just nice to escape and make sure that you’re really focusing on making the record, and focusing on the music, and doing something different.

Is that the reason you moved to L.A. as well?

Yeah, I grew up in Nashville and I’ve been around that scene my whole life. It felt important for me to get out of there and experience some new things, and surround myself with a totally fresh energy. Also I went to acting school growing up and I’ve always wanted to do that. I find the film industry here really inspiring. I tried to come here when I was younger and I wasn’t quite ready, so this time it stuck.

You draw on a lot of influences and genres in your sound, but where do you think country music comes into your musical vision?

For sure I think my songwriting is country. I think it’s a little of that personal touch — and you don’t find that as much in other genres. There’s a simplicity to it, in a good way hopefully! And then sonically, steel guitar is one of my favorite instruments. I don’t want to make a record without steel guitar on it.

I listen to a lot of traditional country but I also really love that era of country with Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam and Lucinda Williams. I love Buddy Miller — he’s kind of on the fringe of country. Buddy and Julie Miller have been a huge influence on me. All of those, and of course, classic country like George Jones and Merle Haggard. Those were my biggest country influences.

Are you a fan of bluegrass?

Yeah, I play the banjo! I thought for a while when I was in high school that that’s what I was going to do. I love bluegrass. Ralph Stanley is my favorite singer. My dad grew up playing with Ricky Skaggs so I was around it a lot. I’m really inspired by bluegrass. On this record, I did “My Love Will Not Change,” which was written by Shawn Camp, but I knew the Del McCoury version. For me, there’s just a similarity in the intensity and the drive behind some bluegrass and rock and blues music. It’s got a simple, emotional feel to it, to me. All of those things connect in my brain and my heart. I love bluegrass.

What was your entrance point to Ralph Stanley? That’s a big catalog to navigate.

I guess just listening to old Stanley Brothers records. Fortunately I grew up in an era where I could explore all music on the internet, you know? So I would go into a bluegrass rabbit hole and listen to that. And then of course, I love the banjo. I think it’s like the electric guitar of bluegrass.

You co-produced this record, too [with Frank Liddell]. What kind of textures did you hope to capture?

I don’t bring in references or anything like that when I’m making music. I think it’s more important to have a vision in your head and make sure you’re bringing in the right players, putting them in the right environment, and having the right songs. Let it evolve, take your time, and let it breathe.

It’s the same with writing and choosing songs. I try not to make it like a factory. I try to let it happen organically. I think it’s making sure you’re putting together the right people in the right environment. You know, I had four guitar players on this record! Sometime it’s about having someone sit out for a song. Letting everything have room to breathe is my philosophy.

Photo credit: Chloé Aktas

LISTEN: The Barefoot Movement, “At the End of the Day”

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Artist: The Barefoot Movement
Hometown: Based in Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “At the End of the Day”
Album: Rise & Fly
Release Date: February 7, 2020
Label: Bonfire Music Group

In Their Words: “’At the End of the Day’ is one of those songs I needed to write for myself. Growing up I was taught a lot about ‘turning the other cheek,’ which I think is a beautiful ideology and I still try to embrace it, but the lesson I think I missed was how to stand up for myself, to express frustrations, and to do it in a loving way. It’s one I’m still learning. I tend to avoid conflict. But as the song says, ‘the truth is all we have’ and I’ve realized that one of the most kind things you can do is to be honest. Even when your honesty might sting a bit.” — Noah Wall, The Barefoot Movement

Photo credit: The Barefoot Movement

LISTEN: Sophie & the Broken Things, “Tornado”

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Artist: Sophie & the Broken Things
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Tornado”
Album: Sophie & the Broken Things
Release Date: January 31, 2020
Label: Petaluma Records

In Their Words: “Tornadoes have been occurring in my dreams for as long as I can remember. A few years ago I had one that was really memorable. So I woke up with the first line from this song in my head. Around that time I felt totally uncertain in every aspect of my life and was doubting every decision I was making. Having that kind of uncertainty makes you freeze in how you go about your life and influences every decision you make, and I just remember feeling very immobile.” — Sophie Gault

Photo credit: Annelise Loughead

LISTEN: Rachel Baiman and Mike Wheeler, “Turn It Off”

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Artist: Rachel Baiman and Mike Wheeler
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee (Rachel), nomadic (Mike)
Song: “Turn It Off”
Album: Countin on You Sessions
Release Date: February 7, 2020
Label: Tone Tree Music

In Their Words: “I (Rachel) started this song in a moment of frustration, wishing I could just escape from the news of the world. I was lucky enough to be a part of a writing residency in Jacksonville, Florida and the place I was staying had all of these turtles hanging out in the back yard. I think I started five songs about turtles that week, the shell idea was just feeling very appealing.

“Anyway, this is one of those songs which I couldn’t seem to finish. I’ve been a big fan of Mike’s writing and singing for years and one afternoon back in Nashville I asked him to come by and help me finish this one (he was my neighbor at the time). We worked through it and really enjoyed singing and writing together. This song ended up launching this EP collaboration.

“When he told me he was planning to head out to Colorado for the winter (Mike is decidedly nomadic), we both thought it would be fun to record some of what we had been playing together in a really live style, to reflect the inspiration we had gotten from our neighbor jams while he was in town and the magic of Nashville nights spent trading songs with good friends.” — Rachel Baiman

Artwork by Taylor Ashton