WATCH: Mile Twelve, “Whiskey Trail”

Artist: Mile Twelve
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Single: “Whiskey Trail”
Release Date: November 15, 2019
Label: Delores the Taurus Records

In Their Words: “Our bass player Nate brought this energetic Los Lobos song to the band nearly a year ago, and it has slowly but surely become one of our favorites to perform. Even though originally imagined for electric instruments, we think the bluegrass outfit suits the music well. Now we’re excited to be releasing this song as a studio single! To celebrate the premiere we made this live video of our arrangement performed at the Fox Bar & Cocktail Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee, and filmed by the amazing Alex Chaloff. What better place to film a song about hard liquor than this, right?” — David Benedict, Mile Twelve


Photo credit: Kaitlyn Raitz

LISTEN: Mary Bragg, “Our Lady of the Well”

Artist: Mary Bragg
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Our Lady of the Well”
Album: Think About It EP
Release Date: March 6, 2020
Label: Mary Bragg Music/Tone Tree Music

In Their Words: “As a writer, one of the things that keeps me sane is that healthy part of the process which is to sometimes get out of your own head and away from your own stories. I’ve started looking for songs to learn that speak to me, and this one in particular, written by the great Jackson Browne, felt painfully timely, as it beautifully expresses some of the feelings I’ve been having about the world we live in, decades after it was written.

“I felt connected to the song after going to Mexico for the first time and experiencing the lovely people and culture there, where, just like in the States, ‘the families work the land as they have always done,’ and ‘your children will be born; you’ll watch them as they run.’ I decided to record it as a creative extension of my new album, Violets as Camouflage, with a similarly simple treatment, musically, with the focus on the story and the voice that’s telling it.” — Mary Bragg


Photo credit: Holly Lowman

LISTEN: Charlie Hager, “Never Good”

Artist: Charlie Hager
Hometown: Las Vegas/Nashville
Song: “Never Good”
Album: Truth and Love
Release Date: November 1, 2019
Label: Flour Sack Cape Records

In Their Words: “I think this song is reflective of what I was feeling at that time in my life. I had recently gone through a divorce and my work was stressful as well. I think my state of mind when I asked myself what ‘I’m good at’ became clear to me that I mess things up a lot. So in a sense, what started out as a narcissistic song actually ended up a little more truthful.” — Charlie Hager


Photo credit: Francis Myron Calara

WATCH: Yola Makes Her Grand Ole Opry Debut

Bold, brilliant, beautiful, and British — these are just a few words that describe the music of singer/songwriter Yola. 2019 has been monumental for the new queen of country soul from across the sea as she collaborated with Black Keys’ founder and Nashville hotshot producer Dan Auerbach to produce her solo debut, Walk Through Fire.

Her powerful voice and old school styling reinvigorate the tradition of combining country and soul music, a classic bridging of two seemingly unrelated musical traditions; and an accomplishment Yola’s musical heroes Charley Pride and Dolly Parton would admire. Among her more recent success, Yola was featured in a song from The Highwomen’s first album and in September, she made her debut on country music’s most famous stage.

Watch as Yola shows us around Nashville and takes us behind the scenes of her Grand Ole Opry debut.


Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor Learned This From ‘Country Music’ (Part 2 of 2)

In Ken Burns’ documentary opus Country Music, a weaving path from the hollers of Appalachia to Garth Brooks’ theatrical stadium concerts was laid out for all to see. But mapping that trail has always been a complicated, cumbersome task.

The sheer number of influences at play required 16 hours of footage for Burns to tell the story – and lots of help from the artists themselves. One of those artists was Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, who gladly jumped in to tackle the unwieldy narrative of his favorite subject.

Secor had a two important roles to play in the series. Most obviously, he related a lifetime’s study of country’s earliest touchstones and how they combined into something uniquely American. But the outspoken frontman was also tapped in the beginning of Burns’ process as a behind-the-scenes consultant, helping guide the project’s tone and ultimately delivering one of its final and most powerful lines.

“It’s almost like [country music] needs to be exhumed, and new life breathed into it,” Secor proclaimed. “The part that is the songs of the people, the hopes and aspirations of the people — the pain and suffering of the people — that needs to remain embedded in country music. If it isn’t there, I’m out.”

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House on the night the series premiered, Secor explained what the project meant to a history buff like himself, and how Burns unwittingly played a role in Old Crow’s founding.

BGS: Old Crow Medicine Show’s music has always shined a light on the past. What made you interested in that to begin with?

Secor: I was always interested in history, and I really attribute that to Ken Burns – I saw The Civil War when I was 11 years old. I lived in the Shenandoah Valley, and I wondered why the kids went to Robert E. Lee High School and why we played Stonewall Jackson, why the name of the shopping mall and the subdivision and the motel was what it was — it was all the war. It was everywhere, and we took some field trips but I didn’t really understand it. I could feel this echo, though. Seeing that movie on PBS really helped me to take this tour of my own backyard and see how history was alive. I credit that to him.

Knowing how deeply you care about country music’s history, what did you think when you found out Burns was going to present it?

I thought immediately, “Thank God. Finally somebody is going to tell our story and get it right.” I don’t trust any of these people to our story [gestures to photos Opry stars dotting the dressing room walls] because they’re all right in the middle of it. Everyone here has a very, very different story, and everybody has “The True Story” — but only their truth. Country music is richer than any one truth, so it takes an outsider’s perspective because of Nashville’s tendency toward this clan-ishness, the good ol’ boys network and these sorts of forces.

I mean, we’re the genre that has told its own history ever since it started. The radio charts today are full of songs about the good old days — and they’re talking about the ‘90s. That’s the good old days now. But it doesn’t matter, whatever the good old days were, the ethos here is that times ain’t like they used to be, they used to be better. That’s what they’ve been selling from the start, but they can’t tell our history without making it a commodity. So it takes this outsider, and you can’t ask for a better outsider than America’s most beloved documentarian, because he was the outsider who told us how jazz was born and flourished, how baseball was created, the Roosevelts, the National Parks, the Brooklyn Bridge. Country music is just as important as all that.

What did they actually ask of you?

I talked about slavery and the plantation system, the penal system — because incarceration was a great cultural conversationalist. It kept people locked up in isolation, which is one of the keys to making country music so rich. How long did the Scotch-Irish people live in Appalachia before being disturbed? Well, the great disturbance comes in Bristol in 1927. The record companies came in and said “Whaddya got?” And what they had was so specific to one region that it might sound different one holler over.

Then I talked about the Opry, and then I tried to talk about more New Age-y hip-fangled things, but they didn’t use any of that [laughs]. The other way I’ve been involved is by being an advisor to the film, so I read all the early scripts for the past eight years. But it was great, they just asked me, “How would you tell the story? Where was the birth? Who was important to mention?”

This has been in the works for eight years?

Yeah, he conducted like 140 interviews, and of that maybe 50 or 60 of his interviewees have died. See, the other thing about Ken is he knows when it’s time to tell a story, and by doing the story when he did, he was able to get Little Jimmy Dickens, Merle Haggard, numerous artists who wouldn’t be here — George Jones is in this film.

Did you get surprised by anything?

Oh yeah, a trove of knowledge is in this documentary, I learned a ton. And lots of things made me cry. What I learned primarily was a real self-reflective thought of, “Oh my God, this is my life.” I think almost all of these folks on the wall are in the movie, and when they watch they’ll be crying, too, because they’ll see themselves in the Bristol Sessions. They’ll see themselves at the earliest days of the Grand Ole Opry, they’ll compare themselves to the Outlaw movement and the traditional movement of the ‘80s, the development of the star system, and contextualize their own career.

You talked about isolation. We’re in this weird moment where country is more popular than ever, but rural life is changing fast. It’s easy to connect with people all over the world. How does the film address that?

One of the things that’s great about the film is that it stops around 1996, because Ken Burns isn’t a journalist, he’s a documentarian. He’s not making a movie about today, and here’s why: Historians say you’ve gotta have a generation pass before you can tell what happened. I just think it’s gonna go a lot deeper than anybody could say right now.

Like if you told the story of why Randy Travis mattered in 1986, it would be a lot different. And also the forces that are at play in country music, they need time to gestate for us to understand what they’re saying. Who’s gonna last? Who are we going to be talking about in 25 years? Blanco Brown? Chris Stapleton? Who’s gonna have their picture on this wall in 25 years? I don’t know.

Editor’s Note: Read Part 1 of our interview with Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.


Photo credit: Crackerfarm

LISTEN: Miss Tess, “The Moon Is an Ashtray”

Artist: Miss Tess
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “The Moon Is an Ashtray”
Album: The Moon Is an Ashtray
Release Date: February 7, 2020
Label: Miss Tess/Tone Tree Music

In Their Words: “This song came out of an experiment with metaphor, smashing two unrelated words together to derive a new meaning. This is one of the few songs in my writing career than just fell out of my brain in about an hour. I grew up with a lot of fairy-tale ideas of how life and love might pan out, but reality can be a harsh mistress. ‘The Moon Is an Ashtray’ is a tongue-in-cheek vintage-kitsch metaphor discussing the idea that romance isn’t real. When you get up close to the moon, you realize it’s not as pretty it seems from a distance, or is just plain fake, or not as it originally appeared. The whole idealism and cruel optimism wrapped up in an image like the moon — or new love — is just an illusion.

“For me, it kind of ties into getting older and realizing some of your childlike views are not what they seem. On a professional level the music industry is really rough when you get up close. Fairy-tale ideas of relationships are never real. I think a lot of the songs on the album speak to that.” — Miss Tess


Photo credit: Gina Binkley

WATCH: Boyz II Men Bring Out Steep Canyon Rangers

Boyz to bluegrass?! You read that right. R&B legends and vocal virtuosos Boyz II Men have collaborated with North Carolina’s Steep Canyon Rangers for this stunning reproduction of the bluegrass group’s 2007 song “Be Still Moses.” During a Boyz II Men performance at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, twelve members of the Asheville Symphony joined the Rangers for this video, capturing what may very well be a once-in-a-lifetime performance of the song.

Boyz II Men’s Nathan Morris remarks, “The other day someone said ‘Boyz II Men does bluegrass?’ We laugh cause it sounds crazy, but to us good music is good music no matter what genre.” Graham Sharp of the Steep Canyon Rangers adds, “I give credit to our producer Michael Selverne and to Michael Bearden for their vision of bringing together two very different musical worlds for a moment that transcends any genre designation.”

Watch as musical traditions collide and stars align in this illuminating performance.

How a Stranger in a Bar Inspired Michaela Anne’s “Desert Dove”

Michaela Anne put a lot on the line to make her new record, Desert Dove. Working for the first time with producers Sam Outlaw and Kelly Winrich, the self-funded album was recorded in San Clemente, California. With many of the songs written either on the West Coast or in the Southwest, the pervasive theme of manifesting her own destiny resounds.

All of the songs pull from a mixture of her own life (potentially even her past lives), characters she’s met in real life, and some of whom she’s envisioned in her imagination. We sat down with Michaela Anne to discuss everything from her inspirations, to her transient childhood as the daughter of a submarine captain, to the anticipation of releasing this very personal new material.

BGS: Can you talk about growing up on the move? Were you playing music and writing back then?

Michaela Anne: I started playing piano when I was about 5. I wrote a few songs right away, instrumental piano pieces and the first one I wrote was called “When Daddy Comes Home.” So from the very beginning, it has always been a sad longing feeling, because I missed my dad when he was out to sea. Then we moved a year later and every time we moved there would be a transition period of, “OK, hurry up and find a music teacher!”

I wasn’t writing. I didn’t write any more songs until I was 17, when my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. That was the first time I wrote a song with lyrics. Then the second time I wrote a song with lyrics was when I moved to college. So everything for me, and I’m actually just realizing this, has all been a result of something that was sad. A sad experience or a longing for.

Do you find there is a transient parallel in touring at all?

Oh yeah. It is different because you live in one place but you miss out on a lot of stuff. It is hard to keep friendships together when you’re gone for a month and then you come home and you’re tired and you don’t really feel like going out. How do you stay in people’s lives when you are missing the big events? That feeling of not really being a part of friend circles because you are missing out, that’s been my entire life. This deep FOMO. It isn’t a fear of missing out. I actually miss out a lot.

What led you to record this album in California? When you were writing it, did you know you’d be making the record there?

I didn’t, which is interesting to me because multiple songs mention California. The West Coast, in general, has always had a nostalgic, warm, romantic feeling to me. It’s funny. I’ve never thought I would move back to the West Coast because I feel like I want to keep it as a magical reprieve. So I wrote some songs out there and for some reason, it kept coming up.

I also wrote a bunch of songs in Arizona. So the Southwest, paired with the West, infiltrated my songwriting. But that wasn’t part of the plan when I was writing the songs. I’d toured a bunch with Sam Outlaw and he’d said in passing that he wanted to produce my next record. I blew it off as a joke and thought it was funny.

Then I started considering it when I was really figuring out how to make a new record. I entertained a few different producers and Sam brought in Kelly Winrich, who is from this band called Delta Spirit and he has this more indie rock background. He doesn’t really come from the more country world, which I really wanted.

It just kind of all organically came together. Kelly is from San Clemente and his parents built out their basement into a studio. I went out there for two days to do a trial run to see what it would be like. I’d also never worked with two producers at the same time and didn’t know if that would make things more complicated.

Had they worked together before?

They had. They had worked on one of Sam’s early records together and they were longtime friends. I felt like I was very cautious before I made a decision but it all went really well. Then we hired a bunch of LA-based musicians with the addition of my friend Kristin Weber, who is from here in Nashville. She flew out and did strings and background vocals.

It happened naturally and it was really amazing to record in a beautiful setting but be really focused. I didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day living of making sure my cats are fed and making sure my house is clean and all that stuff. It was an ideal setting, for sure.

Was there a fleeing from Nashville to California to make the record?

I don’t know, maybe a little bit. I feel like I might be one of those people who has a love-hate relationship with wherever I am. I felt this way about New York and I now feel this way about Nashville — that I see the good and the bad. I think when you are surrounded by a lot of people pursuing similar career paths and when everyone around you is about music, it can feel like a bubble, and I think it is not healthy to live in that bubble.

It’s important to remember that there is such a diverse, large world out there of different careers, different pursuits, different passions. I’m really inspired looking around and seeing so many people figuring it out and being creative but it also can trigger insecurities of, “Oh my gosh, everyone is doing this. Why do we need my voice? What do I have to contribute and how am I saying what I’m saying and how is it different or alike with somebody else?”

That can be really distracting. So getting away from it is helpful. To just be creating your work and not be thinking about it in terms of who else is doing what and where you fit in with all of it. That can be poisonous.

How do you typically write lyrics? Does the melody follow or lead that process?

I usually come up with a melody first. I’m never someone who is just writing lyrics. I’m not a poet. I think in melodies and the words come with it. Then I have to consciously go back once I have a melodic structure and think about where I want to get to with it.

I was comforted when I read Jeff Tweedy’s memoir that he just released. He said that the way that he writes songs is that he mumbles a lot and crafts the song while mumbling gibberish. It was the first time I’d heard of a songwriter doing that and it makes me feel so much better. I’ve considered it a weakness. Like I’m just writing based on what sound feels good in my mouth and not looking at it as a piece of literature. I felt very seen when I heard that Jeff Tweedy does that.

The character in “Desert Dove” seems like one that you know a lot about.

I’m always saying I feel like I could write a novel about that song. It is so many different people to me. I see myself in that character in many ways. I met this woman years ago at Pappy and Harriet’s who was a stripper. Her name was Madeline and she was wearing a white dress that was off her shoulder.

She was this beautiful charismatic woman who I was really drawn to in that one evening’s conversation and then from there it expands to all these other women characters that I’ve read about or learned about from talking to friends. This book Soiled Dove is an historical account of different real-life women who were prostitutes or madames in the Wild West.

It’s like a lifetime of research. How long did it take you to actually write it?

That song came out so fast. I was in Arizona in Cave Creek on a little writing retreat. I knew I had this song about a Wild West prostitute in me for years for some reason. When I was really young, I went to a spiritual healer who told me I was a prostitute in a past life. Maybe that gives you a little glimpse of the complexities of my upbringing.

I was raised in a very traditional family home. That my dad was a nuclear submarine captain but my parents were very interested in lots of different spiritualities and dynamics. When I was back at the apartment I was staying at, I was making a sandwich and I opened my mouth and the first line of the song came out. I think I finished it within a day or two.

Your characters have dimensions of the good, the bad, and the ugly. They feel honest, particularly in “Somebody New.” I read that someone told you once that women shouldn’t be the perpetrator in songs or be in a guilty position. Did that advice ever inform your writing or is it informing your writing now as an act of rebellion from that advice?

I feel like with so many songs there are a few different narratives. Especially in the country world, and this is a huge generalization, but the idea that the woman is the one that gets cheated on but she’s the one that has to then be vengeful. Or like the sad, sullen songs that are like, “I was wronged and as the narrator, I’m the innocent victim in this.”

I just feel like no situation is actually that clear cut. I feel like we have a role in every single situation we find ourselves in. I think it is hard to portray that in a three-to-four-minute song because you’re telling this very complex story of, “I’m really hurt but also I did something that hurt you.” I think that’s real life. How do I portray these very human characteristics? I create these characters, but you know, I’m in every one of those.


Photo Credit: Matt Wignall

The Likely Culprits Issue an Arresting Debut

Most likely to succeed? That’s of no interest to the Likely Culprits, an easygoing group of bluegrass cut-ups who just released one of the most entertaining albums out of Nashville this year.

With four of the band’s members bantering inside a forgotten conference room at IBMA, they readily confess that their name derives from an ongoing conversation within the band: Who’s the most likely to end up behind bars? It’s currently a seven-way tie between Brandon Bostic, Ronnie and Garnet Bowman, Melonie Cannon, Ashby Frank, Deanie Richardson, and Austin Ward. The informal happy hour vibe of this conversation lends itself to proceed on a first-name basis.

“We’re all pretty rowdy,” Deanie says. “We’re all a bunch of hillbilly rebels and we were like, ‘Well, one of us probably get arrested eventually.’ And it was just, which one of us was going to go to jail, and who’s the likely culprit?”

Turns out, that unpredictability is the album’s greatest strength. When pulling together its dozen tracks, they wanted to ensure that all five of the band’s vocalists had a chance to sing, and that nobody’s favorite song was left out. The result is something like listening to a stereo with a seven-disc changer, but with a throughline of excellent musicianship and a high caliber of songwriting.

For example, Melonie unearthed album cuts from Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams, Brandy Clark, and Matraca Berg, while Ashby reconfigured pop star Gavin DeGraw’s melodious “Where You Are.” After years of singing it at the band’s Station Inn shows, Garnet finally recorded “Tennessee Blues,” a deep cut from Keith Whitley. That tearjerker is immediately followed on the album by Brandon’s version of Dave Matthews Band’s “Gravedigger.” Listening to the self-titled album as a complete body of work, it somehow fits.

There might be a shorter version of how the Likely Culprits all met, but here’s one way to tell the story: Deanie and Melonie have been friends since childhood, and when Melonie married Deanie’s brother, they’d host guitar pulls with their mutual friends. Garnet would come to those parties, forging a bond among all three women that’s lasted 25 years. In the years ahead, she would marry Ronnie, who cultivated his bluegrass reputation in the ‘90s with the Lonesome River Band and as a solo artist. He also produced Melonie’s solo albums with her father, Buddy Cannon.

Meanwhile, Ashby met Garnet and Melonie when he was playing in Ronnie’s band. Later on, when Deanie and Ashby crossed paths a party, they recognized that they’d found kindred spirits in each other. Then, as happens in Nashville, they had an idea to form a band, admittedly with no real intentions of taking it on the road. Instead, the priority would be simply making good music. So, together they rounded up Melonie and Garnet, while Ashby recruited two of his friends, Brandon and Austin. And just as the band was hitting its stride, Ashby took a temporary job as a musician on a cruise ship.

“We were having so much fun, it was like, man, we don’t want to stop,’” Garnet recalls. That’s when Deanie asked Ronnie to take Ashby’s spot, not sure if he’d even want to.

Ronnie explains, “Not that I don’t enjoy being in the band now, but I enjoyed not being in the band back then, because I could actually go to a place where I wasn’t expected to play, and I could see these guys play. I mean, I loved them. And by the time Ashby left, I knew all the songs.”

“I knew he was having fun coming and hanging out, drinking a few beers without the pressure of getting up there,” Deanie says. “But he said he would do it and then it just felt amazing. It felt like it should. He’s one of my heroes and I love him to pieces. Just to get him on stage with us was a big dream of ours. So I’m honored he agreed to do it. Ashby eventually came back from the boat and we thought, ‘Well, let’s throw everybody in there.’ And we did. We played a few shows and said, ‘Let’s do a record, why not?’ So here we are with the record.”

So, what makes the Lonely Culprits click anyway? To borrow a title from the album, “Everybody’s Got Something They’re Good At.” Deanie is an exceptional fiddler, while Melonie and Garnet possess warm, instantly identifiable voices. Ronnie sings and plays guitar, and also serves as co-producer (with Buddy Cannon). Brandon provides vocal, acoustic guitar, and electric guitar, and Ashby sings and plays mandolin. Austin keeps the Likely Culprits moving along on upright bass.

Though it sounds like a long-lost Harlan Howard composition, “Everybody’s Got Something They’re Good At” happens to be a Ronnie Bowman/Dale Dodson original, with Garnet singing lead. (Lee Ann Womack recorded it first but her version never came out. Alison Krauss plays fiddle on this version.)

Just after that throwback country tune, Ronnie sings another of his compositions, “Won’t Do That No More,” with such poignancy that it’s no surprise at all that he’s won multiple IBMA male vocalist awards. He’s also an accomplished songwriter who has placed major hits with Brooks & Dunn, Kenny Chesney, and Chris Stapleton.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Deanie earned an IBMA award this year as a member of Sister Sadie. She’s also toured, along with Brandon, in Patty Loveless’ band. Asked what it feels like to have a lead vocal that keeps changing, she immediately replies, “Oh my gosh, I love it because with Sister Sadie it’s bluegrass. With Patty Loveless, it’s country. But with these guys, it’s all of it.”

That bond has only strengthened since the band’s first show at Station Inn in 2012. It remains a special spot for the band, who listened to the album in its entirety for the first time over the club’s sound system. (Yes, they rang the bell.) They’ll also play an album release show there on November 15.

Thinking back to those days, Brandon recalls, “I moved to town and I didn’t know a single person. I took a job playing in a bluegrass band and moved up on a whim. I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of the house, I’ve got to meet some people.’ So I started hanging out at the Station Inn and I found a group of people that are my family now. We’re all pretty much on the same page and we’re like-minded with music and what we like and what we don’t like. Playing with them, it’s like coming home all the time.”

One of the band’s biggest champions is Jamey Johnson, the country singer-songwriter who made it his mission to get the Likely Culprits’ new album into the world. He’s also invited them to open a series of shows this week in the Southeast, part of his ongoing effort to support female artists in country music.

While Jamey’s fans are devoted to his singular approach to songwriting, it’s just as likely that they’ll appreciate the perspective from these seven musicians, too. Because Melonie is already a familiar presence at his shows as a harmony vocalist – and because Jamey comes to all the band’s shows — there’s a certain comfort zone already in place for the Likely Culprits, one that doesn’t involve prison guards or enforced curfew.

“This is us sitting in a living room with somebody saying, ‘Ronnie, pick a song,” Deanie says. “Ronnie might pick one, and Garnet might pick ‘Tennessee Blues,’ and Brandon might pick ‘Gravedigger.’ It’s what we do, man. It’s great. I love these guys. I’d go all over the world with them.”

“I would too,” says Brandon, says as Ronnie chimes in with a “Yeah.”

“Same here,” Garnet concludes. “We all feel the same way.”


Photo courtesy of the artist

LISTEN: Bradford Loomis, “Take a Swing”

Artist: Bradford Loomis
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Take a Swing”
Album: Where the Light Ends
Release Date: October 11, 2019

In Their Words: “How do we navigate through our differences? I feel like we live in a day and age where this question is becoming harder to answer. We live in a declaration culture; there are so many tools at our fingertips that allow us to plant flags on any given subject, proclaiming our values or opinions for all to see and respond in kind. I think it’s human nature to crave connection and to feel understood by others. We have access to too much information about people, yet we still don’t really know them. It’s easier than ever to dehumanize or disqualify others because of our perceived differences. There is so much more power in being vulnerable, and, through that vulnerability, the opportunity to deeply connect becomes possible. Being vulnerable can be time-consuming and even scary, but the payoff can be incredible.” — Bradford Loomis


Photo credit: Tony Hammons