Tag: Nashville

WATCH: Drew Michael Blake and The Belfry, “Cut and File”

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Artist: Drew Michael Blake and The Belfry
Hometown: Parkersburg, West Virginia (Based in Nashville, Tennessee)
Song: “Cut and File”
Album: Blame The Miles Between
Single Release Date: December 7, 2018

In Their Words: “I think, like a lot of other people, I walk around in a delusion and most of the time I don’t really see it. For a long time I was under the impression that everyone knew better than me. I thought the girls I was in love with knew who or what I should be. I thought my peers or my elders knew what I should do better than I did. ‘Cut and File’ is about experiencing a moment of clarity where you see right through those delusions, and start figuring out that those answers can only come from within. When I first started playing in bands in my teens, it was me and my friends in an old barn turning up our amps, sweating through our clothes, and playing rock and roll. I think the feeling and the energy of those early days comes through in this video.” — Drew Michael Blake

Photo credit: Chad Cochran

The Shift List – Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack – Nashville

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

André Prince Jeffries is the owner and matriarch of Prince’s Hot Chicken in Nashville, Tennessee, the original and gold standard for Nashville hot chicken.

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Opened in 1945 by Thornton Prince, André inherited the restaurant and original hot chicken recipe in 1980, and has seen it grow into a culinary trend that’s caught on like wildfire in the past few years throughout the US.

Growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, young André witnessed the origins of her great uncle Thornton’s restaurant, and it turns out that music has been an important part of their success from day one. Just wait until you hear about the typical late night guests that would stop by back in the day.

Theme Song – “Wonder” by Jamie Drake

Presented by Nomad Goods. Head to hellonomad.com/bgs and use code “BGS” at checkout to receive 15% off any full priced items through the end of January.

The Shift List – Philip Krajeck (Rolf & Daughters, Folk) – Nashville

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Philip Krajeck is the chef and owner of Rolf & Daughters in Nashville’s Germantown neighborhood. Distinguished in music city for bringing global cooking techniques to Tennessee’s Southern ingredients, he opened Rolf & Daughters in 2012 and it’s still full every night.

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His follow up, Folk, opened a few months ago in the Spring, and he describes the menu as loosely Italian-influenced food that he’d essentially like to eat himself on any given day.

Krajeck’s musical influences run far and wide, in no small part due to the fact that he moved to Belgium with his family at the age of 10 and soaked up the vast array of genres he was exposed to, most notably by listening to Engligh DJ Giles Peterson and learning about Dance Music, Hip Hop, Spiritual Jazz, Funk, Soul, World Music and everything in between, tapping him into an entirely new universe of artists that he otherwise may have never have discovered.

He contributes this passionate and eclectic spirit to the vibe at Folk, creating a seamless and relaxed dining experience that’s comforting but constantly engaging.

rolfanddaughters.com
goodasfolk.com

Theme Song – “Wonder” by Jamie Drake

With Honesty and Humor, JP Harris Relives a Rough Time

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On the day he released his latest album, Some Dogs Bark at Nothing, Harris took to Instagram with a meaningful post about what it’s really like to put your life out there as a songwriter. He accompanied it with a rendering of Mickey Mouse flipping the bird, a comic reflection of his own feelings about “worry, hard times, notions of ‘success,’ bad reviews and musical criticisms,” among other things.

But in a reference to the actual songs, Harris wasn’t so cavalier. He added, “They are yours now. To love, to hate, to relate to, to be repulsed by, whatever you feel they do not belong solely to me any longer. And that is very scary, as I now must relive these tales I’ve kept hidden these four years, night after night, in hopes that my own recitation helps me heal, learn, and maybe even help someone else.”

That transparency doesn’t shield heavy topics, such as his past drug use, even when those misadventures are wrapped up in a free-wheeling tune like “JP’s Florida Blues #1.” With its ‘70s swagger, the track sounds like something Jerry Reed would have cut if he were prone to singing songs about “seeking inspiration through my nose.”

“I feel like it can be really hard for people who’ve never either dealt with addiction or been close to someone — kind of truly understood someone — who’s dealt with addiction, to get why making light of a bad situation can be so funny or helpful,” he says. “And for me it’s really cathartic to look back. For years, I didn’t want to talk about it. There was a little bit of… more than a little… just ashamed of a stretch in my life when I was living really bad and real close to going hard off the rails. And now I can look back on it, and I pulled myself out of it, and I can laugh about it.”

Although he cuts an intimidating figure – tall and muscular with a long, thick beard and innumerable tattoos – Harris is remarkably easy to talk to, even when he’s wary about saying too much. “I try not to overshare about my personal life in any regard to people I don’t know well in person, or on the internet, or any other way. But no matter what you do, you gotta go out and relive all of those moments,” he believes. “You can suddenly feel the tears well up, and you’re like, ‘Okay, this isn’t gonna go that well. I need to think about baby bunnies,’ or just try and do what I can to disconnect emotionally from this story I’m telling.”

However, he will reveal that the raucous song “Hard Road” came to him literally in a fever dream. While he was in New York for a couple of gigs, an ugly illness nearly knocked him out of commission. “I was having to chug half a bottle of DayQuil to get through the gigs every night, and then spent the whole day sweating and feeling horrible in this wee little Airbnb apartment shithole in Brooklyn. And in the middle of the night, I sat bolt upright and had the melody of that song, and even a big chunk of the words. I pulled this little lamp over and turned it on, found a piece of paper, and started writing the words down.”

He adds, “That whole song is not only, again, a sort of hilarious recounting of some ill-behaved adults that I’ve known in my years, but it’s also my own incredibly subtle way to nod at a bunch of old country and blues songs. The buried references in that whole song are probably going to fly over 99 percent of the fans’ heads. Anyone who’s incredibly well-versed on the music of the 1940s and earlier is probably going to pick up on a lot of it. But there’s a nod to an old prison work song in one verse; there’s a nod to a Leadbelly song in another one. There’s a whole bunch of little winks and nods in there.”

Asked how his interest in old-time music originated, Harris explains that he lived in a remote cabin in Vermont for 11 or 12 years, with no electricity and no road access for six months of the year. For his water supply, he dug his own spring. And to get by, he was fixing up old barns, logging in the woods, and working as a farmhand. Being able to play music without electricity was essential – and although he’d played in punk bands as a teenager, he found himself in his 20s gravitating toward traditional Appalachian old-time music.

“Old-time music is much more about the fiddle tunes and the syncopation and the sound and the melody,” Harris believes. “And a lot of those old fiddle tunes don’t have any words, and if they do, it’s like one refrain that the fiddler will randomly yell out in the middle of the tune, but there’s no real words to it. They’re just tunes, it’s for dancing.”

A three-month winter tour playing with a string band proved to be a turning point. Harris says, “I got home from that tour, and I realized that [old-time music] was sacred to me in this way that I had almost ruined by trying to make a living out of it. By trying to make it more palatable to people, trying to take it into bars, and get people to pay attention. And I had started listening more and more to country music from the late ‘50s up through the ‘60s, and I realized that it was next to impossible to go see a real, old-school country band out on the road anymore. … In terms of young folks playing fairly traditional music and out on the road touring, like road-dogging it, there are very few people doing it. And it was next to impossible for me to go see a show, and it was like, ‘Well, fuck it, I’m gonna start a country band.’”

That decision prompted him to focus for the first time on writing his own songs. Considering his unconventional upbringing, he had plenty of stories to inspire him. Harris spent his earliest years in Montgomery, Alabama, before his family moved to California when he was nearly 7 years old. He remembers, “My dad worked in heavy construction, so we ended up out in the high desert for a couple of years. We moved to Las Vegas for about five or six years after that, and then that’s where I eventually split from. So I grew up in this weird mix of two worlds–a super-Southern family, but then lived in this burnt-out, high desert tiny town in California for a few years. … And then dumped into this run-down part of Las Vegas that had been a suburb in the ‘60s and now was just a run-down neighborhood on the edge of the suburbs.”

Harris declines to go into specifics about why he skipped town. (“I’ll just say it was time for me to get going, and I felt like I had some other things to go do in the world besides live out the rest of my teenage years normally.”) Roughly from the ages of 14 through 19, he hopped trains – a pastime he describes in detail on the album’s closing track, “Jimmy’s Dead and Gone.”

Harris, who moved to Nashville in 2011, says he wrote it after being fed up with other bands creating what he calls “nearly fictionalized backstories.” He admits, “I finally was like, ‘You know what? I’ve done my best to try not to brag about all this weird shit I’ve done in my past, but I need to set some records straight with a song.’ It’s a little bit of a wink and a little bit of a rib jab at everybody writing train songs.”

Not every track on Some Dogs Bark at Nothing – which was produced by Old Crow Medicine Show’s Morgan Jahnig – is quite so confrontational. The title track is a rueful number about the inevitability of messing things up, while “When I Quit Drinking” and “I Only Drink Alone” show that Harris’ memorable Instagram handle is indeed accurate: @ilovehonkytonk.

“I’m not a very prolific songwriter,” Harris confesses. “People sit down and make time to do it in these very specific windows and formatted ways, which is really admirable, but I’m for shit trying to do it that way. They pop into my brain, I write them. Sometimes I don’t write a song for six months and it’s terrifying. I think I lost my mojo and then all of a sudden in a month I write three songs that are killer. And I realized that like everything else in life, my songwriting creativity comes and goes in waves, and art’s just not predictable, and I know that I’ll be able to keep writing records indefinitely. I’ve quit being so afraid of it.”

Photo credit: Giles Clement

BGS 5+5: Granville Automatic

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Artist: Granville Automatic
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Latest album: Radio Hymns
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): We really thought we were going to call the band The Sound of Yesterday.

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

Vanessa Olivarez: The fun thing about Granville is that most times, we aren’t writing about ourselves. It’s fun to dive into someone else’s human experience and imagine that it’s your own. I think as writers, we get tired of scribing the same love song over and over again in a different way … so sometimes it’s a good brain workout to shift the focus onto another topic. I’ve written from the perspective of mothers, soldiers, pieces of furniture, ghosts, lovers, and the like, and I feel like it gives me a greater appreciation for those stories I’m trying to honor. However, if you knew my life and its ins and outs, you would definitely hear all of the hidden personal feelings and thoughts within those characters. I guess you have to read between the lines!

What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?

VO: My rituals are sort of non-rituals. More just habitual peculiarities, like my weird motorboat warm ups, and long looping sirens, and going to the car to run (and visualize) my first song, and never eating before I sing. I also drink a ton of room temperature water and gargle it to the tune of whatever to kick-start my vox. I’m actually a very nervous performer, so I tend to get relatively quiet before I jump on stage for fear of working myself up too much. Once I get through the first song, it’s usually all bets off. I often channel the nerves into saying whatever comes into my head at any given moment … which can be either a blast or really horrifying depending on who you ask. Oh. And always lipstick on stage!!

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

VO: I would say the moment I knew I wanted to be a musician was the moment I figured out I could sing. I used to give performances for my Grandma in her living room from the time I was about 2 years old. I’d sing to Rainbow Brite, or blast my favorite record She’s So Unusual, and my Grandma always let me indulge in whatever ridiculous routine I’d put together for her. I’ve always had an affinity for music, the stage, and an audience. I don’t think that kind of thing is something you acquire, but something you’re born with. As a performer, the love you have for making people laugh, or cry, or just feel something never really disappears. That feeling is addictive.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Elizabeth Elkins: People who create in other mediums fascinate me. I like hanging around writers, painters, architects, etc. We’re all just trying to tell stories in different ways. Since we often write about history, there are plenty of history books that were the spark for these songs. I often think I’m just a very frustrated novelist.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

EE: We really hope these songs are a gateway drug for people to remember stories from the past. I’ve always said this band is going to be a slow burn, but, in the end, I know we will have a collection of albums that truly have something to say.

Photo credit: Holly J Haroz

WATCH: Matt Campbell, “That’s The Way”

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Artist: Matt Campbell
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “That’s The Way”
Album: The Man With Everything
Release Date: November 9, 2018
Label: Flour Sack Cape Records

In Their Words: “I woke up with the hook of the song in my head, not sure where it came from or what to do with it. I was listening to a lot of Merle Haggard at the time. Country music has a rich tradition of artists staking out political positions, but a lot of modern takes are full of platitudes or play to lowest common denominators. I’m staking out my own position in no uncertain terms, informed by my own experiences. I thought of it as Western Swing song, but the more the lyrics came together the phrasing turned into something closer to rap. I suppose that makes sense because my view is that you have to blur a few lines to make sense of America, if only for your own sanity.” — Matt Campbell

Photo credit: Emily Beaver

The Watson Twins Turn to Each Other on ‘Duo’

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Chandra and Leigh Watson, known collectively as the Watson Twins, are stepping to the front of the stage once again with the release of DUO, their first project since moving to Nashville in 2013. The Kentucky natives earned their indie cred in Los Angeles through their impeccable harmony, touring and recording with Jenny Lewis, and releasing a couple of albums on Vanguard Records in the early 2000s. However, DUO marks a new direction for the sisters, as it’s the first time they’ve focused on co-writing with each other.

With a desire to make a record that radiates with warmth and honesty, DUO leans closer to Americana than any other project in their catalog. A few days before they unveiled the new music at a Nashville concert, they chatted with the Bluegrass Situation about serving the songs, finding kindred spirits, and always, always hustling.

How has moving to Nashville affected the way you write songs, or the way that you shape your songwriting?

Leigh: You know, we were in Los Angeles for a really long time and that’s where our musical career began. I mean, we have been singing and playing music since we were little ones, but in Los Angeles, there’s a lot happening. There’s a lot of noise and a lot of influence and expectations. You’re trying to do something unique and different, and something that stands apart from what everyone else is doing. I think coming to Nashville really gave us the space and the quiet to reflect back on what we do, and to let it just be what it is and not try to be someone else, or not try to reinvent the wheel. …

I think we treated it differently in our past writing experiences, when we wrote separately and then sang together. For this one the co-writing process of doing that together was challenging, but also we’re taking the ego and the pressure away and saying we just want to serve the song. That was a good place to come from in our first adventure of writing together and Nashville gave us the headspace and the quiet to be able to do that.

You have to be pretty honest with each other, though. If one of you comes up with an idea the other one doesn’t like, did you have to learn how to say no?

Leigh: I think that comes with being older and also really not having a lot of egos in it. It’s like, if Chandra would write something and I didn’t like it, I would be like, “That line’s not good enough. We need to push ourselves, we need to think harder on this.” She would come back to me and say, “That’s too cliché, we need to wrap that up in a better metaphor” or whatever.

Chandra: Also, we come from an indie rock background, but we’re from Kentucky, so we’ve always had this amalgamation of a country-leaning, Americana sound, with this indie rock tinge to it as well. Indie rock can be very introspective and melancholy but we wanted to write something that felt warm. When you start to go into that indie rock headspace and become introspective or too metaphoric or too poetic, it was like, “Nope, don’t do that, pull it back and just give an honest statement about how you’re feeling and what this is about.” That kept us on this path of creating a more cohesive record versus just drawing on whatever inspiration. We really thought about the direction of the songs and the warmth that we wanted this record to have.

“Hustle and Shake” seems like it has a little bit of Nashville inspiration, like you’ve got to show up and make things happen.

Chandra: Oh, yeah, well, Leigh and I have been hustling and shaking for a long time. (laughs)

Leigh: Chandra and I have been through a lot of different musical chapters in our lives and that song is really our journey. It’s like our biography, if you will. A lot of people will look at us and be like, “Dang, you guys are hustlers.” We’re like, “Yeah, we just don’t stop.” Part of that is because we love what we do and we love music, and it inspires us and it drives us, you know? Whether we’re being the headliner or whether we’re just outside of the spotlight, or whether we’re on a midnight drive trying to get to the next city, it’s about that hustle and the thing that gives you that inspiration to keep doing it night after night, and year after year, and tour after tour.

You’ve been doing this for a while, like you said. What kind of business advice would you give an aspiring musician?

Chandra: What I can say is be as true as you can to yourself, and trust your instincts, and surround yourself with people who truly believe in you, and have a deeper investment in you as a person and not just your talent. Be sure that you see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, whether that’s your favorite sports team or your morals, or whatever that is. Find those like-minded people, because at the end of the day, you’re all on the same page.

Was that hard to do in L.A.?

Chandra: You know, it was very different out there. I mean, in the South, the people are just nicer and a little bit more genuine at the get-go. I think in L.A., you have to dig a little harder to find that genuine nature of people, but there are good people out there. I think that there’s just a lot of noise. It’s a big city and there’s a lot of different music scenes going on.

Leigh: It’s just hard to live there. You’re constantly pushing against other people’s momentum. That sounds like a weird way to put it but that’s the only way I know how to describe it. Everyone is on a singular path and it’s really hard to feel like you’ve got support behind you, and that push behind you, because everyone’s going a million different directions. Everyone is late and in a rush and strapped for money. I think with that collective energy, you can be susceptible to that, you know?

Chandra: Needless to say, if you couldn’t get it from Leigh’s statement right there, we weren’t living in the Hollywood Hills, okay? Let’s put it that way. (laughs)

Yeah, that probably is the perception though. You’re out there on tour, living in Hollywood, living the dream, but it’s a lot harder than it might seem.

Chandra: Yeah, it sounds super glamorous. The one thing that I will say is that I feel like if somebody has a desire to live in Los Angeles, they should do it. I think it makes you stronger and it really puts your priorities in check. We both worked really hard in L.A., working odd jobs and touring and meeting people and being out on the road. I wouldn’t trade any of that for the world. I’m glad that I had that experience and it really has helped shape me as the person that I am today.

Leigh: You were asking about advice to musicians. I think my bigger thing would be, even if you don’t have a budget or an advance to make music, just continue making music because sometimes we can get torn down. We self-released this record, with the help of a distribution company called The Orchard, and Think Indie are putting out our vinyl. That’s what we mean about surrounding yourself with people who believe in you. We’ve been out of the game as a solo act for a while; we haven’t released a record in five years. We told ourselves we’re only going to work with people who are as excited about this record as we are. It took us nine months to make the record because we were going song by song, but also we didn’t have an advance to book out a studio and be able to hunker down for two weeks and make it happen.

Chandra: It was certainly a really grassroots records in the sense that my husband, Russ Pollard, recorded it and produced it and our friends played on it. We had a lot of people help us along the way that were just doing it to help us, and that’s it, you know? There’s a lot of love and trust and people who believe in us that are a huge part of this.

I know you are heading out on tour when this record comes out. What do you hope people take away from seeing you perform?

Chandra: Wow…so many emotions. We have a lot of fun singing these songs and I hope people leave with that spirit in their heart. This record was meant to be a very warm record, and in our performances we are trying to anoint that and give people that. It’s important to us to share love and laughter and enjoyment with people in times of stress and unrest in our country. We are trying to go out there and let people enjoy our music and enjoy their night with us.

WATCH: Tattletale Saints, “Bobby Where Did You Learn to Dance”

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Artist: Tattletale Saints
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Bobby Where Did You Learn to Dance”
Release Date: October 29, 2018
Label: Old Oak Music

In Their Words: “I began writing ‘Bobby’ after a show in Austin, Texas. We were drinking at The White Horse, a local honky-tonk and dance spot when the band on stage started jamming a Cajun groove. I knew my friend Bobby, who is legally blind, had learned to two-step at this very bar, and while reminiscing on the story I started singing the main hook along with the band and the song was born! The song kinda wrote itself and we tracked it live in Nashville with Oliver Craven (Stray Birds) on mandolin and Matty Alger on drums.”— Cy Winstanley, Tattletale Saints

Photo credit: Kaitlyn Raitz

STREAM: Melanie Brulée, ‘Fires, Floods & Things We Leave Behind’

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Artist: Melanie Brulée
Hometown: Toronto, Ontario
Album: Fires, Floods & Things We Leave Behind
Release Date: October 19, 2018
Label: JKB

In Her Words: “Six of us went on a road trip from Nashville to Vegas, where this album was conceived. Three of us travelled in a rented 19-ft RV and stayed at campsites and the other three drove a cheap sedan, staying in motels and camping in a tent. I was in a writer’s block when I left; I came back with this album. It’s meant to be listened to as a soundtrack, like a Quentin Tarantino film.” –Melanie Brulée

Photo credit: Emma Lee

Curiosity and Persistence: Amy Ray Gets Down to Her Roots on ‘Holler’

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Amy Ray’s new project, Holler, is the closest thing she’s made to a classic country album in a career that stretches across nearly 30 years. As one-half of the Indigo Girls, she’s won a folk Grammy and toured the world, sharing her musical path with Emily Saliers. But on Holler, Ray retreated to Asheville, North Carolina, with a hand-picked band of musicians who knew how to play country music – and she was eager to record the new music to tape using the studio’s vintage machines.

“For this band in particular, there is a real kind of magic quality to knowing that you can’t go back and change a lot of things,” she says. “So it keeps you on your toes the whole time. You have to be well-rehearsed. And at the same time, you just want to go for it.”

Taking a break from signing vinyl copies of Holler a few days before its release, Ray chatted with the Bluegrass Situation about finding happiness on a clawhammer banjo, discovering a commonality with Connie Britton’s character, Rayna Jaymes on ABC/CMT’s Nashville, and staying curious about the world.

How much did you rehearse this new material before going into the studio?

This unit has been playing together for about almost five years, so that’s like been our rehearsal — just touring. For these songs in particular, we did have some rehearsals, but most of the stuff we had rehearsed or worked on arrangements at my house. Or we would have a gig, like we opened for Tedeschi Trucks here and there, and I would use that as an opportunity to practice the day before. We would get together at the hotel and go to the conference room and work on songs – like at the Microtel or whatever – and do arrangements. It bought us a lot of time.

So the band knew the songs well in advance.

Yep, except for “Dadgum Down,” which was a wildcard, which no one knew. We didn’t even know if we were going to do it. I kept saying, “I have this song I wrote on banjo, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” like a broken record over and over and over again. Jeff Fielder, the guitar player, and Alison Brown, who guested on banjo on the track – those two really came up with what became the arrangement for the song. It turned out to be a really fun experience because I put my banjo down and said, “I’m just going to sing.” But everything else, we had really worked on it and spent a lot of time fine-tuning the arrangements.

So the reference in that song about the sting of the bee — is that a reference to drugs?

It’s everything. The stinging [lyric] was another song I was working on, and I was like, “Oh, these are actually about the same thing.” Which is addiction, and relationships. So it’s like, it’s in the nature of the bee to sting. And it’s in the nature of love, and it’s in the nature of drugs. You can’t get mad at that item, because that’s part of their nature, and it’s also what you’re hungry for.

So it’s meant to be more than one dimension because the song is about wrestling with addiction — addiction to a person, and addiction to drugs, and addiction to anything. I’m always fascinated by that because I have an addictive personality, but also I have a lot of friends in recovery. And I don’t drink anymore, so I know how it is to try and beat that.

I want to ask about your musicianship. How did you get interested in the guitar?

It was just a vehicle to sing with probably. I mean, that’s probably why I’m not a better guitar player, too, because I looked at it as, “I want to write songs, and I want to sing, so I gotta learn how to play something.” I was playing piano, but not very successfully. I was in fifth grade and I got a guitar and took lessons at the Y. I learned like five chords and I could play all the Neil Young songs. So I was like, “This is perfect.”

What was the path to learning the other stringed instruments?

Well, mandolin, I just learned. It was like a natural thing for me, I guess. I was interested. I think I learned it because…. I’m trying to remember why I picked up a mandolin. I think I borrowed somebody’s flatiron mandolin and I liked it a lot. I thought this was cool, these chords. And I never really learned how to play properly, which I really want to do one day. But I was learning more from mountain music, like field recording kind of stuff. So I didn’t really learn the bluegrass style, or any of that. And then banjo is just something to knock around on, I don’t really know how to play.

Yeah, but it makes you happy right?

It makes me happy! It doesn’t matter. I try to play clawhammer and it makes me happy. [Laughs]

I’ve followed your career since that first Indigo Girls record, and you always seem to be doing something new and having something coming up. Where did that work ethic from?

Probably my parents, my family, just the way I was raised — workaholic.

Yeah, but you’ve never really rested on your laurels or waited around for it.

I get bored with laurels, and there’s not enough of them to rest on, either. I like the process as much as the prize. I mean, seriously. So for me it’s like I get bored and I really do want to become better at what I do. I think the only way to do that is to keep doing it. And for Emily and I, persistence was our friend forever. I mean, if we hadn’t worked hard and been persistent, and then had a lot of luck, we wouldn’t have made it.

That reminds me of “Tonight I’m Paying the Rent,” which is about putting in the time. Some gigs are not necessarily feeding your spirituality, but you’re still working, doing what you love. What’s the reward for what you’re telling me about – where you’re working, and traveling, and staying busy?

I don’t know, I’m just proud of it. Because when I do a solo tour and get to the end of it, and been able to play all the gigs, and drive all the miles and everything, I feel proud of it. I don’t know why. The process is fun, and I like the people I’m with. I’m just compelled. I think we are compelled by something, and it probably is fear of mortality and all of those deep things too. But it’s also like, well, it beats us sitting around. And it’s fun to try to do something that’s hard to do, and then be able to do it. It feels good.

Is it a calling for you, do you think, to be up there singing?

Who knows? I mean, I have no idea. It’s all I know, though. It’s all I know how to do. So I don’t know if it’s a calling or like a compulsion. I mean, “Tonight I’m Paying the Rent” really also grew out of needing an attitude check. Emily and I were playing a few of these private party kind of things, and I had such a negative attitude about it because they’re soul-sucking. And you’re just doing it for the money, and we stopped doing them because of that.

But then at the same time, I was watching an episode of Nashville where Rayna has to play a private party for a venture capitalist in California. And of course, the guy that hired her is a big fan, but no one else likes her, or likes country. And she’s out there, and she’s smiling, and no one’s listening. And I was like, I’ve totally been there a million times. Then her attitude about it after the show was like, “We all have bills to pay,” or whatever she says.

And that’s the attitude I have. Like, “Tonight I’m paying the rent.” That’s what that song grew out of. It’s like, “Why be so negative about this thing?” Yeah, maybe it’s not fun, but it beats digging a ditch. And look – you’re actually paying bills. That’s hard to do.

To me, “Didn’t Know a Damn Thing” is about history that you haven’t been taught, that you discover it on your own by seeking it out. Where does your own sense of curiosity come from?

I think that’s probably from my family and growing up with role models that were curious. Even my dad, who was super conservative, was also curious about everything. Even though we disagreed about a lot of things, one thing I know about him is that he was curious, and he would always listen to the other side. All the best teachers I ever had in high school and my favorite youth minister at church were curious and they didn’t mind it when I questioned things either.

And I don’t know why I always felt like I needed to question things. … I think part of that was paranoia. It was like the flip side of curiosity, which is paranoia. And I was like, this can’t be all there is, there’s got to be something else going on. It doesn’t feel right. And when you start feeling those feelings, you know you’ve got to look into it.

Photo credit (color): Carrie Schrader
Photo credit (black-and-white): Ian Fisher