Tag: Nashville

Finding Refuge at the Edge: A Conversation with Cory Chisel and Adriel Denae

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On a weekday afternoon in September, Cory Chisel and Adriel Denae are at home in Appleton, Wisconsin. It’s been a busy summer. Several weeks earlier, the couple brought 225 bands to town for Mile of Music, the citywide festival that Chisel helped launch in 2013. Not long before that, they hosted the recording sessions for a handful of upcoming albums — including Erin Rae’s newest, Putting on Airs, as well as the debut release from Traveller, Chisel’s trio with Robert Ellis and Jonny Fritz — at the Refuge, the 33,000-square-foot building that once served as a monastery and now pulls triple duty as an art studio, live music venue, and Chisel’s headquarters.

“We used to live at the Refuge, too,” he says. “Now, we have a house as nearby as we could possibly be, without being on the grounds. It wound up being good for us to have a little bit of distance, and not be at ground zero all the time.”

A little bit of distance … Chisel has been working on adding some sort of space — a buffer zone between his current environment and the one he once inhabited — to much of his daily life. Once a roots-rock road warrior who spent eight months of every year on tour, he’s since grown more attached to the home, and the family, he’s built alongside Denae in Appleton. It’s easy to see why. The two have a son, Rhodes, as well as a new album, Tell Me True. Years ago, they would’ve promoted Tell Me True by hitting the highway and gigging relentlessly, but things are different these days. Priorities have shifted. And with those shifting priorities comes a deeper appreciation for the things that matter: family, roots, the gigs that do find a way onto the couple’s schedule, and the downtime that elapses between those shows.

You spent years living in a van, but this year has been different. What pushed you to stay home and plant deeper roots in Appleton?

Cory Chisel: As an artist who tours, you know how you feel like you’re constantly chasing something? You’re chasing the crowds. You’re chasing the people who like you. That’s what the majority of our careers have been. I’ve always felt like I’ve showed up to the party one year after the party ended. Our approach now is to invert that system, if only just to try it. We’re at a point where we’re looking inward and creating our own environment that has pieces of all those things we’ve seen elsewhere, rather than running to those places.

Adriel Denae: Finding out I was pregnant really shifted everything, too. I’d been living on the road since I was 21, and I enjoyed the gypsy lifestyle. I think I had this delusion that I was gonna have a baby and strap him on my back and keep doing it, but when our son arrived, I felt an immediate shift and started craving a deeper connection to the place I was living.

As artists, what are the benefits of spending more time in one place?

AD: It can really help you, in a creative context, to sink down a little deeper into life and a community. I enjoy interacting with artists who’ve lived this way for a long time, and never got on the industry boat the way we did. There are fascinating artists all over the world who’ve never played the game we started playing. I’m finding it really inspiring to interact with them. That’s something that’s fun about moving outside of the music mecca parts of the country.

Let’s compare your current situation with your busiest days as touring musicians. Which album kept you on the road the longest?

CC: That would be Old Believers. And I’m not complaining at all. I needed that experience.

AD: We did have a blast.

CC: We did. But I did have a nervous breakdown, too, where I felt like my soul was always two towns behind me. I showed up to the Letterman stage, and I’d be lying to you if I said I felt anything. This would happen a lot: I’d get to this place I thought I wanted to reach, and either it didn’t feel nearly as momentous as I had expected it to feel or the comedown was so strange that I’m not sure it was worth coming up. We traveled the world as bodiless ghosts for years. For most artists, that’s how you survive. You’re just trying to pick up the next $100 in the next town. But the thing is, that $100 is exactly the price it takes takes to get to the next $100. And at some point, you ask, “What are we doing, exactly? What’s next on this journey as an artist?” After years of touring nonstop, I was ready to try something new.

AD: We hit a season, right around the time we moved to Nashville, where we were only home for a few days a month for the whole year. We’d say hi to friends, do laundry, and then get going again. I liked the lifestyle. I honestly may have enjoyed it a bit more than Cory …

CC: Because I was in charge of the thing. When you’re in front of the boat, you’re taking the full waves, too. Nothing was wrong with it; I was just done with it for awhile. So that’s why I wanted to create a context where I could still be an artist, but reorganize.

And part of that organization included transforming the Refuge’s chapel into a recording studio. You made Tell Me True there. Is the studio a reaction to the more expensive studios you’ve seen elsewhere?

AD: When you’re a young musician, you spend a lot of time dreaming and anticipating the moment where you’re in the studio for the first time. You think it’s gonna be a certain way. But in reality, I was unprepared for the amount of anxiety and awkwardness that a professional studio environment can create. At first, I thought it was a problem with me. Then I read this interview with Elliot Smith, where he was comparing the process of home recording to the experience you get in a big studio. You know what it’s like in a big studio: There’s an artist sitting in a booth with headphones on and cords everywhere, and you get into this headspace where you’re ready to create your song, and suddenly there’s a buzz in some line somewhere, and everything has to stop, and everyone starts running around, and you have to sit there and maintain some space for yourself while they fix it. There’s a lot stacked against you, before you even consider the financial constraints. I can really understand the draw to recording in non-traditional spaces, whether it’s someone’s home or someplace else. A lot of my favorite recordings were done that way. We hit a point in our journey where we were really longing for that.

When did the songs for Tell Me True begin to arrive?

AD: During those months of our son, Rhodes, being a newborn.

CC: It arrived either as a way to soothe our little baby or immediately after he went to bed, in those weird half-awake, half-asleep moments you have as a new parent, where you’ve got a tiny amount of time to do something other than grapple with a new life. It was in those little, tiny spaces. I used to have all the time in the world to do God knows what. That time vanished, but the songs didn’t. I worried that if I added more to my life, the music would go away. But the music just accompanies life. It’s a way of digesting or processing what’s happening to you.

AD: I remember once, when Rhodes was just a few weeks old, I woke up in the middle of the night and Cory wasn’t in bed with us. I could hear a guitar from the other room and, around sunrise, Rhodes woke up and we both went to find Cory, and he was sitting on the floor in Rhodes’s room, which our son never actually moved into. He had that crazed look you get when you’ve been writing all night, and he’d completed a song. It came out through the night like that. There were other songs, like “Tell Me True,” that were refrains we’d been singing for weeks. A lot of the music on the record was something that had been floating around us in that three-month period. I feel like Rhodes brought a lot to us with his life, and that record is part of what he helped to create when he came.

You haven’t entirely stopped touring, though.

CC: We haven’t, but touring is different now. I don’t go out with Traveller for more than 10 days at a time. Our upcoming tour to Australia and New Zealand is a good example. We might have continued that run, but I just couldn’t do it. So Robert [Ellis] is going to Japan afterward to play solo shows. I have things now that matter more to me than going everywhere during a tour. Being present in this life, here, is my number one treasure. When I say to an audience now, “I’m so glad you’re here, and I’m so glad I’m here,” I’m definitely not lying. I love having so much truth to that exchange.

I visited Appleton for the first time this year as a Mile of Music performer. The town is great, but the festival … that festival is fantastic.

CC: Thank you. That festival was born out of one question: Could this thing be done differently? Could we have a festival that was really for the benefit of the people attending, as well as the artists playing? We weren’t asking ourselves, “How much money can we squeeze out of these people involved?” For me, it feels different than other festivals. So we thought, “If that’s possible, why can’t everything be changed?”

You mean, if a festival like Mile of Music can be successful, why can’t a recording studio like the Refuge be equally successful? Or a homemade album like Tell Me True?

CC: Sure. The music industry isn’t that old. We think of it as this unchangeable thing, but it hasn’t been around long enough to earn that kind of respect. I think it’s necessary to disrespect it a bit and see what can be changed.

Meanwhile, Adriel has been working on her new record, too.

AD: Cory and I are in different places in our careers. I’m just beginning the process of releasing my own songs and couldn’t be more excited to do it.

Norah Jones produced it. She’s been a friend and fan for years, right?

AD: I was a fan of hers first. Norah took Cory out on the road in 2012, and she wanted it to be a stripped-down opener. He brought me and a guitar player along, and we wound up finishing the tour just the two of us. I was so star struck. I could hardly even talk to her. I was just a huge fan and have been since her first record.

How did the tour lead to an offer to produce your record?

AD: She started asking me if I’d been writing my own songs, and she asked that I send them to her. I sent her some demos, and she was so encouraging and affirming. She had built out a home studio at her house and she offered to produce, and that was just the biggest dream come true. So I went to New York in January of that year, and I found out I was pregnant 48 hours before getting on the plane. That threw a huge curveball into the equation.

CC: Norah was pregnant, too, so the producer and the musician were both making a record and a baby at the same time.

AD: It was a very sober recording experience! We were in our pajamas and slippers the whole time. I kept seeing her as a painter, more than a producer. It felt like she was helping me find my colors and helping me paint this picture around my ideas. It was really fun to experience record-making with that kind of feminine sensibility and energy to it.

Where was Cory during this?

AD: He was watching Game of Thrones in Nashville.

CC: I told her not to make a record while Game of Thrones was on!

Do you look back and regret that you weren’t there, Cory?

CC: This was Adriel’s art, with Norah in the producer’s role. Now I get to enjoy it as one of my favorite records, and I don’t have that weird feeling of … you know when you work on an album, you can’t hear it the way other people hear it? It’s almost as though, if you participate in it, you can’t be a fan the way others can. So I’m glad to have that record in my collection, where it can be one of my favorites.

Is there a title?

AD: There’s still time to figure that out, but I’ve always thought of it as being called The Edge of Things, which is a song on the record. I like to start some of my sets with that song because, for me, it’s a kick in the pants to not be afraid to jump into the unknown. But I guess we’ll decide before February, which is when it’s coming out.

What about the Traveller record?

CC: If all of this pans out, it would be fun to time it together, so Traveller’s record and Adriel’s record both come out at the same time, and we’re all touring at once. Because then we’ll be a tribe, and everyone’s traveling all together. And suddenly, Gary, Indiana, becomes a lot more fun to be in.

Photo credit: Justus Poehls

Cale Tyson Shifts His Fashion Gear

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After moving to Nashville, Tennessee, from Fort Worth, Texas, there was a brief period where I would return to H-town for the holidays, and my pals would say something along the lines of “I love your outfit … you look very Nashville.” While I knew they intended this to be a compliment, I’ve never wanted my style to be categorized as the entire population of a city. After the third or fourth time hearing that, I bagged up my existing wardrobe, took it to the GoodWill off Gallatin Pike and started over. I have nothing against looking “Nashville.” I love Nashville. It’s just that I’d rather have my own style that reflects me and my interests — not my surroundings.

So, when singer/songwriter Cale Tyson told me he recently threw out every plaid, piped, pearl snap he owned and has hung his hat for a moment, I completely understood. The once outlaw-outfitted artist has traded his honky-tonk duds for a more accurate reflection of who he finds himself to be … today. I met up with Cale to capture two fresh looks that he’s enjoying these days.

When Cale showed up to the shoot wearing overalls and Birkenstocks, I knew the next couple of hours would be a lot of fun. Sure, the thought of combining overalls and Birks together can be a scary one. There is a high possibility of something going terribly wrong with the details, but Cale classes up the look with smart pairings. Layering the overalls over a solid, wide crew-neck tee, a neat cuff at the hem line, and a classic pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses elevated the outfit.

The only thing I love more than a monochromatic outfit is a natural white monochromatic outfit. Makes me think of West Texas deserts and great open skies. Cale tops off this look with a sandy belt, sandy cowboys boots, his favorite turquoise ring, and his go-to round metal frame Ray-Ban sunglasses. This look can carry into the winter and fall with the addition of sweaters, a denim jacket, a wool cap, or a structured hat. If you’re thinking of giving this look a go, just make sure to stick to a single color and vary up the shades and fabric textures. Don’t know where to start? Check out Imogene + Willie for some natural white staples.

Cale is doing a brilliant job keeping to the basics and looking far from basic. His wardrobe is made up of relaxed, versatile items that come together for an effortless, yet polished look. While the items hanging in Cale’s closet are great pieces, I think his tall, lanky posture and disheveled mane contribute more to individualizing his style. I dig the role his body and personality play in setting a vibe for whatever he throws on. There’s a lot shifting in the young musician’s life right now, and I’m enjoying hearing and seeing his expression through this phase.  ​

STREAM: Odell Fox, ‘Thank You’

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Artist: Odell Fox
Hometown: Austin, TX
Album Title: Thank You 
Release Date: September 12, 2017

In Their Words: “Odell Fox is a band that exists mostly on the road; we’ve been touring for a healthy (or unhealthy) chunk of the last three years. As independent artists, we depend a huge amount on the generosity of our families, friends, and fans. The gratitude we feel for our thus-far small but supportive audience is the inspiration for Jenner Fox’s beautiful song, and the title of this album. It’s also about Austin, the city that’s been our sporadic home for the last year-and-a-half. We like to think some of that town’s vibe has rubbed off on these tunes. And then, like so many doe-eyed Americana hopefuls before us, we ran off to record in Nashville, where we were lucky enough to work with producer Kai Welch. He helped us find a sound we didn’t know we had in us. We used one of Béla Fleck’s mics! We sat in a chair that Darrell Scott sat in! That golden sound was in the air around us, seemed like all we had to do was breathe it in and let it back out again.

What we wanted with this record — with any record — is to make something that honestly sounds and feels like the time and place we made it in. We got that with Thank You.” — Raph Odell Shapiro

Nicole Atkins and the Last-Call Lullabye

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She knew the session would be worth documenting, but at the time, Nicole Atkins didn’t realize that the cover of Goodnight, Rhonda Lee would be a shot of her soaking up one of the most difficult songs she’s ever written.

On the night they recorded the string parts for “Colors,” Atkins invited Griffin Lotz — a longtime friend of the Jersey native and a Rolling Stone photographer — to hang around the studio and take a few pictures of her and the guys in action. At one point, Lotz trained his lens on Atkins listening back to the somber strings that accompany her dusky voice and Robert Ellis on the piano. Atkins’s eyes recall the Atlantic waves that wash upon the shore that shaped her, a stunning aquamarine of mirthful reflection that turns tempestuous when the climate calls for it. In Lotz’s photo, the tide is calm: Captivated, and with eyes as big as her headphones, Atkins considers the parts she sang for the string players on the sad ballad that states, in simple, certain terms, that drinking had consumed her life.

“I can see exactly where I was when I wrote that song,” she says of “Colors,” which she and Ellis had recorded in one take in the fitting gloom of a lightless studio. Atkins had just left New Jersey for Nashville with her tour manager husband, Ryan; she had been struggling with sobriety and had gone through a rough relapse when she found herself lonely in their new city and he told her he was heading out to work a two-month jaunt. On top of that, she’d hit a wall on the creative front, and the combination of unlucky breaks had her steeping in despondence. “I was writing tons of songs,” she says. “We were shopping around demos, because we had no money to make a record, and I just had no idea what we were gonna do, you know? It was just months and months of not getting any phone calls, at all, about songs that I thought were good, and a record I thought was, you know, cohesive.”

She decided to go to New York for a few days, as her old friends from college and frequent tour buddies, the Avett Brothers, invited her to their gig at Madison Square Garden, and Margo Price had encouraged her to come along for her Saturday Night Live performance that same weekend. “I just thought, ‘Dude, everybody has stuff to do except for me,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I’M QUITTING MUSIC.’ And then I drank a bottle of dark rum and called everyone I knew, and I was like, ‘I’m just gonna write a musical. Fuck this.’”

One of those calls was to Jim Sclavunos, drummer of the Bad Seeds, who stepped out from a photo shoot with Nick Cave to answer the phone and assure her that quitting simply wasn’t something she was “allowed” to do. Another was to Ryan. “I obviously had to tell my husband the next day that we couldn’t have booze in the house, and it was just freaking me out,” she says. The melody for “Colors” came later, when she was sad, tired, and singing lines of the song into her phone on a train platform on her way to the airport in Newark: “Everywhere I go, the only things I see are glowing brown and green. The bottle’s gonna kill me.” That’s when she set the backbone for Goodnight, Rhonda Lee, an album named for Atkins’s drunk alter-ego: This is her sober record, one that thrives off hard-won clarity throughout, but “Colors” is a breakthrough so simple, painful, and pure that it serves as the album’s anchor. It’s a reminder that the toughest trouble can teach us things, though its lessons — to pour out the poison; to wean off a person or substance you can’t quit — are difficult to learn or even discuss.

“I think there’s a lot of shame that comes with being a woman, and being a musician, and being an alcoholic,” she says. “There’s a lot of embarrassment to feel; it’s not pretty or cute to talk about. There are a lot of sober women in music, but I don’t know if a lot talk of them about it — the only one I can think of is Bonnie Raitt. I write about my life on every record. This was just what was going on, and I couldn’t really write about anything else. Being in and out of sobriety for two years was just totally taking over my life. It was all I could think about. It’s weird: You know when they’re like, ‘It gets better, it gets easier, and you’ll have a day when you don’t even think about booze.’ I couldn’t imagine that because, even in long stretches of sobriety, it was like, ‘I’ll just have one.’” She did get there — at Bonnaroo, where she didn’t even think about the open bar, of all places — and reaching that internal summit was illuminating. “I thought, ‘Now, I have all this room in my brain just to think of music and my husband when he comes home.’ It was such a good feeling, that I wasn’t constantly like, ‘I’m so fucked. How am I going to be unfucked?’”

Those “other things” flooding her grey matter include intricate arrangements and some of the most challenging compositions she’s written yet, as Goodnight, Rhonda Lee is as much an instrumental triumph as it is a lyrical one. In addition to Ellis and Sclavuno, Atkins sat down with a number of esteemed pals — including Chris Isaak and Binky Griptite of the Dap-Kings — to hone in on exactly what she wanted to sing and how she wanted to sing it. Thanks to these collaborations and the brassy guidance of Nile City Sound, the Fort Worth-based production team behind the timeless quality of Leon Bridges’s Coming Home, the result capitalizes on the wry grit of her New York-honed chops; her unadulterated adoration of Lee Hazelwood, Roy Orbison, and classic soul; and the alt-country framework that informed her first forays into songwriting. Though her marriage is wonderful and she’s open to compulsively unpacking her relationship with alcohol in songs like “Colors” and the album’s title track, Atkins found inspiration in painful memories of broken romance, the kind of stuff most people are eager to leave in the haze of a blackout-peppered past. One instance took the shape of “A Little Crazy,” the grand, lonely cowgirl call Atkins and Isaak wrote in an hour after he suggested that she revisit a relationship that went wrong instead of the one going right.

“He was like, ‘You’re happily married — but remember the guy you dated when we toured? Let’s write about that,’” she says. “A lot of [Goodnight, Rhonda Lee] was written about a past relationship. I wanted to own a lot of things instead of saying, ‘This is terrible and I’m a victim.’ After that one particular breakup, I was fucking nuts. I had no control of my emotions whatsoever. I was willing to degrade everything I believed in just to have that comfort back.”

And thus we have Goodnight, Rhonda Lee instead of Goodbye. By dusting off the conversations, opening heartwounds of the past, and keeping those tidal eyes of hers open, Atkins is able to mine the hurt, humiliation, and disappointment they caused for musical gold, just as she does while working through her sobriety with the tape rolling.

“There are aspects of Rhonda Lee that are still kind of there that I’m kind of grateful for. I didn’t get sober and become a giant square,” she laughs. “It’s more so being in a place where you feel confident and better about yourself, that you’re able to hold certain situations that were painful and have some empathy for the people involved in those situations — including yourself.”

Soundscapes for the Silver Screen: A Conversation with Steelism

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Most music, to varying degrees, conveys a cinematic quality, but for pedal steel player Spencer Cullum and guitarist Jeremy Fetzer — aka the instrumental duo Steelism — their new album ism sweeps across vast film terrain. Influenced by legendary composers like France’s Serge Gainsbourg and Italy’s Ennio Morricone, among an array of classic soundtracks, Steelism’s latest offers listeners a journey through movie genres grounded in and through geographies. Both players are based in Nashville, where they recorded the album, but their travels clearly influenced the resulting soundscapes they explore on their follow-up to 2014’s 615 to Fame. Consider it the soundtrack (of sorts) to a film epic spanning decades, settings, and styles.

Cullum and Fetzer began Steelism after meeting in late 2010 during singer Caitlin Rose’s U.K. tour. Their name came from the fusion of their primary instruments, which both put to use in refreshing ways on ism, pushing past the traditional ideas surrounding each one and fusing a new relationship to the silver screen in listeners’ minds. “Shake Your Heel,” featuring Tristen, conveys the whimsy of a ‘60s British comedy while “Anthem” begins with the forlorn meditation film director Sam Mendes might employ before suddenly shifting into the rippling guitar of a heat-saddled California desert scene. What unites these seemingly disparate threads sits at the nexus of a robust visual sensibility and a lively sense of experimentation. Then, too, there’s the fact that Cullum and Fetzer just so happened to begin recording ism the day after Donald Trump’s election. In an effort to break past the heavy feeling pervading Nashville, they set about chasing a feeling that is emotive, expansive, and vibrant. As a result, their sophomore album offers listeners what many a movie offers viewers: a certain kind of escape-ism.

Let’s talk about the title. You’ve equated ism with bringing together colors and tones like a mid-century modern design, and so the word “prism” springs to mind. But I’m more curious about “ism” as a belief system or ideology. Does that play into the album’s themes in any way?

Jeremy Fetzer: We started recording the day after the election so I think, for all of us, it became an escape, and we did some soul-searching as we recorded the record. So it became our thing that our “ism” was Steelism.

Spencer Cullum: I think recording after the election — and me as an immigrant being rather terrified — there was more feeling involved. I think it helped us, beforehand, having everything demoed and worked out, and then we go in after this terrible election and add a feeling of terrified emotion to it. [Laughs]

JF: I remember driving to the coffee shop the morning after the results, and it looked like everyone was crying. We set up our gear in the studio and were like, “Okay, happy days. Here we go.”

And what does Steelism as an idea or spirit mean to you?

JF: Steelism came out of a lighthearted place where the sidemen rose to the center and removed the leader/singer from the equation. It’s been our way of disregarding the modern music industry norms and seeing how far we can take this project that we all really enjoy.

The cover art especially evokes this ‘70s palette, and you’ve referenced soundtracks from that decade as a particular influence. What is it about the era that inspired you?

JF: I think, with our last record, it had more of a throwback ‘60s sound and, to me, that sounded more black and white. We wanted this to be very hi-fi and colorful, sonically. It’s definitely inspired by ‘70s film soundtracks and Brian Eno productions from the ‘70s, so we wanted that to be part of the cover.

It’s incredibly colorful. On “Shake Your Heel,” you tap into this Italy vibe that reminded me of actor Marcello Mastroianni’s movies and then, on the very next song, “Anthem,” you’re suddenly in the California desert a la Marty Stuart. Was it less about playing with genres and more about playing with geographies?

SC: Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with that, especially with soundscapes of imagining a certain place. There was one song that we wrote called “Let It Brew,” which reminds me of where I used to grow up in the countryside — west coast of England. Every song definitely has a place of where we’ve traveled and how that influenced us.

JF: Right. It’s almost our attempt to create this visual landscape, where it’s like you’re taking a trip with Steelism.

That absolutely comes across in the album. At the same time, it’s undeniably cinematic. You’ve said elsewhere that composers like Serge Gainsbourg and Ennio Morricone influenced you both. What have you learned from them?

JF: So much of their stuff, it’s over the top and dramatic, but it’s also quirky and eccentric. It’s melodic. I think you can hear someone whistling one of their tunes in the grocery store, but then it’s also cinematic and huge in a movie theatre, so it’s trying to achieve both of those things: a pop sensibility and this dramatic landscape that you’re creating.

Do you ever hope to score some day?

JF: Absolutely. I was thinking about that more and more because, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were original soundtracks, but nowadays when that happens, it’s rarely ever bands; it’s usually more orchestral, or they’ll have a Trent Reznor soundscape. It’s very rare that there’s original band-style music for films these days.

Right, it seems more common to see an original song added to a soundtrack or score.

JF: Or music supervisors get a bunch of old songs, like a playlist.

So what director would you love to work with?

JF: I listened to a podcast just this morning with Sofia Coppola, and we’re both huge fans of The Virgin Suicides with Air on the soundtrack.

If you had to ascribe your album to a movie genre, what would it fall under?

SC: That’s a good one.

JF: Some sort of twisted English spy movie, where they fly to America and end up in the desert.

Oh absolutely, but then there’s got to be some kind of Italian villain in there.

JF: Absolutely. Then there’s a layover in Nashville, where they pick up a telecaster for some reason, but it doesn’t totally make sense.

SC: Yeah with the ending in Berlin, sort of vibe.

JF: Yeah, we go to Germany, too, that’s true.

What do you find so edifying about Nashville?

JF: We’ve both lived here for a while now; I’ve been here for about 12 years, and Spencer how long have you been here?

SC: About seven years.

JF: We both started our careers here as professional musicians, and we’ve seen the city evolve with growing pains, and we’ve both joked about moving away, but I say we’ve come to this point where we love it here and we’ve taken it in. With this record, we wanted to put the whole city into it. We made the whole thing at the same studio in Nashville, and everyone involved with the project lives here.

Right, you tapped Tristen and Ruby Amanfu, such gorgeous vocalists, to come in and heighten what you’ve already created. Do you have a bucket list about who you’ve love to work with?

SC: There’s a big list.

JF: It’s ongoing. I hope we can make enough records to work with everyone we want to.

Do you see it being pretty Nashville-specific?

JF: As far as Nashville people, we’re big fans of Kurt Wagner from Lampchop, but with each record, we definitely want to do something different. Maybe the next one we’ll do in England or something. We have no idea yet. And we’ve joked about doing a record where we don’t play guitar or steel on it.

Actually, your sound seems so ripe for a concept album. Have you considered that direction, as well?

JF: Absolutely.

SC: Oh yeah.

JF: It’ll be a triple album.

SC: The goal is working toward our triple album concept album where we just completely have our head up our ass and turn into late ‘70s prog idiots. [Laughs]

There are these statistics surrounding Nashville showing 80 people moving there a day. How have you handled that influx?

JF: I think it’s creating more work and opportunity, but we’re getting more crowded. I live a little farther away than in the shit downtown.

Flashing back to the origins of this duo, how did you know this was going to be a more substantial project than just two musicians getting together and jamming?

SC: We were touring so much with Caitlin — three months straight and then 11 months off. We recorded an EP together, and enjoyed it so much it became the monster.

JF: Yeah, we did an EP as a test run just to feel it out and then, when we started to play shows, people were into it. We found that people weren’t really missing the singer, so we kept it going.

The Lonely H, ‘Riding the Clutch’

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When our heart moves, it’s called a beat. When a drum sounds, that’s a beat, too. An organic pulse of melody that sometimes can stir us more than a guitar riff, it connects with the body in a visceral way, pumping the music forward just as our ventricles pump blood. There’s a reason that drummers are so often the quiet life force of a band: They may not be in the showiest position, standing atop the stage and interacting with the crowd, but they have that innate ability to tap into that magical, primal pulse of life. They blast what makes us human through those floor toms and hi-hats, a rhythm we’re born knowing how to breathe to but only they can synthesize into such magic.

This week, Nashville lost a beloved member of the musical community to cancer, Ben Eyestone, who most recently played drums for Little Bandit and who has also kept the rhythm for Nikki Lane. It was in 2013 that his band, the Lonely H, released their last record, a self-titled album filled with modern approaches to ’60s and ’70s rock that felt so full of boisterous energy and life in no small part due to Eyestone’s pulsing percussion. The Lonely H was, in many ways, a document of the beautiful synchronicity and familial atmosphere that exists in a certain corner of the Nashville music scene — his beloved friends Caitlin Rose, Melissa Mathes, Margo Price, and Alex Caress all appear on the record, as did the legendary sax player Bobby Keys, who peppers “Riding the Clutch” with a stellar, ground-shaking solo.

But at the heartbeat of the song is Eyestone, who builds a glorious pulse that keeps the music going and makes the sound linger in your bones. Eyestone’s family and friends suffered a loss that cannot be measured, and it’s impossible to find the right words to soothe their pain. The one thing the rest of us can do is to listen to him play; the permanence of records is an incredible, eternal gift. Put on “Riding the Clutch” and crank it … LOUD. Let your foot tap to Eyestone’s rhythm, and smile.

3×3: Jade Bird on Boyfriends, Barbies, and the Bluebird

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Artist: Jade Bird
Hometown: London, England
Latest Album: Something American
Personal Nicknames: Jadey … I wish I had something more imaginative … Birdmeister has a ring to it.

If you had to live the life of a character in a song, which song would you choose?

Ooh, great question! Every character seems to have such a bleak ending in the songs I like … I’ve always felt a strange connection to “Look at Miss Ohio.” There’s something about the character’s spirit running from having everything. I suppose any of the girls Ryan Adams or Hank Williams sing about — must be nice to be that doted upon.

Where would you most like to live or visit that you haven’t yet?

Nashville!! Although I’m on my way there soon to play the Bluebird with the incredible Brent Cobb, who I got to know on his tour this side of the Atlantic.

What was the last thing that made you really mad?

If it isn’t a boyfriend … I often get frustrated the most with myself. Generally, not doing the best I can at something really winds me up.

 

Brooklyn First photoshoot of the trip… as you can see it was a serious affair #jazzhands @shervinfoto

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If you had to get a tattoo of someone’s face, who would it be?

Oh wow. I don’t know if I like ANYone that much. If it was do or die, someone with a pretty face, like James Dean or a young Leonardo DiCaprio *swoon*.

Whose career do you admire the most?

Patti Smith or Johnny Cash — both I think are totally authentic through their whole career. The amount of music they put into the world is so inspiring in different ways. Cash’s hundreds of songs and Smith’s real push toward a new sound at that time.

What are you reading right now?

In Cold Blood

 

What a first meal I literally died and went to heaven after this… #newyorknewyork

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Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Both, I think every artist has a way of being so. I love being on stage more than anything, yet sometimes I very much like to hold up in my room and hide … until food and water is needed … and sunlight. I’m a bit like a plant, really.

What’s your favorite culinary spice?

I can’t cook to save my life, so I’ll go with paprika. On a side note, I don’t like dill .. .or too much coriander — they used to put it on everything in my old school canteen — not good.

What was your favorite childhood toy?

Barbies were definitely leading, at some point, followed closely by a life-sized Siberian husky who I named Shadow. I did used to create an army of my grandma’s ornamental elephants. (You’ve opened a can of worms here!)

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

Canon Fodder: Lucinda Williams, ‘Lucinda Williams’

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Because she spent so much time between albums — eight years between her second and third, six between her fourth and fifth — Lucinda Williams has been assigned a reputation as a perfectionist, as though country music must be approached with the sonic exactitude of prog-rock. But the near-decade interim separating 1980’s Happy Woman Blues and 1988’s Lucinda Williams doesn’t indicate a maniacal pursuit of a specific vision, although these songs are as close to perfect as just about any country album of that decade. Instead, the Louisiana-born, Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter spent those years redefining her sound away from acoustic blues to something closer to country-rock, moving out of Texas for Southern California, and trying like mad to sell herself to a record label. Recording Lucinda Williams took less than a month. Getting somebody to give a shit took significantly longer.

As Williams has said, in the 1980s, she was perceived as too country for rock radio and too rock for country radio. Lucinda Williams continually writes and rewrites its own rules, with each song presenting a slightly different definition of what “country” and “rock” might be. “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad” opens the album with a bouncy drum beat and a bright guitar lick, with Williams rushing through that title phrase, jumbling the words together as though mid-sprint. It’s full of hope and intense desire, both echoed on the story-song “The Night’s Too Long” and the list of demands “Passionate Kisses.” The blues still informs her songwriting, albeit in different forms: “Am I Too Blue” adheres to the country blues setting, but “Changed the Locks” is something new for Williams, a low-down urban blues tune surprisingly lascivious in its harmonica riff and humorous in its lust and self-delusion. “I changed the lock on my front door so you can’t see me anymore,” she testifies. “And you can’t come inside my house, and you can’t lie down on my couch.” Few singers — including Tom Petty, who covered the song in 1996 — could draw so much sexual promise out of the word “couch.”

Like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Lucinda Williams has become symbolic of the old art-versus-commerce debate, a manifestation of the grievous oversight of major labels and radio programmers, held up as evidence that the business of music, by default, ignores good music in favor of marketable product (as though there’s no overlap). Released in fall 1988, the album became a cause célèbre in Nashville, particularly among female musicians: Patty Loveless covered “The Night’s Too Long” in 1990, Mary Chapin Carpenter enjoyed her biggest hit with “Passionate Kisses” in 1991, and Emmylou Harris sang “Crescent City” on Cowgirl’s Prayer in 1993. You could almost reconstruct the tracklist with excellent covers.

Generally perceived as much more conservative than the audience or the artists it ostensibly serves, in the late 1980s, country radio was only just shifting away from the gauzy nostalgia of neo-traditionalists and the last sputterings of legacy artists and moving toward the hat acts who would define the genre into the next decade. In the fall of 1988, when Lucinda Williams finally made it to record store shelves, Dwight Yoakam, Rosanne Cash, Tanya Tucker, and the Oak Ridge Boys all enjoyed number one country hits. Noted country eccentric Lyle Lovett enjoyed two gold records in 1988 and 1989. Mainstream country music has become a thread-bare strawman for alt-country and roots audiences, but it wasn’t just the industry’s prudishness that kept Lucinda Williams off the charts and the playlists, despite that story’s persistence over the years.

It wasn’t something in the lyrics, either. There were rumors that radio executives objected to the prurience of the line, “His back’s all soaked with sweat,” sure to send housewives into a tizzy, but “The Night’s Too Long” was soon a single for Loveless. Williams’ voice was cited as a potentially alienating factor, one that blurred its syllables around the edges, slurring its speech after too many cold Coronas in some lost honkytonk. Williams replaces the recognizable twang with something more idiosyncratic, something more rooted in geography, something that was, at the time (and definitely still is), as foreign to country radio as ouds and zithers. Lovett’s deadpan drawl and Yoakam’s Bakersfield barb were similarly iconoclastic, but they were guys in an industry that preferred women more easily manageable and malleable (which is not to dismiss the self-possession of Williams’ female contemporaries, but more to speak to the considerable feat of their success).

Ultimately, Lucinda Williams just wasn’t designed for radio. It wasn’t meant for the mainstream. It has become exactly what it was supposed to be: a cult record, a foundational document, the wellspring of a new strain of music that would eventually be labeled alt-country. The Jayhawks might have debuted two years earlier, and Uncle Tupelo might have named the magazine, but this album — more than any other — revealed the limitations of Nashville and its neglect of very large swathes of country music listeners. Williams staked out all new territory. She had had a fairly itinerant life, born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but raised elsewhere. She’d lived in Arkansas with her father, the poet Miller Williams, then Texas, where she made two albums of tentative country blues that even her most avid fans don’t spin much anymore. Most of her 1980s were spent in Los Angeles, which is perhaps the most significant aspect of Lucinda Williams.

That city was a mecca for country music as early as the Great Depression, when itinerant Southerners and Midwesterners moved west looking for work. Singing cowboys proliferated throughout the 1930s and 1940s before they were eventually replaced by crooners and rock stars. The term “country-rock” was coined in Southern California, thanks to Gram Parsons and the Beau Brummels (who recorded the overlooked Bradley’s Barn with Owen Bradley in 1968). Around the same time, Bakersfield became a powerful force in country music; roughly two hours north of Los Angeles, the town supported more than its fair share of roadhouses and honkytonks, where country music was played on electric guitars with strong backbeats and where Buck Owens and Merle Haggard cut their teeth.

Williams might have appreciated those artists, but at least on her self-titled album, her sound never borrowed much from those scenes. Instead, Lucinda Williams sounds bound to a city that, in 1988, would have still been viewed by those back east as a den of crime and ersatz glamour — cocaine and liberalism, yuppies and punks. The city’s punk scene had somehow made room for twang, with X spiking their punk with rockabilly (and sharing stages with Dwight Yoakam) and Lone Justice sneaking out of the underground with “Ways to Be Wicked.” As Williams told Spin in 2016, “There was an actual really cool thing going on out in L.A. in the mid-‘80s, [acts] like the Long Ryders, the Lonesome Strangers, the Blasters, Rosie Flores, and X. I was just opening for bands, and a lot of labels were noticing me and would come to my gigs, but nobody would sign me; they all passed on me, even the smaller labels like Rhino and Rounder.” It took an English label to finally sign her.

To call Rough Trade a punk label would be to minimize the breadth of its catalog, which included a remarkable mix of industrial (Cabaret Voltaire), punk (Stiff Little Fingers), post-punk (the Pop Group), pop (the Smiths), and things in between (Panther Burns). The label opened an American office in 1987, with a mission to sign more U.S. acts. Still, Williams was a departure for the label — a risky bet that paid off. Lucinda Williams peaked at 39 on the Billboard album charts and spawned two EPs in 1989. Her next album would be released by an imprint of Elektra Records, the one after that by Mercury.

The portrayal of Williams as somehow outside the industry — as an alternative to the mainstream — persists today, perpetuated by the woman herself. Williams has continually distanced herself from what she described to Billboard as the “straighter country music industry of Nashville.” In response to that interview, Chuck Klosterman calls her out in Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs and predicts “Lucinda Williams’ music won’t matter in 20 years. Oh, she’ll be remembered historically, because the brainiacs who write pop reference books will always include her name under W. She’ll be a nifty signpost for music geeks. But her songs will die like softcover books filled with post-modern poetry, endorsed by Robert Pinsky and empty to everyone else. Lucinda Williams does not matter.”

As with so many Klosterman statements, it’s provocative, entertaining, and demonstrably untrue. Fourteen years later, Lucinda Williams still matters — as a songwriter routinely covered by artists in a range of genres, as an industry cautionary tale, as an alt-country figurehead, as an artist boldly reinventing herself on her most recent albums. And Lucinda Williams matters perhaps even more — not because we’re still talking about it 30 years later, but because no one is really from Los Angeles. At its heart, this is an album about small-town transplants in big cities, about Southern ex-pats far from home, and few artists have taken up that musical sensibility as confidently or as comfortably as Williams, an LA native displaced in L.A.

“The Night’s Too Long” makes the theme literal, describing a young woman who sells her belongings to move to where things are actually happening. Williams gives her a name, a job, and a hometown in the song’s first line: “Sylvia was working as a waitress in Beaumont.” She moves away to “get what I want,” which might as well be the laundry list of demands on “Passionate Kisses.” Home and travel and loneliness and melancholy suffuse these songs. “Crescent City” recounts a trip back to Louisiana, where she — maybe Lucinda herself, or perhaps Sylvia — hangs out with her family, listens to zydeco, takes rides in open cars. “Let’s see how these blues’ll do in a town where the good times stay,” she sings, as Doug Atwell’s fiddle solo winds its way through those familiar backroads and across that “longest bridge” over Pontchartrain. It’s a poignant song for any listener who doesn’t live where they grew up. It’s the sound of rediscovering the joy and reassurance of home, a theme that ultimately transcends genre, industry, and even performer.

LISTEN: Kashena Sampson, ‘Greasy Spoon’

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Artist: Kashena Sampson
Hometown: Las Vegas, NV
Song: “Greasy Spoon”
Album: Wild Heart
Release Date: August 18, 2017

In Their Words: “I bartended my ass off to make this record. I payed for everything with cash! I moved to Nashville without ever being here, didn’t know anyone. I just had a feeling it was where I needed to be and I went with it. I had to make this record. It’s been four years in the making. Some friends mentioned the Bomb Shelter to me, so I met up with Andrija [Tokic] and checked it out. The studio is just awesome. He put me together with Jon Estes, who worked with me on the album, producing and mixing. It was a perfect fit. Like magic! He understood what I was going for right from the start. We tracked all the songs in two days to tape with Jon Radford on drums, Jeremy Fetzer on guitar, and Jon Estes on bass, and a bunch of other instruments. The whole record was recorded in six days total. It was great. I wish I could record at that studio everyday.” — Kashena Sampson

Photo credit: Jonathan Rogers