Artist:Katie Oates Hometown: Charlotte, North Carolina Song: “Here in Gastonia” Album:We Go On: Si Kahn’s Songs of Hope in Hard Times Release Date: January 29, 2021 Label: Hollow Reed Arts Recordings
In Their Words: “Filmed as a live performance on location at Loray Mill, ‘Here in Gastonia’ (written by Si Kahn) commemorates the 1929 textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina. Containing historic and current-day footage of the mill and the strike, the music video is dedicated to textile worker and songwriter, Ella May Wiggins. Mother of 10 young children, Ella May used her songs to help union leaders organize and lobby congress for better wages and working conditions. The strike was met with violent suppression. 29-year-old Ella May was shot and killed while in a pickup truck with fellow workers on her way to a union meeting. The song and video remind us of the ongoing struggle for better lives and of the sacrifices people make in the fight for justice — past, present and future. We will continue their fight. We Go On.” — Katie Oates
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
Vince Gill has certainly influenced Brooke and I both in a big way since we remember hearing him the first time. We’ve admired him as a musical artist and person our whole lives. His songwriting and great stories he loves to tell, musicianship, the way he connects with his fans, and his love for his wife Amy Grant have always been inspiring factors for Brooke and what we set out to do in our own music. So happy opportunities have given us the chance to let Vince know just how much his music and big heart helped shape us to be the artists and people we are today.
What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?
Our favorite on stage memory is when we got to play the Grand Ole Opry on our 11th wedding anniversary in 2019. It’s always the most surreal experience to stand there on that sacred stage every chance we get to play it. To think of all the incredible artists we’ve loved and admired who’ve graced that stage and many who still stand there today. It’s also really special to share that moment as husband and wife. Two people who started out with the same goals and ambitions knowing that we once both dreamed of a time that we might get to play the Grand Ole Opry. We’ve had that privilege 25 times now and will be going back for our 26th appearance on November 27, 2020. There’s a picture of us holding hands on the Opry stage that will always hold our hearts. Go look for that on our Instagram page.
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
To encourage, uplift and leave people happier than we found them with every note played, song sung, story told and moment when you truly “become one” with the audience.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
Music has always been instilled in Darin and me since we were kids. Our families and communities where we were born and raised had a big hand in supporting and encouraging us since they first realized we had musical talent and a connection with people. I always had the natural ability to hear a song just once and know the lyrics. And Darin could pick up just about any instrument, even if he’d never played it before and start creating licks and melodies in just a matter of minutes. Growing up and hearing artists that our parents loved would eventually rub off on Darin and I and give us an even deeper appreciation for the music we loved and the dream of becoming professional artists ourselves one day.
How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?
Every song that Darin and I have ever selected for a record or live show relates to us first in some way. We think it’s important to channel the characters in songs. This makes you sing the song the way it’s intended to be interpreted and allows every listener who hears it to feel that connection too.
To hear Mipso perform, it’s hard to believe that Libby Rodenbough, Joseph Terell, Jacob Sharp, and Wood Robinson didn’t originally get together with the intention of digging into bluegrass history or starting a band. But as the self-described “indie kids” played around with vocal harmonies and playful strings as students at UNC Chapel Hill, the traditional sounds of their native North Carolina beckoned.
“I had a need for exploring my own roots — the places I’m from and the traditions that come from North Carolina and the Piedmont specifically,” Terrell, who plays the guitar, tells BGS. “There’s a lot of depth to the music that’s been made around here, and because a lot of those folks are still making music around here, it’s still passed down in neighborhoods, at jam sessions and orally.”
As Mipso’s audience grew, its sound evolved, integrating elements of pop with traditional strings and vocal harmonies, and the foursome reckoned with more than just chords and lyrics.
“I was trying to make sense of North Carolina and being a more long-term North Carolinian — not just by birth, but by choice,” says fiddle player Rodenbough, of the early days. “There was so much context and story behind this traditional music. Every song, even if it was a modern creation, had little threads that tied it back to words that had been sung for decades or hundreds of years. It just felt like… well, in a nice way, a bottomless pit. Or, what’s a nice way to say that?”
“A well! An inexhaustible well,” offers Terrell with a laugh. And they’re still drinking from it: Last month, the group issued their fifth full-length album, a self-titled effort that embraced the band’s quirks and their past experiences.
“We’ve been living together so closely for the last eight years, and for better or for worse, we’re us now,” says Terrell. “We had phases of the band where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to be this, we need to make a song this way.’ This record, it was like, ‘Fuck it, this is how we make music.’ We like it, and we’re weird if we’re weird, and if we’re not, we’re not, but this is how we go about it. Here’s Mipso.”
BGS: Plenty of songs on this album feel like they were born from one person’s memory or experience; “Let a Little Light In,” for example, has specific lyrics about childhood. How do you bring a song from one person’s brain or notebook to the band as a whole?
Joseph Terrell: The lyrics and the melodies are certainly an important part of what makes a song, but I think when we talk about combining our voices, we’re talking about making a presentation of a song that makes an emotional impact when people hear it. “Let a Little Light In” is a great example of a song that really transformed in the studio. The lyrics mostly came from me, but Libby and Jacob and Wood had more to do than I did with building this cool, playful soundscape of dancey noises to make up a kind of funhouse mirror of childhood weirdness.
Libby Rodenbough: A lot of the songs are lyrically one person’s, or maybe two people’s, work. But we talk about the meaning of songs when we talk about the arrangements because the delivery of it has so much to do with the emotional meaning. There’ve been songs before that we’ve vetoed or decided to leave off a record because they felt too specific to one person — the rest of the band was going to feel like a backing band. Part of our standard for what makes a Mipso song is that we all have to find an in-road somewhere, something we can sink our teeth into.
You see a lot of bands packing up and moving to places like Nashville or LA, but you’ve held tight to the community where you came up in North Carolina. What makes it such a special place for you, as people and as musicians?
Terrell: For me, North Carolina is where the music comes from, and Nashville or Los Angeles is where the business comes from. In as many ways as possible, trying to keep and hearth and home on the music side of that equation is going to be really healthier in the long run.
Rodenbough: I would say, too, that there’s a part of it that’s arbitrary: Because I was born here and went to school here, and because I believe that there are benefits that you can only reap after a certain amount of time spent in one place, this is the place where I still am. It could have been somewhere else. But it’s North Carolina, because I’m a North Carolinian. This is it.
Terrell: There’s a part of you, a Libby-ness, that’s because you’re from this place. It gets a little bit vague and spiritual on some level to justify it, but I do feel that that’s true somehow.
Rodenbough: We formed the type of connection to a place that we have here by having been born here and having come of age here — by having returned here from every tour for seven or eight years. I have a more intergenerational community of people in my life. I’ve known people when they’ve had babies, and I know their kids now. I’ve met their parents and grandparents. You just can’t really rush that process.
Terrell: I had dinner on the porch with my grandparents three weeks ago — they’re 92 and 94 — and my grandma gave me a CD of my great-grandmother telling stories. It was recorded in 1985. So I’ve just been driving around in my car listening to this CD, and it’s about all these places that I still go. I feel a spiritual connection here that I can’t exactly explain. Yet I would hate to think that this answer could be spun in a way that means, “If you weren’t born in a place, you’re not valuable to that place,” because certainly the reason I love Durham is because of the immigrant community. There’s lots of ways of being from a place.
One song that feels especially prescient on the new album is “Shelter.” I think a lot of people can relate to the idea of seeking out a place to be safe and accepted. What do those lyrics mean to you?
Terrell: That song came from Wood, primarily. He had this great melody that reminded us of a British Isles folk melody. Some of his family in Robeson County in Eastern North Carolina had been really impacted by one of the bad hurricanes, and he had the idea of telling that as a snippet of a story. But instead of making this about one very specific scenario where you’d need shelter, you have four different scenes that land on the same phrase or message — kind of in the tradition of country songwriting. Whether you’re a kid, an immigrant, a person facing natural disasters because of global warming, or the richest person in New York City going up into some big tower, this is a human need for shelter. We all need it, and therefore, we should all think of ourselves as tied together.
Rodenbough: And I think that a lot of the strife — to put it really lightly — happening in the country right now comes from an anxiety about lacking shelter, lacking a feeling of safety. That applies to people who are very clearly lacking in physical shelter as well as people who seem to be lacking for nothing. Our country has failed to provide that for people from every walk of life for a long time now, and so I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s unfortunately especially relatable right now. We all feel untethered. We all feel like we don’t really have a home.
Mipso’s sound developed in part thanks to in-person communities at places like festivals and neighborhood jams. Do you feel like there’s a way to emulate that in online communities?
Rodenbough: For so many subcultures, the internet has given people the gift of knowing that others like them exist. It is very empowering, and in some cases, that’s a bad thing — there are a lot of internet subcultures that we wish probably didn’t have that vehicle. But, for better or for worse, it makes something that probably felt very geographically disparate, and therefore disconnected, feel really strong and unified.
One example during COVID has been a Facebook group called Quarantine Happy Hour: They do a concert every night, or even a couple of concerts every night, and I’ve watched more bluegrass and old time music since [joining] than I did probably in the couple of years prior. It’s like a who’s-who, especially of contemporary old-time players, with bluegrass too. Every concert, no matter how well-known the performers are, has a couple of hundred people, and folks are tipping like crazy. And it’s interesting that it took a pandemic to make that happen, because we could have done that all along.
Even before the pandemic, though, Mipso was really harnessing the power of the internet to reach new fans — even listeners who maybe never considered themselves fans of traditional music.
Terrell: I think we’re probably more like a gateway drug into bluegrass than a haven for diehard fans. We have played a good number of bluegrass festivals and traditional-oriented-type venues, but I think we’re on the fringe of what they consider to be part of that world. If people find our music and like it, they might say, “Wait… there’s something in this that’s leading me towards all these other artists.” But there’s certainly not, like, a big tag we’re putting on our foreheads to weed out bluegrass or non-bluegrass fans.
Are there any misconceptions you think people have about bluegrass or traditional music — things they really get wrong?
Terrell: I mean, I have two things. The first is the idea that it’s white music, which I think is a really pernicious and awful myth. So much of this, the only reason we’re doing this is because it came from slaves who were here, and it came from African American music.
Rodenbough: It’s one of the nastiest and almost most ridiculous perversions of the truth, that white supremacists have used this type of music as an example of anglo-cultural achievement.
Terrell: The other [misconception] is that it’s tame or like, “stripped down.” For me, the best way to understand bluegrass specifically is that it was rock ’n’ roll right before rock ’n’ roll. It was high-energy and rip-roaring — the banjo twanged right before the electric guitar. It was the head-banging music of its day. [Laughs]
Rodenbough: This was a wild music — bluegrass in particular was not an old folky hokey thing. The way that we divide up the genres of traditional music comes straight out of marketing. I think it can be useful to understand how one style of music informs another that came later chronologically or something, but it’s not necessary to draw hard lines between old time and bluegrass in order to love stringband music or to love fiddle-centric music. All the borders are so blurry, just like with everything in history and in our overlapping cultures. I think that’s so wonderful, and I wouldn’t want to try to clean it up. That would be missing what’s so special about not even traditional music, but vernacular music — music that non-professionals make in their lives, about their lives.
Artist name:Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters (answered by Amanda) Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina Latest singles: “Desert Flowers” and “There May Come a Day” Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): I was in a band with my brother and my cousin when I was 8 that was called Crusty Chinchilla Rejects Recently Escaped from a Mental Institution…
What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?
I feel really lucky as I sit here and try to work out what my favorite memory of being on stage is… it’s nice that there have been so many. I think one of my favorites from recent memory was the last show of our 2019 tour opening for Amy Ray. It was at Club Café in Pittsburgh and I got to get up on stage for her last song, “I Didn’t Know a Damn Thing,” which is one of my favorites from her album Holler, and then the encore which was Tom Petty’s “Refugee.” I was enormously pregnant and the stage was already crowded so it was a tight squeeze! But I felt so cool just getting to sing along and dance. The energy in the room was fantastic.
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?
Probably literature and film, the most. When someone can tell a story in a highly relatable, moving way, I am very inspired by that. When I finish a good book or leave the theater after a really well-made film I almost always want to sit down and write a song.
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
I really enjoy making my band “quack” like the Mighty Ducks, but I would be lying if I said they were as into it as I am. And you can’t do it alone. So, mostly I just cry in the bathroom. Actually I am usually just scrambling to write a set list and eat something moments before we go on stage.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
I grew up in the land of all-night diners, and I’ve really been missing that especially now during the pandemic. So I would love to have a post-show burger at a proper diner somewhere… I feel like John Prine would have been a great guy to share a booth at a diner with. I have some questions for him about his songs that I kind of always hoped I’d have a chance to ask him in person.
How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?
I might actually do the reverse more… I tend to always use “I” even though I don’t write autobiographically very often. So in that way I guess I turn every character into “me” and I hide myself in that way…?
Back in March, the Avett Brothers — Scott and Seth Avett, along with bassist Bob Crawford — were scheduled to leave their homes in North Carolina and head out West, where their longtime producer, Rick Rubin, was waiting at his studio in Malibu. They were in a prolific place at the top of the year, and eager to keep up the momentum. They had just released Closer Than Together, their tenth studio album, in October 2019, and had written and recorded The Third Gleam, the latest chapter in a series of acoustic EPs. They had also written a ton of new material — enough for another album, by Scott’s estimation — and were all set to move forward with it when the coronavirus hit. Everything, including their flights to California, ground to a halt.
The only thing that’s gone according to plan for the Avetts in 2020 is The Third Gleam, and it’s weirdly fitting — fateful, even — that it’s a homecoming in many ways. The eight-song EP was ushered into a tumultuous time they never saw coming, one that’s forcing everyone to stay put, slow down, and count their blessings more fervently than usual. It’s a return to the sparse acoustic arrangements that the Avetts perfected in their early releases before they teamed up with Rubin in 2009 for their mainstream breakthrough, I And Love And You, which brought them into the rock arena.
The Second Gleam came out in 2008 just before I And Love And You changed their lives and their sound, and though they’ve never strayed from their bluegrass and folk framework, they haven’t returned to the simplicity of Scott and Seth working through ideas with only their guitars and each other for company to this degree in over a decade. (Crawford does join them on The Third Gleam; he wasn’t brought in for the first two.)
The Third Gleam was written long before the world abruptly changed, but it touches on themes that bubbled up from the tension and strife that’s shaped recent moments of violence, unrest, uncertainty, despair, and the embers of resilience, hope, and the pursuit of social justice that smolder in spite of all of the above. Gun violence (“I Should’ve Spent the Day With My Family”), facing the unknown with grace (“Victory”), considering mortality (“Prison to Heaven”), and the deep joys and struggles of the human condition (“The Fire”) are all explored here, in soft tones, plaintive strumming, and the meditative plucking of Scott’s banjo.
Each song is striking in its approachable yet profound sincerity, and this less-is-more approach is one they found to be particularly effective in this fractured time. These issues were on their minds before the coronavirus upended life as we know it, but the Avett Brothers find themselves finding new meaning on The Third Gleam back where they started: at home, in North Carolina, trying to make sense of the world with little more than two voices and two guitars in sharp relief. For Scott, it’s simple: “The smallness of the Gleam — that’s where its power is.”
BGS: When I think of the first two Gleams, some of the saddest songs you’ve ever written come to mind, like “If It’s the Beaches,” but also gems that became fan favorites, like “Murder in the City.” How do The Gleam, the Second Gleam and The Third Gleam stand out to you? What sets them apart from the rest of your work?
Scott Avett: If there was a heart or soul or spirit to everything we do, [The Gleams] orbit a bit closer to that. If there’s layers to an entity or a life, this is kind of at the pure center of it. I’m coming up with this theory for some reason right now with you. [Laughs] At the root of the songs, a lot of the songs on other releases, we have wrung them out — put them literally through the wringer — to see what they want to become, what they can become, what we’re trying to hear and get out of them. Are we challenging them or going too far with them? With these, we don’t ever take that journey. It’s much earlier in the inception of the life of the song that we stop meddling with them. There’s a little more to just be with them, which is at the root of things.
Seth Avett: The series itself sort of represents a simplification across many aspects of this whole thing. It represents the clearing out of many great things, many great tools, and many great advantages we have with our band and our resources, and our possibilities. It simplifies the process of collaboration, the process of artwork. It simplifies recording, mixing, mastering and everything else. Across the board, it’s just a process of simplification and reduction, to where the only real star is the lyrics. I think that we’re still attempting to make something that’s engaging, musically, but it’s no secret: what we put our time into is storytelling, writing words and then sharing them onstage. It’s always at the heart of our songs, and so the Gleam is presenting only the heart rather than the entire body in a way.
Bob Crawford: They’re Scott and Seth’s sketchbooks, really. If you knew these guys as well as I do — and I know a lot of people know them very well, because they put it all out there and they always have — but if you love a great painter’s paintings, and you become a connoisseur of that painter’s paintings, their sketchbooks are widely available nowadays, be it Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci. That’s how I look at the Gleams, stitched in with the fabric of all our work: they’re basically more broken down, raw thoughts that they guys have. They’ve always wanted these things to be quieter and less. This is the first one, I think, I’ve played on; normally it’s just Scott and Seth doing these. It’s just a chance for them to get quiet, be alone, and be brothers.
You’ve been very busy between Gleams. How has it been to return to this acoustic space after playing arena-ready roots-rock on Closer Than Together?
Seth Avett: What it does for me, personally, is it takes a new inventory of our trust, of our brotherhood — my trust for Scott and his trust for me — with no other real considerations. It’s wonderful to be reminded in such a genuine way, with such gravity, that we still trust each other completely, and we’re not moving forward based only on the efforts of others. We still have each other’s trust and care, and we still hold those things in the highest regard. It’s a funny thing: on the first two Gleams and on this one, when we go into the process of finding out what the songs are going to be, and we present them to each other, there’s very little discussion.
All these full-length records, whether one person wrote the whole song technically or not, the other one will have a certain amount of contribution to it. There’s a lot of weighing: “What does it mean?” “Can it be said better?” “Is this too much, is this too little?” We do consider them in a big way, and we consider the songs on the Gleams in a big way as well — but we hardly talk about it. It’s like, “Hey, here’s four songs that are feeling really good to me and things I want to say,” and the other brother says the same, and that’s it. We just do it. It’s cool.
Bob Crawford: These Gleams give them an opportunity to come together and work together a little more than they have in recent years. We’re coming full-circle because of the pandemic. Since the pandemic, they’ve been living very close together and spending more time together. They were always close as brothers and best friends, but closer, approximately, so they could get together. We were actually about to go to Malibu to record the week the pandemic hit, the week of the shutdown. Ultimately, we tried to do it all these different ways; it just didn’t work out, so it turned into them recording demos themselves, sending me the demos, and me recording the bass and sending them back.
Did any of these new songs pose a new challenge you hadn’t confronted in your songwriting before?
Scott Avett: What’s different about mine — and this is a change for Seth and I — we sort of switched places. Several years ago, I probably would’ve been the one that tended to be more rapid-fire, more erratic. I just chop it up with a lot of syllables and a lot of words. On this one, we switched. We were laughing about it. Seth’s songs have a lot of words and tell stories, they’re narrative, and then mine are very much personal and have a lot less words and a lot more space.
I always look at it that there’s only one character on the record, there’s one character in the story, and the two of us kind of make that character. We would do very different things on our own, probably. There’s a contrast to it, a gemini sort of approach to it I guess. [“I Should Have Spent the Day With My Family”] is a good example of what’s changed for us. It’s minor and subtle to anybody else, but it’s a change for us.
Seth Avett: If you look at The Third Gleam, it’s impossible not to compare and contrast between me and Scott — I know it is, I’m sure all of our fans do it — where the differences between the Seth and Scott songs have never been more laid bare, in terms of the difference of the vibe. Scott’s songs, they just have so much space and breadth in them. I don’t look at “Family” or “Fire” as songs that have a ton of breadth in them; they feel a bit more urgent.
The narratives have a bit more of an agenda. Whereas, “I Go to My Heart,” “Victory,” “Back into the Light,” they have quite a lot of breadth and space, and so I’m seeing a change in him. If we are writing the songs we’re meant to write, and we are giving reverence to our form, then the changes in us are the changes in the song. If you ask, “How have I seen his writing change?” I’m thinking about how he is growing and changing, as a man, as a father, as a brother. It’s all kind of wrapped in one.
The role of advocacy and activism in music has changed, even since you released Closer Than Together, and “Family” is a turning point for you especially, Seth. You mention your wife and child by name in a song about gun violence, and you’ve never done that before. How has it been to anchor the Gleam in this moment in that regard?
Seth Avett: I can’t say that there was a point where I said, “Okay, now I’m going to open the door and start writing these types of songs.” This sort of happened incrementally. A song like “Bang Bang,” there were multiple moments where I’d go to a hotel room, and I’d turn on the television, and it’s just one [show] after the next, from ridiculous garbage to the most eloquent sci-fi — but it’s always the leading man with the gun. It’s always presented with such power, and it’s just ridiculous. The idea of holding a gun to make someone powerful is absurd; it’s preposterous.
I had many moments like that, and then there were many shootings. “I Should Have Spent the Day with My Family” is an obvious, super-literal reaction; “We Americans,” that’s the first four years of a person’s life growing up as an American. I don’t know that there’s one moment where I gave myself permission, but there have been many moments that I consider wholly unavoidable in terms of taking that into the songwriting.
This has been a tumultuous time, so I was curious if you think there’s a connection between that and going back to the foundation with an acoustic EP. Do you find that it was an organic thing to take a step back and retract to that nucleus and get to the root of all things Avett with The Third Gleam, considering everything going on?
Bob Crawford: It’s definitely a time of reflection, and it does make you appreciate all we’ve done, because you don’t know when and how we’re going to do it again. … For me, “Victory” is the greatest song they ever wrote. We only win when we submit; we only find peace when we let go. How do we hold it all together in our hearts at the same time? How do we not lose our minds at that? How do we find true peace inside while there’s chaos flowing back and forth? I think, hopefully, the Avett Brothers can be part of the center of that. If you are the center of that, you’re not polarizing. You can’t alienate anybody. No matter what you know they believe, face to face is how we live the gospel, how we can make real change.
On the national music scene, North Carolina sets itself apart by blending the heritage of traditional roots music with the innovation of modern indie and Americana sounds. The bluegrass canon of North Carolina encompasses pioneers like Charlie Poole and Earl Scruggs, as well as groundbreaking musicians like Elizabeth Cotten, Alice Gerrard, and Doc Watson. Today’s spectrum of talent spans from modern favorites such as Darin & Brooke Aldridge, Balsam Range, and Steep Canyon Rangers, and the progressive perspective of the Avett Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens, Mandolin Orange, Hiss Golden Messenger, Mipso, and many more.
One example of how the state is merging past with present is the recent opening of North Carolina’s only vinyl pressing plant — Citizen Vinyl in Asheville.
According to press materials, the building’s third floor played host to Asheville’s historic WWNC (“Wonderful Western North Carolina”) which was once considered the most popular radio station in the United States. In 1927, the station hosted live performances by Jimmie Rodgers and made his first recordings shortly before he went to Bristol, Tennessee. In 1939, the station featured the first ever live performance by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys during its Mountain Music Time segment. Citizen Vinyl expects to keep the live music tradition alive in this former newspaper building, too.
Here at BGS, we’ve been committed to North Carolina music from our launch, notably with our Merlefest Late Night Jams, which are always worth staying up for. And how much do we love the IBMA World of Bluegrass week in Raleigh? Looking back on our archive, we gathered these songs from the artists we’ve covered over the years — and looking ahead, you’ll see all-new interviews with the Avett Brothers and Mipso, examine the classic country stars with roots in North Carolina, and spotlight some rising talent with video performances at the state’s most scenic destinations.
In the meantime, you can discover more about the North Carolina music scene through their website and on Instagram at @comehearnc
Editor’s note: This content brought to you in part by our partners at Crossroads Label Group.
This week, we feature one of the leading roots-pop bands working today: Mipso. An affable and endlessly-creative quartet formed in Chapel Hill, NC, they are made up of fiddle player Libby Rodenbough, mandolinist Jacob Sharp, guitarist Joseph Terrell, and bassist Wood Robinson.
Despite the anxious mood of their swing-state home base, it’s quite an exciting time for Mipso. Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Libby and Jacob (via Zoom of course) to discuss their lushly orchestrated, self-titled record which just dropped last week; and if you walk down 8th Avenue in Nashville this week, you might catch a billboard with their sheepish grins large in the sky.
How did they get here? It’s hard to find a group where every member can effortlessly sing lead and write genre-bending songs that fit seamlessly on six acclaimed albums — and counting — in under ten years. Earlier standout records like the breakout Dark Holler Pop, produced by fellow North Carolinian Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange, and Edges Run, which features a veritable online hit in the broken-voiced, emotional “People Change,” show how Mipso appeals not only to folk fest-loving moms and dads, but also their edgier kids, who appreciate their subversive turns of phrase and playful gender-ambiguous, neon-tinted wardrobe.
As Z. found out during his conversation with Libby and Jacob, the band nearly broke up after a series of grueling 150-shows-a-year runs, a scary car wreck, and the pressure of putting out Edges Run for their rapidly growing fanbase. The forced slower pace of this last year and a half has been a gift in several ways — allowing the group to catch their breath and hole up to write more collaboratively than ever. The shimmering sonic backdrop that gifted producer and musician Sandro Perri was able to bring to the Mipso sessions at Echo Mountain studio in Asheville really makes the songs feel like they could exist in any era.
You wouldn’t be alone if you heard the connection between the honey-hooked newest record with the timeless, mellow-with-a-hint-of-menace hits of the 1970s (looking at you James Taylor and Carly Simon). Songs like “Never Knew You Were Gone” show off Terrell’s gift for gently asking the deepest questions, like where he might go when he transitions to the other side in a “silvery fire,” or the sardonically nostalgic “Let A Little Light In,” which wonders if the soft-focused images we have of the peaceful, boomtime 1990s (when Mipso was growing up) could use some real scrutiny. Rodenbough’s silky fiddle work stars throughout –and her courageous, vulnerable lead vocal on “Your Body” may be the most memorable moment on the new work.
Stick around to the end of the episode to hear mandolinist Jacob Sharp introduce his favorite contribution, “Just Want To Be Loved.”
Artist:Cf Watkins Hometown: Westfield, North Carolina (Currently in Nashville, Tennessee) Song: “White Nights” Album:Babygirl Release Date: October 16, 2020 Label: Whatever’s Clever Records
In Their Words: “‘White Nights’ is based off of one of my favorite Dostoevsky short stories. On this album, I was trying to explore shifting the way I write music and, in a sense, share myself. I felt a lot of my music was coming from a place of my own longing, unrequited love, and heartbreak. Though I think all of those topics are worthy of our time and attention, I felt, as a woman especially, it was important for me to explore and show my strength as well. I started by simply shifting the focus from myself, and writing songs about something outside of myself. This was one of the first songs to come from that effort. I am singing from the male perspective, who has unrequitedly fallen in love with the female character. There was something very powerful for me to recontextualize romantic longing — to sing the male voice, and to have it honoring the power and magic of a woman.” — Cf Watkins
Steep Canyon Rangers’ Arm in Arm, their first collection of all-new material in two years, is a set of highly grown-up songs, some with storylines that you’d expect from the likes of Drive-By Truckers or Bruce Springsteen. It’s more loose-limbed and less traditional than past Rangers albums, with fine ensemble playing throughout.
BGS caught up with co-leaders Woody Platt and Graham Sharp in separate conversations leading up to the release of Arm in Arm. After starting with Platt yesterday, here is the conversation with Sharp.
BGS: With the band off the road, have you been able to do any songwriting during this time?
Sharp: I started off writing on a real tear the first few months. But then I slacked off a bit, in part because that coincided with me starting to make an album of my own. Switching from writing to recording slowed down that end of it, but working on my own stuff is kind of out of necessity. For the band to survive this and come back when it’s time, we’ve all got to look out for ourselves a little more.
It’s a strange new hustle, but we’re holding up pretty good. We’ve all been forced to sort of pivot, after having not stopped moving in 20 years. This is the longest any of us have stayed put that whole time. It takes a moment to settle, but it’s been eye-opening. Forced me into some new directions that have been good and ought to pay dividends once we can get the band back together. I’m trying to pull out as many silver linings as I can.
That’s a bit of news, about the solo album. What can you tell us about that?
I don’t know where or when it will ever come out, but the solo album is close to done. I’ve been working with Seth Kaufman from Floating Action in his little basement studio here in Black Mountain. It’s mostly new songs, and a handful of tunes the Rangers have been kicking around a while without getting to them. Nothing bluegrassy about it, mostly country to country-soul, because I have definite tendencies in that direction and a deep love for country music of the ’60s, ’70s, ’50s. That’s still among my favorites.
After Charles Humphreys III left the Rangers in 2017, this is the first album where you’ve written all the songs, not just most of them. Was there more pressure on you?
Not necessarily. It did not change my process much, anyway. I always just try to compile as much good material as I can. It is neat that with a band as organic as this one, a song can kick around for years where we’ll never find a place for it and then suddenly it’s revived. The last song on the album “Crystal Ship” was like that. I had that one for a long time and then backstage one day, [Mike] Ashworth just started playing that melody because he remembered it from a year or two earlier. It’s cool to have the band’s collective memory to draw on, where everybody is part of the process.
The first song “One Drop of Rain” is another. I probably wrote that one six or seven years ago and I’d just never taken the time to find the right groove and place for it. Then one night Woody and I were backstage, I had this little banjo roll, he had the phrasing to go with that and we put it together. A lot of songs come together over time like that. The process is more cumulative than me bringing something in, “Hey, I’ve got this new song.”
Do you have any particular favorite songs on this one?
Probably “One Drop of Rain” and “Honey on My Tongue,” for different reasons. I can remember exactly where I was and the situation I was trying to capture with “One Drop,” just shortly after my father-in-law had died very unexpectedly — 64 years old. What it gets at for me is, try to love your way through the hardest situations. And “Honey” is one I wrote with my daughter in mind. She was giving me a hard time, saying I never write songs for her — not true! But yeah, okay, that was written specifically for her. There are several songs about resilience, dealing with loss, setbacks. All to different degrees, tied to different moments in time.
This record sounds very, dare I say it, mature and grown up.
Well, we’re all passing into the point in our lives where we see a lot of past decisions come to fruition as everyone’s lives play out, our own as well as others. That perspective figures into it. As a songwriter, I’m maturing and trying to hone in on the emotional center of a song – and trying not to write about fluff. We were all very aware while making this album that a lot of the songs aren’t necessarily sad, but a little bit heavier.
And on this record, you’ve also got the first lead vocal from new bassist Barrett Smith.
It’s been cool, having him take on a bigger vocal role. With Woody or myself, it’s just us singing songs at this point. But with Barrett, there’s this ability to tailor songs to a new voice in the band. The song he sings, “Everything You Know,” we talked through the lyrics and the story. Woody and I have always done that, gone through songs in detail. Although sometimes, I don’t necessarily want to influence the pictures anybody else sees in their head while singing.
Once a song is written and out there, it belongs as much to the listener as the singer or the writer. Sometimes they come up with something different, too. “Can’t Get Home” from the last record, Woody thought I wrote that for soldiers coming home and he wasn’t the only one. I had not necessarily meant it that way, but I talked to enough other people about it that it kind of changed the song’s meaning for me, which was cool.
Did taking on the production yourself make Arm in Arm more collaborative than past albums?
I feel like what we do on stage is try to give everybody in the band moments to shine while keeping things moving. Producing this record ourselves was like that, more so than us playing while someone else producers. There are songs where I remember, so and so arranged this part, so and so suggested this harmony, so and so came up with the idea for this mix. So many different pieces where I can see everybody’s fingerprints. I’m proud of that.
I’m just psyched to have something to roll out into the world, reach out a little bit. You know, it’s not the best time to be releasing a record because we can’t tour. So I hope this will reach and touch people. I’m definitely prouder of this record than anything we’ve ever done.
Artist:Tyler Ramsey Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina Song: “Back on the Chain Gang” (Pretenders’ cover) Album:Found a Picture of You EP Release Date: October 16, 2020 Label: Fantasy Records
In Their Words: “There are two guitars that I used on this version of ‘Back on the Chain Gang’ — both my favorites. The acoustic is a ’50s Harmony H162 that was rebuilt by Scott Baxendale and the electric that comes in about halfway through is a late ’60s Guild Starfire V and is the most amazing electric I’ve ever owned. I found it in Knoxville at a friend’s guitar shop called Music Room Guitars when I really wasn’t looking for a guitar at all, and it changed the way I play as did the Baxendale! The guitar playing on Pretenders albums has always blown my mind. This song has such a beautiful and catchy lead-in and solo. I tried to capture the essence of it with solo fingerstyle guitar while making it sound like me.” — Tyler Ramsey
Photo credit: Bill Reynolds
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