Tag: old time music

With Honesty and Humor, JP Harris Relives a Rough Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Giles Clement

Nefesh Mountain: From the Inside Out

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In bluegrass, rags-to-riches stories are revered and glamorized, strong personal convictions are lauded, off-stage legends of wit and badassery are currency, and a sharp suit (rhinestones optional) and western hat speak volumes. There’s a notable correlation between the success of the genre’s greats and the presence of their personalities, perspectives, and stories throughout their art. The relatability, accessibility, and appeal of their songs can often be attributed not only to the level of talent, but also to the boldness with which their true selves are communicated, musically, to an audience. Roots music fans have always been hungry for indicators of an artist’s authenticity — a way to winnow out the performative, commercial aspects intrinsic to the recording industry and leave just the juiciest nuggets of “real life.”

Attempting to follow in that tradition and feed that hunger is Nefesh Mountain. Partners Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff want nothing more than to have the lens of their entire identities filtered through their brand of crisp, refined, and timeless bluegrass in myriad ways — tangible or intangible. Overtly, we hear this perspective in vocals sung in Hebrew, lyrical hooks derived from Jewish sayings, and a grassy cover of Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby.” Deeper, more subliminally, we find that the themes of family bonds, a love for home, a respect for nature, and prayers for peace and empathy comforting our ears also stem from their Jewish background. But the specificity of this origin point is neither alienating or confusing. Rather, it reinforces two truths about this music: Bluegrass is for everyone, and bluegrass is indeed better when the people who make it shine brightly throughout it.

So many different folks from so many different backgrounds have analogous stories of how they come into roots music. What is it about bluegrass, old-time, and these more vernacular forms of roots music that allows the heart and soul of the music to effortlessly intertwine and weave itself into any background, experience, or personal story?

Eric Lindberg: That’s such a good question and something I think about all the time. I think that folk music — you could use “folk” or “roots music” — is synonymous with bluegrass nowadays. It’s all under that same umbrella. When I hear folk music from anywhere, it seems to be the music that translates in a spiritual sense or, for some people, a religious sense — which isn’t exactly where we’re coming from — or, as a general function of society, as a storytelling vehicle.

When I see and hear music from China, or Eastern Europe, or Australia, or Ireland, there’s kind of a pentatonic or maybe diatonic, very simple matrix of melody that has that high lonesome sound. There’s a certain thing about bluegrass that feels American to me; it connects me to our country. The way that the melody lilts connects me to the mountains, to the trees, and the things that I feel are undeniably true in the world. It speaks to my soul, as a human being.

As we’ve played our music infused with our Jewish background through the years, Doni and I have gotten in touch with our own hearts and our own worlds, breaking down the barriers between anybody or anything. It’s been really exciting to live this way — where we’re all humans. We’re living, breathing things, and we all just want … well, we don’t all, unfortunately, but the people that I know just want to put more love out there. Most of humanity is good, in that sense. Folk music has a way of bringing that out, and bluegrass, specifically, has this way of embracing nature, the beauties of the world, and also the beauties of humanity: feelings, friendship, love.

On your record, those themes might be assumed to be simply, overtly Jewish, but they do fit uncannily within the working language of bluegrass. The parallels are there. I wonder if you feel audiences relate to your music because they already feel these parallels, perhaps not from a cultural Jewish background, but from their own perspectives. Are you seeing that connection happen?

Doni Zasloff: That’s exactly what is happening, and it brings us almost to tears because it’s so moving. After a show, we’ll go into the audience, and it’s so many people of so many different backgrounds. That’s what’s happening with this music, and I don’t even have words to express the gratitude that I feel that it could do that.

Yes, the point is that we’re singing about love. We’re singing about friendship. We’re singing about these universal themes. That’s why we’re singing about them. The little bit of Hebrew in it is our background — it’s so cool to listen to music with different languages threaded into it. It’s a cultural expression.

EL: When we sing Hebrew, we’re celebrating our culture and our heritage. I was talking with Jerry Douglas, during the [recording] sessions, about the Transatlantic Sessions that he’s been leading and a part of for so long, and about how much that’s influenced me. The Scottish-Irish music they create is sung in these ancient kind of Scottish/Gaelic tongues, and it’s never been a barrier to me. I listen to that on repeat.

DZ: To your point, the message is something that we know all people can relate to. On one of the songs, “The Narrow Bridge,” we sing an old saying from the 1800s: “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is to not be afraid.” We thought it was a beautiful, poetic saying. We turned it into a story and a song relating to the world right now and how it feels troubled and divided.

I love the lyric in that song, “From the cracks of a barren land, a beauty grows unplanned.” I feel like that’s what roots music is poised to accomplish, especially when it’s dedicated to the idea that we can come from different backgrounds, experience life, and be human with empathy and understanding for stories and experiences that might seem ultra-specific and somewhat forbidding. Have you tried to make what you do more relatable for that purpose? Or does it just work if you put it out into the universe as is?

EL: I think, on the one hand, it works if you just put it out into the universe, but we’re really careful what we put out. Well, not careful, but we really want to write songs that are universal. I think that’s something about folk music — it is universal. It goes back to that thought that we’re all people. There are certain things that we can all embrace and rejoice in about life, in general, while also coming at it from our own different places and different flavors. Like food, it’s a universal thing, but sometimes I want sushi and sometimes I want Mexican. We all have cultures — and beautiful cultures — but they’re better all celebrated in the mix together.

DZ: The magic of bluegrass and old-time music, for us, is that it’s been a way to break down some people’s perceptions. We’re Jewish Americans. This is who we are. I’ve lived here all my life. My mother lived here all her life, and my grandmother came from Poland. I think to be doing “Jewish bluegrass,” we’re quite literally being authentic to what we know and who we are. A lot of people will immediately try to stereotype Jewish music as klezmer music, even when say we play this music they’ll say, “Oh, are you like, klezmer-y?” No! We’re not. Yes, my great-grandmother lived in Poland, but I don’t, so that’s not authentic to me.

You’re making melting-pot music.

DZ: Right. And this is who I am.

EL: Jewish people are an interesting bunch of folks. Throughout all the years of this world, Jewish people have lived in all these places of the world: Eastern Europe, Spanish-speaking countries, South America — we’ve kind of moved all over the place. Historically, we’ve made music in all these different places where Jews have put down roots. In Eastern Europe, what we know as the branded Jewish music is klezmer and that’s because that’s where they lived! Klezmer is actually more of an Eastern European sound than a Jewish sound. For me, it’s interesting that Jewish people have lived in this country for centuries, but we haven’t played these American forms.

I want to shift gears a little bit. In my experience, being gay in bluegrass, if I boil my identity down to just those two communities, I find myself on the margins of both. Gays don’t know what to do with a gay who plays banjo, and bluegrass doesn’t know what to do with a gay who plays banjo. So I wondered … you exist in a very small overlap of the Venn diagram of Jewish identities and bluegrass. Do you feel the tension of being on the fringes of both of those communities?

EL: I do. I totally do. Hearing you talk about it makes me feel for you, because I live in a world — in my own head, and I want the world to be this way — where there are no barriers or lines between people. I was born in Brooklyn to be this Jewish American kid who happened to fall in love with bluegrass music. A lot of that was because my father actually converted to Judaism before I was born. My dad’s side of the family, who aren’t Jewish, all used to live in rural Georgia, and we’d go down there for weeks at a time, when I was a kid, being in the heartland, in Appalachia. With the make-up of who I am — whether it’s my experiences, where I was born, or the kind of melodies that I like — I can’t help but be a Jewish bluegrass musician. That’s just the truth. I think the world’s going to have to catch up to that. Just like you have to blaze your trail — which you are doing — Doni and I have to create, for lack of a better word, a genre around this music, because there’s no textbook for it.

That’s interesting, because in bluegrass, Jewish folks are one of very few marginalized, minority identities that actually have had ongoing, historical representation. From folks like Ralph Rinzler to Andy Statman to Jerry Wicentowski — how do you feel your music connects to that Jewish heritage within bluegrass? Or does it at all?

EL: I love Andy Statman. He’s a master klezmer musician and, obviously, a master on the mandolin. He changed the mandolin game around when Tony Trischka was changing the banjo game back in the ‘70s or earlier. Béla Fleck, by his heritage, is Jewish. Noam Pikelny is Jewish — and I’m not trying to out them in any way — and David Grisman. I mean, I’ve had so many heroes in the bluegrass world and whether they were Jewish or not has had no bearing on that. I’ve always found it interesting, actually, that so many Jews could record gospel music. I’ve always wondered about it with my big heroes. Like David Grisman … how did that work for him?

I think that, over the years, and especially since World War II, Jews in this country have been very silent about who they are, whether or not they’re religious with their Judaism, or just culturally. The biggest case, I think, is Bob Dylan who, in the end, converted away from Judaism, but who is obviously the biggest troubadour and songwriter of our time. He grew up as a Jew in the Midwest. When he moved to New York, he basically copied Woody Guthrie, a very non-Jewish persona. Jews have a hard time dealing with the events of World War II. I don’t have it totally worked out, but there’s something in there.

DZ: And I think that people with Jewish identities have been comfortable being the comedians, and it’s different for a Jewish person to come out and be very authentic. There has been some Jewish bluegrass in the past, but it has all been kind of comedic and not quite the same as us coming from a really soulful place, trying to speak to who we are, own it, share it, and take a different approach.

To get back to this prior question: Do you feel like you have looked to that representation of other people with Jewish identities in bluegrass as an influence? Does your music build on it and expound on it, or do you feel like you’re coming from a different place? A different artistic impetus?

EL: I feel the latter. We’re coming from a different place. I was really only influenced by Andy Statman, personally, and it wasn’t in a Jewish way. I have listened to his klezmer music, but that hasn’t had any effect on my own bluegrass music.

I guess I just wanted to feel out if you thought you were on the same family tree as that tradition, or if you felt you two had planted your own sapling. It sounds like you feel like you have your own sapling growing, which is not a qualitative judgement. I’m not saying you should be one or the other.

DZ: I think that we are just deeply inspired by music. All of our heroes, you know, that’s where the inspiration came. We are just trying to be authentic to the expression of the music that we are so inspired by — like Béla Fleck, and all of the guys on the record. We just make honest music and we’re super inspired by other people who do that.

EL: To sum it up, we didn’t set out to be the first ones, but it kind of weirdly happened this way for us. Nobody has ever recorded any sort of spiritual or Jewish heritage [influenced] bluegrass music of their own making. Either I haven’t heard it, it’s been infused with some sort of klezmer, or it’s been something like a Jew doing a cover of a bluegrass song or a song with Bill Monroe. There have been so many beautiful bluegrass songs that I’ve played through the years — all the Bill Monroe, the Flatt & Scruggs, the Stanley Brothers, all the way through Tony Rice, Jerry Douglas, and Béla. I feel like I’m standing more on their shoulders, in terms of the music. I feel like we’re a separate thing.

DZ: Our story is that we fell in love when we were doing this — it’s our love story. It came from falling in love and being vulnerable. We always say this is our baby, this is our life. It came so much from inside of us. We had no plan. We were just falling in love and being authentic with each other. It just happened.

WATCH: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes, ‘When We Love’

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Artist: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Hometown: Wytheville, VA and Big Stone Gap, VA
Song: “When We Love”
Album: Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes
Release Date: June 16, 2017
Label: Community Music, INC

In Their Words: “This song is our way of advocating for love in this time of divisions. Music celebrates our shared humanity. We are grateful for our friends who are doing inspiring work and especially the wonderful young people who appeared in this music video. The evidence is all around us that we can and should work together to build a more inclusive society.” — Sam Gleaves

Photo credit: Susi Lawson

LISTEN: Kelly Marie Martin, ‘Your Rockin’ Bow Don’t Roll No More’

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Artist: Kelly Marie Martin
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Song: “Your Rockin’ Bow Don’t Roll No More”
Album: The Last Kind Word
Release Date: May 23, 2017
Label: Questionable Records

In Their Words: “This song is from upcoming solo album, The Last Kind Word. The 15 original songs and sound interludes are a reflection of what happens when a broken-hearted girl who used to write songs but has been playing old-time back-up guitar and clawhammer banjo for some years, meets back up with her songwriting and sound design self. A little folky, old-time string trio; a little blue, strange travel sounds and beats; some spoken word; and, like the song here, a good ol’ heartbreak honky-tonk!” — Kelly Marie Martin

Photo credit: Jessie Gentry

Counsel of Elders: John Cohen on Never Giving Up the Search

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In 1959, John Cohen went searching for something. Were you to ask him at the time, before he headed south toward Kentucky from New York by way of bus, he might’ve responded that it had to do with a sound. But underneath that sonic exploration lay an interest in weightier connections beyond what he’d heard pour out of his family’s speakers when his mother or his father dropped the needle on a new Frank Sinatra LP. Cohen was looking for a connection.

Over the course of his long and varied career, Cohen has been a musician, a filmmaker, a photographer, and more, but at the heart of those titles — and the identities they color — exists a desire to cull the past for its most earnest and forgotten correspondences. As if the banjo playing of Roscoe Holcomb or the traditional songs Cohen performed with his band the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s and 1960s, and more recently with the Down Hill Strugglers, contained an integral message to be cared for and passed on. It’s an appreciation for the past that has led some to describe him as a documentarian or a historian or even a preservationist, but any such qualifier only strikes Cohen as being too stiff for the living things they contain.

Cohen will be performing with the Brooklyn-based old-time string band the Down Hill Strugglers at the Brooklyn Folk Festival beginning April 28. He joins a host of traditional and world sounds that have shaped him and continue to inform his listening aesthetic to this day. The search, after all, is never finished.

You’ve mentioned before how you wanted to differentiate yourself from your parents and the standards they listened to at the time — like Frank Sinatra — and, later, the collegiate trend within the folk revival. How did class factor into your taste?

My grandparents were immigrants. My parents were children of immigrants in New York City and, in the process of distancing themselves from their parents’ orthodox Russian Jewish background, they let us kids run wild in American culture. We lived in working class Queens, a place called Sunnyside, but around my 10th birthday, they changed classes and went down to the suburbs and took me with them. And I became middle-class.

By the end of my years in high school, I felt something was wrong and I became an open revolt against that. Music was an important part of my realization of what a cocoon the suburbs were. When I heard Woody Guthrie — this is 1948 I’m talking about — and the Carter Family and Uncle Dave Macon, well, it just opened my horizons. It showed me things about America that I had never even heard of. Here I was listening to Lead Belly when I came home from high school, while everyone else was listening to Frank Sinatra. I was on a very different track, and it’s been that for the next 70 years.

Authenticity is such a loaded word, and yet it seems like you were turned off of the pageantry and production that surrounded popular music at the time. What were you pursuing in this kind of sound?

It completed the picture. The middle class, the Frank Sinatra, the comfortable life, and even the things around rock ‘n’ roll, which are really beautiful and exciting but pretty safe … and then suddenly to see this other side to things. That put the two together and made a much bigger picture. I spent many years making films and photographs in Peru, and it’s even more profound there because the culture is so different. Everything is so different than what we’re raised on here in America. I’m not a universal man, but I have this sense of seeing things from many sides at once. I’m satisfied that I got to that place.

Now we have the Internet and infinite discovery at our fingertips, but you really had to go searching, especially with regards to music.

Eli Smith, a dear friend of mine who presents the Brooklyn Folk Festival, gave me an iPod a couple of years ago loaded with 15,000 tunes, but they’re mostly old blues, old hillbilly music, traditional music, and music from all around the world. I just can’t believe how much joy it gives me, and it’s not exactly “joy” because I put it on shuffle. One moment I’m listening to a Ukrainian orchestra and then, in the next moment, an old bluegrass band. In my mind, I’m constantly asking, “What is it about this music that can make me feel so good about each of them, or what do they have in common?” There’s a certain age to the music, to the singing, a certain vigor that you don’t find in every day life.

A certain connectivity?

Yeah, I mean I could go into ethnomusicology terms, but that’s just a structure around it. It’s a feeling, an intensity. There’s a wonderful writer and musician named Julius Lester and, during the Vietnam War, he went up to North Vietnam and said at midnight they were at the edge of the river waiting for a ferryboat to come and get them across. A ferryboat was just one man in a little boat with an oar, and [Lester] said that man was singing and it sounded just like Clarence Ashley, who was an Appalachian singer from the 1920s. To hear that, it explains it. The same feeling, the same ache to the voice, the same explanation of a life.

These subjects are universal. You’ve described yourself as an artist not a documentarian, and — as a thought experiment — if you put those two identities on the same spectrum, I wonder if you won’t fall somewhere in the middle, like a preservationist, if that’s not too staunch of a term.

It is. It reminds me of formaldehyde. Walter Evans, a wonderful photographer, he used the phrase, “Well, I work in a documentary style,” which means it looks like what people think a documentary is, but that doesn’t mean that it really is. The other thing that I find all over the place is that the word “interpretation” comes in more. I look objectively. I take a photograph: It’s a lens, it’s a film, it’s a fact. But by the time I finish with it, it’s an interpretation. In a way, it holds true for my music, too. I don’t consider myself to be an original musician. The origins are somewhere else, and I’m constantly interpreting those origins. That’s the way I have to look at it.

Yes, but you’re also interested in sticking to the instrumental and melodic foundation. There’s an inclination to preserve there.

I use that as the tools with which I work, but I admire so much and I’m so moved by some of the inventive old sounds that it’s my attempt to get at that. Of course, I can never be them — I can never be Clarence Ashley — but I can reach for it, as long as I don’t lose sight of the original. And very often when I sing or perform, I’ll refer to the source … and it’s not for historical reasons or anything; it just helps me get through the song.

A seeking instinct led you to Kentucky, and the idea of seeking has shifted in recent decades. Have we lost anything?

With the Internet and a lot of phonograph records, you can get the illusion that you’re with someone else and still be sitting on your sofa. But the real trick is to get up off the sofa and get out the door and go somewhere else. And don’t go as a tourist. Tourism is one of the biggest industries in the whole world right now, but that’s because people are looking for something beyond themselves. They don’t know how to approach it. I mean, I went down looking for banjo recordings.

Door-to-door, no less.

More gas station to gas station. And once the folks start retuning the banjo, it opens up their memories of songs they hadn’t played in years or sounds that they don’t play regularly. It’s like a continual opening up of very special things when you have something that you’re after.

New Lost City Ramblers at Newport Folk Festival

I look at the Internet and obviously someone could “seek” by searching, but you lose that face-to-face connectivity.

Oh yeah, and all the questions like, “Where am I going to eat?” When you go somewhere else, you gotta ask those questions yourself, unless you stay on the main path all the time. One of the things about my approach to music — and it’s not just me alone — is when you hear something that you wanna get at and you try to play it, you’re engaging in a very different way. You have to listen again; you have to listen closely. That’s another form of engagement. I guess it’s about seeking the experience of making music or participating in it rather than just listening to it.

What excites you about the Brooklyn Folk Festival?

It’s a reflection of all the things I’ve been talking about. It’s a great opportunity to see these people in person and hear the music in person, but again, you’re not sitting in your living room with your headphones on. You’re there.

Like you said, opening up the experience.

Yeah, the depth of variety of music … it’s like that iPod. It’s loaded with stuff from all over the place and strong because it’s been curated: They selected one group rather than another. And it goes back in time, as well as being contemporary.

Years ago, in 1961, we formed an organization called the Friends of Old-Time Music and our purpose, for the first time, was to bring traditional performers from the countryside into the city and give them solo concerts. It was the first time we had tried that. Very often, you have a traditional American singer come and be a guest on a Pete Seeger show or a festival or something. Here we were putting on full concerts and that kind of set things in motion in this direction.

Nowadays we’re enjoying the culmination of that exposure.

When my band the New Lost City Ramblers started in 1958, we tried to get at that music: The music that wasn’t being heard, we tried to perform it. We were showing that city kids or urban kids or kids from another tradition could really involve themselves in performing this music, and I’m so proud, after all these years, to see the size of the string bands. There’re festivals and there’re gatherings; it’s all over the place. How many young men and young women study violin and then they change their mind and they play fiddle music? They’re off and running.

Lede photo: John Cohen with Doc Watson and Mississippi John Hurt. All photos courtesy of John Cohen.

LISTEN: The Resonant Rogues, ‘Can’t Come In’

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Artist: The Resonant Rogues
Hometown: Asheville, NC
Song: “Can’t Come In”
Album: Hands in the Dirt
Release Date: May 12, 2017

In Their Words: “This song is an attempt to transcend borders, to blur lines drawn between genres, geography, and genes. ‘Can’t Come In’ is a story about displacement, which is an unfortunately common experience throughout human history. The verses are a plea for refuge, and the chorus is a closed door. The final verse and chorus are exactly what the lyrics sound like — my hope for how we might treat each other.

We sent the song to our friends in Istanbul, who are in a multi-national band called Country for Syria. They learned the tune, and their guitarist, Bashar, wrote a new verse about his experience of losing and leaving his home in Syria. We loved it and asked him to record it on our album. We are all so fortunate that he agreed and was able to make it happen because it really makes the song. There is so much fear of the ‘other’ in this world. My deepest wish as a musician is to bridge some of those cultural gaps, so that we can find our common humanity.” — Sparrow

Photo credit: Michelle Nicolette Kowalski

LISTEN: Daniel Koulack, ‘Hummingbird Waltz’

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Artist: Daniel Koulack
Hometown: Winnipeg, Manitoba
Song: "Hummingbird Waltz"
Album: Frailing to Succeed
Release Date: December 9
Label: Little Giant Music

In Their Words: "Recording with this group of great musicians (and wonderful old friends) was an incredibly rich and indescribably fun experience! The music has its own personality and an element of humanity to it that I am very proud of. It is jazzy, but not really jazz: When I write, I explore the banjo within its confines as a modal instrument playing things that really make sense on the banjo. I then build out from there using other instruments to highlight, play counter melodies, create harmonic movement, and solo. So, rather than hearing banjo playing jazz, you are hearing wonderful musicians playing and improvising on instruments associated with jazz … but they have been tricked into playing banjo music! The album title, Frailing to Succeed, was named by a friend who came up with the title of my first recording, Clawhammer Your Way to the Top (1992)." — Daniel Koulack

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STREAM: Piedmont Melody Makers, ‘Wonderful World Outside’

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Artist: Piedmont Melody Makers
Hometown: Durham, NC
Album: Wonderful World Outside
Release Date: November 18

In Their Words: “The Piedmont Melody Makers joined forces when I heard Cliff Hale and Alice Gerrard singing in Alice’s kitchen in Durham, North Carolina. It didn’t take much time for Jim Watson to join the fray, and the next thing I knew, we were playing shows. Wonderful World Outside started as an experiment that had to become a full-length recording. It was all so natural — the destiny was predetermined. I think our love of harmony singing and songwriting that is nurtured by the honest emotions inherent in old-time country songs provides our template for musical expression. Alice Gerrard is an old-time and bluegrass music Athena, full of wisdom and power. The fellers are just trying to keep up. We love a good song, and we want to breathe life into it.” –– Chris Brashear, fiddler

LISTEN: 3hattrio, ‘Texas Time Traveler’

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Artist: 3hattrio
Hometown: Southwest Utah
Song: "Texas Time Traveler"
Album: Solitare
Release Date: September 9

In Their Words: "'Texas Traveler' is a traditional, Black string-band tune that I’ve always loved. The simple words, 'Oh, early in the morning,' slay me. They fit so perfectly. I’ve played it on the banjo for years. It was really from that traditional launch pad the Eli and Greg took the tune into the realm of time travel. Each time we play it, I feel like we get going down the runway then lift off to another time.” — Hal Cannon (banjo, guitar, vocals)

Photo credit: Regina Pagles

Different Strokes: Kaia Kater in Conversation with Nefesh Mountain

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The cultural contrasts between Kaia Kater — the singing, Canadian, clawhammer banjo player of Afro-Caribbean descent — and Nefesh Mountain — a northeastern, husband-and-wife bluegrass duo made up of Jewish musicians Eric Lindberg and Doni Zasloff — are immediately obvious. But once you get them all on the phone together and begin to wade into the favorite topic of virtually every artist — music-makers they admire — commonalities quickly emerge.

For starters, Kater and Lindberg, who also plays banjo, share a deep admiration for the musical curiosity of Béla Fleck. Kater was captivated by watching Fleck mix it up with his peers on the Banjo Masters stage at Grey Fox, hold his own with Questlove during a one-of-a-kind live jam, and retrace the banjo’s roots to West Africa in the documentary Throw Down Your Heart, while Lindberg has closely followed Fleck’s virtuosic pivots from progressive bluegrass to jazz fusion, classical, and a dizzying array of other stylistic territory. Fleck could easily “coast on how well he’s doing,” Kater marveled, “but I feel like he’s always into new things and discovering different parts of the instrument or its history.” “That, for me, has broken down any mental barriers that I’ve had,” Lindberg concured, “and maybe in some ways has helped me say, ‘It’s okay to do this,’ and kinda be fearless in it.”

They bonded, too, over their encounters with upright bassist Mark Schatz, who played on Nefesh Mountain’s recently released self-titled debut. “Did Mark show you any of his hambone?” Kater wanted to know. “Oh yeah!” Zasloff enthused. “He clogged and hamboned on the record.”

Kater’s latest album, Nine Pin, also has a track featuring percussive dance. But that’s hardly the most significant similarity between her output and Nefesh’s. Both artists are incorporating their multi-faceted identities and voices into string band music in compelling ways, and they had plenty to say about what it takes to win over an audience when you're coming from an unexpected vantage point.

Doni and Eric, meet Kaia. Kaia, meet Doni and Eric. I presume you’re new to each other’s music.

Eric Lindberg: Nice to meet you.

Kaia Kater: I just checked you guys out. You sound amazing. I just love it.

EL: Thanks! You, too.

Doni Zasloff: Likewise.

Let’s start with your encounters with preconceived notions about bluegrass music — who makes it, who it’s for, what it sounds like. My understanding, Kaia, is that, at some point after you picked up the banjo, you came to recognize that women of color are not well-represented in bluegrass. How did that shape your decision about what direction to take your banjo playing?

KK: I started playing the banjo, I think, at a time when it wasn’t very popular, so I didn’t tell many people. I started when I was maybe 12. I grew up going to bluegrass festivals. Like, I went to Grey Fox for a long time. I mean, that was before even the Chocolate Drops [were well known]. I sort of thought that it was a white instrument, and I just really liked it, which is why I picked it up.

I distinctly remember the Chocolate Drops showcasing at Folk Alliance and, at that point, they were just a bunch of rag-tag college kids who met their mentor, Joe Thompson, and realized the importance of bringing Black string band music into the musical dialogue. So I was obviously very inspired by what they were doing. Over the last 10 years, I [found] Valerie June — she’s a Black artist in string band and old-time music — and Leyla McCalla, who plays string band music.

McCalla’s collaborated with the Chocolate Drops at times.

KK: Yeah. So I think in terms of Black women playing old-time string band music, there’s never been a better time. I feel like we have critical mass now, which is a funny thing to say, but it feels good.

For a long time, I didn’t really wanna bring race into my music. I didn’t really brand myself as any type of Black music. I had a lot of influences who were Black women … like Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill were great influences of mine. I’m still coming to terms with what it means to me. I was talking to Leyla about it: There’s this understanding that the music you play is largely for white audiences. My cousins, they listen to Fetty Wap. They don’t listen to Abigail Washburn or anything like that. So, at a young age, I knew that my musical interests were a little bit different. I think I’m still trying to find my place within that and who I want to be and what I want to say.

Doni and Eric, you’ve pointed out that bluegrass typically exists in non-Jewish contexts. And I would add that there’s often been a perceived connection between bluegrass and white, protestant, Christian gospel traditions, as seen in the repertoires of Ralph Stanley, Doyle Lawson, Ricky Skaggs, Dailey & Vincent, and others. What made pushing against that perception appealing?

DZ: I would just start by saying, because it’s always been a vehicle for spirituality, it felt almost natural. We loved this music always. From our background, it was like, “Of course it’s gonna make sense for this.” It’s always been that vehicle in a lot of ways.

EL: I’ve loved everyone you just mentioned deeply since I was a kid, especiall Ricky Skaggs & the Kentucky Thunder Band and Ralph Stanley. If you’re going to put genres on it — which we all kind of hate using genres these days, because it’s all so cross-cultural — it was never religious music, per se. To me, it was just American music, but it always had this Christian undertone, which is not a bad thing in the slightest. But it just wasn’t one that I connected to in Brooklyn growing up. So it was just a little inward struggle. I felt so powerfully connected to my American heritage through bluegrass and old-time.

Our band and our music is very much by accident. We both are huge bluegrass fans, and when we were writing our music, this is what came out. It wasn’t like a purposeful endeavor to try to go out and blend stuff. As an artist, it really makes me feel good to try to follow my truth. And Kaia, we have some common ground here, where it’s not the norm; it’s not what people would think.

We’re on the road now. Whenever we’re traveling in airports — this just happened, like, two days ago: Someone came up to me and saw a banjo and said, “What do you do?” “Oh, we play bluegrass.” “What kind of bluegrass?” “We play Jewish bluegrass.” And then there’s a roar of laughter.

DZ: They can’t control it. They laugh.

EL: Like it’s a joke. Of course, you’ve gotta kinda look at it like that. Mel Brooks kind of set a tone for Jews being funny in the Old West and stuff like that.

DZ: But that’s not what we’re doing at all. It’s very soulful and it’s very authentic. I would say a preconceived notion is definitely something we face. But the minute people hear us and see where we’re coming from — and it’s this really authentic and spiritual place — they get it. But it does take a little bit of laughter and, “Wait. You’re doing what?”

You’ve pointed out an overlap between the instrumentation of bluegrass and Klezmer music.

EL: Yeah. Obviously, all over the world, the violin is played pretty commonly, especially in Klezmer. You have guys like Andy Statman, who can do the cross-pollination of taking a mandolin and playing Bill Monroe tunes and also play in a Klezmer context. Beyond the instrumentation, the overall feeling and drive of bluegrass, like a slight bit ahead of the beat, [is shared by] bluegrass and Klezmer. The same thing that makes Jews get up and dance the Hora [makes people] dance in the round to old-time fiddle tunes.

DZ: We actually experience that when we do these concerts. A lot of the audiences may not have had experience with bluegrass, some of the Jewish audiences. And the minute we start playing this music — there’s a Hebrew word called “ruach” which means spirit, and that spirit is in Klezmer that a lot of the Jewish community has felt — and they absolutely feel it the minute the bluegrass starts.

You’ve all made conscious choices about how you want to present yourselves as musicians, how you want to frame what you’re doing. Kaia, you straddle trad performer and singer/songwriter territory. Why is it important to you to do both, and emphasize that you do both?

KK: I think it comes with what Eric was saying about genres and how sometimes it is easy to get stuck in a genre. I think you can be and do whatever you wanna do. But for obvious reasons — for marketing reasons — people tend to categorize. You were talking about people asking you in the airport, "What do you do?" You get that question so often, and it’s a frustrating question.

I’ve always been drawn to the lyrical side of things, and I think it’s what keeps it interesting for me. It’s a way that I feel like I can grow. It’s been a little bit challenging to [step forward] more as a songwriter, because my first album was very heavy on the trad stuff. [For Nine Pin] I wrote a song called “Rising Down,” which was about the Black Lives Matter movement, and I had a little bit of apprehension: “How are people gonna take this?" Maybe people just want me to be a trad artist that plays West Virginia music or something. But it’s been really well received, which I’m really thankful for.

So this airport encounter that’s come up twice now … that’s a moment when you introduced yourselves explicitly as a Jewish bluegrass duo. What, to you, is the difference between placing the Jewish descriptor right out front like that and calling yourselves a bluegrass duo made up of two people who are Jewish?

EL: That’s a good question. I don’t present it that way. I don’t come out and say, “Jewish bluegrass.” Usually what I say is, “We play bluegrass.” We’ll show up in Denver and someone goes, “Oh, you’re in Denver. Are you playing [this or that venue]?” And we’re like, “No, we’re actually playing at a synagogue.” And then they go, “Huh?” And I go, “Well, we play Jewish bluegrass, and we’re leading a bluegrass Shabbat service tonight with a congregation, and then we have a big community-wide concert the next day.” And they’re still like, “So you’re not playing at Red Rocks?”

When Doni and I set out to make this record, I think we both felt really strongly that we wanted to make a bluegrass record from the perspective of two Jewish Americans.

DZ: One thing we’ve definitely come up against is the word “Jewgrass.” We don’t have a problem with it, but again it’s this question of, “What does Jewgrass imply?” So actually, I love saying “Jewish bluegrass.” I love to say it, because that’s what we’re doing. It’s just a matter of being authentic and owning who you are and celebrating your background, our background. I don’t know the best way to say it — I guess I’m just trying to be it. I’m not really sure of the language yet.

Kaia, your mother has been involved in organizing folk festivals for years, and you grew up attending them. I know you’ve also pursued formal studies in Appalachian music and, in fact, just completed your degree. Moving through those contexts, how have you made space for yourself?

KK: Doni, I really liked what you were saying about past all the labels “Is this Appalachian? Or is this bluegrass? What is it?” I feel the same. I think, at the end of the day, you just want people to hear your music for what it is. It can be many different things — things that, to a lot of people, seem contradictory or just not the norm.

Just speaking from a very recent experience, I spent four years in West Virginia going to school. There were a lot of experiences for me as a Black person going to West Virginia, which is not really Southern, but I think a lot of West Virginians think of themselves as aligning more with a Southern sort of mentality. There was so much richness there, and I learned an incredible amount, spending four years in a community and meeting people and going to square dances. You know, there are a lot of old timers that are pushing 80 who won’t be with us much longer, and them being willing to impart traditions on a Black Canadian, which I was very thankful for. There was a lot of beauty in moving to a region whose music I’d admired for such a long time.

If 70 or 75 percent of the time it was a wonderful experience, there was also that other part of the experience where I did encounter some racism, or I witnessed racism. I felt the racial divide very strongly, more so than in Canada. … I toured with a string band and a percussive dance team, clogging and flatfooting and Appalachian dance styles. I was with 15 other people from the school. It was myself and a Black tap dancer named Katharine Manor. We performed and then we were standing together at intermission. Nobody came up and talked to us. Like, nobody. And we would even try and talk to people. They weren’t really responding to us. We looked around and our friends, our dear friends, who are white, were getting such positive responses from some of these people. It didn’t cut us deeply, but the tension as palpable. At that point, I realized, “Yeah, you’re gonna perform for people that won’t get it, or that don’t understand your place in this type of music. That’s okay, because the majority will.”

When I’ve poured my heart and soul out for 45 minutes and I’m not getting any sort of response, at that point, you just have to do it for yourself. You have to understand that, some people’s hearts, you can’t change. Coming back from that experience, I think I’m much more Zen about the whole thing. I will try to change to change hearts where I can, but it’s not my problem if people aren’t open to what I do or what I have to say.

Eric and Doni, what does your performing life tend to look like? How often are you playing to an audience who shares a religious and cultural identity with you but is unfamiliar with bluegrass?

EL: Our shows are all over the map. We play for only-Jewish audiences sometimes, and for everybody. The gig changes from day to day.

One really bright note since we’ve launched the record and started to hear back from people [is] how many Jews love bluegrass. This is something I’m really proud to say I think people needed. It’s so gratifying to get an email from someone that says, “I’m a Jew who lives in Memphis, and I never thought this could be done.” Jewish audiences are really receptive to it, as well as non-Jewish audiences, who are really eager to learn about how Jews consider their spirituality. There are so many universal themes in what we write about. When we sing to non-Jewish audiences, there are so many themes that everyone can hold onto.

DZ: It does feel like an equalizer and a connector. We were just in Idaho and it was a mixed audience. I’m sure there were some Jews in the audience, there were some non — lots of different backgrounds. It’s like we get on the stage and just sing and be us. What was amazing was, by the end of the show, everybody’s up and dancing and celebrating together. It’s so beautiful, really.

You’re uniquely positioned to be able to play at a Shabbat service or a folk festival or other kinds of venues. What’s different about what you bring to the context of a Shabbat service, where people aren’t expecting to be passive members of a concert audience so much as participants?

EL: When we do a Shabbat service, it’s interesting because everyone in the Shabbat service generally knows the prayers that we’re singing — although we’ve written our own melodies and arrangements, the whole song behind these age-old Jewish prayers. But what we can lean on and make people aware of is the genre of bluegrass, spreading the love of the music, playing banjo, and having our fiddle player Gary and our bassist Tim — whose last name is Kaia, incidentally. It’s really thrilling to help people feel that lonesome Appalachian sound through connecting our worlds. We play in American Jewish synagogues and we’re playing American Jewish music.

You were saying, Kaia, that for a long time you weren’t sure if you wanted to bring race into your music, or how you would do it. You mentioned your song “Rising Down,” and there’s another on your new album called “Harlem’s Little Blackbird.” How did you move into telling stories in your songwriting that speak to experiences of people of color?

KK: Going back to what Eric and Doni were saying, I think most of us don’t go into trying to write an album or song by being like, “Oh, I’m gonna write a song about the Black experience in America.” You draw on your life or you feel inspired by something and it comes out. The songs that I put on the record were taken from moments of inspiration, rather than just trying to grind out a song because I’m Black and I should write a song about being Black.

I mentioned Katharine Manor, the tap dancer. Because we were the only two Black arts students at the school, I think the dance and music department decided to commission a piece from both of us, and also our professor. We were asked to get together every Wednesday night and try to come up with a piece about the Black experience [Laughs] which is, like, the opposite of what you want to do. It was like, “Great, we have to do this now, because someone said that we had to.” Our inspiration came from looking at the news and talking about what was happening. We ended up talking a lot about state violence and state racism. … Then, in December of 2014, Tamir Rice was shot in Cleveland, and I remember going into class the Wednesday after that happened and we were talking about it and we just broke down, because he was 12 years old. It was horrifying. … So I sat down and thought about what I was feeling, and then I came back with the lyric, “Your gun, it’s always at my temple.” I worked off of that and I wrote “Rising Down.” So we created a dance piece around that.

It’s been a very long process for me to work up the courage to talk about it, and it’s not something I take lightly. Actually, I’ve only presented the song live in my own shows about twice. I don’t know if you guys experience this, Eric and Doni, but when you start talking about things that are really close to your heart with an audience, it’s a very intimate bond that you create. And it is very hard as a performer to put that out into the world, into the audience, and let them catch you. You’re not doing something that’s part of the majority — it’s not Christian; it’s not white; it’s something that talks about hurt. I’m still trying to figure that out: How do you create that bond with your audiences?

EL: I love that image of a musical trust fall, kind of going out on a limb and just jumping off, hoping that the world is good enough to catch you. I think that what you’re talking about, Kaia, in racial issues and religious differences and all of these things that put up dividers between all of us, are hard things for people to deal with, but they’re also real things. You’re singing about real things, and we’re singing about real things. Your stuff sounds great. It feels like you. And our hope is that ours sounds like us. The best compliment that anyone could give us after a show is, “You really sound like you mean it.”

DZ: That goes a long way, being authentic. That’s all we’ve got, really.

Kaia, some years back you made a far more obscure recording called “Rappin’ Shady Grove,” a hip hop-style tweaking of a traditional number. Was that an early experiment with how you might bring disparate stylistic elements together?

KK: That was my very first EP recording. I think I was 17, and Drake was just coming out. Toronto was really proud. I was listening to a lot of Drake, and he was just telling his story. I just admired what he was doing. So I was thinking, “What’s my story?” I just decided to rap, but I think it was more like spoken word. I have listened to a lot of hip hop and rap, and that’s where I get a lot of my inspiration. So I just did it and put it out there and I felt like, “Okay, I’ve told my story in a way that feels authentic to me.” And I haven’t felt the need to do it again. But maybe in the future. Who knows?

EL: Within the last year, we’ve been playing a combination of songs live. It’s not on the record. A Nigun is a melody that you just kind of “Yaida dai.”

DZ: You repeat.

EL: [It’s that combined] with “Shady Grove.”

KK: That’s awesome.

DZ: Sort of mixed the two together.

EL: We kind of weave in and out of them. We put them in the same key. It’s an old Jewish melody. If you play it with Jewish instrumentation, then it might sound more Klezmer-y or maybe more Eastern European, but if you play it with clawhammer banjo, which is how I choose to play it, it had a really lonesome, haunting “Shady Grove” kind of sound.

Doni, I know you recorded “Singin’ Jewish Girl” — your version of Lily May Ledford’s “Banjo Pickin’ Girl” — which I first heard from Abigail Washburn. Was that a way of owning your musical space, placing yourself at the center of your musical story?

DZ: That’s exactly what I feel when I sing that song. Not to over-share, but you know, Eric and I fell in love writing this music together. So Eric actually wrote that song for me. When you meet somebody who really understands you and celebrates who you are, it’s just an amazing gift. Singing that song, not only do I feel I’m being authentic and being myself, but I feel this connection with him and this love of the music that we play.

I listened to some recordings that you made with your other group, the Mama Doni Band, and they’re very playful, funny, and kid-friendly. Bluegrass was one of many styles in the mix — along with reggae, disco, and lots of other stuff. You mentioned that you naturally went in a bluegrass direction with this songwriting. Have you reflected on how or why it became an outlet for more serious expression from you?

DZ: I think as a person, as an artist, and as a woman, you grow, you change, and you evolve. I’m continuing to find myself in my story and my life with my voice. I started out sharing Jewish culture with kids, and I wanted to share it, as you said, in a playful and fun way. That’s how it was expressed. I think as we wanted to go deeper with it, that’s where the bluegrass came in. When Eric and I came together was really when Nefesh Mountain came out. Again, it wasn’t planned. It’s just kind of what happened to us together. Bluegrass has the most pure and honest sound.

There are some fine pickers in the Northeast. Why was it important to you to come to Nashville and get A-list musicians like Rob Ickes, Scott Vestal, Sam Bush, and Mark Schatz?

EL: So much of what happened with the record, I feel like we’re still catching up to why it all happened the way that it did. It’s almost like we were being told by the universe what to do. Those guys are our heroes, so to play with Sam and Rob and Mark Schatz and Scott Vestal and our friend Gary, who played with us, was really the thrill of a lifetime, being northeastern Jews from the New York area who wanted to come down. I really wanted to make a bluegrass record that had the sound of a bluegrass record — not just people picking. If I could have Sam Bush play mandolin, that’s the sound of bluegrass. I mean there are a ton of people, now more than ever, who are playing in the New York area and New Jersey, but it really meant something to me to have some of these guys who, themselves, have redefined the genre. So it was important to me to have them help craft this sound and put a stamp on it. This is an American record; this is a Jewish record; this is something that has that sound, what they bring.

KK: Mark Schatz is awesome, and so is Sam Bush. Stellar lineup of musicians there. Nice work.

Kaia, how did you assemble your circle of collaborators?

KK: I have recorded only in Canada. Mostly because the Canadian government offers pretty generous grants to musicians — Canadian musicians — to record albums. You are eligible for more money if you record in Canada, which makes sense because they want to keep the economic growth within the country. You can work with a U.S. producer, but you have to fly them in.

I think what was important to me was to have some instruments on the record that were maybe not typically considered to be old-time instruments. I felt, because my lyrics are different and my songs are different, it would be fun to give them a different feel. So we brought in a trumpet and flugelhorn player, Caleb Hamilton, and a bass player, Brian Kobayakawa, and my producer Chris Bartos plays five-string fiddle and baritone electric guitar. I played banjo and a little bit of piano on the album, too. We also put in a little bit of Moog. I was interested in doing something a little different. I think, like Eric said, you want to keep the music exciting to you.

Is there any chance you all might be playing the same festival sometime this year?

KK: Are you guys going to IBMA?

DZ: Yep.

KK: Cool! Well there’s one.

EL: Are you playing?

KK: Yeah, I’ll be there.

EL: We should hang.

KK: Totally, totally.

Illustration by Abby McMillen. Photos courtesy of the artists.