Tag: Old-time

BGS 5+5: Brad Kolodner

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Brad Kolodner
Hometown: Baltimore, Maryland
Latest Album: Chimney Swifts
Personal nicknames: B-rad, Dadley, BK

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

My father Ken, hands down. As long as I can remember, my father’s music has been the soundtrack of my life. To be fair, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. The living room in our house was filled with the sounds of his hammered dulcimer and fiddle playing (along with the scores of students who banged away on their dulcimers and scratched out tunes on fiddle). I’d be lying if I said my sister and I always loved the ruckus. In all seriousness, the music must’ve been seeping in all those years. When I finally picked up the banjo as a teen, old-time music clicked and it felt right.

My father quickly became a musical mentor and eventually a bandmate and musical peer. His experience playing a multitude of traditional folk music styles through his years with his band Helicon has informed how I approach music with a creative, open mind while respecting the traditional roots of the music. His musicality and sense of dynamics are captivating. He really feels every note and it’s something I strive for in my playing. While piecing together material for my new solo album Chimney Swifts, it was a natural choice to include my father on the project as I wanted to highlight both the groovy and mellow sides of his playing. It’s always a joy to make music with him and I’ll treasure that feeling as long as I can.

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

Singing “I’ve Been Everywhere” for the student talent show at the Meadowlark music camp in Maine back in 2007 was a catalyst for my love of being on stage sharing music. I had just wrapped up my very first week learning the basics of clawhammer banjo in a workshop with Richie Stearns, who ultimately became a banjo hero of mine. I could only play a very clumsy “bum-ditty” so I wasn’t quite ready to show off my newfound love of the banjo. However, I was eager to share the one song I had memorized in my life up to that point for the student talent show.

Years earlier, I spent weeks memorizing all the places in “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which caught my ear when I heard Johnny Cash’s version in a commercial. Suffice to say, I didn’t do too well in school for those few weeks. With my tail between my legs, I hopped up on stage and sang the song. As a relatively shy kid at that point in my life, I emerged from my shell after belting out each verse with the crowd roaring along the way. I can’t say I knew I wanted to be musician at that moment but it’s certainly the first time I tasted that high performers can get on stage in front of an electric audience. There’s actually a home video of that original performance.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

I’ve been fortunate to have some incredible experiences performing with my father Ken at venues like the Kennedy Center, Winfield, and Clifftop and with Charm City Junction at Grey Fox, IBMA, and the Charm City Bluegrass Festival. However, there is one night that really jumps out: the opening concert at our inaugural Baltimore Old Time Music Festival in 2019. After moving back to my hometown in my early 20s around 2012, I made it my mission to reboot the local old-time music community. I cofounded our biweekly old-time jam with my dad, started the Baltimore Square Dance with some pals, and hosted a monthly house concert series with the long term goal of putting together an old-time music festival someday. Well, that dream became a reality in 2019 when I, with Baltimore Old Time Music Festival in partnership with the Creative Alliance, cofounded an arts organization here in town. I’ll always treasure the memory of standing on stage during the kickoff concert in a packed concert hall rocking out during the encore playing “Tennessee Mountain Fox Chase” with the biggest smile on my face. This year, we’re hoping to have our “2nd” Annual Baltimore Old Time Music Festival in mid-November.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

There’s really nothing more nourishing or magical than the time I’ve spent deep in the dense woods on top of a mountain in Clifftop, West Virginia, at the Appalachian String Band Festival. As an artist, I spend much of my time making music in the context of my work — playing a show, teaching lessons, leading a local jam, etc. While I’m deeply grateful for this lifestyle, I need those soul-nourishing experiences in which I play music simply to play music. Clifftop provides that space. It’s a gathering of thousands of old-time musicians who huddle under soggy EZ-ups ’til the wee hours playing fiddle tunes. The natural beauty of the setting adds to that magic.

There’s something about the shared experience trudging through the mud, square dancing in a dusty dirt road, and watching the sunrise with your buds grooving out on fiddles tunes that can’t be matched anywhere else. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten lost meandering through the woods with sounds of far-off old-time jams swirling around the forest. There’s a hike next to the campground that weaves through a rhododendron grove amidst rock formations atop a ridge before descending to a little mountain stream. It’s the quintessential West Virginia swimming hole and it’s a hike I look forward to every year. Most of all, I’ve made some dear pals at Clifftop who have become my closest musical collaborators including Alex Lacquement and Rachel Eddy who are featured on my latest album, Chimney Swifts. While the music is what draws me in, it’s the people who keep me coming back year after year.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

Well, since you asked… Before I played music, I was (and still am, sadly) a diehard Baltimore Orioles fan. The earliest musical memory I have, besides listening to my father’s music, is seeing John Denver hop up on top of the Baltimore Orioles dugout during the seventh inning stretch to sing “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” back in 1997 just a couple weeks before he tragically passed away in a plane crash. After that performance, my parents gifted me some John Denver CDs and I listened to them more than anything else as a kid — really. I would fall asleep to his albums on repeat and my parents would have to come in and turn them off after I dozed off. So, it would be my dream to sit with John Denver at an Orioles ballgame on a warm summer night while eating a Boog’s BBQ sandwich and drinking a Natty Boh beer (a classic Baltimore combo). Oh, and an Orioles win would be nice, but I don’t want to ask for anything unrealistic…

Photo credit: Joanna Tillman

WATCH: Jordan Tice, “River Run” (Feat. Paul Kowert)

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Jordan Tice
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “River Run” (Featuring Paul Kowert)
Album: Yesteryears
Release Date: October 1, 2021
Label: Padiddle Records

In Their Words: “‘River Run’ started with a little lick I had been carrying around in the key of D — a speedy little cascading thing that felt good to let roll off the fingers that I’d find myself playing in idle moments. I slowly built upon it while sitting around during lockdown and my dear friend, Paul Kowert, tied it all together with his wonderful bass part. To me, the song evokes the lightness and constancy of a swiftly moving river as it passes over rocks, rounds curves, and speeds and slows as its channel widens and narrows. Hope you experience the same sense of motion while listening and are able to glean a little bit of levity from it.” — Jordan Tice

Photo credit: Jacqueline Justice

LISTEN: Skillet Licorice, “3-in-1 2-Step”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Skillet Licorice
Hometown: San Francisco, California
Song: “3-in-1 2-Step”
Album: Allsorts Orchestra
Release Date: September 10, 2021
Label: Tiki Parlour Recordings

In Their Words: “‘3-in-1 2-Step’ was one of the first East Texas Serenaders tunes that we learned. One listen and you feel transported 100 years into the past. It is so named because it borrows its melody from three other tunes: ‘Dill Pickle Rag,’ ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘I Don’t Love Nobody.’ As such, it’s perfectly emblematic of the ETS. They weren’t jazz players and they weren’t classical players, but these talented Texans were able to seamlessly incorporate elements from disparate genres to create something new, something their own, yet somehow familiar. Our version features a driving yet elegant banjo-mando harmony part played by San Diego old-time wunderkind Clinton Davis.” — Elise Engelberg and Matt Knoth, Skillet Licorice

Photo credit: Sean Kelly.
Skillet Licorice Allsorts Orchestra Illustration by ‘The Simpsons’ artist Joe Wack

The Bristol Sessions Get Another Look on ‘We Shall All Be Reunited’ CD

Posted on by Editor

For Dr. Ted Olson, Appalachian music has always been much more than a collection of songs. It’s been nothing short of a passion. The Eastern Tennessee State University professor has spent much of his life writing, researching, and documenting the music that has played and recorded throughout the southeastern United States during the 1920s and 1930s. His respected work on Bear Family Records box sets covering sessions in Bristol, Johnson City, and Knoxville, Tennessee, have brought those long-ago recordings to new generations of listeners. For example, the single-disc set Tell It to Me: Revisiting the Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929 was named Best Compilation Album of 2019 by the Independent Music Awards.

Now, Olson has teamed up again with Bear Family to release We Shall All Be Reunited: Revisiting the Bristol Sessions, 1927-1928, a single CD distillation of these legendary sessions. Commonly called “the big bang of country music,” the recordings in Bristol by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and others became unexpected bestsellers, positioning country music as a viable commercial format. Along with reams of new liner notes, the CD delivers not just those familiar names, but also Ernest Stoneman, Blind Alfred Reed, and more, reminding listeners of the diversity that crowded around producer Ralph Peer’s microphone.

BGS: What inspired you to revisit the music from the original Bristol sessions for this album?

Olson: I found that the story of the Bristol sessions had grown significantly, for me. I’ve changed my interpretation of the Bristol sessions, its historical significance, and how one interprets that legacy. This gave me the opportunity to set the record straight about how that story needed to be told. That new narrative is in the liner notes, which are 44 pages. That is the maximum that can fit in a jewel box. I was pretty adamant that this is the story that needed to be told and this is the length it should be.

We have new documents to learn from, new research that was unavailable to us before. New interviews and new artwork. To me, it’s revisionist history in the best sense of the term. When Sony released a single CD of the Bristol sessions in 2003, they focused solely on the 1927 sessions. To my mind, the 1928 sessions are equal to the sessions of the previous year. With this new CD, we celebrate both of those sessions. We have new masters for the songs as well. An engineer in Germany, Marcus Heumann, produced new masters for this release. They’re very exciting and they sound like they were recorded yesterday.

Dr. Ted Olson

What emerges from listening to both the Bristol and Johnson City collections is that they each demand your attention, albeit with different qualities.

The Johnson City sessions were an essential part of the rest of the story. They were echo sessions, just months after the Bristol sessions. They involved many of the same musicians, and yet the Johnson City sessions explored a different side of the Appalachian music that the Bristol sessions didn’t get to. The Bristol sessions accomplished certain things that are valuable and important, but they didn’t explore other facets that Johnson City was able to get more deeply into, because it had a different producer. It also was a different company, with different priorities and fortunes.

Some people prefer the Johnson City sessions to the Bristol sessions. They find the Johnson City recordings wilder, more exciting. Less controlled by the producer. Ralph Peer was a very controlling producer, very interactive in shaping the sounds, whereas Frank Walker of Columbia had the attitude of anything goes in this music. He was more documentarian, in a way. “What do you have? Let’s hear it.” Rather than shaping something into a package, which is what Ralph Peer’s modus operandi was at the Bristol sessions. I love them both. I’m not going to play favorites, but I’m also not going to acquiesce into the idea that Bristol sessions were more important because they were a year earlier.

How did you come to choose one song from each artist for the new Bristol Sessions album?

I knew that I wanted to match the length of the Johnson City CD, which had 26 recordings. I committed to 26 tracks, because that’s as much as we could fit on a CD, but there was also a licensing limitation. I also wanted a new template, where the ’28 Bristol sessions were as important as the ’27 sessions.

There were 28 artists that performed at the Bristol sessions, which meant that I could include one track from everyone except two. I had committed to including performances that in 2020 would be enjoyable by those who aren’t initiated into the sounds of the 1920s musical world. The stylistic approaches back then have changed over the years. We’ve listened to the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers through the years, so they sound familiar to us. Other artists from those sessions were such talented performers that we can still appreciate their recordings for talent alone.

How did you select the song from the Carter Family? All six of the songs that they recorded in Bristol are amazing.

I came to the conclusion that while “Single Girl, Married Girl” or “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” had gotten a lot of attention from these sessions, it’s “The Poor Orphan Child” that, for me, is the one that has captured my ears as the definitive Carter Family debut performance. A.P. is part of it. He’s not on “Single Girl, Married Girl.” He was out fixing their car tires that morning. To my mind, his best singing at the Bristol sessions was on “The Poor Orphan Child.”

Jimmie Rodgers’ recordings in Bristol have always suggested to me a person with a distinctive musical identity that is still seeking a comfort level in front of the mic. His two songs seem a bit tentative, a little nervous. Rhythmically, he’s very loose, which was always part of his persona. I think those recordings show his great charisma. He didn’t invent the singing yodel, but he first demonstrated it on the track that’s on this CD, “Sleep Baby Sleep.” Several months later, he records “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T For Texas),” and that was his breakthrough record.

The Bear Family box set about the Bristol Sessions received two Grammy nominations in 2011. It should have been a high point for you. How did you come to realize that you had much more to do?

It was fascinating for me to watch the press reaction to the Grammy nominations as well as the box set itself. I found that the press reactions were a little bit uncertain of what the Bristol sessions were. It was as though they were all falling lockstep into rapt amazement at the mythic importance of this thing called the Bristol sessions. It was obvious to me that people were changed by a myth, which revolved around two notions. One was that the Bristol sessions were “the big bang of country music.” But what does that mean? It was where Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family made their first records, but there were many other artists there as well.

The other notion was that Bristol is the birthplace of country music, which has been promoted by both Bristol, and the state of Tennessee, but that statement has often left other important sessions to be overlooked. I came to see that critics didn’t know how to unravel the myth. So, there I was at the Grammys, and as a scholar I felt I had only cracked the surface of what these sessions really were. I, too, was under the spell of the myth. And I needed to get past that. It was quite clear to me that there was more to the story. I remember flying home from that event, thinking that this was a life’s work in front of me.

Photo of Dr. Ted Olson by Charlie Warden

With These Women Inducted Into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, Who Should Be Next?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

For the first time in the thirty year history of the International Bluegrass Music Association a class of Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductees includes a woman in every act. The Hall of Fame, helmed by the IBMA and housed inside the Bluegrass Music Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky, infamously lacks women. Before this year’s class it included ten women, total, and only one woman — Louise Scruggs — had ever been inducted as an individual. All others had been inducted as members of bands, duos, or organizations. 

This year Alison Krauss and Lynn Morris join the rarest rank of individual female inductees, alongside influential manager Louise Scruggs. The Stonemans — including Patti, Donna, and Roni — join the likes of songwriter Dixie Hall, who was inducted with her husband, Tom T.; Polly, Miggie, and Janis of the Lewis Family; Marion Leighton Levy of the Rounder Records founders; Sara and Maybelle of the Carter Family; and Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard.

To mark the occasion, we’re celebrating women in bluegrass who certainly deserve induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, beginning with this year’s inductees. The point is, there is no dearth of women in bluegrass, from way back in its earliest days before the genre even had a name to the big-tent-bluegrass present, and many of whom are more than qualified for inclusion in this hall of honor — as innovators, ambassadors, creators, pickers, and forebears, all.

Alison Krauss 

Arguably the most well-known bluegrass musician to achieve mainstream success, Alison Krauss is a no-brainer addition to the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. With her stellar collaborations — with Robert Plant, James Taylor, T Bone Burnett, and so many others — her bluegrass bona fides, her technical prowess as a fiddler, her crystalline and influential vocals, and her unparalleled skill for song interpretation she’s the perfect multi-hyphenate bluegrasser to demonstrate to veteran fans or the uninitiated passers-by what the Hall of Fame is all about. Because, no matter how far Alison Krauss may stray from bluegrass, everything she does remains firmly rooted in her ‘grassy foundations.

Lynn Morris

Lynn Morris remains a criminally underappreciated figure in bluegrass, partly due to her career being prematurely ended by a near-fatal stroke in the late 1990s. In the decades prior, this IBMA Award winner was a powerful and influential banjo player, bandleader, and community-builder, carving out a pathway to success in roots music for herself — given that no pathways were being made available to women like her. Morris’ brand of bluegrass was unflinching, driving, and gritty, and to this day it continues to defy stereotypes about what women can contribute to a music that often holds up maleness and horse race-style competition as currency. While at the same time, she retained a level of tenderness and openness rare in masculine-centered bluegrass. Hopefully this induction will spotlight Morris’ important role in bluegrass’ golden age during the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Love Grown Cold,” a semi-viral hit for Morris on many a bluegrass social media page, is merely the tip of the iceberg of what will be this Hall of Famer’s long-lasting legacy in this music.

The Stoneman Family

Ernest “Pop” Stoneman, father and figurehead of country’s legendary Stoneman family, was the man who started it all. No, literally. Pop is credited with being a keystone picker, performer, and pseudo-producer of 1927’s Bristol sessions, which later came to be considered as the “big bang of country music,” the beginning of the genre’s commercial fortunes. His family of pickers, including Donna, Roni, and Patti, became stars of stage and screen thanks to their showmanship, homespun vibes, and blistering-fast picking. The impact of this musical family on country, bluegrass, and Americana music — as a unit and as individuals — can simply not be overstated. From Hee Haw to the Grand Ole Opry to winning a CMA Award to international tours with their own group and as side musicians, the fingerprints of the Stoneman Family are all over American roots music across the globe.

Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper

At one point, Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper were perhaps the most famous bluegrass act in the world, landing several singles and tracks in Billboard’s Hot Country Chart in the ‘50s and ‘60s — notably landing four songs in the Top 10. Not on a bluegrass chart, because such a thing did not yet exist, but on the country chart! Granted, at that time bluegrass was still considered simply a subgenre of country and hillbilly music, but imagine not just one “Wagon Wheel”-level hit to their name, but a handful! And somehow, in modern times, Wilma Lee & Stoney are at best relegated to footnotes and asides. Bluegrass has always been a commercial genre and the commercial success of this pair is alone worth induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, all their other achievements and accolades notwithstanding.

Ola Belle Reed

Ola Belle Reed is more than “I’ve Endured” and more than “High on the Mountain.” A Western North Carolina songwriter and picker, Reed typified the politically- and environmentally-conscious, subversive, and grounded style of musicmaking by Appalachian women who lived through the many upheavals and uncertainties within the region and around the world during the twentieth century. Her songs, like “Tear Down the Fences,” highlight that the south, Appalachia, and the people who live there are not monoliths. Just as Reed’s catalog of influential music is not a monolith, either. Truly a glaring omission from Bluegrass’s hall of honor.

Sally Ann Forrester

Born Wilene Russell, “Sally Ann” or “Billie” Forrester — wife of fiddler Howdy Forrester — was one of only two women to have ever been members of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys. (The other being Bessie Lee Maudlin, another prime candidate for Hall of Fame induction and inclusion in this list.) With the band, Forrester played accordion and sang as well as “keeping the books.” Inducting the women who were Blue Grass Boys, members of THE titular band of bluegrass, just makes sense! But with Forrester, it also represents an all-too-rare opportunity to canonize a bluegrass accordionist for the ages. Why wouldn’t we want to do that!? Take a listen to her accordion fills on “Rocky Road Blues” and just try to come up with a reason why bluegrass accordion isn’t more popular nowadays. Besides the obvious reasons.

Rose Maddox

Rose Maddox is traditionally credited as the first woman to cut a bluegrass album, recording Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass in 1962 for Capitol Records and including many a bluegrass hit, like “Footprints in the Snow.” Maddox also marked the beginning of a series of women vocalists and musicians in bluegrass who could accomplish the high lonesome sound for which men like Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, the Osborne Brothers, and others were famous. Women who sang old-time and country up to this point often had rounder, more full, resonant, and rich voices, where men in bluegrass were seemingly attempting to shout tenor to dog whistles. Sexists weren’t sure women could replicate that testicles-in-a-vise-grip sound, but Maddox’s powerful voice immediately commands the same attention – and respect – of the highest and most lonesome. To think there used to be a time when people actually thought (or pretended to think) women couldn’t sing bluegrass!

Elizabeth Cotten

A pillar of American folk music, Elizabeth Cotten’s influence and impact knows no bounds, reaching far from downhome blues, ragtime, and old-time and into bluegrass, folk, Americana, rock, pop, and beyond. Her songs and her playing style continue to influence bluegrass today, but Cotten’s true legacy, one that will stretch on into infinity, is that her existence stands as permission for the Other – for marginalized folks like herself, a Black, working class artisan and musician from the South – to exist and to take up space within these historically white and often forbidding and exclusive roots music communities. Elizabeth Cotten is proof positive that the contributions of Black folks to American roots musics, including if not especially bluegrass, were truly seminal, essential, and vital to the music growing and developing into the entity we all love today. Elizabeth Cotten would be an excellent and unimpeachable first Black and African American inductee into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. Let’s make it happen.

Buffalo Gals

In the 1970s the group considered to be the first bluegrass lineup of all women was Buffalo Gals, including Martha Trachtenberg, Susie Monick, Carol Siegel, Sue Raines, and Nancy Josephson. Their first and only record, First Borne, is finally available digitally and via online streaming platforms, but up until recently was largely forgotten. We featured First Borne in our list of the 50 Greatest Bluegrass Albums by women and retold a now-infamous story about the Buffalo Gals performing in their sleeping bags when a festival promoter gave them a set early in the morning because, you guessed it, who would want to see women perform bluegrass!? Hearing this whimsical, zany mash-up of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” and “Loco-motion” we’d make this group headline. Just sayin’. With bands like Della Mae and Sister Sadie enjoying success and acclaim at all levels of the IBMA, perhaps it’s time to pay tribute to the all-women lineups like the Buffalo Gals who came before and blazed the trail.

Gloria Belle

A woman for a Sunny Mountain Boy! Gloria Belle is most famous as a member of Jimmy Martin’s backing band, but it would almost be an insult to reduce her career to having spent time in the shadow of the King of Bluegrass. She was a fantastic picker, multi-instrumentalist, and singer and the first woman to ever release an album on longtime bluegrass label Rebel Records. In 1999 she received IBMA’s Distinguished Achievement Award after a handful of decades of nonstop recording, touring, and performing in bluegrass. She even made an appearance on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s fantastically popular Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. Another case of an underrated woman who is constantly referred to on the back end of an ampersand after a man or men, Gloria Belle is a perfect example of a woman who deserves induction into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame on her own merits first and foremost.

Dolly Parton

Though she’ll often refer to it simply as “mountain music,” Dolly Parton is as bluegrass as they come. Albums like The Grass Is Blue, Heartsongs, and Trio demonstrate this fact to an obvious degree, but it’s worth pointing out — especially within the context of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame — that Parton’s bluegrass runs deeper than just being an offshoot of her musical expression. With the shows and festivals at Dollywood, her collaborations with artists like the Grascals, Rhonda Vincent, and Alison Krauss, and her longtime commitment to philanthropy in her home region of East Tennessee and abroad, Dolly is the perfect example the Hall of Fame could utilize to communicate the importance and value of taking bluegrass ideals and spreading them around the world. Plus, who wouldn’t want a ticket to the IBMA Awards show at which Dolly Parton would be inducted? (Pro tip: Dolly has actually attended the IBMA Awards and performed once before, when The Grass Is Blue was nominated in 2000 and Marty Stuart hosted. Let’s please recreate that show. Please.)

We could continue this list into infinity, and that’s exactly the point. Artists and bands like Alison Brown, Laurie Lewis, Missy Raines, Kathy Kallick, Blue Rose, Emmylou Harris, The Whites, Patty Loveless, and so many others are waiting in the wings, qualified, ready, and willing to step up and thrive under the mantle of Bluegrass Hall of Fame induction. And plenty of young women, femmes, and non-binary folks are waiting to have examples to look up to, to signal to them that bluegrass can be a place where they can also make a home. The concept of a Hall of Fame may seem like an unimportant or inconsequential or self-serving enterprise at times, but it can be so much more than that! We can supply those examples. Let’s do it.

Andrew Marlin Reveals the Observations and Explorations Behind ‘Watchhouse’

Posted on by Editor

When you’re the child of musicians, you get to see the world. By the time Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz’s daughter Ruby was one year old, she had been to 34 US states and nine different countries. “She was on a bus when she was three months old,” says Marlin. “She loves traveling.”

After a year of hiatus, the family of three is back on the road again as the duo formerly known as Mandolin Orange tour their new self-titled album, Watchhouse. And Ruby, now a toddler, has transitioned back to road life more smoothly than her father, who admits he’s still “struggling to find my sea legs.”

But then this has an unarguably big summer. Performing as Watchhouse, after more than a decade as Mandolin Orange, was no small change. A year of lockdown had given the couple space to reflect on a name change that they’d wanted for a while, but resisted, concerned at how any reinvention would affect their devoted following.

Their latest project proves that their fans have nothing to fear: a medley of richly intimate songs and beautiful vocal harmonies that’s as identifiably them as anything they’ve ever made. Marlin, who writes the songs and plays mandolin to Frantz’s acoustic guitar, spoke to BGS about the new album from their North Carolina home, where they were enjoying a short pause between gigs.

BGS: Your current tour’s taking you coast to coast, from the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island to Redmond, Washington and all points between…

Marlin: It’s all over the map, literally. We’re out for three or four days at a time and I’m enjoying being back on tour but it’s kind of difficult to get in the groove. After we’ve been moving at a snail’s pace at home this past year, this all feels so fast-paced, so much to keep up with!

How do you feel about touring in this age of COVID. Does it feel safe yet?

I was one of the naive ones who thought we were nearly done with this thing, but we’re really not. There is a vaccine but people just aren’t taking it. So no, I don’t feel safe at all. But it’s a balancing act: we need to make money because we haven’t worked in 18 months, and we want to play shows, because that’s what we’re driven to do. Everybody wants to get back to their lives, everybody needs purpose to stay sane. To feel like there’s a reason to get up in the morning.

Was a year of lockdown hard as a new parent?

It’s all relative. Emily and I travel so much that we wouldn’t have spent so much time home as full-time parents otherwise. Eighteen months ago you would have been talking to a different person, but now I just try to live day to day, and write a little here and there. It was really difficult to write at the beginning of the pandemic, though. As a songwriter I try to latch onto things that not many people are writing about and with so many people thinking about the same thing it was hard to separate myself from it and find a way to write about it that didn’t seem unoriginal. I wrote a lot of instrumentals so I could explore how I was feeling without having to put it in words.

Have you discovered some good tunes for getting Ruby to sleep?

Pretty much anything by Paul Brady. She loves him, especially that album he did with Andy Irvine. I put that on and she’ll start talking to Paul and Andy. And because she’s been around our music since she was in the womb, if I sit down and play mandolin very quietly that’ll chill her out. I’ll sit in her room and play and she’ll doze off.

There are a lot of songs sung from a parent’s viewpoint on this new album: “Upside Down,” “New Star,” and “Lonely Love Affair.” Has becoming a father changed your perspective as a songwriter?

Passively, yes. I think the change is that I would love to help pave a safe path for my daughter and hopefully inspire some of our listeners to be kind and open up a kind world for her to go into. And that’s made my its way into my perspective even in songs where I’m not talking about it.

That’s very much the message of “Better Way,” which is about online trolling. Was that inspired by a specific incident?

A number of incidents. It isn’t unique. Every time somebody puts themselves out there on social media you have the people who love to drum up negative energy. And I can’t wrap my head around it because that’s not how I was brought up. I rarely meet people who would do that when they’re talking to you face to face. So I don’t understand why those people feel compelled to sit at their computer or pick up their phone and try to rip others apart. It’s a weird way to live.

Emily says it’s one of the favorite tracks you’ve ever laid down together.

Yeah, I love the sound of that tune. It’s a gentle drive to it, the way the groove is so set. It has this steady pulse that fits with the whole idea of the tune, this nagging thing in the back of my head: why do people feel compelled to be such assholes?

These songs were recorded all the way back in February 2020. Where did you decide to record them?

We did it right outside of Roanoke, Virginia. It’s not quite in the mountains, but it was in the hills for sure, a very peaceful place on a lake. I like making records in places that aren’t studios. It feels a little more free, to just go sit in a living room and to turn that space into a very positive musical environment is way more appealing to me than a studio where you’re watching the clock and every time you hear it tick that signifies a certain amount of money. I think you feel that relaxed energy. There’s no trying to beat the clock on this record. It’s exploring all the directions we could go as a band.

The sound of the album is certainly more exploratory than previous ones — a little richer in texture, a little less acoustic, even a touch psychedelic at times…

There are a lot of sounds we’ve used in the past but on this one we didn’t try to hide them. In the past we’ve tried to keep the simplicity of what Emily and I do in the forefront and have all these light textures around that. I think of it as a mountain peak. We’d be up at the top singing our songs and beneath us is this luscious forest, a lot of organ songs, electric guitar, drums, bass. Well, on this record we brought all the sounds up to the same level.

We’d been touring with many of these musicians since 2016 and so we were already thinking about arrangements that worked for the band and it’s a good representation of what we can do live, as a unit. A lot of people think of Emily and I as a folk duo but we have a lot of music in us! It felt nice to change the name and feel we can do whatever we want to and not limit ourselves to any idea of who people think we are.

The new name, Watchhouse, seems to be a good choice to reflect the observational world of your songwriting.

One of the most important things you can do as an artist is observe the world around you and I’ve always sought out those little peaceful places I can let my mind wander. I don’t do well in chaotic situations. I’m not the one to be right up the front by the stage in a show. I’ll usually go hang out in a corner and close my eyes and listen. I just like to find those places wherever we are, whether we’re on tour, in our neighborhood, or at home.

It makes you sound like a pretty chilled person to live with.

I play music a lot, so if you don’t like to hear constant music then probably not… in lockdown there was a lot of noodling, a lot of searching. A lot of aggression being taken out on an instrument too.

Fair point, I can see Emily needing an occasional break from that.

Oh yeah, all the time! She’d send me out of the room, or she’d go out herself…

You’ve been in a band together for 12 years, and all that time you’ve been a couple too. How do you manage to spend so much time together without driving each other crazy?

We’ve talked about that sometimes, especially with Emily’s parents. They can’t seem to wrap their head around it. I guess we just like each other!

One song on the album that seems especially raw is “Belly of the Beast.” Can you tell me the inspiration behind that?

I wrote that tune after Jeff Austin committed suicide. I didn’t know him super well, but we had a lot of mutual friends and had crossed paths through the years and it woke me up in a scary way. Being a full-time musician you have to continually find new ways to stay relevant and interesting to people, and you have to deal with real bouts of anxiety and self-consciousness. Is this good enough? Am I good enough? Writing and playing is something I’m extremely driven to do for myself, but I also have to do it for others, and I throw my music out in the world to be judged by other people. It’s a weird process that I’ve found is extremely helped by therapy!

So is that what performing is for you: “Hiding from the monsters in the belly of the beast”?

Yes — I love that line. When people talk about being nervous to perform, for me it’s not wondering whether I’m able to perform well, it’s more that when I step out on stage I don’t know what that crowd’s energy is going to be, how receptive they’re going to be. Are these people going to allow me to be myself tonight or am I going to have to put on a hat? For the most part our fans are really receptive and I can be myself. That’s when it feels like things are right.

“Beautiful Flowers” is one of the more cryptic songs on the album. It starts with a tiny flash of color and ends with some powerful images about the climate crisis. How did you get from one to the other?

I hit a butterfly when I was driving down the road and it really bummed me out. Animals have no ideas what cars are. For something to come out of nowhere at 70 miles per hour has got to be the weirdest thing in the world. And that got me thinking about who had made the first car, and it turned out it was this guy, Karl Benz. And when he made this car he had no idea where it was going to lead and how terrible it was going to be for the environment.

For our own convenience we destroy a lot of this world and don’t give a lot back as humans. And my car hitting that butterfly felt like a really strong metaphor for what we’re doing to the earth. It’s a very delicate ecosystem and we’re killing all its intricate little working parts.

Is that a challenge for you, too, with your own carbon footprint as a touring musician?

Our carbon footprint is massive, riding on buses and planes and cars… going to a festival and them using generators to supply all the power. We all see all the problems but how to step outside of your own daily needs and confront them is the conundrum, and I’m as guilty as anyone. How do you inconvenience yourself to make positive change in this world? We’re asking ourselves that right now in terms of racism, climate change, housing inequality, you name it.

Given how personal the songs are, and the fact they’re drawn from your shared life, do you ask for Emily’s input or approval as you’re writing them?

No, not really. The way I write I’ll take a specific idea and continue to break it apart until it’s more universal. I don’t want to reveal too much of myself in any given tune. I’m not laying out a bullet point retelling of my life, just musing on how I felt in a given situation — or maybe how Emily felt, or maybe a friend of ours. In fact sometimes I’ll play a new song for Emily and I’ll tell her what it’s about and she’ll say, “Huh, I thought it was about this.” And you know what? She’s not wrong.

Watchhouse is coming to the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles on Saturday, February 19th 2022 – grab your tickets here.

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

What Amythyst Kiah Is Really Singing About in “Black Myself” (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

When Amythyst Kiah was a teenager in the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee, she wanted to be “the guitar-playing version of Tori Amos.” Locked away in her room with her headphones pulled over her ears, poring over liner notes and listening intently for every nuance in her favorite records, she found solace in the way Amos told her darkest secrets in her songs and how she turned that vulnerability into something like a superpower. It made her feel less alone, especially as a young, closeted Black girl in a largely white suburb. Tori Amos helped her survive adolescence.

Kiah didn’t grow up to become any version of her hero. Instead, she simply became herself. Her new solo album, Wary + Strange, ingeniously mixes blues and folk with alternative and indie rock, devising a vivid palette to soundtrack her own songs that tell dark secrets. It’s one of the most bracing albums of the year, grappling with matters both personal (her mother’s suicide) and public (the struggles of Black Americans). “Now, when I’m in my mid-thirties,” says Kiah, “it’s amazing to make a vulnerable record and then have people at my shows tell me that my music helped them heal, helped them get through some hard times. To have someone connect with my music is really powerful.”

Editor’s Note: Read the first half of our BGS Artist of the Month interview with Amythyst Kiah here.

BGS: These songs are rooted in your own life and your own experiences, but they do seem like there is something universally relatable in them. Is that something you were thinking about or striving for?

Kiah: Yeah. To have someone connect with my music is really powerful. But that’s been hard to process that idea, because for the longest time I had so much social anxiety and depression and low self-esteem. I didn’t think that much of myself and couldn’t imagine that anybody really cared about me. It’s all stuff related to mental health. Obviously there are people who cared about me. I just couldn’t see it. Now, I’ve come around and maybe fully grasped my value as a person and what I have to offer the world, and that has been very reaffirming. I have a better sense of who I am and why I’m here. And it feels good to make music that helps people get through hard times.

What is it like to revisit the tough times in these songs night after night?

I’ve spent some time thinking about that, and I don’t really know how I’m doing it, to be perfectly honest. A big part of it is that I spent a really long time repressing my emotions and keeping my feelings to myself. So writing a song about how I’m feeling is a sign that I’ve processed it. Not that I’m moving on or I’m done with it, whatever I might be writing about. But I’ve confronted it. I’ve learned from it. And now I can continue with my life and move forward.

A big part of my life has been living in the past and not being fully present in the moment. In order to be present, you have to be able to process stuff that’s happening to you in that moment. Otherwise, you make decisions based on something that happened before. So, a song is a representation of me processing something and understanding what happened to me. Singing that song night after night, it doesn’t feel like I’m necessarily reliving it every time. Because I’ve already processed it. That’s my working theory right now. It might change.

That’s something I think about a lot, because as a listener I can play a song based on the mood I’m in. But as an artist, you’re locked into these songs. You can’t not play them.

I get what you’re saying. The way people listen to music is really fascinating to me. My partner and I, we approach music very differently. My approach has always been to listen to things that reflect my mood. When I was younger, that meant listening to a lot of really sad, depressing songs. Somehow that made me feel good. I’m a very critical listener of music and I like to listen to all the different intricacies. I’m not someone who has a vast library of music, but I’m obsessed with certain sounds and ideas so I will listen to an album and pick apart every detail.

But my partner listens to music to shut her brain off. Her favorite artists are very different from mine. She loves a lot of pop music, like Taylor Swift. To her it’s feel-good music. You break it out and sing along. But she also listens to a lot of classical music, too. She’s got that ability to go back and forth with her listening vibe. That was surprising to me at first, because I used think, “How can people listen to happy music? Don’t they know what’s happening in the world?” I would deliberately avoid happy music because I was personally insulted by it. But thanks to my partner, I can totally see that perspective where you’re listening to music that doesn’t reflect the mood you’re in because you’re trying to snap out of it.

Did that change how you listened to music?

As I’ve gotten older and my mental health has gotten a lot better, I can appreciate listening to something that is just meant to be fun. It doesn’t have to be a super serious moment. I think I learned how to be a lot less pretentious about what I listened to and why I listened to it, and I learned to be a lot less judgmental about other people’s listening habits.

Some lines in these songs sound very defiant of religion — like in “Black Myself,” when you sing, “Your precious God ain’t gonna bless me.” Can you talk about that aspect of your songwriting?

With “Black Myself,” the idea was that each verse would be from the perspective of a specific type of person. So the first verse with that line is from the perspective of an enslaved person. They’re singing about wanting to jump the fence, wanting to be free, wanting to be with the one they love. If an enslaved person had a relationship or a marriage, it was never legally recognized. There was always a chance that they might get sold to different people and they’d never see each other again. Whatever bonds they had could be broken, like they were just cattle. The line about “Your precious God ain’t gonna bless me,” that’s a direct reference to the way that pro-slavery people used Christianity as a way to justify enslaving people.

There was a Bible specifically written for enslaved people — it was even called the Slave Bible — and the people who edited it made sure to only leave in the verses that talk about being obedient. All the verses that talk about autonomy and freedom were removed. The sole purpose was to get enslaved people to be content being slaves, so they wouldn’t revolt. But they were basically saying, “God wants you to be enslaved. He wants you to serve your master. He wants you to be treated like a subhuman.” That is not a God that I would ever want to believe in or ascribe to. That line is that character saying that’s wrong.

I’ve had one or two instances where someone got upset at that line, because they felt like I was being disrespectful to God without really understanding the context in which it’s being said. But I don’t agree with that. There are people all over the world with different belief systems, and at the end of the day, if what you believe in makes you a better person and makes you have respect for humanity, that’s wonderful. If you believe in humanity, that’s what important to me. But why would God be OK with telling someone they have no freedom? But any time you make art, there’s always going to be people who see one thing but not everything else surrounding it. And they base an opinion on that. Not everybody’s going to understand the whole picture.

I read about your performances in Europe, where the crowd would sing “Black Myself” back to you. It definitely seems to reinforce that idea of having a conversation with the song.

I was at the Cambridge Folk Festival with Rhiannon [Giddens], Yola, and Kaïa Kater. We put together a set where we’re singing our own songs and then singing harmonies for everybody else’s. There had to be 500 or 600 English white people in this tent, and it was the first time I’d really noticed other people singing the song or singing that line, “I’m black myself.” I remember thinking, “What planet are we on?” One of my biggest reservations about that song was that people would hear it and think, “Oh, that’s just for black people.” But to me, when someone’s telling a story, it’s meant for everyone to hear. Systemic racism is something that affects everybody in different ways, so we all need to be part of the conversation if we’re going to make things better and look out for each other.

Did you get any other negative responses to the song?

My big concern was that there would be some backlash from white people who weren’t really listening to the song or thinking about it. I was afraid they’d try to make a point like, “If this was called ‘White Myself,’ you’d be canceled.” And there have actually been some comments like that, which completely disregards the fact that the song is about Blacks. It’s about overcoming adversity despite being Black. So if someone can’t hear the words of the song and actually understand what’s happen, that says more about them than it does about me or the song. So I have no apologies for it.

But there are white people who understand what the song is about and they’re singing in solidarity. They know that it’s about human experience. And just because you didn’t personally experience some of this stuff doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to sing along with it. I had a similar conversation the other day with somebody about the song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” by Loretta Lynn. I’m not a coal miner’s daughter. I didn’t grow up in the coal mines. But I love that song and I love to sing that song. It’s a great song about someone else’s experiences. Empathy is such an important quality in that regard and we need allyship in order for things to get better.

Editor’s Note: Read the first half of our BGS Artist of the Month interview with Amythyst Kiah here.

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

WATCH: George Jackson Feat. Wes Corbett, “Mississippi Sawyer”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: George Jackson featuring Wes Corbett
Hometown: Christchurch, New Zealand
Song: “Mississippi Sawyer”
Album: Hair & Hide
Release Date: Single, August 25; Album, October 29
Label: George Jackson Records

In Their Words: “I live just up the road from the house where the legendary musician John Hartford once lived, on the edge of the Cumberland River in Madison, Tennessee, and for this live video we had the amazing opportunity to record the take in the crow’s nest on top of Hartford’s old riverside home. The current owners were very generous to let us film in that space and they even keep John’s old chair up there, a nod to when he used to sit in that same room overlooking the river and play banjo himself. It was magical to get to play in that room!

“Wes Corbett and I played a version of ‘Mississippi Sawyer’ together while we were warming up together one afternoon by jamming on some fiddle tunes in preparation for arranging some music to record on my banjo and fiddle duets album, Hair & Hide. It was immediately so much fun and had such a great energy to it that I decided then and there that I wanted to record it with Wes for the album. This tune lends itself really well as a way to bring together elements of old-time fiddling that I bring to the table and of virtuosic bluegrass banjo playing from Wes, as well as being a great vehicle to muddle the lines of both genres as we play it together.

“I ended up taking a deep dive on some old recorded versions of ‘Mississippi Sawyer’ from various old-time fiddlers after that initial jam, and came across two really unique versions that I loved from a couple of legendary West Virginia old-time fiddlers, Ernie Carpenter and Edden Hammons. I liked elements of both of their versions so I decided to take inspiration from Ernie’s A part and Edden’s B part to create this really fun and unique take on this great old chestnut fiddle tune that’s endlessly fun to play. Wes is one of our generation’s great picking banjo players and it was so fun to get to work on this tune with him and hear how he improvises around the melody so fluidly. I hope you all enjoy this!” — George Jackson

Photo credit: Natia Cinco

Amythyst Kiah Ends Her Shut-Up-and-Sing Policy on ‘Wary + Strange’ (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

Amythyst Kiah took great pains to get Wary + Strange just right. After studying banjo and old-time music at East Tennessee State University in her twenties, she gained a reputation as an intense live performer, so much so that she was asked to join the roots supergroup Our Native Daughters, where she played alongside Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, and Leyla McCalla. The group recorded Kiah’s bluesy anthem “Black Myself” as the opening cut on their 2019 album, Songs of Our Native Daughters.

The experience of working directly with her contemporaries — even the idea of considering them as her contemporaries — was a profound experience, one that stirred her to write songs that took bigger risks and told bigger truths about herself. She’d been struggling to make this record for several years by then, booking sessions with various producers, but never feeling satisfied with the results. She didn’t hear herself in the music.

That changed when she began working with producer Tony Berg (Aimee Mann, Phoebe Bridgers), and together they devised a way to combine all of Kiah’s influences rather than compartmentalize them. Wary + Strange is a headphones album, one that listeners will pore over intently. “It feels good to make music that helps people get through hard times,” Kiah tells the Bluegrass Situation.

Editor’s Note: Read the second half of our BGS Artist of the Month interview with Amythyst Kiah here.

BGS: Are you surprised by the response this record has gotten?

Kiah: This is my label debut. So it’s really the first time that I’ve worked with a giant team of people helping me get my music out into the world. So the whole experience has been completely new. My focus was really tol make this album where I’m excited about it and happy with it, so I felt pretty confident about it. Then I started promoting it and things started coming in, and I didn’t realize how much was going to come in because I’d never done it before. So now I have the craziest workload that I’ve had in a long time. I’m just drinking a lot of caffeine and hanging on as long as I can, because I’m getting an opportunity that a lot of artists don’t get.

And add to that the fact that you can actually play live shows again, if only for a little while. What has the audience reaction been like?

People are really excited to get back to playing or get back to just seeing live music. All of us that were doing virtual gigs for a year and a half. Any time I’ve played a virtual gig, I’ve made a point to say that we’re all in this weird situation together, so let’s make the best of it. The audience is just looking at me through a camera lens, and I’m looking at them through a camera lens, but we’re doing our best to share our energy with one another. I can’t tell you how many times over the past several shows that I’ve gone out to the merch table and people have told me, “This is the first show I’ve seen since quarantine.” They are so excited, so the energy has been more intense than I can remember.

You mentioned something a minute ago about wanting to make sure you were happy with this record. You recorded these songs several times trying to get to that point, and I wondered if you could talk about that process. What was missing from those early songs?

The first time I made the record, it was with Dirk Powell in Louisiana, and it was right before the sessions for Our Native Daughters. But I didn’t really have a strong idea of what I wanted. I was dealing with some writer’s block at the time, and I was putting pressure on myself to put out another record. So I was recording a lot of songs that I didn’t really play anymore, and it felt like I was just trying to fill out an album.

At the end of the recording process, it sounded like a record that was very safe. It sounded good but it was safe. It wasn’t showing any real musical growth from me as an artist. I felt like I was compartmentalizing a lot of my folk stuff and the stuff I played with my backing band. I had this folk side of me and this rock version of me, and it just slapped me in the face that all of those songs needed to be on the record.

What was the nature of your writer’s block? How did you get through it?

There was a period when I wasn’t really writing songs that much. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I was repressing a lot of emotions regarding my mother’s suicide. For twelve years I would do anything I could to avoid getting in touch with those feelings. I was in survival mode, and when you’re in survival mode it’s really hard to think deeply about some of your choices. I was just trying to ignore it all. By the time I got to Our Native Daughters, I’d written a handful of songs over the course of two or three years. That was my second year going into therapy, and I’d made a couple of breakthroughs in understanding how my grief was affecting other aspects of my life.

Being around Rhiannon and Leyla and Allison and writing songs with them, I started to understand something important about myself. We all had this similar background of being the token Black person in a genre that has some very obvious African influences. But that history and those identities had been removed and the music had been segregated. We were able to share stories about being confused with other people, stuff like that. Just to be able to have that conversation with other people who understood where I was coming from was wonderful. Being in that environment gave me the courage to write about the things I was talking about. I’d been afraid to put those experiences into songs because I have this shut-up-and-sing policy for a long time. So that was an important moment for me.

We’re telling stories of our ancestors who were able to survive the transatlantic ship voyage. They survived the Civil War. Reconstruction. Segregation. Civil Rights. We’re standing on the shoulders of so many people who survived, and we’re here because of their survival. Once you start to make those big spiritual connections beyond what you’ve read in a history book, suddenly there’s nothing to be afraid of. If they can survive, then I can survive writing a song about how I feel. There was a new sense of empowerment to really write about myself. So after that project, I wrote more songs. I wrote “Soapbox.” I wrote “Opaque.” I wrote “Firewater.”

Did that change how you approached recording the album?

Really I was still figuring myself out and how I wanted to be defined as a musician. It was a lot of self-exploration. I recorded the album again at Echo Mountain Studios in Asheville, North Carolina. But the third time’s the charm, as they say. I met Tony Berg, and he was able to help me encapsulate the inherent wariness and strangeness of all of these songs. We were also able to keep that essence of roots music while adding in these different textures and sounds. He actually told me once while we were recording, “I don’t think I’ve heard a record that sounds quite like this one.” He’s obviously listened to way more music than I ever have, so I knew we had something special at that point. I knew that would be the final time recording the album.

It sounds like you had to go through those first two versions of the album to get to that point.

Yes. I definitely don’t want to say that those first two didn’t sound good or weren’t worthy. And I’m appreciative of anybody who spent time in any capacity working on them with me. It took all of those moments to get where we are now. But something was always missing, and you shouldn’t be too afraid to explore that and figure out what’s missing. Unless you’re 100 percent excited about your record, it’s going to be hard to go out and play those songs.

There’s a malleable quality to your songs. I’m thinking about the two versions of “Soapbox” on the record, or the solo version of “Black Myself” and the Our Native Daughters version. You talked about learning not to compartmentalize your music, but the songs seem like they could fit so many different settings. “Black Myself” in particular sounds very different when you’ve got several people singing as opposed to just one person singing.

I think that’s a recurring theme that’s always going to be part of my creative process. I spent a good amount of time in my twenties focusing on reinterpreting songs that already existed and learning about the different ways to make it your own. Or at least give it another perspective. It made me hyperaware of, “OK, what am I saying? What if I deliver this particular line this way or what if I go to a minor chord here instead of a major chord. How does that change the meaning?” I’ve always been fascinated with that kind of thing.

That’s just as valuable as writing new songs, because that’s the way most of us learn music. We learn other people’s music, and within that we find our own voice. Reimagining certain songs — even if they’re your own songs — is a valid way to express yourself. Balancing that can be a little tricky. With the various incarnations of this album, I was rehashing a lot of songs that I’d already done. I was taking songs I’d already recorded and rerecording them in a different way. So I had to make myself write new material. I didn’t want to stop moving forward.

As for “Black Myself,” I remember thinking, “Man, I wish I could have some people singing with me on this song.” It’s not even just from a production standpoint. It was more personal. So it was good to record with Rhiannon and Allison and Leyla sticking up for me, you know? It’s different without them. For the version on my record I was doing my own background vocals, which is really enjoyable and helps me dig into a song in a different way. But I definitely missed singing with them. But I was really excited to record that song by myself, because it’s a way to continue that conversation about white supremacy and anti-racism. It was a good opportunity to bring the song forward.

Editor’s Note: Read the second half of our BGS Artist of the Month interview with Amythyst Kiah here.

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither

LISTEN: The Grascals, “Maybelle”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Grascals
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Maybelle”
Album: Up All Night
Release Date: August 27, 2021
Label: Mountain Home Music Company

In Their Words: “It’s very rare when looking for a song that you find exactly what you’re looking for. This was the case with ‘Maybelle!’ The song sounds like it came from deep within the mountains. From the haunting words to the clawhammer banjo and fiddle, this song will grab your attention.” — John Bryan, The Grascals

Photo credit: Sandlin Gaither