Tag: parenthood

Suzanne Cox & Brandon Ratcliff Follow Their Inspiration

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When mother and son Suzanne Cox and Brandon Ratcliff first began posting vertical videos to social media singing harmonies and cover songs together, they were just doing it for fun. Virality hadn’t entered their minds at all. In fact, Ratcliff had almost sworn off the internet, or using social media to advance his artist or songwriting endeavors anymore. Meanwhile Cox had been asking herself, “Am I retired? Does anyone want to hear me sing?”

From their very first videos, the answer was an obvious and resounding yes. The denizens of the internet were apparently starved for Cox’s voice – but of course they were, haven’t we all been? – and were ravenous in their discovery of Ratcliff’s own talents in musicianship and songwriting. Song after song, clip after clip racked up thousands of likes and views, dozens and dozens of new followers (including quite a few celebrities), and built an organic momentum neither artist had ever seen in their music-making careers so far.

Cox, in her late 50s, and Ratcliff, in his early 30s, have both enjoyed numerous successes and accomplishments in roots music. The Cox Family won GRAMMY Awards and IBMA Awards and appeared on the iconic O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and are routinely named as one of Alison Krauss’s major influences in bluegrass and harmony singing. They are legends. Ratcliff has had record deals, prominent co-writes, his own solo releases, and been on the Nashville singer-songwriter hustle for more than a decade. But the energy behind their mother-son partnership has been unlike anything either have experienced before.

It’s no surprise, though, viewing their many popular videos or listening to their debut EP, Mother/Son Volume 1, released back in April. There’s something special here that can’t just be attributed to blood harmonies or genetic predisposition or God-given talent or “right time, right place.” There are aspects of each of these inputs throughout their current sky-bound trajectory, but the end result is certainly greater than the simple sum of its parts. And it’s landed them on the Grand Ole Opry, while continuing to garner even more views/followers Looking toward the future with excitement, they still let their inspirations and their audience guide them.

BGS sat down with Cox and Ratcliff at a coffee shop in Bellevue, Tennessee, on an afternoon dotted with sprinkling rain to talk about letting go of expectations, where they’re at now, where they’re headed next, and how badly the roots music world had been missing the inimitable voice of Suzanne Cox.

@therealbrandonratcliff I am weary, let me rest #obrotherwhereartthou #gospelmusic #acousticcovers #family #harmony @Suzanne Cox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

I wanted to start by going back to the beginning. Making music has been a lifelong thing for y’all. Your exposure to the music of your family, it being a part of the household. It’s a little bit like “chicken or the egg.” Obviously, y’all singing and being together and making music together would be a part of your family since forever. But I imagine there was a transition point when it went from being like, “We’re mother and son and we sing together,” to being, “Oh, there’s something here that maybe we should pursue.”

Suzanne Cox: I’ll have to let you tell that, ’cause you tell it very well, what happened.

Brandon Ratcliff: Thank you. When we started this really, none of [the business side of things] was on our minds. I keep telling people, “This whole thing has been a happy accident.” This has been a rare thing for me, and I don’t know if this is the same thing for Mom and them [the Cox Family], ’cause it was a different time. But for me, everything I’ve done in Nashville – for the most part, in the business – has felt a little bit like my dad always says, “Pushing a rope up a hill.” [Laughs] It’s like I’m putting so much effort into making something happen. And this [duo] thing kinda felt, for the first time ever, like we were constantly playing catch-up to what was reacting just naturally. Which has been very fun and has made us move very fast.

SC: Oh, it’s like we cannot keep up.

BR: We put something out and all of a sudden it starts working incredibly well and the next thing you know we’re like, “We gotta go record this. What are we doing? We’re late already.” That has been very exciting, fun, refreshing. The other thing is, too, having this kinda direct-to-consumer thing, where you post a video online and it resonates with people – which by the way, just even that was a surprise to us. Mom and I have talked for years about doing a project together or something. But it was mostly just for us. It was just for fun.

SC: “Someday.”

BR: “Someday we’ll do this thing. One day…” [It started when] I was back home for the holidays and we were together anyway, and singing and hanging out like we always do. I was like, “Hey, if we’re gonna sing anyway, we should just post some of these online.” Like, why not? And again, totally not thinking about the outcome. Never once considering–

SC: He was kinda done with TikTok for a little while.

BR: I was holding on loosely with the internet in general at this point. I told Mom right before, “Look, I’m not giving up on the internet, but I’d kinda let the idea that the internet would be my path to success [go].” I was like, I’ll still post, but I’m gonna try not to think about if this is gonna make my career. This was the first time I was kinda letting go of that outcome situation, and then we posted – the first thing, it was a song I was singing on the way over to her house. And it was [sings Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”], “Trailers for sale…”

SC: We were probably in Louisiana.

BR: “King of the Road.” I was singing it while I was riding the roads back there. And it did pretty well [online]. Better than most videos I had posted at that point. I was like, “Oh, this is cool,” but nothing gangbusters. But then the next one we did was a song that Mom sang on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? movie, “I Am Weary (Let Me Rest).” Yeah. We just got out there, started singing it.

SC: In front of an old vintage truck.

BR: Sang it five times in front of this old drilling rig truck. I posted it, forgot about it. My daughter’s third birthday party was later that afternoon, so I had to rush back over, get set up. All of a sudden family starts showing up and I’m getting texts from my cousins and people at the house are going like, “Dude, your video’s going viral.” I got no service out there in Louisiana.
It’s like I’m off the internet. Once I post, I’m done. So I get back on there and, sure enough, I’ve never gotten flooded with so many [notifications]. I open my phone up and it’s about to crash. It’s 400,000 views, 500,000 views. And I’m like, “What the…? This is crazy!” So then I tell Mom shortly after that, I gotta go back to Nashville.

And this, to your point, is where it starts going, “Oh wow, this is something.” This is resonating. There was one week where Rosie O’Donnell and Joe Jonas followed me and started reposting my videos. And it just keeps coming, all these people – Emily Ann Roberts, Ashley McBryde. It just kinda kept growing. Then it was immediately obvious to us and then everybody we were working with – like my producers and songwriter friends – something’s happening. The whole thing’s been like this, just accident after accident–

SC: [Smiling] Which I don’t believe is an accident.

BR: No, it’s divinely orchestrated, for sure. Very divine. The hand of God is all over this stuff.

SC: Brandon’s been at this [a long time], I [have been] for 52 years. And not really doing as much [lately], really at a point in my life where I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing in this new season. And even in prayer: “God, I’ve had a great career.” And I just thought, “Is it a time where I’m just a wife, a mother, and a grandmother?” Which is the best job. I love it. No regrets on that. No regrets. I was at a point before this all happened of just trying to figure out what my new season is. “Does anybody want to hear me sing anymore?” Still love to sing, but just had a lot going on. I had a real hard time. My husband got really sick in 2021. … And it put a lot of age on us both.

BR: Honestly, I think for us both, this season really came [while] we were both in a season of surrender. This openness – “What could happen? What God may do…”

SC: We answered quickly.

BR: It made the soil fertile for this real, raw passion – a just-living-life kinda thing. And I think it came from that season of surrender.

SC: And I was totally fine with that. I felt a calmness in that.

I hear you both communicating not a sense of giving up, but of letting go. Of realizing, “Maybe this isn’t something I need to clutch so tightly anymore.” And there is a freedom in that letting go.

SC: Yep. I agree. And also for it to be such a connection with other people. And that it resonates with people. And I love – I wasn’t reading any of the comments or anything and finally they called me and said, “Mom, you need to read these. You need to see some of this.” It’s just been such a wonderful thing to read what people say. Even if it’s, “My mamaw’s favorite song.” Or, “I bet you she can cook some good meals.” “Can I be adopted?” I just love that.

I think what stood out to me immediately is there’s something here that feels totally distinct from the Cox Family. Fresh and bright and sparkly in so many ways. But also, I was there on TikTok, y’all were on my FYP when that first video blew up. And I, like so many people who grew up with your voice, Suzanne, realized in that moment how starved I was for it. And then to see the world, all of us who did grow up with your singing have that same reaction – and then so many people who didn’t, too, have that moment of, “Who the hell is this?!” That was special to watch happen, even from the outside. Would you have ever believed people were waiting around for you to “come back”?

SC: No, I would not. And like I was telling you, a lot has gone down the pipe since then. It was a lot of heartache that I’ve gone through. We lost our dad in 2019 – so a lot of different issues. So yeah, at some point I was just thinking, “Does anybody ever even want to hear me singing?” I did. I went there. “Do I wanna hear myself sing anymore?” It wasn’t that bad, it wasn’t like I’m bawling in the bathroom or anything.

But we all have those thoughts.

SC: But we do! And it can get to your confidence, because you think that’s something in the past. For me, it was a good run [back then], and it’s been quite a gift for me to hear [the response now].

@therealbrandonratcliff I feel like I’m in a creaky old pew right now #sunday #hymns #hymnfortheweekend #motherson #familyharmony @thesuzannecox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

There’s something encouraging in how you’re speaking about yourself, because, to me, to somebody on the outside – you’re one of Alison Krauss’s favorite vocalists of all time! Suzanne Cox has the same sort of existential doubt that anyone might have. “Does my voice matter? Does the music I make matter?” And if we could all remind ourselves that’s just being human, we all have that ebb and flow.

SC: That’s right.

I think for so many of the hundreds and thousands of us, we never would have imagined that you would have that sort of doubt.

SC: It’s a little different these days. A lot of people have said, “Is she in retirement now?” I don’t know! Am I? I didn’t say it, but just life happens. As women, too, we wear just as many hats as a man does–

Even more.

SC: You’re a mother, and you’re a grandmother, and you’re fixing problems. I wasn’t heartbroken. I had a life that was good and felt good, I felt a peace about it. But I am delighted to be able to have a new song in my heart.

BR: And for me it wasn’t a shock, of course, because like you’re saying–

SC: Yeah, he’s always been so encouraging– him and his brothers.

BR: I grew up hearing mom sing and always knew she had a world-class voice. I used to hear mom all the time growing up, and me and dad would talk about it. I’d talk about it with my brother. It was like, “If anybody could hear this…”

SC: This might be when you were clueless. [Laughs]

BR: If anybody could just hear Mom singing around the house! And this kind of points to what we’re talking about again, this free space. If you could hear her sing just around the house, when she’s just messing around, you’d be like, “This woman is insanely good at singing.” It’s amazing, and almost even better than anything you hear on a recording.

SC: I feel so uncomfortable with y’all saying that. [All laugh]

BR: But to your point, though, this is a universal thing. I think this is true of a lot of us. That “dance like no one’s watching” mindset. When you don’t care, and you loosen up–

First take magic.

BR: Yes!

SC: If you’re like my sister, there was a lot of them that she did was her scratch vocal. One take!

BR: I tell Mom this all the time, and you learn this over and over with the internet, because posting online, there are diminishing returns the more you polish it. … We do have a tendency as creative people, as performers, to be perfectionists. Nothing’s ever good enough. We’re our worst critics. We all have a little bit of deep insecurities or impostor syndrome.

One of the things I love most about roots music – whether bluegrass or country or Americana or folk – is it’s always asking us to let the imperfections be. That’s why this music is so good. Because you can’t ever get a banjo in tune. Because the music has pocket. Because when you’re singing harmonies with somebody, maybe sometimes you are singing a dissonant note, or you’re singing a flat seven instead of something that’s diatonic, because “that’s how it goes.” Even though it’s got a little ugliness in it. The internet wants everyone to be perfect, but roots music is never perfect.

SC: Yep. Never perfect. Like you said, that’s what makes it really special.

@therealbrandonratcliff Can’t wait for @unclebsdamnedoleopry with @heyuncleb and the gang! April 28th we are honoring #continuum with some insanely talented artists and musicians by singing through some classics from the goat @johnmayer #motherson #cover #harmony #johnmayer @thesuzannecox ♬ original sound – brandonratcliff

I love how you guys are making cross-generational music in so many ways. But one of the ways that evidences itself is that I think this is some of the more “outside” or progressive music I’ve ever heard you sing, Suzanne. You’re really playing with genre in a really interesting way. Whether you’re singing a John Mayer cover or it’s “Far Side Banks of Jordan,” I love seeing how these sort of modern, more pop sensibilities are coming into the music. Then you also how the Cox Family vocal stylings have always had a modern crispness, modern licks, runs, and turns of phrase. How are you thinking about genre and playing with that?

SC: I don’t know. I’ve told Brandon this, I’ve never been one of those [tradition hardliners]. I know you say our sound [was traditional], but Daddy, from the get-go, we were doing [all kinds of styles]. He was very open. We started out old traditional country. We used to do old hayrides before we went into the bluegrass scene. But he introduced us to Don Reno & Red Smiley, plus Merle [Haggard] and Loretta Lynn. I’m getting a lot of people saying [I sound like] Loretta Lynn. She was a hero of mine, so I see that. Of course, Dolly [Parton] and Patsy Cline. But [Daddy] was really open to [different styles], so I was already at a point where I love what I love.

If I can make it sound like me, that’s what I wanna sing. So [the Cox Family] opened up for the Counting Crows. And did Eagles songs and “Blue Bayou.” We listened to classical and anything that we liked – Kenny Loggins, Loggins and Messina. … I’ve done Marvin Gaye, on that last album… It was good that he encouraged us to be able to be open.

BR: I feel like for me – and again, I wouldn’t have probably said this five years ago. I would’ve probably taken some real credit for this and been like, “I think it’s ’cause of me!” I’m young, whatever. But I think that, now, as I get older and I kinda look at the context of my life and what they did and everything, and how she raised me growing up, I kinda think it’s a natural downstream effect. Outside of just how she raised me on music, I grew up in the late ’90s, early 2000s, so I grew up listening to everything. She raised me listening to everything, like Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Hall & Oates, all the stuff she grew up on. But then Backstreet Boys and the rock groups of the ’90s, Sugar Ray – it was just all over the place.

SC: And Don Reno & Red Smiley. [Laughs]

BR: There’s still a box set of Merle Haggard in my truck right now. I’ve listened to all these kinds of things. I grew up with a very diverse listening, and then I was in the iPod generation, so there was the shuffling music. …

I think when we sing something, even as off the beaten path as it is, I think you just innately are you, and I am innately me. It’s fate, we’re mother-son. We kinda have similar tendencies, to notes and a choice of a run here or not there. I think that’s kinda what gives it that common thread. You can take a hard rock song or you can take an old country song, and as long as it’s me and you singing it…

SC: Sometimes it’s a challenge, too. In a good way! …

BR: But whenever I blend with Mom, it’s like I’m learning how to take the thing that I do that’s really distinct and interesting about myself, but also shed some of the other solo stuff to match with her. Because it’s me and Mom, it kinda changes the alchemy of the song a little bit in a really cool way.

One practical impact of you both being at this point in your careers – Brandon, you have already done two or three or four laps around Nashville, trying to get into the scene in the same way most folks do. Suzanne, you had this vibrant career and were asking yourself, “What now?” So, for both of you to then be able to be like, “Actually, we know we don’t have to do it the ‘Music Business’ way. We know we can just do it the way that we’re gonna do it.”

SC: Exactly. I told Brandon, “I’m 59 this year. And at this age you start relaxing a little bit more.” I could relax a little bit more, my son would say. [Laughs] But I’m learning so much, and I don’t think you can [avoid that]. I don’t think people give up. And I feel like I can still learn a lot. I’m learning from my child, I’m learning from this industry. But we always want to be unique.

BR: That’s one of the cool dynamics about being mother-son. We found a niche, I believe, too. … I’ve seen both sides. In the 12 years I’ve been here, it was the old world one minute and then everything was new. I’ve kinda gotten acclimated to this. And I’m always telling Mom, “It’s really funny we share these stories.” ‘Cause there’s stuff to learn from both eras. I’m always telling Mom, “That thing that you see as messy or weird or, ‘Oh, that was embarrassing,’ I go, ‘That’s when I and everyone else see you shine. You’re funny, you’re smart, you’re incredibly talented.'”

That’s something about this new world, the internet world, that is so different from whenever they were coming up. Where everything was kind of media-trained and scrubbed and, “Let’s shave the edges off.” Whereas now I’m telling Mom, “No, that is the goal.” When you are just yourself and I happen to catch it, that’s the thing that people light up for.

In a world where more and more, when you go on the DSPs and you hit shuffle, you might be hearing AI music, having those moments of real humanity are so important. Maybe it’s imperfect, but it’s real and it’s raw. You see so many videos online that are like three singers in a kitchen harmonizing together “impromptu.” You go to the comments and everyone’s saying, “We can hear the auto-tune.” Audiences know what’s real and what’s fake.

SC: Which is fascinating that you say that, because a lot of people have said, “Oh, there’s no way this is just in your backyard.” [Both laugh]

BR: TikTok has a great reverb, if you only knew.

SC: I think it’s funny.

I want people to think I’m tuned when I’m not!

BR: Exactly. [Laughs] I think people are jaded. I think they’re paranoid – to your point about they’re getting fed so much phony stuff. They don’t know what’s real anymore. That’s one of the encouraging things about the world we live in, I think it is increasing the demand for real human authenticity. That is a positive side of this pendulum swinging. People are fed up with this “sounds too perfect” trend. It’s indiscernible from a robot.

Even to the point that there was a girl who commented on this video we did, I posted a backstage video of us at the Opry. She said, “There’s no way this wasn’t studio-recorded before.” I’m sitting here going, “I’ll take it as a compliment.” ‘Cause I felt like I was all over the place in that video! But thank you for thinking that.

I think people are telling on themselves with a lot of the hand-wringing over what to do about AI. Of course I agree, we should be very careful with how we’re proliferating this technology and protect creators’ rights, but also AI is never gonna be able to do what Suzanne Cox’s voice does, right? And I’ve not yet heard a convincing AI bluegrass banjo player. I don’t think it’s coming for our jobs! I hope that what we’re all doing is real and human enough that AI will never come for these jobs.

SC: When they’re all in the coloring book, inside the lines, we’ll color outside … and the rest of us. We’re gonna color outside the lines. …

BR: I’ll say, I think the one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience is there are no rules.

SC: Yeah, exactly.

BR: This whole idea that you gotta post this many times, you gotta do this, you gotta do that… Blah, blah, blah. People will tell you, whether you’re talking about the internet or anything else, they’ll tell you there’s a certain math to it. I’m like, “Man, I don’t know anything about what I’m doing.” My guesses have gotten better, but I’m still clueless. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that you have to follow the pace of your inspiration. As soon as you start doing it because you feel obligated, you’ve already lost.

Photo Credit: Chase Hentges

Michaela Anne Finds Tranquility and Clarity in Parenthood

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Michaela Anne’s life underwent a cosmic shift over the last several years. She had two kids and quickly learned how “physically taxing” parenting can be, she says. That physical transformation directly feeds into her latest album, These Are The Days, a creatively bold, poetic, and profound set of songs about getting older, fading beauty, and music’s connective tissue.

While out on tour, years ago, Anne stopped by a friend’s house and witnessed several young kids playing, laughing, and making a whole lotta noise. Admittedly, she didn’t know if she’d ever have kids herself. “My friend said to me, ‘Yeah, but this is going to feel like a high for you, like falling in love with these children,’” she recalls.

“I remember the first year of being a mother, texting her, ‘Oh, I know what you’re talking about now.’ And that has really surprised me, that exhilarated feeling that I’ve gotten just from the experience of having children and getting older,” Anne reflects. “What has also surprised me is that you hear people talk about it all the time, how, especially in your 40s – I just turned 40 – you don’t give any fucks anymore. And it’s just whatever. And I’m like, ‘Does that just magically happen?’

“And I have been surprised to feel the progression of ‘it does.’ You start to care less because you just get so exhausted from the energy you’ve spent caring about the things that mattered a lot [before], like status, what people thought of you, or inclusion. That has been very delightfully surprising and freeing.”

These Are the Days swirls with a kind of knowledge you only acquire when you hit your 40s. The changes it reckons with have almost a baptismal effect. Songs like “We’ve Got Bigger Plans” and “Will You Still Love Me with a Broken Heart” reflect her ever-changing self, whereas “Two Pianos,” a song co-written by Caroline Spence, and “B-Sides” capture the magic of music in Anne’s life. “If Your Body Fails You” finds Anne bottling up both her mother’s deterioration post-stroke and our society’s obsession with youth.

The album, produced by her husband Aaron Shafer-Haiss, emerges as a timeless ode to the ephemeral nature of human existence. Letting go, relishing the mundane in busy everyday life, and embracing middle age echo throughout the nine tracks like a starling bobbing and weaving across a rosy sunset. Something is calming about it, and you trust that you’ll get to where you’re going soon enough.

What has been your journey of learning to let go?

Michaela Anne: It is continual. It’s such a common thing to hear people say – and this is kind of woo-woo new age-y saying – “just surrender.” But the actual practice of surrendering to all that is, I have found, incredibly challenging and essential to really being open to what life presents to us. I’m a millennial, and I feel like the way that we grew up is, “Dream big, you can be anything you want.” That was so ingrained in me. I have a song from a previous record called “By Our Design.” It was this whole thing about writing it down, manifesting it, and making it happen. And it didn’t take into account that nothing is actually within our control.

So things happen, like global pandemics or your mother has a stroke. [Or] friends that I witnessed in this age group who want to start a family desperately and can’t get pregnant or deal with pregnancy loss. There are so many things that we cannot control that determine a lot of factors in our lives, and a lot of things about whether or not we can have the life that we envisioned. And accepting it is a daily practice, and really keeping my eyes open to what all that is here, rather than continually looking in my mind to the places I thought it should be, is painful.

There’s also the element of not caring what other people think. I imagine that’s even more difficult as an artist.

I try to consciously reconnect to why I make music all the time. Inevitably, there is an element of wanting to be seen when you’re sharing art that you make and wanting to be loved, wanting to be received and affirmed. And that is beautiful, but it can also be really tricky and detrimental. If we’re looking at it in this transactional way, or also career success– I’m also a military kid. I grew up moving every other year. I was socially conditioned to try and make friends fast and be well-liked, and just fit in and survive the next couple of years before we moved on to the next town. I have to constantly remind myself: it is okay to not be liked by everybody. But I always go back to, “Am I doing my best to show up in kindness and in love and openness?” And you still might not be liked by everybody.

Social media certainly doesn’t help either.

No, it’s corrupting our brains. Now, we have this false sense of metrics to measure ourselves that we translate to our worth. How many likes we get, how many followers, how many streams, and it’s really unhealthy.

Have you ever found that affecting your creativity in any way? Have you ever thought, “Oh, this song has this many streams, maybe if I write something like that, it’ll take off?”

I think I would be lying if I tried to say, “Oh no, it’s separate.” I’ve found that whenever I do try to make something, I don’t actually know what people want from me. And what one person wants from me is different from what the next person wants. Collectively or culturally or music industry-wise, that’s changing so fast all the time that it’s fruitless to try to morph myself into that. I’ve definitely gone outside of the box that I think I was seeing, fitting into, and not seeing the response that I hoped for and have had to do the work of, “Well, that’s okay.”

We can confuse streaming numbers with a measurement of artistic purity. They’re very different things. I always go back to, “Did that feel true to me?” I can only write the songs that feel true that come out. Sometimes that’s well received, and sometimes it’s not. It’s always a gamble.

Another essential piece of the album is enjoying the mundane things in everyday life. What things have you come to appreciate more?

Routine. I used to think I hated routine. I loved being on tour all the time, because there was sort of chaos within a routine. You knew where you had to be every day, but then every show is different and every place was different. I’ve really come to love the routine of waking up around the same time–I have two children, depending on when they wake up. I have a morning routine, that first cup of coffee, just all of that stuff has become really enchanting to me.

When you’re addicted to something, you need more and more to feel the high. I used to need a lot to feel excitement. It’s almost like I’ve come down to stasis, where now, to be totally honest, I sometimes open my compost bin and it’s all these different colors. I think it’s so beautiful. [Laughs]

I don’t go out and get drunk and meet new people all the time. It’s a different high. It’s the calm. Now, bouts of excitement are way more exhausting to me than they used to be. Maybe that’s also just middle age. Kids being asleep, getting a couple of hours to myself or a cup of tea and maybe a bath and a book – that is so exciting.

The wonder of music also comes into play on the album, such as with songs such as “Two Pianos” and “B-Sides.” What moments in your life do you cherish most around music?

Music has always been my companion, my way to cope and understand things. The very first song I ever wrote was called “When Daddy Comes Home.” My dad was a submarine captain and he was out to sea for long months at a time. I always say music was my way of processing longing and sorrow. But it is such a companion for joy. I think about every big moment of my life, there’s a soundtrack, you know? Getting married, there are songs that were part of our wedding. Giving birth, there are specific songs that were the soundtrack that we were playing when both of my children entered this world.

Music is everywhere in our lives. Sometimes, I think when it becomes a career, it can taint it a little bit. I have had to remember this is a relationship on my own that doesn’t need to be influenced by outside forces. Some of the bigger moments are those when we put on songs and just dance in the living room with our kids.

Another thread in the album is the idea that beauty always fades. In your song “If Your Body Fails You” you ask a series of questions about why we avoid the mirror and continue to uphold youth on a pedestal. Why do we do those things?

Capitalism. That song is rooted in watching my mom lose many physical abilities from her stroke. As well as the way that her body looked changing and witnessing her experience that, grappling with my own experience and my own relationship to my mother’s body. It was not something I really thought about. While also experiencing so many changes in my own body, growing a human for the first time. And that paired with this idea that it feels like it’s getting to a fever pitch of this expectation, especially for women, to look preserved, to look frozen, to look so smooth, and not aged at all. And noticing that infiltrates my mindset.

I don’t know why we are obsessed with that, literally, other than powerful marketing campaigns have convinced us to spend a lot of our money trying to freeze our faces and our bodies. But it’s something that I really want to resist, which genuinely feels challenging sometimes, because of those messages.

Numerous celebrities, from Kate Winslet and Meryl Streep to Barbra Streisand, have opposed plastic surgery for just that reason: to resist body standards. Hopefully, that leads to a cultural change eventually.

I hope so. It’s really helpful when public people put that out there in a really positive way, so that we don’t think, “Oh, this unrealistic expectation is what we all need to do.” When I see people owning it, it inspires me and builds my courage to also own it in the same way. When I see women rocking gray hair in their 40s, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to skip my next hair appointment.” [Laughs] I don’t want to dye my hair.

“Two Pianos” is lyrically hopeful but musically somber. That’s an interesting dichotomy.

The strings were written, arranged, and performed by Kristen Weber, who’s one of my really close friends and has done strings on almost all my records since 2019. I wrote the song with Caroline Spence, who is also a very good friend. Both of those women have been really intimately witnessing my life over the last several years – and vice versa. Some days it’s really hard to recognize all that we have. And I’m going to be honest, sometimes I compare. Sometimes I feel really sad. For what reason, I’m not sure.

But how do I sit in gratitude and keep this kind of, you know, remember to remember – how we say in the song. I actually got it from Chris Wood from the Wood Brothers. He said that in a podcast that I host with my husband. We were talking about all the things in life and how to stay healthy. He said, “Some days, we just need to remember to remember.” Musically, we wanted it to feel expansive, but also be an intimate experience of being really close at your kitchen table, but how universal that experience is for everybody.

The lyric “I never trust my own point of view” stands out. To both remember that you can be an unreliable narrator and to trust your gut.

At least in my experience, my mind can play tricks on me. It can tell me stories that maybe aren’t actually true. Sometimes, it’s good to be distrustful of my own point of view and try to get grounded in what’s reality. Other times, it’s dangerous to ignore my point of view, but that continual challenge and journey to know who I am. And it’s really hard to ground our individual selves in this world.

Other than music, how do you ground yourself?

I have to move my body. Every morning, I work out for a short amount of time, like 15 minutes. Since having a second child, it’s something my husband and I support each other [in]. Every morning, we take turns while the other person is doing breakfast and packing lunches. Fifteen minutes to do yoga, or a little dance video, or go on a run. That stuff is really essential. My ideal would be to be able to meditate and go on hikes more often. Nature really grounds me. But it’s really hard to find the time. And therapy.

“We’ve Got Bigger Plans” reminds me of the saying that “when you know better, be better.” Whether that’s with social issues or in our relationships with others, it’s about actually learning from the past.

That song is very personal, about my experience [over] the last several years of becoming a mother and having a lot of dreams. The first verse opens up with, “I used to be a dreamer who would dream things you couldn’t see.” I stopped believing, and my husband, partner, the producer of my record, Aaron Shafer-Haiss, was the one who was like, “Life is not over. What are you doing?” We can still have so much beauty and opportunity. We can always make art.

The inspiration for the second verse comes from our daughter, and how mystical and magical it was to witness this little child coming to life, and greeting the moon and stars at night. The kind of ritual of seeing the world really opened up my eyes and my heart in a new way. It’s about not getting pulled into unhelpful, unhealthy belief systems and trying to fill your cup where it doesn’t need to be filled. Looking beyond some of these little things that we can get tripped up on and knowing that we’ve got a bigger view.

What’s it been like adding a podcast to your professional life?

It has been so enriching. It is challenging, like balancing the time. But the conversations that we get to have, and the caliber of artists that we get to meet, it feels like such a gift. And I’m constantly like, “This is so cool that we get to do this and that we get to talk to people who create things that mean so much to other people and us.” Then, really get to dig in on what the human experience of it is. And it’s a great source of comfort to me to know that people I admire have a lot of the same anxieties and hopes and fears. And it just reminds us that we are just human beings.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

How Courtney Hartman
Made With You

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In the late summer of 2022, Courtney Hartman realized that the songs she had written for a new album were not the songs she needed to release. “I had found out I was pregnant a few months earlier, [and already] had a batch of material I was working on for a new record. I felt this quiet urging to set all of that aside and give my attention to what was happening in our life and in my body,” she says.

She discarded everything and began writing her third album, With You, a personal journey through motherhood set to music.

“What was happening in our life” refers to a tumultuous string of events that saw Hartman and her husband, John, through the best and worst of times. Best because the couple were expecting their first child, rebuilding their house in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and Hartman was on tour; worst because her husband fell off a ladder, could not work for months, lost two jobs, she was dropped by her booking agent, and they totaled their car.

The cumulative effect left the couple in need emotionally, physically, and financially. They soon found themselves uplifted by their community – their immediate one and her music community at large. The experience left Hartman deeply grateful and dedicated to giving back even more than she received.

In September of that year, Hartman began writing “in earnest” the songs that became With You. She and her husband welcomed their daughter in February 2023 – more best of times followed by worst of times as Hartman struggled with postpartum depression.

“At the end of [2023] I had all this material and realized I wanted to invite in other voices and stories and perspectives, specifically those of other mothers,” she says.

Once again, she drew on her community, calling on a fellowship of songwriter mothers – Sarah Siskind, Dawn Landes, Ana Egge, Tift Merritt, Kristin Andreassen, and Emily Frantz Marlin of Watchhouse – to help take her deeply personal new songs to an even higher level.

“I spent another few months, December [2023] to February [2024], writing mostly over Zoom, finishing the material with those other writers,” she says. With You was recorded in June and July 2024, at The Hive studio in Eau Claire, with Hartman producing and Brian Joseph as co-producer and engineer.

As one might expect from Hartman, there are plenty of guitars on the album – her Lawrence Smart Archtop, Bourgeois Parlor,
PreWar (modeled after a Gibson J-45), Bischoff Dreadnought, Martin 00,
and a Telecaster – but if you’re looking for the lightning flatpicking work that makes her a bluegrass force to reckon with, you’ll be best served on YouTube. With You tells a story that calls for understated guitars as a palette for its songs.

“Things weren’t all bright and shiny in that season,” she says, “but the impetus to write and pay attention helped me pay attention to some of those lighter moments. Not all the songs on With You are about everything being light, because that’s just not how it is. But there was this extra attention to some of those details that do help buoy your spirit when things are a little more challenging.”

Courtney Hartman’s ‘With You’ album cover art, created by Claire Lindwall.

Completing the journey is With You’s striking cover art. The work of Hartman’s close friend Claire Lindwall captures the music’s delicate intimacy. “Claire is primarily a watercolor artist and illustrator,” says Hartman. “A special part of creating an album, for me, is giving the music to someone who then translates it into a visual piece of art. Every time, it’s surprising and expansive in a new way.”

Lindwall cast her own hand and that of her daughter’s, and positioned the casts so that one holds the other. “We experimented with drawings around it, then having just a splash of watercolor behind the piece,” says Hartman. “That’s all it needed.”

With this album now making its full debut, how do you feel about sharing so much vulnerability?

Courtney Hartman: The processing has happened in phases. I think it started just by saying yes to writing the material. There was an accepting of, “I’m writing about this thing that feels more vulnerable and more naked than anything I’ve written about before.” Bringing those songs to other writers, to collaborators, there was another level of vulnerability there.

A year ago I brought all of this material to my greater community and asked for support, because at that point I needed help putting the album out. Now, to give it to the rest of my community and listeners in the world, there’s a level of vulnerability, but I feel mostly excited. It feels like, “We made it.”

You’ve explained in other interviews that you had to use funding meant for the songs that came before these in order to get back on your feet. Needing financial assistance is also a vulnerable place and one that often brings publicly imposed shame and guilt. How did you process it?

You’re bringing up something that my husband and I have been talking about a lot, just with the news cycle and trying to get an understanding of what we can do for folks in our community. And having had small tastes of that in our life, because I know what we’ve experienced is so small compared to what so many people live through and are currently living through.

An important [word] that you touched on is shame – the shame of needing help; of not feeling like you can do it on your own or you can stand on your own two feet; of needing help for basic things like groceries. I think maybe accepting help and accepting care expands our capacity to feel compassion and to be able to then care for others.

In a podcast for Acoustic Guitar, you used the phrase “the intimacy of sound.” Could you talk more about what that means in the songwriting and guitar playing?

What I hear when you reflect that phrase back to me is the sound of the skin of your finger on the guitar string, or the sound of hands against a percussive instrument. When we went into the studio, I told the friends that were with me there on the first day, “Just as a guiding directive, whenever we imagine a sound that we want to create, let’s see if we can find something natural to create it with.”

Everyone took it in their own way, some on their instruments. Sean Carey was heavily involved on the record and he took that more literally in a lot of the percussion work. He found a nest outside when he was wandering around and that became the percussion on a track. Or even just the sound of skin on skin being a sound that we used as well; bringing in and magnifying some of these quieter sounds and allowing that to be a part of the soundscape [was part of the intimacy of sound].

Did you select the guitars around the songs or did some of the songs develop around your guitars?

Sometimes you think you know what a song wants before going into the studio and then you sit behind a mic and you’re like, “This isn’t serving it quite right.” And sometimes that experimentation takes a little longer than you think it will. Or sometimes you sit down with a first instinct and it’s totally right. That’s part of the reason it’s fun to have a good array of instruments in the studio.

Is the guitar as much a part of expressing your feelings as the lyrics?

It is. I think part of that comes from how long it’s been an instrument that feels like a voice to me. Songwriting came around the same time. I was about 12 when I started writing songs. Singing feels like something I still have so much exploration and learning to do.

How did working with other mothers, and their lived experiences, bring understanding to what you were going through?

What I was given [was the] shared experience and the acknowledgement of, “This is really hard. It’s really beautiful, but it’s also really challenging.”

So much of the caregiving that happens [as a mother], especially in that first year … so much of it is invisible. Maybe an aspect of that applies to all sorts of giving care – that it’s invisible other than to the one giving the care and the one receiving the care. When you feel invisible, it can also make you feel isolated and that can really feed into some of the struggles. A lot of folks have postpartum [depression] and societally we’re not set up to honor and support that season very well at all. It’s something I care a lot about, both from experiences with my family, but also as I’ve delved into work as a birth doula.

When you say, “Societally we’re not set up to honor and support that season very well at all,” what do we need to do?

We need to honor and uphold the importance of rest and nutrition and preparation. Parents are prepared for “Here’s what birth might look like,” but after that six-week checkup [traditional care usually ends]. Postpartum extends far longer than that.

A lot of [postpartum] mental health struggles won’t show up until maybe nine months or a year after a child is born. Better supporting [people postpartum] that would be the first thing I can think of. We live pretty isolated lives, as families in our insular homes, and so we’re not set up to receive support very well.

Or ask for it.

Yes, totally, [we need to be] preparing [people] to know that this is a time to accept and receive care. Preparing your heart for that is such a big piece of it, to know that we, as your village and your community, want to care for you in this time.

You’ve spoken openly about postpartum depression. What was that period of time like for you?

Moments of real happiness, but also moments of hitting my head against the wall … when I was struggling. [It was] hard to admit to myself and then to speak that [struggle] out loud to anybody. It wasn’t until afterwards that I could say, “That was hard.”

All depression is misunderstood and will often make people in your circle run away.

Let’s go back to your community, and the community of mothers, and how they lifted you.

I felt so cared for by our community in a way that was deeply humbling and in a way that somehow prepared me to do some of the caregiving that was going to be required of me. I was receiving so much love and support and meals and folks showing up. That kind of care is life-changing. It changes the way we see the world and our community around us.

My daughter was about nine months old or so when I started reaching out to other mothers, asking if they would collaborate on some songwriting. Having some tether creatively helped pull me through that season. It helped weave together the woman I was prior to having a child with the woman I was in that new space. … Sometimes it feels like … you almost can’t remember who you were before.

I was really afraid of [losing parts of myself]. I was afraid I wouldn’t create music again. There’s all these fears, irrational or not, that show up. Creating and being able to have these conversations that normalize what you’re experiencing. Having women who are [a] few years ahead of me be like, “It might be extra-challenging now, but it doesn’t stay that way forever.”

It’s almost 2026 and society still misunderstands and stigmatizes mental health, certainly PPD, and even some aspects of pre- and postpartum healthcare. Why are we uncomfortable talking about things that are so natural and important to discuss? Are we making progress or going backward?

I hope we’re making progress. It was a lot easier for me to ask, “Why don’t we talk about these things?” when I wasn’t part of the “we.” As soon as it was also part of my story to talk about and share, [I had to come] to terms with my own hesitancy. Why do I not want to talk about something as normal as pregnancy and motherhood in my songs? Why do I feel like if I put this music out, it will be discredited and potentially ignored, even though it may speak to so much of the population? …

I still don’t have an answer. Maybe it’s because there’s so many generations of women having to hide those things for fear of losing wages, or jobs, or discrimination, whatever it might be. For everybody’s sake, there’s so much we have to learn from mothers’ voices, and I hope we’re beginning to really listen.

On a podcast, The Other 22 Hours, you reflected on the period after Della Mae and the realization, at the time, that “Music was not a healing thing.” What role does music now play in your healing and mental health?

It has become healing again. Years ago, I was dealing with physical pain in my hands. That was magnified by touring all the time, being on the road so much, and the strain on my body. So I was speaking about it in a physical way. [Music] has become a lot more than just physically healing [for me]. I think this album exemplifies that.

You have worked with so many people. Who is your wish-list artist or artists?

Oh my gosh. The first person that came to mind – and maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to her record all week – I would love to play music in the same room as Brandi Carlile. She gives all of herself and it’s so good.

We had a listening party [for With You] and as I was listening to the album for the first time with a whole group of friends and collaborators, what I hear on it is my friends and heroes, which is such a joy. There are so many folks on this album that I look up to so much and who have been dream collaborators. So, in that way, a lot of it has been a dream list fulfilled.

Photo Credit: Michelle Bennett

BGS 5+5: Sam Burchfield

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Sam Burchfield
Hometown: Seneca, South Carolina (now Jasper, Georgia)
Latest Album: Nature Speaks (out October 24 on Cloverdale Records)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Sammy B. Rejected band name: Sam & The Samwiches.

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

Around the same time my older sister started playing electric bass, I saw O Brother, Where Art Thou? and I heard “Eruption” by Van Halen for the first time. These memories all felt very important to me wanting to start playing guitar. As soon as I started playing guitar there was no going back. It consumed my life in the best way. Started my first band in 7th grade and ever since I have been writing songs and putting out records. (Long live Kelly Sparks The Fuse, my experimental garage rock band from middle school.)

What’s the most difficult creative transformation you’ve ever undertaken?

Becoming a parent. Ha!

But for real, it has so drastically changed who I am. It feels like I have finally unfolded from within myself. The past 3 years – we just had our second child six months ago – have shown the biggest overall life challenges as well as growth that I’ve yet to experience. My wife and I have been pushed in every way to dig deep and push forward. It’s beautiful, it’s painful, it’s meaningful. Creatively, it has really focused me and helped me to cut away some of the fluff.

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

Going off the last question, it has been so hard to keep pursuing being an artist as a “career” over the last decade. I think it has also made me really value the core reason that I’m doing all of this and putting myself and my family through so much chaos sometimes.

Ultimately, I want to inspire people to see the truth, beauty, and goodness of the world.

Does pineapple really belong on pizza?

Without a doubt, but only when it’s next to that ham, babayyyyy!

If you didn’t work in music, what would you do instead?

Well my first dream job was professional Lego builder. So probably that.

Although, nowadays I really love a good home project. Currently building an addition on the house and there is nothing as satisfying as throwing up a freshly framed wall. So maybe a carpenter!

Photo Credit: Erin Burchfield

Caroline Spence in Conversation With Lori McKenna

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Caroline Spence and Lori McKenna are both lauded for writing songs that cut straight to the heart. In conversation, it’s clear they also share admiration and a generosity of spirit, offering insight into how a life built around family can both coexist with and deepen a life in music. The two met with BGS via Zoom to discuss Spence’s new record, Heart Go Wild, produced by Peter Groenwald, Mark Campbell, and Spence herself.

As Spence charts her first year of motherhood, McKenna reflects on building a catalog of piercingly honest songs while raising five children of her own. Together, they explore the mysteries of publishing, the influence of mentors like Mary Gauthier, and the butterfly effect of one songwriter’s choices on another’s path.

Their exchange drifts from songwriting craft to the role of co-writers in self-discovery into the bigger questions of life: how family and creativity intertwine, how community ripples outward, and how songs become offerings that carry meaning long after they leave the writer’s hands.

What emerges is a portrait of two artists at different points along similar paths, each proving that family life and creative life are not competing forces, but intertwined sources of inspiration and strength.

I know you two have a lot to talk about, but I’d love to start, if we can, with how you know each other? Did you know of each other musically first, and then how did you come to know each other personally?

Lori McKenna: I think the first time we met might have been at breakfast that time?

Caroline Spence: Right. I think that was another Bluegrass Situation connection. I think that was the first time I met you.

I had a good friend from summer camp and we would often trade mixes. She put one of your songs on a CD for me. I had already found Patty Griffin and was having my singer-songwriter love affair. That led me to The Kitchen Tapes, which led me to everything else. And I distinctly remember when Faith Hill cut “Stealing Kisses” and I thought, “Wait, that’s how that works?” I didn’t know what publishing was. I didn’t know how music worked in that way and that became a new little baby dream of mine that I carried with me: to write a song that was good enough that maybe somebody else would want to sing it. I feel like I would not be aware of the job that I have had I not found you, Lori.

LM: That is really cool. I remember not knowing anything about publishing, how it works and all that stuff, too. And I still feel like I know just a tiny bit more.

CS: I know, totally. It’s still a mystery.

LM: We were at a wedding over the weekend and my son Chris, who’s a writer in town, has his first single that he co-wrote that’s going to radio. So we were singing songs and at the end of the night, my brother was like, “Chris sold the song!” I’m like, “It’s not called selling the song.” He’s like, “Well, how does it work?” Nobody knows.

CS: Yeah, nobody knows. They just stream it now into the abyss.

LM: The only reason I knew anything was because of Mary Gauthier. I did know people who had moved to Nashville before Mary, but because I’m in the Boston area, they came back saying, “Yep, it’s very different.” It is very different in Nashville. I didn’t know anyone who had stayed before Mary, you know? I love being inspired by other people. I love it that that’s how life works, that you see someone else do something, and you’re like, “Wait! I can do that! At least I can try!”

CS: I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, the butterfly effect, and how that happens within our community. Like, if Mary hadn’t done this, then this wouldn’t have happened for you, and if you hadn’t done that, then I wouldn’t have known about this, and I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve been in this creative community for a decade now. There’s so much stuff that you never know your little ripple is doing.

LM: The ripple is such a good word. It’s such a ripple, isn’t it? It’s crazy. We’re really lucky. I know you just had a baby, but the number of people that come up to me and ask, “How did you do this with kids?” Nobody told me that I couldn’t. I know stories of other artists that someone’s told, “You can’t do this and have a family at the same time.” I’ve heard those stories, but nobody ever told me that.

It didn’t seem impossible at the time. But now my son Chris has a baby. I look at them and I’m like, “Wait, how does anybody do that ever? How does anybody have a baby?”

CS: Man, some days it really feels that way. Most days it feels that way. No one ever said that to me either, but those are absolutely the cultural messages you absorb. There are certain gigs I might not get because of my familial obligations, but you just make your choices. And I’m not building my life around what I “might get.” I want to build my life around what I know I want to have. I just feel like all of that is gonna feed your person. You can’t starve yourself of these big, beautiful growth opportunities for some sort of potential. My life is bigger than my career, and I would like it to be as big as possible.

LM: And it’s crazy, right?

CS: Yeah, it’s nuts. Absolutely nuts. The fact that I got a shower this morning is a big win.

LM: Well, that and the fact you’re putting a record out!

CS: Yeah, yeah, and the record!

LM: You did good.

CS: It’s a little bit cuckoo, but it’s been done for a while. A lot of the heavy lifting was done even before I was pregnant, so that was an accidentally smart idea and we’ve just had to be strategic about everything else. I feel like there’ll be a lot of people who assume this is a record about marriage and family, which it’s not. I’m sure I will have that, but this feels like a record that’s more about the chaos before I decided I could do all that.

LM: From the minute I knew who you were, I’ve always loved the way that you express your feelings in such a way that makes other people be like, “Oh! I’ve felt like that! This song makes me realize that I’m not alone in feeling that.”

There’s something in the way that you write that is like arms are reaching out, but they’re also like, “I know you feel this way, too and it’s okay that we all feel this way.” I feel like that’s why music exists. For someone pulling over their car and being like, “Oh my god, okay, I’m not gonna die today because I just heard the song!” It is the biggest reason, the service of songwriting, as Mary Gauthier says. You don’t do it consciously, but it just is your way of doing it. It just seems so innate in the way you write.

CS: That’s so kind and means a lot to me, because that’s really how I feel about it. It’s been a progression. I started writing because I needed to get these hard things out when I was a younger person and as I started putting those out there, I would have conversations where someone would say, “I feel that way, too.” That kind of cemented in me to keep writing from that place, because that’s what music did, and still does for me.

What is personal is universal. I feel like someone smart said that before I did, but it’s so true. And Mary’s perspective of songs as a service resonates so deeply with me. There’s a quote I read when I was doing The Artist Way a few years ago that says, “The artist has to be humble, for he is essentially a channel.” To let the divine in, whatever it is, to flow through you, you have to get small and get in your humanity.

And when I’m feeling really in my head and when I don’t want to perform or I’m feeling self-critical, I think about what I’m doing as an offering, and it makes me feel better and more inside what I’m trying to do.

LM: I love the offering.

CS: People want to feel understood. As a listener, you want to find your soundtrack for your hard time or your good time.

LM: Well, congratulations on doing all this, because the record’s beautiful, as usual. You co-produced this whole thing, right? Did you always co-produce? Because this record seems, and I hate to use the word “rockier,” but it feels like it moves a little bit more. Was that intentional?

CS: I think a lot of that might sort of be a songwriting change for me. I feel like I’ve gotten better at translating what I’m hearing into the actual thing, so I think that’s a skill I’ve slowly developed from my slow folk songs for years.

LM: The transition is so beautiful. With the song “Soft Animal,” if I wrote that song, it would be just the slowest. It wouldn’t move the way [it does].

CS: It totally started on the page, too. It was very much like a poem. Sometimes I sit down to a piece of writing, if I’m going through my ideas, and if something’s sort of dead on the page, I’ll just start playing. That one was one where it sort of just came out that way. The clash of “Soft Animal” to something that felt really thrashy, the irony of that felt celebratory to me, and it was fun. That’s one of my favorites production-wise on the record.

LM: Oh, that’s great. When I work with a producer, you can tell. You can listen to the record and know that this is definitely different. But there’s been this really consistent line with you the whole time, which is kind of remarkable when you think about how much you’ve changed in life and as a person over the years. There’s this vibe that really just comes through where you can tell that you are a big piece of the production of everything.

CS: Thank you for saying that. That was actually a dealbreaker thing for me for this record, that I would only work with people who would give me a production credit, because I felt like over the years – and not to discredit the people who are credited as producers on my albums – but because of who they are as producers, it was collaborative, and there were times when I was making sure that my vision got to the finish line in spite of their initial instincts. I didn’t know it mattered to me until maybe I’d read some press that would bring that person’s name into it and it made me feel a certain way.

Producers are important because I think it’s really helpful to get outside of yourself and your own instincts, and to be challenged. But sometimes what’s helpful is to be challenged, and then you know exactly how firmly you feel about something.

For this record, I really wanted to know that it was collaborative from the jump. That felt incredible, and I worked with two people who had the best energy and a healthy sense of ego, and it was just really fun.

LM: That’s awesome. You come through. I’m exactly the opposite, because I can’t stand being in the studio.

CS: I understand that as well.

LM: I don’t know how you do it, because I literally only hear the song and what it sounds like when I sit at my kitchen table and sing it. People kept telling me over the years that I’d start to hear parts. So I am a person who needs producers… I’m just like, “Here are the songs.”

CS: Yeah, I’ve done that so many times, I’ve given a pile of songs and been like, “I don’t know what I made. What’s speaking to you?”

LM: Well, this morning I was listening to the album again, and I thought, “Oh, she’s gonna produce other people’s records someday.”

CS: That’s very kind and, honestly, a thought I hadn’t really had for myself, but I really did enjoy it. I think if I ever do that, it’s gonna be because of the experience I just had with these people that built up my confidence in that space. It was a lot of fun.

LM: You have this beautiful voice. I have an unpretty voice and you have a very pretty voice that you know how to use really well. You can say the hard things with that beautifully well-orchestrated production and then your beautiful voice, and it still makes you feel all the feels, versus I always feel like no matter what I sing, it’s gonna sound sad.

CS: I feel like a lot of the time I try to be like, “I’m not so sweet,” and grit up the production or avoid certain songs. I was self-conscious about it, which I think may be some internalized misogyny, because I have such a high female voice.

Speaking of songs being of service, babies and children come out singing, you know? It’s such a natural thing to do. We’re meant to do it. It’s joyous; it’s a release. And knowing the way it feels in my body to perform or really sing has changed the way I perceive my own voice.

LM: It is the first thing anybody knows how to do.

CS: Your voice has this wisdom to it. It kind of doesn’t matter what you’re singing; it sounds like you believe what you’re saying and you trust what you’re saying. You have this earnestness to your voice. If you were singing “Red Solo Cup” I’d be like, “That song means a lot to me.”

LM: I actually was at a round at the Bluebird [Cafe] with the Warren Brothers a couple of weeks ago, and they sang “Red Solo Cup.” I am so jealous of songs like that, because I could never write them.

In terms of writing for you, how have things changed since the baby?

CS: I haven’t had the same amount of headspace. My publisher held a sync camp and my mom came to town to help. I wrote for days straight and that felt really good to get back at it. As far as writing by myself, that’s just now kind of coming back.

LM: Is your son enjoying you playing the guitar?

CS: It’s a pacifying thing. I could put him in his playpen if I want to and mess around on guitar, and he’s super happy to listen. The other day, I was practicing for this Springsteen cover night that I got asked to do and I just started kind of riffing around. The flow started and that felt really good. I was like, “Oh, okay, it’s still in there.” I just hadn’t had the circumstances to put myself in the position where I’m visited by that energy. Being in creative spaces with others has been really nice right now, too, to slowly rebuild.

LM: When my kids were little, I actually wrote a lot. They all shared a bedroom and, after dinner, my husband would work on the house while I tried to sing them songs – sometimes terrible ones – or make up songs while they fell asleep. That routine gave me more time to write than I expected.

Two of my kids are songwriters now, though at the time they probably went to sleep just to get away from me singing the same line over and over. But honestly, if I hadn’t had that hour and a half every night with them, I don’t think I would have learned how to write. I wasn’t planning to be a musician. My children gave me the time and space to discover that.

By the time I had five kids, I started doing open mics. I never would have had the courage to get up there if I didn’t have my kids. They were my world, so if people didn’t like what I did on stage, I could always just go home and sing in the living room with them. That gave me the confidence to try.

CS: That balance is so important and it’s hard to reverse-engineer for people. If you move somewhere completely career-focused, you can get lost in that and miss the balance of family and partnership. I feel like any sense of longevity in life or career needs that.

For me, I’ve realized that to be a happy, well-rounded person – good partner, good friend – I need a rich family and personal life. Otherwise, my career just eats me alive. I think the reason you’ve been able to sustain your career and create a catalog of songs full of humanity is that you’ve always had that balance.

LM: Exactly. And it’s not just a woman’s thing. I know men who do it, too. But when you put family first, you have to say no to some things. You can’t always do that week-long tour, for example. But the things you say no to fade away; you don’t remember them. You only remember what you did. Instead, you stayed home and sat in the backyard with your kids and that’s the summer you wrote that one song that you’re still singing years later.

Love is supposed to be the thing you surrender to. It just opens up the universe wider. I’ve seen it happen again and again; even songwriters who know exactly what they want in their twenties, after falling in love or having a child, the world opens up in new ways.

CS: That’s making me emotional. That’s exactly where I am right now. I feel like my life is starting in a really good way. My career feels like it is starting over again. It is making me recalibrate how I want to show up in the world. And it’s freeing to have my compass aligned around my family. It feels like a new beginning. It’s really beautiful.

LM: That’s exactly it. Parenthood gives you a stream of love you hadn’t experienced before and it changes everything creatively. For me, it didn’t really happen until my fifth child, but it always happens. The universe shows up when you do something hard, like having a baby. I remember putting out a record in May, right around the birth of my son, David. By Thanksgiving, I had Faith Hill cuts. It’s like the universe says, “We should remind her that she gets to keep doing this.”

CS: That really resonates.

LM: I always listen to the last song on a record first.

CS: I love that because some of my favorite songs on your records are the last songs.

LM: When I heard “Where the Light Gets Through,” that song is such an offering, such a service. I don’t know if you want to talk about where that song came from, but years from now you are still going to have people tapping you on the shoulder saying “thank you” for that song.

CS: We’d made the record basically and we couldn’t figure out the last one. I said to the producers, “What if we write this one together?” Mark and Peter started building the track. I was going through ideas and I’d been writing a lot about my brother-in-law’s passing away. It just so happened that something I’d written fit almost exactly word for word and we shaped it from there. It couldn’t have just been me on that record, because it needed to feel lighter than I wanted it to.

LM: I know exactly what you are talking about. That’s why I love co-writing. You get perspectives that you could never create alone. Sometimes you can’t do it by yourself, and the song only exists because of that.

I’ve had that experience with Liz [Rose] and Hillary [Lindsey]. I had a song I’d been trying to write for a month by myself and I was so mad I couldn’t. I showed it to them and Liz was writing and singing it immediately. Hillary was like, “Do you know this song?”

CS: Do you feel like that is possible because you know each other so well that they can meet you where your brain is?

LM: Absolutely. And that’s another thing I love about co-writing. You fall in love with each other so quickly in the room. And when you trust yourself with someone, you can say the dumbest thing and it might turn into the smartest thing. I rarely sit with someone who doesn’t make me feel like I can speak my mind. With Liz and Hillary, Liz can read my mind and Hillary is like a musical and emotional genius. They both are.

Parenthood also gives you that focus. You don’t have all the time in the world, so you go straight to the point.

CS: I’ve heard many parents say they become more productive because they have to think differently about time and energy. I feel that now, with my baby being a little more self-sufficient.

LM: Exactly. And think of all the things you can do since having a kid! You weren’t opening drawers with your feet before, were you! Well, I love what you do, and I was genuinely happy when I heard you were pregnant. It’s a good thing for artists to step into family life.

CS: There’s a class of women my age choosing to have families now, balancing careers – it feels like a statement in all the best ways.

LM: Parenthood changes your perspective. You look back and wonder how you managed everything, but the flow and the creative life meet you there. You make the things you have to make because that’s what we’re here for.

CS: Man, there’s a lot of stuff I needed to hear today that you just spouted out. Thank you for spending time with this record.

LM: Congratulations. The record is so good. I hope the biggest challenge with it is all the things you have to say no to.

CS: And I won’t remember them, like you said.

Explore more of our Artist of the Month content on Caroline Spence here.

Photo Credit: Caroline Walker Evans

Watchhouse Found New Rituals Amid the Push and Pull of Change

Posted on by Editor

Chances are you’ve cultivated a few personal routines to help you navigate the world: one for daily life, one for weekly, monthly, and so on. There’s also likely a handful of individual habits that affect how you choose to go about your routine. The former, at times, can influence the latter, fitting within each other like a pair of nesting dolls, adjacent and similar in their roles.

Then there are rituals. Though these three recurring sets of actions – routines, habits, and rituals – would seem like easily overlapping bedfellows, rituals carry an intrinsic quality the other two lack: mindfulness. Rituals bear a sense of intention like the other two, but it’s often coupled with an element of symbolism or custom. It’s not just a matter of doing something and saying it’s done; there are other connotations or expectations that may influence why doing it matters.

Holding this notion in mind, it’s Rituals that Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz of North Carolina duo Watchhouse have decided to name their new album. Through its 11 tracks, the married musicians posit an abundance of questions and actions, their contemplations placed in settings that are as clear as a simple back porch and as abstract as a space “through the looking glass,” “beyond this to and fro.” Settings that exist outside of not only any kind of routine, but separate from time and space all together.

Though Watchhouse’s new writings don’t seem to present rituals in their conventional form, the title still feels wholly appropriate. Marlin and Frantz’s reflections, wistful pining, and open-ended ruminations don’t lead to a sense of clear, expected structure that rituals would traditionally provide, but each song is lined with an abundance of intention, mindfulness, and hope for various outcomes. Sometimes these are overtly stated – Oh, I’m dreaming of a life with you in the sun/ And I hope our time together has only just begun… – and sometimes they are dressed in metaphors: Go fire your cannonball, go and fire away/ When the ashes fall we’ll start a brand new day.

There are defined ideas that Watchhouse put forth on the album: identity and awareness, the distinction between patterns and truths, how to develop a positive relationship with change, and what it means to evolve. All the same, while our internal responses to these songs may change over time, the very act of revisiting, replaying, and reconsidering their meanings, and how we are affected by them, can be a form of ritual in its own way.

Amid an extensive tour that will take them all over the U.S. and into Canada through summer and fall, Watchhouse spoke with BGS about their collaborative dynamic, how their individual artistic instincts influence the direction of a song, and the prevalence of duality in the album – as well as in their lives.

It’s been about four years since your last album and eight years since both your lives changed from bandmates to family. Given that Rituals focuses on patterns and the perception of change on our lives, how has the ever-growing longevity of your union in marriage — and all the ways marriage transforms a relationship on its own — changed the way you perceive and interact with the music making process?

Andrew Marlin: When you hit the road and join forces with other people to play music, it’s kind of like stepping outside of the norm and stepping outside of the daily life to go up there and almost take on a role or take on a character in order to get inside the music. You kind of just forget everything that the day often requires of you, because all of a sudden those requirements aren’t there. It’s just the stage and the music and the people that are there rooting for you to go deep, you know?

I think finding that zone with Emily has had its challenges in the past, because we’re so closely tied to each other. We raise kids together and we live together, and so doing all this traveling together and playing music together too, it makes it harder – or made it harder for me at the beginning, I think – to leave the daily routine and expectations behind on stage and just shed all of that and take on that character. It’s one thing to look at your bandmates’ eyes and get a little nod or whatever’s happening during the music. It’s kind of like this understanding of, “I’m not here right now. This is just me playing music.”

Getting to that zone with Emily, now that we’re 16 years into it, has taken a while to get to that point to where it’s an acceptance of all of it, instead of just leaving things behind to get on stage. It’s like we’re carrying all of it with us at all points in time. People that come to see us get a real and honest version of ourselves, trying to go deep in the music but also being completely aware of each other too.

Emily Frantz: I was just thinking about how much things changed in 2020 and 2021, living our mundane day-to-day lives in our house, and the transition back into being on the road again and touring. We’ve obviously been doing that for a few years now since COVID, but that experience made us relearn what the relationship is between our daily life at home and touring and [figuring out] how can they coexist in a healthy way.

Ironically, the album’s opening track, “Shape,” avoids the traditional shape or structure of a song (all verses, no chorus) while the actual narrative of the song embraces ideas that lean into a sense of purgatory and a nebulous state of being — the very opposite of what would help establish a sense of shape, boundaries, identity, direction, patterns, or truths. What were the mental and emotional motivations that inspired you to take the song in this direction?

AM: It’s like establishing the shape or the pattern in order to separate yourself from it. That’s what a lot of those verses are doing, kind of outlining the things that often make me feel like I’m in a box and I’m trying to get outside of that box. The only way to do it – because there’s no real form to it – is to imagine the parameters, imagine the spaces that it ends up kind of confining you in, in order to step outside of those [boxes]. I think that was the intention with “Shape.”

EF: And the way that “Shape” came into its final form, at least final the way it appears on the record, was a lot of the things that you said about it: It didn’t ever really conform and it got rearranged and had things added and taken away from it so many times, a lot more so than other songs. But it always did feel like the backbone of this record in a lot of ways, which is why it felt really right as the opening track of this record.

AM: If there was a shape to define that song, I’d say it’s a spiral.

 

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How have you fit rituals into your lives and have they helped you maintain a sense of stable continuity as a family and as musicians?

AM: I feel like since having kids, the day has taken so much more form. Because I think that, and Emily [is] really brilliant about this, giving structure to the day is super helpful for them. So that they don’t have to wonder what’s happening, so that they can really pay attention to what is happening. I’ve watched both of our kids blossom in that environment. Emily’s really good about helping to create that and make sure we stick to it. Carrying that on the road has been really helpful, too and something that I didn’t realize I was going to benefit very much from. Because I definitely, when left to my own devices, am like a sheet left out to dry – just flapping in the wind. To have a little bit of structure to the day, and have to enter into these mental zones with the kiddos, has added a lot of mental structure to my existence. I think that’s the biggest thing for me.

And within that, it’s about realizing what the day actually requires of me, instead of what I imagined today to be expecting of me. Finding those real anchors and a little more gravity to the things I’m working on have helped me shed old expectations of myself and what I think I’m supposed to be doing. I think that’s what led us to be okay with changing the band name and changing up some of the sounds and approaching this thing we’ve been doing for a long time in a whole new way.

EF: I think the thing that we are [focusing on] 16 years in is finding where the balance is between freedom and artistic expression, and also just daily life and figuring out how to have those two things like coexist and make each other better and not be in a constant sort of push and pull.

The first verse in “Beyond Meaning” is intriguing. The statement of your “gentle” disposition is nice, but its seemingly conditional nature gives pause — particularly when considering that life is noisy and out of our control more often than not. What is it that you’re trying to say about your own identity and awareness of how you cope with the noise and bustle of everyday living?

AM: I feel like what I was getting at is to view it as though it’s external noise. But it’s actually internal noise. That’s often the thing that keeps me from my peace and keeps me from being gentle. It’s my own defenses and my own self-consciousness that end up creating all of this noise. It paints the external noise in a negative light. When I can control that and remember to keep my own defenses at bay and be open and actually present, the idea that maybe this external noise is not a malicious one keeps me gentle and then often what comes from that is a gentle interaction. So it’s more about controlling the internal noise in order to actually experience the external factors.

Out of the 11 songs on the album, Emily is the primary vocalist only for “Firelight.” Why was Emily the right fit to sing the story of this one song? And more broadly, what went into your shared thought process on when, and for how long, you two would sing together? Is it a purely harmony and arrangement-based decision, or do the emotions of a song influence how each vocal arrangement is structured?

EF: A lot of times it can be pretty cut and dry. If we’re deciding who should sing lead on a song, it might just have to do with the range or the key, where we think it sounds good. Sometimes that plays into it maybe even more than the lyrics or the subject matter. With Andrew doing the songwriting, he’s always been more of the primary lead vocalist. Oftentimes, by the time we’re arranging a tune and finding out how we want to present it, it’s very cemented in his voice. But then a lot of times, there will be tunes that we’re struggling with and we’re not quite finding it. By switching out who’s singing, it reframes the whole song and allows us to not just change the lead vocalist, but to find a whole different zone for the song in terms of what we hear and how it gets arranged and recorded. That was the case with “Firelight.” We had so many different versions of that song over the years leading up to recording – different time signatures, different instrumentation – and that was one of the last ones that came together for this album. Most of it got done after the initial tracking session because we were searching on it for a long time and I think I like it more and more the longer I sit with it, the more I hear it.

AM: Often people do want to know why Emily’s not singing more tunes or why the roles are what they are. But I think it’s really important to shine a little light on what Emily does behind the scenes when she’s not singing. The way she plays rhythm and plays violin or whatever instrument she’s on, it ends up being this anchor for everyone in the band. The way that offers complete structure to what we’re doing and allows everything else to sway around that a little bit, I feel like even when she’s not singing, her musical voice is such a strong presence in the music. I’ve heard her say this before, like when she’s playing violin, she’d rather not sing lead because it’s almost like having to sing with two voices. That became part of the structure of what we’ve been doing all along, not just with the lead vocal. The feel of the song and the rhythm and the chord structure and the flow of it all often is hinged on what Emily ends up doing. I think that’s just as important as her taking a lead vocal.

EF: I’ve really, over the years of us playing music together, come around to enjoying singing lead when we find the song that feels good in my range. But for the most part, I’d rather be singing harmony to Andrew and that definitely brings me just as much, if not more, fulfillment than singing lead on a song.

“Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” and “Sway / Endless Highway (Pt. 2)” leave a much heavier state of reflection than that of “Patterns,” the song you chose as the album’s finale. Were the lighter tone of the music and the lyrics a driving factor for why these last three songs are in this order? Did you want to avoid an ending that leaves the listener with a more uncertain emotional state?

AM: I’ll start off by saying Ryan Gustafson, who produced this record with us, actually ended up coming up with this track order. Having not listened to it that way and then taking Ryan’s perspective on it, it was like being able to listen to these songs in their entirety for the first time. All of a sudden, I was getting feelings from these recordings that I hadn’t gotten yet.

“Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” is a heavier song and talks about a really traumatic event that Emily and I went through and that long drone at the end of it kind of dances around the dread of that. Then into “Sway,” it’s more of a coming out of that [feeling]. How do we peek our heads out of the hole once we’ve gone down and slowly crawl back out? To finally get into “Endless Highway (Pt. 2),” where it feels like a real revelation and a real triumphant part of the record? So, you get to the top of the mountain on this song. But I do believe that while those revelations come, we get to the top of those mountains, everything’s clear, and there’s so much lightness and clarity around us, we still have to wake up the next morning, make coffee, make breakfast, get kids to school, go and run errands and carry that little mountain of revelation with us everywhere we go.

I think that the heaviness and the profoundness of that idea ends up giving way to these smaller, mundane parts of our life. That’s what “Patterns” feels like to me. It’s an admission that if we can hold on to those little revelations and the clarity they offered us, hopefully it’ll keep us light by offering us that little reminder of hope.

EF: Going back to what Andrew was just saying about having these big events or these heavy, emotional things happen, and then having to go on with our lives, and the push and pull of that – there’s frustration and beauty in it. I love the order of those [last few] tracks, because I feel both the “Endless Highways” and “Sway” are songs that were written in the middle of this album being written and there’s a lot of anguish from a lot of different sources in those songs. And then “Patterns” was the last song that was written for the album before we recorded it, so it feels like it has a certain clarity to it. Going down in the trench and making your way back up, even though it’s still really just posing a lot of the same questions [as the beginning of the album], but from a more settled state of mind.

What truths about yourselves and how you view the world have you discovered and accepted since finishing Rituals? How many of the questions you’ve posed through these songs do you feel you’ve managed to settle on answers for?

AM: I don’t think I would often look closely enough at how I was making a person feel, as much as I would look at the way the person was. I think that’s becoming more of my truth these days, just to trust that showing up open-minded with awareness and consciousness, focused on experiencing rather than projecting, is probably the closest to any truths that have come out of writing these songs and getting to the end of this record. The takeaway is that it’s not like we found answers, necessarily.

EF: It’s all just a pursuit, always.

AM: You know, it’s not always about finding answers. It’s about finding out–

AM/EF: It’s figuring out what the question is.

Photo Credit: Jillian Clark

Explore more of our Artist of the Month coverage here.

Mason Lively on Only Vans with Bri Bagwell

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Fresh off a new full length album, country and Americana singer-songwriter Mason Lively joins the show to chat with host Bri Bagwell about songwriting, priorities, babies, and the housing market. Do yourself a favor and check out Mason’s new record, Burn The Ground, today!

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Find Mason’s music, podcast, tour dates and merchandise here.

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, The MusicFest at Steamboat, Lakeside Tax & CH Lonestar Promo!

Editor’s Note: Only Vans with Bri Bagwell is the latest addition to the BGS Podcast Network! Read more about the podcast coming on board here. Find our episode archive here.

Basic Folk: John Smith

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Originally from Devon, English singer-songwriter John Smith got his start playing bars and clubs in Liverpool, both with his own songs and as a side player for artists like Lianne La Havas, Lisa Hannigan, and David Gray. Growing up with folk music and guitar music influences from Eric Clapton to Maria Callas to Nick Drake, John’s sensitivity as a player is one of the cornerstones of his music, especially when it comes to his live music. It’s earned him a passionate fanbase ever since his first EP release in 2009.

Host Lizzie No got to witness the connection he shares with audiences on a recent month-long tour around the UK. Everywhere they went together, audience members had stories of how important John’s songs were to them and guitar nerds flocked to have a look at his pedal board.

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Beyond his musicianship, John’s music is imbued with an earnestness that invites listeners to look around and feel gratitude: for nature (especially the vistas of rural England), for the wisdom that memory can provide, and for the people close to us. His latest album, The Living Kind, is a meditation on how delicate love and life can be, but also how enduring. It also showcases the creative partnership between Smith and his longtime friend and roots music industry icon, Joe Henry. One of the album’s highlights is “Milestones,” in which John reflects on how parenthood has changed his perspective on the artist’s life.

Photo Credit: Phil Fisk

Ruth Moody on Canadian Roots Music, Parenthood, and Being a ‘Wanderer’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Ruth Moody has a singular voice, whether she’s joining the soaring three-part harmonies of the Wailin’ Jennys, or carving her own path on her new solo album, Wanderer (released May 17.) The project was almost a decade in the making and finds Moody betting on herself as a songwriter, co-producer, and now-label head for her own Blue Muse Records. The album is parallel to Moody’s own journey at continuing to define herself, with its emphasis on confronting the past and carving away detritus that is no longer needed.

Moody splits her time between Nashville and Vancouver Island. The pull between her sense of place, as well as her identities as artist, wife, and mother, characterize Wanderer. The album was recorded at the legendary Sound Emporium in Nashville and was co-produced with Dan Knobler (Allison Russell, Lake Street Dive) and mixed by Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, First Aid Kit, The Decemberists).

As discussed below, Moody waited until the time was right to bring her favorite musicians together for the record: her partner Sam Howard, who plays upright bass and provides backing vocals; her older brother Richard Moody; The Wailin’ Jennys’ touring band member Anthony da Costa (guitars); Jason Burger (drums); Kai Welch (keyboards); Russ Pahl (pedal steel); Adrian Dolan (string arrangements); and duet partner Joey Landreth (on “The Spell of the Lilac Bloom”). Moody’s patient commitment to executing Wanderer the way she wanted to shows in its transcendent arrangements.

In our BGS interview, Moody discusses how she establishes her sense of self amidst the competing demands in her life, the factors that give Canadian roots music their own special quality, and the lessons she’s learned from doing Wanderer exactly the way she intended to.

What do you think it is about Canadian roots music in particular? It does have a different feel than roots music in the States.

Ruth Moody: You know, I’ve been asked this question for so long. It’s a very valid question, because I think there is something, but it’s really hard to have a clear answer. In Canada there’s such a range of geography and music culture. You can’t really pin it to one thing.

I grew up in Winnipeg and the winters are so harsh that I think music and art are one of the things that get people through. It’s something you can do in the winter. I also think that there’s something about the landscape and the winter that creates a certain work ethic because you’re so small against the elements, really. So consciously or subconsciously, that enters into the picture for people. And so I think people tend to work hard and really apply themselves. And when it comes to touring, especially if you’re from Winnipeg, it takes some effort to get to the next town. It’s a six-hour drive before you get to the next major town. So I think right from the start, young musicians know they have to go out in the world to tour and get their music out.

We’re pretty diverse and we’re also influenced by so many different cultures and types of music. So I think there is a very exploratory aspect to Canadian music. And a lot of cross-pollination between genres and scenes. We are very lucky to have government support for the arts and I think that helps artists thrive, obviously, but it also helps to create music communities and bring artists together in collaborative situations.

Well, it’s always good to start an interview out by asking you to speak for your entire country! But Wanderer focuses on the idea of home, and I know you’ve lived many different places. Did I read that you grew up in Australia?

I was born in Australia, and my parents are Australian, but they came back to Canada when I was only a year old. I grew up in Winnipeg, but, as an adult, I’ve moved around a ton and that was what inspired the title track. I’ve been touring for over 25 years at this point. “Wanderer” is a love song that I wrote for my partner, because he helped me have that feeling of home for the first time in my adult life.

There are a number of songs about young love and new love on the album. Was there something that was making you reminisce about those times in your life?

These songs were all written across a long time-span – over 10 years really – since my last record. So the songs come from different stages and sides of love, right into motherhood. Some songs deal with heartbreak too and some are more reflective about the past. During the pandemic, I was reflecting a lot about how we internalize the messages we receive from society, how as a woman I took on the expectations of others and how that has affected my life. I was looking back, looking for clues, curious about where fear comes from, where strength and resilience come from. How we learn how to be our authentic selves when there are so many outside pressures and confusing messages. “Seventeen” isn’t about that, at all, but it ended up coming out of that period of reminiscing. It’s a song that came from my own experiences but that is essentially about being in love and not being ready or able to face it or express it, which I think is probably a pretty common experience.

These are all things I’m thinking about a lot now that I have a child, too, because they become very relevant. You’re trying to model behaviors for a young person and it really makes you face yourself. You have to look at why you do and say certain things and what you want to teach and how you want to be.

Speaking of wandering, I read that you split your time between Nashville and Vancouver Island.

I just got back from British Columbia, and I’ll be back in BC in the summer, so yes, I’m back and forth. I tour a lot, so I try to get home to BC when I’m already out traveling. But I work a lot in Nashville and so does my partner, so we’re still figuring that out.

Do you feel you are different when you are in these two different places?

Definitely. That’s been a real theme becoming a mother, really. Suddenly, you’re responsible for another human life. You have to let go of a lot of ways that you used to do things and prioritize what matters. I’m always shifting modes.

When I’m on tour, I operate in a certain way. When I’m in BC, I’m close to my parents and that brings out certain things. When I’m on my own, I have a bit more freedom to maybe be my creative self and when I’m in parenting mode, that goes out the window. Additionally, a partnership requires a lot of work and time, too. There are a lot of different parts of life that I’m juggling. But it keeps it interesting.

This isn’t meant to be a conversation about being a musician and motherhood and “having it all,” but it is a big theme of the record!

It has been a big theme of my life of late. Actually, I wanted to make this record about eight years ago and then I put it on hold, because I wasn’t able to line up all the musicians I wanted involved. I thought, “I’ll do it next year.” And then I had my son and I just didn’t know that motherhood would be such an all-consuming thing. It doesn’t have to be – and everyone’s different!

I really want to do a good job at everything that I do, and so I found it hard [to balance everything.] I felt like I wasn’t doing a good enough job at being a parent and I wasn’t doing a good enough job at performing. That was really hard on me. And I think now, with this new way of looking at things, I’m just being easier on myself and thinking to myself, “Maybe I was enough. Maybe we can’t be perfect at every single thing.” Maybe we don’t have to attempt to be perfect at everything.

First and foremost I think that any woman should have the choice to [balance motherhood and work] in the way she wants to do it. I am still figuring out how to juggle everything – especially since for this record, I decided to put it out on my own label. It’s really exciting and I think will be really rewarding, but it is a ton of work and the learning curve is quite steep.

Wanderer is your fourth solo album. Do you feel this process is different than when you’re working with another artist or with The Wailin’ Jennys?

It is different. The Jennys – I mean, we’ve been together for so long and we have a certain way of working. We’re talking about making a new record, which is really exciting. It’ll be different, because it’s been a while and we’re all changing all the time, you know? That feels like it will be an exciting new experience.

But it is of course different working on my own, especially in this case, because I co-produced this record. When you’re on your own, you draw on a different part of your brain and even your heart. Wanderer is a really personal collection of songs. With the Jennys, we tend to maybe gravitate towards songs that call for three part harmony, so they end up being a bit more anthemic. With these really personal, intimate songs, I connect to them in a different way.

What lessons do you feel like you can take away now that you’ve finished making Wanderer that you want to take with you on your next project?

I’ve learned so much in doing this. Because it took so long to make it and these songs were waiting in the wings for so long, it felt really important for me to make it. The stakes felt high, because it had been so long in the making.

Now that it’s done and I’m putting it out, I am really excited and proud of it. I want to just keep releasing expectations and I’m very excited to dig into creative work again.

Photo Credit: Jacqueline Justice

Joe Pug Will Not Ossify

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Joe Pug will not engage in the left-brained vs. right-brained debate. His artistry and pragmatic business sense have lived in actual parallel through his music career. His songwriting and creativity are fueled by passion and result in dramatic and exciting songs, as on his new album Sketch of a Promised Departure. He’s stayed ahead of the curve and created an ecosystem where self-reliance, growth and business thrive especially with his latest venture, The Nation of Heat Vault, that has every album, podcast, and newsletter up behind a paywall. In our interview, we dig into his creative process, family life and artistic balance while creating his latest project.

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The album was made on his own time at his new home studio, which he’s been working on for a decade. His reflection on having complete control over the music production is one of relief and joy in that he was able to take as long as he wanted. In this episode, we go through several songs on the album, remarking on songs like “Then the Rain,” which shines in its simplicity just like many songs of Lucinda Williams’, one of his biggest inspirations. We also talk about his journey into adulthood when he moved to Chicago, a chapter in his life he writes about in detail on the new album. He talks about what he hopes for his own young kids’ futures and how parenting has changed since he first became a dad seven or eight years ago. And of course, we talk about his fantastic podcast, The Working Songwriter, and how being an interviewer has changed his attitude about being the interviewee.

Photo Credit: Ryan Nolan