(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.)
Kayla Jane is unapologetically herself, as evidenced in her new track, “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Before the episode taping, she texted Bri that nothing is off limits; this raw, unfiltered conversation is personal, honest, and fun! The pair get into topics such as being a female singer and how that can affect relationships when it’s not the right partner.
Trey Hensley is simply the most ferocious acoustic guitar player I’ve ever encountered. His attack and control of the guitar is unrivaled and left me in awe. He is, however, also just about as kind and as humble as an East Tennessee man can be. I had a great time playing music with and getting to know more about this musical titan and I’m really happy to make this podcast available.
This episode was recorded live at 185 King Street in Brevard, North Carolina on November 14, 2023.
Timestamps:
0:06 – Soundbyte 0:21 – Introduction 1:25 – Show introduction by Bill K. 2:14 – “Can’t Outrun the Blues” 6:00 – “Can’t Judge a Book” 9:48 – “Brown Eyed Women” 13:40 – Story about “Brown Eyed Women” 15:20 – “Backstreets Off Broadway” 18:15 – Interview w/ Trey 48:40 – “Hold Whatcha Got” 51:30 – “Mama Tried” 53:50 – Outro
Editor’s Note: The Travis Book Happy Hour is hosted by Travis Book of the GRAMMY Award-winning band, The Infamous Stringdusters. The show’s focus is musical collaboration and conversation around matters of being. The podcast includes highlights from Travis’s interviews and music from each live show recorded in Asheville and Brevard, North Carolina.
The Travis Book Happy Hour is brought to you by Thompson Guitars and is presented by Americana Vibes and The Bluegrass Situation as part of the BGS Podcast Network. You can find the Travis Book Happy Hour on Instagram and Facebook and online at thetravisbookhappyhour.com.
Folk singer Ana Egge’s 13th album, Sharing in the Spirit, came out of the musician one song at a time. She didn’t even think about moving onto a new song before the writing and production of each song was complete. Working with her friend and collaborator Lorenzo Wolff, the songwriting process and music arrangement plan was to just work on a handful of songs. Their creative partnership manifested an entire record’s worth of indie folk, acoustic, and new folk music. The record includes eight originals and two covers: one by Biloxi songwriter Ted Hawkins and one by Irish musician Sinead O’Connor.
Ana gives a huge songwriting credit to her dreams, which started getting more and more intense when she began her sobriety journey four years ago. Since then, she’s recorded her dreams, especially those with music segments and full songs, on her voice memos app. We go through the new album track by track, addressing themes in the songs like not sleeping through the revolution, the importance of telling the truth, feelings on mortality and how we’re gonna feel when Bob Dylan dies. Also: Ana was the VERY first guest on Basic Folk! I can’t go back and listen to myself four years ago, but I encourage you to check it out and then dive into her great new album.
Chris Smither has been Peter Mulvey’s mentor since back in 1993, when a young Mulvey opened for the already seasoned Smither. The blues and folk legend liked what he heard and enjoyed their similarities in creativity and quirks; he took that young man on the road with him. Their musical partnership has survived the digital age, the pandemic, parenthood, and the indictment of a former president. Along the way each has worked to influence their best habits and life lessons on the other. As far as mentor-mentee relationships go, this one is for the history books.
In this rare joint interview on Basic Folk, we address the important questions: Why do they delight in calling each other by their last names? Smither shares that he was first called by his last name in Paris when he was in school. The two debate who has the better hometown, Milwaukee or New Orleans. Actually, it’s not so much a debate as a reflection on New Orleans music, since that is clearly the better spot to grow up as a musician.
Mulvey reflects on their musical differences, citing some of his main inspirations to be Kendrick Lamar and Ani DiFranco, versus Smither’s affinity for Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. There are nods to David “Goody” Goodrich, Jeffrey Foucault, Kris Delmhorst and the woman behind it all, Carol Young (AKA Smither’s long-time manager, AKA his wife). We break down how each feels about fatherhood and try to get Smither to spill his secret to longevity. Spoiler alert: It’s not from remaining still.
Smither’s 20th album, All About the Bones, is out now. Peter Mulvey’s latest is the acoustic retrospective, More Notes From Elsewhere.
Photo Credit: Chris Smither by Jo Chattman; Peter Mulvey by Paul Reitano.
(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.)
On this week’s episode of the podcast, host Bri Bagwell is joined by Americana music icon and former member of the legendary Texas band Eleven Hundred Springs, Matt Hillyer. Matt is one of the funniest people alive and the two reminisce on hilarious shows, MusicFest at Steamboat (of course…), and talk about his brand new album, Bright Skyline, out now on State Fair Records.
If you’re looking for recommendations for desserts, might I suggest asking folk music and comedy savant Steve Poltz? This man loves gluten and carb-heavy sweets. He also loves collaborations, camaraderie, creativity and using humor in music. It all began for Poltz – or Poltzy as his friends call him – in his birthplace of Halifax, Nova Scotia, making him an official Canadian. He spent his formative years in Palm Springs and Los Angeles where due to his stutter, allergies, and asthma, he learned to talk fast to get himself out of trouble. His sense of humor was cultivated in part by his funny parents as well as radio and television. He was particularly taken with The Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, and the novelty songs he heard on Dr. Demento’s radio program, which solidified his own aspirations for being silly as hell in his own writing. Along the way, he picked up the guitar at six years old and it’s been by his side ever since.
After he moved to San Diego to attend college in the ’80s, he formed the cow-punk band The Rugburns with Robert Driscoll. The group, which Steve has described as “really slow speed metal,” developed a cult following across the U.S. in the early ’90s. It was at that time when Poltz met Jewel, who was a struggling musician in the San Diego scene. The two dated (they remain friends to this day) and ended up co-writing one of the biggest songs of the ’90s with “You Were Meant For Me.” After a brush with a major label (thanks to all the Jewel stuff), he remained an independent artist who developed a reputation for a singular live performance experience.
In 2014, he actually had a stroke onstage, which temporarily caused him to lose his vision, his ability to read, and also gave him a new outlook on life. Also: post-stroke, he found a late-in-life obsession with the Grateful Dead. In 2016 he and his wife, Sharon, moved to Nashville, where he discovered that he actually does like the Nashville co-writing thing. He’s written songs with people like Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings. His friend Oliver Wood (The Wood Brothers) produced his most recent record, Stardust and Satellites. Here’s to Steve Poltz!
Iowa folk music icon Greg Brown is living that retired life. After playing his farewell retirement concert in 2023, he’s returned with a new book: Ring Around The Moon: A Songbook, which highlights a song selection personally picked by the songwriter himself, as well as family photos, personal anecdotes and self-penned drawings. The book features a foreword by Seth Avett (The Avett Brothers) who calls Brown’s songs “plain spoken expression of the nearly inexpressible.” In our conversation, we touch on topics like inner peace, happiness, personal growth and self-acceptance.
He speaks of how art has impacted him in ways the artist will never understand. He talks about what it’s like to be on both the receiving and sending end of this exchange. It especially impacted him when he learned the poet Allen Ginsberg listened to an album of his while he was dying. I asked him about his music archives, which he calls “a bunch of old notebooks on a shelf” and “a couple boxes of old photos,” which assisted him in recalling family connections for the songbook. Going through the photos and old songs instilled a sense of music nostalgia, including collaboration with Iowa musicians at the Wednesday Night Jam at The Mill. Music nostalgia surfaces several times through the pages like his incredible story of founding the successful and beloved Red House Records.
There’s also discussion on a few choice Greg Brown songs like “If You Don’t Get it at Home,” addressing replacing love for materialism and drug use. We talk about “Brand New ’64 Dodge,” chronicling Brown’s personal experience with JFK’s assassination in 1963 and “Two Little Feet,” written in Alaska where he was inspired by Native American myths he heard and felt in the area. Greg Brown’s songbook was an awesome trip down memory lane for some of the best folk songs ever written from one very serious, yet very silly songwriter. It was an honor to dig in with one of the best to do it!
(Editor’s Note: BGS is proud to announce the addition of Only Vans with Bri Bagwell to the BGS Podcast Network! Read more about our newest podcast coming on board here. Find our episode archive here.)
Dale Martin is an accomplished music columnist and theater production manager in New Braunfels, Texas. He joins Only Vans host Bri Bagwell to talk about his hilarious journey full of Garth encounters, insane rider requests, and bridging genres with his writing over the past four decades.
After banjo player Kaïa Kater attended AmericanaFest in 2016, the music industry started telling her she was a part of the genre, which encompasses all kinds of roots, acoustic, folk, singer-songwriter and alternative country music. She was singing about heavy themes like historical trauma, her cultural heritage (her father is from the Caribbean country of Grenada) and her music history. She confesses in our interview that she never felt comfortable in Americana, that she was always just on the outside, never fully feeling accepted by this mostly white world. Kater has declared that her new album, Strange Medicine, comes from a place that lies beyond the white gaze of Americana. This music is filled with emotional healing, with production that sonically reflects the vulnerability she is expressing so deeply for the first time in her career. It’s also the first time she’s avoiding metaphors and really letting her most raw feelings about colonialism, sexism, racism, and misogyny rip. These songs see her using violent language and releasing emotions she’d previously kept frozen, like anger and revenge.
While creating Strange Medicine, she listened to a lot of instrumental music, allowing her ears to be bigger than they had been on previous records. Which translated to her being more willing to take big swings and risks. Kater attended school to learn film composition, allowing her to be more comfortable with being a little bit more overstated in her songs, which certainly proves true on the new record. Another good piece of news is that the banjo is back! After using it very minimally on her last release, Kaïa picked it up again after listening to a lot of Steve Reich, a composer who developed a groundbreaking minimalist style in the 1960’s that’s marked by repetition. His work helped Kater conceive of the banjo as an instrument that could hypnotically play patterns over and over. We go through this monumental album track by track and unwind songs with topics from Tituba’s revenge (the first to be accused during the Salem witch trials) to getting the critic out of the room, to realizing the critic is you. She also recounts her history in her hometown of Montreal and what the Internet was like when she first logged on in the 2000’s.
It is no exaggeration to say that co-host Lizzie No has waited over 20 years to talk to Ryan. They became a fan of the New England indie outfit in 2003 when the group opened for John Mayer at the West Point Military Academy, of all places. The vibe in the room was a little stiff, but Guster was anything but. Their exuberant, generous, harmony filled, idiosyncratic performance blew her teenage mind. As Lizzie dug deeper into their lore, they discovered that they were a part of a vast network of weirdos: The Guster fandom.
Photo Credit: Alysse Gafkjen
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