Carolyn Kendrick’s latest project explores complex themes of moral panic, tradition, and the figure of the devil (AKA Satan, AKA Lucifer). The LA-based songwriter opens up about the inspiration behind her album, Each Machine, which is accompanied by a thought-provoking zine. In our Basic Folk conversation, she discusses the significance of the color red in her work, symbolizing themes of anger, danger, and familial ties, and how it contrasts with the black and white imagery used throughout the project.
Carolyn also shares her unexpected journey into researching the devil, sparked by a podcast project that ended up overtaking her life, leading her to interview the leader of the Satanic Temple, among many others. This deep dive into the topic became a way for her to process the overwhelming political and cultural landscape. She candidly discusses the challenges of maintaining balance while being consumed by such a heavy subject matter (spoiler alert: she did not maintain balance at all).
We also touch on Carolyn’s work in podcasting (You’re Wrong About, You Are Good) and how it has influenced her approach to music. She reflects on the importance of integrating culture and music, creating a world-building experience that connects various aspects of her life. Carolyn’s creation of the Gender Equity Audio Workshop, along with co-producer and Each Machine collaborator Isa Burke, highlights the power of women supporting each other in the music industry, fostering an environment where questions can be asked without fear of judgment.
She expands on her exploration of traditional songs through a devilish lens, which allowed her to examine how their meanings shift when viewed in this context. She also discusses her dual versions of the hymn “Are You Washed in the Blood,” inspired by Naomi Klein’s book ‘Doppelganger,’ and how they represent different facets of her musical identity.
Throughout this episode of Basic Folk, Carolyn Kendrick offers insights into forgiveness and harm, emphasizing the need for solution-focused actions in today’s society. Our chat concludes with a fun and quirky Satan-themed lightning round, where Carolyn shares her favorite pop culture depictions of Satan and imagines a music festival in hell. The devil is fun again!
Carolyn Kendrick is known among folk and roots fans as a fiddler with legitimate trad bona fides and as a singer-songwriter prone to introspective, observational songwriting. In the podcast zone she has carved a place as producer, researcher, and composer for several shows, including the award-winning You’re Wrong About podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes.
In fact, it was while Kendrick was researching the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s for an episode of You’re Wrong About that she became obsessed with cultural panics in general. That obsession ultimately led to her haunting new album, Each Machine, which released December 6 on Occulture Records.
Last month, from her home in Los Angeles, Kendrick explained the album’s genesis.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about lineage and tradition lately,” she says. “… I’ve been thinking of all of these songs that have these deep traditional roots, that I’ve been listening to and learning and singing around campfires with, you know, friends at bluegrass festivals and folk festivals for years and years and years.”
The songs that were standing out to her all carried some darkness, a little shadow of the devil. She started wondering what might happen if she decided to reinterpret some of them in a way that asserted her personal instincts. “That includes things like more electric instrumentation, more sound design, more world building,” she says. “Not for it to sound inflated, but what if it was part of a more extended concept rather than just, you know, individual songs?”
To explore these curiosities, she enlisted the collaboration of her friend, multi-instrumentalist, and fellow Berklee grad Isa Burke (Aoife O’Donovan, Mountain Goats) to help her flesh out the sonic landscapes that are sure to envelop Each Machine’s listeners in a creepy, devilish fog.
Indeed, the album’s swallowing darkness even pervades on deceptively welcoming songs like “Sumer (Sing Cuckoo)” –sung here in the traditional round, a cappella except for some decidedly spooky timpani wallops. As a result, and in the context of so many songs about the devil, the duo’s approach feels particularly untouchable, like the story of a photograph of a memory of lighter times.
Then again, Kendrick felt compelled to include it amid her exploration of panic. As if to say: Perhaps the light is gone for now, but the nature of summer is that it returns.
To that end, she notes: “It was really, really fun to be able to take these older songs that have such a rich lineage and reinterpret them with the lens of … the issues that we’re going through as a people right now.”
This side of the 2024 election, most topical interpretations are probably incidental – she wrote the album long before votes were cast. But, while Each Machine implies a general warning about what happens when humans become wrapped up in an historical moment, it also becomes specific, for at least one track, on the topic of women’s health.
Track nine is a spoken-word piece Kendrick has titled “Sugar and Spice.” For fifty-five seconds, the listener is treated to a collection of recordings about what it is to be a woman in America. From the nursery school rhyme from which the track gets its name to a news report about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the track ends with a distant crowd of protestors chanting about abortion. This is followed by the artist’s take on the trad song “Wind and Rain,” about a pair of sisters competing for a man’s attention: In pursuit of her prize, the one shoves the other into a river to drown.
Kendrick isn’t wasting anyone’s time being subtle about her views here. Then again, where’s the room for subtlety amidst panic?
As The New York Times reported in 1994, the Satanic Panic encompassed “12,000 accusations of group cult sexual abuse based on satanic ritual.” The same Times article clarified that none of these events seem to have actually occurred, but the fear they provoked in the public was definitely real. As a folk singer drawn to moments of cultural import, digging into the Satanic Panic caused Kendrick to consider the way these “panics” might be connected.
That she tied in songs about the devil; ruminations on a view of Earth from space; what womanhood requires of us; and even the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke means this is not an album meant to be background music. To be sure, the musicianship and arrangements are lovely, but the spoken word bits are necessarily jarring.
Over and over, the disc interrupts itself with interludes that pull one’s attention back – from feeling to meaning – before moving into another song. This tennis match between the heart and the head reaches its apex about halfway in, when Kendrick pivots between two separate recordings, “Are You Washed” and “In the Blood.” Between them sits a spoken word piece (the title track) which feels intimidating and disorienting.
Her decision to include two interpretations of the one song was inspired by Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger. That book, Kendrick explains, “really changed how I’m thinking about how we receive information.”
“As Americans,” she adds, “our media diets are so different and atomized from one another. And there’s also this confusion within the conspiracy landscape that we live in right now. … How can we be receiving the same information and interpreting it so differently? … [So that song is] an experiment. How do I approach one thing and look at it from all different angles? And how will that make me feel differently?”
Indeed, Each Machine is clearly trying to get through a whole lot of questions. And in just eight songs, it somehow achieves its goal. In addition to the questions already mentioned, there’s the Satanic Panic of it all. What, then, does fear – of the devil, of freedom, of technology, of one another – teach us?
As she sends Each Machine out into the world, Kendrick is clear that the lesson she learned is that she’s grateful to have a creative outlet to help her find light in darkness.
“I had been going through all of this really difficult subject matter,” she says. “… I had so many feelings of distress and worry – and also of hope. [I was in] this flurry of all the big emotions that we go through [when] we’re dealing with reality. I needed a place to put all of my feelings about moral panics, I guess.”
Welcome to the BGS Radio Hour! Since 2017, the show has been a weekly recap of all the great music, new and old, featured on BGS. This week, we’ve got new releases from Lindsay Lou and Blue Water Highway while we continue to celebrate our artist of the month – Black Pumas! Remember to check back every Monday for a new episode of the BGS Radio Hour.
This quartet – who come from a working class, small town Texas background – bring us a mixtape, featuring their big inspirations, from Bruce Springsteen to Phoebe Bridgers. Blue Water Highway graces our show this week with this tongue-in-cheek take on thankfulness from their upcoming album Paper Airplanes.
Iowa-based singer and songwriter David Huckfelt brings a single to the show this week, from his soon to be released Room Enough, Time Enough. “‘Hidden Made Known’ is about having faith in the basic intelligence of the universe, and what to do next when you lose it,” Huckfelt tells BGS. “From Wounded Knee to Sault Ste. Marie, tenderness is on the run.”
Our current Artist of the Month, Black Pumas, recently caught up with BGS to talk about their biggest influences, from a gospel music upbringing to original MTV. Black Pumas (Deluxe Edition) is up for Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs!
Miko Marks is reclaiming the music that Stephen Foster appropriated his way to success with. In anticipation of her upcoming album Our Country, what better place to start than this famous song?
Sway Wild brings us this appropriately titled anxiety-inspired song from their upcoming self-titled album. Based in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest, the group is not alone in needing to share their mental struggles as we journey through 2021.
From the mountains of Western North Carolina, Anya Hinkle and Graham Sharp (Steep Canyon Rangers) bring us this new single, written on May 26, 2020 – the first day without George Floyd. “Only by listening to Black voices are we going to know what it is gonna take,” Hinkle told BGS. “We are still so divided and will remain ignorant until we can absorb what it’s like to be Black in America.”
No stranger to BGS and the roots scene, Lindsay Lou offers The Suite Sweets, four songs combined into two for an A and B-side single. Inspired by Immersion Composition Society (ISC) writing lodges, writing for hours as uninhibitedly as possible, the Nashville-based artist combined these song segments into something that was greater than just the sum of their parts.
Chris DuPont brings us a song from Floodplains, out now via Sharehouse Audio. Writing during a time of loss, DuPont recognized an opportunity to grow, for the great “sanding” of loss to smooth out the rough edges, and to not let bitterness overshadow the narrative.
IBMA award winning band Sideline tells this story through both song and visual representation. The video tells the story of the song in perfect synchronicity, pulling the viewer even deeper into the story.
From our 2020 Whiskey Sour Happy Hour segment, we’re bringing back this haunting performance from roots artist Rhiannon Giddens accompanied by Francesco Turrisi. Giddens, who has been outspoken throughout her career about the African-American origins of country music, is another featured artist in our Black Voices segment, uplifting the disenfranchised voices in roots music that helped create the genre.
Texas-based Beth Lee wrote this song before her birthday, and sent it to Vicente Rodriguez for his birthday (who would go on to be her producer for the record). Recorded by Lee, Rodriguez, and James Deprato – who coincidentally had a birthday during the week of recording – this song was the first sign to Lee that her Waiting On You Tonight was going to be a good record.
Though not originally written as a duet, nothing suited Erelli’s song better than vocal accompaniment from Maya de Vitry. Without holding anything back, they emphasize the song’s message – that we all have the opportunity to make something new.
Photos: (L to R) Black Pumas from the Late Show with Stephen Colbert; Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi by Ebru Yildiz; Lindsay Lou by Scott Simontacchi
We are so excited to bring to you the BGS Radio Hour podcast. Since 2017 the BGS Radio Hour has been a recap of the wonderful music, new and old, that we’ve covered here on BGS throughout the week, broadcast over the airwaves in Murfreesboro, TN, southern California, and around the country. Now you can check back in every Monday for the Radio Hourin podcast form!
This North Carolina-based band, who just released their sophomore album Tribulation, is a supergroup of sorts – with members having formerly played with David Grisman, Mountain Heart, and Josh Turner. “Goin’ to Bring Her Back” is a recent release, in the Road Show’s own style of classic bluegrass.
Canadian songwriter Ian Foster first wrote this song when the famous Voyager 1 spacecraft passed into interstellar space, AKA, “the space between the stars.” A monumental moment for all humanity, it inspired this song — which is about faith in ourselves, science, and who we are.
Always a festival favorite, Scythian has a deep connection with their fans: deep enough to have taken over 600 of them along to Ireland on tours over the last seven years. The Virginia-based group brought us a song about those magical nights in Galway City.
Throughout this holiday season in particular, it’s important to remember those traditions which unite us. Though many holiday reunions may hot happen this year, Frank Solivan brings us this warm reminder of how we’ll “muddle through” for BGS Wraps.
Tina Adair – “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” Tina Adair, lead singer of the powerhouse group Sister Sadie, delivers to us her take on an ’80s classic, originally recorded by Kathy Mattea. Adair and the rest of her bandmates in Sister Sadie are our Artist of the Month this December!
The story we didn’t know we needed. From her new album Are You Gone?, Sarah Harmer brings us a song crafted from summer memories and small pleasures. The video, however, gives us a glimpse into the day in the life of a “little frog.”
Colorado banjo guru Andy Thorn first recorded this tune with the Colorado Playboys (Travis Book, Jon Stickley, and John Frazier.) Over a decade later, the composition once again is given life in a collaboration with pianist Eric Deutsch recorded in vibrant Mexico City.
Virginia’s The Steel Wheels were recent 5+5 guests — that’s 5 questions, 5 songs. We chatted with the band about their inspirations, cherished memories of being on stage, and dream musician-meal pairings. This week on the Radio Hour, they brought us a song from their new album, Everyone a Song, Vol. 1.
By way of Katie Oates, this week we honor 29-year-old Ella May Wiggins, a songwriter and textile worker who was shot and killed in an infamous workers’ strike of 1929. This song, written by Si Kahn and from the album We Go On: Si Kahn’s Songs of Hope in Hard Times, reminds us of the ongoing struggle for better lives and justice, for all people.
Songwriter and folkster Jesse Colin Young (of the Youngbloods) brought us a return to his roots with his new record Highway Troubadour. The South Carolina-based artist revisits decades of his musical material while exploring a new launch into solo performance.
It’s no doubt that we’re all missing people this holiday season and Ron Pope is no exception. While there will be few big family Christmases this year, we can still sit around and sing our favorite Christmas songs, which is exactly what inspired this new release from Pope.
Beloved Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings were among the many affected by the Nashville tornados in March 2020. After saving a collection of demo recordings which were scattered amongst the wreckage, Welch has so graciously invited the rest of the world in to hear these 48 unreleased songs. On this episode of the BGS Radio Hour, we bring you “Rambling Blade.”
Like we said: Sister Sadie is a powerhouse – no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The all-female, hard-driving bluegrass band racked up multiple awards at this year’s IBMA Awards, including the highest honor: Entertainer of the Year. The group is our December Artist of the Month, so check back for tidbits all month long, as we have plenty to feature on Sister Sadie!
One thing that bluegrass bands haven’t been slack on this year is Christmas songs. No exception, the Infamous Stringdusters bring us this classic, done Dusters-style of course, from their new album Deck the Halls.
Photo credit: (L to R) Tina Adair by John Dorton; The Infamous Stringdusters, ‘Dust the Halls’; Gillian Welch by David Rawlings.
Matt Rollings says his role as the leading studio piano playing sideman in Nashville from the late 1980s onward made it hard for him to forge his own taste and sensibility as an artist.
Now that he’s slowed that work and broadened his projects, he’s made his first album as a leader in 30 years, Matt Rollings Mosaic, with a bunch of friends and collaborators who happen to be superstars, including Alison Krauss, Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson. Our talk covered the fascinating ways and means of the A Team Nashville session players and much more. Also in the hour, emerging singer songwriter Shannon LaBrie, who’s about to release an album produced by the guy who brought us The Judds and SHEL among many others.
This week on The Show On The Road, a conversation with Nicole Atkins, a singer/songwriter out of Neptune City, New Jersey who has become notorious for making her own brand of theatrical boardwalk soul.
The Show On The Road host Z. Lupetin fell in love with Atkins’ newest, harmony-rich record, Italian Ice, which came out spring 2020 and was recorded in historic Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Both rumblingly ominous and joyously escapist, standout songs like “Domino” make the record a perfectly David Lynch-esque summer soundtrack of an uneasy 2020 scene that vacillates between fits of intense creativity and innovation and deep despair. Toiling below the radar for much of her career, Atkins is finally enjoying nationwide recognition as a sought-after writer and producer; Italian Ice was co-produced by Atkins and Ben Tanner of Alabama Shakes.
While some may try to shoehorn Nicole Atkins into the Americana and roots-rock categories, one could better describe her as a new kind of wild-eyed Springsteen, who also mythologized the decaying beauty of New Jersey’s coastal towns like Asbury Park, or a similarly huge-voiced, peripatetic Linda Ronstadt who isn’t afraid to mix sticky French-pop grooves with AM radio doo-wop, ’70s blaxploitation R&B and airy jazz rock like her heroes in the band Traffic. If you watch her weekly streaming variety show, “Live From The Steel Porch” (which she initially filmed from her parents’ garage in NJ, but now does from her new home in Nashville), you’ll see her many sonic tastes and musical friends gathering in full effect. Italian Ice features a heady collection of collaborators including Britt Daniel of Spoon, Seth Avett, Erin Rae, and John Paul White.
After playing guitar and moving in and out of hard-luck bar bands in Charlotte and New York — many of which that would find any way to get rid of their one female member — Atkins’ bold first solo record Neptune City dropped in 2007 and three more acclaimed LPs followed, including her twangy, oddball breakout, Goodnight Rhonda Lee in 2017 on John Paul White’s Single Lock Records.
Much like the tart and brain-freezing treat sold on boardwalks around the world, Atkins’ newest work is a refreshing and many-flavored thing and demonstrates that, in a lot of ways, the show-stopping performer, producer, and songwriter has finally embraced all the sharp edges of her personality.
Daniel Donato landed a plum guitar gig in downtown Nashville at age 16 and now he’s building a new world of twangy jam with his debut LP ‘A Young Man’s Country’. Jake Blount is re-defining old-time music with banjo and fiddle out of his DC base. His anti-racist push is forcing bluegrass and Americana to investigate its origins and its audience. His new album Spider Tales is a showcase of the Black roots of our shared music.
Harmonics with Beth Behrs is a brand new show from the BGS Podcast Network delving into the intersection of music and wellness. The podcast officially kicks off today with the release of its first two episodes, featuring guests Glennon Doyle and Geeta Novotny.
In episode one, actor, comedian, and banjo enthusiast and Harmonics host Beth Behrs talks with New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle (Untamed) about living in a female body, the freedom that comes with putting everything on the table creatively, and the age old question: how much TV is too much TV in quarantine?
An activist and “patron saint of female empowerment,” Doyle got her start in the Christian family blogosphere as creator of Momastery. She is also the founder and president of Together Rising, an all-women led nonprofit organization that has raised over $25 million for women, families, and children in crisis. Glennon lives with her wife, Abby Wambach, and three children in Florida.
Harmonics’ second interview is with opera singer and sound healer Geeta Novotny, founder of Revolution Voice. Novotny explains the science of sound healing and vibrational therapy and the importance of using music to find your voice (sometimes literally).
Novotny started her career as a classical singer, a mezzo-soprano performing principal roles with the LA Opera and the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera. After twenty years of vocal performance and teaching, she founded Revolution Voice, a practice program that uses the voice and sound as a bridge between music and wellness. In addition to her vocal work, Novotny is an acclaimed sound bath artist and incorporates other multi-therapeutic approaches into her vibrational healing methods throughout California and around the country.
Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow BGS and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!
This week, The Show On The Road features a conversation with members of LA’s Latin roots-rock heroes Chicano Batman. The band came together in 2008 and is comprised of Eduardo Arenas (bass, guitar, vocals), Carlos Arévalo (guitars), Bardo Martinez (lead vocals, keyboards, guitar) and Gabriel Villa (drums).
Host Z. Lupetin was able to catch up with Bardo Martinez and Eduardo Arenas while they sheltered in place at home in LA. In the past you may have seen Chicano Batman at music festivals like Coachella dressing up in matching Mariachi outfits or crooning in a colorful mashup of Spanish and English on previous standout records like the dreamy Cycles of Existential Rhyme and the rebellious Freedom Is Free.
Their newest work, Invisible People, is their most personal, political, and downright danceable release to date. The traditional Mariachi outfits may be tucked away in storage, but their playful vibe remains, even as the musicianship and pop-tightness took a big jump forward.
After twelve years of expanding and fine-tuning their sound and finding a devoted national audience, Chicano Batman is no longer the oddball, upstart band. While they now focus mainly on English lyrics, they know as songwriters and performers that they’ve become role models for Los Angeles’s vibrant Latin-roots rock renaissance, acting as springboards to a whole new scene that may not have a genre or name yet.
Heidi Newfield had a run of country hits in the 2000s w a band and as a soloist. Now she’s reinventing and going gritty with her songwriting and blues harp on her first new album in more than a decade, The Barfly Sessions, Vol 1. Mac McAnally is a legend on the Row – a Hall of Fame songwriter and a 10-time CMA Musician of the Year. His own music displays real independence and countless skills as a singer, writer and producer. His new one is called Once In A Lifetime.
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