Tag: poetry

Outlaw Country That’ll Make You Smile

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Holding the attention of a roomful of moderately smashed bar-goers is no small feat, let alone with a traditional Irish folksong. But last May, country singer-songwriter Dylan Earl ended his set at Brooklyn’s Skinny Dennis standing on top of the bar and singing an a cappella version of “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

“Will you go, lassie go/ And we’ll all go together/ To pull wild mountain thyme/ All around the blooming heather,” Earl implored in his warm baritone, towering above the room in worn jeans, boots, and a sleeves-cut-off T-shirt from his Arkansas-based label, Gar Hole Records. In spite of all the alcohol collectively consumed by the listeners who packed the venue to its beer-tinged walls that evening, the room was just about as quiet as a divey honky-tonk can be.

By ending his set with the kind of folk song which, passed down through generations, comprises one major lineage of country music – indeed, “Wild Mountain Thyme” is based in a much older Scottish folk song – Earl invoked a deep vernacular tradition and history often left out of modern country. Earl’s music attracts labels like “old-school” and “classic country,” and his voice certainly lends itself to those comparisons, but his own compositions convey a whole lot more. Rejecting the banality of tired Southern stereotypes, Earl writes punk-hearted, poetic music rooted in a love of people and place; music which is both socially and class-conscious and captures wide-ranging cultural unease and indignation with nuance and wit.

On his fourth studio album, Level-Headed Even Smile (released September 19), Earl makes clear that his is not a return to a bygone era so much as a carrying on of a long tradition of speaking truth to power and of imbuing dimension and worth into the lives of overlooked characters and issues too easily reduced to absolutes.

“I’d rather be an outlaw than in with the law/ All this authority worship is the strangest thing I ever saw,” he sings in “Outlaw Country,” a thesis statement of sorts for the album and Earl himself. Earl wrote “Outlaw Country” out of frustration at how many people made assumptions about his beliefs and morals because of his appearance – and because he plays country music with a whole lot of Southern twang. Earl wanted to make it clear where he stands.

“I finished high school in a very rural part of Arkansas; I identify with the Deep South, but I don’t identify with its most prevalent fucking right-wing rhetoric… I still want to remain approachable to those people I completely disagree with, because I think that’s an important part of making art, is creating discourse,” he says. “I want to try to approach these people and try to have that conversation. Be like, ‘Listen here, brother, I’m just like you, but you don’t have to be a racist piece of shit. It’s way more fun in life to be happy and be inclusive. Your soul will be happier because of that.’”

Lately, outlaw country morphed from its subversive roots into a shorthand for wicked good independent country or a slightly more specific alternative to Americana. While both wicked good and independent, Earl’s version also rekindles contempt for the establishment that fueled the original outlaw country movement:

I’d rather be a bootlegger than a bootlicker
A side stepper than a homewrecker
And I don’t get a pick me up
From putting other people down

It’s clear to see by the air I breathe
Working class solidarity
Is the only way
We’re gonna stamp that fascist out

Sardonic and irreverent, “Outlaw Country” is an anthem for anyone who ever believed in love and community over corruption and power. But rather than a callback, Earl’s music is of and for the next generation of ne’er-do-wells and dreamers living on the fringes, hoping for something better.

Earl grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he split his time between separated parents. Chafing at the craven habits of money and influence that he witnessed from his father, a powerful local lawyer, Earl preferred the warmth and love he felt in the house his mother shared with his grandmother. (Despite a rocky childhood, Earl’s now building a relationship with his dad.)

“I was living in poverty on one side and then I was living in opulence on the other side, and the poverty side is where I wanted to be, because that’s where all the love was,” Earl says. “I’m so lucky to have that, to be able to have identified where love was at a young age and identify where my soul felt good.”

Earl’s mother showed him how to seek joy and adventure, filling life with road trips and camping weekends. When he was just five years old, Earl’s mother plopped a map in his lap and taught him to navigate. Perpetually tight on money and resources and mired in an enduring custody battle with his father, she nonetheless taught him how to get away from it all, instilling in him a curiosity about the world. On the road, they stopped to check out historical markers, explored parks and rivers and the Gulf Coast, and watched giant boats come in while picnicking along the Intracoastal Waterway.

“That developed a sense of wonder and being like, ‘I don’t fucking need money to feel this type of happiness, to feel this sense of joy and adventure and love of life, just life in its purest form,” Earl says, choking up. (He firmly believes more men should cry, and that it helps him be more humane.)

“Her sense of adventure, her true passion for living, it’s amazing to me; it still is amazing to me.”

The album’s title and thematic heart – level-headed even smile – are derived from that approach to living life fully. For Earl, it’s an essential mechanism of coping and connecting. Remain engaged in the world and aware of all its horrors and tragedies, he says, but then, when it gets to be too much, know when and how to take a break:

Some nights I’m crying on the backroads
Rolling my smoke backwards
Trying to keep a level-headed even smile
Don’t you know I might take a while to get there
Just hoping I get anywhere
Trying to keep a little level-headed even smile

“At some point we’ve got to unplug from the fucking screen and just go explore things that are fucking real, like the trees around us, or the grass, or the water, or the sun or the moon, and try to get in touch with that more primal sense of ourselves,” Earl says. “That is where we can really most quickly and most efficiently achieve happiness, it’s getting in touch with the simplest form of ourselves.”

Beside the love from his mother, Earl describes himself as a depressed kid who struggled in school and wanted desperately to escape his hometown and father and stepmother. At 15, he convinced his father to send him to boarding school which, in part because of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Louisiana, ended up being in rural Arkansas. At the Subiaco Abbey and Academy, Earl studied with monks who’d taken a vow of poverty and offered rigorous, benevolent study, kindness, and care. Though he’s an atheist, Earl counts the monks, whom he visits regularly, as mentors, connecting with them still through shared spirituality.

“We all fucking showed up pissed off as hell. And we found love and we found love amongst each other; we found love from those monks and found nature,” Earl says, reverently, of his time at Subiaco. “It saved my fucking life. The whole thing; I found joy and happiness for the first time in my life.”

Level-Headed Even Smile is dedicated to Earl’s late friend, William, who was the first to befriend him at Subiaco. “He helped me clear my heart,” Earl says. As he sings of those halcyon days on “Two Kinds of Loner,” “We were two kinds of loner/ A misfit and a wayward son…”

Armed with the sense of wonder his mom taught him, liberated by the fallow morals of youth, and subsumed by the ready escapism afforded by their surroundings, Earl and William learned every back road. They’d steal beer from the back of William’s dad’s Crossroads Tavern and drive for hours exploring the backwoods and levees along the Arkansas River.

“William was the first to show me the country air. Hanging out with him, something about getting in that truck after class, taking off down Lile Ridge Road, cracking a beer, putting on whatever weird music he was listening to at the time, that was the first sense of fucking true freedom I ever had in my life,” Earl says.

Stopping just shy of wistful, “Two Kinds of Loner” is a bittersweet, intimate portrait of the desperately important work of becoming oneself as a teenager – and of the raw beauty in forming kinship through human connection rather than blood relation:

Down where the kudzu meets the bodark
And the darkness first let go of me
High in a cab of a buddy I had
He showed me the county air
I used to not care about nothing
Because no one seemed to care for me

After high school, Earl attended Hendrix College, a liberal arts school which lived up to its name situated in Conway, Arkansas. A few years earlier, Earl borrowed his father’s old guitar – a Yamaha FG 180 Red Tag, which he still plays today – and learned enough chords to make himself useful around a bonfire and impress the local girls. Encouraged by one of the monks at Subiaco, who noticed him straying from lesson plans, Earl started writing his own music.

When he got to college, he landed feet first in a robust DIY music scene. Together with a group of friends – including Gar Hole Records cofounder and label manager Kurt DeLashmet – Earl played a circuit of local house venues: White House, Blue House, Brick House, and occasionally Shit Mansion, where both also lived for a time. To this day, their two-day, 28-band Butt Ranger music festival thrown by friends at the White House remains one of Earl’s favorite shows.

“We were drunk off our fucking asses on plastic bottle whiskey and snorting Adderall and fucking ripping cigs and shit like that. It was fucked up. It was so awesome. It was just blood and piss everywhere,” Earl says. He recalls the floor at White House buckling so deeply that by the end of the night all his gear, including his oversized amp, wound up in a pile in the middle of the floor. Volume was of primary concern, tone and other nuances distinctly secondary. “What a fucking beautiful, carnal, amazing culture to be a part of,” he says.

Two songs on Even Smile come from those early days playing music first in college and, afterwards, in Little Rock, where Earl and his band Swampbird moved. (Earl lived in Little Rock for a few years then moved to Fayetteville, where he still lives.) Both songs are paeans to the chaotic moil of early adulthood rendered heady and hazy by too much booze and too little grounding: “Broken Parts,” which he first recorded with Swampbird, and “Little Rock Bottom,” about his time in Arkansas’ capital city.

“I don’t really quite realize it until I am talking about it, how much of my life and my story is wound up into that album,” Earl, who’s now in his mid-30s, admits. The album feels like a fitting way to process and close that chapter of life. “I do feel like I’ve left it on the table and I’ve left it all out on the field, so to speak.”

In total, Even Smile is a loving, layered depiction of both Arkansas specifically and the south in general. Among his many influences, Earl includes Arkansas gonzo poet Frank Stanford (who also attended Subiaco and whose burial there Lucinda Williams memorialized in her song, “Pineola”). Stanford’s realism and wild abandon creep into Earl’s songwriting sensibilities; they share a love of the South and its complexities and a reverence for and dedication to illuminating those stories.

Alongside a few cheeky disquisitions on life on the fringes – including road dog ode “Get In The Truck” – throughout the album Earl relishes the beauty of his home territory. Perhaps nowhere more so than on “High On The Ouachitas,” an extended soliloquy on the wild beauty of the mountain range, his chosen retreat for a reset and solace:

When I’m high on Ouachita
High as I ever saw the Arkansas
With goldenrod and reindeer lichen
Twist flowers in bloom
There’s just no place
I’d rather waste my afternoons
Than high on Ouachita

“I love it so fucking much, because I know all of the nuance and I know all the beauty that’s deep underneath all of the stereotypes. And just how fascinatingly complex our communities are,” Earl says. “It’s fucking beautiful. You have two and a half million acres of national forest. So we have the cleanest drinking water in America; we have endless amounts of outdoor recreation; the food is fucking kick ass; the people are the sweetest ever.”

Earl rounded out Level-Headed Even Smile with two very on-theme cover songs: beloved Arkansas folksinger Jimmy Driftwood’s “White River Valley,” a love letter to Arkansas’s pastoral beauty, and Utah Phillips’ peripatetic wanderer’s lament, “Rock Me to Sleep,” which concludes the album. Together they bracket the glib “Lawn Chair,” written with Cameron Duddy and Jonathan Terrell.

Earl jokes when playing the song live that it might be the worst song he’s ever written. And superficially it sounds like the kind of redneck anthem that might confirm the uneducated listener’s worst stereotypes about uncouth Arkansans: “It’s a whipass life just being me/ It don’t cost much to be the free/ I got my lawn chair/ And I’m sitting on top of the world.” Yet the song is also a sly rebuke against taking everything too seriously. Convivial in its roughness, it’s a gleeful, carefree reminder of the many ways to keep a level-headed even smile.

“If I’m feeling bogged down and feeling depressed, oftentimes it has nothing to do with the task at hand, it’s just that I’ve been absorbing how terrible the fucking world is and it makes me incapable of interacting and interfacing with my immediate world, because I’m so fucking caught up in that goddamn bullshit… and it is not allowing you to reach your full potential as a biological piece of anatomy that is somehow living on this planet,” Earl says.

“[A level-headed even smile is] an attempt to focus on your humanness and try to reattach yourself to the earth and detach from the problems of the earth; and just go out and find your smile. Go find your joy amongst all the fucking evil.”

Photo Credit: Justin Cook

Is Adam Wright the Poet Laureate of Music Row?

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Adam Wright is a songwriter’s songwriter. An artist’s songwriter. A poet whose medium is best set to music. And not just any music, but the absolute highest echelons of bluegrass and country – radio, real, outlaw, Americana, and everything in between and beside. He writes daily from an office nestled between Music Square East and Music Square West in Nashville – the fabled Music Row.

His songs have been cut by stars like Alan Jackson, Lee Ann Womack, Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood, Brandy Clark, and Robert Earl Keen. In bluegrass, bands like Balsam Range and Lonesome River Band have carried his originals high up the charts, and he’s co-written with many players in the genre, like Sierra Hull, for example. His songwriting and its distinct, intentional, and artistic voice has gained him award nominations from the GRAMMYs, the Americana Honors & Awards, and the IBMA Bluegrass Music Awards.

Since early February of this year, Wright has been leaving a trail of musical breadcrumbs online and on streaming platforms, teasing out his brand new album, Nature of Necessity, in four parts, which he calls “sides.” Along with singles peppering the release cycle throughout the following months, the prior three sides of the project finally convene with the fourth today, September 25, as a coalesced and cohesive project of 18 songs. The novel delivery mechanism for Nature of Necessity feels like an extension of the intentionality Wright brings to each of these literary, textural, and fantastic songs. They each stand alone, certainly, but together they sing.

These are not Music Row fodder, or craven attempts at radio hits, or tracks churned out day-in-and-day-out for volume and viral potential. These are passion projects. Ideas and stories that stuck in Wright’s creative craw and demanded much more deliberate treatments. It’s not as though songs written with the bottom line in mind can’t be this successful as works of art – they often are. It’s just that it’s immediately tangible to the listener that these works by Adam Wright aren’t just some of his best, they were clearly written and produced without a single thought towards saleability. Rather, Wright and his creative partners – especially producer Frank Liddell – gave each of these songs the artistic treatment they deserved on their own merits as stories and tableaus, vignettes and pantomimes.

If you remember when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, there was a whole lot of “discourse” on the internet as to the actual literary value of songs and lyrics. It’s a painfully on the nose, forest for the trees moment to even have to accept the premise of that debate in order to refute it. But with a writer like Adam Wright – ever so rare in country and roots music and becoming even more endangered still – it’s easy, direct, and demonstrable connecting the dots between literature and songwriting. Nature of Necessity being 18 compelling points on that trail. With this album, Wright should perhaps be offered a term as the poet laureate of Music Row. Let each of its four sides stand as a resumé.

I really love the sonics of the album, the production. I’m a bluegrass banjo player, so when I listen to records I want to hear the pick noise, I want to hear the room, I want to hear the distance between a singer’s lips and the microphone. I want it to sound like music and I want it to sound like a moment in time.

Granted, I listen to a lot of music that doesn’t check any of those boxes and I like it a lot for sure, but the first thing I noticed about this album was that it sounds not just live, but alive. Can you talk about that and can you talk about how you accomplished it? It feels like, having heard so much of Frank [Liddell’s] work as producer that he was probably a perfect partner to accomplish that production style, too.

Adam Wright: Yeah, he absolutely was. And we wanted the same thing. We wanted it to be live and to sound live. With all the flaws inherent in performance, like a full unedited, undoctored performance.

‘Cause I’m like you – I’m a pretty poor listener currently but I have, in my long life of listening, listened to an awful lot of music and studied a lot of it. I know when I’m listening to a song that was gridded and then a singer came in and sang very carefully and then they cut it up and got it right. Because I’ve made records like that, too.

You sound your best that way, you truly do. It is so flattering to have someone do that to you and then listen back and go, “Wow, I sound fantastic.” So what I’ve enjoyed, for some reason, [is] getting used to what I sound like, giving it my best effort on a play down all the way through, one whole take, and go, “That’s what I sound like.”

It’s like looking at yourself like in a hotel mirror. [They] are the worst mirrors in the world. Like you go in the bathroom in the hotel room and you look awful and can’t figure out why. Something about the lighting or the quality of the lighting or where they’re placed. Every time I’m in a hotel mirror, I’m just like, “What am I doing out in the world?”

It’s a little bit like that. You listen back to yourself, play this song, and you go, “Man… that is not perfect.” There are things I just really dislike about the way I sing certain things on this record, the way I played. I hear me failing the whole way through. ‘Cause we did track it live. Me and Matt Chamberlain and Glenn Worf tracked us a three-piece, me on acoustic and singing with bass and drums. The idea was just to keep all of that as it is, intact, which we did.

I told Glenn, I said, “You’re the lead instrument. No one’s coming to save us. If something has to happen, we just have to do it right now.” We recorded it with that philosophy. The meat of it is my playing and singing with Glenn and Matt and we didn’t fiddle with it. The caveat was, “Okay, we can add things, but this has to remain what it is.” Whatever we did has to be live as it happened.

We did it a bunch of times. We did every song like seven times. So if I didn’t get it, is it gonna get better? No. That’s how I sing that line, obviously. There was some freedom in that … I’ve just gotten to enjoy it.

These feel like songs for you and not songs to sell or to get cut or to pitch on Music Row. Like, they feel like songs that, as they came out of you, you may have been squirreling them away, caching them for yourself for the future. I wanted to see if that was true or if that resonated with you. To me, they’re poetic and they’re literary without being “pick me” or “try hard.” They’re really thoughtful. I love your lyricism because it’s not too esoteric. But, these traits aren’t exactly regarded as commercial. So how did this collection end up… collected?

That’s exactly how that went. And thank you for the kind words, too. I do write every day for a publisher. Usually that means co-writing. I co-write almost every day of the week. Whether I want to or not. I’m usually writing with younger artists that want a record deal or have a record deal and they have some ambitions about the commercial music industry – and for some reason they thought I could help them. [Laughs] As misguided as that is, that’s usually what our job is in that moment. I don’t think a lot about, “Hey kid, I got a hit for you.” My brain just doesn’t really work that way. I just try to write a really good song that I think is tailored towards that particular artist.

I do a lot of that, but I would never try to force one of these ideas like [that] are on this record on someone that is trying to do something like that. This is a different endeavor. I do categorize it differently. That co-writing with people for their records or for whatever they would like to do is almost like a day job. And these songs are my night job. So they are very different. It feels like a different writing brain altogether. The process of writing ’em is very different. It’s not two hours of looking at each other. Some took me weeks, just because I couldn’t unlock ’em, but I kept tinkering away. It’s a much different thing.

I want to find out the deepest realization of whatever the story was or the idea or the character that I decided the song was gonna be about. Just follow that rabbit through the woods as deep into it and as dark as it got, that’s what we were gonna do. It’s rewarding! It’s a lot of work and it takes a long time and I’m so busy at the moment. I don’t know if I could write some of those songs right now. If you told me to write a song that had a lot of Latin in it about watching the dawn, I’m not sure I could pull it off. [Laughs]

But you know how it is when you find these things. You get a hold of this little spark, you follow it, and then at some point it dims a little. Then you’re looking for another spark to light up. I’m currently between sparks – I’m writing every day, but I haven’t found a new thread that I just can’t wait to chase yet. But sometimes you get a little hint of it.

Let’s talk about some of the music. On “Dreamer and The Realist,” are you the dreamer? Are you the realist? Is it about you?

I never really decided if I contain enough pragmatism to be both a dreamer and a realist. Like in some ways I am. Like when my wife says, “Hey, we’re going to Disney World,” that’s what we’re doing. I would never decide to go to Disney World [on my own], because I don’t like fun. [Laughs] But once I know I’ve gotta go, then I can get pragmatic about it.

But aside from those types of things, I’m pie in the sky. If I could stare out a window 10 hours a day every day for the rest of my life and not starve to death, I would do it.

Thank you!

All I really want to do is walk around the world and roll around inside my own brain. That sounds fascinating to me forever, endlessly. And not because I have a fascinating brain, just because I think it’s fun to just go, “What if” and then, “What if” and then, “What if.”

I feel like this is a long way of trying to say, I feel like everyone is some combination of a dreamer and a realist. Or you couldn’t function. But certainly nobody’s all dreamer or all realist, I don’t think. I think we all compartmentalize our dreaming and our realism to certain areas of our life and hopefully we each find someone that compensates for, or augments, [ourselves] in ways. And that’s never perfect. There’s always like a dueling going on with all that stuff. But I love the push and pull of it; within myself and within a relationship. There’s music in all of that I’ll always find it very interesting. The song really is within the same person.

With “All the Texas,” which features Patty Griffin, one of the first things I thought when I heard it was of Lyle Lovett’s “That’s Right (You’re Not From Texas).” Plus, I was thinking about this moment in time with Texas and politics and the culture wars. Country music tends to feature this thinking like, “Everyone loves Texas and you should too!” “Don’t we all agree, Texas is great??” And then you look at what’s happening in Texas and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, Texas. What the hell?” I’ve had all the Texas…

Help us help you, please! Exactly.

Can you talk to me a little bit about that song? Because I have a feeling that there’s much more going on than just the way we’re all feeling about Texas these days.

It really was written before Texas got so Texas-y, recently. I don’t remember what year it was, but it was probably four or five years ago. Texas is always pretty Texas-y, but this was before it got super Texas-y. It was just about a night opening for Patty Griffin there at the Moody [Center] in Austin. It was just a whirlwind of a trip; flew in day of show, ran around Austin for half an afternoon, and then played a show.

She’s so supernatural. There’s just something like… sorcery around her. Anytime you’re around her, she doesn’t come off that way. She doesn’t walk around like talking wizard speak or anything; she’s just such a lovely, cute, normal, funny individual. But there’s still something that swirls around her that is just supernatural.

With all of that, I was like jotting things down, like the whole 24 hours that we were there. I just kept getting like little snatches of things and they all started to have this kind of mythical quality to ’em. Some of it’s literal, the Driskill and all of that stuff was true. But it turns into a sort of dream logic, mythical stuff – which is like watching [Patty] perform. It was an exercise in playing with almost like a journal entry of that experience and then distorting it with mythical language or symbolism.

I also love “Weeds” – and not just because Lee Ann [Womack] is on it. But also because I am obsessed with wildflowers, with native gardening, and habitat restoration. Something that struck me about that line, “Heaven is a meadow with no weeds” is perhaps heaven is a place where we finally understand that a “weed” is a social construct, right? A weed is a plant that we’ve decided is in a place where it shouldn’t be, but maybe we’re the ones where we shouldn’t be–

Yeah, that’s right.

Maybe we changed so much of the environment that we look out and we see a weed, but that plant has been here all along. And [the habitat is] probably supposed to be all weeds.

Exactly.

When I heard “Weeds” I also thought of Dolly’s song “Wildflowers” and the idea of, “What is the difference between a wildflower and a weed?” So, in my own mind, I heard that line as maybe you get to heaven and you realize all these weeds were wildflowers the whole time. Maybe I’m projecting. [Laughs]

I don’t know how the farmer’s perspective developed [on that song], I just don’t remember. And I’m not trying to put any sort of romanticism on it, it just didn’t come to me. I don’t remember what the jump was, but I remember why I started the song initially. I was at the library looking for something new to read and I came across this book, it was like a catalog of late-1800s farming equipment and the techniques and things. You could order out of these catalogs in like, 1870-whatever.

It also had articles about how to fix your wagon or what to do about this particular tractor part. How to deal with a stubborn mule or a pig that wouldn’t do what you wanted them to do. I thought it was fascinating, and the language of it – I love lingo so much. I love getting into some endeavor or line of work or character where there’s lots of language that I haven’t heard before. Like specialized language to a particular job or whatever. This book was full of it. I was just fascinated by all of it.

The whole thing about the last verse about the pig, all of that, it’s just outta the catalog. Those were all things [from the book]. Like, “Are you dealing with a hog who’s ill-formed? And unquiet in his mind? Here’s what you can do.” I found it all so interesting.

Then the middle verse about the tramp, to me he was dressed in soldiers’ clothes. I imagined he’d been shot and was laid over this farmer’s fence. It would have been just at the close of the Civil War era stuff. I wanted all of it to hang together, but with all of these strange things going on the overarching thing is this farmer going, “I can’t get rid of these weeds.” Why does he care? I don’t know. I just liked the guy [because] the thing that sort of kept him going was that his eternal reward might be a meadow without all of these weeds in it.

Your career has intersected with bluegrass and has been part of your career in so many ways. You’re a picker – which is one of the first things I noticed about this album, you guys tracking it live means we get to hear you pick the guitar. All these bluegrass folks have cut your songs, you’ve been nominated for an IBMA Award. What does the genre mean to you? And of course, the inseparable community that comes with it. How does that fit into the constellation of how you make music, songwrite, and be creative in general?

That’s interesting. I love the world of bluegrass. Maybe I’m just a little particular. Like, if you looked at all genres of music as slices of a pie, there’s really only a sliver that I really love. Out of any genre. Whether it be jazz or a big band or blues or bluegrass or classic country or rock, there’s really only a little bit of it that I really like and most of it, the rest of it I find I can leave alone. Not quite for me.

But I always said, good bluegrass might be the best music ever. Like, when it’s good and it’s right. I wish I had started trying to play that kind of music when I was younger. I got fascinated with it too late to physically do it at a level that I appreciate. I can distinguish the difference in the nuances of really great players, but I’m not able to do that. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it, but I’ve probably got carpal tunnel trying to figure out Tony Rice licks a few times in my life. There’s so much of it that I really like and I love.

I’ve never really sat down to try to write bluegrass songs. I just write songs. Like you were talking about this interview going under the Good Country category, I’ve always sat somewhere in the mushy in-between of folk, singer-songwriter, bluegrass, and country. I’ve just always existed somewhere in the middle of all that stuff. Some of my favorite artists have done that, as well.

Some of my favorite bluegrass artists were folkier or bluesy-er. Del McCoury or Doc Watson. Tony Rice was such a genre evader. I always appreciated that about certain bluegrass artists. But writing-wise, I just always wrote songs. And because of the nature of what I’ve ingested, they lend themselves fairly well to more traditional bluegrass arrangements. They always play everything a lot faster than I think they’re going to. [Laughs]

Last night at the Bluebird [Cafe] I did my version of “Thunder and Lightning,” which is a moonshining song of mine that Lonesome River Band cut. I think I’m playing my version fast, like it feels fast to me. And then I hear them do it and it’s about twice as fast as I play mine. It sounds great when they do it, but if I try to play it that fast it sounds ridiculous.

I write some with Sierra Hull, she’s so much fun to write with. It’s funny, she hardly plays when we’re writing, which I had to get used to. ‘Cause the first time I wrote with her I was like, “Oh I can’t wait to just watch her play!” And I don’t even know if she touched the instrument a couple of times, just to check a chord. But I got to like her so much and enjoy writing with her that it didn’t matter. [Laughs] …

My dad was a piano player – and still is. His dad was a piano player, too. So I started on piano when I… I think I was like four. I was kinda tugging on their shirt going, “Hey, I wanna play piano!” And they’re like, “Yeah, okay. Sure.” But they did let me, I started, and I did like classical piano for years. Then I went to saxophone and then I heard a Chuck Berry record and I needed a guitar. Today. Right now. This afternoon.

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a bluegrasser, saying, “I just don’t know how you guys do it, the flatpicking. How are you doing this?” And he goes, “You remember when you were learning Rolling Stones songs on a Stratocaster when you were a teenager? Most of these guys were playing D28s with grown men at festivals then.” When they were that age, that’s what they were doing. Picking with grown men.

Who were having pissing contests with those children. [Laughs]

Yeah! Sorry kid, not today. [Laughs]

Photo Credit: Emily McMannis

Anna Tivel Makes Poetry in Music From Poetry in Nature

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

There is something woodsy and nature-rooted about Anna Tivel’s songwriting. It calls to mind mountain hiking, tall pines, mushroom foraging. The clink of a water bottle against a caribiner. The gentle tiptoe sound of dew dropping from treetops. Maybe it’s Oregon that’s seeped into her bones. Maybe it’s just the way her intrinsic poeticism steers things.

Listening to Tivel’s music tends to conjure the words of other writers. Consider some of the final lines from Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer:

“Solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

Or, consider the poetry of Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver or Andrea Gibson. Each seemed to have plucked their pieces from shrubs and vines – or at least from the air around their foliage. Indeed, some of these names came up in our recent conversation with Tivel about her new album, Animal Poem, which drops August 29 on Fluff & Gravy Records.

Much like a walk through the woods, Animal Poem offers listeners a pathway toward retaining their humanity in a world that can feel inhumane. Though Tivel notes she began writing this album two years ago, she was conscious of the shifting geopolitical landscape and the way the chaos in the news might – or might not – echo into people’s private lives.

In the end, she suggests that life is mostly made of small moments between people who are guided by love and who are trying to understand one another. Those are the moments of dissonance where our commonalities have the best chance of prevailing. To hear Tivel tell it, that is the basis of her job as both poet and songwriter.

With so much going on in the world geopolitically, so many people are struggling with how to make art and why to make art and, of course, feeling compelled to continue to make art. But there’s this existential part of it that I feel like you’re addressing on this album. Maybe also in the creation of this album, which I’m guessing was recorded well before what’s happening today, and will be different from what will be happening when we publish it.

So, when you think about this album now, and what you were working through with these songs in that moment, how has it aged in your mind?

Anna Tivel: That’s funny, I was thinking today how, in this particular year so far, I’m having trouble [writing songs]. I’m having a lot of trouble finding the core of what I mean. I always feel like writing is this search for something a little beyond your understanding. You’re just moving through the world kind of trying to express what you see and what you’re learning and what you’re reaching for. And I’ve been finding, in this particular moment, it’s just so loud and it’s so tangled. I’m writing a lot of angry things that I will never play, [about] not understanding and not even knowing what to reach for to try to understand.

This album was all written like two years ago now, in a state of the world not dissimilar from this one. I was reading a lot of Wendell Berry and just thinking about big, overarching systems and how impossible it is for those to stay about people. [I was thinking] about the earth and kind of thinking about how these smaller communities … function and how things ripple outward. But, the really small things, like your family or your neighborhood. Power lies in these very mundane but magical lives we’re living. How we’re touching the person across the street from us or how we’re figuring out our own hearts, and how powerful that is in the overarching, huge system that [can] become very inhumane so easily.

I think there’s a lot of that there – a lot of love and immense, wild power. All these things are coming out of the technological wavelength that we’re on. And then things like love [that] just can’t be snuffed out.

As you were talking about what we’re reaching for, and the small things, I kept thinking about this image at the end of this record, in the song “Meantime.” The swing set that nobody used and this family that, maybe there was abuse, but the dad built the swing set. Nobody went out to play on it, and they left, and the swing was still there, blowing in the wind.

A swing doesn’t know what it’s reaching, but it’s always there to lift you. What a beautiful thesis that it is for this record, coming as it does, at the end. Can you talk a little bit about that song, “Meantime,” and your decision to place it second to last? Does it feel to you like that’s what this record was reaching toward? I’m always interested in how sequencing tells the story.

Sometimes [sequencing] is really just meaning-based, or it’s sort of sonically based. I really liked the idea of this record kind of starting with this song that expands as much as the whole country. And then going all the way down to the last song, [which] is just very quiet, about love between two people, or what it is to build the language of love with the people nearest to you. I like there to be some kind of journey on a record, where you’re taken through different stories and different lives, for there to be some sort of arc.“Meantime,” to me, feels [like] that’s what I’m trying to say, but it takes place in a very small image. It’s one neighbor. There’s always a lot of neighbors in my music. [I’m a] very voyeuristic neighbor, probably.

There’s this feeling on the record, I think, that we hold all these things and we’re contributing to all these things – such pain and also such beauty. And we’re all sort of trying to separate ourselves from each other [and] from these big forces.

You can recognize yourself in everything, both the good and the bad. But inside of me is so much love and there’s so much cruelty and so much confusion. And becoming part of a family or a community – or a global community – it’s almost like the deeper you [go,] the more you recognize that you are just like everybody. You hold all those things and they hold all those things, even if they feel ugly or small or huge or powerful, they’re in there.

You’re reminding me of the poem by the late, brilliant Andrea Gibson. When I first heard their line, I actually thought of you. And then listening to this album, it came back to me.

The line is, “Do you know how many beautiful things can be seen in a single second?” It’s from the poem, “In the Chemo Room…” It’s thoughts from chemo, which is such a hopeless, awful thing, theoretically. And yet, all of Andrea’s work is so full of hope. I feel like that is so true to what this album conjured for me. I’m wondering if you have any kind of relationship with their poetry or if you were even aware of that parallel.

Yeah, I wish. I wanna take it in, because my good friends in Portland were just telling me to go read their work. I haven’t yet, but I resonate a lot with that. Like, you can just look all around you and see horror upon horror. [But] we are stunningly alive. Full of love and mystery, all at the same time. You’d die if you couldn’t hold that. You can kind of lean in either direction, or you can kind of like just sit there in all directions at once. That’s the journey of the whole thing.

While I’m bringing up poets, you mentioned Wendell Berry. One of my other favorite lines is from him: “Be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts,” Right? Like, this whole idea that we are animals among animals on this planet. Everything’s brutal – and there’s joy. And there’s love, you know. This is such a vital part of what every poet says, right?

There’s a song on here called “Animal Poem,” but the fact that you chose that phrase as the title of the album seemed to resonate. What was it about, to you, to choose those two words as the title of this project?

It’s exactly that. I feel very much like I want to be another being on the earth [who is] trying to express all those things at once, that everybody’s feeling, going through, and finding ways to say to each other.

There’s so many ways that we hold the word “animal”: Wild, untethered, maybe dangerous, maybe instinct[ive], maybe disturbing. … A poem is such an intentional, beautiful way to capture a small part of being. I like the idea that maybe this whole thing is just [us] running around confused, trying to find a little beauty, in what often appears to be utter chaos.

But where is the line, in your mind, between poetry and music? Is there any difference? Is it something intrinsic to the piece? Or, how do you decide what gets music added and what stays a poem?

Yeah, maybe I just think it all comes from the same place – the raw urge to express something. The way that music, or any art form, allows you to express it a little more honestly, because it’s not so straightforward.

When you can live outside the exact facts and use all the colors and the sensory details and emotion of a thing, sometimes that feels more true than being like, “Ted went to the store and bought an egg.” You know? There’s all the other things that happened in that moment that informed the way Ted’s heart was moving, that can be more readily got-at with art. There’s all these ways that people do that.

Ted’s egg was actually quite an experience for him.

Yeah, I mean, why did he go for just one egg? That’s my question.

There’s only one egg left. Poor Ted.

Logistically, when it came to making this record, you noted that it was a group of people in a room just kind of playing together. Was there rehearsal? How many times did everybody else hear these songs? And what was the creative process in that circle?

It was really free. I loved making this record. It felt, to me, like a bunch of freedom. Hearts in a room, just having our thing.
Some of us had toured together a little bit, so we played some of these songs in various ways. Some were new. We sort of just sat and played together for a day or two beforehand. We tried really hard not to make parts. [We were] really trying to at least get comfortable with the forms, so you know where the bridge lives, so it doesn’t surprise you. But [we didn’t do] so much that people settled into things.

Then we just sat in a circle. We didn’t wear headphones, which I loved, and we put my voice through a little monitor in the middle of the room. I’m fairly quiet, so everyone could at least hear the words. We mixed ourselves and just played music in the room together. There was no turning yourself up in the headphones or adding reverb. It just was what it was.

That felt really free. It felt like we forgot we were making a record. Just trying to feel the thing in the moment. I love this group of people. I’ve done a lot of touring with [them] over the years. [I’ve] known them a long time and really respect their musicality, but also their spirits.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

Singing Through Dark Times:
Willi Carlisle Finds Hope in Roaming and Reckoning

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

We are in a moment of extreme distress. Especially, but not limited to, the formal politics of America’s dying empire. Living in its wake, it’s easy to collapse into hopelessness. Hopelessness seems reasonable, considering the criminalization of trans voices, or ICE raids, or the tariffs that wipe out hard earned income, or climate change, or any of the other myriad disasters we are in the middle of. There has to be some way forward – a full understanding of how bad the situation currently is, but also that there might be a small amount of hope; that it has been worse than this, but it has also been better.

Willi Carlisle released an album of traditional songs, called The Magnolia Sessions, in December 2024 and will release Winged Victory June 27 via Signature Sounds. Winged Victory includes original songs and covers of Utah Phillips, Richard Thompson, and Patrick Haggerty, among others. These songs are about the delicate negotiation between historical understandings, current realities, and the possibility of a progressive future; about carving out small moments of pleasure against melancholy; of building a small paradise against these impending crises.

I reached Willi Carlisle by phone on Good Friday, the saddest day of the Christian calendar. On the first Good Friday, no one thought Christ would return. I have not been a believer for a while, but I remember sermons in college which warned against racing through Friday to get to the hope of Sunday. So when I call this album a hopeful one, it is hopeful with a full acknowledgement that it might not get better. The work needs to be done with the assumption that there is no intervention, divine or otherwise.

When asking Carlisle about optimism, or about hope, he makes his choices sound purposeful, mentioning that he had been wanting to make this kind of album for more than a decade and that these two albums are “more just like musical moments that continue to say the things I want to say, as opposed to saying the things that I want to get off my chest.” This is not a manifesting energy, or an optimism despite all odds, but one which is well earned after decades of performing.

Those decades of performance tile with decades of listening, each working together mutually. Winged Victory has several moments which cross cosmic time – decades or centuries – looking backwards or seeing what is possible in the futures of our children’s children’s generations. The collection begins, for example, with the Utah Phillips standard, “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years.” Its chorus states baldly:

Go reckon our dead by the forges red
And the factories where we spin.
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
Good God! We have paid it in!

This album is one of reckoning, of refusing the standard moments. In the original song, “The Cottonwood Tree,” a slow waltz, Carlisle talks about a “place where nobody lives, and everyone is free.” He is singing in first person while he plays a concertina, mentioning how he is part of nature now and how he will be part of nature in his own rotting. He is happy to die trusting people, but even after dies, even when he is buried under “the cottonwood trees,” he will be heard.

He concludes the song, believing that he will meet his friends six feet under the cottonwood tree. In a subtle moment, his friends are “the tall grasses rustling between his ears,” or the forget-me-nots in a parking lot, and maybe even other humans. Here time collapses, between the immediacy of the moment and the length it takes a body to absorb fully into those cottonwood trees.

Carlisle’s album of traditional songs, The Magnolia Sessions, has moments of this cosmic time as well – a much eerier version of “Leatherwing Bat” than the one made famous on Peter, Paul and Mary’s children’s album, as well as the last song, a version of “Jubilee,” a moment which reminds us again that the joy will come, after working and waiting.

Conversation between original tracks and new work is central to Carlisle’s practice. His reckoning, which occurs over and over again, is also about the complex matrix of listening and performing other people’s songs. When asked about the covers, he talks about working together – that he had a “strong relationship to the material…”

“I see my whole project in folk music is hearing history with all of its interpretations, its historicity, back to the lives of actual human beings. It’s time to take off the cowboy hat and put on the work gloves.”

The strength of the relationships between material, is partly due to how the original songs on this album work in conjunction with the old songs. For example, how the waltz of “The Cottonwood Tree” leads into the harder, faster waltz of the Patrick Haggerty-penned “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears.” That Carlisle includes a Patrick Haggerty song at all is remarkable, even more so that he makes it full of joy and he considers it as part of the tradition of folk and country music. It’s a cult song in queer folk circles – the mainstreaming of this work is a foregrounding of queer desire, another tradition and another culture. Carlisle sings it with horns and an accordion which sounds like a circus calliope (between this and Lucy Dacus’ “Calliope Prelude,” the instrument is having a moment).

Collapsing of time can again be seen in his version of Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing.” Also running a little quicker than the original, it’s a song about lovers who cannot be kept and immediacy about “the price you pay for the chains you refuse.” But the next song, “Big Butt Billy” – a comic riff on possibly hooking up with a non-binary server at a diner in the midwest – makes other arguments, models other kinds of hope (for an immediate pleasure).

Other versions of “Beeswing,” meanwhile, take the side of the narrator and have a misogynist tinge against the person who roams. Having these two songs back to back argues in favor of roaming and typifies desire as a kind of roaming – Haggerty wants, the Romany wants, the server wants, and at the risk of thinking he might be a little autobiographical, Willi wants. Throughout these two albums, the hunger is palpable.

Roaming is central to Carlisle’s music, not only on this album, but as a theme. Roaming through time and space, through the cosmos, and on the very real roads of California, Texas, or Wisconsin. The first thing that Carlisle and I talked about was BBQ and about Kansas City, where he is staying on Good Friday when we connect. That could be seen as a kind of metaphor – having strong feelings about a very local meat & three and about the history of a song that is brand new; having thoughts about the place where he is landing and a song that is centuries old.

Roaming is a way through this mess, through catastrophe and disaster as a way of finding community, against despair while not naively thinking things will get better without labor. This pattern of Carlisle’s interpretive skill is top notch throughout both of these albums, because of that curious hunger, that roaming, and that possibility of a way forward, even in the darkest era.

The last question I asked Carlisle was about theater – he had worked at Fringe shows in his 20s. He said that he wanted to direct or act again, especially Brecht. I keep returning to Brecht’s “Motto,” which reads in its entirety:

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

This poem was the epigraph to a book written when Brecht had moved to Denmark, escaping German fascism.

Winged Victory reveals there is great beauty in darkness, that singing itself is an act of optimism, and that exile creates its own narratives. Therein, Carlisle has found a way of singing through dark times.

All photos: Whit Stone

Finding Lucinda: Episode 3

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

Ismay visits cornerstone music venue The Hole in the Wall in Austin to interview Charlie Sexton, the producer and songwriter who’s best known as a guitarist for Bob Dylan. They discuss Charlie and Lucinda’s first gig together in 1979 when he was just a kid. Charlie shares insights into Lucinda’s remarkable songwriting, as well as the emotional struggles musicians face with self-doubt.

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Produced in partnership with BGS and distributed through the BGS Podcast Network, Finding Lucinda expands on the themes of Ismay’s eponymous documentary film, exploring artistic influence, creative resilience, and the impact of Williams’ music. New episodes are released twice a month. Listen right here on BGS or wherever you get podcasts.

Finding Lucinda, the documentary film that inspired and instigated the podcast, is slated for release in the fall. Both the film and podcast showcase never-before-heard archival material, intimate conversations, and a visual journey through the literal and figurative landscapes that molded Lucinda’s songwriting.

Credits:
Produced and mixed by Avery Hellman for Neanderthal Records, LLC.
Music by Ismay.
“Sundays” written by Lucinda Williams.
Artwork by Avery Hellman.
Music Supervisor: Jonathan McHugh
Austin, Texas recordings at The Hole in the Wall.
Sound recordist: Rodrigo Nino
Producer: Liz McBee
Director: Joel Fendelman
Co-Director: Rose Bush
Special thanks to: Mick Hellman, Chuck Prophet, Don Fierro, Jacqueline Sabec, Rosemary Carroll, Lucinda Williams & Tom Overby.

Find more information on Finding Lucinda here. Find our full Finding Lucinda episode archive here.

Finding Lucinda: Episode 2

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Ismay arrives in Austin, Texas to dig through the Collections Deposit Library at the University of Texas in order to understand the life of Lucinda Williams’ father, Miller. A poet and teacher, Miller Williams overcame setbacks to become a prominent writer. Ismay discovers his personal writings, letters, and photographs, highlighting his mentorship and the artistic community that shaped Lucinda’s career.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • AMAZON • MP3

Produced in partnership with BGS and distributed through the BGS Podcast Network, Finding Lucinda expands on the themes of Ismay’s eponymous documentary film, exploring artistic influence, creative resilience, and the impact of Williams’ music. New episodes are released twice a month. Listen right here on BGS or wherever you get podcasts.

Finding Lucinda, the documentary film that inspired and instigated the podcast, is slated for release in the fall. Both the film and podcast showcase never-before-heard archival material, intimate conversations, and a visual journey through the literal and figurative landscapes that molded Lucinda’s songwriting.

Credits:
Produced and mixed by Avery Hellman for Neanderthal Records, LLC.
Music by Ismay.
Artwork by Avery Hellman.
With recordings from The Collections Deposit Library at UT Austin, and records from The Harry Ransom Center.
Sound recordist: Rodrigo Nino
Producer: Liz McBee
Director: Joel Fendelman
Co-Director: Rose Bush
“The Caterpillar” and “Of History and Hope” appear courtesy of Rebecca Jordan Williams.
Special thanks to: Mick Hellman, Chuck Prophet, Jonathan McHugh, Jacqueline Sabec, Lucinda Williams, and Tom Overby.

Find more information on Finding Lucinda here. Find our full Finding Lucinda episode archive here.

Finding Lucinda: Full Episode List and Breakdown

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The Finding Lucinda podcast is now available on all major podcast platforms, with new episodes released twice a month. Listen right here on BGS or wherever you get podcasts. Finding Lucinda, the documentary film, was released on September 9, 2025. Both the film and podcast showcase never-before-heard archival material, intimate conversations, and a visual journey through the literal and figurative landscapes that molded Lucinda’s songwriting.

Twice a month, new episodes will be shared across podcast platforms and right here, on BGS, in our full episode list and breakdown. Simply bookmark this article for new episodes and updates every two weeks!

Find more information on Finding Lucinda here. The film is now available for purchase, rental, or streaming via video on demand. Find ways to watch here.

Episode 11: Meeting Lucinda Williams

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For the finale of their road trip, Ismay finally gets to meet the center of this entire narrative – Lucinda Williams. Their goal is seeking guidance about what to do with their self doubt. Ismay discovers that Lucinda had one major difference in her origin story that is the key to understanding why she never gave up herself. Ismay and Lucinda also discuss items from the archives that Ismay has gathered along their route to Nashville. Ismay performs the song, “Spin,” from the archives for her and is surprised by Lucinda’s reaction.

More here.

Episode 10: Visiting Ray Kennedy at the Room and Board

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Ismay wakes up the day after interviewing Mary Gauthier ready to attend a live performance by Lucinda Williams at the Ryman Auditorium. In order to finish out their journey, Ismay hopes to interview Lucinda right before her show and find a conclusion to their road trip. However, it turns out that due to unforeseen circumstances the interview is no longer possible. So, Ismay attends the show anyway and has to make a decision about whether to continue following Lucinda or to move forward. Plus, they meet up with engineer and producer for Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, Ray Kennedy.

More here.

Episode 9: Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now”

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Ismay travels across Nashville to the Station Inn to meet with legendary folk singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier. This episode of Finding Lucinda is different from those in the past – rather than interviewing a character from Lucinda Williams’ history, Ismay speaks to Mary because of their shared experiences as fans and devotees of Lucinda’s music.

Mary reveals that her most well known song was in fact directly derived from techniques Lucinda uses in her songwriting. This conversation turns out to be incredibly revelatory, as wisdom Mary imparts allows Ismay to discover that what they initially thought this journey was all about may in fact be completely upended.

More here.

Episode 8: Buddy Miller Talks Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

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In this episode of Finding Lucinda, Ismay drives to Nashville to share the incredible never-before-heard tape they found during their road trip journey with friend Buddy Miller. Miller is known to have contributed essential parts to Lucinda’s breakthrough, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. Ismay reviews the commonly told story about the making of this record, how fraught it was, and realizes that there actually is important history to uncover – history that reveals a more interesting and unexpected truth about why this record was so challenging to make. Ismay discusses Lucinda’s history in L.A., where she met a critical collaborator Gurf Morlix and subsequently made her albums Sweet Old World and Lucinda Williams.

More here.

Episode 7: Treasures From the Tape Vault

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In the most exciting moment of the Finding Lucinda road trip thus far, Ismay hears from interviewee Wolf Stephenson that there is some archival material he wants to share from the concrete tape vault. After sitting on the shelf for 40 years, Wolf has finally brought three boxes down to review. He finds that there is something mysterious and unexpected in the third box, so Wolf and Ismay try to get to the bottom of what in the world this mystery box contains. This piece of never-before-heard material gives Ismay insight into Lucinda’s musical development and the choices she made as a creative person. But most importantly, discovering this treasure gives Ismay an opportunity to see themself in a way they never have before.

More here.

Episode 6: Visiting Malaco Studios

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Ismay travels from Texas to Mississippi, to visit the studio where Lucinda Williams made her first record. There, Ismay interviews Wolf Stephenson, who was the engineer that day in 1978, to learn about what happened during the session and whether Lucinda was confident through that initial challenge of recording. They discuss what results when artists get rejected and what keeps certain artists moving forward in spite of various roadblocks. Stephenson oversaw the development of Malaco Records, which produced R&B, soul, and gospel hits. Elsewhere in the episode, Ismay also takes time to visit the stretch of country between Austin, Texas and Jackson, Mississippi in order to understand the landscape that informed Lucinda’s work.

More here.

Episode 5: Lucinda’s First Guitarist

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Ismay travels to Anderson Fair in Houston, Texas, a famed music venue with a unique history that includes legends like Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Ismay tracked down a special character from Lucinda’s early career, who had largely been missing from the national music scene since the ’70s. There they discover how artists’ paths diverge and contemplate what we’re all looking for when we seek out careers in music.

More here.

Episode 4: Early & Unexpected Musical Influences 

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Ismay uncovers a fascinating seldom heard recording of Lucinda from a radio show in 1981, leading them down a path to discover the musical influences in Lucinda’s early Life. Meeting with members of the Grammy Award-winning band Los Texmaniacs, Ismay goes out on a limb and seeks to recreate that radio session in the famed Cactus Cafe.

More here.

Episode 3: Meeting Charlie Sexton

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Ismay visits cornerstone music venue The Hole in the Wall in Austin to interview Charlie Sexton, the producer and songwriter who’s best known as a guitarist for Bob Dylan. They discuss Charlie and Lucinda’s first gig together in 1979 when he was just a kid. Charlie shares insights into Lucinda’s remarkable songwriting, as well as the emotional struggles musicians face with self-doubt.

More here.

Episode 2: Lucinda’s Father’s Archives

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Ismay arrives in Austin, Texas to dig through the Collections Deposit Library at the University of Texas in order to understand the life of Lucinda Williams’ father, Miller. A poet and teacher, Miller Williams overcame setbacks to become a prominent writer. Ismay discovers his personal writings, letters, and photographs, highlighting his mentorship and the artistic community that shaped Lucinda’s career.

More here.

Episode 1: Introducing Finding Lucinda

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As we join the story, Ismay has been living and working on their family ranch for almost a decade – and they’re looking for change. For several years the independent singer-songwriter has been playing in a Lucinda Williams tribute band and writing their own music.

An opportunity to record an album sparks a new and different idea: to instead embark on a road trip to uncover the early days of Lucinda’s music career and, hopefully, find a way forward creatively. However, they are plagued by self-doubt about whether pursuing music can still be worthwhile for them. But in spite of this uncertainty, Ismay dives into research to see where a journey across the country – and further into the life and music of Lucinda – could lead.

More here.

Trailer: Finding Lucinda

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BGS is proud to announce a new podcast partnership, unveiling a sneak peek of Finding Lucinda, our new 14-part limited podcast series created by Americana/folk singer-songwriter Ismay. Built upon Ismay’s work crafting the award-winning documentary film, Finding Lucinda – which is gearing up for its own release in the fall of 2025 – the new eponymous companion podcast is set to launch its first season on May 5. (Listen to the season 1 trailer below.)

The show offers an intimate and revealing look into young songwriter Avery Hellman carving their own creative path by looking towards the early life and legacy of three-time GRAMMY Award-winning singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams.

Produced in partnership with BGS and distributed through the BGS Podcast Network, Finding Lucinda expands on the themes of Ismay’s eponymous documentary film, exploring artistic influence, creative resilience, and the impact of Williams’ music. Told through the lens of Hellman’s personal experiences and journey through music, the 14-part series takes listeners into the making of an icon using archival materials, exclusive interviews, and fresh commentary from artists and collaborators who knew Lucinda – often long before the world did.

Find more information on Finding Lucinda here. The documentary, Finding Lucinda, is available for purchase, rental, or to stream via video on demand. Find out how to watch here.

Artwork by Avery Hellman.

Guitarist Cameron Knowler’s Poetic Portrait of Yuma, AZ and the Gorgeous, Bleak Southwest

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

It’s a warm, summery day in early April when I sit down with archivist, writer, and guitarist Cameron Knowler on the shores of Old Hickory Lake in Middle Tennessee. Both Knowler and myself happen to now live in Old Hickory, a small village in Davidson County that was formerly a DuPont company town and is nestled on the edges of the eponymous, manmade US Army Corps of Engineers lake on the Cumberland River.

The setting is a far cry – geographically, topographically, and ecologically – from Knowler’s hometown of Yuma, Arizona, a place that serves as the inspiration, background, and foreground of his stunning new solo guitar album, CRK (released April 4 by Worried Songs). Knowler’s upbringing in Yuma was traumatic and bleak, not exactly a storybook experience by any measure. Still, like many roots musicians and creatives, the landscapes and dioramas of the wild west California/Arizona border town have become the guitarist-composer’s primary muse.

CRK sounds like the desert. Like hot, searing parking lots. Like mesquite and cactuses and roadrunners and mesas and red rocks. Stark flatpicked and finger-plucked melodies give equal consideration and immortalization to sweeping natural landscapes and small, depressingly human settings, too. Unlike so many of his subjects and inspirations in and around Yuma, this collection of compositions never moves to pave over the intricacies, nuances, and subversions Knowler finds in revisiting his hometown in music and memories. Still, the album is as gorgeous and transportive as any of our favorite famous paintings of the Old West, or soundtracks to iconic western films, or depictions of ancient pueblos. Perhaps his subject is a strip mall or a vignette of the proverbial “suburban hell,” but in this context each feels like an entire universe unto itself, a dreamscape – a home.

CRK opens with a gorgeous prose poem set to music, a track titled “Christmas in Yuma.” Immediately, the record is thereby attached through terroir and tradition to other western artists like Steinbeck and McCarthy. The album’s package is ornamented with gorgeous photographs, polaroids, bits of imagery, printed art, and poetry, further evoking artists we associate with the Southwest like Dorothea Lange and Linda Hogan. But the stories herein are told almost exclusively by guitar – usually Knowler solo as centerpiece, but sometimes joined by ensembles including guitarists Jordan Tice (who co-produced the project) and Rich Hinman, as well as other instrumentalists like Rayna Gellert, Robert Bowlin, Jay Bellerose, and more. The guitar is an instrument so pervasive and ubiquitous we often forget how aptly it can showcase these kinds of narratives, and how at home the six-string always feels in the West.

But with CRK, listeners won’t ever forget those facts. This is a narrative album. Is it also a technical achievement, intricate and intriguing and complex? Absolutely. But making an impressive guitar album was clearly not Knowler’s goal. Telling stories, with his medium being the guitar and the traditions that encircle it, was his chief aim. To say the project is successful in this regard would be an embarrassingly trite understatement.

And so, while watching the springtime water birds and snacking on lunch – with Knowler’s neck, wrists, and fingers dripping in Native-smithed silver and turquoise – we two sat down on the banks of a long, twisting lake on the Cumberland River in Nashville to discuss the guitar, the desert, and the little town on the banks of the Colorado River called Yuma – that Cameron Knowler once, and still, calls home.

I wanted to start by talking about place. I’m obsessed with how music has been slowly but surely divorced from its relationship to place over time. Your album, what jumped out at me immediately was it has such a strong relationship to place. How do you take something physical, tangible, geographical – a place like Yuma or Old Hickory Lake – and translate that into your medium? How do you think about evoking landscape or evoking an image with music?

Cameron Knowler: That’s a great question. I have like 10 ways of responding to that. As you said, music is getting divorced from place and I think it’s something of a cliche at this point that we’re losing regionalism. In the sense that, even with bow strokes– fiddlers in Galax, Virginia are different than fiddlers in northern Virginia. Not consciously, necessarily, but just as a colloquialism. As a part of their place. I didn’t [have] an old man or an old woman playing a fiddle who taught me tunes, I never had any of that [regionalism]. Instead, the “white kid from the suburbs” phenomenon happened. When I moved to Texas, I got connected with a regional fiddler in Terlingua, Texas – kind of [where the movie], Paris, Texas started. I learned his repertoire, which was interesting in that he learned a lot from Brad Leftwich when they were young and living in Santa Barbara. That was the void that I was missing. Not even musically, just in my life. I lost my mom, I lost my dad, I didn’t have family, so to me that was a cue, like a clue.

Then it flips, because there is a robust fiddle tradition of the Tohono O’odham [Nation] right there on the Yuma, Arizona/California border. But that’s not my culture. I could have gone in and said, “I’m gonna learn this tune” – or melody or whatever. Then that [could be] my way into the landscape. Instead of coming at it from an internal perspective, it was an external perspective, basically like a western painter. Like an oil painter painting Tucson or Walpi.

To answer your question, it’s slippery, ’cause you can’t go on stage and say, “Okay, this instrumental song is about a grocery store that I grew up driving by.” [Laughs] I can’t say that. It does come from that place, but I don’t say that. For me, the visual aspects of the record, I weigh them as equally, I would say, as the sonics. I think that’s where I can insert song titles – all the song titles on the record are related to Yuma.

There’s this tradition of stark solo or nearly solo acoustic guitar as an iconic sound of “the Wild West.” One of the first things I thought about listening to CRK is the score and soundtrack for Brokeback Mountain, so much of it is just solo plucked, tender guitar. Then of course in other music that evokes the West, you have sweeping strings and countrypolitan country and western. Even in that context you’ll often hear nylon-string guitar out front, solo. There’s something about unadorned guitar that is connected to landscapes.

But what I’m hearing you say is it’s not about translating the grandeur of Western landscapes at all. It’s about the grocery store, or it’s about the building that burned down, or it’s about a stretch of miles and miles of highway.

Totally. Yes. There’s so much programmed into the sound. David Rawling says, “The sound of a minor chord is a cowboy dying,” which is such a great way of saying that.

I believe this is true of the development of the flat-top guitar in general. At a certain point in 1934 or 1933, when the dreadnoughts start to get developed, there’s something about that that conveniently carries forward the agenda of interrelated musics – like Hawaiian music and bluegrass music for two totally different agendas. Then that [sound and body style] becomes the golden standard. But there were so many other brands and makers and thinkers from different cultures making guitars that, in an alternate universe not far from our own at all, would’ve been the golden standard. I feel the same way about the tradition of the music itself, right? And a dreadnought itself can do an infinite number of things, but just the format itself excludes a lot. As a constant instrument to play solo.

Another thing that David Rawlings says about his small guitar is that the smallest things sound the biggest, when they are in their own diorama – describing what he does with Gillian [Welch]. That’s his goal, to convince listeners that the “baby dinosaur” [small guitar] can actually eat them. Working in miniature, making little boats in glass bottles, you open yourself up, it’s an entire universe. The littlest things sound the biggest. In that way, there’s opportunity in the format itself.

I think people like Norman Blake and John Steinbeck are both hyper-regionalists who synthesize very eclectic sources to create something that is uniquely their own, but also totally comes outta left field. ‘Cause yeah, you think about Norman and certain people would say he is a flatpicker. Some people would say he was a pot smoking hippie who played with John Hartford – and they’re both equally true! Tying together otherwise disparate histories is a compelling format and is rewarding to the solo practitioner, I think.

We should talk about Steinbeck. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago when we first met by chance. But you starting the album with “Christmas in Yuma,” immediately I was like, “Oh, I know where we are. I know what we’re doing.” We’re in the West, there’s poetry/prose poetry happening. That song feels like it’s part of a longstanding tradition. Immediately I was thinking about a couple of my favorite Steinbeck passages listening to that.

Starting with poetry, starting with spoken word over that beautiful sound bed that you’ve created for it, what does that accomplish for you as an opening to a record?

Two things come to mind. Kenneth Patchen, who made these poetry records for the Folkways label in the ‘50s backed by a jazz band and it was almost comical, but he took it so seriously and it’s so convincing when you just forget what the format actually is. The great Texas – I don’t even wanna say outsider artist, but in terms of how he’s viewed – outsider artist Terry Allen, with some of his concept records like Lubbock (On Everything) with the pedal steel. You can do anything at that point. That’s why I started [CRK] out that way.

Also, quite frankly, Ice Cube’s records – I’m thinking of N.W.A. – start out with these sound collages of him getting arrested or walking down a cell block, or the imagined character is. To me, he could do anything after that point. He could make the amazing record that it became, or he could have done some something entirely different. I just think it’s an earnest way of saying, “I’m not trying to do what you [already] know.” We all know that everyone is infinitely complex, but in terms of what they release, it’s fine to not be infinitely complex?

For me, it’s not a flatpicking record. It’s not a fingerpicking record. I’m really not trying to make it a guitar record, so to speak. I wanted to make it a narrative record. [“Christmas in Yuma”] was just an earnest way of saying, “I’m not what you think I might be.”

It’s also a tradition in these roots and folk music spaces to play with expectation. People generally know what a solo guitar record is gonna sound like and what it’s gonna be and what it’s gonna do. I’m imagining a program director at a radio station putting on the record and doing the 30-second listen through – and the first song is poetry?!

I think maybe that’s what you’re talking about? Whatever conscious or subconscious projection you might have about what this album is in your hand, or what this is about to be as you put it on, you want to play with that projection. You’re saying, “I’m gonna tell you what this is.”

That is a beautiful point because, not to go too far back [in my history], but I was “unschooled” and I didn’t have a high school diploma or a GED. [Through all the hardships I’ve faced], I’ve learned this notion of leveraging. I surveyed how I was going to be able to reach people, and it gets more representative of myself as [time] goes. But it’s always been under the guise of leveraging unexpected muscle groups towards something else. That’s just built into this like fight or flight thing. I just have nothing to lose.

Your point about the radio DJ – or whoever that’s listening to the poetry – I think that’s a unique opportunity. At that point, they’re suspending judgment. If I wanna listen to a guitar record, I’m gonna listen to Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar. It’s perfect. It does exactly what it needs to do.

People should continue to try to make records like that. To me, it’s not a push against that at all. It’s starting out on a different foot. You may end up in a place that, by design, is very different than you would if you just tried to hit it on the nose. You can still hit it on the nose. Then you might even have a chance to open it up to somebody. Sometimes people just don’t know who Norman Blake is. But then, there’s a tune like “Yuma Ferry.” Who plays like that? Norman plays like that. If I were to make a whole record of “Yuma Ferry”-style tunes, I think everybody listening would know that it was a Norman Blake type of thing.

Let’s talk about “Christmas in Yuma” a little more in detail, because I’m curious about how you created it. Was it the poem that made the music happen, or the music demanded to have a poem set to it? What was the creative process like for the track?

I woke up from a nap on December 21, 2021, and I just went to Google Docs and typed it out. It just came out like that. The recording process, I had my friends Harry and Dylan sit down with me in our friend Marshall’s studio and we just recorded improvisations with the loose framework. [It’s read by my friend] Jack Kilmer, who similarly grew up in the Southwest. His father, like my mother, was also Christian Scientist. Those are all the things that were vibrating around. I was like, “He has to do it.” He’s an amazing voice actor, amazing actor, and just a great musician. Very musical and a beautiful artist. I had him do it first.

Then we went to the studio and we just said, “This is how long the track is. We’re not gonna play to the track. We’re just gonna play.” There was one take that was like the perfect length of time and I just put it under there. All those sonic features that interact with the vocal are totally incidental.

The music of CRK is so evocative and so visual and is so good at text painting, but I wanted to talk about your work in other media and about how you curated the package for the album, too. You’re so multifaceted in what media you’re working in – archives, photography, visual art, written word, music, melody. How do you see all those forms converging and diverging with this project specifically? Because I see your eye for detail at every level. You can just tell from the package that the whole thing is art to you, not just the songs.

Photography, it is always fiction. That, to me, is the beauty of it. If there’s a picture of someone jumping, you don’t really know where they jumped from. Or if they smile, they are actually crying? Maybe this person crying is not the good guy. Maybe they’re the bad guy.

You can start to track things like that, as the smile gets “invented” throughout photography. But it’s this line of fiction that, if you spend enough time with it, you can infer things right or wrong in there. They can all take you to a different place. Movies are that way, but you lose a little bit with the moving image. ‘Cause then you see the speed at which they’re moving, even if the frame rate isn’t representative of reality.

But then, say you’re playing jazz standards and you’re playing things with semantic content that came from a show, a Broadway show in the ‘40s. You’re shackled by the semantic content of that. I think it’s a convenient metaphor, in my opinion, to see photography and instrumental music as this thing, where – back to working in miniature – smaller things give you more room to insert yourself into it. I shouldn’t say more room, but there’s more fiction to play with, I would argue.

There’s less to compete with.

Right? In terms of things being programmed to you. In movies, you have the aesthetics, you have the costumes, you have the music, you have all this stuff. With photo books, the way that they’re sequenced by gestures is such a fitting way of dealing with sequencing things that aren’t visual. There’s a lot of inspiration from the photo book as a tradition, in terms of sequencing. And how with photojournalism, we don’t really have an American, coalesced identity of the West without the photography of the Dust Bowl. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at FSA photographs and there’s some great Dorothea Lange photographs in Yuma from May of 1935 which can be seen via the Library of Congress. I actually licensed one of them that was not within the purview of her [federal] work from the Oakland Museum and that’s in the song folio for CRK.

Obviously, Norman Blake is a really important musician to you and Dave Rawlings is as well. You’re talking about wanting to make music, wanting to make a record that isn’t just another acoustic guitar, flatpicking, flat-top record. Norman and Dave are great examples of guitarists who make albums that aren’t just the same old same old, and aren’t just products, they’re art. Both showcase that simple solo guitar, that miniature world we’re talking about, can be so expansive and huge and lush. But who are the others? Who are the folks that modeled for you that having your own voice and perspective on your instrument was more important than just doing it to do it. Or to be “best” or to sell yourself as a product for consumption?

For banjo, I think John Hartford. I love the idea that Blake Mills said, he called guitar an instrument for assholes. [Laughs] What I love about that is, no matter how you look at a guitar, the guitar is always a toy. [Andrés] Segovia tried to institute a formal repertoire. The bluegrass people tried to, the rock people [tried to]. Is Jimi Hendrix the definitive repertoire for the guitar? AC/DC? But, it’s still a toy. It’s still marketed as a toy.

I don’t need a million people to listen to my music to make a living or to keep doing it. It’s all within the art/archives, how to make these raw ingredients that are embedded into everyone into something that’s not commercial, but digestible.

In terms of other people [who inspired me]. John Fahey. Leo Kottke, but I didn’t fingerpick up until about three and a half years ago. About 80% of the record is finger picking. To your point about the poem earlier, there’s more outside of the solo, acoustic guitar canon of stuff, too. People like Rambling Jack Elliot and Sam Shepard, yeah.

One final point, I would play these solo concerts in Texas of just flatpicking melodies, like four flatpicking melodies in four different keys. And I was just like beating my head up against a wall, trying to tell some sort of cinematic, fiddle tune-driven [story over an entire set of just flatpicking]. I wanted there to be an arc. Through stubbornness, I decided I was going to learn how to fingerpick convincingly, where I had control of each voice. It’s really hard. It was a pain in my ass to figure that shit out.

But yeah, I see them all as tools: the poetry, the flatpicking, the fingerpicking, the drumming. It could be seen as pushing back against commercialism or whatever, but in some ways it’s actually the opposite. I was like, “I want more. I want a diverse audience. I want as many people to listen to this as possible.” Not sheer numbers, but in terms of who they are and what their listening diets are. Not just everybody in the audience being someone who will already know each of those fiddle tunes.

Photo Credit: Steve Perlin

Artist of the Month: Rose Cousins

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Rose Cousins is nothing if not intentional. With her new album Conditions of Love – Vol 1 (out March 14), Cousins demonstrates a controlled discipline as she considers the most unruly of our emotions. The JUNO award-winning artist is a student of love, from the sweet certainty of “One Love” from her 2016 album If You Were For Me to the entirety of her 2017 masterpiece Natural Conclusion to “The Agreement,” a consideration of the liberties and drawbacks of a long-distance open relationship from her most recent prior full-length project, Bravado.

Over the years, Cousins has honed her approach to her craft as carefully as her music, even taking a five-year break between albums to recover from burn out and focus on songwriting over performance. That commitment to her art is just one small part of what has earned Cousins the recognition of being named BGS’ Artist of the Month.

Conditions kicks off with “To Be Born,” an instrumental channeling of the rural Prince Edward Island where Cousins grew up. Buzzing wonderment introduces us to a song cycle of love in all its forms: romantic, platonic, a sense of one-ness with the universe – and what causes them to grow and die. At the beginning of it all, Cousins tells us, is that sense of wondrous possibility.

“I Believe in Love (and it’s very hard)” harbors a desire that Cousins hinted in a 2012 interview with No Depression – a fascination with songs that are upbeat and poppy, but communicate something serious. The song is a catchy thesis statement for this album: that as much we depend on our bonds with others to survive, we crave our individual freedoms and yearn for balance.

I know in love it’s hard to be
Everything that someone else could ever need
While holding onto “wild and free”

Wild and free
Wild and free
Wild and free
Wild and free

But there are certain types of love that require obligation. “Needed You” weaves bitterness and compassion together with the opening salvo,

Yeah I turned out fine
It’s what we do
I spent my time looking for clues
So I became a wishing well
And I don’t need water
Is what I tell myself

In this moving piano ballad, Cousins considers both the person she’s become and the inner child who needed nurturing. While the song seeks to find reconciliation between that vulnerable inner core and the people in our past who make us lock that core away, the song also invites us to empathize with the legacies of intergenerational trauma that can lead to a family’s failure to meet a child’s emotional needs. It’s an astonishing track, one that efficiently wraps years of therapy into four minutes.

“Denouement” is even more precise – an airy collection of word associations that invite us to fill in the blanks in the arc of a relationship.

Happenstance
Vast expanse
Circumstance
Second glance
Take a chance
New romance
Take my hand
Can I have this dance

Cousins’ abstraction is delightful, a wry acknowledgment of how cliche love can be, even as we revel in its glorious highs (and pray that the lows stay away as long as possible – forever, ideally.) But the cycle eventually starts again – after all, we’re only human – and the dance can feel as familiar as it does wondrous.

That feeling extends to another shade of love: gratitude. “Borrowed Light” asks us to reflect on the ways we connect with everything around us, and to appreciate the all-too-brief length of time we have to experience it.

I am borrowing light
From the moon, who is borrowing light
From the sun who comes back every time
Every time

“Borrowed Light” is anchored by a questing piano line, an instrument that Cousins feels is her first love. As the instrument – a 1967 Baldwin grand that Cousins and long-time collaborator/producer Joshua Van Tassel fell in love with immediately – traverses the cosmos, Cousins is buttressed by a backing chorus momentarily, sublimely, at the song’s apex.

Conditions of Love – Vol 1 doesn’t offer many answers and, of course, the title hints at further dives into the topic. However, Cousins does offer one example of how to live, a waltz dedicated to her late friend and colleague, Koady Chaisson, “K’s Waltz.”

Your heart
It did not give out or give in
It gave everything
It gave everything
It gave everything
It gave everything

As hard as it is, Cousins begs us to be as open as possible, to feel all of it – love and joy, yes, but also grief at partings that are inevitable, no matter what. It’s only when we push through our defenses to embrace radical openness, when we “give everything,” that we can say we have lived well.

We are so very excited to name Rose Cousins our March 2025 Artist of the Month. Dive into our exclusive interview with Rose all about the new album here, listen to Rose in conversation with her longtime friend Edie Carey on Basic Folk here, explore our Essential Rose Cousins Playlist below, and follow along on social media all month long as we go back into the BGS archives for anything and everything Rose Cousins.

Photo Credit: Lindsay Duncan

13 Roots Music Book Recommendations From 2024

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

2024 served up a treasure trove of great music books – too many to encapsulate in a concise way. However, it’s still worth a try! So, here is a look at some notable books (in no particular order) that should hold an appeal to the BGS community. This baker’s dozen hopefully provides a diverse and interesting sampling of what has been published over the past year.

There are biographies of superstars like Joni Mitchell and Dolly Parton alongside important if underappreciated figures, such as guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and the Blind Boys of Alabama. Look into the lives of bluegrass icons Tony Rice and John Hartford led by those that knew them while Joan Baez, Lucinda Williams, and Alice Randall each released memoirs that told their life stories in fascinating ways.

There are books here, too, that examine sub-genres like the world of busking and the outlaw country movement, as well as scenes from the musical history of Greenwich Village and the story of a little-known but significant music project that was part of FDR’s New Deal.

There’s a little something for everyone, whether for your holiday shopping list, your winter break stack of books “to be read,” to use up those bookstore gift cards, or for your 2025 resolution to sit down and read more.

Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers (Dey Street Books/HarperCollins)

2024 was a big year for Joni Mitchell, with her captivating appearance at the GRAMMY Awards representing another major milestone on her amazing recuperation from her 2015 brain aneurysm. NPR music critic (and occasional BGS contributor) Ann Powers extensively examines the many sides of Joni Mitchell in this stimulating and provocative book. Powers makes it clear from the get-go that she isn’t a biographer and compares her work here to being like a mapmaker. It makes total sense then that Powers entitled the book Traveling. The word not only references Mitchell’s tune “All I Want,” but it also reflects the numerous paths that Mitchell has traveled down during her long, storied career – a journey Powers incisively and insightfully explores over the course of some 400-some pages.

Dolly Parton’s White Limozeen by Steacy Easton (Bloomsbury)

Steacy Easton followed up their Tammy Wynette biography, Why Tammy Matters, by tackling an even larger female country music icon: Dolly Parton. Part of the acclaimed 33 1/3 book series, this compact tome focuses on Parton’s popular 1989 album White Limozeen. Easton views it as a pivotal work for Parton as it represented a triumphant rebound from her roundly disappointing 1987 release, Rainbow. Besides delving into how the Ricky Skaggs-produced White Limozeen found Dolly returning more to her country roots from the more pop-oriented Rainbow, Easton also uses her album as something like a prism to look at Dolly’s wildly successful career and her iconic persona.

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams (Crown)

Fans of Lucinda Williams’ songs may think they know her through her lyrics, which are often drawn from Lu’s own experiences. Williams’ memoir, however, reveals more about her extraordinary life than even her deeply felt lyrics have expressed. The book is especially strong in covering her quite turbulent childhood involving her father Miller Williams (a poet/professor long in search of tenure) and her mother, Lucille, who suffered from manic depression. Fittingly, Williams prefaces her book by listing the many places where she lived (a dozen before she was 18) which reflects her rootless childhood and set her up for a home in the Americana music pantheon. While the title suggests a racy tell-all, the book feels more like having the great pleasure of listening to Lucinda intimately tell stories from her life – what more could you ask for?

Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis by Douglas K. Miller (Liveright)

Jesse Ed Davis is a name that probably is not familiar to most music fans. Lovers of ’70s rock might recognize his name as a guitarist who worked with the likes of Taj Mahal, Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, and George Harrison (Davis performed at the fabled Concert For Bangladesh). Those who know him from those gigs, however, might not even know that Davis was a rare Native American in the rock ‘n’ roll world. He only really made his Indigenous heritage prominent when he teamed with Native American poet/activist John Trudell during the ’80s in the Graffiti Band. Sadly, Davis’ career was derailed due to alcohol and drug abuse, which also led to his death in 1988 at the age of 48. In this vividly told biography, Douglas K. Miller, a professor of Native American History at Oklahoma State University, turns a spotlight on this ground-breaking and underappreciated musician.

Down On The Corner: Adventures in Busking & Street Music by Cary Baker (Jawbone Press)

For his debut book, longtime publicist and journalist Cary Baker turned to a lifelong music interest of his: street musicians. Early on in this book, he relates the transformative moment when, as a teenager, he was taken by his father to Chicago’s famous Maxwell Street where he saw bluesman Blind Arvella Gray perform on the street. This experience not only led to his first journalism work, but it also launched a love for street music. His enlightening book, which is broadly divided geographically, profiles buskers from across America and Europe. Down On The Corner is populated with colorful characters like Bongo Joe, Tubby Skinny, and Wild Man Fischer along with well-known musicians, such as the Old Crow Medicine Show, Rambling Jack Elliott, Billy Bragg, Fantastic Negrito, and Peter Case, who share tales about playing on the streets.

My Memories of John Hartford by Bob Carlin (University Press of Mississippi)

My own memories of John Hartford are of him playing on Glen Campbell’s TV show. He seemed so cool and laidback – and he could play banjo with lightning-fast virtuosity. Happily, Bob Carlin has more interesting memories about the legendary musician, and he comes to this book from a pretty unique perspective. Carlin first met Hartford when he interviewed him in the mid-1980s for the radio program Fresh Air. Carlin (himself an award-winning banjoist) later performed with Hartford and even became his de facto road manager. In his book, he deftly balances his background as a journalist and position as a longtime friend in telling the story of Hartford, who was a true crossover star bluegrass musician of his time.

Discovering Tony Rice by Bill Amatneek (Vineyards Press)

Like Bob Carlin with John Hartford, Bill Amatneek has a privileged perspective when it comes to writing about his subject, the late, great Tony Rice. Amatneek, a musician as well as writer, spent several years playing with Rice in the David Grisman Quintet. Rice was one of the best-ever flatpicking guitarists (and a terrific vocalist) whose career was undercut by illnesses and his own personal demons. Amatneek constructed his book as an oral biography, built around stories told to him by fellow musicians who knew Tony, like Sam Bush, Béla Fleck, Peter Rowan, and Jerry Douglas along with Rice family members, allowing readers to discover the bright and dark sides of this bluegrass master.

Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital by David Browne (Hachette Books)

As its title plainly states, Talkin’ Greenwich Village discusses the renowned area of New York City that has been a center for bohemian arts culture for decades. The book can be described as a “biography” of both the people (Dave Van Ronk plays a prominent role throughout this story) and the places (particularly the clubs, such as the Bottom Line, Kenny’s Castaways, Gerde’s Folk City, and the Bitter End) that populated the Village’s music scene from 1957-2004. (Browne here basically concentrates on the West Village.) The author of books on the Grateful Dead, CSN&Y, and Sonic Youth, Browne does a masterful job at bringing this neighborhood to life during its many eras. The Village holds a special place in Browne’s heart; he discovered the neighborhood as an undergrad at NYU just as the new folk scene of the early ’80s was brewing. His passion shines through in his storytelling.

My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music’s Black Past, Present, and Future By Alice Randall (Simon & Schuster)

You may have already heard about Alice Randall and her book right here, on BGS and Good Country. My Black Country has received great acclaim (NPR listed the book among its “Books We Love” for 2024) and justifiably so. An author, professor, and songwriter, Randall tapped all her talents in creating this inspiring work that addresses her life story and investigates the history of Black country music, which she traces back nearly a hundred years to when DeFord Bailey performed on Nashville’s WSM radio station. It should be noted, too, that this isn’t just a Nashville-centered book; it explores Black country music made all across America. Besides enjoying Randall’s literary creation, you can also enjoy her songwriting craft too; Oh Boy Records released an eponymous compilation of Randall-penned tunes interpreted by such artists as Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Valerie June, and Leyla McCalla. (Of which, Giddens’ performance of “The Ballad of Sally Anne” is nominated for a GRAMMY for Best American Roots Performance.)

Spirit of the Century: Our Own Story by The Blind Boys of Alabama & Preston Lauterbach (Hachette Books)

The Blind Boys of Alabama are a remarkable story. Remarkable in the sense that the vocal group came into existence around 1940 at the Alabama Institute for the Negro Deaf and Blind and made their way out into the world through the gospel music circuit. And it is remarkable, too, that the Blind Boys of Alabama not only remain a group today (they describe themselves as the “longest running group in American music”), but they have earned five GRAMMYs (and a Lifetime Achievement Award) as well as an NEA National Heritage Fellowship. Preston Lauterbach (author of books like Beale Street Dynasty and The Chitlin’ Circuit) has done an eloquent job weaving together stories from band members and other musical colleagues, and turning them into this absorbing biography.

Willie, Waylon and the Boys: the Ultimate Outlaw Country Primer by Brian Fairbanks (Hachette Books)

This book is something of a biographical combo platter. The first nine chapters concentrate on the “Mount Rushmore” of outlaw country: Willie, Waylon, Johnny, and Kris. Those 240 pages are packed with colorful tales of the foursome, whether on their own or together as the Highwaymen. At that point, the book pivots and explores outlaw country’s legacy in the form of the alternative country scene that was burgeoning during the ’90s, as the Highwaymen were ending their run (their third, final, and least successful album came out in 1995). Fans of alt-country and “new outlaw” artists might wish for a deeper dive into this scene. The chapter on “The New Highwaymen” (built upon the idea of guys like Chris Stapleton, Jason Isbell, Ryan Bingham, and Sturgill Simpson as a new outlaw quartet) feels a bit too speculative. Fairbanks, however, is on stronger footing with his “Highwaywomen” chapter, which looks at the actual supergroup collaboration of the Highwomen, featuring Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires that, among other things, countered the male dominance of the original outlaw movement.

A Chance to Harmonize: How FDR’s Hidden Music Unit Sought to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time By Sheryl Kaskowitz (Pegasus)

This is a book for history buffs who love music – and vice versa. Author Sheryl Kaskowitz (who previously wrote a book on the history of the song “God Bless America”) has dug up the story on a little-known music unit that was part of the New Deal. This U.S. government program led by Charles Seeger (yes, the father of Pete) sent out musician/agents (noted American ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson was one prime participant) to gather up folk songs around the country. The goal was to use these songs to build community spirit at homestead communities launched by federal government under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration. The projects were considered radical and controversial back then and, consequently, were very short-lived. Fortunately, however, more than 800 songs were recorded and have been stored away in the Library of Congress.

When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance by Joan Baez (David R. Godine)

Joan Baez spent over 60 years making music and touring. While she has basically retired from music, Baez hasn’t put an end to expressing her creativity. In 2023, she released a book of drawings and in 2024, she published this book of poetry. There are at least a couple of notable aspects to this poetry project. Baez has long been known more for being an interpreter of songs rather than a songwriter, so it is intriguing to see more of her writer side expressed in this collection. Also, she has struggled with dissociative identity disorder (AKA multiple personality disorder, a topic addressed in the powerful documentary Joan Baez: I Am A Noise). Baez candidly states in the Author’s Notes that some of the poems are “are heavily influenced by, or in effect written by, some of the inner authors,” adding intriguing layers to her creative process – which she displays through the pieces collected in this book.