WATCH: The Harmed Brothers, “All the Same”

Artist: The Harmed Brothers
Hometown: Ludlow, Kentucky via Portland, Oregon
Song: “All the Same”
Album: Across the Waves
Release Date: June 5, 2020
Label: Fluff and Gravy Records

In Their Words: : “‘All the Same’ is a traveling song. It’s about life from inside the tour van. It’s about chasing a dream, even when you lose sight of it from being strung out on the road and missing home. It’s about our daily lives as an American touring band. Something I’m sure a lot of musicians can relate to.” — Ray Vietti, The Harmed Brothers

“The Ludlow-Bromley Swim Club in Ludlow, Kentucky is a cherished and beloved summer hangout spot, a classic American neighborhood pool — and our good friend and neighbor Matt ‘Catfish’ Williams presented us with the idea of shooting a video there. With his help, along with the pool owner and our fantastic community, we got to do something really fun and special. When initially presented with this opportunity, we felt ‘All the Same’ has this undeniably beachy, summertime vibe that perfectly fit that idea.” — Alex Salcido, The Harmed Brothers


Photo credit: Michael Wilson

LISTEN: Mary Flower, “Crooked Rag”

Artist: Mary Flower
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Crooked Rag”
Album: Livin’ with the Blues Again
Release Date: August 17, 2019
Label: Little Village Foundation

In Their Words: “Most of my instrumentals start with finding a groove that piques my interest. ‘Crooked Rag’ was developed around a 12 bar form in G, but with a ragtime feel. It is basically variations in the key of G. While writing, I kept after it, working my way up the neck until I ran out of musical ideas! As is the case for many of my tunes, I don’t sit down to write something. I fool around with new ideas much like a puzzle that needs solving. I work on it until I feel it’s complete and decide if it’s worth saving!” — Mary Flower

LISTEN: Erisy Watt, “Treasure Maps”

Artist: Erisy Watt
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Treasure Maps”
Album: Paints in the Sky
Release Date: July 26, 2019

In Their Words: “I wrote this song when I was attending school in Santa Barbara, California. Moving there when I was 18 after growing up in Nashville, Tennessee felt like a dream and a lot of my earlier songs were inspired by that change. I’ve since happily put down new roots in Portland, Oregon, but every time I sing this song, a golden-state nostalgia settles in and carries me back to those seemingly simpler times. While this song may be lighthearted, it archives an important coming-of-age chapter of my life and serves to remind me to hang on to my youth and curiosity and not take things too seriously.

“I love the way this song comes to life with a full band. I feel very fortunate to have such great players on it — Anna Tivel on violin, Jeremy Ferrara on guitar, Hanna Haas singing harmonies, Matt Fabi on bass, and Michael Mitchell on drums. ‘Treasure Maps’ is the second track on my debut full-length album, Paints in the Sky. I’m really looking forward to the full album release show at the Old Church Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday, July 25, where I’ll be accompanied by seven other musicians to bring these songs to life. I’ll be taking off on tour for much of August and September around the western US and then to Europe later in the fall. Many of those shows will be with a full band as well. You can find more details at my website.” — Erisy Watt


Photo credit: Bradley Cox

LISTEN: Philippe Bronchtein, “Oregon Air”

Artist: Philippe Bronchtein
Hometown: Portland, Oregon / Montclair, New Jersey (now based in Nashville, Tennessee)
Song: “Oregon Air”
Album: Oregon Air EP
Release Date: July 23, 2019

In Their Words: “I remember finishing the song ‘Oregon Air’ at my friend Martin’s kitchen table in Seattle. The song had sat half-finished for a few years as a patchwork of imagery about my hometown in New Jersey. Over the course of the afternoon it morphed into an introspective saga about what home means, contrasting landmarks of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, with the childhood familiarity of New Jersey. The song asks more questions than it answers, but the immediacy of time and place within the track hopefully leaves the listener with a silhouette of what home means to them.” — Philippe Bronchtein


Photo Credit: Laura Partain

LISTEN: Liz Vice, “It Was Good”

Artist: Liz Vice
Hometown: Portland, Oregon (currently Brooklyn, New York)
Song: “It Was Good”
Release Date: Single — May 31, 2019

In Their Words: “We are more alike than different. I like to erase the line between the stage and the audience by bringing some people on stage (when possible). When I perform ‘It Was Good,’ I always break the ice by saying this is my ‘Make America Great Again’ song. The crowd reaction is about 50/50 haha. My hope is to transport the audience back to a time, that I believe describes the creation of the world and humans in a poetic way; a short time of innocence before humans decided to play god and draw the line between good and evil/’us vs. them.’ If I only have 5 minutes to remind a group of people that they are made from love to love freely, then I hope ‘It Was Good’ does the job and in the process, through their faces, I, too, am reminded to love.” — Liz Vice


Photo credit: Chimera Rene

WATCH: Anna Tivel, “Minneapolis”

Artist: Anna Tivel
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Minneapolis”
Album: The Question
Release Date: April 19, 2019
Label: Fluff & Gravy Records

In Their Words: “This is a song about that stuck feeling, that stagnant winter sadness that can take over everything until you have to physically move yourself to shake it loose. I started writing it after a long tour in the Midwest. I was thinking about how that feeling can seep into a relationship until it seems like the only sane thing to do is pack up and start over somewhere else.” — Anna Tivel


Photo credit: Matthew Kennelly

LISTEN: The Get Ahead, “Faint Outline”

Artist: The Get Ahead
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Faint Outline”
Album: Deepest Light
Release Date: April 26, 2019
Label: Jullian Records

In Their Words: “‘Faint Outline’ is straight from what I think of as some of my most vivid sensory childhood memories. Approaching the Rocky Mountains across Western Kansas in an old panel van, alley light coming through the bedroom window playing shadows on the ceiling above the top bunk. We think we have our memories, distinct and concrete, but how malleable and practiced do they become? The Echoplex guitar was inspired by the Hannah Montana Karaoke machine I was playing my Tele through while writing the song.” — Nathan Earle, The Get Ahead


Photo Credit: Courtesy of Hearth PR

LISTEN: Ky Burt, “Small Town Dream”

Artist: Ky Burt
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Small Town Dream”
Album: The Sky in Between
Release Date: April 5, 2019
Label: Woodstove Records

In Their Words: “I wrote ‘Small Town Dream’ in honor of the small towns I’ve lived in and traveled through across America. This song is my observation of the oldest towns that are still barely hanging on, where the roots run deep but the pockets lay thin. It is a testament of the enduring spirit and struggles of a country that is modernizing quicker than its antiquated towns can keep up with. And for myself and others, the enduring small town represents a slower way of life, a struggle to preserve community, and a place where old stories still live on the front porch steps.” — Ky Burt


Photo credit: Chelsea Donoho

Shook Twins Pay Tribute to Honorable Men on ‘Some Good Lives’

Shook Twins — the duo composed of sisters Laurie and Katelyn Shook — have abided by the label “quirky” ever since they released their first album, You Can Have the Rest, in 2008. Their process of integrating unexpected sounds, looping, and multiple instruments (including a golden egg typically used for percussive flares) may seem unconventional, but those touches serve as thoughtful embellishments to elevate their honeyed voices.

On their new album, Some Good Lives, the Portland, Oregon-based musicians put those voices to use in praise of good men. At a time when women’s narratives have increasingly come to the fore, Shook Twins instead focus on the positive influence certain men have had on their lives. The choice suggests there’s room to strike a balance, rather than cast one gender aside to uplift another.

Following in the footsteps of their archivist grandmother, Some Good Lives is an amalgamation five years in the making — a blend of original songs and “found sound,” of a sort. Katelyn spoke to the Bluegrass Situation about the band’s new project.

BGS: Your grandfather played piano — you even include a clip of it on the album. So it seems like you have music in your blood.

Katelyn Shook: Yeah, that was our first musical experience. We’d go over to their house and lie under his grand piano. He was totally untrained, just [flying by] the seat of his pants. That’s why I had to put those snippets on there, because it’s so Grandpa. We started singing really young and fell in love with it. We chose to be in choir but we didn’t pick up instruments until we were 17.

“Grandpa Piano” and “Moonlight Sonata” aren’t really “found sound” pieces, but they provide an interesting texture to the tracks that you wrote. What was the thinking behind including those?

I wanted to sprinkle those in because it goes with the theme of Some Good Lives. I realized that a lot of the songs were about somebody or dedicated to somebody, and all of them happened to be men, which blew my mind. I was resistant to it at first, like, “Now is not the age of man!” I just wanted to honor women. But then I had to realize and keep in check that there’s a balance, and we need to remember and honor the good men in everybody’s lives.

We’d grown up with such good men, and that’s what made my life so balanced. Most of them have passed away, except for two, so I sprinkled in “Grandpa Piano” because there was not really a song dedicated to my grandpa, but he was such a big musical influence on us.

Considering that so many people want to make room for new stories, how have you made the case that now is a time to also share stories about men, even if they’re positive?

I don’t know. I don’t know that I’ve made that case. We’ve always lived by example, and talking with all the women around me, I honestly feel like Laurie and I are very rare in our generation to have such positive male impacts in our lives. It’s funny when a theme pops up. It’s not like we went into this record like, “We want to honor the good men.” It just came out.

On “Dog Beach,” which was originally written by your grandfather Ted, you added your harmonies to an old recording. How did you retain that original, almost old-timey sound quality?

That song is a trip! It’s a long story, but I’ll try to keep it short. My grandma was an archivist, and she had this tape recorder always going. Anytime we had a campfire with our family, we made [Ted] play that song, and he was always resistant to it because he never thought it was a great song. But it was the only one he ever wrote. Ted passed away in 2015 from this massive, traumatic heart attack out of the blue. It was terrifying, horrible. After he passed away, my dad was listening through those tapes, and we heard “Dog Beach” on there. We didn’t even know it’d been recorded — Laurie and I were 5 at the time.

I heard that, and I got the idea to sing this with him one last time. We were in Portland, and we had a whole bunch of friends over— including his ex-wife and his daughter, who’s our best friend — and I had the tape with me and a shitty tape player. I put it in to play it, and we’d sing along and record it. I hit play and it ate the tape. I was like, “No!” But I knew it wasn’t the only copy — we had another one at home — so I called my boyfriend, woke him up (because he was staying with my parents), and I made him go inside with my dad and look for this extra tape. They found the other tape, they found a tape player, put it in there, and it ate the tape.

It sounds like at this point Ted didn’t want you to share it.

Exactly, but I knew he was just fucking with us because he was always resistant to playing it at campfires. So they took the tape out and they put it together — it didn’t break, it just unwound. Then my boyfriend went to sit in the car, which was the only other tape player we had at the house. If you go back and listen to his recording, you can hear his puffy coat rustling. He’s in the car just voice memoing it on his iPhone, and then he emails me the voice memo, and we play the voice memo in the living room. This all took an hour. It’s emailed through time and space. I don’t know, it’s the way it worked out. It was such a crazy night.

What was the recording process like? I know it took a few years to get to that place after your last album, but it seems like it was worth that wait.

This process was a lot different. We normally block 20 days, and we go to the studio and knock it all out. But this time we took our sweet-ass time. We did it in several chunks. We’d been playing these songs live, and we might choose not to do that with our next album, but I really like to because it lets the song marinate. We recorded three songs first and then we’d listen back to them, and since we’d been playing them live, we added more stuff to it. It was a cool way to do it but it took forever.

I think “Vessels” might be one of my favorites on the new album, both for the message and for the vocals.

That one is really special to us, too. It’s dedicated to one of the men who’s still alive, but he has a brain tumor. We wrote it right after we found out he had it.

Is he around your age?

He’s four years older, but he’s super healthy and super young. It’s super nuts. When we wrote it, we were still in that phase where he could die at any moment. It’s a really gnarly brain tumor. Nobody survives this. It’s a total miracle that he’s come this far — it’s been like five years now. But we were in this state of shock and terror, we had our moments of coming to grips with it. That song was us accepting that we’re just vessels, and we have to say goodbye sometimes, and we have to be thankful that we got you at all. It’s narrow, singing to him, but it’s a broad statement to everybody about accepting your death, your friend’s death, and finding a way to be ok with it.

Vocally, we really like what Laurie did. That’s another song that Gregory Alan Isakov helped out on. She took four songs to him. She repeats lines, talking; I really like that effect because it made it this ghostly statement. Isakov helped make it sound more vibey; we call it adding “God noise,” where he adds all this weird ass-shit, and he tweaks it in Pro Tools, but the stuff he comes up with, he’s a total genius. His essence, his God noise, made that song extra special for sure.

Familial harmonies have their own kind of magic, but as twins you have similar vocal cords, which seems like it could pose a challenge at times. What kind of thought process have you put into your arrangements?

We use that vocal identicalness to our advantage. We’ve started to experiment with more unison singing. It’s trippy because people try to achieve that in the studio, where they double themselves, and you can’t really tell there’s two tracks, but there’s an essence. That’s what it sounds like. Harmony-wise, it’s mostly Laurie; it just comes out of her. When we analyze it, sometimes we’ll totally overlap and all of a sudden one voice will naturally go lower and one will go higher. We don’t do the typical harmony. We intertwine. It’s very trippy.

As twins, how have you managed to forge a sense of individuality in the duo?

It sounds weird, but it’s never been an issue to express ourselves individually. We’ve always been Shook Twins. We actually strive to be more of a duo. Sometimes we play solo and it doesn’t feel right; we don’t enjoy it as much. I think we’re definitely strongest together. We’ve never had a competition issue. We always say, “We’re the twin-iest twins we know.” Most times we meet other twins and they all have their own lives. It’s kind of weird to us. We’ve always had the exact mindset about everything. It’s crazy.

LISTEN: Clara Baker, “Moving On”

Artist: Clara Baker
Hometown: Portland, Oregon
Song: “Moving On”
Album: Things to Burn
Release Date: March 8, 2019

In Their Words: “This song is bittersweet reflection on how hard but important it is to notice that it’s time to move on. It could be about love, but this is a song I wrote on my second retreat at the Shotpouch Cabin in the Burnt Woods. I had been living in Corvallis for 4 years and loved living there so much, but I was at a crossroads in my career and I realized that I needed to be in a bigger city in order to seriously pursue my career goals. When we recorded this song, at the very end, I looked up from the microphone and over at Zach Hickman (on bass) who gave me a knowing nod, that kind of said ‘Hell yeah. Good work.’ I immediately burst into tears. Recording all together in the same room, no headphones, and no separation, we all felt in the moment and it just felt so special to be able to be playing music together, and capturing one specific moment in time, rather than cutting and pasting it all together digitally.” — Clara Baker


Photo credit: Amanda Long