Tag: queer folk

Jobi Riccio Believes Sensitivity is a Superpower

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

When it’s time to recharge her creativity or reconnect with herself, Jobi Riccio goes back to nature. The mountains and hiking trails of her native Colorado were integral to her childhood and adolescence. Today, the trees, plant life, and paths of Nashville help bring her back to center.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that all things natural life and climate factor into her songwriting. Personally and professionally, Riccio has become a spokesperson for our global environment and its future. “Wildfire Season,” from her latest release, Face The Feeling, addresses these issues. Written in the aftermath of the 2020 Colorado wildfires, the song stands out in its unfiltered message, while at the same time slotting in as a perfect fit within the album’s context.

Face The Feeling was produced and engineered by Riccio’s longtime friends and colleagues Jesse Timm and Isaiah Beard. The album leans on her folk and bluegrass roots while injecting them with her passion for indie and punk rock. Riccio takes on mental health, grief, self-doubt, past and present hurt, and the long road to recovery and autonomy. It’s a lot of what is now commonly known as “big feelings,” and entirely the only walk that she knows and wants to take. All of this is served up with a healthy dose of fierce guitars.

Riccio last spoke with BGS in 2023, following the release of Whiplash. Phoning in this time to talk about Face The Feeling, she was days away from a June 9 performance at Wolf Trap as part of Songwriters Celebrate John Prine joining Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, Patty Griffin, I’m With Her, Lucius, Allison Russell, Hayes Carll, Fancy Hagood, and Tommy Prine.

Riccio’s connection to Prine dates back to her early musical influences, reaching a high point in 2023 when she was awarded the Newport Festivals Foundation’s John Prine Fellowship. The Wolf Trap concert was in some ways bringing her full circle, sharing a stage with colleagues, each playing one original and one song of Prine’s.

“I’ve done some stuff in the past with the Prine family,” she remarks. “They have welcomed me into their circle and they’ve been really sweet. It’s been a real blessing of life in Nashville, that whole experience. I’m honored and excited to get to do that show.”

Let’s start a little differently. Tell us about your day so far.

Jobi Riccio: Okay. I woke up and had breakfast on my front porch. I just moved neighborhoods in Nashville – I moved to Madison, Tennessee, and I have a nice front porch now, so I’ve been enjoying coming out and having coffee in the morning. And then I went to therapy, I came back and had a meeting with my manager, we did some co-working stuff together over Zoom, I had lunch, and now I’m doing this.

This album was written between Colorado and Nashville. How did both environments and both communities help shape the new music?

In terms of the lyrics, I feel like I have a lot of references to nature in Colorado and western nature, mostly because I’ve been speaking that language and speaking those names longer. I’m just learning the names of the trees, bushes, daylilies, and all the stuff out here now. I’ve lived in Tennessee… it’ll be five years in September, so I’m just learning everything that’s here.

Any time I’m feeling reflective, I call upon my past, thinking about my family or where I’m from. It’s a big part of my identity. But I definitely identify as an artist both from Nashville and Colorado. Nashville played a really big role in the writing of this record. I started playing a lot more electric guitar when I moved here. I started spending more and more time in my room playing. I was listening to a lot of country electric guitar, but for some reason it became this more indie-rock singer-songwriter kind of thing.

I think I wrote about Nashville and the community more. You hear that on “Love of the Song,” just kind of struggling to find my footing here, because it does take a while to figure that out. I was really lucky to know a lot of people before I moved here. I say this in the song – I was set up in all the right places, with all the right people, and I still felt a sense of “Damn, do I belong here?” The impostor syndrome of doing music for a job is really hard and I think women and femme people in general really struggle with impostor syndrome and living in our heads and second-guessing ourselves a lot more than men do. I address that in the song “Doesn’t Matter,” which closes the album.

So I think it’s a record where I come into living in Nashville and am also like, “I am worthy of doing this job and this job is such a big part of what makes this town this town.” Despite all the new development and changes that everyone’s always talking about, Nashville is and will always be Music City, and the community is what makes it great.

Where were you, mentally and emotionally, when this creative process began, and where are you now?

I was in a hard place when I started – and in the middle of it. I think it’s a brave thing that you really have to do in life, whether or not you want to, which is to own up to your shit. It’s a very crass way of saying it, but basically I was trying to outrun some shadows, trying to outrun some trauma, trying to outrun things that needed to be dealt with that were coming out in my life.

I was still pretty young when I started writing this record and [when I moved] to Nashville. I moved here almost five years ago and I started writing this record about three years ago. It’s been such an up-and-down experience. I feel like it’s mirrored the experience I’ve had with getting my sea legs as a touring musician, too. They’ve been very much in tandem.

Despite what you see online, it’s not this constant upward, “Everything’s great and it’s always getting better all the time, the gigs are always getting better.” Some nights you’re playing for 3,000 people, opening for Lucinda Williams – which I got to do – and the next night you’re in Utah playing for 50 people headlining. It’s a total rollercoaster. It’s about learning how to find the tools to ground yourself. I really needed to learn how to do that intrapersonally first, for myself, and I’m glad that I did at the beginning of writing this record. But it definitely chronicles a long journey of growth. I feel like it’s a weird time to do this job. And also growth is… you’re never done. It’s not linear. So I’m always doing my best every day, and that’s all I can ever expect of myself. And every day is different.

Were the songs finished when you began recording?

Most of them were, but not all of them, which is a new experience for me. I’m used to having all of them done and buttoned up and being like, “Okay, here we are. Let’s go record them.” But when we first started talking about what this album could be, I had the song “Doesn’t Matter,” just the idea of it, the guitar part, and the beginning of it, and I was like, “I don’t really know if this is any good.”

I played it for my co-producers, Jesse [Timm] and Isaiah [Beard], and they were like, “This is really cool. You should finish the song.” They basically watched as I finished it. I was writing stuff down actively in the studio, which I’ve never had that experience. I wrote more songs, too, that didn’t make the record. Whether or not those will go on another project or ever see the light of day, I don’t know. But I was open to seeing what would come.

Tell us about your working relationship with Jesse and Isaiah. How did it begin and how has it grown over the course of your albums?

I met Jesse at Berklee. We met on the first day of college. We were in the same dorm. They’re from Northern California, I’m from Colorado, they’re from a weird hippie town, I’m from a weird hippie town – we immediately understood each other. I feel so incredibly lucky to have met them, because not many people get to have someone who is so encouraging of their music alongside them at any stage.

Not everything I wrote in college was very good, but they were always very invested in it and also [in] finding their voice as an arranger and composer and writing string parts. I would come up with a song and they’d be like, “Oh, I came up with a string part for it. Do you like it?” That’s such a spoiled experience to have, because it would be a gorgeous thing. We’ve played together and been collaborators and friends for ten years now.

I met Isaiah through Jesse. Isaiah also went to school with us, but I didn’t know him. He was a few years older and worked the same student job with Isaiah in project bands. It’s where kids have their stuff recorded for different school projects. They both did admin work for these project band things, so they became friends. I had a friend from the songwriting program at school who had a record produced by Isaiah in Nashville. He moved here a couple of years before me, and he said it was an amazing experience. I listened to it and I thought it was just the coolest thing ever. I heard so much creativity in the production and the mix. Also, Isaiah has his own solo project and he’s one of the most creative people I’ve ever met. I reached out to him and that’s how we ended up working on Whiplash. It felt like a very organic trio and through that we became really good friends.

I moved to Nashville, he lives close by, and I feel like I’m very spoiled for having people who love and understand both me and my music. I feel truly blessed. I don’t know how else to say it. I hear how all three of us have grown as musicians on this project versus the last project. I’ve grown a lot as a writer, the mixing and production work Isaiah did is outstanding, and Jesse wrote all the string parts. I can hear all of our growth and development as individual creative people. My name is on the record, but it does really feel like a collaboration.

You play acoustic, electric, and baritone electric on this album. Tell us about your guitars – which ones you play on the album, which ones are going on the road, any backstories you’d like to share.

I only have three guitars in my personal possession, but Isaiah had a lot of guitars lent to him by our friend Jake Byrne, who works at Carter Vintage Guitars. So nice of Jake! We had a vintage Mustang that Isaiah played on “Buzzkill.” He played some very Green Day-esque type things on that song. It was just the most fun little guitar.

Isaiah owns the baritone guitar that I played. He won it in a guitar raffle at a benefit concert that I played when the Asheville, [NC] flood happened. We had a big fundraiser here in Nashville. We collaborated with some folks in Asheville to raise money and a guy out of Asheville who ran a guitar store put together this raffle. I was one of the artists on the bill, Isaiah and his partner came and entered the raffle, and he won this baritone electric with a metal neck. It’s the craziest guitar ever.

I have a Martin D-35 from 1993 that’s my baby acoustic guitar that you’ll see me playing all the time. I bought it at the Pickin’ Parlor, an acoustic guitar store in Arvada, Colorado. I was with my friend Al out around Denver looking for a guitar. I wanted a dreadnought because I was really interested in playing bluegrass. I was in college, 21 at the time, and interested in digging into flatpicking. I was like, “I need a dreadnought. There’s no other way.”

I played a lot of different guitars, and other Martins, and I fell in love with this one. It reminded me a lot of a friend’s guitar that I had played throughout the years at this bluegrass festival, RockyGrass, I grew up going to. I was like, “Oh, this feels like the twin guitar to my friend’s guitar.” That’s why I ended up buying that guitar. I’ve written so many songs on it, and it’s interesting, now that I don’t play bluegrass consistently, it’s got this whole other life and character to it as a guitar for songs. Sometimes I start writing on electric, but oftentimes I still write on that guitar, too, and transition over to electric.

I have a Fender Telecaster that Jake at Carter Vintage helped me [rig] so that it takes the flatwound strings that I like. It’s a certain sound I really enjoy that I heard Margaret Glaspy champion back in the day, and I wanted to figure out how to do that. We’ve done a lot of little mods to it over the years. I love that guitar, too. I bought it in 2021 off of a guy on Facebook in Denver. It’s not worth a ton of money, but it has a lot of sentimental value to me.

I have a Gibson Songwriter that I got through winning the John Prine Fellowship. Gibson Guitars gave me a 2024 Songwriter. It’s a beautiful guitar that lives at home on my couch. My amp that I have at home is a Fender Blues Junior. I bought it from another Berklee student for $400 on Facebook Marketplace during my senior year of college because I needed an amp.

You’ve talked, in this interview and others, about how being outdoors is important to you. Do you write when you’re out in nature? Do ideas come to you then?

Absolutely. A lot of times, if I’m stuck on something, getting out is good. I think there’s some science behind this, too – the dual motion of walking is really helpful to our brains. So I definitely find myself coming up with ideas while hiking or walking. I’ve always been that way. I’m always writing things down on my phone. Or while I’m in transit on airplanes, trains, in an Uber, or someone else is taking me somewhere, some other vehicle, in the back of a van on tour. Looking out the window, watching scenery go by, can be a regenerative, reflective place for me as well.

I probably write the most when I have a guitar in my hands, but I edit a lot and I have a lot of lyrical ideas while I’m out in nature, walking.

Phone, voice memos, pen and paper?

All three. If I’m out and about, I use my phone. I grew up writing in my journals and then I went to my phone. Everything was in my Notes app for a few years and then I was like, “I want to go back to having a journal and having handwritten lyrics. I miss going back into my journals and looking at my embarrassing little couplets of lyrics from eighth grade.” I want to be able to do that when I’m older, and look back and have more tangible objects in my life. I don’t want everything to be owned by my phone and put into my phone.

So I got several different notebooks of different sizes. I have a little notebook for journaling and writing more personal things, I have a big notebook, I have a legal pad for writing lyrics, and I have a little gratitude journal that I keep on my bedside. I have journals of all sizes now.

Are you particular about your pens?

Yes. I really like this one pen, the brand is Lamy. It’s the best pen I’ve ever owned. You can easily and accessibly buy them online, but I found it at a pen shop in Stockholm, Sweden. I think the romance of that experience also made me fall in love with this pen. They sell a lot of fancy ones that you use for calligraphy, but the one I am obsessed with is their ballpoint model. Occasionally I meet other people who love this pen. I see them with the pen and we’re like, “Oh, you like this pen too?” There’s a little cult following.

I’ve been getting into pencil recently, too. I got these free pencils at an Americanafest event, I think, and I have to figure out what brand they are, because I really like them. I’ve been enjoying having the ability to erase versus just crossing things out. It feels good. Tactile.

You write and speak openly about climate, ICE, politics, the state of the world, and of course about being an openly queer artist. You have received media attention for “Wildfire Season,” which has been called a protest song. Some people think musicians should make their music, share their art, and keep their opinions out of the spotlight. Other people, including quite recently Joan Baez, believe in using that platform to take a stand on issues. Discuss.

In the hardest times in my life, and I think this is true for most people, I’ve turned to music to process things. That was always the hope for this new record – that it could be a processing tool for anyone who needs it.

There’s so much hurt being done to people systematically right now, and I don’t think I could not talk about it. I think it feels very cathartic to attend shows where it is addressed within the lyrics, or in the banter when the artist is talking between sets. My friend Nathan Evans Fox has a great new record and he had a release show here in Nashville. He has a lot of great political country music and I felt such a sense of exhale being in that room. There was so much energy. To be in a room where it felt like church, the catharsis of release, there was such healing. It gave me a feeling of strength.

It’s a really hard time. Harm is being done to so many of us. I know that no matter what side of the political spectrum people are on, I’ve heard it said around here that everything is too expensive for most people and it’s too hot every year for most people. People are feeling the change in the air. There’s a lot of climate denial that still goes on, and yet people know that something isn’t right. Even extremely wealthy people who think they’ll be able to escape the effects of climate change, trying to shield themselves away from it, are being touched by it.

Tennessee is such a gerrymandered state. If you’re familiar at all with the political climate here, it’s really bleak, with the redistricting of Memphis and the current events that have gone down here recently. But going to protests in Nashville, showing up, is empowering. Why shouldn’t music be a space for people to feel through what’s going on, or to at least feel a little bit less alone, to feel stronger, to feel braver, to feel angry, to let that shit out? Because if you don’t let it out, then you continue to let it happen.

I feel that music is one of the most powerful tools of healing and understanding ourselves. People deserve to not feel alone, and they deserve to feel connected. If it’s upsetting to some people that I speak out about politics, I would rather call in people who are really hurting during this time and give them comfort and strength. That matters more to me than alienating people who think I should just sing songs about whatever. I really believe in the power of political songwriting, songs that do work.

When we started this interview with “Tell us about your day so far,” your list included breakfast, went to therapy, came home, met with your manager on Zoom, had lunch. You said, “I went to therapy” as casually as someone might say, “I went to the gym.” Was it a process for you to be able to say it so openly? There’s still so much stigma around mental health.

I think it’s two things. I have been described as sensitive for as long as I can remember by everyone in my family, and that used to be something that made me feel so shameful and embarrassed. I went to therapy for the first time when I was very young. I was in middle school and I was embarrassed about it at the time because this was the narrative I had around it when I was a little kid and things were very different. It’s crazy how much has changed. I think the pandemic changed a lot of things around mental health for the better. Back then I felt like, “I can’t get my emotions under control, so I have to go sit in this office and cry for two hours and it’s so weird, because I’m the most sensitive person in the world. I don’t know what it is.”

I came to songwriting as a teenager, and I found this channel of, “I can put everything in this place, and sometimes I create something that is so bad, and sometimes I create something that’s kind of good, and sometimes I create something that is totally neutral.” I used to go home after school every day and write. It was my confidante. It was what I turned to in hard times and in good times. It was how I processed my life. Once again, music as a way of processing life. Songwriting and creativity was that for me as a young, really sensitive person.

Once I wrote what I felt was actually a good song, I felt brave enough to show it to someone, and I played my first gigs, I was like, “Oh, people connect with this.” I got older, I went to music school, and I was like, “Man, maybe I really have something to say and people want to hear it.” And I met Jesse – going back to talking about them – and they’re a very sensitive person as well.

I’ve always had this thing about sensitivity is a superpower. You’re in tune to certain things that other people miss. I think most people who write songs are keen observers of the world. Sometimes you’re observing more negative things and that’s really hard, it’s painful, it requires tending to, and that’s what therapy is. I think everybody is deserving of taking care of their mental health. Now I’m in a city of songwriters, and every single person I know is a songwriter who does therapy, so I’m very much not in a stigmatized place with it because it’s been normalized to me.

I’m so much older, but it took some time for me to get there. I remember being embarrassed as a child doing it. But it’s been so many years off and on that I have done therapy, and I have seen the gifts and the fruits of my labor. So many of my songs have come out of the work I’ve done in there and the growth I’ve had. I don’t know if my therapist listens, but there’s a lot of inspiration taken from things we’ve talked about, and realizations and connections. I’m proud of myself for being able to get to that place, and I’m proud of others in my life who have had to overcome stigma about it. I’ve seen it open them up, and that’s beautiful to see.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

BGS 5+5: Creekbed Carter Hogan

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: Creekbed Carter Hogan
Hometown: I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but before that I spent most of my life living in Austin, Texas. I wasn’t born and raised in either, but they are the places that have shaped me the most and I think that counts for something.
Latest Album: PEASANTS REVOLT! (out July 24 2026)
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Creekbed, Creeky, Peepaw Creekbed

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

Like a Catholic cliché, my life has been changed forever by two women named Mary.

The first artist is Mary Chapin Carpenter. Watching your mom sing along to “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” with her eyes closed while she presses folded laundry to her chest, both wistful and hopeless… that does something to a person. In a family so Catholic, so conservative, so isolated – not just because of rurality, but also because of my difficult, isolationist father – Mary Chapin Carpenter was one of the few non-Christian rock-related musicians that scored my childhood, and her ferocious form of empathic songwriting has never left me.

The second Mary is Mary Gauthier. I remember the intersection I was stopped at in Austin, late at night, my now-girlfriend putting her on the aux. The first lines of “Slip of the Tongue” hit me like a gut punch: “Honey sit down, I got something to say/ Last night I drowned. I got carried away.” I remember gripping my girlfriend’s hand, crying and laughing and brimming with new, terrifying love as I listened for the first time to one of the few publicly queer Americana artists to really break through. Mary Gauthier made my life as a trans country artist possible. Nobody can see through to the soul of something like she can. It was an honor to release my cover of “Slip of the Tongue” this year, and it’ll be an honor for the rest of my life to know that my songs are in a lineage that includes her.

What other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, etc. – inform your music?

Man, I just really love art a lot. I’ll watch anything, read anything, listen to anything. I don’t think you need any special schooling or whatever to look at something bold and wrestle with how it makes you feel – you just need a lot of curiosity.

I’m putting out a new record in July called PEASANTS REVOLT! and in my liner notes I credit two books as inspirations: Fernando A. Flores’s Texan magical realist novel Brother Brontë and Julius S. Scott’s The Common Wind, a beautifully rendered examination of how word-of-mouth led to the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in all of human history. Those two books gave as much to my new album as Hazel Dickens, Bobbie Gentry, Tracy Chapman, and ANOHNI did.

So did a whole library! The East Side Freedom Library in Saint Paul, which makes formerly private collections of union organizers, activists, thinkers, and artists available to the public. The Twin Cities United Performers, a musicians’ power org I’m a member of, helps me explore the art of organizing with fellow musicians for better conditions. Picket lines are an art form, and I remain inspired every day by the people who hold them. And my songs would probably sound completely different if I weren’t spending so much of my time watching movies like John Sayles’s Matewan and Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.

Before I could leave my small rural community, art was a way of exploring the world. Now that I can live on my own terms, art is a way of understanding the world. As an artist, why wouldn’t I try as many forms of understanding as possible?

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

This is a long answer, but it’s a story worth telling:

This past winter, as ICE invaded the Twin Cities and abducted and killed our neighbors in our streets, I received a grant from the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis to write new labor and union songs. It was a jarring juxtaposition: how could I justify research and writing songs in my room when I needed to be out on the streets with a whistle in my hand, standing my ground with my neighbors against the federal government? But the truth is, I’d already cashed half the money and it had been a lean winter, so I had to make something to show for it. I went to the East Side Freedom Library, did a boatload of research, and then I wrote songs about regular Minnesotans who’d fought the government for dignity for all. From the 1910s miners of the Mesabi Iron Range to the Indigenous founders of the American Indian Movement in the ’70s to the Willmar 8 who held a two-year picket line every single day in every single kind of weather to an Appalachian-styled ballad that tied in the history of labor resistance to what we were all doing now to protect one another, as our own mayor and governor left us in the ice and the snow to fend for ourselves.

On February 20, I took the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis with a four-piece bluegrass band and presented my grant work to 250 Minnesotans. I was terrified that what I’d written hadn’t done enough justice to this incredible place that had taken me in, given me lifesaving healthcare, and taught me new things about what it means to show up for your community – and even more worried that my performance wouldn’t be good enough to raise rent money for my neighbors who were trapped in their apartments, hiding from ICE. But when I started playing these songs, the reception filled me with awe. All 250 of these people sang with me, clapped with me, cried with me, felt pain and joy and despair and hope together, out loud, with me. After the set, we got a standing ovation – and then at the merch table, the line went out the door as neighbor after neighbor came up to me to tell me about the picket lines they were holding or had held, the Minnesotans they’d recognized in my lyrics, the pain they felt and the hope that sat right beside that pain that they could now feel because of what we’d just sung together.

I’ve played a lot of incredible shows to incredible audiences, many of them much bigger and “much bigger deals.” But that show on February 20 this year was the single most important performance of my life. It meant everything to me. And it taught me, again, why I’m still here, writing songs, doing something every single day to take my place in a lineage of resistance and make a new, better world for all of us.

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

Way before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a nun. The nuns I’ve known work really hard for the liberation of all people, even from within the confines of a restrictive, colonialist, organized religion. The Sisters of the Holy Names were the ones who first taught me about protesting at the School of the Americas, for example, and the Catholic Workers movement introduced liberation theology to me,and taught me about fighting for a dignified life for every living thing. I’m not a Catholic anymore – Catholicism remains closed to me as a trans person – but then again, secular convents existed in medieval Europe for people who didn’t want to convert to Catholicism, but still wanted to live in community. So maybe being a secular, liberationalist nun is still an option?

What would a perfect day as an artist and a creator look like to you?

I would wake up and every single person in the United States would have universal basic income, healthcare that serves all of our needs, and the knowledge that our taxes are funding public services instead of wars and genocides and detention centers. I’d get up to eat vegetables from our garden and groceries I could afford, in a house I share with my friends that isn’t owned by a landlord or a bank, in a neighborhood where everyone has the housing they need. I’d pick up my guitar and head out the door to a park or a third space where other people would be playing music, sharing skills, and enjoying rest for free without fear of the cops or some arbitrary law that regulates who gets to rest where. And we’d all get to that space on free public transportation that runs well and doesn’t contribute to climate change.

We’d sing and play in the heart of a food forest and then we’d take a break to swim in water that’s clean in a park we all care for. I’d go to the library and read a book about moss or something, just because it sounds interesting, while people around me use public resources to sew quilts or study or listen to CDs, our phones nowhere in sight. In the evening, I’d go to a show with my girlfriend at a venue that receives funding from the government so they don’t have to rely on alcohol sales to make their business work, and I’d happily pay money that I know goes entirely to the bands playing that night. I’d dance and dance and dance, surrounded by all kinds of people who all have the basic things they need to thrive in the bodies they have, whose bodies are no longer regulated or targeted for state violence or kept out because of a disregard for accessibility. The bands would be shit hot, because they’d know they were making a living wage and that no one was gonna come into the venue to gun us all down.

And when I’d leave the venue with my girlfriend to get on our bikes and go home to sleep, the night air would feel clean. There’d be no wildfire smoke in the air. The stars would be out, and I’d be able to see them all. I’d pass neighbor after neighbor, grinning, happy to go home to a safe place, knowing that Palestine was free and Cuba was free and Puerto Rico was free and that “Land Back” had supplanted capitalism as our guiding principle and that every worker was treated fairly. And while nothing would be perfect, because there’s always work to be done, things would feel possible. Hope would feel tenable. Every living creature would feel valued. That would be one hell of a day, I think.

Photo Credit: Emily April Allen

MORGXN: Home Is Where Your Heart Hangs Its Hat

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“I don’t know when I became an activist,” MORGXN admits. “I’m just a human being who sings from the heart, but my heart is very broken by the world that we are currently living in.”

The singer-songwriter lived in Los Angeles for 10 years before moving back home to Nashville in 2022. “The minute I came back to Nashville, I ran into a guy once. He was like, ‘I only see you at the Capitol singing,’” he recalls. “When I moved back, they were trying to ban drag queens. They were trying to ban women’s access to health care.”

Most recently, he took to the Tennessee State Capitol to protest bills against same-sex marriage. “This is how rights get tested: one state, one bill, one ‘exception,’ and suddenly the floor moves under all of us,” he wrote on Instagram.

“I don’t even think about it as activism. I think about it as humanity. We are more alike as human beings than the media, the news, and politicians would want you to believe,” he explains. “It breaks my heart. If you have listened to this album, there are songs about love and the human experience. The album is for anybody bold enough to live as who they are in the middle of the heartland.

“That is what I hope people get from this album. I hope they feel less alone in their activism… I wouldn’t even use the word activism. I hope they feel less alone in their humanity, period.”

On March 6, MORGXN released a deluxe edition of his album, HEARTLAND, and while it pulls from country music, he wouldn’t exactly label it as such. “I don’t care what genre you tell me it is. I care that I’m speaking something that is true to me, and that’s how I make music,” he says. “I don’t make music outside in.

“I make music inside out. I find what’s inside, and I try to bring it outside,” he continues. “And the heartland is a place that is normally not reserved for people like me and you. And yet, living in the heartland, I see that everyone belongs in the heartland. The heartland is a space for everybody, and I want to reclaim the heartland for everybody.”

Good Country hopped on a Zoom call with MORGXN a week before the album’s release and chatted about collaborations with Tenille Townes and Maggie Rose, the meaning of community, the political divide in country, and the hardest lessons he’s learned since coming out as gay at 19 years old.

What are some of your favorite lyrics on the album?

MORGXN: “GOD CODED” is maybe the most important song I’ve ever written, whether or not most people hear the song – it’s not a radio song. But it is probably the most important song I’ve ever ushered into being. I have no problem with god or religion. I have a huge problem when people use god and religion as a weapon of their hate.

“WILLOW” I wrote for my friend’s daughter who has cerebral palsy, so that she knows that she is a bright light. Already that song has inspired other people, which really means that she has inspired other people. It’s hard for me to choose… “MIGRATION” is about losing my dog. I don’t have a favorite lyric – it’s like choosing a child. [Laughs]

Okay, here’s my funniest favorite line, “EVERGREENS.” The first line: “Tell me your sign/ And I’ll tell you mine/ And I’ll tell you if we’ll be okay.” I think that’s funny, because if I’m dating somebody, I will be like, “What is your sign?” And I’m going to decide right away if we’re even going to be compatible, which is maybe absolutely chaotic, but I love it.

With the deluxe edition of HEARTLAND you have several collaborators, including Tenille Townes, Ruby Amanfu, and Maggie Rose. How did you choose who you wanted, and what did they bring to the table?

Collaboration is like water to me. You know, I have many liquids here on my table. I am a gay man, so I have tons of liquid everywhere around – iced coffee is always a yes. Collaboration is also like breathing to me. When I think about making music, “the bible” to me is Willie Nelson and “On the Road Again.” The life I love is making music with my friends, and I can’t wait to get on the road again. That is how I think about music.

When I moved to Nashville, there were voices that I saw popping up that were saying really important things, like [Tenille Townes’] “Jersey on the Wall.” They were saying messages that really resonated with me inside of a space that is still not reserved for people like me.

I came here in 2022, which was 11 years after this manager told me I would never make it in music as an openly gay person. In Nashville, there was a thing bubbling up, but it was like you were reserved for this sideshow experience. You can be gay, but only during June, only when there’s a tent for you to stand under. That’s not how I believe in love or life or humanity. I reached out to several people wanting to create. Truth be told, I have people in my DMs who are massive artists, who love what I’m doing, but who can’t align with who I am because it will hurt their fan base. That’s insane. That’s 2026 for you.

But artists like Tenille Townes, Maggie Rose, Ruby Amanfu, Katie Pruitt – who’s obviously a queer beacon – and Langhorne Slim, they were people who were brave enough to collaborate outside of what is the norm for them. I’m really honored that they’re helping me create this version of the heartland where everyone gets to live.

With Tenille, “HEAVEN KNOWS” was the first song we ever wrote together. It was actually the day we met. The song has this sort of inner child: Why do we even keep trying in a world that feels so hard? Why do you love when your heart has been broken so many times? Why do you keep making music when it feels like the music industry is as crazy as ever? And why do you keep being a good person in a world that is hell-bent on trying to make you feel like you are an abomination? I try because I care. I love so deeply, you know.

Having grown up in Nashville, what did community mean to you then, before you came out at 19?

The one thing I’ll say about being queer in America – maybe anywhere in the world – is you’re forced to create community, and sometimes family, when that is not a given for you. I was very lucky that my family was… more confused and scared than they were not accepting. But my husband’s journey with his community – he grew up evangelical and his community kicked him out. He was going to be a pastor, going to seminary, and once he came out, he was kicked out of the church. I didn’t have that experience … but family to me widened the moment I came out. The idea that family was not just the people you were born into, but it is the people and friends and lovers who you collect along the way that were missing for me as a kid. Growing up here, I had a hard time fitting in, because everything I did stood out.

I played the Bluebird [Cafe] last night with Molly Tuttle, Maggie Rose, Liz Longley, and Ketch [Secor] from Old Crow Medicine Show. I’m sitting there singing “MY REVIVAL” – and I’ll cry thinking about this, but it’s like I’m sitting there singing [that song]. My husband is over here and the whole room is singing along with me. I have painted nails, singing my song at the Bluebird with legends. I’m the co-chair of the diversity committee for the Recording Academy in the Nashville chapter. I don’t know if I’ve “made it,” because I don’t think making it is even like the goal here. I want a career and a life, not a moment in time. That’s “making it” to me. For the closeted gay boy who was scared to ever reveal who he truly is, that’s my revival. There’s retribution. There’s deep healing, and there’s tons of gratitude, as well.

The divide in country music right now between people who are willing to sacrifice a fan base and those who aren’t is always widening. It’s cool to see who has come forward to make their voices heard.

Country music is three chords and the truth. That’s still the bible, but it has lost its way. There is a real ricochet happening where people are afraid to be truthful, because truth can sear and truth can be very quiet but very powerful. Nashville is at a breaking point. It’s a small town. We are growing by leaps and bounds. There’s a real deciding line between: do we make this a city for everybody or do we make this a city for the select few? That’s the same for country music, folk, Americana, and gospel.

“HEARTLAND,” the song, definitely pulls on gospel, folk, Americana, and pop, for sure, but it also pulls on country because it’s a story. I thought I’d see my name in lights. I thought that my life would be this flashy thing. It’s not. I fell in love with a man, and we have a farm, and we’re building a life together. That’s love to me. It’s a story. It’s my story. It’s real. So, it’s country; it’s folk; it’s Americana; it’s gospel. Now, will any of those genres accept me? I have no idea.

But the people on my album have accepted me for who I am and love me for who I am. And that, I think, is what the heartland is all about. You know, love thy neighbor. What happened to that?

You turn 39 this year, which happens to be 20 years since you came out. Was there any significance in releasing HEARTLAND (Deluxe Version) this year?

It’s funny. Titles of an album are like mystery buckets. I actually have a title for my next album and I’m so excited about it. Prince once said that he’s like two albums ahead of whatever’s commercially released. And I love that for him. I’m one album ahead of what is commercially released. Album titles visit me like a fever dream. Even HEARTLAND – the song, I gotta call out Josh Dorr, the co-writer on that song, who had a number one with Blake Shelton this year with “Texas.” He’s a legitimate country songwriter. Not even legitimate country songwriters would take a session with somebody like me and it takes guts to do that.

I haven’t thought about how it’s 20 years since I came out, but it makes a lot of sense. I have a song called “home.” When people were like, “Where is home?” I would be like, “Well, anywhere but Nashville, Tennessee, because that place would never accept a person like me.” Now, to be making a life here, building a farm, hosting Pride on our farm, there is something beautiful in that. It may have taken 20 years, but I’m home. It’s beautiful. I hadn’t really thought about time like that.

When we wrote “HEARTLAND,” I wrote it on the piano that I grew up on. There’s always ghosts in the bones of old instruments, but it’s safe where my heart lands. It’s the heartland, but it’s also where my heart gets to land safely. That’s the kind of love and belonging I wish for everybody. I’m not somebody who believes that you have to be in a relationship to be happy, or that you have to be married to be happy. That’s bullshit. That’s heteronormative, capitalist nonsense. You can find belonging amongst community, friends, and lovers. Does your heart have a place to hang its hat? That’s home.

What have been the hardest lessons you’ve learned over two decades?

The thing that comes up in my head is: it’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings. I’ve been a fat lady so… [Laughs] It will fall apart, and that’s okay. The true story is what happens when you pick yourself back up and keep going.

I’m far less interested in talking to somebody who’s never moved across the country once. I can’t really relate to you. If you’ve never sold all your belongings and moved somewhere at least twice, we might not have a lot of similar things to relate to. It doesn’t have to be grand moves. My husband has lived in a bunch of places in Nashville, has not left Nashville, but he’s lived a lot of life. You have to have lost everything once, probably twice, and hopefully that’s it. But it’s really about how you pick yourself back up at the bottom, and keep trying again.

Whether you think it’s good or not, it won’t last, and that’s okay. There’s beauty and grace in that. I have a friend, Kristen Griffith[-VanderYacht], who’s a [floral designer] – I think he’s now in Detroit – and he’s gone through a lot. He was on the Drew Barrymore Show, and the guest host was asking, “How do you keep flowers alive for longer?” Kristen grabbed his hand and he was like, “Here’s the thing, lean in close, I want you to hear this: they’re not meant to last. They’re meant to be beautiful for the moment that they’re there, and you’re meant to appreciate them in all their glory, and then you’re meant to let it go.”

That is really hard. That is maybe [informing] some of the themes about my next album, actually. It’s loving and letting go. Life is not linear. It’s not meant to be. Cherish all of the beauty, because nothing lasts forever. And there’s a ton of freedom in that sentence.

Photo Credit: Gabriel Starner

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

Dualities & Disorientation: Olive Klug is Older, Wiser, and Still Feels Like a ‘Lost Dog’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

“If the world is my oyster I’ve been poking at it with a plastic fork,” sings Olive Klug on “Taking Punches from the Breeze,” the first track off their second album, Lost Dog, which released April 25. Klug writes with a mesmerizing combination of levity and intensity about a slightly off-kilter world. Through closeups on minute, funny, and revealing moments in life, they illustrate how schisms can be beautiful, too, if you see them right.

Though often joyful and whimsical, Lost Dog isn’t always rosy. On it, Klug works through immense life and perspective shifts. Their takes on breakups – “The butterflies have all got broken wings” (“Cold War”) – and depression – “When my friend hangs up / and my mind turns gray” (“Opposite Action”) – are refreshing not for their angst but for their realism. But nowhere is their combination of playful, revealing storytelling more evident than on “Train of Thought,” their love letter to their neurodivergent brain.

There’s a train in the sky in the middle of my mind and it’s flying off a one-way track
And they try to button up my suit and tie in an attempt to hold me back
But I’m this strange old conductor wearing pearls and a backwards baseball cap…

Klug grew up in Oregon and studied psychology in college, intending to work towards a master’s degree and career in social work. Not long after graduation, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and they lost their job. Like so many others, Klug ended up at home, on TikTok. There, music took off fast, and their song “Raining in June” scored them an audience. From there, life hit warp speed – a record deal, a move, a music career, a new relationship – and then it fell apart.

Now older and recalibrating, they’re releasing their second album, Lost Dog (their Signature Sounds debut), about aging with a neurodivergent brain, leaning into their differences, and coming to terms with not having everything figured out.

Your first album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded, came out in 2023 and now we’re talking about your new album, Lost Dog. You’ve lived a lot of life between recording the two albums and you’re clearly writing from a different place this time around. What’s changed for you between those two projects?

Olive Klug: I was 23, 24 when I really started to pursue music as a career. I was not particularly young, but I was kind of naive in the music industry world. I blew up pretty quickly after giving it a go and then moved to LA and signed a record deal. When I look back, I had a lot of hubris, I was very self involved. I was living in LA. It was very exciting. I thought “I’ve made it.” I was making all my money off of music. [But] I was dropped from that record label directly after the release of that album, Don’t You Dare Make Me Jaded, which I think now is kind of like funny and ironic and is hilarious.

That’s funny, “Damn, I said don’t.”

So I was dropped from that label and I also went through a breakup. I had these two years of riding this crazy high and then everything came tumbling down at the same moment. I realized that that whole era of my life was a little bit gilded; that relationship wasn’t right for me, that record label wasn’t right for me. But I looked like I had it together on the outside.

All of that made me dig pretty deep into what I wanted out of my life. It was a moment of soul searching and a moment of having to believe in myself, understand who I was, and motivate myself to keep going in music, because there was nobody around me believing in me anymore.

The past two years have been this wild journey of figuring out what I want, figuring out who I am, and maturing and leaving that hubris behind – and [leaving] that life behind. Since that happened, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, I recorded a bunch of songs, I wrote a bunch of songs. I bought a van. I now live in my van, but I still don’t really have things totally figured out. I’m still lost at times. I think that’s the reality for a lot of people my age.

I’m in my late 20s now and I think that this album is really about the moment that I woke up. I was 27 and things were less figured out than they were when I was 24. That’s where the Lost Dog title comes from, feeling like I am getting older yet I am still feeling like a lost dog, wandering around the country.

There is so much pressure in this world to have it figured out or to be one specific way, and it feels like you’re pushing back on that and saying you don’t have to do that if it’s not right for you.

I’m not really trying to make a statement. My first album, I tried to tie all of my songs up in this neat little bow to be like, “Here is the message that I want to send with this song.” This next album is much more unfiltered. It’s just what came out of me. This is my experience. I’m not trying to reassure anybody with these songs.

You’ve said that this album is about aging as a neurodivergent free spirit. Particularly talking about “Train of Thought,” where you’re leaning into the chaos you feel inside your brain sometimes, instead of trying to hide it. What about that experience felt like what you needed to write about on this album?

I spent my adolescence trying hard to fit in. I had my little secret moments at home. But at school and in my regular life, I got good grades. I dressed up in a way that I thought would be rewarded [at] school. I still was very [much] conforming to my gender, and I tried really hard to be “normal.” I was scared of what would happen to me socially if I did not try to fit in, even though there was this part of me that really wanted to be different.

It wasn’t until my adulthood that I felt the freedom to experiment more with my identity and experiment more with rejecting those norms. I think that’s totally the opposite of what a lot of people experience. A lot of people, when they’re a teenager, they rebel and they dress really crazy and they try to be as weird and challenge the norms as much as possible. I didn’t start doing that until maybe even slightly after college. Since then, it’s been a deep spiral down into allowing myself the freedom to really be myself.

I didn’t understand that I was neurodivergent. I didn’t understand that my brain worked a little differently than other people. Now I’m like, “Well, what do I have to lose? I’m just going to be totally myself.” Having this community of people who are my listeners and fans who really like that about me, and who really celebrate that about me, has been really healing. I think that a lot of artists and writers are neurodivergent in some way and the superpower of it is that’s what allows us to write the way that we do. That’s what [“Train of Thought”] is about, allowing myself to stop trying to put myself in a box and let the chaos of my mind roam totally free.

I’m curious about “Taking Punches from the Breeze,” which is you letting yourself wander in a different way. There are these great lines in there like, “…If the world’s my oyster I’ve been poking at it with a plastic fork.” I don’t think anybody has ever presented that concept before in that way.

I wrote that one living in an apartment in LA by myself. And I love living alone. It’s like the best for my creative flow. But I was really sad. It was in the aftermath of that breakup and being dropped from the record label where I wrote these songs. “Taking Punches From the Breeze” was one of the first ones I wrote. That and “Cold War” were the beginning of this Lost Dog era, so to speak. I got really high one night, to be so honest with you. I was in my apartment and I had just gone on– you know when you have your first date after a breakup? I was on this first date after a breakup. I feel like I am pretty good at asking other people questions and I was asking this person all these questions. Then they would turn around and ask me those questions and I’d be like, “God, I don’t know what I’m doing right now.”

When I’m doing shows, I’m like, “Oh, I’m a Gemini. That’s why this album is the way it is.” I think it’s true, it’s about holding a lot of dualities. A constant disorientation is what I’ve really felt for the past two years. But there’s a lot of fun and joy and possibility in that constant disorientation. It can be hard at the same time.

The other side of the duality, or another part of the duality, is “Opposite Action,” where you’re really pretty down in the middle of the album. Tell me about writing that song.

That was also in that time. I think it was late summer, I was in my apartment in LA feeling weird. I was a psychology major, and I learned about DBT [Dialectical Behavioral Therapy]. That song borrows from a DBT concept called opposite action. I remember having questions about it when I learned about it. But it’s basically the concept that you do the opposite of what your instincts are telling you to do: If you are feeling particularly depressed, you’re supposed to take a deep breath and try to do the opposite. So if you wake up and you want to lay in bed all day and do nothing, you’re supposed to force yourself to go out and be social, go to the park, go to the beach.

I was like, “I’m gonna go to the beach, even if it’s by myself. I’m gonna try to plant things in my backyard.” It was all these things that I was trying to do to make myself feel better, but then feeling really frustrated, because I was taking good care of myself and I still felt bad.

How the song really started was, as a touring musician, so many of the things that people tell you to do to establish some sort of stability and happiness are just impossible to do. Growing plants is something that I would love to be able to do. I can’t do that, because I’m not at my house most of the time. I came back from a trip or a show or something and I had tried to grow jalapeños and tomatoes in my little back patio area. They had died.

That to me is one of the things that really sticks out about your music. You have this way of dialing in on these minute observations. Is that how your brain works all the time? Is that how you’re seeing the world?

I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know how people see the world differently or not. But my writing does feel sort of matter of fact to me oftentimes. So maybe that is how I see the world.

It’s matter of fact, but it’s really joyful.

I think a lot of Lost Dog is coping with those decisions I can’t really take back. If I had gone down that traditional path, if I had gone to grad school, become a therapist, I would have health insurance right now, I would have job security right now. There would be a lot of things that I would have right now that I lack in my life. It is scary to be even a semi-successful musician. I have no certainty. It’s really, really hard to feel any sense of stability or certainty. And to not have any health insurance and to not have any benefits, and all of that stuff, it can be really scary. I wish that small working artists had that. It makes me feel like I’m never going to be able to really have a family, if I go keep going at this rate, I am never going to be able to go to the dentist.

That’s the thing that I really wish more people understood. You’re looking at this artist on stage every night and you relate to their music, they’re still on the road maybe 200 days a year. They don’t have that personal life stability. They don’t have that health insurance often. Even if you think they’re well known, the margins are so crummy and what it takes is so intense.

But if I had not taken this risk, I would always wonder what would have happened. I’m really glad I took the risk. It’s such an incredible payoff. One thing that I can always feel when I’m on stage every night is I have the most fulfilling career ever. That is something that I will never question.

People are like, “I want to have a job that has meaning and that feels aligned with what I’m good at and who I am.” Every night I go on stage, I’m getting paid to do the thing that I feel like I am meant to be doing and that is really worth it. Maybe one day that will include some stability.

And just like that, we’re back to dualities.

Yes, exactly.

Photo Credit: Alex Steed

Out Now: Jaimee Harris

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Jaimee Harris is a thoughtful songwriter, a kind and quirky human, and an insightful individual. It was an honor to speak with her about her upcoming tour, the inspiration behind her songs, and how she takes care of her mental health in a demanding industry. Our conversation touches on everything from her daily routine – right down to crafting the perfect cup of coffee each morning – to how she stays grounded on the road, to the process behind her songwriting.

We dive into her haunting song, “Orange Avenue,” written about the tragic shooting at the Pulse LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida – a thoughtful and chilling track. We also explore the details of the title track of her 2023 album, Boomerang Town, a story song rooted in both fact and fiction. It follows intriguing characters with intricate pasts, the restless ache to escape small-town limits and achieve something big, and the soul-crushing realities of a harsh world.

I hope you can feel Jaimee’s humor, intellect, and warmth through this interview.

You have four months of touring coming up. You’re playing shows across the U.S. and you’re also headlining a tour in the Netherlands and Belgium. How does all of that feel and what are you most excited and anxious about?

Jaimee Harris: Mary [Gauthier] and I just got home from being on this incredible thing called Cayamo, which is like a floating music festival on a cruise ship. We were on that boat for seven or eight days and just got home last night. We leave again this weekend for tour. So I’m trying to pretend I’m not home right now. Because if I switch into this mentality of, “I’m home now,” then that just disrupts the system. So I’m looking at this week as if I’m still on the road. With just like a couple days off.

I’m so excited about touring the Netherlands. It’s one of my favorite places to play. It’s one of my favorite places to be. I love the people there. I love the culture there. And it’s been cool because I’ve been over there many times as an opening act, but I’ve never done my whole set there. And it’s been my experience that the people in the Netherlands can really handle and really enjoy the dark songs.

How do you find constantly being on the road? And, how do you balance that with mental health?

Well, I’ve learned that I need to have a couple of things in place to make me feel comfortable and it doesn’t take much, but one of them that is so important to me is my coffee, which might seem silly. But there’s this coffee I love from Austin, it’s called Third Coast, and Mary Gauthier, my partner, used to run restaurants in Boston and one of the only things she kept from her restaurants when she sold them to move to Nashville to become a songwriter is this industrial coffee grinder.

Every morning we grind it and make espresso and that’s like a huge part of my joy. And we bring it on the road with us. I bring a little kettle and my Hydro Flask, I’m a Hydro Flask girl.

Me too! Mine is right here! [Pulls up Hydro Flask]

Amazing! I love them so much. So the water bottle is a huge deal on the road.

Every morning when I start my day with that coffee, it sets me up for success. Having a little bit of routine to keep me tethered to something while we’re on the road is really helpful. I’ve found that I can always find 15 minutes throughout the day to move my body. Making that a priority for me helps everything while I’m on the road. I love being on the road. Today, since we just got home yesterday, I’ve just been on the couch all day. Re-entry is always hard for me. So today I’m just watching movies and being a weirdo on the couch.

Could you tell us about your recent interactions with Emmylou Harris?

I think coming off this thing we just did on the boat was incredible and Emmylou Harris is my number one hero of all time.

Her guitar tech, Maple Byrne, gave us a heads up a few weeks ago that Emmy might want me to play guitar and sing with her for this [songwriters] round we were in. I literally was driving a car in the Hill Country in Texas and I had to pull the car over and scream. I was like, “There’s no way! That’s my number one hero!” And I didn’t even believe it was gonna happen until it happened.

Earlier that day [during Cayamo], I played a show as me on the boat. Twenty minutes before I played, security walked Emmylou Harris and her friend to my show. I literally had to run to the bathroom! I was like, “I’m gonna be sick. I can’t handle this. This is crazy! THIS IS CRAZY!” I literally forgot the first two lines of the first song, because I was so in shock. I just couldn’t believe that happened and then I got to play with her later that afternoon. My wildest dreams have come true!

You’ve mentioned Mary a little bit. What has it been like for you to find a partner, Mary Gauthier, who is both a partner in life and also a partner in music, playing shows and touring together?

It’s been incredible. I have learned so much from her about what it is to be a troubadour from the business side of things. She’s so wise, because she came to music after running three restaurants. She has a lot of business experience that she’s been able to apply to the world of being a troubadour, which is incredible. She’s been able to do what she does inside her own integrity in a way that’s really beautiful to learn from. And I get to live in a house with one of the greatest living songwriters. I truly think she’s one of the greatest songwriters of all time, and it’s made me a better writer. Just getting to watch her, how hard she works on songs. She is a real hard worker. I mean, she’s got a lot of natural talent, but she chisels and chisels and chisels songs out of the marble. And so it’s made me up my editing game.

Your song “Boomerang Town” is so beautiful and relatable and intimate; it’s a story-song format. How did you come up with the idea for “Boomerang Town” and what does that song mean to you?

It came in different stages. I’d always wanted to write a song about where I grew up. I’m from a small town just outside of Waco, Texas. I remember being in my early twenties and trying to explain to people where I grew up and I came up with the phrase, “It’s a boomerang town.” People try to leave, they end up going back there pretty quick. That phrase had been in my mind for a while.

In 2017, I got asked if I wanted to sing a verse of “This Land Is Your Land” during this 4th of July celebration. The songwriter hosting the song said, “What verse do you want?” I said I want the steeple verse. The verse is: “In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people/ By the relief office, I saw my people/ They stood there hungry, and so I stood there asking/ Was this land made for you and me?” In my hometown, there’s an interstate, I-35, that runs through the center of it and on the east side of that interstate there’s a steeple from the Truett Seminary in town and on the west side there are two relief offices. The interstate creates a bridge and there’s been a community of people living under that bridge for decades, like my entire life.

When I saw those words, I saw my hometown. The songwriter said, “I always thought Woody got it wrong with that verse.” I couldn’t believe that he would have such a different take on that verse; that planted a little seed for me. I worked on that song for years. I tried a bunch of different perspectives. I initially started with myself and I couldn’t find a way for the song to move forward if I was the narrator. I tried it from the perspective of a veteran. Then I tried it from the perspective of a woman who worked at a cafe. I decided her name was going to be Julie, because I’m a huge fan of Buddy and Julie Miller. I finally landed on the perspective of the 17-year-old boy who worked at Walmart that knocked up his girlfriend. Which is a combination of me when I worked at Walmart and somebody else I knew. That’s when the story started to take off.

I’ve had so many experiences where people came up to me and said, “Hey, you got that song perfectly right.” Like, “My brother died under that bridge, I know all about that scene.”

Also, being a woman from Texas, with the way things are going there – nationally and politically, that song, how it ends, has a way deeper impact than I could have imagined when I wrote it in 2020. The choices women had in 2020 are more than we have now in 2025. There’s no way I could have known that when I was writing it.

You’ve just passed 11 years of sobriety. Is there anything that you’d like to share about your sobriety, your support system, and addiction in general?

Well, I couldn’t have done it without 12-step recovery. I’m very active in 12-step recovery. That’s been my lifeboat, doing it with other people. Someone in recovery said this thing that has stuck with me: “At five years, you get your marbles back. And at 10 years, you get to play with them again.” I feel like that’s true. I’m learning every day.

I remember when I first got into recovery, people would say this thing that I could not understand, “I’m so grateful to be an alcoholic.” When I got there, it was through the criminal justice system, so I was going there to get a paper signed. I was like, “What are these people talking about?” I can’t tell you how many times over the last six years I’ve said, “I’m so grateful, because I have a support system in a time when a lot of people feel really isolated.”

You spent some time in Florida in 2022 and you wrote a song called “Orange Avenue” about the 2016 shooting at the Pulse LGBT nightclub. What does this song mean to you, and what was the process of writing it?

I decided to visit a bunch of spots in Florida to collect stories and write and record a song in each town. I spent a month traveling the state. I wasn’t even gonna go to Pulse, and then somebody mentioned it and I said, “Okay, I’ll check that out.” Everything about it really floored me. I was imagining this bar being in an entertainment district, where there are a bunch of bars. It isn’t like that, it’s a neighborhood bar. So it’s just house, house, house, house, a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street, and then Pulse. Of course it was a gay bar, but it was also a bar that you could get into if you were 18 and up. So it’s also a place where younger kids could get in and just go dance and have a good time. Which is why the youngest girl that was killed was 18 years old. She was there on vacation with her family.

Now it’s been deemed a national monument. When I was there, it was kind of makeshift. There are pictures of people, notes to loved ones, poems, just all sorts of tributes. Then there’s this one kind of official-looking plaque. It has the names of 48 people that died in the shooting. To the side of it says at the request of a family, one name has been left off this list. I was wondering, what’s the story there? I looked it up and it turns out there was a man of Middle Eastern descent and his family didn’t know he was gay until he died in the shooting.

They were ashamed of that. It took quite a long time for anyone to agree to come pick up his body. That’s how deep the shame was. At the time, I believe the police chief of Orlando was a lesbian and because of the element of it being a neighborhood bar, because there were people that were there just because they could get in because of their age, they weren’t necessarily going to come out and say, “Hey, this was a hate crime.” When they found out that that family didn’t want to come pick up their family member, they said, “We have to tell the world that this was a gay bar. This was a hate crime.”

I tried the song from my perspective, but it didn’t really have the impact that it did until I put it in a perspective of that man and his ghost and what it would be like to embody that man’s experience. It was an honor to write that song.

Photo Credit: Brandon Aguilar

Palmyra Shakes Off Anxieties With Oh Boy Records Debut, ‘Restless’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Palmyra is a bit restless. Their emotions knot into a mangled ball, almost suffocating them.

“Early hours in the morning, tossing and turning/ Everyone else in this house is asleep,” Sasha Landon pours into the microphone. “Palm Readers” emerges integral to the band’s new musical chapter. Aptly titled Restless, this album marks their debut with Oh Boy Records. It’s like reintroducing themselves to the world.

The trio – rounded out with Teddy Chipouras and Mānoa Bell – pounces from the get-go. Similar to The Lone Bellow’s tightly wound vocal work, their harmonies exude a vintage richness throughout as they do on the title track and opener. It’s quite evident that they take their work seriously, down to the lilt of their voices as they glide through the air. Palmyra makes you believe they’ve been singing together for decades, their harmonies are so electric and full of life.

“We definitely put a lot of effort into our harmonies. It’s something that always feels super important when we’re arranging a song,” shares Landon. “The three of us weren’t people who sang with others a lot before this band. When we formed, we learned a lot from old recordings of other bands and all sorts of stuff. We did a lot of transcribing harmony early on in the lockdown. The record needed to start with our voices and we wanted that to set the tone for the album.”

Perfectly performed harmonies underpin the album’s emotional currents. The trio builds guilt, frustration, and hope into the project’s backbone to create a coming-of-age story. “There was a moment when we understood what the album was about. There were separate songs that we found homes together through playing them live,” says Chipouras. “‘Palm Readers’ feels great right after ‘Restless.’ And those songs then became a pair. Their energies matched. The coming-of-age narrative emerged from the time period that the songs were written.”

Restless sprouts from the cracks between each song. Where “No Receipt” meanders through sun-caked uncertainty, the cheeky “Dishes” sees the band accepting domestication and finding peace. Along the way, they agonize over being present while time yanks them this way and that – the pressure that comes from being a working musician crushes their shoulders. The album, based on a “period of leaving college, going out on our own, starting a band, going out on the road, and just trying to figure out what the life of a musician looks like,” captures brutal truths of living, loving, and losing time.

Hopping on a Zoom call, Palmyra spoke to BGS about feeling restless, reenergized creativity, and mortality.

What is it about the title track that made sense to be the opener?

Sasha Landon: It made a lot of sense for us to have this song that starts with the three of our voices kicking off the record. Also, it is a song that has a through line to the record from the jump. The emotional center for this record is pretty heavy. And that’s not to say that there’s not a lot of light in the record. I think there’s a lot of fun on it, as well. But the overall emotional center is pretty heavy and restless, felt like a good way to jump into that.

In “No Receipt,” you lament that there just isn’t enough time. As you’ve gotten older, what’s your relationship with time been like?

Mānoa Bell: That’s the central theme of, not only the record, but questions we’re always asking ourselves. Specifically, the last line there about finding those quieter moments has proven to be such a challenge, to put it all to the side. Being an artist is such a consuming experience. Every moment of your day is a part of that journey and it can be hard to have separation from it, which is a really beautiful thing, but frustrating at times as well. You can’t get away from it.

“Can’t Slow Down” deals with a similar thematic thread. How did this one come together?

Teddy Chipouras: This one was a song that I wrote after a couple of years of not writing songs. I don’t think I wrote hardly any songs during COVID. This tune kind of came out all at once after being fed up with not writing anything for a while, and I think we had just gotten off the road. It was kind of like just throwing words at the page of how I was feeling at the time, just feeling exhausted.

That one’s funny, because it was a really big moment for me and I felt very accomplished that I had written something and finished something. I remember being nervous to send it to the band and then really not thinking anything would come from it. I did not think we would be playing that song every night. It’s one of those tunes that has changed meaning, or it means more to me now than it did when I wrote it.

“Buffalo” roots itself in a phone call during a show in Buffalo after one of your friends had taken their own life. Was this song a necessary cathartic exercise?

MB: There are songs that you try to write and then there are songs that you just have to write. I remember very clearly writing the beginning of it and immediately feeling better. It was a very therapeutic experience, not feeling good but feeling better. It’s a song that’s still hard to play. I feel a responsibility to try to connect emotionally with it every time we play it and not just phone it in. Sometimes, when you’re on stage, you’ve done something so many times, there’s a muscle memory aspect to it. But that song never really feels like muscle memory.

When someone dies, you begin questioning your mortality. Did that happen to you?

MB: I think suicide, specifically, when it’s someone who you see yourself in, and someone who you grew up with, makes you wonder what life would be like without them. It’s not just suicide. It’s just about loss and grief. There was never a point where I was like at such a level of grief that I didn’t want to continue living. But it definitely makes you wonder what life will be like moving forward.

The closing track, “Carolina Wren,” feels like a big sigh to let all the things on the record go. Why does it appear as primarily the demo you recorded?

SL: [Producer] Jake Cochran did such a great job of trying to make sure that the songs sonically matched their emotional core and that the version of the song that we were putting out felt really authentic to the lyrics and our live performance of it. This was a tune that I hadn’t played for anyone in the band yet. I wrote it right before we went to the lakehouse [to record] and played it on a whim. I think Teddy was out getting groceries or something and Jake pressed record. Mānoa is holding the bass and I think plays one note on it, and I am playing guitar and singing. We just felt, after hearing it, there was a consensus that that’s how the song is supposed to exist. It’s how it’s supposed to sound.

And Jake helped us get there, too. With some songs, like “Shape I’m In,” for example, we had to be mindful of how many performances we gave it before we exhausted it and weren’t going to get any more. When you have a song that takes a lot emotionally to perform, you can only do it so many times before it loses its meaning, or becomes muscle memory, or just wears you out from overuse. We had one take that felt earnest. It speaks to the song. It honors the song in a good way and it belongs as it is. Then we decided that it made sense as the last tune on the record. It is a nice little breath at the end.

What have been the biggest realizations you’ve had of being working musicians?

MB: I think maybe for me, I’ve learned that there’s kind of an endless amount of resilience needed. You’re constantly faced with just things you need to get through, to solve. I don’t even know if I would call that a music thing, though. I think that’s just like a growing-up thing.

TC: One thing for me is I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find creative time when you’re a full-time creative. We are full-time musicians, we’re on tour a lot of the time, and then we get home and there’s a lot of work to do. It’s almost harder to schedule the creative time than it is to schedule the work. I never thought it would be hard to find that balance.

Did this album change you in any way?

MB: This record showed all three of us that there was another level to get to and that there are endless places of growth that we will find. I think we dug deep as a band and it has continued to be rewarding for those reasons. The further we dig, the better it is. It does just keep getting better.

With the release, the songs no longer belong to you, but the world. What’s that experience?

TC: It will be interesting to see how this one feels, because this one feels bigger than our previous projects. We talk about this a lot with our songs going through different phases of us letting them go. I think the biggest one for me of letting songs go is starting to play them live. We’ve played all of these songs live before for a while. That moment, for me, is the biggest in terms of feeling like releasing full control of it, and it becoming the world’s and not ours anymore.

MB: We haven’t released something at this level before, so I don’t know. I’m excited to see how it feels releasing the whole project. Last year’s release was an EP. I think that if I’m defining what feels different about an EP versus an album, it’s like Teddy saying that this feels bigger than anything before; it’s the amount of energy we put into creating the music – the amount of energy we’ve put into getting it out to people. It’s just like we’re putting so much behind it.

SL: I’m so excited to see, to know that a listener’s first experience of Palmyra could be Restless, that the first thing that they hear is something that of all of the music we’ve put out, we have been proud of, and has been a really good snapshot of where we are at the present time.

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

A Simple Daily Practice Brought About Liv Greene’s ‘Deep Feeler’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

For Liv Greene, music is all about showing up.

The Nashville-based singer-songwriter just released her sophomore record, Deep Feeler, in mid-October and she wrote and recorded the LP guided by a simple but powerful ethos: Show up for the craft of songwriting and it will show up for you, too. In Greene’s case, that looked like committing to a daily writing practice and finding external sources of accountability – like writers’ groups and online communities – as well as learning to work through days when access to her writerly brain felt blocked.

“A lot of the songs came out of just showing up for the practice, like, ‘Okay, what is there to play with today?’” she tells BGS, calling from her home in Nashville. “‘What’s coming out of my brain today?’”

Though some days only yielded frustration, Greene soon found herself with an album’s worth of material, the bulk of which draws heavily from a concurrent stretch of curiosity-fueled introspection, during which she considered her life as a queer person as well as the quirks and habits that make her who she is.

Greene recorded Deep Feeler at Nashville’s famed Woodland Studios, the East Nashville outpost that serves as home base for David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. She and GRAMMY Award-winning engineer Matt Andrews co-produced the LP, pulling together an ace band that includes acclaimed singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Jarosz, whom Greene considers a musical hero. Highlights on the record include “Flowers,” a gentle and optimistic celebration of treating oneself with love and care, and “Wild Geese,” which draws inspiration from the late poet Mary Oliver.

Below, BGS catches up with Greene about her daily writing ritual, her experience producing Deep Feeler, and her decision to take a gamble on her artistic vision.

You just released a new record, Deep Feeler. What can you share about the project’s origins and how you conceived its initial vision?

Liv Greene: Most of the songs came out of a dedication to showing up for the craft, whether or not I had an idea when I sat down. I was almost forcing myself to write, but in a way that felt like cultivating a more consistent writing practice. Given that it was during the pandemic, it makes a lot of sense that many of these songs came out of that time. I had a few things to hold me accountable, too. There was a writers’ group I was part of, where I was writing a song a week for the first half of 2021, and a songwriting workshop where I wrote “Flowers.” I also led some workshops myself and participated in the exercises I’d give my students. After moving to Nashville, I wrote “Deep Feeler” and “Wild Geese,” and then the rest of the album took shape from there.

I love the idea of showing up for the craft. It’s not easy to sit down and write when you don’t have an idea at the ready. How did you begin those sessions? Do you have a ritual that helps you shift into that writer headspace?

When I’m in a writing season – which I’m always trying to get back to, though sometimes it’s just not the time, if I’m busier with other parts of my career – it’s usually marked by time with my instrument, just improvising. I’m most inspired by windows or outdoor spaces. Sitting on a porch or in my room looking out the window, just a lot of improvisation. That’s really the core of my songwriting: spending time seeing, maybe speaking in tongues, seeing what comes out in terms of gibberish, and then noticing what starts to stick. There’s something to that diligent practice of making things up consistently, even if you hate what you make up.

Tell me about choosing “Deep Feeler” as the title track. What does feeling deeply represent for you?

The album concept came out of a self-aware period of recognizing patterns in my life and seeing that I was the common denominator. I was in a lot of situationships. While the heart of this record is about the heartache and missteps of my early 20s, I hope it resonates with people beyond that scope. I’d come out, accepted myself, and allowed myself to feel desire and joy and all of these deep romantic feelings for the first time. This record is a lot of me sitting with myself and embracing the way I’m wired, trying to find a healthier self-awareness around it. I’m working on drawing boundaries with myself, but also being proud of my wiring and how it makes me a good storyteller and a good romantic.

As I was preparing to talk to you, I found a quote from you about making this record that really stuck with me. You said, “Now, rather than an escape from myself, songwriting is communion with myself.” Could you elaborate on that?

When I started writing songs in middle and high school, I was at an all-girls Catholic high school. I went to Catholic school most of my life. Being queer, I didn’t feel like I had much representation in my world, so I felt pretty lonely in high school. I didn’t have much of a musical community in D.C., where I grew up. Guitar was always my escape. I’d come home from school, play for hours, and write. As I got older, I had to form a bit more emotional intelligence and really sit with the person I wanted to be. I realized I couldn’t keep running away from parts of myself and that those parts were actually wonderful and something I should embrace. Songwriting became a different vessel for me to explore myself, rather than viewing it academically, as a hobby, or in a scholarly way.

You got to set up shop at Woodland Studios to record the album. Woodland is such a beloved part of Nashville’s music community, and it sounds like you had an excellent roster of musicians in the studio with you. What did being in that environment open up for you creatively?

The core of the record was made in one day in July at Woodland and it was just myself, bass, and drums – no headphones, live in two adjoining rooms, live onto tape. It was very high-pressure. We did six songs that day and just fired them off, trying to keep the authenticity of a live performance at the heart of the record. The studio days were some of the scariest of my professional life, but in a good way.

There were so many nights beforehand where I’d get the Sunday scaries and think, “Oh my God. Sarah Jarosz, who’s a hero of mine, is going to come to the studio tomorrow, and I’m producing. What if we don’t have time to do everything we need to?” It was an immense amount of pressure to be in the producer’s chair for my own project. But musicians put a lot of money into their records because it’s expensive to record. So I viewed the record as, like, “Okay, this is sort of like grad school.” Friends had asked me to produce their stuff before and I’d said no because I didn’t have the experience. Now, it’s baptism by fire, and I’m my own guinea pig.

You have some shows coming up, including a couple here in Nashville. Have you gotten to play much of this material live yet, or is that still to come?

Some of the core songs on the record have been in my set list for a while, at least around town; friends already know all the words to “Wild Geese” and some other “hits” from the record. But yeah, especially the B-side songs, a lot of those will be pretty new to my live show. I’m excited to hopefully do a lot more touring in the next year and see how the songs are landing out in the world. I haven’t really gotten to do that. My last record was a pandemic record and I never really toured it, so I’m really excited for the record to come out soon and then to get out there, meet people, and reconnect with those who resonate with it.

Are you still engaging in your daily writing practice? Do you have other new material on the horizon?

I’m hoping to go into the studio again soon to do a couple of songs. I’m just taking my time getting to know different producers around Nashville. I think this winter is going to be about doing one song here and one song there. I feel like I’m about halfway toward another record, so I’m getting excited to be in the studio again. It’s my favorite place to be.

Photo Credit: Joseph Ross Smith

Out Now: Sam Gleaves

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Last month, Sam Gleaves released his latest album, Honest, with the intention of sharing his truth. Sam was born and raised in southwest Virginia.

Songs from the project, like “Queer Cowboy” and “Fear,” were written for his partner and detail queer experiences. Lyrics like “Love is stronger than fear” point toward the challenges of being part of the LGBTQ+ community and the need for authentic love. Other songs address his parents, like “Walnut Tree,” written for his father, and “Beautiful” for his mother. Both songs feel nostalgic and share the value of simple things like gratitude and a day outside, under the trees.

In our Out Now interview, Sam shares his current state of mind, his favorite LGBTQ+ artists, the best advice he’s ever received, and more.

What is your current state of mind?

I feel grateful. After years of work, the new record Honest is out in the world! I am fortunate to have worked with a bunch of my dear friends in the creative process. They are all world-class musicians and singers. Hasee Ciaccio and Josh Goforth were the core team in the studio. We arranged the songs together and recorded most of them as a trio. Josh Goforth is a genius producer and his vision really made the songs shine. A number of my favorite musicians and singers guested on various tracks, like Carla Gover, Linda Jean Stokley, Jared Tyler, Jeff Taylor, and Chris Rosser. I’m proud of every second of music we created together.

Why do you create music? What’s more satisfying to you, the process or the outcome?

What a great question! I create music because I need it. I love storytelling. I walk through memories in my writing process. In the songs I selected for my new record, I wanted to honor the people who have shaped my journey: family, musical collaborators, and lovers. All of those people are tied to places etched onto my heart, especially southwest Virginia and central Kentucky. I process grief through my songwriting, because there is great injustice in our world and that affects the people and places that I love. Most of all, songwriting is restorative and the songs become a mode of connection.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

To try to laugh or smile when I make a mistake. I feel that applies in my musical life and the rest of my life!

Who are your favorite LGBTQ+ artists and bands?

I have too many favorite LGBTQ+ artists and bands to name! I am grateful for friendships with my mentors, who are also pioneers, like Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Peggy Seeger, and the members of Kentucky’s own Reel World String Band.

Over the past decade or so, it has been a great joy to see the many roots musicians that are celebrating their identities, folks like Justin Hiltner, Jake Blount, Jared Tyler, Tyler Hughes, Amythyst Kiah, Pierceton Hobbs, Larah Helayne, and many others. The list goes on and on!

For anyone reading this who might not be out of the closet, were there any specific people, musicians, or resources that helped you find yourself as a queer individual?

When I was in my early twenties, I met Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer. Cathy and Marcy have been the two most generous, supportive, and loving mentors in my musical life. Cathy produced my first record, Ain’t We Brothers, and Cathy and Marcy both played on it. Their mentoring helped me to learn to believe in my art and pour myself into it. By being life partners and musical partners in the traditional music world, Cathy and Marcy created space for musicians like me to be part of the community. They are committed to celebrating diversity and advocating for social justice through their music. I think that all young LGBTQ+ people should hear Cathy and Marcy’s recordings, especially Cathy’s song “Names” and Fred Small’s song “Everything Possible.” I am one of many folks who have benefited from Cathy and Marcy’s wisdom and friendship.

Around the same time that I met Cathy and Marcy, I heard Gaye Adegbalola perform. Gaye’s music, her luminous personality, and her openness about her identities made a great impact on me. I was deeply moved to witness an artist so firmly rooted in blues traditions telling her story as a queer Black woman. At that time, Gaye had recently recorded an album called Gaye Without Shame, one of my absolute favorite records. I didn’t realize how much shame I held around my queerness until I heard Gaye sing her brilliant songs with such confidence and verve. From the moment we met, Gaye encouraged me and poured out love. As she says herself, Gaye has a whole lot of mojo to give!

Photo Credit: Erica Chambers

MIXTAPE: Flamy Grant’s Songs for Healing Gay Religious Trauma

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Welcome to the playlist you probably didn’t have on your bingo card this year: a series of songs spanning from gospel music to ’90s folk to contemporary singer-songwriters, all curated by a drag queen with a number one Christian album under her belt. I’m Flamy Grant, and I’m honored that BGS invited me to share the songs that healed my very gay, very religious trauma.

My first record was called Bible Belt Baby, so I know a thing or two about growing up in the shadow of a religious fervor that wants boys to be boys, girls to be girls, and gays to keep it in the closet. Here are a few of the songs that helped me not only to come out, but to let this little light of mine keep shining in the faces of a lot of people who’d prefer it were hidden under a bushel. Not today, gatekeepers. Not today. – Flamy Grant

“If You Ever Leave” – Flamy Grant

Oh, hello darling. I’m a drag queen with wares to sell. Of course I’m starting off this playlist with my new single! It is, at least, very much on topic. This ballad from my forthcoming record, CHURCH, pretty much speaks for itself, but I will offer this one, brief, supplemental thought: if there’s a God demanding your worship, but as you get to know him you discover that you are capable of loving people better and more completely than he is… don’t worship that God. Girl… it’s a trap.

“Undamned” – Over the Rhine

Outside of Amy Grant, no artist has had as much of an impact on me as Ohio-based duo Over the Rhine. Karin and Linford have saved my life ten times over. “I’m not your little lost lamb, God might still get my world undamned.” This song somehow manages to be both defiant (personally, my favorite posture) and repentant. Brazenly owning your apostasy while unabashedly surrendering to a cosmic, supernatural love at the same time? Slay. (Bonus: Lucinda Williams delivers an absolutely divine featured vocal. Undamn me anyday, Over the Rhine.)

“Wrap My Arms Around Your Name” – Sarah Masen

When I was growing up, I was only allowed to listen to Christian music. Sarah Masen was always a bit of a square peg in a round Christian music industry hole, and one of the first songwriters I encountered who addressed the conflict, doubt, and dissonance inherent to the faith everyone else around her was putting such a sheen on.

From the first line, “Mystery’s walking on my head again,” I was hooked on this song about yearning to feel deeply spiritually connected. “Does hallelujah wear the same old face?” Excellent existential question, Sarah. Thanks for giving my teenage angst a place to freely ask it.

“Amy’s Song” – Matt Simons

Back in 2018, I was a worship leader for a queer-affirming church in San Diego and we decided for Pride month that year that we would put on a worship service that was 100% produced, led, and delivered by our queer members. I even wanted to make sure every song we sang had been written (or co-written, in this case) by a card-carrying member of the alphabet mafia. I found “Amy’s Song” and loved the music and the message: “Does your God really give a damn” about who I love?

The twist for me was in discovering that one of the song’s co-writers, and its namesake, Ames, and I had played a show together years before in when we were both closeted and going by different stage names. I led “Amy’s Song” at our church that Sunday and Ames and I have since reconnected online. We’ve even been talking about writing something together one of these days. “Amy’s Song 2: The Ballad of Flamy,” perhaps? (Pro tip: after you listen, go watch the music video and making-of mini-doc, both on Matt Simons’ YouTube page. Bring Kleenex.)

“breathe again” – Joy Oladokun

Honestly, it was hard to pick just one song from Joy Oladokun’s extensive repertoire of musical remedies for the religiously wronged. She is both plainspoken and poignant, capturing the heartbreak so many queer people experience when we grow up in families and cultures that suffocate us in a shame-inducing, manipulative desecration of divine love. Joy’s voice in this song just melts me, and it’s a breath of fresh air for the closeted kid I used to be when she uses it to sing, “If I hold my breath until I’m honest, will I ever breathe again?”

“Someday You’ll Wake Up Okay” – Spencer LaJoye

This is inner child work of the highest order and nobody translates the specific into the universal with such clarity as my friend Spencer. “You won’t hear me, but I’ll think it from the future.” Oof. Also, who knew healing your inner child could be such a bop?

“Holy Sunlight” – Steven Delopoulos

Something about the music of Stephen Delopoulos, who fronted the ’90s Christian band Burlap to Cashmere, just feels reverent. It’s like high-church Paul Simon. This song reminds me that even when we’re leaving, we’re really not. “Pack my luggage, fake a smile/ Don’t cry, we’re all connected like the ocean sea.”

“Faith” – Semler

No one is more emblematic of a reckoning for the Christian music industry to me than my pal Semler, who was the first out queer artist to have a number one Christian record a couple years back. In “Faith,” they are eye-level with the abusers of power in the church they’re confronting. “Don’t pretend I’m not your body.” GOOSEBUMPS, HUN. And it’s a song that somehow doubles as a powerful worship anthem of sorts for the disenfranchised? We’re here, we’re queer, and we still have faith, dear. I live.

“Shiloh” – Audrey Assad

I had stopped listening to CCM by the time Audrey got her record deal with juggernaut Christian label Sparrow Records back in 2010, so I missed most of her early career. But during the pandemic, I learned about this (wildly-talented) artist that Christian media outlets were criticizing for “backsliding.” Don’t tempt me with a good time, I said. Audrey and I have become friendly on social media since then, and she’s so much more than a good time. She’s a healer. This song in particular patches up a new part of me every time I hear it. God bless the ones who leave the church but never stop providing care for souls.

“The Way You Get Found” – Story & Tune

I’m proud to say I was the first person to ever hear this excellent song, in the basement of the San Diego house I shared during pandemic with its writers, Karyn and Ben. The line that got me then still gets me today: “I bless the way you carve your name on the gate-kept inner sanctums where they said you couldn’t stay.” Absolute pros, these two, crafting an artful turn of phrase that not only perfectly fits the demanding cadence of the song, but delivers a well-placed gut punch to folks who know what it’s like to stand up to religious bullies when they say we can’t be on their playground.

“Jacob from the Bible” – Jake Wesley Rogers

This song came through my Spotify algorithm one day and stopped me in my tracks. Of course, now Jake is a world famous colorful crooner and besties with Elton John, etc., but when this song came out, I was able to reach him online and successfully petitioned him to be on my podcast. You can still listen to that conversation. We talk about this song, where it came from, what it meant to each of us, and why Jake should definitely be our first gay president. For me, it feels like a life-giving extraction from all the oppressive weight of religious expectation. “I don’t want to be held down by a heavenly man.” Makes me think of Jacob from the Bible when he defeated the angel in an all night wrestling match. (Hot!) And honey, wrestling with God? Relatable.

“Testify to Love” – Wynonna

Okay, this might be the only bonafide CCM hit in the mix. It was originally recorded by Christian supergroup Avalon and if you were anywhere near Christianity in 1997/98, this song is In. Your. Bones. Every once in a while when I’m playing to an audience of a certain age — the ones who were in youth group about the same time as me — I’ll bust this out as a cover during my set and, well, let’s just say it’s so cute to watch half the room have a dramatic That’s So Raven-style flashback. But I propose to you that at the end of the day, it’s a gay song. I mean, the opening lyric is, “All the colors of the rainbow!” It’s all about how love wins!

What really seals the deal is Wynonna Judd’s countrified cover of the song from a very special episode of Touched by an Angel. I dare you to listen and not agree that Christianity peaked in 1997 and we should frankly just ignore everything that’s come out of evangelicalism since this song ruled the airwaves.

“House of Spirits” – Allman Brown

London-based singer-songwriter Allman Brown taps right into all of our generational trauma and father wounds with this achingly gorgeous spiritual about how it feels to sit vigil by the deathbed of a parent who “damned my soul to the fires.” As someone with a damaged and deeply strained relationship with an ultra-religious father who’s still alive, this song gives me a glimpse into the journey ahead, and I find myself praying along with Allman that one day that house of spirits “will feel like home.”

“What You Heard” – Amy Grant

An Amy Grant song on this list was inevitable, but far less likely is a song from a parent who learned better communication skills by going to family therapy with her kids. But that’s exactly what we have in this, the first new song from the Queen of Christian Pop in a decade. I saw Amy perform it last year and she told the story of how group therapy with her family helped her understand that some of the ways she thought she was communicating love to her kids weren’t exactly landing that way on their ears. It’s the kind of thing most survivors of religious trauma can only dream of: a God-fearing parent gaining perspective later in life and using therapy tools to change behavior? A better relationship through effective communication? May we all be so fortunate. But even if we’re not, my favorite diva (she would never call herself that, so someone has to) has gifted us with this beautifully-written song that shows it’s possible. Amy and amen.

“May I Suggest” – Susan Werner

I’ll leave you with the best benediction that’s ever been spoken (sung) over me. I wish someone had invited me to the Susan Werner party years ago, so I’m making it my mission to bring as many plus-ones as possible now that I’m here. Actually, in a way, I’ve been here since high school, I just didn’t know it. The first time I heard this song was as a cover by Ellis Paul and Vance Gilbert back in the late ’90s, but I just assumed it was theirs. Then about a year ago, a friend sent me a track by Susan called “Our Father,” in which she expertly/hilariously reimagines the Lord’s Prayer (“Deliver us from those who think they’re you”). I was hooked and started working my way through her catalog, but it wasn’t until I saw her live at the Kerrville Folk Festival earlier this year that I learned she was the composer of this song I loved when I was 17.

When she sat down at a baby grand and soulfully set out to convince a field full of festival-goers that “this is the best part of your life,” I openly wept. It’s tempting after you escape from oppressive, high-demand religion to fall into the trap of regret for a lost youth and years of missed chances. Susan invites us to consider the other side of that coin: thanks to the trauma you’ve survived, “Inside you know what’s yours to finally set right.” The next time Susan is anywhere near you, drag yourself (yes I said DRAG) and everyone you love to the show — and hope that she sings this benediction over you, too.

Photo Credit: Sydney Valiente