Tag: roberta flack

The Revolutionary Act of Grace: A Conversation with Lizz Wright

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Lizz Wright admittedly wasn’t thrilled when her label approached her about doing a covers album to follow her gospel standards release in 2015, Fellowship & Surrender, but she charged herself with a task: Find a message and use other people’s voices to help convey it. To that end, she turned to a musical past ripe with the bold, brazen truth-tellers who stood against their respective times and shared a greater meaning. The resulting tracklist for her new album, Grace, reads like a who’s who index: There’s Ray Charles, Allen Toussaint, k.d. lang, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and, of course, Nina Simone. That last voice, in particular, presented Wright with a charged political call, though Grace isn’t overtly political in the traditional sense. The politics she presents — if indeed they can be called that — are the notion that grace offers a way forward amidst troubled times.

The idea for Grace coalesced before she discovered what would become the album’s title track — a cover of Canadian singer Rose Cousins‘ song “Grace” (off her 2017 album, Natural Conclusion). A songwriter at heart, Wright intended to pen her own take on grace, but producer Joe Henry (who also produced Natural Conclusion) played her Cousins’ song, and the resulting thunderclap was too powerful to ignore. Where Cousins’ reckoning with grace takes place internally, Wright sings as if she’s doing battle on behalf of a community largely craving but failing to find that very gift. Grace, as Cousins suggests in her writing and Wright executes in her performance, isn’t something merited or earned. It’s the simple — at times astounding — act of acceptance. In Wright’s hands, that last, loaded word is a revolutionary act, and a potent message for the present.

You drew inspiration from the 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and, of course, her repertoire encompassed politically charged songs. How does Grace stand as a revolutionary statement?

Every time I make a record, I check in to Nina’s catalogue, and I also check in to Roberta Flack’s catalogue. But the beautiful thing that happened this time around is, it’s also Ella Fitzgerald’s centennial year, so it was all this saturation coming from different ends. I kept thinking about these women, and how they all lived through times where they had to step into their full humanity and express their genius, express their opinion, onstage. I thought about the grace of who they are — especially Nina Simone, in this case — because I think all these women who inspire what I do have exemplified grace as embodying the possibility that’s not realized around them. It takes a lot of strength to become something that your environment might not embrace or support. In my own way, I’m returning to their wisdom and to that gentle, very deep strength of singing from a place of belonging and understanding.

There’s a lot of music coming out nowadays that attempts to make a political statement responding to the times, but “Grace” feels like a loaded idea in its own right, because it’s an adherence to love.

I really believe it’s love that changes us. I really love the earth a lot. I really love growing food — I come from a line of really serious gardeners and, even in times of slavery and sharecroppers, we were providers. I’m so proud of that. I’m also really moved by the kind of communication the earth helps us to have; there is a mirror activity or natural phenomenon that reflects everything that we are trying to figure out as human beings. Seriously, everything nature is trying to sort out, we’re walking on it, we’re breathing it, we’re drinking it, we’re relying on it for life. That’s where the wisdom is. I also got to work with my brother Joe Henry, who I really love. We’ve been friends for over 13 years.

He’s so great at building in space to any album he works on. I love how he was able to let both your voice and the arrangements breathe. It makes sense that he’s worked with Rose Cousins, because I know he’s done similar techniques with her.

Joe is so relaxed. This was definitely the most relaxed session I’ve had — from pre-production to recording. I really enjoyed it.

Also, I forgot to say a minute ago, I’m really inspired by my neighbors. When I got my property in North Carolina, I was the only Black person for miles, renting or anything. It was kind of a bold move, but I really love the area so much, and it spoke to me. I told the family who owned the property that I have an interest in this area because I’m a minister’s daughter and I’m a recording artist, and I just want a place to pray and be quiet. I just want a place in nature to do that — I’ve always wanted it. Between the way I got this property, and the way my neighbors teach me how to take care of things, and the fact that almost everyone on my little road has a childhood story in my house makes it clear that I wake up every day in sight of what’s possible. I can’t be the one who gives up on other people. I can’t do it. I don’t have the right to. It was nice to capture the sweetness of that, and the faith of my actual life in this record.

You’re from Georgia, and now you reside in North Carolina: How has your connection to these places been a source of sustenance to navigate these times?

I was in Dresden, Germany, when the election results came in.

I heard you were overseas! That’s wild.

It really was. That was a sleepless night.

Oh, I bet.

But the direction of the person I choose for leadership doesn’t make my life. What makes my life is the tide of society — what the people are really doing, what the people are really feeling. I’m like, “I’ve gotta go home right now, while I’m most uncomfortable, and touch down. I’ve gotta see people. I’ve gotta listen to them and let my own ears and heart and body receive what’s actually happening,” because it seemed like, all of a sudden and even now, there’s been this projection of the South that has scared its children. To be able to make this record with North Carolina-born Joe Henry is a really sweet way to extend the real present. I wanted to make sure that spirit was captured in this project. I was really blown away by how hard a few people are working to make it look like a different time than it is.

Isn’t it? They’re putting so much energy into it.

It breaks my heart, because the candle of life is something that’s vulnerable, and it took so many miracles to stand in this realm together. And we’re so blessed with so much liberty and opportunity and everything. Even the limitations bring strength. I’ll say this: I had a really interesting conversation with a cab driver in London. I don’t know why this man opened up to me, but he said to me, “I don’t want you to think I’m a bad person, but I understand how Brexit happened. I understand how your president happened. There are a lot of old folks looking around at where we grew up, and we don’t recognize the people there. They don’t seem to recognize us, and the actual culture and the story of who we are and where we came from, and we don’t know what else to do but resist.” I thanked him when I got out, because he gave me a real warm hope about the other side of what I’d been seeing and experiencing. It’s about a terrible exercise in negotiating power and influence between generations, not just cultures. People aren’t asking questions of one another: “What does it feel like to be you?”

Right, listening is a critical skill we’ve really lost touch with.

One day, I was working with one of my neighbors; he brought me a bunch of tools and came over. We’d been working for almost four hours when it started to rain, and he’s carrying bushels of trimmings and stuff in his arms. He barely speaks — he’s extremely shy — but he said to me, “We have our family get together the last week of this month every year, and we’d love it if you came.”

Oh, wow!

I was like, “What?” It’s so crazy. My horrible little childish mind with no experience of that kind of openness totally went to “Your boat is lost at sea, and you’re stranded on an island, and you’re on a pig-roaster by nighttime,” you know? [Laughs] I showed up to their gathering, and it totally changed my life. Yes, it was a little bit awkward, and yes, I was surrounded by Trump supporters, and yes, I was welcomed, and yes, I cried and I played and I ate, and I went home in a state of wonder that informed everything I’m trying to do on a larger scale.

Bless you for hanging out with Trump supporters for a whole evening.

In an hour, they meant so much to me. They are so much like my family that I felt ridiculous for ever thinking anything else.

There’s clearly nuance involved — or should be — with how we consider opposing political parties. But I have to ask, how did you decide what voices to cover in this? You’re pulling from Allen Toussaint and Nina Simone and all these people who have shared such powerful lessons in the past?

I was turned off when the label was like, “We want you to do covers.” There’s no writer who ever wants to hear that. But going into the project and thinking about how to thoughtfully use other people’s music to make a statement, and doing that with another writer? That got interesting.

This maybe isn’t a fair question to end on, but why no “Amazing Grace” on an album titled Grace?

You know what? I’ve already recorded “Amazing Grace.” It’s such a huge, pivotal song in my life and in my history as a singer that … I don’t know. The working title for this record before I knew anything about Rose Cousins was “Grace.” Just to get us somewhere. And then that was the first thing I heard during pre-production and I lost it, because I thought, “Oh my God, someone has taken the time and done the work to find a new way to speak this.” I love that she didn’t have to repeat it. It’s so beautiful. I thought I was going to write a song called “Grace.”

Which isn’t to say that you couldn’t.

No! When it’s done, it’s done. The thing about being a writer is to recognize when the word has happened, and to give voice to it. She did this beautiful thing, and I was very excited that we still have people who take time and think and process life on a level where they can write something like that. I was just like, “Oh, I gotta serve this.” It was a great.

Well, it’s a beautiful rendition and, if we ever get a duet out of both of you one day …

Oh my gosh, I’d be so undone. We’ve been sending these goofy emails of mutual admiration, but I really appreciate her for writing that piece, and I wish her all the best. I’m excited to meet her at some point on this tour.

Photo credit: Jesse Kitt

Transatlantic Telephone: Colin Meloy in Conversation with Olivia Chaney

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Offa Rex began with a daydream. Colin Meloy, best known as frontman for the Decemberists, was driving his car around Portland, Oregon, and blasting No Roses by the Albion Dance Band. “I was marveling at the interplay between Ashley Hutchings’ arrangement work and Shirley Collins’ vocals,” he recalls with the geeky glee of a metalhead describing a Randy Rhoads guitar solo. Then he experienced the kind of epiphany that typically strikes more fans than performers: “It was like a light bulb turning on. I wanted to be in the Albion Dance Band!”

His was an impossible dream. The Dance Band, a loose supergroup of English folkies active during the 1970s, is no more. “I don’t have a time machine, but I have a band and I know somebody who sings really beautiful English folk music. Together, perhaps we could not only discover and re-evaluate old folk songs, but also pay homage to that era of music making.”

That “somebody” was Olivia Chaney, a London-based folk singer who straddles the trad and new folk scenes in England. Following the release of her full-length debut, 2015’s The Longest River, she toured with the Decemberists and left an impression on the band, especially its frontman. Open to the idea of collaborating on a folk-revival record (or is it a folk-revival-revival record?), Chaney joined the Decemberists in Portland for rehearsals and recording sessions

Thus was Offa Rex born, taking their name from the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon king. Their debut, The Queen of Hearts, collects new recordings of old tunes, with Meloy and Chaney trading off vocals. Some are fairly well known, such as “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written by Ewan MacColl but popularized (in the States, at least) by the R&B singer Roberta Flack. Other choices will be perfectly obscure to Yankee listeners, such as “Flash Company,” a 19th-century tune about the dangers of stylish cliques best known from a 1980 album by June Tabor and Martin Simpson that is long out of print.

The Queen of Hearts is a curious album: UK songs filtered through a U.S. lens, a transatlantic exchange between Americans enamored with British folk music and a Brit so thoroughly embedded in that scene that she felt compelled to ask permission from her idols to cover their songs. More than that, it argues for an inescapably political aspect to this music, which is never merely decorous, as it harkens back to a very different Albion of the past. At a time when both Meloy’s America and Chaney’s England are experiencing similar convulsions of identity — Brexit over there, 45 over here — the act of singing these old songs raises questions of appropriation and nationalism that the musicians are still pondering as they prepare for an extensive tour.

For that reason, The Queen of Hearts sounds heavier and timelier than your typical covers album, although Meloy insists they undertook the project primarily for fun. “This was something we just wanted to do, not because we felt there was an audience for it, but because it was a grand experiment and a creative journey.” Will Offa Rex produce an heir? “Certainly, there are more folk songs out there to be sung.”

Tell me about the transatlantic nature of this project. How did that inform the concept of Offa Rex?

Olivia Chaney: The funny thing between Colin and me has been a to-ing and fro-ing of what he sometimes wittily describes as his almost fantasy of this project and then, for me, the reality of actually still knowing, if not working with, some of the people who made some of the records that we both know and love. For example, No Roses, I’d been doing a tribute project to that specific record with some of the people who’d been on it. Ashley and Shirley are both friends. Sometimes it was tough for me because I’d fear their judgment, but sometimes it was a really nice thing because it felt like a hand into the past. Obviously, it was a great honor to be invited by Colin to come and do this, and an interesting transatlantic conversation ensued.

Colin Meloy: The target I was going for was not necessarily realistic, and the aim was not really aping a record from the ‘60s or early ‘70s. What we came out with, potentially in some ways, you could find a place in time for it, but so much of it is also filtered through our influences as people who weren’t necessarily even alive at that time. Inevitably, it becomes something different and new. We were keeping each other in check and created something wholly different than what we had set out to do.

It wasn’t just the re-creation. You were trying to make it about interpretation.

CM: I quickly realized, even though it might be soul satisfying just to sit down and re-create note-for-note the Anne Briggs dual bouzouki/voice version of “Willie O’Winsbury,” nothing could’ve been more boring. You already have that. I think that was also the spirit of the folk revival itself — not only in England but in America. You had this group of standards that everybody was playing with and putting their indelible marks on, even if they were doing, for the most part, similar arrangements. In some ways, the interpretations would be drastically different and, in some ways, it was just incremental steps. I feel like the version of Anne’s “Willie O’Winsbury” versus John Renbourn’s, they’re really closely related and yet feel miles apart.

A lot of contemporary folk groups seem to be confronting that distinction: How do you get past the revival to the raw material?

OC: For me, a bit of a personal irony is that I get called very trad. Even though I grew up listening to a lot of the second revival records, I didn’t, and still don’t, regard myself as trad compared to lots of people in the real deep English folk scene. My interest is in contemporary classical music and other songwriters who were pushing boundaries — that’s often the way I come at trying to reinterpret traditional songs. That’s what interests me. So it was good, Colin and I working together, because we’d keep a check on each other’s agenda and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle.

CM: I don’t know if purism is really the thing because, if we were being purists, we would be in a barn singing a cappella in front of a shitty microphone and …

OC: Colin, we were in a barn.

CM: That’s right. We were in a barn. We had that much going for us. It’s not necessarily purist, but you’re always going for what you feel is right and organic. In popular music, there is a time-honored conversation between the English and Americans — not only in the folk world, but certainly in R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Both sides of the Atlantic have informed the other. Sometimes the person who seems least qualified to approach a certain kind of music inevitably injects something interesting into it. I feel like there’s so much discussion going on about the dangers of cultural appropriation, and that’s something that we talked about in regard to Offa Rex. I imagine that accusation could be leveled at us. Other than having our token Englishwoman fronting the band, we’re definitely guilty of cultural appropriation. We’ll see how people respond.

Folk music has always been tied to a national identity. Especially at a time when Brexit and other things are changing that identity, this album potentially reflects that change in an interesting way.

OC: I’m obviously very English, but really, in some ways, ethnically or in terms of my upbringing, I’m quite a mongrel, as well. I am interested in a sense in cultural identity — or going back to certain roots of different cultures. Folk music often is such a profound expression of a culture or a people. It’s quite a strange mix of things in that sense, as well, the record.

Do cultural purism and musical purism lead to the same dead ends? Sorry, this is getting really deep.

CM: It is really getting deep, but I think it does. If you put boundaries around everything, innovation becomes more difficult. We’re seeing that, if you really want to get political, in our own country, the idea of shutting out immigrants and immigration will do real harm to the sciences and to culture. We need new input for innovation. Particularly for the fraying relationship between America and England, maybe this is a bridge. We’re going to bring America and England back together. [Laughs]

This music is obviously linked to a certain place and a certain culture. With that in mind, I’m curious about the decision to record in Portland, as opposed to some old farm in Northumbria.

OC: I think there was probably some logistical, practical …

CM: Financial …

OC: Exactly.

CM: We were working on a budget. Also, the environment that you create something in can have a profound effect on the outcome. We rehearsed it in the country outside of Portland, in Willamette Valley — very western America. And then we recorded it in Portland with Tucker Martine. All of that created a flavor that’s going to offset whatever sort of Britishisms are there in the music and create a different color altogether, hopefully.

What can you tell me then about choosing these songs? Did you have criteria in mind for a finished product? Or were they just songs you wanted to sing?

CM: We both just made wish lists from the outset. She came out in the summer and we sat around and listened to a lot of records. Then we went away and listened to each other’s wish lists and hemmed and hawed about things — something’s too familiar or it’s not familiar enough.

OC: There were a few songs that I ended up doing that were almost soloistic, and those ones tended be ones that Colin had maybe not commissioned me to do, but certainly gave me license to do. My fear was that the criticism from my own people on the folk scene in the UK would be that we had done too many of the tried-and-tested classics. But then we both agreed that there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think I would’ve had the bravery to come up with something like “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” I didn’t quite realize it could fit the brief, but Colin was very decisive and clear that he thought that would be a great one to do. I’m really happy that we did it.

CM: That came from a place of relative ignorance. I thought I was really steeped in this music, but now I feel like I’m barely breaking the surface. I was like, “Let’s do ‘Fine Horseman’ and give it the pulpits it deserves.” But Olivia said, “No, everybody does ‘Fine Horseman.’” It’s funny: In America, Lal Waterson’s “Fine Horseman” is as obscure as it gets on a record that been out of print for years — although I saw that Domino is reissuing it. But that song is more well known in England. That was something to keep mind — that certain songs I felt were ripe for re-evaluation were considered too familiar by Olivia. It was really a question of finding a balance. Is this a rediscovery record? Or is it a standards record? I think we did a little bit of both.

OC: With someone like Lal Waterson, when I got off the phone with Colin, I had to ring Eliza Carthy, Lal’s niece. I felt I had to seek the family’s permission, if we were going to do one of Lal’s songs. It was just a funny expression of the situation; we were both coming from such differences places and experiences in relation to the music. Me, coming from a tiny island, I’m inevitably going to know half the people who sang or wrote those songs.

Is that something you did with other songs? Did you feel compelled to seek permission or guidance from the originators?

OC: Yes. I had a really interesting correspondence with Andy Irvine about a few songs I did for a new Kronos Quartet record. Some of it’s trad singers, but some are just artists on Nonesuch Records. I did a version of an old Irish song, “You Rambling Boys of Pleasure,” which I learnt from an Andy Irvine recording. I combined asking him about the origins of that song with talking to him about “Willie O’Winsbury” which, rumor has it, he taught Anne Briggs. Also, I did some shows with Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy very recently and was asking Martin about the song “Queen of Hearts.” I think it’s my issue of needing to seek approval from elders and experts. That’s my big hang-up, and Colin certainly was trying to kindly beat that out of me.

CM: I wanted you to be in the cone of silence and not have any interaction because you would just be intimidated. Inevitably, it would influence the process. But that may be the American dilettante in me. Covering a song, I’d never really sought permission and maybe that’s a bad thing. It is more of an American attitude, although I did appreciate getting some sort of approval from the MacColls when we did “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

OC: I would be pretty terrified as to what Peggy Seeger would actually say about it. I saw her on a BBC program which, Colin, I still need to send you. It’s for some anniversary of the song and they’re interviewing her and playing the Roberta Flack version in the background. Peggy is quite a force of nature, as I’m sure you both know. She basically says, “I don’t really like most of the versions,” and I don’t think she’s a huge fan of the Roberta Flack version, either. But her son, Neil MacColl, is a friend and a wonderful musician, plus he’s a big Decemberists fan. He loved the fact that I was doing the project at all with Colin and thought it was a really wonderful idea. I’m excited to play it for him — just not his mum.

That song was one, in particular, I wanted to ask you about. It always feels like the “Mustang Sally” of folk tunes. Everybody covers it. It’s very popular. But this version sounds very fresh, especially with that flickering drone in the background.

OC: That’s the weird tremolo stop on my little Indian harmonium. It’s really magical, that sound.

CM: It’s got a good psychedelic bent. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the “Mustang Sally” of English folk music, although I do think that people associate it with the Roberta Flack version. I didn’t know that it was actually written by Ewan MacColl, until I was studying the liner notes of some Atlantic R&B compilation and saw Ewan MacColl had written this beautiful, smoky R&B tune. This is the same guy who had written “Dirty Old Town,” which I had known from the Pogues. So there was this weird line between these two things. I heard Peggy’s version much later, which has this beautiful, almost naïve art approach to it — a piece of folk art in her inimitable way of singing and phrasing. To my mind, this project was an opportunity to strike a balance between those two and maybe make something new there. Olivia did a phenomenal job of that. It was beautiful.

OC: I don’t know about that. But, again, this is an example of where I don’t feel like a pure folkie. Although I know the son of Ewan and Peggy, and work with a lot of those people in that scene and love traditional British folk music, it’s certainly not the only influence on me or the only music I grew up on. I grew up on the Roberta Flack version. I used to lock myself in my room and listen to her record. I was a massive fan. I felt like I really had both strands and very consciously tried to pay homage to both. And, again, I was kindly bullied by Tucker and Colin not to do 160 takes, but actually live with possibly the second or the third.

CM: For many, many versions of “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” the Roberta Flack version is the source material, whereas we really made an effort to take the Peggy Seeger version as our source material. Maybe that’s part of the process, too: Rather than going off the last version of a song that’s been done in an effort to move the needle forward, we went back even further and hoped that would lead us down a different road.

You mentioned not doing 160 takes of a song. Did you have to adjust your process working with the Decemberists?

OC: Yes. Especially since we were working to tape, it was quite an eye opener for me and really challenged the way I approach making music. There were just some really hilarious moments, specifically on “Flash Company.” We’d get to the end of a take, and I would look at everyone and be all kinds of “Oh, God. That was a disaster. We’ve got to do it again!” And they’d all be high-fiving and going, “Yeah. We’ve got it in the bag.” “Are you serious? What the hell?” Then they’d be bummed out by me being bummed out by my own singing, but eventually I’d have a slow epiphany that maybe there was some truth in the fact that actually that first take was quite lovely. It took me a while to get there.

I love the way that song leads into “Old Churchyard.” Musically, it’s a nice moment, but, thematically, it’s pretty powerful to have those two songs tied together and talking about the nature of life and death.

CM: It does work, thematically. In my head, it’s like, “Oh, it’s in the same key and we can drone into the next one.” But it is kind of like a pilgrim’s progress a little bit.

OC: I used to sing that song a cappella at gigs. When I first started singing traditional music, I was not playing folk clubs at all and I’ve never really done the hardcore folk circuit ever. I was just playing strange DIY hipster venues around East London, which certainly wouldn’t be the kind of place where they’d expect to hear an a cappella religious song. It was a good way to shut a room up and get them listening in a way that they might not otherwise. The song has got a very ping-pong transatlantic journey, because I knew that song from the Waterson:Carthy record. The Watersons learnt that song from an old American singer, when they were traveling around America. Of course, it would have originally come from the British Isles, but then become an American folk song. I think it’s gone to and fro across the Atlantic Ocean many times.

CM: Sort of like a game of telephone — with each pass, the song distorts a little more.