Tag: roots music

The Long Road Ahead: A Visit With Danni Nicholls

Posted on by Editor

Take heed, all Americana fans in the UK. Danni Nicholls will be taking the stage on the final day of the Long Road Festival at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire. Leading up to her appearance, the talented singer-songwriter fielded a few questions from The Bluegrass Situation.

As a performer, what do you enjoy most about festivals?

I think the collective good energy that you usually find at festivals is my favourite thing. Everyone has come together to have a good time and that can be infectious. I’ll usually get to bump into friends/fellow artists too which is always lovely. I love to go off and try to discover great new music too.

The life of a touring musician is certainly unpredictable. How do you like to pass the time when you have a couple of free hours on the road?

Ha, sure is! I like to try to see a bit of the place I’m playing in – not just the inside of the venue. I’ll usually go for a wander if there’s some time to kill, and try not to get too lost! I’ve stumbled across some beautiful, memorable places that way.

Do you consider yourself a collector of guitars? And do you have a favorite one that you like to use when you write songs?

I wouldn’t consider myself a collector as such but I do have quite a few that I’ve acquired over the years! My prized possession is my first ever guitar which I inherited from my uncle Heathcliffe when I was 16. It’s a stunning Burns London 1964 shortscale jazz guitar. A real beaut. But my main touring guitar is an acoustic parlour, a Tanglewood TW73 E called Meryl. She’s feisty but sweet and mellow when you get to know her. She’s my favourite for writing on as well as playing live.

How did your grandmother’s record collection influence the kind of music you’re writing and recording now?

Massively! The music that filled her house and so many family parties was mostly American roots – lots of country, soul and rock n roll. It’s deep rooted in my soul and my music. Feels like home.

How would you describe your first visit to Nashville?

Unforgettable. Really – it was like a dream, I remember walking down a side street and turning onto Broadway where so many of my heroes have walked and known so well and feeling this rush of energy and joy. Seeing the Ryman, Tootsies where the likes of Patsy Cline would have hung out before crossing over to Ernest Tubb’s place. My first night in the city I ended up on stage in two of the bars singing old country songs being backed by these incredible musical strangers and I felt so welcome and included. I was hooked and have explored and fallen in love with many more parts of the city since then and I’m so grateful to have had that opportunity.

What are you working on now?

I just returned from Nashville where I have recorded my third studio album with the wonderful, talented Jordan Brooke Hamlin (Indigo Girls, Lucy Wainwright-Roche) at the new and wondrous studio MOXE, out in the woods just north of the city. I’m very excited to be getting it into shape to send off out into the world in early 2019.

When you finish a song that you’re proud of, who is the first person that gets to hear it?

My cat, Winnie. Yes I think of her as a person. I should maybe address that.

For those people who come to see you at the Long Road Festival, what do you hope they take away from that experience?

I hope they can find some connection, some resonance perhaps. By going out singing my truth I hope to contribute to raising positive vibrations, so I hope they walk away with a little lift, a smile, or at least a bit of one of the songs stuck in their heads.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Nic Gareiss: The Subtle Art of Queering Traditional Dance

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American music and dance have always gone hand-in-hand. Immigrants, bringing their folk traditions, art, and music to North America, combined and cross-pollinated with and stole and borrowed from the art and music of Native Americans, African Slaves, and African Americans. In that beautiful, conflicted, human, melting pot way we arrived at the incredible roots genres of our modern time. Dance had always been an integral part of that reckoning, of the growth, adaptation, and molding of our country’s vernacular music, but at the advent of the recording industry and the commercialization of music, musical dance and percussive dance were left by the wayside. They fell from ubiquity and popularity, largely relegated to preservationist, folklorist, familial, and rural niches.

Nic Gareiss doesn’t believe that dance belongs in those shadowed corners of our musical realms. A percussive dancer, scholar, and ethnochoreologist (think ethnomusicologist, but for dance — choreography), Gareiss devotes his creativity to bringing dance as music back into the traditional and vernacular genres that have slowly but surely lost nearly all of its influence. In the process, he explores greater ideas about his listeners’ and audiences’ expectations about the relationships of dance and melody, dancer and musician, dance partner and dance partner, song and singer, and performer and audience. Not only does he “queer” dance, by stripping it of its normative trappings, and laying its essentials bare, he also queers its heteronormativity, its patriarchal tendencies, and its binaryism — in a fashion that’s supremely gorgeous to both the ears and the eyes.  

A good starting point would just be that we’re a music site, right? We cover music, not so much dance. Some readers might need a quick briefing on your mantra that “dance is music.” Can you give people a quick 101 on your worldview that dance is something that’s essential to music, not just tangential to it?

I work as a dancer who makes sound. The traditions that I study and continue to study — and love — are dance traditions that are percussive. Whether that’s Appalachian clogging, Irish step dancing, or step dance from Canada, all of these dance forms have as their impetus rhythm-making with the feet and body. Also characteristic of these styles is the fact that they occur in environments where traditional music is being played. One might actually argue, and I would probably puckishly argue, that the soundscape that’s created by dancers is actually as much a part of the soundscape of traditional music as someone playing a fiddle or a banjo.

It’s interesting that that is an extant truth about vernacular music — especially American vernacular musics — but the way that American music has grown and evolved, it’s extirpated dance from itself, and then brought it back in, in different ways.

I think that because of the commercialization of music over the years, especially because of recording technology, dance hasn’t had as prominent a role, sonically. For some reason people didn’t think that the sound of a moving body was worth recording as much as the sound of another moving body, but holding a guitar. [Chuckles] What I’m interested in doing as I work mostly with musicians, and usually musicians that come from folk music backgrounds of some kind, is creating dance for listening. That manifests in mostly concerts, but also in some recordings, some teaching, some lecturing — there are a lot of things that make up my year along those lines.

One of those things is Solo Square Dance, a show that you’ve worked up, which strips away all of the old-time music and folk music that’s a part of these forms of dance and just showcases the actual, physical dancing — the part that had been lost, perhaps due to that commercialization, like you were just saying.

Exactly. In Solo Square Dance there are no musicians, except for me! [Laughs] There are no sounds except the sounds that I create myself, using my voice, using my feet, snapping my fingers, whistling. The idea is to reference and pay homage to traditional music and dance as a symbiotic entity. Because I don’t play instruments in that show, that means that traditional music shows up almost as a specter, or as a concept of something that’s been erased, so you can still feel a trace of it. It’s not just the idea of traditional music as a nebulous canon of the music writ large. Instead, there are actually specific pieces of music that come from, say, the fiddle playing of Tommy Jarrell or a traditional Irish dance tune that shows up in a tribute to one of my Irish dance teachers. There is various music in the show, it’s just music as made through a sounding body without a prosthesis, without an instrument.

Something that you’re also digging into with Solo Square Dance is leaving behind a whole host of presuppositions and expectations about dance, but you specifically call out heteronormativity. There are so many layers here, because you have to unpack that dance is music, and that it’s always been an integral part of these musical styles, but then you have to unpack that dance is inherently heteronormative, too. That’s a lot of ground to cover!  

The interesting thing for me came out of these video clips of Bascom Lamar Lunsford dancing on the porch, in this film by David Hoffman that was shot in 1962. [In the film] Bascom is demonstrating what it would be like to be in a square dance, but he only has one body to do it, instead of the usual eight people that it takes to make up a square. I saw that and thought that that was kind of inherently lonely and beautiful. But also, it somehow simultaneously was merry and celebratory. I think Bascom’s reimagining or demonstrating of the square dance is kind of a queer thing — and by “queer,” in this moment, I mean a set of stylistics that are somehow “beyond,” somehow an outsider, that have that “crooked” or critical relationship to the normative. Making that first piece a solo square dance and building the rest of the show around it, I tried to think so much about the way that dance possibly enacts some kind of revolutionary potential. Through touch, through interaction of sound and gesture, through [considering] what it might be like to have communities that move together, and what it might be like to have an individual that a community watches.

In all those things, I kept coming up against this idea that there are, indeed, heteronormative facets of that. Like [in square dancing] when we say, “Gents, swing your corner lady.” We say only “gents” and “ladies.” We say only, “Gents do this.” So there’s also a patriarchal power there, in who does what to whom. There’s also a binary that doesn’t allow for, perhaps, the existence of something like polyamory, where there are multiple people involved in a romantic or physical connection. I started thinking about what it would be like, if instead of singing, [Sings] “I’m gonna get that, get that, get that, I’m gonna get that pretty little girl,” what is it like if someone who performs the gender that I perform sings about someone who has a similar gender as themself? That subtle switch turns more than I ever could’ve imagined. It didn’t take putting on heels and a feather boa to queer square dance, just the simple expression of speaking about intimacy, thinking about the gender dynamics of that special social form, and then creating that little shift in the reiteration of that call. Which, I’m really happy about! At first, to decide, I’m gonna “queer” traditional dance — it’s a little bit of an arduous project. I’m finding that it’s these subtle nuance shifts that maybe make the biggest strides to imagining anti-normative futures as well as pasts.

I read an interview of yours, years ago now, in which you mentioned so succinctly that straight people have always let their identities shine through their art, so why wouldn’t queer people do that, too? That was a groundbreaking moment for me, realizing that my identity has an equal right to being included in my art, because no one else is filtering out their identities, their identities just happen to be the norm. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, like you were just saying, it just takes a change in perspective to open that paradigm up. How do we help all kinds of folks to realize that anti-normative future that you see?

I think it’s important to remember that queer people are not a facet of postmodernity. Queerness has always existed.

That’s such an important point! It just hasn’t always been visible.

Right. When we think about traditional music, oftentimes we relate that not only to a particular place, but a particular time. It’s important to remember that there have always been LGBTQIA+ people in those historical moments, again, whether those people were allowed to visible or whether it was okay for them to be visible is another question. Now, some of what we’re starting to see is nascent queerness beginning to whisper, or to sing, or to dance. That feels like a very exciting time, but we’re not inventing that. Queerness [has] been around for a long time.

For example, people who sing ballads, who maybe keep the pronoun of the song the same, or maybe switch pronouns to express a sexual object choice that is somehow other than straight, this is a simple, subtle way people have always enacted some kind of queer performance. And for a long time! I don’t only think that it’s always related to romantic connections, to be honest. I really like the idea of queerness as a critical set of stylistics. For instance, my relationship to percussive dance is a little queer — or bent — because I had a teacher who always said, “There will be no scraping in our class.” That means, in percussive dance, good technique is a sharp, short, adroit connection to the floor, where you strike your foot against the ground, but you don’t leave it on the ground. That, for me, sort of became a provocation. It made me want to slide my foot, to whisper, to create this foot-to-floor fricative, for many reasons: One, it got me closer to a fiddle’s bow, sliding slowly across the strings, but secondly, simply for the pure joy of transgressing! It opens this world of other tambours I didn’t have access to before.

So then, in conclusion, if a reader and roots music fan is looking to have their ideas about traditional and percussive dance queered, where will they be able to find you in the near future?

Solo Square Dance will continue to tour, there are shows in Ireland and Scotland lined up. I have a new project called DuoDuo with cellist Natalie Haas, guitarist Yann Falquet, harpist Maeve Gilchrist, and myself. That project is out on the road. Also, my band, This Is How We Fly, is getting together to make our third record starting in November, which is very exciting. Then, in the fall, I’m touring with this incredible tap dancer, who is also interested in vernacular dance forms, vernacular jazz and swing — his name is Caleb Teicher. We have a duo dance project, again a project without any instruments! Just us, making the music with our bodies and voices.

Because dance is music, damnit.

Exactly! And, to be honest, music is dancing as well! [Laughs] I found, in my collaborations with musicians, when there’s a moving body on stage, musicians begin to consider their own bodies a little bit more. They start to think about where they stand and how they move. It’s actually an interesting metamorphosis to witness and be engaged with. It reminds everyone that if one person can cross the sound/movement divide, if a dancer can be heard, maybe a musician can be seen!

Editor’s Note: Gareiss will be featured in the Bluegrass Situation Presents: A St. Patrick’s Day Festival at New York’s New Irish Arts Center, participating in an opening night jam session with fiddler-banjoist Jake Blount, clawhammer banjoist Allison de Groot and fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves on March 17 as well as a headlining performance with Blount on March 18.

Photo credit: Darragh Kane

LISTEN: Tony Joe White, “Big Boss Man”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Tony Joe White
Hometown: Oak Grove, Louisiana (now in Nashville)
Song: “Big Boss Man” (written by bluesman Jimmy Reed)
Album: Bad Mouthin’
Release Date: Sept. 28 2018
Label: Yep Roc

In Their Words: “At the time I was just playing electric guitar and singing. When I heard Jimmy Reed and ‘Big Boss Man,’ I went straight to the music store and bought a harmonica with a holder. I thought I bought the wrong key, but come to find out, all the blues players pull on the harmonica instead of blowing on it so it was alright.” — Tony Joe White

Photo credit: Joshua Black Wilkins

A ‘Sunset’ Toast: A Conversation with Amanda Shires

Posted on by Editor

When Amanda Shires throws a party, it’s a crackling and cackling affair. The singer-songwriter has often enjoyed lacing her candor with a biting sense of humor, and her new album To the Sunset offers listeners a celebratory and sharp-tongued toast to all the bits—the good, the bad, the ugly—that have shaped her. Beyond giving birth to her daughter Mercy (with husband Jason Isbell), she completed her MFA in creative writing, but that was after someone stole her thesis and she faced the nightmare of starting over. To the Sunset presents many lessons, but central among them is learning how to accept both sides of the coin because together they pay your way.

Shires once again worked with Dave Cobb, the two aiming for a larger sound than what she’d previously accomplished. For longtime listeners, the result strikes a different chord. She and Cobb hit upon a headier pop sound, integrating slick vocal production, wild rhythms, and scorching, electrified solos. There’s a greater lightning running through To the Sunset, which comes, in part, from the use of pedals to elevate Shires’ fiddle from its folk roots. Between her new sonic direction and razor-edged lyricism—thanks to that MFA—her latest album raises a glass in raucous style. To the Sunset is a dark fête, the kind of party that only occurs when you truly let go and learn to be yourself.

Let’s talk about your MFA. How long did it take you to recover from having your thesis stolen?  

I cried and then I got mad. Jason said, “You know, whatever you write will be better than what you already wrote because you’re practicing writing,” and at the time I thought that was the most stupid thing I’d ever heard somebody say, but it’s true. The more practice you get, the better you get, and it all works out in the end. If you really want something, you’re going to find a way to make it happen.

It’s so exciting to hear what you’ve written on this album.

I think it’s pretty cool because I can tell a difference from other records, where I was working with basically instinct. Going to school, I got what I wanted, which was to learn the reasons why I should go with one choice over another, or at least have a way to argue with myself, and a way to back myself up when I’m editing. They teach you there’s no such thing as writer’s block. If that was a thing then nobody would graduate.

Who are some of your favorite poets?

I like Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Mark Strand, and then, you know, regular favorites like Octavio Paz and all the greats.

What would you say you look for in other poets’ writing?

It’s a time to be quiet and reflect and think deeply. You are the audience of one at the time, really. I like poetry because it can go pretty deep and it’s not three minutes long. It’s as long as it takes you to understand it. Songs are such different animals. You have a lot of things that you don’t get with poems, like, you get a sonic landscape and a mood can be provided, whereas on the page it has to be presented with such precision and such intention that you can understand it without anything else helping you.

You recorded your prior album, My Piece of Land, two weeks before giving birth, and you mentioned having to hide in a closet to write this album. Mercy has, in a way, impacted your last two albums. How do you continue to carve out space—besides the closet—for your creative side to flourish?

I’m lucky because Jason’s an excellent co-parent, so if I need to write and do stuff, he’s all hands on deck, and if he needs to write, I’m right there. When I had to be in the closet, I had to make use of a small space, and it wound up leaking into my bedroom, too, so I was taping everything to the walls, so it wouldn’t accidentally get smashed or crumbled by the two-year-old. I learned how to accept things in their early stages. Before, I was real, like, “Nobody sees what I write until it’s all done.” This was a cool thing where I learned to accept my very shitty lines as they faced me every day and tried to make them better. When I was done, I shredded them and I put them in a composter and that goes into my garden.

Have you found that your plants are growing better because of it?

I don’t know. It’s toward the end of the season until that composter’s done cooking. That was a lot of shredded letters. I’m an editor over and over. Some people can write real fast, but I think everything needs tweaking all the time.

Does the editor side of your brain gets in the way of your natural instinct?

It does, it sure does. I found a thing that helps me with that. It’s called FlowState, it’s an app. You set a timer and if you don’t keep typing it erases your work, so it removes the editing process; you can leave it up there and get your free association going, and really try to put your thoughts into words. When I first got it, I started out doing five minutes at a time, now I do 30 minutes at a time. The further you go with it, it’s like a door in your mind opens and you figure which things you need and which things can wait.

Turning to space, that theme—the space between people—surfaces throughout your catalogue. Here, on “Leave It Alone” and “Charms,” it functions in compelling ways. What particularly interests you about space and relationships?

On “Charms,” my mom’s mom abandoned her at a young age, and that’s where that song came from, and just thinking about how hard that would be for both parties. A lot of times as individuals, I know we all often deal with feeling alone or that nobody understands us. You’re born alone, and you die alone. It’s a thing I think about a lot, and that’s why it presents itself in the work.

As a touring musician, as much fun as it is, things get sacrificed. All that’s to say, writing about it and dealing with it makes me a happier person, and if there’s anybody else that feels like me, then I feel I’ve done a better job because it is a way of connecting in the end.

On the My Piece of Land track “I Know What It’s Like,” the desire to run away comes up, and that theme surfaces again on “Charms.” Except running has turned into forward momentum. When did that shift occur for you? How do you push against the desire to cut and run?

[For “I Know What It’s Like”,] I had a person in my life that was telling me these things, like, “I know what you’re going through, just keep talking to me about it.” To have a comrade in that was nice, and I wanted to keep that conversation, I wanted it to be preserved. The running thing, we all want to run away, but then we’re like, “Nah, our problems aren’t really that bad.” It’s really better for you to not run way, to pick up your big girl underwear or your big boy underwear, or whatever. Put your head down and do the work.

I appreciate that you took the momentum that would cause someone to run and shifted it to a positive momentum on “Charms.”

All this stuff is all inherited—you know, how we do life. I will now cite Philip Larkin: “Your mom and dad, they fuck you up.” So in that one I was moved that even though my mom experienced abandonment, she didn’t fall into that learned thing. I think it’s wild to break habits that have happened in your family, generationally. You can’t let fear be the thing that owns you. It’s just silly. This is such a vague thing to describe, fear and doubt and all that stuff—thinking about hypotheticals for situations—it’s so useless; it’s such a waste of time and energy because you can’t control the future, and you can’t control what’s already happened. It’s about trying to accept what’s happened and move forward, and if you fuck up, you fuck up. At least you tried.

Right, you need to make mistakes in order to figure it out. It’s like editing. You never write something perfect the first time.

Yeah, you’ve gotta find a way to trust yourself.

That’s hard when you’re younger.

Totally because you don’t have much experience with it, so you gotta do all the things that give you experience and wrinkles. They’re worth it. Then you start figuring out that, even as you get older, you were this person and now you’re this person. You’re always changing. You might look back and say, “I don’t even recognize that person.”

Joan Didion had that fantastic quote about making peace with your former selves because you’ll never fully leave them behind.  

That’s a whole thing I’m trying to say with To the Sunset, that sort of a cheers or toast. It takes all the things to make you who you are and who you want to be, rather than just ignoring it, or putting it in a box under the bed.

It’s hard to fight, though, because there can be messy parts of yourself that you don’t want to admit.

If you’re not doing that, you’re probably ignoring something that you need to feel. You need to feel ashamed and humiliated sometimes by your own actions. It’s easy to rewrite the way things happened. Once you face it, you can learn yourself better.

Lastly, there are some beautiful portraits of women on this album. How has your sense of womanhood changed, if at all, since having Mercy?

I always felt like I had a responsibility, but I feel like I have that even more. Doing as much as I can and thinking more about the world for her and hopes for her and fears for her. I also feel like, for a long time, you couldn’t talk about things. Even the ugly parts of being pregnant or postpartum, you couldn’t talk about anything, and everything’s supposed to be dreamy and awesome. Now, it’s easier in that more and more women feel like it’s OK to talk about the ugly parts. I think that that might keep us going in the right direction, somehow. One of the coolest things on the record, woman-wise, is my only guest was Gillian Welch, and she sings the harmony part on “White Feather,” what I call the “God” part. Whatever your God is. That was pretty cool. That was a day I thought I was going to die.

Also, your album is coming out at a time when a lot of artists are challenging this sense of perfection.

Yeah, like we don’t need to write a lot of ballads or whatever. It is a cool moment. I’m so happy to see so many women putting out records this year. There’s always been a ton, but there’s not been as much attention or as much room. … It took all those people before us to get to this spot now; I definitely don’t think it’s just happened over the past few months. They’ve always been there, but to move together works better than to move singly.

Photo credit: Elizaveta Porodina

WATCH: O&O, “Tears in the Rain”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: O&O
Hometown: Colorado / Israel (based in London)
Song: “Tears in the Rain”
Album: Tears In The Rain

In Their Words: “The video for ‘Tears In The Rain’ is our second collaboration with filmmakers Jordan Rawi (director) and William Fielding (director of photography). We shot the whole video in one day at the historic Clementi House in Notting Hill. We wanted the video to reflect the uncertainty of where the relationship in the song stands and add a haunting element. In the video, the two characters are in a mysterious pursuit of each other through the many rooms of the quirky house, but whether or not they could ever find each other again is open to the viewer’s interpretation.” — Obadiah Jones & Orian Peled

Photo credit: Max Weir

BGS 5+5: AHI

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Artist: AHI (pronounced “Eye”)
Hometown: Brampton, Canada
Latest album: In Our Time
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Alleycat

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Bob Marley has by far been my greatest influence. Coming from a Caribbean background (Jamaican/Trinidadian) there’s an obvious cultural connection, but for me it goes a little deeper than just music. I don’t sound like Bob, and I don’t try to, but there was a time in my life when I felt no music was satisfying in the way Bob Marley and the Wailers made me feel, so I decided that if it didn’t exist then I would create it. Bob Marley for me is like a messenger of good and an uplifting revolutionary.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

Music is something I’ve always enjoyed and I’ve wanted to be a musician as far back as I can remember. But there really weren’t any musicians in my family so becoming a musician wasn’t really an option in my house. I come from a family of educators and I was probably going to end up being a teacher or professor myself. Writing was a big part of my childhood and my teen years so I naturally gravitated to poetry and rapping, but nothing musical other than my off-key belting as I ran through the hallways of my school.

It wasn’t until my early 20s that I decided to really focus on singing and learning how to play the guitar. Then came the moment I truly knew I was going to be a musician, while I was backpacking across Ontario and I met a kind stranger just outside of Thunder Bay who helped me realign my life and purpose. But even then I really didn’t decide to make music a serious profession until my first child turned 1, about 8 years ago. That first year of fatherhood put a lot into perspective for me, and it gave me the drive to establish myself as a credible artist.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

I try to stay away from tough songs to write. Any song that has been really tough to write was probably scrapped and will never see the light of day. I don’t think writing a song should be a tough process; if it’s not flowing or you don’t feel like you’re making progress, then put it down.

However, of all the songs that have landed on any of my projects, I will say that “Just Pray” may have gone through the most revision. A lot of folks are going to assume the song is autobiographical, but I much rather say it’s “autobio-fictional.” I spent a lot of time with the lyrics on that one because I really wanted to draw on as much of my life as possible, so that I could sing it with a conviction and passion, but I didn’t want it to become a verbatim retelling of my childhood. So finding the right balance took a lot of edits and rewrites.

If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?

My career mission statement would be “When you’re walking in your purpose, the Heavens bow down to honour your footsteps.” My music career is very closely attached to my faith, values and lifestyle. A great part of my life has been focused on uncovering my purpose and that comes out in my music. What I’ve learned is that when you are working towards your goals and you’re really zoned in on your purpose, people will feel that energy coming off you and they’ll want to help you accomplish more. The coolest look in the world is when you see someone who you know is doing what they are meant to do.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

I hope I never feel like I have to hide behind a character in a song. Whatever I write, even if it’s not about me, I want to be able to empathize with the story so much that the listen thinks I’m singing my own song. My music is the opposite of hiding behind a character. I would sooner jump into the skin of a character and try to express what they may be feeling. I want people to believe every word I say, even if I’m speaking on behalf of someone else.

Photo credit: Jess Baumung

LISTEN: The War and Treaty, “If It’s in Your Heart”

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Artist: The War and Treaty (Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount-Trotter)
Hometown: Albion, Michigan
Song: “If It’s in Your Heart”
Album: Healing Tide
Release Date: August 10, 2018
Label: Strong World/Thirty Tigers

In Their Words: “I had a friend who went through a terrible ordeal. I asked if she was ok and she said ‘yes’ but the truth was that she wasn’t and I felt it but didn’t act on it. ‘If It’s in Your Heart’ is everything I should’ve said to her to let her know that I was willing to go through the rain with her. I should’ve challenged her more and that’s what the song is about.” – Michael Trotter Jr.

Photo credit: David McClister

LISTEN: Hot Buttered Rum, “Sitting Here Alone”

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Artist: Hot Buttered Rum
Hometown: San Francisco, California
Song: “Sitting Here Alone”
Album: Lonesome Panoramic
Release Date: July 20, 2018

In Their Words – “I’d long had the dream of having a cabin in the woods. Removed from the busy rat race, I’d be able to have a clear vision to make my masterpiece, right? Well, I got the opportunity a few years ago to do this on my friend’s 100-acre farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I poured a foundation, built a wall tent, doors, an outdoor kitchen. I put in a desk, wood stove, a bed, a couch. It was a ten-minute walk uphill through a redwood forest to reach the place. Epic! Remote! Serene! I’d finally have the headspace to make my best music…I did write a lot of music there (most of Limbs Akimbo), but I was also struck by how life feels about the same even when your dreams come true. I’m still an insecure, distractible dude, no matter where I am! “I thought I’d have it made if I could only get away/and find a little cabin in the woods/I’ll be so content with no entanglements/and life will flow freely as it should.” All this fits into a general trend in my life of being less of an aspiring loner and more engaged with and committed to other people, and all the good and bad things that come with them.” – Nat Keefe

Photo credit: Matt Sharkey

Allowing Herself to Be Free: A Conversation with Erin Rae

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Quiet may come off as meek, but don’t be fooled; strong doesn’t necessarily present in overly clamorous ways. That’s the central truth Erin Rae unearths on her new album Putting on Airs. Across twelve hushed tracks, her haunting voice depicts the ways in which the past looms over the present, especially how the scenes we witness as children build their own imposing edifices in the psyche. On the title track, she sings with bare-bones honesty, “I never did learn to like myself/ Been chasing down anyone that might could help/ Lure them in with charm, come out stealing.”

Putting on Airs is as much about calling out herself as exploring the circumstances that formed her, but through it all the Nashville-based songwriter’s honesty is manifested through her clear-eyed vocals and deft lyricism. She wants to heal, and her music, functioning like a salve, allows her to do exactly that. For example, on “Bad Mind,” she sings about a lesbian aunt who faced discrimination decades ago in the Alabama court system and how that, and other adolescent experiences, shaped the perception of her own sexuality.

Recorded in Appleton, Wisconsin, during winter’s muted apex, Erin Rae worked with co-producers Jerry Bernhardt and Dan Knobler to make full use of the space—a former Franciscan monastery known as The Refuge. As a result, the production lives, breathes, and echoes, giving her the room to use her voice, both literally and lyrically.

These songs are so tender, and that descriptor strikes me in two ways: Tender like a bruise, and tender as in full of care. When you were writing them, did one apply more than the other?

I think it’s a little bit of both. With “Putting on Airs” in particular, I was like, “Am I just being harsh on myself?” My mom’s Buddhist now, so I’m really [thinking] like, “Is this being kind? Is this causing harm?” It’s been helpful to me to own that behavior and, yeah, it is uncomfortable to feel the reality of that and the consequences of that and how it affects other people and myself. But also, by owning it and saying it, my hope is to continue to get more free from that. It’s a little bit of both: It’s tender temporarily.

How have you seen your songwriting shift on this album?

I guess I’ve always used songwriting to process through my own stuff; it’s been very cathartic for me. My last record was tying my own experience in with that of my parents or close friends. There’s still an element of that, but I feel like this record has become more directly about me. I didn’t really intend for these songs to be that, like “I’m going to call myself out.” “Putting on Airs” is about people-pleasing where it’s harmful to myself and other people, where eventually you just become dishonest in a way.

No kidding. That line, “Lure them in with charm, come out stealing,” got me right in the gut. It almost hurts to hear but it’s so true.

It’s like, “I want you to like me!”

It’s almost like a safety mechanism at first, but it’s interesting how you say it can become self-harming at a point.  

My dad is super outgoing. He’s one of those people who’s never met a stranger. That’s how I am as well, but learning in a way to make sure…especially as far as it goes with relationships. That’s really what I’m focusing on in that song.

Ok, we have to talk about “June Bug.” That transition to the old-timey piano at the two-minute mark is stunning. That riff says so much, and coming after all you’ve confessed, hangs even all the more beautifully.

At the Refuge up there in Appleton, there’s this giant chapel and all these monks’ quarters, 60 little individual bedrooms, and a lounge area on the first floor. It was in the middle of winter, it was still snowing, and the Fox River is right out the back. The room has a wall of windows, so you could see the snow and the bald eagles. There are two hallways, and in the center of that is where we had a lot of tracking stuff set up and the computer and all the gear. Then we ran guitar amps and put the drums in the chapel, so you hear that huge open sound. We tracked vocals in there so we had the room sound.

I have these fond memories of everyone being super sweet to each other. Basically, Jerry played everything. I think he had tracked that piano part and then Dan, when he was mixing everything, surprised Jerry by putting that into the end of the song, because the song otherwise would just be a minute and a half long. We had this beautiful piano track that Jerry had done in this space, and Dan surprised us with the old timey piano outro, and I thought Jerry was going to cry. It was really great.

I’m especially interested in the labels that circulate around Southern women. To that end, “Mississippi Queen” is such a striking song. How have you attempted to battle against the labels about who women should or shouldn’t be?

Nashville is like a blue spot surrounded by red. It’s a town full of creatives. I’ve got a family member that lives in Mississippi and my dad grew up in Missouri, but whenever you go back to more traditional Southern cities, it’s kind of like, “Oh yeah, people more or less adhere to these cultural norms that feel a little outdated to me.” But I’m always drawn to a sense of tradition. The only way I’ve known how to challenge anything is personally, like internally making sure that I’m clear.

That’s what a lot of this record’s about—allowing myself to be free to see what my own personal truth is, so that, hopefully, I’m able to lend that to others and give other people that space. Even in thinking that that’s a way I want to live, it’s still difficult. I empathize with people that have grown up in a more traditional city; I feel like it takes a conscious effort to grow up and be open-minded if it’s not the norm.

Right, if it’s not modeled for you it’s even harder to practice.

My parents are super open-minded and I still grew up in the South and absorbed a lot of the social norms, so I can’t imagine how hard it is for someone else [who didn’t] to feel free enough. With a more conservative or strictly religious background, it’s hard work for everybody to be more open-minded.

The past six months have been fruitful for singer-songwriters wishing to challenge heteronormativity, including projects from H.C. McEntire and Sarah Shook. Why do you think now is such a powerful moment for such visibility?

So much progress that had been made was starting to feel uncertain with this new administration. It kind of worked out to be a timely thing, especially with the song “Bad Mind,” and that story being born out of the state of Alabama. When Roy Moore was almost elected, I was like, “It’s all happening in the same time.” I think it’s so important to keep the conversation going and make opportunities to heal around this stuff, around sexuality, while it’s all being threatened.

It does feel like a backlash, similar to what took place in the ‘80s after women had made significant strides in the ‘70s.

Music helps us process. One image that came to mind while you were talking about a backlash is the Women’s March—the second one that happened recently in Nashville. It ended with a big concert at Bicentennial Mall, and Alanna Royale and Becca Mancari were both performing there. Alanna has always represented real womanhood for me, being a strong and powerful woman. She’s full of life. It was this really beautiful moment to walk with all these people—dads, and little kids, and folks old and young—through Nashville, and then end up at this powerful, beautiful concert with people that I admire in our community. It was such a beautiful way to tie it all together.

Photo credit: Marcus Maddox

BGS 5+5: Chris Stills

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Artist: Chris Stills
Hometown: Los Angeles, California
Latest Album: Don’t Be Afraid
Personal Nicknames: Stillsy

How do other art forms – literature, film, dance, painting, and so on – inform your music?

My favorite way to get inspired is to go see other people play, because you see the human being on stage with their songs and not just the music. There is a depth there that informs you with so much more information on what the artist is about – the nature of their style, the way they wield that style and talent on stage and in front of their audience. I mean, you can get the record and listen to production, but to really get an artist, you see ’em live. It’s all about the banter which, to me, is actually the hardest part of playing in front of people.

Movies and docs are cool … paintings and poetry … I like watching people speak at readings. Anything can strike a chord, inspire a thought … it’s up to you to seize upon it and write it down, record it, spend time with it, honor it. It’s like a laser beam from the universe – not to sound too hokey but it’s true. You gotta put yourself in the position to not just receive it, but to translate and interpret it.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I heard “Little Wing” on the radio when I was about 10 years old. That song changed the way I listened to music forever and, from then on, I started to dive into playing more and wanting to recreate the magic that I was suddenly privy to.

If you could spend 10 minutes with John Lennon, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Joni Mitchell, Sister Rosetta, or Merle Haggard how would it go?

Truth is, I have spent time with others like them and, when I was younger, I’d want to hide in a corner and just observe. I never thought I had anything important enough to say, or that they would ever want to hear what I had to say. Now, with age, I realize that it’s not about being important; it’s about being yourself. It’s that thing where you realize that your existence is no different than theirs and you just need to go with yourself. Be your badass self, no matter who you’re in the room with. That actually can be enough to attract the best of them. And with a cast like that, anything could happen. How would it go? Well, dinner would be nice.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

The toughest time, for me, is mostly getting my shit together to actually finish them. There is a finality to songs that can sometimes fuck with me. Like I’m going to ruin it. I’m going to miss its potential. Dealing with some unrealistic fear that there will be no songs after that. Like when you don’t want your kids to grow up. Because when they grow up, they’re not yours anymore. I’m still finishing songs I started 20 years ago. Sounds crazy and stupid, but that’s my self-inflicted cross to bear. Still working on that one.

As you travel around the world, what is the overriding sense you get of the people?

When you start out, every crowd is different. They present different difficulties but every one is an opportunity. You learn to take the right chances at the right time to grab them and win them over. What’s funny is, when you come back around, those crowds are more than likely the same as they were when you were last there. Just more of them! I love the humanity in that. And it plays into local traditions, and local credence to music, and their understanding and love of it.

 

Photo credit: Laurence Laborie