Tag: roots music

The Show On The Road – The Wood Brothers

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Right before the whole world as we know it shut down and they shortened their West Coast tour due to COVID-19, host Z. Lupetin spoke to Oliver and Chris Wood — Americana pioneers The Wood Brothers — about their renewed musical bond, how they grew up in Colorado jamming with their biology professor dad, and how they just barely missed the great East Nashville tornado earlier this month. When it rains it does pour, it seems.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

The Wood Brothers’ brand new record, Kingdom in My Mind, is a sweetly funky, ballsy, bluesy, booty-shaking, and romantic improvisational masterwork. Do yourself a favor and turn it up loud and proud — it will help you groove through the lockdown. If there is anything that’s clear in this deeply strange and unsettling time, it’s that we need music more than ever.

The Show On The Road – Dustbowl Revival

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week on the show, a very special finale to our winter season, featuring a group of world-traveling, folk-funk adventurers that have been catapulting American roots music into the 21st century with their exuberant melding of string and brass band traditions and their white knuckle, award-winning live shows. It’s Dustbowl Revival.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

To say today’s episode is personal would be an understatement. Your host Z. Lupetin founded Dustbowl Revival in Venice Beach, CA over ten years ago with a lucky Craigslist ad that started it all. What began as a clandestine jam group with as many as ten instruments going full blast at an after-hours advertising office soon moved to speakeasies and small venues around LA, with the band eventually recording their beloved live album With A Lampshade On at the famed Troubadour in LA and the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

In 2013 Liz Beebe joined the group as they began touring full time, becoming a powerhouse eight-piece band that wowed festivals and stages in over a dozen countries, playing over a hundred and fifty shows a year. They’ve released a total of seven full-length records along the way, including their soul-dipped, self-titled work from 2017, which was produced by Grammy-winner Ted Hutt, co-founder of Flogging Molly.

This week celebrates the release of their most daring work to date, Is It You, Is It Me, produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Josh Ritter) and engineered by Brian Joseph (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens). Z. was able to gather the whole band around the mic while on the road in New Hampshire. Make sure you stick around to the end of the episode as the band shares their intimate acoustic single “Let It Go.”

WATCH: Alison Krauss’ Unforgettable Performance of “Amazing Grace”

Posted on by Editor

As one year leads into the next, it’s worth a few minutes to pause and enjoy one of 2019’s most breathtaking performances from a legendary performer in bluegrass, country, and acoustic music.

In this emotional video, Alison Krauss performs “Amazing Grace” on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol for the 30th National Memorial Day Concert. She returned to Washington six months later to accept a much-deserved National Medal of Arts and Humanities at the White House.

On behalf of the Bluegrass Situation, best wishes for 2020.

Photo Credit: Universal

BGS Top Moments of 2019

Posted on by Editor

If music happened in 2019, but wasn’t a “song” or an “album,” does it make a sound– er… does it warrant real estate in any of the many year-end pieces, wrap-ups, and lists hitting the internet on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis? Why, of course it does! Each year BGS notes Top Moments of roots music — whatever form they may take — as a way of reminding ourselves that the art we each consume, especially of the musical variety, is often at its best when it eschews the formats and media we expect and/or most closely associate with it. What changes about the way we view a year in music when we alter the context as such? First and foremost, we change just that — our viewpoint. Turns out that makes a world of difference.

Speaking of top moments, one of the best for the BGS team took place just last week, as we premiered a brand new look with an updated homepage and logo. A lighter color palate, clean modern lines, and updated fonts usher in a new era for the site, and hopefully a positive reading experience for you, our beloved fans and readers. Not unlike the state of roots music itself, our new look is constantly evolving, but what’s at the heart of it remains timeless. Now, read about more moments that turned our heads and caught our ears over the course of the past 12 months.

Chris Stapleton Creates LEGO Alter Ego

When Chris Stapleton’s music video for “Second One to Know” hit YouTube, I found myself musing, “What are the benchmarks we use to determine someone’s level of notoriety? What are their claims to fame? Owning a tour bus? Having your first number one hit? Being the musical guest on SNL? Having a highway named after you? Or perhaps a proclamation from your local public figures designating a [Named After You] Day?” Seriously, can you imagine getting to a point in your country pickin’ / singin’ / songwritin’ career where your Game of Thrones cameo falls into the background of your music video star LEGO-self?

I would be remiss if in this blurb I did not mention another real-ass country singer/songwriter/rabble-rouser who dabbled in alternative visual media this year, too — that would be Sturgill Simpson’s “Sing Along.” More of this oddball, non sequitur energy in country in 2020, please. – Justin Hiltner

Dolly Parton’s America Podcast Finds Common Ground

Epiphanies in the podcast series Dolly Parton’s America are too many to count, as host Jad Abumrad and his team explore the notion that the Tennessee songbird is a rare unifying force in the fractured socio-cultural universe — everyone loves Dolly! But the fourth episode, titled “Neon Moss,” finding the common ground of Dolly’s Tennessee mountain home and the Lebanon mountain home in which Abumrad’s dad (a doctor who became friends with Parton after treating her in Nashville) grew up is gripping on a cultural and emotional level. Bonus: BGS’ own Justin Hiltner and his banjo pop up as a key part of a later episode. – Steve Hochman

Duos, Duos, and More Duos

Were you seeing double this summer? Mandolin Orange, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and Shovels & Rope offered exceptional albums and sold tons of tickets. From the sweeping San Isabel from Jamestown Revival to the intimacy of Buddy & Julie Miller’s Breakdown on 20th Avenue South, roots duos were having their moment. Personal favorites included The Small Glories and Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis, but the true discovery for me was Dravus House, a Seattle duo who delivered an understated and beautiful album that blends Elena Loper’s vocal with Cooper Stouli’s soft touch on guitar to stunning effect. – Craig Shelburne

Del McCoury Turns 80

At 80 years old, Del McCoury has witnessed the rise of bluegrass while still being actively involved in it. (In fact, he’s got a gig this weekend in New York with David Grisman, Jerry Douglas, Drew Emmitt, Andy Falco, and Vince Herman.) An all-star tribute at the Grand Ole Opry provided perhaps the most musically satisfying night of music this year for me, mostly because The Del McCoury Band has still got it (and they make it look like so much fun). Check out their 2019 performance on Live From Here With Chris Thile. – Craig Shelburne

Hadestown Wins Big on Broadway

In an era when Broadway has seemingly been taken over by jukebox musicals that rehash the catalogs of legacy artists, watching Anaïs Mitchell pick up eight Tony Awards for Hadestown was a surreal triumph. For those of us who have followed Mitchell’s career over the past couple of decades, it was truly remarkable to see a grassroots musical that she first staged in 2006 reach the heights of Broadway, earning her a win for Best Musical and Best Original Score. “Wait for Me,” indeed. – Chris Jacobs

Ken Burns Digs Deep into the Roots of Country Music

Ken Burns has a long history of digging into America’s deepest roots, through documentaries like The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball, and The National Parks. In 2019 he took those roots in a more on-the-nose direction, exploring the long and varied history of American Roots Music through his PBS documentary series Country Music, which premiered in September. As the filmmaker himself said in a recent interview, “Country Music is about two four-letter words: love and loss.” Thanks to Burns, who looks unflinchingly at all of the different stories that have shaped this music, we get to see the love, the loss, and everything in between. – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs

MerleFest and IBMA, Rediscovered

After a long break, I made an effort to reconnect with two of the preeminent roots music festivals  in 2019 – MerleFest and IBMA’s World of Bluegrass. With other obligations in Nashville, it had been five or six years since I’d attended either, and both surprised me for different reasons. At MerleFest, I was struck by the caliber and diversity of artists, in particular for landing a headlining set by Brandi Carlile in her breakout year. Five months later, I returned to North Carolina to see IBMA in action, amazed by the way that the city of Raleigh has embraced the musical experience, from the Bluegrass Ramble to the StreetFest with plenty of outdoor stages. North Carolina, I’ve got you in my 2020 vision. #ComeHearNC – Craig Shelburne

“Old Town Road” Can Lead Anywhere

Is “Old Town Road” country? Like millions, maybe even billions of fans, I’m inclined to answer that question with an emphatic “Of course it is!” But I’m also inclined to ask: What else is this song? Is it roots music? Is it folk? Blues? Yes, yes, and yes. That chorus is powerful in its simplicity, and it’s not hard to imagine Doc Watson singing those lines or Geechie Wiley intoning that sentiment mysteriously from some lost B-side, accompanied by a century of acetate scratches and surface noise. Almost accidentally existential, the chorus speaks to an unnamed American melancholy, and it can mean anything you want it to mean and be anything you want it to be. – Stephen Deusner

Roots Music Don’t Need No Man

No, like literally. After 2019 we can definitively say that roots music as a whole does not need any men. From the first albums of the year (say, Maya de Vitry’s Adaptations or Mary Bragg’s Violets as Camouflage), followed by two indomitable women of the Grammys (Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Carlile), then two universally regarded supergroups (Our Native Daughters, the Highwomen), the resurgence of true legends (like Reba McEntire’s Stronger Than the Truth and Tanya Tucker’s While I’m Livin’), to a Newport Folk Fest collaboration that combined nearly all of our favorites, this year in Americana, bluegrass, old-time, and folk has been defined by women. There were pickers (Molly Tuttle, Nora Brown, Gina Furtado), there were scholars (Allison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves, Our Native Daughters), there were poets (Caroline Spence, Jamie Drake) — repeatedly this year I found myself in musical spaces that, if all of the men were subtracted, I would still want for nothing. #GiveWomenAmericana – Justin Hiltner

Yola’s Meteoric Rise

Co-write sessions and frontwoman-for-hire gigs aptly prepared Yola for the non-stop successes she’s had in 2019, from sharing stages with childhood heroes Mavis Staples and Dolly Parton to nabbing a whopping four Grammy nominations, including a coveted Best New Artist nod. Kicking off the whirlwind year was her Dan Auerbach-produced debut solo album, Walk Through Fire, a beginning-to-end stunner and a sure sign that Yola’s star power will only continue to rise. The ample steel guitar on “Rock Me Gently,” the countrypolitan charm of “Ride Out in the Country,” and the buoyant old-school soul of a new bonus track “I Don’t Wanna Lie” show off an eclectic roster of influences and a striking vocal range. But the album standout might be its only number written solely by Yola, “It Ain’t Easier,” a slow-burner with a hell of a bridge that pays tribute to the hard work behind even the greatest of loves. On the stage, in the studio, and in everything she does, Yola is putting in the work — and we can’t wait to see what 2020 holds. – Dacey Orr

Shaun Richardson & Seth Taylor, “Chisholm”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

An expansive generation of simply ludicrous flatpickers has rendered bluegrass, old-time, Americana, and folk replete with acoustic guitar virtuosos. Pickers like Jake Stargel, Molly Tuttle, Presley Barker, and Billy Strings each have in common commanding right hands and withering technique. Others, like Jake Workman, Trey Hensley, and Chris Luquette play at incomprehensible, blistering speeds with pristine precision that defies explanation — down to the most infinitesimal note durations. We can clearly see the shredtastic legacies of Clarence White, Tony Rice, Dan Tyminski, and others living on, even if chiefly through their more mathematical, aggressive, and adventurous methods and tones. 

That adventurous aggression might just be why “Chisholm,” a new tune composed by guitarists Shaun Richardson and Seth Taylor, feels like such a calming breath of fresh air. It’s a welcome counterpoint and complement to the repeated face-peeling-off that we all enjoy in this current golden age of flatpicking guitar. Richardson and Taylor are both veterans of Dailey & Vincent’s bluegrass-based rootsy stage show, giving them ample experience in musical code-switching, from fiddle tunes and swinging numbers to country ballads and passionate gospel. Richardson has performed with Michael Martin Murphey as well, and Taylor is a member of the long-running, heady, Americana-tinged bluegrass group Mountain Heart. 

The versatility lent by these diverse experiences gives “Chisholm” a well-traveled, though relaxed, voluminous vibe. The melodies are resonant and tactile, conjuring six-string players and composers such as John Carlini and Beppe Gambetta — with just a dash of Tommy Emmanuel. Jazz complexities are utilized here not in a gratuitous way, but rather anchored in expressiveness and musical dialogue. Richardson and Taylor’s expertise is very clearly centered not on simply displaying prowess, but in musicality. In this calmer, more subdued setting, that dynamic is especially refreshing and subtly striking.

Photo and video shot by James Shipman

The Show On The Road – Bonnie Bishop

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin speaks with Bonnie Bishop — the fierce singer/songwriter raised in Texas and Mississippi with a powerhouse voice shaped by decades of singing in smoky bars. She cuts confessional Americana gems that have won her a Grammy for her songwriting and have gained her a growing legion of fans nationwide.


LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Like her hero Bonnie Raitt, sometimes it takes an artist releasing six records and reaching her late thirties for anyone to take notice. And sometimes it takes a painful divorce to create a song that would be recorded by Bonnie Raitt and help Bonnie Bishop win a Grammy. No, Bishop’s life didn’t change overnight — reality is usually much more sobering than the fantasy of winning big in music. But, Bishop knows she is winning now. Things are really happening, people respect her, and the road is moving — fast. And sometimes that’s the scariest thing of all.

You Need to Listen to More Indigenous Artists

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

American roots music wouldn’t exist without Indigenous people. Full stop.

Just as Black voices and stories largely informed the creation of these genres of music — old-time, bluegrass, blues, Americana, folk, etc. — Indigenous voices and stories often informed those black creators as well as those of greater privilege and power. Erasure prevents many examples of these cross-pollinations and accurate attributions from being readily accessible today, but Indigenous people are still here. They continually carve out spaces for themselves in these circles and these communities that directly spawned from them, though they continue to exclude Natives today.

Even as conversations surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion permeate the furthest reaches of roots music communities around the world, Indigenous identities and perspectives are still routinely left in the shadows.

We can do better.

Part of “doing better” is making a concerted effort, whenever we are able, to expand our perspectives to include as many Indigenous people and their vantage points as possible. So, let’s return to the idea that American roots music was created by Indigenous people. Such as it is, if one is a roots music fan, it’s quite easy to infuse one’s day-to-day with Indigenous folks, as evidenced by the following list of Indigenous artists, performers, instrumentalists, and musicians that you NEED to be listening to.

Cary Morin

An award-winning, renowned blues guitarist Cary Morin is a Crow tribal member who has performed around the globe. “…I could say that I’m really the only finger-style Crow guy on the entire planet,” he told BGS in a 2017 interview. “That’s unique. But we all can say that, to some degree. We all have unique things that make us who we are…” He counts David Bromberg, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, and Trey Anastasio among his influences, but his sound is truly uniquely his.

Lakota John

Lakota John (Locklear) opened his set at our 2019 iteration of Shout & Shine at IBMA with a land acknowledgment and a captivating piece on Native American flute. His music nimbly toggles between old-time blues, modern acoustic blues, folk, down home country and more, while remaining firmly rooted in and informed by his Lumbee and Lakota heritage. We interviewed Lakota John just last month, in anticipation of Shout & Shine.

R. Carlos Nakai

Possibly the world’s foremost performer on Native American flute, R. Carlos Nakai began his career in music trained in classical trumpet. He’s received eleven Grammy nominations and his iconic album, Canyon Trilogy, went platinum, becoming the first album by a solo Native American flutist to ever do so.

Lula Wiles

Folk trio Lula Wiles cover a lot of the same ground as their millennial-aged string band and Americana counterparts, but with the grounding, legitimizing force of Indigenous perspective, brought to the group by bassist Mali Obomsawin, a member of the Abenaki Nation. Obomsawin and bandmates Isa Burke and Ellie Buckland spoke to BGS about Indigenous rights and the group’s approach to writing socially conscious material earlier this year.

Celeigh Cardinal 

Z. Lupetin, host of BGS podcast The Show On The Road, called Métis musician Celeigh Cardinal “the high priestess of Canadiana soul” in a February episode. Cardinal is also the first Indigenous radio personality on Alberta’s CKUA Radio Network. “The Devil is a Blue-Eyed Man” is the lead track off of her most recent album, Stories From a Downtown Apartment.

Jeremy Dutcher

A classically-trained, Canadian, Indigenous tenor, Jeremy Dutcher creates sweeping, cinematic art-folk with pop twinges, jazz undertones, and often lofty, operatic melodies. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Dutcher’s music, however, is his overt presentation of the fact that its intended audience is first and foremost his people, the Wolastoqiyik. His representations of queerness are firmly rooted in the traditions of his tribe and his language — he is one of only around 100 people who speak Wolastoq — which has no gendered pronouns.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

Academy Award-winning singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has been touring and performing professionally since the early ’60s. Her accolades, awards, and accomplishments are vast and varied, touching almost every nook and cranny of this content in almost every medium — and as an activist, as well. In 2015 the Americana Music Association and the First Amendment Center awarded Sainte-Marie the Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award.

Raye Zaragoza

Singer/songwriter Raye Zaragoza has a message to deliver through all of her music. “In the River” was written during the violence at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline being constructed across Indigenous lands and sacred waters. Zaragoza explains in an interview with Billboard in 2018, “Being a young, brown girl who on one side of my family is immigrant (Mexican, Japanese, and Taiwanese), the other indigenous, I can help [but put] a voice and put words to the way so many people are feeling…”

Charly Lowry

In 2004 singer/songwriter Charly Lowry was a semi-finalist on American Idol, but over the past decade she rose to prominence with Dark Water Rising, a North Carolina-based, soulful blues band of Indigenous folks. Her solo music is entrancing and expansive, with an ethereal quality only matched by the conviction with which she sings. This performance of “Brownskin” is a perfect example.

Led Kaapana

Grammy nominee and Native Hawaiian Led Kaapana is one of the world’s foremost experts in slack key guitar, or Kī Hō’alu, for which a guitar’s strings are detuned (til “slack”) to an open chord. His playing reminds of Chet Atkins and Phil Keaggy and references blues, ragtime, and even bluegrass flatpicking at times, too — which makes sense considering he’s worked and collaborated with Chet Atkins himself, and folks like Dolly Parton, Jerry Douglas, and Alison Krauss, too.

To wrap up we should note, this is an infinitesimal, inherently myopic attempt at a cross-section of Indigenous artists in American roots music spaces. There are so so so so many more to discover. You should poke around the Native American Music Awards website for more ideas, and a historical/archival look, too.

Photo of Celeigh Cardinal: Megan Kemshead Photography

Jamestown Revival Find Their Sound on ‘San Isabel’

Posted on by Editor

There are more trees than people in San Isabel, Colorado, where the Wet Mountains poke the sky and Jamestown Revival’s Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay set up a makeshift recording studio in a cabin. The Texas natives emerged with San Isabel, a gorgeous new album that marks both a return to Jamestown Revival’s acoustic roots and a bold step forward into more topical lyricism.

While addressing the unease now shaping the country’s collective mindset is a first for the pair, the record maintains Zach and Jonathan’s anchors of empathy and hope – along with their now-signature Southern folk harmonies that are woven together with that unexplainable richness usually reserved for families.

With a day off from touring, Jamestown Revival called in for a conversation with the Bluegrass Situation.

BGS: Location seems important to you guys. Take your album titles, for example. Utah was your first, and now, with San Isabel, you’ve returned to an album title that documents where you recorded. You’re not from or living in Utah or Colorado, but you sought them out. Why?

Jonathan Clay: Colorado is a place we’ve always loved. Long story short, we had access to a summer cabin in Colorado, and we thought, Gosh, we should take advantage of this.

Zach Chance: It’s kind of twofold. It was access to those places and trying to record in a guerrilla fashion. We enjoy the adventure of it — going and setting up in these settings, being removed — it just makes for a really fun process for us.

JC: For us, the city is not really conducive to creativity. It’s just not where I feel compelled to create.

ZC: The city has its own flavor of inspiration. It does inspire us at times, but it’s not really where we like to record, so…

JC: We have a habit of getting out into the woods when we’re ready to make an album.

Why did you guys decide to return to a more acoustic sound this time around, compared to The Education of a Wandering Man?

ZC: We weren’t touring as much as we had been the past couple of years. We’d been writing for some other things, and we just really wanted to go back to two voices – to write songs that could work with one guitar and two voices, back to the roots of what we were doing. I don’t know if it was all the noise of the time we live in right now, but we wanted something more centered around traditional folk storytelling. We were listening to a lot of Bob Dylan, Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young – stuff like that. We felt compelled to live in that world.

Do you have favorite songs on the new record?

ZC: I don’t know. As soon as we start talking about them, I’ll tell you all the reasons I love them. Maybe I’m too diplomatic. I love “Harder Way” and “Who Hung the Moon.” That was a song we wrote in Colorado and recorded in a day. They’re like children. We love them all equally but differently. This might sound really dumb [Laughs], but there have been times playing “Crazy World” that I get kind of choked up. I start thinking about everything, and I get a little sad. The first few times we played it out, I got really emotional. We want to write stuff that ages like we’re aging — that matures a little bit.

JC: I think that’s a good point. We want our art to grow with us and mature with and without our listeners. I really like “Who Hung the Moon.” “Harder Way” is a pretty special song. I’m actually pulling my three-year-old boy on the scooter right now, humming melodies that I don’t know. It’s a special thing. When I sing the line about my boy, it’s coming from a real place. I have to hold back emotions sometimes because I think, I’ve got an audience to perform to. I can’t get choked up because that makes it hard to sing.

It seems like more and more artists feel obligated to address the uneasiness in the country right now. San Isabel does it – not necessarily explicitly, but it is still more topical than your previous work. Did you feel obligated to do that?

JC: I don’t think it was out of obligation more than it was just compulsion. We just felt compelled. It’s on everybody’s mind –everybody’s consciousness. As an artist, I think your consciousness manifests in your songs. That’s what happened with us.

First, you take a beat to acknowledge the despair a lot of folks are feeling in “Crazy World.”

JC: Zach and I have always been careful not to speak from some place of moral high ground. We don’t want to be just one more person preaching to somebody, as if we’ve got all the answers, because I think the problems plaguing our country are very complicated. If you oversimplify them and place blame, you’re falling victim to the very thing you’re proclaiming to rally against.

In a lot of our songs, we just point out what we see. It’s almost a lament rather than a judgment. We’re all in this together. All of our countrymen and women, we created this – we all played a hand in it. We’re trying to point out our observations and underscore the fact that we’re all on the same team, when you really get down to it. We all do care about each other. I feel like we’ve got more in common than we realize sometimes. It seems like sometimes the world is wrapped up in greed and malice and angst and vitriol rather than peace and — not to sound cheesy, but — harmonious things, the things that really give us happiness.

ZC: Yeah, it’s funny. “Crazy World (Judgment Day)” and “This Too Shall Pass” are back to back on the album. And those are like two sides of the same coin, you know? “Crazy World” is the day you wake up and think, I have zero hope for humanity. The idea was you’re sitting in a bar, and you’ve had a few to drink. Stuff is coming across the news, and you’re just discussing the state of affairs, like, “Yeah, man. It’s still a crazy world. Not much has changed.”

I love that you just brought up that it’s like those two songs are two sides of the same coin because it does feel like “This Too Shall Pass” offers some comfort.

ZC: Yeah, as dark as I can get, I recognize that I’m probably a glass is half full person. John, I think you are too.

JC: Oh, I’m a hopeless optimist.

ZC: [Laughs] So, that song speaks to that. No matter how dismal it is, we have to find a silver lining. Friendships and family are where the true joys in your life come from, more often than not.

What’s the best thing you’ve encountered or experienced back on the road this time?

ZC: Oh gosh, I have so many good ones. Eating dumplings in New York in this little shop in Chinatown. We crammed in with all our people, sat with strangers, and the beers were flowing. Those nights are fun. The camaraderie of being on tour again: You’re just living together, and you come home with a million new inside jokes and phrases.

JC: One thing that was really cool about this tour is we brought somebody out in our crew as a roadie who had never been out of Texas. We saw the world through his eyes. His parents brought him here from Mexico when he was six years old. He hasn’t had the opportunity to do much traveling. I met him and thought he seemed like a cool dude, so we gave him a job as a roadie.

ZC: We’re all a bit more advanced in age and have made a few more laps around the country, so in some ways, you can be jaded by that. But he’s 21, and experiencing all these things for the first time. It was really fun to relive some of this stuff through his eyes.

On this album, it feels like you have found your sound, at least for now. Comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel are inevitable, but ultimately, you don’t sound like anyone else out there right now.

JC: Well that’s a huge compliment. I appreciate that.

ZC: We definitely look up to Simon & Garfunkel and the Everly Brothers and would gladly take a comparison, but humbly say those guys are masters. We’re trying to figure it out.

JC: Yeah, those guys are masters, but we want to be masters. Somebody’s got to carry the torch. I’m not saying that in a cocky way, but I would love to be somebody that attempts to carry the torch. It’s what we love to do, and it’s what we love to sing. Singing without harmony — I don’t enjoy it half as much. When I sing with Zach, my voice feels complete. So it’s almost like a musical necessity for us.

If it were just the harmonies, the comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel would still come, but it’s your writing too, which is so strong.

JC: A lot of people still ask, “Are y’all brothers? The way y’all harmonize, I feel like you have to have grown up with each other.” Well, we’re not brothers, but we have been singing together since we were 15 years old, so I guess that’s about as close as you can get without being blood-related. It’s like a vocal marriage.

As far as the writing goes, we try to be thoughtful and not say things in a way that’s been said before. We knew early on that we wanted to be the kind of writers who are not overly esoteric or hard to understand. We wanted to speak in a way that’s plain and understandable but at the same time, maybe put in a way that you haven’t quite heard it put before.

Photo credit: Paul Pryor

The Show On The Road – Freddy & Francine

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, host Z Lupetin’s conversation is with Freddy & Francine (aka Lee Ferris and Bianca Caruso), a deeply soulful duo who have been lifting up audiences around the world with their gather-round-one-mic harmonies and been-through-hell-and-back love songs.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Z. talks about Lee singing on Broadway and snaking through the gauntlet of substance abuse and Bianca finding her voice after too many years of dead-end jobs and giving herself the permission to let her voice lead her as an artist.

Canon Fodder: Mindy Smith, ‘One Moment More’

Posted on by Editor

I didn’t want to hear “Come to Jesus” in 2004. As the first single from Mindy Smith’s debut album, One Moment More, it’s a gentle pop hymn, delivered in the voice of a parent comforting a child. “Oh, my baby, when you’re prayin’,” Smith sings, “leave your burden by my door. You have Jesus standing by your bedside to keep you calm, to keep you safe, away from harm.” With a subdued roots accompaniment, Smith follows that child throughout her life, documenting her changing emotional needs as well as her changing relationship with her beloved parent. Her vocals lack twang, but they have a steadiness that seems to arise from the certainty of her faith that mother and child will be united in the next life. “Here in heaven we will wait for you arrival, here in heaven you will understand.”

Smith was writing from experience. In 1991 her mother died of cancer — a loss so cataclysmic that she and her father found it too painful to live in their small Long Island hometown. So they headed south, and Smith enrolled at Cincinnati Bible College (now Cincinnati Christian University), although she has said that decision was motivated by her desire to connect with some of her mother’s old acquaintances. When she released One Moment More thirteen years after her mother’s death, Smith filled it with songs of loss, recovery, and renewal. On “Raggedy Ann” she compares herself to a childhood doll whose seams are fraying and whose stuffing is coming out. On “Angel Doves” she reassures herself that “God is soaring above a world that is running out of love.” Musically, she melds several traditions and styles, from contemporary country to contemporary Christian, into a sound that never announces its ambitions or lets them interfere with her lyrics.

I didn’t want to hear any of it at the time. In 2004 I was still raw from a similar loss, the death of my father in 2002 after a long battle with brain cancer. I watched as one of the sharpest minds gradually lost his ability to speak or communicate in any way. I watched as one of the most generous hearts I’ve ever known lost his ability to recognize his sons. A church deacon and a small-town lawyer, he died just a few short months before the birth of his first grandchild and namesake, which seemed too cruel for me to comprehend. It shook me to my core, and I struggled to reconcile the God I had heard about in my small-town Southern Baptist church with the God who would strike down a good, humble man like my father. It felt like there was too much chance and chaos in the world for it to be overseen by a loving God, and I admit I grew angry and resentful.

Even two years later, the consolations that Smith sings about in “Come to Jesus” — namely, the promise that we will meet our loved ones in heaven — sounded cheap. I was tired of empty reassurances designed to rush someone through his grief, to dam up those messy emotions so others wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I was sick of having people clasp my shoulder sympathetically to tell me that everything happens for a reason. The idea that we could not possibly understand anything in this life, that we must wait until the next one to get any satisfactory answers, hit my ears with a vulgar dissonance. Ungenerous to all others in my confusion, I rejected what I thought were easy excuses and nursed my own angers and sadness. It felt righteous, in a peculiar way, and honest.

“Come to Jesus” is fifteen years old in 2019, and I am fifteen years older. Now when I hear the song, I listen with very different ears. I listen as someone whose life and livelihood involve absorbing all kinds of music constantly, which means that I hopefully have a better sense of Smith inhabiting and innovating these different genres. More crucially, I listen as someone who has grown spiritually and emotionally, who has further processed the tragedy of my father’s death, who has shed so much of that anger that once seemed so essential to survival. I can hear Smith’s song not as a litany of spiritual excuses, but as an expression of someone still grieving, still trying to work through the mayhem of grief in the hope that she might locate some essential truth of life. Her truth is different from mine, but it sounds like she had something healthier than anger to sustain her. And I can be moved by her song now in a way I couldn’t when I was younger.

So it was only in the last few weeks that I finally listened to One Moment More in its entirety and made it to the title track, which closes the album. That might have been too much for my 15-years-ago self to hear. It’s a song about leavetaking, general enough that it could be sung to a lover or a friend or anyone whose departure would upend someone else’s life. But we know it’s not that. We know that is song is about her mother, which makes the chorus sound even more desperate: “Oh, please don’t go,” Smith sings, that faithful steadiness having left her voice. “Let me have you just one moment more.” There is no poetry in that lyric, which only makes her pleading more powerful. It sounds more direct, more desperate, the emotional need stronger than pen and paper could hold.

The composure Smith shows on “Come to Jesus” has eroded into uncertainty. “Tell me that one day you’ll be returning, and maybe, maybe I’ll believe.” It’s that extra “maybe” that sells the sentiment, that conveys her struggle to maintain her faith. Ultimately, the arc of One Moment More veers from certainty to doubt, which seems unusual. Most albums, especially Christian or country albums from this era, would rather end on a note of certitude and firm belief, because the story of overcoming tragedy is attractive and reassuring. But Smith knows you never truly recover from grief. It grips and marks you for the rest of your life. We will mourn our parents until we die, and at this point in my life, that idea is inexplicably comforting.

Photo credit: Fairlight Hubbard