Basic Folk: Liv Greene

Oh, how I’ve longed to talk to Liv Greene. Every once in a while you come across a young artist that seems older and wiser than her 26 years. Liv’s been giving me that impression since I met her in 2019, when she was at Club Passim waiting tables and breaking hearts on the stage at just 21 years. Ok, enough about being young.

Liv’s been writing, studying music, and going to music camps since she was 12. Arguably she’s been studying music all her life with her Americana loving parents, who were filling the house with the sounds of Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, and Shawn Colvin, to name a few women in heavy rotation at the Greene house. Being the only of her friends that liked that kind of music, Liv attended many D.C.-area concerts with her mom, taking in the magic of live music at a very tender age. Speaking of tenderness, that’s what Liv Greene is all about and she digs into it in our conversation.

Liv started writing and playing shortly after she was inspired by a Taylor Swift concert. From there, she took off on the instrument and even sought out music education in camps like Miles of Music in New Hampshire. It was at that camp, as well as the arts academy Interlochen High School, where she started meeting peers with similar interests. She found herself living for summers with her music camp friends. Prior to her senior year at Interlochen, Liv was a closeted queer at her all-girls Catholic school mostly writing fictionalized stories into her songs because she could not deal with who she was.

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Liv attended and graduated from The New England Conservatory of Music and released her debut album (produced by Isa Burke) right in time for the pandemic in May of 2020. Shortly after that, she moved to Nashville and has spent the last several years on an intense path of self-discovery. Liv found her community, came out, wrote, and self-produced her new album, Deep Feeler (out October 18). On the album, you can hear the growth she’s experienced and you can hear her thriving in her corner of the Nashville music scene, including indie folk. We talk about all of this, including what it means to have a neurodivergent brain, music production, the roller skating community, and Liv’s favorite Taurus personality traits.


Photo Credit: Joseph Ross Smith

Cayamo 2024: A Behind the Scenes BGS Photo Diary

BGS’s third year on board Cayamo’s Journey Through Song brought no shortage of familiar faces and “fun in the sun” vibes.

From a jam-tastic BGS Nightcap set lead by our pals Mipso – which included appearances from Hiss Golden Messenger, Dom Flemons, Lizzie No, Rachael Price of Lake Street Dive, and Taylor Ashton – to live podcast tapings with Basic Folk hosts Cindy Howes and Lizzie No. There was our exclusive wine tasting experience hosted by myself and Mipso’s Jacob Sharp (who moonlights as a wine rep for Terrestrial Wines). There were stopovers in Aruba and the Dominican Republic and countless musical sets from the likes of Lyle Lovett, Lake Street Dive, Rodney Crowell, Shawn Colvin, the Black Opry, Waxahatchee, and so many more! Our eight days on the high seas went by way too fast.

Our team documented the whole thing (on our new Camp Snap screen-free digital camera!) so you, too, can soak up the sunshine and memories. Will you join us on board next year? The 2025 lineup was just announced and suffice to say we’ve already got some great things cooking for Cayamoans. But hurry, because this is one fest that sells out faster than you can say piña colada… – Amy Reitnouer Jacobs, BGS executive director

Booking information and more details available at Cayamo.com


All photos by Amy Reitnouer Jacobs shot on Camp Snap.

GIVEAWAY: Enter to Win a Free Cabin on Cayamo’s 2024 Voyage

BGS is so excited to be returning to Cayamo in 2024 to once again set sail with the premier roots music cruise! From March 1 to 8, 2024, Cayamo will set sail from Miami, Florida porting in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic and Oranjestad, Aruba while the greatest artists and musicians in Americana soundtrack the picturesque voyage.

In partnership with Cayamo and Sixthman, we’re honored to once again be giving away a FREE CABIN to a lucky roots music fan, who will join their fellow roots-music lovers on board the sold-out journey. Enter to win here.

In addition to a complimentary cabin, the winners of this giveaway will enjoy concerts and performances by Lyle Lovett, Lake Street Dive, the Mavericks, Billy Bragg, Rodney Crowell, Shawn Colvin, Lucius, and many, many more. Plus, don’t miss our BGS-hosted events, parties, and shows – to be announced soon!

Enter before December 31, 2023, for your chance to win a free cabin on the 16th edition of Cayamo. Winners chosen before January 31, 2024. Official rules viewable at this link.


Artwork courtesy of Sixthman and Cayamo.

Mary Chapin Carpenter Walks Us Through ‘The Dirt and the Stars’

Mary Chapin Carpenter’s fans have got to know her kitchen well since the start of lockdown. It is a beautiful space, often ornamented with bright, round peonies from her garden. It makes you long to be as tidy, and as tasteful, as Mary Chapin Carpenter.

It’s in this kitchen that she records her Songs from Home series. She greets us with the tender familiarity of a family member on a weekly Zoom call. Guitar slung around her neck, she’ll share some snippet of news or wisdom before singing to us from a back catalogue so deep that there’s always something appropriate to the mood of the day. Often there’s an unscripted appearance, even an added harmony, from Angus, her golden retriever, or her cat, White Kitty. It’s less a house concert than a singalong with an old friend.

She’s in her kitchen again as we talk, this time making chicken stock. “I’ve got two enormous pots of chicken bones and carrots and celery boiling on the stove,” she says, and for a moment, it’s like an audience with Julia Child. “I get it started just before noon and then it simmers for about five hours. Just before dinner time I take it off and put it in jars. Then it’s there for whenever I need it.”

I tell her that I’d been wondering, from seeing the immaculate state of her kitchen on her lockdown videos, if she ever cooked at all. “Well, I make sure I clean the dishes out of the sink!” she laughs. “I love to cook. This kitchen is a place where I’m so happy. I wish everybody could come over and hang out!”

She pauses, as the thought strikes her. “These are things that you didn’t even think about, when this all started, about half the things you’d miss. It’s one of the pleasures of my life, feeding people around a table. I miss it so much.”

Carpenter was supposed to have continued her nationwide tour alongside Shawn Colvin this spring, playing songs from her new album, The Dirt and the Stars. With all gigs cancelled, and the travel that usually “balances” her introvert tendencies curtailed, lockdown has been challenging for Carpenter, who lives alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“I’ve been very, very isolated for many months now,” she admits. “It’s a remote rural area, and I don’t need to leave the farm very often except to pick up groceries curbside and use the drive-through drug store. And just like everyone it can be tremendously lonesome and at times very hard, but my reality check at that moment is to remember that so many people are struggling so much more than I am. The minute I start feeling sorry for myself, that’s all I have to think about and I stand up a little straighter.”

After all, Carpenter quickly reminds herself, she is not completely alone — there’s Angus and White Kitty. “And here I am in this beautiful part of the world and I walk every morning for miles, I’m out in nature as much as possible and I really do try to use those elements of my life as meditation and medicine and inspiration.”

Her songwriting walks are a long-established part of her process, although she’s trying not to put pressure on herself to be creative during these extraordinary times. A friend recently phoned her and told her how the various things she’d hoped to accomplish while stuck at home were coming to nought, and how bad it made her feel.

“I said to her, and I think I was saying it to myself at the same time, who among us is going to be accomplished during this time? It’s asking too much. The best you can do in that moment of frustration is to be still and inhale and be kind to yourself.” She catches herself. “I know, it sounds very woo-woo and Oprah-like.”

Carpenter’s new album, recorded in January and February of this year, is arguably the most intimate and autobiographical of her career. But what’s particularly noticeable is the powerful thread of empathy that runs through it, along with a repeated message of tolerance for our fellow humans, all of us carrying our private burdens and flaws.

It’s there in the titles: “It’s OK to Be Sad,” “Secret Keepers,” “Everybody’s Got Something.” In “Where the Beauty Is,” she takes the image of kintsugi pottery — “the shattered pieces of a bowl/ Filled and fused with dust and gold” — to illustrate that our brokenness is what makes us beautiful.

The final song of the album, “Farther Along and Further In,” suggests that these discoveries are ones that Carpenter has been making herself: “There’s a crack in the armor, an opening/ My heart seeing out and my eyes see in/ Where they’ve never seen before.” She agrees with the analysis. “It’s like I’m writing about my own experience, but talking to myself at the same moment. And that new reckoning with self has everything to do with growing older, it’s directly connected to that. The wisdom that comes to you with growing older is the sense that you don’t care as much anymore about little things that used to nag at you. You’re able to let them go. You’re able to realise you can find sustenance and comfort and meaning in things you never did before.”

So much of life, she says, is struggling with oneself — wanting to be better, smarter, more accomplished. “It’s as if as you grow older you’re able to shed that somehow and not care as much. That’s the gift of growing older.” Even still, there are things that are hard to share, even in song. In her excellent three-part podcast, recorded with poet Sarah Kay, Carpenter shared the inspiration behind the song, “Secret Keepers” — born of a #MeToo experience in her past — and admitted to Kay that she found it difficult to reveal too much of herself in her work.

There are other difficult, poignant subjects, not least the death of her friend John Jennings, to whom she pays moving tribute in “Old D 35.” Her fellow songwriter and longtime producer passed away five years ago from cancer, aged 61. “We weren’t just musical partners — he was my best friend,” says Carpenter. “He had been my boyfriend years ago and we’d evolved into being oldest friends. I miss him every day — there’s a hole in my life that’s always going to be there.”

The talk of loss brings us to John Prine, who died of Covid-19 in April. “People are experiencing these losses and have been unable in many instances to even be there with their loved one when they pass away. There’s probably nothing crueller. I may be wrong, I’m just guessing, but I think this terrible disease and catastrophe became a lot more real when someone like John died of it. Sometimes things don’t seem quite real until they touch you directly.”

The scale of the pandemic was only just becoming apparent as Carpenter finished mixing the album. She had chosen to return to England, in order to work once again with Ethan Johns, who produced her last album, Sometimes Just the Sky. The West Country, where Johns’ studio is based, is one of the parts of the world Carpenter loves most, and she finds a beautiful symmetry with her own Virginia countryside. “I live in the northern part of the Blue Ridge, where the mountains aren’t so dramatic as North Carolina. It’s gentler hills and pastures and valleys and whenever I’ve spent time in that area in England near Bath, it’s real similar.”

She performed in a show in London before heading home to the growing crisis. “Someone said to me since, ‘You’ll be one of the few people who can say you had a gig in London in 2020!’” Even now, she can’t bear to ponder when her next live gig might be. “If I think about it too much I get really sad.”

It is no surprise to hear her vent her fury with the Trump White House. “This country is burning up because of the absolute abdication of responsibility of the current administration,” she says. “It’s a debacle, and I feel equal parts rage and sadness.” Her political outspokenness has often caused a backlash among parts of her audience — what she calls the “shut up and sing brigade” — and she says she’s still “incredulous” to hear it. “They’re saying that by deciding to be a songwriter or a singer you’re not permitted to have a conscience. I would direct them to Nina Simone, who said it’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times in which we live.”

Her passion for justice, both in her songs and through her support of organizations like the Women’s Refugee Commission, stems partly from the unusually global worldview she received during her childhood. Her father, an executive for the Asian edition of Life magazine, took his family to live in Japan for a couple of years when Carpenter was 11 years old. Her parents, prescient enough to know that they might never have the chance again, brought the children back to the US the long way, travelling through India, Hong Kong, Greece, Italy, and France.

It was, she says, a magical and eye-opening experience, and gave her “an understanding of what is necessary to be a contributing citizen of the world.” She notes, “My parents raised us to always speak out on behalf of people who have less than we do. That’s why it’s such an insult when people condemn artists for speaking out. I always think it’s a great loss when people feel they’re not able to speak their conscience.”

Still, a seam of hope for the future runs through this record, whatever present trials we face. “It’s disappointing to me when people think it’s a sad record – it’s almost as if they hear it and say, ‘There’s a lot of slow songs on here.’ Inherently it’s a record of looking toward the unknown future and believing that’s the best part.”

It’s certainly something she believes, as she return to the “solace and serenity” of the quiet farmland — to Angus, to White Kitty, and to her bubbling chicken stock.


Photo credit: Aaron Farrington

Sarah Jarosz Studies Her Heroes While Staying True to Herself (Part 2 of 2)

Wimberley isn’t just another “little Texas town” for Sarah Jarosz. It’s where she grew up, where she first fell in love with bluegrass, and where she found seeds of inspiration that grew into World on the Ground, her first album with producer John Leventhal and her fifth overall. From the sharp-eyed opener “Eve” to the quick-picking of closer “Little Satchel,” Jarosz gives voice to the stories of hometown life and the dreams that grow beyond it — a radically empathetic detour through her past that gives relatable depth to World on the Ground.

“Ultimately, if I’m being true to myself, if I’m moving myself within my music, then that’s the most that I can try to do as a songwriter,” she says. “That’s what has to be at the basis of any great song: a real feeling that you believe in more than anything. Even the songs where it’s written from another perspective, it’s still me in there, trying to inject what my beliefs are and what I am feeling at any given time, but in a poetic way that feels like you’re reading a story. That’s what so many great songwriters do and have done. I’m studying them and trying to honor them, but also be myself, just try to find that balance of honoring tradition and doing my own thing.”

In the second half of our two-part Artist of the Month interview, Jarosz reveals which Texas songwriters she turned to for guidance on this musical trip home, how to tackle a song about a small town, and more.

Editor’s Note: Read part one of our interview with BGS Artist of the Month Sarah Jarosz here.

The American small town is definitely well-trodden songwriting territory, and all the greats have returned to that endlessly inspirational well. Based on everything we’ve been talking about, you have different perspectives to explore, scenes to describe and a wealth of landscapes to uncover in that one place. What were you listening to when you were working on World on the Ground? Which artists did you turn to for inspiration?

Jarosz: I feel like in a way, the people I was listening to leading into this and during the recording process [were] a lot of what made me want to turn back to even writing about my Texas upbringing at all. When I was going into this, I think I had this moment. Sometimes as a writer I feel like, what should I write for the people who love my music? But I think it’s more important to say, what music do I love, and just get that zingy feeling from? How can I create that music myself? I want to write a song that I can sing and that I can believe in, because ultimately that’s all I can do.

Before John and I were locked in to work together, we met up in New York, and I played him a few ideas that I had lying around. From the get-go he was like, “Why don’t you try to change your approach and not necessarily write about your feelings and looking inward towards yourself? What if you tried to be more of a storyteller?” Just the simple act of him saying that, it changed my perspective a little bit. Simultaneously I was listening to all these Texas singer/songwriters. James McMurtry is one of my favorites of all time. I really did study his lyrics, because I think he’s one of the greatest in terms of creating these characters, but it doesn’t feel contrived — it’s like reading a novel in a song. Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, Lyle Lovett — Shawn Colvin, obviously, her music was why I wanted to work with John in the first place.

I was realizing, OK, yes, so many other people have written about their hometowns — but I never have. When I started writing music as a high schooler, so much of the feeling when you’re that age is wanting to leave, writing about what you’re longing for and what’s not right in front of you. There is such a wealth of images and landscapes and memories that I have that are a part of who I am as a person, and I had never really taken the time to write about them. That’s what led to a lot of these songs. With that being said, it was never, “I want to make a concept record about my hometown.” I realized there were all these throughlines after all the songs were recorded and done.

What’s the most difficult, or moving, song for you to listen back to, or one that was hard to tackle when you were writing it?

“Maggie.” That one is based on a real person, and I don’t think that’s something that I’ve done before as a writer. Thankfully, she actually has written me since it’s been out and told me how moved she was by the song. It’s funny because there’s so much truth and honesty in a song like that, but then it’s also still being creative. The blue Ford Escape in “Maggie,” that was a car of my parents’, so it’s still songwriting and pulling images in from different inspirations but it’s not all necessary literal or the actual story.

It’s trying to pull symbols together in a way that makes the most meaning. That’s what I tried to do there. In a way, if that was the most difficult song for me to face, it’s actually turned out to be my favorite song on the record. I felt that way when we were recording it, that I was kind of hitting on something that I’ve always wanted to do and write about, but wasn’t quite ready for before. I think “Hometown” would be the other one that’s just very, very moving for me, even still, to sing — sometimes it’s hard for me to get through. Those two songs stand out in that way.

It sounds like you experienced a lot of firsts that shook up World on the Ground. How do Undercurrent and World on the Ground separate themselves in terms of the growth that went into each of them?

I think Undercurrent was a step towards wanting to just be me. The three albums prior to that were full of tons of guests on a lot of the songs. The way we made those, I would record my part, and Gary [Paczosa, who produced her first four albums] and I would invite so many of my heroes and musical friends in, and we’d just layer, layer, layer, layer with lots of different people. Undercurrent was the first album where I was like, no, this needs to be more truthful to me, and sound like that. There are four songs on that record that are literally just me and a guitar, no other instrumentation, no drums — I tried to keep things very small with that in an effort to start peeling away and finding out who I am as an artist and trying to convey that in a record format.

That felt like the beginning of that journey, and World on the Ground feels like I’m fully in that journey. I just feel like I believe in these songs more than I have in the past — nothing against my old songs, because the thing that means the most is when people say songs mean something to them, and moved them in hard and good times in their lives. I’m not trying to detract from that, but I really try to see these songs through in a lyrical way that I haven’t before. John was really key in helping me do that and trimming the fat and being really clear about what the purpose of each song, and the story that each song told. I believe in every single song so much. That’s a really kind of beautiful feeling. I’ve loved all of my records, but I haven’t felt it this strongly before.

What did World on the Ground teach you about yourself as a songwriter you didn’t already know?

It taught me that there’s always room to grow. Before I started writing this record, I had this sense of myself, where I was like, okay, these are the sorts of songs that I write, this is the vibe, and this felt like a departure from that. No matter how much you think you know or how much experience you have or whatever life has thrown your way, there’s just always more, and there’s always more to be discovered and learned. I think that was a beautiful lesson that this record taught me and sort of inspired me going forward. For me, it’s all about the songs — I think that’s also what I realized with this record. The music that I love, it all boils down to the song. That’s what I tried to focus on this time around.


Photo credit: Josh Wool

The String – Shawn Colvin

In 1989 the album Steady On marked a pivot in Shawn Colvin’s life from playing bars to make the rent to being a leader in the singer/songwriter movement.


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Through a string of albums, including the hit-producing A Few Small Repairs, Colvin became a multi Grammy winner and an Americana Lifetime Achievement Award winner. This year, she’s revisited Steady On, recording and performing it in her signature, solo acoustic guitar style. Stripped to its essence, the songs speak as clearly now as they did 30 years ago. Also, an introduction to new Rounder Records artist Logan Ledger, a Nashville transplant with a voice so arresting his demo led to a production deal with T Bone Burnett.

Shawn Colvin Still Going ‘Steady On’ With 30th Anniversary Acoustic Album

Shawn Colvin’s new album will be intimately familiar to fans who have loved her from the start. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of her landmark debut album, Steady On, Colvin re-recorded the full album acoustically – and she’s posing on the cover with the same guitar strap she wore on the back of the original packaging, too.

Since her auspicious arrival on the scene, Colvin has sold millions of albums and won multiple Grammys, including her first one for Steady On, in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Recording. If you’ve seen her perform over the last 30 years, you’ve certainly heard these songs — “Shotgun Down the Avalanche,” “Diamond in the Rough,” and “Ricochet in Time,” among them. She invited BGS for a hotel room conversation while she was in Nashville for AmericanaFest, where she’s performing the album in its entirety.

BGS: When you went into these sessions, were you hoping to capture a certain sound for this version of Steady On?

SC: No, just an acoustic tone, a stripped-down, non-produced, sort of bare-bones rendition of the songs.

Because you’re so familiar with these songs, were you able to work pretty quickly?

Even though I co-wrote a lot of them with John Leventhal, he would give me pieces of production and I thought, the way I need to figure out how to write is to strip all this production down to just me and a guitar. Almost every song on the record began that way. I stripped it down. It’s the beginning of what became the produced version of Steady On.

I was curious if you wrote most of those songs on the same guitar.

Oh, I think so, yeah. The Martin D-28.

What is it about that guitar that suits you so well?

I bought that guitar in 1974, and it was a 1971. I was 18 and it was my dream to have a Martin guitar. I think I paid $400 for it. And it was just my guitar. I mean, that was a big deal for me to spend that kind of money. I played that guitar on the road I don’t even know how many years. I still have it. It’s pretty beaten up. And I retired it, but yes, in 1988 or ’87 whenever that was, that’s the guitar I was still using.

How many songs had you written up into the songs that were on Steady On?

Maybe three or four.

Wow. So these are some of your earliest songs.

Oh, yeah.

That’s pretty remarkable.

Well, I wasn’t really a songwriter. I wanted to be and I practiced at it, writing lyrics to John’s fully-produced pieces, which were really pop. And I love pop music, but I wasn’t very good at writing lyrics to it. You know, my heroes were all singer-songwriters from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Joni Mitchell in particular. Very personal stuff, and that’s not what I had been writing. I realized, I think I have my own story to tell and I opened up to that and then I liked what I was doing.

Were you living in New York at the time?

Yeah.

How did that city shape you as an artist, do you think?

Oh gosh, the city shaped me personally and artistically in a huge way. I underwent a lot of personal changes there, a lot of growing up, a lot of waking up. It’s a dose, as Levon Helm said in The Last Waltz. But I met people I’m still friends with to this day that really nurtured me in my 20s and helped me grow up. My best friend Stokes is still there in New York that I met in 1980. And the music scene was so rich!

I started out in Buddy Miller’s country band. That’s how I got to New York. He hired me to come sing because Julie had left the band. And he needed another, what we called then, girl singer. So I was in a band like that. I played solo acoustic at places like The Cottonwood Cafe and The Bitter End and I did anything I could make a buck at. I was also in a country band with Soozie Tyrell. I did rockabilly bands.

We were just putting together bands piecemeal, you know “Hey, can you make this gig?” Everybody was up for whatever, all the musicians, and you cobbled together a band from gig to gig, whatever you could get, just whatever we could do. So I learned a lot. I played a lot, which is part of my advice to anybody who might want it,who is a young up-and-comer. Play live. Just do it and do it and do it, you know? I think it makes you confident and good and better your craft and you learn. You’re a student.

What was your live show like at that time? Was it just you and the Martin, singing solo acoustic?

Yeah.

You were never intimidated by that?

Nobody ever listened.

What do you mean?

When I was doing bar bands four hours a night in the city, sometimes they did. That was the goal, to play well enough that maybe someone would listen. It’s where I developed this percussive guitar style that I have, because I thought, what can I do to make it sound like more instruments and do something a little bit different? So I made more noise that way. Sort of a rhythmic thing.

I think of that as your signature sound because I haven’t seen a lot of artists doing that.

And that came partly from Joni Mitchell, who made progressive, clicky sounds on the guitar. And I always thought she was using the back of her hand to go against the strings, this fleshy part of your thumb in the back of your hand. I realized later she was using her nails against the strings to give that click. But I developed it my own way.

As a new artist, how did you find your audience? Or how did your audience find you?

I started to make a name for myself a little bit down the Eastern seaboard, Cambridge and DC, New York, and some other areas in Massachusetts, and Philadelphia. So I was getting finally to play listening rooms rather than bars. I had a little bit of a draw. I got to go on college radio stations and they would play cassettes of mine. It was really helpful, especially in Cambridge, so I got some fans that way that weren’t just the New York people. Then when I put out the record, I wasn’t prepared it for what was going to happen. It was on Columbia Records and it was time for the big push. I’m like, “Sure, no problem.” And it was a grassroots global push. So that meant drive-time and morning radio shows, if they’d have me.

And God bless the label reps in all these different cities, which you don’t have anymore. Their job was to take you around the radio and try to get them to listen to you. And they had a reputation so they could usually get you in. Whether the radio station was really interested or not was always sort of up in the air. And then I would do press, anybody that would talk to me, a magazine and a paper — local, big, small, whatever, other radio if I could — and then I’d do a show at night. Sometimes there were 10 people. And I did that a lot. It was a groundswell, I guess you could call it. Radio stations did start picking up songs from the album. And next thing you know, I’d go back to a town like Boulder and people would come.

That is grassroots for real.

Oh yeah, for real. But you know, those people that have been with me from the beginning have stayed. I have a loyal following. It’s fantastic, yeah.

When Steady On was released in 1989, how did you define success at that time? What did success mean to you?

I remember being in Boulder and I had a day off and I like to ski. I was in a rental car and I was driving to… I can’t remember if it was Keystone, someplace close to Boulder, and I heard myself on the radio and I almost went off the road. That was to me a measure of success. Then the Grammy Award of course was pretty cool. Who could have thought that up?

How do you define success now?

I’d say first and foremost, if I write a song that I like, that’s the best feeling. It’s gotten harder to do for me. There’s less time, because there’s so much roadwork. Less drama in my life, to force me to the paper. There’s really not a better feeling than finishing a song. Writing is hard, but the fact that I can still sell tickets, that’s success to me. Not everybody’s in that position. I think those two things — and I can still do it. Physically I can still play and sing as well, in my opinion, as I ever have. So it’s kind of longevity and luck.


Photo credit: Deidre Schoo

MIXTAPE: Mother Banjo’s Womenfolk Playlist for Hard Times

Long before I picked up a banjo and started writing songs, I was a fan — an awkward teenage girl that stayed at home on Friday nights so I could listen to WKSU’s Profiles in Folk show. I found solace in the singer-songwriters that shared their heartfelt stories of hope and heartbreak. I most identified with the women artists like Dar Williams and Shawn Colvin, who spoke to me in every stage of life and became a key part of my road trip mixes and my playlists as I hosted my first college radio show more than 21 years ago.

I still host a radio show to this day — Womenfolk, highlighting the best in women’s folk/acoustic music on KFAI 90.3 FM Minneapolis. I’ve gotten to interview some of my biggest sheroes, including Joan Baez, Indigo Girls, and of course Dar and Shawn. It is the best way for me to stay connected to the next generation of songwriters, find new inspiration and introduce today’s awkward teens to female voices that speak to being yourself, finding love and embracing the hope that exists even in the darkest of times. I created this particular mix of mostly new songs to help me through pregnancy, reminding myself to be ferociously authentic and kind, no matter what life hurls at us. Mother Banjo

Our Native Daughters – “Black Myself”

One of my favorite albums of 2019, Songs of Our Native Daughters features four African American banjo-playing singers (many of whom have been staples of my radio show), including Rhiannon Giddens, Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Amythyst Kiah. Like this opening track, the whole album speaks to standing tall no matter what.

Vicky Emerson – “The Reckoning”

I have known Vicky Emerson a long time and have had the privilege of playing shows around the country with her, including a double release show we did this year in Minneapolis. Taking the production reigns, Vicky has released her most fully realized album to date with songs like this that speak to these times and showcase amazing voices, including Kari Arnett, Annie Fitzgerald and Sarah Morris.

Lena Elizabeth – “Get It Right”

One of my favorite young talents to come out of the Twin Cities music scene, Lena Elizabeth just put out her first full-length album featuring this title track. She’s embarking on her first tour this year so catch her if you can.

Jillian Rae – “Free”

Minneapolis fiddler Jillian Rae has played with many notable acoustic bands including The Okee Dokee Brothers, Brass Kings and Corpse Reviver. But around these parts, she’s probably better known for her own songwriting project that mixes Americana, rock and pop. This song is from her more acoustic EP, Wanderlust.

Tracy Grammer – “Hole”

Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer were hugely influential on my songwriting. (I even covered the tune “Anyway I Do” on my gospel record.) When Tracy released her first EP after Dave’s death, I was blown away and eagerly awaited her next solo project. Fourteen years later, we were finally blessed with Low Tide, featuring this awesome non-radio friendly tune.

Emily Haavik & The 35s – “Candle”

Duluth native Emily Haavik writes terrific songs with honest lyrics and infectious hooks. This song always makes me feel better no matter what state I’m in.

Heather Styka & The Sentimentals – “Love Harder”

I’ve known Heather Styka for years, but I’ll never forget when I first heard her sing this at a late-night showcase at Folk Alliance International Conference. I cried as everyone joined her in this cathartic anthem. If you haven’t already, check out her new album North–this song won’t be the only that will make you cry.

The OK Factor – “Love Song for Lucy”

Originally from Iowa, this dynamic string duo can do anything they set their mind to–re-interpreting pop songs, putting their own spin on traditional tunes and writing timeless pieces like this. The OK Factor’s new EP is a collection of love songs and lullabies.

The Lowland Lakers – “Time to Move Along”

Haley Rydell’s voice never ceases to move me, nor her deceptively simple songwriting. Although The Lowland Lakers are currently on hiatus while songwriting partner Nate Case is studying in Germany, Haley continues to play music solo and with the band Buffalo Gospel.

I’m With Her – “Overland”

I’m With Her is a folk supergroup needs no introduction. From my first listening, this song was one of my favorites as it hearkens to the best old folk songs–telling a personal story in the context of a changing country. This tune just feels timeless.

Amy Helm – “Michigan”

One of my all-time favorite singers, Amy Helm put on one of my favorite shows of the past year at the Dakota Jazz Club, blowing me away with this Milk Cartons Kids cover. This studio version from her new album features some amazing harmonies by Allison Russell (Our Native Daughters, Birds of Chicago) and Russell’s partner JT Nero.

Sarah Morris – “Confetti”

Sarah Morris does the impossible, writing songs about being kind without being saccharine or condescending. I love everything about this track–the message, the melody, her singing and her amazing band that bring this song to life.

Mavis Staples – “We Go High”

Quite simply, Mavis Staples is my favorite–as a singer, an activist and a relatable human that brings joy to all who get to experience her music. Although she is 79, this latest studio album proves her best days are not behind her. Thank God.

Mother Banjo – “Will Your House Be Blessed?”

Written by British songwriter and crime novelist John B. Spencer, this song is one I learned from Rani Arbo & Daisy Mayhem. It has become a favorite of the Mother Banjo Band and a staple of our live shows. It feels even more relevant now in our political climate and has become such a personal anthem for me, I couldn’t imagine not putting it on my new album, Eyes on the Sky.


Photo credit: Elli Rader

The Producers: John Leventhal

John Leventhal makes records that are almost impossible to categorize. Is Shawn Colvin’s 1989 debut Steady On folk or country? Is Rosanne Cash’s The River & the Thread country or blues? Are they roots or rock? Americana, perhaps? The man himself, a native New Yorker with a genial sense of humor and a geek-level knowledge of pop history, refers to his wheelhouse as “singer/songwriter,” but he says it in the off-hand way that lets you know it’s merely a placeholder: shorthand for a music much larger and more complicated than one simple term could ever convey.

Call it simply American, then. Nearly 30 years after his first producing gig — Steady On, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album — he works with musicians whose songs sprawl across many genres, alluding to various styles without settling into one in particular. In addition to Colvin and Cash, he’s worked with Michelle Branch, Kim Richey, Joan Osborne, Jim Lauderdale, Rodney Crowell, and Loudon Wainwright III, among others. He’s backed many more artists and co-written with even more than that. His fingerprints are on an impossible array of records; even if you don’t know the name, you’ve heard a Leventhal song before.

Fittingly, he defines the role of producer very loosely and admits it can change from one project to the next. He’d rather not sit idly in the control room fidgeting with the levels or supervising a small army of engineers and session players. Instead, he likes to dig in, get his hands dirty, and work as closely as possible with his collaborators, whether that means co-writing songs, choosing good covers, plucking out a bass line, banging a drumbeat, firing off a guitar lick, or laying down a bouzouki riff, if that’s what the song needs. From one moment to the next, he’s a sensitive sideman or a one-man band, Bacharach to your Hal David or Felice to your Boudleaux Bryant.

Perhaps his greatest gift as a producer, however, is that fanboyish excitement over every aspect of the music: his simple joy in the act of creation. That animates the music he makes with other artists, lending it a distinguishing liveliness, a sense of energy and urgency. All of those traits come to bear on Leventhal’s latest project, This Is Where I Live, the first album by Stax soul legend William Bell in 10 years, not to mention his first for Stax in more than four decades. Bell is most famous for penning hits like “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “Born Under a Bad Sign,” both of which are American standards by now, and, at 76 years old, his voice retains all of it vigor and expressiveness.

It’s ostensibly a soul record, but for Leventhal, it’s something more — it’s a “singer/songwriter” record.

At what point in the process did you come in on William Bell’s album?

Right from the get-go. A year-and-a-half ago, I was doing a show in San Francisco and I was walking to a soundcheck. The phone rang and it was Joe McEwen, who works at Concord, which owns the Stax imprint. He asked if I would be interested in producing William Bell. Really, it was like a lightbulb went on and, within a few seconds, I not only knew I wanted to do it, but knew what it should be. If people even think about me at all, they know I do a lot more singer/songwriter stuff, but I actually grew up playing R&B and soul music. It was the first music I learned when I became a musician. It’s a huge part of my DNA. So I was really excited. I knew all about William. I love his voice and I love a lot of those old records. The only caveat I had was that I wanted to write the songs with him.

Why did you want to do that?

I want to say this in the right way so I don’t sound arrogant. I can’t explain it. I just knew I would be able to do it really well. I felt confident. I do a lot of collaborating and a lot of songwriting, and maybe that’s slightly unusual among producers of rootsy music. But I just felt immediately this intuitive sense that I knew the shape of the record. I knew immediately that it should have some substance to it and that it shouldn’t be a pastiche or a nostalgic rehashing of Stax and Muscle Shoals clichés. I knew it needed to honor that tradition, but move past it at the same time. I can’t explain why, but I just understood that intuitively. So that was how I approached it. I had to woo William a little bit. He’s a reserved guy. I don’t think he had done any real collaborating for a while.

It doesn’t seem like a soul revival album. It’s a bit more comfortable in that style, and it sounds like you put a lot of thought into that aspect of the record.

This kind of project can fail if it gets too enamored of the language and clichés of when the music was vibrant and on the radio — the early '60s through the mid '70s. When people fall in love with that language, they just rehash it and spit it out again. But it can never be as great as it was. So I’m not going to go in and make this the Stax cut or make this the Motown cut. You can hear when people do that. But, for me, it’s always a losing proposition. I trusted that enough of this language was in my DNA, and I know it’s in William’s DNA, so I knew we could honor what had already been done without getting bogged down in it.

But I want to say this the right way. I say this with a creative and loving attitude. I love the tradition of great soul music, but in some ways I’m completely uninterested in re-creating it. That’s not interesting to me, in the least. What it really boils down to is this: It’s just like doing any other record. I really want to write and produce great songs with meaningful vocals and some real feeling at their core. I want to listen to a song and really be moved by it. William was communicating some real feelings, some deep feelings. That voice is so glorious. Even though I love soul music and wanted to make a soul record, at the end of the day, for me, it just boils down to great songs, great vocals, and hopefully some thoughtful arranging and production.

What kinds of conversations did you have to prepare?

It’s hard to put into words. William is a reserved guy, and he didn’t know me from Adam. We had arranged for him to come up to New York and hang for a couple of days at the studio. I was already so inspired that I had come up with ideas for four or five songs … some lyrics mostly. William is 75, and he’s in amazing shape physically and vocally. But when you’re that age, you can’t sing what you sang about when you were 25. You’ve lived 50 more years. You want to pick the songs a more experienced man is going to sing. And William has got this beautiful, dignified reserve. He’s ultimately a ballad singer. He can get down with the best of them, but when you think of “You Don’t Miss Your Water” and “Everybody Loves a Winner,” those are two of the best soul ballads ever written. Those songs cast long shadows.

Short version is, my friend Marc Cohn and I had started this song “The Three of Me.” I had some music and we had a little bit of the lyric. I played it for William and he started singing it, too. So that was a good first song. We finished the lyrics, and he sang on the demo, which basically ended up being the final record. I was lucky enough to play everything.

It sounds like an extension of what you’ve done in the past — the singer/songwriter album as a soul album. Which is interesting because, when most people think of roots music, I feel like they think of country or folk. They don’t think of R&B or soul.

I am so with you on that, man. I really am. I love country music, and I love bluegrass, too, but so much of roots seems to come from those perspectives. I look at what I did with William to be exactly the same thing that I did on Rosanne’s last record, which won Americana awards. I see them coming, in many ways, from the same tradition. The language is slightly different, but I think you’re right. I hope William is embraced by the roots community, because this record sits right there.

You mentioned that R&B was the first music you learned and played professionally.

When I was growing up in New York, if you were going to make a living playing guitar and bass, it meant you were going to play in bars and clubs. If you were going to play in bars and clubs, it meant you were going to play music that people liked to dance to. And the music that people liked to dance to was R&B and soul music. Not exclusively, but that was what you had to play and you had to play it well. I’m very grateful for it.

One of the first gigs I got as a working musician was with this guy Billy Vera, who lives in L.A. now but grew up in the New York area. I was in his band, and we played for dancers. Billy pulled deeply from the soul and R&B tradition. I studied all the great drummers and bass players and guitar players. Cornell Dupree was the premiere R&B guitar player in New York, and I used to go hear him play all the time. My guitar ideas tend to be people like him and Curtis Mayfield and Reggie Young and Bobby Womack. I just inhaled all that stuff. My favorite bass players were James Jamerson and this guy Tommy Cogbill, who played on a lot of great Muscle Shoals records, including “Chain of Fools.” So working on William’s album felt like I was coming back to the beginning for myself. In some ways, soul music is closer to who I am than all this singer/songwriter stuff I’ve done up to now.

How did you transition from that role to producing?

My first successful collaboration as a songwriter and producer was Shawn Colvin’s first album, Steady On, in 1988. I produced and co-wrote most of that album, and it won a Grammy. That was the first thing I did. Up until then, I was a sideman and was starting to get slightly disgruntled. I wanted to do my own thing, whatever that might be. Luckily, I developed this collaboration with Shawn. The next thing I know, I’m a record producer.

It sounds like you play three roles: producer, songwriter, and sideman. Do you feel like a good producer needs to be able to multi-task?

The short answer is, I think it’s unbelievably valuable. But I also think you could probably be a successful small producer without knowing a whole lot about music or engineering. It’s an amorphous job description. It can go from someone who knows when to order the right bottle of wine, to someone who’s hands on and is essentially an engineer and arranger. I’m, at heart, an arranger and a musician. I love songwriting. I love playing. I love arranging great rhythm tracks. I just love all of it. In some ways, my perspective is, it’s my life. I love all of it. So, if I can do all of it, all the better.

In the beginning, I think I approached it in a slightly more traditional way, where I stayed in the control room and cut tracks. Over time, I learned how to be a recording engineer and started playing more instruments. For me, it’s great, but I can’t say if it’s right for other people, particularly current producers — because I’m probably not as up to date as I should be about what other people have been doing. People can make valid records even when they don’t know that much about music. But my heart tends to be drawn to people who are very musical, as well as very soulful and creative. To me, just being musical alone isn’t enough. You have to have a creative, soulful heart and a thrust toward originality. There are a lot of factors that go into making great music for me.

The role of the producer, especially in the roots world, is so nebulous that people can define it very differently. They can be hands-on or hands-off. They can play or they can find the right musicians to play. They can write songs or help others write songs.

For me, it’s really hands on. I think the hands-off approach has value to it, as well, and I should probably try it occasionally, but it’s just not as much fun for me. I get really excited. That’s the musician in me — the fanboy. On one hand, the producer part of me needs to retain a detached perspective on what’s happening in the studio, but the musician part of me gets really excited and wants to get in there and play bass. So it’s really hard for me to resist, and at the point it’s like, "Why even bother resisting?" It’s such a joyful thing, and I have to say this: Making this record with William was one of the most joyful things I’ve done in my life. Hopefully that comes through when you listen to it.

Like a lot of the albums you produced, This Is Where I Live was recorded at the place where you live. But it doesn’t sound like all of these records are coming from the same place or the same studio.

Some effort does go into not repeating the same old strategies. If you do this job long enough, you’ll start to develop some paths or strategies — certain ways to record instruments, certain ways to write a song, certain ways to arrange them — which will give you decent results but nothing new. That path will be too well worn. So I have definitely put some effort, spiritually and specifically, into not doing those familiar things all the time. I try to inject some element of mystery and surprise on all levels. I’m always looking for moments that end up having a little bit of surprise — an unexpected chord change, a surprise lyric, a mysterious piece in the arrangement. All that stuff is important to me, and I think it keeps the listener involved, as well.

How does that work for an artist that you’ve had a long-term collaboration with, like Shawn Colvin or Rosanne Cash?

You always needs a break, at a certain point, to recharge, but there are certain people I just click with. Shawn Colvin and I, we just get each other. She’s done plenty of records without me, but the records we’ve done have been pretty successful. Rosanne and I have a complicated deal since she’s my wife. Our collaboration is awesome now, but if I go back to the beginning, maybe it wasn’t quite as awesome. It took us a while to really find the best in each other. I’m always up for doing new stuff.

Rosanne’s most recent album, The River & the Thread, grew out of a road trip that you took together.

We had been looking at whatever her next record was going to be. I really wanted to write with her, and I kept thinking it would be great to do … I hate this word, but it would be great to do a "concept" record. What I really wanted was to find something to write about other than just the random collection of your next 12 songs. Not that there’s anything wrong with a random collection of your next 12 songs, particularly if they’re great songs. But I thought it could be amazingly powerful and fun to find something to hang it on, and we just happened to be taking a trip to Memphis and rural Arkansas to look at the house that her dad grew up in. It had been falling apart, and Arkansas State University was making plans to rehabilitate it. So, we decided to make a road trip of it.

We had a friend in Muscle Shoals, and I had always wanted to go there because so much great music has come out of that area. A few things happened on the trip that seemed incredible — like something you could write about — and we had this vague idea that we could write an album about these places and these people. We wrote two songs right away, one called “Etta’s Tune” and another called “A Feather’s Not a Bird.” One is bluesy and the other is country. I took those as the parameters of what we were gonna do, and we just ran with it. It was really fulfilling for both of us, and thankfully it seems to have connected with a lot of people.

I associate your records with a strong sense of place, especially that album, but also others like Rosanne’s Rules of Travel and the Wreckers’ Tennessee. Is that something that’s important to you?

It certainly was on [The River & the Thread]. You know what, I don’t think it’s ever come to the forefront in the way I think about myself or how I’m inspired, but I do think you’re right. Both Rosanne and I travel a lot. We do 50 shows a year. I love going to American towns and cities and trying to soak up some of the vibes on all levels, musically and spiritually, just to get a feel for places and people outside of my own New York experience. I think that’s inspiring. Shawn and I wrote a song called “Wichita Skyline,” and I remember thinking that, when we were kids, that tradition of writing songs about places and folding a compelling story into a place was a big part of some of the great songwriting when I was younger. I think it has a lot of power, but I think I carry with me this sense of being an outsider when I go to a new place and just hover. There’s a gulf between being somewhere and feeling like you belong there. What is the idea of home? What does that even mean? That’s a thing I always carry with me.

Especially since home is a place not only where you live but where you have your studio, where you create, where you turn those experiences into music.

There’s a song on William’s record along these lines. Part of my job as his producer and collaborator was to get a sense of him on the record. He has a slight reserve to him, and I wanted to inject … I didn’t really care about injecting a lot of Autobiography with a capital "A." But I thought it would be great to have elements of his story in some of his songs. We were in the studio one day, talking about how we knew all these musicians who, as they got older, maybe they grew up in Shreveport or New Orleans or wherever. At their heyday, they either went to L.A. or Nashville, but when they got older or the recording scene dried up or the vibrant part of their career ended, they ended up moving back home. That happens with a lot of people. And Williams said, "People just want to go home." Everybody wants to go home — metaphorically, spiritually, literally. So the last song on the record is us playing around with that idea. Everybody wants to go home. Everybody wants to have that place that feels like them, that centers them.

I heard that as a gospel song, where home is heaven. Everybody wants the comfort of salvation.

It’s definitely a gospel tune, and of course it could be read as heaven. The soul tradition is heavily indebted to the church. A lot of those feelings people can have toward Jesus, a lot of those feelings people can have toward their lover. The yearning is similar, I think. We all need it. We all want it. It’s why we write all these damn songs.

The Producers: Buddy Miller

Even if you weren’t already aware that Cayamo Sessions at Sea was recorded on a cruise ship, even if the title didn’t spell out the circumstances of the album’s creation, you could probably guess as much. Featuring several generations of roots artists covering old country songs, the record sounds sunny and breezy, light but not lightweight. Buddy Miller and Lee Ann Womack make “After the Fire Is Gone” sound more about the make-up than the break-up, and Elizabeth Cook emphasizes the buying rather than the crying on “If Teardrops Were Pennies.” Even Kris Kristofferson’s new take on “Sunday Morning Coming Down” sounds like nothing so serious as having to disembark at the end of a week at sea.

It’s to Miller’s considerable credit that none of that is a bad thing. A producer and central performer, he keeps things light, as though you’re flipping through vacation photos, but that strategy showcases the amiable dynamic between performers and singers more than the ocean-bound environs. It sounds like it would have been a blast to make, even if they held the sessions in an outhouse or a bank vault.

For nearly a decade, Miller has been a prominent figure on the Cayamo Cruise, which sails from Miami to St. Maarten and Tortola and features a who’s who of roots and country artists. In that time, he’s only missed one boat, and that’s only because he was recovering from a heart attack. It struck him onstage but, professional that he is, he finished the song.

Over the last 40 years, Miller has emerged as one of the most imaginative musicians in Nashville, both on the stage and in the studio. A former Deadhead turned sideman turned producer, he has helmed albums for a mind-boggling range of artists: Shawn Colvin, Emmylou Harris, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Devil Makes Three, the McCrary Sisters, Dr. Ralph Stanley, and Robert Plant. When Patty Griffin wanted to make a gospel record, he had her sing at the pulpit of the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville, with the band on the floor playing up to her.

“Every record has a story to tell,” he says. “Every record is a whole different world. I don’t come into anything with a preconceived nothing. I might hear things before we go in, but I won’t impose that on an artist. I just hire the players I love and see what’s going to happen.”

Why did you want to make an album on the Cayamo Cruise?

I grew up loving music, in general. I loved blues. I loved rock. I loved folk. I was a Deadhead at the age of 14. When their first record came out, I bought it pretty much for the cover. And then I started going to every show I could make it to, until around ’72 when Porter Waggoner, Tammy Wynette, and Ralph Stanley won that war. I stayed in that country music camp and gradually drifted away from the Dead. But I remember, from that very first show, there was a sense of one big family coming to those Dead shows. Now, it’s legendary and they make movies about it, but even at those first shows, you’d see the same people. They were immediate friends — an extended family. Everybody loved each other and everybody was there for the same reason.

I guess that’s a long way of saying that there’s a similar feeling on the boat, although it’s a different … I hate to use the word “demographic.” Is that what the politicians are using these days? It’s a different set of people, but all with the same heart. They’re all there for the music. It’s not a party boat. It’s a lot of people — 2,000 or 2,500 people — and I just want to hang out with them all. They’re all great. And I thought it would be interesting for them to have the veil pulled back on the process of recording. That’s why I did it. I don’t think people have any idea how records are made. I don’t even know how magical records are made. How does that magic happen? So we’re showing them the nuts and bolts — what musicians do, how they play together in a room, pick a track, fix it up, do all that stuff. I thought that would be of interest to these people that I love. That, and I worked on this television show called Nashville. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it …

Definitely.

I worked on the pilot for Callie [Khouri, who created the show], and then, when the first season got picked up, I worked with T Bone Burnett producing [the music for] it. Most of the things we produced together, I would say. I continued with it, but I think it drove him crazy. I have a higher tolerance for bullshit, I guess. But now I love it and I love the people — especially these two little girls, the Stella Sisters. John Prine was going to be on the cruise, and what I wanted to hear was those two little girls, the Stella Sisters, singing, “Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County?” And then John would come in singing the verses to “Paradise.” It seemed like a good thing to document. It’ll make the sweetest record. Unfortunately, John got sick and couldn’t make it.

But that was where the idea came from. What I do is, I try to engineer collaborations. That’s just how I think: Let’s pair this with that. I think in collaborative terms. I don’t know if it’s because I’m lazy and don’t want to do all the work by myself. But I think it’s because I just want to hear certain things. Shawn Colvin asked me to do a record of hers a while back, and I thought, "You know what? Brian Blade and Bill Frisell. I would love to hear her voice framed by those two musicians." That’s what I’m talking about. It’s all about coming up with your dream teams.

Tell me about setting up a studio on the boat.

I asked one of the engineers I work with, Gordon Hammond, if he wanted to go on this cruise. We bought a bunch of microphones, a lot of gear, and set up in what was a bowling alley on the ship. We managed to turn it into this vibey … I hate that word, “vibey.” It’s very homey and warm, with all our gear set up and the band set up in a circle. There are about 100 chairs, because we couldn’t fit more than that in there and I didn’t want the sound of more than 100 people breathing on the same time to work its way onto the record.

What are some of the challenges that come with recording on a boat?

I guess I don’t look at it that way. There are certainly challenges, like when somebody turned on the wrong light switch. Boats just have a lot of switches on them. We couldn’t always tell what they were for, so somebody turned on the disco ball accidentally and it started blasting some dance song. That was actually a fun moment. And an easy problem to fix. You just don’t want to stop if there’s a flow going. It’s as much about the lighting in the room, the air in the room, how it feels. All of that affects the music. Outside of that, there aren’t really any challenges that are any different from recording on land.

The one and only cruise ship I’ve been on felt very institutional to me. Aside from the scenery and the sun, it didn’t feel like it would be especially conducive to making music.

That could be anywhere. That could be any recording studio. It’s all about … I don’t want to use the word “staging.” I’ve been working on television too long. But it’s about the feel of the room, how close people are together. I like people to be right on each other. You can bring in nice-looking rugs, even on a cruise ship. You can drape things on the wall, turn the lights down. You can make any room feel nice. That’s what we did in that bowling alley, which actually felt pretty nice to begin with. And it felt great when we had it set up and started recording. I think everyone enjoyed themselves — the artists and the audience. They loved to see that recording process, even though this isn’t really the process. The vocals went down with the track, and the track went down fairly complete. Maybe a couple of tracks have two or three overdubs and a few vocal fixes, so it’s not really like making a record. It’s a little more honest than that, but it still gives people a view into that world.

So there’s an instructive or an educational element to this project.

Exactly. I thought, if people love music enough to get on the boat, then they might love to see that process and see how artists say, "You try singing that part. Let’s flip on the chorus, and you take the harmony while I take lead. Let’s leave that line out. Hold the drum till the chorus. Don’t have the bass come in until the fourth bar." All of that stuff is worked out long before the audience gets involved, so they don’t know what goes into it. This is a very, very simplified version, but it’s still something I think they find fascinating.

There’s a nice range of artists on this album. You have younger artists like Kacey Musgraves alongside older singers like Kris Kristofferson. Was that something you were thinking about, that generational exchange?

Yeah. It’s a funny thing: My name is on the record, so I have to be involved somehow, playing or singing or just having a presence on it. My part is very minimal, but I had to be there. If it was just me doing whatever I wanted to do, I probably wouldn’t even be on half of those tracks. I would have put Kacey singing with Kris or someone else, not me. But it’s my record company and my name goes on the album, so I have to do something. I think it’s a good record. I like it. Maybe because I don’t hear myself is why I like it so much. That’s what makes my records so hard to listen to.

Nashville is like no other place in the world for songwriting. People come here from all over the world — songwriters, young singers, all these young women. In addition to the cruise and the television series, I do a radio show on Sirius XM. Usually it’s weekly, or just whenever I can get it done. I have a guest come over every week, and lately I’ve had some of these younger writers that I run into. I find it amazing that they’ve been doing this since the age of 13 or 14. That’s when I knew I was going to be making music for the rest of my life, but some of these kids have already started writing songs. A lot of them have their parents’ support, too. That was something that wasn’t really around, when I was a kid. My parents wanted me to do anything but music, maybe because there was this whole other subculture that was tied to the music. I think there’s less money in it now than there was when I got started. I think. I don’t really know much about that end of it, but it does seem like the music business has dried up. You might know more about that than I do.

I hear conflicting reports. Some people say it’s still possible and there’s great music being made, and others are very pessimistic. I guess it all depends on who I’m talking to.

There’s always great music. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder for it. I think with downloads and iTunes and everything, it’s more about singles than it is about albums. That’s the part I miss. You would make a record. The Grateful Dead made Anthem of the Sun in 1968, and you wouldn’t think about chopping it up into 10 little songs. Ralph Stanley made Something Old Something New back in the early ‘70s and, even though I’m sure there was no intention of it being a themed record, it just flowed together so well that you had to listen to it in that sequence. You wouldn’t want to download just one song. Or Porter Wagoner. He was doing concept records before the Beatles. So I’m glad vinyl’s making a comeback.

I think that’s something that’s overlooked in country music, especially. There are so many incredible singles, but there are a lot of amazing albums, too. Making a good record is a very different process than making a great song.

I don’t know a whole lot of big country artists. Well, I know some, I guess, and I think they still look at it as as making a record. And gosh, when I was growing up — and I’m old! — it was about the single. That’s what got played on the radio, in mono. It was all about the mono mix. So, maybe, in a way it’s not so different; but I would make a point to buy the albums and listen to side one all the way through, then side two. There might be a stinker in the middle of side two, but that was all part of the package.

When you start working with an artist, is that what you’re thinking about as a producer? Are you looking at these projects as albums rather than songs?

Completely. It’s funny you ask that, because I’ve never thought about it. I think that’s because I don’t produce anything that is going to end up where people are going to care about singles. In my mind, the audience is buying an album, so we’re making an album. I just finished a record with Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin — a duets record. They’ve made some incredible records, and all they cared about with this one was the vinyl. Steve, in particular, was very concerned with sequencing for vinyl. We cut a lot of songs together, but we just put enough songs on there that would fit and sound great on vinyl. I’m happy to be thinking along those lines.

That’s one thing I actually went to school for as a kid, was to learn to use a Scully lathe. For most of my life, that was a great skill to have. Then it became pretty useless. I don’t actually have a lathe. I have enough useless stuff in my house that weighs 500 pounds. But I like being around all that old equipment with all of its old smells.

I do think the weight of that equipment — the tactile quality of it, the smell, and look of it — does add to the way you experience music.

I’ve got so many old, heavy microphones. I guess the heaviest one I have is an RCA 44-BX, that big … I don’t know what you call that shape. Not the big egg, but the one with the angles on it. You see Frank Sinatra singing into it all the time. It weighs a ton. It’ll take down any mic stand. It’s a warm mic, a beautiful-sounding mic, so it’s difficult to record with. But I’ll put that up or my old Neumann U47 because they take the singer someplace. You look into that thing; you get up close to it and you can smell it. You look into that thing and you start singing and you think about who has sung into it for decades. That’s part of creating the world that you record in, and it affects the music. There are great new microphones, of course. I keep buying new ones that sound really good, but when it comes to the singer trying to tell a story, you have to give them a mic that’s really been down the road.


Photo credit: CJ Hicks