Tag: singer songwriter

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

Joe Henry Surrenders to the Song

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Joe Henry is sitting and chatting in the living room of his vintage, Spanish-style home in Pasadena, California. The subject of the note that starts off his new album, The Gospel According to Water, comes up. He looks over his left shoulder and points to the corner.

“It’s that guitar right there,” he says. “It’s an all-mahogany Martin from 1922. It was the first guitar they made that was created for steel strings.”

Seeing this small, plain instrument, it seems impossible that it was from this that he conjured the note in question, a sound deep yet brittle, intimately resonant. It’s at once ancient and fully present in the now. And it’s a sound that serves as something of a motif throughout the marvelously moving, affectingly poetic cycle of songs. It was a sound from a specific source that was echoing in his head when he sat in the Los Angeles studio of his longtime friend, recording engineer Husky Huskold, to set a new batch of songs on tape.

“I played him one song from Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says. The song was “Mama and Papa Hopkins,” a 1959 recording from the point of view of young Lightnin’ getting his feuding parents to see the good they share.

“It was just vocal and acoustic guitar. And Lightnin’ is mostly singing to a single string that he’s playing. And yet the way it’s recorded, it’s so heavy. There’s such a sense of ominous space. And I said, ‘Look. I know I’m not him. I’m never going to be Lightnin’ Hopkins. But listen to what’s going on here. There’s something that’s making this so visceral in a way that I want to hear. Even if this is just demos, I want to hear a sense of drama.’”

You’d think Henry, who just turned 59 last week, would have had more than enough drama. A week before Thanksgiving 2018, he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasized to his skeletal system. (He is in remission now and feeling hearty.) When he went in to record, it was a week before Father’s Day. All but two of the songs had been written in an unexpected rush of expression that started at Valentine’s Day. He specifically references those poignant holidays when giving the timeline.

As he plucked that first note for “Famine Walk” (one of two songs on the album written during a two-month writing residency at a small art college on the west coast of Ireland, before the cancer diagnosis), he had no idea it would be how he opened the album. He had no idea he was making an album.

He just wanted to get these songs down while they seemed fresh, and that’s all he thought he was doing in the course of two quick days of recording with his son, as well as reeds player Levon Henry, pianist Patrick Warren and guitarist John Smith sitting in on some of the songs, and with David Piltch playing bass on “Book of Common Prayer.” At the end of the second day, he went home to listen to the recordings, sitting in his office with his wife Melanie Ciccone, Levon, and a friend. Only then did he really hear what he had.

“We just listened to the whole thing,” he says. “And it was so obvious to me and to everybody in the room listening back that it felt fully realized. I mean, it’s raw. It’s really spare. But emotionally speaking, I heard it and thought, ‘I don’t know if I’ll get closer to the intention of these songs.”

The only thing added later was the background vocals of Allison Russell and JT Nero, AKA Birds of Chicago, on the songs “In Time for Tomorrow” and “The Fact of Love.” He would have added his longtime drummer Jay Bellerose to some of this, but when he sent the tracks to him, Bellerose responded with a simple voicemail: “Um, not on your life.” His drummer’s instincts of when not to play, though extreme here, were exactly right.

In its sense of space, The Gospel According to Water is a perfect portrayal of the experiences that brought it about, mystifying and mystical in as personal a way as can be. At times it’s as elliptical and elastic as the engagingly playful folk-jazz that’s been a signature of his last several albums. But here that portrayal is stripped down to its essence.

At the center is the natural fragility of Henry’s voice as he lingers over key words and phrases in ways that can be enchanting and startling, sometimes both at once. While it’s instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with his work, it stands apart not only from his previous 14 solo albums, but also from his many production credits: for New Orleans titan Allen Toussaint’s final works (including the 2006 The River in Reverse, a collaboration with Elvis Costello following the city’s devastating flood), Bonnie Raitt, Rosanne Cash, Bettye LaVette, the Milk Carton Kids, Joan Baez’s most recent album Whistle Down the Wind, and Rhiannon Giddens’ and Francesco Turrisi’s stunning there is no Other.

But he winces at this being considered his “cancer album.” He even considered trying to avoid the topic in interviews and promotion of the release. But ultimately he opted for openness.

“Whether it’s fair or not, it’s going to happen,” he says. “I lost a little bit of sleep over that, wondering how I can mitigate that. And then I just realized that I can’t now, more than I ever could, control how people respond to the music — if they respond at all — and rein that in… People are going to hear it like that, and there’s not much I can do about it. It’s an aspect of how this record happened and what it is.”

Indeed, as the music made its way out to the world, friends and fans alike started sending him notes, almost all mentioning his health issues. He came to accept that for the good intentions, too.

“I just believe in the songs enough,” he says. “They’re already moving out into the world without me. They’re going to have to make their own way. They’re going to have to straighten their own teeth, find their own job. I can only do so much and when I go out and perform these songs, I may or may not at times offer any framing context about how the songs occurred or when they occurred.”

He references a comment made many years ago by his mentor T Bone Burnett, who produced Henry’s 1990 album Shuffletown, when discussing his Christian faith in regards to his art. Burnett said that while some sing about the light, he sings about what he sees illuminated by the light. Henry addressed that, in his own way, when he first played a few of the songs in public, in a concert at the Los Angeles’s Largo theater.

“Part of my preamble was to say, ‘Look, I know I’m holding this shoehorn that would help you into the tight fit of a big batch of new songs. And if I have one reluctance to hand this shoehorn over it’s because I don’t want you to think, from what I’m about to say, that where a song comes from is what a song is,’” he says. “A song is not where it comes from. Just because my particular health crisis has invited me to receive these songs in a particular sort of way, that is not what the songs are.”

He thinks back to being with Toussaint, doing interviews right after New Orleans was flooded in 2005, his home among the many destroyed. In interview after interview, Henry saw Toussaint refuse to deliver the “heartbreak” stories journalists craved. Finally, when pushed by a CNN interviewer, he made his point.

“He said, ‘You have to understand something: More than a drowning, this was a baptism,’” Henry recalls. “And talk about something that silenced the room, myself included. I’ve thought about this so many times since this occurrence for me, the fact that Allen wasn’t in denial about what had just happened. He just had the ability to see, that his vision didn’t stop with this trauma. He was seeing beyond.”


Some of that is elusive on the album, found in shadows cast by the metaphorical light. The song “Orson Welles” is a good example, with its arresting chorus: “You provide the terms of my surrender, I’ll provide the war.” He’s still mystified how that one came about, the words written as he and Melanie flew from Burbank to San Francisco.

“That’s just something I found falling off my hand,” he says. “I open my notebook and I literally watched my hand write ‘Orson Welles’ at the top of the page. And I didn’t know what Orson had to do with anything. It’s just one of those moments where it felt spring-loaded. I didn’t believe I was writing about Orson, but I believe that somehow his specter was kind of directing, gesturing me on to something, somewhere I needed to go in that moment. And I just followed, because, you know, who wouldn’t?”

He found himself thinking about a part of Citizen Kane in which Welles’ title character wants his newspaper to have headlines from a conflict in South America that is petering out, so he cables his correspondent there, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.” (In real life, William Randolph Hearst instructed his staff, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war.”)

For Henry it took a different turn, though, with the idea of surrender — certainly tied to his health situation, and the ultimate lack of power over it, but extending far beyond that.

“I feel like I’ve written about surrender a good bit,” he says. “And I don’t mean surrender in terms of resignation, I kind of mean surrender in terms of radical acceptance, which is empowering, which is motivating, as opposed to the idea of collapse.”

Two titles stand out, though, for the clear view of the basics of life, the perspective brought by such things as loss, age, kids growing up and facing mortality. “The Fact of Love” is pretty much self-explanatory, but “Salt and Sugar” really captures it. “Everything is salt and sugar now,” he sings, boiling it down to things that make life possible and meaningful — though too much of either can kill you.

He explains that he and Melanie have been doing some “decluttering” in recent years, having left the large house in which they raised their two kids, and moving twice to subsequently smaller places. But the song definitely shows what he’s seen from the light brought by his health.

“It’s paring things down to salt and sugar,” he says. “Everything. What matters? How do you make a record? How do you express what you want to say? Who do you spend your time with? What do you spend your days doing? All that.”

He recounts many of the changes in his life in recent years, the moves, the attachments and the letting go of attachments. Finally, he sums it up in a way that gets to the heart of what he has done with The Gospel According to Water, and it’s just as on-point as that note he plucked to start the album.

“I mean, just, you know, occupy life.”

Photo Credit: Jacob Blickenstaff

MIXTAPE: The Milk Carton Kids, In Harm’s Way

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“There’s a paradox at the heart of great harmony singing: when voices combine in so elemental a way that they disappear into each other, the effect is dizzying, mystifying, disorienting, and yet by far the most satisfying sound in music. Here’s a VERY incomplete playlist, spanning a few generations, of bands defined by their harmonies, who set my mind spinning with their vocal arrangements, execution, and pure chemistry as singers.

“Full disclosure: my own band is included aspirationally and for the sake of self-promotion. Author’s Note: Sorry not sorry for naming this playlist with a pun.” — Joey Ryan, The Milk Carton Kids

The Jayhawks – “Blue”

That unison in the first few lines is so thrilling cause you know what’s about to happen, and when the parts separate it just feels so good.

Gillian Welch – “Caleb Meyer”

The harmonies and Dave’s playing are so intricate in this song you’d be forgiven for glossing over the lyrics, which tell the story of an attempted sexual assault victim killing her attacker with a broken bottle. Check out the Live From Here version with Gaby Moreno, Sarah Jarosz, and Sara Watkins, and catch the alt lyric subbing “Kavanaugh” for “Caleb Meyer” about halfway through.

Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris – “Hearts on Fire”

Just one of the all-time great duets. Who’s singing the melody, Emmylou or Gram? Hint: trick question.

Our Native Daughters – “Black Myself”

Do all supergroups hate being called supergroups? I wouldn’t know. Our Native Daughters is a supergroup though, and the power of their four voices in the refrains and choruses of this one are all the proof I need.

Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, & Emmylou Harris – “Those Memories of You”

It’s insane that three of the great singers of their generation just so happened to have this vocal chemistry. Their voices swirl together like paint and make a color I’ve never seen before.

boygenius – “Me & My Dog”

Favorite game to play when this song comes on is “try not to cry before the harmonies come in.” Very difficult. Impossible once they all sing together.

The Smothers Brothers – “You Can Call Me Stupid”

GOATS. IDOLS. Favorite line is, “That’s a pun isn’t it?” “No, that really happened.”

The Milk Carton Kids – “I Meant Every Word I Said”

My band. Imposter syndrome. We recorded the vocals on this whole album into one mic together. It helps us disappear our voices into each other’s.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – “Carry On”

For me, CSNY are the pinnacle of that disorienting feeling harmonies give you when you just have no idea what’s going on. I’ve never been able to follow any one of their individual parts and I LOVE that.

Sam & Dave – “Soothe Me”

When the chorus comes around and you can’t decide which part you want to sing along with, you know they did it right.

Louvin Brothers – “You’re Running Wild”

The Louvins sound ancient to me. Primal. The way their voices rub against each other in close harmony is almost off-putting but I’m addicted to it.

The Highwomen – “If She Ever Leaves Me”

There’s probably even better examples of the Highwomen doing that crazy thing with their four voices where they become one entirely unique voice, all together, but this song is just so good I had to go with it. And the blend in the choruses is just as intoxicating as it gets.

I’m With Her – “See You Around”

Really an embarrassment of riches in modern music on the harmony front. Hearing I’m With Her perform around one microphone drives me insane with the best possible mix of confusion, jealousy, and joy.

Mandolin Orange – “Paper Mountain”

The melancholy is so satisfying when either one of them sings alone, and then they bring that low harmony and I have to leave the room.

Skaggs & Rice – “Talk About Suffering”

This whole record is a masterclass in two-part harmony. It changed my entire concept of singing. I’m Jewish, but when this song comes on it makes me sing wholeheartedly of my love for Jesus.

The Everly Brothers – “Sleepless Nights”

The absolute masters of both parts of a two-part harmony standing alone as the melody. Credit to Felice and Boudleaux for that, for sure, but the Everlys executed it better than anyone before or since.

Simon & Garfunkel – “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) — Live at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY – July 1970

This is far from my favorite S&G song, but this live version especially showcases what geniuses they were at arranging crossing vocal lines, unisons, parallel melodies, nonsense syllables and swirling harmonies. Plus the nostalgic “awwww” from the crowd gives me hope that a sensitive folk duo could one day achieve mainstream success again.

Shovels & Rope – “Lay Low”

This starts out as a song of profound loneliness with just one voice singing, then the harmony comes in and it gets… even lonelier? Harmony is magic.

Boyz II Men – “End of the Road”

I’m a child of the ‘90s, don’t @ me. I never realized at all those 8th grade slow dances that we were subliminally being taught world-class harmony singing and arranging. Good night.

Photo Credit: Jessica Perez

Grace Potter Sets the Scene with Dramatic ‘Daylight’

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Grace Potter possesses one of the most commanding voices in popular music — which is a good thing, because on Daylight she’s got something to say.

Potter co-wrote much of the new solo album with producer Eric Valentine, with whom she fell in love while still married to a member of her band — which is now broken up, too. After their divorces, Potter and Valentine married, started a family, and now live in Topanga Canyon, California.

The overwhelming emotions of these dramatic life changes are channeled into Daylight, with many of the songs written with Valentine, and on occasion, his longtime buddy Mike Busbee, who died in September.

“Love Is Love,” a potent opener to the project, grabbed immediate attention as the first single, but in this interview with BGS, Potter goes deeper into musical pathway that ultimately led her to Daylight.

“Release” is about the aftermath of the breakup. Who was the first person you played that for when you finished it?

Grace Potter: Eric. Busbee actually texted it to Eric but it was only half the song. Our voice recorder cut off before we finished. But he just wanted Eric to hear where we were at with the writing and Eric had to pull over the car because he was bawling listening to it. And Eric doesn’t cry easily. So that was a really important moment and one that I didn’t expect.

That song, I’d started it myself in the bathtub and it had sat in my voice memo bank for like a year and a half before Eric had heard it and was like, “Let’s not sleep on that one. Let’s pursue that and see where it goes.” Obviously it went and went and went and it’s definitely the one that gets under my skin, every time. It’s hard to play live actually.

And you’re setting yourself up as the character that set this all in motion, too.

Yeah. “I know that I caused this pain…” And that really is the full taking ownership and being accountable for your choices and knowing that those choices are not always this self-righteous, “I can do no wrong” thing. Humans are vulnerable. Humans do make mistakes. Humans change their mind. Lives and careers and happiness and financial fortitude – it all shifts and changes over the time that we live. And the more I’ve lived, the more I realize that it’s okay to give yourself permission, to be that vulnerable.

You quoted the opening line to “Release,” and the opening line on “Shout It Out” sets up that song’s storyline, too. I’ve always thought that those opening lines are something you do really well, but I didn’t realize until researching for this interview that you went to film school.

Oh yeah.

So I’m curious, do you think there’s a correlation there? Because when you make a movie, you have those establishing shots in the beginning, and in your songs you have those establishing opening lines.

And sometimes I like to mislead. I like that opening line to take you in, like, a Quentin Tarantino direction. But it’s actually like a Nora Ephron romance. But I really love storytelling. It’s the same thing I do when I’m writing my sets too. Every single song and every musical experience has to take you on an emotional journey. So there’s a launch point and there’s a revelation, which you know, within the first 20 minutes of a movie, you’re always supposed to basically set up the premise of the movie and potentially introduce one twist. For me, my life was full of so many twists while I was writing Daylight that it wasn’t hard.

After the Nocturnals ended, you had to start a band again. What’s an audition process like to be in your band?

I just want to be around people I like first. Then hopefully they’re good at music. For real. Life is too short to be in a band with people that don’t fit into your ethos or feel, or just don’t feel right. You get these feelings, you get a sense when you’re in a room with someone, if they suck the air out of the room and they have that negative energy, it really changes your entire life and your entire demeanor.

You can feel yourself going kind of gray. I call it the Eeyore effect. You know, it’s this “uhhhhh” feeling. So I generally avoid Eeyores. Although an occasional well-balanced, calm person who doesn’t talk all the time is a wonderfully welcomed part of the road because we can’t all be psychotic extroverts. It’s enough with just me and my baby. But I really enjoy finding musicians who specialize in something that’s just one step quirkier than what you would expect.

Busbee, what I loved about him was that not only was he an amazing songwriter, he played the trombone. Just randomly, like, “I studied trombone.” Really? Eliza Hardy Jones, my keyboard player and singer in my band, is a next level, Olympic champion quilter. Quilting is her thing. She’s actually got a huge show in 2020. She’s doing a massive exhibition in Nebraska at the quilt museum.

Our new drummer, Jordan West, was working for Roland demoing the audio equipment, but actually was hiding in plain sight for so many people. I was looking for a female drummer who could sing, or a female bass player who could sing, or a female guitarist who could sing. I just wanted two female voices that could do all the Lucius parts. So it was fitting the puzzle pieces together for me. Instead of auditioning a bunch of people saying, “I know exactly what I’m looking for,” I just waited until I found a flow of people that felt right. And if they happen to play an instrument I needed, then you’re hired.

Kurtis Keber, our bass player, who’s been with us since last year, came into our world through my previous drummer, Matt Musty, who is now out with Train. We miss him all the time, but these happy accidents happen where you find your people. I saw Kurtis the other day. I was like, “Kurtis, what are you doing? Are you in the studio?” He goes, “No, no, I’ve been building. I’m helping do some carpentry.” My longtime guitarist [Benny Yurco] is now becoming obsessed with recording and becoming one of those crazy studio guys — from the humble beginnings of not even using one guitar pedal to this mad scientist lab they have in Burlington, [Vermont] now.

I like jack-of-all-trades people who like doing lots of things. Those are the things that attract me to people. Their strangeness. Their idioms, their specific obsession with just the tiniest little thing. You know, loose leaf tea. You can talk for an hour and a half about loose leaf tea? I’m in, count me in.

I read the lineup of your Grand Point North festival this year and you did an acoustic set on that Sunday night. What is it about that presentation that you enjoy?

Well, Warren Haynes from Gov’t Mule has been a longtime collaborator and it’s been something that we have talked about doing because we share a joy of being musical and not really knowing what’s going to happen. And not having the stakes be so high that there’s an entire band behind you train wrecking. You know what I mean?

Usually you have to rehearse and really gain a mastery over every single song and arrangement, but when you’re doing an acoustic set, there’s so much freedom to explore. Warren’s musicality and my musicality are complementary to one another where we can take it in a lot of different directions and kind of wring out the towel different every night.

We’d done it a lot backstage and not in front of people, but we felt like it would be a cool thing to share because so many musicians, they just get out there and they run the Ferris wheel, they crank the thing up and they do the same show night after night. There’s been nine years of my festival. People have seen me play with my band. They’ve seen Warren play. He’s played three times in my festival. So I really wanted to treat the audience to a different experience.

Is part of that perspective because you went to a lot of festivals growing up?

Yeah. I came from the jam band world. Warren really ushered me into it. I was very much standing in the shadows of some amazingly talented people who paved the way for me. The festival circuit is really the only way that I was able to break out on my own and be noticed and stand out. I think it’s because of those festivals that I have the sense of diversity. I can take it in a lot of different directions and it’s more fun that way.

And if you’d go to a music festival, you’re going to hear seven, eight, ten genres of music in one place and love every single one of them. I think my instincts took me in that direction, to continue on in my career through creating in the moment, more than creating for a forever thing. …

I think none of my records have ever done my musicality justice because it’s like a high school photo album. It’s this one moment — and maybe it was a very manipulated moment that isn’t even the real reflection of what I was feeling in that moment. So Daylight was the opportunity to completely break that down, take away that premise, take away this idea of having to bottle lightning, and package it and sell it to the world. And instead have an experience. Be vulnerable and open to it and see where it takes you.

As you were talking about festivals, I was wondering, did you ever get an ear for bluegrass?

Absolutely. I grew up listening primarily to Appalachian and Celtic music, which have so many deep connections. And from my family’s record collection, I was obsessed with traditional English, Irish, and Scottish songwriting because the storytelling has these archetypes in it. It’s like the Brothers Grimm. There’s these really intense, very dark stories of women that are shape-shifting and there’s these evil goblins, and then they turn into a beautiful woman. This is a combination of fantasy and reality and love and lust and danger and war. There’s all these amazing cinematic storytelling moments in those songs.

So I grew up around that, but then bluegrass came into my world because in the festival scene, there was so much crossover. I got to meet and be in a songwriter circle early on in 2006 with Béla Fleck, Chris Thile, Jim Lauderdale, and Buddy Miller. It was such a cool lineup, pulling all these people together from all these walks of life and just playing. And it was very humbling. It made me realize I got to get my shit together, my instrumentation, because these guys know how to hold it down.

I understand that you’ve moved from Vermont to Topanga Canyon, which must’ve made your inner hippie very happy.

Oh man! My inner hippie became my outer hippie. I walked to the store two days ago in a pirate shirt with a Burberry trench coat, sweatpants, Doc Martens, and a flower crown. And I didn’t even think about it until somebody sent me a photo of it and I was like, “I did what?” That was just my usual day-to-day getup. That’s Topanga. I live and breathe that lifestyle and those people really get me.

It’s a real community too. It’s a small, small group of people. And again, I think the thing I’ve been finding that I want in life is accountability. And in a big city like L.A., you can hit someone with your car, drive away and never see them again and not really ever worry about getting caught. But if I, or anyone in town, sees anything out of the ordinary, we check in on each other. That’s how tight-knit we are, and how much we care about one another. And it’s a really, really wonderful community to be a part of.

What do you hope that fans will take away from the 2020 version of Grace Potter on tour?

You know, everything about my life has been unexpected, even to me, so I certainly can’t tell people what to expect yet because I just — every bit of it has been this ride. And as I’ve gone on as a musician, I realized that my favorite part of being a musician is inviting people into that ride with me. Instead of presenting them with a packaged thing, that is what it is, I don’t know what it is! I don’t know how this is all going to work. I’ve got a baby now and my life has fundamentally changed in so many ways. I can’t wait to see how it manifests onstage. I guarantee you there will still be headbanging, that’s for sure!

Photo credit: Pamela Neal

An Incomparable Album, ‘White Noise/White Lines’ Is the Kelsey Waldon Experience

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

I’ve had the good fortune of knowing Kentuckian country queen-in-waiting Kelsey Waldon for almost the entire time I’ve lived in Nashville — more than eight years at the time of this writing. I’ve stood over her unfathomably enormous cast iron skillet, filled to the brim with bubbling, sizzling battered fish. I’ve sung harmony on one too many choruses of “Smoky Mountain Memories” after perhaps one too many slugs of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey with her, too. 

And yet, in listening to her brand new album, White Noise/White Lines, I still found myself picking up fresh tidbits of her extraordinary yet downright ordinary approach to musicmaking, songwriting, self-expression, and artistic exploration. Waldon, despite limitless comparisons to almost every female country forebear to ever growl through a lyric, remains a paragon unto herself, a true singularity in realms of American roots music. 

White Noise/White Lines cements the fact (which has always been plain as day to those who dug deep enough) that Waldon will refuse tidy, one-for-one comparisons to any/all other country stars and writers who have come before her or who count themselves among her contemporaries. Except perhaps two: Loretta Lynn — whose “Coal Miner’s Daughter” inspired Waldon’s own “Kentucky, 1988” — and John Prine. The latter is fitting, in so many ways, now that Waldon makes her label home with Oh Boy Records, label of the denizen of Kentucky songs, meat and threes, and plain spoken oracle-like wisdom through lyrics. 

A brief album by many measures, White Noise/White Lines captures technicolor moments of Waldon’s life, her joys, her musings, and her homeplace, encouraging listeners to lean into the record’s brevity and engage wholly with each constituent moment therein. Because truth needs no more than a moment.

For BGS I made the trek out to Waldon’s cabin outside of Nashville and after a quick stroll around the vegetable gardens and a tour of the many Kentucky-themed decor items imported from one state north, we settled in the kitchen, sipping water out of mason jars, to talk.

People routinely refer to you as being similar to Loretta, similar to Tammy Wynette, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline. People are constantly making these comparisons to these kind of foremothers of country and I wonder how that makes you feel, to be a bookend against someone like Loretta or Tammy Wynette?

Kelsey Waldon: Honestly, I think that’s an incredible compliment. Those are all, you know, my sisters that have gone before me, women that I’ve looked up to quite a bit. Especially in the country music realm. However, I also kind of feel like, especially with this new record, I think it’s apparent that hopefully I’m also finding quite a bit of my own thing. 

Sometimes when people say things like that to me it’s like, well maybe their scope of country music isn’t that wide. When someone would be like, “You sound like Patsy Cline!” I’d be like, “Uh, no I don’t.” [Laughs] I mean, I love Patsy Cline and I hold her up as something sacred, I wouldn’t ever even sing Patsy just because nothing touches that. 

I think it can kind of be, dare I say, a lazy comparison to just kind of name [some popular woman country star.] It’s definitely there. Even sonically, I was so inspired by them. Especially Loretta, absolutely.

I hope the new record showcases that with the years we’ve spent on the road — just using even my own touring band. It starts at country with me, I can’t just flip off a light switch and say, “Oh, it’s not country!” I guess some people can do that, but I don’t see it that way. Country is just so much embedded in me. No matter what form my artistic expression comes out, that’s still gonna be there. It just may not be cookie cutter, it may not be formulated. It may not even sound exactly like that. One thing that I think the growth of this record shows, hopefully, is that these are my songs, I’m not a throwback artist. I’m not a retro artist. I am an artist making music in 2019.

I did want to talk about your band, I think it’s remarkable. It’s getting more and more rare that folks tour with the folks who played on the record, because — and it’s not the fault of anybody — they’re trying to make money on the road. So if they stack their record, of course they aren’t bringing those people on tour. Why is it a priority for you to have the same band?

There are obviously all of these amazing musicians out there who are session musicians and a lot of people I’ve been fortunate enough to play with myself. I’ve learned a lot from [them]. This time around, this was always a goal of mine, to have a record that had a band I wanted on it. I worked really hard to find the band to really fit those pieces together. It took me a while…  just trying to figure out really what I wanted. My last record, I’ve Got A Way, caused the right people to gravitate towards my music. I mean, I eventually found the band that I have now because they heard those earlier records and they were like, “I would love to be a part of this.”

The band I have now, which is Mike Khalil, Nate Felty, and Alec Newnam — and Brett Resnick played on the record, but he doesn’t get to play with us a lot anymore, he plays with Kacey Musgraves, which is wonderful. But with the band I have now I just knew it. I was like, “I think this is it.” We all knew it. Even Brett. People were like, “We think this is the right combination.”

In that way, too, there’s nothing wrong at all with using session players, I just think, honestly — and I might be a little biased — my band is just as good as any. I think they could, and they will be one day, they will be those session players. They care so much about their craft and they work hard. I’m very lucky. 

One of the things that excites me most about this record is that I’ve always heard the bluegrass influences in your music, but they’re really forward in this record. Especially in your rhythm playing, in your rhetorical style in your writing, in your vocal phrasing, even in the arrangements with the twin fiddles and there are a couple of “fast waltzes” on the record. I love that “Lived and Let Go” really could be played on bluegrass radio. 

I think that is such a huge compliment, thank you.

It’s bluegrass! I wanted to ask, and not just because we’re The Bluegrass Situation, but in general, because this is a huge part of the canon of music you reference and that you listen to. Who in the bluegrass sphere influences you now and who has in the past — and I’m gathering Ola Belle Reed is at least one of them. 

I love Ola Belle, obviously, we did an Ola Belle song on the record. Well, I love that you can pick that out. To me, I feel like it’s plain as day that there’s a bluegrass influence all over it. To some people it’s not as apparent, I guess. I’ve had some people just be like, “What is this thing that you’re doing?” It’s because they don’t listen to bluegrass. I’m like, “I STOLE that!” [Laughs]

I guess I understand now why they don’t put those two together, if you’re talking about mainstream country, because that’s clearly not. But to me, I’m always like, “Of course bluegrass is country.” It’s also bluegrass, but it’s also country.  It’s like the OG country music. 

I would say one of my favorite influences, one of my favorite singers ever, is Dale Ann Bradley. She’s up there for me. I really think Dale Ann should be a legend, honestly. And Ralph Stanley, and obviously I love Bill [Monroe], and Jim & Jesse, and all those groups. And early Keith Whitley, I’ve been obsessed with that for a long time. 

I think it’s interesting that you mention both Ralph and Keith back to back like that, because you can hear elements of both of their vocal phrasing and vocal techniques, in what you do singing-wise. 

The same thing with Dale Ann. They have such unique registers of their voices and it’s something that I really relate to. Sometimes I didn’t really know what it was that I was doing. I could kind of hear my own voice in [their vocals]. If that makes sense? I could really relate to that. It’s so soulful. 

I feel like Keith could sing on anything. [Laughs] He sounded exactly like Keith. That’s the beautiful thing about a country singer to me, he could sing on an R&B track and it would be sexy as hell. It’s like George Jones — and Dolly can sing on anything, as far as I’m concerned. That’s a great singer, to me. Ralph, I’ve always said that he is like the Pop Staples of mountain music. It’s like he doesn’t even have to be loud, but he is so loud. He’s barely singing. He’s just projecting. I love Flatt & Scruggs as well. 

New artists… Molly Tuttle, I love what she’s doing. That new record. She’s really taking a genre and making it her own. Something that’s not worn out or tired. Doing something fresh. She has accomplished making this new for people. In my own way, I hope to do that as well. 

I don’t guess there’s anybody else completely new, besides like Sister Sadie, and Dale Ann! [Laughs] They are some BAD girls!! Dale Ann, man. The mark of a true artist is that she can sing all of the covers she does. Like I said, I think Dale Ann should be a legend. 

Words are clearly your priority in your songwriting. You’re prioritizing what you’re meaning to say first and foremost, then making the melody and music and everything work around what you’re trying to say. It sounds effortless when you listen to it, but I wonder what kind of intention goes into that?

Songwriting is kind of interesting to me in that way. I’ve actually heard a couple people be like, “It sounds effortless.” Sometimes, it is effortless and you’re just like, “Wow that kind of poured out of me. I didn’t realize it was in there but it poured out of me in like five to ten minutes.” With this record, though, there were definitely a couple of things I had to go back to. I had the meat and taters, but there were a couple of things I rewrote and made sure made exactly the sense I wanted them to make. There’s a balance there, too. You don’t want to kind of go too far, over-analyzing the whole thing.

With “Kentucky, 1988,” I think your songwriting up to this point has felt so personal, and so tightly intertwined with who you are, that I almost didn’t realize that you hadn’t written this exact kind of song, yet. What brought you to the point of wanting to be that direct with telling your origin story? Was it more intuitive or more purposeful?

That was definitely purposeful. That is awesome that you’ve observed that, because I’ve felt the exact same way. I was writing new songs and I felt like, “You know, I haven’t written my ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter.’” I don’t really have something that is kind of like this definitive origin story. I just set out to write it. The title was actually kind of inspired by someone I forgot to mention, Larry Sparks — one of my favorite singers. 

Oh my gosh!! “Tennessee, 1949!!” 

Yeah! Yeah, it was inspired by that. That and a Tom T. Hall song that has Kentucky and a year in the title, with the comma and everything. In my head all of that sounded so cool. Everything about it, the rhythmic feel, it all rolled right off my tongue great. I just had to write it. People always [say], “That’s very vulnerable and transparent.” Well yeah, isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? [Laughs]

I know a lot of artists say this, but I definitely think this is the most personal thing I’ve done so far. I think all of it has been very transparent, in a way. I want to completely embrace that. I want to be as much of a freak as I want to be. It’s not like I was afraid to before, I just don’t think that I was ready. My mom always said I was a late bloomer, but she said, “When you bloom, baby, you’ll bloom!”  

I did want to ask you about the significance of the Chickasaw Nation members singing on the record. We hear them at the end of “White Noise, White Lines.” What’s the personal significance of that for you? And are you a tribal member? Is anybody in your family a tribal member? 

No. All of the Rollins side of my family, which is my granny’s side, they were all of French and Native American descent, but I never claimed anything like that. I just think it’s been something that’s been such a part of where I grew up, culturally. Even just hunting for points [arrowheads] and having such a respect for that way of life and culture. 

It’s always really hard to keep this story short, when people ask me about the song, because I wrote it right after this amazing experience I had back home in Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky, my hometown. When I went back to watch a ceremonial dance that the Chickasaw from Ada, Oklahoma [performed]. They came to re-bless the Wickliffe Mounds. They ended up lodging at my Dad’s that night, for free, [he was] cooking the food, doing the catering and stuff. I ended up staying down there and visiting.

We just became friends with the members of the tribe. We had so much fun. They’ve kept in touch… My dad took them arrowhead hunting for the first time, and they were doing ceremonial dances out on my dad’s land as well. I think he really really was appreciative of that. We were kind of the only people who ever lived down there in those river bottoms, maybe besides [the Chickasaw]. I mean, it’s the river bottoms. That’s why we find all these artifacts. No one has been down there except us. 

I just remember thinking about how awesome the weekend had been and the radio had been on white noise for literally fifteen minutes and I had no idea. I was just in this tranquil moment. The song is just a detail of all these things. The solar eclipse had also blown my mind that weekend. Just realizing how small we actually are, compared to what is even going on in this universe. 

Naturally, I included the details. “Chickasaw man got a buffalo skin drum,” because Ace — Ace Greenwood and Jesse Lindsey, that’s who’s on the song — actually did have a buffalo skin drum. It was pretty badass. My dad asked them to sing some songs on the porch. I love Ace’s voice, it reminds me of Ralph Stanley. It’s a voice that just feels like it’s been there for a long time. It’s so pure. I just loved it, I was really touched.

He sang a song that had been in his family for generations. The message of the song was basically, “Though I’m far away I’m still near you. No matter where I am. We are together.” In that moment that really was something I needed to hear. I put that [on the record] not only because I thought it was beautiful, and I wanted people to experience what I felt, but I also wanted the record to feel like an experience. 

Ace told me one time when we were down there that the media likes to tell his people who they are and that’s not who they are. I think in a way, perhaps it’s also why I thought it would be really beautiful to have that at the end as well. I hope it doesn’t seem like it was for my own reasons, I guess. I was just writing about that weekend and I felt like it was so beautiful to me I wanted it to be documented. 

I think it makes a lot of sense. And I’m not saying it’s not a complicated thing to talk about, or that it doesn’t trip into some territory that we as settlers will never fully understand, but I do think that it follows perfectly with you bringing your whole entire self to your music. So much of what you do is tied to place and is tied to coming from Kentucky. 

That was another part of it, showcasing where I’m from. And the cultural background of it. 

And not just the colonial background of where you’re from? 

No. I mean absolutely not. To me, that’s exactly how I saw it. Nail on the head. It might cause a little bit of question, but I think that’s good. ‘Cause then I’ll get asked about it. And then I’ll tell ‘em. [Laughs] 

Photos by Laura Partain for BGS. See the entire photo story.

WATCH: Darrell Scott Reminds “It’s A Great Day To Be Alive”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Song sorcerer and musical mage Darrell Scott is celebrating autumn with a refreshed rendition of his ever-popular song, “It’s A Great Day To Be Alive.” In a nod to his acoustic roots, Scott recorded a bluegrass version of the hit, which has been covered by many artists in country, Americana, and bluegrass. In October, he released the official music video — depicting fall festivities like hay rides, a corn maze, and other images of the season — which, as he tells it, was actually inspired by a surprising collaboration.

“I found that a local Nashville corn maze (Honeysuckle Hill Farms) wanted to put my image and song ‘It’s a Great Day to be Alive’ into its corn maze design this fall,” he explains. “And since I had never made a video for the song, and since the song’s message is as needed as ever, we decided to make a video with great help from family and friends. I love the result.”

Feel the warmth of autumn through this music video; watch right here on BGS.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

For ‘Dolly Parton’s America’ Host, It All Starts with “Muleskinner Blues”

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

In public radio and podcast fandom Jad Abumrad’s voice is not only immediately recognizable, it’s iconic. As a host of WNYC’s hit show, Radiolab, Abumrad has explored myriad topics ranging from secret World War II missions to the social and cultural impacts of contagious diseases. He has a knack for storytelling, uncovering and contextualizing minute details that many other writers and journalists may have simply shrugged at or glossed over.

This instinct, a sixth sense that guides him to these subtle nuances that often rest undisturbed just below the surface or hide in plain sight, is focused on a new subject in his brand-new podcast (also produced and distributed by WNYC), Dolly Parton’s America. The nine-part series lives up to the oft-invoked, seldom accurate characterization of “a deep dive,” covering ground that even the most ardent Dolly experts and fans may have never trod.

A self-described “new initiate” of country music, Abumrad grew up in Nashville, but given Dolly’s standing as an almost omnipresent cultural touchstone he realized much later that during those Tennessee years he almost couldn’t see the Dolly Parton forest for the Dolly Parton trees. “I knew her music, in terms of the crossover stuff — ‘9 to 5’ and ‘Islands in the Stream,’” he admits. “But the first place I started was going back to ‘60s Dolly and ‘70s Dolly. That’s a very different Dolly.” 

Though what he found in those early decades of her career was often unexpected, it was never truly shocking or surprising, especially given the pop culture monolith that Parton has become since those years. A monolith that Abumrad describes as being able to bring people together across all manner of divides — something particularly remarkable in this current global moment. 

“You see these stories emerge of not only her changing over time, but what was happening around her in the south, in Appalachia, and in America,” he continues. “The early Dolly music and lyrics became almost like a portal that I could step through to talk about history, to talk about politics, to talk about culture, to talk about feminism. It’s all there in her music.”

And so, it’s all in the podcast. In the two already released episodes Abumrad et. al. cover topics as broad and varied as Dolly’s constantly being undervalued as a songwriter, her being “typecast” as a secondary character (a “dumb blonde”), her shift from the sad, forlorn songs of her early career to her jubilant, encouraging anthems later on, and even her own struggles with suicidal ideation.

With such an entity as Parton, a bystander might assume that any approach to unspooling the many tendrils of her vastly variable and dynamic career would be insufficient, myopic, and/or excruciatingly intimidating. Abumrad faces this daunting task with aplomb, acknowledging the many ways such a project can go awry, but not allowing that acknowledgment to dissuade him. Rather than shy away from storytelling that might open him and the podcast up to criticism about omissions or oversights or missteps, he leans into the humanity that allows for those scenarios. “This is a project where I was trying to see Dolly through other people’s eyes, so that I could understand them and understand their lives and their experiences… I wanted to understand Dolly not simply as a performer and an icon, but as somebody who’s created all this culture… Why do they love it? What do they see in it? What is it about it that calls them? I felt like that was a way to understand the country at this moment.”

BGS editor and contributor Justin Hiltner spoke to Abumrad on the phone about Dolly Parton’s America; the two took turns picking their favorite Dolly tracks, as if standing in front of a Dolly-only jukebox in a Dolly-themed dive bar. 

JH: If you and I were standing in front of a jukebox full of Dolly Parton songs what would be your “pick” if you were asked to play Dolly Parton for a room full of people? What would be the first song you would think of? 

JA: I think [with] any jukebox selection you have to disclaim: There’s no way to be comprehensive, so any selection you make is going to be one tiny sliver of a tremendous catalog of thousands and thousands of songs. 

But, I think the first one I’m going to have to pick is “Muleskinner Blues.” I think it was 1970? I think that’s right. 1970. I would play this one because that song is just… it is pure fire. The rhythm section is so badass and her on top of it, you just cannot — you have to move when you hear it. And I say this as somebody who didn’t grow up with this genre. I grew up in a house full of opera and bad hair metal. Country music was not my jam. But this is one of the first songs that when I heard it I was like, “Oh my god. This SONG.” 

The moment that she ad-libs, “I’m a lady muleskinner–” 

Oh my god, it’s so good. 

It’s so good! And I think about it all the time. When we talk about bluegrass, [people like to say,] “Oh, you know, we don’t have that many women forebears, we don’t have many [women] to point to.” I hear that [ad-lib] and I hear her telling the history of women in roots music and American music. “I’m a lady muleskinner” is like, “I’m not just singing this song that’s always been sung by men, this song is MINE now.” I love that. 

Let me follow that inspiration, because one of the things that I think about that song is where it falls in her history. She was on the Porter Wagoner show, right? She’s this crazy prolific songwriter, but she’s kind of under the thumb of this guy, who’s a legend and an amazing hitmaker in his own right, but he was kind of holding her back. At that point she’s starting to bristle. We talked to a bunch of people… I think of them as “Dolly-ologists,” these new academics who think about Dolly a lot, before this song it was a lot of sad songs, often sung from the perspectives of little girls, about something that had been done wrong to them. This is the first song that she grabs her power, in some way. 

When she holds that first note she holds it as long as she wants and the band has to follow her. So she’s like, “Y’all gonna follow me.” Then as soon as she lets go the band follows her. It’s literally her taking charge of the band. You feel that power, you feel that energy. It’s such a good song. I’ve been listening to it non-stop.

I think my first jukebox pick, what might be my favorite Dolly cut ever, is “Do I Ever Cross Your Mind” with Chet Atkins. Have you heard this? 

Yeah! 

It’s just two guitars, it’s just them. They’re kind of conversing while they play. There’s this subtle moment where Chet makes a joke like, “Why don’t you pick one, Dolly?” Then he continues to pick a solo and Dolly laughs like, “That’s not me, that’s not me!” But there’s this sort of respect in his voice, where he’s telling the listeners that she’s a picker. Like, “Don’t forget, don’t sleep on Dolly Parton. She can play guitar!” She’s the real deal. 

They mix up the words at one point, they aren’t singing the right harmonies together. Then at the end, they’re just laughing together, and Dolly sighs, “Oh, I love you Chet.” He’s like, “Oh, I love you Dolly.” I think it’s my all-time favorite Dolly Parton recording ever. And for a song that she’s re-recorded so many times, to hear it pared down like that — definitely my number one pick. 

Wow. That’s awesome. 

What’s another one for you? 

Let’s see, I’m really zoned in on ‘70s Dolly right now. I hope you don’t mind that most of my picks are going to be in that era.

Nothing wrong with that! 

I just love the moment that her songs go kinda funky and percussive. I’ve always been less of a lyric guy and more of a music/tambour kind of guy. I love from “Jolene” on when she starts adding different instrumentations to her songs. 

I have a couple of picks here… let’s go with “Joshua.” Again, it’s a song she did right after “Muleskinner” and I feel like that’s the moment when she truly becomes [a star] — if you want to look at her ascent to global superstardom, I think it begins in those few years and “Joshua” was her first number one. I just love the production of the song, I love how her voice was recorded, it’s a little bit distorted. I love how all the instruments are panned hard left or right. The rhythm guitar is over on the right and Dolly’s voice is on the left — or maybe it’s vice versa. I love the whole ‘70s production of it. 

It’s such a weird story! It’s [about] an orphan girl meeting a crazy old man living by himself in the woods and they fall in love. There’s something kind of offbeat and oddball, but also kind of poetic about it. When it modulates, it goes up a semitone, like somewhere in the middle. It’s just cookin’. I love it.

My next pick, and really this is hard, I would probably pick something off of The Grass is Blue. And I think that my favorite one is “Train, Train.” I mean, you can’t be upset at a bluegrass song about a train, for one, but also that album means so much to me. You have this woman who has conquered every genre, has hits on so many different charts, and for her to come back to bluegrass — and I always make sure to emphasize the “back” to bluegrass because she’s been based in this. Her music since day one has been bluegrass music, the mountain music, as she calls it. 

And the band on that record, the band that she toured with doing promo for that record, they were ridiculous! Chris Thile was in the band, if Chris Thile wasn’t, Sam Bush was. Jim Mills — it’s everybody. Jerry Douglas. This stacked roster of bluegrass pickers and then she takes that band to like, the CMA awards. To see bluegrass in primetime, in the mainstream like that always means so much to those of us who have always loved bluegrass first and foremost. I keep beating the drum of, “Induct Dolly Parton into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame! Induct Dolly Parton into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame!” I think it’s a no-brainer, and “Train, Train” is the perfect distillation of that for me. 

Totally! You know, it’s interesting, what I remember is being in the UK — we went to the UK to shadow her for the premiere of 9 to 5 the musical — and on the way to the show I had to be in the car [with her] posse from the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library, like David Dotson and some of these folks. They all were echoing basically what you just said. That album, more than any other album of hers, is most meaningful to the people around her. I think a lot of people feel like you feel. I don’t want to say it was one of her less successful [records], but it didn’t have the crazy crossover [appeal.] That album meant a lot to a lot of people. 

Do you have another one? Maybe to close us out? One more for you, one more for me. 

Sure, let’s see. I’ll give you a choice and you can tell me which one will be more interesting. “Love is Like a Butterfly” or “He’s Alive.” 

Oh shoot, do both.

Okay, I’ll do both in one shot. So, “He’s Alive” is not the kind of song I’d ordinarily choose to put on, as a — I’ll be completely transparent — godless liberal. I come from a country that was torn apart by religion and my parents are scientists, so when we came from Lebanon my parents were like, “Don’t you damn set foot in a church!” [Laughs]

The first time I heard “He’s Alive” I got goosebumps. I hadn’t been that moved by a song in a long time. We were driving from Knoxville to Dollywood, actually, with one of Dolly’s biggest fans, and she put that song on for us. It was crazy, driving through the hills seeing signs like “Jesus saves you” and “Jesus loves you.” Then that song comes on and, as you know, the first few minutes are kind of a little bit overblown and orchestral and there’s this bombast going on, but when the chorus and the gospel chorus come in? Oh my god. That is more intense than any techno DJ drop. We were all just pinned to our seats for that. It feels like she’s alive, right? [Laughs] 

I played it for my wife and my family the other day and they were like, “You like this?” But when it gets to the chorus they were like, “Oh, I get it.” 

I’ll throw in “Love is Like a Butterfly” because when she had a string of number ones going from Dolly the “girl singer” to being Dolly the superstar, that was one [important song.] I don’t know, there’s something about her voice on that song. She’s describing this almost trance of love, she’s in love with someone and she’s weightless and entranced the way a butterfly is in the wind. The song isn’t as poetic as some of her others, but there’s something in the way she sings it that I just feel what she’s describing without even hearing the words. Something about her voice that is so… it literally flies. It’s like a butterfly. Her voice captures that. I’m so mystified by her voice on that recording. 

I think my last choice would be, “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That,” not only because it’s just a really good jukebox song — it is a perfect rollicking country song for a night at the dive bar. But also I realized — I’m openly gay, I’m a career banjo player who happens to moonlight (during the day) as a music writer, and so I went through this whole dynamic [when I was younger] of discovering my sexuality after I had already been in this music for my whole life. I realized, “Oh wait, I don’t think I belong here. I don’t think this space is for me. I play banjo, I love bluegrass.”

Something that I really appreciate about Dolly, from long ago, before I even knew she was a queer icon — and rightly so! — I could project my queerness onto and into her art and see myself in it. There’s something about “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That” that’s just like, “Why does this straight man have to come up in my business and remind me that he’s unavailable to me?” That’s what I hear listening to that song, and it’s funny that I could go down a list of like ten other Dolly songs that feel like that to me. That feel like the queer experience realized through Dolly’s lens. 

That’s really interesting… how so many of her songs create that space, so you can read it that way. I love that you have a list that goes beyond that. I might have to call you back and ask you to elaborate on that. [Laughs]

It was something that I really didn’t want to have this conversation happen without mentioning. I mean, even if you don’t count the rhinestones and the false nails and the big boobs, and everything. Boiled down to just nuts and bolts, and thinking of her as just a songwriter, she’s still allowing space for people to see their own experiences in her music. That’s not a very common thing in country. It is because heartbreak is all through country and everybody’s heart gets broken all the time, but other than that it really takes that sort of [approach] — well, what you’re talking about through this whole entire project. She touches on all of these issues that are sort of endemic to our culture, in a way that’s so organic that we ingest them almost without realizing it until now, in retrospect, I look back thinking, “Well of course she’s a queer icon, she’s creating space for us to relate to her music.” Even if it’s coming from such a specific place. 

She, as a songwriter like you say, has created that space. Even without having to look at the persona in any way. 

She still has not gotten her due as a songwriter, and it’s painful at times. To see that be such a big part of what you’re doing [is important.]

Yeah, I appreciate that, that’s where we start the series is taking her seriously as a songwriter, cause I agree. Robert Oermann said in one of our episodes that if she had been born two hundred years ago she’d be Mozart. (I think maybe he means more than two hundred.) Because she’s that touched by that creative spirit. That’s never been acknowledged. Bob Dylan gets it, Johnny Cash gets it, but she hasn’t. 

Photo of Jad Abumrad: Bo Jacober
Illustration: Christine de Carvalho

Hiss Golden Messenger: Hope, Joy, and ‘Terms of Surrender’

Posted on by Editor

To make his eighth proper album as Hiss Golden Messenger, M.C. Taylor left his adopted hometown of Durham, North Carolina, and went… everywhere? He booked studio time in Nashville, tracked songs in New Orleans, and headed north to upstate New York, where he recorded at the studio owned by The National’s Aaron Dessner. There might have been even more cities in that list, but logistics and time cut his traveling sessions short.

“I wanted to make a record anywhere other than Durham,” he says. “I felt like I needed a change, and it felt like the songs were asking for a change. This is a wandering record. It just felt like the songs were wandering around a little bit. So I felt like maybe I should, too.”

Travel is a major theme of his music, both as inspiration and consequence. Working as a musician means touring; providing for his family means leaving them. Out on the road, however, he finds new reasons to make music. Taylor peppers Hiss Golden Messenger songs with place names, references to home and elsewhere. For Terms of Surrender he decided he needed to make that part of the creative process, which meant recording wherever he landed.

Taylor’s wanderlust extends to the music, too, which draws from a range of roots traditions: psychedelic folk and rural funk, southern soul and classic rock, American primitive guitar and ‘60s frat rock, J.J. Cale and the Staple Singers, Neil Young and composer Harry Partch. The result is a sober but hardly somber album that surveys America at the end of the 2010s, during a moment that is — to say the very least — tumultuous.

BGS: Place always feels so important to your music, so it made me wonder if getting away from a place was as important as getting to a place. Could you have made this record back home in Durham?

Taylor: Yeah, I could have made it in Durham. Definitely. But it would have a very different character. I try not to think of the records as the final form of the songs. I think of them as snapshots of the songs, snapshots in time — a documentation of the tunes as they exist among a certain group of people on a certain day in a certain city. So this particular version of Terms of Surrender is a document of that particular time in my life.

Given that these are wandering songs, and given that you’ve talked about the album coming out of a very hard year, how did that inform the music?

The trials and tribulations I was experiencing are obviously threaded through the songs. Some of that is maybe obvious lyrically, and some of it is a little more coded. It’s something that is obvious only to me. I was dealing with those issues in the composition of the songs, but the making of the record was pretty joyous. Actually, the writing was, too, because it’s always a cathartic experience.

So I can’t really say that I went into the writing of the songs in a tortured place and came out with all the answers. The songs were just a way for me to speak about that stuff, to process it in a way that made me feel like I was evolving emotionally. Not that I was solving my problems, but I was at least beginning to understand what they were. We don’t find an answer in an instant, but we can identify the issue and over time find ways to address it.

To what degree can you talk about the events that informed this album?

It’s a tricky question, because it was something that was part of the fabric of my life for the last year or two. It’s something that comes up in the one-sheet because every record has to have a story, but then when it comes time to talk about it, it’s tough. You never know how much you want to reveal, you know what I mean? I’m a pretty open person but there’s this curtain between all of the stuff that I make public and all the stuff that I keep private.

So I’ll just say that I had some personal problems with someone that I worked very closely with. It felt like over the years they had become an emotionally abusive person. I couldn’t even put a name to the things I was feeling because of that relationship. I thought I had lost my way a little bit. Over time I came to understand what was going on and was able to extricate myself from that relationship. That was important. And then to have all that against the backdrop of the way our country feels right now… it was a lot. I’m a sensitive guy, I guess.

That definitely seems like something that informs these songs, but it’s not a political record. It’s more about living at a certain time when these things are encroaching on your mental health.

And I want to be clear: I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’m a white man in this country. I’m living on Easy Street compared to people of color, queer people, women. But that was a question that came up on the last record, Hallelujah Anyhow. That wasn’t really a political record either, unless you realize that everything is political. The personal is political; the emotional is political. But that record and the new one were made a different times, so the relationship to hope is different.

That’s something I picked up on: this sense of optimism as well as something like joy. That’s not necessarily a word that I associate with this time in history, but it comes through on a lot of these songs.

On Hallelujah Anyhow joy and hope seemed like these bright, sharp things, a nice glinting in the sunlight. They could cut through just about anything. But they work differently on this record, I think, because you realize that we have to work at them every day. If we don’t, they’ll become dull and unwieldy.

And hope and joy are things that I have to work at. Some of these songs are reminders to myself to work at these things that bring me hope and joy. You have to keep that bright thing sharp. It’s like marriage: If you stay in a marriage long enough, you realize that it takes a lot of hard work to keep it going. I’m pretty sure that that’s the way forward for me if I want to survive.

Is it difficult to get into that mindset when you’re writing, to remind yourself of these larger goals?

There are days when I wake up and think, I don’t want to make this music anymore. I don’t want to make any music anymore. This isn’t something that’s making me happy anymore. There’s too much competition, too much saber-rattling, which is all so superfluous to what we all actually do. I guess I’m interested in people who have been making music for a long time, because I want to be in this for the long haul. How does their language change over time? How do they adapt to survive in the world?

You mentioned that you wrote these songs as reminders to yourself. Does that change how you relate to them on the road, when you have to perform them night after night?

That’s why I try to approach records as snapshots. I know the songs are going to change every night, because of the emotional content in them. That changes the phrasing of how I sing certain things. Part of that comes from my emotional understanding of the songs, you know? The other part of that is that my favorite songs are the one I write without totally understanding. Usually I’m not very satisfied with them when I get them down on paper, but eventually I realize that if I live with that dissatisfaction, it’ll becomes something different.

It’s like there’s a hand that is guiding this stuff. It’s not God-like; it’s more an unconscious feeling that it’s okay to feel that way. It’s OK to feel like, “OK, this is as good as I can do right now. I don’t have the time or the emotional capacity right now to make this any better.” And then you just leave it. It’s like planting a seed. It grows even though the words on the page don’t change.

Is there a particular song in your catalog that changed or grown like that?

I would say most of the songs that are in live rotation remain in the set list because there is that element of discovery from day to day or week to week. “Blue Country Mystic” [from 2012’s Poor Moon] is a good one. And there’s one on the new record called “Down at the Uptown,” which is about this dive bar where we all used to hang out in the Mission District in San Francisco. This was many years ago, late ‘90s. It was a formative place for many of us.

I knew that I wanted to write about that time in my life, and I did the best I could. But it felt clunky. I thought, I’m just going to leave these words here and hope that if something better does come along, it’ll be better than what’s on the page now. But the process of singing it in rehearsals has made me realize that no, this is really good. Not a great song, but for me it’s good. It does the thing that I needed it to do.

That one did stand out because it seemed like a very specific reference to a very specific place. I thought it might be in North Carolina, but I was on the wrong side of the country.

I don’t even know if the Uptown is still there. When my friends and I moved to San Francisco in the late ‘90s, we found this bar on the corner of 17th and Capp in the Mission District. It was pretty scuzzy, you know. But the Uptown was this little hidden waystation where all of us learned to drink. There were a lot of promises made at that place, some of which we kept and some of which we didn’t. It was a clubhouse. And the jukebox was very educational. Lots of stuff on there was way above my pay grade. That’s where I heard Patti Smith’s “Horses” for the first time. I’d be lying if I said I loved it immediately. But all of my favorite music is not something that’s immediate.

I was an adult, but I was still a child in a lot of ways. I was out of the punk rock phase of my life — at least musically, not spiritually. I wanted more, but I didn’t know how to do it. It was a time when I was discovering all of the music that has continued to inform my life. So Patti Smith, but also the Silver Jews, Johnny Paycheck, Merle Haggard. All of that stuff was coming into my life at that time, and it was overwhelming in the most beautiful way.

That discovery of oneself is thrilling. It’s exhilarating to find a formative record one day and the very next day it’s another record that brings a similar emotional resonance. It happens less now because I’ve heard more. But every time I have that feeling, it’s wonderful.

That gets at something I’ve been thinking about regarding Hiss Golden Messenger. You’ve got eight albums in ten years, which is very prolific. How do you manage to keep things fresh for yourself?

Just trying to remember why I started doing this in the first place is usually the best way. I try to make sure what I’m doing feels vulnerable and genuine. Whether or not it feels fresh to other people? I don’t know if that’s something that I necessarily feel I should concern myself with. I hope people continue to find things in my music that moves them, because I’m still discovering new things in the music.

Photo credit: Graham Tolbert

How a Stranger in a Bar Inspired Michaela Anne’s “Desert Dove”

Posted on by Editor

Michaela Anne put a lot on the line to make her new record, Desert Dove. Working for the first time with producers Sam Outlaw and Kelly Winrich, the self-funded album was recorded in San Clemente, California. With many of the songs written either on the West Coast or in the Southwest, the pervasive theme of manifesting her own destiny resounds.

All of the songs pull from a mixture of her own life (potentially even her past lives), characters she’s met in real life, and some of whom she’s envisioned in her imagination. We sat down with Michaela Anne to discuss everything from her inspirations, to her transient childhood as the daughter of a submarine captain, to the anticipation of releasing this very personal new material.

BGS: Can you talk about growing up on the move? Were you playing music and writing back then?

Michaela Anne: I started playing piano when I was about 5. I wrote a few songs right away, instrumental piano pieces and the first one I wrote was called “When Daddy Comes Home.” So from the very beginning, it has always been a sad longing feeling, because I missed my dad when he was out to sea. Then we moved a year later and every time we moved there would be a transition period of, “OK, hurry up and find a music teacher!”

I wasn’t writing. I didn’t write any more songs until I was 17, when my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer. That was the first time I wrote a song with lyrics. Then the second time I wrote a song with lyrics was when I moved to college. So everything for me, and I’m actually just realizing this, has all been a result of something that was sad. A sad experience or a longing for.

Do you find there is a transient parallel in touring at all?

Oh yeah. It is different because you live in one place but you miss out on a lot of stuff. It is hard to keep friendships together when you’re gone for a month and then you come home and you’re tired and you don’t really feel like going out. How do you stay in people’s lives when you are missing the big events? That feeling of not really being a part of friend circles because you are missing out, that’s been my entire life. This deep FOMO. It isn’t a fear of missing out. I actually miss out a lot.

What led you to record this album in California? When you were writing it, did you know you’d be making the record there?

I didn’t, which is interesting to me because multiple songs mention California. The West Coast, in general, has always had a nostalgic, warm, romantic feeling to me. It’s funny. I’ve never thought I would move back to the West Coast because I feel like I want to keep it as a magical reprieve. So I wrote some songs out there and for some reason, it kept coming up.

I also wrote a bunch of songs in Arizona. So the Southwest, paired with the West, infiltrated my songwriting. But that wasn’t part of the plan when I was writing the songs. I’d toured a bunch with Sam Outlaw and he’d said in passing that he wanted to produce my next record. I blew it off as a joke and thought it was funny.

Then I started considering it when I was really figuring out how to make a new record. I entertained a few different producers and Sam brought in Kelly Winrich, who is from this band called Delta Spirit and he has this more indie rock background. He doesn’t really come from the more country world, which I really wanted.

It just kind of all organically came together. Kelly is from San Clemente and his parents built out their basement into a studio. I went out there for two days to do a trial run to see what it would be like. I’d also never worked with two producers at the same time and didn’t know if that would make things more complicated.

Had they worked together before?

They had. They had worked on one of Sam’s early records together and they were longtime friends. I felt like I was very cautious before I made a decision but it all went really well. Then we hired a bunch of LA-based musicians with the addition of my friend Kristin Weber, who is from here in Nashville. She flew out and did strings and background vocals.

It happened naturally and it was really amazing to record in a beautiful setting but be really focused. I didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day living of making sure my cats are fed and making sure my house is clean and all that stuff. It was an ideal setting, for sure.

Was there a fleeing from Nashville to California to make the record?

I don’t know, maybe a little bit. I feel like I might be one of those people who has a love-hate relationship with wherever I am. I felt this way about New York and I now feel this way about Nashville — that I see the good and the bad. I think when you are surrounded by a lot of people pursuing similar career paths and when everyone around you is about music, it can feel like a bubble, and I think it is not healthy to live in that bubble.

It’s important to remember that there is such a diverse, large world out there of different careers, different pursuits, different passions. I’m really inspired looking around and seeing so many people figuring it out and being creative but it also can trigger insecurities of, “Oh my gosh, everyone is doing this. Why do we need my voice? What do I have to contribute and how am I saying what I’m saying and how is it different or alike with somebody else?”

That can be really distracting. So getting away from it is helpful. To just be creating your work and not be thinking about it in terms of who else is doing what and where you fit in with all of it. That can be poisonous.

How do you typically write lyrics? Does the melody follow or lead that process?

I usually come up with a melody first. I’m never someone who is just writing lyrics. I’m not a poet. I think in melodies and the words come with it. Then I have to consciously go back once I have a melodic structure and think about where I want to get to with it.

I was comforted when I read Jeff Tweedy’s memoir that he just released. He said that the way that he writes songs is that he mumbles a lot and crafts the song while mumbling gibberish. It was the first time I’d heard of a songwriter doing that and it makes me feel so much better. I’ve considered it a weakness. Like I’m just writing based on what sound feels good in my mouth and not looking at it as a piece of literature. I felt very seen when I heard that Jeff Tweedy does that.

The character in “Desert Dove” seems like one that you know a lot about.

I’m always saying I feel like I could write a novel about that song. It is so many different people to me. I see myself in that character in many ways. I met this woman years ago at Pappy and Harriet’s who was a stripper. Her name was Madeline and she was wearing a white dress that was off her shoulder.

She was this beautiful charismatic woman who I was really drawn to in that one evening’s conversation and then from there it expands to all these other women characters that I’ve read about or learned about from talking to friends. This book Soiled Dove is an historical account of different real-life women who were prostitutes or madames in the Wild West.

It’s like a lifetime of research. How long did it take you to actually write it?

That song came out so fast. I was in Arizona in Cave Creek on a little writing retreat. I knew I had this song about a Wild West prostitute in me for years for some reason. When I was really young, I went to a spiritual healer who told me I was a prostitute in a past life. Maybe that gives you a little glimpse of the complexities of my upbringing.

I was raised in a very traditional family home. That my dad was a nuclear submarine captain but my parents were very interested in lots of different spiritualities and dynamics. When I was back at the apartment I was staying at, I was making a sandwich and I opened my mouth and the first line of the song came out. I think I finished it within a day or two.

Your characters have dimensions of the good, the bad, and the ugly. They feel honest, particularly in “Somebody New.” I read that someone told you once that women shouldn’t be the perpetrator in songs or be in a guilty position. Did that advice ever inform your writing or is it informing your writing now as an act of rebellion from that advice?

I feel like with so many songs there are a few different narratives. Especially in the country world, and this is a huge generalization, but the idea that the woman is the one that gets cheated on but she’s the one that has to then be vengeful. Or like the sad, sullen songs that are like, “I was wronged and as the narrator, I’m the innocent victim in this.”

I just feel like no situation is actually that clear cut. I feel like we have a role in every single situation we find ourselves in. I think it is hard to portray that in a three-to-four-minute song because you’re telling this very complex story of, “I’m really hurt but also I did something that hurt you.” I think that’s real life. How do I portray these very human characteristics? I create these characters, but you know, I’m in every one of those.

Photo Credit: Matt Wignall

The Show On The Road – Matt the Electrician

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Matt the Electrician — a kind-hearted songwriter and cunning craftsman of smile-inducing folk songs that retain the one thing we might need most in our jackknifed new century: hope.

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While the artist not known as Matt Sever may still be able to fix the sparking wires behind your walls with his nimble bear hands, he found a line of work even more daring, dangerous, and financially precarious. What did he set his sights on back in the 1990s? Being a roving folk singer.

Matt’s been at this a while, he looks more like your cool tatted shop teacher than the next big arena money maker for the major labels. So, letting the people who have put him up in their houses and cooked him a warm meal on the road support the music their own way? It’s kind of beautiful. In fact, his sturdy fanbase just lovingly funded his next record, for which he’ll be working with a producer for the very first time, and that producer is none other than Tucker Martine. He’ll be heading up to Tucker’s studio in Portland, Oregon to start the project in October.