Tag: singer/songwriter

BGS 5+5: Anna Lynch

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Artist: Anna Lynch
Hometown: Sebastopol, California
Latest Album: Apples in the Fall EP
Release Date: March 13, 2020
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): My name is pretty short so I have never really had a nickname… although when trying to get my attention both my mother and friends will use my middle name. Nothing quite like hearing someone yell “Margarita!” across a room. My middle name is really Margarita, and it was my grandmother’s first name.

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Patty Griffin, hands down. I heard a song that was included on some American folk compilation in high school, then bought her 1000 Kisses album and walked the tiny streets of my hometown crying about some boy who didn’t love me back while simultaneously begging the universe to let me be her when I grew up and moved away from that town.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Honestly, though I have been on stage a lot, the memory that will be with me forever is playing the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley with my dad when I was 5. My dad was always a musician and performed a lot. Being a kid I just thought he hung the moon and jumped at the chance to perform my favorite Bob Reid song at the open mic my dad played every week.

We had agreed to split the words, until dad, mid-song, left me hanging to finish the song by myself. I remember being angry he didn’t feed me the words like he said he would, but then I remember the crowd cheering and feeling proud of myself. Call it an addiction, a bug, a calling. My dad knew exactly what he was doing. He probably created a monster.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

I am secretly a huge WWII history buff. My great uncle was in the war and left me with an amazing curiosity for the life he lived before I met him. He was also a lifelong artist, and though most of his works were abstract paintings, while he was in the war he would sketch the people and scenery around him. We have notebooks upon notebooks of sketches he made during that time; some are even made on the backs of old maps. In a weird twist of interest I have started embroidering these sketches. It’s relaxing in a way and also a way to connect with him a bit.

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

Oh man, the ones you haven’t heard yet… Songs are like little word children you let into the world, some you wish you had worked on more before you let them out into the big scary world, some come out as they should and some just don’t see the light of day.

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

I have written a few “story” songs. I use them as more a vehicle than anything. It is really hard to create an emotive work and perform it like a song, like a conversation, if you come right out of the gate saying, “Hi, my name is Anna, I’m a little depressed but that’s OK, also I love walking on a beach for hours alone, hoppy beer, sad songs, staying up late, waking up before anyone else in the house, WWII documentaries, dark jokes, old wood, playing acoustic bass, strong coffee, cotton sweaters, salted butter, gas stoves, handmade mugs and watching who splits the last cookie on the plate in half….” Not exactly a place to start a conversation. I use story songs as a sort of place to hide real things in plain sight. I hide little bits to make it both more “palatable” for me and more relatable to an audience.

Photo credit: Jessie McCall – Little Green Eyes Media

The Secret Sisters’ Lydia Slagle: Good People With Great Purpose (Part 2 of 2)

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Hearing the Secret Sisters sing captivates you immediately. Known best for their entrancing harmonies, the Alabama-born artists write songs about everyday hardships and headline-grabbing injustices, with a balance of poetry and punch in every lyric. It’s made fast fans of many, including Brandi Carlile, who called sisters Lydia Slagle and Laura Rogers in 2015 and offered to produce their next record, 2017’s You Don’t Own Me Anymore.

On the new Saturn Return, co-produced by Carlile and Phil and Tim Hanseroth, the duo expands beyond their well-known harmonies by exploring the previously untapped power that their voices have solo, recording many segments separately for the first time in their decade-long career. In a nod to that milestone, BGS spoke to each sister individually in advance of the album’s release. Here, Lydia Slagle talks about Carlile’s strength as a producer, finding hope despite hardship, and the distinct pride in being a late bloomer.

Tell me about your upbringing and your first memories with music.

We’re from rural Northwest Alabama. We grew up running through the woods and making forts and playing in the creek. We spent a lot of time outside with our cousins, and it was really family-oriented. Our dad is in a bluegrass band, so we were going to bluegrass festivals every Saturday. We went to church every Sunday, and the church that we grew up in was all congregational. Everybody sang together, so from a very early age, you had to learn to sing harmony.

You were the main writer on “Late Bloomer,” one of my favorite tracks from Saturn Return. Has anything ever made you feel like a late bloomer? How did you reframe that feeling with the positivity we hear in the song?

I’ve always felt a little bit behind. People in my grade, or my age… I always felt like they got there before I did. Part of that is being a Southern woman. I think that we are a little more pressured to have children faster, or get married at an earlier age. Even though I’d been all around the world, I still felt that pressure — I still felt behind. When I wrote “Late Bloomer,” my husband and I had been trying for a baby for almost a year. That particular day, I was just really frustrated with the whole situation. I thought, of course, this happens to me. I’ve been behind in every other aspect of my life, so of course I’m gonna be last for this, too — which sounds dramatic, I know…

No, it sounds… relatable.

Well, it was September, and I was at the piano looking out the window. I had been told that March or April was when I should hang my hummingbird feeders, because that’s when they’d come to the house. And I had not seen a hummingbird all year until the day I wrote this song. It made me start thinking about that aspect differently: they’re late coming to the party, so it’s OK for me to be, too. It’s OK to feel behind. Whatever timeline you set for yourself, it doesn’t matter, because we’re all on our own path. It was a really encouraging way to look at it. I’ve tried to look at it like that ever since.

Brandi Carlile produced your third album, You Don’t Own Me Anymore, and you chose to work with her again on Saturn Return. What made her the right person to produce this album?

We had a lot of fun with our third record. Not that we didn’t with our others, but we were so serious in the beginning, so concerned with being perfect, with having every note be exactly right. With the third record, we were this big family, just playing music together, just jamming. We really wanted to have that same experience again with the fourth record, especially because we had gone through some stuff before this record that was really hard. I was struggling with infertility; I didn’t really understand what was going to happen with our careers. We needed the positivity that Brandi tends to bring to a situation. She always helps us remember that we do this for a reason — and that we’re good at it. It was a really great communal effort, and I would say we were more comrades this time around. It felt like a bunch of friends playing together.

She recommended you and Laura record your vocals separately for the first time ever. What was going through your mind, from the first time you tried it to when you heard it played back?

It felt like an out-of-body experience in so many ways, just because we were so used to singing at the same time, into the same mic. So it was a new, refreshing experience to remember that we are separate people, with our own voices and our own things to say. That’s what Brandi is so good at doing — helping us remember what our talents are. It was a really important part of this recording process itself: finding our own voices and being who we are separately, but still being a band; and learning how to still sing together, even when we have our own perspectives to draw from.

As the album’s closing track, “Healer in the Sky” has a deeply spiritual and peaceful theme — a message of hope. Through the making of this record, what’s something that made you feel hopeful?

Even though we were on separate paths, Laura and I, there was a common thread going through our situations when we were recording. We were kind of settling into adulthood. Our grandmothers had just passed away within a week of each other, and we could see that our parents are getting older and going through health issues. We were both at a time in our lives when we were trying to reconcile things that don’t seem fair, seeing how other people around us have struggled. The reality of adulthood had set in, and you can hear that in a lot of the songs on the record.

But what gives us hope is that we’re people of faith. You do hear it especially on “Healer in the Sky” — we try to remember that we have a bigger hope, and we have a reason for why we do this. It’s easy to get ‘in our heads’ about things that seem hard at the time, but when you look at the grand scheme of things, those things are usually actually pretty petty. So for us, it’s been important to remember our purpose, and to just try to be good people along the way. That’s all that really matters.

Read the first part of our Artist of the Month interview with the Secret Sisters’ Laura Rogers.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

LISTEN: Dietrich Strause, “Last Man Standing on the Sun”

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Artist: Dietrich Strause
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
Song: “Last Man Standing on the Sun”
Album: Last Man Standing on the Sun
Release Date: March 13, 2020

In Their Words: “I once asked my 92-year-old grandfather what he knows now that he wishes he had known when he was my age. He said, ‘I wish I had known that everything is in constant motion and that the fundamental shape of the universe is a wave.’ With that as an impression, I wrote ‘Last Man Standing on the Sun’ looking up at the stars and sky from an island in the middle of a lake, in the middle of the mountains in New Hampshire, thinking about the constant decay and renewal of love, purpose, and nature. I wanted to record this song in particular for this album because it seemed fitting for the constant motion and physical limitations of working on a reel-to-reel tape machine.” — Dietrich Strause

Photo credit: Rose Cousins

LISTEN: Jack Grelle, “Mess of Love”

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Artist: Jack Grelle
Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri
Song: “Mess of Love”
Album: If Not Forever
Release Date: April 17, 2020
Label: Jack Grelle Music

In Their Words: “This is a breakup song without any finger-pointing… where two people are both coming to grips with a change in life and trying to adjust to new chapters. I was listening to a lot of Elvis Costello’s early records when I wrote this tune. I wanted to blend classic honky-tonk with power pop elements. Devin Frank, who played bass on the album, came up with the harmony guitar parts on the chorus along with the lead guitar player, Josh Cochran. It added an overall feel that brought all those elements together and really made the song.” — Jack Grelle

Photo credit: Nate Burrell

LISTEN: Alicia Viani, “Tomten Farm”

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Artist: Alicia Viani
Hometown: Bend, Oregon
Song: “Tomten Farm”
Album: Alicia Viani
Release Date: April 3, 2020

In Their Words: “I was sitting in my living room on a cold winter morning in Bend with the barely-warm sunlight shining through the windows. It was a home I would soon lose following the breakup with a partner. I didn’t know it at the time but I had a strong intuitive despairing sense about our future as a couple. My partner, a close friend, and I were sitting there in the sunlight and it was a happy peaceful morning, which was becoming rarer.

“I was noodling in the background on my guitar and my friend was talking to my partner about memories from a summer on a farm in Telluride. Her descriptions and imagery were beautiful to me and I just started writing this song live based on the words coming out of her mouth about her time there. Threading the imagery together ‘North of Telluride,’ ‘sunflower mesa,’ ‘the well ran dry.’ I’ve never been to Tomten Farm. I’ve spent a lot of time in Telluride, so I already had a connection to the place. I think the song was sort of an escape fantasy during a difficult, dark time. I took artistic ownership over her story!

“When we did separate, losing him, the home, and my sense of family left me reeling from abrupt changes in day-to-day reality but also reeling from the gut punch of realizing my dreams we worked together on were gone too. What did I believe in building now? Navigating these losses put me at a crossroads. Do I let this devour me? Or do I attempt to stay open to changes and get rocked and hopefully find new solid ground and direction? This song came from my attempt to do the latter. I wrote it over time as I found my way again, found joy in a relationship again with a new lover, and pieced my dreams back together again based on my own desires and beliefs about how I wanted to live. — Alicia Viani

Photo credit: Laura Schneider

WATCH: Brian Dunne, “Harlem River Drive”

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Artist: Brian Dunne
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Harlem River Drive”
Album: Selling Things
Release Date: April 10. 2020

In Their Words: “‘Harlem River Drive’ is a song about contentment and the things that stand in the way of it. It was born out of this feeling of being forever stuck on the precipice of something big, ultimately driving you to the edge of your sanity. That’s what the song is about to me; missing the present — either in anticipation of the future, or in romanticism of the past — and the consequences that come along with that. But there’s resolution in the song. I do believe there is hope for us yet, or something like that.” — Brian Dunne

Photo credit: Adam Gardner

LISTEN: Jess Jocoy, “Somebody Somewhere”

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Artist: Jess Jocoy
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Somebody Somewhere”
Album: Such a Long Way
Release Date: April 10, 2020

In Their Words: “This is the song of someone who thinks they need something more, so they run. In their running, we’re with them as they parallel themselves with ‘somebody somewhere.’ Aware that their relationship isn’t perfect on either side, as the end of the song reveals, they come to realize it’s a love worth fighting for. ‘Somebody Somewhere’ came together like a dream — from the writing process to recording. It was a gray day in Nashville and I needed a song with some bounce. The band really succeeded in giving it a good, fun vibe — it feels like a good driving song.” — Jess Jocoy

Photo credit: Patrick Sheehan

BGS 5+5: Taylor Ashton

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Artist: Taylor Ashton
Hometown: Brooklyn via Toronto via Winnipeg via Victoria via Vancouver
Latest album: The Romantic
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Roger

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Paintings, drawings, movies, dancing … all of those things give me feelings that I want to express through music, and that’s a big part of what inspires me, to see if that’s possible. For a little while I was obsessed with the idea of trying to write songs the way David Lynch directs movies. That idea floated around in my head for a couple years and then I realized David Lynch sort of directs movies in a way that is kind of like songwriting — you don’t always understand the literal connection between all the elements but they give you a really emotionally affecting end result that feels personal.

I’ve been into visual art a lot longer than I’ve been into music — as a kid I used to draw constantly no matter what else was going on. I discovered music in my teens and the drawing took a backseat for a while. Then, a few years ago, after my old band Fish & Bird stopped being on the road all the time, I moved to New York and stayed still for a while. I took a few years off of touring and releasing music, and in that time I got back into making visual art in a big way and it was such a huge relief. Right now those two halves of me feel pretty balanced. Music and visual art work well for me because if I’m stuck in a rut with one of them, I can usually turn to the other for relief, and actually I sometimes use one medium to directly process my frustration with the other. And then the cycle continues!

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

I’m fluid with this… some of my songs are very biographical in that they accurately express my actual feelings toward one specific other person, and only use details that are from my life. Then there are others where the characters in the song are amalgamations of different people, or exaggerations, or sung by a healthier version of me, or by a stupider version of me. Different stories call for different angles.

Sometimes if somebody has told me about something hard that is going on between them and another person, I’ll find myself walking away from that conversation chewing on the situation in my mind. Some stories, after you hear them, just seem to roll around in your brain, and you can’t help but imagine yourself in the shoes of the people involved. So, let’s say somebody has told me about a new relationship they are in, where they really like the person but they’re not feeling connected to them and they can’t figure out why. I might subconsciously imagine that I am them or that I’m the other person, and I’ll wonder how that would make me feel.

Of course, to imagine how you would feel in somebody else’s shoes you have to draw on your own experience, so I have a number of these songs where the “I” or the “you” character is sort of a combination of myself and somebody else I know or that I’ve read about. In “Anyway” for example, I think I’m the “I”, the “You”, AND the implied third person, at different times. And certain lines really make me think of specific people when I sing them, but it might just be that one line in a song and then I’m me again for the rest of the song.

But I don’t know if it’s “hiding” exactly because distancing yourself slightly the “I” you’re singing from can let you be more fearless in exploring vulnerable spaces that might feel off-limits if you thought people were going to assume you were always singing about yourself. OK, maybe it is hiding.

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

Usually the hardest songs to write are the ones I don’t end up liking very much. For me, writing songs needs to be basically enjoyable. If it’s not, I’m afraid my resentment toward the process will come out in the finished product and infect all who hear it. I have songs that I’ve labored over for months, joylessly chasing some idea I felt like it was important to express, and then once I finally put the finishing touches on it I felt completely unmoved to share it with anybody.

So, if the writing is “tough,” I try to just set it down, especially if it’s something I really like. “If You Can Hear Me” was one that was like that … I came up with the seed and got really excited about it, but then I just couldn’t finish it. I tried to fit so many things into the empty space and everything just made it worse. In that case I just had to stop fussing and trust that I just wasn’t ready to write the rest of that song yet. Sure enough, months later in the shower, I thought I was having a completely new song idea, until I realised it was the other half of “If You Can Hear Me.” I really wanted to finish that song, but I kind of had to trick myself into stopping wanting it so bad in order for it to happen.

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

MISSION STATEMENT: To make art that inspires people to be honest, true to themselves, and compassionate toward all people and their natural world; to help little girls know they can do anything; to help little boys know they can have feelings and ask for help; to cause all to laugh and cry.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

I would love to go to the Mermaid Café and have 1971 Joni Mitchell buy me a bottle of wine … y’know, laugh and toast to nothing, and smash our empty glasses down. (Does wine count as food?)

Photo credit: Jonno Rattman

WATCH: Smooth Hound Smith, “Crazy Over You” (Live at Ten Four)

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Artist: Smooth Hound Smith (feat. Connor Vance from Dustbowl Revival)
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Crazy Over You” (Live at Ten Four)

In Their Words: “‘Crazy Over You’ is pretty guileless in its meaning, and remains one of the only true-blue love songs I’ve ever written (no cheeky humor or heartbreak in this one, folks). Over the years it’s been used many times as a first dance song at weddings, and it even got licensed for an adorable love scene in MTV’s The Real World a while back. These days, when we play it in a live setting, we usually do it stripped down, with just two voices and a guitar, so this session was really fun. We built it up a little with some great players (Danny Pratt on drums, and Rhees Williams on bass), and felt especially lucky that Connor Vance from Dustbowl Revival was around Nashville that day and willing to sit in on fiddle and play with us. We filmed and recorded it live at Ten Four Recording Co. here in East Nashville, and it was engineered by stalwart supporter of sonic excellence, Jesse Thompson.” — Zack Smith, Smooth Hound Smith

Photo credit: Adam Murphy

Artist of the Month: The Secret Sisters

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The secret is out, as the Secret Sisters have finally issued their newest album, Saturn Return. Time is a through line of the project, heard in songs like “Late Bloomer,” as well as the album title, which is an astrological reference to Saturn returning to the same location in the sky as it was when you were born. Motherhood also informs the music, as sisters Lydia and Laura Rogers were new mothers at the time, but also grieving the recent loss of their grandmothers.

Produced by Brandi Carlile and Phil and Tim Hanseroth (aka “The Twins”), Saturn Return positions the sisters as solo vocalists to some degree, as both Lydia and Laura recorded separately for the first time. And in contrast to their other albums, they wrote all of the material here themselves. A sweet celebration of the women who came before them can be found in the opening track, “Silver,” while the final track, “Healer in the Sky” is poignant, vivid, and simply beautiful.

Look for a two-part interview with the Secret Sisters — our BGS Artist of the Month for March — in the weeks ahead. (Read part one here. Read part two here.) In the meantime, enjoy our Essentials playlist, comprising choice covers (including one of Carlile’s songs), rare and interesting collaborations, and new music you’ll want to hear from Saturn Return.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen