WATCH: Bonnie Whitmore, “Time to Shoot”

Artist: Bonnie Whitmore
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Time to Shoot”
Album: Last Will and Testament
Release Date: October 2, 2020

In Their Words: “When I wrote ‘Time to Shoot,’ it was after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. It was the largest death count of any mass shooting and was in the summer of 2016. Remember 2016? That year of a thousand losses that started with David Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen on Election Day, and Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) right at the end? I was reflecting back on the earliest mass shootings that I could recall and I remembered it was Columbine in 1999. It struck me that it has been 20 years, and nothing has changed. Twenty years of making mass shootings normalized. The potential of becoming someone’s target practice is no longer how, but which large gathering.

“I was in high school when Columbine happened and I remember the immediate fear and repression that came afterwards, and for more than half of my life I’ve watched systemic violence being tolerated by my country and its people. I can see a pattern of unaddressed mental health issues and the ease of accessibility to these military-style weapons, and also the toxic masculinity and fear and shame that’s at its core, but each time it happens nothing changes. Nothing but more fear and ‘thoughts and prayers.’ I cannot accept that this is the only way. I know this is not an easy topic to discuss, but it is worth discussing over and over because we have to find a solution. It’s time we collectively shed some light in those dark places and do the work to get through this, because if the desire is to build towards a better future, then there is a lot that’s got to change for the better.” — Bonnie Whitmore


Photo credit: Eryn Brooke; Video: Ryan Doty

LISTEN: Selena Rosanbalm, “Can You Really Be Gone”

Artist: Selena Rosanbalm
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Song: “Can You Really Be Gone”
Album: Selena Rosanbalm
Release Date: October 9, 2020
Label: The Balm Records

In Their Words: “My ex-boyfriend took his own life four and a half years ago, but I still see him all over the place. I thought I saw him driving a van the other day, thought I saw him in a coffee shop. But I was especially struck when I saw a photograph of his niece some months ago; I could see his face so clearly in hers. ‘Can You Really Be Gone’ is about the suspension of reality people often experience after losing a loved one, when the logical mind knows the person is gone, but the emotional mind doesn’t want to give in to that fact.” — Selena Rosanbalm


Photo credit: Daniel Cavazos

WATCH: Justin Wade Tam, “Paradise”

Artist: Justin Wade Tam
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee, via San Diego, California
Song: “Paradise”
Release Date: July 24, 2020
Label: Soundly Music

In Their Words: “I wrote this song with my friend Daniel Ellsworth about the subjectivity of paradise. We often get caught up in staring at idealized photographs on social media and forget that there can be beauty in the everyday, no matter where we are. Maybe paradise is more a state of mind than an actual physical location. So when Luke Harvey (Moss Flower Pictures) and I set out to make the music video, we wanted to convey that people all over the world have their own versions of paradise, and that is lovely: so many people and so many paradises. To help with the concept, friends from Chile, France, Iran, and Russia translated the lyrics into their respective languages. I’ve met each of these friends through music and touring over the years, and it’s wonderful to have their friendship reflected in this project. Luke set the translated subtitles and music to old film vignettes, capturing and challenging our perceptions of paradise.” — Justin Wade Tam


Photo credit: Annelise Loughead

WATCH: Malin Pettersen, “Queen of the Meadow”

Artist: Malin Pettersen
Hometown: Oslo, Norway
Song: “Queen of the Meadow”
Album: Wild Horse
Release Date: October 16, 2020
Label: Die With Your Boots On Records

In Their Words: “My grandmother, my father’s mother, died a few years ago. She lived on this tiny island and she is buried in the graveyard by the small island church. There is a kind of flower that grows out there called Queen of the Meadow (Mjødurt) and it has the sweetest most distinct smell. It makes me feel a quiet kind of happiness that is so pure and whole. After my grandmother died I tried writing her a song, but I just couldn’t find the words that could express how I felt about her. Words can only express so much — emotions are much more complex and textured. It ended up being a song about my own funeral. I hope I can be buried at the same graveyard, and I hope it’ll all align with the bloom of Mjødurt — because it holds everything I could ever dream of being remembered by.” — Malin Pettersen


Photo credit: Jonathan Vivaas Kise

LISTEN: Chris Smither, “Caveman”

Artist: Chris Smither
Hometown: Amherst, Massachusetts
Song: “Caveman”
Album: More From the Levee
Release Date: October 2, 2020
Label: Signature Sounds

In Their Words: “This is one of those songs that began very innocently, pretending to be a harmless little ditty… then about halfway through it turned on me and showed its teeth, not so much with a snarl, just a simple expression of hunger and a desire to eat me up. I thought it was going to be easy to write, and it was, as long as I thought it was a ‘four stages of man’ kind of theme. But then THE WALL kept climbing into every verse, and things got heavier. Finally it consumed me. This is one of those ‘surprise hits’ in my repertoire. It’s a frequent request. Maybe I’m the only one who’s surprised.” — Chris Smither


Photo credit: Joanna Chattman

Harmonics with Beth Behrs: Episode 4, Brandi Carlile

Harmonics with Beth Behrs is the newest show from the BGS Podcast Network, which delves into the intersection of music and wellness. The podcast’s third week features Brandi Carlile, Americana icon and advocate for the empowerment of women and the LGBTQ+ community.

LISTEN: APPLE • SPOTIFY • STITCHERAMAZON • POCKET CASTS • MP3


Harmonics host Beth Behrs talks with Carlile about spirituality and wisdom found through horses and nature, performing the album Blue for Joni Mitchell, the joy and connection of live music, anxiety, and singing with Dolly Parton at the Newport Folk Festival.

For many folks, the first time they heard of Brandi Carlile was during her show-stopping performance of “The Joke” at the 2019 Grammy awards. Carlile walked away with three trophies that night for her record, By The Way, I Forgive You (including Best Americana Album). She’s been honing her distinctive voice and building a dedicated audience for over twenty years, all the while staying committed to building a family and community with her band and team.

That commitment has made her a godmother of modern American roots music — as a curator of festival stages, interpreter of the legendary artists who came before, and producer and collaborator for a whole new generation of female artists.

Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow BGS and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!

WATCH: Handsome Ghost, “Weeds”

Artist: Handsome Ghost
Hometown: Worcester County, Massachusetts
Song: “Weeds”
Album: Some Still Morning
Release Date: September 18, 2020
Label: Photo Finish Records

In Their Words: “‘Weeds’ may be the brightest song on our record. The melody, the production — and the lyrics too. It’s about anticipating the inevitable end of a relationship (sounds sad, I know), but recognizing that you’re both going to move on and find your own way, independent of one another. In the simplest terms, it’s: ‘I’ll be here, you’ll be there — but I’m still going to care about you and I hope you think about me too sometimes.’ The song comes from a good place, a steady state of mind.

Nick Noyes has worked on all of our music videos for Some Still Morning and ‘Weeds’ is his latest creation. Typically the three of us will build up a visual concept together — but ‘Weeds’ is all Nick. He had a vision and we trust him and basically said, ‘Go for it, brother.’ Nick and I didn’t speak about the meaning of the song beforehand — and I’m glad we didn’t — because he interpreted it completely differently. To Nick, the song is about memory. About longing for a moment in time that is no longer there. The visual focuses on that feeling and explores it further…without explicitly referencing memory or flashbacks or anything of the like. I love how the video turned out, I find it very powerful and strange at times. And I mean that as a compliment.

“I also love that listeners, in this case someone extremely close to the band, can interpret a song completely differently than it was intended. That’s the best part about music, in my opinion. Once you put a song out there, it’s any listener’s right to make it their own and define what it means to them.” — Tim Noyes and Eddie Byun, Handsome Ghost


Photo credit: Mitchell Wojcik

LISTEN: Garrett Owen, “Souvenir”

Artist: Garrett Owen
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Song: “Souvenir”
Album: Quiet Lives
Release Date: September 18, 2020

In Their Words: “I wrote the opening guitar figure and first verse to ‘Souvenir’ a long time ago. I showed what I had written to a friend — ‘I put our love in a jar and drove it around in my beat-up car….’ He thought it was catchy. I started slowly trying to coax the rest of it out of myself and used it as an opportunity to take some really tricky chord work in the chorus and impose a massive key change for the second chorus. I have a lot of songs inspired by a long-term relationship I was in; the rest of the lyrics are a mix of abstract expressions of pain and emo-dramatic statements about how things with her ended.” — Garrett Owen


Photo credit: Melissa Laree Cunningham

LISTEN: Delta Spirit, “What Is There”

Artist: Delta Spirit
Hometown: NYC, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Austin, Montreal
Song: “What Is There”
Album: What Is There
Release Date: September 11, 2020
Label: New West Records

In Their Words: “’What is There’ is an acrostic poem that I wrote for the guys in the band, with each verse directed at a specific person. I wrote the song in the winter of 2018 while living in Oslo. We had just decided to give the band another go and I was feeling sentimental about the journey we had been on since 2005. We were all just kids trying to break into this business. Each of us had been burned by the major label system with other projects. Starting Delta Spirit with my best friends, traveling the world, and playing music that meant the world to us was such an improbable miracle, but then it felt inevitable. There were moments when we lost our way as brothers and as creative collaborators, but since the break, we have found new and better ways to communicate. And that feeling of inevitability is back.” — Matthew Logan Vasquez, Delta Spirit


Photo credit: Alex Kweskin

Through His Music, Charley Crockett Speaks to ‘Hard Times’ We’re All Facing

“Welcome to Hard Times,” the opening and title track from country crooner Charley Crockett’s eighth album is Crockett at his finest. He is pensive and pitch perfect, relevant and retro. “The dice are loaded, and everything’s fixed,” he sings. “Even a hobo would tell you this.”

It’s hard to tell if the 36-year-old Crockett is the hobo he references in that line, though it’s entirely plausible. As contemporaries cut their teeth at Belmont and Berklee, Crockett was busking on the streets of New Orleans and New York. While there, he learned how to entertain an audience in pursuit of a tip; perhaps more importantly, he learned the ways of this world, how we’ve all been ushered into a 24/7 casino where the house is telling lies and the gamblers are predestined to sin.

Welcome to Hard Times, comprised of 13 tracks of searing anguish set to slick, ’60s-style, country-western production, culminates with the particularly sorrowful “The Poplar Tree.” It’s a song that Crockett says has been received differently by different audiences, even as he — a man living somewhere between Black and white, privileged and not — feels that his message is obvious. “I have, many times, on this album cycle, said to press folks, ‘Yes, we’re all oppressed folks, but some folks just have it harder,’” he says. “And you have to recognize that.”

By phone, we talked to Crockett about his album, the role of artist as activist, and, of course, these very hard times.

Welcome to Hard Times sounds like you wrote it for this moment — in the midst of a pandemic, with widespread racial unrest — but you actually wrote it before everything went down. What inspired you?

You didn’t need this shit going on this year to know about these problems that we’re talking about. I don’t know how you could travel this world as an artist and not see it. I think that says everything about the nature of people. I recognize people are in different positions, but there are a lot of people who are in positions to not see what’s going on, and there are no consequences for them. Then there’s everybody else who’s forced to see it, who deals with it and suffers for it.

You’ve definitely been vocal in interviews and in your music. But even as you speak now, I get this sense that there’s a push and pull, or a toeing of some line that you’re subconsciously doing.

I’m trying to walk this line that is strange because I have been identified by a lot of my audiences as just a regular white man. Then there are a lot of people that look at me strangely as the complete opposite, as African-American. But I can’t speak for the Black community and I don’t really feel like I’m speaking on behalf of the white community either. I never saw myself as Black but I never liked my whiteness.

What does it mean when you say that you never liked your whiteness?

I dreamt of myself and viewed myself as not white from probably 5 years old. And then I look at myself now in videos and stuff, and I just… I feel like I look strange.

I guess what I’m saying to you is: My issues with my own identity tie to the kind of James Baldwin viewpoint that whiteness is just a metaphor for power, and that my identity as somebody who is uncomfortable in my whiteness says a lot about the relationship between Europeans in America and African-Americans and Natives. The romanticization of genocide is an unbelievable crime, but I think what is probably more savage and brutal is the assimilation through rape, through bondage, through [people like] my grandmother [who was mixed].

The easy thing for somebody to do is say, “Well, you can’t skip white responsibility for institutional and structural privilege.” I see that, so I’m not saying, “Hey, whiteness isn’t real, therefore nothing that’s happening to you is valid.” I’m saying you have to recognize that it’s happening, and then, if you truly wanna change it, at what point in the future do whites need to stop looking at whiteness as meaning anything? That’s the step that I feel is completely absent in the national conversation.

There are conversations happening though, right? And white people, at least some of them, appear to be really listening.

There’s a combination of white consciousness, and then there’s this other, fake, white virtue signaling. I just can’t stand some of that stuff ‘cause I see a lot of these people playing politics with their public image who are not doing anything in their life about shit. It’s whites signaling to other whites, and that’s what Martin Luther King was talking about at the end, you know? He really was. I think Malcolm X saw it at the end; I think James Baldwin, because he was so intellectual, was saying it to everyone, but he managed to get away with it because I think he seemed like he was mostly speaking within that kind of elite, intellectual world.

“Blackjack County Chain” is a song written in the ‘60s about a Black chain gang in Georgia that kills their supervising sheriff. Word on the street is that Red Lane, the writer, offered it to Charley Pride, but he passed on it because he didn’t want to stir up controversy. You covered it on Welcome to Hard Times, and it’s the only song on the album that you didn’t write. Why’d you decide to cut it?

I sung that song mostly ‘cause I listened to the words and identified with it. I feel like I’m dragging chains, you know? I just do. I always have. I think that that’s the other weird thing about America that is really hard to recognize, for a lot of us. It’s, like, no matter how much better a lot of these people have it, the insane thing that I’ve seen about America is, even among all these people in positions of power and privilege, they all view themselves as discriminated against and oppressed.

Your song “Poplar Tree” discusses lynching. Was there a concern about going too far when you wrote it?

I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about where that song was gonna go. It just went there.

Right, because you said this stuff dominates your mind.

It just does. And it’s who I am. I am in the public eye on some level and people got all kinds of crazy shit to say about that. And it is not lost on me that, for whatever reason, these people saying the crazy shit that they’re saying about me, they got nothing like that to say about these people that I’m getting compared to in the independent, Americana country scene. Even if I can sing ‘em under the table, they don’t criticize how they sound, but they criticize me up and down. And I’m not blaming them; I’m not mad at ‘em, I’m asking for it, in a way. I know that I’m asking for it, ‘cause I can just pack up and stop doing this shit.

 

Like, let’s talk about folk music. Let’s talk about blues, back in the day. When these guys were singing about their situation, it was all code. It had to be code because if it wasn’t, that might mean your life. So I’m stepping up and down to say this shit loudly, but I’m trying to build my audience to a place beyond where it is now. I’m just saying, I don’t exactly know who I’m speaking for, really, because of how completely outside of this society that I feel.

How did playing on the streets for so long shape you as an artist?

To me, that’s the best education I could’ve ever gotten in my life. It was unfortunate circumstances and difficult living that brought me there, but I would never wanna go another direction. It’s informed what I’ve done, and I learned about folk music, hip-hop, and everything else. I just absorbed it all on the street, and I made it into what it is now.

I have people in country who look at me like, “This guy’s an imposter! Look at this video of him on the subway train ten years ago! He’s wearing a beanie and tight pants; he’s not a real cowboy! He’s not country music!” And I’m like, who is more authentic than me? I never got a leg up in the business, period. I never opened up for anybody of note. I built my career out of the most unlikely of circumstances.

Do you think artists have a responsibility to speak up about social issues?

It’s like this: If your art isn’t saying shit, I don’t care about your political opinion. Like, if your art isn’t making an impact, your political opinion, to me, is little more than you trying to get ahead. And I mean that about white people; I mean that about everybody. If the art isn’t doing anything, then what’s the point?


Photo credit: Laura E. Partain. See the full photo story.