Tag: Songwriting

BGS 5+5: My Brother’s Keeper

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Artist: My Brother’s Keeper
Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio
Latest Album: Wartime Cartoons
Personal Nicknames (or rejected band names): Most of the band goes by our given names. Titus, Joshua, Adam, and Benj(amin), but our bass player “Wyatt” has been holding strong to the nickname “Sawmill” and has a “Sawmill” vanity license plate on his Ford Focus to prove it.

Answers provided by Benj Luckhaupt. 

Which artist has influenced you the most – and how?

I’m sure any artist would say “it’s hard to choose” and I’m going to say the same. Brian Wilson, Chris Thile, Alison Krauss, Tony Rice are all so formative to us, but as a songwriter I would say Bruce Springsteen has inspired me above all. His melodies are insanely catchy, his lyrics are gritty and literary. I appreciate his ability to be both subtle and straightforward, sometimes in the same sentence. He tells you the facts and then makes you think about the implications. Bruce also covers such a wide range of the human experience. His music is a great blueprint for the “song first” approach and I really try to incorporate that into my writing, even in the bluegrass medium. I want to write simple songs that make you think. There’s also such a variance in sound (think between Nebraska and Born in the USA) and yet it all works. I could nerd out about this forever.

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

Definitely film and literature. We look to film often to inspire our visuals. We have a music video that is very Wes Anderson-esque, and the visuals for the album cover of Wartime Cartoons were inspired by the starkness of show Severance. There are certainly a few songs inspired by movies. A song called “The Banshees” on our last album was inspired by the landscape and darkness of a movie called The Banshees of Inisherin.

Literature, song and poetry are all so closely related. Leonard Cohen was a great author outside of songs. Spending a lot of time in books has had major influence on my writing, directly and indirectly. I love to start my day with a book about religion or history and end my day with a book about music or musicians. Sometimes I try to do an audiobook in between. Just taking in all those beautiful words is such a wonderful way to increase your vocabulary and worldview.

Titus and Wyatt are both photographers, and I think that art form opens up creative pathways as well, and of course contributes to the visuals of the band.

What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?

This kid told me to think about what I’m thankful for and write about that. That was great advice. He was like 5 or 6 years old and I do think about thankfulness every time I write. Out of the mouth of babes.

What is a genre, album, artist, musician, or song that you adore that would surprise people?

Most people are pretty surprised when they find out that we love hip-hop and mainstream pop. They’re even more surprised when we tell them that our music is inspired by those genres. I’ve even had people say things to me like, “I like all music except for that rap crap” and I’m always like, “Oh, really? Because I love it!” Some people are even surprised when they hear how much we love The Beach Boys.

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

I’d like to sit down with Tony Rice and eat whatever fish he just caught and fried up. I’m sure we wouldn’t talk much, but we’d probably listen to Miles Davis and I’m sure I would learn a lot.

All Photos: Tasha Moehlman

Tim O’Brien & Jan Fabricius Pick ‘Paper Flowers’ As Their First Album Together

Posted on by Editor

Tim O’Brien & Jan Fabricius‘ new album, Paper Flowers, represents something of a double collaboration. While O’Brien has achieved many accomplishments in his long career, Paper Flowers stands as his first official album collaboration with his wife, Jan, although she has written and performed with him over the past decade.

Secondly, Paper Flowers is the result of the couple’s ongoing collaboration with the legendary singer-songwriter Tom Paxton. Twelve of the album’s 15 songs are the product of these regular Zoom sessions. Paxton had known the couple for years from traveling in similar musical circles, but their virtual songwriting dates arose after mutual friends Cathy Fink and Jon Weisberger asked O’Brien and Fabricius if they would consider co-writing a song with Paxton for the Bluegrass Sings Paxton project that they were then just getting off the ground.

The first song the three of them wrote together, “You Took Me In,” wound up on that 2024 release. “We wrote the song really quickly and we’re really happy about it,” O’Brien shared on a phone call between concerts with Fabricius in New Mexico. “It did jump start the process.”

O’Brien has found this collaborative process particularly productive. “Writing songs on your own, for me, sometimes I labor over them for months,” he elaborates. “But with a co-write, it seems like your time is precious. The idea that you’re together in the same space…and you want to get to the crux really as quickly as possible. And in general, it’s a liberating process. It’s like fishing. You’re pulling these things out of the water and you see, ‘Oh, there’s a good one. Here’s a good, good size one.’”

You can easily sense the musical liberation on Paper Flowers. The album stands as perhaps O’Brien’s most musically diverse work across his celebrated career. While still securely rooted in an acoustic foundation, the record contains a variety of music styles, including the boogie-woogie jaunt “Blacktop Rag Top,” the gospel-tinged “Back To Eden,” and the New Wave-y rocker “Down to Burn.” Fabricius discovered that these songwriting sessions can lead to some interesting results.

“It amazes me how we’ll have an idea and then by the time the whole song’s molded and done, it may be totally different, take you down a different path than you thought you were going,” she says. One example of this twisty path of songwriting came when the couple shared with Paxton the story of an armadillo that they were battling in the yard of their Nashville home – including the animal’s miraculous escape from a raccoon trap. Paxton, who was at a laundromat at the time, immediately saw it as a song premise. The highly comical “Lonesome Armadillo” relates the misadventures of an armadillo that’s stranded in a laundromat. It’s trying to bum a quarter to get back to Amarillo after failed attempts to become a Nashville music star, including getting kicked out of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop and not getting to meet award-winning bassist (and longtime O’Brien collaborator) Mike Bub.

Fabricius also credits Paxton for coming up with a key lyrical detail – a peanut butter sandwich – in “Covenant,” a heartbreaking song about parents losing a child in a school shooting that was inspired by the 2023 Covenant School tragedy in Nashville. She recalls, “When he said, ‘Well, let’s say this kid has got a peanut butter sandwich in the backpack,’ at first I thought: ‘Huh?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh boy, that really does bring the reality to it.’ We’re just putting ourselves into the parents’ shoes a little bit, you know, and what can you say? It’s hard to put the words to it, so less was more.” O’Brien adds that these “visual references and physical details are sometimes better than trying to moralize or anything.” He also drew a parallel to the subtleties involved in cooking: “If you make cornbread, you don’t want to stir it up too much. It doesn’t work as well if you stir it up too much.”

Detailed lyric writing is something Paxton very much believes in. “It’s not just a tree; it’s an oak tree,” Paxton believes. “It’s not just a street, it’s Cornwall Street. You get them closer to life when you notice the particulars of life and the sandwich in the kid’s backpack is a given and it’s up to you to see it.”

The importance of details also was central in the creation of the track, “Yellow Hat.” Paxton came to one session stating that he wanted to write a song about a hat. Not just any hat, but a yellow hat. This sense of specificity certainly lent an air of realism to the tune, which deals with a couple aging gracefully. The lyrics come off as being so relatable and authentic that people think it is about O’Brien and Fabricius. O’Brien says that he has alerted audiences that it is not them in the song by announcing: “This is about an old couple, not us; (they’re) moving out of their house, not our house.”

“He hasn’t bought me a yellow hat!” Fabricius chimes in.

Paxton, in fact, often arrives to the Zoom with a premise or a phrase that he is eager to work on. Fabricius recalls him saying: “’This idea has been driving me nuts all week. It’s about a guy who really loves his wife but all he does is complain about her.’ And we were off and running.” After coming up with lyrics for this premise, O’Brien and Fabricius realized the next day that the song was very husband-sided, so they wrote a verse from the wife’s perspective. “And (Tom) was really happy with it,” Fabricius reveals. And well, he should be. The tune, “This Gal Of Mine” sits nicely with Tennessee Ernie Ford/Kay Starr’s “You’re My Sugar” and John Prine/Iris Dement’s “In Spite Of Ourselves” as a classic battling couples country tune.

There are times too when ideas come out of nowhere – or close to nowhere. At one of their virtual meetups, O’Brien was sitting around riffing on the guitar and, as he recalls, “Tom says, ‘Boy, the more you play that, the more it sounds like you’re playing ‘fat pile of puppies.’” And thus, the song “Fat Pile of Puppies” was born. While the tune may initially sound like a light romp simply about adorable little dogs, “Fat Pile of Puppies” (at one time considered for the album’s title) holds a deceptive depth to it. The crucial lyric “Falling in love is what I fear” could easily be describing the emotions for another human as much as for a dog.

“It’s kind of a love song in a way,” Fabricius confides. The writing of this song also came as O’Brien and she were still mourning the loss of their 17-year-old dog; however, they have since acquired a new pup named Nellie Kane (yes, after the O’Brien-penned Hot Rize track).

Real-life inspirations serve as the source for several other songs on this album. “Father of the Bride,” for example, was written for Fabricius’ son when his daughter was getting married. The humorous “Atchison” was inspired by a trip the couple took to Kansas, where Fabricius is from. She has a cousin who actually lives in Atchison, and during the visit, O’Brien exclaimed: “I have never been to Atchison.” The phrase stuck in their heads, giving rise to the album’s catchy lead-off track, which not only references the great train tune “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe,” but also affords O’Brien the opportunity to break out a Jimmie Rodgers-like yodel.

It’s not surprising, however, that the couple wound up choosing “Paper Flowers” as their title track, because it serves as something like their courting song. The tune came about after they came across O’Brien’s old notebooks (the “little $2 notebooks you could put in your shirt pocket,” as he described them) in which he had written his early love notes to her. Fabricius saved the postcards and paper flowers that he had sent her. One of the notes contained the sentence: “one for you and one for me and one for the miles in between,” which got transformed into one of the song’s key lines.

“We still have the paper flowers on the mantle,” Fabricius shares. “And they made for good cover art.”

The tracks that the couple wrote without Paxton, “I Look Good in Blue” and “Down to Burn,” are both true stories, although not drawn from their own lives. “I Look Good in Blue” is a gin-soaked portrait of a honky-tonk piano player whose family told O’Brien and Fabricius about this woman whose wish was to “save that (Bombay) Sapphire bottle and pour my ashes in.” Another song drenched in alcohol, “Down to Burn” was written after the couple encountered a quintet of drunk women on a “girlfriends’ getaway.” The tune, which exudes an ’80s New Wave party vibe, provided O’Brien the chance to dust off his electric guitars. “The great part is seeing Tim in our music room putting electric guitar on (the song). He had more fun with that,” Fabricius shares. O’Brien admits, “I sweated over it more than I had fun. I did enjoy that. I have several electric guitars, and I don’t know how to operate them, and it made me try to learn more. I kind of got a couple of them working pretty good.”

O’Brien has won two GRAMMYs and made a lot of music in his over 50 years as a professional musician. Toward the end of our conversation, he shared some of his thoughts about the role of music and musicians in society. “The music is, in a broader sense, like the human song. It’s like creative force, like a tree growing or grass growing. It’s going to happen and we’re the vehicles – the musicians – the people who play music and we just organize it in some way to let it be there…

“The human race could not function without music,” he continues. “It’s used for various things. It’s used for ceremony. It’s used for dancing. It’s used for entertainment. It’s used for communication… I mean Bob Dylan, he wrote ‘Blowing in the Wind.’ He was writing what he saw, what was already going on. It wasn’t like he invented that. He’s the channel.” O’Brien then paused before adding, “It’s a nice thing to be in the channel and kind of push it along.”

Photo Credit: Scott Simontacchi

Watchhouse Found New Rituals Amid the Push and Pull of Change

Posted on by Editor

Chances are you’ve cultivated a few personal routines to help you navigate the world: one for daily life, one for weekly, monthly, and so on. There’s also likely a handful of individual habits that affect how you choose to go about your routine. The former, at times, can influence the latter, fitting within each other like a pair of nesting dolls, adjacent and similar in their roles.

Then there are rituals. Though these three recurring sets of actions – routines, habits, and rituals – would seem like easily overlapping bedfellows, rituals carry an intrinsic quality the other two lack: mindfulness. Rituals bear a sense of intention like the other two, but it’s often coupled with an element of symbolism or custom. It’s not just a matter of doing something and saying it’s done; there are other connotations or expectations that may influence why doing it matters.

Holding this notion in mind, it’s Rituals that Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz of North Carolina duo Watchhouse have decided to name their new album. Through its 11 tracks, the married musicians posit an abundance of questions and actions, their contemplations placed in settings that are as clear as a simple back porch and as abstract as a space “through the looking glass,” “beyond this to and fro.” Settings that exist outside of not only any kind of routine, but separate from time and space all together.

Though Watchhouse’s new writings don’t seem to present rituals in their conventional form, the title still feels wholly appropriate. Marlin and Frantz’s reflections, wistful pining, and open-ended ruminations don’t lead to a sense of clear, expected structure that rituals would traditionally provide, but each song is lined with an abundance of intention, mindfulness, and hope for various outcomes. Sometimes these are overtly stated – Oh, I’m dreaming of a life with you in the sun/ And I hope our time together has only just begun… – and sometimes they are dressed in metaphors: Go fire your cannonball, go and fire away/ When the ashes fall we’ll start a brand new day.

There are defined ideas that Watchhouse put forth on the album: identity and awareness, the distinction between patterns and truths, how to develop a positive relationship with change, and what it means to evolve. All the same, while our internal responses to these songs may change over time, the very act of revisiting, replaying, and reconsidering their meanings, and how we are affected by them, can be a form of ritual in its own way.

Amid an extensive tour that will take them all over the U.S. and into Canada through summer and fall, Watchhouse spoke with BGS about their collaborative dynamic, how their individual artistic instincts influence the direction of a song, and the prevalence of duality in the album – as well as in their lives.

It’s been about four years since your last album and eight years since both your lives changed from bandmates to family. Given that Rituals focuses on patterns and the perception of change on our lives, how has the ever-growing longevity of your union in marriage — and all the ways marriage transforms a relationship on its own — changed the way you perceive and interact with the music making process?

Andrew Marlin: When you hit the road and join forces with other people to play music, it’s kind of like stepping outside of the norm and stepping outside of the daily life to go up there and almost take on a role or take on a character in order to get inside the music. You kind of just forget everything that the day often requires of you, because all of a sudden those requirements aren’t there. It’s just the stage and the music and the people that are there rooting for you to go deep, you know?

I think finding that zone with Emily has had its challenges in the past, because we’re so closely tied to each other. We raise kids together and we live together, and so doing all this traveling together and playing music together too, it makes it harder – or made it harder for me at the beginning, I think – to leave the daily routine and expectations behind on stage and just shed all of that and take on that character. It’s one thing to look at your bandmates’ eyes and get a little nod or whatever’s happening during the music. It’s kind of like this understanding of, “I’m not here right now. This is just me playing music.”

Getting to that zone with Emily, now that we’re 16 years into it, has taken a while to get to that point to where it’s an acceptance of all of it, instead of just leaving things behind to get on stage. It’s like we’re carrying all of it with us at all points in time. People that come to see us get a real and honest version of ourselves, trying to go deep in the music but also being completely aware of each other too.

Emily Frantz: I was just thinking about how much things changed in 2020 and 2021, living our mundane day-to-day lives in our house, and the transition back into being on the road again and touring. We’ve obviously been doing that for a few years now since COVID, but that experience made us relearn what the relationship is between our daily life at home and touring and [figuring out] how can they coexist in a healthy way.

Ironically, the album’s opening track, “Shape,” avoids the traditional shape or structure of a song (all verses, no chorus) while the actual narrative of the song embraces ideas that lean into a sense of purgatory and a nebulous state of being — the very opposite of what would help establish a sense of shape, boundaries, identity, direction, patterns, or truths. What were the mental and emotional motivations that inspired you to take the song in this direction?

AM: It’s like establishing the shape or the pattern in order to separate yourself from it. That’s what a lot of those verses are doing, kind of outlining the things that often make me feel like I’m in a box and I’m trying to get outside of that box. The only way to do it – because there’s no real form to it – is to imagine the parameters, imagine the spaces that it ends up kind of confining you in, in order to step outside of those [boxes]. I think that was the intention with “Shape.”

EF: And the way that “Shape” came into its final form, at least final the way it appears on the record, was a lot of the things that you said about it: It didn’t ever really conform and it got rearranged and had things added and taken away from it so many times, a lot more so than other songs. But it always did feel like the backbone of this record in a lot of ways, which is why it felt really right as the opening track of this record.

AM: If there was a shape to define that song, I’d say it’s a spiral.

 

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How have you fit rituals into your lives and have they helped you maintain a sense of stable continuity as a family and as musicians?

AM: I feel like since having kids, the day has taken so much more form. Because I think that, and Emily [is] really brilliant about this, giving structure to the day is super helpful for them. So that they don’t have to wonder what’s happening, so that they can really pay attention to what is happening. I’ve watched both of our kids blossom in that environment. Emily’s really good about helping to create that and make sure we stick to it. Carrying that on the road has been really helpful, too and something that I didn’t realize I was going to benefit very much from. Because I definitely, when left to my own devices, am like a sheet left out to dry – just flapping in the wind. To have a little bit of structure to the day, and have to enter into these mental zones with the kiddos, has added a lot of mental structure to my existence. I think that’s the biggest thing for me.

And within that, it’s about realizing what the day actually requires of me, instead of what I imagined today to be expecting of me. Finding those real anchors and a little more gravity to the things I’m working on have helped me shed old expectations of myself and what I think I’m supposed to be doing. I think that’s what led us to be okay with changing the band name and changing up some of the sounds and approaching this thing we’ve been doing for a long time in a whole new way.

EF: I think the thing that we are [focusing on] 16 years in is finding where the balance is between freedom and artistic expression, and also just daily life and figuring out how to have those two things like coexist and make each other better and not be in a constant sort of push and pull.

The first verse in “Beyond Meaning” is intriguing. The statement of your “gentle” disposition is nice, but its seemingly conditional nature gives pause — particularly when considering that life is noisy and out of our control more often than not. What is it that you’re trying to say about your own identity and awareness of how you cope with the noise and bustle of everyday living?

AM: I feel like what I was getting at is to view it as though it’s external noise. But it’s actually internal noise. That’s often the thing that keeps me from my peace and keeps me from being gentle. It’s my own defenses and my own self-consciousness that end up creating all of this noise. It paints the external noise in a negative light. When I can control that and remember to keep my own defenses at bay and be open and actually present, the idea that maybe this external noise is not a malicious one keeps me gentle and then often what comes from that is a gentle interaction. So it’s more about controlling the internal noise in order to actually experience the external factors.

Out of the 11 songs on the album, Emily is the primary vocalist only for “Firelight.” Why was Emily the right fit to sing the story of this one song? And more broadly, what went into your shared thought process on when, and for how long, you two would sing together? Is it a purely harmony and arrangement-based decision, or do the emotions of a song influence how each vocal arrangement is structured?

EF: A lot of times it can be pretty cut and dry. If we’re deciding who should sing lead on a song, it might just have to do with the range or the key, where we think it sounds good. Sometimes that plays into it maybe even more than the lyrics or the subject matter. With Andrew doing the songwriting, he’s always been more of the primary lead vocalist. Oftentimes, by the time we’re arranging a tune and finding out how we want to present it, it’s very cemented in his voice. But then a lot of times, there will be tunes that we’re struggling with and we’re not quite finding it. By switching out who’s singing, it reframes the whole song and allows us to not just change the lead vocalist, but to find a whole different zone for the song in terms of what we hear and how it gets arranged and recorded. That was the case with “Firelight.” We had so many different versions of that song over the years leading up to recording – different time signatures, different instrumentation – and that was one of the last ones that came together for this album. Most of it got done after the initial tracking session because we were searching on it for a long time and I think I like it more and more the longer I sit with it, the more I hear it.

AM: Often people do want to know why Emily’s not singing more tunes or why the roles are what they are. But I think it’s really important to shine a little light on what Emily does behind the scenes when she’s not singing. The way she plays rhythm and plays violin or whatever instrument she’s on, it ends up being this anchor for everyone in the band. The way that offers complete structure to what we’re doing and allows everything else to sway around that a little bit, I feel like even when she’s not singing, her musical voice is such a strong presence in the music. I’ve heard her say this before, like when she’s playing violin, she’d rather not sing lead because it’s almost like having to sing with two voices. That became part of the structure of what we’ve been doing all along, not just with the lead vocal. The feel of the song and the rhythm and the chord structure and the flow of it all often is hinged on what Emily ends up doing. I think that’s just as important as her taking a lead vocal.

EF: I’ve really, over the years of us playing music together, come around to enjoying singing lead when we find the song that feels good in my range. But for the most part, I’d rather be singing harmony to Andrew and that definitely brings me just as much, if not more, fulfillment than singing lead on a song.

“Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” and “Sway / Endless Highway (Pt. 2)” leave a much heavier state of reflection than that of “Patterns,” the song you chose as the album’s finale. Were the lighter tone of the music and the lyrics a driving factor for why these last three songs are in this order? Did you want to avoid an ending that leaves the listener with a more uncertain emotional state?

AM: I’ll start off by saying Ryan Gustafson, who produced this record with us, actually ended up coming up with this track order. Having not listened to it that way and then taking Ryan’s perspective on it, it was like being able to listen to these songs in their entirety for the first time. All of a sudden, I was getting feelings from these recordings that I hadn’t gotten yet.

“Endless Highway (Pt. 1)” is a heavier song and talks about a really traumatic event that Emily and I went through and that long drone at the end of it kind of dances around the dread of that. Then into “Sway,” it’s more of a coming out of that [feeling]. How do we peek our heads out of the hole once we’ve gone down and slowly crawl back out? To finally get into “Endless Highway (Pt. 2),” where it feels like a real revelation and a real triumphant part of the record? So, you get to the top of the mountain on this song. But I do believe that while those revelations come, we get to the top of those mountains, everything’s clear, and there’s so much lightness and clarity around us, we still have to wake up the next morning, make coffee, make breakfast, get kids to school, go and run errands and carry that little mountain of revelation with us everywhere we go.

I think that the heaviness and the profoundness of that idea ends up giving way to these smaller, mundane parts of our life. That’s what “Patterns” feels like to me. It’s an admission that if we can hold on to those little revelations and the clarity they offered us, hopefully it’ll keep us light by offering us that little reminder of hope.

EF: Going back to what Andrew was just saying about having these big events or these heavy, emotional things happen, and then having to go on with our lives, and the push and pull of that – there’s frustration and beauty in it. I love the order of those [last few] tracks, because I feel both the “Endless Highways” and “Sway” are songs that were written in the middle of this album being written and there’s a lot of anguish from a lot of different sources in those songs. And then “Patterns” was the last song that was written for the album before we recorded it, so it feels like it has a certain clarity to it. Going down in the trench and making your way back up, even though it’s still really just posing a lot of the same questions [as the beginning of the album], but from a more settled state of mind.

What truths about yourselves and how you view the world have you discovered and accepted since finishing Rituals? How many of the questions you’ve posed through these songs do you feel you’ve managed to settle on answers for?

AM: I don’t think I would often look closely enough at how I was making a person feel, as much as I would look at the way the person was. I think that’s becoming more of my truth these days, just to trust that showing up open-minded with awareness and consciousness, focused on experiencing rather than projecting, is probably the closest to any truths that have come out of writing these songs and getting to the end of this record. The takeaway is that it’s not like we found answers, necessarily.

EF: It’s all just a pursuit, always.

AM: You know, it’s not always about finding answers. It’s about finding out–

AM/EF: It’s figuring out what the question is.

Photo Credit: Jillian Clark

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Basic Folk: Mary Gauthier & Jaimee Harris

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Mary Gauthier and Jaimee Harris talk to Lizzie and Cindy for Basic Folk onboard the Cayamo cruise in front of a live audience. We get down to business in addressing nice things by asking Mary what kind of shoes she’s wearing – as she has a reputation for enjoying the good stuff, especially on her feet. After that, we asked and Jaimee enthusiastically answered the age-old question: What is the correct number of shoes to bring on tour? They generously share about their relationship, which began two years after they met as teacher (Mary) and student (Jaimee) in a songwriting workshop. Interestingly enough, both Harris and Gauthier have been playing music for about the same amount of time, despite their age difference. Jaimee, mid 30s, and Mary, early 60s, are also both sober and expand on what it’s like to be students of their own patterns.

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We also talk about their touring life, songwriting processes, and the alchemy of transforming personal trauma into art. We get to hear the very cute story of how Jaimee first heard of Mary Gauthier, by way of Ray Waylie Hubbard’s song “Name Dropping.” Mary, in turn, talks about her first impressions of Jaimee’s songwriting (spoiler alert: she was completely floored). They share their future plans with us, where they say there will be a Harris-Gauthier album, right after Jaimee completes the three records in her head and Mary writes her second book. They also share what it’s been like when they are together and around people who know Mary (who has a higher profile in the Americana world), but don’t know Jaimee. Each comment that they feel for partners in relationships with people who are “actually famous.”

We end with a great Lightning Round, a game we like to play with partners called “Which One.” We think they might have enjoyed that, because on the last day of the cruise Mary, getting off the boat, shouted, “Thanks for the interview! The Lightning Round was a real moment!!”

Photo Credit: Will Byington 

David Ramirez Shares His Dreams on ‘All the Not So Gentle Reminders’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The first key to All the Not So Gentle Reminders, the sixth album by singer-songwriter David Ramirez releasing on March 21, is “Maybe It Was All a Dream,” the moody, elegiac song that opens his first LP in five years.

There are no lyrics to spell it out for the listener. It’s an instrumental, mostly a synthesizer riff over drums and a stately organ interspersed with a muffled, mysterious, and unintelligible voice. It’s more about mood – think Twin Peaks – than anything specific.

“The connection I have with it, which is a little too personal for me to share, it just felt right to open the record,” Ramirez said. “I had already gone into it knowing that I wanted some very long and dreamlike intros and outros to some of these songs. So it just seemed like a very fitting thing to have it all tie in by introducing the record with a musical number.”

The second key to the album is “Waiting on the Dust to Settle,” the second track, where Ramirez confides he doesn’t yet know where he’s headed.

“Amen, I can see it in the distance, the potential for a new beginning,” he sings. “I don’t recognize this place anymore … [I’m] waiting for the dust to settle.”

In our BGS interview below, you’ll learn the identity of the third key song on All the Not So Gentle Reminders, why it took so long to record and release the new material, and how the album’s lush string arrangements are a sign of the maturation of the artist.

The string arrangements on the album are very prominent, a counterpoint that duets with the lyrics. What brought that on?

David Ramirez: Yeah, for sure. I’ve never worked with strings before and just to kind of stay in the same lane of this dream world that I was trying to build, it made sense. … I’ve been doing this thing for a while now, but I feel like bringing strings into an album, I felt very adult for the first time. It felt good. It was really exciting.

Why did it take you five years to get this album out?

It was COVID and a breakup that kind of paralyzed me from being creative. I didn’t want to directly reference [the breakup]. There is one song on the album called “Nobody Meant to Slow You Down” that is direct from my last relationship. But the rest of it, I wanted to explore some other things.

You have Mexican heritage. Things are going badly for Mexicans and Mexican Americans — and immigrants and their families from many nations and backgrounds — in the U.S. now. Any reason you didn’t tackle that?

I have a couple of political tunes on past records and it’s something that I address during shows. This record for me, especially with the state of my heart recently going through a pretty big breakup that was extremely world-shaking for me, I didn’t want to put out for personal reasons a heartbreak record. … I did write some songs that were more social and politically heavy and I’m reserving those for an EP or my next album. I have this new song that I’ll release sometime later this year, called “We Do It for the Kids,” which is probably my most political tune to date and it’s a pretty heavy one.

To get the full effect of your songs, close attention must be paid to the lyrics. Is that a challenge during shows where people are also socializing?

I’m lucky enough to have people here in the states who’ve been following me for a while and they enjoy the lyrics. They enjoy how meditative it is. But the shows aren’t just that. I do not like going to see a songwriter and they sing for two hours and it’s just dark and depressing the whole time. So we mix in a lot of music from a lot of different records and make sure that there’s a dynamic and it’s fun and it’s funny and it’s upbeat.

Sure, there are slower and more contemplative moments. But we like to put on a show. … In Europe, they’re very polite and you can put on the most rocking show and they’re going to give you a golf clap. They’re there for the songs and the stories. So I generally have to curate a different set when I’m overseas.

You’re based in Austin, Texas. Did you grow up there?

I was born and raised in Houston, playing baseball growing up. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school that I met these fellow students who were all in theater and choir, and those relationships led me to stop playing ball and join choir and join theater and pick up an instrument and start writing my songs. I went to Dallas for a brief time to attend [Dallas Baptist University], and that’s where I started playing out in front of people for the first time, whether it was just open mics or the midnight slot at a metal club where they allowed an acoustic songwriter guy to show up and close out the evening. I was just so desperate to play that I didn’t really think twice about it. In 2007 and 2008 I lived in Nashville and then I moved here to Austin, Texas, in December of 2008 and I’ve been here ever since.

A third key track on the album is “The Music Man,” where you credit your father for helping spur you to make music.

“The Music Man” is a song I wrote about my father who gave me a Walkman when I was 10 years old. There are many people I can thank and [to whom I can] attribute my passion and my love for not just music itself, but for writing and performing it. But if I’m really upfront and honest, I think it goes back to when my father gave me his favorite cassette tapes and how that led to this life as a 41-year-old where I make records and tour the world full-time.

Who were the artists on those cassettes?

The Cars Greatest Hits. That’s obviously a rock band, but the song that I was so obsessed with was [the downbeat] “Drive.” Then I went to the Cranberries, and then to Fiona Apple, and then I went to Sarah McLachlan and that led to Radiohead.

… There’s this melancholy nature and mood that all those records have that at such a young age made a deep impression on me. I didn’t start playing music till seven, eight years after that, but by the time I did pick up a guitar or pick up a pen or piece of paper and start writing down my feelings, I think all those influences from such a young age really started to show their faces.

Any one artist in particular that inspired you to take up songwriting?

When I was 21 I got Ryan Adams’ Gold and that was just a big, massive influence musically for me. … That really locked in for the first time how I wanted to tell stories and what kind of stories I wanted to tell. Ryan and I don’t know each other, but his records led me to folks like Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan. He was the doorway to a lot of a lot of greats that weren’t really coming my way when I was in high school.

Are you comfortable with your music being categorized as Americana?

I don’t mind it, but I don’t really understand it either. If you say it’s Americana, people assume that it’s more country and I don’t feel that way at all. The more I do it, [I prefer] just “singer-songwriter,” because at least that offers freedom. Because every record I’ve released sounds different than the last. So at least with singer-songwriter, I can kind of have the freedom to evolve and change.

Photo Credit: Black Sky Creative

Tiny Desk Country Star

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Now here’s some Good Country!

Last week, NPR Music released a brand new Tiny Desk Concert featuring country phenomenon Megan Moroney; it’s the starlet’s first visit to the fabled cubicle concert series. With an acoustic band and her fretboard inlays sparkling with her most recent hit album title, 2024’s Am I Okay?, Moroney plays through a handful of her hits – two selections from her Am I Okay? era and two from her 2023 breakout album, Lucky, which was certified Gold by RIAA.

Moroney’s brand of country is wholly mainstream and ripe for radio love (around ten of her titles have charted so far) and a sound that combines the polish and glamour of artists like Carrie Underwood with the grit, humor, and self-awareness of The Chicks and women country forebears from Loretta Lynn to Gretchen Wilson. It’s all packaged in a familiar brand of rhinestones and gorgeous blonde hair, sly humor, and manicured and idyllic while down-to-earth beauty, yet Moroney’s music ends up consistently striking her listeners as feeling totally brand new. It’s grounded in tradition, yes, but breaking new soil with each and every effort.

Critics and fans agree – what Moroney is doing works. She’s won a CMT Music Award, an ACM Award, and took home a CMA Award in 2024 for New Artist of the Year. Her Am I Okay? Tour kicks off this spring and continues through the fall, with dozens of dates at huge arenas, theaters, festivals, and venues across the country.

Her too-short 17-minute Tiny Desk Concert demonstrates why. “Tennessee Orange,” Moroney’s breakout hit and a viral internet sensation, is quippy, witty, and leverages a mighty Music Row hook. These songs are as sardonic as they are saccharine, a subtle siren plying us through our ears, eyes, and hearts. “I’m Not Pretty,” which leads off both her Tiny Desk appearance and 2023’s Lucky, certainly warrants her middle finger to the mentioned “ex-boyfriend,” leaning into the liberation and comeuppance dripping from the track you can still hear regularly over the airwaves. “No Caller ID” is found in delicious heartbreak that reminds listeners of ’90s and ’00s classics like Lee Ann Womack’s “Last Call,” but with 2025 production values and plenty of Moroney’s own spin. She introduces the final song, “Am I Okay?,” the titular track for her current album, tour, and the inspiration for her signature guitar’s inlays with even more of her biting wit and charm:

“[‘Am I Okay?’ is] proof that a man once made me happy, which is nice in my discography of sad songs. Full transparency, he did screw up, so this song is no longer true, but it was fun while it lasted, right?”

Yes, indeed. All of her music, from the sad to the salacious, is entirely fun, top-to-bottom. Megan Moroney is a mainstream country icon on the rise and her Tiny Desk Concert appearance illustrates why and how she will continue to win hearts and ears with her particular brand of Good Country.

 

With Each and Every Album, Extraordinary Mandolinist Sierra Hull Finds Herself

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

The traditional path of a musician’s career would say that gaining a record label’s approval reflects a certain level of accomplishment and stature. That’s a good thing, right? It can be, but what makes for the right fit to a musician’s career – whether with a label or as an independent artist – largely depends on how a person wants to navigate the ebbs and flows that come with making music for a living.

Enter Sierra Hull.

Just over five years removed from her fourth full-length album, 25 Trips, the aforementioned fork in the road is exactly the juncture at which Hull recently found herself. Now bearing her fifth full-length album, A Tip Toe High Wire, the Nashville-based mandolinist and songwriter decided that the extra work of an independent release didn’t scare her.

In fact, Hull is someone who keeps busy – “I’m not good with time off,” she says – and A Tip Toe High Wire may turn out to be her most true-to-form album to date. From her collaborators – Béla Fleck, Tim O’Brien, Aoife O’Donovan, Lindsay Lou, Ronnie Bowman, Justin Moses, Ethan Jodziewicz, Geoff Saunders and more – to her co-writers, to production, arrangements, and underlying theme, every aspect of the record evokes Hull’s concentrated instincts as a musician, composer, and experienced public artist.

These songs let the rest of us know just a little more about the “who,” “how,” and “why” behind the music and how it fits into Hull’s life and of the lives of those she holds dear. It’s a multifaceted expression of individualism and independence while also being nowhere near a display of isolated work – truly a balancing act of coexisting contrasts.

BGS spoke with Sierra Hull by phone ahead of a packed tour, about the significance of going independent, embracing new ways of songwriting, how her perspective of making music has changed, and more.

How would you describe where you were creatively, between the release of 25 Trips and leading into this new independent recording?

Sierra Hull: Part of it is that I didn’t really have the opportunity to go out and tour 25 Trips. When things were starting to open up [after the pandemic shutdown], I put together this band that I’m touring with and was able to think about what I wanted the music to feel like on the heels of [COVID]. I tried to think about songs that would would feel fun to stand on a stage and perform, you know? And I think some of the context of moving into [A Tip Toe High Wire] was thinking about that.

[25 Trips] was also my last record as part of my Rounder Records contract. A Tip Toe High Wire just felt like this new chapter. And having fresh songs that I had started to write, having been inspired by the time off the road to write music, I kind of leaned into that. I was loving playing with this band and I felt like I had the freedom to not necessarily have outside chatter in my ear about what the next thing needed to be. It felt like an opportunity to just make music that I felt excited by and capture it. At first I wasn’t sure if it was going to become a record, or a single, or what it might be. But the further we got into it, I would just continue to book sessions that we could get in the studio and record in between all the touring.

I feel like [being independent] gives me more of an opportunity to have a direct offering and connection to my fans in a way that maybe I couldn’t have in another scenario, and it feels really important for me to have that in this moment.

How has your perspective of the music and album making process changed? What kind of goals did you set for yourself in this new career chapter?

I don’t know if my goals felt different, because the goal for me has never been to try to chase a particular thing or to please a certain kind of entity. But at the same time, when you’re independent, you get to call all the shots, you know? You decide when you’re recording, how you’re recording, when the music gets released, how it gets released, all that kind of stuff. It’s kind of like a difference of me deciding what’s on the puzzle pieces and then figuring out how to put the puzzle together, rather than just somebody handing you a puzzle and the picture is there already.

I often say, “If I was only making music for me, I could do that anytime I want.” I can sit at home in a room by myself and enjoy music that way. But I think that we as artists and performers, we create and we make stuff because we want to be able to share with people. We want to be able to share a common emotional experience with people. It’s the struggle between trusting yourself, and being vulnerable enough to receive the good things and knowledge that other people around me have to offer.

In deciding, “I’m going to do what I want to do,” it almost prompts the question, “Wouldn’t she have that figured out already?” It’s a nice reminder that there’s no timeline to connecting with self-discovery.

It’s funny, because I feel like it’s one of those things with every album I’ve made. [People say,] “She’s finally coming into her own” – it’s like that every chapter! But the truth is, that’s the human story at any level. You can be coming into your own your entire life. you know? It looks different at 16, and it looks different at 20, it looks different at 25, and it looks different now in my 30s.

There is a certain amount of weird calm that I feel about more things in my life and I think part of that is when you work hard throughout your 20s and there’s such a grind taking place. For me, I love the grind. I live for the work part of all this. Like I said, I’m not really good at just sitting around doing nothing so I’d rather be working than not. But at the same time, I need to not clench my hands too tightly around the thing that is my art and my career. So much of this is out of my control. People will like it or they they won’t and it’s about trying to find some peace and asking myself, “Do I feel like I’ve done my best?” And how much that really matters, instead of being as validated by the praise one receives. We all long for that – I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, too. But I think there’s just a little bit less worry about that. It kind of feels like age gives you that.

What about your songwriting approach did you change for A Tip Toe High Wire?

I think songwriting is always such a journey. This was the first record that has been primarily made up of my touring band. Some of the songs were written and then performed live before we even recorded them in the studio – not all of them – but a good chunk of them have been road-tested, which is an interesting way of [developing a song]. “Lord, That’s a Long Way,” I wrote that tune because I literally was imagining in my mind the way it would feel to play this live with this band. It’s a different kind of approach when you’re thinking that way. I imagine one instrument kicking it off and then another one joining in on that same riff and kind of building the opening. In this way, sometimes you can almost hear it and feel it in a live experience before you’re even finished writing a song.

“Muddy Water” is a beautiful song with an equally beautiful sentiment about staying true to oneself. How does this mentality applies to your experience as an artist?

I think part of it is about trying to not become jaded by [the life of a musician]. If you’re doing something over and over and it kind of becomes your world, it’s easy to get burned out. I’m always trying to make sure that I don’t get burned out and am finding ways to be inspired. So much of that is about keeping a positive mindset and trying to keep an open mindset to the inspiration around us. The other thing that I’ll say is, I’ve gotten to do so much collaborating over the last few years. That’s been a big part of my musical world and I feel like it’s been really broad-reaching too, in ways that I’m inspired.

Stepping out on tour with Cory Wong – that’s a fun time. It’s way different than what I do, but it’s a fun time. Going to make music with Béla Fleck – that’s about really getting in the weeds and rehearsing and working hard on incredibly complex instrumental music. Getting to go join Sturgill Simpson on something, it’s about not over-rehearsing the songs and making sure there’s something about the freshness of maybe one or two takes in the recording studio. That’s why I love collaboration. Being part of something that’s not yours, but you’re kind of part of it so you’re getting to learn and grow and experience and have that excitement rub off on you.

Several of the songs on A Tip Toe High Wire – “Red Bird,” “Haven Hill,” “Spitfire,” “Lord, That’s a Long Way” – nod to the matriarchs of your family. How would you describe where and how music fit into their lives and shaped each of their relationships with you and how you remember them?

Music was part of everyday life. My whole family is very much rooted in the backwoods of Appalachia, the boonies of Tennessee, as far back as I know. Not a lot of money, no college degrees, but such smart, strong characters and people with a wealth of knowledge and grit and toughness and all that. I think music was a way that they were able to cope and have it be part of their way to pass the time. More a way of life than trying to dream of being a performer.

I remember my Granny singing when I was a kid, hearing her sing in church, and I know [my husband Justin Moses’s] family background was much the same. So certainly a different kind of musical experience. But music has always been a big part of both my family story and Justin’s family story. And I was lucky enough to get to know all of his grandparents – he’s since lost three of them – but I was lucky to get to know them and my grandparents too. Not everybody gets that. So I feel super lucky. And yeah, I think inevitably those stories kind of wind up weaving their way into my songwriting.

How do you balance so many different but interconnected objectives – especially finding space to let out parts of yourself through your music?

I’ve been able to say yes to a lot of things, because [I’ve chosen] to say no to some other things and that feels rewarding because normally I’d be stressing out. So trying to think ahead and find the balance as a human, asking, “How can I be focused in the moment, not stack too many things on top of each other, and instead carve out the balance where I do have time to write, I do have time to record, and I do have time to tour?” Because I love all those things. In a perfect world, you make them exist in a cohesive way and that can inform what the art becomes on the other side of it, because I’ve given myself space to enjoy all these things in their own way, instead of just the constant chaos of trying to do five things at once.

Photo Credit: Bethany Brook Showalter & Spencer Showalter

Chatham Rabbits Face Hard Truths of Growing Old(er) On New Album, ‘Be Real With Me’

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

From the onset of the Chatham Rabbits‘ new record, Be Real With Me, the North Carolina-based husband and wife duo are at a crossroads of sorts.

On one hand, its opening track, “Facing 29,” is filled with the despair of growing older, but on the other it also relishes in the wisdom and knowledge that comes with making it another year around the sun, as one half of the pair Austin McCombie sings of “Grabbing 30 by the strap of his boots.”

That relationship with age, the maturity that (typically) accompanies it, and the people that come and go along the way are a constant through line of the album in what Sarah McCombie describes as a journey of self discovery. “This is very much a millennials record,” she says.

Their fourth album, Be Real With Me is the duo’s most personal and vulnerable yet, a touch that’s already resonated well for them through things like 2020’s COVID-inspired 194-show Stay At Home Tour and an appearance on PBS’ limited series On The Road. “I strongly believe that putting the fans first, instead of the industry or the mystique of being an artist, has been what’s carried us to where we are now and keeps us motivated,” Sarah asserts.

The album is also set to be their most sonically diverse to date, with drum machines, synthesizers, pedal steel, and other new layers being brought into the mix. Ahead of its release, we spoke with the McCombies about the varying means of growth and evolution within it, how a pen pal inspired one of its songs, the family farm that keeps them grounded when not touring, and more.

You mentioned this being a very “millennial” record due to the heavy themes of growing up and growing away from certain people or things. Are there any other big themes that help to tie these songs together?

Sarah McCombie: Another thing that came up a lot when I was writing the songs for this record is the way we often tell others we’re doing the best we can even when we’re not, which is the case on songs like “Collateral Damage” and “Gas Money.” Sometimes you’re just completely maxed out with nothing left to give a situation other than just being a hindrance to yourself.

I thought about that a lot on “Matador,” which I wrote from a place of repeating the patterns of trusting people too fast or getting into situations that aren’t healthy, ignoring red flags along the way. Looking back, if I slowed down or was more mature I never would’ve found myself in those situations in the first place.

It all ties into the overarching theme of growing up, looking yourself in the mirror, and having these real, maturing moments. Sometimes we have to go through tough experiences to come out the other side. Where we’re at now, in our late 20s and early 30s, is when you typically come to grips with a lot of that and being real with yourself, like the album title suggests, so you can move forward in an authentic way.

Speaking of moving forward in an authentic way, your song “Gas Money” came about through an organic exchange with a longtime fan of the band that has evolved into your close pen pal. Care to explain?

SM: In the past, I’ve overcommitted or maxed myself out with friendships due to music, moving, or other circumstances that I can no longer be there for in the way I used to be. So when my pen pal Eve, who’s going to be 87 this year, sent me one of her letters containing a card with an orange sticky note with a $20 bill on it that said “for gas money for the long road home,” I knew I had to get it in a song. It’s such a cool line that reminded me of Patty Griffin’s “Long Ride Home” and turned into a story about wishing you could give more or that a friendship could be more, but you’re just maxed out at your current life stage and cannot possibly give more to that relationship.

Whether it’s pen pals like Eve or just the personal way you interact with your fans in general, it seems like both have gone a long way in pushing your career forward, in some cases almost more than the songs themselves.

SM: I couldn’t agree more. We draw so much inspiration for our music from our fans. None of what we do would be possible without them keeping us going. In addition to “Gas Money,” there’s a song on our 2022 record called “You Never Told Me I Was Pretty” that a fan also inspired.

Regarding “Gas Money,” I think there’s also a beauty in not wanting to over promise and under deliver in a relationship while still wanting to make a connection or stay in touch. And what kinder thing [is there] to do than pop a $20 in the mail in a letter to say, “Hey, I’m reaching out because you mean something to me”? I remember sending Eve the press release for the song when it came out to let her know how she inspired the chorus and to invite her to our next show in Charlottesville near where she lives. She got back to me saying she’d love to, but she’s already committed to a date that night. I thought it was so sweet how she let me down respectfully and had her boundaries about it, because that is something that’s a big part of this record as well.

Another big part of not just this record, but your lives as a whole is the family farm you live on in North Carolina. Mind telling me about that and how your work on it inspires and informs your music?

SM: The farm has been in my family since 1753, but we bought it from my grandfather a couple years ago, right before he passed away. It used to be 640 acres, but is 65 now; we still own the original cabin and home site, horses – it’s like its own entity.

It’s taught me that working really hard feels really good on a blood, sweat, and tears level. Moving fences, hauling water, and other physical work feel great to accomplish, but so do the aspects of planning ahead and working with others to build a vision. It’s very similar to how we collaborate in the band with other musicians or with graphic artists and other creatives. On that note, we work with another couple who are Angus beef farmers to help keep up our property, because it’s so much land and we’re gone so much of the time. No matter what though, the intentional behavior of putting time and effort into something, whether that be our land and the farm or songwriting and interacting with our fans, is definitely a place where you reap what you sow.

In addition to what we’ve already discussed about the record’s themes of growth, I’ve also seen you describe this project as a “new chapter” for the band. How so?

SM: We’re writing a lot more about ourselves and present-day experiences and less about older stories from our family. I went through a big phase earlier on writing Civil War-era ballads, but now we’re getting more comfortable being vulnerable with our fans and writing about our relationships and what we’re individually going through, which is huge.

Sonically, we’ve had the pleasure of working the last two years with Ryan Stigmon, an incredible pedal steel player who now tours with Zach Top. Getting to play with the pedal steel and its ambient sounds overlaid on guitar and banjo was really fun, new, and different for us. We also brought in a keys player on this record and have been touring with one as well. And “Gas Money” is an example of where we used a drum machine for the first time. We were taking a lot of ’90s pop influence from artists like Robyn and Annie Lennox. It’s led to us becoming more aware of how people are coming to see our shows and like our music because of the song, not because of the genre. We don’t care about labels, we just want to write what feels good.

Another new route y’all take on this album is with the song “Big Fish, Small Pond,” the band’s first instrumental. What led to its creation?

SM: Austin came up with the melody and we tracked it completely live in the studio, Small Pond, that we named the song after. We had an octave mandolin, banjo, guitar, and upright bass on it that we jammed on after popping gummies one night sitting around our microphones. It was around midnight or so and we got into this state and played through it a bunch of times until we got the right take.

It never had any lyrics – an instrumental is just something Austin and I had always wanted to try. We both typically just get by playing our instruments and take much more pride in our songwriting, but we still wanted to try our hand at it and challenge ourselves to place in the middle of the record that would be a breather – or intermission – from everything else we’re singing about.

Since you just mentioned that song being like an intermission, tell me about the song sequencing and how that’s helped to shape this record?

Austin McCombie: We’re really diligent about the song order. It’s not a perfect chronological order, but it does start with the first song written for this record, “Facing 29,” which helps to set the tone of getting older. As the record goes on, we also strategically placed the instrumental in the middle as a breather followed by some heavier songs like “Did I Really Know Him,” “One Little Orange,” and “Pool Shark’s Table.” It was a fun way to show how after all this reflection, we can still look in the mirror and acknowledge that we’re young, have problems, and may not be ready to change it all yet. Sometimes you have these heavy conversations where you leave trying to work on yourself and other times you table things because you aren’t ready for it, and that’s fine too.

What has the process of bringing Be Real With Me to life taught you about yourselves?

AM: It’s pushed me to realize I have more musical ability than I thought, in terms of co-producing and playing so many different instruments. In our genre you have the Andrew Marlins and Billy Stringses of the world and other folks who absolutely rip, but Sarah and I don’t really fit into that category. While that’s still true, it’s been fun to push ourselves with this record, which has given me more motivation to continue leaning into our songwriting in a deeper, more meaningful way than just a fun story about our family members. There’s still room for that, but clearly the magic is happening for us when we dig deeper.

SM: It’s taught me how to confront things I’m uncomfortable with and to not hold back as much. For instance, the song “Collateral Damage” starts with me singing, “I want my freedom and I want a baby.” It makes me cringe just saying it, but that song and phrase has wound up being a big talking point amongst fans and one of our most well-received songs during shows.

What do you hope others take away from listening to this record?

SM: I hope this record feels relatable to people in our age demographic and others wanting to look back on that time in their own lives, serving as a reminder that we’re all just trying to figure things out. It may be difficult, but if we can be real, honest and vulnerable with each other then it will ultimately help us be in a better place.

Photo Credit: Samuel Cooke

The Rambunctious Wisconsin Americana of Them Coulee Boys

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Some of more commonly associated marvels of the Badger State are salty cheese curds, verdant farmsteads, and acrimoniously freezing winters – as well as a whole bunch of simple roadside attractions and signature small-town revelries. It’s the adopted home of Harry Houdini and John Muir and the birthplace of a memorable host of charming eccentrics, including Orson Welles and Thornton Wilder.

Soren Staff, lead vocalist of Wisconsin’s homegrown and free-range Them Coulee Boys, was born in the rolling hills of the country. He has spent ample time explaining the sort of commonsensical people and curiously provincial patois that make the state endearing.

“A coulee is a valley with a river in it,” said Staff. “We’ve had to clear up that name every single step of the way.”

Staff hails from just outside of Taylor, Wisconsin, population 400, and he attended high school in Milwaukee. He and his four bandmates now call Eau Claire home, a small city typifying and sharing their Midwest values and sensibilities: an industrious, approachable, and self-effacing kind of existence.

“People in Eau Claire care about art and music and there is a neighborly goodness to life here,” said Staff. “Wisconsin is not a state that people associate with a lot of luminaries coming from, but I like to think we are doing our part, pulling our weight.”

Them Coulee Boys – who are readying a brand new album, their fifth, No Fun in the Chrysalis (set for release February 28 via Some Fun Records), produced by Grammy winner Brian Joseph – are a bunch of small town Wisconsinites who have found a common place to live, where locals have embraced them with joviality and applause. Banjo player Beau Janke comes from Trempealeau, a beautiful village on the Mississippi River. Soren and his brother, Jens Staff, a mandolin player, come from the Taylor area. Bass player Neil Krause was born and raised in Chippewa Falls. Drummer Stas Hable is a native of Eau Claire and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s music studies program.

Staff and Janke met at Camp Chetek, a Christian camping ministry in northwestern Wisconsin. The two camp counselors played music all day long, from the time of morning prayer, through the daily worship services in the afternoon, to evenings spent entertaining teenagers around the campfire. The following year, Jens joined Soren and Beau.

“That’s where we cut our teeth and cultivated our chemistry with each other,” said Soren. “We met at that camp and it has blossomed into a whole career.”

A few years later, Them Coulee Boys formed and the forceful folk-Americana band has lasted 11 years, which could be lauded as an eternity in the seemingly short-lived music business. Indeed, the music of Them Coulee Boys is grounded in their friendship and rooted in their desire to express a walloping good time. Such closeness, conviviality, and simple gratitude elevate the music to higher stages.

“We care about each other,” said Staff. “I trust and love these guys, personally and musically. Still, it took me time to trust in bringing an unfinished song to the others and to realize that their influences and skills and personalities will serve the song best.”

Staff was exposed to a wide variety of music in his youth, from classic rock to ’70s disco and pop, but it was the unaffected, everyday-man songs that he heard on COW97 (a Western Wisconsin country channel and his grandfather’s favorite) that created the largest impression. He was struck by the simple yet deep songs of Roger Miller and Tom T. Hall and songwriting prowess of granite and stone immortals such as Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard.

Staff, who works part-time at a local print shop, has a fondness for the contemplative capacities of the singer-songwriter experience. With mirth in his eyes, he still attends open mic night at The Plus in Eau Claire on Tuesdays, which he has done for about 10 years. But one of the most special things about Them Coulee Boys is that within the group there exists a worship of many varieties of music. Janke was raised on the thunder of Led Zeppelin, which pushes the band’s sound to an altogether different space, allowing them to turn it up to the heights of exuberance, to blaze the woods on fire.

“Finding the balance between introspective songwriting and the energy, bombast, and power of a rock and roll band, there is a good tension there. Striking a balance in that tension carves out a sound that we want to make.”

Them Coulee Boys started in a basement and, quite honestly, they never expected to be out of that basement. They played their first gig at a ski lodge in northern Wisconsin, the only ones seated and listening their parents and girlfriends. Then they signed up for the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. spell at as many bars in the state as possible. Once, the guys played four hours of music in four separate bars in four small towns, for four nights in a row. The total haul was $1,000, split between four musicians. At that time, Staff considered their take a grand success. In 2016, the group started taking its energetic, impulsive brand of Wisconsin-Americana outside the state in earnest.

Virtually all of the group’s songs begin with lyrics, melodies, and chord structures that first arise in Staff’s head. He comes up with something rough and ready, presents it to the others, and they turn it into something utilizable, a playable song.

“My biggest job as a songwriter is to be a gatherer and be open to ideas,” said Staff. “I let images run through my head throughout the day, waiting for the words that make me want to keep writing. I’m seeking a line to build off of. If it is a good line it will stick around. If you are looking all of the time, it becomes easier to draw from that when you sit down to write something.”

Staff is pleased with the results of No Fun in the Chrysalis, the band’s fifth album. Rambunctious, playful, and wonderfully inspired, the recording is submerged in the mystery of transformation; the relentless blitz of change the most dominant theme of the songs.

“There has been massive change in my life and the other guys,” said Staff. “Kids. Marriage. Switching jobs. There is tension in change and eventually there has to be acceptance. … The first song, change is a question. But by the last song, there is an answer to it.”

The album reflects a few of those inner and interpersonal changes within the band, an encapsulation of their growth spurts and plodding development.

“Musically, we’ve embraced that we are not a string band,” Staff continued. “We have drums, electric instruments, banjos, mandolins. We’ve pushed our sound forward into different spaces, but we’ve also accepted that we come from a string band background, and could harken back to older records. There are contemplative jams. But there is also a stomping song about making out.”

No Fun in the Chrysalis reveals not only a tumultuous, change-filled time in the individual and collective lives of the musicians, but it serves as a lively expression from a band somewhere in the middle phase of their journey.

“On one hand, we are still trying to prove ourselves,” said Staff. “Though on the other hand, we have a decade worth of experience, and it shows. We’ve come a long way from the basement and hope to have many miles ahead.”

Photo Credit: Kenzie Trezise

Embrace the Past,
Move Forward

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Music has and continues to be a form of healing for Fancy Hagood. The Arkansas-raised singer who takes his forename from the Drake song – not the Bobbie Gentry and Reba McEntire hit – first began writing songs as a queer junior high student struggling to fit in before dropping out of school at 17 to chase his newfound dreams in Nashville.

Despite growing up listening to everything from contemporary Christian music to The Chicks, Shania Twain, Tim McGraw, Destiny’s Child, and Missy Elliott, it was choir and theatre that brought Hagood’s own creative aspirations to life.

“I really found myself in those classes,” Hagood tells Good Country. “I was dealing with a lot of bullying at the time and writing music became one of the few ways I could truly express myself.”

But upon his arrival to Nashville, Hagood was told that a career as a queer country musician was unlikely. This was followed by a move to Los Angeles, coupled with a transition to pop, that led to him to opening for the likes of Meghan Trainor and Ariana Grande as he juggled a day job at Forever 21. Those opportunities coincided with a decrease in creative control over his own work, something he’s taken back for himself on 2021’s Southern Curiosity and his most recent project, American Spirit, which released October 25.

“I was hell-bent on this album not being a breakup record, but instead one about healing, moving forward, and finding yourself,” Hagood says of American Spirit. “I don’t want to be on the road singing songs about my ex, but I do want to sing about reclaiming your story, bouncing back, and that being the most powerful thing after experiencing something like that.”

Speaking on the phone from his Nashville home, Hagood detailed his ambitious Music City move, experiences with gatekeeping, his work with Apple Music, and more.

What was it like for you moving to Nashville so young? I imagine on one hand it’s quite empowering, but it can also be overwhelming too.

Fancy Hagood: On my song “Fly Away” I sing, “You were scared as hell to take the highway/ You barely knew how to drive…” and that’s the truth. I got my driver’s license when I was 16 and I never drove on the highway until I moved to Nashville, so it was very much a culture shock. I know a lot of people don’t view Nashville as a big city compared to New York or Los Angeles, but when you’re coming from small-town Arkansas it felt like the whole world had opened up for myself. There were parts of it that were really intimidating, but for the most part I had so much enthusiasm that you couldn’t really tell me anything. I had this idea that I was going to be a country superstar and you couldn’t tell me otherwise.

I know things haven’t always been easy for you though. You’ve dealt with some gatekeeping and other hurdles along the way. What’s that been like?

Before I moved to LA, I was getting all this attention in Nashville, selling out shows on my own. A lot was going on for not having any music out in the world yet. I quickly got a publishing deal, but instead of things taking off from there I started getting a bunch of people putting their own opinions on me and putting their own stuff into my music, thus limiting me because of their own fears. That was something I never had going into all of this – fear. It’s a complicated thing when you start mixing art and commerce. The powers that be recognize you have talent, but in figuring out how to make money from it they start thinking of Middle America and who’s going to buy it, leading to a fear game rather than just letting the artist be an artist.

When I moved to LA and got a record deal, that’s where other people’s fears began sinking into my own train of thought and my delusion began slipping away. I was accomplishing all these things, from performing on Dancing With the Stars to hitting the road with Ariana Grande, but on the inside I felt miserable. I realized I’d sacrificed so much of myself and my art to get to a place where other people found it comfortable for me to be successful, but a year and a half into it I just imploded and lost all the deals.

It wasn’t until moving back to Nashville in 2016 that I was able to shake all that off. In 2018 I signed a new publishing deal and began work on my album Southern Curiosity, a slow burn that didn’t release until 2021. It was a really difficult transition having [to go from] a Top 40 hit and everyone treating you like you’re the king of the castle to no hits, no deals, and nobody wants to touch you with a ten-foot pole. It was a humbling experience that taught me that the industry in place was not set up for someone like me to be successful. Because of that, my train of thought stopped being about how do I fit into the industry to thinking about how to create my own, which is exactly what I’ve been doing since Southern Curiosity.

One way you’ve been building that community you speak of is through your role as the host of Trailblazers Radio on Apple Music. What’s that gig meant to you?

I’ve never experienced a company that puts their money where their mouth is quite like Apple. They were supportive of me and my first record before hosting a radio show was even a thought. They first came to me after I guest-hosted on the late Leslie Jordan’s Apple Radio show, which I did three or four times with him. After that, they approached me with the Trailblazers idea and threw me into the deep end. When they offered it to me in 2021 I’d never done radio before and just recently we were picked up for our fourth season. My idea is to feature artists who don’t typically get those opportunities, allowing country music to be for everyone. If you look at our playlist you’ll see all kinds of artists on there, not just what country radio suggests Nashville is.

It’s also been meaningful getting to sit across from actual legends and people who have shattered the glass ceiling in country music. Each artist that’s come through our doors has taught me that not one artist’s journey is the same, which has done a lot for inspiring, motivating, and informing me as an artist.

Are there any particular moments or guests from the show that stand out?

I’d never met Jelly Roll before he came in for his interview and his heart just blew me away. Who he is at his core is so full of joy and his philanthropic side was really inspiring to me. He had just sold out Bridgestone Arena and donated all the money to an organization that helps incarcerated youth. Even when we weren’t recording he was wanting to know more about me, my art, and what I do. He’s just a stand-up person.

A moment ago you mentioned Leslie Jordan, whose loss you touch on (along with your grandmother’s) on the song “Good Grief.” I guess that goes back to songwriting being a method of healing?

Yeah, it came about during a writing session with my friend Jeremy Lutito on a particularly solemn day. We were both in sad moods, but in typical fashion when two guys are alone in a room the last thing they’ll do is ask, “What’s on your heart?” We got to talking about a situation with his family where their dog had passed away the night before, which led to a conversation about grief and having to walk his kids through it for the first time. As he was telling me this I just fell apart thinking of how grief is such a hard thing to come to terms with and reckon with, but sometimes it’s ultimately a good thing. We’d been struggling all day, but that song came about in only an hour or so. It was pure magic.

I’ve seen you refer to this album as a “breakup record,” and I feel like one song that really captures that essence is the title track, “American Spirit.” How’d it come about?

I wrote that with Gina Venier and Summer Overstreet. It started with this idea of cigarette season or a time in your life where you’re smoking and stressed. But with Gina, who’s also a queer artist, it evolved into a song about becoming someone else’s vice. It’s not an unheard-of story in the South, people not being able to fully speak to who they are or how they feel – there’s a lot of closet cases among us. I’ve dealt with that a lot in my time in Nashville and I know others have, too. The song is mostly a nod to those experiences and being an openly queer person dealing with others who aren’t open but are addicted to your openness and freedom and not being able to let that go.

What has music taught you about yourself?

It’s taught me that I’m resilient and can get through anything along with the power of believing in yourself. I’ve gone through a lot in this industry, but I keep coming back. This is what I love and I’m never going to stop.

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Photo Credit: Natalie Osborne