Tag: Songwriting

MIXTAPE: Trapper Schoepp, The Midwest & Bob Dylan

Posted on by Editor

For The Bluegrass Situation’s Dylan in December series, I compiled a list of Bob Dylan songs with Midwestern ties. These geographical references in song recall Dylan’s own roots, grounding some of his narratives in specific places from his past. My own roots in the Wisconsin/Minnesota/South Dakota region have given me some insights below that I hope act as a nice companion to the playlist. Enjoy! —Trapper Schoepp

“On, Wisconsin”

In 1961, Bob Dylan started writing a song about my home state of Wisconsin. In 2018, I finished it. The lyrics were unearthed last year and put up for auction at $30,000. As a Wisconsin folk singer, I felt compelled to add a link to the song’s chain. The song’s narrator is a drifter pining for the Dairy State’s finest exports: milk, cheese, and beer. I imagined a homesick traveler in a train car being rocked to sleep to the waltz of my added chorus, “On, Wisconsin / Calling me that way.” So I set the lyrics to music, got a band together, and recorded the song. We thought little of it until I got a late night email from my manager succinctly stating, “Dylan has it now.” A few months later and voila! I had landed a co-writing credit with Dylan. Only recently did I realize the significance of the date scrawled at the top of the original lyric sheet–11/20/61–the same day Dylan stepped into Columbia Recording Studios with producer John Hammond to begin his debut album.

“Highway 51″

Dylan’s eponymous debut finds the 20-year-old “rambling out of the wild west / leaving the towns I love best.” One of these beloved towns may have been Madison, where Dylan is said to have stopped as he hitchhiked to NYC. The conversational, folksy feel of album’s original compositions echoes that of “On, Wisconsin.” Bobby howls, “Yes, I know that highway like I know the back of my hand / Runnin’ from up Wisconsin way down to no man’s land.” Like Highway 61, this north-south highway starts on Wisconsin’s northern border, and runs straight down the state’s center through Madison, ultimately ending around Highway 61 near New Orleans.

“Walls of Red Wing”

Originally cut for Dylan’s second album, this ballad paints an unforgiving portrait of a juvenile correctional facility in Red Wing, Minnesota. I was born in Red Wing and often witnessed the haunting “gates of cast iron and the walls of barbed wire,” located just a stone’s throw from Highway 61. Some suggest there’s an autobiographical angle and that Bob himself was institutionalized there, but let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story.

“With God On Our Side”

In this sprawling seven-minute song examining a world gone to warmongering, Dylan questions the sanctification of war by the state. Dylan sets up the song masterfully, framing his forthcoming sentiments within his own modest Midwestern identity: “Oh my name it is nothin’ / My age it means less / The country I come from / Is called the Midwest.”

“Girl From The North Country”

Inspired by “Scarborough Fair,” Dylan brings the framework of a traditional English folk ballad back from a trip across the pond, putting a spin on it that feels uniquely Minnesotan. In his visions of the girl, he alludes to a landscape of frozen rivers, snowflakes and heavy winds. “Please see if she’s wearing a coat so warm / To keep her from the howlin’ winds.”

“Ballad of Hollis Brown”

Set on a South Dakota farm, Dylan depicts a desolate and poverty-stricken countryside. This arrangement, characterized by a hypnotic drop D guitar tuning, can be traced back to the English murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” showing the cross-continental folk process at work. The song closes with the despondent-turned-deadly farmer taking the lives of his own family and then his own: “There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm / There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm / Somewhere in the distance there’s seven new people born.”

“North Country Blues”

This is another dark snapshot of Minnesota life off The Times They Are A-Changin’. Sung from the perspective of a coal miner’s wife, the narrative is likely inspired by Dylan’s upbringing around the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota. The song touches on mining tragedies within a family, corporate outsourcing of the operations, and a decaying downtown. The song works as a powerful companion to “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” chronicling the hardships faced by farmers and miners, and the communities in crisis during the first half of the 20th century.

“Highway 61 Revisited”

Dylan says it all in Chronicles: Volume One: “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors…It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

“Something There Is About You”

In this hazy recollection of a past lover, Dylan sings, “Thought I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth / Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin’ the hills of old Duluth.” Not unlike “Girl From The North Country,” Dylan recounts a sweet kind of love against Minnesota scenery. On the back cover of Planet Waves, Dylan gives a shout out to “My brothers of the flood, Cities of the flesh – Milwaukee, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Bismarck, South Dakota, Duluth!”

“Went To See The Gypsy”

On his New Morning album, Dylan describes a dreamlike visit to a mysterious gypsy staying at a crowded hotel. In a song that would feel right sequenced alongside “The Man In Me” on The Big Lebowski soundtrack, the narrator recounts what went down at daybreak: “So I watched that sun come rising / From that little Minnesota town.”

Photo credit: Valerie Light Hart

John Hiatt’s ‘The Eclipse Sessions’ Shares Common Bond with His Best Work

Posted on by Editor

Nowadays we make pinhole cameras and don special glasses to take it in, and we forget that an eclipse must have once been terrifying. We’ve got thousands of years of science and human experience to reassure us now, but what must the first one have felt like? Unexplained darkness in the middle of the day, no idea if or when the sun would reappear—it had to have been unnerving to say the least. It’s a novelty now because we know it’s nothing to worry about; the sun always comes back.

That’s not why legendary songwriter John Hiatt chose to name his latest record The Eclipse Sessions, though it was recorded during the solar eclipse in August 2017. (“I never know what to call these things, so this one kind of presented itself and it seemed to fit,” he says.) But with four years in between it and 2014’s Terms of My Surrender, the highly prolific Hiatt was forced to similarly wait calmly for something he knew would return eventually.

“I don’t really consider writer’s block a state anymore,” he says. “I mean, I’m either writing or I’m not writing; it doesn’t really matter. You know, I go for periods where I don’t write, but the only sort of discipline I have regarding songwriting is I pick up a guitar pretty much every day for a half hour, hour, two hours, and if a song is gonna come, that’s usually when it comes, when it shows up. So I’ve always done that since I first started playing guitar when I was 11. … I guess I’ve had enough of a life of songwriting that I figured they’ll come eventually, you know. You only have writer’s block if you tell yourself you have writer’s block.”

These songs came after a period of transition that included moving into the city of Nashville after 25 years in rural Williamson County. After wrapping a long tour in 2015, Hiatt cut his dates in half, now aiming for about 60 or 70 shows a year. “And then just getting older,” he adds. “You know, I turned 66 this past summer, so a lot of things converged all at once to come up with a different set of songs with different subject matter.”

He continues, “I always use the old Guy Clark quote, when do you know when it’s time to make a record? He said, ‘When I’ve got 10 good songs,’ so that’s kind of the rule of thumb I go by. It’s always if I get a batch of songs together, then it’s time to record. So I didn’t have any until finally I had about 15 songs at midsummer last year. It took me a couple years between Terms of My Surrender and this record just to start writing. We’d been touring pretty relentlessly through the end of 2015. And like I said, with all the other shifts in my life, it took me a minute to see the next train, what station it was gonna leave out of.”

Once Hiatt amassed a decent amount of songs, he booked time in a studio south of Nashville owned by Kevin McKendree. Although he had considered a solo acoustic approach, he brought on drummer Kenneth Blevins and bass player Patrick O’Hearn for the sessions, resulting in what Hiatt calls “a little happy accident.”

“I still wasn’t convinced I was making a record. I just had some songs,” Hiatt explains. “I said ‘I’ll just bring my little Gibson LG2 and play acoustic, and I’ll just sing and play the songs and you guys just play along with me, we’ll just put them down on tape and see how it goes’ and that’s what we did,” Hiatt says. “And then next thing you know we were doing about three songs a day, and we’d get about three recorded and Kevin would come put piano or organ on it almost immediately and we’d go home at night and his little son Yates McKendree, he was 15 years old at the time, would come in at night and put an electric guitar part on, and that’s how the record got made.”

The unplanned nature of The Eclipse Sessions has led Hiatt to liken it to two of his most beloved albums, 1987’s Bring the Family and 2000’s Crossing Muddy Waters, and while he won’t go so far as to say that he works best flying by the seat of his pants, he admits that “I sure enjoy it when that happens, let’s put it that way. … It doesn’t always happen. But yeah, it always feels the best. When it works, it’s great, and when you feel like you come out with something that has a flow to it and has a beginning, middle and end that feels like it’s of a piece—that’s what I meant when I said I felt that those three records had a common bond.”

To a certain extent, all of his work shares that serendipitous quality because he’s careful to never force a writing session, preferring to wait for inspiration to strike naturally.

“My experience with that is I set myself up when I tell myself that I’m gonna write a song because it almost never happens,” he says. “So I just play guitar. I give myself the tools that make songs happen, and if it’s gonna happen, that’s when it’s gonna happen. And if it doesn’t, that’s fine too. You know, it’s just music. So I just put myself around the music and I play and I sing, yodel, whatever the hell it is I do, because I enjoy it. Like I said I’ve done it since I was 11, and I’m 66, so that’s a pretty long time at it – 55 years, Jesus Christ, that’s over half a century. It’s just part of who I am. So if I’m gonna write a song, that’s how it happens. Some days I write and some days I don’t. There’s no pressure.”

That’s how he came to write “Over the Hill,” a meditation on aging about a man who’s “long in the tooth” but still eager to take “huge bites of life.”

“I’ll get a melody going and I’ll be singing nonsense and then hopefully some sort of lyric idea will pop through and then I’ll get a line, and that’s what happened with that one,” Hiatt says. “I got that line ‘I’m over the hill, under the bridge, got a few peaks and valleys I ain’t seen’ and I thought ‘well that’s interesting, let’s write that, what’s that guy talking about?’ So that’s how that one kind of got started and then it was all about that, how do you deal with old age? You know, it’s a wonderful period of your life and yet it’s diminishing too, so it’s fascinating how you deal with that.”

And while he’s more than half a century removed from the first song he wrote (“Beth Ann,” at age 11, for a fifth-grade classmate he had his eye on), Hiatt has no plans to stop writing, recording and performing—no matter how “over the hill” he gets.

“Even if it was just at the corner pub, it wouldn’t matter to me,” he says. “I wanna write songs, I wanna sing, and it kinda doesn’t matter where I do it or how I do it. I’m very fortunate I get to do it, and I’m extremely grateful that I’ve been able to do it and make a living and have a family, and it’s been wonderful, but I would do it regardless.

“It’s the same stuff I’ve pretty much always enjoyed doing, which is telling stories about the agony and ecstasy of life, the will of love to overcome and the pain, the agony of defeat and how we pick ourselves back up and go on in spite of the worst of it,” he says. “That stuff, the stuff that makes us all get up in the morning and go at it.”

The stuff we’ve come to trust we’ll always get from John Hiatt, as sure as the sun.

Photo credit: David McClister

12 Essential Songs by Tom T. & Miss Dixie Hall

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

She was a trick-riding horsewoman born and raised in England; he, an Army veteran born in the foothills of Appalachia. Together, they were one of the most important songwriting duos of bluegrass, country, and American roots music as a whole. This year, they were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame together, following his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008. If y’all don’t know the music — and impact — of Tom T. & Miss Dixie Hall, it’s time you do. Here’s a 12-song primer that attempts to scratch the surface of their far-reaching influence.

“Truck Drivin’ Son Of A Gun” — Dave Dudley, co-written by Miss Dixie

Co-written by Miss Dixie Deen (before she became a Hall), this single, released by Dave Dudley in 1965, reached #3 on the US country charts. It earned a BMI award; Dixie and Tom T. met at that awards banquet. The rest is history.

“Fox On The Run” — Tom T. Hall

An absolute classic. Tom T. brought bluegrass to country radio in 1976, when this track reached #9 on the Billboard charts. Just one stellar track on an entire album of top-shelf bluegrass that included appearances by J.D. Crowe, Donna Stoneman, Bill Monroe, Bobby Thompson, and so many more.

“Washed My Face In The Morning Dew” — Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, written by Tom T. Hall

Recorded the year before “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Tom T.’s first top 40 hit is still going strong, relevant as ever 51 years later. “The rich got richer and the poor got poor, and to me it just didn’t seem right.”

Here’s a version by one of country’s favorite duos of all time, Porter and Dolly.

“Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine” — Tom T. Hall

“Old Dogs” was Tom T.’s third #1 hit as an artist. Charlie Sizemore, who followed Keith Whitley as Ralph Stanley’s lead singer, led an all-star cast on an entire album of Tom T.’s songs, including this one, in 2002.


“I Flew Over Our House Last Night” — Tom T. Hall

“So close, yet so far away,” Tom T. laments, whimsically, being 30,000 feet above the one he loves as he flies over home. This one has been covered by everyone from Balsam Range to Joe Henry.

“Leaving Baker County” — Junior Sisk & Rambler’s Choice, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

There’s a sardonic glee in the chorus, leaving Baker County and the woes described herein. “I never did think much of Baker County, and every mile I’m thinking of it less.”

“A Hero In Harlan” — Chris Jones & the Night Drivers, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

A somber story of a little brother coming home to Harlan the one way all military families fear — in a flag-draped casket. But Tom T. and Dixie don’t glamorize or sensationalize the story, as songs on this subject matter often do. They (and Chris Jones & the Night Drivers, who first recorded the song) tell it real, raw, and relevantly.

“Lessons In Stone” — Longview, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

A 1990s bluegrass supergroup, Longview’s original members included Dudley Connell, Glen Duncan, James King, Joe Mullins, Don Rigsby, and Marshall Wilborn. Woof. Dudley, Don, and Glen give the buttery three-part on the chorus.

“Our Little World” — Darin and Brooke Aldridge, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

The way Tom T. & Miss Dixie tell it (via Darin and Brooke), you really can have it all, without needing much.

“Pretty Green Hills” — Tom T. Hall, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

These two could write a story song like almost no one else can. The level of detail might seem mundane, but with such deft pens, these two make the little things seem integral — important, minute colors and shades that make the whole picture shine.

“Someone Made the Sandals Jesus Wore” — Paul Williams and the Victory Trio, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

Paul Williams, a fellow Bluegrass Hall of Famer inducted with Tom T. & Dixie this year, sings this gospel tune with the Victory Trio. It’s a simple, but incredibly poignant message: there really is no contribution, talent, or skill that’s too small or insignificant to positively impact the lives of others.

“Somewhere In Kentucky Tonight” — Tom T. Hall, written by Tom T. & Miss Dixie

When Tom T. recorded this song on Tom T. Hall Sings Miss Dixie & Tom T., that project was a Christmas gift to his wife. His Christmas card to Dixie promised:

“We’ll record in our studio; you choose the songs and the pickers. You produce and I’ll do songs we have written together. Local and Pal will handle (canine) security. We will call the project TOM T. HALL SINGS MISS DIXIE & TOM T. Merry Christmas! Love, T.”

And if that beautiful sentiment doesn’t capture their love perfectly, the song itself truly does. What a pair. Hall of Famers, indeed.

Photo courtesy of IBMA 
Jon Weisberger and Justin Hiltner contributed to this piece. 

An Otherworldly Landscape: A Conversation with Gregory Alan Isakov

Posted on by Editor

You could call it an epiphany of sorts. Gregory Alan Isakov was riding an elevator with the rest of his band when the doors slid open and a woman got in. She noticed their instruments and asked the question musicians dread. “What kind of music do you play?”

Isakov chuckles. “I never know what to say to that question, you know? So I said, ‘Oh, like, sad songs about space.’” It was, the band immediately agreed, as perfect a genre definition as Isakov could have given.

The singer-songwriter’s new album, Evening Machines, is undeniably dark and cosmic. Atmospheric, opaque, and layered with texture, its electronically accented folk-rock is a departure from the spare, intimate sound Isakov has favoured in the past. And while he is perfectly upbeat today, looking out from his kitchen window onto his four acres of Colorado fields and handful of sheep, he admits that his latest music came from “a pretty dark birth.”

On the face of it, Isakov’s life was going great. But even as he had just fulfilled one of his most fantastic career goals – orchestrating his work for the Colorado Symphony – he was beginning to suffer from a debilitating physical anxiety. “When you’re touring, and trying to figure out how to put out records, you forget about peace and quiet for long periods,” says Isakov, who admits to being a natural introvert. “You’re just hustling all the time. I did that for so long I forgot how to unplug. And it caught up to me in a way I’ve never experienced before.”

And then, on the plane home from Scotland after a six-month tour of Europe, he heard the news that Donald Trump had won the presidential election. “I’ve never had a sense of overwhelming darkness and anxiety like I had that year. You can’t ignore it on an emotional level, whether you read the news or not. And it does make it into the landscape of music or anything that you’re doing. You’re going to feel that stuff. It’s part of being alive.”

Songwriting was a focus and a release; it was also, he says, a reminder that he was someone who needs space and quiet built in his life. Hence the sheep. Isakov took 12 months off from touring and immersed himself in the life of the land he has been working for some years now, supplying vegetables to restaurants and markets. When Isakov was not in his recording “barn” with engineer Andrew Berlin, he was out in the fields, planting salad greens, turnips, and cucumbers, feeding and watering his 10 sheep. “They’re great, they have good vibes when you want to chill,” he smiles. “They’re so easy to look after.”

While the songs on the album draw from what Isakov calls an “otherworldly landscape,” the farm itself is a very real character in his recording process. Apart from the live symphony recording, every album he has released has been made in his own home – “because I really don’t like studios,” he laughs. “I don’t like the glass, I don’t like going into another room to listen, I like to have the words to the songs up everywhere, and all the stations ready to go.”

For Isakov, the key factor is speed: the ability to capture, as quickly as possible, the emotions and sensations he is exploring. Evening Machines, it turns out, is full of first takes. “To maintain whatever feeling you’re having is really important. In the moment you say, ‘This is just an idea, but later I’ll do this good,’ you know? And then I’ll come back to it and something’s different and I can never get back that initial emotive, ineffable something.”

So Isakov developed his own mantra – “sketch to keep” – and created a working space nimble and nearby enough that he could to capture inspiration whenever it struck. The ‘evening machines’ of the title are actually the blinking lights of his electronic equipment, which he visited mostly at night. By the time he came to create the record, he had more than 40 tracks to choose from.

The songs that made the final cut – the ones that felt, to Isakov, to “live together” – share a common, haunting feel. Images return in numerous songs, stars and weightlessness, gunpowder and bullet holes, while the sounds of the machines – a Juno synth from the ‘80s, a compressed drum kit, an Orcoa pump organ that sounds like a toy – provide an unnerving and ethereal backdrop. It is a sound far heavier and, dare one say, dirtier than Isakov’s previous albums. And yet the lyrics remain fraught with the fragility of human essence.

Some, like “Powder,” read off the page like poems – “were we the hammer/were we the powder/were we the cold evening air” – which pleases Isakov to hear. “That’s the goal!” he laughs. “Powder” in particular was inspired by one of Isakov’s favourite poets, Billy Collins. “I bring his poems out with me on the road because I tend to slow down whenever I read them.” And if meaning can feel mysterious in Isakov’s songwriting, it’s not only obscured to the listener: Isakov says he often doesn’t know what his songs are about until after he’s written them.

Take “Berth,” which he wrote with his brother Ilan – a film score composer and “one of my all-time favourite songwriters.” The pair often spend the summers together, engaged in all-night-co-writes. “We start after dinner, and this time I had a melody in my back pocket, that crooked piano part, and I went to one end of the building and he went to the other and we wrote as many verses as we could and then met back up, and mixed them together. The original song was 17 minutes long!” It was only when they edited it down to its final version that they realised what they’d written. “And then we were like: I think this is an immigrant song. We didn’t see that coming.”

Isakov was born in South Africa at the heart of the apartheid era – “a pretty rough situation” – and his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was a young child. For the first couple of years, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his parents, his granny, and his two brothers. “A lot of friends I made growing up were immigrants and I really connected to their families a lot. They had a different vibe to the American kids I knew.

“Even now – in no way is our country somewhere that feels safe all the time, or going in a good direction at all – but, man, we are lucky to be in a place where we can have a sense of freedom and be able to work and create whatever we want. That doesn’t exist hardly anywhere and it’s a nice perspective to have.”

His upbringing also created a close bond with his brothers, who would play instruments together in the basement: “I was always excited to get back home from school to play with them. That was the fun part of my day.” Not that music has made any of them any less introverted, Isakov admits. “When we’re hanging out, we don’t even talk,” he laughs. “One of us will ask, ‘Who’s he dating now?’ and the others will be like, ‘I don’t know, we don’t talk about that.’”

But then, Isakov is happy to live with uncertainty. It’s a principle that’s central to his creativity. “I’ll read an interview with another artist saying ‘I wanted to write a song about this or that,’ but that’s never happened to me,” he says. “I never set out to write a song about anything.

“I feel like I’m sort of holding on, not even driving. You just hope you can get it all. Sometimes you do, and when you do it’s the greatest feeling, you’ve struck gold or something. But there’s plenty of times I don’t get it. My trash can’s pretty big.” It makes him reluctant, he says, even to take credit for his songs – and even more so to imbue them with too much narrative. For instance, “Was I Just Another One” can sound to the unknowing ear like a simple love-gone-wrong story. “To me that song’s about a relationship with someone on heroin but it never says that. And it’s not interesting what I think it’s about.”

His fascination with roots – from jazz and blues standards to the old-time clawhammer banjo he learned to give him a break from guitar – has not left him. “Some of the traditional songs that are so relevant today, stuff like Mississippi John Hurt, you can listen to it and they could have been written right now.” And now that his own dark period is, happily, over – “I’m so lucky to be on the other side of that” – the lighter tracks he recorded over the past year will be repurposed into a new, more country-influenced collection. If this record has taught him anything, however, it’s never to assume. “Songs have minds of their own,” he laughs. “And I’m just following them along!”

Photos of Gregory Alan Isakov: Rebecca Caridad

LISTEN: The Bottle Rockets, “Maybe Tomorrow”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Bottle Rockets
Hometown: St. Louis, Missouri
Song: “Maybe Tomorrow”
Album: Bit Logic
Release Date: October 12, 2018
Label: Bloodshot Records

In Their Words: “‘Maybe Tomorrow’ is a personal favorite song of mine, because of the way it was born. I was trying to write a song all day long. Nothing materialized. Around midnight I gave up. Posted about my failure on Instagram, when I read back what I posted, I made this whole lyric out of the hashtags of my post. At midnight I was a failure. This song was completed by 12:15…” –Brian Henneman

Photo credit: Cary Horton

Richard Thompson Lets the Songs Guide ‘13 Rivers’

Posted on by Editor

Richard Thompson’s new album contains 13 tracks and is called 13 Rivers, which suggests an intriguing metaphor regarding music and bodies of water. These are songs as rushing currents, as tributaries cutting through the landscape with unstoppable force; they can be dammed but not contained, their power harnessed but not diminished. Or perhaps they are obstacles to be crossed, either by swimming against dangerous rapids or by devising elaborate feats of engineering. It is any wonder that songs have bridges?

Thompson admits he didn’t think too hard about it. “It’s just a convenient title, and I liked the way it sounds,” he says with a chuckle that sounds both self-deprecating and possibly curious about the idea. “I’m not sure how deep it is or if it stands up to intellectual scrutiny. I guess songs and rivers can be fast or slow, straight or meandering. They have a beginning or end. You should make of it as much as you can. The more you make of it, the better I sound.”

He doesn’t need me or anyone else to make him look smart, but let’s go ahead and make too much out of that metaphor. Thompson’s catalog is full of raging rivers, most with rock rapids and treacherous oxbows, some stretching for miles and miles or years and years. He’s been navigating them for more than half a century, ever since he strummed his first notes as the guitarist and occasional songwriter for the famed London outfit Fairport Convention. That band helped to electrify folk music in the late 1960s, adding drums and Stratocaster to centuries-old rural ballads about maidens and knights, before Thompson went solo to emphasize his own songwriting.

For years he was merely a cult artist in the States, his early records available only as imports, at least until 1980’s Shoot Out the Lights—written, performed, and recorded with his then-wife Linda Thompson—established him as an insightful chronicler of the challenges of commitment and contentment, a songwriter who is neither blandly optimistic nor cynically dismissive, but somewhere right between bitter and sweet.

And, of course, he is a guitar player whose resourcefulness somehow dwarfs his technical virtuosity. A teenager in the late 1960s, he was too young to be as enamored with American blues as other players were, which means he was never a contemporary of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, or Jimi Hendrix. Instead his playing is grounded in folk music, aligned with the experiments and excursions of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, and Davy Graham. Like them, he has significant range, incorporating a range of styles and sounds: African desert rock, urban punk, country & western, Indian ragas. His solos change shape constantly; listening to him play, you never know where he’s going but you know he’s going to get there.

While many of the players listed above have either died or all but retired, Thompson continues to make relevant music in the 2010s, both as a songwriter and as an instrumentalist. “The most important thing is the song—the particular batch of songs you find yourself with. That dictates so much about the way the record sounds,” he says. “The songs are going to tell you how they want to be shaped, how they want to sound in the end. They tell you if they want to be acoustic or electric; they tell you if they want to be simple or complex. If you’re listening to what the songs are saying to you, then making the record should be a fairly easy task.”

The batch of songs that comprises 13 Rivers stemmed from what he calls a “difficult time in my life,” although he declines to discuss the specifics of those difficulties. Still, it’s possible to gauge the general nature of them based on songs like “Rattle Within” and “Shaking the Gates,” which suggest a feisty relationship with the idea of mortality. Writing them, however, is not necessarily a conscious effort to address certain events or predicaments. “It’s a semi-conscious process. You’re not always thinking about the big picture. You’re just kind of floating sometimes. You’re almost allowing yourself to switch off some of your critical faculties in order to write. And once you’ve written it, you think, okay, here’s this song, now what does it mean? But you’re not thinking about that meaning while you’re writing it.”

Take the opening track, “The Storm Won’t Come.” A low, brooding number with a worried vocal and a searing solo, it reverses the typical storm metaphor, casting the thunder and rain as something other than destructive. Especially opening the album, it almost sounds like an invocation by an artist waiting for inspiration to strike like lightning. “That’s not what I had in mind, but that sounds great! I was thinking more than sometimes in life, you can feel stymied and you long for change. Sometimes if you try to change it yourself, it doesn’t work. You have to wait for the world to do it to you,” he says.

One storm arrived just after he had assembled this batch of songs: The producer backed out of the project, leaving Thompson to ponder its fate. Thankfully, pragmatism won out. “I thought, well, the studio is booked, the musicians are booked, we’ve got the material, so I’ll just produce it myself. I’ve done it before. It’s always nice to have the contrast of working with other people, but it can be good to do it yourself. You can get more into the nuts and bolts of what you really intended to find in the songs.”

Perhaps that’s why so many songs have a raw-nerve friction to them, lyrically and musically. After a handful of solo acoustic albums, including 2014’s Still, produced by Jeff Tweedy, Thompson put together a very tight, very agile rock and roll combo to give these songs a jittery energy. He’s worked with bassist Taras Prodaniuk and drummer Michael Jerome for years, “so I know them a bit—what they’re likely to come up with.” They worked quickly in the studio, learning the songs just enough to pound them out but not enough to pound them life out of them. “I try to not get too embedded in learning the song. We just give it a couple of listens at rehearsals,” he says. It’s a way to avoid what Thompson calls “overlearning” the song, to allow room for happy accidents and to keep the possibilities wide open.

When the song goes out into the world, those possibilities shrink dramatically. The song becomes settled, more or less. “What the song is now is public domain. It becomes a kind of public property, and the audience won’t let you change it, even if you want to. I’ve got songs where I’ve snuck in the odd word change, but to change a verse or even a line is just asking for trouble.”

Being the song’s creator doesn’t mean he determines that meaning for anyone else. In fact, his interpretation is only one of so many. “It’s always amazing to hear other people’s ideas of what a song is about. I may have written it as a satirical song or a very pointed song, and people will say, ‘Oh that’s about Bob Dylan’ or something. How did they reach these bizarre conclusions? But I’m glad they can find their own meaning in it.”

Illustration by: Zachary Johnson
Photo by: Tom Bejgrowicz

BGS 5+5: Ryan Culwell

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Artist: Ryan Culwell
Hometown: grew up in Perryton, Texas; lives in Nashville now
Latest album: The Last American
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Earl the Squirrel and the Combat Brigade

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Several years ago I was on stage in a honky-tonk in Texas. I had my eyes closed and was playing a very long solo on guitar, when the crowd started roaring and cheering. I thought I had become a golden god, but when I opened my eyes, my friend Daniel Davis, the bass player, pointed out into the crowd where a fight had broken out.

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

I like words. Reading is important to my process. I read poetry, short stories, novels, etc. If I’m not reading then I run out of fuel pretty quickly. When I was a kid I would write poetry on the walls in black magic marker. I’m sure my parents were furious, but they never showed it; they just kept encouraging me to play with words.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

When I was 10, I wanted to be a painter, an author, a professional baseball player, and Bon Jovi. There was a pretty good chance that I would have played college sports at a high level, but I ripped my shoulder out of socket a few times and all my plans instantly changed. At the time I was devastated, but now I look back and think it might have been providential. I quickly turned all my attention towards words when sports fell away and that played a big part of how I wound up playing music. Also, I have Siri setup to call me Bon Jovi, just for kicks.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I’m always looking for water. Lately I’ve been fishing a lot with Megan McCormick who co-produced The Last American. Water has a certain draw and fishing is like performing magic. Another friend of mine, Adam Riser, is one of the top kayak fisherman in the nation and he always describes fishing as reaching into another mysterious dimension and pulling a creature through to the other side. I like that way of thinking about it.

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

I don’t really hide when I write. In fact, I do the opposite. I step into other people’s shoes and try to feel through them, so sometimes it’s actually “you” but I’m saying “I” so I can sympathize more. On my last two records, I think I’m about as honest and vulnerable about myself as I could possibly be without getting naked in front of a microphone. Actually, whose to say I didn’t record these songs naked? Maybe I did.

Photo credit: Neilson Hubbard

WATCH: Ben Danaher, “My Father’s Blood”

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Artist: Ben Danaher
Hometown: Huffman, Texas
Song: “My Father’s Blood”
Album: Still Feel Lucky
Release Date: September 7, 2018

In Their Words: “Growing up with a father as a songwriter meant a lot of things to me. It meant that I had a strong-willed example to follow. Someone who defied social norm, [didn’t] get a 9-5 job and settle for that lifestyle. It might have meant that we grew up poor, but the wealth in living free and happy overshadowed that. We grew up in a house with musical instruments everywhere and both of my brothers played as well. My dad played every night club, festival, restaurant, and nursing home that would let him set his stuff up. He was fearless. Which is amazing because as a songwriter I have learned that rejection and disappointment can be as common as breathing.

The thing I admired the most about my dad, was that despite never getting another artist to record his songs, or having a big gold record, he was writing songs up until the last week of his life. That was a pretty eye-opening realization. There wasn’t a light at the end of the tunnel. There wasn’t a chance to even record them himself. He just did it because he loved it. I feel very lucky to get to step in front of a microphone and sing songs to strangers that I have made up about things I have lived, and am very grateful that people listen or clap or cry, but if I never get a chance to do any more than I have done in this business today, I hope I maintain his persistence and pureness for writing.” — Ben Danaher

Photo credit: Ryan Nolan

LISTEN: Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton, “Better”

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Artist: Courtney Hartman & Taylor Ashton
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Song: “Better”
Album: Been on Your Side
Release Date: August 31, 2018
Label: Free Dirt Records

In Their Words: “Courtney and I and about 25 other songwriter friends around the world had an email thread going last year where we had a weekly deadline to send in a new song, as an exercise in mutual encouragement to keep in the practice of writing. One week I forgot about it until 1 a.m. on the night of the deadline, and even though I had a gig at 9 a.m. the next morning, I spent a couple hours with my banjo and “Better” came to me. It took a second to arrive at the first line and the rest all sort of fell into place. At some times in my life I’ve been attracted to the idea that you can’t force inspiration, and that it chooses when to strike. But this is an example of a time where if I hadn’t been holding myself to some arbitrary deadline I would definitely have just fallen asleep and never written this song.

The voice in the song is sort of an amalgam of myself and of a lot of people in my life so it feels good to sing it with Courtney — it brings it into a cool middle ground for me, between a specific personal sentiment and a more universal one. And to me it feels good to sing about your personal flaws in harmony with somebody else. I think the chorus is something we all want to cry out at certain times in our lives.” — Taylor Ashton

 

Photo credit: Shervin Lainez

Jason Eady: Down to a Single Point

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There are two songs about dying on Jason Eady’s new I Travel On, but he insists this isn’t a downer album. Neither the contented “Happy Man” nor the rambunctious “Pretty When I Die” flinch as they depict the end of life, but Eady says the songs “put a positive spin on it. I think they’re both very positive songs. Live life to the fullest. Leave it all on the table when you go.”

Positivity was the conscious theme of the Fort Worth-based singer-songwriter’s seventh record, yet these songs aren’t naïve or blindly, blandly uplifting. What makes I Travel On so poignant and so memorable is Eady’s willingness to look something like death right in the face and find that silver lining. “It’s going to happen to everybody, so why not talk about it? It doesn’t have to be this unspoken thing that’s sad and depressing. Life is life and death is just a part of it. That shouldn’t be ignored.”

It helps that those two songs, along with every other one on the album, are expertly and even jubilantly picked and strummed and bowed and plucked and sung by Eady’s road-hardened touring band, with special guests Rob Ickes and Trey Hensley. “This album,” Eady explains, “is very specific to our last year. We traveled so much during that time, and we listened to Rob and Trey’s two records, which were a big part of our lives at that time. So it seemed like the perfect thing to call them up and see if they wanted to be on the record. These two guys were with us out on the road, even if they didn’t know it.”

Just as Eady writes within the parameters of positivity on I Travel On, the band played only acoustic instruments: guitars, bass, drums, Dobro. Their limited arsenal forced them to be more creative, to find new ways to use their instruments. As a result, the playing on these songs is somehow both loose and tight, technically precise yet lively, focused but eclectic. “We all sat down, miked everything up, and just went for it. There are no punches, no overdubs, nothing. When you hear something on the record, that’s what happened.”

The record is a document of getting lost out in America, gauging the climate of the country touring out-of-the-way places like Calaveras County, California, which gets its own song. It’s about finding silver linings in the gray clouds overhead. It’s about traveling on. And it has one of the finest album covers of the year: an evocative and psychedelic image that was one of many subjects he discussed with the Bluegrass Situation.

First of all, can you tell me about “Calaveras County”? What about that place inspired you to write that song?

That song is a mixture of some things that happened last year and another thing from my childhood that I always wanted to get into a song. We played a festival there last summer, which was the first time I had been there. I fell in love with the place. We were touring up the California coast, and every place was blazing hot. But it was breezy and nice and the weather was beautiful. The people were great. We had a chance to catch our breath and relax. The night before the show we had a big bluegrass jam. When we were leaving, it just struck me how awesome the place was.

Of course, the name Calaveras County doesn’t hurt. It just sounds good. I wrote the song when I got off the road. I can’t really write much on the road, so I just collect notes and thoughts. When I get home, I sort it all out. And the first thing I did after that tour was sit down and write that song.

What’s the other story? The one from your childhood?

There’s a verse about the man in the multicolored Volkswagen bug. That’s a true story from my childhood. I was maybe 6 or 7 and my dad was driving us through the Mojave Desert. We had run out of gas, and it was thirty miles to the next gas station. This was before cell phones, not that cell phones would have done us any good out there. So my dad had to hitchhike to get gas, while we sat in the pickup on the side of the road. People just kept flying by him and flying by him.

The guy who finally stopped was an old hippie who looked like Santa Claus. He was driving a Volkswagen bug and every single panel on the car was a different color. He gave my dad a ride into town, and then he gave him a ride back and wouldn’t take any money for gas. This guy goes sixty miles out of his way just to get us a tank of gas! That always stuck with me. My dad called me the other day and told me he couldn’t believe that I actually remembered that story.

How could you forget something like that?

It was my first experience of not judging people on appearances. This guy was nothing but helpful. Completely selfless. I’ve always wanted to get him into a song. I tried before to find ways to mention that story, but it never fit until now. It just went with the spirit of “Calaveras County.” The people up there had a similar spirit to them: Anything you needed, they would run into town to get it. They would do anything to make sure you enjoyed your stay in their town. The song fell into place pretty quickly.

I get the sense that most of these songs were written pretty quickly.

I did something this time around that was pretty terrifying. We booked the studio before I had the songs. So I gave myself a deadline to write this record. We got off the road in October, then we went into the studio in December. I wrote them all in those two months in between. It was a challenge, but I’ll tell you what I love about it: This is a very intentional album. These songs were all written in the same space, so it makes for a very cohesive record. I didn’t have to just take the best twelve songs I’d written in the last two years. Everything was written to be on this record.

A lot of the songs relate to things we did over the last year. I didn’t realize that until later. I called it I Travel On because that’s what we did. That’s where the spirit of the record comes from, and I think every song is about getting from one place to another, whether it’s physically traveling or mentally shifting ideas. “Always a Woman” is a good example. It starts off very tongue-in-cheek, very dark, but by the end of the song you’ve traveled from that idea to a very different idea. You’re using the same words but putting a positive spin on them. You move from one position to another in that song.

It inverts the country convention of the woman doing wrong to a man.

Well, I didn’t want to be negative on this record. That’s not where I’m at in my life, and the world doesn’t need any more of that right now. I wanted this to be a positive record. With that song, I didn’t know where it was going after that first verse, but I knew I wanted to take it somewhere different. I didn’t want it to be a dark song, so I had to find some way out of that.

You’ve mentioned that you recorded these songs completely live in one take, with no overdubs. Was that a difficult process? Were there any songs that proved especially hard to get through?

“Always a Woman” for sure. It’s a one-chord song, and I knew when I wrote it that it was going to be tricky. How do you make a one-chord song interesting for four minutes? I just do the same picking pattern for four minutes. Who wants to hear that? For that reason it was the last song we recorded. It was a daunting thing, but I think they all did an unbelievable job of finding ways to change it from verse to verse and add dynamics. Kevin Foster on fiddle did these things where he muted the strings but still rubbed the bow against them. Rob Ickes did something similar on Dobro. It sounds like a distorted electric guitar. I think some people just assume that’s what it is, but it’s all acoustic. I think everybody thrived under that constraint. It made us all more creative.

Way off topic, but this is one of my favorite album covers of the year. What can you tell me about that image?

It’s one of my favorite things I’ve done since I’ve been working in music. For years I had this concept, but I’m not a visually creative person. I can barely draw a stick figure. But I had this idea and I took it to a couple of graphic artists. It’s this universal concept: Everything starts from many, then filters down to a single point, then explodes back out to many again.

You’re going to have to elaborate for me.

Genetics is an example. It took an infinite number of people to get to me being here right now, and from here I’ll have offspring who’ll have offspring and it multiples back out. Events are the same way. All of these events in the history of everything have made this conversation we’re having right now possible, and then from this conversation will come other things that will spread back out. It’s a universal idea. It applies to everything.

But the only visual idea I could come up with was an hourglass, which I didn’t want it to be. But then Casey Pierce, who did the video for “Why I Left Atlanta” and documented the sessions for I Travel On, he’s a graphic artist and his work is very abstract. That’s exactly what I was looking for. I explained the concept to him and what you see on the cover is his first draft. As soon as I opened the email, I couldn’t believe it. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. He got it all. He got the vagueness of it.

It’s very different from your typical country album cover.

Yes, but Casey made it look like a road, like you’re going down the road and these clouds are in front of you. The road is disappearing into the horizon, which goes along with the title of the record. That’s the beauty of what he did. There’s a lot going on inside of it. It’s art.

Photo credit: Scott Morgan