Tag: Sonic Ranch

Aubrie Sellers Lets Her Music Breathe in ‘Far From Home’

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With her new album Far From Home, Aubrie Sellers is living up to its title. Raised in Nashville as the daughter of musicians (Jason Sellers and Lee Ann Womack) and now living in Los Angeles, she absorbed bluegrass and country while still exploring genres with a harder edge. That spectrum of influences is apparent in her new music, which ranges from the softer sounds of the title track to the electrified vibe of “My Love Will Not Change,” a duet with Steve Earle.

Adding another meaning to “Far From Home,” Sellers wrote much of the album in Texas, and she’ll launch her national tour by opening for Tanya Tucker in New York City. BGS caught up with her just before she hit the road.

BGS: You recorded Far From Home at Sonic Ranch in Texas. What made you interested in working there?

Sellers: I was listening to a lot of what I call “desert music.” Tarantino soundtracks and The Ventures and stuff like that. I had taken my camper out to Marfa, Texas, and wrote some of the songs on this record there. I was very inspired by that vibe. My whole family is from Texas, so that kind of feels like my home.

Also I wanted to get outside of Nashville and I loved that idea that the whole band stays there while you’re recording. You immerse yourself in the making of the music. It’s really important for me to focus on making a record and having a cohesive experience. I feel like all that stuff tied together.

Why did you feel like you needed to get out of Nashville, do you think?

It’s nice to have no distractions. It’s nice to have a new environment. Your environment affects what you’re doing and I felt like it was important to have that vibe, since that’s what was in my brain already. It’s just nice to escape and make sure that you’re really focusing on making the record, and focusing on the music, and doing something different.

Is that the reason you moved to L.A. as well?

Yeah, I grew up in Nashville and I’ve been around that scene my whole life. It felt important for me to get out of there and experience some new things, and surround myself with a totally fresh energy. Also I went to acting school growing up and I’ve always wanted to do that. I find the film industry here really inspiring. I tried to come here when I was younger and I wasn’t quite ready, so this time it stuck.

You draw on a lot of influences and genres in your sound, but where do you think country music comes into your musical vision?

For sure I think my songwriting is country. I think it’s a little of that personal touch — and you don’t find that as much in other genres. There’s a simplicity to it, in a good way hopefully! And then sonically, steel guitar is one of my favorite instruments. I don’t want to make a record without steel guitar on it.

I listen to a lot of traditional country but I also really love that era of country with Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam and Lucinda Williams. I love Buddy Miller — he’s kind of on the fringe of country. Buddy and Julie Miller have been a huge influence on me. All of those, and of course, classic country like George Jones and Merle Haggard. Those were my biggest country influences.

Are you a fan of bluegrass?

Yeah, I play the banjo! I thought for a while when I was in high school that that’s what I was going to do. I love bluegrass. Ralph Stanley is my favorite singer. My dad grew up playing with Ricky Skaggs so I was around it a lot. I’m really inspired by bluegrass. On this record, I did “My Love Will Not Change,” which was written by Shawn Camp, but I knew the Del McCoury version. For me, there’s just a similarity in the intensity and the drive behind some bluegrass and rock and blues music. It’s got a simple, emotional feel to it, to me. All of those things connect in my brain and my heart. I love bluegrass.

What was your entrance point to Ralph Stanley? That’s a big catalog to navigate.

I guess just listening to old Stanley Brothers records. Fortunately I grew up in an era where I could explore all music on the internet, you know? So I would go into a bluegrass rabbit hole and listen to that. And then of course, I love the banjo. I think it’s like the electric guitar of bluegrass.

You co-produced this record, too [with Frank Liddell]. What kind of textures did you hope to capture?

I don’t bring in references or anything like that when I’m making music. I think it’s more important to have a vision in your head and make sure you’re bringing in the right players, putting them in the right environment, and having the right songs. Let it evolve, take your time, and let it breathe.

It’s the same with writing and choosing songs. I try not to make it like a factory. I try to let it happen organically. I think it’s making sure you’re putting together the right people in the right environment. You know, I had four guitar players on this record! Sometime it’s about having someone sit out for a song. Letting everything have room to breathe is my philosophy.

Photo credit: Chloé Aktas

The Lil Smokies Tighten Their Bond with ‘Tornillo’

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The Lil Smokies’ long-awaited album Tornillo reflects the vast openness of the Texas desert town in which it was recorded, possessing all of the energy that comes with a renewed creative spirit. In a phone interview with lead singer Andy Dunnigan, BGS discussed rule-bending, burnout, and how recording at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas revitalized the Montana-based band.

BGS: It sounds like this album is really special to you. Can you tell me about the process of making it? What’s memorable about this one?

AD: Yeah, this is a special one. We were coming off of two or three solid years of extensive touring. We were pretty road-worn and dare I say a little burnt out. When we came into this session we needed to become a little more unified than we had been while on the road. We were looking for somewhere that we could go and get outside of the box creatively.

Texas was somewhere we had never spent a lot of time. We wanted to go down to the desert and we wanted to be able to live on the compound. These were all [realities] that Sonic Ranch in Tornillo was able to provide us, so when we got down there we didn’t really leave for ten days.

We lived a stone’s throw away from the studio. We’d wake up and eat huevos rancheros and then head over to the studio. We were kind of autonomous in the fact that we could make our own hours. It really brought us back to life. We were really unified in our work and the production of this album, and I think that’s really ostensible throughout the songs.

How much does a new album like this, where you have brand-new material and are fresh off the experience of recording, help motivate you to keep going out on the road?

I think it’s just that we toured the last album for a couple years and got a little tired of some of those songs. We were playing so much that we didn’t have all that much time for writing. I found myself trying to juggle between writing, being on the road, solitude, hobbies, and having a girlfriend. I was thinking, “Man, there’s just not a lot of time.”

So now that we were able to hammer out some new songs, getting back out on the road seems so much more enjoyable. I think when we’re having fun on stage there’s a direct correlation to the audience. They’re feeding off us and the pillars of reciprocity are strong.

This album definitely sounds like you’re having fun and doing things your way. You sort of bend the rules of bluegrass, but always in a way that adds something to the music. How do you keep an open mind about trying new things without being gratuitous about it?

We wanted to think outside the box for this record, but we didn’t want to do it in a contrived way where we say, “OK, this is going to be a weird album, so we’ll just make it intentionally weird.” We wanted to cater to the songs and adhere to what each song needs.

On the title track, “Tornillo,” we had originally worked up our traditional way of doing it with the bluegrass ensemble, but when we started playing it, it sounded like something that should be on the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. We were thinking, “This just isn’t going to work.”

Then Rev, our guitar player, worked up a piano arrangement and brought it to us towards the latter part of the session and we were like, “Oh man, this is so awesome. We have to use this.” We were just serving the song, and that was the ethos. Once we had the piano foundation, we started experimenting with drums and horns and some baritone guitar.

It was really fun for us. We intentionally gave ourselves a surplus amount of time in the studio so we could tinker around a little bit. We wanted to experiment sonically, and I think the results are really fun. It opened our minds to what you can accomplish in the studio if you have enough time and patience.

This album has a clear overall sound. Big, open, and full of space. Is that something you went into the studio wanting to accomplish, or did it develop more on the fly?

It’s a little bit of both. We wanted to create something big from the get-go, but we weren’t sure how we were going to do that. We knew we wanted to record live because that adds a little more energy, we had it in mind to drench a lot of it in reverb to create sort of a Fleet Foxes vibe or something a little more alt. That’s the kind of music that a lot of us have been listening to and getting inspired by for the last few years. We’re all listening to a lot of different music and we wanted to expand outside of the bluegrass domain in the production at least.

In your bio it’s mentioned that you “draw on the energy of a rock band and the Laurel Canyon songwriting of the 1970s.” How did bluegrass become the avenue that you express those influences?

Well, I think we all started out playing bluegrass. I came to it in my latter years of high school. I went down to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. I had gotten an electric guitar from my dad. He plays music for a living, so he gifted me a Strat, and then a lap steel. I listened to a lot of David Lindley and Ben Harper. Those were kind of the gateway into bluegrass music. Then when I went down to Telluride it blew my head open.

I think we all have our pioneer stories of how we got into the music. That’s how you meet the community of players. There’s this whole vocabulary attached to it but as you get older you expand your musical library. I think we listen to a lot of songwriters and a lot of rock. We still happen to play these bluegrass instruments, and we love bluegrass, but we’re just trying to express what we want to say while wielding bluegrass instruments.

Do you find that you’re an introduction to bluegrass music for a lot of your fans?

I do, and it’s one of my favorite remarks after shows. People say, “Man, I hate bluegrass, but I love you guys.” I hear that a lot and I think it’s funny and ironic, but it’s cool because I think there has to be somebody to pull you in and make you realize that you’ve been wrong about the stigma perhaps. I know I was that person at one time. I thought, “Man, bluegrass music? My dad plays the banjo. This is really lame.”

I think we’re seeing bluegrass kind of blossom into its adolescence and beyond, because for a while I think it was restricted by the staunch purists who were slapping everyone’s wrists for playing minor chords. Now we’re seeing Punch Brothers, Greensky Bluegrass, Infamous Stringdusters, and of course now Billy Strings, who all have obviously done their homework religiously and can pay homage to the traditional godfathers, but they’re also putting their spin on it. It’s really cool and it’s getting people excited. I think to be included in that group is really awesome and I think it’s an exciting time to be riding the wave.

How much do you rely on melody, texture, and other instrumental factors to further the meaning or story within a song?

A lot of it happens in the arranging as well, but a lot of times when I’m writing a song there will be a hook line, and that’s sort of from a rock standpoint. You have your verse-chorus and then there’s a riff or something. You know, this band was almost an instrumental band for a short period in the beginning. We were listening to a lot of David Grisman, Strength In Numbers, and a lot of that music.

We loved writing instrumental music, and then when I started singing and writing songs we kind of fused the two worlds together. Those little melody parts and arrangement parts are still so fun to incorporate in songs. In a tune like “Giant” on this album, we wanted something kind of spacy to create a dream-like state, so we tried to write something that sounded kind of spacey and sleepy.

Some of these songs are intentionally ambiguous in their origins. What is the intent behind that ambiguity?

I went to school at the University of Montana for creative writing and poetry and I love the way words sound together as much as I love melody. Sometimes the words and just the assonance, what they sound like, will dictate the melody and vice versa. Once I have a word in my head and I’m kind of ad-libbing on the guitar I try to steer away from some words and how they sound.

I like to write stories and have some ostensible narratives, but I also just love words and how they sound. “World’s On Fire” has a couple meanings in there but I also like to keep it intentionally ambiguous because I think it’s fun for people to create their own story.

You’ve said your time at Sonic Ranch “encapsulates all of the good things about being in a band and making music.” How did the band grow from the experience of making this album?

To circle back on what I said in the beginning, it’s a huge a sacrifice to be in a band. There’s the greatest ups and the greatest downs, kind of married to each other. Coming off of those past three years of touring we were all a little tired and burnt out, and maybe questioning if we were on the right path. During our studio session in Tornillo I think we were all realizing that this is why we do it.

When you make an album it’s like setting a bug in amber. It’s this fossilized preservation of your life at that point. The word tornillo literally means “to fasten” and refers to a screw. We named it after that place. The place really tightened us up together as friends and as a band. I remember leaving there and feeling really proud of what we had accomplished. I think it’s the most unified we’ve ever been as a band.

Photo credit: Bill Reynolds

LISTEN: The Devil Makes Three, “Pray For Rain”

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Capturing your band’s live sound in the studio is right up there with writer’s block as one of the most common challenges you can face as an artist—particularly if, like The Devil Makes Three, your live shows are your bread and butter.

The California trio, whose high-energy tours and festival appearances attract a fiercely dedicated fan base, have already released a couple live albums. But as they were writing Chains Are Broken, Pete Bernhard, Lucia Turino and Cooper McBean made a conscious effort to further capture their live instrumentation in the studio by inviting their touring drummer, Stefan Amidon, to record with them.

“We recorded with a [session] drummer who we really liked on our last album, Stranger, and it was just fun,” Bernhard says. “It gave us a lot more, I dunno, freedom I guess. There’s a certain freedom in playing as a string band too, but it was a different kind of freedom. But yeah, we’ve been playing with [Stefan] for years. Sometimes people see us play and they’re really shocked that we have a drummer, but that usually means that they haven’t seen us in like three or four years.” He laughs. “So we wrote a lot of the songs including drums, so when we went into the studio, it seemed like the natural progression to have him play.”

However, that doesn’t mean drums are a permanent addition to the band’s setup.

“I don’t like to predict the future,” he says. “I think that maybe we’ll use him if we think the song is appropriate, and if we write a song that’s just like a guitar and a bass, then we’ll do that. The main thing I like to do is just approach it like there really aren’t any rules, you know? And if the song wants drums and it wants a bass clarinet, then that’s what we’re gonna do. And if it doesn’t want that, if it wants like an electric guitar and standup bass and vocals and nothing else, then that’s what we’ll do.

“We still play without a drummer sometimes, it just really depends on the gig. But for us it was really exciting to do it and just try it because we hadn’t done it before. But yeah, for the next record, maybe we won’t. Maybe we’ll use drums on some songs like we did on Stranger and not on others; maybe we won’t use them at all. I think it really depends on what we’re excited about writing. There are no hard and fast rules.”

That lack of rules when it comes to their recording process led them to venture out to Texas for a new sort of studio experience as well, working on Chains Are Broken at the Sonic Ranch, the largest residential recording studio complex in the world.

“I’d never been to a recording studio like that before,” Bernhard says. “I’d never done like a live-in sort of studio. It was really cool. It was a very strange experience. You live at the studio, and there’s a lot of other people recording there too, so it’s kind of like—I don’t know, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like band camp or something. Because while we were there, there’s like a jazz artist next door who’s recording, and there’s a rock group, and then there was Tito & Tarantula, which is a little more on the punk side of things, and it was really cool and very, very different. We’re used to sort of going into a city and recording in a studio and kind of spending a lot of time someplace in the middle of everything, and this could not be further away from that.”

He adds, “It was incredibly isolated. It was down by the Mexican border. It was really, really pretty and really quiet and really peaceful, and we just focused on playing every day for a couple of weeks and before we recorded the record, we sort of hung out and played the songs and talked about how we wanted to change them, things we liked, things we didn’t, and it was like we got so much more space and time to work on the record than we ever have before. It was really cool. It’s kind of creepy out there though…It’s the desert, you know? And I think that kind of influenced the sound of the record too. Just sort of the environment is very kind of empty and really pretty but also a little bit lonely.”

You can hear that influence on tracks like “Can’t Stop,” a deceptively upbeat song with dark lyrics that only reveal themselves if you’re listening closely. Bernhard says it’s about the pitfalls of being an artist.

“I think mainly for me it’s just a song about being an artist of any sort—a musician or a visual artist—and what I think is sometimes necessary to be an artist. When I wrote the song I was thinking a lot about how a lot of artists kind of finish their lives in a terrible way, you know?” he says. “Like someone like Hemingway, he was given electroshock therapy and he basically drank himself to death, and somebody like Townes Van Zandt also met with a sad end. I was reading James Baldwin and he was talking about how being an artist is one of those things where instead of you choosing to do it, it’s one of those things where you can’t help doing it. You have to do it. And you don’t have a choice whether you do it or not, and you do whatever’s necessary in order to make that happen.”

He continues, “And sometimes that’s kind of not that great. But people who are artists and feel they have a vision that they want to see happen and that they’re driven to are willing to do that. And I think that was the inspiration for the song, you know, really not being able to stop. You might want to, but you can’t. And I think that’s sort of a part of the life of being an artist or a creative person in any way, and it is kind of dark sometimes. I think it’s a really great thing and it’s a wonderful gift to be given, but at the same time, yeah, it can be kind of a dark thing. And just that feeling of not being completely in control, I think that that’s part of being an artist of any kind. You kind of give yourself over to that, and it takes you wherever it’s gonna take you, and sometimes where it takes you isn’t that great, but that’s part of the ride.”

Sonically, Chains Are Broken is a heavier record as well—a natural progression stemming from the band’s live show.

“I think it actually sort of unfolded in the live show over the years, playing with a drummer, and everybody in the band is really into heavier music,” Bernhard explains. “It’s pretty funny, actually, if you like go around the room and ask the band what kind of music everybody’s listening to right now, the answers you get back are really hilarious for the kind of music that we play. We all started out in the punk scene, and as we’ve gotten older, I think Cooper especially got really into sort of slow metal and a lot of experimental music, like drone music.

“So yeah, we definitely made the album heavier just out of our music getting heavier over the years onstage. I think it’s just kind of happened naturally. And it’s also so fun to play like that. I think we’ve always tried to emulate that, even when we were just three people playing acoustic instruments. We always tried to play as fast and hard as we possibly could, so it’s sort of a continuation of that.”

But like their live show, no Devil Makes Three record is immune from being tweaked with and evolving, and Bernhard says the group is eager to see how Chains Are Broken shifts as they take it on tour.

“I think the thing that happens for us, you know, we write a record, we’re excited about it, we go out on the road, and then a lot of times we change it.” He laughs. “We change how we play the songs. We like to do them in a different way, we might change the tempos of them, it’s like things evolve and we find a certain way that we really like to perform stuff. I mean, I think that’s part of why you want to see a band live, too. Just sort of to see the different songs and see how things evolve.”

Photo credit: Jay Westcott