Artist:The Dead South Hometown: Regina, Saskatchewan Song: “The Recap” (Live) Album:Served Live Release Date: January 29, 2021 Label: Six Shooter Records
In Their Words: “It’s been tough not being able to do what we love. Playing live shows is a part of who we are and it has been ingrained in us to work hard and put on a great show night after night, and we miss the hell out of it! Putting out a live record is the next best thing to keeping these feelings alive and strong. We hope this live album brings people great feelings and sparks memories of unforgettable nights with us.” — Nate Hilts
“‘The Recap’ was one of the first songs we ever wrote. It was also the first music video we filmed. This song really helped kickstart this whole thing, and we’re happy it’s become such a fan favourite.” — Colton Crawford
The Goat Rodeo was back in town in 2020, and while their stay was short, they left behind a new record for us to enjoy until their next visit. The all-star string quartet (no, not literally a rodeo) released their second album Not Our First Goat Rodeo in June, and much like the passing of a comet, audiences everywhere took it in with wonder and awe. The four visionaries that constitute the Goat Rodeo have each accomplished many incredible, out-of-this world feats, but when Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and Stuart Duncan join forces, the music made feels less like an album and more like a rare phenomenon you’re lucky to see even once in a lifetime.
This fall, NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) concert series shared music from their sophomore release. Chris Thile acts as an emcee sharing backgrounds and insights between the three songs featured, all of which can be found on Not Our First Goat Rodeo. As in the 2011 release, the rodeo’s second coming features the beautiful vocal presence of Aoife O’Donovan on the song “The Trappings” (as well as on two other tracks not performed for NPR). Despite their brief reunion, Not Our First Goat Rodeo will surely be considered as one of the highlights of 2020. Watch the Tiny Desk performance here – and read our BGS Artist of the Month interviews with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and Yo-Yo Ma.
There are a whole lot of ways you can tell the story of 2020, but for us here at BGS, it will be remembered as a year of especially remarkable songwriting from women in roots music.
We lead our playlist with the one and only Dolly Parton, who assured us that life will be good again. Parton’s songwriting is presented in an enticing new book, Songteller, and her ability to articulate complicated emotions — through lyrics that speak to all walks of life — is something that Brandi Carlile picked up on as a teenager. In this video interview from the 2020 BMI Country Awards (with a cameo from Dolly at the end), Carlile explains how Parton’s perspective on equality kept Carlile from divorcing country music completely.
Parton, who turns 75 next month, shares a number of important qualities with a new generation of singer-songwriters she’s inspired. In the case of Brandi Carlile, there’s a sense of belonging that is woven throughout their work, from Parton’s “Joshua” to Carlile’s “Carried Me With You.” Like Parton, Brennen Leigh is able to capture a sense of place and make it relatable, even for a listener who’s never been there. Kyshona Armstrong offers a sense of self-worth and self-awareness in her writing, as Parton does, allowing listeners to know them better. Likewise, Maya de Vitry and Parton share a sense of wonder and joy, portraying landscapes — internal and external — that are imagined, yet vivid.
On Prairie Love Letter, her full-length paean to her homeland on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, Brennen Leigh demonstrates a visceral, evocative grounding – just as Parton constantly speaks of her Tennessee mountain home: with a glint in her eye, and a sorrow in her heart for knowing she had no choice but to leave it. Leigh stakes her claim on both the wide, expansive plains and Nashville all at once, asking her audience “Don’t you know I’m from here?” As if to remind she’s as at home in bluegrass and country — and Music City — as Dolly herself.
“Backwoods Barbie,” “Dumb Blonde,” and “Just Because I’m a Woman” are all perfect examples of Parton’s lifelong radical self-possession. She expresses her agency boldly, confidently, without (visible) second guessing – from her wigs to her infamous tattoos to her nothing-special acknowledgement of her plastic surgeries, struggles with suicidal ideation, and so on, she is her fully realized, autonomous self. As Dolly told Jad Abumrad on Dolly Parton’s America, “Who we are is who we are… I would just bow out if I wasn’t allowed to be me…” Kyshona Armstrong‘s prescient album, Listen, holds similar space, as Armstrong doesn’t simply ask folks to listen; her presence, compassion, and radical honesty demand it. Because, first and foremost, she’s welcoming and non-judgmental in that aim, you will find yourself fully enveloped by her music before you realize the conviction within it.
Maya de Vitry made a gorgeous, poetic foray into heavier, rockier turf with How to Break a Fall, a gutsy, genre-bending set of songs. Their anger, release, and passion, expressed by the folk-rock production style, feels right out of Parton’s post-White Limozeen era, an effortless combination of seemingly disparate musical influences, distilled into something that, almost above all else, feels joyful. Where male-centered rock and roll finds itself often hung up on its endemic toxic masculinity, de Vitry and Parton stride into electrified sounds with their femininity forward, and the result is as charming as it is subversive.
It’s striking, among such an incredible volume of musical output from their Americana and country peers this year, that these women would stand out, above and beyond the still-common glass ceilings imposed upon them for decades. Dolly blazed a trail, but these dozens of writers — and singers and pickers and composers and front women and side musicians and authors and poets — would have crashed through inevitably on their own. With songs like Adia Victoria’s “South Gotta Change,” Sunny War’s “Can I Sit With You?,” “Troubled Times” from Laurie Lewis, the Secret Sisters’ “Cabin,” it’s obvious Dolly Parton’s songwriting legacy will be inherited by multiple generations worthy of carrying it on.
Throughout 2020, the BGS editorial team embraced this wealth of excellent music from women songwriters in roots music. It has been a privilege to share these original voices with our readers, too. Here are 50 of our favorite tracks from 2020:
Photo credit: Daniel Jackson for BGS, Newport Folk Fest 2019
Artist:The Steel Wheels Hometown: Harrisonburg, Virginia Latest album:Everyone a Song, Volume 1 Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): Trent Wagner and The Steel Wagler
Answers by Trent Wagler
What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?
I remember a festival finale performance of “The Weight” in northern Alberta where we were thrust (last minute) into leading the song. Isn’t “The Weight” some sort of Canadian anthem? I don’t know, we felt a little like impostors, but it became even more hilarious when a whole bunch of volunteers and other musicians hopped on stage and we were given conflicting accounts of who was singing what verses. In the end Michael Franti surprised us by appearing on the drum kit and singing a verse that included a little change of lyrics name-checking the festival. It was memorable.
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
When I was about 9 years old, I played Duffy the Fluffy in a small church Christmas play called Baa, Baa, Bethlehem. I slicked my hair back and wore sunglasses and sang a song that went, “Duffy the Fluffy is who I’m gonna be, come to the city you’ll be waiting to see me.” And the rest of the sheep sang, “Get a job, baa baa baa, baa, baa baa baa baa baa.” But I had a guitar strapped around my neck and I sang with confidence. Wait, maybe THAT was my favorite memory from being on stage!
What rituals do you have, either in the studio or before a show?
In the studio, I always tape a sheet of paper on the wall with the title of each song we are recording. On that paper, we keep a running list of notes, ideas, or whatever that song still needs. It’s helpful to have a visual representation of notes, and when things are dragging along, there’s a sense of accomplishment to crossing off each note. When the song is finished, it’s ceremoniously taped on a different wall.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
I try to ride bike everyday. Recently, I’ve been most excited about gravel road rides, a bit easier than mountain biking, but with a similar feeling of distance from civilization. I love the way riding a bike gives you respect for a mountain. The bicycle also turns you into a different kind of an animal. Sometimes a mule, sometimes a bird, but I usually feel transformed after a good bike ride. And the whole process, of getting away, being in nature, and riding is a great reset for my creativity. I live in the Shenandoah Valley and the beauty of the landscape finds a way into my writing all the time. There is a reason that rivers and mountains are cliché metaphors, because there is an undeniable depth and power to them.
Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?
It seems like I should say I’d eat a fistful of cigarettes and a barrel of red wine and listen to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, but I can’t think of a better pairing than Brandi Carlile and some wild-caught salmon. There are musicians that garner praise from critics and others that have an easy-listening popular songs for the masses, but very few thread the needle like Brandi Carlile. She might be the only music my wife, 16-year-old daughter, and I can all passionately agree on. You know how salmon looks like it’s just a layer of pure pink muscle? Brandi’s songs are all muscle.
Artist:Scythian Hometown: Front Royal, Virginia Song: “Galway City” Album:Roots & Stones Release Date: October 13, 2020 Label: Konenko Records
In Their Words: “We take a yearly trip to Ireland with our fans and have taken over 600 of them over the last seven years. There is one place we never miss — Galway City — and it never disappoints. So many magical nights. We wrote a song in tribute: a bunch Americans pulling up to the jewel of Ireland and falling in love with its cobblestone streets, cozy pubs, nooks and crannies, and coastal air. We hope ‘Galway City’ brings people back to happy days drinking and laughing with friends.” — Alex Fedoryka, Scythian
Artist:Appalachian Road Show Hometown: Canton, North Carolina (Jim Van Cleve); Lexington, North Carolina (Zeb Snyder) Personal Nicknames: Jibby (Jim); Appalachian Zeb (Zeb)
Editor’s Note: As BGS and Come Hear NC team up in November, we present North Carolina natives Jim Van Cleve and Zeb Snyder of Appalachian Road Show for this edition of BGS 5+5. Their newest album is Tribulation.
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?
I think in a subconscious way, film and photography likely inspire my writing and even playing in a powerful way — and especially when referring to instrumental pieces. I’ve often said that when I’m writing, I can almost see or even “feel” a scene from a movie or a compelling visual image or something. There’s almost like this “unseen visual” which informs the emotional content of the piece of music in question. In some subconscious way, the gravity of a scene from a movie, or in a powerful photograph, will inhabit the melody shapes and rhythmic feel I’ll gravitate towards.
And, I think when I’m writing, I’m often subconsciously wondering… “What is happening in the movie that THIS song is the score for?” It’s difficult to put in words, but I definitely feel it. With Appalachian Road Show, there are such compelling stories that come from the region of our namesake, that it feels like it saturates every note of every song when we’re at our emotional peak. I can often envision scenes from Cold Mountain or The Outlander or Braveheart even during certain songs we’ll perform. — Jim Van Cleve
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
I’d have to say Tony Rice. When I think back on my growth as a flatpicker, I can see how Tony’s influence on me has changed and come from different directions over the years. When I first discovered his music at eleven years old, I was all about figuring out his lead playing on bluegrass songs and fiddle tunes. After that, I started getting into his original instrumentals and his work with [David] Grisman and on Béla Fleck’s albums, which taught me new chord voicings and more challenging leads.
The next and maybe the most important phase would be when I started taking rhythm playing more seriously as a teenager and started studying all of the subtleties of Tony’s rhythm pattern and embellishments, particularly on the Bluegrass Album Band stuff. I have so many favorite guitar players, but I always come back to Tony every so often and figure out things that I had never noticed or understood earlier in life. — Zeb Snyder
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
I believe maybe the one that was the most challenging for me was when I was asked to write a new IBMA Awards show theme song. The song was ultimately called “The Road From Rosine,” and there were a LOT of angles to consider with that one. For starters, the previous song, “Shoulder to Shoulder,” was written and recorded by one of my heroes Jerry Douglas, (and the whole band on that track is a bluegrass Mount Rushmore). The tune itself is a classic and had been used for years and years as the awards show theme. I’d grown up with the song, and it being a staple of the show, so I had this subconscious mountain to climb in the first place.
Then, on top of that, you have all of these “marks” — emotional and energy/dynamic-wise — that a song being used like this has to hit, because you know how it needs to be used throughout the show. So, it just had a lot of different roles it needed to fill, and in general you just want it to be as great as it can be, given the gravity of that situation. I wanted the song to capture the essence and spirit of bluegrass… the way the founding fathers of the music intended for it to feel, but I also wanted it to embody a sense of where the music is heading, with kind of a forward looking element. So basically, I was trying to write a song that would bridge all the gaps between the past, the present, and the future of our music, and also be theme-ish. — Jim Van Cleve
If you had to write a mission statement for your career, what would it be?
Every undertaking, big or small, do it to the absolute best of your ability, keeping integrity and transparency above all. If you’re going to do a thing, do it beyond the point of excellence. Be authentic and strive to treat the people you work with like you’d wish to be treated, even (and especially) when they make it difficult to do so! haha! 😉 Full disclosure: It’s been our intention from the start to adopt this philosophy in Appalachian Road Show, and we feel that it’s been an important part of our early successes. — Jim Van Cleve
What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?
Well, I started playing music through classical lessons. I was seven years old, and my sister had just started doing Suzuki method violin lessons. My parents got me into the Suzuki classical guitar program. At that point, I enjoyed playing, but it was kind of like a favorite school subject, not a passion. Four years later I started playing bluegrass guitar. That was when everything changed. I was so passionate about playing, and I was acting on my own initiative instead of treating practice like it was homework.
I would lose track of time while I was practicing, figure songs and licks out on my own, spend hours researching and listening my favorite artists on the internet, and even get random ideas for my own little instrumentals and licks before I even really knew what I was doing. When my family band started playing a few gigs, that was it. I discovered that I could feel pretty calm and confident on stage, even though I was a shy and reserved kid by nature. My passion for the music took over, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else for a living. — Zeb Snyder
To hear Mipso perform, it’s hard to believe that Libby Rodenbough, Joseph Terell, Jacob Sharp, and Wood Robinson didn’t originally get together with the intention of digging into bluegrass history or starting a band. But as the self-described “indie kids” played around with vocal harmonies and playful strings as students at UNC Chapel Hill, the traditional sounds of their native North Carolina beckoned.
“I had a need for exploring my own roots — the places I’m from and the traditions that come from North Carolina and the Piedmont specifically,” Terrell, who plays the guitar, tells BGS. “There’s a lot of depth to the music that’s been made around here, and because a lot of those folks are still making music around here, it’s still passed down in neighborhoods, at jam sessions and orally.”
As Mipso’s audience grew, its sound evolved, integrating elements of pop with traditional strings and vocal harmonies, and the foursome reckoned with more than just chords and lyrics.
“I was trying to make sense of North Carolina and being a more long-term North Carolinian — not just by birth, but by choice,” says fiddle player Rodenbough, of the early days. “There was so much context and story behind this traditional music. Every song, even if it was a modern creation, had little threads that tied it back to words that had been sung for decades or hundreds of years. It just felt like… well, in a nice way, a bottomless pit. Or, what’s a nice way to say that?”
“A well! An inexhaustible well,” offers Terrell with a laugh. And they’re still drinking from it: Last month, the group issued their fifth full-length album, a self-titled effort that embraced the band’s quirks and their past experiences.
“We’ve been living together so closely for the last eight years, and for better or for worse, we’re us now,” says Terrell. “We had phases of the band where we thought, ‘Oh, we’re supposed to be this, we need to make a song this way.’ This record, it was like, ‘Fuck it, this is how we make music.’ We like it, and we’re weird if we’re weird, and if we’re not, we’re not, but this is how we go about it. Here’s Mipso.”
BGS: Plenty of songs on this album feel like they were born from one person’s memory or experience; “Let a Little Light In,” for example, has specific lyrics about childhood. How do you bring a song from one person’s brain or notebook to the band as a whole?
Joseph Terrell: The lyrics and the melodies are certainly an important part of what makes a song, but I think when we talk about combining our voices, we’re talking about making a presentation of a song that makes an emotional impact when people hear it. “Let a Little Light In” is a great example of a song that really transformed in the studio. The lyrics mostly came from me, but Libby and Jacob and Wood had more to do than I did with building this cool, playful soundscape of dancey noises to make up a kind of funhouse mirror of childhood weirdness.
Libby Rodenbough: A lot of the songs are lyrically one person’s, or maybe two people’s, work. But we talk about the meaning of songs when we talk about the arrangements because the delivery of it has so much to do with the emotional meaning. There’ve been songs before that we’ve vetoed or decided to leave off a record because they felt too specific to one person — the rest of the band was going to feel like a backing band. Part of our standard for what makes a Mipso song is that we all have to find an in-road somewhere, something we can sink our teeth into.
You see a lot of bands packing up and moving to places like Nashville or LA, but you’ve held tight to the community where you came up in North Carolina. What makes it such a special place for you, as people and as musicians?
Terrell: For me, North Carolina is where the music comes from, and Nashville or Los Angeles is where the business comes from. In as many ways as possible, trying to keep and hearth and home on the music side of that equation is going to be really healthier in the long run.
Rodenbough: I would say, too, that there’s a part of it that’s arbitrary: Because I was born here and went to school here, and because I believe that there are benefits that you can only reap after a certain amount of time spent in one place, this is the place where I still am. It could have been somewhere else. But it’s North Carolina, because I’m a North Carolinian. This is it.
Terrell: There’s a part of you, a Libby-ness, that’s because you’re from this place. It gets a little bit vague and spiritual on some level to justify it, but I do feel that that’s true somehow.
Rodenbough: We formed the type of connection to a place that we have here by having been born here and having come of age here — by having returned here from every tour for seven or eight years. I have a more intergenerational community of people in my life. I’ve known people when they’ve had babies, and I know their kids now. I’ve met their parents and grandparents. You just can’t really rush that process.
Terrell: I had dinner on the porch with my grandparents three weeks ago — they’re 92 and 94 — and my grandma gave me a CD of my great-grandmother telling stories. It was recorded in 1985. So I’ve just been driving around in my car listening to this CD, and it’s about all these places that I still go. I feel a spiritual connection here that I can’t exactly explain. Yet I would hate to think that this answer could be spun in a way that means, “If you weren’t born in a place, you’re not valuable to that place,” because certainly the reason I love Durham is because of the immigrant community. There’s lots of ways of being from a place.
One song that feels especially prescient on the new album is “Shelter.” I think a lot of people can relate to the idea of seeking out a place to be safe and accepted. What do those lyrics mean to you?
Terrell: That song came from Wood, primarily. He had this great melody that reminded us of a British Isles folk melody. Some of his family in Robeson County in Eastern North Carolina had been really impacted by one of the bad hurricanes, and he had the idea of telling that as a snippet of a story. But instead of making this about one very specific scenario where you’d need shelter, you have four different scenes that land on the same phrase or message — kind of in the tradition of country songwriting. Whether you’re a kid, an immigrant, a person facing natural disasters because of global warming, or the richest person in New York City going up into some big tower, this is a human need for shelter. We all need it, and therefore, we should all think of ourselves as tied together.
Rodenbough: And I think that a lot of the strife — to put it really lightly — happening in the country right now comes from an anxiety about lacking shelter, lacking a feeling of safety. That applies to people who are very clearly lacking in physical shelter as well as people who seem to be lacking for nothing. Our country has failed to provide that for people from every walk of life for a long time now, and so I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s unfortunately especially relatable right now. We all feel untethered. We all feel like we don’t really have a home.
Mipso’s sound developed in part thanks to in-person communities at places like festivals and neighborhood jams. Do you feel like there’s a way to emulate that in online communities?
Rodenbough: For so many subcultures, the internet has given people the gift of knowing that others like them exist. It is very empowering, and in some cases, that’s a bad thing — there are a lot of internet subcultures that we wish probably didn’t have that vehicle. But, for better or for worse, it makes something that probably felt very geographically disparate, and therefore disconnected, feel really strong and unified.
One example during COVID has been a Facebook group called Quarantine Happy Hour: They do a concert every night, or even a couple of concerts every night, and I’ve watched more bluegrass and old time music since [joining] than I did probably in the couple of years prior. It’s like a who’s-who, especially of contemporary old-time players, with bluegrass too. Every concert, no matter how well-known the performers are, has a couple of hundred people, and folks are tipping like crazy. And it’s interesting that it took a pandemic to make that happen, because we could have done that all along.
Even before the pandemic, though, Mipso was really harnessing the power of the internet to reach new fans — even listeners who maybe never considered themselves fans of traditional music.
Terrell: I think we’re probably more like a gateway drug into bluegrass than a haven for diehard fans. We have played a good number of bluegrass festivals and traditional-oriented-type venues, but I think we’re on the fringe of what they consider to be part of that world. If people find our music and like it, they might say, “Wait… there’s something in this that’s leading me towards all these other artists.” But there’s certainly not, like, a big tag we’re putting on our foreheads to weed out bluegrass or non-bluegrass fans.
Are there any misconceptions you think people have about bluegrass or traditional music — things they really get wrong?
Terrell: I mean, I have two things. The first is the idea that it’s white music, which I think is a really pernicious and awful myth. So much of this, the only reason we’re doing this is because it came from slaves who were here, and it came from African American music.
Rodenbough: It’s one of the nastiest and almost most ridiculous perversions of the truth, that white supremacists have used this type of music as an example of anglo-cultural achievement.
Terrell: The other [misconception] is that it’s tame or like, “stripped down.” For me, the best way to understand bluegrass specifically is that it was rock ’n’ roll right before rock ’n’ roll. It was high-energy and rip-roaring — the banjo twanged right before the electric guitar. It was the head-banging music of its day. [Laughs]
Rodenbough: This was a wild music — bluegrass in particular was not an old folky hokey thing. The way that we divide up the genres of traditional music comes straight out of marketing. I think it can be useful to understand how one style of music informs another that came later chronologically or something, but it’s not necessary to draw hard lines between old time and bluegrass in order to love stringband music or to love fiddle-centric music. All the borders are so blurry, just like with everything in history and in our overlapping cultures. I think that’s so wonderful, and I wouldn’t want to try to clean it up. That would be missing what’s so special about not even traditional music, but vernacular music — music that non-professionals make in their lives, about their lives.
Back in March, the Avett Brothers — Scott and Seth Avett, along with bassist Bob Crawford — were scheduled to leave their homes in North Carolina and head out West, where their longtime producer, Rick Rubin, was waiting at his studio in Malibu. They were in a prolific place at the top of the year, and eager to keep up the momentum. They had just released Closer Than Together, their tenth studio album, in October 2019, and had written and recorded The Third Gleam, the latest chapter in a series of acoustic EPs. They had also written a ton of new material — enough for another album, by Scott’s estimation — and were all set to move forward with it when the coronavirus hit. Everything, including their flights to California, ground to a halt.
The only thing that’s gone according to plan for the Avetts in 2020 is The Third Gleam, and it’s weirdly fitting — fateful, even — that it’s a homecoming in many ways. The eight-song EP was ushered into a tumultuous time they never saw coming, one that’s forcing everyone to stay put, slow down, and count their blessings more fervently than usual. It’s a return to the sparse acoustic arrangements that the Avetts perfected in their early releases before they teamed up with Rubin in 2009 for their mainstream breakthrough, I And Love And You, which brought them into the rock arena.
The Second Gleam came out in 2008 just before I And Love And You changed their lives and their sound, and though they’ve never strayed from their bluegrass and folk framework, they haven’t returned to the simplicity of Scott and Seth working through ideas with only their guitars and each other for company to this degree in over a decade. (Crawford does join them on The Third Gleam; he wasn’t brought in for the first two.)
The Third Gleam was written long before the world abruptly changed, but it touches on themes that bubbled up from the tension and strife that’s shaped recent moments of violence, unrest, uncertainty, despair, and the embers of resilience, hope, and the pursuit of social justice that smolder in spite of all of the above. Gun violence (“I Should’ve Spent the Day With My Family”), facing the unknown with grace (“Victory”), considering mortality (“Prison to Heaven”), and the deep joys and struggles of the human condition (“The Fire”) are all explored here, in soft tones, plaintive strumming, and the meditative plucking of Scott’s banjo.
Each song is striking in its approachable yet profound sincerity, and this less-is-more approach is one they found to be particularly effective in this fractured time. These issues were on their minds before the coronavirus upended life as we know it, but the Avett Brothers find themselves finding new meaning on The Third Gleam back where they started: at home, in North Carolina, trying to make sense of the world with little more than two voices and two guitars in sharp relief. For Scott, it’s simple: “The smallness of the Gleam — that’s where its power is.”
BGS: When I think of the first two Gleams, some of the saddest songs you’ve ever written come to mind, like “If It’s the Beaches,” but also gems that became fan favorites, like “Murder in the City.” How do The Gleam, the Second Gleam and The Third Gleam stand out to you? What sets them apart from the rest of your work?
Scott Avett: If there was a heart or soul or spirit to everything we do, [The Gleams] orbit a bit closer to that. If there’s layers to an entity or a life, this is kind of at the pure center of it. I’m coming up with this theory for some reason right now with you. [Laughs] At the root of the songs, a lot of the songs on other releases, we have wrung them out — put them literally through the wringer — to see what they want to become, what they can become, what we’re trying to hear and get out of them. Are we challenging them or going too far with them? With these, we don’t ever take that journey. It’s much earlier in the inception of the life of the song that we stop meddling with them. There’s a little more to just be with them, which is at the root of things.
Seth Avett: The series itself sort of represents a simplification across many aspects of this whole thing. It represents the clearing out of many great things, many great tools, and many great advantages we have with our band and our resources, and our possibilities. It simplifies the process of collaboration, the process of artwork. It simplifies recording, mixing, mastering and everything else. Across the board, it’s just a process of simplification and reduction, to where the only real star is the lyrics. I think that we’re still attempting to make something that’s engaging, musically, but it’s no secret: what we put our time into is storytelling, writing words and then sharing them onstage. It’s always at the heart of our songs, and so the Gleam is presenting only the heart rather than the entire body in a way.
Bob Crawford: They’re Scott and Seth’s sketchbooks, really. If you knew these guys as well as I do — and I know a lot of people know them very well, because they put it all out there and they always have — but if you love a great painter’s paintings, and you become a connoisseur of that painter’s paintings, their sketchbooks are widely available nowadays, be it Rembrandt or Leonardo da Vinci. That’s how I look at the Gleams, stitched in with the fabric of all our work: they’re basically more broken down, raw thoughts that they guys have. They’ve always wanted these things to be quieter and less. This is the first one, I think, I’ve played on; normally it’s just Scott and Seth doing these. It’s just a chance for them to get quiet, be alone, and be brothers.
You’ve been very busy between Gleams. How has it been to return to this acoustic space after playing arena-ready roots-rock on Closer Than Together?
Seth Avett: What it does for me, personally, is it takes a new inventory of our trust, of our brotherhood — my trust for Scott and his trust for me — with no other real considerations. It’s wonderful to be reminded in such a genuine way, with such gravity, that we still trust each other completely, and we’re not moving forward based only on the efforts of others. We still have each other’s trust and care, and we still hold those things in the highest regard. It’s a funny thing: on the first two Gleams and on this one, when we go into the process of finding out what the songs are going to be, and we present them to each other, there’s very little discussion.
All these full-length records, whether one person wrote the whole song technically or not, the other one will have a certain amount of contribution to it. There’s a lot of weighing: “What does it mean?” “Can it be said better?” “Is this too much, is this too little?” We do consider them in a big way, and we consider the songs on the Gleams in a big way as well — but we hardly talk about it. It’s like, “Hey, here’s four songs that are feeling really good to me and things I want to say,” and the other brother says the same, and that’s it. We just do it. It’s cool.
Bob Crawford: These Gleams give them an opportunity to come together and work together a little more than they have in recent years. We’re coming full-circle because of the pandemic. Since the pandemic, they’ve been living very close together and spending more time together. They were always close as brothers and best friends, but closer, approximately, so they could get together. We were actually about to go to Malibu to record the week the pandemic hit, the week of the shutdown. Ultimately, we tried to do it all these different ways; it just didn’t work out, so it turned into them recording demos themselves, sending me the demos, and me recording the bass and sending them back.
Did any of these new songs pose a new challenge you hadn’t confronted in your songwriting before?
Scott Avett: What’s different about mine — and this is a change for Seth and I — we sort of switched places. Several years ago, I probably would’ve been the one that tended to be more rapid-fire, more erratic. I just chop it up with a lot of syllables and a lot of words. On this one, we switched. We were laughing about it. Seth’s songs have a lot of words and tell stories, they’re narrative, and then mine are very much personal and have a lot less words and a lot more space.
I always look at it that there’s only one character on the record, there’s one character in the story, and the two of us kind of make that character. We would do very different things on our own, probably. There’s a contrast to it, a gemini sort of approach to it I guess. [“I Should Have Spent the Day With My Family”] is a good example of what’s changed for us. It’s minor and subtle to anybody else, but it’s a change for us.
Seth Avett: If you look at The Third Gleam, it’s impossible not to compare and contrast between me and Scott — I know it is, I’m sure all of our fans do it — where the differences between the Seth and Scott songs have never been more laid bare, in terms of the difference of the vibe. Scott’s songs, they just have so much space and breadth in them. I don’t look at “Family” or “Fire” as songs that have a ton of breadth in them; they feel a bit more urgent.
The narratives have a bit more of an agenda. Whereas, “I Go to My Heart,” “Victory,” “Back into the Light,” they have quite a lot of breadth and space, and so I’m seeing a change in him. If we are writing the songs we’re meant to write, and we are giving reverence to our form, then the changes in us are the changes in the song. If you ask, “How have I seen his writing change?” I’m thinking about how he is growing and changing, as a man, as a father, as a brother. It’s all kind of wrapped in one.
The role of advocacy and activism in music has changed, even since you released Closer Than Together, and “Family” is a turning point for you especially, Seth. You mention your wife and child by name in a song about gun violence, and you’ve never done that before. How has it been to anchor the Gleam in this moment in that regard?
Seth Avett: I can’t say that there was a point where I said, “Okay, now I’m going to open the door and start writing these types of songs.” This sort of happened incrementally. A song like “Bang Bang,” there were multiple moments where I’d go to a hotel room, and I’d turn on the television, and it’s just one [show] after the next, from ridiculous garbage to the most eloquent sci-fi — but it’s always the leading man with the gun. It’s always presented with such power, and it’s just ridiculous. The idea of holding a gun to make someone powerful is absurd; it’s preposterous.
I had many moments like that, and then there were many shootings. “I Should Have Spent the Day with My Family” is an obvious, super-literal reaction; “We Americans,” that’s the first four years of a person’s life growing up as an American. I don’t know that there’s one moment where I gave myself permission, but there have been many moments that I consider wholly unavoidable in terms of taking that into the songwriting.
This has been a tumultuous time, so I was curious if you think there’s a connection between that and going back to the foundation with an acoustic EP. Do you find that it was an organic thing to take a step back and retract to that nucleus and get to the root of all things Avett with The Third Gleam, considering everything going on?
Bob Crawford: It’s definitely a time of reflection, and it does make you appreciate all we’ve done, because you don’t know when and how we’re going to do it again. … For me, “Victory” is the greatest song they ever wrote. We only win when we submit; we only find peace when we let go. How do we hold it all together in our hearts at the same time? How do we not lose our minds at that? How do we find true peace inside while there’s chaos flowing back and forth? I think, hopefully, the Avett Brothers can be part of the center of that. If you are the center of that, you’re not polarizing. You can’t alienate anybody. No matter what you know they believe, face to face is how we live the gospel, how we can make real change.
Artist:Stillhouse Junkies Hometown: Durango, Colorado Song: “Mountains of New Mexico” Album:Calamity
In Their Words: “‘Mountains of New Mexico’ is an old-school murder ballad about misunderstood victim vs. outlaw, but it’s also an ode to the great wildernesses of the American West and their ability, even in the Information Age, to humble us as they have since the beginning of time. And what better backdrop for this kind of tale than northern New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands, a sun-scarred, alien landscape of hoodoos, gullies, and maze-like washes. The August sun limited our video shoot schedule to early morning and sunset, and the light was nothing short of magical; the song’s windswept climax came to life in a way we had scarcely imagined. ‘Mountains of New Mexico’ is a reminder that trading one kind of trouble for another doesn’t always work in our favor.” — Cody Tinnin, Stillhouse Junkies
Artist:Tejon Street Corner Thieves Hometown: Colorado Springs, Colorado Song: “No Good” (Acoustic) Album:Monarch Sessions Release Date: October 16, 2020 Label: Liars Club
In Their Words: “At first glance, ‘No Good’ is about being a party animal. But a more in-depth look reveals the struggle for acceptance and a teetering battle with impostor syndrome. It’s easier to be hard on yourself than it is to understand why people like you. The song is a reminder to practice a positive self-image even though it takes work. Monarch Sessions combines both audio and video mediums so that we were able to portray our most authentic and emotionally-fueled performance in a time when live music isn’t an option. The video accompaniment allows for an inside look at our own reactions to the songs as we perform them, adding a layer to the album that wouldn’t be achievable otherwise. We put our heart and soul into these songs and you can finally see it through Monarch Sessions.” — Connor O’Neal, Tejon Street Corner Thieves
Photo credit: Gabriel Rovick @F4DStudio
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