MIXTAPE: Lily Kershaw’s Songs That Made Her Want to Write Music

“I decided to make a mixtape of the songs that inspired me to write music. It is always good to return to the reason you started something, especially if you find yourself lost in the middle or far from the start and you need to anchor back to where you began. It’s like going home to reground, rejuvenate, and revitalize! Luckily music is a portable home on our phones these days so I can always dive back in whenever I need to. I hope you enjoy my Mixtape!” — Lily Kershaw

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Sound of Silence”

I chose this song to begin with because it was the first song I heard that made me want to write music. I remember the first time I heard it the world felt like it stopped and an immediate desire to create a song arose in me.

Joni Mitchell – “Cactus Tree”

I’ve been listening to Joni since I was a kid, and this song of her’s in particular made me want to write. I love that she is talking about a woman who would be deemed as “complicated” just because of her desire to be untethered and free, but Joni made her seem so alive and well and glamorous. I remember wanting to be like the woman she sang of.

“He can think her there beside him
He can miss her just the same”

How brilliant is that lyric?!

Leonard Cohen – “Chelsea Hotel #2”

I have covered this song at the majority of shows I’ve ever played live. Cohen wrote this about Janis Joplin. These particular lyrics break my heart:

“Ah but you got away didn’t you babe
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away I never once heard you say
I need you, I don’t need you”

Crosby, Stills & Nash – “Helplessly Hoping”

I went through a very dark season in my life and the first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning during that time was listen to this song. It would make me feel better even if only for a fleeting moment. I always hope that the music I write can bring comfort to anyone who needs it.

Bob Dylan – “A Simple Twist of Fate”

People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within

I deeply relate to these lyrics.

Joan Baez – “Diamonds And Rust”

Joan actually wrote this song about Bob Dylan. The poetry is next level!

“Well you burst on the scene already a legend
the unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half shelf could keep you unharmed”

Cat Stevens – “The Wind”

This song always re-grounds me and connects me back to my heart and my goal to write music and tell stories from my heart.

Elliott Smith – “Between the Bars”

This is another song I love to cover live and have done so often. I love and relate to this passage of lyrics in particular:

“People you’ve been before that you don’t want around anymore
That push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I’ll keep them still”

Nico – “These Days”

I love a woman simply speaking about where she is at in that moment of her life. It is honest, poetic, simple, and profound.

“I’ve been out walking
I don’t do too much talking these days
These days
These days I seem to think a lot
about the things I forgot to do”

Sufjan Stevens – “Chicago”

This song brings me life. I feel so many things when I listen to this song. It definitely connects me back to my heart and to the place in me that wants to write music.

Now comes the part of my mixtape that is solely a Simon & Garfunkel appreciation section. Here are some of the lyrics that have most inspired me to write!

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Boxer”

“I am leaving I am leaving
but the fighter still remains”

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Dangling Conversation”

“In the dangling conversation
and the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives

And you read your Emily Dickinson
and I my Robert Frost
and we note our place with book markers
that measure what we’ve lost

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Only Living Boy in New York”

“Half of the time we’re gone
but we don’t know where
And we don’t know where”

Now these next two songs are ones I have written. They show the side of what the inspiration from the songs thus far have lead me to create!

Lily Kershaw – “Now & Then”

This is a simple honest folk song about the complicated nature of love and how it changes over time.

“Remember the rooftop parties
Remember the friends
Remember the way I love you now
and the way that I loved you then”

Lily Kershaw – “Darker Things”

This is another of my more acoustic, stripped songs. In it I worry about someone I love very much and how they are hurting and in return hurting themself.

“And you say you hate the way your
mind makes you feel about
all the darker things in your life
I feel you now
I can feel you”

I hope you have enjoyed my mixtape of the songs that inspired me to write music!


Photo credit: Lindsey Byrnes

MIXTAPE: Joseph’s Night Drive

All three of us went to college in Seattle at a school tucked between Fremont and Queen Anne. At the time, pre-Amazon, we knew the city best for its bridges and sailor vibes and constant grey blanket of melancholy. When you’re driving around at night on top of Queen Anne Hill, thinking about your unrequited love (just me?) the city views of blinking lights are spectacular and the LiveJournal entry is brewing in your mind. These are the songs you’re listening to. – Joseph (Natalie Schepman, Allison and Meegan Closner)

Nick Drake – “From the Morning”

I chose the song with “morning” in the title as the first track of this Night Drive mixtape. Sequence is very important in a mix for a night drive. The first verse says “A day once dawned from the ground / Then the night she fell.” It sets the stage and delivers the opening monologue. — Natalie

Laura Veirs – “When You Give You Give Your Heart”

One of my favorite songwriters:

“My stampeding buffalo
Stops in her tracks and watches the snow
Falling through the old oak tree
When you give your heart to me.” — Natalie

Blanco White – “Ollala”

I found this song on a curated Spotify playlist and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it. It’s become one of my partner’s and my favorite songs to listen to together. — Allie

Fleetwood Mac – “Sara”

My friend showed me this song and told me her Mom used to sing it to her as a kid while she was tucking her into bed. I’ve never been able to shake that childhood movie moment when I hear this song. I listen to it as though that were my own comforting memory. — Meegan

Iron & Wine – “Naked as We Came”

This is a mood, isn’t it? I bet anyone who loved this song gets taken back to where they listened to it. It’s the quintessential Night Drive feeling. — Natalie

John Moreland – “Hang Me in the Tulsa County Stars”

This song means 1,000 things to me, but mostly it’s always felt like coming home. In a lot of uncertain times I returned to this song over and over again to ground me. — Meegan

Death Cab for Cutie – “A Lack of Color”

When I was first curious about how to write songs, Death Cab was big for me. He starts the song with “and” like you’re already in a conversation and that wowed me. — Natalie

Bob Dylan – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”

I heard this song later on in life (within the last year) and fell in love with Bob Dylan’s voice. I know… took me a minute. I love the tongue-in-cheek feel of it and it has given me many special listening moments. — Allie

Sufjan Stevens – “Casimir Pulaski Day”

Sufjan. Mind blowing for me. I’m amazed by his matter-of-fact, deadpan delivery while singing about scenes that combine the horror of cancer right next to “the complications you could do without when I kissed you on the mouth.” It feels like acceptance. It’s devastating but it feels true in my chest. — Natalie

Nickel Creek – “Sabra Girl”

I listened to this song in headphones every night as I fell asleep in my dorm room freshman year. The acoustic guitar, the mandolin, the violin, Sara’s voice. Perfect. — Natalie


Photo credit: Louis Browne

Keeping Watch: A Conversation with Laura Veirs

Laura Veirs’ new album, The Lookout, celebrates a significant milestone for the singer/songwriter: It marks her 10th solo album. For a musician 20 years into her career, that’s a significant output upon which to reflect at a time when reflection has become more crucial than ever. Like many indie folk artists — those forever attuned to the social, economic, and even political struggles of the world they attempt to capture in song — Veirs has been wrestling with the changes that have taken place since Donald Trump became president. In many ways small and large, his leadership has legitimized certain behaviors that once existed in the shadows. Now, they are out in the open. It’s time more than ever, then, to be on the lookout.

Veirs penned her new album around the trope of protection. The characters that surface across all 12 songs oscillate between protecting and needing protection, because humans, in all their complexity, never simply occupy one role. She punctuates that subject matter with stark and striking natural imagery — meadows, lightning, frost, fire … each setting or accoutrement placing in sharp relief exactly how fragile people truly are, and why we must take care of one another’s safekeeping. After all, as she sings on “When It Grows Darkest,” “When it grows darkest, the stars come out.”

The Lookout is filled with quiet flourishes. Veirs tapped Sufjan Stevens’ steady, whisper-soft vocals for “Watch Fire,” a reminder about staying vigilant for prowling wolves, while “The Lookout” praises the relationship she’s built with husband Tucker Martine — how it’s a safe haven in times of trouble. As foreboding as some of Veirs’ imagery is on The Lookout, her folk sensibility and elegant melodic strains leave the album leaning more toward hope than despair. Keeping watch can be exhausting, but it’s a worthwhile fight.

This album presents an interesting dichotomy: There are characters who protect and characters who need protection. Which side of the line do you think you fall on?

I’d say I’m more in the protector role, as a parent of young children, but I also feel very vulnerable and confused. It’s a very chaotic time and a very confusing time to live in, so I feel I need protection. That song, “The Lookout,” is about my husband Tucker and how he looks out for me, and how precious it is for someone to have your back like that, and how hard it is to trust everyday people sometimes, especially with the divisions we have in our country.

There’s this guy who killed another guy on a train in Portland, and that kind of racial violence and misogyny and the rock getting turned over is just so upsetting. I mean it’s always been like that, but I feel like, with this new administration, there’s this legitimization of violence that we haven’t seen in recent years, and it makes me feel like I want to protect and also need protection myself.

Speaking of parenting, it’s one thing to navigate these newer changes as an individual, but how are you helping guide your children?

He’s gone to protests with us in the past — he went to the Women’s March. We do everything we can to expose them to powerful voices of color, and powerful women, and to have friendships that are not just people exactly like us, to take him to public school, and to support the public school system as much as we can, and to be good citizens, and to show them that it’s a complicated world, but you have your own voice and you have your own power in this. Even though you’re just a child and even though we’re just artists, we can use our voices to try and make the world a better place.

Which is what makes this album so special because you’re working against that sense of complacency that got us to November 2016. On “Seven Falls,” the chorus includes that line about struggling to be kind, so how do you personally fight that?

I definitely have struggled to have compassion and empathy for people who have radically different political views from me.

It’s so hard!

It is hard, and they write us off, which is why we have such a divide, but we need to find a way to bridge it. In that song, it was a little more personal than political, in terms of me thinking that, even though I don’t want to be mean, sometimes I am. We all have a dark side. I need to look at that side of myself to move past it. It could be as simple as just yelling at the kids less, or speaking to my husband in a nicer tone instead of being short and quick. It takes discipline, basically, to not go to that dark place. It can be tiring. Sometimes you just want to be impatient and be a jerk. It’s about the dark side of human nature and how we contend with that, and how it can stay with you, even though you’re getting older. It doesn’t mean you’ve moved past it.

Absolutely, which is why it’s so important to keep talking about it. To pretend it doesn’t exist does everyone a disservice.

Yes.

Does your sense of wonder, either for life or language, feel dulled after 20 years in the business?

Oh, definitely. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for artists who continue on through decades is how do you maintain your passion for the craft. So much of it is a slog; so much of it is grunt work and there’s no reward. I try to remember there is a reward, and for me they’re, “Wow! I totally got in the flow today, and I forgot time!” That’s a hard thing for a parent of young children to do, because we’re so under the clock. If I can get into that flow state, that feels like such a gift, and that is often where my good writing comes from. I can’t get there all that often, but when I do, it feels so good, and it fuels the next session of writing, which will probably be sort of fallow.

Also, it’s an opportunity to realize how you’ve done this a long time. There’s truly an infinite path here of discovery, whether that means totally changing the way that I’m writing lyrics, or whether that means I’m studying a different style of guitar — I’m learning new chords. I’m changing tunings. I’m studying how other people have written songs in detail. I’m reading books about songwriting. I’m using a very limited palette to limit myself, in terms of chords or guitars or instruments or tracks on a demo. It’s definitely a big challenge to stay in that beginner mind, because you’re not a beginner anymore, but if I can remember that sense of wonder that I felt in the beginning, it does remind me, like, “You still can get there because there’s still so much to learn.” It just takes effort.

It’s tough when you’re a parent because you’re balancing the needs of your children with your creative need, which is why I appreciate the song “Everybody Needs You,” because it’s such an honest moment. How do you carve out time for your creative needs knowing that, if you don’t, it will suffer?

Well, I do treat it as my job, and I’ve always done that. I feel privileged in that I can choose my own hours. I have usually four-to-six-hour days, four days a week. That’s my work schedule. I’ll usually write two-to-three hours of the morning, and then I’ll spend a couple of hours catching up on emails or shopping or cleaning the kitchen or just even going for a run. I don’t usually spend more than three hours writing; I just don’t have the focus. When I am writing, I’m really focused on that. I’ve always done it that way.

That kind of discipline is fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, certain days I guess I don’t really get to it, but mostly I do. And then I’ll take long periods off. I haven’t written a song since I finished making the record in July because I started a podcast, Midnight Lightning. It has taken a remarkable amount of time and energy, and also I wanted a break. I was so burnt out. I feel like breaks are good for people, too. If you get too wrapped up in what someone’s expecting of you, you’ll burn out quick.

How has Midnight Lighting been a different kind of creative influence for you?

I’ve been learning a lot about the art of interviewing, which I hadn’t studied at all. I’ve been listening to that podcast The Turnaround with Jesse Thorn, and he discusses interview techniques with different famous interviewers, and I learned a lot about that. I’ve only done 16 interviews, but I’m really enjoying it.

It’s kind of easy for me — in terms of the subject matter is so close to my heart — to connect with other people. This season, it’s the moms, and I might do another season with dads. It’s been neat to try out the creative side of coming up with questions that feel new and interesting, and then just the risk-taking of not really having notes, and just having a couple things jotted down and winging it. That’s been a good exercise for me. I’ve gotten a lot out of it, and it’s extended my community a lot, which is why I started it.

It’d certainly be interesting to hear from dads in the next season. Now, you said you wrote “Watch Fire” with Sufjan’s voice in mind. You’ve been friends for some time, so why this collaboration now?

I said in the press release that I thought of it, but actually Tucker did. He was really the one who heard Sufjan’s voice on there and, once he said that, I really could hear it. We’d never asked him before, but he’d asked me to sing on something, and it felt like a natural thing to try. He did it, and it sounds like a good fit for his voice, that line that he’s singing.

Right, and I love that sense of historical circularity — there’s always a wolf we have to watch out for. How do we stay on guard?

I think just looking up, looking out. Don’t get so buried in your phone. You see all these people on the street — I sound like an old lady — but they don’t even look up anymore. Keeping your eyes open and looking out for each other and staying awake, whatever that means. Stay alert.

Lastly, nature plays a large role on this project. You position people in places steeped in natural imagery. With your background in geology, are you always aware of this connection between people and the environment?

Yeah, my parents took us camping a million times growing up. We spent a lot of time outside. My dad was a physics professor and always explained how everything works, and my mom was an artist and craft weaver, and I really do feel like that combination of my mom and dad comes into my work a lot.

Jacob Metcalf, ‘Ein Berliner’

Jacob Metcalf might call Dallas, Texas, home, but for a new song off his forthcoming LP, Fjord, he's "Ein Berliner." With a name nodding to the famous speech JFK delivered to a crowd of West Berliners in the midst of the Cold War, Metcalf's "Ein Berliner" examines the very idea of identity. Metcalf says the song grew out of his fondness for pondering and revering the things he doesn't know. For him, that included thinking about future children and the questions they might ask … and the points at which his children's questions would eclipse his ability to answer them.

"This song draws a scene of bad guys and good guys and poses the question what do 'they' have in common with 'us'? How do you instill love for humanity in a child when there are these horrors facing against you?," he explains. "Calling the bad guys bad doesn't make us any good, and neither does killing all our enemies make the world a better place. The truth is, I don't know what I'd say, and that's kind of what the song is about. "

The song's arrangement occasionally recalls Illinoise-era Sufjan Stevens, with warm horn parts blooming behind a gently picked acoustic guitar. Its strength lies in its quiet intimacy: Metcalf's music is inviting, even as it addresses a thorny subject. 

3×3: The Accidentals on Musical Obsessions, Non-Designer Jeans, and a Shared Love of Amy Poehler

Artist: The Accidentals
Hometown: Traverse City, MI
Latest Album: Bittersweet
Rejected Band Names: The Savage Kittens
Personal Nicknames:
Sav: SavvyKat 
Katie: Katie Arson is my heavy metal name. Someday we will have a psychedelic side project called the Acid Lentils (instead of Accidentals).
Michael: Big Michael, Scout Leader, Boy

What was the first record you ever bought with your own money? 
Sav: Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace by the Foo Fighters and Illinois by Sufjan Stevens. I bought them together.
Katie: The soundtrack to the film Juno. I listened to it obsessively in middle school. 
Michael: Seventh grade — Rocks by Aerosmith and Fly By Night by Rush

How many unread emails or texts currently fill your inbox?
Sav: I'm really OCD, so … none.
Katie: None! 
Michael: Zero, OCD like Sav.

If your life were a movie, which songs would be on the soundtrack?
Sav: 1. "Rhapsody in Blue" by George Gershwin … the Fantasia animation pretty much sums up my life. 2. "Mr. Blue Sky" by ELO. Who can resist such a happy song? 3. "Bicycle" by Queen: "I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride it where I like." Sums it up.
Katie: Everything on the Juno soundtrack. (I am obsessed.)
Michael: Anything by Sufjan Stevens and the National, with a pinch of Animal Collective.

What brand of jeans do you wear?
Sav: Brands. Ugh. Whatever fits and doesn't have holes in it.
Katie: Flying Monkey (dig the name).
Michael: Arizona

What's your go-to karaoke tune?
Sav: When I was six years old, I performed "Paved Paradise" for my school talent show to a karaoke track. That's all I got.
Katie: Any song from any Disney movie ever.
Michael: "Don’t Stop Me Now" by Queen or "Just Like Heaven" by the Cure

If you were a liquor, what would you be?
Sav: I’m not a drinker, so I have absolutely no idea. I would guess the strong bitter kind that you have to have an acquired taste for. 😉
Katie: I don't drink, so to confidently answer, I took a quiz on quizrocket.com. RESULT: Rum — "You are sweet and friendly and sociable, but you have a laid back vibe. You are best enjoyed in a relaxed state of mind."
Michael: Fireball Whiskey = red hair. 

Poehler or Schumer?
Sav: Amy Poehler slays it in Parks and Recreation.  I'm pretty sure she's my spirit animal.
Katie: Tina Fey is my favorite, so naturally, Amy Poehler. 
Michael: Poehler all the way.

Chocolate or vanilla?
Sav: I was actually born without a sense of smell or taste, so it's all the same to me.
Katie: Chocolate
Michael: Vanilla, for sure. Chocolate is everywhere, and a good vanilla flavor is hard to come by these days.

Blues or bluegrass?
Sav: Blues-grass.
Katie: Greensky Bluegrass
Michael: Billy Strings — Punch Brothers — Bluegrass