Artist:Abby Litman Hometown: Bethesda, Maryland Latest Album:Still on My Mind EP
Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?
The one artist who has influenced me the most is Joni Mitchell. I first discovered Joni when I was in high school, and she became one of the reasons I wanted to pursue music. Listening to her, I was floored. Her lyrics were so relatable yet incredibly smart and observational, grounded in nature and full of poeticism. I spent hours and hours listening to all of her songs, dissecting them, taking them apart and putting them back together. Her albums made up my syllabus in songwriting. I read every biography and article about her I could get my hands on. Now, whenever I feel stuck with my own writing, I often go back to her songs and am quickly reminded why I wanted to be a musician in the first place.
What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?
I love reading poetry. My favorite poet is Edna St. Vincent Millay. I discovered a collection of her books on the shelves of my great-grandparents’ house in Maine. I was immediately taken in by her writing: blunt, sparse, yet layered with meaning and metaphor. Similar to my relationship to Joni Mitchell’s music, reading St. Vincent Millay’s poetry felt like finding someone who saw the world as I do. I also find inspiration in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and Shel Silverstein.
What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?
Sometimes, I struggle with finishing a song. Often, a song comes out all in one piece, almost seamlessly, but other times it can take weeks, sometimes years for a song to feel “finished.” Learning to enjoy the revising process has been helpful, but I sometimes feel like the constant revision takes away from the song’s authenticity, its initial spark. When I was writing my song “Alright,” I went through dozens of verses, melodies, and guitar parts. And the more I messed with the song, the less connected I felt to it. I was getting further from what the song was initially trying to say. It wasn’t until my producer Tyler Chester and I put some of the disparate parts I had written together, that I felt like the song finally revealed itself. Collaborating with Tyler has been one of the best experiences of my songwriting career.
What has been the best advice you’ve received in your career so far?
It sounds obvious, and maybe a bit trite, but the best advice I’ve ever been given is to “write good songs.” When I find myself comparing my music to other artists’, worrying about whether I’ll ever be successful, or feeling jaded by the music industry, I go back to that advice. I go back to writing songs because that’s really the only thing I can do. As long as I focus on my craft and keep making art that I am proud of, things will fall into place. I know that as long as I continue writing songs and making music, I’ll be happy pursuing the thing I love.
Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?
I currently live in Los Angeles and my go-to spot for nature is the beach. My favorite thing to do is grab a towel, sit on the sand and stare out into the ocean. There’s something about the vastness and wildness of the ocean that helps to clear my head. It’s actually a place where I’ve gotten dozens of lyrics and guitar parts. One of my favorite times to go to the beach, perhaps paradoxically, is when it’s cold and cloudy. I love the salty wind, the crashing waves. It makes me feel small and renewed, but most of all, it opens up my mind to accept inspiration that I otherwise wouldn’t find in a city.
This week, The Show On The Road places a call into Woodstock, NY, where we speak to a respected singer, songwriter, and sometimes drummer Amy Helm, beloved daughter of Levon Helm of The Band.
Growing up in the home of two working performers (her mother is singer Libby Titus, who wrote songs covered by Bonnie Raitt and Linda Ronstadt) wasn’t always the easiest for the introspective Helm, but it gave her a fertile proving ground to begin exploring creating her own soaring songs in the folk, blues, and soul traditions. She waited until she was forty-four to release her acclaimed first solo record, Didn’t It Rain, with her father lending his signature earthy drums on several tracks — and this year, she teamed up with multi-instrumentalist and producer Josh Kaufman (Taylor Swift, Bonny Light Horseman) to create What The Flood Leaves Behind, her most emotive and lushly-realized project yet.
With her dogs often joining the conversation from her upstate home, Helm dives into her early years trying her hand at singing in New York City cafes, having folks walk out of her folk fest shows because her band was too loud, founding the band Ollabelle, joining her stepdad Donald Fagen’s group Steely Dan onstage, backing up legends like Stax soul artist William Bell and finally reconnecting with her dad in her mid-thirties as he began his late life renaissance, hosting his epic Americana throwdowns called “The Midnight Rambles.” It was being a member of that crack “ramble band” that gave Amy the final push to pursue her own lead voice.
While Levon famously struggled with heroine addiction and the foibles of post-Bob Dylan and The Band fame fallout, it was when he got clean and took Amy under his wing that both of their stars began to rise again. You can hear Amy singing on his gorgeous return in 2017’s Dirt Farmer. Becoming more ambitious, Amy laid down her upbeat rock-n-soul-tinged second album with producer Joe Henry in LA with notable players like Doyle Bramhall II, Tyler Chester, and a vocal choir of Allison Russell and JT Nero (Birds of Chicago) and Adam Minkoff. This Too Shall Light was released in 2018 on Yep Roc Records and Amy began to be recognized as one of the most powerful singers touring the Americana circuit. Her newest record was recorded at her spiritual home, Levon Helm Studios, where each ramble still takes place on the weekends.
During the pandemic, Helm had a unique idea to keep her creative muscles strong, even when live music gatherings were not technically allowed in public. She began setting up “curbside concerts” for her friends and any curious fans who missed her songs, touring around Woodstock with her guitar, bringing a little joy to her shut-in listeners during New York’s darkest hours.
Stick around to the end of the episode to hear Helm introduce the spiritual opening track of What The Flood Leaves Behind, “Verse 23.”
The Schinus molle — more commonly known as the California pepper tree — can grow up to 45 feet high and 50 feet wide, producing small yellow flowers and rose-colored berries, and bringing shade to everything within reach. For Nickel Creek originator Sara Watkins, the pepper tree brings about memories of family, youthful fun, and inspiration for her latest record, Under the Pepper Tree. Produced by Tyler Chester, the 15-song album is a personal project for Watkins, including songs from her own childhood alongside a few original compositions. Reuniting Nickel Creek, I’m With Her, and a range of guest performances, she tackles favorite songs such as “Pure Imagination” (from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) and “Blue Shadows on the Trail” (from The Three Amigos).
BGS caught up with Watkins from her California home to talk about the inspirations behind Under the Pepper Tree, and the experience of making a record like this during the COVID-19 pandemic.
BGS: Was the making of this album a different experience from those you’ve done in the past?
Watkins: Yeah, and not just because we did it during COVID. That was a huge appeal in working with Tyler Chester — he can play so many instruments so well. His musicality comes out on each instrument really well. Other than that, I knew early on that it would be necessary for the songs to weave together. As I was collecting these songs, realizing that so many of them are kind of dreamy and mellow, I wasn’t dealing with the typical balance of “up” songs, “down” songs, “sad” songs, “happy” songs, the way those things can affect the sequence of a normal album. Because of the nature of this material, a lot of the songs had a similar dreamy quality, so I thought by connecting them all, that would let the album kind of drift along, and hopefully sweep you up in a way that might not happen if they were all just 15 individual tracks.
Before going in to record the project, we did a bit of a practice swing, just to see how the sequence might work together. We made some changes to the sequence and adjusted the transitions accordingly, so that everything went together as well as possible. This is the first time I’ve sequenced an album before going in to record, and I really enjoyed the result and how it affected the process throughout. It’s definitely something I’m going to bring with me into my future projects, even if I don’t do it exactly the same way. I’m going to consider it very seriously before starting records.
How did getting to be home during the pandemic influence your day to day, and outlook on this album?
If affected it completely. I don’t think I would have made this record without the experience of just being home, and realizing that I needed some kind of rhythm, needed something that would tell me that today was passing. I’m new to being home, the way that all musicians are. That, combined with having a toddler now, was a new experience. The first couple years of being a mom I was on tour, and the rhythm of tour life is built into the work, the way that most people’s jobs provide a rhythm for their life. I think a lot of [musicians] were discovering that we needed to create those rhythms, by taking morning or evening walks around the neighborhood, by spending more time making meals or cooking, or doing whatever it is that helps cycle you in to the next part of the day.
I was digging through my old record collection, and I would listen to five a day, and decide whether or not I wanted to keep them or whether I was done with them. A big part of me creating Under the Pepper Tree with vinyl in mind was because of this wonderful freedom that it gave me to put on a record and not have to make a choice for a while. I could just listen to it and not have to worry what song came up in the algorithm next, or decide whether or not I wanted to skip ahead. That freedom of just making one choice and being able to go about the rest of the things that I needed to do, it felt really liberating, like a kindness that I could do to myself.
That also played into why I wanted to make this album with record listening in mind. It works great on digital too, but I imagined it being an A and B side. If you only listen to side A, you can get a full arc and it can send you into dreamland. And if you want to listen to it altogether, that’s another experience.
Like with Nickel Creek on “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” were any specific guests important to certain songs?
“Tumbling Tumbleweeds” with Aoife [O’Donovan] and [Sarah] Jarosz, my I’m With Her bandmates, was just as important, because I really wanted both of those bands on this record. I feel like this album in a lot of ways celebrates this time in my life, and the music that I grew up with. For me also, it was an incredible way to get those two bands together on an album, because they’re both so meaningful to me, and have played such huge roles in my life, and in my growth and development as a person, as a mom. So it was incredibly meaningful to get to have them on it.
All of the players on the record mean a lot to me, but I really also loved having Davíd Garza on this record, who is a dear friend. In particular, he plays this beautiful solo on “Moon River.” There’s a song on Emmylou Harris’ record Roses in the Snow when Willie Nelson comes in with a guitar solo, and then it sounds like he just goes away. When I first heard that record — I think it was in my early 20s — it was pretty informative to me about how a lot of times musicians can be known for one or two things, but they might not often get asked to just be a musician on somebody else’s record. I just love that [Harris] didn’t get Willie to sing on it, she got him to come in and play a guitar solo. That was really eye-opening for me, and changed the way I thought of playing with people.
On “Moon River,” I specifically had that moment in mind where Willie comes in and plays a solo and goes away, and so Davíd graciously agreed to be my Willie Nelson on this song, and he does a wonderful job.
Having a couple of original tunes on the record, what was your process behind writing something that incorporates naturally with these classic songs?
I felt like there should be a spot for fiddle on this record. I knew that I wanted to have an instrumental on here, and I knew that I wanted to write it. It was important to have a little break in the lyrics. It was great to expand my childhood story with the title of the [instrumental], “Under the Pepper Tree.” That has very personal weight to me. A lot of instrumental titles are pretty arbitrary in my experience, but this was an opportunity to share a little bit about my own childhood.
There’s a tree that I spent a lot of time growing up with, playing in and imagining in. There are several very important pepper trees in my life. One of them is at my aunt’s house, where my grandma used to live. There were two huge family reunions under that pepper tree. I just remember running around with my cousins, playing tag, listening to my aunt’s laugh, all that stuff. It’s a really beautiful thing, and I think that had a natural place on the album.
The other song [“Night Singing”] was a poem that I wrote, that eventually fell into a guitar part. Originally, I thought that this record would be a lullaby record, but my goal for the record changed. It was to make something a little more deeply transitional for people of all ages. But “Night Singing” is a true lullaby, for my daughter, for myself, and for my friends.
Do you have any specific plans you’re looking forward to taking on when we climb out of this pandemic?
This fall, my brother [Sean Watkins] and I are going to do some touring behind our Watkins Family Hour album brother sister, which came out a year ago now. We weren’t able to tour it, but a lot of the dates we had for last fall have been rescheduled for this fall, 2021. We have some dates on the books starting in August, which is kinda hard to believe! So this fall we’ll be able to do some in-person shows, and I’m really looking forward to it.
I feel very stopped up in terms of creativity, because we wrote the brother sister record, recorded it, and put it out, and haven’t really been able to celebrate it with an audience. Then I put together Under the Pepper Tree, recorded that, released it, and I haven’t been able to do shows for it. There’s been writing for other projects, but I honestly feel a little bit stopped up creatively. I think I just need to perform some of these songs, and get them out of my body, so that I can put more stuff in. As alienating as this whole thing has felt for us, and as isolating as it has been, there has been to some degree a shared experience, and the universality of that has been reassuring at times for me.
Sara and Sean Watkins, as Watkins Family Hour, are coming to Colorado in March 2022! Grab your tickets here.
Artist: Dominique Arciero Hometown: Manhattan, New York Song: “I Wait” Album:Saturday Songs Release Date: September 27, 2019 Label: Middle Sister Music
In Their Words: “Saturday Songs is a new series of singles I’m releasing on (you guessed it) Saturdays. Self-produced and featuring some of LA’s greatest (Sean Watkins, Tyler Chester, James McAlister and Rich Hinman) these very personal songs come straight from my house to yours. Releasing a new song weekly is my attempt to approach the process of making art in a way that has otherwise been touch and go ever since my band of sisters (country trio The Lunabelles) disbanded in 2012. To confidently bear my stories, record them, let them loose… and start again.” — Dominique Arciero
Sometimes you have to be willing to make sacrifices for your art. Sometimes you spend extra hours rehearsing or extra days touring; sometimes you have to become a martyr for a larger cause. Sometimes all you have to do is wax your chest.
On the cover for his latest album, the cheekily titled My Finest Work Yet, the Chicago-raised, LA-based multi-instrumentalist and virtuoso whistler Andrew Bird lies in an old tub, his head hanging askew: the poet on his deathbed, expiring after scribbling his final testament. He recalls, “A few days before the shoot, the photographer said, ‘OK, you have to wax your chest!’ She wanted me to be as smooth as a dolphin. My first thought was, ‘Oh lord, is she just testing me? Is she just seeing how committed I am to the concept?’”
Bird’s chest hair. “We just ran out of time,” he says, no small amount of relief in his voice. Despite his hirsute torso, that image is startling, beautiful yet gruesome, and strangely fitting for an album that examines in a roundabout way the artist’s responsibility to his audience.
The cover is based on Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 painting The Death of Marat, on view at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. “I stumbled across that image in a book called Necklines, which is a funny title for a book about the French Revolution. I had already decided to go with My Finest Work Yet for the title, and I was trying to find an image that would make that title work, that would make it funny. When you don’t know the history of that painting, you just see the suffering poet on his deathbed penning his last words with his dying breath. I thought it was pretty tongue in cheek,” he says.
The more research he did on David’s painting and its subject, the more it revealed a slightly more serious, slightly less self-deprecating undercurrent running throughout these new songs. Jean-Paul Marat was a radical journalist during the French Revolution and one of the leaders of the insurgency against the Crown. He took frequent medicinal baths to soothe painful skin infections, and he wrote most of his most famous works while soaking in his tub. That’s where he was assassinated by the conservative royalist Charlotte Corday; shortly after, David painted him as a martyr, a stab wound to the chest stained his bathwater red. “We went to great lengths to re-create the painting,” says Bird. “There’s a lot of detail, but we drew the line at blood. It felt like if I had the wound and a bathtub full of blood it would go just a little too far.”
An album that might actually live up to that title, My Finest Work Yet, makes clear that we are living in revolutionary times, that we are at the precipice of some great calamity, some great upheaval. “The best have lost their conviction, while the worst keep sharpening their claws,” Bird sings on “Bloodless,” a sober, even scary examination of American factionalism. “It feels like 1936 in Catalonia.” That last line might sound cryptic, but it is a reference to another revolution – not the French uprising, but the Spanish Civil War. “There’s a lot to unpack in these songs,” Bird admits. “Maybe you don’t know what happened in Catalonia in 1936, but you’ve got Google and three minutes to figure it out. I think that makes people a little more invested, maybe not quite knowing what the references are but hopefully thinking, ‘I need to find out.’”
His lyrics have always been brainy, often bordering on merely clever, but the allusions to the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War — not to mention to Greek mythology, J. Edgar Hoover, Japanese kaiju, and whoever Barbara, Gene, and Sue are — lend the album weight and timeliness, as though we might better understand our current political predicament simply by looking to the past. And the artist in 2019 might understand his duties by looking to past examples like Marat. “The flipside to music being devalued as a commodity these days is that it can maybe make even more of an impact than any other medium can. Everything is commodified, but music is slipping away, but it’s still this thing that is very powerful. It helps people get through hard experiences,” Bird says.
Released back in November following the midterm elections, “Bloodless” was the first song on which he found just the right vocabulary to sing about issues that he and so many other artists are pondering. It was also the moment when a sound gelled alongside his lyrical strategy — a sound that incorporates bits of folk, pop, gospel, even jazz. Bird was fascinated with what he calls the “jukebox singles of the early ‘60s,” when jazz vocals were popular, when the piano was a prominent pop instrument, when bands worked out songs and recorded them live together.
“The piano contains so many references, a couple centuries’ worth,” he says. “Our ear gets taken in certain directions, but something was happening during that period in terms of not overly complicated jazz and gospel. I knew I wanted to make a piano-driven record with Tyler Chester, and I knew I wanted to make a jazzier record with a good room sound. And ‘Bloodless’ was the first time we got it right.”
Bird and his small jazzy combo recorded live in the studio, which wasn’t easy. It involved rehearsing heavily and using only a handful of microphones. He says, “There is so much work before you record the first note, so it’s risky. But if you spend the time, you end up with something that I think is weightier and has more value, even if it goes against the last 34 years of production trends.”
There is a lot of bleed between the instruments, which creates an intimacy even when you’re listening over your computer speakers. However, it means you have almost no opportunity to make changes after you’ve recorded a song. “If you want to change the vocal sound, you have to change the drum sound. If you want to change the drum sound, you have to change the bass sound. Everything is connected,” he explains.
It became a house of cards. Remove one and the whole thing tumbles. That meant Bird had to surrender his usual self-criticism to focus on other things besides listening to his own voice. “When you record, you have to have something to fixate on and fetishize — something that has some ceremony to it. Maybe it’s a certain microphone that gives you a certain sound, or a tape machine. It helps you remember who you are,” he says. “I tend to forget who I am when I’m recording. I know exactly who I am when I step onstage, but you have to trick yourself into being yourself in the studio. I liken it to hearing your voice on an answering machine, and you’re like, ‘That doesn’t sound like me.’ Same thing happens when you’re recording: You hear yourself back and you don’t recognize yourself.”
During the sessions for My Finest Work Yet, Bird focused on the piano and more generally on the live-in-studio approach to keep himself centered. Rather than make him more prominent, however, it only makes him one musician among many: the singer and creative force, certainly, but only one member of a lively band. That connectivity — that sense of musicians joining together in a common artistic goal — is “philosophically important,” says Bird, as are the pop references he’s making with that approach. “The music I’m referencing was deep in the Civil Rights era, the beginning of all this activism and turmoil. I wasn’t thinking about that when we were in the studio, but I think it makes sense,” he says.
In other words, those connections weren’t planned, which means My Finest Work Yet lacks the self-seriousness of a concept album or the self-righteousness of a political album. Instead, Bird wrote and arranged and recorded intuitively, as though posing a question to himself that would be answered on this album. “I’ve always had a tendency to say, ‘Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about,’ but I’ve always trusted that the listener has the curiosity and intelligence to think about what I’m bringing up.”
Photo credit: Amanda Demme Illustration: Zachary Johnson
We’re thrilled to present Jubilee: A Celebration of Jerry Garcia, taking place on Friday, March 30 at the Theatre at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Presented by BGS, Goldenvoice, and the Jerry Garcia Family, Jubilee gathers a wide range of artists and acolytes who loved Garcia all celebrating his songbook, his legacy, and the year of his 75th birthday.
The lineup includes Mike Campbell, Josh Ritter, David Hidalgo, Amos Lee, Willie Watson, Molly Tuttle, Hiss Golden Messenger, Billy Strings, Jamie Drake, Banditos, and many more special guests, all led by the Jubilee House Band — featuring Benmont Tench, Sean Watkins, Tyler Chester, and Jay Bellerose. And, JUST ANNOUNCED: Stephen Malkmus, Margo Price, Sam Bush, and the Decemberists’ Chris Funk have been added to this stellar lineup!
The evening will benefit three Garcia Family selected charities: the Rex Foundation, the Jerry Garcia Foundation, and the Center for Biological Diversity.
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