He arrived in Minneapolis from Nairobi, Kenya, in 2013, benefiting from the luck of the draw—a winning application in the Green Card lottery. He chose Minnesota because he had an aunt who lived there, and because it was the home state of Bob Dylan, one of his songwriting heroes.

When he landed, he had pages of lyrics, but couldn’t even play guitar. In the six years since, he’s gone from performing at open mics, posting covers on the internet, and independently recording an EP, to working with producer Mike Viola and guest artists Andrew Bird, Joey Ryan, and Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith on Tales of America. He’s selling out rooms across the country on the tour supporting the album, and he was recently nominated for “Emerging Act of the Year” by the Americana Music Association.

On one hand, it’s the American Dream. But, as the songs on Tales of America tell us, things are never that simple.

How is your tour going? You’re opening for Neil Young tonight? Is that correct?

That’s correct.

Is that kind of crazy for you?

Yeah, very crazy. Totally.

If someone had asked you a few years ago what the chances were that in a few years you’d be opening for Neil Young, what would you have said?

Very close to nil. Zero. It’s surreal.

Was he one of the songwriters that you listened to when you were growing up?

Yeah, absolutely, definitely. He’s a huge influence on me, on my path as a songwriter, as a storyteller. It’s a big honor to be out here with him.

What has been the most surprising thing about America for you?

Good question. I think the change in tides, as the politics of the country are concerned. That was definitely a surprise to see that happen, and the aftermath of that. I think that was a surprise for people all around the world, not just me, I guess.

The last song on your album, “God Bless America,” seems to imply that although you’re grateful for the chance to live in America and to pursue your career, you’re very aware that others don’t have that chance. Is that something that you’ve thought about?

Yeah, I think I was wrestling with that same idea throughout the making of this record, trying to grapple with my fortunes and other people’s misfortunes at the same time. And that push and pull between gratitude and terror at the same time. I’m grateful for the opportunity, but I’m also aware of the troubles that the country is going through. So that’s definitely is something I had in mind throughout the writing of the record.

Will you let me bring Isabela here from Nairobi / On the phone she was ill, and so was the economy / In fifty years, when I’m frail, barely on my feet / Will you be kind, oh dear, like you promised at the embassy

In the song, “Days of Insanity,” you use the metaphor of animals, rather than describing a specific scenario, to demonstrate that these times are far from normal. How did you come upon this way of telling the story?

I was online, watching some videos of kittens, and then YouTube brought me this video that it thought I should watch. It was a video of Stephen Colbert having a talk with John Mulaney, the comedian, and at some point during that conversation, John was telling Stephen about some trip that he had just taken abroad. When he was abroad, he came up with some kind of analogy, I suppose, to explain to those people what the times are like in America. He would tell them it’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital, just something that no one’s ever seen before. And he explains it in a more elaborate way, maybe–you should go look it up–but I remember seeing that, and thinking that would be very poignant and very accurate, and so I wrote a whole song around it and built more characters, more animals around it.

There is a bear at the airport, waiting on a plane / There is a cow at the funeral, bidding farewell / There is a goat at the terminal, boarding the C train / There is a horse at the hospital, dancing with the hare

Also, on that song, at the end of the chorus there are a few seconds of this whirlwind of strings that give it an ominous feeling. How did that idea come about?

We were thinking of adding something to the song that brought in that element of insanity, in a way, just like, something is about to happen, something ominous, something terrible. So, we brought in a double bass player, and had him fool around, and that’s what he did. He fooled around, and we liked it, and we kept it.

When you were working on this album, was everyone on the same page about what kind of record it was going to be?

Yeah, absolutely. We wouldn’t get into the studio in the first place if there wasn’t a shared vision. When I walked in the studio I brought records. I brought The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, and I brought Astral Weeks (Van Morrison.) I brought Nebraska (Bruce Springsteen.) I said that I wanted to make this very stripped-down album. There’s maybe a few things happening on top of it, not too much. Very focused on the stories and the voice and the guitar. And we always went back to those records when we thought we’d lost our way.

You have a real gift for language–for metaphor and for storytelling. And it’s astonishing to me that you’re writing in a second language. Have you also written any songs in Swahili, or is English really the language that you turn to when it comes to music?

Yeah, it’s what I communicate in musically. It’s always English. It’s how I fell in love with all this music from the U.S. and the U.K. at a young age. It was partly the music, but it was also just that the language was so different. I was very fascinated by the language, and I wanted to learn the language because of it. And so, my interest in the music and the language sort of started at the same time. They’re sort of intertwined together in that way.

Were you learning English in school as a child, or did it really start with music?

They did teach it in school, but like anything else, for you to develop a good command over any language, you’ve got to have that interest outside of just school. It helps to motivate you to keep learning, to keep building the vocabulary. And that was music for me.

Have you ever written any songs that you discover new meanings for later on?

That happens all the time. That happens because some of my songs are just subconscious stream of thought. And then over time the meanings sort of reveal themselves in the conscious mind and I start thinking, “Oh, you know what, that’s what that song’s about.” So, I’ve had that happen a lot. I’ve definitely had that happen with my song “Saying Goodbye.”

In what way did that song change for you?

I wrote those words after landing here from Kenya many years ago. I had those words down and there was no melody for it, there was no song, just words in a book. And so, I turned it into a song and I started singing it. I thought it was a love song, and then, the more I sang it, the more I realized it was me grappling with saying farewell to my past, to my family, to my culture. All those things that made up my past, that in some way made me who I was, but also, in some ways held me back from becoming the person that I needed to be. It was just that process of saying goodbye to all that, so I could move here and move closer to the best version of myself in the world.

The post Emerging Artist J.S. Ondara Makes Voyage From Kenya to Minnesota & Astounds With ‘Tales of America’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

The first time I met Jonathan Scales was in 2014 when I interviewed him for Glide Magazine. He talked about his song “Lurkin’”, which was a tribute to, and written in the style of, his musical hero, innovative banjo player, Béla Fleck. Since then I’ve followed his career closely, even hosting a couple of house shows for him over the years.

The quality of his music that first got my attention, and what we talked about in the first interview, was his ability to tell stories and express emotions through instrumental music. On PILLAR this quality is even more pronounced. There are a lot of good ways to listen to music, but for this album one especially good way is to let the name of each song serve as a story-starter and then see where your imagination leads you as you listen.

We took a deep dive into most of the songs on PILLAR. He talked about the back-story of some of the songs, his techniques, and, as a self-professed music nerd, some of the unusual ways that he composed and arranged the music.

How to Rebuild Your Battleship

This is a song that seems to have a narrative. Did you have a story before you started, or is that something that happened along the way? How does a song get hooked to a story?

It starts as a concept for me. So, for “How to Rebuild Your Battleship,” the concept behind that was for a couple years in the life of the Fourchestra I didn’t have set lineup. So, from 2016, for maybe like a year and 8 months, I had a rotating cast of guys. It was cool to work with all these people, but it was also really hard to keep up with everything. And every time I went out on tour it felt kind of like I was going into battle, almost. And at the end of those tours, everyone would fly home to their respective places and I’d be driving home by myself.

It was a time of reflection for me because I felt like, we’ve done all this work, and now, coming home at the end of these tours, I would feel worn down, and kind of banged up a little. Just from night after night of playing and traveling, and teaching people new music, and making sure of the flight, selling merch, and making sure everyone knew what was going on at all times. I would be driving home, usually in the middle of the night, worn down and exhausted, but in my head, I knew that I had to go on the next tour, which was probably like a week away or something. We had all these runs lined up, so I knew I’d have to come home and prepare myself for the next one. I couldn’t give up.

So, “How to Rebuild Your Battleship” is the concept of going out into war with your ship, you lose some men, you get a big hole on the side of the ship, you have a leak, you have to fix this, you lost this part of the ship, you’ve got to repair the gun, and all these things. And so, you come home with bandages on your head and everything, but that same ship and that same crew has to go back into battle again.

Or maybe not even the same crew, right?

Or maybe not even the same crew. But the ship has to go out again. And the leader of the ship. I have to go back out there again. Whenever I end a tour, and I’m heading home,  usually through the night, I always envision that scene at the end of the battle, in a movie, where all the soldiers are headed home, with bandages on their heads, their armor’s all torn to bits, and they’re bleeding, someone’s missing an arm, someone’s got an eye patch, and there’s this big orchestral music playing in the background, and they’re heading home. That’s the vision I get for myself, after the tour, because it takes so much out of me.

We Came Through the Storm

“We Came Through the Storm” places the listener in the middle of a storm that grows in intensity and tension, accelerating, twisting and turning in ways that seem unpredictable. The last two minutes ratchet up the tension with an extended drum solo punctuated with blasts of horns and strings, and then the introduction of a low, ominous growl. Against the backdrop of this swirling, chaotic maelstrom, Scales repeats a simple, regularly spaced phrase on the steel pans, again and again, just like someone putting one foot in front of the other to push through the rain and wind.

How did you create the tension in this song?

I wanted to create a feeling of a whirlwind, when the tornado starts to take shape and takes form, and it starts to pick up debris, and starts to spin around faster. I wanted to create that kind of vibe. So, I knew it couldn’t just be in 4/4. I also didn’t want to impose my own time signature on that because if there’s an actual storm you don’t really have any control over what happens.

I knew the chord progression already. I figured out these 8 chords that would harmonically create that effect. But then, for the amount that you would hold each chord, I didn’t want to come up with those numbers. I couldn’t impose my own will on how long each of those chords was going to be held. So, I got a random number generator from the internet and I put the limit to 8, I believe, and I hit it once, and the first number was 5, I think. I hit it again, second number, without even thinking, and I got all these numbers. I already have the chords assigned to them, and that was the progression. So, I have the progression, and now I have the meters of the progression.

And then I had two options. For my part I could kind of improvise, or I could have a solid part. And I wrote a solid part that was 8 measures, that repeats, with the speeding up.

What was that growling sound toward the end?

OK, so, I’m revealing all the secrets today. So, that is a combination of a lot of instruments. It’s like an orchestra. That low growl is the combination of an upright bass–the lowest string of an upright bass, tuned down a half step, actually. A contra bass clarinet, which is this monstrous monstrosity of an instrument. Bari sax, tuba, trombone and cello. They all recorded it separately. I brought them in one by one.

And also, the funny thing about that is the framework started off with just a drum solo. And then I arranged all the stuff around the drum solo. So, when Maison was playing everything he played, he didn’t know that I was going to do that. Honestly, I didn’t know I was going to do that. When we first went to the studio it was really just Maison, E’lon and myself. That’s it. And when we got out of the studio that’s when I used that as a framework to create the rest of it. If you listen closely you can hear where the drums line up with the horns and line up with the strings. And most people would think that the arrangement came first and the drum solo is lining up with the arrangement, but it’s actually the other way around. That’s the secret.

Your music is so visual for me. You’ve got a concept, but how do you express it to the band so that they’re all contributing to that concept?

It’s kind of complicated because music can be so interpretive. I get it across to my players by actually telling them how I feel about it. Like, for example, the song “Cry.” We can play it all day long and people can interpret it all different ways. There’s a million ways you can interpret it, but if I say, “Hey, you guys, this is the meaning behind the song. This is the feeling behind it. I’ve been through a lot of stuff, a divorce, and the insanity of a crazy new relationship, and not knowing how to handle it, and moving from different house to different house. Having different people in and out of the band, feeling like I have a band but I’m the only one in it, there’s no solid members for a while. I was going through a lot, so that song’s a really heavy song for me.”

So, I’ll explain that to them, because maybe they feel it in a different way. Like, the drum part is really active on that. It’s this current of rhythm. And for example, sometimes a player, they might just be so caught up in their part, this current of rhythm, that they just have fun with it, they take it in a whole other direction, but that might be not what I’m looking for. Because I still want this gravity with this song that’s not necessarily playful and not necessarily light. So, with my players, it’s not just the music on the page. A lot of times I’m talking to them, like, “this is what I was thinking when I wrote this, this is what I was feeling when I wrote this, and you need to think about that whenever you’re playing your part, whenever we’re on stage.”

Is it hard to express a lot of emotions on steel drums? It seems like, as an instrument, it doesn’t have as many dynamic tools as some other instruments.

Here’s how I can answer that. I don’t really know. With the violin there’s certain dynamic things you can do. There’s sustain, you can hold a note for longer. With steel pans there’s definitely limitations. You can roll, you can kind of do these grace notes, where you’re able to imply other pitches while you’re playing a main pitch. But in terms of expression that’s one of those things I haven’t really figured out yet. I haven’t figured out how to put my finger on that yet.

I would say that there’s two answers. There’s compositionally and there’s improvising. When it comes to improvising I feel like there’s a connection between your feelings and your ability as a performer that find balance within each other. Even if you have just a little bit of ability you can still express yourself if your emotions are connected with your facility. And if you have a lot of facility in your instrument it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not connected with the emotion.

As a composer I would say that the way that you manipulate chords and melodies together, along with the rhythm, it kind of has its power of tension and release. And so, just playing around with different chords and how to resolve different chords or how to not resolve different chords. I’ll give you an example. On the song “Cry,” the way that builds emotionally. I keep my melody the same. If you notice, the steel pan part on “Cry” is the same for four minutes. That doesn’t change. But it’s a long melody. It’s a through composed melody, which basically means that when you first hear it you can’t initially tell where’s the beginning and the end of the melody. As opposed to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” That’s a really basic melody. You hear the melody, and when it repeats again you’re like, oh, there it is.

But in a through-composed melody there’s so many parts to the melody. This is a 32-bar melody. So, I have this melody that stays consistent, but in the rhythm section I have the whole band just build, every single time it repeats. Every single time those 32 bars repeat, the band builds in intensity. I add instruments and I add thicker textures. Adding violins, or the keyboard soloist, or adding a cello, or having the bass be more active, or having the drums be even more active. It builds up in volume, it builds up in the thickness of the texture, what people are playing. And all together, it creates an effect, in the same way that a chef will add different spices or add different ingredients to give someone a certain feeling.

The Trap

“The Trap” features two guest bassists, Victor Wooten and MonoNeon, as well as percussionist Weedie Braimah and trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah.

You recorded “The Trap” a long time ago but this version has a lot more energy and intensity. Why did you decide to record it again?

A couple of years after I graduated I was actually commissioned to write this piece based off of those first 8 notes.  It was this project going on at this really progressive church in Asheville.

That melody sounds like church bells.

Exactly. So, there was this progressive church in Asheville called Jubilee! Jubilee! had this program and they commissioned these four bands to write a piece of music based on those eight notes. And they put the audience in the middle. And the first band plays the first 8 notes and then they go into their tune. And then it switches over to the next band and then the next band. I was commissioned to write this piece. And I thought I was going to get paid. I was excited about it. I was looking forward to it. And then I found out I wasn’t getting paid. And then it was like a volunteer type thing. Then I kind of drug my feet and procrastinated until the very last minute. I felt like I was trapped in the situation of writing this piece.

So (the night before the church event) in the middle of a gig at a restaurant called The Lobster Trap, on the set break, I wrote “The Trap” on a napkin, in like five minutes. I was angry and frustrated and I really didn’t care, and I just kind of jotted it down. It took me like five minutes to write this. And then we played it on the second set. It wasn’t the best. We played it at the church event the next day and we got this huge standing ovation, which I did not expect. To me, that was a throwaway piece that I was just going to play for that day and never play it again. So, it worked out really well.

At that point I decided to put it on my album, “Character Farm,” because we were on the tail end of recording it. When we recorded it, the track had just been written maybe a week, maybe two weeks before. So, it didn’t have any kind of road testing. And that was in 2011. So, 7 years later, “The Trap” has been played a lot, by a lot of people, and things kind of evolved over time. I never expected it to get that far but it’s one of our most popular tunes. People who I never met in my life come to me, and say they like “The Trap.”

So, part of it is that it’s grown so much that I wanted to re-record it. But I’m not ashamed to say there’s the business part of it too. It’s not on any recent album, and people want to hear it, so let’s just record it again and make a better version of it, a more up-to-date version. That way I can hand them something I’m really proud of, especially because that first version of “The Trap” was recorded at the very beginning, when the song was born, so it hadn’t grown yet.

Focus Poem

Béla Fleck plays banjo on this song, making it, in a way, the end of the story that “Lurkin’”, which we discussed in the first interview, started. “Lurkin’” was about how early in his career Scales would show up any time Fleck played anywhere within driving distance, and would “lurk” around, trying to talk to him. Fast forward a few years and Béla Fleck is playing on Jonathan Scales’ album.

So, what was it like recording with Béla? Was it surreal?

There are different layers to it. On the first layer it’s like “this is absolutely insane.” On one side it was really surreal, because obviously, he’s a big influence on me. He’s probably my biggest influence, and it was definitely just like a dream to be there, and him wanting to play the role of making my music come to life. He was very invested in making sure it was correct. He could have come in like a diva and been like “Hey, you know, I’m Béla Fleck, that’s good enough.” But no, he came in and he would play a part over and over until he got it correct, and he would say “Hey, what do you think about this?” He’d put in his input. And if was something I wanted him to do, but it didn’t work well, he would offer different advice that would be amazing. He stayed in the studio with us for maybe six hours. Just tweaking it and making sure everything was right, and making sure that I was happy. So that was a big deal.

So, there’s that part. I was totally just blown away, very surreal. The other layer of it, which is the professional part, is that for some reason I’m able to put on that hat, be that guy. It was easy for me to be in the studio and say “Béla that’s the wrong note. It actually goes like this.” That’s something I had to develop over the years, just from working with so many people. I can’t be the fan boy, I have to work, I have to be there and make sure it’s right. I can’t just say “Oh cool, it’s Béla Fleck, that sounds great.” I have to be like, “Yeah, I think this one’s better than this one.” Or “Actually, I don’t know about that idea.” So that was the other layer of it.

And then the other layer of it is the personal side. Everything that was going on in my life during that exact time. In terms of my personal life, things were really insane right then. So, there were moments in there where it didn’t even matter that I’m having this time with my biggest hero in the world, because I had so many personal things going on that were super heavy. There were times when even that same day, or the next day, I had feelings of “What does this even matter?” To put it in perspective, if it were to have happened five years earlier I would have been so hyped about it for years, you couldn’t stop me from smiling. But I was going through so many heavy things in my life, that even the day after recording Béla Fleck, I was still going through some depression and dealing with a lot of personal issues.

But in a lot of ways it made it really real. I wasn’t shying away from that, because that’s how this album was made, really. Because of the stuff I was going through, and taking that stuff and translating it into actual music. Or just going through situations and going, you know, I want to write a song that is inspired from this feeling or that feeling. A lot of the album comes from that, so I can’t even look back and wish that things were different.

This is the Last Hurrah!

The main melody in “This is the Last Hurrah!” (played by Jeff Coffin on soprano sax) sounds like a child mocking another child. Is that what you intended?

For sure. It’s definitely that kind of vibe, the nanny-nanny-boo-boo. It kind of pulls from that. That tune is just kind of a playful, joyous kind of thing, based off of my obsession with Béla Fleck. The reason why it’s called “This is the Last Hurrah!” is because, you know, I had written “Lurkin’” for Béla, I had learned all these other tunes (of Béla Fleck’s), but “This is the Last Hurrah!” is me saying, “All right, you know what, I’m going to stop writing songs for Béla.” And originally, I wrote that song with the intention of having Béla Fleck play on it. It’s very Flecktones-esque.  

And there’s even one little line in there that I stole directly from Béla. There’s this one part where, during the melody, everyone cuts out and you hear the steel pan play this melody. 8 notes, or 12?

The melody you play right before the melody I was talking about?

Yes. It leads into that. Those notes came directly from Béla Fleck’s first concerto. Except he’s playing it really fast, in the midst of like a thousand notes. No one would ever figure that out. He might not even figure it out. But in the midst of this thousand-note run, where he’s going crazy, he plays however many notes those are.

And that part at the very end of the melody, I actually wrote that part at your house. The very, very first time I was at your house for the house show. It was one of those things where I was at sound check in your living room and that little part just came to me, so it was detached. The other part hadn’t been written yet. So, whenever I went to write the song I knew I had that little chunk and I had the idea that I wanted to steal from Béla and then I had some little chunks of little ideas and I put it together. That’s how the melody wraps up. But that’s what was written first, and it was written at your house.

Originally, I wanted Jeff Coffin to play on “Focus Poem” and I wanted Béla Fleck to play this one, because I was so caught up in that I wrote this for Béla, but I had to kind of remove myself from that and make what the best decision was, and I think that the best decision was made at the end of the day.

Dream-Life State

Was there any song that surprised you in how it turned out?

Remember how I said that this album comes from such a crazy place in my life? You might say that what that tune represents is a day where I’m definitely in the midst of crazy divorce stuff, crazy new relationship stuff, crazy life stuff, in between houses, but for some reason I was so happy that day. I was so happy. I probably had coffee that morning. I started singing that melody and I recorded it onto my phone, just to say “Ok, I’m gonna write a tune that’s kind of like this.” So, months and months later when I went to actually write it, I tried to come up with something that was based off of it, and I couldn’t, so I ended up transcribing my own voice.

So, if you listen to the melody, the first time through the melody, the second time through the melody, that’s inspired by the style I wanted, but the third part and the fourth part of the melody are direct transcriptions of my voice memo.

If you were going to break down what’s happening melodically you will see that there are notes that are technically wrong notes for the key. So, I changed the chords underneath to fit my butchered singing. And then I put the harmony to it and I added the rhythm to it and added the orchestration and the horns and the strings. I had to beef it up. But that turned out better than I thought it would.

In the album notes you described this as an album 10 years in the making. What do you know now that you didn’t know 10 years ago that allowed you to make this album?

The first thing that comes to mind when you ask me that is, what I know now that I didn’t know then is that the pursuit of the career isn’t everything. Real life is important. Real life matters. After going through everything I went through, divorce-wise, my life situation changing rapidly, I feel like I have more of an appreciation for life outside of just pursuing the dream. Just the balance of life. Honestly, this album wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t gone through a bunch of shit. And you can’t go through a bunch of shit unless you put yourself out there into life.

The post Composer/Steel Pannist Jonathan Scales Talks New Fourchestra Album ‘PILLAR’ & Being A Self Professed Music Nerd(INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

The discussion starts on the album cover. Baiman poses as the Statue of Liberty, with a flaming fiddle as the torch. A skull and roses lie at her feet.

The image, by artist Gina Binkley, gives notice that she’ll be addressing some weighty issues within these ten songs.

Baiman says, of Binkley’s image, “She looked to the suffragette movement for inspiration, and she was sending me all these copies of political cartoons that were made. Some of them really terrible anti-suffragette cartoons, and there were ones that were pro-suffragette. A lot of them used this image of Lady Liberty in the white dress, and that’s where that whole symbolism comes from. And I think that, coupled with the album title, it makes you go, ‘Whoa.’ Because it’s saying ‘shame’ and there’s this image of Lady Liberty, and we’re giving up all these ideals that we’ve fought so hard for.”

She stands on a pile of serious looking books, tomes with the titles, “Women and Eroticism,” “Heaven” and “Religion and Humanism.” The books give clues about the issues that the songs will wrestle with. If the issues are heavy, and sometimes difficult to think about, the songs themselves, with breezy melodies and a folk sensibility, some with lush arrangements, go down easy.

The first song, the title track, starts and ends with the lyrics “Many times I’ve passed a church, and wished that I believed.” It goes on to indict the patriarchal system of much of organized religion (“Old white men write books about faith and healing love/And old white men look happily onto others from above/In the name of sweet religion they would lay their claims on me/And ask me to be grateful for triumphant jubilee.”)

But those first lines demonstrate the ambivalence that a non-religious person can feel about religion. Even while rejecting the shame-mongering (the chorus: “They wanna bring me shame/Well there ain’t no shame/You better look away, bow your head and pray, Cuz I won’t feel same”) Baiman also recognizes the comfort and community that religion can bring.

“I think that one thing that I really wanted to express, and this is why I started that ‘Shame’ song the way I did, is that I don’t have a lack of empathy for the role that religion plays in people’s lives. I think that especially now, but always, people go through really hard times. And some people’s whole life is a really hard time. I don’t want to ever pretend that I could know what someone’s going through and why they would need that kind of support that they might find in religion… It’s this very powerful communal force.”

The song seems, in part, to be asking the question: where can a non-religious person get that comfort that many find in religion? Baiman proposes an answer in the final song of the album, “Let Them Go to Heaven.”

The song was inspired by, and includes sections from, the poem “When I Die I Will Go To Jazz,” by Ishmael Reed. In the song, Baiman chooses the joy of music over the promise of a perfect heaven. “Spare me from perfection/Bring on that scratchy fiddle/Well loved with cracks running right down the middle/What use are angels singing sweet, soft hymns?/These dancers are gonna stomp out all my sins.”

Baiman says, “I do have these really specific problems with religion in the sense that it allows people to accept non-rational ways of thinking, which can lead to horrible things, just depending on how it’s used…So to me that’s a fundamental issue, but I recognize the fact that there are things in everybody’s lives that don’t operate on a rational plane. Terrible things happen to people that they have no control over. People fall in love or have these feelings that don’t operate on the rational plane of being. For me, one of those things is music and the way I feel about it. I don’t, obviously, consider it a religion, but that’s kind of why I love that song so much. It explains that we can relate about this thing that for some people I’m so far away from them on.”

Baiman draws from the church’s musical tradition on “Let Them Go to Heaven.” The backing vocals sound like a gospel choir, an effect that Baiman, producer and musician Andrew Marlin and musician Josh Oliver created together.

“We were definitely going for that gospel choir sound,” Baiman says. “I love the way that production sounds. It was completely far away from where I thought I was going to go with it. I thought, ‘this will be a closing song and I’ll just play it solo with the guitar.’ And then we got the piano going. Josh Oliver plays piano on that track. Josh grew up in the church and so he’s fluent in that language. I love what that did to the track. And I was like ‘ok, let’s put some oohs on it.’ We just went crazy. We created the whole choir. It was so much fun. There’s nine parts. We had a three-part harmony and we each sang each part. And we sang it through this crazy vocal mic and that had a really old sound.”

Bookended between these two songs is the powerful “Take a Stand,” which is sung from the perspective of a now-adult victim of child sexual abuse, but also several songs, like “In the Space of a Day,” “Thinkin’ On You,” and “I Could’ve Been Your Lover,” that address different stages in romantic relationships.

The gentle “Something to Lose” is written about that moment in a relationship when you realize that you matter to someone.

“Maybe it’s about realizing that you don’t want to be as free as you thought you did,” Baiman says. “I remember being on tour, the first really long tour I did, in Europe. I was hired by a Canadian band. I was over there for two months. Here I am in this random town in Belgium, and anything could be happening to me right now and nobody would know. I don’t have a place where I would be missed if I were gone. Of course my parents would be sad, but in the day–to-day situation, that feeling of not having an everyday role in anyone’s life can be really lonely. I’ve always been very career driven and ambitious, and I think that there came a point where I was sort of like, well, maybe I just want to feel a little more grounded. I came back around to appreciating those things that I had been running from a little bit, like normalcy and everyday life. That’s where that song is coming from. As well as just falling in love.”

Although Baiman is based in Nashville, where there are countless options for recording records, she recorded this album in North Carolina with Andrew Marlin of Mandolin Orange after immersing herself in the music coming out of Chapel Hill. Marlin also provided vocals on most of the tracks, and he and Josh Oliver played various instruments during the recording sessions.

“I was listening to a lot of his albums, like Mandolin Orange, as well as albums he’s made for Josh Oliver and Mipso. I was also listening to Hiss Golden Messenger. So I was just getting really obsessed with this sound that was coming out of that region, with a lot of it having to do with the albums that Andrew’s producing.

“I went to North Carolina because I kind of have this theory that if you want a specific sound, go to the place, use the studio, use the person, use the gear, get in the vibe of the place. I would drive out there (from Nashville) and I’d have about 8 hours to transition out of normal life into album life. I’d be sleeping in the room next to the studio, and I’d wake up and there were pine trees all around me. It was just so North Carolina.”

The post Rachel Baiman Takes A Weighty Stand On Solo LP ‘Shame’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

Kentucky Native, the new release from innovative cellist, vocalist and songwriter Ben Sollee, does delve into bluegrass music but it layers it with the music of diverse traditions from Mexico to the Congo, stretching it, twisting it, and challenging the listener to rethink what bluegrass actually is or could be.

Sollee makes the case that incorporating other musical traditions into bluegrass is true to the origins of bluegrass, which was a distillation of the music of people who came from other places, like Scotland, Ireland and Africa.

Sollee says, “I wanted to make music that was native to Kentucky but also inclusive, just like bluegrass music was in 1948 when Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys got together. They incorporated all those styles. Today if Bill Monroe was around, and Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, I think they would have incorporated music from Mexico, and music from Somalia and the Congo, and all these different places where we have residents from in Kentucky that are good musicians, that are working folks, that play music in the evenings.”

For a healthy dose of Mexican influence, listen to “Mechanical Advantage.” Years ago, Sollee was struck by the sense of happiness and ease of a beautiful, long-legged woman riding a vintage bicycle in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since then he has wanted to find a musical expression that matched the feeling of the visual poem that he experienced.

He found it in huapango, Mexican folk dance music.

“It’s a very different meter,” he says. “So it took a little while to get comfortable playing over it and it took even longer to get comfortable singing over it. But once I got comfortable with it I took it to the band, and those guys are so amazing– Julian Pinelli playing fiddle, and Bennett Sullivan playing banjo. They really took to that style and made it their own.”

Sullivan, who Sollee describes as a “banjo chameleon,” was the solo banjo player in Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s recent Broadway production of “Bright Star.” In “Mechanical Advantage,” he plays a melody line that dances through the piece, similar to the melody that might be played on a cuatro, a small guitar, in traditional huapango music.

Sollee’s interest in Mexican music actually goes back pretty far.

“I came across it as a kid,” he says. “I loved the movie Three Amigos. And as culturally inappropriate as that is, as stereotypical as that stuff is, it still had a lot of really great traditional music. It instilled a love for that kind of music in me. And then I grew older and I found the actual authentic music. So I guess Three Amigos was my gateway drug to huapango.”

In “Carrie Bell,” Sollee draws from two different sources, both field recordings. The first is a recording that ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax made of the Georgia Sea Island Singers as part of his Southern Journeys Series. Sollee gravitated to the song, which is sort of a chain gang type of chant, in 2006, and has been singing it at sound checks ever since.

When he finally decided to record it, he drew upon a very different kind of music to back up the chant-like singing.

“I was experimenting with chopping up field recordings that I like, and tracing or imitating them, or singing along with them, and I found this field recording from the Congo, from this Pygmy tribe. It’s the Bayakas, I think. It’s this amazing percussive drive and I started tracing it with my cello and adding in harmony and when I took the recording away I had a groove that was kind of like what you hear on the recording.”

Kentucky Native is the name not only of the album but also of the ensemble that was born in that log cabin. It includes Sollee, percussionist Jordan Ellis, who is a long-time collaborator, Bennett Sullivan on banjo, Julian Pinelli on fiddle, Jonathan Estes and Josh Hari on bass, and Jona Smith on background vocals.

“We literally built a studio in a log cabin,” Sollee says. “We slept in bunk beds and cooked for each other and drank bourbon with each other. We tended the fire, we went on hikes. It was a really deep dive, 10 or 11 days, with each other.”

The intimacy and the morning to night togetherness allowed them time to let songs grow and evolve, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Sollee had written “The Wires” years ago but hadn’t recorded it. Finally with the group of musicians he had gathered in the log cabin, he thought it was the right time.

He recalls thinking, “Oh man, I’m starting a string band, let’s do a really burning bluegrass version of it.”

“And we sat down, and we totally wasted maybe half or two thirds of a day trying to figure out how to record it as a bluegrass tune,” he says. “It just would not go there. Every time we did it, it felt forced for sure and it felt a little hokey. So, we were like, ‘OK, what can we do to make this interesting and different?’ So I pulled up this little chunk of music that I’d written for a film years ago called Maiden Trip. It was scrapped; it didn’t get used in the film. It’s this really cool sea shanty sort of tune and we started playing around with that, sped it up, turned it in a groove and then I was like ‘What about this cool Soca music?’ And we put a Soca groove under it (note: Soca is a genre of Caribbean music) and then played that in a really odd time signature, then the bass player started nerding out and trying to do this weird contrapuntal bass line. All of a sudden within 20 minutes we had the bones of the song as you hear it. So that’s proof of sticking to it in the artistic process, but also we probably should have followed our noses a lot sooner and not tried to force it.”

In “Pieces of You” Sollee examines our relationship with physical objects. The video for the song was recorded in an exhibition of work by Louis Zoellar Bickett II, a Kentucky artist who has spent decades building an open-ended work of art he calls “The Archive,” in which he painstakingly organizes and labels thousands of everyday objects from his life: a roll of scotch tape, a receipt, children’s shoes, hair from a haircut. The full archive is in his apartment, blurring the line between art and life.

In 2016 Bickett was diagnosed with ALS. So Bickett was on Sollee’s mind, and it made him remember a snippet of a song that he had written in Austin after visiting the “Cathedral of Junk,” an installation in an artist’s backyard that’s made of a huge pile of objects like old telephones, crutches and bicycle wheels.

It was Bickett’s diagnosis that spurred Sollee to complete the song and to think more about the role of physical objects in our lives.

“Things aren’t worth anything until you care about them. And I think that’s the biggest challenge when we’re talking about things as simple as keepsakes around the house and things as big and important as water. And mountaintops. All these things, they’re not worth anything unless you’re connected to them and you have an intimate knowledge of them.”

His growing family has also made him think more about physical things.

“I think that one of the biggest things that is pushing on me about physical objects right now is not only the fact that my son is growing up–he’s nine now–but also that he has a little sister on the way. And that’s really pushing on me, knowing that I’m bringing another life into the world. I’m really excited about that but I’m also recognizing that that’s going to be that much more impact on the planet. And how different it’s gonna for her…for her it’ll be profoundly different. She absolutely will never need to drive her own car. She will absolutely have some kind of digital identity that will be just as important as her physical identity in many ways. It’s wild.”

The state of Kentucky weaves like a thread through the album but the most remote place it shows up is in the song “Moon Miner.”

Sollee got the idea for “Moon Miner” from a science fiction story that he read.

“I subscribe to something called MIT Tech Review and twice a year they put out this collection of commissioned sci-fi stories called ‘Twelve Tomorrows.’ I was reading through that, thinking about all the interesting twists and turns that we may take on our future path as humanity. And one of the twists and turns is private mining corporations on the moon, mining for Helium-3.

“So I was pondering that and then I thought ‘Somebody’s gonna have to go up there to run the machines. I wonder who that would be.’ And I thought, ‘I wonder if that would be a Kentucky boy. And I wonder what that would be like.’ To be up there with all that technology at your helm and you’re still just digging rocks. So that was the spawning of the song, in a very nerdy place.

“I wanted to write a near-future folk song in a Woody Guthrie kind of aesthetic that addressed the fact that we’re such a consumptive species, us humans. And what it would feel like to be that far from home. Same story, different celestial body.”

Sollee thought about the articles he’s read about people who have lived on the International Space Station, and how they look down and see the green and blue spots, the empty brown spots, the water and clouds, the sunrises and sunsets, and how they look at it as a planet and not a collection of countries.

“I just think that if I was up on the moon looking down I would still have an affinity for my homeland of Kentucky.”

Group photos by Mallory Cunningham

The post Ben Sollee Reveals Making of New LP ‘Kentucky Native’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

The album showcases the burgeoning songwriting collaboration between multi-instrumentalists Jason “Rowdy” Cope and Wes Bayliss, with the two joining forces on five of the songs, their strengths as songwriters complementing each other.

Vocalist Bayliss says, “As far as the ideas go, the story lines and lyrics mainly start with Jason. Typically the idea and the hook will start with him and that’s what I think his strength is.”

“Then I bring it to him and he has one of the best ears of any musician I’ve ever met,” Cope says of Bayliss.

Cope’s friend and frequent collaborator, Brent Cobb, had a hand in this record, writing or co-writing four of the songs, including “Let the Rain Come Down,” which also appears on Cobb’s album Shine On Rainy Day.

Cope says, of Cobb, “I was good friends with his cousin, (producer) Dave Cobb, and Scooter Jennings, and they kind of weaned him and brought him out to Los Angeles, where we lived at the time. That was in 2006, and we’ve been friends ever since. We’ve been making music together for a long time.”

One song that is a surprise, in the context of this album, is “The Secret.” Lyrically it’s not an outlier, presenting a version of the Eden story, where Eve, rather than the serpent, is Satan. But musically it’s very different from the rest of the album. Instead of electric guitar, there are strings. And instead of a drum kit, timpanis roll in the background like ominous thunder. The net effect is both lush and stark.

“That’s one on there that sticks out from the rest of the record,” Cope says. “It’s very orchestral. It has a string arrangement. We have cello, violin, viola, standup bass, timpani drums, piano. That whole song is just me and Wes and the string player.”

There is a fire and brimstone sensibility in much of this music. Besides “The Secret,” there’s “Axe,” where the narrator waits out the devil through the metaphorical night, in anticipation of impending salvation. And in “Della Jane’s Heart,” a spurned lover murders her cheating lover and then is weighed down by her sin.

Which is why “Whatever It Means To You,” comes just at the right time. The song take a step back and acknowledges that there can be more than one way to interpret symbols.

“You got a rabbit foot in your pocket / And a cross on your rear view / And all it means is whatever it means to you.”

Then, in a self-referential twist, it addresses the songs on the album, introducing the idea that there can be truth in fiction and that the truth depends on who is listening.

“The stories told in all these songs / Don’t sound the same to everyone / Some you hear, and some you see / And all that means is whatever it means to me. / Not all are real, but all are true / Cause all that means is whatever they mean to you.”

Bayliss says, “That song actually started with a session that I had with Aaron Raitiere. I just went over there, wanting to write a conclusion song that just said that it’s different for everyone. That’s why a lot of the lyrics are vague. Especially the ones that aren’t a story. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re going through, maybe it’s different for you and the person next to you. And of course not all the stories are true. But they’re all…whatever they mean to you. “

The album includes a couple of covers, including a slightly Southern-tinged version of Black Sabbath’s “Hole in the Sky,” and a faithful rendition of Darrell Scott’s gem, “Uncle Lloyd.”

“We view this thing as our introduction to the world of who we are as musicians and songwriters and artists,” Cope says. “We went at this thing with absolutely as much artistic integrity as could possibly be done. We did it all ourselves. It’s a collection of what we thought were great songs and the songs that we wrote that we thought the world needed to hear. I think the whole album encompasses pretty much every array of emotions that a human can go through in their lifetime. “

The post The Steel Woods Employ Truth in Fiction Sensibility on ‘Straw in the Wind’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

You don’t have to know anything about David Childers to appreciate this album, with its addictive collection of evocative vignettes, but I’m going to tell you some things anyway.

He’s 65 years old and has lived almost all his life in Gaston County, a red county in North Carolina, but he’s unapologetically left wing in his opinions. He’s a Christian. He played high school football. He earned his living as a lawyer. He likes poetry, jazz and opera. He’s a history buff who wrote and recorded a song about Alexander Hamilton years before the musical made Hamilton a pop star. He recorded his first album when he was over 40. It was called “Godzilla! He Done Broke Out!” He speaks with a deep southern drawl but drops vocabulary into conversation that you may need to look up afterwards. You probably haven’t heard of him if you don’t live in North Carolina (or maybe even if you do) but other songwriters, including a couple with the last name of Avett, revere him.

If this sounds to you like a contradictory description, that might say more about your preconceived notions about people of the rural south than it does about Childers.

People are complex. This is something I wanted to ask him about–the complexity of people, not just him, but also the people whose spirits are woven into this album, as characters in the songs, inspiration for the songs and also as songwriting collaborators. Several of the songs started out as poems or stories that other people shared with him.

We’re sitting in the backyard of his Mount Holly home in the early spring, before the mosquitoes have come out. The yard is filled with gardens. Paintings lean against the walls on the porch. Cajun music by Carolina Gator Gumbo floats from a shed, competing with a chorus of songbirds for air space, and a cat walks across the table where my phone is recording our conversation so that it can rub against Childers’ shoulder.

I mention how most of the people who contributed song ideas to the album aren’t songwriters.

“But they’re people,” Childers says. “And that’s what my songs are generally about. People, just people living their lives. That’s about all I know how to do, is write about what’s around me, stuff I can relate to.”

“Collar and Bell,” a story about a hunting dog getting lost in the snow, came from lyrics sent to Childers by Shannon Mayes, a schoolteacher in Ohio.

“There was just something so genuine, and that story really grabbed me,” Childers says, and nods toward one of his dogs, who’s rolling around in the grass like he’s dancing to the sounds of the accordion and fiddle music wafting from the shed. “As you can see, I don’t have as many dogs as I have been before. They’re dying off.”

The song “Belmont Ford,” is another that started with the contribution of someone who isn’t a songwriter. Childers was familiar with the subject matter, the flood of 1916, which caused a trestle to collapse, sending a train into the Catawba River, killing 17 men. Mary Struble Deery shared a poem about the flood with Childers, and he condensed it and re-worked it, turning it into a song.

A couple other songs are the results of collaborations. He wrote “A Promise to the Wind” with Douglass Thompson, and “Hermit” with songwriter Mark Freeman.

The best-known contributor to this album is Scott Avett of The Avett Brothers. It was actually Bob Crawford, bass player for The Avett Brothers, who initially became interested in Childers’ work. Back in 2007, he heard that Childers was planning to hang up his guitar, and he coaxed him back into the music world by forming the band The Overmountain Men with him. They recorded two albums together.

In 2015 Crawford asked Childers about doing another album, this time with producer Don Dixon (R.E.M. and The Smithereens; he also produced Childers’ 2003 album “Room #23”) at Mitch Easter’s Fidelitorium, and that’s how “Run Skeleton Run” came about.

Along the way, Crawford’s band mate Scott Avett became interested in Childers’ music, often covering his song “The Prettiest Thing” in concert.

Avett’s is actually the first voice you hear on the album. The title track starts with a spooky poem, almost shouted, that says, in part: “There’s a skeleton in my living room / Telling many woes / His cold eyes blaze with anger / His beard is white as bone.”

I ask if this poem was written as part of the song.

“No, it wasn’t actually,” Childers says. “A friend of mine had come here and had almost driven me insane ‘cause he just wouldn’t stop talking and it was always angry, bitter stuff about his life that I listened to for two days. That poem came out of that. Just this skeletal figure, just spraying all his hate. Not at me. I love the guy, he’s a great friend, but he was in a bad place.”

As to Avett’s involvement, Childers says, “Ol’ Dale Shoemaker, plays guitar with us, he called me up and was like ‘I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you get Scott Avett to do some of them crazy voices he does. Like, read a poem or say something.’ And I’m like, I’ve got it. And that started right there and everyone dug it. I was very happy that he wanted to participate. Apparently, he liked that last record, ‘Serpents of Reformation,’ that nobody paid any attention to. So Bob Crawford, who (co-)produced this record too, he told me Scott was really into it. It was hard to get to know if he was going to do it or not. I’d actually given up on it. But all of a sudden he had time and he did stuff remotely. Banjo parts, vocals. I’m glad as hell he did.”

Childers is also a painter. Prominently featured in his primitive style artwork are musicians, Jesus, rivers and skeletons. It was one of his skeleton paintings that kick-started this song.

“I was painting this picture on a great big old board and I wrote those words out (‘Run Skeleton Run’) and it was like ‘that’d be a pretty crazy song.’ Skeletons resonate with people. They always have with me. To me, it’s a symbol of mortality. In my view of the world death is just a process you go through and then you move on into another process.”

I ask Childers about the second song, “Radio Moscow,” which feels eerily timely. He talks about what the song is really about, a time in his youth when he listened to Russian transmissions on a shortwave radio, but he draws a connection to what’s going on in the world today too.

“He was waiting on the day to make his escape / So he could figure out the American way. / He had no friends, he didn’t fit in, but maybe there was some kind of message for him. / The shadows and the groans of a dying world / Didn’t frighten him as much as talking to girls. / Hiding in the attic, 14 years old, listening to Radio Moscow.”

“(Trump) had nothing to do with it,” Childers says. “But, you know, I’m happy if people see that connection. Cause I think it needs to be seen. And it needs to be dealt with. It’s just coincidence. But if there’s a common linking thread it’s alienation. That song’s about alienation. This young guy, me, when I was 15, felt like I had absolutely no place in this place here. Where I live now. I actually live in a very different place, although it’s only two miles from where I grew up. But I have my own world that has transcended that.

“But I was so unhappy in that stage of my life that I was reflecting on. I would find solace in something like a guy spewing anti-American propaganda through a little radio far away. I was attracted to it.

“Trumpism was very much about alienation. Not feeling like you’re a part of the society because you’re a white man or a white woman who’s lost their job, and you feel like Mexicans, and black people, or Asians get more. And you see them succeeding. It’s kind of a sense, particularly in the south, that white people have, it’s being privileged because they were white. Like they should not have to compete. And it’s a different world now and they feel displaced. Racism is a part of it. I don’t know if it’s the main part of it. Most of the people I know, though, who were Trump boys are racist. I’m sorry. They’re my friends, I love them, but…”

There’s a particularly disconcerting line in the song: “Somewhere a finger is twitching by a red telephone / While he’s listening to Radio Moscow.” I point out that right now, it’s hard to listen to that line without thinking of Trump.

“We had recorded the song a year before Trump, in the spring, at least. But that’s what made us do the video. It helped us focus in on which song we were gonna do.”

The tension is tightened by a Russian language radio clip that starts and ends the song, and that plays in the background of some of the instrumental sections.

“That’s something (producer Don) Dixon had. And he said it was from some intercepted conversations that the U.S. military picked up. But I don’t know where the hell he got them. I don’t want the CIA or the NSA coming around here asking me about it,” he says, laughing. “But it’s something he just had. I didn’t ask too many questions. I don’t even know what they’re saying.”

Alienation of different kinds is a recurring theme in this record. It also shows up in “Greasy Dollar” which was inspired by his time working as a laborer when he was a teenager, digging ditches and picking up trash by the side of the road. He writes from the point of view of the people he worked with back then, older, uneducated men with no other prospects.

“Digging ditches all day out by the freeway / With a backhoe and a shovel crew. / What good is living and what good is dying / If this is all I’m ever gonna do?”

“It was one of those songs I’d been trying to write since I was about 16 years old, because I was inspired. The world was very vivid to me. I couldn’t capture it. That song just came to me one day and it felt like a gift from God. I’ve seen so many people react to that. I’ve seen people just listen to it and you can tell that it resonates with them. I remember playing it in downtown Charlotte and all these people on a bus looking down at us in a kind of recognition and sadness about them. Like ‘damn, that’s my life.’ I respect people that work, that make that effort to go out and sweat or just whatever you do. Use your brain, your hands, your back. I just respect that a lot. When I wrote that I was like, finally. Finally I said it. I’ve been waiting 50 years, literally 50 years.”

As hopeless as never-ending manual labor might sound (as the chorus goes: “Some say the world was made for fun and frolic / And so say I, indeed, O say I / But I’ve got to go and earn my greasy dollar / So I can keep on working ‘til I die”) Childers draws from his experience as a lawyer to zero in on an even greater pathos.

“What’s sad is when they lose that job or they lose the ability to do that job. I dealt with disabled people, trying to get social security benefits for probably my last 15 years. I really came to sympathize with that. You see people time and time again displaced, alienated, with an illness… And they’re lost in this whole web of trying to find a doctor to say ‘well you can’t work’ and dealing with regulations and a system that says ‘you can’ and you’re just shit out of luck, man.”

“Greasy Dollar” is one of the songs that include backing vocals by Scott Avett, as well as by Jacob Sharp of the North Carolina string band Mipso. Sharp also contributed mandolin to several songs.

“Ghostland” addresses a different kind of alienation, the way a person loses the connection with a loved one and becomes estranged. “Memories are blind to me now / Pages from an unwritten book / And all the magic that we used to share / Cannot be found wherever I look. / And so I fade away into the ghostland.”

When I ask Childers about this song I mention that to my ears it has the vibe of one of those slow, romantic Elvis songs (although later I think Roy Orbison is a better comparison.) At the end of many lines, Childers’ vocals trail off, sliding down in pitch, which adds a delicate, tender quality to his rough-hewn voice. The organ, played by Don Dixon, helps give the song a wistful 1950s feeling, and when a plaintive fiddle solo follows the line “Maybe today, maybe tomorrow / I’ll find a way to outlive this sorrow” we are planted solidly in heartbreak territory.

“I’m glad you mentioned that one. Cause that’s kind of my favorite. Specifically for what you said. It reminds me of songs you’d hear on the AM radio sitting in the drive-in restaurant or something, or out parking with your girlfriend. A lot of that’s Dixon though. When I wrote it I didn’t foresee it turning out that way. I write them to play on a guitar and sing. I don’t have an understanding of a piano or an organ. I’m probably the poorest musician in the whole band of all the guys I play with. Hell, they’re just songs. I write a song with the words and imagery and have a melody that I enjoy singing, and if I enjoy it I figure someone else will too.”

The musicians who so skillfully bring to life the songs on this album are his regular band mates Robert Childers (his son, on drums), Geoff White (fiddle), Korey Dudley (standup bass) and Dale Shoemaker (guitar.) Besides Scott Avett, Don Dixon and Jacob Sharp, the fourth “ringer,” as Childers calls him, is David Niblock, who plays guitar on three songs.

If alienation is one thread weaving its way through the record, another is growing older, and the changes that age brings.

On two songs, Childers assesses his stage in life and looks back. On “Thanks to All (Long Ago)” he recognizes the people who tried to help him throughout his life, possibly when he didn’t quite deserve their help. “And thanks to all my teachers / Who did the best they could / Until they finally realized that I was just no good / Long ago, long ago / And thanks to all the judges / Who did not send me down / And all the cops who let me pass on through their little towns / Long ago, so long ago.”

He touches on the quiet enjoyment of his life today: “I could have wound up dying young / In some hidden place / And never known these peaceful days / Filled with amazing grace.”

“If you look at my life,” he says, “there’s nothing to envy. It’s pretty boring. My wife and I work a lot. We like to have private lives. That pretty much encompasses it. But I’m ok with it. I like it, actually.”

And in “Goodbye to Growing Old,” which he wrote with Theresa Halfacre, he sings about his acquiescence to the passage of time, and the sense of contentment that he’s found.

“I saw that old man looking through the glass / I thought that I might cry but that soon passed / Although he is alone, he will not be for long / And he won’t waste time on chasing what he’s lost. / So I guess I’ll say goodbye to growing old / And keep your memory held to me close / I’ll get on with the game. / I ain’t about to fold. / I guess I’ll say goodbye to growing old.”

I ask him if his approach to songwriting has changed as he’s grown older.

“I think my life is a lot more orderly now. I’ve settled down a lot more. I’m very happy with the existence that I have. I was a very unsettled person when I started out playing music.

“I’m not so emotional when I write. If you go back, like I was listening to a song from way back, ‘Possibility,’ it’s just not the kind of song I’d write now. It’s kind of excessive. I like to think maybe my songs now are a little more sparse. The language is more sparse. It’s not cluttered up with so much. It’s just a different way of writing. I guess it’s just not as emotional. It’s more in control. I’m much more interested in getting a thing I can hold onto and move around, instead of something that’s thrown over on top of my head, like a net. But thank God I had that outlet. Writing songs and being able to put them on records, I’m lucky I’ve gotten to do all that.

“I’m 65 now and I feel like I got maybe another 65 years,” he jokes. “But whatever the hell I got I’m gonna use it to create with.”

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But after a few more listens, and after you run out of adjectives to describe her voice, other elements rise to the surface, particularly the drums, which occupy an unusually prominent space for an album of mellow country/folk songs. The drums, which Cahoone plays on the album, propel the songs forward with a gentle but persistent rolling motion. Cahoone’s first musical instrument was drums, and she was the drummer for Band of Horses during part of 2005, as well as for Carissa’s Wierd, before striking out on her own as a singer/songwriter. Her experience as a drummer influences her songwriting on a fundamental level.

“The way I play guitar is very rhythmic. I don’t do anything too fancy,” says Cahoone to Glide. “When I strum it’s very rhythmic to me and a lot of times I’ll hear what the drums should be, right away. I want to actually sit down and play some drums at the same time. I do that a lot.”

Her regular band mates Jeff Fielder, who contributed guitar, banjo, mandolin, Dobro and vocals, and Jason Kardong, on pedal steel, add tasteful touches throughout. Co-producer John Morgan Askew brought in Rob Burger to play a variety of keys, Annalisa Tornfelt to play fiddle, and Dave Depper to play bass.

The new musicians she was working with sometimes took songs in directions that surprised her.

“I started with the song ‘Time to Give’ more like total country. Pedal steel, this country vein. Rob (Burger) came in and did this weird Dusty Springfield kind of piano thing to it. It’s still obviously country-ish but it has more jam to it or something.”

Instrumentally the album has a spare, uncluttered sound, leaving plenty of open space around her vocals.

“I’m like that in general,” she says. “Most of my records are pretty sparse in that way. I don’t like too much going on. It gets too much for me. It’s easy to be like, just add this, just add that. I just want it to be simple.”

The transition from being a drummer to being the person in front was not an easy one for Cahoone. In the opening track, “Always Turn Around,” she sings “The first years I ever played my/ My songs for anyone / my back was turned toward them and I sang down to the ground. I’m so tired of being nervous, so tired of being nervous / That I finally turned around.”

“I’m a really shy person,” Cahoone says, “but not as shy as I was back when I was first starting to move from drums. When I first started I was trying to do open mics and I just forced myself to get comfortable, but sometimes it’s still uncomfortable. In drums I loved being kind of behind and not having to worry about anything, but now you’re just right up in front of everybody. Everyone’s hearing every word you’re saying. And there are pretty vulnerable lyrics.”

Most of the songs on the album focus on relationships. In “Up To Me,” against a backdrop of banjo and finger-picked guitar, she hopes for love: “I wanna be your garden, let’s plant some flowers / We’ll scatter seeds out in the morning time / I wanna be your honey bee and make you honey / But it’s not really up to me.”

In “Better Woman” she strives to be a better partner, and in “Taken its Toll,” she faces the end of a relationship.

But “Ladybug,” which is not about a romantic relationship, stands in stark contrast to the rest of the album, and is the most vulnerable of all the songs. It was written about her 21-year-old cousin, Tawnee Baird, who lost her life to domestic violence. It’s easy to obscure personal details in songs about romance, but not in a song about a specific event, especially one that received news coverage. So “Ladybug” created different challenges, including making sure that her family wouldn’t be hurt by the song.

“That song was definitely not an easy song to write. I didn’t know if it was going to make sense on the record. I really loved the way it turned out. I put this drum beat to it and it was kind of unexpected. It almost has this peppiness to it. Then I was like, is this too happy? The lyrics are depressing. It was kind of a weird song that I didn’t really know what to do with, but I knew that I needed to put it on there.”

The chorus speaks of the guilt that can be left with relatives:

“All the signs were right there / We just couldn’t see / All the signs were right there / we just couldn’t believe.”

“I talked to her mom and her grandma,” Cahoone says. “I wanted to make sure that they felt ok about this because obviously it’s going to get brought to light again and they’re going to have to talk about it again. They were actually really honored and thought it was a very sweet gesture compared to everything else that happened, because this was so awful. It’s a very sensitive subject. I wanted to make sure this was something I should do. But it just felt like something I had to do too.”

The reason she felt she had to write and record the song wasn’t just to process her own feelings, but also the hope that she could make a difference for someone else who might see the signs of domestic violence.

“Especially in the queer community,” Cahoone says, “because my cousin was dating a woman. That’s not talked about as much. You don’t always expect a woman to do that to another woman. You kind of brush it off more than if it was a man. I think that people have to make sure that they listen to anyone that’s telling them that things are wrong.”

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On the Other Side delivers ten songs with addictive melodies and simple, infectious beats. You might find yourself involuntarily nodding along before noticing the sometimes sorrowful lyrics. Or maybe you don’t notice them at all, and that’s okay too. Listening to this record is like walking into a slightly seedy dive bar in an unfamiliar town and meeting your new best friends.

Of all the songs on the album, “Music Man” might serve as the best introduction to the band. A rolling, playful tune, aided by frequent collaborator Geoff White on fiddle and banjo, it describes the life of a touring musician, from the highs of getting the audience singing along and dancing, to the lows of budget travel–and sometimes not even getting paid.

The band’s primary songwriter, Perry Fowler, sings about the balance between the fun side of playing music and the tough side of trying to earn a living at it. Without sugarcoating the difficulties of being a working musician, Fowler hones in on what it’s all about for him—sharing a moment of connection with the audience. “Gotta make ‘em sing, gotta make ‘em feel. Gotta have some faith to make it real.”

“In my mind,” Fowler says, “I’m writing this song to someone who’s trying to be a songwriter, or thinking about getting into the music business. It’s not fairy tales and daydreams and butterflies. It’s sleeping on floors, putting up with some weird shit. Being broke and all that stuff that goes with it. “

“Whiskey Drinking” is another song that captures the ambience of the band’s usual venues, complete with background banter and clinking glasses.

“We thought that since most of the time we’re playing in clanky bars that it would be fitting for a song titled ‘Whiskey Drinking’ to have that same noise and chatter. We pretty much just did a couple of takes of me and Mark and our friend Jeremy reading out of books and banging glasses around.”

It’s a feel-good song, in the most southern of senses. It shifts unselfconsciously from talking about the lord to talking about drinking, sort of like a drunken tent revival, the gospel of good times.

“Nobody Left to Believe” gives voice to the little guy being taken advantage of by the powerful, and yearning to fight back: “Don’t give ‘em an inch. No, take what you can. They can’t take us all if we rise up.”

Fowler says, “I wrote that song before Trump threw his hat in the ring as a candidate for presidency. Things have definitely not gotten better.”

In “Old Bones,” Fowler offers up a twist on the typical “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” story song. In this version (spoiler alert) boy meets girl, boy and girl get a dog, girl leaves boy, girl misses dog, girl comes back. Each verse ends with the lyrics “he’d (or we’d) howl at the moon” and each chorus ends with “I don’t ever get any sleep at night,” but the connotations of the howling and not sleeping cleverly change with each verse.

Fowler gives Geoff White credit for bringing an unexpected interpretation to “Old Bones,” as well as to “Promise Land.”

“When we got Geoff White in the studio with us to play fiddle we were like, holy shit, that’s a totally different song! His fiddle parts in those songs give them a Cajun vibe.”

Mark Baran’s dog, Bump, gets the last word in, though, with an extended howling solo at the end.

The final song, “Ready to Go,” is the only song listed on the album written by Mark Baran. It stands out for its easygoing waltzing tempo and the warm trombone solos, but also for what happens after it ends.

Wait a few seconds and you’ll hear a hidden track, a beautiful finger-picked guitar instrumental, written and played by Baran. It’s as if the bar has finally closed, the patrons have stumbled out and the tables have been wiped down. The room is empty and the sound has been turned off. The guitarist plays the untitled song for himself, and maybe for the good friends who stick around after the party ends.

The post Meet Sinners & Saints, North Carolina’s “Two-man One-man Band” appeared first on Glide Magazine.

“The other guy” was Michael Collins. While Armstrong and Aldrin spent almost a day on the surface of the moon, Collins orbited the moon, alone, waiting for the rendezvous with the lunar module.

Folk singer John Craigie was drawn to Collins’ story from a young age because his father, a test pilot in the 1950s, knew Armstrong and Aldrin, and would often tell his son about Collins, the astronaut who came so close to the moon but never touched down on the surface.

The song “Michael Collins” on his new album No Rain, No Rose (out 1/27/17) tells Collins’ story, and it was a long time coming.

“Even as a kid I remember thinking that was really interesting. When I first started writing songs I wanted to write a song about him, but initially I wanted to write one that was more sad or more wistful. So for years I worked on that, about a character who’s up in the shuttle, à la Major Tom, but it never came to me. And then I was talking to my dad just about a year ago and we were being a little more jokey about it.”

This time the song came easily and it ended up far from sad or wistful. It’s a playful, amiable song with a bluegrass sound.

The chorus goes like this:

One small step for man, Jesus, goddamn,
22 hours hanging in the air.
Sometimes you take the fame, sometimes you sit backstage
But if it weren’t for me them boys would still be there.

While recording No Rain, No Rose in the living room of his Portland home, he’d play it as a joke.

“During the sessions I’d play it for the people to try to make them laugh. We didn’t really think we were gonna put it on the record, but we had so much fun doing it that we ended up putting it on there. It’s a pretty loose recording, and the engineer, Bart Budwig, ended up singing on it.”

Craigie recorded No Rain, No Rose over a period of three days with Gregory Alan Isakov, The Shook Twins, Tyler Thompson and Jay Cobb Anderson of Fruition, as well as other members of the Portland music community.

There’s one cover song on the album, a laidback, folksy take on The Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice.” Its presence on the album is a nod to the mood-setting Craigie did with the group.

“I really wanted to loosen everybody up, because a lot of people who played on the album are used to stiffer recording sessions, just because they’re all from really good bands. So to get them in the flow of being in my living room and really loosening up, at night, we’d set up one microphone and we’d play through a bunch of covers that I liked and that I had arranged. Then we’d do an original. I wasn’t going to use any of the covers, but the Rolling Stones one ended up coming out really fun and it really encompassed the family vibe. But I have 10 other (cover) songs that I want to release somehow. Maybe this summer.”

The relaxed atmosphere of the sessions comes across in the album, which includes some of the banter and chatter between songs. At the beginning of one short track, titled “Interlude,” Craigie plays the beginning of Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Suitcase Full of Sparks.”

“What’s funny about that audio clip,” Craigie said, “is that’s me talking to Gregory about his own song ‘Suitcase Full of Sparks.’ There’s a song called ‘Highway Blood,’ which is track three. He was talking about doing some ‘oohs’ on that, and so I said ‘Let’s make it like Suitcase Full of Sparks,’ but obviously not too close.

“When I wrote that song, we had just become friends and I was hanging out with him a lot, so I think that his vibe was rubbing off on me. So that song has a lot of his mojo in it anyway. So having him sing on it was great. That and the California song (‘I am California.’) Both of those songs are indicative of my time with him, playing music with him and listening to his music a lot. “

Craigie sees the folksinger’s job as traveling, seeing what other people’s experiences are, and sharing those.

“It’s all pretty easy if you travel enough and you see enough people and enough things. I think there’s plenty to write about. I think the only times it’s hard to write is when I get stagnant or when I get stuck somewhere, which luckily doesn’t happen too often.”

On this album he draws inspiration not just from people, but also from a place: his current home of Portland, Oregon.

“It’s been about two years since I’ve been living in Portland. I feel like each of my albums tries to catch me in a period of my life. All these songs were written during my time in Portland. This community of people was huge. I’ve known the Shook Twins for about ten years now, but the other people I met by living in Portland. I wanted their sounds on it. The title itself is stolen from Buddha, I think. Buddha said ‘No mud, no lotus.’ And I thought that was symbolic of music. You need some friction; you need some bad things to make good stuff.

“So I was sitting there talking to my housemate about how I wanted to make it more Portland. I wanted to use roses because Portland is the city of roses. I was like ‘No dirt, no rose,’ and then she was like ‘Rain really is what we’re most famous for.’ So the title comes from that. We have all that shitty weather and we end up getting beautiful springs and summers and our roses bloom.”

That sentiment made its way into the first track, “Virgin Guitar.”

“And also there’s just little mentions of Portland in different songs. I think people will connect with it if there’s town or a place that has held them, that has given them a nest. All of us musicians, we look for that.”

Photos by Maria Davey

The post John Craigie Embraces Portland Musical Community For Relaxed LP ‘No Rain, No Rose’ (INTERVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.

On Mandolin Orange’s new album, Blindfaller, there’s more reason than ever to pay attention. Take the second track, “Wildfire.” It starts with the story of Boston physician and Revolutionary War patriot Joseph Warren, who was killed at Bunker Hill after insisting on fighting as a private, rather than serving as Major General, his recently commissioned rank.

It should have been different, it could have been easy

His rank could’ve saved him but a country unborn needs bravery

And it spread like wildfire

Then Marlin goes on to contrast the growth of the young, free country with the institution of slavery and the hatred that remained entrenched even after abolition. The song ends up in the modern day, with the struggle in the south between those who use history as a justification to hate, and those who want to leave the hate behind. With just a few words Marlin nails the weariness, the “we’re still doing this?” feeling of the modern South–the sense that the battle will never end.

I was born a southern son

In a small southern town where the rebels run wild

they beat their chests and they swear “we’re gonna rise again”

And it should have been different, it could have been easy

The day that old Warren died, hate should’ve gone with him

But here we are caught in a wildfire

That “small southern town” where Marlin is from is Warrenton, North Carolina, population 862, on the border with Virginia. When I talked on the phone and by email with Marlin we talked about his hometown, and about this song, but he left it to me to draw the connection that the town was named after Joseph Warren.

His small town North Carolina roots play a big part in his music sensibilities. His grandmother, mother and sister all played piano in the church, so he was surrounded by hymns and old songs as a child. Then he lost both his grandmother and mother at a young age.

He said, “I don’t consider myself a churchgoer these days or even much of a religious person but I think those tunes still hold a very special place in my heart. The melodies remind me of a time when my family just felt a little more whole than it does these days.”

He moved to Chapel Hill about ten years ago (Frantz is a Chapel Hill native) and encountered the burgeoning acoustic scene in Chapel Hill, its neighbor, Carrboro, and the surrounding Triangle area. This part of the state is rich in traditional music and in new approaches to traditional music. There’s a lot of music played on porches here.

“Moving to Chapel Hill,” Marlin said, “is when I first discovered acoustic music and people my own age that were actually playing bluegrass music and had these great ideas on how to take a simple three chord progression and make it into this masterpiece. I think the music is so simple it allows the players to do their own spin or do their own twist to the solos and the lead sections. I just became entranced with some of these players that I was meeting here. So that definitely was a turning point in my musical approach because it brought me out of just wanting to write songs and actually made me want to learn play leads and get better at my instrument as well.”

Marlin’s involvement in the local music scene includes producing records for other artists, including Mipso, Charles Humphrey III of Steep Canyon Rangers, Josh Oliver, and Rachel Baiman of Ten String Symphony. His approach to producing, he told me, is more listening than talking.

“It’s not being the guy to throw out ideas, it’s being the guy who, when you hear a good idea from somebody who isn’t speaking up, or if somebody accidentally plays a part that could be a really great theme, stopping the whole process and saying ‘Wait. Go back. What was that?’”

He and Frantz produced Blindfaller and took a similarly collaborative approach to the recording of a record that was already, from the start, their most collaborative effort. It’s the first record that they’ve recorded live with a full five-piece band. Joining Marlin and Frantz were Clint Mullican on bass, Kyle Keegan on drums, and Josh Oliver on guitar, keys and vocals. In addition, Allyn Love contributed on pedal steel.

“We really wanted to get a live energy on this one,” Marlin said. “We wanted to include some other people on it and let them put their own kind of spin on what’s happening, and speak up as far as the arrangements go.”

The openness to the guest musicians’ ideas led to some surprises for Marlin.

“There’s little things here and there, like at the end of ‘My Blinded Heart’ we do this ending section that starts on the 7th chord of the progression and it just goes between the 7th and the 1st (chords), and everyone’s just kind of floating in there. And that was an idea that Kyle, our drummer, and Clint, the bass player, had, and we all loved it. We were just messing around with it in the studio and it ended up being a big turning point for us because then we realized that not only did we have musicians that were capable of taking sections like that and just running with it, but also that these guys just have some great ideas. We all tried to open ourselves up to everyone’s ideas and I think that’s what led it to sounding like it does. It was more a collaborative production.”

I asked Marlin what part of the record was the biggest surprise for him.

“I think ‘Hard Travelin’’ was probably the biggest shock to me because it came out like straight out of a honkytonk. The first time we ever got the five guys together we did a demo session. I called Kyle, who played the drums, because we had a mutual friend. We had never played with him before and so he came in and just for fun at the end of the day we did ‘Hard Travelin’’ straight honkytonk. And Josh was just ripping it on electric guitar and Emily and I sang it live and sang it really hard. It was a demo session. We weren’t gonna use it. We were planning on doing that song a little more bluegrassy. So we messed around with a bluegrassy version a little bit but then at the end of the recording session we went back to the original demo and were like ‘that’s a take.’ I think that was probably the biggest surprise for me because it was the first time we had ever gone into the studio to just completely fool around and ended up coming out with a really great take. I’m glad it ended up on the record the way it did. I think it’s how it was supposed to be.”

Trees populate some of the songs on this album. In “Wildfire,” forests burn, regrow and burn down again in the forest fires of hate and bigotry. In the evocative, yearning “Echo,” Marlin uses different trees as metaphors. He searches for calmness in his memories of the pines of his youth. White Oaks signify a place of safety and wellbeing. Redwoods (perhaps—just one take on it) represent the way society can lose its way and become stagnant as it focuses more on growth and strength than on people.

But I saw it in a dream, monuments of trees

As the air we breathed turned our lungs to dust

And the redwoods so tall, in all their awe, began to rust

With no bend and sway at all, that ancient dance was lost

And the wind moved like an echo, with a sigh in every gust

When Frantz and Marlin listened to the album from start to finish they began picking up on these images of trees and zeroed in on the idea, for the album title, of a faller—the person in a lumberjack operation who’s responsible for felling the trees.

“We ended up liking the meaning of blind faller, meaning somebody who’s just recklessly tearing down all kinds of shit and not really paying attention to what it is or where it’s falling. When we looked at it as two separate words it could have meant so many things, and then we put it together. It just had that certain ring to it that for us seemed to sum up the record.”

“Blindfaller” is a reference, in part, to the political climate in the country right now, a subject that Marlin does not shy away from addressing. In “Gospel Shoes” he writes about politicians using religion as a weapon.

Gospel shoes are laced with shackles and chains

Fitted for the poor, the runners of the race

Now every hand is folded to the shape of a gun

The target’s ever changing but the war, it rages on

When I asked him how current events influenced the songs on this record, he said, “This is definitely a polarizing time in our country and most of these tunes were not really a way to state a political stance but more just let’s not forget to step away from politics and remember what’s truly important, which is that anybody who’s going to vote for anything is always looking for the same thing. Whether you’re on the left or the right, I think everybody just wants to find people that they can relate to and they want their voices to be heard. Some of the tunes on this record are just a reminder: don’t be afraid to let those voices be heard.”

Please check out the newest track “Hey Stranger” via spotify…

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