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Mother Jones
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Jacob Blickenstaff
At 33, singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan already boasts a distinguished music career that stretches back 15 years. As a teenager attending the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, her hometown, O’Donovan helped assemble the innovative bluegrass ensemble Crooked Still, which would release four albums between 2005 and 2010. Her warm, earthy voice and musical versatility have made her a go-to collaborator, appearing on 2011’s “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” with high-strata talents such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile (of Punch Brothers fame), bassist Edgar Meyer, and bluegrass multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan. O’Donovan (whose first name is pronounced “eee-fah”) also recently recorded and toured with Sarah Jarosz and Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins as part of the Americana power trio I’m With Her.
This year marked the release of her second solo album, In the Magic Hour—a follow-up to 2013’s Fossils—which moves into more experimental territory. (Both albums were produced by Tucker Martine, whose credits include The Decemberists, My Morning Jacket and Neko Case.) On her latest, O’Donovan surrounds herself with, but is never overshadowed by, a cast of talented collaborators as she forges an intimate path through nostalgia and memory, meditating on death, rebirth, and our magical relationship with nature and the universe.
Mother Jones: What kinds of adjustments are necessary when you go from being part of a group to making music as a solo artist?
Aoife O’Donovan: It’s really nice to have both outlets. I started this record at the end of 2014, when I was still touring with I’m With Her. Having the solace from the band while working on your solo stuff was helpful. I could hunker down by myself and listen closely to mixes, but then to be able to have a sounding board of peers to get advice and feedback. Performing alone—it’s a very solitary experience. When you’re in a band, when something amazing happens on stage you can look at each other, “Yeah! we’re so locked in.” Or if something goes wrong, you can look at each other and shrug and say, “Oops.” If you’re doing it by yourself, you reflect on it in a completely different way. You might not be riding high on a great show for as long because you didn’t have people to share the joy with. Same if you had a bad show, it just rolls off you more easily.
MJ: Lots of your past collaborators have guest roles on this record, and yet you manage to maintain a consistency of message.
AO: I think the consistency comes from the parts. There’s the thread of Eyvind Kang’s viola weaving in and out, and Chris’ mandolin lines on a couple songs. The strings appear on the later half of the album, so it all weaves together and creates a circle. This was such a different process than my first record, which also had many of my close friends on it. The songs came from a more solitary place and I hadn’t played them with many people before recording. So I just added the layers of people who are in my life, and built up the songs with Tucker, who brought in his people to help me make a finished product that I think is greater than the sum of its parts.
MJ: Did you have certain themes in mind before going into the studio?
AO: They presented themselves throughout the process. I had this collection of songs, some of which didn’t make it onto the record, but this was a meditation on solitude and life and death and nostalgia and on looking back to your childhood. I just finished a tour in the UK. At two separate shows, when I sang the line from Magic Hour—”Songs about Old Ireland/songs about being young again/I wish I was young again”—twice people cried. I saw them. That is the whole point of the record: crying, not out of sadness for your loss of youth, but the moment of nostalgia for when we were all kids. And then how the album ends with “Jupiter,” where we all get old and we all die, it’s just what happens.
MJ: “Jupiter” is quite a shift from the intimate perspective of the rest of the album: Zoom! Suddenly we’re floating out in the solar system. How does that song relate?
AO: It comes out of left field in that way. The lyrics make it a post-apocalyptic love song from me to somebody else. It’s what I would say at the end of my life: The world is ending and I’ll be at your side until we’re planets. It’s very cosmic and maybe a little silly, but it is a universal theme of The End. In the first song on the album, “Stanley Park,” there’s a lyric, “See that baby at her mother’s breast/if I could I’d take my rest/back in the belly from where I came.” It all starts over again. The album is partially inspired by my grandfather dying. But within a week of his death, two great-grandchildren were born, so it does start over.
MJ: Did you have a deep connection to him?
AO: It’s more like a deep connection to family than to him specifically. My relationship to all my family in Ireland is more to family as a whole. It wasn’t that we had a very specific one-on-one relationship. He had 27 grandchildren! It was more that he was this figure, and we were all kids running around.
MJ: So, there’s this recurring theme on the album of human to animal transformation, especially birds.
AO: I don’t think I realized it was so prevalent until the record came out. I’ve always been fascinated by flight and the freeness of birds. On the record, as we talk about the life cycle, the cosmos, etc., the idea of coming back as something else fits in with that. I love the idea of birds having human qualities. It’s hard to even get close enough to a bird to imagine that they are having any human thought. But I think all humans want to be birds so we can fly.
MJ: How did Tucker Martine shape this project?
AO: He was hugely instrumental in assembling the musicians and helping me realize what kind of sonic landscape I was trying to create. A lot of the songs were not fully formed. Some weren’t even fully written. So bringing in the bass and drums—Steve Nistor plays drums on everything, and there are two different bass players, Sam Howard who lives in Portland, and Nate Query from the Decemberists—and getting the basic stuff down. Tucker got Tim Young to come up from LA to play guitar, he got Eyvind Kang to play viola, plus Rob Burger on keys. It’s a very cool assembly of people.
MJ: You’re from a background of traditional and acoustic music. How open were you to the rock-oriented and experimental elements that made it onto the album?
AO: Very open. My listening tastes have always included artists like Joanna Newsome or, when I was younger, Suzanne Vega or the Story or Downtown New York jazz like Peter Epstein Quartet—stuff that’s more than just fiddles and banjos.
MJ: You seem so busy with your various groups and solo projects. Where do you encounter this solitude you refer to, and is there an element of loneliness in it?
AO: It’s not as much loneliness as the experience being on the road by yourself for so many hours a day. You wake up in your hotel room, go for a run, have your coffee, eat lunch alone, sit in your car by yourself, you might stop for a scenic view alone. You show up at the gig at five o’clock, and you go out on stage and you’re still alone, even though there’s people out there and you’re having this kind of conversation. It’s a very different head space to get in, and one that I’d never really experienced being from a big family and growing up in a big community and coming up in a band and not ever going on the road totally alone. It really taught me to be comfortable being alone. Even when I’m not on the road, it’s given me a reason to carve out that time. Some people never get to.
MJ: Tell me about the lyric “weighed down with family photographs and relics” from your song “Not the Leaving.” Is there a dark side to your nostalgia?
AO: That song is what I’d imagine to be a love letter my grandfather would write to my grandmother, even though they wouldn’t have used language anything like that. I’m imagining where the song takes place, Inchydoney Beach in West Cork, Ireland. It’s an image I had of walking straight out to sea holding all of your belongings, draped with photos all around your neck, and not so much going under as walking toward the other side. It’s a weird image, but I’ve always wanted to be thrown into the ocean when I die—to be rowed out to sea and thrown overboard into the Atlantic.
MJ: There are a lot of proclamations about your own death on this album.
AO: I know! I really am planning on living to be 100. People ask, “Why are you so depressed?” I’m actually a very happy person. It’s not a morbid thing, but I think I’ve never been afraid of death, which is maybe why I love writing about it. It feels like the beautiful unknown, and I feel like there is all this magic in the world. It’s not that I literally believe in magic or spirits. In my logical life I absolutely don’t believe in any kind of mumbo jumbo. But I do have this belief in the greater magic of the universe. Maybe when I die and I’m thrown overboard, I’ll turn into a mermaid.
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Mother Jones
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Yo La Tengo: Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, James McNew Jacob Blickenstaff
Coming out of the close-knit music community of late-1980s Hoboken, New Jersey, Yo La Tengo was the product of the romantic and musical relationship between guitarist and music journalist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley, the daughter of well-known animation producers John and Faith Hubley. With help from a rotating cast of supporting musicians, the husband-and-wife duo released four albums, including their 1990 breakout, Fakebook, before bassist James McNew came on board as a permanent and stabilizing member.
Last month, Yo La Tengo released its 14th album, Stuff Like That There, which serves as a companion of sorts to Fakebook. Both albums draw on an eclectic mix of covers as well as remakes of the band’s previously recorded songs. Guitarist Dave Schramm also returns to lend his guitar work.
Active for more than 30 years, the band owes its staying power to its ability to absorb and integrate a vast range of influences. Stuff Like That There singles out and connects some of those myriad points of reference—including The Cure, the outsider doo-wop of Sun Ra, and Yo La Tengo’s 1980s alt-rock contemporaries Antietam—to reveal the band’s musical center. I visited with the trio at their Hoboken rehearsal space.
Mother Jones: How did the thematic similarity between Stuff Like That There and Fakebook come to pass?
Ira Kaplan: We’ve been asked a lot over the years about doing another album like Fakebook. When people ask you to do stuff, it’s not your idea anymore, so it’s tough to get behind it. But over time, we started realizing that that didn’t make it a bad idea.
MJ: Reinterpreting and re-recording your own songs is something you’ve done on other albums, too. Do you think that’s unusual?
IK: It may be unusual-ish. James was just listening to Country Joe and the Fish—all the San Francisco bands were very free with the interpretations of their material. If you listen to Jefferson Airplane’s God Bless Its Pointed Little Head, the live versions of their old songs don’t sound much like the studio versions. The Velvet Underground’s live versions changed constantly. And as Beatles bootlegs keep surfacing, you hear all the different sketches and ways they approached things, so it’s always felt pretty natural for us.
MJ: When Georgia and Ira created Yo La Tengo, you guys were very much amateur musicians.
IK: I still feel like an amateur! I remember being in college and taking a class on classical music and getting a big laugh when I said very sincerely that I was not really into trained voices. Some of the greatest singers can transcend their technical perfection and still sound great.
Georgia Hubley: They have to get over that stumbling block of talent!
MJ: You seems always to be evolving, yet Yo La Tengo maintains a consistent core identity. Is that deliberate? Like, are there parameters that you follow?
IK: I don’t think there are really that many rules. We are willing to change, and we’re willing not to, but we just try to be listening. This has been a crazy year. Every time we play live, it feels diametrically opposed to how we played the last time. We’ve been playing with different people and different configurations, and just allowing those things to happen. At the same time, we’re consciously going back in time and playing with Dave Schramm again to just see what that would be like.
MJ: The band began as a duo, with other musicians coming in and out. How did James’ involvement change things?
IK: We thought we had a band, but when James joined, it was, “Oh, I see! This is a band!” Everything we do now, even though we had four records before he joined, traces back to when he joined. May I Sing With Me was the first record he plays on, but with Painful, I think that’s when we were really a band for the first time.
MJ: Did it feel natural when you began, James, or did you find it tough to integrate?
JM: There’s a Halloween episode of The Simpsons where Homer goes back in time. If he touches one thing and then flashes back to the present, everything is different. I didn’t want to do that in the band. I was a fan; I already thought they were doing great. It was like, “Don’t touch anything! Don’t ruin that band you like!” So I tried to find that spot where I felt, “I didn’t ruin things today? Let’s move it a little further.” I’m still toeing that line. But it was natural in a sense of our personalities. The first day we practiced together, we spent just as much time discussing Second City Television episodes as we did playing music.
MJ: Georgia and Ira, how do you keep your marriage from interfering with the business of the band?
IK: It’s pretty jumbled, and it is a challenge. But I feel like it has to be that way when you are passionate about your work—as opposed to waiting until five o’clock so you can do the things you really care about. Like James mentioned about SCTV, there is a gray line. Like, what is band practice? These things just work their way in. That goes back to being receptive, and being confident that the experiences you are having are going to find their way into what you’re doing. It’s not a matter of “We gotta learn that bridge today!” Things happen more formlessly.
MJ: How would you say your dynamic has changed since you first started playing?
IK: I think there’s less panic, and more acceptance that not everything is going to go the way that you thought it might. We are much more accepting of the days, or the weeks, when nothing we really liked happens. Or we’ll like something and try to play it again and find that it’s gone. I think there was a lot more anxiety about that in the past. Now it’s more like, “Oh well, that’s part of it.”
GH: We always are learning something, whether its, “Let’s not do that again,” or “How do we make that better?” Making music is really fun. Some of the other stuff can get to you, but I think we do a pretty good job of riding it out.
MJ: What other stuff?
JM: Everything but music!
GH: Everything else is terrible!
JM: There’s an actual physiological thing that happens to me on tour. There’s that moment where I sit in my seat and click the seatbelt, and five seconds later I fall asleep. There’s the excitement, and I guess anxiety, about what the shows will be like, but it’s overwhelmed by, “Thank God, here we go!” It’s letting go of all that other shit I had to do to get to this moment. It’s done—or at least it can’t touch me until we land.
MJ: So, to what do you attribute Yo La Tengo’s longevity?
IK: We managed to not ever be part of a movement. Even “indie” is a word we run from—that word is so amorphous. We’ve never been trendy, so consequently we’ve never fallen out of fashion. We didn’t have a hit, so we’ve never been locked into anything. As far as we know, maybe we are locked in somewhere from a few years ago in other peoples’ perceptions. Maybe we’re too stupid to know it.
GH: Or delusional? I think it’s probably a good thing.
MJ: Is there anything about your group temperament that allows you to keep going?
IK: We were never a group that thrived on volatility. We just don’t work well calling each other out, saying, “That sucks!” Some sports teams hate each other in the locker room and that’s what makes them great, but we’re not that team.
We did a show recently in Spain where the sound on stage was miserable and no one knew what to do about it. Georgia stopped a song that had begun, which is not the response anyone was expecting, even Georgia. There’s no question in my mind that if that had happened years ago, the band’s response and my response would have been so much worse. We just kept going. It didn’t derail the show in ways that it would have. It wasn’t even something I had to reflect on later.
JM: Mindfulness in action. When you’re in the audience and you’re seeing a band and shit’s falling apart, that’s thrilling! But when it’s happening to you, you think, “This sucks! I hope nobody is seeing this.”
IK: Even if we do look awful, it was a human moment. But it’s not always easy, seeing yourself.
GH: This trip we just did was fairly difficult. We were on this bill with a lot of bands, and it was very hard to connect to the audience. It’s a strange way to feel when you’re about to pour your heart out—to get on stage and feel like, “Does this matter to anyone?”
JM: I was reacting to the same feeling, that there are some people who aren’t watching the show. I thought, “Okay, so this is for us.” It was a really beautiful, emotional feeling—just joyful: I love doing this so much, and I hope you do too. I left with a smile. Or something close to a smile. I was very tired.
You can catch Yo La Tengo at their upcoming tour dates in the United States and Japan. They’ll also be appearing at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival and Big Ears Festival in early 2016.
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Mother Jones
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Terence Blanchard
Fifty-three year-old New Orleans-born trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is a heavyweight among his musical peers, and not only for his passion as an amateur boxer. As a bandleader, he has released 20 albums over the past three decades. A prolific composer for film and television—he created the soundtracks for every Spike Lee film since Jungle Fever—Blanchard has a gift for constructing narrative and nuanced mood in his music.
His new album Breathless, released this past May, is his first with the electric E-Collective band and features vocal contributions from Maroon 5’s PJ Morton and Blanchard’s son JRei Oliver.
With the new band and the thematic connection to Eric Garner’s death, you’d think the album would be full of raw nerves and anger. But instead, Blanchard has created a suite of instrumentals, songs, and spoken word meditations that invite reflection on finding the strength and peace to heal and move forward. He challenges listeners to be “breathless from exerting your free will, breathless from doing good, breathless from blowing your own sweet solo.”
I spoke with Blanchard at the Jazz Standard in New York, and later on the phone from his home in New Orleans.
Mother Jones: Was your label, Blue Note, supportive about changing directions with this album?
Terence Blanchard: We just lost one of the greatest music executives of my time, Bruce Lundvall. The last time I saw him we were right here, taking a picture together. He was the type of dude that whenever I saw him, he always talked about music. It wasn’t ever, “I can do this for you, blah, blah, blah.” I always thought it would be great to be on a label with a guy like that because not only does he appreciate the music but I could also learn from him. When we finally got the chance to work together, he said, “I want you to be you.”
Now we have Don Was, who is very much like Bruce in that regard. When I first had the conversation with Don about the record he said, “Great, but bring it up to where you are, don’t dumb it down.” It was great to hear that.
MJ: Is composing for film a different process for you than making an album?
TB: When I first started it gave me headaches: I’d be working on a jazz thing then my brain would have to click out of that mode and then go work on the film. Wayne Shorter talks about your life being one continuous song with different variations, moods, textures, and color. That’s the way it is right now for me: Both inform each other in a way that I can see more clearly now. The film side has opened my eyes to story telling, context, and all of those issues. You’d think that working in film is limiting, but it’s actually liberating because it shows you that within the context of the story there are still a million permutations.
MJ: How did the topical side to Breathless evolve?
TB: Breathless didn’t start out to be a statement record, it started out as something we wanted to have fun with just playing music. But it’s hard with my background to turn a blind eye to what’s been happening.
MJ: Given that many of the people who have died in these police incidents have been young people, what did it mean to you to have your son involved in the record?
TB: It wasn’t something I thought about initially, but once it dawned on me, it made more sense. My son had had an incident of mistaken identity. A woman claimed that somebody had broken into her house, and she described the suspect as a black guy with dreads. My son had been walking by that house at that time. Her husband saw my son, followed him all the way to school and called 911. Seven patrol calls pulled up to the school. Seven. They handcuffed my son in class, walked him out and put him and put him in a patrol car. One of the cops there was a guy I grew up with, literally our back yards were connected. He saw my son sitting in the back of a patrol car and said, “I know this kid, he didn’t do this.” When they brought my son back to the woman’s house, her story fell apart. What got me was the seven patrol cars. That says a lot about the mentality going on in law enforcement. The thing I keep saying: It’s not going to stop until those police who are responsible go to jail.
MJ: My guess is that if the police prosecute their own, it undermines their power and control, and they’re afraid.
TB: I believe it to be true. That describes a whole host of problems with insecurity. You see it all the time.
I’ve been boxing for 20 years. When you start boxing and you get in the ring, the first thing you learn is to respect the person in front of you. That carries over into my daily life. I don’t care who it is or what they look like.
I’m going to tell you this, and this is probably going to get me in trouble, but I’ve seen some cops come to the boxing gym and not stay. Some of these dudes, they have an attitude problem; they come to the gym for the wrong reasons. And I think, if you have that problem here, what’s going to happen out on the street with your badge and a gun?
That’s the part we’re not dealing with. They are supposed to be the professionals. I’ve accepted that there are things that come with being a public figure as a musician. What’s crazy is the power they want to exert over everyday people when the side of the car says, “protect and serve.” To serve is something noble, something distinguished and honorable.
I have friends who are good cops but they are not speaking out. It’s creating this atmosphere of distrust that is truly dangerous. These police officers are human beings too, but they are subject to the same faults as everybody else, so they make the same assumptions as everybody else.
MJ: Your song “See Me As I Am” brings up the issue about perception and race.
TB: I hate using the term “as a black man,” but in my experience, I’ve gotten to the point when I meet people I feel that tension, I can see their minds change as I’m talking to them, I can see their thoughts about who I am change as we’re having a conversation. That’s normal in some ways for all interactions, but you call always tell when a first impression is mostly negative. Forget what you see on the news and television. Try to come and experience who I really am.
What gives me hope is when I look at my kids and their friends, I see that as an indication of where we’re going. My daughter was talking to me the other day about a girl friend of hers who is “gender mobile.” And I was like, “What’s that?” She says, “Sometimes she dresses like a boy, sometimes like a girl.” And she was cool with that. Race, ethnicity, sexual orientation— nothing matters to these kids, it’s beautiful.
MJ: Despite the real and justified anger about these incidents, the album seems to focus more on internal feelings and preservation of the self.
TB: At the end of the day that’s all we have: self-preservation. Our history has been to rely on our faith in times of trouble and distress. That’s been the place where we have found our salvation, and our rejuvenation.
MJ: As expressed in the song “Samadhi,” what does the practice of meditation do for you personally and creatively?
TB: It’s done so many things. It’s built up my awareness, it’s allowed me to understand that being selfless doesn’t mean powerless. That’s the reason I have “Confident Selflessness” on the album too, because you need to be confident in your aspirations, but you also need to be selfless in how you serve society and other people. It has allowed me to choose whether to be angry or not. Anger is not necessarily a reaction; it can be something that you choose to allow. When you start to see the bigger picture of things, you can respond accordingly. It’s brought me a lot of peace. It allows your mind to slow down, it allows your thoughts to slow down, and it allows your soul to strengthen itself. One of the things I chant for is peace in this country.
MJ: Is there anything else to staying happy and healthy as a musician?
TB: A lot of it is just peace and solitude. You need that to rejuvenate yourself and rebuild your brain and your spirit. People don’t understand how much energy it takes to do this, not just physically but mentally. I did a gig with Ron Carter and on the way back to the hotel, the driver was playing some music. Ron said, “Excuse me, could you please just turn that off? I’ve been playing music all night and I have to resolve all this shit that I played in my mind.” I get his point.
Actually, do you know what most musicians used to do? They’ll never admit it, but before the Internet—it was soap operas. There were a lot of them, and they would have discussions about this stuff on the road. I wasn’t into them but I would think to myself, “Boy if they could see me now, with these dudes talking about The Young and the Restless!”
MJ: Are you going to name names?
TB: Naww, I can’t do that! For me it used to be Jerry Springer, because when you watch Jerry Springer you immediately forget about whatever you were doing.
This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.
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Mother Jones
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The British jazz pianist, singer, and songwriter Jamie Cullum rose to fame in 2003 with his major-label debut, Twentysomething, which sold more than 2.5 million copies. With successful follow-up albums, he has earned the distinction, at age 35, of being the highest selling UK jazz artist ever. On his BBC Radio 2 show—modeled on the work of British radio greats Gilles Peterson and John Peel—Cullum passionately curates a wide spectrum of jazz and improvisational music. His charm and energy, both on the air and as a stage entertainer, has earned him a lot of loyal fans, and opening slots for Billy Joel’s recent shows at Madison Square Garden.
Against a traditional big band set-up, his recent performance at the New York City’s Beacon Theater involved pogo dancing, beat-boxing, a flying leap off the piano and entreaties to the audience to take more cell-phone videos. He was touring in support of his seventh studio album, Interlude, produced by fellow old-soul-with-youthful spirit Benedic Lamdin—also known as Nostalgia 77. Interlude was recorded straight to tape with a live orchestra. It features a mostly-classic jazz repertoire, with covers of Sufjan Stevens and Randy Newman thrown in for good measure.
I photographed Cullum at the Beacon Theater. We spoke on the phone later about the freedom of limitations, the predictability of rock, and Billy Joel‘s staying power.
Mother Jones: In your musical arrangements, I hear a lot of connections back and forth between jazz, modern rock, and R&B.
Jamie Cullum: I look at it a bit like joining the dots. Gilles Peterson has had as much influence on me as any musician. He has helped form my tastes through years of listening to his radio show. He does this thing where he kind of joins the dots between styles. Getting into heavy metal got me into Jimi Hendrix eventually, and as I was getting into Hendrix, I discovered Frank Zappa, and as I was getting into Zappa, I heard him referencing quite a lot of jazz things, prog-rock and improvisation. Before you know it, I’d found Herbie Hancock, Art Tatum, Thelonius Monk, and Nat King Cole. A lot of my musical ideas come from being a music geek. I think a bit like a radio DJ might.
MJ: You’ve opened for Billy Joel at several recent Madison Square Garden shows. Did you gain any insights that you might want to apply to your own approach?
JC: You see the power of having such a catalog of hit songs. His songs really live in people’s bones and when you see 20,000 people singing to “New York State of Mind” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” or any of his millions of hits, you get a sense of the community that creates. Very few people can make Madison Square Garden feel small. He doesn’t amplify his gestures with big stage production. He walks onto the stage and goes, “Welcome to the Garden. What songs do you wanna hear? Hey, let’s play that.” He is himself. He’s naturally funny, a bit of a joker, a wise guy kind of vibe. He’s lovely, he’s a human being, he’s well aware of his own faults and his own flaws. He seems like one of us, you know? Everyone feels like they’re standing next to the piano with him. That is very much a gift.
MJ: You cover a lot of rock and R&B, and are influenced by it, but you also have a pretty traditional approach to jazz, especially on this album.
JC: I think I fell in love romantically with the idea of the jazz musician before I became a jazz musician. You know, reading Kerouac as young teenager and looking at the photos of Chet Baker and Count Basie by William Claxton—the iconography of it and how different it was to where I grew up—got to my young soul. But the level of mastery you need to be a jazz musician—incidentally, I feel I’m only 10 percent of the way there—is very appealing. Improvisation means not having to do the same thing twice, which very much appeals to my personality. I’m an improviser at life, anyway. I don’t do well with really set plans; I thrive on unpredictability. I love the language of jazz, the fact that you can take interesting musical turns and twists that are informed by some musical mastery and education.
When I was in rock bands, I loved the image of the rock star and carrying the guitar, being on the road and wearing a leather jacket, and that kind of thing. I was in a band that supported Paul Weller on tour; we were having an amazing time. But it became to me a little bit predictable: After you’ve done 10 shows, you’ve done it the same way musically every time.
MJ: With Interlude, you’ve removed your own songwriting and some of the modern instrumentation you’ve had in the past from the equation. What were you going for?
JC: Interlude is very much a collaborative album between myself and the producer, Ben Lamdin. I was in love with the way his records sounded. We booked three days in the studio with him and his band; my label didn’t know anything about it. I said, “Look, I want to live in your world for three days.” We didn’t know if it was going to be an album, maybe just a couple of EPs or something we put out on his small record label under a different name. I didn’t have the chance to think about it.
But the truth of it is that limitation, and giving ourselves less options, is the most freeing thing ever. You sit there and you go, right, we’ve got these instruments, we’ve got this amount of time, we’re not even going to be able to mix the album because we’re all playing in the same room, so this is how it’s gonna sound. But let’s get this incredible repertoire, we’ll get great performances, and it’s gonna be imperfect, you’re gonna hear what the room sounds like, you’re gonna here the count-off, you’re gonna hear the beer being drunk between solos. I’ve learned a lot about what I want to do on my next record by doing things that way; giving yourself certain limitations gives you the freedom to do something really special.
MJ: You recorded with all live takes. How did that affect the process?
JC: We did it in two and a half days. We weren’t even listening back to takes after we did them. If it felt good, we would move on. So rather than kind of picking through it and going, “Well, I don’t like that,” we’d all kind of look around and say, “You know, that was good.” We’d trust the feeling. And it keeps the energy going, it keeps an excitement in the room, because you’re always moving forward.
MJ: At your Beacon Theater show, after you encouraged people to come up closer, I really got a sense of the communal nature of your performance. Not to diminish it, but there was a sing-along element.
JC: Obviously there are some of my originals that the audience knows really well and will literally sing along to. But one of the things that I think makes it communal is that on stage, I’m also a fan. I wasn’t the kid who stood in front of the mirror with a hairbrush for a microphone wanting to be famous. And when I’m on stage I don’t feel a big audience-performer divide. I’m enjoying watching my musicians play, and we often have guest musicians, so I’m enjoying them too. And I think the audience can feel my passion for what is going on. I couldn’t be aloof if I tried. Being aloof seems very cool—I would love to be a bit aloof, but I’m shit at it.
MJ: So, has your manager been pushing to get you a movie role as a heartthrob vampire or anything like that?
JC: Laughs. I don’t think so. I’m not really quite dark in the spirit enough. Not yet.
In Close Contact is an independent documentary project on music, musicians, and creativity.
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British Jazzman Jamie Cullum Is Not Your Grandfather’s Crooner
Mother Jones
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The Americana Music Association, which just wrapped up its 15th Americana Music Festival, is not so much about defining a genre as it is about circling the wagons around a wide variety of roots-influenced styles and staging a big-tent meeting for the faithful. The music spans roughly three generations of artists, from the likes of Loretta Lynn and Billy Joe Shaver, who helped define classic country music; to musicians like Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, who during the ’70s combined reverence for the past with rock and roll; to young artists like Robert Ellis, The Milk Carton Kids, and others who are innovating and expanding the older traditions with fresh energy. No matter their age, Americana artists are finding a growing audience to start and sustain careers; it’s as much about moving forward as it is preserving the past. With 160-plus acts in Nashville for this year’s festival, there was no shortage of great music and fascinating individuals. Here are portraits of 11 artists who are definitely worth a closer look.
Jim Lauderdale
Nashville’s guardian angel of songwriting, Jim Lauderdale, is truly the face, and voice, of Americana—a humorous, kind, and gracious ambassador to the association, and host of the Americana Awards for the last 12 years. Lauderdale’s songs have been recorded by George Strait (more than a dozen of them), Vince Gill, Blake Shelton, and the Dixie Chicks, to name just a few. His most recent album (number 26), I’m a Song, features songwriting collaborations with Elvis Costello, Robert Hunter, and Bobby Bare. Near the end of his set at the venue 3rd and Lindsley, he was joined onstage by Lucinda Williams, who asked the crowd, in her trademark drawl, “Why is Brad Paisley up on all these billboards and not Jim?”
The Milk Carton Kids: Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan
Winners of the 2014 Americana Award for Best Group/Duo, The Milk Carton Kids are the Los Angeles-based guitar and vocal duo of Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan. With an uncanny chemistry, they blend their voices and guitars through one microphone into gossamer folk songs with the precision and depth of Simon & Garfunkel or the Everly Brothers.
Robert Ellis
Robert Ellis was nominated for Americana’s Artist of the Year, Album of the Year for The Lights from the Chemical Plant, and song of the year for “Only Lies.” While heavily steeped in country and western music, his current album goes into more experimental territory, blending elements of prog/psychedelic rock and jazz within a sparse soundscape. The Houston, Texas native recently relocated to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The Howlin’ Brothers: Jared Green, Ian Craft, and Ben Plasse
Nashville’s own The Howlin’ Brothers— Ian Craft on banjo and fiddle, Jared Green on guitar and harmonica, and Ben Plasse on bass—play dirt-under-the-fingernails bluegrass, blues, Cajun, social-dance music, and anything else “old-timey” they can scratch up, mixing originals that sit nicely along side timeless songs. Their third album,Trouble, was released this year on Brendan Benson’s Readymade Records.
Leo “Bud” Welch
Leo “Bud” Welch of Bruce, Mississippi, is both one of the oldest and newest artists at the festival. Welch, 82, released his first album, Sabougla Voices, early this year on Big Legal Mess Records, home of Junior Kimbrough and RL Burnside. He had been playing gospel in small local churches, and blues at picnics and parties for decades in a stripped-bare style, but a cold call to the record label finally got the ball rolling.
Doug Seegers
Doug Seegers is finally doing what he was born to do: write and sing soulful, sharp-witted, universally identifiable country songs. For much of his 17 years in Nashville, Seegers was homeless, drunk, and playing for change on the streets. A trained cabinet maker from New York, Seegers had tried to make it as a musician and songwriter in the ’70s and had played in a band with a then unknown Buddy Miller in Austin, Texas. Through luck or divine intervention, Swedish country singer Jill Johnson (country music is big in Scandinavia!) met Doug while producing a documentary on Nashville musicians. Dumbfounded by the quality of his songwriting, she recorded a single with him that hit No. 1 on iTunes in Sweden. Through the path of recovery, and support from artists such as Emmylou Harris, Buddy Miller, steel guitarist Al Perkins, and producer Will Kimbrough, Seegers released his first album, Going Down to the River, on Rounder.
Carlene Carter
The granddaughter of “Mother” Maybelle Carter, daughter Carl Smith and June Carter, and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, Carlene Carter is music royalty’s wild child. She recorded her first three albums in England. Her 1978 self-titled album with Graham Parker and the Rumor and 1980’s Musical Shapes, with her then husband Nick Lowe and his band Rockpile, blended country music with high-energy New Wave. Last year, she returned to her family’s legacy with Carter Girl, produced by Don Was. The album brings her youthful energy to songs from the Carter Family repertoire. Beginning in early 2015, she will join John Mellencamp on an 80-date tour.
The Haden Triplets: Petra, Rachel, and Tanya
The Haden Triplets use their sibling chemistry to beautifully reanimate classic country and gospel music. They are the daughters of jazz bassist and composer Charlie Haden, who also grew up in a country music family, performing on the radio in Iowa as part of the Haden Family Band. Five years after Charlie’s country music tribute album Ramblin’ Boy, which featured the triplets, they now have their own self-titled album, produced by Ry Cooder and released on Jack White’s Third Man Records.
The Mastersons: Eleanore Whitmore and Chris Masterson
The Mastersons, a husband and wife duo, play straightforward country-inflected rock with big-hearted lyrics, tight song structures, and sweetly intertwined harmonies. They released their second album, Good Luck Charm, this past July on New West Records, but are already touring veterans as the core of Steve Earle’s band, the Dukes.
Ethan Johns
England’s Ethan Johns recently released his second album, The Reckoning, a suite of stark, mythology-steeped songs that draw from British folk and early American blues. Johns also has a substantial career as a producer, having worked with Ryan Adams (who returned the favor to produce this album), Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, and Ray LaMontagne. He no doubt learned a few things from his father, Glyn Johns, the legendary producer of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Eagles.
Sons of Bill: From left, Sam Wilson, Todd Wellons, James Wilson, Seth Green, and Abe Wilson
Sons of Bill are brothers James, Sam, and Abe (father: William Wilson), plus Seth Green on bass and Todd Wellons on drums. The band’s sound ranges from “No Depression” alt-country of Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt to Byrds-like folk-rock to the Chapel Hill alt-rock of early R.E.M, and many points in between. Their new album, Love and Logic, is produced by Ken Coomer of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco.
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Portraits of 11 of the Americana Music Festival’s Most Intriguing Acts
Mother Jones
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Jolie Holland in Brooklyn. Jacob Blickenstaff
Since the release of her 2003 album, Catalpa, Jolie Holland‘s music has evolved from close adaptations of pre-war blues and ballads into deeper, more complex works. Holland grew up in Houston, boxed up inside a strictly religious family. She left home after high school and was essentially homeless for more than years, squatting and bouncing between Houston, Austin, and New Orleans. In this environment, her musical education was direct and unmediated—the music of Blind Willie McTell as influential and intoxicating as that of John Cage.
Holland has often been pigeonholed as a folk-blues-soul singer, but even from the beginning there has been something experimental and immediate about her approach. With Wine Dark Sea, her just-released sixth album, Holland exerts more control as a bandleader, setting her voice, as serpentine and wily as a rattlesnake at a Pentecostal meeting, against a more improvisational ensemble consisting of two drummers, three additional guitarists, bass and reeds. Photographer Jacob Blickenstaff spoke with Holland recently in New York City. The following is in her words.
I have a really tight relationship with the I Ching. You can see the lyrical influence all over the record. One of the basic statements of the I Ching is there’s a time when the most effective thing is to just do nothing. It’s really enormous. It’s about the flow of circumstance and of seasons. Songs like “Waiting for the Sun,” “All the Love,” and even the Joe Tex cover, “The Love You Save,” say that:
I want you to stop! Find out what’s wrong
Get it right or leave love alone
Because the love you save today
May very well be your own
Observation and engagement with ideas without explicit teachers is the global norm of how to learn things. So many people aren’t ready to go to art or music school, because it destroys their own agency in the work. I remember that feeling when I was a young teenager and was learning how to play. When you’re an undeveloped musician or artist, learning too much about theory can put the cart in front of the horse.
The voice is at the center of the compositions. You have to make sure that the band is augmenting that while expressing themselves, but at the same time not flattening out that complexity. Indigo Street takes the first solo on the record on “On and On.” When I gave her direction for that solo, I said I just wanted her to sound like she didn’t know what a guitar was, like something started a fire in her hand. I’ve been playing with her for a long time and I was trying to get her to play more noise. But with the absence of drums, it was harder for her to feel like she could go there. She said that me having a “pretty” voice held her back.
The approach on this album is more about bandleading than anything else. On past albums, I couldn’t get people to do what I wanted them to do. More volume helped; getting more people on stage and not being polite. A track like “Wine Dark Sea” is totally huge. There are no overdubs on that song, we’re playing live. To make this album we had to find the right room to get two full drum sets in with enough separation to record but still together. There are three electric guitar players in that same room. I was in the isolation booth with piano or guitar. Recording it was a real challenge. Douglas Jenkins, my co-producer, had never engineered something like that before.
We developed the sound during a weekly residency at a small place called the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn. We’d have two drum sets on the stage and we’d go through the songs, and then we’d also have an improvisation set. I would tell stories from the book that I’m working on—true ghost stories and strange occurrences told to me by friends—and the band would play behind me so they could get used to moving together. I think some of my nerdier fans didn’t like it but fuck it. I warned them, “This is not a normal show.”
My friend Stefan Jecusco has a great saying: “It’s impossible to be sexy and nostalgic at the same time.” Most people listen to old music and they experience it as nostalgic; they can’t get inside it and don’t have a nonlinear sense of history. When I first heard Blind Willie McTell, I just had a crush on him, it just felt real even though he was speaking and playing in a different way than people do now. I hear melody in a more complicated way than other people do—so much of it comes from Blind Willie McTell. He is the guy who taught me how to sing. It’s all about microtones and internal phrases.
One thing about old songs, if we are listening to them now, then we know they’re good. They went through the filter, they stood the test of time: McTell, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Beyoncé—a good song is a good song.
With singing covers, it’s not nostalgia; it’s happening right now. Being on stage is a responsibility, an opportunity. All of these people are paying attention to you. Your present psychological experience will be affecting everyone. The more you can release your resistance to being in the present moment, the more you are providing people an opportunity to do the same. If you are playing a song that you wrote, then you are still covering that song.
I love what Tom Waits said: “We all love music, but what we all really want is music to love us.” That kind of unity in your being on stage is what has that power.
“Contact” is series of portraits and conversations with musicians by Jacob Blickenstaff.
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