GRAMMYs

Yola

Photo: Daniel Mendoza/Recording Academy

News

Yola Ascends To 'Walk Through Fire' & Become The Queen Of Country Soul | Newport Folk 2019

Facebook Twitter Email
Backstage at her Newport Folk Festival debut, Yola talks her new Dan Auerbach-produced album, transcending genre, her love for Elton John and more
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Jul 28, 2019 - 1:09 pm

The spirit and soul of Yola's breakout album Walk Through Fire was nothing if not well-earned. Even the title came from overcoming hardship, as her kitchen literally caught fire before the project, a symbol of the adversity the Bristol-born singer/songwriter faced—and overcame to create her own masterpiece. 

Yola On Being The Queen Of Country Soul

Yola graced us with her infectious energy backstage at Newport Folk Fest after her show-stopping set and opened up about her breakout album, working with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach and what it means to be the Queen of Country Soul.

More: Backstage At Newpork Folk Festival's 60th Anniversary

Congratulations on your album, Walk Through Fire. What are you most proud of in how this album came out?

I think how people are connecting with it. One of my specialist subjects is that connecting to what I'm saying. And I hope by doing that then that helps people connect as well with what I mean. And that gives us a relationship across airwaves, across oceans, across an arena.

And so, that's the most important thing, for people to be connecting and for things to be going crazy. We're not into six months yet and things are going super crazy.

But that's not just a hype machine situation. It's so down to people connecting in a real way and I think it's very easy for that to not happen. For people to get swept away with hype.

What can you say about the collaboration with Dan Auerbach? It sounds like you guys wrote a ton of songs together.

Yes, we did.

How was it working with Dan on this album?

He's just a machine. I always thought I was kind of a quick writer once I got into my flow, my flow state, if you will. Yeah, he's a machine and his sonic palette, his kind of delicacy in the mix is unrivaled, it's unbelievable what he can do.

I was actually a fan of his album that came out, his solo album that came out, "Waiting on a Song." When I listened to just all the layers and I was like, "I love this, wouldn't it be amazing if I could do an album like this with him?"

Anyway, that's what Dan and his people bump into me in '17. I must've just put that into the Ether or something, that was serendipitous at the very least.

He's a complete machine and the upside, especially when it comes to things like production means, I could be hands-off. I don't have to be concerned and idea of what you going to come across is going to be turned into something other than something utterly beautiful and so yeah... It's the most relaxing production experience I've ever had because you deliver your vocal and you know everything is going to sound beautiful.

It's in good hands. 

Very, very, very capable hands indeed.

"Faraway Look," I think that was the first song that I heard of yours. Can you tell me about how that came together in the studio with Dan?

When we were writing, Dan and I would be in the room and we'd invite a third party, if you will. And that third party would be the spice, so me and Dan had talked about our common ground musically. The things that we loved, even the things that we loathed. So, then that would form the kind of people he would invite.

And Pat McLaughlin is a dreamy kind of guy and so yeah, it became... we had, obviously Pat came in with this song and that we had Dan Penn and Joe Allen and Roger Cook. So, really kind of stellar writers and so the idea was to kind of bring in the spice would occur. And allow me to explore the range of things that I'm into like classic pop music, classic country, classic soul music.

And so, the way that lyrics tend to come with me... and thankfully with both Dan and Pat is, what I like to call the mumble write. Where you're kind of dowsing for the vibe and I think most of the songs came like this.

In this case, maybe Pat is strumming something and going [mumbling] and starting to mumble something and so then out of the mumble... and then you carry on, you pick up that mumble [mumbling], making no sense at all. But trying to decipher a more elegant meaning out of their aesthetic, out of the shapes that are coming to you. And really they're actually batting around the idea in the back of your mind.

And there's some deep meaning there that you're trying to discern through the fog and that's how much the songs came together, it was Dan or Pat strumming of the 30 songs and in some cases, me strumming. And just feeling out what we were doing. And then obviously something salient-like comes forward.

So, in this case it was the chorus melody, that was the first thing to come. And then we're starting to try to figure out where that goes but this whole process was like we were trying to unveil it, more than going in with a preconceived idea of the genre that we are going to have a look at that day or what the whole album was going to be. It was like we were going to write a whole bunch of songs and then we're going to figure out what the hell we'd done.

And see whether there was a sense of continuity through it, which there was. And so, that was the kind of saving grace with the writing of that song. I think of this record it was very open because people have been describing this as a country soul record. But then you listen to "Faraway Look" and it's not country or soul. It's classic pop.

While I think Queen of County Soul is really a perfect moniker for you, it captures a lot of what you do, but there's always so much more. How do you feel about genre today?

It's like you're trying to help people understand something they just need to listen to. And it's feels like we are dissecting to understand like we're in Biology and we're doing the frog dissection. And in that dissecting of the thing where it separating out, all of everything. Putting that over there, that over there, that over there. And they didn't start that way. They all started together.

And we're separating it out to be able understand the constituent parts and so that feels like the opposite of what I'm trying to do with music. I'm trying to find the common ground. I'm trying to bring all those constituent parts and show how they were linked to all the tissue all the fascia. And, so that's what I'm passionate about in music, is that gray area, that's why I love the band, that's why I love Little Feat, that's why I love staple singers, that's why I love Aretha. They didn't stick... that's why I love Elton John. C'mon, right?

There constantly listen to Honky Chateau, right? It's got this and then it's got this. Everyone I love, Bee Gees- Man, that early Bee Gee stuff, that "Run to Me." That's a bowl of soul. And I was thinking disco and I'm like, "Boo, there's more." "Run to Me" is a massive tune.

For sure. So, how does it feel to experience this type of accelerated rise to success, and did you ever think that was possible when you were going through some of the harder times in your life, dealing with homelessness and loss of your mother.

Well when I was four I saw this [passion for music]. I was like, "Yep. This is entirely feasible. Sure, why not? I feel ready. Let's do this." And so I'm kind of my 4-year-old self right now and I went kind of... I grew up and moved away from that person, which was a mistake. 4-year-old me was on point.

Yeah, instincts like that are usually correct.

Yeah. I nailed it, and I just got talked out of being that person. You should be ashamed of your dark skin, you should me ashamed of your natural hair. You should try and sing more R&B. You should drop some weight. All the kind of things that are shaming and the number of times that I get pulled up by women of color, certainly people darker than Oprah kind of, which is the line in the sand.

"Thank you, thank you for being upfront, thank you for not being in the back, thank you for just being, not being apologetic about it or shrinking in some way." And yeah, that's been a journey, that's been a long road to get it to that point.

So, in that process of being talked out of this willingness to just be myself, I went through bad company. And that bad company pushes you into that realm and when I was in that moment of homelessness, the thing that was making me sad was that, the bad company. Was that sense of lack of connection with the people around me, the people I was working with. People that I was social with who were also people I was working with. That's always been the thing, that has been the heartbreaker, as much as the loss of my mother.

That whole sense and period of neglect, so this period is very much been about that rise to accepting yourself and that's been reflected in how quickly this has risen that's what people want to see. They want to see love, love and connection, to people, to the people you're working with, to yourself.

Maybe it took the 30s to get to that, but yeah. It's been unreal and all the sparkly stuff aside, which there's lots of sparkly things. I didn't think I would be playing Bridgestone or Ryman multiple times or whatever. All of this stuff is mind blowing to me but the connection has always been top, that the most self-actualization.

You mention the Bridgestone, Kacey Musgraves, Maggie Rogers gig. Can you talk a little bit about preparing for that big of a show and playing an arena?

When I was early 20s, late teens, I had a little bit of arena experience but as kind of fronting other peoples' outfits. So, I was that fronting gun for hire. And so you'd have to learn to prowl the stage and all your gestures had to be super massive because people might not see you. If you're just doing this, no one is seeing that ten rows back kind of thing.

So, yeah that was one massive thing that I had to pick up that I'm going to be able to draw back on for this show and yeah and we got the full band, so we should be ready to kick booty.

Charley Crockett's Walk Through 'The Valley': "That's What Artists Do" | Newport Folk 2019​

GRAMMYs

Billy Strings

Photo: Daniel Mendoza/Recording Academy

News

Billy Strings Talks New LP, Being Billed As Bluegrass' Future, Heavy Metal & Mental Health

Facebook Twitter Email
The virtuosic bluegrass guitar star opens up about his forthcoming album, his rock and metal influences and how he copes with the pressures of touring and being hailed as the future of a genre
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Aug 8, 2019 - 11:31 am

Once you hear Billy Strings do his thing, you'll get it. His unhinged flat-picking guitar playing kicks the tradition of bluegrass into new territory with one foot while keeping the other firmly planted in the genre's rich tradition. As a young artist, his songwriting, already scary good, seems to only be improving. For good reason, Stings is being called the future of bluegrass. And even though seeing is believing, and he proves he's worthy of the attention every night he takes the stage, that's still a lot of pressure for one person.

Billy Strings On Bluegrass, Playing Live & More

We sat down with Strings recently at Newport Folk to talk about how he handles the challenges of all the attention and success, how other genres like rock and metal have weaved their way into his astonishing guitar work, the collaborative process of making his forthcoming album, HOME, and more.

You're new album HOME is on its way, Sept. 27. Can you tell us how it was recorded?

We made it back in January over about 10 days or 12 days I think.

So lots of live tracking then?

Yeah, we just all were isolated in different booths and stuff, but we just try to lay the tracks down and I'll play it and live track it. Yeah, I think most of the songs we just end up doing that way. It kind of feels more live that way too than if we played the music and then did the vocals and then did this and that. We kind of just do it all at once like we do at our concert, you know?

I think there's a collaborative element of that, and a collaboration is a theme to this album. Why is it important to you, as a solo artist?

For me it's just I love playing music with my friends. Like I just did with Molly Tuttle up there [on stage at Newport Folk], but yeah, Jerry Douglas played some on the record and sometimes collaborating with people like that, it's just inspiring. It kind of puts a fire underneath you and keeps you going. When I get to play with my heroes, it really inspires me. It's good for you.

There are a lot of the people who want you to carry the torch for bluegrass, bring traditional bluegrass into the new generation. Obviously, you know the history and you come from the history, but you're doing something new. How do you navigate that as an artist?

A lot of people have said, and I would believe that it's true that you kind of have to know the origins and to know traditional bluegrass before you can then branch out. I think there's something true about that. I grew up playing bluegrass with my dad and very traditional bluegrass, I cut my teeth on it, but then somewhere along the way when I was a teenager, I got into heavy metal and rock and roll and all sorts of different music as I grew up and branched out a little bit.

As a writer, I try not to block off those other genres for inspiration as well. I'll let all the rock and roll and the metal and all that stuff that I've listened to inspire me while songwriting just as much as a bluegrass. And also, even if I'm writing a song that's not very bluegrass, it sort of comes out because that's how I learned how to play. It always kind of, you'll hear that flavor in there, I guess.

Yeah, is there something specific about rock or metal that has worked its way into your style?

I think it's more just about our live show. I think the most important thing that we do is our live show. I think that's where we are really best seen is on stage, in a concert venue somewhere. We're gonna make records and we're going to do our best to recreate that live setting on an album, but we're a live music band. Every night it's different. We could play the same song, but it's totally sometimes different. I don't know, we just try to jam with each other.

How often do you practice to play at such a high level?

I mostly even play on stage every day. Sometimes I never get to practice because I'm always on stage. I was talking to my friend David Grisman about that the other day and like, "Man, I never have time to practice." He's like, "Well you could work up new songs and play them and we do that." But, we play a lot of gigs, and sometimes when I'm not playing gigs, I finally get a day or two off after several weeks on tour. Man, it's almost like you just want to take a nap and catch up.

But, I would like to practice more. Honestly, I think I could do better about that. I'd like to write more music. I'd like to get out my metronome more and practice with that. I'd like to just practice learning my fretboard, everything. I mean I'm still trying to get better.

You spend a lot of time playing shows and touring. For a lot of artists, mental health has become a topic we talk about now, where it used to be avoided. What do you do to kind of stay grounded when you're away from home?

The main thing that I do is I see a therapist and I talk to that person and I've been doing that for a while. I had a lot of anxiety back in January maybe before we started making the record and I don't think it was based around the record. It's based around a lot of other things. Things when I was young and just everything, everybody has their own troubles and that kind of things, but certain things can haunt you or if you keep things inside and don't talk about them, that stuff can come out as an anxiety.

It's almost if you have a pot of boiling water, all these emotions and things that you wish you would have said or maybe thought about or this or that and you put the lid on, it starts boiling and a little bit of steam is gonna get out no matter how hard you hold that lid on. Might as well just take it off.

That's what I do is I talk, I see a therapist and I would recommend it to anybody who struggles at all in that way. I think it is an important thing to talk about and I'm certainly not ashamed of that or anything. I have to work on myself and I think a lot of other people do too. I've lost a lot of friends to, whether it's substance abuse or depression and anxiety and that kind of stuff is very real to me.

Unfortunately, I do believe in this line of work as a musician, entertainer, an actor or actress, those kinds of folks, because there is this added amount of pressure, I think a lot of times anxiety and depression sometimes, I think a lot of musicians deal with that or I think maybe a lot of therapists or psychiatrists see a lot of musicians or entertainers because we're like in the public eye and there's a lot of stress involved.

A lot of musicians depend on things. I know a lot of people that are in bands drink a lot and that kind of stuff. It's easy to do. People are always handing your stuff too man when you're out there. People are offering you everything and it's hard to say no when there's a party and it's, until you start to have anxiety and stuff and that's, man, I just, I do everything I can to try to stay healthy. I try to make sure I get enough sleep, make sure I drink enough water, don't be doing drugs except for psychedelics, but yeah, just try to take care of myself and stay zenned out brother.

One more question: What's inspiring you right now?

I think my earlier life, I use [it] as inspiration a lot. When I grew up, I grew up in a small town and I saw a lot of drugs and stuff, a lot of substance abuse and I saw also that those people drove themselves down into a dark hole and that they can never get out of, prison and overdose and stuff like that. It's like, I didn't want to be a bum. I wanted to do something good with my life. I think just seeing that kind of helped me run towards the light in the right direction.

It's great that we get to travel and spread the light and meet people and play music for people and hopefully brighten somebody's day. Also, I've got to mention my father who taught me how to play. It's just great to sort of carry his torch in a way and to kind of, I'm doing it for him and from my mom and him.

Molly Tuttle On 'When You're Ready,' Her Modern Nashville Bluegrass Classic | Newport Folk 2019

GRAMMYs

Our Native Daughters

(L-R) Rhiannon GIddens,Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla, Amythyst Kiah
Photo: Daniel Mendoza/Recording Academy

News

American Roots Music Supergroup Our Native Daughters Look Back To Move Forward | Newport Folk 2019

Facebook Twitter Email
The banjo-based quartet discuss how their new album drives the conversation of race in America forward. "We're looking back at the past, but the music is for today"
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Jul 30, 2019 - 3:34 pm

Newport Folk has always hosted historic musical and cutural moments, but when the roots music supergroup of Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah know as Our Native Daughters close out their debut run of shows, history took center stage. 

Best described by Smithsonian Folkways, the album Songs Of Our Native Daughters "shines new light on African-American women’s stories of struggle, resistance, and hope. Pulling from and inspired by 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century sources, including slave narratives and early minstrelsy, [Giddens, McCalla, Russell and Kiah] reinterpret and create new works from old ones." 

"Black women have been makers and markers of social change in the United States for centuries, at this point," McCalla said. "I think this album is a part of that," adding, "We're looking back at the past, but the music is for today."

Just after their landmark first-ever set on the Newport Folk Quad Stage, the Recording Academy sat down with the quartet to hear how the project came together, what tools they used to create it, how they hope it will affect the narrative of history and more.

Why was Newport Folk the right place for Our Native Daughters perform in this brief initial tour?

Giddens: Well it just seemed like the right thing, because Newport folk festival has such a history to it and I know that they've been really trying especially recently to really build on that legacy. In a way, even more than they have in the past. You know, just really make it about the folk music and about what folk music can do. And so when the offer came in, it just made so much sense. If we could build a tour around it and let this be the sort of finale to this part of the tour, it's really amazing.

Obviously, this is a and very historical and research-heavy concept for an album, but the music rings out fresh and very alive. How did you approach the daunting task of balancing the historical elements with the musical elements?

Russell: Well I think we really approached it song by song. I would say Rhiannon was struck with the idea to do something like this when she was given a private tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture with her daughter. And that's a painful experience for anyone, let alone a descendant of some of the people who were enslaved. And a quote, a William Cowper quote really sparked the idea, and it was a quote to the effect of, "slavery is terrible, but how could we do without our sugar and our rum?" And the correlation to our modern day dependence on technologies that are being supplied by slave labor… that connection really resonated in her mind and she invited all of us to come and join her and sort of explore some of that history.

Initially the project, the idea was to kind of explore some early slave songs and minstrel music and we did a little bit of that with, with her adaptation of 'Better Get Your Learnin'." But we really realized we had a lot, we're all songwriters and we had a lot of feelings to process around all of this painful history, which is so much in evidence that these ghosts have not been laid to rest. Clearly the divisiveness in our country, the kind of outright racist and fascist rhetoric that's coming from the highest offices in our land is indicative of the fact that this history is not sleeping easy. It is affecting our present on all of us directly and all of you, directly. And so we, we felt like we had some things to say.

Giddens: I think it's also just the recognition of the lack of reckoning around the effects of slavery in the United States and the Atlantic Slave Trade. And even though we come from this place of a lot of research and reading and engaging with like academic material, I think that we've been living in our skin our whole life and that's a part of our experience. We've inherited some of this trauma in different ways and we represent different parts of the African diaspora. And so it made sense for us to come together and try to process this together. And honestly we didn't really know what exactly that was going to land us. And, like Alli said, I really think it was song by song. It was like; 'I have this musical idea, I have this musical idea, I have this phrase that has been turning in my mind,' 'Well, oh, I just came up with something that plays off of that.' And it was very collaborative.

Can you tell us more about the instrumentation and the instruments you used?

Kiah: The banjo was the centerpiece, all of the songs in some capacity needed to revolve around the banjo because the banjo is a descendant of the West African loot family. And historically, at least in contemporary music times, it has been very long associated with white male, three finger style bluegrass players. And that history has been sort of muddled and lost because of the segregation of the commercial music industry. There were black banjo players, black fiddlers and once the record executives wanted to market music, they assumed that, 'well only white people are going to listen to string band music,' so black people had to put down their banjos and fiddles and pick up a guitar and play the blues or play jazz if they wanted to make a living making music.

So this was obviously spun from Rhiannon's Inspiration, but her idea to take the banjo and to reclaim it as something that is also part of black culture because all of us in some capacity have lived like on the in-between of you know, not being black enough or not being white enough because of our interests and, even though by default, if someone is moved by music or move by something, they should be able to like it. There shouldn't have to be a birthright to be able to enjoy your love something, but just in case here is the historical backstory this instrument. And so that was really important to have that because that more or less blasts away the myth of like, 'what is blackness?' You know, what it means to be black, it goes to show that we're not a monolith and there's all sorts of ways to express yourself regardless of what your race is. So the banjo was really important. And then we had fiddle, we had drums and really just song by song, we kind of pieced together what instruments would make sense to serve the song. I think that's kind of kind of how we pieced arrangements together.

Giddens: Yeah, we were in Louisiana, we worked with Dirk Powell, who's a got a lovely, very small studio and it's kind of a built out of a very old, one room house that was once owned by a Creole family nearby. And it's just got all this history to it and he was great to work with, in that he was really very much setting up the sounds and then we just got in there and just did our thing… It was a very much a kind of fostering of like; 'I want what you want.' You know? 'I just wanna make it sound really good,' And so that it became a very safe space and it was a space where we all just felt very comfortable to, "oh and let me try this banjo or that or do that." And we weren't afraid to put electric guitar on and we weren't afraid to put modern instruments on it because it's not a historical record. It's something inspired by histories and inspired by these instruments and we wanted to use those sounds just because that's what we play.

Russell: We're all multi-instrumentalists, as well. We all do play banjo, different banjos, each of us. Rhiannon plays a fretless minstrel banjo, I play a five string, gut-string banjo, Leyla plays a tenor banjo, Amythyst plays a steal string. So we all have different banjos, but we also play other things. Amythyst is an incredible guitarist, Leyla is a classically trained phenomenal cellist. I tootle along on the clarinet and plink on the Ukulele [laughs humbly] and Rhiannon plays like eight to 25 instruments as far as I can tell-

Giddens: I play also fiddle [laughs humbly].

Russell: So we all, you know, we were kind of bringing all our little babies into the project as well.

McCalla: I think it's also that the banjo, like despite how much research we've done on the history of the Banjo, the Banjo is a modern instrument and it is relevant to the conversation of, 'what is folk music and what is American music?' I think the banjo is essential to that conversation. We're looking back at the past, but the music is for today.

What types of conversations are you hoping listeners will have from experiencing this album?

Giddens: Well, I'd like to think that maybe people that are possibly on the fence with the whole... I think this will really be helpful for the people that are like, "Well, isn't racism over? We elected a black president. Isn't racism done?" I think this is a record for people that are asking that question and these subjects are difficult to talk about just face to face. You can talk about it academically with other academics but when you talk to a person that doesn't know the history... A lot of people don't necessarily understand it or people get too upset and don't want to talk about it. Like they kind of go into like a bit of an emotional crisis of either not wanting to hear about it or being defensive.

And so music has a way of disarming people. It's like sugar for the medicine, if you will. You know, these are these harsh realities of things that happened. Because these things happened, this is why things have evolved the way they have, socially, in our culture. This is a way to to disarm people and allow them to think and realize, "oh, this is why we still need to talk about this," you know? Because we're all sort of wrapped in this trauma of that part of our history that still affects how we interact with each other and the kind of legislative policies that we make and all those kinds of things that affects that, whether people see it or not. And hopefully with this record, people can maybe start thinking about it and having that conversation.

The album's liner notes serves as an emotional, historical and contextual companion to the album, and the song by song information is very insightful Can you talk about how they support the music?

Giddens: Well, the liners were collaboration. I wrote the essay.

Russell: It's a great essay.

Giddens: I got together the bibliography, I really wanted people- I mean the problem is that people forget that something always comes from something else. So knowledge is always coming from a place and I have such a respect and such a debt to the scholars who really found such amazing, you know, facts and figures and put them all together. And especially nowadays, these incredibly sensitive, like really, really just well done books. And so I wanted people to know where to go, you know and also to say this is where I got my information from, because I'm not making any of it up and I don't want credit for that.

And then I asked the ladies to give what they would want people to know most about each song, and Dirk wrote something. I just think it's important also to acknowledge him, all of the folks at the Smithsonian Folkways, most of which are white dudes. There is a relationship with allies going on here and I think that that's really important because, in this day and age, there's a lot of kind of, us versus them and I'm like, the only way forward really is to accept the platform that's given to you and the help that comes along with that and then you say your thing. It was like we weren't in any way needing anybody to help us say what we wanted to say, we just needed the space to do it.

So it's really important, I think, to acknowledge that, and to say, "This is how we can work together and not by you guys writing our story, but by you guys letting us have the space to write our story." And in this day and age, that's what it takes, and that's okay. You know what I mean? That's the way to turn it around. It's not like, "No, we don't need your help." It's like, "No, actually, because of the behemoth that we're shifting, it's going to take that." It's going to take the handout and then, "thank you. I got it now." You know what I mean? "Thanks for giving us the space." So I just think that's really important to say, and I'm glad that the Smithsonian has the budget to put liner notes in [laughs].

Russell: And I think, something that you said, this idea of allyship and moving forward and we move forward together. It's a family, it might be a dysfunctional, broken family, but it's a family. This country is still very young and its strength is also where the fault lines can, you know, when there's fear-mongering going on, those fault lines can crack and break and people can have the illusion of some sort of inseparable gulf between themselves and someone they perceive as other. But as Rhiannon's other album posits, there is no other and it's a we, you know, it's a we, and we have to figure out how to talk to each other.

And you know, we were talking about so many of these songs, the reason we wrote them and the way that we connect with them emotionally ourselves, it's a lot of them are trying to make things personal. It's personal, it's not academic, it's not dusty, it's not ancient, dead history, it's personal, it's present. Empathy comes from being able to imagine yourself, your child, your family in that situation, in a given situation. And that's what our hope is, that we're building empathy and sharing empathy and being more empathetic ourselves and I think that is the only way forward.

McCalla: I think it's also so important to talk about the strength of black women in this country and worldwide, really. Because a lot of the time we talk about the victimization of black people, and I think that that's certainly part of the story, but it's not the whole story. And black women have been makers and markers of social change in the United States for centuries, at this point. So, I just think this album is a part of that. And I don't see any other completely black groups at the Newport Folk Festival, for example, you know? And so, it's a step forward. You have to start with one foot in front of the other.

Yola Ascends To 'Walk Through Fire' & Become The Queen Of Country Soul | Newport Folk 2019

GRAMMYs

Molly Tuttle

Photo: Daniel Mendoza/Recording Academy

News

Molly Tuttle On 'When You're Ready,' Her Modern Nashville Bluegrass Classic | Newport Folk 2019

Facebook Twitter Email
Hot off four nominations for this year's International Bluegrass Music Awards, Tuttle took time to talk with the Recording Academy at Newport Folk Fest about her groundbreaking debut album & more
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Jul 27, 2019 - 5:47 pm

Bluegrass master Molly Tuttle continues to accumulate accolades. Last year she was named Guitar Player of the Year at the International Bluegrass Music Awards, the first female ever to receive the honor, and just this week she received four nominations for this year's IBMAs, including Female Vocalist, Guitar Player and Song of the Year, all before clearing her first quarter-century. But what's striking about Tuttle, beyond her staggering talents, is her authenticity as an artist and a human being.

Molly Tuttle On Newport, "Million Miles," More

Born into a bluegrass family band in Northern California, Tuttle relocated to Nashville not long ago, where she'd write all the songs for her debut LP, When You're Ready. The album blossoms from her deep bluegrass roots and blooms into a sound all her own, with sweet dashes of pop, weeping streaks of Americana and the simple sincererity of country.

Backstage at this year's Newport Folk Festival, we caught up with Tuttle to talk about When You're Ready, working with GRAMMY-winning producer/engineer Ryan Hewitt, what it means to be a strong female role model and much more.

Let's start with Newport Folk Festival. It's your second time here. What do you think makes this festival special?

This festival is so historically incredible. I grew up listening to folk and bluegrass, and so many of my heroes have played on the stages here and have had really historic musical moments. I remember seeing footage of Bob Dylan going electric here for the first time and Pete Seeger, of course, playing here and Joan Baez, and also bluegrass people like Ralph Stanley. So I think the legacy of this festival, it's always been pushing the boundaries and it's always been really inclusive to tons of different styles, which is why I think the audiences here are so incredible, because they get exposed to so many different styles of music. And it just feels like a really welcoming and really special event.

Is there anybody on the bill that you're excited to see?

Today I'm really excited to see Kacey Musgraves. And I just watched part of I'm With Her earlier, they're always incredible. I think Maggie Rogers is playing this weekend; I've never seen her before, so I'm really stoked for her. I haven't downloaded the app yet, I need to do that and really plan out my schedule.

More: Backstage At Newpork Folk Festival's 60th Anniversary

Let's talk about When You're Ready. It's officially your debut album, but as your career and life have been centered around music, and I'm curious how you feel about it now that it's out. Also, what do you think you accomplished with this project?

I think I've just taken my music a step further in the direction of really having it feel genuine to who I am, including all my different influences. I grew up playing bluegrass, but I've always listened to so many different styles of music, and with this record I really just wanted to follow my muse wherever it took me with songwriting and then build the album around the songs. To not try to stay in one particular style of music or keep with one kind of instrumentation, but really just follow what the songs wanted and what I thought would be best. I think I achieved that. I think it's a lot different than all the music I've made in the past, and it's been fun playing the songs on the road with a totally different band, it feels really reenergizing to me.

What was it like working with Ryan Hewitt on the album? He's new to Nashville, and he's done all sorts of rock projects.

It was amazing working with Ryan, we instantly connected. We met at one of my shows in Nashville and talked for only a couple of minutes, and he was telling me about all these bands he'd produced, engineered and mixed. He'd worked with [GRAMMY-winning super-producer] Rick Rubin a lot, with Blink-182 and Red Hot Chili Peppers, also the Avett Brothers. And it felt like he was just naming all these bands that I listened to at different ages of my life, and I was totally fangirling about all of it, like, that's amazing. But beyond that, when we kept talking further, we really just connected about different things we loved about music and about our favorite bands and favorite records. It really flowed well with and we work together really well.

Is there a song on the album, maybe "Million Miles," that you want to talk a bit about how you wrote it?

"Million Miles" is the first track on the record, and that one came about through my friend Steve Poltz, who's a great singer/songwriter and lives in Nashville as well. We were writing together a bunch one summer, the other song we wrote on the album together was "Don't Let Go."

One day we had finished writing a couple of songs, and I had known Steve had written a bunch of incredible songs with Jewel back in the '90s; they wrote "You Were Meant For Me" and a bunch of other really incredible songs that ended up on her records. So we'd finished up the writing session for the day, and he said, "Hey, I just remembered the song that I started writing with Jewel over 20 years ago, and we never finished it." They had a verse and a chorus, and he played that for me, and I recorded it on my phone and he was like, "Maybe you would want to take this and finish it."

So I did. A couple months later I sat down, and the song was kind of haunting me because I instantly really loved the song, and I was a little intimidated to try to write another verse. But I sat down and finished the song and sent it back to him, and he said he really liked it, and I knew I really wanted to record it on the album. I had to get Jewel's permission somehow, but I didn't really know how to get in touch with her, so I asked Steve if he could send my version of the song to her.

He did, and I didn't hear back. She wasn't really responding back to the song. I found out later she had been on a meditation retreat for the whole time we were trying to get in touch with her, so she wasn't checking her phone. Steve actually just decided to tell me it was okay with her, which I found out a year later. He had never heard back, but then months later, she eventually heard it and really liked it. Luckily, it was totally fine with me recording it and we got to play it. The three of us played it at a festival earlier this summer at Telluride Bluegrass Festival. That was really cool and really special.

Talk about a full circle moment.

Yeah, it was cool.

I want to ask you about the IBMAs. First of all, congratulations on the nominations.

Thank you.

And last year you became the first female to win Guitar Player Of The Year. We talk about gender issues a lot within the music industry. I'm curious how it feels for you to have that distinction as the first female guitar player to win that award.

Yeah, it felt really, really important to me. That was probably one of the biggest things that has happened to me in, I guess, my musical life or career. It felt really special to win that award because I've been a part of the bluegrass community and have grown up in that world. So to feel the whole community lifting me up in that way was really special, and it was just really meaningful to me to be a woman playing lead guitar. Sometimes it doesn't really dawn on me that there aren't a lot of other women playing lead guitar. It's always just felt really natural to me to play guitar. It's something that's really important to me to hopefully get more girls playing guitar. I studied guitar in college and I was always the only female in my classes.

I think it's kind of a combo of women who play guitar historically haven't really been recognized in the way that men have, their legacies have kind of been erased in a way. But I also think that there are fewer women playing guitar because we're not encouraging it as much as we encourage boys to pick up a guitar, maybe. I really hope that changes in the coming years and hopefully, if a girl sees me or sees other women playing guitar and being recognized, that'll encourage them to pick up a guitar too.

Back to the album; the songs were all written in Nashville, right? What about that city do you think added a specific touch of spice to this record?

Yeah, I think Nashville is just so full of songwriters, and it was fun in the first few years that I lived there. I just would reach out to anyone I knew, really, who I loved their songs or I knew they wrote a bunch of songs, and it was fun getting to meet so many new people through writing songs together. I think I wrote in ways that I wouldn't naturally have written on my own. And it was cool to see how other people worked with songwriting.

Nashville is such a collaborative city. The music community is just so intertwined, and everyone's kind of working with each other and supporting each other, which I felt right away when I moved there, that was really cool. I think this album kind of represents that because I had a lot of friends that I wrote with for it and I brought in a lot of friends living in Nashville to play on it. So yeah, the city definitely influenced the record a lot.

This is an optional question, but I was really touched by your article on No Depression, especially about your history with alopecia.

Oh, thank you. Yeah.

I just really want to point people to that interview, and I would love to know how it felt for you to share that story?

It felt really great. I loved writing about my journey with alopecia and playing at the conference that I went to. It was a conference for all people with alopecia, which is an autoimmune hair loss disease, and it's just something that's been a really big part of my whole life. But I haven't always been open about it with others and with the public and my fans. So it feels really freeing and great to be at a point where I can just share openly with people about it. And it feels like I've let the world see this other part of myself that I used to keep hidden, that I would only share with people I knew really well. But now it feels cool to get to share that with everyone.

That's great. I'm sure it'll inspire a lot of people to be themselves.

Yeah, I hope so.

I want to ask you about a big issue in music and entertainment; mental health. A lot of artists are under a lot of pressure, which can be difficult to cope with. I'm curious what you do to stay grounded and what your processes is for staying mentally healthy.

That's a good question. I think that's something I'm still learning, because it is challenging when you're traveling and you have all the pressure. I felt it a lot with having my first record come out, I was putting all this pressure on myself. But then, as you develop a team of people, you're feeling outside pressure as well. I found that seeing a therapist regularly when I'm off the road is really helpful, and there's a few different groups. There's MusiCares, which helps musicians afford mental health services, and there's other groups that do similar things. I've done meditation, which always helps me stay grounded on the road, if I can make myself get in the routine of doing it, which isn't always easy. Those two things have been big for me.

Do you have any dream co-write collaborators out there? Are there any artists that you'd really like to get in a room with?

Oh, yeah, there's a lot. I grew up just obsessed with Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, so both of them are huge songwriting inspirations to me. So they would be probably my biggest dream collab.

I've been working on the crosspicking that he does recently.

I love his playing. That really influenced me as well.

What is next for you? You've got the debut that you're touring on, what else are you looking at down the road?

We have some festivals, we're doing Pilgrimage Festival later this Summer. We're doing a little run in Colorado and we have a couple of festivals and tours in the works for this Fall. Going to IBMA, of course, for the award show, and then I'm playing there [in Raleigh] that weekend. We'll be doing the AmericanaFest, which happens in Nashville every year. it's gonna be a busy Fall full of tours and festivals and different events, but it'll be a lot of fun.

Charley Crockett's Walk Through 'The Valley': "That's What Artists Do" | Newport Folk 2019​

GRAMMYs

Robyn Hitchcock

News

Robyn Hitchcock On Nashville Living, His 'Planet England' EP, John Lennon's Legacy & Making "Beatles Music"

Facebook Twitter Email
The delightfully eccentric singer/songwriter also discusses working with XTC's Andy Partridge, his cinematic single "Sunday Never Comes" and what other new projects he's got hidden up his colorful sleeve...
Nate Hertweck
GRAMMYs
Dec 8, 2019 - 3:34 pm

Chances are, you've never met anyone quite like Robyn Hitchcock. The beloved British singer/songwriter has spent the better part of the last five decades earning a sort of self-adjudicated PhD in all things rock and roll, poetry, folk, America, philosophy, the human condition, psychedelia and, of course, the Beatles.

"If there was a genre called 'Beatles music' rather than called '60s pop or psychedelia or something, that would be what I play," Hitchcock said. "There are other influences there, but the harmonies, the guitars, the tempos, the sounds, essentially, in my head anyways, [come from the Beatles]."

But don't let Hitchcock's reverence for the Fab Four fool you – he's one of the most imaginitive and original artists of his generation, which is saying a lot for someone who came up in the hotbed of '60s rock. From his early–and highly influential–work with the Soft Boys in the mid-'70s to his impressive catalog of 21 albums, either solo or backed by incredible bands such as the Egyptians and the Venus 3, Hitchcock has consistently released records that inspire the imagination, delight the ear and defy the norm.

These days, Hitchcock calls Music City, U.S.A. home, and plays with the aptly named Nashville Fabs. He's also recently diversified his psychedelc folk portfolio, penning the haunting number "Sunday Never Comes" for the remarkable Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke 2018 movie Juliet, Naked, and releasing a new collaboration EP with XTC's Andy Partridge just a few months ago titled Planet England.

The Recording Academy had the surreal honor of speaking with Hitchcock over the phone from his home in Nasvhille to hear about his ongoing project with Partridge, his love for the Beatles debates, John Lennon's looming legacy, and why what he's working on next is keeping him "incrediby busy."

By moving to Nashville, you bring an eclectic flair to its ever-widening creative scene. But what has living there brought to your life?

Well, it's brought great people to play music with. And you can also get anywhere in the bloodstream of the United States and Canada, anywhere east of the Rockies in about two hours by plane, which is fantastic. It's a very good place to tour from. Touring the States is my job, it's what I do for a living.

But I think all of the recent recordings I've done have been here with other people based in Nashville, and it's a joy that a great bunch of people just come around and run through songs in your living room. And then you find some other place to play, and then you can do a show or make the record. I haven't been in a community, such as small local, specific community of people all engaged in the same thing, since I was at what y'all call high school in my teens.

I see, regularly, people that do the same thing as me, and that I work with and play with. There was a little bit of that in the Soft Boy days in Cambridge, which was another small scene, but [Nashville] is bigger than that, much more professional. Very few musicians make it out of Cambridge alive. And Cambridge, U.K., it tends to kind of eat its own sons and daughters. But Nashville, it's a great hive. People are swarming, taking off and landing and get to the airport and it says, "Welcome to music city!" I love that element. It is great.

Being surrounded by songwriters like that, has it changed your writing process?

No. No, not at all. I haven't done that thing of getting into a cage with another songwriter and trying to co-write. Nashville wears a Stetson for publicity purposes, but all kinds of music goes on here. I think the commercial end of it is still quite country-ish. And my connection to country music really doesn't go any further than "Sweetheart Of The Rodeo" by the Byrds, which I love and gave me a crash course in some elements of country, but it doesn't influence me on the whole. Every so often I'll come up with a kind of pastiche country song, but I don't have to be in Nashville to do that. I think the last one I wrote, my last faux country song was written in Norway and probably the one before that, I was living in London. Being out here hasn't made me any more twangy.

"Nashville wears a Stetson for publicity purposes, but all kinds of music goes on here." -Robyn Hitchcock

Yes, I thought I heard it for a couple notes of twang on your new EP with Andy Partridge, Planet England, but I was mistaken. Maybe I was looking a little too hard for the Nashville influence, but I'd love to ask you about that project, too. You've said it could have been made any time in the past 53 years. Why was now the time for you and Andy to do this together?

I think because of the stage in our life cycles that we're at. We actually wrote those songs and did the basic recordings 12 years ago. We were in our early-to-mid-50s, but we didn't finish it off until last year for a whole variety of reasons.

I think Andy and I probably were quite suspicious of each other when we were young indie rockers, and then we were kind of both on the alternative charts in the States in the 1980s. By the time we were over 50, I think we were kind of able to approach each other really. Now we're heading into our late 60s. I go around to his house in Swindon when I'm back in Britain, which is fairly often. It's just down the road from my sister. So I could easily see a day's gone where I can meet him in Swindon and get back to Bath. And I've got country roots anyway, so you know, it's my parallel life. It's two old psychedelic pensioners rocking away in a shed in a back garden. It's just everything that Americans probably dream of, these quaint little Brits in some damp shed in a backyard with primitive equipment.

But actually Andy has the equivalent of the entire firepower of Abbey Road's Studio One in his shed and has always maintained it completely state-of the-art sonic libraries. So he's capable of summoning out any kind of sound that we want for our proto-psychedelic music. We're two guys who had been 17 when the Beatles broke up, still looking for that missing Beatles album. And so we're sort of basically trying to make it ourselves. I mean both of our careers have been that to some extent. And we think that the Dukes of Stratosphear [Partridge's band] really nudged it.

When I make a rock record or I play with a band, it's always some kind of basically playing Beatles music, and there are other influences there, but the harmonies, the guitars, the tempos, the sounds, essentially, in my head anyways is just kind of- If there was a genre called "Beatles music" rather than called '60s pop or psychedelia or something, that would be what I play and largely what Andy plays and, As we're getting the arc of our careers, we're getting to the point where that's what we really like making. So fingers crossed, two songs into another project and I'm supposed to see him in Britain at the end of next month so we'll see what we can do.

The Beatle gene runs deep…

Well you know, again, it's what people have in common. I've got this show tomorrow night with my band the Nashville Fabs. They're all Beatles freaks, and we do a ton of Beatles encores with guest singers, and I'm doing one. Everyone just disappears into the corner of their own mind trying to work out whether something is a major-seventh or a relative minor-third. Is it a minor-sixth or is it actually a seventh of the relative-fourth? I mean, it's fantastic watching people debating and playing. Now they've all got the Beatles on their phones, and they just sort of hold the phone up to the microphone, and we can all hear this transistor radio sound, on whatever it is, "You Won't See Me," or something. "I think it's a minor-" "No, it's not actually, it's-" "Oh, gosh, they're singing a D over B or is it a B over D?" You know, nobody's ever completely sure. I love that, they get excited about defining it.

Yeah, it's like one, big, first chord of "Hard Day's Night." Everybody's going to be debating what it is until the end of time.

It is! It's the library in Alexandria that the Romans burnt down, the repository of all human knowledge, hanging on the first chord of "Hard Day's Night."

Well, we're coming up on the anniversary of John Lennon's death [Dec. 8, 1980]. I thought maybe you could say something about what John, specifically, meant to you.

John Lennon, to myself and probably millions of other kids, including probably Andy Partridge, was a sort of an elder brother, you know, he was the cool, daring, kick-ass, wise-but-foolhardy older brother, the one who took the risks, the one who went out and got hit, the one who challenged authority, but also the one who had success, you know, the trappings of success. You could think, "Oh wow, John Lennon's got a house. John Lennon's got a plane. John Lennon's got a beautiful wife. John Lennon's got a drug habit. John Lennon's paranoid. John Lennon's beautiful. John Lennon's falling out with Paul McCartney. You can look at anyone you admire and the way they are on a pedestal, you can never be them. In another way, they're just like you, if somebody's too alien, they're very hard to kind of connect with, you know?

And I think there's that thing about idols with feet of clay. I think people do want a vulnerable hero, and John was just that. He was vulnerable, and in the end he was killed. How's vulnerable is that? It was awful. I am still grieving Joan Lennon much more than I grieve my parents. And you know both of them lived a natural lifespan. I mean there's so much now for John Lennon to live up to, that if he came back, he couldn't. Since he's died, he's been the good cop. McCartney's had to be the bad guy because he lived on. It's been "St. John" for nearly 40 years and you know, he obviously wasn't.

But he, as Richard Lester [director of 'Hard Day's Night' and 'How I Won The War,' both featuring Lennon] said, he made you care about him. I think he's a real emotional touchstone. The Beatles always make me feel very human. A lot of people I like, Captain Beefheart or Syd Barrett, they're kind of elsewhere, or David Bowie, there is more of a kind of, "I'm outside of this human orbit. I'm not down there in the mud with you lot. I'm somewhere apart." And Bob Dylan, you know, they're kind of insightful, mythical creatures on the edges of things. The Beatles are right in the center, and John was right in the center of the Beatles. And then he couldn't keep it together, couldn't keep up with Paul, who was actually probably tougher than him, but didn't get the knocks. John was the ice-breaker, he was the one who started it, but also [got knocked].

But I also don't think John was better than Paul, you know. I think it works because they were so evenly matched. And then George, became as evenly matched as them, and it was too much, a mouth with too many teeth in it, time for them all to leave home. But the tension on that journey is sort of, John starting it, and then Paul coming up, and then George coming up – what that did to them still produced incredible records. I love the Beatles. Really. Lennon could rubbish the myth all he wanted. It doesn't really matter what you are, it's what people think you are, especially once you've gone. It was for him to demolish the Beatles, but even he couldn't really, the myth is as strong as ever. And you know, as you can see, I have a lot to say about John Lennon.

Indeed. It's a tough time every year when this anniversary comes around to remember that loss.

It's awful and I feel for Yoko [Ono], and Julian [Lennon], and Sean [Lennon] because it's a personal loss for them. And for the rest of us, we're all sort of projecting, a person we never knew but had a relationship with.

Absolutely.  I also want to ask you about "Sunday Never Comes," specifically the new video you've made, which leaves you with a very beautiful and disconnected feeling, much the way the song does. You wrote it for a film, but how did it feel to have the song survive that process, and kind of come back to you in this way with the video?

We deliberately decided to do a proper recording of it because the only thing that was out was my demo for the Juliet, Naked movie, and I really liked the way Ethan Hawke sang it, but I wanted to see what it'd be like if I did it properly. So I recorded it with the Nashville Fabs, and then our friend Jeremy [Dylan] actually did that video. He was our roommate for a while, and he very sweetly makes these videos for us. He made that in Sydney. My partner Emma Swift, who sings with me sometimes and is working on her first full-length record here in Nashville – in fact we're doing some recording in LA next week – Emma's in there as my kind of- I'm this artist in an abandoned apartment somewhere. Nobody's decorated since the 1960s. Somehow the electricity is still connected, and I'm watching obsolete programs on dead televisions, and then Emma appears, my muse, but I can't get at her. She's somewhere else across the world looking desolate.

Most of my videos have always had some humor in them. I don't like taking things that seriously, I guess. I just think there's always got to be a laugh in there somewhere, or it's- Life is pretty unbearable [laughs]. And this one, we didn't put any jokes in. There's nothing funny in there at all. It's just me. I start drawing her at one point, and then I see her on the telly, but it's very unresolved. Sunday never comes, and Emma never turns up, whatever Emma represents, my enigma, my muse. But it's quite a sad one for me, but I'm sure whatever I do next will be a million laughs. [laughs]

Robyn Hitchcock performs "Mad Shelley's Letterbox"

Well, you latest LP [2017's self-titled album] was not only your 21st album, it was one of your best. What are you working on next? What are your goals and interests these days?

Well, whatever I put out, if I put out a 22nd one, I want it to be as good as the 21st. So right now I'm rather avoiding that by working with Andy and working on Emma's record, and whatever I've actually written. I never write the songs that I want to write. I write the songs that appear. "Sunday Never Comes" was a commission. But even then I didn't know what I was going to write. They just said, "Write a Robyn Hitchcock song." So that's what popped up. So what I've got lying around or what I'm working on is a collection of piano songs, rather somber piano songs. And I guess when Emma's record is done, because I'm part of that, I'm part of the hive mind working on that, guitar and arrangements. And once Andy and I are well into the Partridge record, hopefully next year, I will start recording these piano songs.

"I never write the songs that I want to write. I write the songs that appear." - Robyn Hitchcock

I bought a four-track cassette machine and a reel-to-reel. I want to do it on hissy, compressed tape with tape delay so it sounds like something that was done years ago. I mean, I know Elliott Smith was doing it 20 years ago, there's nothing new about retro sounding. But kind of how I used to take demos in the 1980s, I want to kind of get a sound that's all my own before I bring anyone else in. And then, you know, it might be a long time before anything comes out, but I'm totally working on it. And I've got lots of other projects, visual stuff. I'm supposed to be doing some paintings, and I'm got a collection of lyrics with illustrations. That's probably going to be the next thing to be "on sale," if you like.

So I'm incredibly busy. You wouldn't think so, but actually there's a hell of a lot going on. Plus, I play a hundred cities a year and I have to get to them all. So I've got L.A., Chicago, New York before New Year's and then it all starts up again.

Robyn Hitchcock will be playing at Largo at the Coronet in Los Angeles on Friday, Dec. 13, and tickets are available here.

WATCH: Robyn Hitchcock Talks With Portia Sabin About Touring, Songwriting, Rock & Roll And More...