Category Archives: My Back Pages

Pairing Tom Brosseau with Modern Art

The last time I went to an art museum by myself was probably never. I can recall middle school field trips, romantic dates on Sunday afternoons, and slouching through exhibitions in pack formation with my kids who were neither bored nor overly enchanted. With the youngest now off to college and my empty nest being the new norm, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan on a hot summer night seemed in order.

Times have changed since my being-dragged-to-the-art-museum days, and I hadn’t anticipated a sea of selfie-stick-wielding tourists more interested in taking pictures than looking at them. For my part, it felt right to detach aurally by pumping Tom Brosseau’s music into my ears on a continuous loop, as soon as I walked through the door.

I’ve always suspected that I don’t behave properly at museums. Some people stand in front of a painting for what seems like an ungodly amount of time, staring at it until their eyeballs slither over their cheeks and onto the floor. Others like to read the little cards that have the name of the artist listed, when and where they were born and died, the name of the artwork and what they used to create it (“olive oil and burnt sienna sage on bleached linen with Albanian mud, lamb’s wool, and distilled gin”).

I, meawnhile, prefer a method of migratory motion and furtive glances, and Brosseau provided me with a soundtrack that served to enhance the visual experience by adding thoughtful lyricism, unexpected chord and rhythmic transitions, and shimmering under-production, all around a single microphone.

If you don’t know Brosseau, you should know that neither did I until I saw him at last year’s Newport Folk Festival, performing in a variety of configurations. He is a mainstay of John Reilly and Friends, which usually includes Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond on vocals and a bunch of other folks who slip in and out as they are able. At the Watkins Family Hour post-festival show, he performed solo and also did a few songs with Reilly. At some point Sean and Sara Watkins made it a quartet.

Looking in the window from far across the continent, I’m imagining that there is a strong alliance between both of the Friends and Family collectives with a cadre of Los Angeles-based players that appear on each other’s albums, perform together at shows, sing each other’s songs, are tapped into the art and film circles, and telegraph dotted lines of connectivity to other like-minded musical communities throughout the globe.

Brosseau is a California transplant originally from North Dakota, and trying to pin down an accurate discography proves to be a challenge. A friend has provided me with a make-believe digital box full of uncredited songs that come from several sources. There’s the Les Shelleys album on FatCat Records with partner Angela Correa, Brousseau’s seven-inch single of Delmore Brothers’ tunes with Reilly, the Grand Forks project produced by Gregory Page and John Doe, featuring Hilary Hahn on vocals, and his solo Grass Punks album, which Sean Watkins produced. I suppose I could leave you with lots of links, but I think it’s much more fulfilling to strike out on your own as if panning for gold.

Listening to Perfect Abandon while letting my eyes wander over a disconnected collection of modern artwork by artists ranging from Yoko Ono to Andy Warhol, turned out to be a perfect union. This is music rooted in the traditional, yet pushed beyond the borders to allow something new to bubble up. With Brosseau’s album, my ears heard the footfalls of both Woody Guthrie and Lou Reed; the lone prairie met the metropolis. It was a wonderful choice for the evening and, by any measure, it was a most excellent pairing.

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

1975 Rewind: Pet Rocks & Bruce to Disco Tex & His Sex-O-Lettes

I doubt that anyone could have missed the news this week that, 40 years ago, Bruce Springsteen released his Born to Run album. Somebody somewhere was working hard behind the scenes, getting the word out. Stories popped up all over major television networks and cable channels, national magazines, local newspapers and morning shows, trade publications, websites, social media, and blogs. There were the usual suspects like Rolling Stone and Billboard magazines, as well as the unexpected mentions at Fox Sports and the Absolute Punk website.

I was 23 in 1975, and living in Philadelphia, which was close enough to Freehold and Asbury Park that we considered Springsteen a local boy. His first two albums were played in heavy rotation on our FM radio stations. He performed often in the area, up and down the mid-Atlantic coast. And in February of that year he and the band delivered a spellbinding set at Bryn Mawr’s famed folk club, The Main Point. It was broadcast live on WMMR, was instantly bootlegged, and, remarkably, is still readily available in both the US and UK on a large internet marketplace that begins with the letter A. And you can stream it on the ‘Tube. This clip was shot later that same year in London and the band was still raw and rockin’.

Although my long-term memory is usually laser sharp, when it comes to the mid-’70s, I admit to having a musically blank slate. I suppose we can just chalk it up to high times and one too many Dead concerts, but today I refreshed my brain by scanning all the releases from 1975. I also looked at the singles and album charts and read back issues of the industry trades. It took a little time of sifting through the mud to spot the gems.

The first release of that year was from Elvis Presley and the last in December was from the Bay City Rollers. The number one song was “Love Will Keep Us Together” by The Captain and Tennille (backed by The Wrecking Crew — catch the fabulous documentary film of the same name). At the bottom of the Top 100 for the year was….wait…I’ll get to it in a sec or two.

On a more roots music tip, a few artists released not just one, but two albums. Dylan had Blood on the Tracks and also The Basement Tapes with The Band. Emmylou Harris brought out Elite Hotel and Pieces of the Sky. Richard and Linda Thompson offered Hokey Pokey and Pour Down Like Silver. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen, Chip Taylor, and Joan Baez each delivered their highest charted albums. There were solo albums from Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, John Fogerty, Stephen Stills, and two from Neil Young.

John Prine, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, Steve Goodman, Fairport Convention, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, The Strawbs, Steeleye Span. Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie all released albums that year. So did Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Burning Spear, Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, Hot Tuna, Little Feat, and Guy Clark. Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Charlie Daniels, Waylon Jennings, Stanley Brothers, Statler Brothers, Roy Clark, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner, Kris Kristofferson, and Chris LeDoux released new albums and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger entered the world. All things considered, not a bad year at all.

Now if any of you out there remember Sir Monti Rock III, congratulations. You’ve managed to maintain your brain cells much better than I. Sitting at the bottom of the Top 100 was his band, Disco Tex and The Sex-O-Lettes. I share this video for educational purposes only, and please be advised of momentary nudity with Saturday Night Fever flashbacks.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.

Anais Mitchell Writes, Billy Bragg Sings, Trump Strikes Fear

We were sitting at a table in our local diner owned by a Greek family, eating lunch and discussing the latest headlines from the Sunday morning news shows about Donald Trump. His position on immigration had just been posted on his website and I was already stuck on the first of his three core principals: “A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.” Not to be contrary or sarcastic, but has anybody thought about Canada lately? If the issue is safety and security, it would seem that we’d want to protect ourselves on all fronts. But that’s not what a wall is really about.

As the conversation took its course, I began to wonder out loud if putting up a barrier to keep people out might also have the unanticipated effect of keeping people contained. Thoughts of the authorities, in the middle of the night, rounding up families who’ve lived here for decades, whose children were born within these borders and are protected under the Constitution, made me think of the politics and tactics of Germany and the Soviet Union. Their wall was called the Iron Curtain, and the government suspended liberties; jailed dissenters; banned books, music, and art; crawled into isolationism; and created a society with a teensy-weensy segment of the population who lived in luxury and privilege, while the majority toiled in poverty.

About to go off on a long tangential rant, my friend stopped me and asked, “Do you know that song about walls on Anais Mitchell’s album Hadestown? It’s a duet with Greg Brown. Check it out, because I think there might be a thread there for you to pull at.”

And so I did. And so there was.

Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?

Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

Both of my parent’s parents came to America from Eastern Europe sometime around the turn of the last century. When my father died, we heard a story from an older relative who would seemingly know such things that my paternal grandfather escaped from extreme poverty and political oppression in Russia by using falsified documents for his entry through Ellis Island. I imagine it was probably his parents who you could blame for this act of illegal immigration, as he was only four or five at the time. When he turned 18 he enlisted in the U.S. Army and went off into battle during the first world war — the one they called “The War to End All Wars.”

How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?

How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

After my grandfather was discharged from the service, he hung wallpaper for a living and married a woman who worked in a clothing factory for long hours, short breaks, no benefits, and low wages. She later became a union organizer. My father was born, a sister followed, and when the Great Depression arrived, they lived in a small, two-bedroom house in South Philadelphia. Having a roof over their heads made them pretty lucky, and their good fortune was shared by other relatives. A total of three families that included grandparents, husbands, wives, and lots of children lived together in that little house. Over the years, the family assimilated and thrived, and to my knowledge, none of them were sent to prison or ended up on welfare, and there was not a rapist or murderer in the bunch.

Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children
Who do we call the enemy?

Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

My folks were married just as this country entered the second world war and my dad enlisted in the Air Force. After he completed his service, he used his veteran’s benefits to go to night school and earn a degree in engineering. They saved for years to buy a house in the suburbs using a government-backed mortgage, and with my mom also in the work force, they always took care of our needs, paid their bills on time, felt it a duty and honor to be able to vote or be called to serve on a jury. They were good citizens. Beyond just patriotism, they were grateful to have been born and raised in this country. Their generation, these children of immigrants, called it the American Dream.

Because we have and they have not!
My children, my children
Because they want what we have got!

Because we have and they have not!
Because they want what we have got!
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

José Palazón captured that image I used at the top of this column. Those are African migrants sitting on top of a border fence between Morocco and Spain’s North African enclave of Melilla. I believe it to be a strong visual image as to why and to what lengths economic inequalities force people to move geographically, just as my parent’s parents did.

As I stare at that photo and listen to the words of men like Donald Trump who urge us to build walls and deport our own brown-skinned immigrant neighbors, I detest this rhetoric of fear and the media manipulation that fans the fires of hatred. We’re in another political season, and those with large egos and loud voices eclipse our values, sense of reason, and fairness. If you want to make America great, don’t make America hate. Our country and our people deserve better.

“Why We Build This Wall” was written by Anais Mitchell, and performed this past June by Billy Bragg. If anyone is looking for a musical antidote for these times, this might be it.

Anais Mitchell posted these words on her website about Hadestown and “Why We Build This Wall”:

“To me the essence of ‘Why We Build the Wall’ is, it’s meant to provoke the question. Take global warming to its terrifying logical conclusion and imagine part of the world becomes uninhabitable and there are masses of hungry poor people looking for higher ground. then imagine you are lucky enough to live in relative wealth and security, though maybe you’ve sacrificed some freedoms to live that way. When the hordes are at the door, who among us would not be behind a big fence? These conditions exist already, but most of us don’t have to acknowledge them in a real way. I really and truly had no specific place in mind when I wrote ‘Why We Build the Wall.’ People often say, ‘Oh, that’s just like Israel/Palestine, or that’s just like the US/Mexico border,’ and maybe it is, but the song was written more archetypally.”

This was originally published by No Depression, as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column.

Families That Play Together

From The Sound of Music

New York City, August 13, 2015: This past Sunday, I took the train and then a subway to the Upper West Side, walked up and down Broadway picking at piles of books sold by street vendors for a mere dollar or two, and found shade in a plaza at Lincoln Center as I watched Iris DeMent perform songs from her new album. I looked around to see if her husband Greg Brown’s daughter Pieta was in the crowd with her spouse, guitarist Bo Ramsey. But if they were there, I missed them.

During the show, and as Iris sang, I pulled out my phone and tapped a message to a mutual friend of ours from Iowa City, photographer Sandy Dyas. Although we’ve never met face to face, we’ve had casual correspondence from time to time, over the years, and I’ve written about her work and featured it in my articles. Along with all of the people I’ve met through my connection with this particular website and music community, I consider Sandy a member of my No Depression family.

In life, love, law, politics, society, civilization, art, music, literature, and pretty much everything else in this world, there are threads that bind us together. While a dictionary might tell you that there are only three specific types of families, the American Academy of Pediatrics lists eight and sociologists can quickly rattle off over a dozen. Some folks might tell you that there is only one kind of family, but my own definition is much broader.

Be it a coupling of two or a group of thousands, we seem to have the capacity to create connections that can have the same feel and offer the same support system as what a traditional family does. Sometimes it endures, other times it evaporates as quickly as it came together. But whether bloodlines or lifelines, and despite a high rate of dysfunction, families often and unpredictably can produce some amazing results.

When Teddy Thompson came up with the idea of having his family work together to release an album last year, his sister Kami tried to back out. As quoted in the New York Times Magazine, she asked him “Could I be like that one Osbourne who’s not on the show, whose name no one knows?”

Nonetheless, Thompson’s Family is probably one of the best collections of songs ever created through emails, file sharing, and studio magic. It features music that is just simply beautiful, from divorced parents Linda and Richard, nephew Zak Hobbs, Richard’s son Jack from his second marriage, and the reluctant sister Kami with her husband James Walbourne who perform as the Rails. (If you haven’t heard the Rails’ album Fair Warning, run don’t walk.)

Explaining to the Times reporter how and why this album came about, Teddy says: “It was difficult to make it sound like everyone’s together, because we weren’t – which is exactly the way my family is. If anything, that kind of sums up the whole process. It’s trying to bring everybody from wherever they are, in their own little world. And make it sound like we’re a family.”

At the end of this year, when all of the writers and bloggers and reader polls put together their “best of” lists, if they don’t include Pharis and Jason Romero’s A Wanderer I’ll Stay, they will be sadly mistaken. While I tend to keep my distance from such beauty contests, it isn’t hard at all to point to this collection and scream, “This is why I love music,” at the top of my lungs. While I’ve enjoyed the story of how another married musical couple – Pete and Maura Kennedy – met at the gravesite of Buddy Holly, Pharis comes in a close second because she sent Jason a 1928 recording of Tupelo Blues by Hoyt Ming and His Pinesteppers, and they had a wedding three months after. You can read their whole story here, but you should know they live in Horsefly, British Columbia, he is a custom banjo maker, she was the co-founder of Outlaw Social, they were both in The Haints Old Time Stringband, and as a duo they’ve released three near-perfect albums.

For many years, I lived in a small town north of San Diego and attended services and played music on occasion at a small Unitarian congregation in Vista – the town where Sean and Sara Watkins grew up. While it could be a false memory syndrome thing, I’m pretty sure I saw them play, when they were just little people, at some local events.

Ten years ago, all grown up and based in Los Angeles, they created what I like to think of as an ‘Our Gang’ variety show that features an ever-changing cast of characters. We got to see them at last year’s Newport Folk Festival after-party, and it was the highlight of the weekend, which you can read about here.

When they released an album recently, I made the mistake of sampling some tracks on Spotify and stashing it in the virtual file cabinet. On the way to see Iris DeMent, though, I sat on the train and listened to it end to end, start to finish. Brilliant concept, flawless execution. Coming from a man who dwells in the house of shuffle and prefers my music to pop up unexpectedly like a jack in the box, I have to say: you won’t exactly get the concept of The Watkins Family Hour without putting in the time to go all the way. The only family members by blood in this troupe are Sean and Sara. But what’s so special is that, not only are the other musicians in the cousins’ club, but we – the listeners – are in the family too.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Roots Music Journal.

From One-Hit Wonders to State Fairs…Guitar Contraptions to Steve Earle

As it approaches midnight, my thoughtful column on one-hit wonders and signature songs just took a hard left turn — my finger slid across the track pad and landed on a website that spoke of such things as two-chord songs, partial capos, and Liberty tuning. I seriously don’t have time to transgress from the storyline I’ve worked out in my head for the past five days, especially as a deadline looms and the image of an anxious editor refreshing her inbox is imprinted behind my blue eyes. Actually, hazel. And just an hour ago everything was so perfectly clear and linear, from point A to point B.

So as to not throw the baby out with the bath water, my original premise was more a question pondered and posed about whether if, within this big tent of roots music, we had songs that were either bigger than the musician(s) who wrote or performed them, or were so defining that they overshadowed everything else in their repertoire. I researched and studied, read and listened. I considered some examples mostly from the mid-1950s that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Bond, Hankshaw Hawkins, The Weavers, Johnny Lee Wills, and Ferlin Husky before I advanced the Wayback Machine and settled on Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.” I wanted to juxtapose it with Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart.” Do not thank me for sparing you the anguish.

Have you ever been to the Minnesota State Fair? Earlier this week, I flirted with the idea of flying in for a couple of days to visit an old friend and search for deep fried pannekoeken on a stick. Thoughts of quilts, seeds, cows, hogs, and Princess Kay of The Milky Way’s butter sculptures clouded and obscured rational processing as I prepared to hit the buy button on a thousand dollar air-hotel-car package. When in doubt, I pause and play guitar.

Looking into my guitar case, I saw an old partial capo and it reminded me that I needed to get a new one. Amazon Prime whispered my name but I wanted to go one step beyond. The old “one click-two click” took me to the doorstep of Harvey Reid.

It is with fear of public embarrassment that I admit to not having come across this man before tonight, although I have since learned that he performed on a stage at Newport Folk Festival last year with his wife and fiddler Joyce Andersen, and I missed their set by mere minutes. Residing in York, Maine, Reid is master guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, music educator, inventor, and innovator. He has released 32 albums on his Woodpecker Multimedia label, published dozens of instructional music books, and co-wrote the college textbook Modern Folk Guitar. He designed a new type of partial capo (if you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, just go with it), and came up with a unique method for playing and tuning a six-string guitar.

One project that caught my attention as I surfed through what seems like an endless sea of Reid-Andersen websites was The Song Train: 56 Great Two-Chord Songs Anyone Can Play. An 80 page hardbound coffee table book that accompanies a four-CD set. It includes a wide range of music from songwriters such as Dylan, Guthrie, Lucinda Williams, J.J. Cale, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, and Gillian Welch. Released in 2009, Acoustic Guitar magazine interviewed Reid and he shared about this concept that he and Joyce created together as a husband-wife project:

“We sensed a groundswell of interest from people wanting to play music, and we have children now, which really got us thinking about how musical knowledge gets transmitted. We wanted to help pass the torch, and realized that The Song Train was a valuable and unique missing piece in the puzzle of learning that suited our talents as performers and that really would help people get going. If you think really long and hard about it, the idea of The Song Train becomes obvious, though not everybody sees its value instantly. Boomer generation people don’t realize how many of the simple songs that enabled them to start playing music were present in schools and in mass culture, something that is no longer the case. We think it all starts with songs in people’s heads.

We wanted songs that we liked, that were alive and in circulation, and that covered a lot of styles and tastes. We probably could have made a whole bluegrass or gospel Song Train, but we wanted a cross-section, and tried to balance the country, folk, gospel, blues, rock, gospel, folk, etc. We wanted some famous songs, but wanted songs that had some durability, so we skipped topical things like ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and ‘The Beat Goes On.’ Our model was a single person with an acoustic guitar driving the song, so we did that with each song ourselves. Some rhythms are too complex, and we left out a lot of 1 and 2-chord songs that just are not one-guitar songs. ‘Sex Machine’ by James Brown and ‘Heroin’ by Lou Reed are 2-chord songs that did not make the cut, for example.”

Can’t tell you how happy I am that I abandoned that one-hit wonder theme and ended up finding this incredible tool for learning, teaching, and passing down music. Harvey and Joyce will likely be the beneficiaries of some hard-earned money from my wallet that would have otherwise ended up being spent on a day at the Mighty Midway. As far as Steve Earle and “Copperhead Road” goes … did you know it’s a song with only three chords and a capo used on just five of the six strings? Didn’t think so.

An afterword or two: I originally published this on the No Depression website as my Weekly Broadside column under the title Harvey Reid, Joyce Andersen and The Song Train. As it turned out, it didn’t get much traffic and for that I feel terribly sorry. One…because I happen to like this post. Two…Harvey, Joyce and their project create a vehicle to easily hand down tunes from one generation to the next, which I believe to be a worthy endeavor. So in the days that have past, I think that perhaps a new title and a small-budget marketing campaign on social media might help make more folks get to know this couple and their music. If you like this post or more importantly the Song Train project, please pass this on. Much obliged. EE.

Ana Egge and Why I Cry at 2:35

I was not unfamiliar with the name Ana Egge when, on the first of July, I received a communique from a friend of mine that new music from her was on its way. Four years ago I took notice of this woman with an album called Bad Blood, at first, admittedly, because of its connection to Steve Earle. He handled the production, recorded it at Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock, had Ray Kennedy mix it, sprinkled in both his own and ex-wife Alison Moorer’s harmony vocals on a few tracks, and the backup band included Chris Masterson, Eleanor Whitemore, Rob Heath, and Byron Issacs. All that roots music star power aside, what jumped out of my headphones was Egge’s singular voice, clear as a bell, with intelligent songs that offered stories, structure, emotion, and power.

If you missed Bad Blood, you can thank the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t business paradigm that musicians face in this day and age as they try to be heard above all the noise in the aural soup kitchen. Too often great music arrives with so much promise, only to slide past us ever so quietly. We miss so much. It takes strength for an artist to stay the course, but Egge is one who has consistently delivered.

In 1997, when she was only 20 years old and living in Austin, Egge released her debut album, River under the Road. She has not stopped delivering great music since, and now we’re blessed with her eighth album, Bright Shadow.

Just to get you caught up, Egge was raised in a small town of about 50 people in North Dakota, and she also spent time in New Mexico. Her bio quotes her as saying:

“I was taught how to shoot a gun and how to enjoy alfalfa sprouts and tofu, raised by two back-to-the-land hippies. My folks loved the outdoors and eccentric people; I ran around barefoot and learned to ride a motorcycle when I was 5. I grew up with all the time and space in the world.”

While living in Texas, Egge had offers to go out on the road, and she opened for Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Iris DeMent, Shawn Colvin, and Ron Sexsmith. Later she got to share the stage with John Prine, Lucinda Williams, and – yes, this is sort of weird but it’s on her Wikipedia page – Sinead O’Connor. After spending time on the road. she moved back to New Mexico and settled in Brooklyn in 2002. She still lives there today with her wife of seven years and their young daughter.

Sifting through some of the marketing and biographical information about Egge, you start to find quotes like this one from Steve Earle: “Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets.”

Lucinda Williams said she’s “an exceptional songwriter, listen to the lyrics … the folk Nina Simone!”

“An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy,” Mark Miller – a concert promoter and frontman of Spuyten Duyvil – told me. “Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

As I’ve listened to this record over the past several weeks, I’ve come to think of it as a very special project. Egge has said she wanted to do an acoustic album with everyone sitting around a mic, and she self-produced this time around. While Bright Shadow is a collaborative effort with The Stray Birds – Maya De Vitry (fiddle, banjo, vocals), Charles Muench (upright bass, vocals), and Oliver Craven (mandolin, fiddle, slide guitar, vocals) – the cover lists only Egge’s name.

Over email, Egge recently told me: “The Stray Birds approached me as fans a few years ago wanting to back me up live at Folk Alliance [Toronto 2012]. We recorded the album two years ago and their success since then has been marvelous. I actually asked them about billing the album as ‘Ana Egge and the Stray Birds’ after we recorded it, but they didn’t feel that it was right. I had strong arrangement ideas going into it, and I think it would be different if we had co-written or recorded some of their songs.”

After they finished recording, Egge’s mother passed away and she also welcomed the arrival of her daughter. In retrospect, she says, the songs on the album mirror those intense and formative life changes. There is a very soft, warm feeling throughout the album, with layers of delicate textures in the instrumentation, and vocal lines that can go left when you expect them to go right. The tight harmonies that are a hallmark of the Stray Birds’ repertoire envelop and complement Egge’s voice. If you need an additional descriptor, I’ll sum up: stellar songwriting with sophisticated string band instrumentation.

Back in May, there was a video from Bright Shadow posted online for Mother’s Day. Egge wrote the song with Gary Nicholson, and in the description it says that it’s “a tribute to mothers everywhere as well as the divine feminine and possibility of redemption in all of us.” Filmed and directed by Paul Kloss and edited by Amy Foote, “Rock Me (Divine Mother)” features simply Egge and her guitar, interspersed with clips of moms and kids from what I imagine to be home movies.

Rock me in the arms of my divine mother.
Divine mother.
Rock me now.

It’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, but this is the one: A tribute to mothers. Indeed it is. By the time the Stray Birds add their voices to the chorus toward the end, you can tip me over with a feather.

And I cry at 2:35.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression; The Journal of Roots Music.

In Memory of Jillian Johnson

There was another all too frequent feeling of sorrow this week as I read about the victim of a shooting at a movie theater in Lafayette Louisiana. Jillian Johnson, a 33 year old artist and designer who ran the Red Arrow Workshop with her husband Jason Brown, was also a radio DJ and roots music fan. She was the ukulele player in The Figs, a band who Gambit Weekly of New Orleans said “looks like a country-time tea party of pretty girls in pretty dresses, but it rocks, Cajun-style, like a roadhouse full of moonshine and buckshot.”

A former resident of Nashviile, television station WKRN reported on their website of her friendship and support of musician Woody Pines.

Musician Woody Pines met Johnson 10 years ago as he got his start on the streets of New Orleans, hitchhiking from city to city. She first became a fan, and then a friend.

“She posted a photo on MySpace saying, ‘Woody Pines super fan,’ and that was the first time, you know. We were just a small traveling band,” Pines said. “That was touching.”

His group often made trips to Lafayette, Louisiana, to play at the Black Pot Festival, and Johnson hosted them all at her home.

“She put us up, me and my band, always gave us a couch to sleep on; even when there was no couch, just floors,” Pines told News 2. “She was not a native of Lafayette, but people said she made the city cool.”

Pines was glued to the TV last night watching the aftermath of the theater shooting, not realizing Johnson was one of the three people killed until this morning.

“It blew my mind; it made me hold my hands to my face and say no,” Pines said. “I imagine being in that theater for a second.”

Johnson also designed Woody Pines first logo, and the graphics on the band’s first website. She was a musician herself, part of the all-girls string band The Figs.

This is what her husband posted on Red Arrow’s Facebook account, and there’s really nothing else to add other than to say our collective hearts and spirits are broken too, and our thoughts are with all of those who have been touched by Jillian.

Our hearts are shattered. We will love you forever. She was a once-in-a-lifetime gal. A mother, daughter, sister and a truly exceptional wife. She was an artist, a musician, an entrepreneur and a true renaissance woman. She was the love of my life and I will miss her always.

Thank you all for your kind words and offers of support. Our family is together now to mourn our loss. We would appreciate privacy during this time but your messages on outlets like this truly mean the world to us.

Our thoughts are with the family of Mayci Breaux. We mourn with you. And finally our thoughts and prayers are with Jillian’s best friend, who was in the theater with her at the time of the shooting. We love you and we’re wishing you the best!

This was a senseless act and, as is the case with all such acts, there is no playbook, no rules on how to cope. We’re trying our best to pull ourselves together. We’re putting one foot in front of the other. Thank you all. If you have a thought or memory you’d love to share, feel free to do so here or Facebook.

Red Arrow will be closed until further notice. Thank you all for your support and understanding.

The Real Easy Ed

Americana and Roots Music Broadside