I’ve got no idea what the troubadour is actually singing, but what I’m hearing is a whole lot of yearning.
Although he’s been playing these subway stations for months, his image — and that of the entire crowd — suggests a kind of Huck Finn vagrancy, just passing through. His songs ought to be played at a Mississippi Delta crossroads, or by a campfire, or on the porch of a log cabin in the days of yore.
He evokes a distant time and place, but he inhabits a subterranean world of cold lights, dripping pipes, and scurrying rats. He may be yearning for a transient lifestyle, but he’s settled in New York City. The crowd has probably chosen to move to New York too, but the way they dress and the way they respond to the music declares that they are also yearning. Exactly what they are yearning for isn’t clear; the important thing is that it is removed from all the hipster irony, from the disposable cosmopolitanism, from the bustle and heave of city life. They are yearning for wherever the authenticity, the transcendence can be found. As long as they can get there without changing trains again.
Hurray for the Riff Raff’s album “Lookout Mama” comes out TOMORROW and it is bound to be overplayed in these parts shortly thereafter. If you haven’t seen this video we shot of in NOLA on Day of the Dead back in November, take a gander.
And after that, to continue celebrating Levon Helm’s life and mourning his passing, watch this video of Sons of an Illustrious Father covering The Weight at Oberlin College with the excellent Nina Violet. Looks like it was a great show, and they switch off verses so enthusiastically… it made me cry a little bit.
We met Alynda and Yosi of Hurray for the Riff Raff on our New Orleans stop. It was the Day of the Dead, and they joined us on the levee in the Lower 9th Ward to play some music and talk about the culture and community of their adopted city before heading off to a parade to mourn friends lost in the past year. We’ll be posting the interview and a track from their upcoming album (due out May 1) soon, but until then, check out this gorgeous cover of Lucinda Williams’ “People Talkin’.”
As the reality of reaching our Kickstarter goal sets in, our excitement is sort of acting as ambition-steroids… and we’d love to be able to hit a grand slam (sorry for the awful analogy, I am not sports people).
Let me put it differently: We want to go everywhere and talk to everyone. These past three weeks have been incredibly affirming, and not just because we’ve actually raised the money we need to keep this project going and expanding.
We can’t sing enough praise for Kickstarter and what it’s doing for independent creativity, not only as a fundraising tool but as an online community. So many people with so many great ideas - we’ve heard from more people across the country about their local folk music communities and the projects they’re working on since launching than we have since starting Folk to Folk this past summer. We’ve also gotten a ton of recommendations of places to go and people to meet.
So before we ask you to keep sharing our project (because we’ve still got over a week to go and the more we raise the more we can do!), here’s a few blogs, organizers and generally awesome things we’ve found out about this month.
In Brooklyn…
Go Folk Yourself (GFY) is a Brooklyn-based volunteer organization focused on promoting local and independent musicians. GFY accomplishes this goal by recording live performances and producing music videos free of cost. Additionally, we interview the artists and write articles published on our website as a resource to discover local, talented musicians.
In Baton Rouge…
American Thrift is dedicated to building community and supporting creativity by booking, promoting and producing live music and art events in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
We book/promote/produce shows for touring and local artists specializing in non-traditional spaces (art galleries, listening rooms, houses, theaters, etc.) with hopes to break down the artist/audience divide.
In Eugene, Oregon…
A blog/record company/mixtape making/festival throwing institution. We are told they do big things for the Northwest folk scene. Yum.
In New York…
Acoustic Night NY: A monthly unplugged acoustic series showcasing local artists in different amazing New York spaces.
There are just… so many… It looks like we’re on to something.
Folk to Folk has officially started its Kickstarter! Please take a look at our video and share it with friends, family, strangers, strange friends and family, people who love music, your dog, your cat, online acquaintances you’ve never met in real life! We appreciate all the support we can get and we look forward to the next leg of this project! THANK YOU
We spent the better part of last weekend at Ladyfest Boston - a communally organized event dedicated to representing women in music and the arts. Vibes ran high, crowds ran posi, and bands ran loud, with many fitting along the punk/hardcore spectrum. And that’s cool. Punk’s good for a revolution.
Not for nothing, almost all the folk musicians we spoke to on our “tour” told us they were heavily influenced by punk. Punk is the sound made by the energy released when you’re deconstructing an inadequate world. Punk is about possibility. Punk is the soundtrack of a community brought together by politics, passion, and an appreciation for drinking cheap beer and crashing into each other in sweaty basements.
But sometimes people chill out. Or get sad or old, or tired of screaming, or move to neighborhoods with stricter noise ordinances. Sometimes bands break up. And then, sometimes, people start up folk projects.
Cue the Waxahatchee set on Friday.
Waxahatchee is the solo project of Katie Crutchfield, formerly of pop-punk outfit P.S. Eliot. We loved the hell out of P. S. Eliot - the combination of poignant lyrics and pugnacious pop-punk got us so fangirl’d up that after seeing them at The Fest in Gainesville, “Tennessee” became the unofficial anthem of both our road trip and our whole year. (Baby, let’s push our limits.) Unfortunately, the band broke up shortly after moving from Birmingham to Brooklyn. (We paid our respects by road tripping down to Death By Audio for their farewell show.)
Waxahatchee, nostalgically named after Waxahatchee Creek in Crutchfield’s home state Alabama, makes it immediately obvious that Katie was P.S. Eliot’s songwriting half. On stage, her performance was as stripped down as it gets - lyrics, an acoustic guitar, and a whole lot of feelings.
Times must be tough in Brooklyn - the songs on American Weekend (released on Don Giovanni, streaming on Punk News) are way bleaker than anything off last year’s Sadie, and without the accompanying band, there’s a lot less variety in the songs and enough space around the bad-night-gournal lyrics to make us…well, a little worried. But at her best, like on “Grass Stain,” her lyrics hit on a universal magic that reminds me of Conor Oberst circa “June on the West Coast,” (off 1998’s Letting Off the Happiness) and if the Oberst parallel and PS Eliot history is any indication of things to come, upcoming albums may these might grow into songs people know by heart, songs people scribble on their notebooks and put into whatever 2012’s equivalent of the passive-aggressive away message happens to be.
So, is Waxahatchee folk? Depends on your definition. Traditionalists would probably say no - there’s no supplemental Americana-esque instrumentation, and Crutchfield’s voice is more scrappy and sulky than the gentle siren song of the archetypal female folk vocalist. (Though, if you ask us, that’s a plus.) But…if you’re characterizing folk by stripped-down instrumentation, strong storytelling, vulnerability, a sense of place, and an urban longing for simpler times in simpler places, then…folk yes.
American Weekend does mention catfish, whiskey, and Sam Cooke songs, but it’s also so bare-bones that it can really go anywhere from here. Since “June on the West Coast,” Oberst cycled through a number of sounds, before taking the full-on folk plunge with 2004’s I’m Wide Awake it’s Morning, 2007’s Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band record, and 2009’s questionably named Monsters of Folk. At this point, it’s too early to tell if that’s the route Katie’s going to follow. Either way, we’re listening.
Hey all! Thanks a lot to everyone in tumblr-land who’s been keeping up with this.
We’ve been sorting through some footage - it made us misty-eyed and nostalgic for this fall, because that’s how nostalgia works these days. Then it made us determined. We’re about to launch a Kickstarter and then we’re going to put out a documentary short and we’re going to send it to some festivals and also to some people. It’s going to be swell.
In the meanwhile, we’re planting some roots in other corners of the internet. We’re slowly uploading the videos we already have to YouTube, so definitely check those out on the Folk to Folk channel.
And if you haven’t done so already, please “Like” our Facebook page, not only because everyone “likes” to be “liked,” but because we try to post updates and songs and videos by artists we dig on there every now and again. Satisfaction guaranteed! Tell all your friends!
Also, we have more webisode type stuff that we can’t wait to put together, and we’ll post it as soon as we do.
This is a public service announcement from Folk to Folk: listen to American Water by the Silver Jews. Pretend i’m your renegade wise older sister with big ole Zooey Deschanel eyes and i’m imparting some life-changing wisdom. You will not see your future in it but it might change your life or at least your day. You will see Virginia birds flying in threes like background singers and you will see David Berman sitting on a porch talking spiritual with a wandering god over a cold beer and you will smoke a pack of camels and it will not affect your lungs and you will feel easy and you will feel something.
Nina Mashurova, Folk to Folk-er extraordinaire, profiled Gracious Calamity (the first band we interviewed for the project back in June) in this week’s Boston Phoenix. Check it out here.
On the new album, due out this winter, Lee and Wallach stayed true to their folk roots, even laying down a version of “Apple Tree,” but also recorded all tracks digitally and added a more rock-and-roll sound. “Shoes With Laces,” which debuted in November on the Whitehaus compilation Are You in Paradise?, is as fluttery as its accompanying stop-motion video — full of twitchy leaves and tinkling xylophones. Lyrics like “I’d run all your races/you’d make all my wishes/we’d be friends for ages” hit on a theme of both the album’s creation and the DIY scene in general — doing-it-yourself can be tricky, not to mention lonely. It takes a village.
Luckily, Jamaica Plain might be that village. The album, which was recorded at the Episcopal Rhode Island boarding school where Wallach teaches, is full of the JP music community’s collaborative yes-wave ethos. Charlotte Huffman of Welcome Home, Laura Smith of the Woodrow Wilsons, and Regina Peterson of the Points North all came down to sing on the album, while other musician friends were on hand to hang out and offer input. Kindred spirits from out of town were just as important — Josh and Matt Dean and Tara Toms, who run a mobile recording studio called MurderBoats Music Recording, drove over from Pennsylvania to produce and record the album and add instrumentation to many of the tracks
Be sure to listen to the featured track from their new album - “Shoes With Laces” - sure to keep our Boston-bound bones warm until pale green things return… likely, sometime in May.
Folk to Folk is an independent documentary project exploring how contemporary folk music builds communities and creates accessible, participatory spaces across America today. Through a combination of words, photography, audio recording, video, and online media, we've set out to explore different scenes across the country.
We want to share what folk means to those who keep it alive, revive and reclaim it to fit their own personal and communal definitions. Genre classifications are always problematic, especially since disparate influences are everywhere. Some perceive similar values we've seen in folk music to be present in hip hop and punk scenes, and who are we to disagree? We’re simply using folk instrumentation as an organizational thread to follow, looking where the spirit has continued to meet the sound throughout history.
Although there is always an element of nostalgia in folk, there is something new happening here. This is not a revival of the sixties. Contemporary folk communities don’t deify Dylan-esque figures, they encourage a polyphony of voices. Shows are often horizontally organized on the internet, using a network of donation-based all-ages DIY spaces. Vulnerable songwriting and passionate performance strip away the veneer of untouchable hyper-ironic cool that has made a lot of popular music so alienating. Folk music is being used as a tool to connect people with people and empower rather than just entertain.
Take a look at some of the voices, both sung and spoken, that we’ve gathered so far. Please get in touch with thoughts, ideas or recommendations for this project at folktofolk@gmail.com . We value all participation and interaction.
