Steep Canyon Rangers

Heralds of the Carolina sound for more than two decades, Steep Canyon Rangers find themselves in a unique seat at the table for their new release, Morning Shift, due September 8, 2023. On this record, the GRAMMY-winners tell stories that both honor their roots, and expand upon the living art of bluegrass music, all while solidifying their reputation as some of the most influential songwriters in Americana today.     The Steep Canyon Rangers recently recorded their 14th studio album in Bat Cave, NC, at the Hickory Nut Gap Inn, a historical refuge settled near a long-forgotten crossroads of Southern Appalachia. Much like the story of bluegrass music, the conversations surrounding this area are shared, fluid, and greatly affected by a simple matter of perspective. This was the perfect space to feel confident in expanding upon that Carolina sound, the perfect runway to let their well-oiled machine do what it does best- craft stories from the ground up, as a unit.     Hailing from both the Appalachian and Piedmont regions of North Carolina, the Rangers have long held traditional bluegrass paramount, while possessing an exceptional ability to bring it down the mountain, and to incorporate accessible influence from all walks of the region. With the band’s last few albums, they have gained recognition from well beyond the world of bluegrass, earning a reputation as some of the most influential songwriters in Americana today.

Statesboro

Tristan Und Isolde

James McMurtry

A Lone Star sheriff hunts quail on horseback and keeps a secret second family. A mechanic lies among the spare parts on the floor of his garage and wonders if he can afford to keep his girlfriend. A troubled man sees hallucinations of a black dog and a wandering boy and hums “Weird Al” songs in his head. These are some of the strange and richly drawn characters who inhabit James McMurtry’s eleventh album, The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy. A supremely insightful and inventive storyteller, he teases vivid worlds out of small details, setting them to arrangements that have the elements of Americana—rolling guitars, barroom harmonies, traces of banjo and harmonica—but sound too sly and smart for such a general category. Funny and sad often in the same breath, the album adds a new chapter to a long career that has enjoyed a resurgence as young songwriters like Sarah Jarosz and Jason Isbell cite him as a formative influence. As varied as they are, these new story-songs find inspiration in scraps from his family’s past: a stray sketch, an old poem by a family friend, the hallucinations experienced by his father, the writer Larry McMurtry. “It’s something I do all the time,” he says, “but usually I draw from my own scraps.” As any good writer will do, McMurtry collects little ideas and hangs on to them for years, sometimes even decades. “South Texas Lawman” grew out of a line from a poem by a friend of the McMurtry clan, T.D. Hobart. Driven by gravelly guitars and a loose rhythm section, it’s a careful study of a man whose feelings of obsolescence motivate him to take drastic action in the final verse. “Dwight’d stay at our house way back in the ‘70s, when we lived in Virginia. During one visit he wrote this poem about his father’s attitude toward South Texas. He wrote it down on cardboard, and I came across it recently. There was a line about hunting quail on horseback, and that was the seed of the song. I’ve lost the poem since then.” The rumbling title track, a kind of squirrelly blues, features two mysterious figures who appear only to those slipping from reality, yet it’s never grim nor especially despairing. Instead, McMurtry namechecks a “Weird Al” deep cut and depicts a tortured soul who doesn’t have to work a nine-to-five. He finds a defiant humor in the situation at odds with the gravity of the source material. “The title of the album and that song comes from my stepmother, Faye. After my dad passed, she asked me if he ever talked to me about his hallucinations. He’d gone into dementia for a while before he died, but hadn’t mentioned to me anything about seeing things. She told me his favorite hallucinations were the black dog and the wandering boy. I took them and applied them to a fictional character.” Soon McMurtry had enough of these songs for a new record. “It happened like all my records happened. It’d been too long since I’d had a record that the press could write about and get people to come out to my shows. It was time.” What was different this time was the presence of his old friend Don Dixon, who produced McMurtry’s third album, Where You’d Hide the Body?, back in 1995. “A couple of years ago I quit producing myself. I felt like I was repeating myself methodologically and stylistically. I needed to go back to producer school, so I brought in CC Adcock for Complicated Game, and then Ross Hogarth did The Horses & the Hounds. It seemed natural to revisit Mr. Dixon’s homeroom. I wanted to learn some of what he’s learned over the last thirty years.” During sessions at Wire Recording in Austin, McMurtry observed firsthand Dixon’s grasp of digital recording technology as well as his instinctual approach to tracking. “What Don’s really good at is being able to sense when it’s happening. He can hear when it’s going down. If I’m producing myself and I don’t have him, I have to do three takes and then go in and listen to them. Listening to those three takes can take about 15 minutes. So Dixon’s ability to know when it’s happening is crucial, because it can cut 15 minutes out of the day. That can really save a session, because you only have so many hours in the day and only so much energy. Working with McMurtry’s trusted backing band—Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on guitar, Daren Hess on drums, BettySoo on backing vocals—they worked to create something that sounds spontaneous, as though he’s writing the songs as you hear them. They were open to odd experiments, weird whims, and happy accidents, such as the cover of Jon Dee Graham’s “Laredo” that opens the album. It’s an opioid blues: testimony from a part-time junkie losing a weekend to dope. “We were playing a benefit for Jon Dee at the Hole in the Wall there in Austin, and we thought it’d be good if we played one of his songs. We rehearsed the song in the studio, and it sounded good. The drums were ready. We’d already got the sounds up. Might as well record it.” “Laredo” is one of a pair of covers that bookend The Black Dog & the Wandering Boy, the other being Kris Kristofferson’s “Broken Freedom Song.” “I did that one a few weeks after our initial sessions. It was just me and BettySoo, then we added drums and bass later on. Kris had just passed not too long before we recorded it. I guess that’s why I was thinking about him.” Like Hobart’s poem, it’s a bit of inspiration excavated from deep within his own life. “Kris was one of my major influences as a child. He was the first person that I recognized as a songwriter. I hadn’t really thought about where songs came from, but I started listening to Kristofferson as a songwriter and thinking, How do you do this? He was actually the second concert I saw. I was nine. He and the band were having such a good time, and that really solidified for me that this was what I wanted to do with my life.” Once the album was mixed, mastered, and sequenced, McMurtry recalled a rough pencil sketch he had found a few years earlier in his father’s effects. It seemed like it might make a good cover. “I knew it was of me, but I didn’t realize who drew it. I asked my mom and my stepdad, and finally I asked my stepmom, Faye, who said it looked like Ken Kesey’s work back in the ‘60s. She was married to Ken for forty years.” The Merry Prankster’s—Kesey’s roving band of hippie activists and creators—stopped by often to visit Larry McMurtry and his family. “I don’t remember their first visit, the one documented in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I was too young, but I do remember a couple of Ken’s visits. I guess he drew it on one of those later stops. I remembered it and thought it would be the perfect art, but I had to go back through the storage locker. It’s a miracle that I found it again.” It's a fitting image for an album that scavenges personal history for inspiration. Even the songwriter himself doesn’t always know what will happen or where the songs will take him. “You follow the words where they lead. If you can get a character, maybe you can get a story. If you can set it to a verse-chorus structure, maybe you can get a song. A song can come from anywhere, but the main inspiration is fear. Specifically, fear of irrelevance. If you don’t have songs, you don’t have a record. If you don’t have a record, you don’t have a tour. You gotta keep putting out work.”

The Reagan Years

Eilen Jewell

“They say things have to get worse before they can get better,” Eilen Jewell reflects. “And for a while there, everything got worse.” Indeed, in the span of just a few months, Jewell watched as her marriage, her band, and what felt like her entire career fell apart in a series of spectacular, heartbreaking implosions. By the time the dust had finally settled, the critically acclaimed singer and songwriter was grieving and shocked, living in a remote cabin in the mountains and unsure if she’d ever get to make music again. “Up to that point, I’d just been going with the flow and letting outside forces dictate the path of my life,” Jewell explains. “Losing so much so fast forced me to figure out what really mattered. It made me realize that I’ve only got this one life, and I’d better get behind the wheel if I want to make the most of it.” With Get Behind The Wheel, her ninth studio album, Jewell does precisely that, planting herself firmly in the driver’s seat as she picks up the pieces and finds new purpose and meaning in the process. Co-produced by multi-instrumental wizard Will Kimbrough (Todd Snider, Hayes Carll), the collection pushes Jewell’s trademark blend of vintage roots-noir into more psychedelic territory, with spacious, cinematic arrangements complementing her revelatory explorations of grief, loss, resilience, and redemption. The band’s performances are truly electrifying here, blending elements of early rock and rockabilly with old school country and soul, and Jewell’s delivery is timeless to match, her voice effortlessly moving from unguarded intimacy to icy cool and back, sometimes within the very same song. The result is Jewell’s boldest album yet, a powerful work of artistic alchemy that transforms heartache into genuine creative rebirth. “I never wanted to make something that just wallowed in its misery because that’s not what I got from this whole experience,” Jewell says. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tough, but I survived and I’ve come out so much stronger and more in tune with myself, and that’s the journey I wanted to capture in these songs.” Hailed as “one of America’s most intriguing, creative, and idiosyncratic voices” by American Songwriter, Jewell built her career the old fashioned way, touring relentlessly with the kind of undeniable live show that converts the uninitiated into instant acolytes. Over the course of nearly two decades on the road, the Idaho native has crisscrossed the US, Europe, and Australia countless times, playing an endless series of headline and festival dates in addition to sharing bills with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Loretta Lynn, Mavis Staples, Wanda Jackson, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, and The Blind Boys of Alabama. Rolling Stone lauded Jewell’s “clever writing,” while NPR declared that she has a “sweet and clear voice with a killer instinct lurking beneath the shiny surface,” and The Washington Post mused that “if Neko Case, Madeleine Peyroux and Billie Holiday had a baby girl who grew up to front a rockabilly band, she’d probably sound a lot like Eilen Jewell.” “From the outside, I’m sure everything looked very fun and exciting,” Jewell reflects, “but somewhere along the way I started to feel like I was stuck in a life that wasn’t my own, and I started drinking too much to escape all the stress.” By the time the COVID-19 pandemic brought touring and recording to a grinding halt, things were nearing a breaking point at home, and Jewell and her husband of roughly a decade decided to call it quits. “My husband was also my drummer and my manager,” Jewell explains, “so in one fell swoop, it felt like I’d lost everything.” The untimely deaths of several close friends and family members followed shortly after, and Jewell soon found herself in the midst of a painful period of transition and self-examination. She left her home in Boise for a small cabin in the Idaho mountains, where she dove deep into meditation. She went for long hikes in the wilderness to stave off the constant threat of panic attacks, and she began experimenting with psychedelics in a search for clarity amidst the chaos. “When I’m going through something big, I just instinctively start writing,” says Jewell, who began documenting her journey through lyrics and melodies. “I didn’t think I’d get to make another record, but I needed to write anyway just for the catharsis of it.” The songs proved to be some of the finest, most arresting and emotionally nuanced writing of Jewell’s careers so far. Her ex-husband agreed. “He really loved the songs, too,” Jewell explains, “and he ultimately decided to stay with the band and come back on as my manager. We’ve always worked well together, and we co-parent really well, too, so when it was time to record, I think we were all just excited to get back to something that felt like normal.” That excitement is palpable on Get Behind The Wheel, which opens with the slow-burning “Alive.” Raw and brooding, the track builds from a whisper to a gritty roar as it revels in the crucible-like quality of complete reinvention. “You gotta get behind the wheel / You gotta drive,” Jewell sings over blistering guitars. “Baby how you feel? / I feel so alive.” Like much of the album, the song grapples with a complicated swirl: longing, sadness, freedom, and fierce determination all churn just beneath the surface. The searing “Lethal Love” reckons with the dark side of romance, while the bittersweet “You Were A Friend Of Mine” contemplates loss and regret, and the soulful “Come Home Soon” finds new faith in the power of human connection. “I used to think I was a natural hermit,” Jewell reflects, “but I had some really profound experiences with complete strangers over the past few years that made me realize how important the bonds we share with other people are. We’re all social creatures just trying to find home, and we need each other for that.” Such revelations help keep the album from ever drifting too far into despair. The playful “Winnemucca,” for instance, embraces an openhearted joy. The instant classic “Crooked River” finds fervent hope in the possibility of a fresh start. The dreamy "Silver Wheels and Wings” sheds the trappings of the self to find buried spiritual treasure. “I recently got engaged to someone I’ve known since I was a kid,” Jewell says, “and I think that’s a big part of the joyful element in this record. Sure, there’s a lot of heaviness and loss here, but there’s also a lot of hope and love and redemption, too. There’s a phoenix rising from the ashes.” Things had to get worse before they could get better, and for Eilen Jewell, the best, it seems, is still to come.

Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain