#folk music history

[ollieoliveoboelo22]

Music of TURN

Round 19

Hangin' in the Wind

3.10: Trial and Execution

Also from what I learned, is that Matt Berninger sang this. The same singer in the Hush theme.

The motif that we hear when Andre dies (and Abe nearly dying) is present through the entirety of the episode. The episode opens with this theme on solo violin as we watch Nathan Hale be executed. We've associated it with death/hanging, and it serves as anticipation to what we know will come as we watch the gallows in Setauket constructed, the trial, the journey to the site, and the final march where it's played on fife with a drum cadence.

What we heard be mostly solo instruments play this motif, it goes into a full string ensemble as Richard saves Abe.

Just for you, I spent time humming at the piano with a tuner and this recording trying to figure out what key this is. C# minor, which usually along with the sadness of a minor key, has a lot of introspection, grief, and self-punishment. (Think moonlight sonata for reference). And then it modulates (changing keys by using similar notes) into E major, which is the relative major to C# minor. This key usually evokes dissatisfaction, a ready-to-fight feeling, but also joy and delight.

If this is confusing... welcome to music theory. This is the least daunting stuff.

Yankee Doodle

4.09: Reckoning

I did not intend for this to line up on Yorktown day, but it makes it all the better.

I don't have much to say on thematics because the moment is based off true events. But I have a gripe that the fingers of the piccolo/fife plays don't even move the same time the note change. Or worse, hold the same note.

This song really does embody the spirit of America, especially in this context. Playing the song your defeated enemy once mocked you with. At a surrender so embarrassing and ruinous that your own general does not attend and you attempt to surrender to the French to make it hurt less. Any way, I love Yankee Doodle and it should be played more often. The spotify recording is of a piece I played in high school, the ending is the best part so give it a listen.

[intheholler]

the appalachian murder ballad <3 one of the most interesting elements of americana and american folk, imo!

my wife recently gave me A Look when i had one playing in the car and she was like, "why do all of these old folk songs talk about killing people lmao" and i realized i wanted to Talk About It at length.

nerd shit under the cut, and it's long. y'all been warned

so, as y'all probably know, a lot of appalachian folk music grew its roots in scottish folk (and then was heavily influenced by Black folks once it arrived here, but that's a post for another time).

they existed, as most folk music does, to deliver a narrative--to pass on a story orally, especially in communities where literacy was not widespread. their whole purpose was to get the news out there about current events, and everyone loves a good murder mystery!

as an aside, i saw someone liken the murder ballad to a ye olde true crime podcast and tbh, yeah lol.

the "original" murder ballads started back across the pond as news stories printed on broadsheets and penned in such a way that it was easy to put to melody.

they were meant to be passed on and keep the people informed about the goings-on in town. i imagine that because these songs were left up to their original orators to get them going, this would be why we have sooo many variations of old folk songs.

naturally then, almost always, they were based on real events, either sung from an outside perspective, from the killer's perspective and in some cases, from the victim's. of course, like most things from days of yore, they reek of social dogshit. the particular flavor of dogshit of the OG murder ballad was misogyny.

so, the murder ballad came over when the english and scots-irish settlers did. in fact, a lot of the current murder ballads are still telling stories from centuries ago, and, as is the way of folk, getting rewritten and given new names and melodies and evolving into the modern recordings we hear today.

305 such scottish and english ballads were noted and collected into what is famously known as the Child Ballads collected by a professor named francis james child in the 19th century. they have been reshaped and covered and recorded a million and one times, as is the folk way.

while newer ones continued to largely fit the formula of retelling real events and murder trials (such as one of my favorite ones, little sadie, about a murderer getting chased through the carolinas to have justice handed down), they also evolved into sometimes fictional, (often unfortunately misogynistic) cautionary tales.

perhaps the most famous examples of these are omie wise and pretty polly where the woman's death almost feels justified as if it's her fault (big shocker).

but i digress. in this way, the evolution of the murder ballad came to serve a similar purpose as the spooky legends of appalachia did/do now.

(why do we have those urban legends and oral traditions warning yall out of the woods? to keep babies from gettin lost n dying in them. i know it's a fun tiktok trend rn to tell tale of spooky scary woods like there's really more haints out here than there are anywhere else, but that's a rant for another time too ain't it)

so, the aforementioned little sadie (also known as "bad lee brown" in some cases) was first recorded in the 1920s. i'm also plugging my favorite female-vocaist cover of it there because it's superior when a woman does it, sorry.

it is a pretty straightforward murder ballad in its content--in the original version, the guy kills a woman, a stranger or his girlfriend sometimes depending on who is covering it.

but instead of it being a cautionary 'be careful and don't get pregnant or it's your fault' tale like omie wise and pretty polly, the guy doesn't get away with it, and he's not portrayed as sympathetic like the murderer is in so many ballads.

a few decades after, women started saying fuck you and writing their own murder ballads.

in the 40s, the femme fatale trope was in full swing with women flipping the script and killing their male lovers for slights against them instead.

men began to enter the "find out" phase in these songs and paid up for being abusive partners. women regained their agency and humanity by actually giving themselves an active voice instead of just being essentially 'fridged in the ballads of old.

her majesty dolly parton even covered plenty of old ballads herself but then went on to write the bridge, telling the pregnant-woman-in-the-murder-ballad's side of things for once. love her.

as a listener, i realized that i personally prefer these modern covers of appalachian murder ballads sung by women-led acts like dolly and gillian welch and even the super-recent crooked still especially, because there is a sense of reclamation, subverting its roots by giving it a woman's voice instead.

meaning that, like a lot else from the problematic past, the appalachian murder ballad is something to be enjoyed with critical ears. violence against women is an evergreen issue, of course, and you're going to encounter a lot of that in this branch of historical music.

but with folk songs, and especially the murder ballad, being such a foundational element of appalachian history and culture and fitting squarely into the appalachian gothic, i still find them important and so, so interesting

i do feel it's worth mentioning that there are "tamer" ones. with traditional and modern murder ballads alike, some of them are just for "fun," like a murder mystery novel is enjoyable to read; not all have a message or retell a historical trial.

(for instance, i'd even argue ultra-modern, popular americana songs like hell's comin' with me is a contemporary americana murder ballad--being sung by a male vocalist and having evolved from being at the expense of a woman to instead being directed at a harmful and corrupt church. that kind of thing)

in short: it continues to evolve, and i continue to eat that shit up.

anyway, to leave off, lemme share with yall my personal favorite murder ballad which fits squarely into murder mystery/horror novel territory imo.

it's the 10th child ballad and was originally known as "the twa sisters." it's been covered to hell n back and named and renamed.

but! if you listen to any flavor of americana, chances are high you already know it; popular names are "the dreadful wind and rain" and sometimes just "wind and rain."

in it, a jealous older sister pushes her other sister into a river (or stream, or sea, depending on who's covering it) over a dumbass man. the little sister's body floats away and a fiddle maker come upon her and took parts of her body to make a fiddle of his own. the only song the new fiddle plays is the tale about how it came to be, and it is the same song you have been listening to until then.

how's that for genuinely spooky-scary appalachia, y'all?

[folk-enjoyer]

Song of the Day

"Call of the moose" Willy Mitchell, 1980 As you might know, September 30th is Truth and Reconciliation day (more commonly known as Orange Shirt Day), a national day in Canada dedicated to spreading awareness about the legacy of Residential schools on Indigenous people. Instead of just focusing on a song, I also wanted to briefly talk about the history of the sixties scoop and its influence on Indigenous American music and activism.

The process of Residential schooling in Canada existed well before the '60s, but the new processes of the sixties scoop began in 1951. It was a process where the provincial government had the power to take Indigenous children from their homes and communities and put them into the child welfare system. Despite the closing of residential schools, more and more children were being taken away from their families and adopted into middle-class white ones.

Even though Indigenous communities only made up a tiny portion of the total population, 40-70% of the children in these programs would be Aboriginal. In total, 20,000 children would be victims of these policies through the 60s and 70s.

These adoptions would have disastrous effects on their victims. Not only were sexual and physical abuse common problems but the victims were forcibly stripped of their culture and taught to hate themselves. The community panel report on the sixties scoop writes:

"The homes in which our children are placed ranged from those of caring, well-intentioned individuals, to places of slave labour and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The violent effects of the most negative of these homes are tragic for its victims. Even the best of these homes are not healthy places for our children. Anglo-Canadian foster parents are not culturally equipped to create an environment in which a positive Aboriginal self-image can develop. In many cases, our children are taught to demean those things about themselves that are Aboriginal. Meanwhile, they are expected to emulate normal child development by imitating the role model behavior of their Anglo-Canadian foster or adoptive parents."

and to this day indigenous children in Canada are still disproportionately represented in foster care. Despite being 5% of the Total Canadian population, Indigenous children make up 53.8% of all children in foster care.

I would like to say that the one good thing that came out of this gruesome and horrible practice of state-sponsored child relocation was that there was a birth of culture from protest music, but there wasn't. In fact, Indigenous music has a long history of being erased and whitewashed from folk history.

From Buffy Saint-Marie pretending to be Indigenous to the systematic denial of first nations people from the Canadian mainstream music scene, the talented artists of the time were forcibly erased.

Which is why this album featuring Willy Mitchell is so important.

Willy Mitchell and The Desert River Band

This Album was compiled of incredibly rare, unheard folk and rock music of North American indigenous music in the 60s-80s. It is truly, a of a kind historical artifact and a testimony to the importance of archival work to combat cultural genocide. Please give the entire thing a listen if you have time. Call of the Moose is my favorite song on the album, written and performed by Willy Mitchell in the 80s. His Most interesting song might be 'Big Policeman' though, written about his experience of getting shot in the head by the police. He talks about it here:

"He comes there and as soon as I took off running, he had my two friends right there — he could have taken them. They stopped right there on the sidewalk. They watched him shootin’ at me. He missed me twice, and when I got to the tree line, he was on the edge of the road, at the snow bank. That’s where he fell, and the gun went off. But that was it — he took the gun out. He should never have taken that gun out. I spoke to many policemen. And judges, too. I spoke with lawyers about that. They all agreed. He wasn’t supposed to touch that gun. So why did I only get five hundred dollars for that? "

These problems talked about here, forced displacement, cultural assimilation, police violence, child exploitation, and erasure of these crimes, still exist in Canada. And so long as they still exist, it is imperative to keep talking about them. Never let the settler colonial government have peace; never let anyone be comfortable not remembering the depth of exploitation.

Every Child Matters

[eroticlamb]

Bob Dylan at a press conference, Mayfair Hotel, London, May 3 1966. Photographed by Tony Gale

my favourite twink

[originalhaffigaza]

[rhapsodynew]

I want to protect myself from fools, build a wall against them. But then I remember that it's impossible to hide from the whole world.

Robert Plant

[mimi-0007]

[birdfriend-theband]

SOMEWHERE YOU DID, SOMEWHERE YOU WILL: Bird Friend's Our Gods at 10; or, Last Thoughts on the Albuquerque House Show Scene

Author’s note:

Okay - bear with me on this one. Ten years have passed since the events in this piece occurred. In those ten years I’d like to think I’ve picked up a few scraps of wisdom here and there, and while our culture has built an industry around depictions of untamed youth, I’m inclined to believe that those years aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. I was far from perfect as a young man, and this memoir is not designed to suggest any differently. It is, however, partly an attempt to express gratitude towards those folks who gave me the opportunity to live something like the rich life of an artist. If this work has found its way to you, I will say this: my inbox is always open.

G. Himsel

Funeral Hill, Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Autumn 2024

I. 

Halfway through the last-ever show at the old Vassar house, someone called the cops.

Cheap Time was playing in the living room when the police banged on the door, and when the hostess took over the mic to warn the crowd, the whole place fell apart. The music shambled to a halt, and the living room - which was painted floor-to-ceiling in graffiti - became the scene of a mad scramble for the exits. Young punks spilled into the backyard, clambering over the cinderblock walls and into the alleyways, or sprinting drunkenly past the squad cars blocking the driveways. Underage kids tossed bottles and dime bags onto the neighbors’ side of the fence before disappearing into the darkness themselves. The band stood around, dumbfounded, as the room cleared, their audience disappeared, and a pair of tired-looking cops wandered into the house with their hands on their hips. The night was over, prematurely - and while the old house’s closing ceremonies were supposed to have some sort of significance, the chaos of the evening was befitting of the chaos of its era. The street was full of wasted kids, running from the cop lights. With three beers in my body, I ran, too - into the cool bronze night of the neighborhood, past the bungalows and pueblo revivals, holding my half-empty pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt. It was the fall of 2013 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I was nineteen years old, and it was the first house show I’d ever attended. 

II.

Albuquerque is about a day’s drive from anything; eight hours east of Las Vegas, seven hours out from Phoenix. Denver lies six miles to the north, and Mexico five hours south. The city rests on a massive alluvial plain and straddles the Rio Grande at its midpoint, where droughts and water-rights battles often reduce the river to a trickle. It’s bright: the sun shines four out of every five days, and at a mile above sea level, the sun can feel intimately close. Isolated by miles of Southwestern desert, it’s nonetheless a city of intersections - intersections of North American cultures, of rivers and railroads, and of highways. I-40 and I-25 collide here at the “Big I,” an engineering feat that doubles as a towering monument to the car culture of the American West. Nearly thirty percent of residents speak Spanish, and another significant portion speaks Navajo or Vietnamese. In the last hundred and fifty years, it’s grown from a railroad depot to nearly two-hundred miles of low-density urban sprawl - and many parts retain an odd 1960s or ‘70s feel. Outside of the city, they make movies and television, and test weapons for the military. Passenger trains still clatter through downtown, and bands play under gazebos in the historic district. In Barelas, Chicano pride shines. In Rio Rancho, suburban tract homes bump up against the stark, high desert. But while the city glows with a sort of mid-century American-ness, it more often feels far, far away from the mainstream culture and customs of the rest of the U.S. It’s a weird place, especially if you - like me - grew up amidst the urban renewal and suburban gloom of post-industrial New England. Out in New Mexico, you sort of get the feeling that you’ve traveled off the map.

I lived in Albuquerque from 2012 to 2016. I wanted to make art and play my guitar, and I got my wish; I spent most of those years submerged in the city’s weird subculture of underground house shows. Our neighborhood of University Heights - more generally known as the Student Ghetto, due to its huge population of off-campus UNM students - was the kind of starving-artist paradise peculiar to college towns. The neighborhood was made up of cheap, low-density rental housing. Landlords and neighbors were generally tolerant of the 18-25 crowd and whatever noise and chaos it generated. Homes were usually single-unit, with spacious yards and a sense of relative privacy. Rents were in the high hundreds, and we often had more space than we needed. The infrastructure supported public transit and cyclists and the whole area was anchored by a commercial strip with cheap food and plenty of intellectual resources.

But while while the Student Ghetto was typical of any neighborhood near a big college campus, the fact that the college campus happened to be located right in the middle of a major city - a city that, in turn, was an isolated stop on the way to the rest of the world - meant that a disproportionate amount of creative energy was funneled directly into the laps of the people living there. In 2014-15 a five-block stretch of Gold Avenue alone boasted five house venues, each with distinct programming, that sometimes threw shows on the same nights. The most important of them, Gold House, changed hands countless times but survived for over a decade as a magnet for nationally-recognized punk and indie acts. I saw Kid Congo play at Gold House, in the living room; I saw Kimya Dawson play on the porch. The loudest show I’ve ever seen in my life was at Gold House: the Cosmonauts blew my eardrums there, on a Sunday night in the summer of 2014.

A culture existed around these places. Different houses were home to different sub-families of the city’s greater punk community, and often had one or two of their own house bands in addition to a few touring favorites. My immediate neighbors hosted murky, reverb-washed psych rock bands like L.A. Witch, while the legendary Bungalow was something like a fraternal organization for strange, outer-limits outsider punk. 

Beyond that, different houses had different philosophies about live music, different levels of permissiveness surrounding drugs and drinking, and varying levels of preparedness for interactions with the police. At some venues, “rules” were looked upon suspiciously. At one Fourth of July show in 2015, the entertainment options were split between outdoor American flag-burning and a basement set by a band that played completely naked. But there were more often attempts to establish some order. At the Bungalow, there was generally a volunteer at the door who checked IDs and marked hands accordingly; this protected the house and its inhabitants when the cops were called, as they were during the second Mountain Blood Fest when one hardcore punk vocalist ended up on the roof. 

My Albuquerque experience eventually reached its zenith at the Bungalow, where Bird Friend recorded Cibola and I probably attended more shows than anywhere else, but it was Wagon Wheel - a miniscule pueblo house on Stanford Drive - where I first found my footing as a writer and musician. 

III. 

Wagon Wheel’s house band was Arroyo Deathmatch, an insane hardcore/folk-punk band that played a weird assemblage of uncommon and handmade instruments and acted as the essential masthead for the local Goathead Record Collective. Besides being the band that I most closely identify with this space, they were the first group I encountered in the Southwest who really completely embodied a DIY ethic. A lot of people coming into music feel as if they need to gather a certain amount of abstract necessities in order to reach a performance level - things like promotional materials, or a clear idea of genre, style, influence, etc. These guys didn’t even need proper instruments. They played a kind of shambling punk on a frankenstein lineup of homemade drums, bass guitars, flutes and ukuleles that was nonetheless really literary and challenging and rousingly political. They hand-printed their own CD jackets, did all their own distribution, and created their own music network before Spotify was a thing and when social media as we now know it was in its infancy. 

The first time I caught them was at Wagon Wheel, on their own turf - in the sweaty, postage-stamp sized living room that felt like it was ready to burst with bodies dancing, jumping, singing along. I have no idea how long they had been a band before I encountered them, but the scene that I wandered into felt completely fully-formed by the time I arrived. Folks knew the words to their songs, knew the breaks, wore the fashion and participated fully in the music. The audience was committed to this local band in a way that I had never considered, let alone encountered, in the fragile, decentralized, conservative and suburban music community back home in New England.

Seeing Arroyo Deathmatch for the first time completely reordered my idea of what was possible as a performer - instead of meeting the expectations of an entrenched music scene, as most fledgling musicians attempt to do, they created their own scene, with its own internal logic and set of rules. Obviously this wasn’t the first time this had ever happened in punk history, but to see it happening on such a grassroots level - and with an audience that was so ready to be a part of their thing - was incalculably influential on my soft, teenage brain. I sent them an email, asking how to be a part of that thing, and they set me up with my first show in town. It was the first Bird Friend show - a last-minute addition to the opening ceremonies of the first-ever Mountain Blood Fest. I banged my way through six or seven solo songs, completely unamplified, met our lifelong friend and collaborator Nikki Barva, and was at a Goathead Collective meeting two weeks later.

IV.

Goathead Record Collective was an non-hierarchical affiliation of artists and musicians that organized gear shares, music promotion, and operated a sort of mobile recording studio whose equipment was free to use amongst collective members. They organized a weekly meeting - on Wednesday nights - where participants drew up show schedules and local promo stuff and organized workshops on everything from tour booking and zine-making to discussions about scene politics and self-policing. The location rotated, sometimes taking place at the Bungalow, sometimes at my own place, Coffee House, and most often at Wagon Wheel. A ton of stuff came out of the GRC: an organized network of merch sales, three iterations of Mountain Blood Fest, countless shows at venues ranging from living rooms to warehouses, clubs, and karate studios. That’s not to mention the recorded output: GRC was involved in early releases by bands like Days ‘N’ Daze, and a distinguished list of Albuquerque artists like the Leaky Faces, Manuka Piglet, the Vassar Bastards, and Arroyo Deathmatch themselves. Using the DIY studio setup and a refurbished 10-CD duplicator from the flea market, the collective did hand-made CD releases and promoted them in local newspapers. 

If it sounds utopic, it was - and the collective disbanded after a few years. But when I stumbled into it, it was in its halcyon days. At Wagon Wheel and the other houses it felt as though there was an endless parade of bands who, although now fading into history, left a permanent impression on us. Far from the cultural centers of the country, and far even from the curated, “professional” music community of Albuquerque, the weirdest bands in the world summoned magic, effortlessly, night after night. These houses glowed with creative energy, and the more music they contained, the more their myths assumed legendary proportions.

V. 

I hoped that some of that magic would rub off when Alexster, of Arroyo Deathmatch, invited Bird Friend to record an album at Wagon Wheel. Our band was - as it’s always been - a pretty loose unit. I had one record out already, a self-titled release that I’d cobbled together with my high school band. It was a gloomy, navel-gazing collection of bummers and breakup songs that nevertheless featured “Parting Gifts,” a song that’d soon become a singalong staple of our years in Albuquerque. I’d been playing solo shows in the city for about six months, and had recruited Cody and Peach of the Leaky Faces to play with me when they were available. My then-roomate (now wife) Carson would sit in on harmony vocals every now and then. 

I booked a weekend at Wagon Wheel to bang out some songs I’d been working on; I’d recently read Hesiod’s Theogony & Works and Days and some of Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology and become really interested in the weird, flawed gods and heroes of ancient Greece. I was a young dude, very far from home and trying to figure things out pretty much completely on my own; I was very aware that I was going through a transitional period, twenty years old and particularly susceptible to self-mythologizing. I began to think of myself as entering a new epoch of my life, and through my involvement in the Collective and the music community I felt as if I were making a full break from the expectations and orthodoxies of my “old life” in New England. It became very important to me to write down what I was seeing unfold all around me.

Reading the ancient stories - which really feel so contemporary at times - pushed me to mythologize what I was living through. The writers, artists, strangers and cities of the Southwest lived on one hand, with the folks I left back in New England on the other. I started to try and fit them into the contours of very, very old stories. I may have been trying to make some sense of the weird new world I found myself in. But I was more certainly writing to my older self; caught in that present utopia, I had the bright idea to create a sort of Myth of Ages that would elevate that fleeting moment to the status of folklore. After all, the excitement of the music community back then felt so much bigger than the sum of its parts. If this radical moment of mass self-actualization was, in its essence, just a bunch of people hanging out in living rooms, it felt huge, important, essential. That meant the only way to write about it was mythologically. 

Once again, it’s not like this idea was itself a radical development. Storytelling and tall tales are as old as anything in the folk tradition. But if Bird Friend’s love for the folk tradition has often pitted us against the prevailing currents of popular music, it was - in this instant - the most appropriate vessel.

We only had two days to record the material that would become Our Gods. Some elements of my music life never change, and the matter of scheduling is one of them. Alexster had a day job, a venue to run, and other groups to record; Cody had his other band, Carson was still in school, and I worked nights at the 66 Diner. Peach, who at that point had already played shows with us, may have been out of town or otherwise occupied, and didn’t get to join us at all. As it were, we had two days back-to-back in mid-October to crank out whatever songs we could. We planned a double release with the Leaky Faces in December, so the feeling was that whatever we committed to tape that weekend would pretty much be the album. The “the studio” was set up in the empty living room, and was limited to two microphones and a dining room chair. Alexster’s bedroom served as the control booth.

VI.

A few days before the release, the Collective got together in the basement of the Bungalow, and we had a CD-making party for Our Gods and the Leaky Faces’ Freak Tree. We burned blank discs ten at a time on the duplicator, and cut album covers that we’d printed for free with someone’s UNM library card. We did some beers and carefully glued the covers onto plain black CD jackets, each one stamped with the Goathead Records logo. It was December, and it was cold; in photos from that night, everyone’s wearing jackets and sweaters indoors. I wonder now if the heat was on, or if it was ever on in that house. 

We did the show at Wagon Wheel a few nights later - something like eight bands played, and our resident videographer Isaac “Boose” Vallejos got the whole evening on film. That night was Wagon Wheel as I remember it: packed, sweaty, and electric with creative energy. In those days, getting a show at all felt like a blessing - every single performance felt vital, essential, and to attach a whole album to it felt triumphant. I have the videos of the Bird Friend set, and we’re loose, sloppy, full of humor, and backed against the wall by a big crowd of happy people.

The Goathead thing began to splinter apart a few months after Our Gods. Social friction amidst the growing proportions of the scene, not to mention the exhausting undertaking of Mountain Blood Fest II, contributed to a slow drift towards other projects. The atmosphere of idealism was hard to sustain as more people joined the fold, and the collective itself felt more beholden to a sense of expectation and accountability that quickly overwhelmed it.

It was tough to let it all go. It’s not like the shows and the bands simply vanished, but a growing sense of dislocation and disunity began to take over. The essential loss of a mutual support network returned the music scene back to a landscape of unfocused cliques. At this point, I was 21 years old, totally untethered and spinning my wheels. I started drinking a lot, and entered a dark stretch, turning out songs that were long, desperate, and heavy with a sense of doom. I fell down for a while. Eventually I left Albuquerque, in order to hit the reset button before I went too far down an ugly path.

A friend of mine once said that writing is a selfish act. Before he passed away, I often thought about asking him what he meant - and now that I don’t have the chance, I meditate on it often. And writing down these memories so long after the fact, I find myself meditating on it all over again. Maybe it’s selfish to attach too much significance to this brief period of my life. Or maybe it’s selfish to view something that touched so many people through the narrow window of my own, meager experience. After all, the world of New Mexican music was so much bigger than the record collective. Or perhaps it’s selfish to talk about those days like they belonged to some perfect, unspoiled era; for they most certainly did not. All of this history took place against the confused, chaotic backdrop of about a thousand peoples’ early twenties - not generally known as a peaceful or self-assured time in life. Not everyone got out in one piece, or even alive.

Yet I’ve been playing my guitar in front of people for a long time now, and Bird Friend has been around in some form for over a decade. And though I’ve started to suspect that we’re not going to be famous (not that that’s the point), in navigating a whole range of music scenes I’ve started to double back to the questions leftover from the days of Goathead. How do we celebrate each other, and our art? How do we inhabit the role of audience, critic, and creator all with the same grace? And now, in a world whose modernity is more disenfranchising than ever, how do we do it all with dignity?

As musicians, we’re constantly being assaulted by statistics: our plays, our listeners, and their level of engagement is constantly being tracked in extreme, granular detail. Promoters use these numbers to gauge your marketability, an important task in a world where the profitability of a music venue is considered life-or-death. Less people are going to shows, less people are consuming physical media, and the network of music discovery is essentially in the hands of algorithms and AI. The context of a piece of music is often lost when a “user” only spends a few seconds with it on a reel or social media post. The act of creation is its own reward, yet I sometimes find myself asking the most frightening question: what’s the fucking point?

What are we supposed to do as artists? Why do we make music? Who’s it for? In a perfect world, it’s one pathway to building a shared philosophy. That’s what the Goathead era was for me: a forum in which a little music scene was foundational to ideas about culture, community, and mutual support. But what’s the benefit of creating a shared philosophy, if it only exists in a digital space? The town I live in now is supposedly full of artists - and I don’t see a united front against the behemoth of corporate development that’s shuttered a frightening number of venues these last few years. Art as content, art as corporate culture, art supposedly made “accessible” by an internet machine designed primarily to make money are all more dominant than ever - and I sometimes wonder if the concept of an art community actually stands a chance. When I worry, I think of the extremely unlikely success we had in Albuquerque. If it warms me just a little, I also remember that it was all a very long time ago.

Our Gods is not the greatest album ever made. It’s not even the best album Bird Friend ever made. But for myself, and my own personal history (here comes the selfish act again), it represents a little glory that we got to participate in, if only for a while. I wonder if I’ll ever experience that intensity again, but if your time is still yet to come, hear this: somewhere you did, somewhere you will - somewhere you are all together still.

VII. Belated Liner Notes

Listen to “OUR GODS” on Spotify or Bandcamp.

Overture (Muses)

The idea with “Overture” was to start the record with a reference to Greek poetry and to Hesiod’s work by including a rip-off of the kind of invocation that would commonly begin a piece of ancient literature. This little prayer was meant, in the old days, to set the tone and context of a piece and to assure the audience that a storyteller knew what they were talking about.  Performed a cappella in one take, I don’t think this song was ever performed again. I still like the concept, and still think it’s clever to flip this old convention on its head by admitting in the first line of the album that the writer of these songs is an unreliable narrator.

Where Are You?

I spent a lot of my younger years wandering around the woods of New England. This is the oldest part of the country, and if a historical site isn’t preserved, it’s quickly swallowed up by nature. The area I grew up in was clear-cut in the 19th century for sheep grazing, and by the early 1900s was completely forested again. There are really no such thing as historical ruins out here, and if you do find something abandoned out in the forest, it’s probably only a few decades old.  I saw some coincidence in the idea that, in both the Mediterranean and the Southwest, researchers are constantly finding throwaway evidence of really old civilizations - potsherds, petroglyphs, architectural stuff that’s all just been sitting out in the desert for hundreds or thousands of years that gives you an idea of the everyday lives of people who lived and died generations ago. You can actually just wander out into the desert and see this stuff. It doesn’t get washed away by the rain or the ocean or torn up by a tree root after fifty years. That’s the idea behind “Where Are You?,” a song that supposes what will be left of our lives a thousand years from now. When you’re young, you feel things so, so intensely - how much of that intensity lives in the objects we leave behind? What kind of half-life does it have?

Oh, Pilgrim!

This is a pretty straightforward song, message-wise. It was most likely written before I began to fixate on the “concept” of this album, and it’s more of a clear-cut celebration of my independence and my Big Desert Adventure than anything else. It’s very important in our catalog, however, as the first-ever recorded Carson performance. Her natural gift for harmony is obvious here, and I remember Alexster being somewhat stunned that she pulled her part off in one take.  Recording vocals can be the most nerve-wracking element of the studio experience, and her fearlessness in performance and ability to write complex vocal harmonies is as stunning now as it was then. 

The Wheel

I haven’t talked much about the dominance of folk punk in the Albuquerque scene of those days. It had already been around for years by that time, and the blank-canvas nature of the genre was well-suited to the limited resources of our little scene. For a while, it felt like folk punk was all there was in the neighborhood, since it could be played convincingly on cheap instruments, by folks with limited chops, and didn’t require anything as burdensome as an amplifier. The minor-key inertia of “The Wheel” owes something to the prevailing folk punk conventions of the day, and seems to be particularly indebted to The Leaky Faces’ “Steam,” even if it doesn’t match the energy of that band. 

The Road (Forever Returns to the Heart)

“The Road” flirts with bluegrass, a style whose strict conventions and average level of musicianship are completely foreign to a band as ramshackle and inconsistent as Bird Friend. This was one of the songs that was supposed to include percussion, which is blasphemous in the bluegrass world, and there are live recordings out there that include Peach on the drums. Nevertheless, any listener of “The Road” can probably tell that I’d discovered Ralph Stanley by this point.  This is one of the songs from Our Gods that I vividly remember working on; I recall flipping through Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume as quietly as I possibly could while Cody recorded the freewheeling banjo parts. “The Road” is probably only second to “Parting Gifts” when it comes to its popularity, as well as the number of times it was caught on video during this era. It’s featured in the Before You Burn documentary and on the Mountain Blood Fest II compilation. 

Granite & Gold

This is an interesting track. I don’t remember much of what motivated me to write this one, although it strikes me now as some hand-wringing over the future legacy of the Goathead scene. Ten years later, Goathead is long gone, and the artists that are still active have completely evolved. Looking back at that time in such depth feels like going back to a place you used to live in; everything’s different, and a lot of people are gone, but the light still falls in the same way. An uncanny feeling, I guess. Like visiting your old elementary school. 

The Fear, The Fear

“The Fear” is a weird composite of a lot of my influences at the time of recording. The title is, of course, ripped from the Defiance, Ohio album of the same name. The guitar part is totally indebted to Bob Dylan’s version of “House Carpenter,” which I played often back when I spent my Sundays busking in Santa Fe. I’m not entirely sure where we got the idea to attempt the weird, sitar-like banjo part, but I suspect it was from Mark Fry’s “The Witch,” which was on heavy rotation at Coffee House. I do also remember Cody joking that the banjo part came out “sounding like Donovan.” Our Gods is a pretty spare record, and I think this is the most ambitious we got during those recording sessions. It’s another comment on the fleeting nature of the community and the anxieties and social pressures that motivate people to choose a life of convention over a life of art. 

Our Gods

The title track features Kylee Jo on fiddle. Kylee was staying overnight at Wagon Wheel during the Our Gods sessions; it wasn’t uncommon for house venues to host traveling musicians (or just travelers) even if they weren’t performing there, and Kylee was just on the way to somewhere else when we met. Having never met us before, and certainly never hearing of our band, she agreed to play fiddle on “Our Gods.” I played the song once through to teach the changes, we recorded one fiddle track, I wrote her name down on a piece of receipt paper for the album credits, and we never saw each other again.  Some of the most intimate exchanges of ideas happen in your own home, far from performance spaces, and Carson and I have always tried to keep our home open to other artists. It’s a tough world out there, and a little sanctuary can go a long way. Sometimes you even make new friends, or collaborators. 

Sucker & St. Joan

Sometimes you look back at a song you wrote and surprise yourself, and in revisiting Our Gods after so many years, this song seems to stand taller among the others. The intent behind this album is clearer here than anywhere else, and the composition, harmony, and structure are all about as highly-developed as I was capable of at age 20. The playing’s good, too; but what really strikes me on “Sucker” is its clarity. Hearing the chorus again, recognizing that even a decade ago we were aware of our community as a temporary junction of lives, is awfully moving - and revisiting this song is what encouraged me to write this piece in the first place. When listening to this song, I can feel my present self looking back, my past self looking forward - and we meet each other somewhere in the middle.  I do my best to catch up with people from the old scene, engage with their art, listen to their bands and see what’s going on in their lives. Some folks are still permanent fixtures in the Bird Friend family, while some are like distant relatives. Still others I check in with once a year or so, or catch their shows when they’re in town. Others just cross my mind from time to time, or pass by in the social media parade. 

IIX. 

Spotify, music streaming, and social media all belonged to a very different landscape a decade ago. Many bands of the Albuquerque community never made it to Spotify for logistical or philosophical reasons; others never recorded much at all, or produced anything that sounded like their live performances. Practically none of the bands of those days are still active - although most of the artists involved are still working, the vast majority of them have moved onto other projects. Much of the Goathead Record Collective’s web presence has been lost over time.

Below, I’ve listed a few songs that are representative of Bird Friend’s world during the 2013-2016 era. Some of it comes from bands we played with, and most of it comes from Albuquerque. All of the bands featured were, in some significant way, affiliated with the house show scene. Bandcamp is still the best way to listen to these artists. If you have the paper edition of this piece, the QR code on the bottom will take you to the web version where you can listen to the music.

If you want the authentic experience, you can download these songs as mp3s, drag them into an iTunes playlist, load them onto an iPod Mini with a cracked screen and listen to them on a skateboard.

The Leaky Faces - Steam 

Arroyo Deathmatch - Swimming the Witch

Bella Trout - Coffee Stains

Human Behavior - Crag

Smoke & Mirrors - The Godslayer

Manuka Piglet - Mr. Kelp

Crushed!? - Ethereal Horizon

Soviet Science Fair - Toast (Live 2014)

lemurtween - pee van/no one understands me

Lindy Vision - Bad Things

The Vassar Bastards - Dead Cat

Nobody Particular - Cage Wreck

Colour Me Once - 10,000 Miles to Graceland

Marissa. - Running For The Gates

Klondykes - BTSD

[undergroundrockpress]

Bob Dylan on stage at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.

[caveguy22]

Elizabeth Cotten playing banjo for a segment in a TV series. (1985)

Song is called Georgie Buck, which is an old traditional folk tune. She was around 92 years old when this was recorded.

Source: Aly Bain's Down Home

[clove-pinks]

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there," is the quote from a mid-20th century novel. The War of 1812 took place decades before the military funeral song "Taps" was written and popularized during the US Civil War.

Alfred Lorrain describes scores of men dying from disease at Fort Meigs in 1812-1813, which was the top killer of soldiers throughout the Napoleonic era:

They died daily. The mournful air of "Roslin Castle" became the prevailing music of the day, while the sharp rifle-cracks of the platoon told how many were borne to their long home. A deadly homesickness overwhelmed our troops, and we believe a repentance of war was kindled in every bosom, from the highest to the lowest.

— Alfred M. Lorrain, The Helm, the Sword, and the Cross.

It's a haunting melody (and new favorite song). When I was at Fort Meigs historic site earlier in the month there was also a fiddle player in period costume, which was wonderful.

[ollieoliveoboelo22]

Music of TURN

Round 28

The Turtle Dove

4.03: Blood for Blood

Jock O'Hazeldean

1.08: Challenge

[gag-magazine]

FOLK PUNK DEEP DIVE 4 U!!!

By Clem Peterson

[folk-enjoyer]

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 1960

Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott

[useless-catalanfacts]

Listen on YouTube / Listen on Spotify.

This is a traditional work song from the Valencian Country that used to be sang in the storehouses, with lyrics talking about their working rights. In this recording, it's sang by two of the most recognized Valencian singers of traditional style of the moment: Pep Gimeno "Botifarra" and Noelia Llorens "Titana". Botifarra has learned this song from elderly women and has added one new stanza as homage to them.

As always, here's the original lyrics in Valencian/Catalan and the translation of each stanza in English.

Ja ve l'aire, ja ve l'aire! Ja ve l'aire del migdia I ha vingut un pardalet A portar-nos l'alegria The breeze is arriving, the breeze is arriving! The noon's breeze is arriving And a little bird has come To bring us happiness.

Senyor amo, senyor amo A això no n'hi ha raó Que han tocat les dotze i mitja I encà estem en el muntó! Mister owner, mister owner This is nonsense For [the bells] have rung 12:30 And we're still at the pile!

Ací estan les triadores Fortes com els diamants I les encaixonadores Perles fines encaixant Here are the sorters [women] Strong like diamonds And the packers [women] Fine pearls [when it comes to] encasing.

Allà està el tapador Passa el dia repicant I l'embalador que embala I el carreter carrejant There's the capper [man] Who spends all day pricking And the wrapper [man] who wraps And the cartwright [man] carting.

Ja s'emporten les taronges Ja les duen al vagó Ja se'n va l'amo a València A forrar-se el jaquetó They're already taking away the oranges They're taking them to the coach The master is going to València [the capital city] To get the get his refeer coat lined

Ja ve l'amo, ja ve l'amo Ja ve l'amo dels diners Porta paper, porta plata I calderilla també The master is coming, the master is coming The money's master is coming He brings paper, he brings silver And loose change, too.

Ja se'n van totes les xiques Molt contentes se n'anem Amb el jornalet a casa Que el tinguem ben guanyadet All the girls are leaving We're leaving very happy With our salary [we go] home For we have earned it hard.

Ací estan les perles fines Braç a braç amb els diamants Repicant amb alegria Volem tot: les flors i el pa! Here are the fine pearls Shoulder to shoulder with the diamonds Pealing merrily We want all: the flowers and the bread!

[Repeat the first "ja ve l'amo..." stanza]

Ja ve l'amo, ja ve l'amo Ja ve l'amo dels diners Perquè les hores són nostres Si en vol més que en pague més! Perquè les hores són nostres Si en vol més que en pague més! The master is coming, the master is coming The money's master is coming Because the hours are ours If he wants more of them, he shall pay more of them. Because the hours are ours If he wants more of them, he shall pay more of them.

[originalhaffigaza]