This week’s String is an expanded, modified show transcript.
Twenty five years ago a group of about 30 professional music lovers from record labels, radio and media met at South By Southwest in Austin to talk about making a new space for a musical movement that fell between the cracks, as they say. It was too country for country radio, too indie for rock stations, and it had a deep and abiding kinship with folk music and the blues. The radio chart that gave Americana its name had been up and running for a few years by then, but these folks wanted to translate that visibility into more infrastructure, more promotion, and more coordination. So with that in mind, the Americana Music Association was born.
This week brings another Americanafest, the annual gathering of the Americana tribes. Between Sept. 17 and 21, there will be almost 300 showcases across dozens of venues all over Nashville. There will be numerous parties at record stores and breweries hosted by labels and promotion companies. We’ll witness the conferring of lifetime achievement awards on a fascinating and illustrative class that tells a lot about the Americana idea - the Blind Boys of Alabama, Shelby Lynne, Dwight Yoakam, Dave Alvin, and the late Rev. Gary Davis.
There’s going to be much to see and much artist discovery in the days ahead, but as I thought about the talent emerging from Nashville right now and the recordings I’ve heard from the next wave of our music, I realized that I was especially excited about Sophie Gault and her sophomore album Baltic Street Hotel. It’s coming out Friday, but I’ve been listening to it for several weeks, and it’s rich with personal details, sharp and memorable melodies, and an old school electric Americana spirit that evokes Lucinda Williams and Kathleen Edwards. And it’s got a good story, in that roots super-producer Ray Kennedy, who mixed Gault’s debut album, reached out to her to ask if he could produce her next project. That’s quite a vote of confidence.
“He's very creative,” Gault says about Kennedy in Episode 296 of The String. “He cares about how it sounds. He really cares about the artists and what they want. I had only met him when I did my first album, so he was around. And then he asked me to do an album with him. And who would say no to that?”
Gault came of age on the eastern shore of Maryland. She tells us that growing up with no siblings and parents with good musical taste led her to spend a lot of refuge time with a guitar. “It felt good to get good at something,” she says. She began playing out during a collegiate music program in New York and came to Nashville on an internship and never left. She hasn’t been through a period of relentless touring yet, partly because her first album Delusions of Grandeur was delayed by the pandemic. But that album earned good reviews and she found a professional team at Torrez Music Group, the same boutique company that manages her friend and sometime tour partner Gabe Lee.
The deeper we go, we discover that for all of her talents, Gault is not the type of artist who came to town with a singular focus on being a performing artist. She networked slowly and played occasionally. But opportunity came looking for her. “I kind of gave up on the idea of doing it. I don't really know what to do or how to do it, and I hadn't written enough songs yet, so I went to grad school. I was gonna be a teacher, and then I got signed by Petaluma.”
Now Strong Place Music, Petaluma was/is an indie label run by a former major label guy and artist manager with a savvy, worldly roster that includes desert blues guitarist Abdallah Oumbadougou and North Mississippi All-Star Cody Dickinson. And in Baltic Street Hotel, they’ve added to their catalog a stylish, succulent album that balances a rocking spirit with a folk songwriter’s acumen. The opener “Kick The Devil Away” urges a friend to get his act together against a sunny power pop twang. In “Lately,” Gault writes and sings a classically mournful country duet, delivered with Gabe Lee, echoing her brilliant duet “Trouble” from album #1 with Logan Ledger. “Kid On The Radio” is a blast, with lyrics that conjure the southern impressionism of R.E.M. and the minor-keyed electric jams of Neil Young’s “Ohio” era.
Then there’s “Christmas In The Psych Ward,” an edgy and sardonic look back at a tough stretch of Gault’s life when she was diagnosed as bipolar. This leads to some insightful conversation. Also in this broadcast we play the song “Over And Out,” a lament of regret and reconciliation that shows the excellence of the Kennedy-selected studio band and the vibrancy of their all-live recording sessions. It’s a stunner. And it’s followed by the benediction song, an uplifting still life of a normal morning sunlit with gratitude that’s simply called “Things Are Going Good.”
Gault confirms that things are going good for her, and that more touring and more doing what she loves is lying in wait on the other side of her Americana showcase, which is tonight (Tuesday) at 9 pm at the Row One Stage at Cannery Hall. She also plays the Indies & Outlaws day party hosted by Torrez Music Group on Thursday from noon to six at Nations Bar & Grill, as well as a celebration of Mary Ford at the Gibson Garage on Friday between noon and six.
Also in this hour, a visit with 15-year-old mandolin player and new bluegrass breakout artist Wyatt Ellis. Taped at the Earl Scruggs Music Festival over Labor Day weekend, the interview covers his upbringing in East Tennessee, meeting his heroes Marty Stuart and Bobby Osborne, playing the Grand Ole Opry, and his debut album Happy Valley.
