My notes from Humbird’s official showcase at Americanafest 2024 are full of urgent scrawls and exclamation points, even a couple (approving) f-bombs. It all made quite an impression. The songwriter/artist, whom I’ll address by her given name, Siri Undlin, sang beautifully, played electric guitar, and twiddled knobs on her pedalboard with bare feet. Her band was streamlined and tuned in: drummer Nate LeBrun and bass player Pat Keen, who had even more elaborate effects at his feet. Keen would also play, from time to time, a small synthesizer. But my central memory from this smart, funky, intoxicating set is Siri’s almost constant smile, even as she sang about some complex stuff.
“Well, there is a fair amount of improvisation in our sets, which is just sort of the style that Pat and Nate play,” Undlin explained the next morning as we talked for Episode #304 of The String. “I'm not much of an improviser, but I love to hear other people do surprising things. So we end up laughing and smiling a lot, because we're just always kind of goofing around with each other and pulling the rug out from each other and adjusting on stage. So it's a very alive process. And yeah, that leads to smiles.”
As for the bare feet, she says, “People are always like, Oh, is that a spiritual thing, playing barefoot? And it's like, no, I actually need the dexterity of my toes to spin this phaser knob.”
So I hereby tag Humbird’s music as barefoot phaser folk rock. She’s a Minnapolis native who released her first album Pharmakon in 2018, and there we can hear outlines of the sound that had me so captivated on that September Friday night - sturdy songcraft, thought-provoking lyrics and a pure, affectless voice, wrapped in an embrace of beats and texture and ensemble expression. I discovered Humbird through her follow-up album Still Life of 2021. And by the time I caught her show, I’d become a fan of the current LP, Right On, whose fusion mindset and excellent songwriting would, I’d suspect, appeal to fans of St. Vincent or Madison Cunningham.
The opening title track, a reflection on a breakup, is the most country leaning and wistful song on the album, so track two, the head-bobbing “Cornfields and Roadkill,” takes us in a new direction. It’s a slow burn song with a crisp backbeat and vivid imagery in the opening line: “There’s an old barn on a ghost farm, hollowed out and filled with stars.” From there, it’s a rumination on monoculture, environmental negligence, and lost regionalism, with the music surging into an angry, cathartic climax. She calls it one of her most effective and favorite songs. During this hour of radio, we also hear “Ghost On The Porch” with its angular and amazing riff and a spectral story inspired by Undlin’s study of folklore, as well as album closer “Song For The Seeds,” a serene but troubled meditation on what plants can teach us.
Siri Undlin says she banged on a piano so much as a four-year-old that her parents helped her find musical outlets, including a spell playing Irish folk music in the local pub scene. As a budding songwriter, she found her place in a Midwestern DIY music underground. “I'm really lucky to be from (Minneapolis),” she says, “There's funding for the arts, which is pretty cool as a kid moving through public school systems. But then as you get older, you realize there's these legendary bands that stuck around in the Twin Cities music scene. There’s a lack of competition. In my experience, it was more about community and collaboration and the art of it, as opposed to, like, trying to climb some ladder. And that was really fertile ground for me.”
Her music was supplemented by studies in anthropology and then folklore through a Watson fellowship that let her spend a year overseas studying Celtic and Nordic traditions, specifically, as she says, “how people used music to tell stories.”
“I was really curious about how melodies can trigger our memories, how sometimes life-saving, crucial information can be hidden in these stories,” she adds. “They are these ways of remembering that people used the whole time. Now we are out of practice with all the technology, but yeah, stories and songs are their own kind of technology that our ancestors left for us.”
So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Humbird’s music leads me to take notes. Enjoy.
