In a time of venue upheaval and cozy old dives giving way to shiny towers, Nashville’s Springwater Supper Club And Lounge seems immortal. It claims to be the oldest continuously operating bar in Tennessee, with a birth year of 1893, and who am I to disbelieve? The three promises by the door are verifiable: Live Music, Cold Beer, Cash Only. Glad I had a twenty tucked in my wallet for Olivia Wolf’s show on a frozen night in late February. I was fortified, and Olivia, in a black cowboy hat, cut a figure in front of the stage wall’s red tinsel fringe. As she fronted an excellent band and sang the songs “Brown Liquor” (her own) and “Bluebird Wine” (Rodney Crowell’s), I slipped into a honky tonk haze.
This was night three of a four-week residency and Music City coming out party for Wolf, a late-bloomer artist who made her opening statement - an Americana radio hit called “Cosmic Appalachian Radio” from the album Silver Rounds - worth the wait, even though we didn’t know we were waiting. “Is this your debut record?,” I ask her when we sit down a few days later. “Um,” she pauses, “the first record I've ever felt I wanted to show the world.”
It’s not all drinking songs to be clear. There are also weed songs. But again, that’s not a fair impression. This album is a rich catalog of emotions documenting loss, grief and rebuilding, and connection to the natural world. Wolf took a while to pick up a guitar, to start writing songs, to tip-toe into performing, and ultimately to move to Nashville with a purpose, so her patience is paying off in the music. I didn’t ask her age, but based on dates she mentions during our conversation, she’s in her later 30s. Her bio did not mention a prior career or stages of her musical development, so you’ll hear me figuring the elements of her life story out in real time.
I’m reluctant to share too many spoilers, but I learn in the first 15 minutes of Episode 317 that Olivia is a granddaughter of Warren Hellman, the late Bay Area billionaire who founded and endowed the iconic Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park. She talks about how access to that festival and Hellman’s personal heroes - Emmylou Harris, Hazel Dickens, and Alison Krauss - shaped and inspired her.
“The first year I got to go, I think, was the ninth year, and I was blown away,” Wolf says. “I was like, what vacuum have I been living in that I'm not here doing this? Just the coolest guys were playing, like Guy Clark and Verlon Thompson, Ricky Skaggs, Ralph Stanley! I got to hear Ralph Stanley sing a capella over Golden Gate Park, right? And I can sit here and see that in my mind. Gillian Welch and Dave Rollins singing ‘I’ll Fly Away’ brought me to tears.”
Wolf’s youth was peripatetic, with stays in Northern California, the Bay Area, Virginia and Hong Kong. But music kept calling. Grandad Hellman played the banjo in a bluegrass band. The O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack of 2001 shifted her bearings and opened up doors to old-time and folk. She fell for Doc Watson, an obsession we share. In the end, she says a visit to a psychic in Sedona helped convince her to leave behind her other pursuits (she’s been a professional photographer and designer) for music. And a much more tragic event - the death by accident of her fiance just weeks before their wedding - shaped the stories and songs that became Silver Rounds.
In a nice String coincidence, Episode 316 featured Sean McConnell, who produced Olivia’s debut, so if you heard that chat, we got his perspective on their inspiring collaboration. The album is a western-tinged, country rock gem full of powerful melodies, crafty sonics and cut-to-the-bone sentiments. That opening track, a long-running single on the Americana chart called “Cosmic Appalachian Radio,” swirls like the mists in the Smoky Mountains but punches hard like an alt Marty Stuart side. The infectious “Lucky One” shows the singer in the fog of confusion and grief that enveloped her life soon before the pandemic. “The Veil” takes on that liminal state as well in a more melancholy tone at the start, but it lifts off into a powerful, orchestral anthem. Album closer “The Wild” takes us outdoors and lets us feel the breeze in the music.
What stands out in our conversation is Wolf’s patience in finding her truest voice as a singer and songwriter. “I wrote and wrote and wrote,” she says of her years in Nashville. “I worked with a couple other producers, and I realized I had to find my sound. And I wanted so badly for that to be four years ago, but as you know, you’ve got to dig it out of yourself, and it takes years. And the more years you can put into it, the more you can let it become you, without it being a copy of something else.”
Here's Olivia's recent Wired In Sessions mini-set, recorded at WMOT's East Nashville studio.
