When I had the country-noir songwriter and artist Olivia Wolf on the show in 2025, the conversation delivered some unusually surprising revelations, chiefly that she was the granddaughter of Warren Hellman, one of the most extraordinary philanthropists in the history of modern Americana music. Hellman, a Bay Area investor of great wealth, personally started and financed Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the game-changing San Francisco festival that’s taken place every October since 2001. Not only was that a cool connection, it helped me connect two more dots - that Olivia must then be the sister of one Avery Hellman, the folk singer known as Ismay.
I was already a fan of Ismay at that point, thanks to her visionary and beautifully unusual 2024 album Desert Pavement. The songwriter sang of ranch life and nature and self-investigation with a particularly poetic and regional flair. Her songs spun around surprising melodic turns and chord changes. Her voice was springwater pure and the album’s production seductive. In a sea of singer songwriters, Ismay struck me as just the right kind of different. So it was just a matter of time before I sought Avery Hellman herself out for a visit, and when she started touring on her new record Half Truth, she came through Nashville and we had the wonderful conversation in String #364.
Hellman took on her moniker after reading about the smallest incorporated town in Idaho in a book about the west, and Ismay the persona was born. “Ismay and Avery Hellman are not the same thing. Ismay does not represent Avery Hellman, and to me, Ismay is very much a collaborative thing,” she says. “Mostly up until recently, I wrote my own songs, but now I've started co-writing. Andy (Allen-Fahlander), my partner, is writing songs too, and then his contribution of guitar playing is a really big part of the sound. And so, yeah, I mean, I think (the name) almost allows for more flexibility because it's almost like creating this separate cloud in the air.”
Avery was profoundly influenced by Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, where she and her sister were able to run around backstage through their formative years. Every year, the voices of Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Buddy Miller, Alison Krauss were in her ears and on stage. But it took a while for the performing bug to bite. She thought she was going to build on what she’d learned working on her family’s northern California ranch and study environmental science. Then, paradoxically, Warren Hellman’s death in 2011 lit a musical spark in multiple members of her family. They started various family bands for recreation.
“I didn't know what being a musician was. I didn't know what a gig was,” she tells us. “And then all of a sudden I was thrown into this incredible world and embraced by all these really wonderful, thoughtful people like Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Ron Thomason from (bluegrass band) Dry Branch Fire Squad.” As she recalls, she was 19 when things began to come into focus. “And I saw this world and I was like, that's a great thing to spend your life doing. And so I started playing gigs. I started understanding how folk music worked. And then I wanted to start my own project.”
Between Desert Pavement and Half Truth, Hellman unveiled yet another creative direction by way of her documentary Finding Lucinda. It opens in Hellman’s rustic California home before she sets out on a road trip to better understand the legendary and somewhat mysterious songwriter, as well as herself.
“I was experimenting with different art forms and wanting to do a project that involved some kind of documentary storytelling,” she sums up. “We didn't intend to set out and make a whole full-length film, but we just said, ‘Let's set out on a road trip to uncover, you know, the origins of Lucinda Williams. Let's just meet these people from her early days and learn about her.’ And at the same time, this question that I had - that was really hard to admit to myself - was like, if I tried to do this fully (a songwriting career), like, would it be worth it? Because do I have enough to offer to make it worth it? And I think not every artist asks themselves that.”
While Desert Pavement earned critical praise as the emergence of a promising new roots music talent, Half Truth confirms that Ismay is here for the long haul. Recorded in upstate New York with noted indie rock artist and producer Sam Cohen, it’s warmly enveloping and confident. Hellman says that partly inspired by Lucinda’s father Miller Williams, a National Arts Award winning poet, she reached harder for her poetic voice, letting the songcraft follow that more indirect map.
The opening title track doesn’t give itself away easily but invites study of how she negotiates her inner and outer world. Next, “American Flag,” the album’s first single, is more punchy and direct with a killer beat and neo-psychedelic swoon, as she sings about a failed attempt to tame a wild horse. I’m also fond of “Jesus Sign” and “On The Honest Edge Of Being,” not because I totally grasp them, but because I don’t. And yet they keep calling me back.
Here's Ismay's "American Flag"
