Episode #250 of The String opens with ideas about the relatively divergent music categories of indie rock and folk music, since in my rattling on through this year’s coolest, Americana chart-making albums, I encountered a number of interesting artists who divided the distinction in their own methods. Cat Clyde is an interesting young songwriter from Canada whose present album Down Rounder impresses with its moody grace and confrontive lyrics. About the exact same time, Eric D. Johnson launched yet another album under his name Fruit Bats, and in the wake of his acclaimed deal with folk trio Bonny Light Horseman, his intense and uplifting pop sounds completely rootsy. They divided a fresh-sounding hour of the program.
With the climatic, digitally boosted noises of the latest Fruit Bats album thrumming in your ears – A River Running To Your Heart it’s called – one may be shocked to learn that Eric Johnson’s very first severe instrument was the conventional clawhammer banjo which while he was getting developed as an expert in the late 1990s, he taught at the Old Town School of Folk Music in his native Chicago. But it was playing with home recording and oddball keyboards that led him to the fold of speculative rock band Califone and its ultra-DIY label home Perishable Records. Califone made typical cause with increasing indie imitate Modest Mouse and The Shins, whom Johnson would later on sign up with for a stretch as a member.
“I’m at this very interesting age, where I caught kind of the tail end of the 90s indie rock world, and I was enamored of those bands,” Johnson says in our remote interview from his home in Los Angeles. “And for me that music was filled with possibility, because I had grown up with pop radio and then became a kind of a Deadhead, but I wasn’t good enough to be a jam artist. I couldn’t play a guitar solo or anything like that. So indie rock was like this palpable thing, where you can kind of be yourself and create a vibe. And like you don’t have to be a virtuoso; you just have to have a voice of some kind.”
Fruit Bats, a “nom de plume” that Johnson handled in the early 2000s, ended up being a cumulative with him at the center, eventually biking in as numerous as 50 various artists, though he says the recent lineup has actually been steady. Then there was the 3 years he dissolved Fruit Bats with a goodbye performance in Portland, OR just to reform in time for a prominent run of programs with My Morning Jacket.
Amid this Americana-nearby indie-rock, Johnson signed up with Bonny Light Horseman, pointed out as a supergroup including rarified songwriter Anais Mitchell and the multi-faceted Indianapolis artist Josh Kaufman, whose accomplishments consist of winning Season 6 of The Voice. “It seemed like something where maybe I could flex those (folk music) muscles,” Johnson says of the trio. “Or not even flex but exercise them. Because they weren’t even ready to be flexed yet.” Their album went beyond everybody’s expectations and ended up being a nationwide talking point and a Grammy candidate.
A River Running To Your Heartself-produced in a studio neglecting the ocean in Stinson Beach, CA, entered focus in response to the moody blue tone of the folk trio as a “swashbuckling, hard-hitting pop record.” But its one with a great deal of sonic flowers to appreciate too, similar to the cinematic crucial opening gesture “Dim Star North.” When that segues into “Rushin River Valley,” we’re in space that feels for all the world like a more joyful and jangling Hiss Golden Messenger. There’s a genuine benefit series in the center beginning with “We Used To Live Here” that Johnson says assisted the album arc click into location, and it’s simply all a revitalizing, sun-kissed album that will be among the most pleasurable of the year.
Meanwhile Cat Clyde strides back onto the phase after a pandemic lull that exceptionally disrupted her profession momentum with Down Roundera significant album that’s as abundant with concerns as it is with piquant singing. It seems like a “leveling up” for her, she says, and with a display at this fall’s AmericanaFest just recently revealed (along with some severe idea about transferring to Nashville), I’m hoping that she ends up being more of a gamer in the roots/songwriting discussion.
Clyde matured in Burlington, Ontario near Toronto, however she says her environments were quite rural and she invested a great deal of time alone in the woods, and her musical contacts were restricted to a number of extended member of the family who played guitar. What really lit her fire she keeps in mind was a path from Nirvana’s variation of the old blues number “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” to the initial recording by its author Leadbelly. She was 14.
“It just absolutely destroyed my world,” Clyde said over a Zoom connection, in an excellent way. “I never knew that music that old had been captured, and it just felt so familiar to me. And it just felt like home. And I just felt like I could really feel all of those feelings and emotions and it just enthralled me how so much was captured in such a simple recording. And I just couldn’t get enough after that.”
After getting her start in carrying out with an official music and music business degree (plus time in a punk band), she made things occur with her very first 2 albums – Ivory Castanets and Hunters Trace in 2017 and ‘19 respectively. Released on an American label, she grew a touring base in the States. But the huge time out of 2020 broke her stride. In the peaceful, she home-made a real roots folk album with her partner Jeremie Albino called Blue Blue Bluewith such covers as “Freight Train” and “Girl From The North Country.” An album of originals remained in the operate in that exact same home studio, however then her world was overthrown once again when she was forced out after the discovery of serious mold invasion in her location.
“I just felt very lost in the whole thing and really felt a lot of pressure to get it done,” she informs me. “And I didn’t really know how to get it done or how I wanted to get it done.” Then her supervisor presented her to well known manufacturer Tony Berg, a sonic wizard with a resume that consists of albums by Aimee Mann, Andrew Bird, Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift. They workshopped the tunes by Zoom however had a hard time to discover time that Berg might commit to the tracking. Clyde felt rather helpless for a time, so when Berg called with an unexpected window of 6 days, she got on it and she says it was among the very best experiences of her life.
Clyde informed me in a sector that was cut from the program that moving forward she prepares to indulge both her inner indie rocker and old-time folk vocalist sides. “Yeah, absolutely. I really love them both,” she says. “I think I’m going to be skipping stones between them for some time.”
