Jonathan Bird on Hornby Island

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Saturday, October 4th, 2014

I started going to Clifftop and Mt. Airy and finding Old-time jams at home and on the road, anywhere my new friends lived. I got to thinking that I could write songs like that, or maybe one just fell out of me and I thought, “Wow, there it is.” Either way, I figured nobody was writing songs like that anymore, at least nobody I’d heard, and I knew that style was just technique. In other words, those songs didn’t sound old because they were old; they sounded old because they were written in an old style. There wasn’t a reason in the world why somebody couldn’t write a song like that, if he wanted to.

“Ashe County Fair” was probably the first song I wrote like that. Another one was “Velma,” a song I wrote about the woman who killed my grandfather. I think somebody dies in most of the songs on my first album. Three of them die in “Velma.” I was also playing Irish music by the time I recorded, so I played the guitar parts in an alternate tuning, DADGAD. In retrospect, it gives the whole album a dark, open sound that takes the themes over the edge and out into the dripping woods.

I started touring full-time in 2000, realizing that I could do it as a solo performer and actually make a living. Of course, that’s what every other singer/songwriter in America was doing, too, but I didn’t even know what a singer/songwriter was, so that didn’t bother me. I thought I was a folk musician. Over time, I realized that folk got cross-dressed and don’t mean what it used to mean anymore. I think my friend Aengus Finnan said it better than anybody I’ve heard yet, “It’s a style of presentation.” So that’s just it, as long as you don’t put on the razzle-dazzle and shake your ass in a sequin skirt, you can be a folk musician. Sit there on a stool and play your tuba, tell a story once in a while and wear some Birckenstocks. Everybody will think you’re a folk musician.

In 2002, I went to the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, where there are lots of these folk musicians, only mostly songwriters. I wandered around for a week looking for the dance tent and the fiddle bands before I realized what I’ve already said about the word “folk.” It ended up being an amazing and inspiring experience and I’ve been for all 18 days every year since. At the 2003 festival, I won the New Folk competition and got hired on as a performer for the next three years. I never took to Birckenstocks and my friend Anais Mitchell helped me find a great pair of boots in Austin. They’re Fryes.

In 2004, Dromedary and I recorded an album together called “The Sea and the Sky,” which brings beautiful instruments from all over the world into my sound and songwriting. I’ve toured in Europe and the US with them, including a return to Kerrville and two consecutive years at the Moab Folk Festival in gorgeous Moab, Utah. If you’re not familiar with Dromedary, I highly recommend you go to dromedarymusic.com right now- well, after you read the rest of this, anyway. Their music is magic, like the voice of Emmylou Harris, an instant drop in the shoulders, a glaze on the eyes, a trip back to childhood. I’m honored to be friends with them and occasionally share the three-man funk in a rental car.

The next album was a rock ‘n’ roll album called “This Is The New That.” Rock ‘n’ roll, because I just didn’t know how else to play these songs. They’re rock ‘n’ roll songs. It leads off with a revision of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Dromedary came back into the studio with me and played electric guitars. Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall-of-Famer and Muscle Shoals session guitarist Will McFarlane sits in on a few. It was amazing to watch him work, a blue-eyed gent in a kilt ripping the blues from stem to stern. When the first take was done, there were no questions and nothing left to be done but get the cat off the ceiling. What a pro.

Also, on the side, I’ve recorded a collaboration with Diana Jones, from Nashville, called Radio Soul. We went to a barn, sat down in two chairs, and recorded the whole album in 7 hours.

Texas is a huge influence on my writing. “The Law and the Lonesome” is what might have happened if Townes Van Zandt had made a record with Doc Watson. Tamara Kater of Canada’s venerable folk mag Penguin Eggs called “The Law and the Lonesome” her “album of the decade.” Co-produced by the brilliant Chris Bartos in Toronto, “The Law and the Lonesome” features a couple of co-writes with my friend Corin Raymond. We wrote the title track together, which was featured in a songwriting class at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

I beat “Radio Soul” and recorded “Cackalack” in six hours with a handful of the best musicians in Toronto, although it sounds like it was recorded in a barn in North Carolina. Ken Whitely, who has gold and platinum records to his name, engineered the record in his converted garage with Nik Tjelios. As of mid-January 2011, “Cackalack” was #1 on Roots Music Reports folk radio chart.

The Barn Birds is my latest record, an eleven-song duet with Chris Kokesh. “…negotiations, proclamations, prayers and conversations between lovers… intimate and poetic, passionate and playful.” -Erik Balkey, Hudson Harding Music. Chris and I met in 2007 at the Sisters Folk Festival in Sisters, Oregon. I invited Chris to play with me during my set. The overwhelming popular reception encouraged us to team up and hit the road. After touring cross country, we went back to Oregon to make our first recording in a barn, but we were foiled by the intermittent noises of the barn’s resident birds. We became “The Barn Birds” and did a live re-recording in Texas at Blue Rock Studio.

http://jonathanbyrd.com/