#nanci griffith

[oldmanpeace]

[protoslacker]

Nanci Griffith in Norway 1993 From A Distance

orogenicman

In the early days of social networking sites, Google's was called Orkut. It was more popular outside of the USA than in country. I was checking the site out and noticed there were users in Iran. Looking at posted pictures, I saw young married couples, babies, favorite nieces, grand parents, birthday cakes. and all the sorts of things that keeps me at Facebook. People are people.

"From a distance I cannot comprehend what all this war is for."

[krispyweiss]

Song Review: I’m With Her - “Wild and Clear and Blue” (Live)

I’m With Her’s singing and playing is so beguiling, their similarly brilliant songwriting is oftentimes overlooked.

But when a song like “Wild and Clear and Blue” comes along, said brilliance is hard to miss. The latest single from the trio’s forthcoming in-concert LP, Sing Me Alive, references musical heroes, memories of a carefree youth and encroaching adult worries as guitarist Aoife O’Donovan sings in harmony with Sara Watkins (fiddle and bow) and Sarah Jarosz on octave mandolin:

Now the static is slowly replacing the sounds of my childhood days

That’s a line anyone can relate to, even those who miss the nameless references to Nanci Griffith and John Prine. And the wistfulness of the mid-tempo melody and the longing melancholia in the harmonies are sounds that’ll devastate anyone who feels time slipping.

Sing Me Alive is out April 17; read Sound Bites’ previous coverage here.

Grade card: I’m With Her - “Wild and Clear and Blue” (Live) - A

3/26/26

[creek-rock]

Music in Conversation

I was finishing up yet another listen of the excellent new Kevin Morby record the other day when it occurred to me that the final track is a kindred spirit to the closer of Ratboys' (coincidentally, also excellent) new record. Morby's "Field Guide For The Butterflies" and Ratboys' "At Peace in the Hundred Acre Wood" close their respective projects on a note of grace, finding slivers of serenity in retreat to the natural world and offering nuanced but ultimately optimistic takes on how to move forward through the dizzying, suffocating reality of everyday life.

There's obvious musical similarity, with both tracks stripping down to plaintive lead vocals and breezy supporting instrumentation. They convey a similar sense of sonic resolution, but the lyrical commonalities are especially notable. They earnestly sing of mornings and fresh starts (always a welcome trope at the end of a record). Morby hits the open road in his Econoline, while Julia Steiner and crew sail away to "leave my old life behind." They both even address the inevitability of death and lean towards accepting time's passage with a mix of dignity and defiance. Morby squeezes all the juice he can out of this life trying "to grow wings," and Steiner hints that the titular patch of woods is a source of eternal peace.

What really cements the songs' bond, I think, is their shared emphasis on friendship as a way to mitigate pain and joyfully live out shared values of community and love — Steiner even went so far as to cite Winnie The Pooh as an influence on the song, which is so wholesome it hurts. There's something particularly beautiful about saying it as plainly as "where there are my friends, there are happy times" and "laugh through the pain / it doesn't hurt so bad when I am with my friends." I'm grateful for these albums and songs and will always think of them as cousins — which got me thinking about other songs I think of in that vein, and more broadly about when artists are seemingly in conversation with each other across the years.

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In the "songs that are cousins" category, a few other candidates immediately come to mind — Hop Along's "Sally II" and Nervous Dater's "Farm Song" are earthy, country-indebted outliers on otherwise emo-heavy albums. Sticking with the Ratboys theme, I previously wrote that their 2023 epic "Black Earth, WI" was "the stonier, less abrasive cousin" to Wednesday's ferocious "Bull Believer." Which brings me to instances of music as both homage and conversation, something that Wednesday is unparalleled in the modern era at making manifest.

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One of the many things I love about Wednesday is Karly Hartzman's willingness to wear influences on her sleeve; she talks openly about the writing process and how she layers those influences into her own songs. "Chosen To Deserve" is a prime example of this metatextual spirit — she explains "I heard “Let There Be Rock” by Drive-By Truckers. The premise is describing a fucked-up childhood, basically, and I wanted to write that song but use all my memories instead." Even DBT's straightforward chord progression played a part in how the song was structured, relying only on three chords in service of simplicity and accessibility. And going one layer deeper, "Let There Be Rock" is a nod to the 1977 AC/DC album of the same name...will circle back if it turns out there's a reference to a reference to a reference to a reference I haven't yet peeled back.

"Bitter Everyday" also invokes one of the great American songwriters, alluding to Iris DeMent's "Easy's Gettin' Harder Every Day," a deeply mournful portrait of lower-middle class decline that's somewhat perversely become one of my most reliable comfort songs. Elsewhere, "Bath County" lifts multiple memorable lines from Loudon Wainwright III's "I Am the Way (New York Town)." "Fate Is..." borrows from the Arthur Russell classic "What It's Like" and "Hot Rotten Grass Smell" opens Rat Saw God with a Bill Callahan reference. It's impossible not to hear the opening riff of Dolly Parton's "Gettin' Happy" in the re-recorded version of "Phish Pepsi," and "The Way Love Goes" owes a debt of gratitude to, naturally, Merle Haggard's "That's the Way Love Goes." (Bonus reference — it's self-evident that MJ Lenderman's "Knockin" would not exist if it weren't for Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" before it.)

All these references fit seamlessly into the band's oeuvre and serve to enrich their lyrical depth, contextualizing the band's sound and explicitly placing them in a unique songwriting lineage. Discussing Callahan's "The Well," Hartzman notes the immediate resonance to her own personal life, along with her tendency to "collect stuff by tone." For someone with similarly avid music collection habits, it's so cool to witness my favorite band continuously layer in these easter eggs throughout their catalogue.

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I also love the path that songs can take changing hands from artist to artist over the years — Kate Wolf writing the stunning "Across The Great Divide" in the 1980s would have been more than enough on its own, but Nancy Griffith and Emmylou Harris valiantly breathed new life into her words in the 90s, as did Little Mazarn just last year. Shoutout Iris DeMent for backing me up ahead of this live cover — "this song of Kate's that I also think of as Nancy's song; in my mind, they're kind of merged somehow."

Cataloguing the full scope of artists who have covered "A Satisfied Mind" would be a fool's errand, but what a joy to hear the old country standard turned into Bon Iver's intensely emotional and vocoder-smothered interpretation, just as with Lucinda Williams' and Loretta Lynn's more traditional takes decades prior (not to mention Vampire Weekend's own interpolation!).

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I could go on and on, but all of this is to say that the context in which music is written and recorded can bring so much additional meaning to works that are already cherished at face value. I think of these threads a bit like the movie Annihilation, where an alien force causes interspecies DNA to splice, to mutate, and form entirely new types of organisms that the rules of nature can't account for. And ultimately, that's kinda what art's all about; the old made new, the internal made external, buoyed by human spark and interpersonal connection.

[flankingmanoeuvres]

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[brecbc123]

[typingtess]

"Like a Rolling Stone" - Bob Dylan with Rosanne Cash, Nanci Griffith, Emmylou Harris, Michelle Shocked and Mavis Staples on the 10th Anniversary of Late Night with David Letterman.

[yourbelgianthings]

amber gris and devo la main

speed of the sound of loneliness (nanci griffith) / mirage (luis g. dato) / our lady, star of the sea by bernadette carstensen / great white shark / in the house by the sea (stacie cassation)

for eliot @yardsards