Author: erinohare

About seven years ago, Guion Pratt was living in County Meath, Ireland, working on a farm and writing poetry. He and a friend played songs —some of Pratt’s originals plus a few Bruce Springsteen tunes—as a guitar and saxophone duo in some area pubs.

They called themselves Nettles, for the leafy, stinging plants they had been weeding on the farm. Pratt was drawn to the onomatopoeic quality of the word and, he says, it made sense with the impressionistic texture created by layering thoughtful lyrics over fingerstyle guitar.

The name—and his penchant for making multidimensional music—stuck, and when Pratt moved to Charlottesville to study poetry at the University of Virginia, he brought the Nettles project along and opened it up to a number of local musicians. Fellow poetry student Juliana Daugherty joined with her Irish and concert flutes, and the Nettles lineup has included Sam Bush on guitar and keys, Chris Campanelli on guitar, Michael Coleman on drums, Brett Jones and Joseph Dickey on bass, Daniel Levi Goans on piano and a handful of others (including Travis Smith on sax back in Ireland).

Like a nettle, these folksy, Irish-y, alt-  songs will stick to you, but they will get under your skin in a dulcet way. To truly hear Nettles and experience that pleasure, you must listen. With Nettles, nuance matters.

“I’m not interested in ever getting my hands completely around a song, in wrestling it down and saying, ‘That’s what it is,’” says Pratt, who comes up with lyrics and a basic arrangement before bringing a song to the group. “There can be multiple avenues into and out of a song, entrances and exits where the end of the idea is not necessarily the end of a song.”

Take, for example, “Brando,” the second track on 2015’s Locust Avenue, formed around Marlon Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Lyrically, it follows the arc of the play from Stanley’s perspective, with tensions building between a husband and wife as a sister overstays her welcome and people start to talk. “All the gossip on the porches / And the talk in all the churches / Is white as a forest of birches / Drier than drought / Loud as a shout / Empty as doubt,” Pratt sings, his voice reminiscent of Ryan Adams’, tender but strong and always thoughtful.

“Brando” then moves out of the Streetcar plot and into an exploration of rage: “Well the ocean will have what it craves / I’ll win your love or roll you in my waves / And you say you don’t mind when it rains? / I’ll blot out your sunlight and swallow your planes.” Then Stanley erupts: “I threw the radio / my first mistake / then my hands got to flailing / caught you in your wake.”

The instrumental arrangement matches. It begins with a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, bright flutes and light percussion; drums and flute dance around each other as other instruments come in from time to time, sonically swelling the emotion. Like boxers circling the ring before a match, the now dark flute and heavy drum go back and forth before colliding when Stanley explodes. The song ends on a deep flourish with Stanley yelling up to Stella from the street below. The band—like method actor Brando—has become the character.

Daugherty points out that it’s the power of the collective Nettles that makes this extraordinary nuance possible. They’ll work for hours to get those parts just right. Together, “we’re capable of much more than we would be on our own,” she says.

Pratt finds Nettles’ songs in many places, in Brando and Stanley; in podcasts about locusts and in planets that have no orbit. He finds them in Ruan Lingyu, a Chinese film star of the 1920s and ’30s whose life tragically mimicked art when she committed suicide at age 24, and in Harry Caul, the fictional audio-surveillance expert who hears too much in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

But none of his songs are completely about these subjects. When Pratt crafts a song around, say, Lingyu, he’s seeking to understand what draws him—a 28-year-old man living in Charlottesville in 2016—to this film actress who lived nearly a century ago and half a world away. He’s certain that there are many possible connections to uncover in each performance of a song; he never wants to give it all away, because “a song can’t mean many things if one person can hold it in his hands,” he says.

Pratt and Daugherty are currently working on an EP of traditional folk songs, and Pratt says a new Nettles record is in the works. In the meantime, the band will play some local shows this spring before Pratt departs for a solo tour of Europe to introduce these songs to a new audience.

Ultimately, Nettles’ songs shorten the distance between the past and the present, between fiction and reality. Pratt hopes that a song is always elusive enough to carry him and the listener out and into life to be amazed by wondrous stories of planets, insects or fictional characters. Don’t try to pin them down, he insists. Just stand before them and say, “Wow.”

Who is your favorite storytelling songwriter?

Tell us in the comments below.

–Erin O’Hare

Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield released her second album, Cerulean Salt, in 2013 to high critical acclaim. Full of punk-edged folk songs that are at once quiet and powerful thanks to a stripped-down performance and sublime lyrics, the record was rated an 8.4 out of 10 and dubbed Best New Music by Pitchfork. It landed at No. 36 on Rolling Stone’s 50 Best Albums of 2013 list and was chosen as an album of the week by Stereogum. And the accolades kept coming.

So what did Crutchfield do when it came time to make a follow-up record? She tried something new.

Crutchfield plugged her guitar into an amp and paired a more electric sound to her clarion voice and piercing lyrics on Ivy Tripp (2015). The instrumentation in particular, she says, was ambitious. “I really wanted to challenge myself to make a record that was totally different than the other two I had made. I wanted to surprise my audience, to show that I can write a wide array of songs while still being cohesive.” Crutchfield opens the record with “Breathless,” trading her acoustic guitar for a synthesizer and singing, “You indulge me/I indulge you/But I’m not trying to have it all.”

She’s not trying to have it all; she’s just trying to make good music. Music that she’s proud of, music that others can connect to.

“I’ve been writing hyper-personal music for more than a decade,” Crutchfield says, sounding a bit incredulous at the fact. She got her first guitar at 13 and starting writing her own songs out of the desire to accompany herself while singing. “And also partly due to lack of skill,” she admits with aplomb. “Playing other people’s music is kind of hard. Once I started writing my own songs, it was something I really loved and I became immediately passionate about it.”

Before she began recording as Waxahatchee, Crutchfield played in rock-, pop- and punk-influenced bands The Ackleys and P.S. Eliot with her twin sister, Allison (currently of Philadelphia’s Swearin’), and various friends. As a kid, she and her two sisters were always singing, dancing and putting on shows.

The music is not directly autobiographical, but it is born from personal experiences. It has become Crutchfield’s way of processing and coming to understand her emotions. When she returns to a song after some time away, she remembers—and better understands—just how she felt in the moment she wrote it.

She is often asked by worried exes, friends and family members if she’ll record a song about them and what that song might say. “I try not to be super obvious, like ‘You have brown hair and a birthmark on your face,’” she says. “But I want to be honest about how I’m feeling and put that out in the world.” Crutchfield is acutely aware that when she sings to lift the veil and expose her feelings, she’s often involving another person.

The first Waxahatchee record [2012’s American Weekend] was made on a whim, and she didn’t think anyone was going to hear it. But a few people did hear American Weekend, many more heard Cerulean Salt, and even more will hear Ivy Tripp—as the supporting act for Sleater-Kinney this fall her audience is bound to grow, but it may not leave a lot of time for songwriting.

Crutchfield’s lyrics are a huge part of Waxahatchee’s draw and she doesn’t intend to leave that behind completely. “I try to be as respectful as I can and hope for the best, because if I’m feeling something that I need to put down, I want to be able to do that,” she says.

When writing Ivy Tripp, she pondered universal experiences. On the album’s second track, “Under A Rock,” propelled by driving guitar hooks and a catchy pop melody, Crutchfield could be singing to just about anyone. “Maybe you got your head caught in a ditch last night/I got to you, imparting/Now you’re someone else’s mess tonight/And I got upset, I told you twice/That I know how to break inside/The brick house that you build around your cranium/You wear it like a crown.”

She knows how to get in your head, how to crack you with her tender but strong voice, and she knows exactly where to slice you with her sharp lyrics. She’ll open you up so that you’re on even ground with her, a double exposure. Crutchfield’s songs get at the essence of what makes her—and her listener—human.

The 26-year-old believes fully in the music she makes. It’s evident in her voice, in her guitar playing and in her confidence on stage. It’s how she can continue to write and perform songs that are close to her heart while owning a completely different sound on a new record. After all, she says, “I am myself. And I’m growing.”

–Erin O’Hare

Take a look at The Anatomy of Frank’s song catalog and one thing is immediately clear: These guys are really into geography. The group named its debut album Pangaea, after a supercontinent, and its forthcoming second album, North America, includes songs with titles such as “Occupy Anchorage,” “Vancouver (for child astronauts)” and “A Bridge Over Lake Champlain.”

This constant rumination on place, says The Anatomy of Frank keys player Jimmy Bullis, is a fact of a band’s lifestyle: They’re often on the road.

The songs on North America are an ode to the continent, to the places the band has been and the people it’s met while on tour.

“The songs come from that cavernous mindset that you run into when you remember places,” says Bullis. “The memories [we make on the road] get filed in our minds under ‘place.’ ‘This was in Redwood National Forest,’ or ‘This was in the Cascade Mountains,’ or ‘That was at the continental divide in Mexico.’”

When Bullis points this out, guitarist and vocalist Kyle Woolard grins widely. “Our lives are totally about where things happen,” he says.

With the release of North America, the band takes on an extremely ambitious agenda: Write one album for each continent—seven total—recorded on each continent. It’s a massive undertaking that’s been in the making for years. A project that has roots in an imaginary cinnamon plantation in Sri Lanka.

When Woolard was a teen, he read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a fictionalized memoir with elements of magical realism, and started dreaming about a life in the jungle of Sri Lanka. When he ended up studying astrophysics at UVA instead of moving to Sri Lanka, he says he started writing songs “inspired by how I felt about this longing, this craving for this place.” Then when Woolard’s dad started talking about Antarctica, Woolard began writing songs about the coldest continent. One winter break, he stayed in the dorms—with no heat, no running water or electricity—to approximate the arctic experience. He already has more than an album’s worth of songs, and the band is contemplating how it will travel there to record.

Woolard, Bullis and their bandmates—guitarist Erik Larsen, bassist Jonas Creason and drummer Max Bollinger—all contribute to the project. They’re constantly writing songs and learning them as a full band. In addition to the Antarctica tunes, TAOF’s two albums’ worth of material for Europe and South America is coming along nicely.

The Anatomy of Frank loves performing live. Not only do the members get to “moan about their feelings on stage for money,” says Woolard half-joking, they also become part of a rewarding exchange of music and said feelings with their audience. But, life on the road can be tough. Oftentimes, the band is far from home, with very little money and a certain number of CDs to sell to buy food or book a hotel room.

When nighttime approaches and a gig comes to an end, says Woolard, it can be a dreadful feeling, not knowing where they’ll be staying. Relying on the kindness of friends and fans, they’ve slept on floors and couches in Iceland, in the U.S. and throughout Europe. One fan (now a friend) even showed them around Paris. “It’s like we’ve found a sweet spot in the world with traveling…a whole [undercurrent] of amazing people,” says Bullis, who admits that even if the band reaches a level of popularity where they can afford hotel rooms regularly, he’d prefer to continue staying with these “saints of the road.” These experiences are, after all, the very substance of the band’s songs.

The Anatomy of Frank will hit the road this fall to tour North America around Europe. They’ve come a long way from Pangaea, a pop-rock record that doesn’t quite match the band’s current sound.

North America is Sigur Rós meets Sufjan Stevens, musically diverse and sophisticated in lyric and concept. The album opens with “Minnesota (part i), for Scott and Jeremy,” a shimmery tune with folk notes and bright percussion that builds steadily to the energetic swell of vocal harmony. Each song that follows captures a distinct feeling inspired by a place—some rock harder, some sway softer—but it’s cohesive, a neatly surveyed set.

Before TAOF goes abroad, the band is hosting what it says will be a raucous hometown album release show at Meade Hall. Charlottesville bands The Hill and Wood and Lowland Hum will open, and The Anatomy of Frank will be joined by string and horn sections on various North America tracks.

At that show, the band will gift a round-trip ticket to Alaska to someone in the audience, so he or she can experience the essence of the North America album firsthand, and see how vast and diverse the continent is, in people and in landscape.

“It’s awe-inspiring how people live within this same world differently,” says Bullis. “It’s too easy to forget.”

“You don’t have to go overseas to seek beauty,” adds Woolard, insisting that it’s all right here in North America.

–Erin O’Hare

As audio engineer for Charlottesville’s Paramount Theater, it’s Gary Green’s job to make musicians sound great.

What many people don’t know is that Green is an accomplished musician in his own right. A virtuoso harmonica player, he won the Hohner-sponsored 1987 World Harmonica Championships, and by his own estimate has since played on recordings for more than 60 artists.

This month, Green will sling his harp—slang for harmonica—skills on an eight-city East Coast tour with the Mayer Kirby Mayer Acoustic Group, which makes a stop at the Paramount on September 16.

These four musicians—Green, Peter Mayer, Scott Kirby and Brendan Mayer—have known each other for years. Green and Kirby grew up together in New Hampshire and played in bands throughout high school and then met Peter Mayer through the East Coast music scene. Brendan Mayer (Peter’s son) has known Green and Kirby his entire life.

Five or six years ago—neither can remember quite when—the elder Mayer and Kirby organized a small tour during a break from their usual gigs—Peter Mayer has toured as lead guitarist for Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band for more than 20 years. When he’s not on the road with Buffett, he tours with his jazz- and gospel-inspired project, the Peter Mayer Group.

Kirby is a self-taught fingerpicking guitarist who weaves a laid-back, beach vibe into his classic Americana and country sound. He has seven solo albums and plays upward of 150 shows a year. Like Peter Mayer, Kirby is a fixture on the Key West/Margaritaville/Parrothead scene.

That first small tour was a success, so they organized one each subsequent year, and three years ago folded Brendan into the mix. He may be young, but he’s no stranger to the stage. He released his debut EP, Getaway Car, in October after spending most of that year as a featured artist with Jimmy Buffett’s This One’s For You tour.

The current tour is a celebration of song stripped down to three guitars, three voices and some light percussion. The group performs in the round, with each taking turns leading his own tunes and telling stories. Don’t expect a set full of Buffett covers. That’s not what this is about.

The trio invited Green to join the 2015 tour after the four of them played a spontaneous-but-by-all-accounts-explosive set of shows at the Smokin’ Tuna Saloon in Key West in April-—the chemistry was palpable.

Green’s melodic harmonica fills the role usually played by a keyboard, violin or lead guitar. He taught himself to play while hitchhiking as a teenager, and had the chance to study with harmonica masters such as Howard Levy and Peter Madcat Ruth. And then there’s that whole world champion thing. Most people think of Bob Dylan when they hear the instrument, but Green proves there is sonic force in a subtle harmonica melody.

“I work with songwriters, so I have to pay attention to what’s happening emotionally and lyrically in a song,” says Green. “I try to be sensitive to that in a way that also honors what the harmonica can do as a musical instrument.”

The Mayer Kirby Mayer tour marks a new phase in Green’s own music career. After he took the audio job at the Paramount, he all but gave up his instrument (he plays nothing else), gigging occasionally with local musicians such as Peyton Tochterman and Terri Allard.

On a trip to Herat, Afghanistan, in June 2012, Green was suddenly—and unexpectedly—tossed out of that rut. He had been invited to Herat by Tochterman, who had been tapped by the U.S. State Department to serve as a cultural ambassador and share traditional American music with Afghani musicians and audiences. “Some connection that needed to happen between my music, my mind, my mouth—it happened [there],” says Green. When he returned to the U.S., he began performing regularly again.

The Paramount show is unique among the tour’s eight stops. It’s a hometown show for Green, and it is also a benefit show for the Robin and Mani Aldridge legacy projects.

Robin Aldridge, the Albemarle County special education teacher, who, along with her teenage daughter, Mani, was murdered in her Rugby Avenue home in December 2014, was a longtime friend and fan of Green, Kirby and Peter Mayer. They all met in New Hampshire in the late 1970s, when Robin was waitressing at a bar where they often played music.

The group will donate their artists’ fees to the Robin Aldridge Memorial Playground at Hollymead Elementary School and Robin and Mani’s All Buddy Camp, which partners preschool students with disabilities with local high school “buddies” for a week of activities and field trips focused on arts, dance, drama and music.

The program, run by Charlottesville and Albemarle Parks and Recreation, honors Robin’s passion for special education as well as Mani’s love for the arts, especially music.

“Our main focus is to offer the community a night of great music, a set that Robin would not have missed,” says Green, noting that music—the thread that continues to hold him together with Kirby, the Mayers and the Aldridges—is what tied them all to each other in the first place.

— Erin O’Hare