Blake Layman’s solo offerings have been called “folk adjacent,” and he’s taken to the tag. Although the way he puts it is “almost folk.” The distinction’s subtle. But words are important to him.
Layman, a Charlottesville native who plays bass for Richmond’s hot indie pop foursome Frames, has come a long way in the last decade or so. Not much more than 10 years ago, he was playing bass in a C’ville metal band.
But Layman knew metal wasn’t his thing. “I enjoyed the music, but it didn’t really feel like the kind of music I wanted to write myself,” he says.
Layman learned the kind of music he did want to write in stages. He started a band called Raintree with his brother Gavin, making heady instrumental indie rock layered under dreamy lyrics. Along the way, he wrote songs here and there that didn’t necessarily work for Raintree and were never recorded.
Then in 2019, around the same time he joined Sarah Phung’s Frames, Layman decided to put his own writing together for a solo record. Cobbled from songs that were penned as far back as 2014, imagined as fully acoustic, and demoed in various oddball places (including a school bus that served as Layman’s one-time home), the result is Goodness, Littered, a nine-song LP released on June 25.
“Over the years moving around Virginia, I had written half these songs, but I got busy and interested in other things,” he says. “Then COVID hit and it provided me the perfect opportunity to sit down and finish. It’s about little things from my life, mundane things. It’s almost a folk album, but not quite…It is a love letter, or a bookend, to my 20s.”
Mundane or not, Layman’s 20s have led to a solid set of tracks. On Goodness, the burgeoning songwriter is lyrically obtuse enough to maintain intrigue, and more times than not, the songs are musically moving. The final recordings feature Layman on multiple instruments (bass, acoustic and electric guitar and pump organ) with contributions from brother Gavin and other past band mates. While Layman produced the demos in multiple places—there was the furniture workshop where he was an apprentice in addition to the old bus—Jacob Sommerio tracked and mixed the finished album at Charlottesville’s English Oak Recording.
“It was something I felt like I needed to do for myself, and if nobody gets anything from it, I suppose that’s okay,” Layman says. “I had been sitting on these songs and I had gotten to the point where I decided I am just going to release this so I can say I completed something.”
Now a furniture maker by trade, Layman cites influences ranging from the ’40s jazz and country that his elderly mentor played during his apprenticeship, to older influences like Tom Waits and Billie Holiday along with modern nudges from Sufjan Stevens and The National. Listeners might also hear a breathy resemblance to Iron & Wine or a folk-ified Band of Horses.
“I had only really planned on it being an acoustic album [but decided] it would be fun to add some other instruments,” he says. “I like to think I tend to focus on the lyrics—that has always been really important to me. I play guitar and bass, but I don’t feel like I am exceptionally good at them. I am good enough to write a song and communicate what I want.”
The multi-instrumentalist is being modest, but in the end, it’s Layman’s ability to balance earnest lyric writing with a sense of humility and humor that makes Goodness feel genuine rather than overwrought. A whimsical spaghetti western thread runs throughout the record, driven in part by the use of a pump organ. And the thread is reinforced in the video Layman released for the LP’s first track, “Unhistoric Acts.” The video opens on a bucolic, sepia-toned scene and features two cowboys—Blake and Gavin Layman, one dressed in white, the other in black—facing off in an over-the-top, farcical duel.
“I had thought I wanted to do a video that maybe communicated the lyrics of that song, then I got worried it would come across as too try-hard,” Layman says. “So I think the main point was to have fun with it. One of my pet peeves is artists that take themselves too seriously.”
Goodness is now available streaming, and Layman is working on a vinyl release, as well. In the meantime, Frames is also working on a new album with Layman on bass.
“I’ve always played bass in other bands, but I’m actually more of a guitar player,” he says. “I am trying to step out of my shell.”