Tag: Free Union

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Arts Culture

Return to form through function

DJ Williams
Short Stories, Projekt Music

For a musician who’s spent over a decade playing countless live shows, teaming up with industry heavy hitters from Questlove to Karl Denson, you wouldn’t think there’d be much ground left to cover. But Williams’ latest project, Short Stories, is something of a rebirth. It showcases his first time mixing and engineering an entire album at home. Across the disc’s six tracks, labeled “chapters,” Williams recorded all of the instruments himself. He bought all the gear and watched YouTube tutorials to achieve the sounds he wanted. Only later did he add appearances by Denson, Deshawn “Dvibes” Alexander (Eric Krasno Band), Kenneth Crouch (Eric Clapton), and more.

In essence, it’s Williams’ first official solo album (and his first release pressed to vinyl). But it’s not chock full of the familiar guitar riffs and solos that fans have come to know and love from him. Instead, each chapter is its own funky landscape with catchy melodies. Playful chapters like “Athleisure Wear,” “Quarantine Dreams,” and “Y’all Accept Bitcoin” boast humorous, good-natured fun to keep you dancing. (Released February 1)

Free Union
Somethin’ + The Other Side, Self-Released

Free Union hasn’t been dormant through­out this elongated season of quarantine. Over the past several months, the band has maintained a Quarantunes Series, releasing live versions of original songs like “Good Day to Cry” and “It Gets Better,” alongside holiday tunes and spirited covers of current pop hits by the likes of Harry Styles and Billie Eilish.

Spearheaded by Michael Coleman and Rob Dunnenberger, Free Union also stayed true to form by digging deep for two new tracks. Released as a double single, Somethin’ + The Other Side, each offers a glimmer of hope in the face of the harsh realities of white supremacy and deep- seated division displayed in 2020. “Somethin’” is the funkier of the two, a bop meant to embolden, while “The Other Side” is a smooth meditation on getting past struggle and strife.

With special guests including Morgan Burrs of Butcher Brown and mixing by Adrian Olsen at Montrose Studios, the Charlottesville-based group looked to Richmond for this release—even the cover art by Spanish artist Fredingrado reflects the changing tides, depicting the graffiti- adorned Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, which has been the site of public demonstrations and protests. It’s proof that uniting our communities through arts and advocacy paves the way for positive change. (Released January 22)

Lael Neale
Acquainted with Night,
Sub Pop Records

Growing up on her family’s farm in Albemarle County, Lael Neale was a devout fan of poetry, and held an affinity for nature writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson. When she moved to California to pursue music in 2009, her penchant for poems and the outdoors never waned. The up-and-comer signed to indie stalwart Sub Pop Recordsin the fall of 2020, and is making her label debut with Acquainted with Night, a collection that gives as much of a nod to central Virginia as it does to the West Coast.

Last April, Neale returned to her family’s farm to ride out part of quarantine. There, she picked up an old Sony Handycam and began shooting grainy videos to accompany the album’s songs, which were all written and recorded in Los Angeles. The video for “For No One For Now” is filled with Southern imagery: wide shots of an old church, scenes of the countryside viewed from a car window, and a protagonist cutting up peaches and spreading jam on toast. This track, alongside other singles like “Every Star Shivers in the Dark,” has a sonic uniformity rooted in minimalism, harkening back to Neale’s love of poetry. Recorded on a cassette recorder, the songs possess a gauzy, lo-fi quality that features Neale’s voice front and center, accompanied by a drum machine and an Omnichord (an instrument she didn’t pick up until 2019). By channeling the breadth of her surroundings, Neale has crafted a coast-to-coast dreamscape. (Release date: February 9)

Categories
Magazines Unbound

Something wild: A native habitat grows in Free Union

Behind the house, a hill tumbles down to a dry creek bed, and then the land rises up to a hilltop that Amy Lewis and her husband, Reid Humphries, have turned into a vast tract of native plants. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

Sweat glistens on Amy Lewis’ brow as she cracks open a bottle of beer in the kitchen of her home in Free Union. It’s late August, and she’s just back from the 1,000-acre Albemarle farm where she maintains the grounds and gardens, her full-time job. At the wooden dining table sits her husband of 21 years, Reid Humphries, and at her feet lie their two Australian shepherds. A hummingbird hovers at the feeder hanging on the back porch.

“Everything you see here, we did,” she says, patting her forehead with a wadded-up paper towel. She sweeps her hand to direct my view out the glass-paned door. The land tumbles down to a dry creek bed and then climbs a broad hillside covered by a sun-drenched thicket of native plants.

Before the sun goes down, Amy Lewis tends to her multi-acre native garden for hours after leaving her full-time job—as the gardener at a 1,000-acre private farm. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

She’s sure they are native plants—with a few invasives to be weeded out—because she and Humphries put them there. They have been tirelessly creating their 11-acre “labor of love” (her words) since 2010. The landscape has become a showcase of cultivated wilderness and environmentally conscious living, so much so that the Piedmont Master Gardeners and Rivanna Garden Club chose it as a site this year in a series of tours of extraordinary domestic green spaces.

Lewis has lived in Charlottesville since 1978, when she moved here with her now ex-husband after he took a job at Georgetown Veterinary Hospital. Humphries, born and raised in Virginia, had been an itinerant carpenter—living and working in Manhattan, Colorado, and Nantucket—before landing in Charlottesville. He met Lewis 25 years ago on a job: She was installing a garden that included a water feature Humphries was building.

After Lewis’ kids moved away—her daughter, 35, now lives in Washington, D.C., and her son, 32, in Denver—she and Humphries, who has a wry and slightly off-color sense of humor, bought the land in Free Union. He likes it because it’s secluded. “My definition of privacy,” he deadpans, “is that I can take a piss off the back porch and not get busted.”

Amy lets that line slide without comment but takes it as a cue to begin our tour of the property. The upper portion of the parcel, in front of the house, has a small orchard, vegetable garden, chicken house, and barn, all built by Humphries, who is a multi-talented craftsman. When their house was being built, they hit rock—dense sandstone—not far beneath the surface, and excavated a great deal of it. Humphries used it to build stone walls that bracket the house—the wall in back is 82 feet long.

Australian shepherds Ollie and Mo trot along the grassy paths and sniff out critters in the tall plants. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

For gardeners, the real show begins at the creek bed, where ferns, bulbs, Virginia bluebells, and woodland phlox have naturalized. Paths of packed soil and mowed grass lead up the hill and into the meadow, a scraggly but beautiful three-and-a-half-acre display of native plants: witch hazel, bee balm, St. John’s wort, plumbago, cedum, aster, prairie grass, coneflower, sumac, and the list goes on. Grassy paths criss-cross the meadow, the plants buffering the sound and providing a green embrace. Butterflies flit around, alighting on flowers. Songbirds provide the soundtrack.

Before the couple cleared that land, it was a livestock pasture that, once abandoned, became overgrown with non-native trees, poison ivy, rosa rugosa, and more. “It was a mess,” Lewis says.

To clean it up, Lewis and Humphries successfully applied for two federal grants to create the native habitat, one from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the other from the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program.

The funds enabled the couple to realize Lewis’ vision. “I wanted to contain the soil on the hill with natives that have strong root systems,” she says. “I didn’t want a landscape that was tied to plants that require a lot of water and can’t survive on their own.”

Today, the meadow—and most of the property, in fact—consists of plants that not only survive on their own but are deer resistant. They provide an idyllic preserve where birds forage and bees and butterflies thrive, fulfilling their natural duty as pollinators.

The work, usually initiated by Lewis, has been intense for the couple, and the property is always evolving. “She gets this look in her eye,” says Humphries, “and I say, ‘Oh, here we go.’”

“People ask, ‘What’d you do this weekend?’” Lewis says. “I say, ‘Oh, we gardened.’ We’re cheap dates. Our entertainment is built in.”

In the front yard, Reid Humphries, Lewis’ husband of 21 years and a skilled craftsman, built not only the barn but also the rock wall, which is made from stone excavated during construction of the couple’s home. Photo: Virginia Hamrick

Categories
News

Free Union fray: Appeals board upholds rural business

Albemarle County affirmed that Carter Hilliard’s company in rural Free Union is an agricultural services business. Staff photo

Close to 100 of the landed gentry filled Lane Auditorium for an Albemarle Board of Zoning Appeals hearing, a crowd size rarely seen during the usual Board of Supervisors meetings there.

Well-heeled rural residents lined up for and against a Free Union Road business, lobbing accusations of “Californian,” “cronyism,” and “sleight of hand” in a June 4 hearing to determine whether Hilliard Estate and Land Management is a landscape company—forbidden commercial activity in the rural area—or one that provides agricultural services, which is allowed.

Former Tupperware CEO Rick Goings lives at Eagle Hill Farm, an estate once owned by Scripps heiress Betty Scripps. Across the street is a 217-acre parcel owned by Mary Scott and John “J.B.” Birdsall, who serves on the boards of Piedmont Environmental Council and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello.

The Birdsalls leased the property to Carter Hilliard and company. Goings, his wife Susan, and a dozen neighbors contend the bulk of Hilliard’s business is landscaping, and they complain they weren’t notified Albemarle had allowed commercial activity. The land also is in a conservation easement.

The county determined that Hilliard’s business provides agricultural services, such as fencing, vineyard trellising, planting, and burning, a by-right use, and confirmed that in a July 26, 2018, letter. By-right activity does not require neighbor notification. And the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, which holds the conservation easement, confirms that ag services are allowed under the easement.

Hilliard says his company acts as a farm manager for large and midsize farms, providing the equipment that wouldn’t be cost-effective for them to buy. He got a permit to build a 4,500-square-foot storage barn in November, and in January, the complaints began.

Then-zoning administrator Amelia McCulley, now deputy director of community development, investigated, and in a February 14 letter, said she stood by her original determination that Hilliard’s business was not in violation of county ordinances.

But the Goings appealed that decision, and at the June 4 meeting, both sides had lawyered up. Eleven of the 16 speakers were there in support of Hilliard, including Stuart and Ali King of King Family Vineyards. Buddy-from-college Stuart said he’d borrowed equipment from Hilliard to use at the vineyards on “many occasions.”

Andrew Baldwin, who owns Piedmont Place in Crozet and who built million-dollar condo project 550 Water, said he was founder of eco-development Bundoran Farm, where Hilliard does maintenance. Baldwin called the appeal “ridiculous.”

Susan Goings said she and her husband had been accused of being “Californians” for complaining about Hilliard. She told the board she cared about open-space protection, and had contributed $20,000 to the Birdsall and Hilliards’ lawsuit against Foxfield to prevent the sale of the 179-acre racetrack.

The county’s July 2018 letter of determination said Hilliard could perform landscaping services as an incidental use. Goings reported multiple lawn mowers and weed trimmers, which she said she didn’t see at her grandfather’s farm.

And she referred to high-end catalog Scout, where last year HELM advertised landscaping services, while this year “all the landscaping equipment is gone.” She also said the company had changed its website so that the landscaping services that were prominent a year ago are absent, and the focus is estate management.

“They’re trying to use some fancy language to call it something else, but if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it is a duck,” she said.

McCulley said in the Goings appeal of her decision, the burden was on them to prove their “irrelevant or unsubstantiated claims.”

Assistant county attorney Rich DeLoria reiterated that McCulley’s original go-ahead allowed some landscaping, and that the Goings had 30 days to appeal—and missed that deadline.

David Thomas, the lawyer for the Goings, suggested McCulley had been misled by Hilliard, and the county took his word about the nature of his business without demanding financial information about the sources of his revenue. He also alleged that when the county did an inspection, Hilliard was notified in advance.

Not true, said McCulley, who also said it was “very rare” to ask for financial information.

“If Mr. Hilliard wanted to hide, he’d never have gone to the zoning administrator in the first place,” said DeLoria. “The appellant is calling him and the zoning administrator liars.”

New Board of Zoning Appeals member Marcia Joseph described the situation as a “he said, she said.” But she came back to McCulley’s original letter, which allowed landscaping as a secondary use.

Former Albemarle sheriff Ed Robb, also on the BZA, said, “We look at the facts,” in particular, that the Goings had 30 days to appeal the 2018 determination, and hadn’t.

“This is a messy business,” said appeals board member David Bowerman, who once served on the Board of Supervisors. He voted to support McCulley’s determination, as did the rest of the board.

The 4-0 vote was followed by applause.

After, Hilliard said he appreciated the board’s decision “as I went through the proper channels to do business in Albemarle County.”

“I was shocked,” says Susan Goings. “We’re very concerned about the precedent, not just for Free Union, but for Albemarle County. It seems like a cronyism system.”

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“They’re trying to use some fancy language to call it something else, but If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.” Susan Goings

Categories
Arts

Free Union pushes social positivity on new EP

Free Union, led by Michael Coleman and Rob Dunnenberger, seeks unity in Charlottesville on its new, self-titled EP. Photo by Tristan Williams

Last summer, Michael Coleman had a realization about the power of music.

The night of August 12—after 24 hours of terror and chaos that included a torch-lit march led by white supremacists and the Unite the Right rally that left three people dead and dozens of community members and activists injured—Coleman took to Facebook Live to play a song to friends and followers.

He’d written “Good Day to Cry” in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, downtrodden by the polarization of the United States, by the hatred, the anger and the deepening divisions among people. Coleman began to wonder, “What happened to all of the good things that made us [as a country] who we are, in terms of being welcoming and being understanding of differences?”

Free Union
The Southern Café and Music Hall
May 25

But on that rainy August night, Coleman says the song evolved in its meaning. It was no longer about the United States; “it was specifically about Charlottesville,” a song for “realizing that, as a city, we’re pretty broken. And it’s just calling it out in the hopes that we’ll start a discussion about it,” he says. What’s more, the responses that the song received made Coleman see the ways in which music can “shape opinion, facilitate discussion” or make people “forget about anything else,” if just for a few minutes, he says.

“If I could push a little more, maybe we’d come out as equal,” Coleman sang. “’Cause love is not dead, it’s just missing all of the people.”

“Good Day to Cry” became the closing track on a recently released five-song EP that Coleman—who played drums in local folk acts The Hill & Wood and Nettles before picking up guitar and lead vocals for his eponymous soul-rock act The Michael Coleman Band—recorded with the musical collective Free Union.

Free Union EP by Free Union

The group celebrates the record’s release with a show at The Southern Café & Music Hall on Friday.

Free Union is, in some ways, The Michael Coleman Band evolved. Coleman sings and plays rhythm guitar in the new collective, which he leads alongside drummer Rob Dunnenberger, who has supported various other artists in town, including Devon Sproule, Post Sixty Five, Dillingham, David Wax Museum and The Michael Coleman Band. Other members of the collective—keyboardist Butch Taylor, bassists Parker Hawkins and Jon Markel, vocalist Carrie Coleman and producer Devonne Harrison (of Richmond-based band Butcher Brown), have equal influence on Free Union’s rock-soul-R&B-pop sound, even while not being present at every performance.

Free Union stands for collaboration, for “positivity and community,” says Dunnenberger. It’s there in the sheer act of playing music that’s been collectively written, and it’s in both the musical and lyrical content of those songs too.

“While we present something lyrically, we also play music that sounds good, has a groove that you can move to. But we’re also trying to present ideas on top of that, that get you prepared for change, or wanting change,” says Dunnenberger.

You might get lost in the music, adds Coleman, but at some point, there’s going to be “a line that’s going to wake you the fuck up.” Perhaps it’s one of the lines from “Free World”: “Elaborate illusion / Is that what you meant when you said everyone’s included?” or “Watch what you do and where you step, they’re listening / Watch where you go and who you meet, they’re judging. / And if it’s all a dream, then why am I not awake?”

It’s “showing Charlottesville a mirror of itself,” says Dunnenberger of Free Union’s music, as it asks us all to take a long, hard look at our shared reflection and see the ugliness, the beauty.

Free Union also asks Charlottesville to take a look at what’s present—and what’s absent—musically. Free Union isn’t your run-of-the-mill energetic singer-songwriter stuff that people have come to expect from a place where the specter of the Dave Matthews Band hangs over just about every stage in town. Free Union combines soul and R&B with catchy pop sensibilities and a funk-ish groove, and while the music sounds familiar—it’s also fresh growth for Charlottesville’s musical landscape.

In “recognizing multiple perspectives lyrically and stylistically,” the collective can inspire change in a variety of ways, says Dunnenberger. Playing and “listening to these tunes makes me want to go out and do something bigger than myself, and I hope for other people, it brings that same emotion.” He says Free Union’s “Survivor” gets him particularly excited for that: “Maybe I will be the one to change the world / and if I can, you can too. / You and I will be the ones to risk it all, / because it’s who we are,” the song goes.

None of this is to say that Free Union has all the answers—Coleman acknowledges this outright. “We’re posing questions; we’re figuring this out at the same time as everyone else,” he says.

But what the collective’s emphasis on collaboration and communication does promote is “the idea that we can all work together to make something beautiful,” says Coleman, “whether it’s music, or art, or this town.”