by Lisa Renee on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 10:05pm
Going back to work full time was what I wanted to do. I have never tried to hide the fact that I never really was "SAHM" material. I could not adjust. To leave my friends in East Nashville and become "SAHM" at the same time. Tough. Then to be SAHM to two under 3 at the same time, while trying to maintain some sort of professional connection with the world, almost impossible for me. I never really stopped working, managing at point to be doing one consulting job, and two part time jobs all at the same time. It allowed me precious time with Mazzie and Ben, though my sleep patterns may never be the same. Joining Sarah Cannon happened in a whirlwind it seemed like. Schedules had to be adjusted, I quit one of my part time night jobs, finally turning in all my equipment just hours ago. But earlier today, I took one last trip through the fairy forest. A tiny little one lane road that runs to where Maz & Ben have attended a mothers day out every Tuesday and Thursday. It is surrounded by woods and fields. We used to play spot the fairies as we would curve around the tiny bends in the road. Usually, I was able to identify the fairies by name in my mind (Cardinal, Robin, Blue Jay) but to Mazzie and Ben, they were Tink, Mariposa, Sparkle, Rainbow, and whatever other silly names they came up with. We saw a few today. And a large group of cattle lounging next to the creek at the bottom of the hill, right next to the car, so we could roll down our windows and moo to them, eye to eye. As we came out of the forest two large wild turkeys were standing in the way. We honked to make them move. Mazzie and Ben imitated their gobbles the rest of the way. I helped them out and walked them into the class rooms with their backpacks and the lunch I had made (crust cut off) and headed off to work. I had not been able to take them to school the past month due to my training schedule and several 12 hour days I had to pull to get through the month. I had not even had time to think about it, I have had so much on my mind. But I realized today that I had just made my last trip through the fairy forest with my two little brilliant babes. I realized for the first time, I might have enjoyed being a SAHM more than I knew. Every single moment, every single dumped toy box, emptied milk jug, overflowed sink , muddy shoe print, was a blessing. Except maybe that broken glass in the kitchen I stepped on tonight that almost took off two of my toes. I could have passed on that one. Good bye fairy forest in the morning, I will miss your magic.
Last month I got to visit Wade Wharton in Huntsville again, and we even went to visit one of his friends in Arab who has an also-fascinating home (which I'll post later this week). Here are some of the things I photographed on this visit:
Pickle jar pyramid:
Bottle trees forever:
This is one of his newer pieces -- a tractor made from an old sewing machine:
Mr. Wharton loves visitors to his home/art environment in Huntsville -- I can give you his phone number if you'd like to call first -- just contact me.
The road to the Avett brothers’ family home in Concord, North Carolina, snakes through suburbia, passing freshly constructed strip malls and a pristine elementary school. But then the pavement gives way to gravel, the trees become thicker, the distance between houses grows longer. It’s nearly dark, but in the woods behind a weather-beaten farmhouse, the faint notes of a banjo and a guitar can be heard underneath blissful harmonies.
Scott and Seth Avett are sitting on wooden boxes, playing a delicate version of “The Weight of Lies” from their 2007 album Emotionalism for a video crew. Their playing is gentle, but their voices are forceful, confident; voices that were probably honed from years of picking parties with their family and friends.
Except they weren’t. “Bluegrass was never a part of our upbringing,” says Scott, 34, having changed from his old-time “stage gear” to a comfy gray hoodie and jeans. He’s seated at his parents’ kitchen table with his younger brother sipping tea and scarfing down some crackers and cheese. “I just did a two-hour drive listening to this great bluegrass station and I didn’t recognize a song,” Seth, 30, adds. But over the course of ten years, the Avett Brothers have become the preeminent iconic roots rock act in the country, incorporating elements of punk, folk, country, and yes, bluegrass that transcends the limits of any label or genre. The band has gone from playing for ten people in a Greenville, North Carolina, coffeehouse in 2000 to blowing away ten thousand fans at a concert in 2009.
Homegrown
The Avetts’ childhood home was given to their father, Jim, in the 1940s—costing him only “fifteen dollars for a lawyer to draw up the contract and fifty dollars for the deed.” Through the years, Jim has added on to it, giving it a ramshackle, rambling feel, but making it a home whose walls reek with love and camaraderie. The brothers grew up in this house on a sixty-acre plot of land that was also a bit of a hobby farm. Indeed, the kids lived among dozens of cats and dogs and were responsible for the upkeep, gathering eggs from the chickens and feeding the cows and pigs. “When you’re nine years old, staring down a giant pig, you grow up real quick,” Scott says. At their day jobs, Jim was a welder and his wife was a schoolteacher, while the brothers did a lot of manual labor, including welding for their father and landscaping.
Though they play gigs all over the world, home remains the textile town of Concord. “We don’t want to be where all the action is,” Seth says. “We just want to be where we’re from.” On this day, the brothers are enjoying some much-needed downtime sandwiched between wrapping up a major tour on Halloween in Nashville and embarking on a winter jaunt on which they will play a number of shows, including a sold-out performance on New Year’s Eve at the Asheville Civic Center. “I just want to live someplace modest, and North Carolina is home,” Scott says. “The chains that I thought were holding me back were actually arms that brought me back when I wanted them to.”
Despite the absence of bluegrass, music was definitely a key part of the brothers’ upbringing. Jim—who is a musician in his own right, just releasing an album of country tunes—encouraged each of them to take piano lessons and kept a box of old eight-track tapes with albums by Three Dog Night, John Denver, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan at the ready. The brothers also delved into early ’80s albums from Men at Work, Hall & Oates, and Michael Jackson.
Occasionally, friends of their parents would come over and play guitar, drink, and smoke. “I definitely remember more Coors Light being drunk than playing,” Scott says, laughing. “There were these guys who wore leather jackets and looked like Kenny Rogers sitting in the living room.” While their parents and friends jammed to Hank Williams and Tom T. Hall, the boys were drawn to heavier music.
“A cousin of ours was a big Rush fan and he’d take us up into the bedroom and play drums,” Scott adds. “That was the dark side.” Moving on from mid-’80s metal, both gravitated to punk bands. “There were a lot of influences running parallel with those bands,” Seth says. “We were also listening to Blind Willie McTell. But nothing like Flatt and Scruggs—we wouldn’t even recognize their music. We would never say Flatt and Scruggs as an influence.”
When the music stops, there’s no place they'd rather be than their N.C. home
Blasphemy to some, but in the Avetts’ world, hard-core sounds are just as present as any banjo. Scott Avett formed a heavy rock band called Nemo with friends from East Carolina University while Seth was playing with Margo, a melodic rock outfit based in Charlotte. “It was the NASCAR thing, big football. We didn’t relate to that,” says Scott, hinting at the brothers’ rebellious streak. “We didn’t want to swallow what we were being given.” Eventually the two merged their bands and began to slog it out of the North Carolina college and coffeehouse circuit, dabbling with acoustic instruments while still maintaining the intensity of their former projects. They would take the stage at places like the Percolator in Greenville, North Carolina, playing after bands with names like Acid Bath. They’d also play house parties where the beer-soaked room heaved from the kids and anti-authority delinquents going bonkers. “Both of us got teeth knocked out by microphones,” Seth says. “People were on top of you, drinking and screaming. We both scream really loud, and that’s why we project now. We just wanted to play and drink beer.”
Band of Brothers
What is now the Avett Brothers began as an acoustic side show, dubbed the Back Porch Project, which became a full-fledged band by adding upright bassist Bob Crawford in 2002. Listening obsessively to the Old & in the Way album—a bluegrass classic by Peter Rowan, David Grisman, and Jerry Garcia, among others—the trio made their full-length debut with 2002’s Country Was followed by 2003’s A Carolina Jubilee. The brothers then spent much of the next few years in New York, soaking up the city and honing their writing.
Eschewing the rising picking scene in the bars of Greenwich Village and Brooklyn—where several of the Punch Brothers earned their chops—the Avetts hung out with artists like Regina Spektor and Langhorne Slim, who emphasized storytelling in their lyrics over proficient musicianship. A key point of difference with other progressive bluegrass bands: The Avett Brothers are obsessed with writing strong narrative tales so vivid and cinematic they feel like a screenplay for the next Coen brothers movie.
“You write words, then figure out the chords,” Scott says. To this day, the brothers write constantly. Earlier in the morning, Seth spent an hour churning out words, while Scott wrote one verse for a new song. “You take the twenty minutes you don’t have and get it done,” he says. “I’m constantly interested in the darkness and light, good versus evil. We draw a ton from our own experiences. We grew up going to church, and our grandfather was a Methodist minister. Sometimes religion and exercise can be the same thing.”
After years of putting out their own rec-ords and building up a rabid fan base, in 2008, the Avetts caught the attention of mega-producer Rick Rubin, who famously resurrected the career of Johnny Cash in the mid-1990s. Rubin has a notoriously heavy hand with some artists, but with the Avetts’ track record, he let the band take the lead, guiding the project only when necessary. The resulting I and Love and You is a leap for some Avetts fans. The songs are ballads—epic ballads—sparer and more pop oriented, but a record made in complete harmony given that the brothers had quit drinking earlier that year. “When we were young, it didn’t matter,” Scott says. “But then it started affecting our artistic decisions. We had to change.”
The Avetts say the jump musically is all on them. Some songs like “Laundry Room” started out as typical banjo-driven numbers but morphed overnight. “It just sounded like broken glass,” Scott says. “But the next morning Seth sat at the piano, I was at the guitar, and it worked. We had to take it out of that live mentality. We’ve been chasing the live thing in the studio for years, and sometimes it just doesn’t work.”
And while I and Love and You made it to number 16 on the Billboard 200, the moderate success of the album doesn’t help you sell out two nights at the Ryman Auditorium or play to ten thousand people in your hometown. It’s a dogged road schedule—often more than two hundred dates a year—changing the set lists every night, creating an intimate relationship with your audience that keeps fans interested and coming back for more. And staying true to your roots doesn’t hurt either.
“No one ever came to one of our shows and saw only bluegrass,” Scott says. “The label ‘punk-grass’ bothered me at first; now I don’t care. Things are getting bigger for us—we’re on that journey. We may fail and be playing some bar down the street. But whatever happens, all I know is that in five years, I want to be sitting in this same chair at this same table.”
Todd Snider likes playing Stuart's Opera House in Nelsonville, and it's no wonder. The vintage theater is nearly sold out for his show tonight, and it's in the middle of a week when every third local resident is off gallivanting around the country.
The packed house tonight probably has something to do with the sort of shows that the iconic folk-country singer-songwriter puts on. He connects with the audience first thing and never lets go.
On this visit, he'll be plugging his new live record, “Todd Snider Live: The Storyteller,” a double album due for release early in 2011.
It contains a combination of his classic talking-story songs and singing-story songs, as well as talking-singing story songs. Yes, Snider tells a lot of stories, and they all have a few things in common, they're funny, they're sincere, and they come from left-field. And some of them appear to have been cannabistically (my word) inspired.
In a phone interview two days before Christmas, Snider said that while he's originally from Beaverton, Ore., near Portland, he's been all over, and has just put in a decade in Nashville.
Snider has always done his own thing musically, and isn't about to change now. “I’ve never had to keep up with the new stuff,” he said about popular music, noting that he's always played what sounded good to him. “Let someone else keep up with it,” he said.
Like a lot of alternative-country singer-songwriters who came out in the '80s and '90s, Snider said he looked up to the great Steve Earle. “Steve Earle was my hero. We all wanted to be Steve Earle,” Snider said. However, at some point he said he realized that Earle was so cool precisely because he did his own thing, went his own way. “So why would I want to imitate him? I decided to just try to be me,” Snider said.
He credited the success of his go-your-own-way approach largely to Bob Mercer, a famed record industry executive who died last May. Snider remembers when he was singing at a club in Memphis in the early ’90s, Mercer, who had worked with such big names as Paul McCartney, the Sex Pistols, Queen and Olivia Newton-John, urged him to take a plunge into the music business. Mercer, who was managing Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Records at the time, signed Snider to his first record deal in 1992.
“Bob Mercer came to Memphis to see me. He asked me what I was waiting for. I said I was holding out for artistic freedom.” Mercer looked at him, Snider remembers, pulled out a joint and said, “Well, let’s get the f*** to work.”
That plan appears to have worked pretty well, with Snider recording a number of highly acclaimed and entertaining albums over the years, while seldom compromising his own approach to the art and the business.
The new album follows that pattern. The following monologue, ironically titled on the album, “Eighteen Minutes Speech” (it's actually about 18-minute speeches, as opposed to being one) hints at the sort of sly humor concert-goers can expect tonight at Stuart's:
“...I make these songs up and I'll sing them for anyone who will listen. Some are sad, some are funny, some are short, some seem like they go on forever. Sometimes I may ramble on for as many as 18 minutes in between a particular song.
“I also want to let you know that I may share some of my opinions with you over the course of the evening. I'm not going to share them with you because I think they're smart, or because I think you need to know 'em. I'm gonna share them with you because they rhyme. I didn't come down here to change any of you all's minds, I come down here to ease my own mind about everything... If everything goes particularly well this evening, we can all expect a 90-minute distraction from our impending doom.”
Mr. Snider may not be pleased that I’ve outed his concert patter, but I doubt this genial dude will object. It’s on the live record after all.
Some of you familiar with Athens County's own poet laureate J.D. Hutchison might catch a whiff of his whimsically ironic humor in the much-younger Snider's way with music and words.
Here's a few things that might work if you're sick and tired of daily upheavals in your life:
1) Don't take on other people's stuff! Sure, it's okay to be a shoulder and care, but it's THEIR stuff. Don't own it like it's your own.
2) Set boundaries! My favorite hot topic right now. Be clear about what's okay and not okay for you. If it's not okay, then stay away!
3) Be as clear as possible in your communication. This is hard if you're not used to it. Tell people what you need or don't need. No one I know is a mind reader. If you're not getting what you need, you may only have yourself to blame.
4) Take care of business now. Procrastination is a petri dish for drama. Deal with what's on your plate, and let it go.
5) Gossip and TMI breed drama too. Not only does it make you perhaps a not so great confidant, you are doing nothing but putting junk on your plate.
6) And speaking of your plate.....Keep a "clean spot" on your plate. As an painter, I make it a practice of leaving a spot on my palette that's clean. I may need that spot and working to keep space open, allows for those little surprise moments when I need it. Chefs do this too. A plate with a "clean spot" is much more appetizing than a plate piled high.
Drama is a drag. It's an energy drain.......just saying!
I change my point of view when I’m wearing heels. I’m taller, tougher, tender…and I don’t know why. It’s such a silly cultural stereotype, but who cares? I know that Keen and Merrill and Birkenstock are all good for me, but they make my soul feel flat-footed and clunky. Like I’m a Hobbit extra in Lord of the Rings. I know flats are more convenient, but they make me feel childish. More like Madeline, less like fey and sylphy Audrey Hepburn. I know flip flops are always there by the door for errands and taking out the garbage. But they make me feel like I have dirty feet. I know running shoes are for my own good. But there is nothing remotely attractive about tractor-pull soles. Of course, I’m not going to walk around in high heels every day, all day (unless they’re black suede Cole-Hahn heels with Nike Air soles), but I love to have a reason or make a reason to dress up and step up–to bring the world to heel, if only in my own mind.
Probably the best thing about Winter here is that as far South as we live, it doesn't very often get just uncomfortably cold...it's nice weather to be outside most of the time. The part I enjoy the least is that there aren't very many festivals going on.
This recipe makes oh, probably thirty or forty bourbon balls, so they're perfect for a party. With this particular recipe, they can be frozen for a while too, so you can make a batch and then a week or two later take them back out and enjoy them then.
The more traditional recipe for bourbon balls calls for vanilla wafers and cocoa, but this recipe is a little different, mostly because the wafers aren't used, and the bourbon balls are actually dipped in chocolate. Av likes just about anything chocolate, so I figured this recipe would suit him best:
Bourbon Balls
Ingredients:
2 cups powdered sugar
1 stick butter, softened
1-1/2 cup pecans, chopped as fine as you like
4 tbsp bourbon (I used Maker's Mark for these)
8 oz. semi-sweet chocolate, thinned with a couple tbsp. butter and a splash of sweet milk (this is one of those things that you just have to play with the consistency, getting it not too thick and not too thin. Melt this chocolate/butter/milk mixture using the double boiler method - in a bowl over a simmering pot of water.) Directions:Cream together the softened butter and powdered sugar. Once the butter and sugar is mixed together well, add the chopped pecans. I like the pecans in these to be pretty fine, but it's entirely up to your preference.
Add the bourbon, and mix again until the pecans and bourbon are entirely incorporated:
Place the mixture into a bowl, and set this in the freezer for an hour or so:
Even though the mixture will be cold, it will still be pliable enough to work into a round shape. I make these round and put them back in the freezer for a few minutes more (on parchment paper, on a baking sheet is easiest)just to make certain they hold their shape when they're dipped in the chocolate:
Next, I melt the chocolate mixture using the double boiler method. I use a toothpick and pick up the frozen rounds, dip them in the melted chocolate, and put them on a seperate baking sheet with parchment paper. Once these are all done, I pop them in the freezer until they're all set up (just a few minutes) and they're ready to enjoy.
