LAURA VEIRS

FOLK TRAILS

Portland songstress Laura Veirs glides through tangled roots with help from Neko Case, Jim James, and the ghost of Alice Coltrane

by Matt Ashare |  
Published August 21, 2013

The birth of rock and roll is generally credited to the coupling of blues and country music that spawned rockabilly and r&b in the 1950s. Or, as the great Muddy Waters so aptly put it in one of his more memorable tunes, "The blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll." That may be true, but it isn't entirely accurate: folk music also had a major formative role in the conception of rock and roll, most notably in the form of what's become known as the great American folk revival of the 1930s and 1940, a loose movement that encompassed the likes of Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives, and inspired Bob Dylan to pick up a guitar back when he still went by the name of Robert Zimmerman.
    Dylan was one of dozens of musicians and songwriters weaned on the songs of the revival who were instrumental in laying down the foundation for rock in the’60s, from the Byrds, the Kingston Trio, and the Mamas and the Papas on the West Coast, to the Band, the Lovin' Spoonfull, and and Joan Baez back East. Much of that forgotten, or at least overlooked, aspect of rock and roll history resurfaced in the late-’90s, in the wake of the release of the first three volumes of Dylan's "Bootleg Series" recordings, and the CD reissue in 1997 of a "The Anthology of American Folk Music" by Smithsonian Folkways. The latter, a sprawling and mercurial 84-song compilation of recordings originally collected by experimental filmmaker Harry Smith from 1927-1932, became a sacred text for the original folk revivalists when it was released as a vinyl box set in 1952. And just as it had in the ’50s, the "Anthology" once re-lit the darkened trail down a pathway toward a broader, grittier, more wildly eccentric notion of folk music than was familiar to those of us weaned on the earnest convention of the heart-on-his-or-her-sleeve folkie as confessional troubadour. In short, it served as a welcome reminder that folk music wasn't necessarily as staid, boring, or insularly out-of-touch as it was portrayed in Christopher Guest's 2003  mockumentary "A Mighty Wind."
    My sincere apologies for the history lesson, but it struck me, when I was talking to former Byrds bassist Chris Hillman in advance of his show last weekend in Roanoke, that we may now be in the midst of a second great American folk revival. It's something that perhaps began in the ’90s with the emergence of indie-folk, and then to spread in various forms, from NYC's anti-folk scene, to the freak-folk subgenre that coalesced around avant-leaning singer-songwriters like Sufjan Stevens and Joanna Newsom, to the growing ranks of artists who exist under the Americana umbrella, somewhere in the nebulous expanse between country and rock. Closer to the mainstream, you've got the studied folk-rock of the Decemberists, whose overt nods on 2011's chart-topping "The King Is Dead" toward the jangle and strum of early R.E.M. were a subtle reminder that the threads of folk the Byrds wove into their music are very much still part of the fabric of rock and roll.    
    Hillman was merely reflecting on the degree to which rock and roll offered guys like him and Roger McGuinn an escape from the then codified strictures of folk music — just as plugging in did for Dylan in 1965. But it occurred to me that, in a roundabout way, the electrified instrumentation and psychedelic shadings the Byrds embraced as a rock band rather paradoxically brought them closer to the anything goes spirit of "The Anthology of American Folk Music" than the unplugged rules of the folk scene permitted at the time. And, that's essentially that's the same cover that hyphenation (indie-. anti-, freak-) has provided for folksters who don't want play by the narrow coffee-house rules of the sensitive singer-songwriter.
    Laura Veirs, a 39-year-old mother of two from the Northwest hipster outpost of Portland, is one such songstress. I first stumbled across her in 2004, when she released an album with a great title — "Carbon Glacier" — on the experimentally orientated Warner Bros. imprint Nonesuch, the same label that had rescued Wilco's "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel" from major-label limbo just two years earlier. "Carbon Glacier" hit that sweet spot somewhere between organic warmth and programmed cool, artfully framing Veirs' yearning yet knowingly pristine voice in dreamy pop atmospherics, foreboding loops, and plaintive acoustic instrumentation. I wouldn't have thought to call it "folk' at the time, but I wasn't really listening for that. And, except for a duet she sang with fellow Portlandian Colin Meloy on the Decemberists' 2006 rock-opera "The Crane's Wife," I pretty much lost track of Veirs until an advance of her new album, "War & Weft" (the title refers to a fabric weaving technique), turned up in my inbox a week ago.
    So, here are a few salient things I noticed right away: My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James and erstwhile alt-country rocker Neko Case of the New Pornographers are both on the guest list, as is MMJ's resident pedal steel master Carl Broemel. The disc's meditative seventh track, "Finster Saw the Angles," is an ode to the late Howard Finster, a Georgia-based outsider artist who was championed by R.E.M. early in their career. And the "Alice" of "That Alice," a churning psychedelic rocker with killer Neil Youngian guitar work by Broemel, is Alice Coltrane, the wife of jazz great John Coltrane, and a jazz composer/performing in her own right until her passing in 2007.
    And then there's the mystically shaded, gorgeously bleak "Dorothy of the Island," a foreboding, sweetly sung, and starkly poetic tale of a mother who leaves two young kids behind when she falls "into a well inside her head." It also has a chorus — "Motherless children have a hard time, when mother is dead" — that's roots can be traced back to a late-19th/early 20th-century folk blues that Eric Clapton covered on his second proper solo album in 1974. Likewise, the chugging "Say Darlin' Say," with its growing electric guitars and slide solos, is Veirs's take on an unatributed folk tune that folks have been covering for a century or so.
    It didn't take much digging — and, maybe I should have seen this coming — to discover that a just a couple of years ago Veirs released "Tumble Bee," a children's album of folk songs drawn, in part, from the very same "Anthology of American Folk Songs" that served as a blueprint of sorts for so many of the original folk enthusiasts who flocked to rock and roll. Indeed, "Warp & Weft" is just the sort of likably strange, strangely likable collection of songs you might expect from an acolyte of the "Anthology." Untidy, at times raw, at time elegant, and occasionally just kinda far out in a admirable way, it fits into the realm of underground folk by not quite fitting in. There are gloriously melodious passages like the disc's opener, "Sun Song," a sweetly countrified humble prayer to the sun outfitted with sweeping string arrangements, elegant pedal steel, and Neko Case's pitch-perfect vocal harmonies. And there are more discordant experiments, like the jazz-tinged closer "White Cherry," where a squealing sax and etherial harp tussle over undulating piano chords that never quite resolve. Put together enough albums like "Warp & Weft," and you've got the raw materials for another anthology of American folk music, and the makings for a second great folk revival. It's beginning to feel like we may already be there.