Women in Bluegrass, Songwriting & Each Machine — Carolyn Kendrick Transcript
The Show Notes bring you to the Podcast, Video, Carolyn’s projects, and related episodes! Below is the complete transcript:
Carolyn Kendrick:
But one of the things that I always was butting my head against as a kid that is eventually why I left the classical community altogether is just because I always kind of felt like the narrower I got, the more I was celebrated. And I feel really lucky that in this other alternative life that I've been living and that I am living, it's like the more breadth I experience, the deeper I feel and the more connected I feel. So I feel lucky that that's the deal these days.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests.Carolyn Kendrick is a fiddler, songwriter, and producer based in California. I’m really looking forward to her upcoming podcast with Tristan Scroggins “Don’t Call Me Darlin’,” based on an archive of Women in Bluegrass newsletters. You’ll also be fascinated to learn about Carolyn’s project “Each Machine” and you’ll be hearing some of that music and about her research into the Satanic Panic. She also started a really cool initiative with her friend Isa Burke, the Gender Equity Audio Workshop. You’ll hear Carolyn’s tips on songwriting, how she remembers songs, and how she’s built balanced life in music. You can watch the video on my YouTube or listen to the podcast, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode on my website, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast, and other episodes you’ll enjoy!
Hey, Carolyn, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Hello. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman:
So I thought it might be really interesting to start with your new podcast project with Tristan Scroggins. Do you have a release date for that?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. The release date currently right now, the plan is that it will be coming out in June of this year. Though I will say that sometimes things happen and it might get pushed back a little bit, but that is the expected time right now. It's been a really fun project to work in or to work on, especially with Tristan and it's pretty extensive and cool and it's going to be really fun.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So listeners of this podcast might remember my episode with Alisa Rose, and she has a duo with Tristan Scroggins. So we featured their music on that podcast, so I'll link that up. Great. So "Don't Call Me Darlin'". Fascinating to learn about this history. Why don't you just dive in and tell us about it?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, absolutely. So our friend, Tristan Scroggins, he came into having a collection of this physical newsletter that was distributed kind of zine style in the '90s that was made by this banjo player named Murphy Henry. She lives in Virginia. She's originally from Georgia. And this was basically an underground feminist newsletter that was meant for women who played bluegrass. It was called Women in Bluegrass. And the purpose of the newsletter was essentially to display and showcase to all bluegrass fans and all music fans generally in the bluegrass community. In general, that there are a ton of women who play bluegrass because at that point in time, it was very, very rare for women to be getting hired in professional capacities in the bluegrass scene. And there certainly has been a lot of strides made, but we're far from parity at this point. But at this point in the 90s when it was being made, Murphy wanted to display that ... She would constantly have these conversations where men would be like, "Well, I'd love to hire a woman, but I just don't know any who play." And so she basically created this database and this newsletter and she said, "Well, if you ever say you can't find somebody, like a woman to play Fiddle or Dobro or whatever, here's a list of everybody that I know." And it's thousands of women."And in the newsletter, there's lots of articles about not just gender parity, but figuring out how to work on the difficulties of being in a male dominated industry and also community support, also changes in life support. So for example, if somebody was going through a sickness or a family death or something, there would be a bulletin about that, so that people could send in their well wishes and flowers and drop off soup and things like that. And so this newsletter, Tristan got a complete copy of it and it ran for about 10 years and he was showing it to me and I was like, this is really incredible stuff. I really love how this is not just exactly up my alley because I am a fiddle player, but also because I grew up around a lot of women who were really influenced by the riot girl era of music.
And I grew up in a DIY hardcore punk scene as well, which is very zine focused and very community and mutual aid focused as well. And people don't tend to think of progressive politics and bluegrass together very often. And so Tristan and I decided we wanted to make an archive out of this newsletter. And then as a way to promote the archive, we were like, let's make a show about it and go back and interview these women and see if they agree with their former selves or their younger selves, what they think now, what's changed, what's better, what's different, what's the same, all of that.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. So I've signed up for the podcast, so when it comes to that, I'll be notified. So we'll have that link in the show notes. Love that. You guys have put out a great trailer. Could we maybe ... Do you want to include that as part of this episode?
Carolyn Kendrick:
That would be great. I would love that. (Don't Call Me Darlin's trailer, link in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
It just had me thinking I should have it to show you. From my mom, I inherited, I think it's like the first edition of Ms. Magazine
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh great!
Leah Roseman:
from 1970 maybe. I forget the exact year. Yeah, just when I would have been a baby and it's amazing to have these physical archives.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Something different to hold in your hand.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of this project has really been about kind of contending with how digitized everything in our lives are, including the music that we make. And I have the physical archive on my bookshelf and I often thumb through it. And I just absolutely adore physical media and I especially think it's important to have a relationship with music in the physical realm as well. And so it's kind of a cool combo of all those things. And Ms. Magazine is awesome. I've read some really cool articles from that publication.
Leah Roseman:
When I interviewed Brittany Haas for this podcast a couple of years ago, we talked about women in bluegrass a little bit, and she said there can be a lot of testosterone in the room just in terms of taking solos in a jam session, this sort of thing, and you kind of have to push back. I mean, you have your foot in different styles, but in that scene, have you found that?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. I play bluegrass almost all the time in a weekly setting, I would say. There's at least two or three days a week where I'm in pretty heavy bluegrass jams or gigs or whatever. And I'm almost always the only woman in the band, if not ... Maybe there might be one other woman, maybe if I'm lucky, but usually it's just me. And that's still pretty common across bluegrass in general. There's definitely a lot more female band leaders. And there's always been all girl groups and we've obviously got the Della Maes and The Good Ol' Persons and all these mixed gender bands, but it's still kind of rare to have more ... It's less common than you would think in bluegrass to have more than one woman on the band stand.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of the pipeline, I know you went to Berklee, but I'm curious, did you fiddle camps when you were younger in terms of the gender divide?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, I didn't. I had a little bit of an untraditional path to get into fiddling compared to many of my other cohort. I have musician parents. My dad is a jazz drummer and my mom is a French horn player and composer and a music educator. And so growing up, I played drums and I played classical violin through Suzuki and I sang a lot. And when I got into high school, I just started playing with bands, like any bands that I could get into kind of agnostic of genre because I really was just kind of the most important thing to me in playing music is playing with other people. And so it took me a long time to figure out what kind of genre and world and realm that I really felt emotionally and musically connected to in a bigger way other than just like, I just love music.
But when I was 17, I did go to Mark O'Connor's camp, but it was at Berklee. And that was because I was looking at Berklee as a school to go to. And so yeah, it really wasn't until I got to Berklee that I learned about Fiddle as a world or learned about Fiddle Camps more extensively. And yeah, I was maybe like 19, 20 before I fully got into Bluegrass.
Leah Roseman:
Well, when you first contacted me actually was over a year ago and your Each Machine album had come out. So I've listened to this a lot. I read your zine. Thanks so much for sending it to me.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
I am curious, have you considered publishing it in different formats or putting it on Substack or some kind of other physical?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I have. Yeah. There's all kinds of ideas that I've had about what to do with it, but ultimately I always end up coming up against the dreaded calendar and the amount of hours in the day. But I have thought about maybe publishing it through some publication or just putting it on Substack or something like that. I've also thought about maybe making it into video essays of some kind. And I do think that, I think I eventually will probably have copy of it up on my website or something like that. But I really felt like making that zine and making Each Machine was such a, it was such a catharsis for a very particular time of my life. And it was like a way to process this big project that I had been part of. And a little bit of me is like, once I got it out into the world, I was like, I'm ready for that chapter to be what it was and I don't necessarily need to like be revisiting it with regularity, but I am very fond of all of the essays and the music.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, if I could just suggest, because you do provide it for people if they buy a physical copy of the CD, but although I'm a fan of physical media, a lot of us have too much stuff in our small places of residence, if you could just sell like a PDF on your Bandcamp for a small amount, then more people could read it.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, that's true.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's a beautiful document. So let's dive into the project. I have to say, in terms of the music, the last track on the album, A Perfect World with poetry by David Keig, it's really beautiful. Do you want to maybe start with that and we could play a clip for people?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, absolutely. So I came across this poem online. I'm like a big poetry head. I probably read poetry most days, but I came across this poem kind of on accident because I was looking through historical documents of historic poems about the devil. And then I just happened to come across this modern poem and David, I believe, lives in New Zealand or maybe Australia. I'm not sure he might have moved since we last spoke. And I was just immediately struck by it and it felt like it was like the thesis of what I had been thinking about in the process of making the music, which was that we're all fallible and any fault that we see in others, it's our responsibility to hold ourselves accountable and responsible as well for our own bullshit. And I also just, I probably wrote this song in 10 minutes. It just felt like such a natural extension of the poem and it was very easy to come together and I really love that song. Yeah.
(clip "A Perfect World" Each Machine album linked in show notes, from poem by David Keig) I dreamt I saw a perfect world. A perfect world I did see, but it could not be perfect as it included me. As it included me.
Leah Roseman:
So did you send it to him right away? How did that work?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I did. I sent it to him and we asked for permission and figured out how to do all the rights and stuff like that. Yeah. And he was very, very gracious to be down, to let me release it.
Leah Roseman:
So in terms of how you got to be researching, all these things related to Satanism, the pandemic hit, your life took a big turn. Do you want to tell us about that?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Well, I had been a professional musician and touring in my own projects and as a side person for forever. And then yeah, COVID hit and I, not completely randomly, but a little bit randomly was living in rural Maine, which was supposed to only be a very short-term couple month thing as a break and then turned into more of like an extended year and a half situation because of COVID. And because of that, the combo of that, and then also just where I was at in life and needing a little bit of a scene change. And I think it's pretty common for most musicians to go through a period of time where they're like, "Well, how do I want to interface with music? Do I have to have this be a money making endeavor or do I want this to be just social or do I want to be in this industry?" I was kind of asking all of those questions and as a way to kind of like buffer myself and not have so much pressure on all of my music all of the time, I decided to take a job as a podcast producer.
And then through that, I ended up working on these various other shows and then yeah, I just got hired as a researcher and a producer on a docuseries about Satan.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I'm old enough that I remember the Satanic panic and all the stuff in the news in the 1980s and '90s. And so I did kind of do some Googling when I was listening to the album and reading the zine and remembering some of this stuff and it's pretty shocking. So like just that term satanic panic in these relatively recent times, do you want to talk to that a little bit?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Well, so the satanic panic as many people culturally remember it is often people remember like the Tipper Gore hearings or people freaking out about their ... When you listen to like heavy metal or rock records, there being like satanic sentiments if you listen to records backwards or things like that. But on a deeper level, there's this kind of cultural shift that came up with the rise of evangelism and Reaganism. And I think as women were moving into the workforce, there was kind of just this flurry of all of these different cultural anxieties about, well, who's going to take care of the children if the women are working and if people are generally were concerned about that, which I generally have a lot of sympathy for and empathy for. But the way that that ended up culturally getting expressed was a lot of innocent people being accused of like abusing children or sacrificing children in the name of Satan, often with almost no evidence or like very bad evidence.
And usually it was just like there was something that was suspicious and then it like snowballed into this just big massive panic. And the idea is not that this is like an isolated incident, it's that these types of panics have happened across time and space and culture and like the Salem witch trials is another example of a moral panic.
The Blood Libel Panic is also another example of that. And so, we're kind of prone to panic in our culture and this was just one particular way that it ended up manifesting.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And of course we're not talking about the horrible reality of child abuse that's separate.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Right.
Leah Roseman:
These were like fabricated like weird satanic rituals connected with childcare, like daycares.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the most famous case was in California and it's like the most expensive case that has happened in California judicial history. I might have that slightly off, but like something along those lines and then absolutely like zero evidence was found at the end of all of it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So processing all this, doing all this research and you came up with this album of both original and traditional songs and also some ... And it's not just songs, it's like a sort of an audio documentary almost as we listen through. Maybe we could play ... I was thinking ... Yeah, like you have some 1970s feminist protests, this track "sugar and spice" in there, maybe just play a short clip of that. (Sugar and spice: women at rally in 1970s from Each Machine)
So as part of your research, what kind of people did you interview?
Carolyn Kendrick:
A lot of the folks that I was interviewing were like cult survivors. I was interviewing people who are actually Satanists, which is the people who participate in either the Satanic Temple or the Church of Satan. It's very different than the cultural imagination of Satanists in the 1980s. It's a much more modern and sort of contrarian free speech movement rather than what people tend to think of it as. And I was also interviewing some folks who had been wrongly accused. I was also interviewing some folks who had backgrounds on other types of moral panics that had happened, people who had context for the Salem witch trials and the political context around that. And it's so funny thinking about all of this, especially since I've been kind of removed from the project a little while. I will never get tired of how funny it is that it's like I am like a fiddle player who loves fiddle tunes and then I just like casually in a situation where I'm like interviewing Jim Jones's son.
It's just like the world is wild and you end up in these very interesting places if you open the door and go through it. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Jim Jones' son. Tell us about that interview.
Carolyn Kendrick:
It was really lovely. Stephan is really just, he's done a really remarkable job of being like a bastion of like reason and self-reflection. And I think it's one of those things where like if you've experienced such a deep horror such as Jonestown, and he was not there when it happened, he was out of town for a basketball tournament, but I think he's spent most of his life dedicated to being somebody who is pretty level-headed and loving and reasonable, I think, as like a direct counterweight to his dad's energy.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Maybe it would be interesting for you to suggest one other track we could play a clip of from this album.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Well, I think my personal favorite is Leela, though I think a lot of people really enjoy the Devil's Nine questions, but I love Leela because it's ... I think people ... This record is about me processing my feelings about being involved in this project about Satan. But I am myself not religious. In fact, I'm actively areligious in many ways and I do not believe in a literal Satan. I don't believe in a literal devil, and I also don't believe in a literal God. But I am a very, very deeply humanist person. And I love the song Leela, because it feels like that's actually kind of more of a reflection of what my worldview is as opposed to what the project's worldview was. (clip of Leela from Each Machine)
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And another thing came up when I was researching this, I remember, was the function of murder ballads.
Carolyn Kendrick:
I pulled a lot of the trad songs that I picked from this from Jody Stecher's music. He's definitely one of my favorite folk artists of all time. And one of the only murder ballads that I play and will play is Wind and Rain, which is on this record. And I think that if we're considering the ways in which society implements violence against itself and its own, then I think murder ballots are a really interesting allegory and metaphor for how cultural violence is transmitted culturally for better and for worse, both as a warning and as information that women spread to each other and, yeah. (clip "Wind and Rain")
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Now you do have an upcoming album later this year.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yes, I do.
Leah Roseman:
I was privileged to listen to a preview. Thanks for sharing those tracks, but I understand that-
Carolyn Kendrick:
My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
You'll start releasing singles in the summer maybe.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Yeah. The plan is that we'll finish up releasing Don't Call Me Darlin', and then after that, then I'll start releasing the record.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So are you going to be having a tour associated with this release?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I hope so. Yeah. I imagine that it will be mostly a West Coast based situation. I'm kind of sticking over here these days, but yeah, I'm very much looking forward to playing a lot of shows for this record. And this is such a different tone.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Carolyn Kendrick:
It's much more lighthearted, I would say.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So actually on Each Machine, I meant to ask about Isa Burke, if I pronounced her name correctly. So she's a close friend who worked on you with that album. Is she involved in the new one?
Carolyn Kendrick:
No, she wasn't, which I was sad about. We were hoping to be able to match up our timelines, but yeah, Isa's definitely one of my best friends, if not a best friend. And yeah, we met our first week of Berklee together and we've stayed very good friends and collaborate on a lot of different projects, including music. And then also we run a program called the Gender Equity Audio Workshop together. And that provides studio time for women who want to learn how to produce and mix and work in a studio.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I remember seeing that project. So how many iterations have there been of that?
Carolyn Kendrick:
We've done two and we're in the process of scheduling or planning our third.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Has anything surprised you about the people who attended or anything about it?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I mean, mostly I've been surprised by what a great reception we've got to it. And it's one of those things where Isa and I are doing it for free. We're not getting paid. We're just doing it as a community effort, but we're trying to figure out how to build it out so that there can be more infrastructure so that we can do more because I mean, we were overwhelmed with applications from people all over the world. And I think that's mostly what surprised me was like how much people really are gravitating towards it, although it's really cool. But mostly I think it's just that women are so underrepresented in studio spaces, both as side musicians and musicians generally, but also on the engineering side that it's just really hard to go into a studio space and feel at ease with trying to figure out how to work the gear and things like that, but there's just such a hunger.
Every single one of the people that has come to the program has just been brilliant and really, really just down to get their hands dirty, which I love.
Leah Roseman:
And you're doing this virtually?
Carolyn Kendrick:
No, it's in person. Yeah. Yeah. So the two that we've hosted thus far have been in a studio called Great North Sound Society in Maine. And yeah, we book out the studio for three days and then we, it's a very small program. We can really only fit. I think we had like eight people, eight participants last time. And then we just talk about all of the gear, we record, we practice and everybody gets an opportunity to work both behind the board and in front of a microphone and learn about all the gear.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. The reason I asked about it being in person was simply or online because you said people from all over the world, so people were willing to travel.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, people were definitely willing to travel. We had some folks apply from Australia and the UK and we weren't even advertising. I think people just found out through Instagram or whatever. So yeah, we're hoping that we can kind of keep expanding that program.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So when you studied at Berklee, Carolyn, what was your program? Was it songwriting or was it also production?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I did take some songwriting classes, but I didn't get into production at all. I'm all self-taught in the production world, but I did performance at Berklee and then my minor was in American Roots music. I did the American Roots program.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So any important mentors from that time?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh my God, yes. Bruce Molsky is definitely my guy. Love Bruce. Joe Walsh, dear, dear friend, and also great mentor. Darol Anger, Matt Glaser, huge mentor of mine. And then I also, there were a lot of people who were visiting artists that I really got a lot out of. And those were people in the roots program. Casey Driessen also, I learned a lot from him. But then I also learned a lot from Rob Thomas, who was not in the roots program. He was teaching jazz there, but he was a huge influence on me as well.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And what did jam sessions among the students look like when you were there?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh my God, constant.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes. I've linked directly to this one in the show notes with Alisa Rose, Lily Henley, Martha Redbone , Joe K. Walsh, Alexis Chartrand and Martin Hayes. In the show notes, you'll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter where you'll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly where you can buy me one coffee or every month and my podcast merchandise store with the design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word. Thanks. Now, back to my conversation with Carolyn.
Carolyn Kendrick:
I mean, the first couple years when most of my cohort was in dorms, we would be jamming in the practice rooms, jamming in our rooms, things like that. And then eventually I ended up moving to a house called the Brighton House where a gazillion of us lived as a massive house. And we would have these big parties with huge jams and stuff like that. But then also, I would say probably the most important place for me in my jamming life and learning how to play bluegrass and how to fiddle in general was at the Cantab in Boston or in Cambridge. There was a weekly jam on Tuesdays that I would sneak in the back door before I turned 21 and then eventually we'd go through the front door. And yeah, that was really amazing.
Leah Roseman:
So coming from this classical background as a child, but you said you played in bands and stuff in high school. I'm curious how this more ear based learning of tunes evolved for you in improv.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Well, improv was always really important to me as something that I wanted to do and I was always very encouraged by my parents to improvise. And I always really hated classical music. I'm not going to lie. I really struggled in that scene, not because I wasn't good at it, I was really good at it, but I just culturally did not connect with the scene. I have come to love a lot of classical music now, but it just was not my music. It felt like it was just something that I had to do to learn how to be a technician on an instrument, but I always loved music more than anything else. But my focus always in listening to music was like, I love songs and I love being able to improvise over songs. And that's what I care about. I still feel like that's kind of my north star rather than any particular genre, though I am quite rooted in folk traditions.
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Well, you have such a beautiful voice. Oh,
Carolyn Kendrick:
Thanks.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious about your singing when you were younger. Was it choir based or what kind of singing?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, I definitely would like singing around the house quite a lot. And I took some voice lessons here and there, but I was in youth chorale. I was in youth choirs and then eventually ... I did choir in school a couple different years, but not the entire time. And I also did musicals growing up, so I was often singing for that. But I always felt a lot of tension around singing really up until the last handful of years, not because I don't love singing, but I always wanted to be seen as a musician holistically. And at least when I was growing up, there was definitely a stigma against people who were only singers, which I think is not ... I don't ascribe to that. I think that that's bullshit, but I was really afraid or I didn't want to be somebody who didn't understand how harmony worked.
I wanted to be somebody who improvised. I wanted to be an instrumentalist. And so I kind of shied away from singing as an identity. I didn't want to be a singer. I wanted to be a musician. And yeah, there's all kinds of interesting gendered perspectives on why that was. But I often felt like, and I still kind of feel like this, it's like I often am given vocal opportunities before I'm given instrumental opportunities, even though I do think that I'm equally strong in both departments, but I think people tend to see men more as instrumentalists. So anyways, but it's really only been in the last handful of years that I felt like my singing is like a fully integrated part of my identity and my musicianship.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And growing up with your dad being a jazz drummer, I mean, you said you're playing drums, so I imagine that's kind of intimidating, but super helpful.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, totally. And I loved playing. I still play drums. I have a kit right here. I love playing drums. Playing drums is super fun. I like doing it just as a thing to do for fun now. But yeah, I think I probably would have kept having ... I mean, for a long time, drums was like my main instrument. That's like how I identified. I was like, "I'm a drummer. My name's Carolyn. I'm a drummer." But then once I got into high school, the bands that I was in, I was joining existing bands that already had drums and I was like, "I just want to be in a band. That's my most important thing. So I'll play anything. I'll do anything you guys need." And so just kind of by nature of circumstance, I just ended up not playing drums quite as much and ended up going in this other pathway.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So then what would you be doing in those bands?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I was usually singing and playing violin. But there were usually funk bands and the only reason I was playing violin was because I was the only other instrument I knew how to play and I was like, "I'm not going to only be a singer, so I have to do something." Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, I was curious, you released a few singles, like Break of Day, So beautiful. And you wrote that during a cross country move?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I did, yeah. Yeah. I wrote that when I was moving from Austin to Nashville.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And you kind of talk about struggles with perfectionism in the lyrics.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's so funny too, because I wrote that when I was 25 and part of the lyrics is about me turning five or me turning 25. I think I wrote it a day or two before my birthday. It's so funny that I feel so much compassion for that version of myself and I also feel so far away from her and the things that that narrator is worried about is just simply not the things that I'm worried about anymore, which is such a blessing and also so hilarious. And also I feel so deeply for that younger version of myself because she was stressed out.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's good to have compassion for your younger self. I think for myself, I don't often enough have ... I think I'm a little bit too judgmental about my younger self, like I should have or ... Yeah.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Well, I mean, you only know what you know in the moment, but it's hard. It's hard. Yeah, I understand.
Leah Roseman:
Let's talk about, because you worked for many years as a side musician in terms of your identity now, because you're leading your own projects. And I understand you had an early gig, you had a duo project called The Page Turners.
Carolyn Kendrick:
I did, yes.
Leah Roseman:
It's kind of a funny name. I mean, you were playing by ear, I presume, in this duo.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yes, we were. I know. It is really funny too. Yeah. I had never even considered that aspect of it actually because we both became friends and then we eventually were dating and started this band and a big basis of our friendship was on our love of reading, so that's why we ... Yeah, of reading books, not necessarily music. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So I listened to, you have a 2020 album, Tear Things Apart, and on that you have one of my favorite folk songs, Silver Dagger. It's just really wonderful.
Carolyn Kendrick:
It's so good. Yeah. I love that song so much.
Leah Roseman:
Could we include a little bit of that for people just to point people out?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. (clip of Silver Dagger from Tear Things Apart linked in show notes)
Leah Roseman:
We've talked a little bit about your life as a singer, Carolyn, but I'm always curious to talk to singers in terms of their voice as an instrument, kind of part of themselves, but separate from themselves. How does that affect you?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I don't know why. Similarly, I had all of these feelings as a younger person about what it would mean to be a singer, and now I feel so lucky to be a singer, and I just love singing so much, and that was not always the case, but lately, I live in Los Angeles, best city in the world, in my opinion. And there's a very fun country night that I play on Tuesdays, and I've been having so much fun approaching, singing these different songs, like these different George Jones songs and Buck Owens, and kind of trying to model my voice tonally, completely differently than how I would sing my own songs or something like that. And yeah, I feel like I'm the most agile I've ever been with my voice lately. And I feel like I've been really enjoying working and practicing being a vocalist in the last year or so in a way that I think I was maybe a little bit more begrudging about my singing before, which is ... I also am sad that that's how I felt.
Leah Roseman:
Just curious in terms of memorizing tunes, how that works for you.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh my God. I used to be so bad at it and I think it's kind of similar to when you learn fiddle tunes in the sense that the more you learn, the easier it is to learn more. And it used to just stress me out so much to be like, "Oh, I have to get every single word correctly and have to do ... " I don't know. It felt like too many chunks to bite off or too ... And now I feel like I've gotten way better at being like, "Okay, I'm really good at remembering the words that rhyme." And then once I remember the words that rhyme, then I remember how I feel about it. And then once you remember that, then it's a little bit easier to remember like, "Oh, right." I'm remembering the plot line of the song rather than individualized words.
So I think that's kind of how I've at least attempted to approach it. And yeah, whenever I'm learning a new song to sing at a gig or whatever like that, I often write out the lyrics physically, not to look at, but I actually am much worse at remembering lyrics if I have them in front of me. So yeah, practicing remembering them in the shower and stuff like that, that is usually how I go about it.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Actually, that should have been a two-pronged question because remembering lyrics is different than remembering a fiddle tune in terms of the ... I'm always curious with traditional fiddling because as a classical player, it seems like often the differences are a bit subtle, let me put it that way, like within a certain style of fiddling. A lot of the same keys.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, definitely. Lots of the same keys, lots of the same. But it's kind of like in the same way that you remember when you're learning how to drive around a city, for example, at first it all seems like kind of like, "Oh, this is just a blur of streets that I don't know and blah, blah, blah." But then eventually you get to be like, "Okay, well, I got to go to this neighborhood. I know that it's west of here. I know if I need to go west, then I need to get on the two." And so you eventually figure out these kind of shortcuts. For example, in a fiddle tune, there's only three or four endings to phrases. It's like (singing). And so you kind of remember the shorthands for each of how to get to each thing as opposed to it being little individualized steps.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Okay. The other thing I wanted to follow up with was you said LA's the greatest city in the world?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. Which I don't expect everybody to agree with me.
Leah Roseman:
I've never been there, but that wouldn't have been my impression. So tell me why you love it so much.
Carolyn Kendrick:
I absolutely adore Los Angeles. I am very Californian. I am a very Californian person, even though my extended family is very Texan, but I adore the culture here. It's such a big ... I also love New York and I love Chicago and I love other ... There's lots of other places that I love, but I really love living in Los Angeles. There's so much culture, there's so much great food, so much great music. It's gorgeous. I can walk outside and just have an infinite amount of different experiences. And I think there's an interpretation of Los Angeles as being this quite vapid city that maybe is pretty image based and image conscious. And I do think that there are kernels of truth in that in wealthier, wider parts of Los Angeles. But I think that anybody who that's the center of their life, of course that's what you're going to think.
And Los Angeles just has such a diversity of experiences and people. And if you're feeling like everybody's vapid, that might be an opportunity to go meet other people.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I mean, my impression actually is just freeways, that people have to drive everywhere.
Carolyn Kendrick:
That's true. Yeah. And I don't mind driving. So I think that that probably would be a harder thing if you were somebody that bugged you. But also, the part of town that I live in, everywhere that I go, all this stuff that I do is within a 20, 25 minute little circle. So I'm almost never on the west side ever. So it's really not actually all that far or that bad.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, it's important to love the place we live, and you certainly moved around a bit, so back to your roots.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, definitely. It took me a long time to feel comfortable where I was living. I also really loved living in Austin. Well, I've loved a lot of things about all of the places that I've lived, but Los Angeles definitely feels like it's the most authentic place that I can feel like I'm able to live through my values and things like that.
Leah Roseman:
What do you mean by live through your values?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I think it's a lot easier for me to be the kind of ... It's easier for me here to be connected in different communities. It's easier for me to be involved with community organizing. It's easier for me to know how to interface with just any amount of ... If I need extended education, if I want to ... Because I grew up in California, I feel like I understand the culture and how to navigate the systems that are in place here. I feel like I feel very comfortable with the culture generally speaking, whereas in Nashville, I felt so out of place in terms of I'm constantly having to learn how people are navigating all kinds of ... I just didn't really understand how any of the systems worked there, and I always felt a little bit like I just don't quite know how to be there.
So therefore, because I'm spending all of this extra energy learning how to just get basic stuff done, that means that I don't have the energy to actually be the kind of person that I want to be, which is somebody who is actively involved in the world around them.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, I'm curious in terms of ... We had started talking about Don't Call Me Darlin', your new podcast project. So you had worked for other people doing different aspects of podcast world, which my podcast, I do all the things, but no money here. But I'm curious, what aspects do you enjoy in terms of production, writing, music, research, all that sort of thing?
Carolyn Kendrick:
I mean, I love all of it, especially when it's my project and especially working with Tristan, who is just so brilliant and so funny. I really have enjoyed every bit of this process. And we similarly are running on a bit of a tight budget, so it's going to be us doing almost everything for this show. But the most meaningful thing to me thus far has been interviewing all of these women. We've gotten to go in person and interview Alice Gerard and Lori Lewis and just all of these heroes of mine who ... We're talking about music, but we're more so talking about the context of living an artistic life and how to connect and what does it mean to be a folk musician out, not just within the music that you're playing, but as a full community member. And what does that mean in terms of how you support each other and how you want your communities to grow and what you want to be different and what things you want to change for the people that you love around you.
And I think the interviews have really been the most meaningful to me, but also just doing all the sound design and making the music and all of that is really fun too.
Leah Roseman:
So Alice, these people you met, do you want to speak a little bit to who some of these people are?
Carolyn Kendrick:
We've conducted dozens of interviews essentially with women, and they'll be kind of interstitched between our writing on this subject. But the majority of the women that we've interviewed are women that were initially featured in the newsletter in the '90s. And so there are folks who have been playing bluegrass since the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. And so they're kind of like an older generation of women in bluegrass. And then we also have interviewed women who are younger and of my generation and younger about what it's been like to be coming up as a woman in bluegrass now that things are a little bit easier and also kind of reflecting on like, okay, well, if being a woman in bluegrass is easier, that's great. That's certainly progress, but that does not mean that we are like necessarily ... That doesn't mean we've solved all of our problems.
We also don't operate on a gender binary anymore. And there are plenty of trans people in bluegrass and folk communities and things like that. And there's also like a very stark racial divide. So what are we doing about all that?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So do you get into the racial divide?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. That's great to hear.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So Carolyn, what other creative outlets do you have outside music?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Well, at the beginning of COVID, I was really feeling estranged from my musical life and now I feel so plugged in and dropped in with all of it. I have just been loving playing music and practicing and writing songs. And I'm part of this song a week group with a bunch of friends of mine and that's great. But other than that, I love gardening. I garden all the time. I go hiking quite a lot. I do a lot of collaging with my friends. Last week, my friend Amy came over. She's like a poetry professor and we made Valentine's for her kids and stuff like that. But I feel like pretty lucky these days that most of my ... Other than the podcasts that we're making that are about music, almost all of my creative outlets are kind of going into music these days in a way that feels good, not stressful.
Leah Roseman:
Tell us about the Song of the Week club.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Oh yeah. It's just like a group of friends of mine. Most of them live in New York. Isa is part of this group also, actually. But it's just like friends of ours who have been friends for like a really long time and then we write songs and then have to send them in by Friday and then they get put into a playlist and we listen to them and give each other feedback and stuff like that. And it's all demos of what we're working on and yeah. Yeah. I was actually, I was working on my song for the week before we got onto the phone and I think I'm going to have to redo the melody, but it's coming along.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Do you consciously use creative prompts like if you're stuck or just for fun?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah, definitely. Not always, but also part of this group is like, we Each week, whoever's song kind of felt like the most full fledged or whatever. Somebody nominates a prompt each week within this. And so I think some ones that have come up recently, it's like write a song that feels warm or write a song about the political climate in America or write a song that is verse refrain form. And so there's a gazillion prompts that I fall back on constantly all the time. And a lot of them I got through ... I did take some songwriting classes at Berklee and some of the prompts that I come back to a lot were ones that I learned from Mark Simos. And he has a really cool way of extracting what's cool about a traditional song and then converting it into a prompt and then being able to use that as a way to kind of jump off for your own writing.
Leah Roseman:
That's good to know. Anything we didn't talk about that you'd like to talk about?
Carolyn Kendrick:
Yeah. I think the only remaining thing that I think is maybe the thesis of not just Each Machine, but also this podcast project and Don't Call Me Darlin'. And also this upcoming record is I just feel so lucky to be somebody who's like ... I am primarily a musician. That is my main thing. I love being a musician. I'm a songwriter. I'm a fiddle player. I'm a producer. But I love that my life has taken this kind of unexpected route where instead of just only being a musician, I also can express my music through these other different creative avenues. And I think one of the things that kind of ... Every classical community is different, but one of the things that I always was butting my head against as a kid that is eventually why I kind of left the classical community altogether is just because I always kind of felt like the narrower I got, the more I was celebrated.
And I feel really lucky that in this other alternative life that I've been living and that I am living, it's like the more breadth I experience, the deeper I feel and the more connected I feel. So I feel lucky that that's the deal these days.
Leah Roseman:
Well, I love that. And it's one of my inspirations for doing this podcast is that I feel that what I was shown coming up was this very tiny box and I managed to fit into it and be successful. But a life in music is so broad and so diverse. So I really try to show that with this podcast and hopefully inspire listeners. There's one thing I didn't ask you about that I'm curious. Are you teaching at all?
Carolyn Kendrick:
There was a big period of my life where I was teaching privately quite a lot. And these days I'm mostly just teaching at fiddle camps. And that seems to be kind of like a nice balance. I definitely will teach one-offs here and there to some folks, but mostly I teach at fiddle camps. I'm teaching at three this year. I'm teaching at two in California and one in Maine. And yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, thanks so much for this today. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. Please do share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
