ON THE RISE
Caroline Spence discusses how she used her "English major brain" to crack the code of country songwriting.
Molly MatalonAfter moving to Nashville from Ohio in 2011, Caroline Spence nannied, waited tables and wrote songs. It took her two years to come up with one she felt was good enough to play around town: “Whiskey Watered Down,” a gently savage kiss-off to a flaky musician. “You think you’re a big deal with that guitar in your hands,” she sings. “But you’ll never be Parsons, Earle, or Van Zandt.”
“I had been making myself a student [of those famous musicians],” the 29-year-old country singer says of her songwriting process. “The tagline of the verse is the same as the tagline of the chorus, and every time it lands, it means something different.” In the first verse, the song’s title refers the sub-par tunes of a wannabe singer-songwriter; by the second verse, it describes what it’s like to try to love such a person. Spence says, “It was the first time I wrote the type of song that I love.”
Spence first started thinking about becoming a songwriter as a teenager in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she grew up in a family of piano players and audio engineers. Loving music was simply part of the family routine. “Everyone could kind of play, so it didn’t feel super special,” she says. “It just felt like a thing I did.”
As a teenager, Spence idolized singer-songwriters like Patti Griffin and Lori McKenna, whose songs often would up getting recorded by others. When she first heard Faith Hill sing one of McKenna’s songs on the radio, she had a realization: “’I want to do that.’ I just didn’t know that was a job you could have.”
But the singer’s plan to remain in fully the background hasn’t quite panned out. After two self-released albums, she recently signed to Rounder, which put out her third LP, Mint Condition, a gorgeous reflection on finding peace amid upheaval and confusion. “I don’t think I considered being an artist,” Spence says. “[There was just] a need for someone to be singing my songs. And [that person] was me.”
The album establishes Spence as a writer somewhere between Kathleen Edwards and Guy Clark in her deft chronicles of interpersonal complexity. She relies on the Nashville tradition of rigorous songcraft and is obsessive about songwriting on both a literary and formal level: how words work in relation to one another, how removing a word like “when” can change the entire meter of a verse, how a protagonist in one song on her album seems to respond to a narrator on another. When she was writing “Sometimes a Woman Is an Island,” Spence flicked on “English major brain” and created a line that unlocked the entire meaning of the song: “Sometimes a woman is a bell.”
Spence’s craft has even impressed Emmylou Harris, who appears on Mint Condition’s poignant title track. Spence wrote the song back in 2013 from the perspective of her grandparents, with Harris’ iconic voice in mind.
Spence has also had to grow comfortable with the inherent beauty of her own singing. “I would love to be able to rock a little bit, but there’s no denying the tenderness and softness of my voice,” she says. “I just have to be like, ‘Yeah, OK, I’ve got a sweet voice.’”
Spence’s potent, unflashy sound feels like part of a movement, also exemplified by Kelsey Waldon, Erin Rae, and Michaela Anne, fellow rising singer-songwriters who share her mission of stripping country and folk music back to its core elements. “People always ask, ‘is it hard to do this?’” says Spence. “And I mean, everything’s hard. But because it’s so hard to make a living, seeing anybody rise up always feels like a victory. That’s the greatest joy of living here.”
Music-News.com met up with talented singer/songwriter Ben Prestage at TANJazz festival in Tangiers, Morocco, where he returned after a successful first trip last year.
We grabbed Ben for a filmed interview after his slot at the colourful TANJazz Cafe within the impressive Palais des Institutions Italiennes.
To watch the full uncut interview please scroll down, but prior to that here's Ben's story so far....
Ben Prestage’s musical background began before he was born... even before his parents were born.
Ben Prestage’s musical background began before he was born... even before his parents were born. Ben’s great-grandmother was a Vaudeville musican who toured with Al Jolson and also participated in medicine shows. Her daughter was a Boogie-Woogie pianist and painter who used to play for Ben when he was coming up. On the other side of the family tree, his grandfather, who was a Mississippi sharecropper turned Ben onto the sounds and culture of Mississippi and Blues in general.
“When my father was growing up in Mississippi,” states Ben, “ they never had running water and the only electricity was one light bulb that hung from the ceiling, but they had it better than some of their neighbors, because they didn’t have dirt floors. I grew up in rural Florida, on a 14-mile-long dirt road, near the headwaters of the Everglades. It was 7 miles either direction to the nearest paved road, and when you got to pavement, you still weren't near a town. It was panther, gator, and cottonmouth country. Out there, there was only one kind of music in the house. Whether it was being played on an instrument, or on a recording, it was Blues.
“One day though, in my early teens, I went to help a neighbor build a chicken-coop on his property. When we went inside to eat lunch, I asked him about a banjo I saw in the corner. He picked it up and I heard Bluegrass music for the first time. He was from a musical family and learned old-time banjo from his father from the South Ohio/North Kentucky hills. He lived half a mile away, but it was so quiet out there, you could hear that banjo all the way to my house, if he was on his porch and I was on mine.. He made homemede wine with my dad and when he’d come over, he’d bring his banjo and show me how to pick with my fingers instead of a plectrum.”
Later while living in Memphis, Prestage became a busker (street performer) on historic Beale Street. This is where he perfected his drum-kit. "I played out there a few times with nothing but a guitar and my voice. Once people heard me they liked it, but it was hard to get them on my side of the street with all the other music going on down there. There were some other guys out there who played drums with their feet, and they always got people's attention. I started playing drums with my feet as an attention grabber but soon found out that the drums played with foot pedals actually enhaced my music dramatically. Not only were people listening and buyin' discs, they were now dancing and hollerin' to boot. Now I am to the point where, if you close your eyes, you would think there was a professional drummer with a full-size drumkit behind me. I learned alot from the guys I shared the street with, including John Lowe, (inventor of the Lowebow, a type of diddley-bow that I play), Robert Belfour, and Richard Johnston."
Ben returned to Memphis over the next few years for the International Blues Challenge (the world's largest gathering of Blues musicians) and within three consecutive years took he 4th, 3rd, and 2nd place. He is also the only two-time recipient of the Lyon/Pitchford Award for "Best Diddley-Bow Player." Ben's interesting approach to instrumentation, (fingerstyle guitar, harmonica, banjo, lap-steel, fiddle, resonator guitar, foot-drums, vocals, and his award-winning original songwriting (recipient of "The Most Unique Performer" at "The Song- writers' Showcase of America") has earned him invitations to perform across North America, Europe, and as far as North Africa. All awards aside, he has proven himself, through his live performances, to be the future of American Blues, Roots Music, Americana and is one of today’s most talented outsider.
Watch Music-News.com's full uncut interview with Ben below:
For more info on the Jazz Festival visit www.tanjazz.org
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