Folk Festival 2023: of Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell, and Brent Kane

...So: the thing editors are most likely to change in anything I write is the title. Sometimes, having gotten used to this, I don't even bother coming up with a title, and when I do, I try not to get too invested in it, as editors almost always have better ideas... or, uh, think they do: I still think, given that Vancouver had a an alt-country band called They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, that the Straight should have entitled my Charles Mudede piece -- the first feature I ever did with them, back in 2007 -- "They Fuck Horses, Don't They?" I mean, it was about the Enumclaw horsefucking case, which Charles had written about here, then later collaborated in a film on, Zoo. But, y'know, much as I prefer my title to their incoherent one ("Zoo Tugs Man and Horse Tale," where the main draw is, I guess, its utter incomprehensibility), I can understand why they didn't go there.  

Anyhow, my editors at Montecristo didn't use my proposed title for my folk fest coverage, which was something like "Folk Fest 2023: Death, Rebirth, and Healing." (I ain't complaining; I'm going somewhere with this, but I like their title just fine, and like I say, I try not to get too invested in these matters). But I did have reasons to have "death" front-and-centre: festival standout Amythyst Kiah had talked specifically about death and rebirth in the interview I did with her -- it's in the article -- and there was some reason to contemplate death this year, including a hint of mortality in Ferron's comments (also in the article) and the awareness that the festival itself had actually kind of died, then been reborn. But I would bet that articles with the word "death" in the title get a lower click-rate than articles with words like "spirit" and "faith" (both also relevant to the feature as written -- "faith" in particular, since a big part of the article dealt with Christianity, including some surprising expressions of it coming from a First Nations artist, William Prince.) Some people find death, well, offputting. And furthermore, the main reason for thinking about mortality this year, for me, had nothing to do with Kiah, Ferron, or the folk fest, and in fact was not even mentioned in the article.

RIP, Brent Kane.

Brent Kane and company, 2022, by Allan MacInnis; not to be re-used without permission

I first met Brent at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival 2022. I had seen him around in other contexts, I know -- he had a very recognizable face -- but it was at Folk Fest 2022 that we first (to my knowledge) spoke to each other, mostly around the East Stage, where Alejandro Escovedo had just performed at an afternoon workshop with Ford Pier and Fortune Block. Brent was aware of my writing, and I, uh, knew he was someone. He'd been part of Co-Op Radio, which used to be an important source of culture for me in the days prior to the internet, every bit as vital as, say, the CBC's Brave New Waves, but better because it was local (and unlike CITR and CJSF, was easy to tune into out in Maple Ridge). I don't know if I ever listened to him, but I may have! He also had a long history with the Folk Fest, and apparently collaborated with NO FUN (or at least leapt up onstage with them for impromptu contributions to songs, which that is an example of). The last time I saw him in person he was at the Lou Reed tribute show at the Princeton, where David M. played, but he was reeling from his diagnosis then, and quite tearful. That was in March. But this time last year, Brent did not know he was dying.

...and now he's gone; the whole ordeal, from finding out he was sick to having seriously intrusive surgery to finding out that it had not worked, to having to come to terms with his mortality, took less than a year, maybe even less than half a year. I offered when he found out his diagnosis to write something about his history with Vancouver media, but that did not end up happening. So I never really got to know him, not as well as my Facebook friends did. Mostly I watched him face down the indignities of his cancer treatment on Facebook, and felt for the guy (and thought about my own dance with cancer, which, who knows, may not be done). He had expressed wishes on Facebook that he would get to go to the folk festival one more time, and so he did, though I'm not sure how much of it he was able to see before he ended up in the medical tent. It was, really, a kind of strange way to get to know someone. But Brent was a big, unspoken reason why thoughts of mortality loomed this year, always in the back of my mind: "Is he here?" I kept an eye out, but didn't see him ("will I recognize him?"). I was thinking I would shoot him a message to ask if he had any thoughts he wanted to share, before posting my final piece on the 2023 chapter (that is, the one you are reading now). 

Before I could get to it, his friends were posting RIPs on social media. 

I'm not sure what death has to teach us about life. There seems to be more than one lesson on offer, more than one conclusion to be reached, some quite incompatible, ranging from "What you do doesn't matter; you're going to die" to "What you do really matters; you're going to die." When I finally face things down, will I be glad I devoted so much time in my life to my love of music, or will I be filled with regrets that I didn't do more "important" or noble things with my time here? Considering how much of my time I spend listening to music, thinking about music, watching live music being performed, and writing about music, I very much doubt that "I should have listened to more music" will be on a list of my great life regrets, when the time comes (sure, there are a few concerts I kick myself for not having gone to, but they're not gonna be anywhere near the top ten things I feel bad about, I assure you; I can't speak to Brent's own regrets, either, but I imagine we're similar on this count -- that the things he felt bad about had very little to do with his fandom). But as I discuss in that Montecristo article, these things ARE fragile, and shouldn't be taken for granted.

So while I'm alive and healthy, there are a couple of shows I'm keen on in the next while, including Big Thief and Lucinda Williams, on August 3rd, and, come August 12th, Allison Russell, also mentioned in Montecristo. She's playing Burnaby Blues and Roots -- a free event with Buffy Sainte Marie as headliner, but it's really Russell (bio here) who I'm excited to see, having caught and loved her at the 2022 Folk Fest, and having purchased her album, Outside Child. (It's kinda weird how many queer women of colour are on my turntable of late -- Russell, Kiah, and Britney Howard; it's not like I have a diversity agenda or such, but Erika and I are both really enjoying their musics).The song "Persephone" on Outside Child is one of the catchiest, and certainly THE sexiest, of any of the songs I have encountered of late, and does a fine job of using some fairly unambiguous sexual imagery to explore potent emotional grounds; it's not sex as an end-in-itself, but a powerful relationship song that happens to have eroticism in its toolkit, but is about a lot more than that. 

As I was wrapping up with Amythyst Kiah, having had my "one last question," as her handler (?) had requested, I asked her to sign a CD, and as she did, snuck one final OTHER quick question in, more conversational than interviewish, just a kind of by-the-by, making chit-chat thing: "You know Allison Russell, right?" She grinned: "I've known her for a few years now! I really love how things have gone for her, it's well deserved, she's a really wonderful person." 

Allison Russell by Allan MacInnis, Folk Fest 2022

In fact -- as Kiah briefly mentioned -- there's a whole album that Kiah recorded with Russell, which I confess I did not know about when I sat down with Kiah and do not have -- Songs of Our Native Daughters. All members of the band are depicted on the cover (below) holding banjos, which connects with a striking lyrical image in the song "Black Myself," which appears both on that album and on Kiah's 2021 album Wary + Strange, about how "I pick the banjo up and they sneer at me." What was that about? I had noticed, to be sure, Russell playing banjo at the previous folk festival -- not an instrument you expect, especially when coupled with a sparkly evening dress, and maybe the first time that I had seen a black person playing that instrument, but I was unaware of any prejudices about that. Was being sneered at for picking up a banjo something that had actually happened to her?

It was, in fact, my first question to Kiah, and you could see her kind of inhale and gauge how much needed to be explained (she was visibly relaxing and enjoying the conversation by the time we got around to the Two of Swords).  

"I mean, it's not really happened to me specifically," she responded. "It was really just sort of a reference to the segregation of the commercial music industry, if a black person was playing in a string band. They designated 'string band music' as 'hillbilly music' and therefore they marketed it towards white audiences. If a black person were to play a banjo or a fiddle, they really couldn't get recorded anywhere, because in the record executives' mind, white people would only want to listen to other white people playing [that kind of] music, and they only saw stringband music as something that other white people did..."

Kiah told me that in fact, she actually had "quite a bit of encouragement to play banjo" when she was in college. (Wikipedia offers that "Kiah is a graduate of East Tennessee State University, where she completed the Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music Studies program and joined the school's marquee old-time band"). Kiah: "When I was first starting out performing, I do think there were instances where people were a little puzzled, because I would get questions like, 'how did you get into the banjo,' or 'how did you get into old time,' just because they weren't used to seeing a black person participating in that music, but I took it as an opportunity just to explain that there's a longstanding history of West African culture playing a role in country music. It actually ended up opening the door to a lot of really cool conversations with people that were genuinely curious. That was more or less pointing to that aspect of history, where a lot of black people just ended up not participating in stringband music, just because they couldn't make any money doing it in that time period."

I observe that if you go far enough back in the recorded history, to Americana from the 1910s and 1920s, there's a lot more similarity between so-called "white music" and "black music."

"Oh absolutely, because the fiddle and banjo, those were the two instruments; the Scots-Irish tradition of fiddling and the West African banjo playing, that's where that kind of came together; the rhythmic aspect of African music and the sort of really melodic thing kind of combined together. That's the birth of American music, really, those two coming together. Of course there have always been cultural influences from other parts of the world that have come into play; if you go to Louisiana, there's French influence -- those kinds of things, obviously. But yeah, as far as Appalachian music in particular, those two things really came together..."

The set on the main stage Friday had been pretty blues-based, I thought, though it is not in any way all Kiah does (we talked a bit about here cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart," but I'll hold that in reserve on the chance of a future magazine article about Kiah's music). Does Kiah consider herself a blueswoman?

Amythyst Kiah by Sharon Steele, not to be used without permission

"I kind of like to stay vague," she responds, smiling. "So I like to use the term 'Americana.' I've had to go back on forth on what it means -- does it mean anything, does it mean everything, does it mean nothing, because it's so amorphous. 'Americana' is kind of like, the catch-all of other artists who maybe aren't part of the pop-country world or aren't part of any other aspect of American music, this catch-all of people who play American music, but you can't quite put your finger on what they do, is how I've seen it. I just consider myself an American music artist that listens to various kinds of music. Roots music is kind of the base, but I take inspiration from pop music, just all different parts of the spectrum. I can do country, folk, blues, rock; whenever I'm writing a song, whatever it turns into is what it ends up being."

Case in point: "Wild Turkey," a song Kiah wrote about her mother's death, which is more on the folk/ country end of the spectrum. But I'm not clear on the background of the story. Can I ask - was her mother's death an accident, a suicide? 

"Yeah, so... my Mom committed suicide when I was 17, a few months from when I graduated from high school. I think for a really long time, I had a lot of resentment and anger, because in my mind, I felt like she didn't care enough to stay; that's how I processed it at the time. I didn't really understand, like, depression or mental illness; it really wasn't until years later, in my late 20s, when I started going to a therapist for cognitive therapy... it became apparent that there were still some things I hadn't quite grappled with. I realized I hadn't quite allowed myself to grieve for my Mom. At least not in a healthy way -- it was more-or-less kind of repressing it. But the fact of the matter is, it affected me very profoundly, because it would later on cause me to put a really big barrier between myself and other people. I was, like, 'What's the point of getting close to people if they're just going to leave?' So it created this barrier of protection for myself, which, y'know, served its purpose, it did what it needed to do, but it was getting to a point in my life where I was getting older, I was having more responsibilities, and my career was starting to steadily move towards, 'Hey, I can maybe make a living at doing this.' But my inability to let the wall down, instead of keeping it up all the time, was starting to take its toll. I realized that was part of the reason why. It took me two years. And I was like, 'I need to write a song about this, in order to process it.' Because that's how I've always dealt with stuff: through writing about it. So after two years of tackling that song, it finally all came together. That was my way of seeing how I was dealing with it at that time, and in a way, writing the song for my younger self, to recognize, 'This is why you felt that way.'"

Which brings me to another lyric of Kiah's. Understand: a week prior to sitting down with Kiah, I had heard none of her music, had not known her name. The folk festival is amazing for that, introducing you to artists whose music you did not appreciate previously, but it requires you to be a fast study, sometimes, if you're planning to write about someone. So: listening to Kiah perform -- I think, at that point, from behind the main stage, sitting on the ground with a notebook -- I overheard her singing a lyric about how "just like that, she washed away," in the song "Opaque." But that was all I knew of the song. So was that also written about the death of her mother? 

"No, that's actually about a person that I was in a really ambiguous relationship with! Actually, this person was kind of a reflection of myself. She had dealt with her own trauma, which was very different from my trauma, but... she was even more closed than I was. And so at one point, I just had to back away and let it go, but I had had a dream; the first verse in that song was me recounting the dream I'd had, where I was at my childhood home for some reason, and I opened the door, and it was storming and raining out and she was standing on the front porch wearing a raincoat. And she was choking, like she was about to pass out from choking. I reached out to help her, and she backed away. And then I woke up. That was sort of like, 'Okay, I'm going to take this dream as a sign that I'm trying to make something happen that's just not going to happen,' y'know? And that song was my way of letting it go: this is a relationship that's not going to work, and I'm not going to force it; I'm just going to let it wash away in the rain." 

Kiah gives a laugh. "But water does kind of make it's appearance again, in various ways, which is kind of interesting. I also think, as far as water goes... in Taoism, there's a lot of talk about water and how being like water is being able to adapt and change, to be able to make changes but be steady and slow and gradual. And the way that water has kind of showed up in my songs has very often been, I guess, destructive, but at the same time, in a way, it cleared a path for something else to happen. I don't know; I'm just sort of musing right now, but I think about that sometimes. Water gives us life, but if there's too much of it, it can also kill you. It's kind of a double edged sword, with water..."

This, of course, leads very nicely to talking about the symbolism of the Two of Swords in Tarot; I'll direct you to that discussion in Montecristo. It's also actually when Ron Stewart, one of the Folk Fest people tending to the media tent, asked if he could take a photo of us (I wish I'd gotten my own closeup of the gorgeous top that Kiah was wearing). He was kind enough to provide a copy; thanks, Ron. 

I hope to have more to come with Amythyst Kiah at a future date, possibly in a print magazine; I'll let you know here. To return to Brent Kane, there is at least some chance that he got to hear her perform on Friday; I hope he did. Kiah's official website is here, and while I should imagine that it will be awhile before she returns to Vancouver, note that her sometimes-collaborator Allison Russell will be performing at a free outdoor event on August 12th, in Burnaby. Check out her bandcamp page here.

Allan MacInnis interviews Amythyst Kiah at the media tent, by Ron Stewart, not to be used without permission