Country Pocket

Garrett T Capps, honky tonk owner and cosmic country rocker, believes things are getting better. It’s not because of the things he sees on the news or social media, where he sees fear, division, and lies running rampant. Instead, he turns inward and, much as he suggests on his first track, uses hope as a religion.

“I don’t subscribe to organized religion, so hope seems like a good one,” Capps explained.

People Are Beautiful is an album of peaceful, soaring rock and deep gratitude. It’s a look inside the mind of a man who considers it normal to see the faces of dead people from his childhood and believes that even feeling pain is something worth being thankful for.

“Being thankful for being alive is something I try to practice all the time,” said Capps

A big part of that life worth savoring is great music. As the owner of The Lonesome Rose, Capps is constantly booking great acts, including a few I’ve been lucky enough to have on my radio show.

“I’ve always been pretty passionate about booking bands, going to concerts, and knowing about the history of the live music world,” Capps said. 

He was able to find partners who wanted to open a honky tonk and became the creative force behind the operation. 

“We have a little tiny disco ball that’s always on no matter what,” Capps said of the vibe. “It’s somewhere between a total dive, a rock bar, and a classic Texas honky tonk.” 

The Lonesome Rose just celebrated its fourth year of operation with a show including artists like Dale Watson.

Capps’ lyrics are occasionally profound and unique, such as on the standout Happen Anytime where he’s hit with waves of truth and guilt. Other times, they’re more repetitive. But even on Time Will Tell, a song with exactly those three lyrics, there’s a statement being made. The cosmic country soundscape is gorgeous and there’s time to breathe and contemplate the statement. Capps is smart to have moments of relative quiet on the album. His guitar solos are rarely intense but instead contemplative and push the album forward gently, perfect for an album so focused on positivity, patience, and spirituality. A Better Place and People Are Beautiful do let him rock out a little more though.

Capps is at his most impressive on tracks People Are Beautiful because instead of providing examples of altruism and love, he’s showcasing pain and shitty behavior. His optimism and love for humanity are hard won and believable precisely because he acknowledges just how hard things can be sometimes. Instead of turning a blind eye to the pain, Capps is just grateful for it. When I asked him if all people are beautiful, he answered yes.

“It is beautiful to be a human being,” Capps said. “I think it’s the high road to take to realize that we are human beings trying to do our thing. Some people have a better moral compass than others, and some people are in better places than others, but personally I think everyone is beautiful, even the ugliest person in the world.”

Capps may be completely wrong to trust the species he considers beautiful. I’m more deeply suspicious of them as a whole, though there have certainly been moments where most of them have come together to do the right thing. There are still Ukrainian flags flying in my local shopping district. When those went up I was certainly feeling warm and fuzzy about my conservative neighbors for a while. I hope Capps is more right than my anxiety tells me to be. Time will tell.

Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Garrett and the songs we discussed, starting with Gettin’ Better, which begins the album. You can hear the show live every Monday at 11am on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://garretttcapps.com for more. I’d especially advise you to click on Garrett’s website. It’s done up like it’s still the 1990s and displays his profoundly weird sensibilities.

The pandemic affected us all in funny ways. Folk music mainstay John McCutcheon found himself with more time to read the newspaper, including some sections he used to overlook.

“I don’t know if it’s only the pandemic or if it’s also due to my age, but I’m not skipping over the obituaries like I used to,” McCutcheon said.

Naturally, one of those obituaries inspired a song. It was that of Esther Cohen, a Greek Holocaust survivor who educated future generations on her ordeals.

“I thought of the people of that era, and not only Holocaust survivors, but World War II veterans, people who worked in the civil rights movement, people who endured amazing things and in some cases accomplished amazing things,” said McCutcheon. “Everything is going to be second hand as they pass on. Esther’s story really struck me. I figured she deserved at least one song.”

Memories of the dead have colored several of McCutcheon’s songs over the years, including two other standouts on Leap! “Song When You Are Dead” is a rare spinoff song. It stems from his 2020 track “The Night That John Prine Died” in that it led to another of McCutcheon’s other friends to ask him for their very own song of remembrance. Instead, the song becomes an absurd comedy that rhymes composing and decomposing. It’s corny at times, but charming.

Also funny, but much more profound, is “The Third Way,” the true story of his Cuban father in law’s experiences in a Georgia steel mill during the 1960s.

“Carlos was my father in law. He was born on a farm in Cuba and my wife was born in Havana,” McCutcheon explained. “Like most Cubans at the time, they supported the revolution until they couldn’t. They arrived here in 1964 and he took this job at a local steel mill. He certainly had never lived in a system that segregated basic services into white and colored.”

When Darnell, a black man assigned to train Carlos showed him to the bathroom, Carlos had an interesting reaction.

“There was an amusing moment of tension there when he realized he couldn’t use either bathroom. So as a matter of his own private protest, he just went out and pissed in the woods.”

It was an amazing act of protest that resonated across languages and cultures. It’s inspiring. In an age when ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ and pink knit caps qualifiy as clever political protest, it’s a reminder that certain bold acts can still make an impact.

“We are talking about a lot of non-binary things these days, but we often don’t talk about non-binary thinking,” added McCutcheon.

Speaking of our political situation, McCutcheon saw parallels between modern America and “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland after participating in a songwriting workshop in the region.

“I came home thinking that we have these things we digest from afar, where you have two groups who are essentially neighbors and these people are killing each other,” McCutcheon said. “The whole point of this song is to say it’s not just over there, it’s not just them. We have our own version of it right here.”

Elsewhere on the album, “The Ride” manages to be uplifting while sounding absolutely fantastic. On “Fuller Brush,” McCutcheon provides a vivid picture of a confident but drained door-to-door salesman and uses it to lament that entire institutions have come and gone over the course of his lifetime.

McCutcheon knows his way around a folk song. He literally owns the domain name for folkmusic.com. Leap! is a solid collection of 18 songs, most of which come along with a well-measured message of some sort. They were mostly written over the pandemic but rarely directly address it. The style is timeless and as pure folk as McCutcheon’s website would suggest, but the messages are almost all timely.

Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with John McCutcheon and the songs we discussed, starting with Second Hand, which the song about Esther Cohen. You can hear the show live every Monday at 11am on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://www.folkmusic.com for more.

Politics and denial can both be helpful for mankind if used correctly. People can vote for representatives who promise competent and efficient government. Even denial has its purposes. Laura Benitez, who performs with a backing band called the Heartache and who penned their album California Centuries, explained that we make good use of denial every day. 

“It’s best that you don’t think of your chances of dying in a car accident as you’re driving down the road,” said Benitez. “It’s fine to know those things, but it’s not helpful.”

Unfortunately, politics and denial are not so helpful when they mix. In the incisive “Bad Things,” Benitez channels her pre-pandemic angst into a warning that those of us lucky enough to live in America still need to vigilant. The last verse describes a crisis in which doctors and lawyers flee an increasingly terrifying strongman.

“A lot of people have talked about it as me talking about a refugee crisis,” Benitez explained. “I’m not not talking about that, but what I meant to say is that the refugees are us. In this country, we have this idea that we’re wealthy and first world and we can rest assured that truly terrible things don’t happen here. But I don’t think we can, and the past few years have truly taught that to me in stark terms”

The thought isn’t comfortable for many of us. The other kind of denial that shows up on California Centuries is all about that notion of discomfort. Conversations about topics like race, guns, and police brutality are difficult for people invested in a right-wing world view and downright terrifying for those trying to maintain an unjust status quo for their own ends. So the conversations are deemed inappropriate. Pundits say it’s too soon after a mass shooting to talk about guns; governors say that children are too impressionable to read about the experiences of minority groups. “Gaslight (We Shouldn’t Talk About It)” takes on that attitude by pointing out the reason for interrupting those conversations is to prevent any empathizing from taking place.

“They know when the conversations happen, we come together and we find solutions for the most part,” Benitez said. “If we have the conversation, we’re going to realize that this isn’t the problem. The problem is the people in power. I think we forget how much power we have in organizing, in getting together. That is our superpower.”

There are some non-political standouts as well. In “Plaid Shirt,” Benitez uses a left-behind article of clothing as a profound and amusing way to example a breakup. It’s one thing to be left for another person, Benitez explained. 

“I think we all understand wanting to be with someone else,” Benitez said. “If you’re in a long term relationship, it’s not like you don’t have attractions to other people. We’re all human. That’s all normal. But if they are just a different person, it’s way weirder for sure.” 

But for someone to change, for that person to no longer exist, that’s not as easy to grasp. For this man to have failed to take this plaid shirt when he moved out meant that maybe his tastes had changed, or he was only putting on a sort of costume for his ex. Or maybe, it’s just that his new woman prefers to dress him another way. 

“It’s also just a little bit of country pettiness to be like ‘Oh you’re going to dress all differently now,’” Benitez said. “You gotta have that.”

To close the interview, I asked Benitez to name her favorite California country song. The Bakersfield sound seemed almost certain to make an appearance, but Benitez quite literally had the city show up in the title of the song. As someone who lives in an area with congested roads, I’m partial to CALICO the Band’s “The 405,” which uses the infamous traffic of Los Angeles as a metaphor for that one giant problem standing between a couple and their happiness. It seems like they live a few miles apart, but the distance between proves to be a lot more impressive when all those brake lights come into view.

Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Laura Benitez and the songs we discussed, starting with Bad Things, which also kicked off California Centuries. Our California country songs conclude the playlist. You can hear the show live every Monday at 11am on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and http://laurabenitezandtheheartache.com for more. Photo by Emily Sevin

“Everything changes when it needs to.” Those words are oft repeated on “Ancient Oceans,” an unusual but clever song that documents geological transformations as a way of easing the listener into the comparatively small changes going on in their life. Lou has undergone quite a few changes of her own over the years, including moving through two backing bands and from a raw acoustic grassy sound to something more mainstream Americana.

Lou and I had an in depth conversation about change and human nature. Everyone has to change to survive, she explained, but everyone has an immutable part of themselves, their essence, that will remain consistent. On standout track “Still Water,” she essentially says that there are people whose minds will always be still water and others who will experience the rush of a river. We both identify as rushing river types, although Lou has made attempts to quiet her mind through meditation, a practice she explains as focusing on the breath.

The conversation on change and consistency is especially relevant given Lou’s transformation in sound toward something more polished and with percussion. “If you love an artist, even if something about what they’re doing changes, you will see and you will feel, and you will be able to connect with something in there that is still them,” Lou said. “But maybe you’ve changed. The beautiful thing about music is sometimes you’ll go back to it years later and realize that the essential thing in me that connected to the essential thing in that that was an extension of the essential thing in the person who made it is still there. I just needed to go through something.”

I’m all there for Lou’s change in sound. While this EP was more grassy than some of her recent efforts, her more Americana sound remains enjoyable. Her voice is strong as always, both literally and metaphorically, and some of the songwriting is top-notch. Her 2018 rendition of her and her friend Maya De Vitry’s co-write “Shining in the Distance” stands out as an example of how rich her new sound can be. Still, you though you knew is a welcome return to some of her original vibes.

“Freedom,” a co-write and duet with Billy Strings, is, to use a word that was tossed around often in the interview, essential listening. The lyrics are somewhat modern but the sound is a call and response take on a traditional bluegrass hymn. When I tried talking about genre with Lou, she defined the word as non-existent or fluid. But she did acknowledge that learning the bluegrass repertoire gave her a tool with which to express herself and that it takes many tools and some original thoughts to make a song. If that’s the case, Lou and Strings are excellent handymen.

Above is the full episode as aired on WUSB’s Country Pocket, including both my interview with Lindsay Lou and the songs we discussed, starting with Still Water. We also discuss a concert she is performing with Sierra Hull that takes place in New York on September 22, 2022. If you’re reading after the tour and didn’t get a chance to attend one of the shows like I did, I’m sorry you weren’t able to make it. You can hear the show live every Monday at 11am on WUSB 90.1 FM or check the blog to watch it as a YouTube playlist. Visit http://www.WUSB.fm and https://www.lindsayloumusic.com for more.