IT GETS WORSE THE MORE you hear about this man.
Nick Shoulders isn’t just a left-leaning, politically-active, devastatingly-articulate artist from the deep red state of Nebraska that we saw in part one of this interview. He isn’t just playing country music in the old-old ways in a branch of the industry that’s as deeply conservative and safety-first as it is fearful. Oh no, there’s more: he is a proper radical.
As in, radically bringing joy to the way he approaches music, performs music and connects with music’s past. He can be just as funny as pointed, self-aware and even silly.
“I would say the reflex to be recklessly and joyfully present and try to find the best out of the situation, I think that’s as much of a reflex as the pushback against the systems,” says Shoulders from his home in Fayateville, in the state’s northwest, the second biggest city, and home to the University of Arkansas.
“What I try to say on stage and what I’ll say here is, if this all becomes doom and gloom, if at all becomes self-flagellation, if it hits a point of guilt and darkness, then they win. The people who are trying to extract our labour and our time and trying to keep us from organising and becoming a better version of society, they win if we lose the joy.”
If that sounds like it might echo a certain political candidate’s pitch it isn’t without connection, though Shoulders has been making this point for a while, in musical choices as much as political ones.
“I think that [joy] is evidenced in the old music too. The way we structure our rhythm and everything is based around dance music,” he says of his songs that tap into rustic roots, dancehall days and the late night house parties when the kids should be in bed but no one wants to stop them enjoying life. “The variety of country music I play was conceived of in a dance scene in Louisiana and Arkansas, where we were playing. Not to a listening crowd of people who cared what I said, but to how we played it so they could catch a dance.
“That joyful aspect, if it all succumbs to introspection and academia then it’s just as soulless as the truck commercial of pop country that we are subjected to.”
Not wanting to succumb to introspection is not the same as not wanting to think deeply about a history of slavery and devastation of native populations, family roots and growth, rural poverty and exploitation, unions and community. Joy doesn’t come unencumbered.
“For me it’s not an act how gleeful I can come across, but there is a seriousness to this because they both are so important. They are coequal in their value to me: maintaining joy and asking the hard questions. And I hope that comes across. It’s difficult for me to separate the two and I hope I don’t lose that.”
It used to be said that country and soul was Saturday night music and Sunday morning music, but it’s equally true that it’s getting loose on Friday night music and heading to work on Monday morning music.
“Again if we lose our joy, if we are allowed to be crushed and subjugated, they win. So to keep on the heat and have existence as resistance, as I’ve heard it put, we are trying to loop in on that.”
If the politics can sometimes crowd out the songs, it’s only temporary because there’s plenty to dig into with the music as his most recent album, All Bad, attests. The sound of this record is back to a fuller sounding, whole band effort after a lockdown-era virtual solo album, Home On The Rage, and that dance and energy he mentioned reclaims our focus.
Was this where he would have gone had Covid not interrupted his schedule after 2019’s lively Okay, Crawdad, sending him back to Arkansas from Louisiana, and into isolation? Or is it a reaction to that closed-in record?
“I don’t know if I’ve thought about it in those purposeful terms but I think there’s something interesting that Sam Dawes said while we were recording, because he was helping with the recording process. Essentially it was this feels like the next record after Okay Crawdad, and I think that that statement and what you just said lines up for me,” says Shoulders. “Had the pandemic not happened and lockdowns not happen I think there is a pretty good chance I’d still be in New Orleans and not up here in Arkansas, and that album came out just a few months before lockdowns were announced.
“Coming roaring back with the dance sound, there is a pretty good chance that that would have just been the next record but I do like this idea of [the contrast] and there is an acoustic EP [Nick Shoulders Live AF Session] and a stripped down version of this that could see the light of day. There is a decent chance there will be another acoustic album in the future.”
Acoustically or not, Shoulders is a genuine multi-instrumentalist, with fiddle, guitar, banjo and mouth harp just to start. So given he can turn his hand to a number of musical tools, which is the one that his hands go to first when he thinks to play, and which one does he write on?
“I’m not a teenage singer/songwriter/guitarist; I started on drums, so I have a much more hard rhythm background,” he explains. “The banjo for example is the drummer of an old-time string band: it’s got the most drive to it, it’s got the most syncopation, and when I’m trying to pass time and get my head right, that’s is the instrument I usually reach for. Because guitar is something I essentially play drums on, that boom-chuck [rhythm] that’s entirely just meant to be a platform for songwriting. I can’t play a bar chord, I can’t play a solo, all I know is the first five frets,[he laughs] where all the money is.
“I am writing on the guitar and I am usually writing from the perspective of rhythm and melody first, lyrics second, and as such the most melodic and rhythm-driven instrument I have in my little arsenal is the banjo. I don’t write on it very much but when I am home and I want to get my whole mental state set right, especially after a tour, banjo is the one I pick up.”
One final note, I’ve mentioned, and you might now have heard, that Shoulders is partial to a yodel. It’s as natural as breathing, or whistling for him. As he explains, “a yodel is a controlled yell” and growing up in the hollers of rural Arkansas, where your nearest neighbour might be visible but not necessarily reachable, helped develop this. Made it necessary even.
“A holler makes you better at this because you’ve got to do more to communicate with neighbours.”
And communication is what it’s all about after all.
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Nick Shoulders and Margo Cilker play:
The Factory Floor, Sydney, October 9
Out On The Weekend: Ballarat October 11; Williamstown, October 12; Korumburra, October 13
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