By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Singer-songwriter with musical road dog status, Amy Helm is talking as she travels from eastern Maryland to her hometown of Woodstock, New York.
This could be the set up for a road song, and as such would fit nicely onto her forthcoming album “Silver City.”
The recording features her original material, more than her previous three recordings.
It hits the stands on Sept. 6. The album release show will be in Martinsville outside Cincinnati at the Nowhere Else Barn Loft hosted by the band Over the Rhine. Then Helm and her band. Head north to perform a headline set at the Black Swamp Arts Festival. Helm will perform Saturday, Sept. 7 at 8 p.m. on the Main Stage.
The festival opens Friday Sept. 6 at 5 p.m. with the juried art show, music on the Main Stage, and food trucks. The festival’s offerings expand on Saturday and Sunday with more art and music as well as youth and teen activities. Click for schedule.
“I travel so much for work and the stories in the songs are very much about my experience at different times in my life that are always defined by the place I was,” Helm said. “There is a lot of motion. It is a travelogue from many years of hard touring and watching things from the car window and working things out.”
She earned her status as a “road dog” with time in bands led by her father Levon Helm, the drummer with The Band, as well as the folk collective Ollabelle, and then with her own band.
She started singing in bands at 14 while in high school on the Upper East side of New York City. She was mentored by Aaron Bell, a jazz bassist most known for his work with Duke Ellington. “He took me under his wing,” she said. “I got to sing in his jazz ensemble all four years. I wasn’t just focused on having a career, but getting better as singer.”
It was during this time and into her 20s that her career took shape. “That was my world where I found my identity and became clear about what I wanted to do.”
That always included writing and co-writing songs, but “in the last four I’ve taken songwriting more seriously as something to develop and get better at.” The transition into more songwriting was a natural next step after years of performing work by others, including the greatest songwriters in American music.
“Sometimes for people who have been singing for so many years the melodies that we’re writing ourselves hold our voices in more organic way,” Helm, 53, said. “Choosing to sing our own stories becomes more important at certain times of our life. …These songs come and knock at your door, and you have to answer the call. Even if it’s not the greatest song in the world, it’s the truest thing I have to offer. That’s where I am with this album.”
The title track is an example of a song that needed the right moment to emerge.
Helm explained that “Silver City” speaks to the trauma of divorce — “the grief of that and a family shifting and changing. That was a painful tune to write.”
She said that she and her ex-husband are “great friends” both remarried. We have a really healthy blended family,” she said. “I don’t think I could have written it until I was in that place with it.”
When the melody came to her, “I knew it was about that, but it was hard… it was fragile to go back to that. I just had to sit it with it and breathe with it and let the words come out,” she said. “You just have to surrender and push through.”
Her music has been shaped by the sounds she absorbed in regular visits to her father’s home state of Arkansas. “A lot of the album takes place in the south,” Helm said. “In my experience, Down South the blues and soul music and gospel music are just more present. You’re around it easier than you are in the Northeast.”
Helm continued: “Being around that sound and the people who were creating that music, especially the gospel people, really shaped what I strived to feel for when I’m singing or taking the stage in anyway. There’s kind of joyful and free confidence in people who make that music, something I always strive to feel.”
Helm is excited to be bringing that joy to the Black Swamp Arts Festival. She said she’s heard “wonderful things” about the festival and she’s happy to have been invited to perform. “It sounds like a cool community building event. I’m excited to be there I love playing music for people. It’s happiest I am.”
