SPEAKER_00 4:58

Bonnie, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so glad to have you in the studio. So the last time we spoke was the summer of 2023 for Boulder Weekly, which was amazingly three years ago. It doesn't feel right. At that time, Elephant Revival was just about to return to Planet Bluegrass. It was about a year after your like reunion show there. So what have these last few years been like for you? Can you just kind of catch me up?

SPEAKER_01 5:23

It's been a journey. Lots of exploring different uh musical approaches, which has been fun and interesting. And you know, the healthy balance of challenge and and comfort is always important to feel alive and everything. So yeah, it's been a lot of that. I'm just exploring different music and I got to record this solo record. So that's been a lot of my focus the last couple, two and a half years.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Well, that's definitely what we want to talk to you about. You're back with your first solo record unseen, which is a beautiful collection of songs that I think any fan of Elephant Revival should be stoked about. Can you tell us a little bit about how this project began to germinate and come together for you?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, I mean, it's been a long time coming. The elephant has encouraged me for years to do it because I write a lot of songs and you know, and a lot of those, most of them are in Elephant Revival. It's nice. They have a lot of these have a little bit of a different tonality, so a little more ethereal building into rocking kind of a vibe. And so they felt like they had a nice home in the solar project. I was uh Gregory Alan Isaacov is a good old friend of mine, and he we were talking because he's heard me and he said, play me a song, and so I played him a song I was working on. He's like, Let's go record right now, and so I was like, okay, might as well just start, and that kind of like cracked the seal to get over the feeling of like it has to be this like perfect moment when you begin. I mean, it was pretty perfect and beautiful. I love the studio, but that got me kind of going with recording. So we went into Gregory's studio and tracked the song, and then he just layered like voice after voice and um cues and pianos and synthesizers and god noises, and we had a really fun time with it. And then we took that song to Ferncliffe Studio, um, which is a studio that my husband had designed out in Ferncliffe, Colorado. And we finished it there with uh Daniel Sproul, helped co-produced, and then we helped with four more songs. That place felt like a stone cave with like a candlelit kind of like old world vibe in there. And then T Vone Burnett, who I've been in touch with for a while, recording the rest of the record with him, five more songs, which was super fun and a huge honor. Yeah, T Vone and Burnett had sent Elephant a New York Times article years ago. Maybe we were interested in having him produce an elephant album. And he said, we'll write a song about this article. And I'm like, I typically don't like I don't want songs to be too contrived for me to write about something specific that somebody's like, write a song about this. So it took me um many, many years to write a song about this article that was so interesting about basically how information is gonna be you know widely available to everybody. It's gonna be an amazing and beautiful thing, but it's gonna be really hard to discern the truth of what's going on. And media is gonna become bought by the largest corporations and just gonna become another advertisement platform, and like how you know being a musician will become something that you're just a marketing specialist, will become the the top musicians and all these things that we're seeing signs up today. And that was a really interesting article, and I was so inspired by it. So I wrote the song called Phantoms in the Station over the course of the next 10 years, and then I saw T-Bone at Telluride, and we were talking and having a good time. And I said, You know, I did write a song about that. Sorry, it took me so long. He said, We'll send it. And so I recorded it, just a little voice memo in a cabin and sent it to him. He said, This is great, let's do this. Uh, when can you come out and record? Uh super fun. And then I got to have a bunch of my Colorado musicians fly out with me. And Brittany Haas also got Nashville copped on the fiddle, who's I just love her playing.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Does it feel more vulnerable to release an album under your own name as opposed to like as part of a collective? Does it feel like you're putting yourself out there in a different way?

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Absolutely, and that's probably why it's taken me 20 years. Yeah, for sure. You're just you are the the name, but I still like to have a lot of creative freedom. I started playing music with my sisters, which was very comfortable. And um I'm like the baby in the family too. So I was a very shy person when I first started with elephant. Like, like I remember when we would do interviews, like Bridget, I would look at her for every question and she would answer for me. And you know, like it was very like I got to ease into the having people put so much attention on you, which that part is not my favorite, honestly, but the music part is so fun.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Because I imagine on the flip side that there's something quite meaningful about having your name on the record and having your vision come to life in this way. Does it feel gratifying in a different way than working collectively?

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, I think so. It it feels yeah, liberating to be able to have a vision and know that you can articulate it, you know, to whatever extent, and then see that come to life in ways that I hear things readily in my mind, and then to be able to hear it out loud like that is very satisfying.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

I actually wanted to talk about your path to music being through the drums, and which I think maybe some people might not expect right away. Can you tell us a little more about those early days, like when you first kind of found your path?

SPEAKER_01 11:01

I would say it started with like singing with my mom or listening to her sing more. So like singing, I would find like reverberous spots, you know, to sing in since I was really little. When I was five, we moved to town and across the street from who had become my oldest stepsister. And there was like a a tree that you could climb up. My brother climbed up to where her window was where she was playing the drums, and was like, you know, this guy Randy Crouch needs a new drummer, who was an old friend of my dad's. And so she ended up becoming his drummer, and we became friends that way, and then she ended up moving into our yard in a bus with her boyfriend, who was the bass player for his band, and they would leave all their instruments set up for rehearsal, and me and my sisters, other sisters would go and play on all the instruments, and then we became part of their show at times. They call us the rat nurses because we took care of baby rats that we found.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

I'm so glad you told us that.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

My dad made twice. Um, it was not like a thing that we're particularly proud of, but um, we ended up playing shows together as um rat nurses, but also known as Randy Crouch's flying horse opera band. Also a great title. I remember being like 12 for our first show that was on the Marquee. There's a dream theater in Talakwa, Oklahoma, and it's Randy Crouch Live with the rat nurses, and my dad had made these t-shirts with these three girls or rats dressed in nurse rat nurses outfits, all playing guitar. I played electric guitar back then. And uh it was we were just mortified, like because as a 12-year-old that's but now everybody wears them as like, you know, I should sell them at the show, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Yeah, you said you were you were searching for for names for this project. I mean some great options right here. So let's let's go back to the new record a little bit. Obviously, the songs in this collection are all quite different, but is there a through line connecting them in your mind? Like, is are there any overarching themes you're exploring on this record any any blue that in your mind holds them together?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, I mean it it it is pretty all over the place in some ways. And I was wondering if they're all too different. But once I found that I feel like I found a cool order for them to go into where it feels kind of like a journey where it there's like a mysterious landscape of sounds almost like a storm is brewing to introduce it and then it eases into more groove. I would say the unseen, the title, partly why I chose that title also again, is that there is a recurring theme of like this thing that we're all a part of, and you know, the the most magnificent unseeable forces that move our bodies around and like make us feel the feelings and do the things and make the wind blow. And you know, I just it was like a homage to whatever you want to call that beautiful thing that we're all inextricable from.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

I imagine you've seen a lot of changes in the years since here in Colorado. I imagine a lot is different now compared to 2004. Can you speak to that a little bit, maybe specifically in regard to the music scene here? What has changed or maybe not changed um in the decades since?

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Well, I would say one of the things that was so beautiful and I was so excited about when I first came here was the live music and the opportunity to play not on stage, also, so that you could have that developing time and just like that freedom of making music together. There were so many jams. If there was a gathering, there was bound to be people playing music together, which I just love that. And I I wished for that for more people because I don't know that I would have ever developed the way that I did on instruments if I didn't have off of the stage opportunities. You know, when I see kids, you know, I would go to recitals and stuff like that, and you're like, wow, this is a different tone whenever you're playing music and you're performing right off the bat, versus getting to have those intimate moments where you're like sitting around the fire and passing a guitar around. Like I like to play past the guitar because it makes everybody kind of come out of their shell and you're not allowed to pass it without even you have to at least play like one note or two notes or something. And it like helps it's just fun to hear that part of people, even if they've never played a guitar before. Like, I'd rather do that than chit-chat all day. Like, I hope that there is four more forms of that that come back for everybody's sake, because I just think it feels so meaningful and it's like a fun opportunity to you can try out a different instrument and get over the fear of like rather than having to like play it alone your whole life and then you're on stage, you know, like or you're at rehearsal with the idea of being on stage, like was a beautiful thing that I loved about her when I came here.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

So when you look back on those early days of making music when you were first kind of cutting your teeth with the band and you compare it to where you are now, what goes through your mind when you when you think about that journey? Like, did you ever imagine you'd be in this position?

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Well, I remember when I was, I think 14 or something. My mom for my birthday got me an astrological reading from she like sent in the time that I was born, and it was like, whoa, most likely be or you know, very visual art, visually artistic, and will most likely be a singer. And I was like, Mom, I'm like, no way am I singing in front of people. Like this thing is so off. Like, you know, um, it was really like pretty spot on in every other way. And I was like, this is because I remember being really excited about reading it and then being like, What? I can't write. Um, because that just seemed like impossible. I would, I was so shy that I would like whenever you had to say here in class, I would like literally puke in my mouth to have to say here. I hated it so much. Um, so I would have never dreamed that I would be so comfortable with singing now and got have gotten to sing for so many folks. And I feel pretty fearless when music is happening now. The in-between songs is still like can be awkward, but um music is like something that it instantly connects us, and so you just like it takes all of for me anyway. That's been a really lovely part of it. So yeah, and then to play like with my sisters, I played electric guitar at first, and then that felt too in the front, and they the guy Randy Crouch would just be like solo out of nowhere, and I it just scared the crap out of me. And so I'm like, I'm not doing that anymore. So I switched to congos and bongos, and then I would have this whole like fortress I could hide behind, and just you know, I didn't have to know the chords, they weren't, you know, they weren't gonna give me a guitar solo, which is if they did give me a solo, it was just percussion, I didn't have to know the right notes. And then my sisters and I joined started a band with James Townsend in uh called Mighty Kind. I started singing in that band with James and writing songs, and um, he's the one who taught me how to play musical song and got me my first musical saw, which was so fun. It was a very eclectic band. He had learned from Neutral Milk Hotel and was pretty inspired by that band. So there were some tones of that and like um modest mouse. So it's very like a rock band. And then I met some members of Elephant Revival, Bridget and Dango and Daniel, and I started playing with them, and then we would open up for the band with my sisters, and um, so yeah, it was a it was like a nice journey into that, and then to be able to play red rocks, you know, headline red rocks a few times was super a huge honor.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Anything you want to say before we wrap up here?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

The album will be out on May 8th, which is gonna be fun, and then there's the show at the Fox Theater on May 16th, and I'm really excited for the musicians that are the surprise guest there. And Hermana is opening their really cool duo sing in Portuguese and Spanish, and um, they're really good friends of mine that were part of a band called Leyline, so I'm excited for that. And David Brown's gonna play guitar from Rising Appalachia. A lot of surprises. I just won't say any more than that, but a lot of fun folks will be there.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Well, we're looking forward to it. Uh, Bonnie, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Thank you for having me.