A conversation with Palmyra

Transcript from episode eleven of the Good Folk Podcast.

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SPENCER GEORGE: Hello folks, my name is Spencer George and you’re listening to the Good Folk podcast. 

I’m so excited to introduce you to the wonderful humans of band Palmyra, joining me in conversation today. Established in the Shenandoah Valley, Palmyra’s set explores the fusion of traditional folk string instruments, three part harmonies and foot percussion.

The trio captures the collective spirit of three Virginia natives, Teddy (he/him), Manoa (he/him), and Sasha (they/them), often described as a distant cousin of the progressive folk band, Punch Brothers, mixed with elements of Oliver Wood or the Avett Brothers. Palmyra’s songs are intimate and contemplative, with arrangements that allow them to create the illusion of a full, larger-than-three ensemble. The trio's sound is a nod to Appalachia and Midwestern Americana, apparent through their stirring craftsmanship and dedication to a folk-driven, innovative experience throughout each live performance.  

In 2022, Palmyra made their Newport Folk Festival debut, were named the FloydFest 2022 On The Rise Winner, and performed over 150 tour dates on acclaimed stages up and down the east coast, including a support tour with national headlining act, Illiterate Light. Currently, they are gearing up for a new round of shows in the new year and settling into their new home base of Richmond, Virginia. 

This conversation touches on many things close to my own heart: concepts of home, what it means to call a place home, finding your own unique sound, and embracing both the fear and joy of sharing who you are with the world. 

Their music and lyrics speak to experiences I have often felt alone in, and create a new sound that weaves the traditional in with something new, something special. I can’t quite put a name to what it is, but I know that hearing this type of music when I was younger could have changed my relationship to home and what I thought it looked like to be from the South. As most great musicians have the ability to do, they gave me something I didn’t know I needed until I heard it. 

I can’t wait to follow as they continue to pave a new path in the folk world, and I hope you enjoy this conversation. 

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SG: Well, I'm super excited to have you all here. I really love your music. The minute I heard it, I was like, I have to reach out to them and get them on here because it just aligns so much with, like, what I do and what Good Folk does. I think where I would love to start is if each of you just kind of want to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit more about the band, how you met, how you got started and where you are now. And whoever wants to jump in can go.

MANOA BELL: My name is Manoa. I play upright bass in the band. 

TEDDY CHIPOURAS: My name, I think, is Teddy. I play guitar and banjo. And sing. 

SASHA LANDON: My name is Sasha, and I play mandolin and guitar, and we all write songs together. And we call ourselves Palmyra. And yeah, that's us. For those listening, these two, Teddy and Manoa both use the he's and the him’s. And me over here, Sasha. I use the they’s and the them’s. We once had a boss together who said, I heard you use the theys and the thems, so that's what I do. 

MB: The three of us all met in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in a little town called Harrisonburg, and that's where we started writing music together. We were all going to school there. We're all from different parts of Virginia and met there in Harrisonburg and then have been pals and have lived in a bunch of different places now together and, yeah, I guess that's how we met. That would be the origin story. 

TC: We're living in Richmond, Virginia now. We're super new to the Richmond scene, but we have a bunch of friends here from JMU and from high school that are here and play music. There's a great DIY scene here, so we're stoked to be getting into the Richmond community. 

MB: We were in Floyd the past twelve months and so we just moved to Richmond just moments ago. 

TC: A couple of minutes ago, yeah. 

MB: Walked in this room and we arrived. [laughs] 

SG: Both places have really incredible music scenes. I'm in Durham, so I'm just south of y'all in Richmond, but I have a lot of friends who are in Richmond and tell me constantly they're like, you've got to get up there and start checking out the music scene. How has the experience been going from kind of small town to Floyd, which is another small town, but it has this history of being very artsy, and with Floyd Fest, obviously a huge music scene. And then Richmond. What has that experience been like going from small town to urban? 

SL: We've been touring full time for the last year and a half. And so the time that we spent in Floyd,  we were only there a little bit of the time. I feel like we didn't get to experience all of what Floyd was. We really loved it for its culture, especially around old time music, and we love the folks there and met a bunch of lovely people, but I wouldn't say that we got the whole small village town in Virginia experience. 

Now we're in Richmond, where we have a bunch of friends already, and we're really glad to be here. And it's a place that when we're not on the road, which is where we spend most of our time, we get to come back and see friends, which isn't an experience we really got to have in Floyd, because we weren't there long enough to get to know anyone. 

SG: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. 

MB: You asked about the different music scenes between the two places. So the house in Floyd we were living at was on a bunch of acreage, and there were cows in the backyard. And you'd wake up and you go on the back porch and you'd play your instrument and kind of observe the beautiful rural setting. And then you'd go downtown, the one stoplight in Floyd. You'd go to the general store where everyone would meet. So you can call that downtown. 

TC: The country store. 

MB: The country store, yes. And you'd play that song that you'd written that morning. Looking at the beautiful pastoral surroundings. And that was just like a shared experience that everyone was having and kind of relating to. Then you come here to Richmond, and it's like, I met this person once who was in a rural area, and here's the song about this person who experienced this thing. It's like it's almost one step removed, which is also a really cool perspective. 

SG: There's a really interesting thing with Southern cities that have become these large urban developments that are very much surrounded by smaller rural communities. You don't see that happen as much in other places. I know North Carolina, which is where I am, makes a lot of headlines for having these major urban developments that are just surrounded by total rural counties. 78 of North Carolina’s 100 counties are rural, and Virginia is a bit of a similar story. But you do see the ways in which these two— I don't want to call them scenes, but the two kind of different locations come up against each other and work together in really cool ways. I think your music does that in that you're taking these very kind of traditional folk instruments and melodies and then really urbanizing them through lyrics and through sounds and what you're doing with them. And I would love to backtrack a little bit and hear more about how the band actually started and what the origin was, if you all met. But what was the idea of, let's make a band, and have you gotten to kind of where you are today with it? 

TC: So it started that we were all kind of playing in each other's solo projects. I had a solo project, singer songwriter stuff. Sasha has a hip-hop project that we were all playing for. And we were like, planning tours before COVID in like, 2019, planning 2020 tours, touring under my name and under Sasha's name. Eventually we just started writing together in a different genre than either of our music. And it felt like we had to create something bigger than just our name. So we made Palmyra and started writing teams under that name. 

We were doing an interview yesterday and we were talking about our influences, and Manoa brought up his classical influences. Sasha and I kind of had a similar upbringing with listening to music like the Avett Brothers, just like folk music that we still draw so much from. But Manoa kind of brings a different edge with his classical bow chops on the upright bass, which kind of brings in these melodies that Sasha and I think wouldn't think of on our own, just based on what we grew up listening to. 

SL: Yeah, our name came from a song by a band we all really love called Houndmouth. They've got a tune called Palmyra. It's one of our favorites. When we're doing our longer, like brewery gigs, where we've got to play covers too, we play that.

SG: I was going to ask you if that's where it came from because I know that song and that band, and when I googled Palmyra, that's what came up and I was like, I wonder if that's the connection. And I'm glad you brought up the Avett Brothers, which are one of my favorite bands of all time. They’ve been hugely influential in my own work. I'm sure you've seen the documentary they did about filming their album or recording their album and then they filmed all about it, working out in Malibu with Rick Rubin. 

And they had a quote which you all might be able to relate to, but I remembered this fundamentally changed my perspective on life. They were like, at some point we went from trying to be rock musicians and fit in with this other scene to realizing that we couldn't run from who we were and from being Southern, so we might as well lean into that and make that part of our sound. And they said that's when they started to really experience success. Is that something that you feel like you can relate to at all?

MB: Yeah, definitely. I think that especially the clawhammer banjo being a traditional Appalachian instrument and specifically Southern Appalachia, that has been kind of a turning point, I think, for us creatively, in that a lot of the music we're writing right now features clawhammer banjo. It feels like it's connecting with not only the music we're making, but us personally in a way that we had electronic instruments. We were doing all these things to kind of get away, and then when we stepped back and really kind of explored Appalachia, it felt right. 

SL: Yeah. I think all of our music is really deeply influenced by the sounds of Appalachia. I grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, which calls itself Appalachia. But I learned recently that culturally it's not Appalachian, which it's funny that I grew up there and spent so much time there and called myself that and it’s not. 

I think that the sound of Appalachia is something that we all really treasure and have learned so much from, and especially the culture of old time music. We've all put a lot of hours into learning old time and going to jams over the last few years. I think we still sit on the outskirts of that a little bit, but it definitely really influences the music that we make. 

SG: Yeah, I think you can see that for sure. And Sasha, it's funny. I have a similar experience. My family is all in Mount Airy, which is technically part of Appalachia, but these days is so modern that it feels wrong to use that term, which, again, contributes to some of these stereotypes, both in music and culturally, that people have— that Appalachia is this kind of backwards, rural place where everyone's just living out on a farm playing a banjo. Right. 

I think what's cool, as we have more musicians and artists and filmmakers and photographers and writers, people who are coming out and they're telling the stories of their experiences there, and you're realizing it's not this kind of monolith of a region. And this idea that everything is so traditional, especially in the world of folklore, is really backwards in a way. It's good to kind of make these new connections and bring things out. And I think you're really doing that. 

One question that I have for you is how do you feel— Sasha, you touched on this a little bit, and Teddy, you brought up your influences, but do the places that you're from influence your music more so than just this idea that we want to go into folklore and folk music and modernize that? How do you kind of bring in some of your own experiences, if you do it all? 

MB: Definitely. I would say all of our music is written from our own experience. There's certainly some general folklore idioms and motifs in some of our songs, especially, like, form wise, but lyrically, they're all coming from our experience. And yeah, I think that all of the music we make is kind of us observing our surroundings. There's a song that Teddy should speak to on our first record Shenandoah called Rolling Hills, that's very pastoral. 

TC: Yeah. I think that a lot of the music we write has to do with Virginia, especially over the last year. We've been on the road so much, it's been a big adjustment period, and we've been missing home a lot. So a lot of the tunes we’re writing are reminiscent of our time spent in Virginia and growing up here and just how special it is to us. 

SL: Yeah. I think also a big thing for all of us is we all learned pretty much everything that we know about music while we were living in Virginia. We all went to college together at James Madison in Harrisonburg. I grew up in Roanoke, which has a really, really good arts education, and I got really, really lucky to be introduced to a lot of different music by really good local teachers. And so I think something that's just important to all of us and really influential of our sound is just the fact that we were taught by a bunch of Virginians how to play music. And are that, too. 

SG: Yeah, like you're sticking to what you know in a way, which is really great. One question that I have is— it comes up in a lot of conversations, and I know growing up in the South, I experienced this, and many other people I've talked to experience this— did you feel that in order to make it as an artist, you couldn't do it in Virginia, that there was some kind of pressure to go and take on this other identity or go somewhere else? With writing, making it was like, moving to New York. With music, it's like going to LA. Is that a pressure that you felt? And what was that like? 

TC: Yeah, for sure. I think, like what you just said, with every art space, everyone thinks you have to go somewhere else no matter where you are. And that place for us was Nashville, like everyone says, you have to go to Nashville to make it. Especially what we do, which is like Americana folk music. 

And we did. After we graduated school, we moved up to Boston just because we thought we had to be in a bigger music scene to make connections and to play shows. It was the pandemic, so we couldn't do any of that, really. So we spent a lot of that year in Boston just writing. That's kind of going back to, like, the old time and bluegrass stuff. We didn't really grow up playing old time or bluegrass, but when we were in Boston, that music kind of reminded us of home just because we were around it a lot when we were younger. So that's how we started playing that music. 

But yeah, for sure. I think there is a pressure to move somewhere bigger than where you are to make it, but we found that you definitely don't need to do that. We moved back to Floyd, which is the smallest town any of us have ever lived in, and toured from there for most of this last year. And it's been the craziest year of my life, for sure. I mean, it's been an amazing year of music. We didn't move to Nashville.

SL: We got some advice from our friends in a band called the Illiterate Light out of Harrisonburg, Virginia, that were like, if you want to do this band thing, what we did was we just toured all the time, so you all should do that, and it will work. And so it hasn't really mattered where we are, where we live. We're glad that we all live in the same city now, but I think everything that we have been able to accomplish in the last two years is because we've been on the road almost all of that time. 

SG: I want to talk about the tour because you've mentioned this a few times, and it sounds amazing. How did that get started and where did you go? It was a year, that's a very long tour to be on the road. And really, it seems like you've kind of reached this new level as musicians through this experience of going on tour, and I would love to know what that experience was like. 

MB: Yeah, how we do touring is we play 21 days out of the month. So we're constantly traveling and we travel from kind of up and down the East Coast. The farthest north we've gone is Maine and then the farthest west is, like, Toronto, Nashville. So, like, this side of the Mississippi and then as far south as southern Georgia. Each month we're hitting a different part of the East Coast, basically. So it'll be southeast, and that will be northeast and mid-Atlantic. And we do it all ourselves. Last month we were touring with this other band that Sasha mentioned, Illiterate Light, opening up for them at different clubs along the East Coast. But typically it's just the three of us. It's just us in our minivan and just kind of playing anywhere and everywhere, trying to say yes to every opportunity. 

SG: It kind of sounds like living the dream. And I think about that a lot. With creative practice, sometimes you just have to say yes and just go and do it and see what connections you make and the people you meet and go from there. 

SL: I was going to say in the car the other day, Manoa and I were just talking about how what we do in Palmyra is just to commit fully to this art form and this band and this project that we're all really excited about. And the thing that we do. And I think it's really fulfilling for all of us to just be like, this is what we do. We're Palmyra. Our friends ask all the time where we work. I meet people who are like, what do you do? And I'm like, I'm in a band. And they're like, what do you mean? What else do you do? But this is all we do. And I think we're all really content to be doing that, even though it's hard sometimes. 

SG: So you're all doing music full time? All three of you?

SL: Have been since May of 2021. 

SG: Wow. Congratulations. That's a leap to take. I have, like, three jobs on top of this, so I'm sure it feels really amazing. When you think about where you want to go as a band, what is, like, your dream for Palmyra? Or your dream day. What is your dream day in the life? 

TC: Yeah, I mean, I think this is something that you were just talking about. I think we are living the dream every day. And it's hard to remind yourself of that just because some days can be so hard on the road. But, like what you just said, we were doing this for a living, and that's pretty crazy. But we have some big goals. Yeah, we’ve got a lot of fantasies, for sure. 

SG: Well, tell me, what are some of these big goals?

SL: One of them was to play Newport Folk Fest. That's, like, the biggest dream ever. And because of our friends in Illiterate Light, we got to do that this summer. We got to go up there and play for a bunch of people. It's just such a cool festival and, like, one of the biggest for folk music. And we're endlessly grateful to Illiterate Light for giving us that opportunity. But that was for all of us a dream moment for sure. 

MB: I think it's easy to pinpoint, like, the fantasy performances or, you know, a headlining tour or playing at Red Rocks, this kind of thing, but maybe a step past that, I think, for Palmyra is making a musical contribution to folk music at large that felt like we had our own unique voice and that people could look back on and say, like, oh, that said something about the genre. So that's kind of what we're working towards, I guess. 

SL: Creating a legacy. 

TC: Hell, yeah. 

SG: I love that. And I definitely think you're doing it. The first time I listened to your music, I kind of had a thought that— I see the Avett Brothers influence, and I do want to touch on other influences a little bit— but I thought, I’ve never really heard anything like it, and there was something really affirming about listening to these lyrics that represent an experience that I feel like I've had in the South, played in the style of the music I grew up on. And there aren't a lot of people doing that. 

I'm thinking really specifically here, like Noah Kahan's newest album, which is all about his Northern attitude and being raised on little light and how so many people are coming out, like, on TikTok and saying they relate to it so deeply. And I feel like y'all are doing that for the South a little bit, in a way.

The lyrics specifically that come to mind, and the first song I listened to of y'all’s was Park Bench, and the first stanza says, Flip a coin with your strange hands /  Not quite woman / Not quite man /  It might land somewhere in the middle or somewhere out of reach / And if I ever learn my name / I'll carve it in a park bench / And I'll stare / So the letters don't look like anything / I'll stare just like you stare /  With judgment and uncertainty.

There's so much here. It's beautiful. There's so many things you're bringing in and so many different topics that you're raising, and then it's rooted in this very traditional folk sound in a way. I want to talk a little bit more about these lyrics and about writing these experiences that you've had that are true and honest and what that is like and who does that and how you go about that, because I just think it's so beautiful and it's really amazing to hear. These are lyrics that people can really see ourselves in and understand that and connect to it, but also have that kind of nostalgic experience of, like, this sounds like the music I grew up on. And that's rare, that's hard to find. So I want to thank you all first for doing that, and then I want to hear more about the lyrics. 

SL: Well, thank you for that. That means a lot. That tune Park Bench is one that I wrote. It's about being a queer person and my experiences with that and how my identity relates to my position in the world. Whether that is in, you know, the South at large, whether that's in Richmond, in Boston, in Floyd, wherever we are on the road, one thing I'm really thankful for with that tune is that we get to play it every night, just about, in a different city. 

Whether the crowd is listening or not, there's like, something really powerful in being able to sing a song about being queer— and a folk song at that— anywhere. In rural Gay, Georgia— the name of the town is Gay, I don't know that their politics are pretty left. Or in northern Maine or, like, wherever. That's just something I'm really thankful for with that tune. And a lot of the tunes we play, that's not the only one that— I mean, I think a lot of the tunes that I start or the verses that I write are just about me. Whether that is about me as a queer person or not. I think that being queer is really central to my identity as a whole. So I think that comes out in those tunes. 

SG: Thank you so much. That's a beautiful response. I completely agree. And I think a lot about representation, a lot of my work has been in rural queer studies. And I think all the time that I feel like— I identify as just generally queer, and I think I would have come out years earlier if I had had that kind of representation or any way to see myself in the stories and the places I'm from. 

One thing that I talk about all the time, I think I bring it up every podcast episode, is that the South has the largest queer population of anywhere in the country, 35% compared to 18% in the Northeast. But because storytelling doesn't often value those stories, and most of the stories you see of being a queer person in the south or a rural community involve leaving and going somewhere else, it becomes something that people think is impossible. 

There's a TikTok I saw recently that went viral, and it was a very Southern man with a very Southern accent talking about his nonbinary partner. And so many people commented and they were like, hearing you talk about this in your accent made me realize all the bias that I have. And I think you bring that up a little bit with these lyrics of you're staring at me with judgment, even if people don't realize they're having judgment. Have you had different experiences performing that song in different communities? Have you felt like it's been an affirming thing to perform? Or has it been something that people have had different reactions to? 

SL: I think in a performance, it's a little hard to see until afterwards how people are engaging with the song. And also, it's really hard to tell if people are actually listening to lyrics when they're seeing you live. We've definitely had people talk to us at shows afterwards about what that song means to them. And that is a really beautiful thing, because I didn't write it to mean something to someone else. I wrote it to speak on my own feelings. And so that is a really surreal and weird and lovely feeling to have someone say that they saw themselves in a song. 

I'm glad that Park Bench in particular can do that to people. And yeah, I think, honestly, the reception that has been the most— like, the place that I've been able to see people interact with it the most is online. And it's been really cool to see people say, like, oh, I listened to this song, and it, like, changed my perspective. Or I found this song through this podcast or whatever, and I really didn't know I needed to hear it. The Internet can be so weird and negative and bad. But with what I’ve experienced with Park Bench online, it's just like the people that have found it and have said something about it have had lovely moments of awareness around it. So that is really awesome and I'm really happy about it. 

SG: Always a good thing. I do want to go back to some of these lyrics that you're talking about because I think it's such a beautiful thing that you were saying. With the power of the Internet bringing new audiences to you— there's so much debate when you're an artist of like, is the Internet a good thing? Is the Internet a bad thing? But I think— like, it enables us to do this project. It enables so many bands and musicians to reach new audiences. When you're talking about people finding you on the Internet, do people tell you how they find you? How is this song getting to all these different people?

SL: Our friend Lauren actually— this is a weird one—I bring this one up because it was a surprise, but with Park Bench, our friend Lauren was pitching the song to some people for us, and she pitched it to this podcast called Welcome to Nightvale. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it has a whole following. So Park Bench was on the Weather Channel within the universe of Nightvale, which I'm not super familiar with, but for the next month or two after that, we had people come into a show here and there who were like, oh, I heard you on Nightvale. Someone came to a show in D.C. that we hadn't met before, which is a super weird, surreal experience, especially because it's an awesome podcast, but it's not one that the three of us are particularly familiar with. So that was a strange, strange experience, I would say. 

Yeah, a lot of it is just like, we're fortunate to have people that believe in our music sharing our tunes with other people. The Spotify algorithm has probably pushed Park Bench in some people's faces, but yeah, I don't really know where people… 

MB: But where do they interact? Where do you see their comments? 

SL: Facebook or some… I mean, all the social medias. I posted it on TikTok before. And, you know, TikTok, it seems like anyone that interacts with you there is a stranger. And there were definitely people there.

MB: I'm thinking about an Instagram story. It was Park Bench and someone had text on it. Do you know what I'm talking about? It's happened a couple of times. 

SL: Someone made fan art once for Park Bench. That was kind of crazy. It wasn't someone I knew. Sorry if I'm not speaking well to your question. 

SG: You're absolutely fine. This is fascinating, just hearing about all the different ways in which— I'm not a musician, so I have no idea how this works— but hearing how one song can just reach all these different audiences. I want a physical map of just the lines being drawn as it spreads out. 

TC: That would probably be a good exercise for us to do because we don't really know where it goes either. 

SL: One thing we keep our eye on is where our streams are coming from. And mostly just on Spotify, it seems like that's where most of our listeners are. And pretty recently, Park Bench became the song that had the most streams and it was not on the top. Like, even when we put it out, it was probably number four or five and just stayed there for a really long time. And then our two tunes, Saratoga and Microwave Dinner, were both at the top for forever. And then Park Bench just passed it like a month ago or something. And it's the tune that at shows, I feel like I see the most people that are singing along with it. They know the words to it, which is really cool. Shout out the 7% non-binary listeners we got. 

TC: Is that seven? 

SL: Maybe it's not that high. I thought it was. 

MB: No, it is.

SG: Can you track that? They can track that now?

SL: Yeah, they tell you your listener’s gender. I'm surprised that Spotify knows that many people's gender. Like, I'd be surprised if Spotify knew who I identified as, but I don't know. That's what it says. It says 7% non-binary listeners. 

SG: That actually kind of answers my next question, which was, I was going to ask you if you feel that people are connecting with this song because they see themselves in it and therefore, like, queer people of the South. When you talk about your tracking, where are most of your listeners coming from? 

SL: All over, yeah.

MB: Geographically, I would say Virginia. I mean, we've toured so much up and down the East Coast that I think we have little pockets in a couple of different places, but the majority of people, I would say, are in Virginia.

SL: A lot in Atlanta. A lot of listeners there.

MB: I would say that at shows it’s a really interesting demographic spread because there's kind of like an older folk audience, but there's also, like, a lot of our peers that a lot are not typical— like they're not socially normal, I guess, compared to the older folk audience. It's really visible at our shows, which is really cool, I think, because it's like, oh, all the people that are like us are right in front of us. And then there's the sea of 50 year olds behind them.

SL: Who we love and are deeply thankful for. The older listeners as well. [laughs]

SG: You gotta put the disclaimer in there, right? 

SL: We got punks at our shows, we got queer people at our shows, and with our kind of music like you were saying, that's not necessarily the norm. And we love that. That's the community we exist in. We're glad that people like us are interacting with our music. 

MB: It definitely also gives us some peace of mind because I think there's… like, we don't necessarily feel that. And it's super evident in our music and the lyrics specifically, that we fit in with, like, the stereotypical folk scene, especially like a Southern Appalachian scene. Like, living in Floyd, there was a lot of anxiety around if we would be accepted by these people. And so it's nice to see in our audiences that it's like the people that are responding to this music are also kind of taking a risk and that they're like, hey, we're going to go watch this band that we feel passionately about, but it's probably at a venue that we wouldn't typically go to. Or I know there's going to be an audience there that I don't always feel that I'm a part of. But for us, it's like, really accepting because it's like, oh, thank god you all are here. Like, you're making us feel better. 

SG: It's bridging these two communities that might not exist otherwise, which is a really cool thing in art to do because it speaks to what you said at the very beginning of this kind of multiplicity of sounds, of finding people who might like classical, who might like folk, who might be really interested in modern queer musicians and bringing that together in one thing. It's part of what makes art so powerful. 

But I completely feel you on the fact that it can also be really challenging in certain spaces, because on the one hand, you want to be representation, and as an artist, you often want to speak your truth and your experience. And on the other hand, when you're doing this work in art or community organizing or any kind of radical work in the South and in Southern Appalachia, you also have to protect your own safety and make sure that you're not putting yourself in harm's way. And it's striking that balance, which is really a difficult thing to do. 

SL: Yeah, that makes me think of— there's an old time jam that we went to in Southwest Virginia, vaguely, that I was talking to the person that leads the jam, and he was saying— and like, an old time jam for anyone listening who maybe isn't super familiar with old time music all the time, It's what came before bluegrass and it's a really rich tradition of mostly instrumental music that has been passed down through generations. And yeah, the jam normally is, like, older white men mostly, even though that's not where the music comes from, necessarily. But I was at a jam in southwest Virginia, and the guy who leads it was like, the only thing that we talk about here, if you're going to talk to your neighbor, the person sitting next to you at this jam, playing banjo or whatever, the only thing we talk about here is music. We don't talk about politics because music is the one thing that we all agree on. 

I think it's a really beautiful thing that music can be that. For me, as a young queer person, I can go to a jam that maybe necessarily isn't a super safe environment as far as the people around me’s beliefs. But I know that I can go to that jam, and this is a language that I speak through music, and it's really like, it's respected in the room that all of us are using that same language to talk to each other, even though we're not talking about politics or identity. 

SG: Oh, that idea of a common language through art is so great and so pertinent. Do you feel that when you show up in those spaces, even if you're just using music and you're not talking about identity, do you feel accepted in those spaces because you're using music as a common language with which to interact with each other? 

SL: Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's definitely spaces that we have gone into touring, like, not necessarily jams, but like, there's definitely been spaces we've gone into where, you know, there's aspects of toning down. For me, I'm going to tone down what I'm projecting here so that I feel more comfortable in this space and so that I know that I am not being perceived as the only queer person in a room or whatever, because that can be really weird and alienating. So there's definitely a level of that on the road and in venues and at jams. But I think overall, doing what we do, we get to create the atmosphere in a room with our sets. And I think for the most part, with the three of us, it's a really, really safe atmosphere. And because the thing in a room, if people are coming to see us, that everyone has in common is that they like folk music or our music specifically, if everyone is agreeing on that one thing, then the identity of each person in the room isn't the focus of conversation and so there won't be hostility around it, especially if the music is about, like, celebrating yourself, which I think a lot of our music is, not just Park Bench.