Virginia folk band Palmyra stopped in on Dec. 5 to talk to WYEP’s Rosemary Welsch and play some songs from their latest release on John Prine's label, Oh Boy Records.
Interviewer: Rosemary Welsch
Engineers: Tom Hurley, Thomas Cipollone
Setlist:
Speak My Mind
Happy Pills
Floats Away
Restless
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Rosemary Welsch: What I want to start off with is Virginia because I think this is a very big part of the makeup of this band. Whenever you talk about Virginia, there's an old joke about Virginia, which is how many Virginians does it take to change a light bulb? At least three. One changes it. The other two have to discuss how great the old one was. It is a state that is steeped in history. It's steeped in tradition. It's maybe in convention. How does it impact your music or does it really impact your music?
Teddy Chipouras: There is a super rich history of music and especially old-time and bluegrass music in Virginia, especially in the Appalachian region. I think to some extent, we all grew up around old-time and bluegrass music, but when we were kids, we were kind of too cool for it. At least I was. After college we moved out of Virginia, and we’re missing home, and I think learning some old-time and bluegrass tunes was a way for us to kind of connect back to Virginia and back to our roots. It’s definitely a core part of us as a band. A root system is always good, but like anything that's growing, it’s going to go up and branch out and it’s going to take in all the things that you're living in. You’re meeting people. You’re going places. It’s going to impact where your music goes.
Welsch: Now you all got together at James Madison University, which I don't think about whenever I think of a music school. Was that what you were really focusing on when you first went into that college?
Sasha Landon: We were all studying different things, but we're all participating in the School of Music, particularly the music industry part, which was something that a through-line we all had in common. We met in a songwriting class there with a professor named Ojo Taylor, who we still think about every time we write a song.
Chipouras: In that last song we played, “Speak My Mind,” was actually a tune that came out of that class that I wrote, and then we had like kind of, I put it aside. I played it a couple times live just as you know, playing solo, and then once Palmyra became a thing, we were kind of like searching for old tunes that we could revive, and that was one of them we brought back for Palmyra.
Welsch: So you're in a songwriting class. Now you can go solo. You can go duo. You end up writing as a trio, which I think is a fairly unusual avenue, direction to go in. What is the common thread that ties the three? How did you decide this is what works?
Mānoa Bell: Well, I think the common thread that ties the three is that we all really love songwriting-focused music. Our songs are definitely lyric-forward. The process will be someone comes to the group with a group of lyrics. It can be as simple as, you know, just a verse. Sometimes they're completely fleshed out songs, and then we immediately kind of get our hooks into it as a trio and start to pull the song apart and really try to find the thing that is working inside the song, and then we arrange it together. We start playing it live. The songs change. They're continuing to change. Songs that are already released change every night, and so it’s a writing process, the three of us, that is really editing. Writing is editing for us and trying to boil it down to what it really is about.
Welsch: You guys are very serious. I can tell, and it sounds like from the very beginning it was like we really want to do this. This wasn't just something that flew together. I mean, you have a real sense of what you want out of this.
Landon: We're super committed to the thing we do. Nobody's gonna do it for us. I think that was also kind of a very core common thread for us in the beginning, was like coming out of college, it was hard to find other people who were 100% committed to doing the thing, and all three of us were. So we were like, let’s do it. It turned into this.
Welsch: When I listen to the music, I spent a lot of time listening over the last several days to your early stuff and where you are now, and there were a couple of times where I was listening to a song and I thought, I wonder who they're writing about because it felt very real, like they have to know this person. This isn't just fiction. And there was also, I felt like a sense of nostalgia, which I don't expect from people that are... Am I on the right track on that?
Bell: Yeah, absolutely. We put our friends and our loved ones in our songs, and I think one thing that we'll also do is when we’re writing, we’ll step outside of ourselves. The tune called "Belladonna" — that’s this long story song, and I started writing it and I was trying to find a way to write myself in a feminine voice, and so it's not a tune that sounds like it’s about me, but maybe about a friend, but the goal for me in writing it was just to find kind of a different ground to write about myself. And I think a lot of our songs come from that place of trying to step outside of the thing that we do and our day-to-day and our bodies and selves and write something that speaks to us.
Welsch: That is that tree that’s growing out there into the world. Well, there’s a lot more questions I can ask you. We’re going to talk about getting signed to a very special label here in a little bit, but I know we’ve got to get another song on here.
Welsch: Oh, that was sweet. That’s a sweet one there for you. So if you’ve just tuned in, it’s a new song there, obviously not resting on your laurels, just keep working and working, which might be one of the reasons that you drew the attention of Oh Boy Records. But you know, when I think about Oh Boy Records, which was founded by John Prine, I think of it as a songwriter's label. You know, the songwriting is really key. So if you’re signed to that, that’s a pretty good indication that someone says, “This is real, this band is something special.”
Bell: We are beyond honored. We're such big John Prine fans and such big fans of all the songwriters on that label. Dan Reeder was like our anthem in 2021, who’s another artist on Oh Boy. I think the conversations we've had with them and now working with them, working together with them the last couple of months, they have been so supportive of artists just doing what feels instinctual to them. Jody, the president of the label, once said to us, we were coming up with ideas on how we could release music, and he was like, "I think if it doesn’t feel right to you, then it's never really going to work anyways." That level of trust in our first record, our relationship with the label, has just been mind-blowing. We heard all these, you know, horror stories about labels that would come in and they would really want to control the process and things like that, and it’s been the exact opposite. They’ve just been supportive and really believing in us as artists, so it's been great.
Welsch: So who have been your champions? You know, one of you heard us talking about the membership here, one of the artists, and you need that kind of support. It’s not just from, you know, radio, but the people in your life who championed you so far?
Bell: I think one of our biggest ones is the band that we’re playing with tonight at Club Cafe, Illiterate Light. They are a rock duo from Virginia, and they have been, they’re dear, dear friends of ours, and they have been mentors to us. They have brought us to the Newport Folk Festival, where they opened a door just a little, and we got an elbow in there and got to play one of the main stages this year. They truly have been there for every step of the way. Jake Cochran, the drummer of Illiterate Light, has produced our full-length record that'll be coming out next year with Oh Boy. He produced our project Bella Donna. He plays drums with us sometimes. He’s a joy, and they have been so, so helpful every step of the way. Every time we have a question about who we should work with, what we should look out for, they’ve always got our backs. We're so grateful for that.
Welsch: Well, you’ve been a mentee. Maybe somewhere in the future you’ll end up being mentors. You can pass it along as well. Speaking of, you know, folks who have been there before, there’s a lot of comparisons that you get to the Avett Brothers. And the early stuff from the Avett Brothers was really raw, and then they too developed and changed, and there were serious arrangements and different genres sneaking in. I’m beginning to see that same arc with you because I’ve listened to some of the really early stuff and what we just heard here. Okay, tell us about what's going on. Are you just learning, or are you just coming into understanding what this band is about?
Chipouras: Yeah, I mean, first of all, we love getting the Avett comparison. That’s like our favorite group ever, so thank you. It feels good. Yeah, I mean, so the first project we ever recorded, we just did it ourselves in our living room. We were living in Floyd, Virginia at the time, and it was very raw. Just a couple mics and just our acoustic instruments, a lot of banjo, like acoustic guitar. And I think every project we have released since has evolved just a little bit. You know, I’ve started playing more electric guitar live, which is really fun. It adds some more energy. We’ve started playing with our buddy Samir Tawalare, who’s a drummer. He’s an amazing drummer, and we just love playing with him. So it’s just like, slowly but surely, adding some things into our live set that will creep into the recording process.
Bell: I think we’ve gotten a lot more comfortable in the studio too. Starting very fresh in it, we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we’re lucky to have people like Jay Cochran of Illiterate Light to kind of show us what to do, and learning that it’s a totally different workflow from writing and arranging. So learning how to record and how to experiment and make weird choices in the studio, I think has affected our sound a lot. Our lives have too.
Chipouras: I think also just touring over the past three years, we’ve seen a lot of bands and friends with a lot of amazing artists. We’ll see them do something live or listen to their recordings and be like, “Oh man, that was so cool. Let’s kind of take that and use it in our songs,” which is a fun process and just one of the many cool things about touring.
Welsch: Yeah, I’m sensing some passion here.
Bell: Yeah, going back to that songwriting class Sasha was talking about earlier, one thing that was always brought up was a song needs to be able to work on just a guitar and voice or one instrument and voice. So I think that our first recordings, we were super conscious of that, and we wanted to make sure that they were songwriting-driven, lyrics-driven, and that we weren’t getting in the way of the art. Now that we’ve developed some confidence from playing live over the last three years, we’re feeling able to maybe add some other colors and choices and things like that, but it’ll always just be a one instrument and a voice that has to be the core of the songs.
Welsch: Well, before we wrap this up, I want to throw one kind of oddball question in here, and this is coming at you, Manoa, and that is: Okay, you play this bass now. You, I read, started playing the cello when you were three. I want to know how a three-year-old handles a cello.
Bell: Yeah, well, so it was great. My parents are university professors, and I grew up in Austin, Texas, and the university that they worked for had a great program where it was just free childcare. You could bring your kid down there to the music department, and the students of the school would get experience teaching children, and you know, my parents would get a break from having to take care of me for a little bit. So I started at a really young age with the cello, and it was like a quarter-size cello. It’s the smallest thing ever. There’s still a picture of me on my mom’s fridge wearing a bolo tie and cowboy boots, and I’ve got the world’s smallest cello. And I think it was always something that I both had a social experience with. I made a lot of friends playing music. I’ve always done that, and then it was also something that I felt like I was excellent at, and it felt really validating in that way, to feel like, “Man, I found this thing that if I really work hard, I could do something with this.” So I just feel so fortunate to the public school system because I’ve always just had public education. Yeah, it’s turned into a beautiful life.
Welsch: I see an album cover with that picture, and the title of the album is “The Smallest Cello Ever.” It’s coming, I just know it. Well, if you’ve just tuned in, it’s Mānoa and Sasha and Teddy. It’s Palmyra, and we’re so happy that you stopped by.