A Conversation with The Pines’ Benson Ramsey & David Huckfelt – HuffPost 11.12.12

Mike Ragogna: Hi guys, let’s dive right into your new album, Dark So Gold. It kicks off with the song, “Cry, Cry, Crow.” Can you guys go into it?

Benson Ramsey: It’s the first song on the record, and it helps kind of drift into the record. It’s just sort of a meditation between the rural and the city.

David Huckfelt: It’s also the first song that we’ve ever done a music video for. There’s a an official video up at http://www.thepinesmusic.com with that song featured, made in Minneapolis.

MR: Yeah, what’s going on in the video?

DH: There are some really talented filmmakers up there and they wrote a plot for it, and we got to help out with it and be on set. It’s just sort of a fairytale-vision-adventure that this woman goes on during the song. It’s worth checking out, I think.

MR: Now, you’re both from Iowa, and Benson you’re the son of the amazing Bo Ramsey. Despite both being from Iowa, you guys ended up meeting in Tucson. Can you go into how that occurred?

DH: Yeah, sometimes, likeminded individuals end up in a place for random reasons. About eight years ago, we had each moved to Tucson from the Iowa City area, and though we didn’t know each other in Iowa, we met each other and started playing music together right away. It wasn’t too long before we started to write our own material together, and eventually, we came back to the Midwest to make our first record and really get to work on things.

MR: You’re first record was Sparrows In The Bell?

BR: That was our first Red House record.

MR: So, you guys had some projects before that?

BR: A little bit. We had a collection of songs that we recorded.

MR: Now, you guys ended up playing together through your discovery of blues and fold, right?

DH: Yeah, we had a lot in common musically, but also it was kind of like a constant introduction. I learned a lot. There were a lot of artists I wasn’t aware of. I learned a lot through Benson, and we would trade material. We listened to a lot of Chess records and early country blues records. Then, certain songs, we would both kind of gravitate toward, so we would start to do our own versions of stuff like Howlin’ Wolf songs, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James–you know, everything was kind of fair game. Then we started to do a lot of the early American, public domain songs, songs by Woody Guthrie, Doc Boggs, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen songs.

MR: So how did those influences apply to your own writing?

BR: We were just playing the songs as we discovered them, and not really trying to play them like they played them, but kind of how they fell out. We did that for a couple years before the songs started to kind of grow out of doing that. All the while, we were kind of working on our own songs, but it felt like if the song is speaking, it doesn’t have to be yours. It was speaking to us, so that’s what we were playing, and then it comes time where you’re digging deeper and deeper, and you need some time to fill these spaces. I think that’s where our songs started to come from.

MR: Does the music come before the lyrics?

BR: I don’t think we separate the music from the lyrics. I feel like they’re the same thing. It’s the space between the notes and chords, and it’s the feeling that that generates. I think it’s that space in there that keeps the songs exciting for us. I think that’s what we were trying to get at underneath it all.

DH: Yeah, a marriage of music and lyrics. I can remember even when we set a couple of poems by Frederico Garcia to music, just as an exercise of trying to develop melody and have the marriage of lyrics and music in the songs.

MR: You both are pretty proficient on your instruments, having watched you before. How did you both get so good?

BR: I think it just came from playing all those songs, playing together, and playing in different kinds of rooms and situations. I think we kind of got our own style through that. It was a really intuitive process. I think we’re both really into that intuitive art and the folk arts–just a guy in the woods with a Crayola and what comes about that. It’s that real primitive reaction to an instrument, but also that combined with the craft. Those two worlds are infinitely fascinating where they meet, and then juggling those is really fun.

DH: Also, I think we were interested in blurring the lines between what a duo does. Usually there is a lead guy and a side guy, or a singer and an instrumentalist, and we’ve got two songwriters, two singers, and so the style of playing together is not necessarily so cut and dry. Just finding out what makes a song come across was, I think, our goal.

MR: You’re getting accolades across the board, from Rolling Stone to Goldmine. Has it gone to your heads yet?

BR: Not at all. I haven’t really attached that to the process.

MR: I’m interested in what you guys have said about regional music, in that it isn’t about becoming big, it’s about living your life within your craft, and you’re doing it regionally. Can you go into that a little bit because you’re not just romanticizing this idea, you are actually jumping in the car and going place to place and living the life in that area. What is this like?

DH: When we encounter an artist, a musician or a band, we want to know where they’re from. People that come from a place have an intrinsic connection, and it used to be that way so much more back before the internet, when regions of the country were known for their musical styles. I’m not saying that progress is bad in any sense. We love to travel far and wide, and we love to go to a new city we’ve never played before; it’s exciting. But also, the towns in between the cities, and the smaller communities that are maybe more tightly knit, I think that’s part of our process. We perform for the sake of itself. I think it’s its own reward. So, playing in a small room in someplace that is a little more rural feels great to us because you can have a really deep connection in that setting. The cities are also fantastic for different reasons.

MR: Are some of the places you’re traveling to inspiring some of the music?

BR: Sure. We’re inspired by everything from the travel itself–just the view out the window or people you meet. You realize pretty soon that it’s a pretty small world. If you’re in the Midwest or on the East Coast, people are people. The more you get deeper in writing, and just be honest about it and let it grow out, there is a comfort in that, and the escapism is interesting when you take it out. It’s comforting when you take songs from the Midwest to another region, and it’s equally as comforting to perform them in the Midwest. It kind of feels the same wherever you go, in a certain respect.

MR: Have there been areas that you’ve been to that have affected you in a really specific way?

DH: I think maybe our first time going out to the East Coast. We went to upstate New York, to the Ithaca, Syracuse area, and it was like we’d found a place familiar. People there had already been familiar with our music, and the very first time we went, we felt welcomed. Ithaca reminded me of Tucson, of Iowa City, of these little places where passion in the arts and music are valued. Any place like that feels good to play.

MR: And they do love their folk festivals in upstate New York.

DH: Yeah, our trip to England was like that too.

MR: Tell me about that.

DH: I think we both agree that it was really enjoyable to play in London. We had really great crowds in our London shows, and then we got out North into Scotland, and you would find little communities where people were really excited that we were there. It was a good connection.

MR: That leads us back to the title of this new album, Dark So Gold, which was inspired by a trip, right?

BR: Yeah, it sprang out of a tour we did when we found ourselves way up in Northern Scotland in the dead of Winter. The sun would kind of come up, and it was like a sunset at noon. I think day after day of that for a couple of weeks started this feeling, and then Dark So Gold kind of arose out of that night and day, and kind of losing that perspective. It was just a feeling where you’re kind of nostalgic. I don’t know what it is. You think of home, but the beauty of traveling and being where you are is kind of where that came from. It’s sort of like being in the city if you grew up in the country or vice-versa. I think there is a multitude of layers to that, and it’s something you can’t just articulate, but you can almost articulate in a song; it’s subconscious and sort of surreal. You could sit down and write a thousand books about it, but it’s something you can get closer to in a song.

MR: Over the years, you’ve had some very talented opening acts play with you, but you’ve also been the opening act with other groups. What are some of the acts you’ve opened for?

BR: Well, of course, we always love opening for like Iris DeMent, or Greg Brown and our Iowa roots. We’ve been fortunate to open for people that we really love and connect to their music. It’s heavily inspiring as songwriters, just seeing how people live their lives and how they perform. Then there are more current acts that went from playing little small rooms like us to being on top of the world like Bon Iver, and that’s super interesting to us.

DH: When we did two nights with Emmy Lou Harris, it was such an honor, and just a top-notch band. To see an artist that has a stature like that still try to push the envelope, incorporate new material and take the show somewhere, that’s very inspiring.

MR: When you’ve finished opening for an act like Emmy Lou Harris, that feeling watching from the backstage must be awesome?

BR: Absolutely.

DH: For sure. In my mind, there is nothing that has come close to watching Mavis Staples just light up a room in Minneapolis when we did two nights with her. It was just powerful. We just felt lucky to be within a hundred miles of that.

BR: That’s one of those moments where you break your thing down, and like my grandpa would say, “Just play pretty.” We’d play our songs and it worked really well. To see her, and how she grew out of The Staples and The Civil Rights movement and just how heavy that was, it was really inspiring.

MR: Are there any other songs on the new album that have a specific story as to how the song came together?

DH: Well, track five on the record is called “Rise Up And Be Lonely.” That song started off as three or four pages of a blues lyric that I had put to a pretty simple blues format, you know? By the time I played it for Benson, he had the mind to see the song and be able to take it someplace else and how to draw out the essence of it. It didn’t have a name and it didn’t have a chorus, and he brought those things to the table when we got together and worked on it. It’s a great example of how a song benefits from collaboration because it’s stronger as a result of that. You never know where things are going to come from. The tiniest scrap, or some kind of recorded demo might catch each other’s ear, and in a way, open it up. That song has some political stuff in there, it’s sort of a rant, and it doesn’t have a very overt message, but it’s a feeling of contemporary dread a little bit, you know?

MR: Is that how your writing process works usually? Both of you bring material and compliment each other’s offerings?

DH: Yeah, to a great extent. You talk to any songwriter and they’ll tell you collaboration can be difficult. It’s hard to find someone who you trust and respect, and it’s hard to get in there and work on the song from the inside out. I like to think that we have no rules in the way the songwriting happens in The Pines. Finished songs can be brought in. You can sit there with nothing on the table and pull something up from scratch. You pull something you wrote maybe eight years ago that is ready to be reborn or something. Sometimes I toss an idea by our band and the other musicians and we play with it to see how that develops that way. Sometimes one of us will write a song at home in the middle of the night, bring it to the table and it’s already done.

MR: When you recorded this album, you got together with your players and laid down just the basic tracks?

BR: Yeah, just that foundation underneath it all. We just cut the performances down, and just captured those real quick in one or two takes, and not allow ourselves too much room to wiggle around it. It’s really focused, and it kind of helps to add to the cohesiveness of the record overall.

MR: What advice do you have for new artists?

DH: I think being true to yourself is something that applies across the board. When I talk to young bands, I try to remind them that it’s going to be a mountain of work no matter how you slice it. People get lucky, and that’s great, and you want your music to get out there, but just don’t neglect what’s right in front of you–where you’re from, your region, the people that you can connect with. There is no shortcut to heaven when it comes to it. Luck is involved with any success, but I think that you cannot postpone the joy from playing music if you manage to have realistic goals and work where you’re from.

BR: It’s really easy to get caught up in the daily scheme of things, I think, but if you just follow your vision, people will come. If it’s honest, it’s a win-win and you don’t have to worry because you’re doing what you believe to be honest. Create that environment. Play places that you would go to. Follow yourself, then you can’t lose.

MR: You’re going to be touring for this album, right?

DH: We have been and we will be.

MR: Has it been an interesting tour so far?

BR: Yeah.

DH: Yeah. It’s been fascinating. We’ve tried new things. There was a five-piece band for the first time, and we’ve done a lot of support shows. The great thing about it is that everything kind of funnels toward the same goal. We’ve had great nights, we’ve had rough nights, but there is a cumulative thing going on where we’re proud of the record and we love to be out working it.

BR: I feel like we’re a brand new band every day. It’s just learning, and it just gets more exciting the deeper you get into the songs and the night.

MR: Five years from now, where are The Pines? What’s your goal?

BR: Well, we try really hard to live in the present.

DH: Our goals have to do with having music and life in harmony. I can see us living in rural settings, touring behind new records and being excited about new songs. Sustainability is the answer to so many things we face as a country right now, but it’s also something that we want to do. We’d like to be able to sustain this and grow it to a point where we can do this, have a life, and say, “Yes!” to things that are exciting to us; be the captain of our own ship, choosing what we want to do and going out and doing it.

MR: You talked about sustainability for our country. Is there anything on your radar that you’re sort of behind right now?

BR: Uh, yes. We’d need a couple of hours for that. We like to remember that we are on a rock in the middle of outer space. We believe in the beauty of life, getting away from the TV and connecting with your neighbors. That’s what keeps us moving forward. That’s why we go out and perform, just to bring people together. That, if anything, is sort of like a thesis, and there are many things that go along with that like knowing where your food comes from, what’s in your water, education, kids. All those things are very important to us.

DH: And live music has a very strong role in that because the communities where live music can sustain and does well are usually communities that are very strong and have these kinds of values. It doesn’t have to be a big city. It can happen anywhere. We play in the smallest little locales where they serve us six course meals from all the produce they raise, and people come early to have coffee together. You get away from your computers, you’re around people, discussing viewpoints, what’s important, what’s pertinent to the community, and I think music’s role in that is really big.

MR: What scares sometimes me is seeing two people sitting next to each other, texting each other rather than talking to one another. I know, it’s fun, whatever. But to me, the impersonal thing can’t be sustainable.

BR: In big cities full of people, the streets are quiet, you know? We worry about that. What people also need to realize is how much power they have with where they spend their money. That’s why we like to play at places that are independent. We feel like that’s the number one thing we can do. We don’t like to preach too much; we just like people to be mindful and educate themselves. It is interesting times we’re in.

MR: Yes, and it seems like we can choose to take it to a better place.

BR: We could change it in a matter of days if we wanted to.

DH: We need each other and we need help. A concert or an event is a place you can find allies and you can organize.

MR: This has been wonderful, truly. Congratulations on living a life that not only works but is real.

BR: It’s been a wonderful afternoon. Thank you so much. We’re blessed and honored to be here.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney