DAVID HUCKFELTIn a career on the road less traveled, songwriter / poet / activist David Huckfelt has shared stages with a staggering list of artists from Mavis Staples, Emmylou Harris & Greg Brown, to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire & Gregory Alan Isakov. As founding frontman of Minneapolis cult favorites The Pines, Huckfelt toured the country carrying forward the folk & singer-songwriter traditions of his native Iowa, with a heavy emphasis on social justice, climate & Indigenous rights issues. A lifelong ally of Native causes, David has worked with an impressive array of Indigenous musicians & leaders including John Trudell, Winona LaDuke, Louise Erdrich, Keith Secola, Annie Humphrey & Joe Rainey Sr. With The Pines on indefinite hiatus in 2018, Huckfelt received the prestigious Artist In Residence award at Isle Royale National Park and wrote 16 songs in 14 days which became his solo debut record “Stranger Angels”. “Room Enough, Time Enough” was created in the borderlands of southern Arizona, in the musical mecca of Tucson, the high Sonoran Desert and one of the richest, most biodiverse ecosystems in the world. He asked Tucson producer and multi-instrumentalist Gabriel Sullivan (XIXA) to open up Dust + Stone Studios to a host of friends, contemporaries, strangers, artists, outlaws, cowboys, and Native musicians: Ojibwe ambassador of Native Americana music Keith Secola, Tucson's own living songwriting legend Billy Sedlmayr, Giant Sand founder and head purveyor of the southwestern electric-fuzz border sound Howe Gelb; former Bob Dylan drummer Winston Watson, and Calexico hired guns Connor Gallaher on pedal steel and Jon Villa on trumpet. Together with the unmatched vocal chants of John Trudell's constant collaborator & Warm Springs Nation Native singer Quiltman, these songs found their people and vice versa in a perfect storm of generosity, fierceness and compassion. In thousands of shows across the United States, Canada & overseas, Huckfelt’s grassroots following has grown from small-town opera houses, Midwestern barn concerts, and progressive benefit events to national tours and festival stages like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Edmonton and Calgary Folk Fests, and the legendary First Avenue club in his beloved Minneapolis home.
CHRISTOPHER PORTERFIELD
Wisconsin's Field Report center around the narrative songs of Chris Porterfield (the band name is actually an anagram of Porterfield's last name), songs that, at their best, recall the writing and feel present on albums like Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, and Paul Simon's Hearts and Bones in their hushed and passionate detail. Born in Minnesota, Porterfield moved to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he was a member of the folk-rock group DeYarmond Edison with Justin Vernon, Phil Cook, Brad Cook, and Joe Westerlund. When the band decided to relocate to North Carolina in 2006, Porterfield opted to stay in Wisconsin. Vernon eventually left the band, going out on his own under the name Bon Iver, while the remaining members of DeYarmond Edison became the freak folk outfit Megafaun, and both incarnations had critical success.
Porterfield, who had never really written songs before, spent a couple years writing a batch of songs on guitar, refining and reworking them, trying them out at open-mike and songwriter nights in Milwaukee, where he now lived, under the name Conrad Plymouth. In time Porterfield assembled a band, which included Nick Berg on keys, Travis Whitty on bass, Damian Strigens on drums, Jeff Mitchell on baritone guitar, and Ben Lester on pedal steel. Field Report were born, and the band developed a sparse, hushed, and intimate backdrop to Porterfield's intricately detailed and very lyrical narrative songs, the best of which, like "Fergus Falls," "I Am Not Waiting Anymore," and "Route 18," conjure up Nebraska-era Springsteen, Blood on the Tracks-era Dylan, or the long epic personal passion songs of Leonard Cohen, and sometimes all of these at once.
Vernon and Porterfield touched base when Bon Iver toured in Milwaukee; Vernon offered Porterfield the use of his April Base studio in Eau Claire when Field Report were ready to record, and in December of 2011, the band met at April Base and recorded a self-titled debut album with engineer Beau Sorenson. The project was then mixed by Paul Kolderie in February 2012 and appeared from Partisan Records the following September, garnering almost immediate critical acclaim. The band's sophomore long-player, the Robbie Lackritz-produced Marigolden, followed in 2014. Returning in January 2018, Porterfield channeled the anxiety of becoming a new father into the band's deeply personal third album, Summertime Songs.
From her life to the studio, Elizabeth Moen carries with her a certain kind of street-smart wisdom: She knows when you’re on your bullshit and she is also highly sensitive to when her own actions fall short. This perceptive quality is a gift and a burden. The burden is that she is too smart, too tuned into reality to lie to herself and put on a facade that makes it easier to pass for ok. The gift is that instead of giving in, Moen channels life’s turmoil into a constant process of growth–as a songwriter, an arranger, and powerful lyricist.
Emerging from the introductory stage of her career, Moen is now cementing her commitment to craft: Making Wherever You Aren’t wasn’t just an impassioned way to pass time, it was a calling and an opportunity to reflect life’s lessons into a gripping statement of art.
A self-taught guitarist, Moen wrote her first songs while a student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. It was a small town in the Heartland but also a culturally dense world of artists, musicians, and writers–a scene whose space limitations meant the traditional songwriters, the alternative rockers, and the avant-garde enthusiasts were playing the same house shows, talking at the same bars, and dancing in the same clubs. That interdisciplinary experience and its overlap of styles shaped Moen's aesthetic scope over her first self-released albums.
She gave up her lease in Iowa City and toured for two years across the USA, the UK, and the EU, eventually making Chicago her homebase. It was during that swirl of migration that she leaned into the project that would become Wherever You Aren’t. The first sparks: A session in Dublin, Ireland in Summer 2019 where she recorded the lead track “Headgear.” Then: Passing through Alabama on her Fall 2019 tour, she laid down the core tracks for “Synthetic Fabrics.” With a long list of songs and just enough money to pay the players and engineers, she guided her band to San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios to record basics for a full album in early 2020.
Those initial sessions produced 14 songs. As the pandemic took hold, she tracked vocals and overdubs wherever she could–apartments and studios across the States, Canada, and Ireland and finished mixing and mastering in Winter 2021. (She only took a pause to record a satellite set of songs in the midst of the process; those tracks became her haunting Creature of Habit EP.)
Stepping back from those two years of work, Moen reflects: These songs are about mental health, joy, panic attacks, falling in love, falling out of it, and accepting that sometimes it will stay with you forever.
Musically, the record teases sounds from alt. country, contemporary Nashville, and indie soul but mostly settles into the less genre-specific tone of early 20’s weariness. Where 2020’s Creature of Habit etched out a dark, synth-folk vibe, Wherever You Aren’t finds its spirit in guitar twangs and robust rhythms; though something ethereal and haunting is always there in the mix–it’s Moen’s nuanced understanding of space, knowing when to flood a track with catharsis and crescendo and when to let her voice guide us through eerie minimalism. As evidenced across all her catalog, Moen can bend any genre to her unique mix of sorrow, hope, and endurance.
Throughout these songs, Moen confidently exhumes the emotional hangover of our 20s: a turbulent, sometimes euphoric, often fraught time. “Where’s My Bike?” is scorching in its irreverence, annoyance, and downright anger with nothing ever being quite all-together. Like many of her songs, it’s a vignette and metaphor at once–so many young adult anxieties and self-doubts are rolled into one: Ex-lovers, parents, and the inability to financially support oneself even though you’re supposed to be grown up. My friends, she belts out, don’t talk to me much anymore/I don’t blame them/What do I have left to say about shit/That’d be worth listening to? And on “Synthetic Fabrics”, she starkly admits the desire to Spend the day focused on the next one.
Her commitment to this album, to her career, and to continually showing up affirms Moen’s raw and honed ability to see the truth, face it, and send it back into the world as a beautiful song. The album ends with a big-hearted display of empathy. Surrounded by swirling harmonies and ascendant strings, Moen sings that she’ll meet you/us/herself, Wherever you are/Wherever you aren’t/That’s okay.
She understands that past lovers, friends, and family–even in their failures and missteps–are also just people trying to make sense of the world in real-time. And in this admission, Moen stays true to her most succinct statement about the record and her current worldview: This album has shown me that I have the capacity to grow.
Ray Young Bear
he/his
Ray Young Bear, Meskwaki (Red Earth People), lives in central Iowa. He is a writer, artist and musician. In 2015, his book Manifestation Wolverine: The Complete Poetry of Ray Young Bear was published by Open Road Media. His bilingual poems and songs have been featured in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Poem-a-Day, Under a Warm Green Linden and Native Voices, a Tupelo Press anthology. In 2020, his work is included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, a Norton anthology of Native Nations poetry. Young Bear also has an essay with several photographs forthcoming in Magnetic West, the Enduring Allure of the American West in Photography, Skira Books.