Photo courtesy of Joseph Allred
For listeners familiar with the rich tradition of American Primitive guitar, Joseph Allred is a name that is quickly becoming synonymous with its innovative evolution. Like the genre’s predecessors that include fingerpickers such as John Fahey, Peter Walker, and Robbie Basho, Allred masterfully blends East-meets-West influences, weaving together ragas, rags, and the soulful sounds of Appalachia.
However, Joseph’s musical landscape extends far beyond the acoustic guitar. Allred is a true multi-instrumentalist, incorporating the harmonium, banjo, and other folk instruments to expand an already diverse sonic palette. Releasing work that has been described in fascinating ways: from baroque pop with psychedelic flourishes to compositions featuring glockenspiel and horns, percussion ideas and experiments reminiscent of Danny Elfman and Tom Waits, and even nods to post-rock-filtered western guitar twang and the dreamy ambiance of the Cocteau Twins.
Allred was born and raised in Tennessee with a musical home that is far less tethered to a single locale by releasing records that not only reveal the depth of connection to American Primitive guitar, but also a deep exploration of rural mysticism, an internationally oriented inquisitiveness, and even idiosyncratically reinterpreted shoegazing. Allred’s latest release, Old Time Fantasias (Scissor Tail Records) continues down a path of curiosity, study and collaboration that began in the Spring of 2023.
It’s clearly not the radio-friendly folk of the late 20th century, nor is it simply the traditional folk of rural Tennessee. Perhaps “folk guitar” is simply a convenient term, a way to describe your instrument to someone you meet on the street. Because ultimately, it’s not what you call it, but what this music does for you. It’s reflective yet never burdened by darkness; purposeful in its meanderings; and ultimately, profoundly centering. It’s the kind of music that, once played, helps you be exactly where you need to be.
Massive thanks to Dylan Golden Aycock at Scissor Tail for the hook-up and to Joseph for his time.
James Broscheid: I was happy that Dylan sent this record over to me because I’ve been playing it all week anticipating this interview. I am really enjoying it.
Joseph Allred: Oh, thank you.
JB: You had initially envisioned this as a mostly solo acoustic record, so I wanted to ask what the catalyst was that shifted that vision more towards the involved orchestrated sound you ended up with?
JA: The first step that I took in that direction, I guess, were the two tracks that Hans (Chew) played piano on. I met him a few months before I started recording this album at a show in Nashville. He mentioned maybe doing something together and then I started recording this album. Thinking that it could stand alone as an acoustic guitar album and all the pieces started out with just an acoustic guitar track. I sent a few of them to Hans since he had mentioned doing something together. He ended up playing piano on “The Groundhog” and on “Daji”, the first and the last songs on the album. From there, I don’t really know how it happened. It ended up taking a couple years to finish, so I started working on this sometime in the spring in 2023. It took at least a year and a half to do all the collaborations and then all the stuff that I played on it. I don’t know how I got into doing all that! It just kind of happened, and I was already into it before. I knew what was going on.
JB: Did your collaboration with Hans specifically influence that direction?
JA: I don’t know. I feel like the there’s a whole lot of stylistic differences amongst all the different songs on the album. It took a while for that dreamier quality, I guess to come out. And I think there’s one track on there I collaborated on. I ended up having Magic Tuber Stringband, I think they’re a trio now, but it was Evan (Morgan, pump organ, amplified banjo) and Courtney (Werner, fiddle) both from Magic Tuber Stringband that played on one track (“Cub Creek Blues, Part II”). And on that one, while I was waiting for them to send me their stuff back, I was experimenting, and I ended up playing this Synth-y thing. It reminded me of Danny Elfman (Oingo Boingo) or something like The Simpsons theme song or some of the sounds on the Twin Peaks soundtrack! I have a plug-in version of a common ’80s synthesizer, the Roland D-50. It’s one of the first FM (frequency modulation) kind of synthesizers. It’s all over all kinds of 80s stuff, and it has just a dreamy, fantastic quality about it.
I put that on the song that the Magic Tuber Stringband collaborated on, and I ended up taking it out of that song. But I used that kind of sound or atmosphere on some of the other ones. I think that’s what ended up, kind of pushing it in that dreamier direction when Hans’s piano playing is still so down to earth; a kind of old-fashioned, honky tonk, old-style piano playing. So, I don’t know why it took a while for all that to come out. I just didn’t know what I was doing or didn’t really think about it that much. That’s how I tend to work most of the time.
JB: Were you going back and forth with Hans, sending him tracks?
JA: Yeah.
JB: What was it about his response or contributions to those tracks that made you realize the album could become much larger than a solo acoustic record?
JA: Just hearing something. Somebody else playing on it. I guess that made me come out of my head a little bit. I tend to either get very in my head, or I feel like I need to be having lots of collaborations. I think from Hans’s thing I went to a couple of the bass parts that Kelby Clark played. He played an upright bass with a little bit of a bow kind of sound. That’s another sound that’s very organic and down to earth. With that it took a little while. I don’t remember exactly when that kind of lush or dreamy kind of quality came out or the orchestral stuff, like the bigness of it, that is what I hear. How I tried to arrange it and what I was experiencing. What took the longest is all the stuff I added to it, like all the percussion. I added a lot of keyboard instruments including the (Hammond) organ and some mellotron sounds.
Actually, the percussion, the way that I played, was each drum on its own, imagining an orchestral percussion section. And it takes a very, very long time to do it that way. I can’t play the drum set very well so I went in and played a bass drum with a mallet and then a snare. But that didn’t happen until quite a bit after the first collaborations with Hans. After I’d started recording, I had to set it aside for a few months because I did quite a bit of touring in 2023.
So, I had a couple collaborations, and then I had to leave it for a little while. I came back to it, and it seemed kind of different, and I ended up really getting into something kind of labyrinthine or something. I didn’t decide I wanted it to sound some particular way and then bring that into being, you know? I got caught up in something that I didn’t have a whole lot of control over or understanding of.
JB: I listened to the record before reading what Dylan had sent over, and you’d mentioned it a couple of times already: the instrumentation on the LP is pretty earthy and organic. That was my impression after the first couple of listens, and I was blown away by the extensive list of credits on this record—the collaborators you played with and the wide array of instrumentation. Because it’s one of those nuanced albums where you really must listen to catch specific layers and sounds. How did those individual contributions shape the overall sonic texture of the album compared to that initial solo acoustic concept?
JA: I don’t really know. I think any step toward getting completely out of my own headspace on it just made me start to hear something a little bigger. All the tracks that have people collaborating with me are stylistically kind of different from each other. For instance, “The Groundhog” is very country-sounding, like ’70s or ’80s country, maybe. Then “Daji,” has some fuzz guitar and is in a minor key. I feel like it has a really different kind of thing going on. So, all the songs ended up just kind of becoming something bigger. I’m trying to see how these collaborations fit into that exactly. It just seems like they added depth to it. I remember when Kelby sent me his tracks; it sounded really antique somehow, having the upright bass play in the style that he used. It’s something a lot of old-time records use. It’s not playing like a classical bass or a big cello; it’s playing that almost sounds like a tuba. It’s a big, stately kind of sound. There’s a little more volume. That’s the reason that some upright basses in string bands are played like that. It makes it sound really old, like 100 years old or something.
JB: Yeah, that’s what I thought about the record. It’s varied. It’s like, “Wow, this track could be a great soundtrack backing track,” or “This track sounds antiquated.” Like you were saying, it doesn’t sound like it all came from the same place and time, which is cool.
JA: True. I think sometimes there’s a kind of physical space that’s coming together when I was working on these, and that space is really different for each one of them. So sometimes not just a physical space but like in the opening credits of a movie or something, a landscape or establishing shots. That kind of thing was going on. “The Groundhog” ended up being almost a theme song for some sitcom or something like Cheers except with little forest creatures instead of humans in a pub, trying to run around and not get shot by somebody.
“Cub Creek Blues” is (pauses), where I’m sitting right now. Cub Creek is just maybe 50 yards in the direction I’m pointing, back behind you as if you were here facing me. In the summer, or even now, in late spring, it’s really lush and green, and there are all kinds of birds and insects and things. I mentioned that to Evan and Courtney when I sent the track to them. Some of what they did sounded like simulating a woodpecker. I think it’s maybe Courtney tapping on the violin; it sounds similar to a little bird song. The whole thing is just very dense and lush, and I feel like it really does kind of evoke that, like being down here in the river valley, where it gets kind of wet and hot and humid in the summer.
Actually, the one after that, “Rope Swing on the River Styx,” was a little… again, I was thinking about a swimming hole that’s just down the river a little bit that I used to swim at when I was a kid. But I imagined that being a dividing place between the kind of world of the living and the dead. Like, I thought about Corpse Bride, that Tim Burton movie, where all the spirits of the dead can come back and kind of reunite with the spirits of the living. Even though they’re kind of terrifying-looking, everybody’s still happy to see their dead loved ones and their dead dog and all this stuff. They have one night to kind of dance around and… see each other. So, on that one, I was imagining an underworld swimming party or something, like at a swimming hole where the living and the dead can kind of congregate.
“Tracks in the Snow” was maybe like a high desert, snowy horror movie or something, somebody being stalked by some creature. So those are different. I think you have this real warm, lush thing, and then you have like an underworld fantasy, and then you have like a snowy, high desert horror movie thing.
JB: I like the intro to “Cub Creek Blues,” because the babbling brook just sets the mood and transports me out of my own head. It’s very calming and soothing, but nature has always been that for me. You did bring up Danny Elfman. Reading the notes, and listening to the album, there are a lot of percussive layers. I think Tom Waits was even brought up for this record in terms of percussion. You did kind of touch on it, but did you consciously approach that as a way to weave the diverse elements into the album’s sound, or did it just kind of evolve organically as you went along?
JA: Some of both, I think. I just started to hear maybe some of that as I was developing it, and then I accentuated it a little bit more. I didn’t decide I was going to do something that sounded like the Cocteau Twins or Danny Elfman. I just kind of started doing something and then started to hear that kind of come out, and I might have run with it a little bit. I think Danny Elfman has some allegations against him. I saw a recent piece on that, like a #MeToo thing. Somebody accused him of being sexually inappropriate.
JB: Oh, really? I did not see that.
JA: I know. That’s the kind of thing that happens so much. It just kind of comes and goes without anybody paying attention to it. So, I don’t know why we happen to hear that, and I feel like I have to, I should say something about it if I’m going to say that I’m influenced by somebody. Then I was reading about Danny Elfman after I did this album, and I saw some of that come up, or I think maybe something was just suggested to me on social media. It was like an ad or something. There was some piece about that.
I still really like the music that he did for Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, and even some of the Oingo Boingo stuff. That started out as a kind of street performance thing where people were using trash and trash cans and discarded stuff to make noises with. I think that came out with some of the percussion stuff that I did, especially. I used random things laying around. I had some spoons; I had some bones I found in a field that I used on a song. I used an old washboard that was from my grandparents or great-grandparents. I think it was my grandparents on my mom’s side. I remember seeing that washboard growing up in one of the rooms and asked my mom if she still had it, and she did. So I used that. I used a cymbal that really doesn’t sound like a musical instrument. It sounds like a piece of scrap metal or something. I’ve got a propane stove in my living room here that I used. I hit it with brushes and used that as like a situated snare thing, and it does sound a little bit like people just banging on trash or like some weird marching band coming through. But that’s partly what made me think about Danny Elfman, knowing the history of Oingo Boingo. The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo is what that started out as.
JB: Yeah, that is a big debate. Can you separate the art from the artist?
JA: I don’t know. Like, celebrating somebody, or even mentioning somebody’s name, if there are accusations like that against them, as somebody else has gone through something similar. I know that can be really triggering. Which, at the very least, if I mention Danny Elfman, I feel like I should mention that. Maybe I shouldn’t mention Danny Elfman, but I already have. I don’t know why. He’s not been convicted of anything. I don’t know exactly what the detail of that stuff is (there is currently a defamation lawsuit against Elfman over a sexual misconduct denial – JB), and I think you ought to take allegations like that seriously, but you also shouldn’t…, people shouldn’t be tried in the court of public opinion. It just seems like the only place that people were able to just get away with so much before the public opinion shifted so much. So, I don’t know. That is really awful. It’s just something that’s been a reality that shouldn’t have been for so many people. Just having to be around that kind of person.
JB: The powerful versus the powerless.
JA: And the gatekeepers. People have the kind of reputation and the status and everything. In order to establish yourself, you have to kind of be let through the gate by people like that, and there’s just such a tendency for them to abuse the power that they have. Well, that’s not very fantastic or dreamy or anything.
JB: No, but you know, that’s our reality.
JA: Yeah, maybe that’s part of the reason. When I started this album, like I said, it’s been over two years ago. A whole lot has happened in the last two years. Since, you know, we’ve been watching Israel and Palestine… this just absolute mess go on. That’s another example of something being tried in a court of public opinion when it shouldn’t be, as far as I’m concerned. There were arrest warrants issued by the highest international court in the whole world, [but they] decided that they weren’t going to enforce that.
So I know what it looks like from my perspective, but I don’t think that should matter as much as what can be proven in a court of law. And I think that’s where this belongs. But just that horrible… all this violence going on. Now we’ve ended up with Donald Trump again and this awful bill that they just put through that is… apparently they’re trying to just completely make it so trans people can’t get any kind of gender-affirming care on insurance, at least, even adult trans people. They just slipped that in. So, having to deal with America just feeling like it’s collapsing, like we’re taking so much of the rest of the world…
JB: Feels like it’s eating itself from the inside out.
JA: We haven’t had a reckoning. Some countries have tried, but I mean, there are now a whole lot of places in the world that are having a real kind of far-right resurgence. But I think of Germany, like after World War II, at least Germany tried to have a reckoning with what happened. Like, you can’t go around and wave certain symbols around in Germany or make certain gestures or do anything like that without at least getting like a fine.
JB: There is absolutely no sense of humor about that in Germany to this day.
JA: Well, maybe there shouldn’t be. I mean, I grew up here in this region of the country with Confederate flags all over the place, even though Appalachia was largely not in support of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Like this area, I’m on the very western edge of Appalachia. It was kind of split down the middle between people who supported one side or the other, but it certainly was not all Confederate. But I grew up with that kind of crap all over the place. We had a statue of Nathan Bedford Forest (1821 – 1877) in our state capitol building, like literally one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan, a Confederate general, a slave trader, a plantation owner. Not only are we joking about it, we have people that are still trying to honor that stuff. And that’s exactly how we’ve got here. We have not come to and really had a reckoning with that.
I’m not ashamed of something that happened hundreds of years ago because I didn’t do it personally. I don’t have to be ashamed. What I should do is acknowledge my responsibility to do something with the conditions that I’ve inherited and the fact that so many people have not done that. They’ve just prioritized their own comfort or just trying to sweep anything uncomfortable out of the way. All of that, all the disruption that’s been going on in the last couple years has made it so… like this album, I feel like Old Time Fantasias is kind of light-hearted, and it has this mood that’s a little fantastic and dreamy. I don’t think I would make anything like that if I started right now. I don’t think I could; it just wouldn’t feel honest. But I don’t know, maybe it’ll help, like, at least remind people that there, at some point, somewhere, was a sense of enchantment or just something that deserves to be protected from all of this violence. Whether it be by people like Danny Elfman, maybe like what he’s accused of, or people like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu.
JB: Russia and Ukraine, too.
JA: Yeah, the likes of that. The whole world has just decided they’re kind of casting their lot on one side or the other of all this stuff. There’s just so much militancy going on right now, and I don’t think that anybody who’s advocating for political violence is doing the right thing. Even if I can understand what would lead somebody to do that, I don’t think that that will establish any kind of lasting good. Like, what political violence does is, you can maybe establish a restructuring of power, but then you have to continue to use violence to maintain it. But see, this, that is what’s been on my mind. It’s hard to even talk about it, making an album. I don’t feel… I don’t know why some people will say they appreciate it, and they’re glad that they heard it, etcetera. I’m sure they will, but it’s still hard to feel like I’m just doing something that doesn’t even… if I have anything to offer in a world like the one we live in right now. I don’t know what art has to do when it comes down to it. Especially trying to be a professional artist or something, it could be something we do just to try to stay alive somehow.
JB: I’m worried for our elderly, our “minorities” and our poor, and there’s not a lot on the table… well, they’re trying to clear the table for them. But a record like yours, something that can transport me mentally out of this space I’m in, you know, it’s greatly appreciated because it’s so needed. I mean, I remember when we had our election, I took a southern route by car to Ohio to visit family, and I made a pilgrimage to all the Delta bluesmen graves that I could pray over, just to say thank you for the music. Thank you for your struggle. That’s what this country was built on. I just kind of hopped my way over, went through Muscle Shoals, came up through Tennessee, and, you know, went to Ohio, and I came back through Memphis. Everything our nation has been through, and it seems like we’re not learning the lesson like you were saying. There wasn’t a reckoning.
JA: No, some people were. That’s why I love old blues stuff so much. I haven’t got to visit any of those places, but I’m doing it. I’m starting a tour here in just another week, where I’ll be… I have a day off, I think, between Baton Rouge and Atlanta, and I may go into Mississippi and try to find some of that. I mean, that’s what I mean when people are making music to survive. A lot of Black American music, I think, is precisely people trying to keep their spirit from being completely broken when their bodies are just being so abused (James agrees). An instrument like the banjo is something that originated on plantations, on slave plantations, and people were just reconstructing from their memories, like, maybe things that were similar in Africa. And then that instrument was taken and used to make a mockery of Black people, like the whole history of blackface minstrelsy.
Appalachian music, it’s never been like that exactly. It just got kind of adapted to set with a bunch of fiddle tunes and stuff, and I don’t think it’s… I don’t know, but I love playing the banjo. I grew up with it and didn’t know that history of it until quite a bit later in my life. So now I very much try to at least have that in mind whenever I approach it. But that’s… so much Black American music is that. I think it can give us a message of resilience. But I don’t know, being… I feel like I’m trying to protect something about my myself, about my heritage here. I know there is enough goodness in my ancestors to produce me, and I don’t hate myself. I have at points in my life, and it’s taken a whole lot for me to control that and that’s what some of my music is about.
In an album like this, there’s a real tenderness in it that I just don’t feel like I could even afford to do now because things have changed so much. But at least at some point, I felt like I was safe enough to put something like that out. I hope that can maybe be helpful, of course. What I’m going through is nothing like what people were living through, you know, in the rural Deep South, there in the Great Depression, in the era of Jim Crow and lynch mobs, and all of that. That’s where blues music came from. And I love that kind of stuff, but also feel like I should be respectful of it and know that this is something that came from such a deep sense of pain and oppression. And some of it is just human and a little silly in songs that people probably sing after a day of work in the fields, and in juke joints and stuff.
But it’s not… and, you know, with somebody else’s pain, somebody else’s experience, I can talk about it as if it’s universally human. But to some extent, it’s not. It belongs to a particular people, a particular cultural experience. And I feel like Appalachian music does too, to some extent, and that tends to not really be respected. And I think that there’s not enough understanding of the distinctness of Appalachian culture, and there’s a tendency to act like we don’t still exist. Like, our culture is something that belongs to some mythological past. It’s old-timey in the past, and it’s like, no. Where I titled this album… it probably… I don’t know if it’ll come across, it probably won’t, but it’s supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek. The Old, Old, Old-Time Fantasias is a little bit of a send-up of that attitude. It’s definitely like I’m very conscious of how old-time has been used to kind of stick certain people back in the past and just turn something into a form that anybody can do. To remove it from the experience of the people who came up with it to begin with.
That’s a way in which Appalachian people have something in common with Black Americans that we don’t have in common with some a lot of white Americans, when it comes to our accent and our dialect of English being mocked and just considered as substandard as you can get. I hear Black people talk about code-switching all the time. If I go into a professional setting, like when I was in grad school in New England, people hear the Southern accent, you’re always fighting against them not wanting to take you seriously. And they’re considering you’re kind of dumb or quaint, you’re just being silly or something.
I don’t know. I wish that more people understood that. That’s an alliance that needs to happen. Appalachia is the place where there were huge labor movements. You know, striking coal miners almost went to war with the United States at one point. The military had to be called in to defuse situations like in Blair Mountain, West Virginia. Right up the mountain, about five miles away from here, there was a big strike back in the ’30s in one of the coal towns up there, and the president of the coal miners’ union was assassinated. And we’ve turned from that to these staunchly conservative, authoritarian types… and I don’t know how exactly that happened. I wish it wouldn’t have. So many of the people here have lost that part of themselves. And how on Earth anybody in rural Tennessee can think a man sitting on a gold-plated toilet on top of a tower in New York City has their interest in mind is ridiculous.
JB: Yeah, throw in machismo, religion and the second amendment and you get an administration that “cares about you” while taking away from them to give to themselves.
JA: All the manufacturing stuff that used to employ people after they moved from coal mining to a lot of factory labor. There was a big clothing factory in the town I grew up in, and they employed a lot of people up until… I guess NAFTA (the trilateral trade bloc between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. – JB). It allowed a lot of corporations to start shipping manufacturing overseas.
JB: I lived in Colorado for a spell, and there was a… there was a mine conflict with the military that resulted in a lot of death, which I didn’t know until I lived there. It was the Ludlow Massacre where the Colorado National Guard and guards from the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company attacked a colony of 1,200 striking coal miners (and their families). 21 were killed – primarily women and children. Poor working conditions ran rampant in mining.
JA: What the mining companies did was basically own entire towns, and they would often pay miners in credit to a company store, so they didn’t get money that they could take and spend wherever or save. So they tried to have just complete control over what people had access to and how much they could charge for the goods that they had in their company store, and that’s what the miners up here on the mountain were striking against. They demanded to be paid in money, in cash, not just credit to a company store. And the coal mine and the mining company responded by bringing in mercenaries basically under the guise of being company security guards.
People who are using fake names, who were apparently wanted for crimes in other places. So they brought in mercenaries with the sole intention of assassinating the president of the miners’ union so they could prevent other people who might want to go on strike. And that’s how brutal some of those people were, like, some of the coal bosses were. I guess it was how much they had at stake. I’m not anything neat working class like that. If I quit making music, a few people would be sad, but nobody’s going to kill me over it. I think record labels, venues, musicians… I don’t think anybody is doing well at all in the United States, and in this whole world there’s an attempt to kind of unionize for musicians, for independent musicians to do that, but I worry we just don’t have any leverage. It can really only be taken care of by some kind of state, you know, like subsidies, like subsidies for arts and culture, if we care about that as a society. Especially not like independent, really exploratory art.
So I don’t know. Like I said, I’m hesitant to even try to make too much of a connection between myself and people who are literally putting their lives on the line for what they were doing. I can’t withhold my labor and expect society to come to a screeching halt. It’s something way up at the top, and all these other things have to be taken care of before somebody can even do the things that I do. I don’t know why I feel… it is such a difficult time period we’re in the middle of.
JB: Yeah, it’s pretty disparaging for sure.
JA: And journalists, I imagine, are not doing very well either. I just saw the thing about The Wire. They issued some statement about… I can’t remember exactly what it is they said, but they’re having some kind of financial problems, and it’s a pretty big publication. (The publication’s website has been blocked in India by the government amid tensions with Pakistan – JB). So I don’t know, even people who I think are doing a whole lot better than I am are not doing very well at all, having to cancel tours for financial reasons and having disputes with record labels over payment and stuff. Nothing that I’ve done is even worth fighting with anybody over. Well, I don’t know. I’m sorry if you came here wanting to talk about other things than what I’ve been going on and on about.
JB: No reason to apologize. This is what it’s about.
JA: The thing is, most of my creative process is really difficult for me to put into words at all, because I try, if anything, I try intentionally to not even be that aware of what I’m doing. I don’t like to stop and think about it very much, I think that just complicates things. You end up with so much… you don’t want an ego getting in the way. And it’s difficult sometimes, if somebody asks me like, “What was going on here or here? How did this happen?” A lot of the time, I don’t know. I try to remember or think of something to say, and I just… yeah, it seems like I wasn’t even there. Like something just happened. I don’t really know why or how exactly, it just did, and I had something to do with it, but that’s just kind of how it feels sometimes. And this, when I was like, deep in this kind of space, I was into it for a while, then had to leave it behind. And then I had to get into it again, and that’s part of why it ended up… it went in a few different directions before it ended up where it ended up. It was complicated and confusing, and I don’t really even know exactly how I ended up with the thing that I ended up with!
Photo courtesy of Joseph Allred
JB: Is that why it took so long? I mean, you said it started way back in the spring of 2023.
JA: Yeah, it’s that, and me having to… I feel like I’m always learning more about engineering, recording, and mixing stuff. Sometimes I’ll start mixing something, and then I’ll think that this song may be done, and I’ll get to some other song and then I’ll figure something out that I want to go back and apply to this thing. So it’s always… I’m always learning stuff. That’s part of why it took so long and just playing all the instruments I played on it! That takes forever, too. You have to go back and play each individual percussion instrument instead of just doing it all at once.
JB: And did the number of instruments you played, did that influence how… I guess your approach to songwriting this record?
JA: All the songs were… I just sat down with an acoustic guitar and played all of them, and I thought I may be done, and then I wasn’t done at all. I just used that as a little seed that’s still in there, and everything is kind of built off of it. So I don’t know why. I don’t remember why I did a lot of things, like I was just thinking about an electric guitar track that I put on there. It’s one of the focal points in one song. I don’t remember why I did that. Something made me just do it. I didn’t even think, “This would be good if there were an electric guitar in it”. I just kind of thought that guitar, that amp, etc.
JB: So, do you have that sound in your head, like “this guitar, that amp” would craft what you were thinking, or was it like, “I gotta try this guitar, that amp,” was it more of an experimentation?
JA: Oh, no, it wasn’t an experimentation at all. It was just like, “this guitar and this amp,” and then I did that. And then, that was it. I think I already just knew. I don’t know. I know my guitars and amps very well, and I know what kind of thing you need to get this particular sound or that particular sound. And then, with recording technology being what it is now, I don’t think there’s nearly as much pressure on like using the right mic in the right position of it. A lot of people really obsess over that. I don’t really. Just as long as I get something… something I can work with, I can do EQ and like stuff on it once I’ve got it recorded. I really don’t like to obsess about things like that because I’m always kind of moving, and I feel like I have to get this done or my mind will be somewhere else, and I’ll forget what’s happening. It can be a little bit frantic.
That’s why doing something this involved, it ends up taking a whole lot out of me. I did an album called New Jerusalem that came out on Centripetal Force in 2023. And that was another album that took a really, really long time for me to do. That’s compared to some of my albums being improvised, and taking like an hour to just sit down. I just had something. I would feel like I needed to do something, and I would just sit down with an acoustic guitar and a mic and then played something. I had an album in like an hour or two, so sometimes that’ll happen. And then, sometimes I won’t have an album for two years. I don’t really know which one it’s going to be or what’s going to happen.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m a little… it’s like people who are kind of in the hands of something else and don’t really know what’s going on. There’s just some something else kind of guiding them along, and I almost feel like that sometimes.
JB: Is Mikey your brother?
JA: Yeah, he mastered the record and contributed trombone. He gave me just a little bit of mixing help when I was getting into some of the bass instruments. I had never really worked with real low-frequency stuff. He showed me how to use a multi-band compressor, which allows you to compress certain frequencies and make the bass a lot more consistent, rather than a particular set of frequencies bothering [the listener]. Other than that, I usually mix this stuff and then send it to him to just get all the levels to an industry standard. He’s a recording engineer, and he’s much more… well, I don’t think he really obsesses that much about mic placement either. He knows exactly how it will sound if he puts it in a specific spot.
So, I think he has a kind of intuitive approach, but he’s still a lot more into those kinds of details than I am. He used to work in a studio in Nashville. He still does some mixing and mastering work, and he had a studio out of his house in Nashville until they sold it. Now, he barely… I had to kind of make him play trombone on it. He hadn’t played his trombone in a long time. I was sad that he wasn’t playing music at all and decided to try to get him involved. He’s also a bass player. The last band I played in, we played in that band together.
JB: Was he reluctant to play on the record, or was he easily persuaded?
JA: He’s pretty easily persuaded. Just asking him to do it, he wouldn’t have. I think his trombone is in storage over at my mom’s house right now. He just hadn’t touched a musical instrument in a long time, but he was pretty happy to, once he just had to warm up a little bit.
JB: Were there any particular instruments or sonic textures that you were most excited to explore on this record that maybe you hadn’t featured prominently on your previous stuff?
JA: The percussion is what I had a lot of fun doing, and also some of the organ. When my brother moved out of this house I just mentioned, he had a studio. He had a pretty cheap, transistor kind of Hammond organ, not like one of the iconic B3s, but it also had a real Leslie cabinet, like a rotary speaker. And he gave those to me, so I had a lot of fun playing that organ. It’s all over this album. I really enjoyed that and a lot of other… I used a plug-in version of a Mellotron, you know, like The Beatles on “Strawberry Fields” using that flute sound. And I love King Crimson, the strings and choir, but it has a weird, haunting, tape-kind of saturated character to it. I used some strings and choir; I used the flute setting on the Mellotron plug-in for one thing. So, I really enjoyed doing that. Some of the keyboard textures and the percussion textures I spent a whole lot of time on. And the percussion, I had never really done much at all before, so that was a learning experience. I enjoyed getting resourceful and just using random stuff I had around.
JB: Yeah, that would be fun.
JA: Oh, hitting the stove using cattle bones. Those are still sitting here… I need to go bury those. I feel kind of bad about taking the bones of a cow. They tend to go to remote places to die. I guess they know when they’re going to die, and they go off into the woods. I found several of them. I should go bury them and maybe say a little prayer over them or something. I hope they don’t mind that I used their bones, it does seem a little bit morbid. I’m trying to think if I died and somebody dug me up and started clanking my bones together. Or if somebody did that to one of my family members or something, that’d be terrible. So I don’t know if I should have done that, but I did. And jaw harp and spoons and bones and washboard and mallets, like hand drums, just like cymbal swells. That’s what they’re like. Layers of percussion instruments and the way I kind of panned all of that is to try to make it seem like there was really an orchestral percussion section or something sitting back there.
Now, I don’t know why I spent so much time doing that. I’m really not… I don’t know. I like thinking about the way different things fit into a bigger context, like the different sections of an orchestra kind of fit together. I don’t play percussion very well at all, and sometimes it doesn’t seem like a whole lot goes into playing orchestral percussion instruments, but I think it’s a lot more difficult than it seems to get different shades out of a bass drum. What I spent the most time doing… I’m a guitar player; that’s really the only instrument I played that I have much business playing, and I spent all this time doing all this other stuff. So, it’s kind of odd where I ended up spending the least amount of time on my main instrument and the most amount of time on all the other stuff.
JB: Do you think you’ll be doing that more in the future?
JA: I kind of don’t want to, and maybe if I just really feel like I should, I will, but I think I might not be doing that. Just focusing more on solo acoustic stuff. Or maybe going into a little bit more experimental stuff for some of the sound collage textures or something. I don’t know if this orchestral kind of thing is something I’m going to be that interested in doing. I think I need to maybe limit myself more to doing what I can do live. When I tour and play live, it’s been pretty much only solo acoustic stuff. And people will come up after the show, and they’ll ask me about my records, and I have to say, “Well, this doesn’t sound anything like it.” It feels kind of stupid for doing that. So, I think it has felt a little like a mistake at times. So I’ll end up with a really good album that I’m happy with as an album, but then there’s no way I could assemble the number of people it would take to make anything sound like this album. It would require an orchestra, and like two or three keyboard players, and a big percussion section, and bass, and electric guitar, and all kinds of stuff.
JB: Are you going to come out west?
JA: In August, I’m playing in Colorado and New Mexico.
JB: I’ll have to keep an eye out if you play New Mexico. Maybe I’ll drive up.
JA: Where do you live?
JB: I’m in Tucson.
JA: Oh, I considered playing in Oracle, do you know where Oracle is?
JB: Yes. It’s up north of town.
JA: I played there a couple of years ago. There’s some painters or some weird little community of artists. It’s a really little place, and Ralph White lives out there. He’s a real idiosyncratic, multi-instrumental, weird folk [artist]. I’ve crossed paths with Ralph a whole bunch of times, and he put that show together. I went and stayed at his place, and he has a collection of all these little kind of folk accordions. He has Russian types of accordions, he has a bunch of them. Just all kinds! Though, I don’t have anything planned in Arizona on this tour. So, I’m going to Boulder, and then down to Albuquerque. And then I’m going back.
JB: Who all contributed to Old Time Fantasias?
JA: Trying to remember who… I feel bad if I mention some of the people I collaborated with and not the other people I collaborated with Magic Tuber Stringband and Hans and Kelby. Daniel Kimbro is a good bluegrass bass player. He’s played with Béla Fleck and some people or at least shared a stage with. He’s also a songwriter. I think he’s on tour in the UK right now. He played (upright) bass on “The Groundhog.” The way I play guitar, trying to build everything from a guitar track… with somebody who’s used to just playing alone and not ever having to be rhythmically steady… like, when I went back and tried to add percussion stuff to that, it became very apparent that I tend to really like swagger and sway a lot. It’s not very steady, but Daniel managed to put a real solid bass thing in there.
And Lydian Brambila, my friend Lydian, who lives in Athens, played electric cello on “Moondance” as part of a whole lot of the dreaminess. It sounds a little like a pedal steel in there. There’s a sound that sounds a little bit like that. It’s like a whole kind of orchestra. Like this electric cello going on that sounds really neat.
JB: Yeah, that track. To me, it has a subtle Pacific Islander vibe to it, you know?
JA: It’s this guitar over here I have is a Hawaiian style guitar made in Cleveland, Ohio, which is not a tropical paradise!
JB: I can attest to that. That’s where I was born and raised.
JA: Back in the ’30s and ’40s, Hawaiian stuff was popular, and they made these little square neck kind of lap-style guitars. And the company that made it was in Cleveland back in the late ’30s. And that’s the main instrument on that song, so it does sound a little like the Cocteau Twins in Hawaii or something. That track and the Casio keyboard… I thought I might… it doesn’t sound like a dub song, but that’s what made me want to use that Casio. It’s a whole bunch of Jamaican dub stuff. Some… I think one person brought a Casio keyboard to Jamaica, and then for like 10 years, every single Jamaican dub thing has the same Casio rhythm. And they did it. And they did new vocals and stuff over it repeatedly. So, I put that Casio beat on there and then did some other stuff. I kind of enforced it with a couple little drum machine sounds.
And then Jack Bird played some violin on “Daji.” That was the last part that anybody contributed to the album. I was mostly done with that song, I thought. I kept feeling like it just needed to do something to me that it wasn’t doing. And I sent it to him. And what he added, especially like the old part where the violin fades in on that song, it’s just real high-pitched and that real heartstring kind of crying. And that was exactly what it needed, I think. That was the only time I sent one of the tracks to somebody because I felt like it really, really needed something instead of thinking, “I bet this person would add something neat to it, and they’re my friend, and I want to collaborate with him.” He is my friend, and I wanted to collaborate with him too. But that track also just really felt like it needed something that wasn’t there. So that was maybe the only example where I really felt like I needed somebody to add something that I wasn’t capable of with all my instruments here. I can’t do anything in that kind of register with that texture, like bowed strings, I don’t do very well at all.
JB: How did you come to those decisions where you wanted to have somebody else look at a track and layer it?
JA: I don’t know. That’s another one of these things, except on that track. The reason I sent it to Jack is something about the way that track swings a little bit reminded me of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, the violin player that played with him. I know Jack does some old-time-y stuff and some jazzy stuff too on the violin, so I thought he’d be a good fit for that. But the other ones, I just sent stuff to people. I don’t remember why exactly. I didn’t really expect anything in particular. It was more like, I know this person, and I know whatever they add will be something I can run with.
And I just wanted to not be so stuck in my own head. And of course, I know all kinds of musicians. And I feel bad. I don’t get… well, no, I do get asked to collaborate with people occasionally, but not all that much. And I’m afraid sometimes I’m just bothering people by sending my stuff to them and asking them to play on it. But nobody really treated me that way.
JB: Do you have any ideas of what’s coming next after this record, or are you going to let it breathe?
JA: I maybe should have, but I haven’t. I already have a solo album that is done, and I’ve got a label lined up for it. I don’t think it’s time to announce anything about it yet. And then I have a collaboration with Kelby Clark, he’s mostly been playing banjo now. He has a solo banjo album that came out maybe last year on Tentative Power. Kelby moved to Los Angeles. He lives in the LA area now. And right before he moved, he came over to my house, and we just made a racket on a bunch of the stuff laying around here. So we have a collaboration that I’m pretty sure we have a label lined up for it too. And then I have another album finished, except I haven’t had it mastered yet. And I have another one written, like, solo acoustic stuff.
So that’s another problem with it taking so long to get an album out is, by the time it comes out, I’ve already gone, literally four steps down the road. And that’s why I said maybe I should have let it breathe, but I didn’t, and I don’t usually. I think it’s hard for people to keep track of how much stuff I put out. I always feel like I don’t get a whole lot of my albums. There’s not much of a push behind, and it’s maybe because I’ve already moved on, and I can’t put that much of a push behind it. It’s like a small release on some label; it just kind of comes out, it’s not that big of a deal when a new Joseph Allred album comes out because there’s already been like 25 of them! But this one, I’m glad… Dylan doesn’t put that many albums out. So when he puts one out, he can put quite a bit of focus on it, even though he has a solo album out (No New Summers – see our interview with Dylan elsewhere on this site! – JB). And the other Scissor Tail album. He was the first person to put an album out of mine. The first three things I did I self-released, and the fourth one was one that he put out on Scissor Tail nine years ago in 2016 (Fire & Earth). He had just put a solo album out and was doing a tour with House and Land. I think they went to England. They’re hanging out with Shirley Collins in England. And that album got… it got a little bit of attention, but Dylan had a lot of other stuff going on too. I don’t know how he manages this.
JB: Yeah, I feel really fortunate because he reached out to me on his latest record out of the blue, and I knew nothing about American Primitive and this whole movement that’s happening. I am always amazed by scenes happening in the underground, solo acoustic and all this stuff. He sent me an album out of the blue, and he’s like, “Based on our discussion, I think you’d really like Joseph Allred.” Now, I’m finding other labels, underground labels, and things that are putting out solo acoustic stuff.
JA: There are a lot of people in Europe now. Like, this stuff has spread to Europe, and there are a whole lot of solo acoustic people who are very much influenced by John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the same kind of people. There are some people in South America, like a friend in Argentina that does this kind of stuff. I know somebody in Brazil that does. I know, like I said, a bunch of people in Europe. It’s generally kind of underground in all those places. But for some reason, I’m trying to book… this is the first time I’ve started planning anything in Europe. I want to get there before the global political situation here gets worse. I’m having an easier time actually than I have the last few American tours I’ve tried to book. I’ve met people who seem genuinely excited to have me come play, and I’m excited that they’re excited. And I feel like everybody is just so burdened somehow.
Like in the U.S., if there are these underground scenes, there’s maybe just too many people or COVID happened, and so many venues had to close, and predatory real estate companies came in, and people couldn’t afford their rent, and venues had to close. And all of that kind of stuff, and it feels like every single booking email, person, every single venue, everything is just swamped.
Every time to get a show, I always feel like I’m having to bother somebody. Like they’ve just got all this stuff going on, and they can barely… anyone who will let me play somewhere. It doesn’t feel like anyone is really that excited about anybody coming and playing. And actually, meeting with people who are excited there… I guess it’s going to be wonderful. “You can come play here and stay here!” I don’t know what the reasons for that difference are, or whether it’s just maybe a coincidence that it’s happened in this way. There are so many problems in this country. It feels like being able to take care of independent artists is just maybe way down the list of priorities. And there are so many things. I mean, we are a society that refuses to invest in itself in so many ways. We just invest in care and refuse to invest in things like infrastructure and education.
JB: The arts too.
JA: Everything is a profit-making opportunity, and that’s how the value is measured. Or like, at the highest level, that’s the way it is, and you have to play that game to some extent to survive. That’s probably why it feels so different. Like trying to book in a lot of places in Europe is not perfect, but it seems like maybe when it comes to that, they can at least be willing to invest. Like, you have countries that actually invest in themselves. They have much better healthcare and education and transport, and they invest in art too. And we have such a… it feels like just such a long way to… I don’t know. I think we have to just focus on getting through the next few years, period, before we can think about anything like doing something about these deeper problems.
JB: It’s difficult when nearly half a country is out for themselves.
JA: I feel kind of sheltered from that world a lot, as long as I’m here on this land that I live on. My family has been here for 200 years at this point. They came from North Carolina, and my great-great-great-great-grandparents came and settled Norberton County, Tennessee. My great-grandparents built this house. I went and lived in Boston and got into grad school there, and just didn’t fare well. I had developed really severe depression and some health problems and stuff. I had to come back here where I can live at least and not have to be burdened by the cost of living and trying to succeed in academia and all that sort of stuff. Academia just seems like a terribly stressful place to be right now, too.
So, I’m just kind of sitting here living off of, like, what’s an inheritance, basically. The cost of living is a lot lower. Being outside is good. In a city, you can’t go outside without being in somebody’s way. You can maybe go to some carefully curated little park or something, but here, I mean, my closest neighbor is across the river over there, and I can walk around and not be in anybody’s way at all. I can go down to the creek. I can walk around in the woods. I do all sorts of stuff.
JB: I love jumping in my car and hitting the road and going places that help define us. Having that reassurance that people did fight for this country. People did struggle a lot more than us. All different areas of this country. And I think that was… that was like my jaunt through the South was kind of having that reassurance that things aren’t as bad as they could have been. It’s still unfathomable to me to the extent of the poverty and the violence, and they’re just playing music? And I just… up until this last election, I thought we were a country that learned the lessons from all that. Difficult to wrap my head around the fact that racism, poverty, chauvinism and other sorts of douche bagger-y still exist.
JA: I think the kind of paradigm of psychoanalysis, or especially like Jung-ian psychology, maybe not psychoanalysis, but the shadow is like the demons. That’s where you push off all these things that you don’t want to accept about yourself. And if you do that, if you continue to refuse to deal with that, it basically can just completely take over. But what you don’t do is try to completely externalize and destroy it. You can’t do that without destroying yourself. What you have to do is assimilate it. You have to acknowledge it. You must face it, and you have to somehow assimilate it into a functional, like, conscious person. And if you think about how that works on a political or a national level, we have the demons running the show right now.
I think a lot of the protest movements and this stuff is an attempt to kind of externalize and destroy all of that. And maybe the only thing that we can do if there’s any future is somehow to achieve an assimilation of it. We can’t have this split going on. We have to somehow work it all together for some kind of consciousness to emerge that acknowledges the demons. Whatever work is necessary to assimilate and transfigure those into some kind of conscious person that has really learned from claiming them. You can’t learn from it if you just think it’s something you can just push over there and burn to the ground. Like, what you’re doing is destroying yourself if you do that and you’re giving more power to those if you think that’s all that America is are these aspects that are in control now. That’s not all America is. I know that you know that.
I’m very, very far from being a perfect person, but I’m good enough to know that there is more to America than the aspects that are running the show right now, and I wish we had a stronger movement of people doing that. It’s not in fashion amongst all the people I’m around to be willing to claim anything about America, to think of it as something that’s anything other than just irreparably, you know, broken and oppressive and racist and colonial and imperial and all these kinds of things. It is those things, but not entirely those things. That’s what I’m trying to say, and I don’t know how to try to work this out. Like, I said, it’s something that works more easily on an individual level. They’re trying to apply that kind of stuff. I don’t know if there are working in psychology or psychoanalysis who are doing work like that. But that’s something that needs to happen.
JB: You’re in Tennessee?
JA: Yeah. It’s kind of on the Cumberland Plateau, a little western edge of the Appalachian Mountains. About maybe 20 miles from the Kentucky border between Knoxville and Nashville.
JB: Yeah, my wife and I are entertaining the idea of moving to Chattanooga at some point.
JA: That’s really, really pretty down there. Well, Chattanooga is not an awful place. It hasn’t… it’s not as big as Nashville or Knoxville, even. It’s not very far from Knoxville. If you want to come up to Knoxville for anything going on, it’s just a straight stretch on the interstate.
JB: Near the Great Smoky Mountains, too, my favorite national park.
JA: It’s really beautiful there and you can go to Atlanta and Nashville pretty quick, or go to Knoxville if you wanted to go to anything.
JB: Birmingham isn’t too far away either.
JA: Yeah, that’s right. I was trying to book a show in Birmingham on this tour I’m about to start. Nothing came together. I’ve never played there before. I am playing in Chattanooga. I’m playing at a record store there. I don’t think I’ve been to Birmingham. I’ve never played a show in Alabama. I know some people there and had a bunch of people trying to help me with the show, and it was one of these things where somebody’s like, “Well, I’m not really doing it anymore. You should ask this person.” They thought, “Well, no, you need to ask this person.” Then I’d run into a dead end, and then I’d go over here, and I’d run into a dead end, and run into a dead end. And then I just… I was going to have a day off, which is all right. I really did think I might try to go into the Delta and see some of the things you were talking about.
JB: Yeah, it’s worth it. I enjoyed my time in the South. I want to visit more historically significant people/places through the Delta and beyond. I don’t know why. I just really needed that perspective of what this country has really struggled through and to be reassured that deep down we are a good country.
JA: Yeah, that’s something I’m not going to… I really can’t give myself over to entirely. Like the attitude that America is nothing other than the worst actions of the most powerful people. That’s part of what it is, but that’s not all that it is, and the more we act like it is, the more power that gains.
For more information please visit Joseph Allred’s Bandcamp or the Scissor Tail Records Website or Bandcamp to preview or purchase.
Upcoming live dates:
June 3 – House show – Austin, TX
June 4 – MidCity Ballroom – Baton Rouge, LA
June 6 – Star Bar – Atlanta, GA
June 7 – Cabbage Town Reunion Day Festival – Atlanta, GA
June 8 – Bolo Bolo – Athens, GA
June 9 – Yellow Racket Records – Chattanooga, TN
June 10 – Cabin Floor Records – Greenville, SC
June 11 – All Day Records – Carrboro, NC
June 12 – The Todd Mercantile – Todd, NC
More dates to be announced soon.
