Bill MacKay & Nathan Bowles

When Drag City announced that the super powers that are Nathan Bowles and Bill MacKay were joining forces, music fans rejoiced, knowing the result would be greater than the sum of its parts, which are already pretty great. The two musicians have many commonalities, including their versatility and adaptability to any musical situation, their respective breadth of work as solo performers, their acclaimed collaborative output, and a shared sensibility on genre and improvising. This delightful collaboration seemed as natural and self-evident as the sometimes charming, sometimes enigmatic songs and instrumentals on their album Keys, out April 9th.

Keys draws on the duo’s interests in both experimental and traditional music, alternating between wonderfully ruminative (“Dowsing,” “The i in “Silence,) buoyant (“I See God,” “Joyride”), and proving that both things can simultaneously exist (“Truth,” “Late For Your Funeral Again”). Improvisational moodiness and enchanting instrumentals weave between the pair’s jubilant harmonies on traditional folk songs from Nathan’s native Virginia as well as timeless originals. The two graciously joined me for an interview via Zoom – Bill from his home in Chicago, Nathan from a porch swing in Durham, North Carolina.

Lara:
Nathan, I’m guessing that, due to your whereabouts, maybe folk came to you first, and then you became interested in more experimental music. Is that accurate?

Nathan:
I would understand why that would be an assumption based on where I’m at, but it’s generally the other way around. I grew up playing piano and percussion, and in college, I was playing drum kit in garage, psych bands and stuff. I was also getting into improvised music, and Mike Gangloff from Pelt and Black Twig Pickers had been steeping himself in some of the traditional music of where we were in Virginia. With Mike and the Twigs’ influence, I became interested in some of that old-time music. It was ticking the same boxes for me in my interest in drone and minimalism.

Lara:
How about you, Bill?

Bill:
I, too, probably have a weird slant on it. I see it as one of the avenues of my interest, but it’s not the primary one. I was coming from a family that was listening to lots of jazz and classical and Broadway. I think the interest in folk was always there, from hearing Neil Young on the radio, or that kind of stuff. I think there were remnants of American folk music always around, and it is always around us, in a way.

To wind up for hitting the actual baseball of the question now, I was mostly playing electric guitar until I did a couple records with Ryley Walker in 2015 and started to record more acoustically. Those albums were very folk-oriented. It’s interesting what you said, Nathan, on seeing of the same elements in minimalism and experimentalism that you were seeing in these various folk musics.

Nathan:
My interest in different traditions in music is all based on common threads that I hear among them.

Bill:
I would say that, too. I think we probably both think less in terms of genre than a lot of people do.

Nathan:
I think that’s maybe what made us such simpatico collaborators quickly, because we didn’t have to talk about that. That holistic approach, that was assumed, which I think made it a bit easier to jump in with both feet.

Lara:
How did this collaboration come about?

Nathan:
As far as we know, the first time we met in person and talked was in 2016 or so. I was drumming with Steve Gunn in his band at the Cactus Club in Milwaukee and Bill was playing a solo set on the same bill. I was stoked to finally meet Bill, and I was really impressed by the variety of approaches and confidence of his set, just solo. He played acoustic and electric that night.

Then Bill and I were being tapped to play sets at the Cropped Out Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. One of the organizers knows Bill and I and said, “We only have one slot left, so how about you two do a collaborative set?” He was probably thinking, “If I pitch them this idea of doing a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants collab, I bet they’ll do it.” And we were like, “Yes, absolutely,” with no hesitation.

We started emailing ideas back and forth, and we didn’t rehearse together until a couple hours before the set. We played some primarily acoustic interpretations of solo-ish numbers from my Plainly Mistaken record, and a couple from Bill’s Esker. None of the songs that ended up on Keys were played during that initial set, but the vibe was set.

Bill:
Yeah, that was cool. I remember Nathan was bowing on something interesting, like a whale jawbone. [laughs]

Nathan:
Oh, yeah, the bowed cymbals, right?

Bill:
That might be it. But it was lovely. I thought it had a very excellent reception, and it set the tone for a weekend of and celebration. Illustrious guests showed up. We played early on a Friday afternoon, dinnertime, and the sun was setting on the river. It was really nice.

Nathan:
Sometimes, you’ll do a set where it feels really magical on stage, but you’ll talk to people in the audience afterwards and the effect will have just fallen at your feet.

But at Cropped Out, with the vibe, outside on the river, the magic seemed to be permeating the whole zone. Everyone felt electric afterwards. So that made us realize that it couldn’t be only a one-time thing. We thought, “That felt pretty magical, so let’s maybe pursue making a record together.”

Bill:
That was a really nice seed for what was to come. I felt the same thing. We were almost playing off the atmosphere. There seemed to be a lot of promise, potential, to work together.

Around the fall of 2019 or so, we played a couple shows when Nathan came to Chicago. That was cool, because we were just thinking of the next steps. Then, we recorded on two different dates in January and February of 2020. But interestingly, those weekends were jam-packed. Every day, we were recording, and at night, we had all these weird, disparate gigs. We were developing some of the material that’s on Keys, and our relationship was deepening. I think we were a little exhausted, but it was an exhilarated exhaustion, recording all day and then hitting these shows and then, of course, partying with all kinds of friends after.

I like to record pretty quickly and when possible, capture that lightning in the bottle kind of thing. We did Keys in about four total days. Only a couple songs took a while to capture. But even that wasn’t labored at all. I remember feeling very free.

Lara:
When working on material while far apart, how did improvising work when you can’t be together physically?

Nathan:
Bill had four songs “through-composed,” I had two songs, and then I brought these ideas for these two traditional/covers [“Idumea” and “I See God”]. One a little bit more traditional song, and the latter an E.C. and Orna Ball song.

We came up with those independently, and then when we would get together, we would try and play them together and arrange them on the fly. I don’t think we talked specifically about, “Here’s the part we ‘jam’ or improvise or whatever.” But the more you play them, the more that becomes clear that this is a part where it feels like we can stretch out more.

Lara:
How did you select the two traditional songs?

Nathan:
“Idumea” is from the shape note singing tradition. The version that I love that really blew me away, that was on a Watersons record from maybe the early ’70s, so four-part close harmony, a cappella. I’d been toying around with the idea of making an instrumental arrangement of that song for a couple years. I brought it to Bill, and he responded to it favorably.

As for “I See God,” I’d been familiar with E.C. and Orna Ball for a long time, I only heard that particular song on a record I’d gotten recently. The first time I heard it, I thought, “Ooh, that could go in a pile of songs that would be fun to try.” We didn’t know how it would fit in the scheme of things. But it’s such a simple country gospel kind of arrangement in terms of chords and playing. It’s like an old coat. You put it on, and it’s so fun to play on. And then the real question was , “Can we pull off singing this?” But I think we did an okay job.

Bill:
I like it. I’m a little charmed by our harmonies on it. I do a few fills, and then you have this very delightful organ line that comes in. It’s so joyful. The track ends up being strange to me. It seems like it was just done yesterday, and it seems very old, too. It seems modern and present and has this great earlier time frame. And that organ part, too, I think lends something special that’s new to it. It’s almost carnival, or fair-esque.

Nathan:
On the original track, Orna is playing accordion, and it’s really sweet-sounding. It’s one of those strange details that to me is so pretty and unique. When we were tracking it, I thought, “It’ll be cool to have that kind of wheezy timbre going on.” I brought that up to Nick, and he was like, “Oh, shit. Well, there’s the pump organ in the other room.” To me, I feel like that organ really helps glue the track together.

Lara:
I was really intrigued by “I See God,” because I imagine that it was probably considered rather progressive for its time.

Nathan:
It’s one of the few E.C. and Orna songs that is not very specific. There’s plenty of mention of Jesus and specific biblical passages in many of their songs. I think maybe part of what I was drawn to in that song was that it’s one of the few that’s more open. It’s so old, it’s almost got this pagan-y element to it, because it seems to be referencing things in the natural world.

Bill:
I thought that was interesting, too, because when I think about even an album like the Louvin Brothers’ Satan is Real, everything is heavily centered on sin and redemption.

Nathan:
A lot of E.C. and Orna stuff is. That’s more of their vibe, generally. Sometimes, the lyrics are straight-up scary. They’re so heavy. And then the melody and the harmony will be so sweet. That’s the thing that makes a lot of that music very magical.

Bill:
In some ways, there’s a big part of folk music that could almost be the musical counterpart to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are folk tales, where they deal with murder and mayhem, and all kinds of debaucheries and disillusion. Not all of it, but it’s a thing, right? It’s a predominant theme.

Lara: What is really interesting about the pacing of the album and where the covers are placed is a lot of the songs on Keys sound like they could easily be canonical folk songs. Because I found “I See God” progressive, I would’ve guessed that “Late For Your Funeral Again” was most likely a traditional song.

Bill:
I would’ve thought the same thing if I hadn’t written it. The melody’s based on earlier melodic forms. I think the music came first, and then probably that line, “Late for your funeral again,” and it wrote itself backwards from there.

It was both the kind of lament that comes in a situation like that, that regret you have for missing something sacred, something you ought to have attended. I thought there was something funny about the idea of, “How can you be late for somebody’s funeral more than once?” I did also think, humor aside, that being late for someone’s funeral again could mean that they’re spiritually dying in a repetitious way. That kind of idea.

It feels cleansing to me, the song. I guess maybe that’s one of those things that you were commenting on, Nathan, is that there’s a cleansing element in heavy material, where the music is light. That’s a really good thing. You can deal with heavy themes without all of it being one color, or all of it being darkly shaded. And if the music’s light, sometimes, that illuminates the lyrical theme in a different way. And you can take it in easier, too.

Lara:
Nathan, I’m curious about the song “Dowsing,” especially the title. Is there a story behind it?

Nathan:
The title just came to me, and the image of the dowsing rod, because the song felt like it had a searching quality to me, but searching in a way that felt maybe mysterious or melancholy. I like the sound of the word, and the more the word started living with the music, the more it made sense to me. I don’t know how you title songs, Bill, but sometimes, I’ll try on a song title like a hat on a song in my head for a while, and I’ll let it sit there for a few days while I play it. Sometimes, the hat doesn’t look right, and so the title goes away and another title comes. When we talked about me going out and shooting stuff for a video for the song, it informed what my eyes were landing on and resting on during my walks, then. I wanted to follow the mystery of the title in terms of what I was shooting.

Bill:
So, you feel like it informed the video, then, the content and stuff? That makes sense. That seemed very much like the type of territory I imagined fitting into a dowsing-type scenario of someone. I think it really fits the music in a great way, too. It’s interesting when something comes to you and you don’t know if it’s really right or not. The best thing is to try it on, let it sit for a while, rather than sitting with something forever with nothing attached to it, like, “I don’t know. Should I call it the Vault? Should I call it Blue Buses?” So, you try it, and it’ll reject itself if it’s not right.

Lara:
There is plenty of mystery in this record.

Bill:
It still feels like it has some good spook to it when I listen to it now. It’s pretty, but it still has some haunt to it in various places, and some deeply felt sentiments.

Lara:
Speaking of haunting, I think “Truth” is one of those really great, beautiful, haunting songs.

Bill:
I first remember playing some of that in Scotland in 2018. For a while, I called it Glasgow. I remember it seemed pretty to me, but yeah, the music had a haunting-ness to it. I suppose the theme of it is, this is a time being in touch with what’s urgent, whether it’s helping others or ourselves, or just not bullshitting, not getting caught up in all these narratives.

Sometimes, you have those ones where you feel like you nailed something you were really feeling about the time that you were in. I guess, ideally, all of our music would be that way. It’s just some of them feel closer to that than others. I had a strange title for it as it was gaining steam a little bit, which was Glass and Ice. It appealed to me and reminded me a little bit of the wintriness in Glasgow. Then we chiseled away at it, and it became Truth.

Nathan:
You had to try that hat on for a while.

Bill:
Exactly. Like the album title. It was one of those classic processes where you have a germ of an idea maybe, and then you expand wildly into lots of titles. Keys was originally much longer, like Keys to…. Something, I forget. The things that end up being the best seem like they were so self-evident to begin with. They seem almost like they were under your dowsing rod the whole time.

Buy Keys and follow:
Bill MacKay’s Bandcamp
Nathan Bowles’s Bandcamp
Drag City’s Bandcamp