As I alluded to in a recent review of a film Shotgun Stories here at Into the Hill, southern art — or, to be more precise, art created by artists who call the south home — typically focuses on just that: home. Southerners are people often defined by where they live, and thus their art reflects that.

Jazz, blues, country, southern rock, bluegrass, alt-country, even gospel music, etc., all tend to focus on place and the many things that attend that particular place: Arkansas tobacco fields, Appalachian fog, bar rooms in New Orleans, even churches in Birmingham. The music of Tennessee band The Everybodyfields is a perfect example.

Hailing from the Johnson City/Knoxville areas (up in the smoky mountains of East Tennessee) the Everybodyfields are, without a doubt, one of the best alt-country-ish, folk-ish, bluegrass-ish bands performing today and their newest album Nothing is Okay is one of the best of its kind. Their’s is a soft, melancholy sound, lonesome and mournful. But in a way that lingers and resounds, never dreary, never fully morose. Like a southern folk tale or legend. Or, think autumn, when the leaves are falling from the tress and crunching beneath your feet, when the skies are becoming gray and those northeasterly breezes are riling up the birds and squirrels; think sweater weather.

Co-lead singers Jill Andrews and Sam Quinn grew up in the Smokies and began the band in 1999 when they met at a summer camp where they were both working. They immediately hit it off. And when they quickly realized their common affection for the rustic sounds of folk and blue grass music they began playing and writing songs together. Oh, and dating.

In 2003, the band actually began to make some money off from their music by playing in dive bars and malls. In 2004 they released their first LP called Halfway There: Electricity and the South, and a year later Plague of Dreams. As their twangy, folksy, hard to define precisely sound developed, band members came and went, they traveled across the south playing shows in support of artists like labelmates The Avett Brother’s (Ramseur Records), and eventually, somewhere along the line, their romance fizzled out. It appears that Nothing is Okay is their response to those experiences — both individually and as co-conspirators.

Their songs are often about loss - especially love lost - as in “Savior” where they sing, “Love’s not a savior when you’re messed up/when you’re messed up forever” and “… There’s no good answers to your questions/I had a feeling and now it’s gone/It seems like you’re waiting on some verdict/But it’s a mistrial, please go home.” They also sing about home and especially about being away from home or being lost, as in the tragic, Dylanesque “Out On the Highway.” Appropriately then, loneliness also is a key theme to Nothing is Okay. In “Lonely Anywhere” Andrew’s sings mournfully “I walk in
You walk out of rooms everywhere/I’m talking/You’re looking through me/With a blank stare/And I can’t help but ask if today would be my last/Would you care?”

Along with band mates Josh Oliver (keyboard/guitar) and Tom Pryor (pedal steel), Andrews and Quinn have a great ability to conjure the sounds and smells and places and feelings that are inherently southern. In any one song you might hear a banjo and a harmonica and a fiddle combined with bluesy guitar and piano as they sing about the hot southern summers and long winding roads, about lost lovers and family members, about coming and going and never staying long and wishing you could linger.

As one might expect from a band that sites artists as widely varying as Gillian Welch, Joni Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Uncle Tupelo, The Jayhawks, Dylan, Creedance Clearwater Revival, and Whiskeytown as influences, the Everybodyfields certainly have a unique and creative sound. Almost all of their songs are built around various harmonies; the fact that Andrews and Quinn have vastly different voices only makes their sound more interesting.

Moreover, one might expect them to have been influenced by the fiction of southern writers like Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner. They do sing, after all, that “the best you can hope for is to go in your sleep.” But, like O’Connor, etc., and as Andrews implied in an interview with the Knoxville News Sentinel, you can be sure that their songs are not about sadness for the sake of sadness or melancholy for the sake of melancholy: “… people need truth. I feel like that’s really what we try to give them.” Like all good southern artists the Everybodyfields understand what makes people hurt, and they feel it, and in Nothing is Okay they address that pain.

Is their response just cynical, or is it ultimately a positive outlook to say “nothing is okay”? Well, they will let you decide. You can listen to their music at their Myspace page.

Artist: The Everybodyfields
Album: Nothing is Okay
Release Date: Currently in stores and on itunes
Our Rating: 9.5

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Album Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.