Her Crooked Heart
To Love To Leave To Live
2019 | Folk, Rock
— track 10: "For a Song”
Rachel Ries: I was born in Sioux Falls. My family lived in Zaire — what was then Zaire — for ten years, but they were home on furlough to deliver me. They had me and then flew back to Zaire when I was four months old. Absolutely great way to be a toddler: in this little village, just running around in the red dirt. My dad was a doctor, family practice, in the little village. Mennonites are really into service. Very service-oriented, pacifism, separation of church and state, living a life of service, what-you-do-matters kind of stuff. And then when I’m four in ‘84 we come back to South Dakota and settle in my dad’s hometown, which is Freeman. My uncle still farms the family land. We all grew up having to help on the farm. We were half farm kids, half city kids — I mean, town is a thousand people in a square mile, but yeah. For growing up in a very small, very rural farming community, the Mennonite community in which I was raised is really big into music, and theater, and the arts. I was very supported in that way. I don’t remember learning how to read music, I just remember knowing how, because you would sit in church, and you follow the pattern, and you figure out the pattern of the sounds and the pictures, you know? And then once you figure that out you’re like, “Okay I’m going to make a fifth part now.” [laughs] I started playing violin when I was five. I was just hell-bent on it and my parents don’t know why, but I informed them in no certain terms that I was going to play violin, so that happened. I was at Freeman Academy. It’s very art-centric, very art-focused, and I’m very grateful for that. But, well, in a school that small, I remember there were times when I was the substitute teacher for both my own art class and music class. It’s so small they’re like, “Uh Rachel, I’m going to be late… Can you run choir? Or run band?” And I’m like, “Err, sure!” Never did get payment for that… But yeah, I was always very encouraged. I was a weird kid, and I wasn’t sporty in any way. And I was obsessed with taking the rare and blessed trips to Sioux Falls to Ernie November and to Zandbroz Variety to pick up my monthly copies of CMJ Music Weekly, Uncut, and Mojo, that’s where my money went. And my early CD collection was influenced by my brother, who’s six years older, coming home from college with, you know, Tori Amos and Toad the Wet Sprocket. But also Zandbroz Variety, back then they had a very small and curated CD collection. When I was in high school, so ‘96, ‘97, ‘98, I’d go to Zandbroz — just, the smell of heaven, that place was to me — and I would look at their CDs and be like, “Okay that cover is amazing. That’s the one I want.” So I got Vic Chesnutt’s Is the Actor Happy? Amazing. That’s how I found Nick Drake. It’s like, “Okay, I trust these people to only have good music here. So that one looks amazing. Let’s do that.” I’d also scour Ernie November for, like, Blind Melon, and Green Day, and the Weezer Blue Album, and yeah.
Started briefly college [in Goshen, Indiana] but I had made the tragic error of living in an intentional community the summer after high school, before college. So I was living and working with all of these non-violence activists, peacenik, back-to-the-landers, kind of like that whole crew. I could have said “commune” but not everything was shared in common. There were different households on this shared, big, rural plot of land, and some of the shared infrastructure and duties, but yeah, a number of families and children running around. It was really an incredible and positive experience to go from a very small, insulated, isolated Mennonite farming town to go to this intentional community where the focus was living out your beliefs in action. And also there were lesbians, there were straight, there were Native American Spiritualists, Catholics, agnostics, atheists, Lutherans, and to have all those people living together in mostly harmony, and bonded by beliefs that are much bigger than who you pray to, or our skin color — peace, and justice, and doing good, and serving, and fighting the good fight — It was great. Which set me up for going to college and being like, “What? What’s this shit? You’re just talking to hear yourselves talk. You’re not doing anything. I’m out. And also you’re all white and between the ages of 18 and 22. Peace!” So I dropped out pretty quick. I feel like that was sort of the first big moment — there are moments in my life, on the path, that are like, “Oh, yeah, that was Rachel being like: This? I’m living someone else’s life right now. I’m not on my path, and I’m claiming it and calling it right now. No.”
So I wandered around, lived in Denver for a summer with some college friends. And then I was dealing with depression, probably because my lifestyle wasn’t all that awesome at that point. I went to see a therapist, and I didn’t like her. She told me that I should be on meds, and I told her no, and I was going to fix myself. So I took a summer to go live and work in Scotland, for some people that I’d met, and I just lived by the sea, hitchhiked into work, worked in a little vegetarian café, explored a little bit. And my plan that I executed on, was that when I came back to America, I would move back to South Dakota, and I would live on one of the empty family farms. There’s two homesteads a field apart, so my uncle and his little girls lived on one farm, and I moved into the empty homestead the next field over. And I lived there for about a year-and-a-half in this little, three-bedroom farmhouse where my grandparents had lived, the house where my folks had lived for the first year when we came back to the states. And, that year and eight months — I knew, bizarrely and instinctively as a 21-year-old, that if I moved back home, I could learn to understand and love the community that raised me. Because I did not like growing up in Freeman. I was drowning. I knew that the world was huge and I wanted a piece of it. I did not belong. I was such a little weirdo. But I knew at 21 that if I moved back there, if I got to know where I came from, if I could learn to love Freeman and the community that raised me, then I could learn to understand and know myself, and I could learn to love myself. I knew that that was the medication I needed. And it was an incredible time. No regrets on that one at all. I feel like that’s when I started writing good songs.
I had done some open mics at Black Sheep, or I think it was Great Plains Coffee, but they used to do open mics, and I’d do that on occasion. I met a few guys there. These three boys who seemed so cool and weird to me, they had long, blonde hair, and kind of a little scraggily, a little rough, and a little charming, and we got to talking about songwriting. It was Matt Fockler, Emmet Stahlheim, and Raybo. And they were like, “You should go to Kerrville Folk Festival.” It’s a music festival that takes place in the hill country of Texas, and it is a songwriter’s festival. It’s for the people who are obsessed with songs and songcraft. It’s not a bluegrass festival, it’s not a — you know, there is a lot of genre in there, but the focus ultimately is about songwriting. And it’s an 18-day festival, it just goes on forever, and there’s just a whole lot of song circles all throughout the night. There’s the stages, but it’s all about the sharing of songs that happens 24 hours a day. They were like, “You should go to Kerrville. Those are your people.” And I was like, “Alright.” I was 23, and I knew that I was ready now to go out into the world. I was ready for the next thing. So I packed, I drove down with one of the guys, with Matt, and went to Kerrville Folk Festival for the first time, and that just changed my life. I did meet my people, a lot of friends who are still my tribe, still my community. That’s where I met Anaïs Mitchell, that’s where that friendship formed. And a whole lot of other incredible writers and players.
In 2003, I moved to Chicago. I had now started to meet my community and realized, “Oh, that’s how you can tour.” Because all I’ve ever — since I was four I said that I wanted to be a singer. There was never a question, that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a singer when I grew up. But I had no idea how to make that — how in the hell do you make that a reality? It’s such — it’s incomprehensible. It was just like, “How do you even find audiences?” And so by going to that festival it was just like, “Oh, this is how you do grassroots touring. This person loves what I do and I love what they do. Okay, well, I’ll travel to their town and play a show for their people,” and it just grows from there. It’s all relationships, show after show, day after day. So I moved to Chicago kind of having a sense of kind of what is maybe possible if you persevere. Chicago is when I started playing live out a lot more, and becoming part of a scene there a little bit, and making my first official record, For You Only. It is so much about relationships. Without that, nothing. Every gig is because of some relationship, some conversation, some recommendation.
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Shane [Leonard] lived in Chicago. Shane and I had some overlap time in Chicago. We didn’t know each other when I was living there, but I got married and moved off to New York, and I remember at some point meeting him for coffee after I had left Chicago because he just reached out one day out of nowhere. I think he had heard Ghost of a Gardener, which came out in 2014, and he really liked that record, and he just emailed me one day being like, “Hey, you don’t know me, we have some common people, I think you’re great, let’s work together sometime.” I guess he was trying to build his network. He was on a jag right then of intentionally, “Okay, I want to make music, I want to work with people, I want to produce, I want to tour. Who do you like? Okay, write to all of them.” So we met up for coffee months later, and had a great time, and didn’t know what would come of it. It was just that. And then fast forward through a divorce, through living in Vermont, through wild times, and moving to Minnesota, and me sitting here like, “Oh, I have enough songs now. I need to make a record. What do I want to do? I want to make it here. I want to actually make a record where I live,” because I hadn’t done that for a minute. “I want to use people from where I am. I want to collaborate with people from where I am.” So I reached out to Shane, I’m like, “I have a bunch of songs. Um, do you think, maybe, do you wanna… Can I, like, come over to Eau Claire?” It’s just an hour and fifteen away. “Can I, like, come over and show them to you and talk about things?” And he’s like, “Yeah!” And so that first time I went out there to workshop songs and talk about things with him, I think I had knitted some little booties for his then-infant baby, and I had like a bunch of bread dough rising and ready to bake, and I had a bunch of jam, various pickled and preserved things ready to eat. I’m like, “Okay! I made this yogurt! Let’s play some songs!” It was a great weekend of just — I felt really safe with him. I felt really at ease collaborating with him and showing him an unfinished thing and rattling around ideas and seeing what would happen next. Which I haven’t always felt — sometimes I’ve been very guarded about that. “You can’t hear this until it’s done,” kind-of-thing. So it was really wonderful, and at some point during that weekend he was like, “Hey, I have a friend who just is finishing up his studio. Let’s go check it out and say hi.” I was like, “Okay.” We go to this studio, some guy named Brian, I walk in the door, Brian and I are like, “Wait. You. Wait! It’s you! Wait!” Turns out Brian [Joseph] had been running front-of-house sound for Bon Iver the year that I was touring in Anaïs’s band. Anaïs and I had done a lot of touring throughout the years, from two-singer/songwriters-in-a-Subaru kind of touring to this tour where I was her sideman in 2012 for Young Man in America, that album, and for maybe ten days we were opening for Bon Iver. Yeah it was super cool. That was fun. That was crazy. We played Radio City Music Hall. Terrifying. But little did I know, in my monitors every night there was this wonderful, gentle, tender, affirming, lovely voice that would talk to us. This disembodied, gentle voice. And then fast-forward, walking into this studio and being like, “Wait! It’s you! You’re the voice of everything that makes my heart go calm before Radio City Music Hall.” And we just had a great connection, and it was like, “Okay. I’m going to make the next record here with these two guys, and we’re going to get some local musicians going for it.” And it was great.
I would play piano — lots of piano on that record — piano, various other keys, and guitar stuff. And Shane is a brilliant drummer, percussionist, he can play anything. And then Pat [Keen] was on the bass. You know, I walked away from music theory for so long just like, “No. I’m making my own thing.” But oh my gosh, it’s still so in me, and influences — from “I Fell In Love” you know that song, that’s in four different keys and fugue-y, that kind of high drama, classical-influenced stuff, to “Windswept” which is a song that does change meter, and I don’t know how many times that modulates. I gave [Shane] co-producer credit on that one. He also got credit [on “Are You Good You Are”] because the first version of that song I wrote had very much more of this rolling, kind of soul piano vibe to it, and he turned it into a pop song. I was like, “Alright, you get part of this one here.” Yeah, I’m pretty sure “Windswept,” the modulations were all me, but he had the brilliance of dropping it into 6/8. Which, that kind of thing I cherish so much, and admittedly, it’s not probably what makes a pop song, it’s not what’s going to make me a household name ever, but if I can make music that can capture someone’s attention and be like, “What? What’s going on? Oh I need to listen to that again.” I want music that will yield more when you listen to that again.
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I’m not on a label right now. I say I’m on SoDak Records, but I figure if I’m hiring the publicist and paying for the manufacturing and doing tour support, then I’m a label. I am one of those people who is very capable, and I can figure out how to do just about anything, and so I’m going to do it. And sometimes it’s a little hard to say, “Sure you could do that, but you don’t have to. Someone else can do that and you can put your energy elsewhere.” That said, I have been on different labels and each time it’s kind of been like, “I don’t know what this was for. I don’t know what I got out of this situation.” And I think, you know, I can be pretty down on myself. Most of the time I’m not so sure if I have enough to show and pitch for myself for a label or a booking agent to want to work with me. I’ve kept things very grassroots, very intimate. I love the weird out of the way shows in small towns in a gallery space, and then I love a rock club in a city the next night, so I’m not probably someone’s idea of a great financial investment. And at the end of the day, what I love the most are the real relationships I’ve developed through doing this kind of intimate, real touring where you’re in someone’s home and having dinner with them, and learning about their lives, and the test that their son has to take the next day. Keeping it small and real resonates with me. How much of that is self-sabotage? How much of that is me not believing that I’m allowed to jump up a few tiers? You know? I don’t know. It is wild to see friends get famous and you’re like, “ughhh.” Tony award winners, Grammy winners, I’m just like, “Come on.” But we’ve all got our path, right? And that’s just something that I have to wrestle with all the time. The whole “compare and despair.” But, like, nah. That is literally not your path. The path is made by walking and you only have your feet. And my path is living in this lovely little bungalow, helping to raise the kids, building a house out in the country, and running a choir of 65 weirdos [Kith + Kin Chorus] who love and trust me, and I can fill their lives with song and joy, and raise money for local charities through my arrangement of Queen’s “Under Pressure.” And I make visual art, I have patrons on Patreon. My life is wacky and it’s good. It’s good. The wonderful little four-year-old who declared she wanted to be a singer when she grew up, she did it. I am a singer, and it’s been my occupation now for a long time. It’s misshapen but it’s wonderful.
HER CROOKED HEART'S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Jami Lynn — Fall Is a Good Time to Die (2015)
Eliza Blue — South Dakota, 1st of May (2018)
SOURCES
Wood, J. Allen. “Her Crooked Heart Bends the Ear of Music in Minnesota.” Music In Minnesota, 5 June 2019, www.musicinminnesota.com/her-crooked-heart-bends-the-ear-of-music-in-minnesota/.
Ries, Rachel. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 27 Apr. 2021.
