Amy Alvey and Mark Kilianski are preserving the ethos of old Americana music, not only through their band Golden Shoals’ songs but also through their performance style. With Alvey on fiddle and guitar and Kilianski on guitar and banjo, they’ve toured on foot with backpacks, lived in vehicles, and floated between Asheville, Boston, California, and New Jersey over the past seven years. Their third album, Golden Shoals, memorializes this time on the road, embodying the roots style the band has mastered while also putting a twist on it.
“Mark and I have been pretty much living on the road since 2016, so a lot of these songs — I mean, most of them — were written as we were traveling just because that was our way of life,” says Alvey. The result is a combination of love songs and meditations on larger issues like race, class, and gender.
In the single “Love From Across the Border,” Kilianski reflects on toxic masculinity and how it’s affected his relationships: “It took me far too long before I finally realized/I didn’t know how to compromise/I was so high/I didn’t know that I was hurting you/I didn’t know that I was hurting myself too.”
Alvey examines her own race and class privilege in “Sittin’ Pretty,” which contrasts her own relatively carefree life with vignettes of the lives of American families who are struggling to make ends meet and those embroiled in tragedies like school shootings. The lyrics grow increasingly grave as her voice remains happy-go-lucky against lackadaisical guitar and fiddle melodies, creating an appropriately eerie, uneasy feeling.
“Reading and hearing about all the stuff that was going on in the news was pretty terrible, and meanwhile, Mark and I were feeling sort of disconnected from it all because we were living a life where we were just kind of going to the next gig and figuring out where we were going to stay afterwards; we were doing our jobs and getting form point A to point B,” says Alvey. “At this point, I’m now making much more of a pointed effort with myself to just be more involved, and just because it’s not affecting me doesn’t mean there aren’t things I can do, whether it’s educating myself, donating to organizations, listening, and following activists of color.”
The album’s bold ventures into heated topics is its biggest strength, combined with its lyrical depth as it explores spirituality, politics, and everyday life. In “Brood of Hate,” Kilianski sings of an unnamed “monster in the White House” in a haunting tune accompanied by mesmerizing banjo, observing that “everyone wants to be Jesus Christ, but nobody wants to die.” In “Going Down, Down, Down,” he declares that “the soul is not a blank check so much as a sack of cash buried underground.”
The album also provides new perspectives on romantic relationships in tracks like the wistful breakup song “New Friend” and the ballad “I’ll Fall in Love Again,” which Alvey refers to as a twist on the Hank Williams “sad country boy song” template, reimagining the disappointment of being “friend zoned” by celebrating the friendship it entails. “[Kilianski] wrote it at first and then he changed the meaning of it, because I think this is another part of this toxic masculinity culture, where being friend-zoned is seen as this shitty thing, like ‘I can’t believe she friend-zoned you.’ He changed the ending to celebrate that [even if] you can’t be lovers with them, a friendship is an equally valuable connection.”
Alvey and Kilianski met in 2008, when both were students at the Berklee College of Music. Previously trained in classic violin, Alvey was excited to learn to play bluegrass and folk songs, and Kilianski similarly learned this new style after playing rock and jazz guitar. They started playing together locally, then decided to embark on their first tour while en route to Arkansas to visit a friend. They’ve also partaken in an annual tradition of hiking around Massachusetts with instruments and tents, playing at community concerts.
They originally called the band “Hoot and Holler,” a nod to a phrase used in square-dance calling, and to “hootenannies,” old country parties where people would pass a guitar around and sing. But a few years ago, they changed their name to avoid confusion with another Hoot and Holler. It also reflects their changing sound, evident on the new album, with drums, electric guitar, and more thorough production than their past work. And in addition to the usual stripped-down duo songs, they recruited musician Landon George to play upright bass and drums.
Still, the new album retains the band’s traditional Appalachian mountain music influence; the chorus of the first track, “Everybody’s Singing,” is a composite of traditional bluegrass and classic country lyrics, as well as an instantly recognizable line from Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Wagon Wheel.” Not only does it provide insight into Golden Shoals’ influences, it embraces unabashed, genre-spanning love for all kinds of music – especially the soul-affirming sing-along.
“We’re always just trying to write better songs, make better music, always trying to stay true to ourselves – whatever that means,” says Alvey. “Just serving the songs as we hear them to help share our authentic voices.”
Follow Golden Shoals on Facebook for ongoing updates.
