Photo of Beth Bombara by Virginia Harold
The first thing you notice when you hear Beth Bombara is the voice. Her delivery isn’t showy, but it is warm, friendly, and, to steal a phrase from American Songwriter because it’s so dang accurate, husky and velvety. Her crystal-clear singing lets you next concentrate on her lyrics, which are poetic yet plainspoken; they avoid obviousness and platitudes but still conjure real, relatable emotions. Then you start to notice the music, built to provide sturdy support to that voice and those words, mostly using the language of Americana—a rock band setup with acoustic guitars, augmented with strings and pedal steel—yet not beholden to the conventions of the genre and willing to play with harder and softer sounds to hit the mood just right. And that’s when you realize how lucky we are to have such a stellar all-around musician call our town home.
Beth Bombara has played countless stages around town in the decade and a half that she’s lived in the Gateway City, but her profile spread nationwide with her last album, 2019’s excellent Evergreen, which finagled fawning coverage from as far afield as LA Weekly. Now, after four years, Bombara is ready to follow-up that breakthrough with an equally excellent new album, It All Goes Up, which is out today. As the name implies, the new album has a slightly sunnier disposition than the sometimes melancholy Evergreen, but it maintains all the sonic qualities—the Americana base, the musical adventurousness, and, of course, that voice—that Bombara has come to be known for.
The pandemic, of course, looms large on It All Goes Up, but not in an overbearing or obvious way. Bombara manages to come at it from interesting angles: album opener “Material” longs for the slowed-down pace of lockdown (“I wanna stay just a little bit longer/ Slow down long enough to take a Polaroid picture and wave it around,” Bombara sings with a heavy sigh), while the longing, lonely-hearted love song “Lonely Walls,” with its throbbing bass and the ringing notes of its economical guitar solo, conjures a sort of slow jam version of Sky Blue Sky-era Wilco. But then the clouds part for “Everything I Wanted,” with chug-chugga guitars on the verse that give way to a sunny jangle and harmonized “oohs” that bring power pop into the sonic mix. Fans of Bombara’s countrier side won’t be disappointed, with songs like the pedal steel-soaked “Get On” or the swooning fiddle that dances around Bombara’s voice on the soul-tinged slow-burner “Carry the Weight.” It’s not all smiles and sunshine; the darkness seeps in around the edges, such as on “Curious and Free,” a stripped-down, minor key folk tune whose guitars sound ominous and string accents sound downright mournful yet the lyrics conjure youth and innocence (albeit from an older, nostalgia-tinged remove), or the distorted guitars of “Give Me a Reason” that pour down in Bob Mould-ian black sheets of rain. Suffice it to say, It All Goes Up is another audacious addition to Bombara’s already fine catalog of tunes.
It All Goes Up is out today, both in physical form from Black Mesa Records and all the usual streaming outlets. Bombara will be celebrating the release with a show at the Old Rock House (1200 S. 7th St.) on Friday, August 18th. Tickets are $20 in advance, and more info is available here. We caught up with Bombara via Zoom to discuss the genesis of the new record, the St. Louis music scene, and how to know when a song is done. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The fourth birthday of your last album Evergreen is coming up. What do you think of when you look back on that record today?
Out of all the records I’ve made, that to me was the first one where the recording process was just a true joy, because we got to take the whole band into a really cozy studio that felt good, and we set up live, and we tracked that one live. I had just started playing with [pedal steel player] Sam Gregg so it was the first record he’d ever recorded with us. I look back on that record and it brings up a lot of great memories, the making of it. I’m super proud of that record.
It seems like that album grabbed a lot of people’s attention, that that album went a lot wider than your previous stuff had.
Definitely. I got a lot of great feedback from that record.
The pandemic, of course, took the wind out of a lot of people’s creative sails. How did you decide when the moment was right to start writing and recording a new record?
Well, I’m kind of a sporadic writer and I hadn’t actually finished a song since writing the Evergreen record and I was kind of feeling…bad about it [laughs], getting down on myself.
But I needed something to push me ahead, to motivate me creatively. Because sometimes, just left to my own devices, I come up with ideas for things—I had tons of song ideas, but couldn’t ever really finish anything. I had started a Patreon during the pandemic, just as a way to connect with people more, outside of social media, and I had this idea that I should just write a song a week and put it out to my patrons, and that became the pool of songs that I ended up pulling from for this new record. It was sort of me trying to outsmart myself in a way. [laughs] Like, okay, I want to finish these songs but I need another reason to do it other than just making a record.
Another big thing that was motivating for me was I had hooked up with this record label, Black Mesa Records out of Tulsa. They really loved the Evergreen record and they told me, “Beth, we would love to put out your next record.” And I said, “Well, it doesn’t exist yet…are you sure you want to go out on a limb and do that?” [laughs] And they said, “Well, we loved Evergreen so much that we’re sure that your next album is going to be good, too.” Having them come alongside me, to support me, was also a motivating factor to get that record finished.
What was the experience like of churning out those songs to the Patreon, and letting a song get out there when it’s in that embryonic state as opposed to only releasing it when it’s “done” done?
It was actually really great, because it forced me to not overthink it. Like, I had a week. You can get a song in a week, but it’s never going to be—like you said, it’s a very embryonic form, it’s the first idea or iteration. And letting go of that pressure of it having to be perfect was amazing for me, that really unlocked something creatively for me.
I was curious too, I read in another interview that this album was tracked with the rhythm section recorded live, and then you did the vocals and lead instruments and atmospheric stuff on top of that base recording. When you work in that mode, how do you know when a song is done? Or, for example, have you ever had it where a song ends up being overdone and you had to strip it back? How do you find that zone of something being done just perfectly?
It’s funny you say that, “Do you have to strip it back?” I feel like it was pretty easy for me to tell when a song felt supported enough. For instance, the song “Carry the Weight,” we had the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar done, and then I really was hearing strings on the song so we put strings on it, and it still felt like it needed a little extra support. So then I told Sam Golden, our other guitarist, “Let’s also add a second electric guitar underneath everything” and nail that maybe Motown-y vibe with the guitars as well as the strings. And then after we added that, I could feel it. I said, “This feels done to me.”
The hardest thing, though, is pulling layers back. One other track on the record, it’s called “Get On,” I had my friend Karl Kling produce that song with me from afar, so remotely we worked together. I sent him the rhythm tracks that we did in the studio and then he layered a ton of other guitars and background noise, like atmospheric guitar, guitar lead lines—he layered a ton of stuff on it. I said, “This is too much,” and he told me, “I’m just going to give you a bunch of stuff, you can decide what to use.” And that, honestly, was way harder, to wade through everything and then mute a track, add it [back] in…that took a lot longer for me to arrive at a place of “Okay, this is done.” I prefer to do it the other way.
You prefer addition to subtraction?
Yes. [both laugh]
I remember reading an interview with Pearl Jam back when they were recording Vs., and they were recording the song “Rearviewmirror” and they were struggling with it because they were like “This sounds like a Van Halen song, and we don’t want to sound like Van Halen, so how do we make it not sound like a Van Halen song?”
Totally. We had a similar sort of experience with the song “Everything I Wanted.” For that song, I had recorded a demo version in my home studio and it just didn’t feel right, it was missing something and it felt like… [laughs] my bandmates were like, “Yeah, it just sorta kinda feels like butt rock,” and I was like, “That’s not what I want!” [laughs] But the idea is good, so how do you take that idea and arrive at its final form where you feel like it works?
So that took a lot of experimentation—I would work on it, [then] let it sit for a few weeks. What unlocked that song was Kit [Hamon, Bombara’s bassist, co-producer, co-writer, and husband] and I were working on it again together, revisiting it, and I said, “Hey, what if, when you’re playing bass, you just hang on one note? Like, I’m going through the chord changes, but instead of you going through the chord changes too, you just hang on one note?” And we did that and it instantly put it in the right vibe and then everybody was like, “Oh! This is what we were looking for.” Sometimes it just takes picking up a song and experimenting with it, putting it down for a while and coming back to it, and that can take a long time, sometimes.
I can believe it. I love the way that song turned out, especially the chorus is such a big, catchy chorus with the harmonized vocals and everything, but it doesn’t feel overdone, it just feels like it hits that sweet spot.
Another collaborative song is the album closer, “Fade,” where I understand that John Calvin Abney just kind of dropped in and had a spur-of-the-moment collaboration. Where was that song headed before that happened and why do you feel like it paid off to have him involved?
That song, I was planning on just being vocal and classical guitar, but I thought it would benefit from a little extra texture. And I have always loved working with John, I know he’s a fantastic all-around musician on multiple instruments—he plays guitar with a lot of people, but I also know he’s a very talented keys player. He actually tracked all of the keys on the Evergreen record. I thought, “Man, I would really love to work with him again.” So I looked up his tour schedule and I was like, “Well, he’s on the road for, like, the next six months,” but one of those tour dates was in St. Louis. Right before his show, he came over to my studio and he just sat down at the Rhodes piano and just went to town. We were like “Wow, this is cool, John.” “Ok, cool, I’m glad you like it.” He was about to leave and then he just picks up my electric guitar and plugs it in and says, “Hey, can I try playing some guitar over this, too?” And I said, “Yeah, sure, if you have time.” So he says, “I’ve got some ideas,” and he just laid down a few tracks of electric guitar—and then he left! [laughs] And it was awesome. It added the vibe that I was hearing in my head.
You know, it’s hard to listen to anything that was birthed out of the pandemic without wondering how that might have affected it. One of the cool things I caught, and I’m curious if this was purposeful: on your two opening tracks, “Lonely Walls” is this great capture of being lonely during the pandemic and being separated from the person you’re in love with, but then the song before it, “Moment,” almost seems like it’s craving a return to, like, not having to go anywhere or do anything and a return to the slower pace. Was that intentional?
Yeah, definitely. That’s what I was feeling when things opened back up, I was like, man, I really got used to this new slowed-down pace of life and, um, I kind of miss it. [laughs]
You’re a transplant to St. Louis. What brought you here originally and what keeps you around?
Originally, I migrated to the area to finish school. I graduated from Greenville College, which is about 50 minutes east of St. Louis, and that’s how I discovered St. Louis: we would come to town on weekends and go see shows and that’s when I really started discovering, oh, this is a fun place! This is a place that supports the arts, and there’s a lot to do, and there’s a good food scene… That stuck with me.
When I finished school, I traveled around for a year playing music with another band, and when I was ready to be in one place and not sleep on couches anymore, I said, “Y’know what, I’m gonna find an apartment in St. Louis and see what that’s all about.” And I stayed because I felt like there are a lot of places to play, I felt supported as an artist. St. Louis, geographically, is wonderful because you can get to many major Midwest cities within like four or five hours…as a touring base, it’s been an amazing spot, too.
When you play around town, I’ve noticed you don’t necessarily have a “spot,” you play a lot of different venues, you play a lot of festivals and things like that. I imagine you see a lot of different crowds. Do you have fans that follow you from all of those different places, and how do you approach when you’re playing a more “hometown” crowd versus a crowd that might not be familiar with you when they walk in the door?
There’s definitely a core group of fans that will show up at whatever venue I’m playing, whether that be Off Broadway or, say, Open Highway Festival. But playing things like festivals like Open Highway—and we’re doing the Kirkwood Greentree Festival, which is more of a city event that the whole town comes out to because they know there’s going to be fun, food, and music all day. Those, I approach as, there will be fans there, but there will also be people there who’ve never heard me before, very likely. I don’t do a lot of cover music, but that’s the sort of situation where maybe I’ll play a Beatles tune or a Bob Dylan tune that everybody knows to connect on that familiar level.
Any St. Louis musicians that are exciting you these days?
There’s strong presentation of women who are doing cool stuff in St. Louis right now, and some of them have been in the scene for a while, like Emily Wallace and Mattie Schell. There’s a newer gal who’s moved to town in the past couple years, Emma Nobbe, but she does more like psych rock. She plays electric guitar—she really rips, so it’s cool to see that. Nick Gusman is always super prolific in his writing and his band is just killer when they all get together.
Your album release show is at the Old Rock House. What do you like about playing that venue?
The stage is nice and big. I feel like it’s got a vibe—the classic St. Louis architecture; it’s a big old brick building and I like that. I just like the space a lot.
I love seeing shows there but it always cracks me up when the musicians have to walk through the crowd to go to the patio for the encore and then walk back through the crowd to return to the stage. It kind of ruins the illusion!
It’s the only downside of that venue but, y’know what, it seems like bands keep playing there, so although that is a weird feature—feature! [laughs]—it’s part of the charm. | Jason Green
Beth Bombara’s It All Goes Up is available on CD and 12” LP from Black Mesa Records and on all the typical streaming services beginning August 4th. Bombara will celebrate with an album release show on August 18th at Old Rock House, with Tim Easton supporting. Click here for more information or to purchase tickets. To keep up with Bombara’s latest news and tour dates, visit bethbombara.com.
Beth Bombara on tour:
08.18.23 | St Louis, MO | Album Release Party W/ Tim Easton
08.19.23 | Berwyn, IL | Fitzgerald’s
08.24.23 | Nashville, TN | The Underdog
08.25.23 | Nashville, TN | WMOT: Finally Friday
09.13.23 | Chicago, IL | Golden Dagger
09.14.23 | Wausau, WI | Grand Theater
09.15.23 | Bloomington, IL | Nightshop
10.06.23 | Tulsa, OK | Mercury Lounge
10.07.23 | Oklahoma City, OK | Blue Note Lounge
10.08.23 | Kansas City, MO | Knuckleheads
10.19.23 | St. Louis, MO | Joe’s Cafe & Art Gallery
