PRAISE FOR THE WEST WAS BURNING

"This gets a big thumbs-up for its literary words and its soulful rootsiness."- popmatters.com

"We're told that this is the first solo album by Tennessee singer and songwriter Martha Scanlan, but such is the cool assurance and earthy authority of these performances, it could well be her sixth or tenth collection." - No Depression

"Martha Scanlan's cracked and quavering voice is a taste that, once acquired, is nigh on impossible to satiate.  It's completely addictive."- Utne Reader

An Interview From The Kentucky Herald-Leader.

A FORMER TRAVELER JOURNEYS ON HER OWN

Going solo, singer sticks with what she likes

By Walter Tunis

It can be argued that all great music is a communal creation. It might boast a leader, conductor or some guiding presence. But the resulting sound is inevitably a conversation. 

As proof, let us view the recording of Martha Scanlan. She was raise on old-time music and bluegrass, and the very traditional heart of her musical labor has taken her from Montana to Johnson City, Tenn., and from prestigious gatherings like Colorado’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

"That’s what is so nice about traditional music, said Scanlan, There is such and ease about it because the music belongs to everybody. There’s this wonderful consciousness and connectedness about it."

Scanlan is possessed of a voice of stirring but almost brittle calm and songs that plow and cultivate emotions in a sort of musical harvest; her initial performance vehicle was a Tennessee ensemble called Reeltime Travelers.  A pack of like-minded string music enthusiasts, the Travelers forged seemingly antique folk and country into two killer indie albums and a wondrous tune called Like a Songbird That Has Fallen. Scanlan didn’t write that song, although given its scratchy folk feel and sense of homey faith, she could have.  It was penned by Bob Neuwirth and T Bone Burnett, the musical troubadours who enlisted Scanlan and the Travelers to record the song for the soundtrack to the hit 2003 film Cold Mountain. 

Then the travelers got a serious taste of communal music by hitting the road with Alison Krauss and Union Station, Ralph Stanley, Ollabelle, the Nashville Bluegrass Band and most of the Cold Mountain crew for an Americana caravan called the Great High Mountain tour.  

“What an amazing experience being with the Travelers was”, Scanlan said. “For so much of our career, it was a true grass-roots operation, a band supported so generously by the people who enjoyed our music. I grew up musically with them. It was a time that was so fulfilling and rich.”

When the travelers quietly called it a day in 2005, Scanlan set off on what would become her most adventurous collaboration, a project that would heighten and expand her roosts-music inspirations.  The result was the singer’s debut solo album.

“The album, to me, is essentially a jam session that just happened to be recorded,” she said.

Titled The West Was Burning, Scanlan’s album gathers together multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, who also produced the album; Amy Helm and Glenn Patscha of Ollabelle, and banjoist Riley Baugus.  All were players who bonded quickly with Scanlan on the Great High Mountain Tour.

“Ollabelle and Reeltime Travelers shared dressing rooms on the tour,” Scanlan remembered. “In most places we played, Alison Krauss had the first floor. The rest of us would be on the second. And we just played music all the time, onstage and off.”

But an outside Mountain man would soon enter the picture –namely, Helm’s famous father, drummer Levon Helm. He was part of an Americana excavation a generation earlier as a founding member of The Band.  Together, the ensemble convened at the elder Helm’s recording studio in Woodstock, N.Y.

Initially, though, Scanlan didn’t want to make a fuss.  In what was perhaps a reflection of the intimate string sound she crated with the Travelers, she pondered a similar foolish flavor for The West Was Burning.

“At first, I was just thinking about having brushes and guitar on the songs,” she said. “But doing that with Levon Helm there would have been like starting an art project with Picasso and only using a pencil.”

Along with sessions cut at Cypress House in St. Martinville, LA., a regular haunt of producer Powell, The West Was Burning echoes the earthy string music of the Travelers on Seed of the Pine but opens up in the pedal-steel country sway of I Don’t Even Have To Ask and the rugged electric gospel charge of Get Right Church.

“A lot of these sounds I simply grew up with,” Scanlan said.  “This is music I like. But I never imagined having the opportunity to go in so many directions with the music I’m making or develop so many wonderful friendships along the way.”