Martha Scanlan

The Montana singer-songwriter discusses how the landscape can influence songs, gospel’s accessibility, and the power of collaboration.

By Scott Nygaard

Though she has only been writing songs for eight years or so, Martha Scanlan’s debut solo album The West Was Burning (Sugar Hill), released early this year, proves she’s already become one of our most distinctive roots poets. With a stellar band providing a musical backdrop of old-time and alt-country string sounds and honky-tonk grooves (an inspired pairing of producer Dirk Powell’s backwoods instrumental virtuosity and Levon Helm’s earthy roadhouse pulse), Scanlan’s stark, cinematic verse leaves you longing for places you’ve never been: “Cottonwood a-shakin in the breeze / Surrounded by a starry sky / Easy to forget the things we need / Easy to stumble around mostly blind.” The sound is simple and straightforward, led by Scanlan’s loping acoustic rhythm guitar and Powell’s fiddle and banjo. But certain instrumental touches—a bit of barroom piano or plaintive pedal steel—draw you toward Scanlan’s lyrics, which are anything but clichéd, as in the first line of the bluesy, gently swinging “Walkin’”: “I like your coffee, baby / I like your tea / I like the tangled way you talk to me.”

Scanlan started playing music when someone left a guitar at her house after a party. She was 21 and living in Montana. “I had gotten into bluegrass, and I went to the fiddle contest in Weiser, Idaho,” she says. “That was the first time I saw people playing old-time music, and it really knocked me out.” After moving to east Tennessee to get closer to old-time music’s source, she took first and second prizes, respectively, in the Bluegrass and Country categories of the Chris Austin Songwriting Contest at MerleFest in 2002 and helped start the Reeltime Travelers, an old-time string band whose fresh combination of traditional tunes and Scanlan’s original songs soon drew attention from people like Alison Krauss and T Bone Burnett, who enlisted the band to sing his gospel song “Like a Songbird That Has Fallen” on the Cold Mountain soundtrack. The subsequent tour promoting the soundtrack turned out to be the tinder box for The West Was Burning.

 “I had these songs that weren’t old-time songs,” Scanlan says, “and I knew I wanted to do a record at some point. I spent a good deal of time with Dirk and the folks in Ollabelle on the Great High Mountain Tour, and a lot of these different sounds came out of that experience—melding old-time music and people with more of a blues, jazz, and gospel background. We played tons of different music in these jams on tour. Then I went to see Ollabelle play in Nashville and ended up getting on the bus with them and going to their next few shows. We found ourselves near Lafayette [Louisiana], so we stopped and spent a day with Dirk. It kind of had its own momentum at that point.”

            With some notable exceptions, songwriting is not generally expected of old-time musicians, whose repertoire tends to be anonymous and ancient. Scanlan, who wrote poetry before she started writing songs, credits a songwriting class at East Tennessee State University’s bluegrass music program with helping her get started. “It wasn’t so instructional,” she says. “What was most helpful was having to write a song, to have it done at a certain time. Part of my desire to write came out of playing traditional music and being here, where music and songs are so connected to the landscape and the culture. I was very inspired by that. That whole connection with place is very interesting to me.

“I spent a lot of time in the last year writing songs that have to do with Montana in some way—about different aspects of loss and impermanence that came out of a real stark landscape,” she says. “There are places there that I just long for. One thing I really connected to in moving to Tennessee was all these songs that have so much longing in them for a place—all those bluegrass and old-time songs that came out of people having to leave to go make money during the Depression. It was funny to be here and be so moved by all these songs, while I was longing for a different place. I guess that’s where gospel music influences me as well. Because a lot of gospel songs come from specific places. What I love about gospel music is that it’s an immediate way to access something very large. It’s very tangible and accessible—there’s a sense of ease in finding that with people.”

Gospel became a good way of finding connections with diverse people on the recording sessions as well (witness Levon Helm’s obvious enjoyment at the end of James Cleveland’s “Get Right Church,” the second track on The West Was Burning). And the collaborative process helped Scanlan expand her sense of her songs. “Dirk and I got together and talked about some instrumentation,” she says. “but it came together in a different way than I would have thought. Like I knew I wanted pedal steel, and I thought I wanted brushes. I had played some with Levon—he’s got such a huge groove to stand inside of, it has such a physical space. We got up to Woodstock and started warming up, and it seemed like the obvious choice to go with that. I had a much more limited palette in my experience of what the songs could be, and it was fun to have all that input. It made the album feel like a real collective process.” AG

Share and Collaborate

“Songs become larger than us when we share them with people,” Scanlan says. “There was a collective sense of doing this record that gave me a place to rest. The songs are kind of a source of strength or refuge, because they’re not really mine anymore. They’re something that we all did, and they’re out in the world. There’s a lot of freedom in that. I don’t have to worry about what it says about me, because really it’s not about me. And they don’t necessarily feel like they come from me. That just makes it easier to write. In Buddhism, they refer to it as what’s ‘skillful’ instead of what’s really right or wrong, or good or bad. Ultimately it’s just about what’s skillful.”