Pine Hill Haints
An interview with Pine Hill Haints by Daiana Feuer
Pine Hill Haints attracts an audience that likes songs about the cursed nature of the world—people that have gone to the dark side and found it uplifting. Real weirdos and rebels gather around this band and its junk instruments. The rawness feels natural and natural feels honest. People who believe in things you’re not supposed to believe are drawn to Pine Hill’s spooky bosom and folklore.
An Interview With Emily Lacy
What is folk?
A lot of what folk is about is a sense of empowerment, a sense of tradition and making due and experimenting. There are all these songs that exist that no one knows where they came from. They have a structure and resilience and pattern that just persists through time without an author. That’s magical.
An Interview With Amanda Jo Williams
What is folk?
Old music can be boring but it doesn’t have to be. Some people really channel old music, like Frank Fairfield and Olentangy John. They do it well. They’re comeback characters. Some people don’t do a good job of it. Henry Wolfe I love, Mia Doi Todd I love. If that’s folk music too, then that’s folk music I like. It’s original. I would suppose it’s earthy. It’s music for people and their troubles and being a human. My music is basic and simple. I do stuff that’s more from space, channeling how aliens would tell us to be when we’re more evolved.
An Interview With Les Shelleys
What is folk?
Tom: It’s pretty simple stuff. It’ll be what’s happening right here right now.
Angela: I think of a song that I always have in my head that someone sang to me.
Tom: Like “Scarborough Fair?”
Angela: No!
An Interview With Olentangy John
What is folk?
It’s the unanswered question. Like all art. It’s a necessary branch of any medium. Folk music is the pursuit of what makes us human and what makes us a collection of individuals that are sharing something, I guess. The old songs people keep singing come from apparently nowhere in many cases. No one knows where these songs come from. But there are the seminal versions and the bested versions. It becomes these finite points where you know there is a commonality. You can track the history of a song with all these different approaches and meanings and people involved. It’s kind of a way-point for defining oneself in the greater history of culture at large. —This is a weird answer! It’s a representation of culture.
An Interview With Eagle Winged Palace
What is folk?
Cashew: Story-telling. By the people for the people in an uncluttered, uncomplicated way. Its complete opposite would be classical, which was written for kings and queens, very high-minded. Folk has always been, like back in the day of the troubadour or traveling minstrel, telling the news of the day. Today if you say it to the modern pop or rock listener, folk is Americana, it’s country, bluegrass, acoustic. It’s not totally about story-telling.
An Interview With Linda Perhacs
What is folk?
Linda Perhacs: It’s difficult to make a definition of something that is constantly evolving. It’s not all acoustic. We have cutting-edge techniques, even though it comes from the streets. It’s completely new to me to see synthesizers on stage. At this point I would have to say folk simply means it comes up from the ground-level, from the people.
An Interview With Ruthann Friedman
What is folk?
Ruthann Friedman: It is the music that comes out of personal experience living in society. It’s not necessarily composed. It’s not written by people who are highly educated in music. It comes from a simpler place. That’s my definition of it. Someone else can have another. It’s the music of the people.
An Interview With Mia Doi Todd
What is folk?
Mia Doi Todd: Folk music is when you play stringed instruments, it seems, and tell stories of your life and other people’s lives. It’s a very old tradition, going back to the role the bard had in sharing human knowledge and making community. I don’t even need a guitar. I can just sing a song for people at a dinner table…
An Interview With Henry Wolfe
What is folk?
Henry Wolfe: I think of music that is created with a sense of continuity of tradition behind it. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is traditional, so to speak, but it is aware of the tradition it comes from. Even if it’s not so much about having a song that can be passed down through generations like “If I Had A Hammer.” Folk is one of these words that becomes synonymous with acoustic instrumentation. All these signifiers that lead people to categorize music as folk are arbitrary. You can have loud rockish folk music.
