Photo by Danni Valdez
“My favorite moment on the record is these couple of bars in ‘River’s Run Dry,’ right after the main gal’s father shoots her lover dead while he’s sleeping in her arms. The sound opens up and reminds me of a desert landscape,” says Gabrielle Pietrangelo of Silver Thread Trio.
The sound really does open up, with haunting three-part vocalizations and members of Calexico holding down a steady rhythm like a cattle drive under the lonesome croon of Paul Niehaus’ steel guitar. The group is releasing a new album this month, titled “Trigger and Scythe,” all about death and misery.
In contrast to their self-titled debut album, filled with traditional songs recorded live with room mics in an old miner’s boarding house in Bisbee, “Trigger and Scythe” has been a year in the making at Waterworks Studio, with mostly original songs and over ten guest artists opening up the sound.
“It sounds amazing as a result,” says Trio songstress Laura Kepner-Adney. “What we do when we play live and it’s just the three of us is really special, but recording allows us to include so many other people who helped us expand our sound.”
Silver Thread Trio’s bedrock is in crystalline three-part harmony renditions of Appalachian and English folk songs. “There’s a certain gravity and revealing of the human condition in the old Appalachian ballads and folk songs of our country,” relates Peitrangelo. The album begins in homage to this tradition, with the comforting scratch of a Victrola record underscoring “Mockingbird,” a new lullaby that sounds so familiar you wouldn’t guess you’ve never heard it before.
Original songwriting on their latest work travels across the genres of America, hitching its horse to a honky-tonk bar, letting its hair loose at a barn dance, unleashing a rock ballad, swaggering into a roadhouse and listening in on Diana Ross, Elvis, and the delta blues. The clear voices of the trio become the silver thread in a tapestry of Americana, creating something that’s both collaborative and wholly original.
“I see it as an evolution,” says Caroline Isaacs, vocalist and the informal percussionist of the trio. “We’re still very grounded in the folk tradition, but part of that tradition is about adapting music and making it relevant to the situation or the times you live in.”
Laced through the lyrics and the sound is lasting misery and heartache, and yet it’s not a somber record; at times it’s chilling, but other times it’s hilarious and raucous. “I think it was Laura who said, sad makes me happy,” says Pietrangelo. “There’s a truth in that. It puts all the weight of the natural angst about death out in the open and comforts the soul somehow. It’s bittersweet, and there’s a beauty in the darker tales that strikes a chord.”
The album closes with another lullaby, sadder this time. “Beneath the Waves,” by Isaacs, is about drowning: “my legs feel like lead and I long for my bed/and I already feel like a ghost,” she sings. And the scratching Victrola fades back to the depths.
The CD release is January 28, 9:30pm at Plush, 340 E. 6th St. PlushTucson.com, 798-1298. Details at SilverThreadTrio.com.
