Themes of community, home, friendship and the importance of place as a creative touchstone are explored powerfully, melodically, and mellifluously on the new album from Kentucky residents, The Harmed Brothers.
Released recently on Fluff & Gravy Records, it is the fifth collaboration between singer/songwriters Ray Vietti and Alex Salcido, but arguably their most personal and impactful, as its 10 songs were inspired by significant lifestyle changes (for the better) and rootedness that neither of the veteran touring musicians had ever previously felt throughout their careers as travelling troubadours.
Now, firmly and happily ensconced along the muddy banks of the mighty Ohio River, The Harmed Brothers are exploring their new lives and relationships through their songwriting – which has led to the insightful Across the Waves.
It was thanks to repeat performances at the irreverently named Whispering Beard Folk Festival near Cincinnati, Ohio, that The Harmed Brothers first came into the region they would eventually call home, more specifically in Ludlow, Kentucky.
“We met in Oregon and we called Oregon home for a while. But, a lot of the time we would be back home for only a week or two weeks before we were back out for two or three months. And through that whole touring period, we lived in a lot of different cities, and I say ‘lived’ because we wouldn’t be there very long. But we were getting older and around 2013 we heard of the Whispering Beard festival, which was held in Friendship, and they kind of found us out of nowhere. We were happy to join up and be on their bill and when we got there, we found this feeling of community that we hadn’t really felt at a lot of other folk festivals. We felt at home,” Vietti explained.
“And they kept bringing us back, year after year. Friendship, Indiana is between an hour and a half and two hours max from Cincinnati, and the organizers live in Cincinnati, which is just across the [Ohio] river from Ludlow. Before this, we had never played in Cincinnati before. It was never on our tour schedule for some reason, I guess we just didn’t think there was anything there for us, audience wise. Once we started coming regularly to the Whispering Beard Folk Festival, we started playing in Cincinnati regularly, and the more we came the more the community from the festival, called ‘The Beardos,’ would show up, and we became friends with all of them.
“Three years ago, I came out here to do an artist in residency, and that led to me now where I am with my fiancé living in Ludlow. And Ludlow has become a real thing. One of the guys from the festival, Matt Williams, who everybody calls Catfish, moved here and opened a place called the Folk School Coffee Parlour. It started to become this sort of meeting ground for folk musicians across the country. All kinds of people would show up, and the place would hold maybe 50 or 75 people at shows, and they would all sell out. This community just started to grow around the place and pulled me in. And then Alex came – our drummer had actually come a year before I did. So, we all ended up here, and I couldn’t be happier.
For both Salcido and Vietti, it marked the first time in a number of years that they not only had a home base, but a legitimate community around them. That sense of closeness and stability has brought forward a whole new perspective on life and on the music the duo is creating as The Harmed Brothers.
“I don’t really feel like it’s so much the end of a chapter as it is a beginning of a new one. It’s almost like an awakening of this feeling that we belong somewhere. For a lot of years, I don’t think we felt we really belonged anywhere, so we didn’t really know what we would do long term. And I feel like that might have hindered us within the rest of the music world because it was like, ‘what are they doing. Sometimes it’s a guy with a guitar and a guy with a banjo, and other times it’s this five-piece rock and roll band, but they’re doing the same songs.’ I felt what happened along the way was we steadily became what we were always shooting to be, even though we didn’t know what we were. I don’t think for the longest time we knew what we were either, aside from Alex and I both liking each other’s songs and feeling like they worked together and being able to sing together well enough to call what we do harmony,” Vietti said.
“I think it’s happened now. Maybe finding this sense of community, slowing down and taking a different approach to what we’re doing, to realizing that we’re not just out there spinning our wheels anymore, which we can’t really do anyhow in this pandemic. But even if you take the pandemic away, we had slowed down long before, and slowed down with the intent to focus on this record, to give this record the best possible treatment that we can afford to give it, or that a label is willing to give it., as opposed to being out there playing shows, just to play shows. I took a job for the first time in about 10 years, working at a music store, which is great.
“Settling down, so to speak, gave us a chance to write some songs that I don’t know if we would have otherwise written. I think River Town is a song that is near and dear to me because of that. It’s about me and my life. I am talking to you right now from Oak Street, which I talk about in the song. It’s my life with my fiancé and leaving to go out on tour and missing that person and missing that home – missing home really for the first time, or at least the idea of home. And that’s because we actually have one now. I am 38 years old, and I don’t know when you’re supposed to have a mid-life crisis, I feel like I am getting close to the middle of my life, hopefully it’s a bit longer. But with being at this place in my life, songs like River Town and Where You’re Going started becoming these ideas of accepting what all of us must face at some point. I’ve slowed down and allowed myself just to be older and we allow ourselves the space to be calm and just express where we’re at in our world today.”
Vietti said music has always been a vehicle for he and Salcido to process what’s going on in their lives, their, heads, hearts and spirits. Songwriting has been a key component of pretty much every key existential moment and crossroads in their lives collectively and as individuals.
“For me, it’s personal therapy. When I pick up a guitar around the house, I will just start rambling on, and the song that comes out of it will be just for whatever it is, just in that moment. It allows me to get all that stuff out and if I like something from my daily ramblings I will grab it and try and make a song out of it, and sometimes I will wait a bit and see what it becomes down the road. I can’t speak for Alex, but music is a vehicle for me personally to be able to deal with my own internal struggles,” he said.
“And I am a fan of music, first and foremost. I feel I am always wanting to find something new and attaching myself to someone else’s song, and I have done that since I was a little kid. I think we all do that so, yeah; music is a very powerful tool.”
It’s interesting that the themes explored on Across The Waves have an even more profound resonance in the current climate of pollical and social upheaval, compounded exponentially by the Covid-19 outbreak. One of the more poignant and pertinent is the track Ride it Out.
“I mean, it wasn’t out intention to make an album that seems to be perfect for these times, there’s no way we could have planned for any of this. But it does though; I really do feel a song like Ride It Out on this record, I don’t think there is anything more timely on this record. Ride It Out is saying, ‘take a deep breath, don’t call the family just yet.’ It’s basically saying we can get through this,” said Vietti.
“It’s a mantra for Alex as it relates to anxiety in general, but I think it translates pretty well to the situation that we’re facing. It’s like, ‘come on guys and gals everywhere, we can do this.’ It’s really hard, there’s going to be a backlash and tough times, but for now what we can do is try to be still and okay. As long as we have the things we need to survive – water, food and hopefully health care if we need it, we can be okay, we can ride it out, together.”
Vietti believes the musical partnership that has developed between he and Salcido has become stronger and more profoundly prolific and meaningful over time – as any emotionally intimate relationship should. And, like a marriage, or familial bond, it has been strengthened through shared experiences: the good and the bad.
“I was on tour with a previous group and one morning I woke up to a kitchen full of my stuff, and the two guys that were playing with me said they were going home. I was not willing to go home, and at that point in time home was North Carolina. They said they wanted to leave so I was stuck trying to finish the run of shows. I had met Alex not long before, on his 22nd or 21st birthday. I heard him play some songs and we had a great time together. We wrote a song together that first night, which is a fun thing songwriters are wont to do, which is a song we’ve never released called Ode to Uncle Tupelo. So, I needed somebody to help me with these festival shows, and I called him and his then bandmate and asked if they could help me out, maybe in a three-guitar configuration,” he said.
“Alex actually decided to play the banjo, so we completed the shows, but then the demand died down for this old-school folkie thing we were doing. We took a break, but people kept asking if Alex and I were still playing together. I reached out and told him that people were asking us to play and if he wanted to do some duo shows together. As we did that, years went by and he and I were both horrible drinkers. I have been sober now for five years, but at the time he and I were horrible drinkers and we would get into shouting matches and stuff. But through all those years, we had this rule about never putting our hands on each other, and always talking about the issues that we might have. So, we just kept an open line of communication. If something bothers either of us, it’s important for us to see that if it’s a big enough deal, that we need to bring it to the other guy, talk about it and quash it. And so far, we haven’t reached anything yet that we couldn’t squash. It’s like an old married couple, one that sleeps in separate rooms, but still really like each other’s company too.
“And that carries over into the songwriting these days. We know each other so well that I think we’re able to step inside each other’s lives or emotions. He knows my relationship well enough to be able to write about it, especially if I am mapping it out thematically for him already. He can look at my relationship sort of from an outsider’s perception of it, but also kind of from the inside, because we do spend so much time together. He and I are like family. We just talked about this the other day and it’s funny because we are sort of like spouses, but we’re also like brothers. He is very much like my little brother. It would be a difficult relationship for someone to get in the middle of and try to break down. It’s the longest ongoing relationship that we have both ever had.”
For more information on The Harmed Brothers, Across the Waves and possible post-Covid-19 tour dates, visit www.theharmedbrothers.com, www.facebook.com/TheHarmedBrothers/ or www.instagram.com/theharmedbrothers.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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