“They say things have to get worse before they can get better,” Eilen Jewell reflects. “And for a while there, everything got worse.”
Indeed, in the span of just a few months, Jewell watched as her marriage, her band, and what felt like her entire career fell apart in a series of spectacular, heartbreaking implosions. By the time the dust had finally settled, the critically acclaimed singer and songwriter was grieving and shocked, living in a remote cabin in the mountains and unsure if she’d ever get to make music again.
“Up to that point, I’d just been going with the flow and letting outside forces dictate the path of my life,” Jewell explains. “Losing so much so fast forced me to figure out what really mattered. It made me realize that I’ve only got this one life, and I’d better get behind the wheel if I want to make the most of it.”
With Get Behind The Wheel, her ninth studio album, Jewell does precisely that, planting herself firmly in the driver’s seat as she picks up the pieces and finds new purpose and meaning in the process. Co-produced by multi-instrumental wizard Will Kimbrough (Todd Snider, Hayes Carll), the collection pushes Jewell’s trademark blend of vintage roots-noir into more psychedelic territory, with spacious, cinematic arrangements complementing her revelatory explorations of grief, loss, resilience, and redemption. The band’s performances are truly electrifying here, blending elements of early rock and rockabilly with old school country and soul, and Jewell’s delivery is timeless to match, her voice effortlessly moving from unguarded intimacy to icy cool and back, sometimes within the very same song. The result is Jewell’s boldest album yet, a powerful work of artistic alchemy that transforms heartache into genuine creative rebirth.
“I never wanted to make something that just wallowed in its misery because that’s not what I got from this whole experience,” Jewell says. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t tough, but I survived and I’ve come out so much stronger and more in tune with myself, and that’s the journey I wanted to capture in these songs.”
Hailed as “one of America’s most intriguing, creative, and idiosyncratic voices” by American Songwriter, Jewell built her career the old fashioned way, touring relentlessly with the kind of undeniable live show that converts the uninitiated into instant acolytes. Over the course of nearly two decades on the road, the Idaho native has crisscrossed the US, Europe, and Australia countless times, playing an endless series of headline and festival dates in addition to sharing bills with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Loretta Lynn, Mavis Staples, Wanda Jackson, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, and The Blind Boys of Alabama. Rolling Stone lauded Jewell’s “clever writing,” while NPR declared that she has a “sweet and clear voice with a killer instinct lurking beneath the shiny surface,” and The Washington Post mused that “if Neko Case, Madeleine Peyroux and Billie Holiday had a baby girl who grew up to front a rockabilly band, she’d probably sound a lot like Eilen Jewell.”
“From the outside, I’m sure everything looked very fun and exciting,” Jewell reflects, “but somewhere along the way I started to feel like I was stuck in a life that wasn’t my own, and I started drinking too much to escape all the stress.”
By the time the COVID-19 pandemic brought touring and recording to a grinding halt, things were nearing a breaking point at home, and Jewell and her husband of roughly a decade decided to call it quits.
“My husband was also my drummer and my manager,” Jewell explains, “so in one fell swoop, it felt like I’d lost everything.”
The untimely deaths of several close friends and family members followed shortly after, and Jewell soon found herself in the midst of a painful period of transition and self-examination. She left her home in Boise for a small cabin in the Idaho mountains, where she dove deep into meditation. She went for long hikes in the wilderness to stave off the constant threat of panic attacks, and she began experimenting with psychedelics in a search for clarity amidst the chaos.
“When I’m going through something big, I just instinctively start writing,” says Jewell, who began documenting her journey through lyrics and melodies. “I didn’t think I’d get to make another record, but I needed to write anyway just for the catharsis of it.”
The songs proved to be some of the finest, most arresting and emotionally nuanced writing of Jewell’s careers so far. Her ex-husband agreed
“He really loved the songs, too,” Jewell explains, “and he ultimately decided to stay with the band and come back on as my manager. We’ve always worked well together, and we co-parent really well, too, so when it was time to record, I think we were all just excited to get back to something that felt like normal.”
That excitement is palpable on Get Behind The Wheel, which opens with the slow-burning “Alive.” Raw and brooding, the track builds from a whisper to a gritty roar as it revels in the crucible-like quality of complete reinvention. “You gotta get behind the wheel / You gotta drive,” Jewell sings over blistering guitars. “Baby how you feel? / I feel so alive.” Like much of the album, the song grapples with a complicated swirl: longing, sadness, freedom, and fierce determination all churn just beneath the surface. The searing “Lethal Love” reckons with the dark side of romance, while the bittersweet “You Were A Friend Of Mine” contemplates loss and regret, and the soulful “Come Home Soon” finds new faith in the power of human connection.
“I used to think I was a natural hermit,” Jewell reflects, “but I had some really profound experiences with complete strangers over the past few years that made me realize how important the bonds we share with other people are. We’re all social creatures just trying to find home, and we need each other for that.”
Such revelations help keep the album from ever drifting too far into despair. The playful “Winnemucca,” for instance, embraces an openhearted joy. The instant classic “Crooked River” finds fervent hope in the possibility of a fresh start. The dreamy “Silver Wheels and Wings” sheds the trappings of the self to find buried spiritual treasure.
“I recently got engaged to someone I’ve known since I was a kid,” Jewell says, “and I think that’s a big part of the joyful element in this record. Sure, there’s a lot of heaviness and loss here, but there’s also a lot of hope and love and redemption, too. There’s a phoenix rising from the ashes.”
Things had to get worse before they could get better, and for Eilen Jewell, the best, it seems, is still to come.
Nick Delffs
Nick Delffs is not a protest singer. He’s not a gospel singer. Still, subversiveness and spirituality permeate Transitional Phase, his long-awaited second solo album. The product of five years of musical and personal growth that coincided with widespread social upheaval and a global pandemic – just as Delffs navigated first-time fatherhood, losing friends, and approaching his 40s; all weaved these songs.
Now Boise-based, Nick Delffs has been a beloved staple of Pacific Northwest music since emerging with his Portland-based band The Shaky Hands in the mid-2000s. It was clear then, as it is now, that he possessed an authentic—maybe ancient—voice. Transitional Phase is some of his finest and most vulnerable work. As the title suggests, it’s an album about opening oneself up to change, refusing the calcification that comes with age, and opting for wholesale transformation instead.
Incidentally, “Transformation” is the title of the album’s opening track. It’s a looping, percussive opener, a dub-inflected signal that Transitional Phase’s themes of change and transfiguration will not be limited to its lyrics. Like much of the new album, it was recorded in early 2020 at co-producer/collaborator Eli Moore’s spacious and strange stripmall studio on Whidbey Island, just outside of Seattle. However, when the sessions were interrupted by the onset of the pandemic, Delffs was forced to continue work back in Boise. He wrote constantly in the early days of the lockdown and entered a secluded vocal booth in his friend Z.V. House’s Boise studio. Delffs would send the resulting tracks to Moore, who often took songs in unexpected new directions. “Eli added a lot,” Delffs says. “He really put himself in it. I’m not sure I’d felt that level of deep collaboration and trust since the Shaky Hands days.” This process continued until Delffs had about three albums worth of material to sort through.
When writing, Delffs spends as much time as possible not listening to music. “That’s really helpful for me,” he says, “because then it becomes this thing where I need music, I need songs—so I have to make them.” Delffs spent as much time thinking about cows—yes, cows, like the John Gnorski-illustrated one on the album’s cover—in the recording process as he did about any particular musical inspirations. Delffs’ recent trip to India, his second, was filled with cow admiration, and he picked up some cow fun-facts along the way. “They just eat grass and somehow milk is created,” he marvels. “Their poo and pee is antiseptic and medicinal!”
Still, the memory of music sneaks into the process, as Delffs found himself thinking about Tom Petty and Talking Heads, two artists he loved in childhood. One can hear echoes of David Byrne on the angular “Power and Position”, which also serves as a spotlight for the unmistakable accompanying vocals from LAKE’s Ashley Eriksson, whose voice has been heard by millions in Cartoon Networks ‘Adventure Time’ credit music. Delffs enlisted more old friends to help flesh out Transitional Phase, including drums from Joe Plummer (The Shins, Modest Mouse, Cold War Kids), Dan Galucki (Wooden Indian Burial Ground) and Graeme Gibson (Michael Nau, Fruit Bats); keys from Luke Wyland (Au, Methods Body); strings and arrangements from composer Peter Broederick (Sharon Van Etten, M. Ward); and bass by Mayhaw Hoons, his old bandmate in The Shaky Hands.
The lush “Brave New World” looks outward, juxtaposing a smooth groove from Galucki and Hoons with heavy themes of social upheaval. The titular phrase, often used ironically, is presented here with utter earnestness, underscored by Broderick’s beautiful string arrangement. It’s one of three songs on Transitional Phase—along with back-to-back closers “A Perfect Storm” and “Egomaniacs”—that slowly transforms into a prayer. The chanted and sung lines might feel like nods to some of Nick’s favorite artists (including Alice Coltrane, George Harrison, Yamuna Devi), but they arrive on the album naturally. Delffs has long been fascinated with Hinduism, and was deeply inspired by his India trip. “Meditating and chanting are such constant parts of my life these days,” Delffs shares. “They came into this album like any other naturally flowing thought.”
“Transitional Phase”, the towering title track at the album’s center, is a perfect marriage of two aesthetics. Delffs brings his vulnerable, misty-eyed self-examination to the collaboration; while Moore and Eriksson bring LAKE’s exacting, literate DIY Yacht funk. The result is transcendently, sonically free, like those particularly melodic moments spent with Peter Gabriel or Kate Bush. “In-between words and dreams, there’s only a line,” Delffs sings in seeming self-interrogation, “And you’ve crossed over it so many times.”
The songs on Transitional Phase don’t just cross that line, they dance on it. If the distance between waking life and dreams was narrow on Delffs’ 2017 solo debut Redesign, it is almost imperceptible here. He sings (and speaks, and occasionally chants) about the changing tides of our shared troubled world and all the mysterious worlds within. He yearns and searches and remembers, and occasionally wishes he could forget. He finds faith and loses it. And when he can’t find that faith again, he admits on “Absence of Love Song” that he’ll wait “on and on and on and on for another chance.” Maybe that’s foolish. Or, as Delffs sings, “Maybe it’s today.”
Nick Delffs’ Transitional Phase is due out July 26th on Mama Bird Recording Co.
