Photo via Margaret Glaspy - Facebook
Margaret Glaspy (2026)
Margaret Glaspy (2026)
Around three years ago, at nearly the same time singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy began creating the songs for her fourth album, this year’s I Am Both, she turned away from social media.
“I felt like I was becoming addicted,” Glaspy said during a recent phone interview. “As I started to poke at it, I realized it was a more serious problem. My own process of making music had become unconsciously self-aware. I needed to have some distance.” She performs 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12 at Vivarium.
In 2022, before she had gained that distance, Glaspy met I Am Both producer Joe Henry at a Bob Dylan tribute at New York City’s Town Hall. Like the tribute’s curator, T Bone Burnett, Henry is a singer and songwriter as well as a producer, and he and Glaspy formed a strong connection.
“I sang with him and sang harmonies for him, and we got on really, really well from the get-go,” she said. “He became like family. When I was starting to write this body of music, I just knew he should be involved. I knew that Joe had a handle on what I loved about acoustic music.”
(A minor aside: one of Henry’s production credits is for 2024’s Speak to Me, by American jazz guitarist Julian Lage, who co-produced Glaspy’s 2023 album, Echo the Diamond. Lage is also Glaspy’s husband.)
Musical Snapshots
Besides providing his experience from producing roots-music greats like Joan Baez and Rodney Crowell, Henry selected drummer and percussionist Jay Bellerose, bassist Ross Gallagher, and keyboardist Patrick Warren—whose combined resumes include Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, and Madeleine Peyroux—to cut Glaspy’s songs hot.
“There were a lot of first takes and second takes,” Glaspy said about the three-day session. “The spirit of the whole recording project was definitely to take musical photographs rather than laboring over things. These guys were just so in tune with what I was doing and had the foresight to see what the music was.”
Glaspy’s four co-workers lend sophistication to the funk-folk simplicity of “I Thought She Was a Song,” the bluesy desire and jealousy of “That Rose,” the strum-accompanied breaking hearts and sad compromises of “James and Marie,” and the stark resentment of “Petty.”
Cooly Enigmatic
Her voice, alternately seething and penitent in “Petty” and coolly enigmatic in the title track, unostentatiously displays her extensive expressiveness. “I think a lot about songs as films,” she said. “How the script gets delivered always changes from scene to scene.”
The term “Dylanesque” deserves consideration with Glaspy, and not just because she and Henry bonded over Bob Dylan.
“I find him to be a mentor to me, and he doesn’t know that,” she said. “I’ve never met him. I was metabolizing the impact his work has on me as this music was being made. The more I dive into his music, the more it grounds me.”
During her current one-woman tour, Margaret Glaspy is diving into the work of many others as well as her own discography.
“I’m going to be there with my acoustic guitar and pulling from about 70 songs,” she said. “A wide range of my favorite songs by my favorite people: Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, Magnetic Fields, Lucinda Williams. I’m excited.”
