Photo credit: Amanda Lillian Mills
Nickel&Rose
Upright bassist Johanna Rose and guitarist Carl Nichols didn’t set out to be in a folk duo. As Nickel&Rose, the two Milwaukee singer/songwriters cut their teeth playing jazz and blues clubs across Europe, before gradually settling into a rootsier sound. The more time they spent playing folk festivals, though, the less comfortable they became with what they saw.
“It’s almost all white men,” Nichols says. “If you look at the lineup of any folk or Americana festival, you see that they use that term to associate it with a really narrow thing, which is either this Tom Petty sort of hard rock with acoustic guitars, or weird Southern rock. It’s rock bands, basically, but they’re billed as folk. It’s all about playing festivals now. People are making records that can be played at festivals.”
Nichols both calls out and grieves for the genre on the title track of the group’s new EP, Americana. “If I wasn’t standing on this stage, would you wonder why I was here,” he sings, “Would you ask me if I was lost or if I came to sell you pills?” He’s singing from personal experience. As one of the few black performers in the scene, he says, “I’ve gone to so many shows where people just assume that I couldn’t possibly be there for the music, or that I must be there for a drug deal.
“To me the song is much more of a personal statement than just a general criticism of folk and Americana,” he continues. “I really wanted to capture the experience of being a black entertainer, where I get these moments where I’m in front of a microphone and my opinion is heard—maybe not appreciated, but heard. And I think about myself and so many other people who aren’t heard. So I realized I that it’s my responsibility to say something meaningful, because people are listening to me who otherwise wouldn’t be.”
The song doesn’t shy away from the obvious irony of black voices being shut out of Americana: Folk was created from black music.
“It really touches on that history and the people who are cut out of the history of folk,” Rose says. “Historically all this music comes from black artists, but because of how record companies market things they’re cut out of the history of things. When you look at the history of country and blues, black and white artists were playing similar music, but record companies called white people doing it country and black people blues. Americana is a more recent term, but when people think of folk or Americana, they’re usually thinking of a white dude with an acoustic guitar and a banjo.”
The rest of the EP isn’t as overtly pointed as its mournful title track. “Moving Pianos” is a sweet love song with a cheerful, old-timey spirit, while “Life Goes On” celebrates the hard work that goes into making a relationship last, but Rose sees the whole EP as of a piece.
“‘Americana’ may be a political song, but it is still personal,” she says. “All of these songs have this common thread of loss, and so I think ‘Americana’ fits in with the other songs because it is talking about loss. Stylistically there are common threads, too. All the songs are more traditional and less experimental than the folk we’ve done in the past, so it’s a little bit of a tribute, but also a little bit of a declaration that we can do this, too.”
Nichols notes another irony about the song “Americana”: It was written as a kind of kiss-off to the genre—“a nail in the coffin,” he says—but it ended up further ingraining the duo in that world.
“I feel like there’s more pressure on us now that we’re pointing out the racial issues,” Nichols says. “We always have to be performing our best, because we can’t be perceived as the band that’s complaining that we’re not doing as well because of race. We have to be as good as any other band, because people are going to be looking at us like, ‘Well, you’re talking about it. Now you have to back it up.’”
Nickel&Rose play an EP release show Saturday, Sept. 1, at Company Brewing at 8:30 p.m. with King Courteen and Grasping at Straws.
