Q&A: Rachel Harrington Stands At The Crossroads of Country, Folk, And Bluegrass

Hailing from the Northwest United States, Rachel Harrington fuses country, folk, and bluegrass to form her instrumentally rich brand of music. She released her debut album, The Bootlegger’s Daughter, this past May on her own record label, SkinnyDennis Records, and has already opened for seasoned veterans Guy Clark and Todd Snider. After discovering her music through MySpace and becoming hooked I requested an interview.

I noticed that your debut album, The Bootlegger’s Daughter, was recently released. Where did inspiration for the name come from?

Regarding the title, it’s a line from track #5. I had a handful of CD title ideas at the time. But later in the recording process, when we got to thinking about graphic design, I began looking at museum archives and such for old photographs from the northwest. (I really wanted to avoid having some picture of me on the cover because the CD is not about me, it’s about the CD. It’s like an author writing a novel and putting a big picture of themselves on the front. The cover shouldn’t be about the writer, it should be about the book.) As soon as I found that shot of the girl on the car in Oregon, circa 1925, I said there she is–the bootlegger’s daughter.

http://historicphotoarchive.com/subject/auto.html

And I grew up in Oregon, so I have a soft spot there.

Sweet story, and the picture does fit seamlessly with that particular lyric. If you could choose only one song from your album to showcase to a new listener to represent your music, which one would you choose?

That’s hard to say, but I’d probably play “Sunshine Girl”. It’s what I start every show with and so it was natural to put it first on the CD.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the diversity of tracks from the CD that radio has decided to play. Rather than one or two tracks getting lots of airplay, it’s been 6 or 7 tracks getting real regular airplay.

That said, I think I’ve gotten most radio listener response from “Sunshine Girl” and “Walk to You”, two very different tracks.

I checked them out on your MySpace page and both have absolutely beautiful instrumentation, which can be said for your other songs as well. Do you try to make the instrumentation a focal point of your songs, or is it just something that comes together naturally?

When I play live, I’m usually playing just as a duo. On occasion, I’ll get a third person–sometimes fiddle, sometimes mandolin, sometimes pedal steel, whatever–depending on who is available. I’d been playing this collection of songs the past few years, with a variety of instruments, so by the time I went into the studio, I had a really clear idea of the arrangements I wanted on each song. so that was where we started.

If only every song went through such rigorous testing…

Did you have any experience producing albums prior to The Bootlegger’s Daughter?

No prior experience, at all, whatsoever. It was initiation by fire.

So I had these original ideas that were pretty well formulated and fairly well tested. We brought people in, laid down all the tracks and then that’s where the rubber meets the road. You listen back and go, “oh, ok, well I guess that harmonica thing we got there just doesn’t work like I had remembered it did” or you know, maybe a string was slightly out of tune and we didn’t catch it until the studio player was in another state, or hey since we’ve got the banjo here, let’s go ahead and try it on this other tune too…

In the end, we recorded probably twice as many instruments as we actually used in the final mix. The real work (and the bulk of the time) was spent editing all of that down to what I felt was just the essential stuff needed to make the song repeatedly listenable, enough to make it engaging and interesting to the ear after repeated listens (which is what recorded music is for), without weighing the song down.

For the most [part], I think we succeeded.

Is that something you enjoyed enough to do again?

My first thought is that that’s rather like asking a new mother if she enjoyed her labor. :)

Only the fruit of the labor makes it worth it all. But yes, I look very forward to making another one soon!

Nice analogy. Before we wrap this up, what are some of your short term goals that you’d like to accomplish with your music?

Most recently, my short term goal was to get The Bootlegger’s Daughter into top 40 on the Americana Music Association’s radio chart. It just reached #36 last week.

With that, I’m now working on booking a UK tour for October. The CD has been getting great airplay overseas (was #1 on the Euro-Americana Chart in April). The fall will also bring additional work to be done in terms of booking festival dates for next summer.

As this was a completely independent project, there is the financial matter of paying off the remaining CD-related expenses, about $6500 as of this writing (total cost of the CD was right around $20,000). And it is slow going. I read a NY Times article last month that reported CD sales being down over 200% for the year so far. Not exactly music to a musicians ears.

When I complained to a friend about the amount of $$ it took to make this CD, he suggested I consider it tuition: for all the learning I did in the last year and a half - the studio time and experience, the production and editing, the mixing and mastering, the promotion and publicity.

So, come this winter, the CD will be paid off. And I look very forward to using the education it gave me in making another CD in 2008.

Between now and then? I just need to write the best songs I can.

Listen to songs from The Bootlegger’s Daughter on Rachel Harrington’s MySpace..