The Chart-Topping Blackberry Bushes
Earlier this year, stringband The Blackberry Bushes recorded a full album project, Little Bit of Grace here at Empty Sea. I engineered the album and co-produced the album with Matt Sirceley. Since then, the album is in its second pressing and climbing the roots and bluegrass charts due to extensive radio play.
I had brunch with Jes Raymond and Jakob Breitbach from the Bushes to see what they’re up to, and over some delicious green chile eggs at the Four Spoons Cafe, they told me what they were up to.
Jes Raymond (Blackberry Bushes)
So, in March of this year, you guys recorded an album with me called Little Bit of Grace . That album is now released to the world and doing pretty well – tell me what’s going on with it.
JES: Well, we’ve been touring that album and doing pretty well with it at shows, and we also did a radio promotional campaign with Hearth Music which has caused us to move up the charts in the last three weeks. We started out at #54 on the FolkDJ-List chart, and then we appeared on the Roots Music Report chart the next week at #36 on the bluegrass chart – pretty exciting because that’s an international chart. And then this past week we moved up to #19 on that chart – we beat out Rhonda Vincent, that’s our claim to fame. We’re also #1 on that chart in the state of Washington.
That’s really awesome. Where have you been traveling on tour?
JES: This spring we went down to Telluride, Colorado, then we did a loop back and around up the coast. We’ve been out to the Midwest, the Mississippi River Valley, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Now we’re about to leave for the East Coast – we’re going to tour our through the Midwest again, then take ourselves from New England down to the Southeast and back.
So from your most recent tour, what were your most favorite and least favorite gigs?
JAKOB: Oof! That’s easy. (laughs)
JES: On our last tour, we did a really wonderful small festival called the Boats and Bluegrass Festival that was right on the Mississppi River in Winona, Minnesota. There were some really great bands – I was really impressed with them. The people that put on the festival did a really good job for a startup festival of making it have the right energy!
JAKOB: You know a festival organizer spends time at the festival when he makes sure that the porta-potties are lit at night – and there was an exciting undercurrent to the whole festival because the river was rising one inch per hour – so two days after the festival finished the entire campgrounds were under about two feet of water.
Jes Raymond & Jakob Breitbach looking dapper
JES: So there was kind of a feeling of commitment for the people who were there.
JAKOB: Impending doom.
JES: Many of the artists camped, and we stayed up all night and created some memories we’ll keep, which was really great.
JAKOB: And the low point of the last tour was a no-turnout show in Des Moines, Iowa at 11 on a Sunday night.
Zero turnout?
JES: Well, it would have been zero which we were thinking would be kind of cool, because we had a video camera. There was a nice stage, a good sound system, and we thought, “we’ll get a good video of this.” But then these four kids who’d seen the poster came in – they thought we looked cool, and they wanted to see the show. They stood right up front and we played to them! But then when we looked back at the video it made it very obvious that there were four people watching us.
Four people clapping in an empty room. (laughs)
JES: It was a low point without being a bummer.
JAKOB: We set ourselves up to have low expectations.
JES: There was a pool in the hotel.
So do you have future album plans? Are you going to ride this one for a while?
JES: Really, we’ve already got enough tunes for another album, and our plan right now is to start working the songs that we’d like on our next album into our live set, and start playing with those in performance and see what happens by next spring.
There’s always that debate between recording fresh songs versus songs that you’ve polished up on tour.
JAKOB: We definitely did the unproven route on this last record. It was good in a lot of ways.
JES: I like that in some ways. I like the process of discovering in the studio. But [the next record] is a different one and we’ll try it a different way this time.
Click here to purchase Little Bit of Grace on CDBaby.
JAKOB: I think everyone’s a little more ready to go in and lay it down this time – to be more polished and prepared from the get-go.
JES: Really, [Little Bit of Grace] is what’s brought us into this fulltime touring mode I feel like we grew so much in the studio creating this album, and then since then as we’ve taken it out, we’re really on a learning curve as a group of musicians still. I feel like we’re almost a new band in the way we approach things. The process of recording this last album really influenced the way we approach our stage show and rehearsal.
Thanks guys. Have fun out there on the road!
JES: Thanks Michael.
Jes Raymond w/ Squirrel Butter
Tickets: $10 advance, $12 at the door.
Click here to purchase advance tickets.
There are things you should know about Jes Raymond. Her favorite word is wonder. She loves and laughs. She takes it too far, and she is not sorry.
Her songs have climbed mountains. They meditate on gravity, color and flight. They have gotten their hands as dirty as they get. They are a radio, forgotten in a treetop. They eat their bran cereal (they are good little songs). They are the small stories of our moments that become our days, that become our lives. And they are presented as they are lived, from a whisper to a wail.
Jes is a beguiling performer, combining her voice, poetry, and all the rhythm and sound one can juice from a guitar and feet. She notes her influences as country, old-time, swing jazz, rock and roll, bluegrass and folk. She is backed by Her Famous Band, headed up by Famous Jake (Jakob Breitbach) on fiddle and the Professor (Morgan Thompson) on acoustic bass.
She has performed solo, with Her Famous Band, and as a member of several ensembles including The Blackberry Bushes, and The New Prohibition Band. She performs in acoustic houses, house concerts, galleries, pubs, cafes, street corners and festival stages. Wherever she is playing, there is a celebration, and an audience who hears a path from tradition to modern illuminations.
Appearing with Jes is Squirrel Butter, the duo of Charlie Beck and Charmaine Li-Lei Slaven. Charlie and Charmaine began performing together in 2005 after meeting at the Portland Old Time Gathering and discovering that they lived merely blocks away from each other in Seattle. The pair began busking, and soon realized that their individual styles, sense of rhythm, and tendency towards the quirky and obscure blended well together. It wasn’t long before they began performing at venues off the street.
Charlie Beck, hailing from Indianapolis, Indiana, is a highly accomplished musician. His mastery of guitar and banjo come from years of consistent study. He is well versed in jazz and swing, is an avid enthusiast of old American blues and string band music. His repertoire includes a bushel of traditional folk tunes along with many jazz numbers. A talented songwriter, Charlie’s original compositions combine modern approaches with traditional styles, giving his songs a unique sound. Charlie is an outstanding vocalist, and also plays brilliantly on fiddle.
Charmaine “Lady Li-Lei” Slaven, from Stevensville, Montana, is a gifted dancer, and her skill at traditional percussive buckdancing is phenomenal. She is also an adept rhythm guitarist, ukulele player, and vocalist. Her clear, strong singing style is reminiscent of the Carter family. She brings a fine repertoire of traditional ballads to the duet, along with several of her original works.
