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In February 2019, musician/songwriter Benjamin Lazar Davis and Lake
Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney headed to West Africa to continue the
life-changing musical exploration they’d begun five years before.
Equipped with the most minimal of gear—a guitar, two-channel
recording console, and tiny toy keyboard—the longtime friends soon
struck up a collaboration with Stevo Atambire, a legendary Ghanaian
musician and master of a two-stringed lute called the kologo. Less
than a month later, Kearney and Davis returned to the U.S. with an
entire album’s worth of material: the 11 wildly imaginative yet
insightfully crafted songs featured on Still Flying, the duo’s
full-length debut.
A work of profoundly joyful camaraderie, Still Flying has its roots in
an impromptu session with Atambire, which was arranged by Colter
Harper (an ethnomusicologist Kearney and Davis met during their 2014
trip to Ghana). Upon gathering in an empty café, the musicians soon
found themselves swept up in an undeniable chemistry. “We were
coming up with melodies and counter-melodies and it was all so
electric,” Kearney recalls. “It was so exciting to experience this
combination of sounds completely different from anything I’d ever
heard.” As they worked with Atambire to shape the songs that now
comprise Still Flying, they also teamed up with Aaron Bebe Sukura: a
master of the gyil (an African wooden xylophone), and one of the
figures most essential to their studies in a Northwest Ghanaian
musical tradition known as Bawa. “I’ve never been a part of a
record where everything came together so quickly and with such
intensity and purpose, and I think that’s a testament to how
inspired we were by working with Aaron and Stevo and Colter,” says
Davis. “We never second-guessed anything, and the whole process was
just magic.”
In each track on Still Flying, Kearney and Davis show their singular
talent as both interpreters and innovators, reimagining traditional
gyil parts and drum patterns in the context of their own graceful
collision of folk and pop and indie-rock. Mainly recorded at a
makeshift studio in Harper’s home in Accra (Ghana’s capital), the
decidedly DIY album takes its title from a lighthearted track echoing
the kinetic energy of their connection with Atambire. “‘Still
Flying’ was one of the songs where Ben and I already had a lyrical
concept going, and then Stevo came in and had us break down the theme
and added to it from there,” Kearney explains. With its breezy
back-and-forth between English and Atambire’s native tongue of
Frafra, “Still Flying” unfolds in dreamlike storytelling that
perfectly captures the everlasting high of youthful abandon. “That
one was fun to write with Stevo, because it’s such a universal
thing: those memories of being young and doing crazy things, and how
the feeling of that time sort of stays with you for your whole
life,” says Kearney.
With Kearney and Atambire trading off vocals all throughout the album,
Still Flying kicks off with the wide-eyed reflection of
“Endings/Beginnings,” a song celebrating the sometimes-terrifying
possibility in rebirth and change. Lit up in effervescent beats and a
radiant choir of childlike vocals, the track also speaks to the
ceaseless experimentation that guided the album-making process.
“During the 2019 trip we took a 16-hour bus ride to visit Aaron’s
mom and witness where the music he was teaching us came from, and all
night long there was music blasting with this super-sick bassline,”
Davis remembers. “We had our phones out and started messing with
GarageBand, and ended up coming with that melody and chord progression
to ‘Endings/Beginnings.’”
One of the most riveting moments on Still Flying, “Dog Teeth”
underscores the abundant attention and ingenuity that Kearney and
Davis brought to the album’s rhythmic component. With its lyrics
offering a layered meditation on cycles of aggression, the song’s
shapeshifting rhythms took form as Davis electronically manipulated a
particularly frenetic piece Atambire had performed on kologo. “The
Ghanaian music we’re basing these songs on is mostly played at a
really fast tempo, and the whole album is us slowing things down and
creating a new kind of feel,” says Davis. “It was really exciting
to not only be so inspired by this music we were learning, but also to
bring something new to the table that we never would have created
without having spent that time in Ghana.” The result is a mood both
mournful and propulsive, setting the stage for lyrical interplay
exploring broken love and friendships.
An album informed by a passion for musical discovery, Still Flying
often finds Kearney and Davis chasing their curiosity to unpredictable
outcomes. In creating “The Weatherman,” for instance, the duo drew
inspiration from a musical fragment found on a USB stick given to them
by a convenience-store clerk in Sukura’s home village. “We were
asking around if anyone had any recordings of Bawa music to bring back
home, and this guy at the convenience store filled up a thumb drive
with a bunch of songs for us,” says Kearney. “There was one piece
that really stood out because it had a lot of programmed gyil sounds
and used a different scale, and when we got back to Accra there was
this long process of transcribing everything, then disassembling and
reassembling the different parts. Through all that, we ended up coming
up with the backing track to “The Weatherman.” A soulful and
groove-heavy number, “The Weatherman” is also threaded with
sharply poetic commentary on climate change. “It’s about
recognizing that the world that we live in won’t look the same very
soon, unless we change what’s happening,” says Kearney. “It’s
asking, ‘Could we be the last to see the world this way, in all its
richness and beauty?’”
In the spirit of honoring Still Flying’s cross-cultural origins,
Kearney and Davis adorned the album’s tracklist with two pieces of
Bawa music, each performed by Sukura. “We wanted to put that
cross-cultural aspect on display, rather than bury it or present these
songs without context,” says Kearney. As she points out, Still
Flying follows from years of a shared fascination with West African
music, beginning back when the two friends were students majoring in
jazz bass at The New England Conservatory. Not long after graduating,
Davis journeyed to West Africa for the first time, a 2009 trip that
included a chance encounter with Sukura. After several years of
playing with Davis in myriad projects and sharing the stage at
countless shows, Kearney proposed traveling to Ghana together to study
the region’s music with the masters themselves. Their search for a
teacher quickly led them to Sukura, who began giving them gyil lessons
and later introduced them to Colter Harper (his fellow professor at
the University of Ghana). Over the course of their four-week trip in
2014, Kearney and Davis seized on the overwhelming inspiration of
their surroundings by recording with Harper at Vivivi Studios,
resulting in their critically praised 2015 EP Bawa.
In looking back on the making of Still Flying, Davis recalls an
especially poignant moment that transpired when Sukura brought them to
a village inhabited by the Sissala people of upper west Ghana. “The
chief was so excited about introducing us to his culture, and said how
that was his job—to promote the culture of the Sissala tribe,”
says Davis. “It made me think how generous Aaron and Stevo were in
sharing not only their personal takes on their music, but also the
very deep history that runs within the tradition of that music. I was
just struck by how much it means for all of them to make sure their
music lives on not just in Ghana, but throughout the whole world.”
With the release of Still Flying, Kearney and Davis ultimately hope to
extend that sense of connectedness to each of their listeners.
“I’m so excited to celebrate the spirit of meeting these musicians
from another part of the world who are just as passionate as we are
about creating something new together,” says Kearney. “Hopefully
when people hear the record, they can feel the same electricity we
felt when we first played with Stevo, and had that incredible feeling
of watching some flower we’d never seen before just emerge before
our eyes.”
BRIDGET KEARNEY AND BENJAMIN LAZAR DAVIS
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"'I May Be Lost But I'm Laughing' is well worth the full listen – an
album full of color and emotion, it resonates with the glow of an
experiment gone right. It is everything and nothing, a boundaryless
indulgence that goes where it wants to go with neither shame, nor
expectation."
- Atwood Magazine
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29/05/2020 Last update