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Gregory Alan Isakov: A Master of Modern Folk Music

Gregory Alan Isakov: A Master of Modern Folk Music

Message from Walker: “Intellectual Takeout depends on donors like you to bring my work and the work of my stellar colleagues to the public. I love writing about art, culture, rural life, literature, and philosophy for ITO. If you value that kind of content too, please consider making a donation today. Together, we can help spread time-tested traditional ideals.”


Maybe it’s the fact that Gregory Alan Isakov also works as a farmer, supplying some hundred CSAs and a few restaurants in Boulder, that makes his music so earthy, raw, and real. Isakov’s lyrics and sound–like his plants–are deeply rooted in the landscape, specifically the Western U.S.

South-African born but residing in the U.S. since childhood, Isakov calls a Colorado farm home, and that landscape plays a central role in his music. In Isakov’s own words, it becomes a “character” in the songs:

Landscape makes it into my writing quite a bit, and almost this world that, as artists, we sort of draw from, I think everyone has their own kind of world that they draw from, and for me, there’s a lot of character in nature – it’s a giant character in this kind of world that the songs come from.

Wide-open, echoing sonics reinforce the broad spacial feel of the music. When you listen, you find yourself on an open plain, or at the foot of a mountain, or in a solemn northern forest, or maybe in a small rural town, with the wind tousling your hair.

To my mind, Isakov’s experiences as a real-life farmer lend authenticity to his descriptions of landscape as well as rural and agricultural life in America in a way that many country singers are unable. The typical country singer on the radio may talk about tractors, dirt roads, and being a redneck, but he likely lives in the elegant neighborhoods of Nashville. He’s playing a part, offering a mere simulacrum of American rural life that is actually foreign to his own experience.

Not so with Isakov. His hands bear the marks, cuts, and dirt of his labor in and with the earth. And so when he sings about dirt roads, horses, or trucks, it’s real. Similarly, much of his music is recorded in a converted shed at his farm, not some slick, plush studio. You can almost taste the dust and dirt, smell the old wood of the shed when you listen to the music.

This, I theorize, is part of what makes folk music folk music: a groundedness in the physical environment, the earth, the people of a particular place. Traditionally, folk music was played by the “common folk”–laborers, farmhands, craftsman–those in the most direct contact with the physical world, which is shaped by local climate, topography, flora and fauna. Hence folk music possesses distinct personality that varies from one locale to the next. Isakov’s music is distinctively American, shot through with American place names and ethos and traditional American instrumentation, including fiddle and banjo.

That being said, Isakov’s music—like all great music—possesses a universality that makes it relevant across time and space. It beautifully blends the cinematic, cosmic, and universal with the intimate, personal, and concrete. Consider, for example, these lyrics from a song called “Caves”:

You go ahead
There’s something I forgot
Walk slow and I’ll catch up
Let’s hear the stars do their talking

I used to love caves
Stumble out into that pink sky
Remember that bright hollow moon
It showed our insides on our outsides

This town closes down the same time every day
Put out the smoke in your mind
Let’s put all these words away
Let’s put all these words away

Here, Isakov blends dramatic, visionary images with the normal phrasing of everyday speech. The singer sounds like someone you might meet on the street, yet we have the impression he is talking about profound spiritual truths. These truths are often examined through nature: The bright moon reveals the interior of the singer and whomever he is addressing (“showed our insides on our outsides”). Hearts have been exposed, though what they show remains unspoken.

Similarly, the singer mentions casually the talking of the stars; we aren’t privy to what they say, but we can imagine, whatever it is, it must be earth-shaking revelations, even though paired with simple statements like, “You go ahead … walk slow and I’ll catch up.”

The singer refers to a cave, painting a vivid picture of stumbling out from the dark into a suddenly bright sky to be filled with wonder. The line possesses a mythic or visionary quality: The heavens open up; some unspeakable new vista has unfurled. One is reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave, or Tolkien’s fellowship emerging from the Mines of Moria.

Finally, Isakov recognizes that confronted with this darkly beautiful world of ours, full of meaning, words are not enough. “Let’s put all these words away,” he sings softly. Yet somehow he uses words to communicate what words cannot say! Now that’s good writing.

The everyday language in songs like “Caves” is another trademark of folk music. Folk music occupies itself with the everyday experiences of the average person. From worn out jeans to coffee cups to baseball cards to broken down trucks, Isakov’s songs are filled with the simple happenings of life that are somehow and at the same time weighted with great meaning, as we saw with “Caves.” His music is both “expansive and intimate,” as Mitch Mosk notes for Atwood Magazine.

Such is the power of poetry–of which music is perhaps the most popular form in our time–that with its King Midas’s touch it turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. Or, to use another metaphor, great art allows us to put on glasses that clarify our vision, enabling us to see the import of the seemingly insignificant. Beautiful music like Isakov’s casts a golden glaze over the world, revealing it in its resplendent and mysterious shades. Isakov’s music takes us “to another place”–a place that turns out to be paradoxically right here.

Thus, the power of Isakov’s poetry is its alchemical mixture of everyday and mystical, familiar and alien. Here are some lines from a song called “Liars”:

Seems these old hills
They keep on calling
The clouds ’round here talk
Man, I been listening
I sold all these clothes
To buy me this land
I’m sorta happy most of the time.

This potent combination of everyday and faraway inspires a sense of nameless yearning.

Rich harmonies, gritty guitars, plunking banjo, makeshift percussion, just the right touches of modern drums and electric instrumentation, and Isakov’s warm, relaxed, yet vulnerable voice laid down over a bed of echoing soundscapes combine into an entrancing ensemble that develops organically out of the American folk tradition, sounding both contemporary and vintage.

Isakov’s music feels deeply traditional without being stagnant or antique. Like the best folk traditions, it remains faithful to the past while speaking to the everyday lives of people today. And, though colored by contemporary society, those experiences ultimately fall into broadly recognizable human stories that transcend time. Frequent themes in Isakov’s oeuvre include love, both lost and found, wanderlust, grief, failure, brokenness, redemption, hope, loneliness, and the mystery of the world that surrounds us.

Artists like Gregory Alan Isakov give hope for the future of music and exemplify in their work the traits that endure: authenticity, vulnerability, tradition, narrative power, lyrical depth, and universal themes.

Image credit: “Gregory Alan Isakov” by rgmcfadden on Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0. Background removed.

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Walker Larson
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    Daniel
    October 29, 2024, 7:42 am

    Thank you for the introduction, Walker!!

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