Issue #13: Nick Shoulders' Anti-Fascist 'Grandpa Music'

A Q&A on growing up in Arkansas, the beauties of busking, and fighting for a better kind of country.

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by Nick Futch

By Natalie

Nick Shoulders' most-streamed song subverts expectations from its opening seconds: it begins not with a familiar guitar riff or gruff lyric, but with the early-30s Arkansan crooning a pretty, eerie and wordless melody in a sweet falsetto. "Snakes and Waterfalls" certainly sounds like the product of some long bygone era, but in a way that's arresting as much as it is comforting. 

It was to me, at least, when it popped up via my Spotify algorithm (sorry, it happens). I was instantly captivated by the song, a rough-around-the-edges ode to the lush ecosystems of Shoulders' home state — "This place might be cursed after all/but it's my land, of snakes and waterfalls," he sings — and by Shoulders' distinctive and powerful voice, which draws not so much from old country music but from a pre-country era. 78s rather than 45s, as it were.

More surprising still was what I found when I started listening through his catalog: a pitch-perfect anti-fascist anthem called "Bound and Determineded" that still gives me chills about a thousand listens later. It's funny and fiercely incisive, the optimal counterpoint to so many overwrought and vague "political" statement songs: "Though I might eat all of my steaks rare," Shoulders sings, "I never sold my soul to a billionaire" — a line to which I can't help but fist pump.

Neither can anyone else, as evidenced by the two raucous, festive shows I've seen him and his Okay Crawdad Band play in Fort Worth. Fort Worth is not necessarily the first place you (or I) think of when we imagine a great audience for progressive country (or something) music — and yet when Shoulders sang, "If you were country/you'd save your land from being spoiled/Do you drink water? Do you breathe air?" at a show in early May, literally the entire crowd joined for the next line: "I think if you were really country, you would fucking care!" They cheered just as loud when he sang "I wish ancestral lands belonged to Indigenous people" during "Won't Fence Us In," the visionary riff on "Don't Fence Me In" off his upcoming fourth studio album All Bad, out September 8.

The overwhelming response, I think, stems from both the fact that Shoulders and his band are great musicians who have distilled a kind of old-time country via New Orleans jazz, Cajun music and '50s garage rock sound into something fun, danceable and compelling (as well as the ideal setting for Shoulders' yodeling, whistling and generally otherworldly vocal dexterity) and from the relatable honesty of his songs — especially for other progressive Southerners (a group I am definitely a new member of) who have spent a lifetime face-to-face with all the things blue-staters decry from afar. They are neither nihilistic nor blandly upbeat; there is a taste of aggressive online (All Bad opens with a pitch-shifted clip from Garth Brooks' first Facebook video, a stroke of genius) but it's far eclipsed by an earthy realness that's increasingly hard to find. 

Seeing him and his band play is surprising and exciting because of the way they cull the past to aggressively forward-looking ends: Shoulders' stage patter sounds like he's a prewar radio DJ or carnival barker, not a Millennial musician…until he starts talking about mental health or activism, that is. I spoke with Shoulders (yes, it's his real name) before his last Fort Worth show — below is an edited version of our conversation.

How did you start playing music? What were some of your earliest influences?

My parents did not play instruments nor were they very interested in music, but my dad was a good whistler. Both sides of my family were very musical, but in completely different strains. My Arkansas side of the family was kind of the piney woods, Deep South gospel — a vibrato-rich, almost, like, operatic way of singing that was sort of pre-microphone. Like a clapboard church sort of thing. My grandfather on that side actually has like eight albums that I put on YouTube: like, Pat Riley Sings Country, Pat Riley Sings Patriotic Music, Pat Riley Sings Gospel, that kind of thing. On my dad's side, my grandfather and my grandmother both had cool rich musical lineage in the Missouri Ozarks — my great-grandma played piano for the silent movies. They would play Red River Dave recordings, old Bob Wills and stuff like that, a lot of the old cowboy singers along with Hank Williams and Patsy Cline and everyone else. I ended up with [my grandfather's] fiddle. 

So I was exposed to music without being able to participate in it — I was a kid that loved doing as many musical-sounding things as possible without any instruments in my hand. Then, when I was 13, I finally got a hold of a Walmart drum set, spray-painted pink and started playing in crappy punk and metal bands. Being around all the warbly archaic music was cool, but I definitely reacted against it first by playing that kind of music. After a few years, I realized that I had the skill set to get into this stuff that I'm actually more equipped to do —  so in my late teens and early 20s, I started playing banjo and getting into old time music and then on into traditional country. Definitely started with the crappy Walmart drum set, though.

When I was first trying to get into the older songs and try to learn them by myself, I would run them by my grandparents and be like, "Hey, do you know this one?" And of course they knew all the recordings and lyrics and could hop in and sing along sometimes. I have a bunch of their albums now — the old literal albums, binders full of 78s. Slim Whitman and all those kind of wobbly, freaky old cowboy singers. Well, fake cowboy singers.

At what point did you realize you had the vocal capacity to mimic that kind of older stuff?

I remember being a little kid and like, kind of making fun of my grandparents music? Doing the operatic old gospel singing more or less just out of mimicry, figuring out I could do it and not always in a wholly congratulatory light. I also learned how to do owl calls and stuff, and I remember [learning] some of my early diaphragm control from that — like, "Oh, that's how you make it louder and pitch this certain way, you push out of your your midsection instead of singing out of your head." I don't have any formal singing or really any music training, but I did figure out kind of a physical skill set from whooping and hollering with my neighbors, making owl calls, and stuff like that.

When you were playing in punk bands and stuff, which was like, into your early 20s...?

Basically from 15 to 25, I was very dedicated to being like, a small town Arkansas rocker. I wanted to just be in all the loudest worst bands. When we were in our bad teenage metalcore years, I would do fiddle songs on the harmonica in between our songs — I'd just stomp the kick drum and play like, "Soldier's Joy" or something and the band would tune really fast and then I'd be like, "Okay, I'm done doing the hokey hillbilly thing" and we'd start up again. We never were really able to rub the dirt off of what we were trying to do, we were always still heavily influenced by the material circumstances of our existence in northwest Arkansas.

And at a certain point, you moved to New Orleans, right?

Actually, I lived in my van out West and that's where I met Cheech [Moosekian, the band’s drummer]. We had a sort of busking/dance band that did traditional country, and I was playing snare drum. After a stint of moving home and living with my grandma and actually kind of teaching myself guitar and being like, "Okay, I think I want to try to write these songs and move down there," I eventually ended up in New Orleans. She had moved down there, and Grant [D’Aubin, the band’s bassist] had moved down there around the same time; we sort of all recombined and that became the band. That would have been fall 2017. 

by Joseph Wyman

What did you feel your place in the New Orleans musical zeitgeist was? I feel like I hear a lot of that city in your music.

I mean, I have some Louisiana roots and distant family, and I've always been fascinated by the place. When I visited early on, I was just like, "I'm gonna end up here, it's too cool." But yeah, there's a ton of rhythm and blues and Creole and Cajun influence on the music. Cheech plays in a Cajun band, Grant played on Bourbon Street doing the Cajun gigs for four hours at a time. The rhythm section is heavily influenced by this confluence at the base of the Mississippi River where you know, jazz, ragtime, blues, rock and roll, country all has its physical nexus. Because it's a dance scene, even the way I play guitar is very rhythmic. It was all to accommodate the Cajun/rhythm and blues-influenced dancing that is big down there. It's cool that it's survived, but it's definitely different from a lot of places. It's not Nashville, it's not talent scouts and record reps.

Just bringing up Nashville, as you've started to find an audience and people try to put you into whatever the right sales category would be — "Americana," presumably — have you felt any pressure to sort of get into that scene? 

We don't know any better. For the new record, we just went back and did exactly the same thing we've done all along, which is with our friends, a couple of microphones, tape machine and a shotgun house next to the levee. Very much a DIY operation. But we had a really funny conversation last night, where somebody was like, "I didn't like you on Spotify because it's very rockabilly, but I liked you live because it's very bluegrass," and it was the exact same band and instrumentation. It was hilarious, and yeah, the word Americana got used. 

But I feel that country music is a misnomer for so many reasons. It does feel like such an insidious, politically-charged marketing scheme. Also, saying "Southern vernacular music with hard syncopation and the influences of historical inequity" doesn't really catch it either, because that's obviously a mouthful. So I say "grandpa music" when people bring it up, because I really and truly am trying to embody a physical way of singing that we consider an inheritance. It's different from being like, "We want to be a bluegrass band," or "We want to be an Americana band." The fact that they picked up on rockabilly, though, is funny, because we definitely reference some hyper-obscure rural rockabilly from northern Mississippi from the '50s that I don't think a ton of people listen to, so I'm glad they caught it. 

When did you decide you wanted to kind of reclaim, like you're saying, southern vernacular music from a more radical, progressive — whatever word you want to use for "not Republican" — political perspective?

It would be hard to say, because a part of me definitely feels like it's a bit of a life project. A lot of the same stuff we used to yell in our crappy metal and punk bands — about feeling alienated by church and completely and constantly swimming upstream of this dominant culture that we were in — we're just yodeling them now. I do remember an instance of putting on Hank Williams — I was probably 19 or 20, and I was living in Denver briefly — and someone said something defective to the effect of, "What is this cross-burner music?"

That was right when I was first leaving Arkansas as a teenager, trying out college and failing, being like, "I want to try to learn old time banjo, I'd like to take this harmonica that I was just screwing around on and actually learning to play it, I would like to actually listen to my grandparents' recordings for a second time rather than just make fun of them." So I would say leaving Arkansas initially and going to a city that had twice as many people as the whole state was probably one of the nexuses where I was like, "I think this is something I adore, and I think it deserves a lot better."

Stylistically, how did you pin down this particular interpretation of all the different influences you're mentioning? When did you feel like you had sort of distilled it? Like, "That's the thing I want to replicate."

I do feel like it's in constant process. But when I lived in my van out West and met all these amazing musicians and artists out of a world I could have never had access to back home, I actually found what I had and held dear. I held it up against the national country scene as well as the traditional, nerdy, academic side of things (like the old-time world, the fiddle festivals etc.), all of which I was really encountering for the first time. That's when I was like, "Okay, I need to complement this and react to it, and create something that's ours." 

The experience of Arkansas, Louisiana, eastern Oklahoma, like it's very peculiar and particular to the region — it's different from the Southern plains. It's kind of its own strange, economically-depressed thing. That van-dwelling phase was when I realized I needed to sort of — as you said — distill it into something a little more peculiar to me and not just a general reinterpretation. As an illustrator, doing all the album art and the merch and stuff like that, I've also tried really hard to make a distinct visual universe around the songs and the art form. 

How do you feel you've been able to find an audience? What modes have worked best as far as drawing people to your music?

I was doing street music out west, playing on the corners, and doing one-man-band stuff. Frankly, I was just trying to get my chops and make ends meet. But I started seeing that people were reacting to the yodels that I thought were kind of novel and obnoxious, and were interested in the whistles that, to me, were just things my dad and grandpa did. When I could gauge an audience's reaction in real time, by tens of dollars, that really gave me a good idea of what worked, how to stay engaged and be engaging. 

That whole street music phase — which ended in New Orleans, doing that there as well as playing the clubs — was definitely one of the better ways to learn about performing. Also physically, it just helps you sing louder and more clearly, and it makes you a more weathered performer in a real literal sense. You get to experience environmental challenges, and either quit or keep going. I can't overstate how much I attribute some of the strengths of the music to the busking scene.

With the more explicitly political songs, have you ever like gotten much backlash? Or do you feel like you're mostly preaching to the choir, as it were?

It's been a mixed bag. For example, when we played [in Fort Worth] with Sierra [Ferrell], it was a more ideologically diverse crowd than we usually play. And I said something like, "It would be cool to have access to mental healthcare," and somebody yelled "Greatest country on Earth!" And that pretty much sums up the vast majority of the real time pushback. It's not going to stay that way, I know that it's only a matter of time until there's more, but I will say it's a huge relief to endure maybe people walking out or yelling the occasional thing or giving the odd look as opposed to what I experienced online during the pandemic. 

As soon as lockdown started, a video of mine got picked up, and there was a lot more attention than I was used to. I was saying what I've always felt then known to be true...and I saw some really ugly stuff out of people on the internet. People want to shoot protesters and do all sorts of awful stuff, and they told me all about it. Live, we have to really put our necks out there and it feels uncomfortable, and there are moments that are pretty raw. But I would much rather be put in that position than to be in comment wars with psychopaths for the rest of my life. 

There are so many other people within whatever this broad world of music is who are trying to make statements and be allies in a way that is very sincere and admirable, but like, the music itself, is so...not fun. Why do you incorporate humor in your songs and sort of take a lighter touch that (I think) makes them a little more compelling? 

I think maybe it's connected to the fact that I don't feel like I'm coming from a clean slate or an all-knowing, life-long exposure to these ideas, or to the concept of being political whatsoever. That continual growth of access and ideas, that need and thirst to understand and actually embody ideas in a way that's not abstract has been part of the reason that I think that these songs don't come off as preaching. Because I never liked getting preached at and I never stuck around for it. Just trying to get the most basic understanding of how we arrived where we are as a country, how much people are denied by their material circumstances and where they come from, and their cultural and economic plight — I was right there, I didn't have any of that. 

That's part of why I try to extend as much grace into this as I can. Shoot, I could very easily just be as angry as I actually am. That's the simple answer. But I really, genuinely don't want to live in some permanently combative reality. Having that capacity for people's change — I wouldn't have changed if someone else hadn't. I try to make the songs a little more accessible, because I could just browbeat someone and be as completely justified in my misgivings as I want to, but they're not going to budge. If the goal is to compel somebody to see the reason they might be able to budge, I think that's more important than being right.

That's interesting too, because I think so many of those other "statement" songs come from a fear of not being right — of performing correctness, in some ways. 

And also not having any conviction in their beliefs...the aversion to…

Saying exactly what you mean.

Yeah. Exactly. 

But I think a lot of the people who are doing it haven't gone that far in even... thinking about the issues. 

We genuinely don't want to just be bare minimum not-fascists. That seems to be the standard that has gotten us here. That sense of duty to resistance can be misplaced, and can be so warped and contorted in people — and it also can be put into actionable grievance. We're trying to find where people's anger is, and their anti-authoritarian tendencies — even the ones they express in ways that we may not agree with (let's face it, voting for Donald Trump was one of them). Those acts of trying to challenge and disrupt a status quo that's venomous, taking those thoughts and putting them in a place that is actually grounded in reality. Then, there's something that we can all work with. 

Is there anyone whose career that you admire or would ideally want to emulate?

I think Hazel Dickens is so cool. In the Ozarks, we don't have coal. There's certain things about her life that I would not ever try to emulate or be a part of — the extractive industry that people like her were exposed to is so much more profoundly gnarly than a lot of the stuff that we ran into. But just being someone who was folk and gave a shit for the right reasons and put in the time and also was just an unabashedly raw singer. When you listen to her sing, it's everything — that is yelling in the woods, that's trying to find your neighbors, that's the same stuff that I heard.

People like her on the labor and activism side of things I sure would like to be like, but honestly, I kind of see myself ending up a lot more like Almeda Riddle: just an old lady who had people over, and they would share songs and make quilts and stuff. I think I'm kind of a permanent grandma and so that's probably the career I'd shoot for.