{"id":2451906,"date":"2019-12-05T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-05T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=317163"},"modified":"2019-12-05T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-12-05T23:00:00","slug":"folk-singer-and-farmer-gregory-alan-isakov-returns-to-belly-up-aspen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/folk-singer-and-farmer-gregory-alan-isakov-returns-to-belly-up-aspen\/","title":{"rendered":"Folk singer and farmer Gregory Alan Isakov returns to Belly Up Aspen"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Evening Machines” has been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.<\/strong>
Courtesy image<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Most musicians\u2019 touring and recording schedules are dictated by music label demands and marketing plans. These days, Gregory Alan Isakov\u2019s<\/a> run is according to the needs of beets, fennel and other crops on his 3-acre farm outside Boulder.<\/p>\n

The singer-songwriter, among the state\u2019s most beloved working artists, has in recent years devoted himself to the farm, working the land from the spring planting season through the fall harvest. Come winter, he hits the road to play music, which brings him back to Belly Up Aspen on Friday night during a Colorado stretch that also includes shows in Breckenridge, Estes Park, Steamboat Springs and Boulder this month.<\/p>\n

Isakov, 40, studied horticulture at Naropa in Boulder, but had all but given up farming as his stripped-down folk found a national audience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think, \u2018Gosh, three or four years ago the band and I were playing 200 shows a year or more,\u2019\u201d he said recently in a phone interview from the road in Indiana. \u201cIt was amazing, because I didn\u2019t know that was possible. It was a dream realized, like, \u2018Wow, we can do this, it\u2019s happening.\u2019 But I never investigated why.\u201d<\/p>\n

He fell prey to anxiety, he wasn\u2019t writing on tour and, after losing his home in Boulder and most of his possessions to a flood in 2013, Isakov decided to return to the rhythms of the land.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found I wasn\u2019t writing a lot, because we were traveling so much,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI missed work and I missed having the time to actually write about life that wasn\u2019t related to being on tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first album he\u2019s made in his barn studio on the farm, recorded mostly at night between producing vegetables for Front Range restaurants, is \u201cEvening Machines,\u201d which last month was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. It is filled with intelligent and economical lyrics to parse and pore over, lush melodies to hum and deceptively complex arrangements that include touches of pedal steel, electric guitar and strings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to make a lo-fi rock \u2019n\u2019 roll record,\u201d Isakov recalled. \u201cFor some reason, the record started and wanted to go in a different direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concurrently, the singer-songwriter took on other projects including his collaboration with the Colorado Symphony and 10 other national orchestras. The residue of that work is on the new record, which includes gorgeously integrated string arrangements on songs like \u201cSouthern Star.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI still trip out that that happened,\u201d Isakov said of the orchestral project.<\/p>\n

The record effectively employs nature metaphors \u2014 the colors of the sky, the angles of stars, tangles of brambles and the immensity of the sea \u2014 in diverse songs from the meditation on loss in \u201cWings in Black\u201d to the timely immigrant story \u201cBerth\u201d (Isakov immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa as a child).<\/p>\n

The bittersweet songs on \u201cEvening Machines\u201d were carved out from three dozen that he wrote and recorded for the project. And though it\u2019s his first full-length studio release since 2013\u2019s \u201cThe Weatherman,\u201d Isakov has many album\u2019s worth of unshared songs.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s been releasing music for nearly half his life, going back to his 2003 debut. But Isakov still finds every songwriting attempt a challenge and has learned to be patient with his creative process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel every time I try to write a song, it\u2019s brand new \u2014 like I\u2019ve never done it,\u201d he said. \u201cI wish it was more calculated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most often they start as poems or bits of prose, and as they become songs he waits \u2014 unsurprisingly for a guy who composes surrounded by his tended beds of greens, vegetables and flowers \u2014 to see whether they blossom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sit on songs for a long time and I like that feeling of a song when it\u2019s just sitting in the background of your life for a while,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m cool with letting it hang out for quite a long time. I know that\u2019s different than a lot of writers. I love that feeling of, \u2018Let\u2019s see where it can go. Is it going to stand the test of time if I come back to it in a few weeks or months? Will I still feel the same way about it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite commercial and critical success, Isakov has operated in DIY fashion from the beginning. He\u2019s always kept his music production in-house, recording at home and tracking all the instruments himself before bringing the band in, releasing albums through his own independent Suitcase Town Music label.<\/p>\n

So \u201cEvening Machines\u201d would seem to be a step toward the pop music mainstream. It\u2019s his first album licensed to a record label \u2014 Dualtone \u2014 and supported by marketing muscle he\u2019s never before had behind him, leading to a wider national audience, milestones like a sold-out Red Rocks show last year and the Grammy nod.<\/p>\n

The songs \u201cSan Luis\u201d and \u201cChemicals,\u201d from the new record, have racked up 21 million and 31 million Spotify streams, respectively, over the past year.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me it hasn\u2019t changed all that much,\u201d he said, adding that he and his manager, Sarah Levin, simply wanted to see what it\u2019d be like working with a label. \u201cWe didn\u2019t need to sign to a label, but thought it might be fun. It came out of this place of experimenting. I\u2019m not sure if we\u2019ll do the next one with a label or not, we\u2019re still figuring that out, but it was nice to see what it was like.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Evening Machines” has been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album.Courtesy image Most musicians\u2019 touring and recording schedules are dictated by music label demands and marketing plans. These days, Gregory Alan Isakov\u2019s run is according to the needs of beets, fennel and other crops on his 3-acre farm outside Boulder. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2451906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-19 03:33:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}