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Chicago Tribune
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Lydia Cash peels back the layers of her own life to share rich, evocative Americana-inspired rock music
'I kind of love that mix of excitement and fear, like on a roller coaster,' says Lydia Cash. Those warring emotions permeate Cash's latest body of work, including the singles 'We Can Never Go Back' and 'A Whole Summer of Loving You,' which were both released earlier this year. Confident and lyrically naked, Cash (yes, of that Cash family) peels back the layers of her own life — including the end of an eight-year relationship and marriage — to share rich, evocative Americana-inspired rock music. New and old fans can hear her latest tracks during a solo set at the Empty Bottle on May 23. 'I grew up knowing that I'm related to Johnny Cash, but it actually took me a really long time to realize the impact this man had,' Cash said about the famed country musician, her distant relative. 'I grew up thinking that he was a cousin who picked up a guitar sometimes. I didn't understand the weight of that until high school.' Yet despite the family connection, music performance was not modeled to Cash during her childhood. Having grown up in a conservative home in a small town outside of Birmingham, Alabama, writing and performance were things she discovered on her own. 'Music is something that I've always naturally felt drawn to for as long as I can remember,' she said. By age 9, Cash was writing lyrics in a Lisa Frank notebook. During high school, she began singing in church. But it was college that proved to be a major turning point for the musician. There, she made friends with artists and writers around the Auburn, Alabama, music scene who inspired her to take performing seriously. So she did. In 2013, Cash moved to Chicago to pursue music and visual art. 'It opened up my entire world,' she said about the city. 'It's honestly the best decision I've ever made, moving here.' Yet music didn't always come naturally. Cash focused on visual art, her other talent, becoming a full-time painter by 2016. The pandemic, like for many musicians, became a turning point. Cash and her then-husband moved to Nashville. 'I wanted to do the full thing. I wanted to tour. I wanted to play the big shows,' she recalled. The city, rich with songwriters pursuing country music, pushed her forward. 'Everyone's good there, so I really started digging in,' Cash added. But after two years of Nashville's competitive, sometimes 'pay-to-play' atmosphere, Cash came back to Chicago. Surprisingly, it was here where she connected to the local country music scene filled with musicians, fans and two-steppers. This found family filled with encouraging friends and collaborators has now made the music creation process easy and fulfilling for Cash. 'It's just the best, most humbling feeling in the world that my friends want to play my songs with me and share that experience with me,' she said. 'I think I just got addicted.' And creating has been a healing, transformative experience for Cash. While going through her separation, Cash found music — not visual art — to be her strongest creative outlet. 'Writing songs was almost all I could do,' she said. 'It's all I wanted to do.' Most of Cash's songs are a reflection of things happening to her in real time. 'Blush,' a sweet EP she released last summer, focused on the ups and downs — the intimacies — of new romance. Raw and vulnerable, Cash leans into her openness rather than shy away from it. 'I know that we all need more empathy. We all need more connection, and that's really the only goal at the end of the day,' she offered. 'To write a song that someone else is going to relate to in some way and feel that it's genuine.' But her latest batch of music signals a new direction in Cash's life and musical direction. The single 'Joshua Tree,' released earlier this month, takes on a more structurally assailing tone. Grungy yet melodic, the track is about wanting to start over and feeling frustrated with your current situation. Inspired by a trip last year to the desert California city, Cash called it a 'symbolic trip' and the beginning of a new, unpredictable single life. 'I think part of that trip was learning to lean into my friendships and let people in. It was exhilarating,' she recalled. That spirit will permeate Cash's upcoming record, titled 'Violet,' which is slated for release this fall. Filled with a mix of angry and restorative songs spun through ripping electric guitar solos, Cash said this new record is a reflection of everywhere she's been these last few years, and this invigorating, musically-rich state of her life. 'I truly just write when I feel like I've got something to say, or when the ideas are flowing, which I feel lucky about,' Cash began. 'Because lately, there's been a lot.'
Chicago Tribune
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Carolina Chauffe bring her music to Chicago's Empty Bottle as Hemlock
'I'm not in the business of twisting arms, whether it's my own or someone else's,' said Carolina Chauffe. Open, warm, and highly communicative, Chauffe, who performs as Hemlock, has made a name for herself around the country by embracing a free-spirited and loose approach to her music and her everyday life. Chauffe has been on tour for nearly a year and a half while the rest of her bandmates are still based in and living in the city. From the deep South to the upper Plains, Chauffe has found community and support for her music. And life on the road hasn't stopped her from creating and releasing new music. Some of this work can be heard on '444,' a best-of compilation of re-recorded cuts from Chauffe's ongoing song-a-day project. Audiences can catch another brief Hemlock return on April 10 at Empty Bottle. 'It has been miraculous and exhausting,' she said of her 'routine migratory patterns' of life on the road. Chauffe described herself as a follower of open doors. And so, as opportunities kept presenting themselves, her time on the road kept stretching onward. Since embarking on her tour, she has traveled to Colorado, Utah, Idaho and throughout the Pacific Northwest, among other parts of the country. Chauffe stays grounded through the support of her community. A willingness to rely on other people means that she must know how to ask for what she needs. Most nights, she sleeps in someone else's home, but there have been a handful of times when she's been in her car. It's not a glamorous life, but it's a satisfying one for Chauffe, who says this wide-reaching community of mutual reliance and dependability helps keep the whole experience enjoyable and motivating, rather than daunting. 'It's kind of an ongoing free fall with an infinite safety net from people that I care about in all corners of the country and beyond,' she said. Yet, she still encounters challenges, at least when it comes to her songwriting process. A solitary writer, Chauffe said it's difficult to find solo time to work on new music when surrounded by other people. 'It's one of those things where my well of inspiration is overflowing and I've got lots of notes in my phone's Notes app of little phrases, lyrics, potential songs, but not a lot of time to flesh them out until I settle down again,' she said. To work around this situation, she creates hard deadlines for herself ('gentle pressures,' she explained), like last November's song-a-day project. First launched in 2019, this yearly, month-long creative exercise gives her an extended opportunity to gain relative stillness during the chaos of life on the road by focusing on her songwriting. Chauffe relied on a practice of 'first thought, best thought' to craft her songs. Since first launching the project, Chauffe has chosen a different month each year, with the goal of creating a whole, long-form calendar of her music and songwriting journey over the course of 12 years. Some of her past song-a-day works were eventually fleshed out to their full potential for '444,' a 12-track compilation of Hemlock's past music. The result is a quietly compelling body of folk that is evocative and poignant. 'Day One,' the first song she created in February 2019 after launching the project, softly opens the compilation. 'Hyde Park,' first crafted in December 2021, is a bright, bouncy number that is given a rumbling injection of life from the propulsive instrumentation from her band. 'Hazards,' from May 2023, is given a more guttural edge that will remind the listener of early PJ Harvey. In its original form, the music was solid. On '444,' Hemlock sounds vital. For listeners interested in diving into her rich and comprehensive body of work (she's released 10 albums since 2018), '444' is a great place to start. Outside of music, Chauffe has plans to find a bedroom again that she can call her own. 'I think doing (touring) indefinitely is not the truest way to honor my own boundaries and energy and bandwidth,' she acknowledged. 'But I'm not willing to compromise or settle on what feels like the right spot for me. I really trust the cosmic, serendipitous presentation of what that will be.' Ideally, it'll happen around the summertime. But that's still a few months off. In the meantime, she'll continue this journey of traveling, reciprocity and performing her music for old fans and new communities. 'I feel really confident, more than I ever have before,' she said. 'I feel like my feet are underneath me in this practice, and any kind of impostor syndrome that I may have had when I was younger doesn't feel like it's with me anymore.' Britt Julious is a freelance critic.
Chicago Tribune
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
For Polish post-punk band Trupa Trupa, coming to Empty Bottle, the atrocities of the past aren't in the past
In 2018, Trupa Trupa was 15 minutes from taking the stage at the venerable South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, when singer and guitarist Grzegorz Kwiatkowski's amp burned out. His frantic search for a replacement ate up 10 minutes of the psychedelic post-punk band's 30-minute slot. Most bands would have sighed and shaved a few numbers off their setlist. Trupa Trupa? They blasted through the entire set as originally planned at double speed. 'Hello we are Trupa Trupa we are from the city of Gdańsk, Poland, where the Second World War started so … come on!' Kwiatkowski remembers yelling before diving into the set. No matter how crunched for time, Trupa Trupa — Kwiatkowski, fellow singer-guitarist Wojtek Juchniewicz, and drummer Tomek Pawluczuk — will always acknowledge their history. Trupa Trupa plays at the Empty Bottle on Feb. 25 to commemorate their just-released EP, 'Mourners.' The title track begins with pummeling percussion, then a primal cry from Juchniewicz. From there, he and Kwiatkowski trade off slightly altered verses: Kwiatkowski sings to 'let the mourners come,' inspired by a line from W.H. Auden's 'Funeral Blues' ('Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come'), while Juchniewicz sings to 'let the mourners go.' The song captures what Trupa Trupa is all about in three tight minutes. The trio's lyrics are mantric, minimal, haunting. They sing the vast majority of their songs in English, a nod to influences such as Fugazi, Sonic Youth, The Beatles and the Velvet Underground. (Another song off 'Mourners' is even titled 'Sister Ray' in tribute to the Velvets.) Trupa Trupa's lyrics tend to be wide-open, but one — or several — readings are, invariably, political. 'I wanna eat all my uniforms,' Kwiatkowski sings in a song off 2022's 'B FLAT A.' Only those listening closely will notice the refrain subtly change: 'I wanna be all my uniforms.' 'The songs of Trupa Trupa are always very paradoxical,' Kwiatkowski tells me on a video call from Gdańsk. 'You can think that maybe I am right, or maybe he is right. Usually, things are very complex. Things are not black and white — never, ever.' Above all, Trupa Trupa dwells on the painful work of memory — and Kwiatkowski insists that remembering is work. The grandson of a Polish prisoner of war who married into a Jewish family, Kwiatkowski, 40, grapples with World War II's long shadow across all facets of his life. He's a published poet, with a residency at Yale University; he names Edgar Lee Masters' 'Spoon River Anthology,' a cycle of short free verse poems documenting the residents of a fictional Illinois town, as a major influence. Kwiatkowski writes his own aphoristic, bluntly matter-of-fact poetry on a Nokia flip phone, so that each word, each letter, is painstakingly chosen. Take this poem from his soon-to-be-published collection 'Without an Orchestra,' translated into English by Peter Constantine: they killed eighty-year-old Chana Lerner because she was too old and Manya Fininberg's one-month baby because she was too young '(My work) is not about the past: It's about human beings, and the eternal possibility to make evil,' Kwiatkowski says. When he's not writing poetry or music about those evils, Kwiatkowski is fighting them in his native Gdańsk. He successfully urged the city to better recognize the sites of war crimes, including installing Stolpersteine ('stumbling stones,' or pavement plaques commemorating the former homes of people annihilated in the Holocaust). His day job is at a do-good social institute for metro area residents, founded by former Gdańsk mayor Paweł Adamowicz. An outspoken supporter of LGBTQ and immigrant rights and one-time organizer in the Solidarność trade union movement, Adamowicz was assassinated in 2019. After being invited back to South by Southwest, Trupa Trupa dedicated its performance at that year's festival to Adamowicz's memory. I first learned about Kwiatkowski — and, by extension, Trupa Trupa — through his semi-regular emails to journalists. Written in sparse, staggeringly candid English, Kwiatkowski's missives take after both the band's lyrics and Constantine's translations of his own poetry. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, they have all begun the same way: Greetings from the free city of Gdańsk. Kwiatkowski opened his most recent email to journalists, on Feb. 15, in the usual way. It continued, each sentence on its own line: 'I've written these words so many times. I've begun so many letters with them. And now, I believe in them more than ever. In this idea of freedom. In this necessity of freedom. Because we have just entered a new era of fascism. And, unfortunately, I am quite sure I am not exaggerating …' Despite breathless critical praise in the West — including from former Tribune critic Greg Kot, who listed Trupa Trupa's South by Southwest concert among his top concerts of 2018 — Trupa Trupa's members maintain they've been met with comparative indifference at home in Poland. Kwiatkowski believes Poland's dominant culture remains homo sovieticus, particularly in the face of resurgent fascism and historical denialism. 'You should be humble; you shouldn't be proud of yourself. You shouldn't smile at each other on the street; you shouldn't say hello,' he says. 'People were affected by the history, by the system. In my opinion, more or less, we are all victims. 'But I'm like a glitch in the system. I was always not like that.' In the case of the Museum Stutthof — commemorating the concentration camp east of Gdańsk, where some 65,000 people died and Kwiatkowski's grandfather was once incarcerated — he claims he's even been met with annoyance. The museum keeps a glass display case containing several thousand shoes, most of them belonging to murdered Jewish prisoners. But during a walk in the woods outside the museum in 2015, Kwiatkowski found more rotting shoes — in fact, mountains and mountains of them. Since then, prominent Jewish and human rights groups have joined him in petitioning the museum to inter the shoes and post commemorative signage. But in 2018, the Polish government made acknowledging Poland's cooperation in the Holocaust illegal, and Kwiatkowski claims the museum has not yet made good on its agreement to secure more of the shoes and mark the area. As recently as last month, a stroll through the woods with a BBC reporter turned up more decaying soles. The first he picked up belonged to a child. 'A lot of people told me, 'You're wasting your time; the time of the big wars and atrocities, it's finished.'' From 4,500 miles away, Kwiatkowski looks very tired. 'Unfortunately, they weren't right.'
