All About the ‘Tried To Do’s’: Live and Local with Trippers and Askers!

Jay Hammond of Trippers & Askers stopped by Live & Local this week, ahead of the release of his latest album, “Tried To Do’s.” Learn more about Trippers & Askers via Sleepy Cat Records. “(My) last record was a concept album about Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower,” Hammond says, “and I thought I was going to make a record about (her sequel) Parable of the Talents. But the thing went in a different direction in the end.” What emerged instead, Hammond says, was a collection of 11 tracks that engage with the process of grief. The title, “Tried To Do’s,” refers not to Octavia Butler but to a line from the revolutionary Black poet Nikki Giovanni: “I really don’t think life’s about the I-could-have-beens; I really think that life is all about the I-tried-to-dos.” “I was thinking about different religious traditions, the Buddhist tradition, Christianity, just different ways that different traditions move through that experience,” he says. “The very last song is a traditional (Christian) tune called ‘Old Churchyard,’ but the first one is called ‘No Coming, No Going,’ and that one is based on the (Buddhist) writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s something that helps me, is therapeutic for me, and I hope will be true for people who listen… “I think the reason that ‘Old Churchyard’ was interesting to me was that it felt like a sort of lost art of really looking death in the face, in this almost kind of haunted way. I felt like there was more in common with what I had been learning about Buddhist practice, where the idea is that you really experience the pain and the suffering – not just to wallow in it, but as a way of transforming it into something new.” Listen to the album and order it on Bandcamp. It was a journey for Hammond to transform those songs into reality, both in time and space: he says he started recording all the way back in 2019, with numerous recording sessions over the subsequent years in Brooklyn as well as the Triangle. The result is a stellar collection of 11 tracks, a showcase for Hammond’s signature dreamlike acoustic sound. Co-produced by Michael Hammond and Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, the album also features a powerhouse lineup of musicians – including Chessa Rich, Libby Rodenbough, Casey Toll, Joe Westerlund, Joseph Decosimo, and many more. “I call Trippers And Askers a collective,” Hammond says. “I always involve many, many people in the creation of the music. I write the song, the lyrics and the chords and all that, but the recording process is extremely collaborative…I try to bring people in who are great players, and I love putting a song in front of them, that they’ve never played, and get them in a nice space and just roll.” That’s a fitting approach for a project that’s named after a line from “Song of Myself,” the famous Walt Whitman poem that’s both radically individualistic and radically all-inclusive at the same time. “I was grappling with what it meant to be choosing a life as an artist,” Hammond says, “and that line, “Trippers and askers surround me…but they are not the Me myself” – I think it’s a way of pointing to the fact that what I’m doing is me, you know, but it’s also not me.” Now that the album is out, Hammond will take his collective onto the stage, with an album-release show Saturday, May 9, at the Pinhook in downtown Durham. Joseph Decosimo, one of the musicians who appears on “Tried To Do’s,” will open with a set of his own music. Visit ThePinhook.com for tickets and more information about Saturday’s album-release show. Jay Hammond stopped by Live & Local to discuss “Tried To Do’s” and play three songs: “Kin,” “Closeness,” and “Old Churchyard.” Listen: The post All About the ‘Tried To Do’s’: Live and Local with Trippers and Askers! appeared first on Chapelboro.com.