because that just said that I'm mostly gonna be talking to you tonight. Okay, yeah, we'll just send him out of the room. Or I'll just cut out. Yeah, I'll cut out everything.
Hello and welcome to WNC Original Music, episode 122, the oldest man to ever live episode. Very happy to have on this week's episode the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs. They are Zach and Kendra Harding. They are ostensibly a folk group from Western North Carolina, but they delve into other genres as well, which is no more apparent than on their most recent album, Folk-ish.
And that's not my natural stammer, that's how it's written. They still have a lot of traditional folk influences in this new album, but you're gonna hear some new flavors there as well. You can find Kendra and Zach at brownmountainlightningbugs.com, and of course we'll have links to their music and their social media and the show notes, so make sure to check that out. They do a lot of cool stuff on social media too.
You'll see clips of their live performances and a lot of extras there as well. And now ladies and gentlemen, the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs. So we have two dogs, and one of them already had her own feature song on our first album, which was Joni Girl, which Zach wrote before I ever even had my dog. And one morning I woke up, and I saw one of the dogs, we have a border collie, and a border collie mix in a lab mix.
I woke up in the border collie mix there, and she's got this white kind of collar, and she looks kind of like the Joker. She kind of got this psychotic look, and so she was standing there in the early morning light in the shadow, looking at me, waiting for me to get up to give her breakfast. And so I got that first line, Joker's at my bedside, and then a couple weeks later, Zach was noodling around on the banjo, and so I pulled that line out of my brain, and then from there it was, what if I just wrote a whole song about both of our dogs? And so the verses are about each, a mix of each dog, and then the choruses are about both of them together.
But there's no like direct dog reference. It's all sort of somewhat veiled in there. Yes, it was meant to sound very cryptic and swampy. But really it's just...
I thought it was about politics. That's how cryptic it was. It maybe it was. If that's what it meant to you, don't let me dictate what it means.
But yeah, that was my intention in writing the lyrics for Alabaster. And so a lot of times when we co-write, it's either one of us has lyrics and a melody, and needs some help on the chord progression or vice versa, and often Zach will have some kind of lick, or a chord progression or something going, and then we'll sit down and either write the lyrics together, or I'll take on the bulk of the lyric work while he takes on the bulk of the music sign. So I don't know how you came up with that riff. So if you've ever heard of a slap bass, that's like the kind of funky sound that guys do with their thumb and finger on bass, a lot of funk stuff.
I do that on banjo, and the main part on the banjo is that is a slap banjo part. So it's like kind of adapting a technique that you normally associate with electric bass onto banjo, which that was sort of the synthesis of the music aspect of it. I like the... this song, The Feel of it, had...
I forgot, I meant to look this up and I forgot, but there was a band, they do like... what would you call it? Like Celtic music, but it's like hard rock and Celtic. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Well, there's a couple like that. Like Dead Candidates didn't have that vibe. Yeah, Dead Candidates. There's another one too.
It almost came to me just in flogging Molly. That kind of sounds... What's the one from Boston? The Pokes?
Maybe. I know what you're talking about. There's a few bands that have that vibe. It's like there's a famous movie like a mob movie from Boston.
I think they departed. Where's that thing for them? That gave me that because it was kind of like... it had that like Americana banjo riff, but then the staccato kind of heavier parts in there.
It's pretty cool. Yeah, well thank you. Yeah, that's definitely... we want to kind of hit both of those things.
We want the Americana more traditional sound, but also throwing drums and electric guitar and stuff to kind of bring a little bit of outside influence into it. So yeah, that's it. So there's a triple murder that happened in the town that I'm from in 1963. Oh yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but Western North Carolina. Well yeah, well yeah, well yeah, well yeah, not everybody knows Hendersonville, but anyway, and Hendersonville in the States. This goes out to the world, so you have to... that's Hendersonville, North Carolina, United States.
Right, right, right, right. And so there was a triple murder that involved two fairly prominent businessmen in town in the town of Hendersonville, and then a third person that seemed to just be a bystander who just was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And to this day, you know, we're over a half a century later, it was never solved, and there's a lot of like a... there's a lot of ideas that involved some pretty higher up people in town that kind of wanted to hush some people up and things like that.
And so I thought that was... we didn't have a murder ballot, and I think every fault ban needs a murder ballot, so Blood and Apple Agit is our murder ballot to kind of hit that topic. Because yeah, it has a murder ballot bill, but it's slightly more uptempo than a typical murder ballot. I can't talk a murder ballot.
Yeah, has a slightly faster temper. You don't translate. Answer that question, but you know I'm trying to ask. Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, so well, I think a lot of... like Kendra often starts with lyrics when she's writing songs, or at least a lyrical idea and a melody and kind of goes from there. I often start with music. And so with my banjo playing specifically, I don't want people to think of me as the bluegrass guy, because that's not really what I do.
I like banjo that fits a lot of other styles. And so that has this pretty aggressive, fast banjo part, but it's not really bluegrass. And so I wanted it to kind of have this forward propulsion in it. And because of the kind of unsolved aspect of that murder, I wanted it to be sort of like a little frantic and kind of you didn't, you know, you don't know exactly where it's going.
So to be real, real slow with it, I think, was a little bit too, I don't know, kind of reflective. And I didn't want this to be reflective. I wanted this to be something that still progressed into a modern mystery. And so I just think the speed kind of helped with that.
And also the aspects of the song, like there's a bunch of weird stuff with that murder, like there's a line about a crease of form of crutches being left on the murder scene, and that was real. So that one of the people that was murdered was on crutches at the time, and over top of the bodies that were just laying there in the woods, that somebody had built a cross out of the guy's crutches and laid it over top of the body. And it's like some really weird stuff. And so I guess the kind of like fast, aggressive sound just suited that the weirdness of all that.
Do you hope, secretly or not, specifically that someone does like a Netflix special on this, and then they can use your song as the company? Oh, yeah, that would be great. But I'm nervous every time when we play that within say 100 miles of Hendersonville, I'm nervous that somebody's gonna be in the audience that still knows about it. They're gonna like meet me out back.
You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. You're asking for it.
Yeah. In keeping with the darker Appalachian themes, I am a fan of ghost stories and some of the the dark and sad histories of things. In fact, I did a trio of ghost story guitar pieces a few years ago. I think Appalachian ghosts and things are better than anywhere else, no offense to New England and all those people.
But the idea for this one was to write about somebody who was kind of being haunted. But somebody in the long distant past. So a couple years ago, we were playing a show with our friend Ryan Packett who played with us for a while. And he and Zach were goofing off with some riffs on Saint Patrick's Day.
So it had kind of a little bit of a Celtic vibe as well. And a couple weeks later, we were getting together to jam and do a little bit of rehearsing. And Zach was like, well, why don't we write something with that? That wrote the two of us were goofing off with.
And so I started with the lines. Well, I actually started in the verse and then worked my way back. So the first line I wrote for this was, I was young, but you were younger. That was something I thought of again, years before I actually wrote this whole song, but it was kind of floating around in my head.
And I was like, well, what if this is about somebody who was like an older sibling or an older sister of a child who unfortunately drowned in a river. And she's haunted by his ghost. And so it's kind of the story of her all these years later, reflecting on this and kind of being haunted either maybe literally, maybe metaphorically, and trying to kind of work her way through that basically. And we shot a video for this one that we're hoping to release at some point.
And I learned that if you're shooting in or near a body of water, you should do it in the summer, not in November. Just the coldest I think I've ever been. But hopefully, hopefully we got the shots we needed and it looks good. Were you in the water?
I was at one point, very briefly. And there's some good behind the scenes footage of me post being in the water. Yeah, I think the shot, the last shot's gonna look real good. But then like, if you were to see just two seconds past that last shot, it would be her going.
I was a lot when we shot it, I was like, just shoot me from behind. You don't want to see what my face is doing as I'm wading out into this ice cold water. Now we're ruining the last shot. Hopefully the video will be out before this comes out.
But yeah, it was a good making off story for the D to the extras. The special features, man, that's what they think. We were listening to something we were talking about how now they don't really have special features because everything is streaming. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't have those as much more from the Brown Mountain Lightning bugs. And just a few moments, I want to remind you, you can find them at brownmountainbugs.com. For people who are not from Western North Carolina, Brown Mountain Lightning is kind of a sort of a semi-paranormal phenomena that happens around here, similar to the Northern Lights in Alaska, but just a little scarier. Make sure to download or stream the Brown Mountain Lightning bugs, most recent album, Volk-ish, wherever you get your albums.
And of course, as always, we will have links in the show notes. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, WNC Original Music, wherever you get your podcast, probably where you're listening right now would be a good place to start. Also, follow us on Instagram and Facebook for lots of extras, videos from the show, pictures, you know, other links to the show if you want to listen again, but on a different platform, that's always cool. Yeah, we met at an open mic night in Hendersonville at the ugly mug in 2014.
I was living in Asheville doing my senior internship for college and Zach ran that open mic. And so I was just kind of doing the circuit up there and going to all the different open mics and happened upon that one. And we talked and we hit it off. He crashed a date that I was on.
Not the first time I came, but the second time I came. Unknowingly, I was completely unaware of that. Yeah, but yeah, so that's how we met. And then we started swapping gigs between, I moved back here to Winston-Salem and he was still up in the Mills River area.
And he would, he would toss me a gig from wherever up there. And I'd, you know, return the favor and get him a gig down here. And so we started doing that and I just kind of kind of grew from there. This is another one, another, me one.
We're in the folk side, which is gonna be more me. So Zach, his stepmom is from the Philippines and he had gone to the Philippines with her for a couple months to go visit their family over there. And I was, I was bombed and so I dropped him off at the Asheville airport and was driving back to work at like five o'clock in the morning. And as one does, I stopped at McDonald's to get a crappy cup of coffee and sat in the parking lot while I drank my coffee and wrote the lyrics for this because I was, I was bombed.
This is when we were just, we just started dating not long before that. And I was, I was sad that I wasn't gonna see this dude. I started dating for a couple months, you know. And so that's where this one came from.
That's pretty much it. Yeah, musically is kind of interesting because we tried to record that one a handful of times before we settled on the version that's on the album. And most of our stuff, when you add extra musicians in, whether it's a bass player or keyboard or drums or whatever, it usually enhances it. And that one, we kept trying to go that route and it wasn't working.
So we stripped it back and stripped it back. And that's the, the most spare track on the album musically, because it's just the two of us with the harmonica, I think, is the only thing extra. And that song just happened to work the best being stripped back compared to any other song in the album. So.
So you write this song for this guy? I mean, you pretty much barely know, you know, you date him a little while. So do you like calling him up and say, Hey, I just wrote a song for you. Or is it later that he learns about this?
I waited. So he, he was there for I think like a month or six weeks or so. And his birthday happened in the time period from when he left to when he was gonna get back. And so I sent it to him as his his birthday present.
Oh, that's cool. Because I'm cheap. I don't want to say anything. But I wrote you a song.
Yeah, I wrote you a play. I wrote you a very sweet. Thank you. But yeah, so that and it turns out he had written one for me in that same span of time.
But it's on the album. Which is also on the album. Oh, okay, we see if I can guess it. I was hoping to find one wildly inappropriate, something like devil girl or something.
But it wasn't up here. All right, go ahead. Is it my best guess is 100 miles gone. It's not that one.
It's sweet island mama. Oh, not a guess. Yeah, next one. So sweet island mama.
Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go down. Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go down.
Let your cool night breeze blow this morning. Oh, sweet love of mine. Oh, sweet love of mine. I miss you so.
Oh, sweet love of mine. Oh, sweet love of mine. I miss you so. And I get back to home.
You know I'm never gonna let you go. And we can't swim and see just the same. And we can't swim and see just the same. We'll kiss you when the sun said hold you close.
When it starts to break. Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go down. Oh, sweet island mama.
Let your son go down. Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go down. Let your cool night breeze blow this morning.
Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go. Oh, sweet island mama. Let your son go down.
Let your cool night breeze blow this morning. Okay, so I love, I have a little story that I tell about Sweet Island mama whenever we play it out live. And that is that I wrote that for her because I was missing her and I wrote the island theme musically and lyrically because I was in the Philippines at the time. I was living right on the edge of the ocean.
But I was staying with my stepmom's family who they had like everybody come into town when she comes in. And so it's like all of her family nieces nephews cousins and everything all coming into this house that she has. And so it's like 30 or 40 people living in this one house that's about the same size as an average American house and probably 20 of those were little kids. And a lot of them didn't speak English too well, but they they learned this song.
They started singing this song that I had written and I would walk around in town to different streets and go to different markets and stuff. And I would hear little kids singing this song. And so like I have this idea that whether if I never make it in the United States as a musician, there's a little town in the Philippines that I'm like a big shot in. So anyway, hopefully they're still singing that song over there.
But yeah, I wrote that one missing this lady right here. If you wait like 20 years, there'll be a couple of generations and like your your your legend will have grown. So there might be statues to you when you go back. I mean you'll have mythic proportions.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's just it's just gonna grow. So I think the thing and I like that one.
And I thought I did think it was very sweet of him to to do that. The song though that he wrote for me that really means the most is one I don't know that we'll ever record a release because it's too special. And it's the song that he wrote to propose to me. So he he went all in and we went up we climbed up to the top of big glassy overlook in Flat Rock.
And that's where he proposed with this song. And true to my if you haven't picked up yet, we're both real awkward. True to my nature. True to my nature.
He was sitting there, you know, new, lin around on guitar and I'm having a snack. And then he starts singing. And I'm still snacking, not really paying attention to what he's doing. And then I catch on long about verse three toward the end.
And I'm still I'm eating crackers. So I've got a mouth full of cracker and I'm trying to like wash it down real fast. But I'm like, Oh, crap, he's proposing. So I was surprised by that one.
Those guys were so much fun to talk to again that is Kendra and Zach Harding, also known as the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs, find them at Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs dot com should have a couple more episodes coming up with them. Also, make sure to go and check out their social media for videos and information on upcoming shows. They're doing a lot of shows lately, including they did one just like a half a mile from me. The other day, I didn't even know about it until it was over.
That was really my mistake for thinking that they could travel more than 20 miles from where they live. Thanks to Becca and Cody from Admiral Radio for doing the little jingle announcement in the middle for the podcast. You can find them at admirallradiomusic.com. They are just great guys.
Also, one more time. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast, wherever you're listening to it right now, or any other place would be great. I don't have a preference. Make sure to go out and support your local musicians wherever you live.
Even if it's not in Western North Carolina, there are good musicians everywhere. I've heard speaking of which the closing song this week comes from Waking April, who are from almost my hometown, Raleigh, North Carolina, much like the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs. Waking April is also a husband and wife duo made up of Bethany and Alex McKee. Search for Waking April on all the streaming sites.
Here is their song stuck on Silver Linings. Have a good week. Oh man, it's really Jack Nicholson then.