The County Well, Future Country is a new CD release that is helping define new, innovative music. More than just another CD, this heralds both musical innovation as well as an upturn in Idaho’s growing music scene. The County Well comes out on the Floating Records label, which started in Mill Valley, CA but has now located their offices as well as a recording studio in Hailey, Idaho. In addition, Floating Records has begun working with the Mountain Music Collective, a new face on the music scene in Ketchum dedicated to providing local musicians with rehearsal space, booking and greater visibility for their music.
Don Zimmer is the Owner/Producer/Recording Engineer of Floating Records, who also has written songs and performs on several of the County Well tunes. Don said about County Well, “These songs were not recorded in a band format, they were usually recorded starting with either Graham or myself on guitar and we would start with an acoustic click-track. That seemed to me to be bringing your old-school country with your acoustic guitar to a more futuristic thing where you are using new drum loops but combining them with the instrumentation in-between, so that’s where that concept came from”. Graham Guest, guitarist/vocalist/writer added, “I call that in my own personal lingo ‘creative maintenance’ of things; things get worked on over time in creative ways. So, sublimation—-we’re trying to create the mood or re-tap into the mood of older country-rock type music through people who are musicians today.
County Well seems to fit in very well with Americana music. It seems to fit into a category called underground country, about which Graham Guest explained, “Don and I are fans of good old classic country and country rock music—Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, stuff like that. Stuff that came out during the era of the LP, so I guess we have an ear for that sort of music being produced today in the same spirit. It just wouldn’t be rehashed Merle Haggard or something like that, but it’s going to have contemporary nuances to it. It’s going to tap into a classic spirit that you would hear on some of those older country songs. I think when he says underground, I think it’s music that we also to think has been—you know, it’s not music today like your classic country or classic rock that’s buried in the imagination or the memories of a lot of us older folks; and maybe the younger folks are listening to it as well, which is just natural to hear musical styles and trends. What we’re doing is tapping that memory and that’s what I think he means by underground. So, reaching back in the underneath parts of the human music history and human music memory, tapping into that to see if we can find players—and this dovetails into the County Wellproject—who are also tapped into that memory and are also players today”.
The songs on County Well range from new tunes especially written for the CD, to older tunes written by Graham Guest for his Southern Rock band Moses Guest, who has been playing for 20 years and is a fixture in Texas as well as a recording artist on Floating Records. Plenty of other musicians appear as well, including multi-instrumentalist Eric Yates, Steve Moore on bass as well as bassist Steve Carlson, Amy Nordstrom on background vocals and Steven Younger on keyboards. Adding some excellent fiddle work is Alyssa Joy Claffey, whose range of violin and fiddle work stretches from country fiddling to work with the Boise Philharmonic and several musical theater groups in the Ketchum/Sun Valley/Boise area. Alyssa is also the driving force behind the Mountain Music Collective.
Several songs stand out in this collection. Baby, a Graham Guest song, has a true country feeling with an infectious rhythm. As Graham said, “This song was a lot of fun to write. It was written in the style of, more or less imitative of a Willie Nelson country tune, with the irony of ‘don’t take your love out on me‘ sort of thing. Its got love in it, its got drinking in it; and with all your standard country chords it becomes kind of a classic country song”.
Another song by Graham is Alabama, which starts off with a very tasty, classic pedal steel guitar intro. From there, though, the song goes into a very current advanced beat and really updates the country sound into the concept of Future Country. Graham explained, “Don had some ideas about how to con-temporize that even more, so latent or even buried—this is a really good example of underground country, because the country or classic or blues elements of that tune have been sublimated, as the first part of the tune and then the choruses, the bridge part actually is in a funk or newer type chordal moves”. The lyrics, however, are straight from the country playbook. Graham explained, “That song is one of my favorites, I still play it quite a bit today. Lyrically, it’s about girls who move from the South, be it Alabama or Texas or Mississippi or Georgia or wherever, with the glitter of New York in their eyes. They are starstruck or smitten by buildings and glamour and fame and money. I guess the idea was lyrically to criticize that, to lament that sort of obsession. There may not be anything objectively wrong with coming from the South and wanting to move North and all that. I suppose there’s something in me that didn’t appreciate on a moral level, abandoning a place that you think is too down-home and dirty South-type thing for all this glitz and glamour. I think there is a moral criticism in there that is not so veiled, perhaps”.
Whiskey Before Noon is a country blues tune with Alyssa Joy Claffey’s fine fiddling. A song written and sung by Don Zimmer, Alyssa had an interesting story about its inspiration. She said, “the first time I went over to Don’s space, he had just turned it into the studio and the heater was broken. It’s fall and freezing and he had a little space heater that made a ton of racket, so in order to record we had to turn the space heater off. I don’t even remember what song we were working on—it was one that he had already done—and he wanted me to add a fiddle part to it. It was probably 10:30 in the morning and I’m recording and freezing to death. I couldn’t wear my jacket because it was bulky and I couldn’t hold the violin right with it on, so I had my jacket off and the heater off and I just was freezing to death. I could barely feel my strings, I said that I could not play a quality track for him since this was not working. He said, ‘I’m so sorry, do you want some tea or something that could really just warm you up?’. I said, ‘Actually, you know what I really need is some whiskey!’. He said, ‘It’s 10:30!”. And I said, ‘Well….’ So I said, it’s before noon so we’ll have whiskey and it was just a joke but he said ‘You know what? There’s a song in there’. So that was the start, it was at our first recording session together and I was sort of the muse for this song”.
Alyssa is the person behind the Mountain Music Collective, which is based in Ketchum. Mountain Music Collective supplies rehearsal space, booking and more for musicians in town or visiting the Wood River Valley, which encompasses Ketchum, Hailey, Sun Valley and the surrounding areas. . Alyssa is a big proponent of local bands and musicians, as is Don, who said, “I’m a big proponent of the original recordings; and that sadly has become a streaming thing which is free and artists don’t get much reward from that, but I still find that to be a powerful thing and want to encourage that, so part of the Mountain Music Collective is going to be taking songs from local artists and putting them on a compilation that’s going to benefit the community library. That’s coming probably in July, but also that concept of taking local musicians and their songs and trying to get them to a bigger audience, which is kind of what County Well is all about”.
Alyssa commented that “I actually often joke and say that ‘Idaho is the South of the Northwest’. I do think there is an Idaho sound and I think that the Wood River Valley is a hotbed for what I consider the ‘Idaho sound’ now because you’ve got artists coming in from Stanley and such, people who spent the winter in a cabin and it definitely has that old-school underground country feel to it, but it’s influenced by Boise and its music scene and you’ve got incredible things happening here like the Treefort Music Festival and the Visual Arts Collective. I think if there’s a ‘Idaho sound’ I would say it’s like Indie-folk-underground-original country. It’s very eclectic, it doesn’t have to be one sound, it’s not grunge, it’s not like that Seattle Death Cab For Cuties sound, it doesn’t have to be one thing. Our musical artists are as independent as all of Idaho is, we want our own space, we don’t want anyone else to tell us what to do; and those Idaho roots are reflective in—what I love about this first Volume 1 of the Mountain Music Collective is that it’s really good to reflect how much Idahoans—our environment affects us so much. You meet a musician and he’s a fisherman, you meet a musician and he’s an avid outdoorsman. So many local bands that I play with, when they play their Idaho song, it’s about driving for hours and not seeing another person or house and I love that. For this area, the Sawtooth, there’s a lot of Idaho’s landscape influencing and inspiring people”.
Floating Records is still very active in the San Francisco Bay area with several of their artists based there, so they will have their Floating Records Spring Revue this Saturday, April 14, at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, CA. Peter Kaukonen, Mark Karan’s Budz and the Jeffrey Halford Band will be featured.
The County Well
Floating Records
Floating Records website
