Photo by Adam Parshall
Eleanor Elektra, Max Ridley, Taylor Holland, and Zoë-Rose DePaz live in a house like any other on Goodrich Street in Jamaica Plain. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, in-unit laundry. There is a garden where tomatoes, peas, basil, and bee-friendly wildflowers are growing. There is a communal concertina in the living room for when the housemates gather to play folk-inflected free jazz. “Non-idiomatic improvisations,” Ridley, a Berklee-trained jazz bassist, explains. Things like this happen in the Goodrich Family Band household. What do you expect from four accomplished musicians living under the same roof? “We have more instruments than there are people in the house,” says Ridley. The house itself is an instrument, too. The band notes that the faucet drips with such regularity it can function as a metronome. “We’ve definitely played an entire song to it,” says Holland, a singer-songwriter and the group’s banjoist.
DePaz describes these loose jams as feeling like play. “It’s something you don’t get a chance to do much in adulthood, but you get to do all the time as a kid,” says DePaz, a punk fiddler with Celtic folk bona fides who is also Ridley’s fiance. On an ordinary night, the house might serve as a DIY concert venue, but the shows were halted due to the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus. In their place came more regular jam sessions. “We throw parties for ourselves now,” says Holland. Upon this fertile ground, the seeds of the Goodrich Family Band were sown. “There’s a party face to the house and there’s the more serious, studious side,” says DePaz. “Like, ’Let’s work and make something creative and beautiful together.’” The result is a four-track EP titled Balance, Right? to which every member contributed a song of their own.
The band cites “Lie Fallow” as the first official GFB song. Written by DePaz in the fall of 2019, she describes the song as a much-needed creative outlet after her folk-punk band Troll 2 went into hiatus. It describes a period of intentional stagnation that ultimately yields to new growth. Though written before the pandemic, it has taken on new meaning in its wake. When she sat down to record the song in the living room, she invited her housemates to add their own parts to the track: Ridley on bass, Holland on banjo, Elektra on guitar. Soon, what was intended as a solo release became the new house project. The full-band’s recorded version is a gentle, loping folk ditty with a barn-burning chorus. DePaz’s warbling vocal performance hits the ear with the grace of the first spring robin but you can still hear the effort it’s taking for her to sound so unbeat. It’s a song about the struggle to feel good when everything around you is wilting. “It’s hard to let things go / and it’s hard not to brace yourself against the coming cold,” she sings. It is the opening track on Balance, Right?.
As longtime cohabitants, the members of the Goodrich Family Band were already close, but creating music together took a wrecking ball to any boundaries that were left. Being quarantined spurred things along, too. “The lockdown hitting threw every relationship into sharp relief,” Holland says. “You’re either living with people and now those are your people, or you are not with people and everything that was in any kind of a gray area is now on the chopping block and it goes one way or the other.” This feeling of isolation was the genesis of her Balance, Right? track “Closer.” In the absence of human closeness, she became more attuned to the flora around her. “Do the trees feel closer? Are the flowers so much more important when I cannot touch you anymore?” she sings over a mournful fiddle and descending bassline.
Holland describes her songwriting approach as “not understanding on a conscious level.” She purges thoughts and feelings in exorcistic fashion and returns later to make sense of the resulting mess. By looking back at her unfiltered thoughts she can come to a greater understanding of how she feels with the benefit of distance. By contrast, Ridley is spurred on by the moment. “My favorite way to make music is just, ‘And…start’ and make something from nothing,” he says, pantomiming pressing the Record button on an invisible four-track. His song “Balance, Right?” is the album’s closer and title track, a slacker-folk number built around a melodic bass and finds Ridley taking stock of his life. What’s working, what’s not, what should change and what indulgences he’ll allow for himself. “If I drink a little now and then and only do drugs on weekends I think I’ll finally get it right,” he sings, and an orchestra of guitar and fiddle bursts onto the scene to meet him at his eureka moment.
Folk music has always trafficked in some form of intimacy, be it the emotional openness of the delta blues or the homespun warmth evoked by acoustic instruments. Folk has been called “the people’s music” for both its role as ledger of the cultural-historical record, and for the way it can convey the Big Feelings of ordinary people. There is some transsubstantive quality to the music on Balance, Right?. There’s a genuineness to these songs that goes beyond the patina of folk they exist within. “The idea that country music or acoustic instruments equates to authenticity is garbage,” Elektra said. She’s right, of course. To write songs that feel personal is to be a musician, but to write songs that feel elemental is to be a folk musician.
Balance, Right? is available on Bandcamp. You can also stream it on Apple Music and Spotify.