Tucson-based singer-songwriter Rebekah Rolland has been steeped in the sounds of bluegrass since childhood.
Her mother was a member of the “Up With People” ensemble. From there, she and her sister learned how to sing. Her father and grandfather were deeply involved in Arizona’s bluegrass scene, laying the foundation for Rebekah’s passion for the genre.
As an adult, she’s part of the band Run Boy Run and married her sweetheart and fellow bluegrass musician Matt Rolland.
Rebekah joined The Show last year to discuss her artist-in-residence project for the National Park Service. Now she and her husband are back with their own Tiny Desert Concert.
Earlier this year, before COVID, The Show spoke with Rebekah for more about her music.
Full conversation
REBEKAH ROLLAND: I think something that I love more than anything is songwriting and arranging. I love the singing, I love the performing, but I really love thinking about kind of the next project and the production side of things, and how these songs fit together thematically, or how I can sort of right to a theme, and then the process of bringing those songs to life and bringing the musicians together to bring those songs to life, and thinking about those things when we were bouncing around the Southeast, and we ended up in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina, up in the mountains at a 24-hour contre-thon. So that is a square, square dance and a country dance that lasts for 24 hours straight. And we did not last that long, but this is the tune "Geometric Slide."
BRODIE: So let me ask you about the type of music that you have started with in terms of folk or bluegrass, Americana type music, obviously, it's based on very old songs, old traditions. How do you try to either take those songs and rev them up a little bit for the time that you are in now, or write and arrange new songs that sound old, but are maybe taking on modern themes or have more modern elements to them?
ROLLAND: I just think we have really good models in this, in the scene, you know? I guess I grew up really, truly in a very formative time listening to musicians who were doing that. And so it's almost become, I don't know second nature to take a song and to say, well, what if? "What if we started off with, like, a plucking fiddle that's doing, like something really rhythmic," and I think that we just had a lot of really good musicians who were very experimental at a time when we were developing as musicians ourselves, and we were really young, and that that sort of like set a certain tone in the traditional music scene of all right, this has been done for this many decades. Like, how can we do things a little bit differently?
But I guess, to answer the question, how we set about doing it, why do usually, it's like, hey, we want to put a new fiddle tune into the mix. Like, how can we sort of maybe put it together with another traditional song, and have a moment where there's a lull in the fiddle tune, in this very intimate and stripped down moment of vocals, or a vocal riff. Or, how can we sort of make the solo melody like different you know, in order to kind of recreate it.
BRODIE: So tell me about this new project. How is it similar to what you've done in the past, and how is it maybe a little different than what you've done in the past?
ROLLAND: I would say it's probably a little. I mean, it has all of the folk elements that we've always had, and we like, we like leaning into that. That's what we do naturally and easily, but I think it's, we're gonna bring in some electric elements, which we've done before.
It's a little bit more rock and roll. We had one of the songs that was one of, kind of the original foundational songs. We thought this sounds kind of Shins-like, and we love the Shins. And there, I would consider them sort of like, in some way, they have so many folky elements, you know, while being like, distinctly a rock and roll band. And so I guess in that way, when we started leaning into that a little bit more, it evolved from there. And so yeah, we're kind of gonna explore some different production ideas.
BRODIE: Is that something that you really think about? Like, okay, this is kind of interesting, but we're kind of known for this, and now we're taking a different direction. Like, is this gonna be Bob Dylan when he first plugged in and people were really upset about it?
ROLLAND: Yeah, yes, we do think about that a lot, I mean, to the extent that I'm always like, well, we should have something that's really fiddly. We should, gotta have a ripper and fiddle song. Yeah, I don't know. It feels like the instrumentation is always going to maintain that folkiness. We want mandolin, we want fiddle, we want guitar and, and those will, I think, always be at the core of what we do. But, yeah, we like it, I don't know. We might throw some effects on the fiddle, or we might add some percussion and, and so hopefully there will always be a bridge there, sonically for people who want, who want the fiddle.
BRODIE: All right, Rebekah, can you play one more song for us on the way out?
ROLLAND: Yes, this is "Walk With Me," a tune that I wrote a few years ago, and It's just a kind of mellow little love song.
