I first saw Della Mae when they played a small club in Los Angeles, exactly three years before they spent two days taking the 2016 Huck Finn Jubilee by storm. In the meantime, the all-female bluegrass band has regularly returned to Southern California to play increasingly larger venues, most notably the Greek Theater in 2015 as part of the Bluegrass Situation’s annual flagship festival. They also received a Grammy nomination for Best Bluegrass Album for their second album, “The World Oft Can Be,” and recorded a self-titled follow-up with three-time Grammy-winning producer Jacquire King (Dawes, Punch Brothers, Melissa Etheridge, Josh Ritter).
“The Dellas” have spent the last six years making three records, touring nationally (the last several years with their record deal with Rounder Records), and internationally in fourteen countries on State Department tours. Now they’re finishing out another banner festival season before going on hiatus through 2017 for some well-deserved time off and to pursue side and solo projects. In between the band’s own main stage set at the Huck Finn Jubilee, playing multiple live stream events across the festival grounds, and sitting in with numerous bands throughout the weekend, Della Mae’s main singer/songwriter and guitarist Celia Woodsmith was able to sit down with me for a lengthy interview, during which she was wonderfully generous with her insight and her time. I’m so grateful for having been able to ask her so many long-held questions about one of my favorite bands. Here’s what she shared with me about songwriting, touring, making the last two “Della Mae” records, and what the future holds for her and the rest of The Dellas.
Jackson Truax: How did Della Mae come into fruition, and how did you come to be their main songwriter?
Celia Woodsmith: Della Mae started about six years ago in Boston. Kimber [Ludiker], the fiddle player, she was at a festival on the west coast and was joking around with people, “Hey, wouldn’t it be amazing if we started an all–female band and called it, ‘Big Spike Hammer?’ And the girls wore power suits and played faster than any of the guys!” It was going to be a joke band… But it turned into, “Hey, the all-female band is kind of a good idea. There’s nothing like that on the scene right now, really…” Kimber said, “But I really want women who can solo. And really own their instruments.” So she came to Boston… She found women, little by little. I was actually playing in a Rock and Roll band. I had seen Della Mae a couple of times. I went out to see their shows and I would always think, “Man, they’re really great. I love these girls and I love what they’re doing.” But I was doing something else. Eventually, I ended up quitting that Rock and Roll band. Kimber asked me out for coffee… She said something like, “Listen, I want you to sing for us. I think you’ll bring a different flavor to the band.” Since I’m more of a Blues/Rock and Roll singer. She said, “You already wrote one of the songs that we play in Della Mae right now. So I think we could use more of your songs. And we could use your voice, as something a little bit different for us. We’re playing Grey Fox this summer.” That’s a festival I’m obsessed with. So I said, “I’ve got a great opportunity to be in this band as a hobby. We’ll go play Grey Fox and it’ll be fantastic.” I never saw it going where it did. I really didn’t at all… We did a record… We got a record deal. We got the Grammy nomination. So it’s just been one thing after another for a while. It’s been really great.
JT: A lot of your songwriting could be described as “historic fiction.” How do you find the stories that interest you, and then fit the narrative into a set of lyrics?
Woodsmith: A lot of the songs just come to me. It’s a hard thing to explain, as a songwriter. I don’t ever sit down thinking, “I want to write a song about the Labor Union Movement…” I have a song called “Hounds,” based on this long, long poem by Frances Thompson. I just let the songs come to me. When I write a song, I sit down and I play melodies again and again until I find the words that fit in the melody. And then I try to think of what those words make me think of. So it’s kind of a weird way of writing. But it’s gotten me these songs so far. In a way, I just feel like they were given to me through this magical energy… I don’t think the songs come from me necessarily. I have to reach out and grab them.
JT: The only other person of our generation who’s really doing this kind of songwriting is Josh Ritter. You must also have a similar knowledge base, and your writing suggests that you have this love and knowledge of American history and folk history. Where does that come from?
Woodsmith: I’ve always been interested in history. I read a ton. I love books. I read books all the time. I read poetry and I listen to music a lot. But I really do think my grasp of words and history comes from the desire I have to just read. My mother is a writer and a poet. And I grew up without a TV. And I would just read, read, read. Sometimes when I do songwriter workshops I tell people, “You have to read. And reading other people’s lyrics is really important.” I just did that the other day with Townes Van Zandt. I pulled up so many of his lyrics and just read them.
JT: Della Mae is an interesting Rorschach test for different generations bluegrass fans. If one grew up listening to The Stanley Brothers, your music might sound more progressive. But if one thinks of bluegrass as being The Punch Brothers than you’re very traditional. Have you thought about where you fit on that spectrum? Or is genre distinction important to you?
Woodsmith: As humans…who categorize things, I’d like to think that we could transcend genre, but we can’t. We just do that. When we look at things we categorize them in our brains… I would definitely say that we’re bluegrass. We’re blues. We’re folk. We’re Americana. Whatever “Americana” means. I guess that’s the umbrella above all of the things I just listed. I do think you’re right… We play traditional bluegrass festivals… I’m positive some of the people in those crowds [think], “This is awful. They don’t even have a banjo.” We used to get a lot of flack for that… Are you really going to categorize us and just totally eliminate us from bluegrass, just because we’re not playing this one instrument? I do understand that it’s a very important instrument to the bluegrass genre… It’s keeping a very narrow vision of what something can be and how creative you can be with it. Bill Monroe himself created something out of all of these different sounds that he was hearing. It doesn’t seem to me that Billy Monroe would want us to have such a narrow vision of music… Our home has been in bluegrass. That’s where we started. We owe a lot of our success to the bluegrass crowd. It does seem to me that they’ve embraced us.
JT: Over the last three years your live show has evolved so much. Now it really feels like the blues influences and the soul influences are right at the forefront of the music. Was that something you were striving for? Or did it just seep in eventually?
Woodsmith: We’ve been able to own a little bit more of all of our different influences. And own who we are a little bit more… This band was supposed to start out as basically a traditional bluegrass band… But we’re all women. That’s one thing that we are that we don’t necessarily need to talk about on stage. But we want to own our femininity. And we want to own our different way of songwriting our different ways of singing, our different harmonies… We are able to change these things and play to our strengths. I think when we realized [that], that’s when the evolution sort of came about. I’m a blues singer… Jenni Lyn grew up straight bluegrass. But we can coexist…and we can both show off our strengths… I’m not really concerned with what genre that makes us, as long as there are people enjoying it… People can make up their own mind about what we are. I definitely have grown more confident as a bluesy singer, knowing that the bluegrass crowd would still accept me.
JT: As a band that’s been coming into the scene and building a following these past few years, how do you think most of your audience has come to your music?
Woodsmith: SiriusXM Radio plays us a lot. Bluegrass Junction, they’ve been very kind to us. We have had a lot of people come to us though that avenue… Albums have become less and less important. Although we do sell a decent amount of them, we probably sell a fifth as many albums as we would have sold fifteen years ago… Your social media presence, that’s what gets people to come to you. Playing festivals like this, and most importantly talking to people afterward. Not every band does that. But I don’t know if they realize how important that is. You have to take an hour after your set. Even if you’re tired. Even if you’re hungry. Just to talk to people. Because they’re the people keeping you doing what you’re doing. You wouldn’t be out there on the road playing, unless it was for these people who want to come talk to you after shows. So I would say that festivals are the biggest thing for us. And keeping a constant social media presence.
JT: “This World Oft Can Be” wasn’t a debut album in the strictest sense, even though it was the first album with that lineup. Did it feel like an important artistic step or a big step forward as you were making it?
Woodsmith: I think we were cognizant of the fact that it was a very special place we were recording in, the Cash Cabin Studios in Hendersonville, Tennessee. It was very historic. It felt like there was a lot of good energy there. And we were working with [producer] Bryan Sutton who we were all incredibly lucky to be working with. He was so patient and so kind with us… We just wanted to try our hardest… It was more carefree. The [follow-up] album was more nerve-wracking.
JT: “Heaven’s Gate” is one of the standouts of that album, both as a work of songwriting and as an achievement of production, mostly because it’s always hitting so many different notes emotionally. How did you figure out arranging and recording the song to make it resonate as deeply as possible?
Woodsmith: We knew it had to be treated carefully… I wrote that up I Saddleback, Maine. We were staying in a haunted hotel. I’m very into the idea of things being haunted. Mostly because I love the idea of ghosts and why would they stick around… That’s the kind of thing that gets me thinking. So I decided to write this story about a ghost who lived in the hotel, who had been a veteran and had killed himself… And was urging another veteran who had stayed in the hotel to not kill himself. So that’s what I was thinking as I was writing it. You wouldn’t want that to be treated with a very heavy hand… Because it’s supposed to be a tender, sad story. But dealing with really sensitive, and difficult subject matter. I know Bryan had a huge influence with the production of that… We start in a half-time and then we go into full-time. We wanted to set it up as a sensitive story and then lead it to the bluegrass rhythm… We did want to make it sound sort of ghostly, so that’s where Kimber’s fiddle part came in.
JT: You’ve talked before about growing up in Vermont. How did that influence your perspective or your songwriting?
Woodsmith: It does… But it’s hard to tell how. I grew up in a very non-musical family. No one else played music. I didn’t even really start doing music until I was older. It was all really musical theater for me up until around eighteen… I come from a family of nurses. I’m not sure where the influences come from. Other than the fact that I was already interested in Gospel music. I was always very interested in people like Bonnie Raitt. I was always very interested in strong singers like Patsy Cline. I would always pick up lyrics very quickly. Even today I can learn lyrics very quickly. So there are songs that I used to sing, years and years, ago that I haven’t thought about the lyrics in forever but I’ll be able to remember them. So even when I was a little kid, just listening to these lyrics again and again. I would memorize them and just sing them to myself and think about the lyrics. I don’t know where the influences come from. Or how they vary coast to coast… I was very drawn to writing about Boston.
JT: Getting back to “Boston Town” and back to the last record, you recorded it with three-time Grammy-winner Jacquire King. How did you come to work with him, and what did he bring to the record?
Woodsmith: We decided that it was still going to mostly our songs. We weren’t really looking from that many tunes from different people. Even though we were pitched a lot of different stuff. A lot of more country sounding stuff… We all really wanted to experiment with a different producer who would push us to do something, maybe a little bit more out of our comfort zone. So for instance, Jacquire King, he’d worked with Norah Jones, Tom Waits, Punch Brothers, Of Monsters and Men, Kings of Leon. He’d worked with people who were experimenting with a bigger, bolder sound. So that’s why we chose him. We never thought that we would get his attention, actually. We had a friend who had worked with him. And that’s how we got his contact. We sent him our stuff. And lo and behold he said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll work with you.” We [thought] “Wow. That’s amazing, that this guy would work with us.” I think he saw the potential for us… We plugged our instruments in. We used effects on them. We used a lot of different effects on my voice… We wanted to change things, but not that much.
READ THE REVIEW OF HUCK FINN JUBILEE DAY TWO HERE
JT: When Nickel Creek released “This Side” in 2002, it was meant to be a really, maybe “provocative” is the wrong word, but certainly a statement challenging a lot of the audience that they had built with their previous album. And controversy ensued. Contrastingly, would you say your last record was meant to challenge Della Mae as a band but not their audience as much?
Woodsmith: We wanted to bring a lot of those bluegrass people along with us. But also experiment with grabbing some of the people who see themselves as liking different musical genres. So we wanted to be open in reaching out.
JT: One of the things I love about your live act is your array of well-curated covers. How did you select those, either for a show or to add to your repertoire?
Woodsmith: It really depends on what the set needs. I have a ton of really sad, slow songs. We try and only do one of those a set. But we could play you a whole hour’s worth of heart breakers… We were just learning Willie Nelson tunes and Dolly Parton. A lot of these people, we just love their music… I love playing “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton. And I think if we’re having fun on stage, that translates to the audience… We had never played that Loretta Lynn (“Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’”) song until today. We just learned it… Earlier in the day, and we’re feeling like it’s a very chill vibe, we’ll definitely would pull out more of the slow, sad stuff.
JT: You’ve talked about how much you love John Prine, and you’ve done some really memorable renditions of his songs. What about him as a songwriter is significant to you?
Woodsmith: I love the fact that he’s not afraid of words. And different words that I might never put in songs. For instance, he’s got a line that goes, “I felt about as welcome as a Wal-Mart superstore. I would never put that in, I would think, “Does that even flow?” But it makes so much sense, the way he puts it in and than uses it and just owns it. He’s such a quirky songwriter. And he’s not afraid of being just a little bit different. And he’s able to deliver a very powerful message. Sometimes using quirkier language. Stuff that you just never would expect… And when he’s onstage, he’s so honest. He loves what he’s doing… He seems very in the moment.
JT: For people who don’t already this about Della Mae, can you talk about the State Department tours? What have they taught you, either as a performer or as a human being?
Woodsmith: We’ve been to fourteen different countries with the U.S. State Department. It’s been an incredible ride. It’s been over the past four years. We’ve been to…some really difficult places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I guess what I’ve learned again and again, is that we are very similar. We do want the same things. Even though our religions might be different. Our outlook on…women’s rights, on human rights might be different… And we have been to some of the places that I have felt need to improve in those areas. But those very same places…they have an incredibly rich history and background of religion, food, all of these different parts of their culture that are so wonderful and deep and lovely and human. That you can’t write these people off, just with what you think you don’t like about the way they do things or a difference in your culture. You really do have to learn about one another first. And appreciate one another for who you are. And at that point you can start influencing one another… I have wonderful memories of working with kids in all of these different places. And working in orphanages. That’s been incredibly sad, in a lot of ways. We have it very good in the United States of America. We live really well here. I know a lot of people, you might not think that. We’re certainly in an interesting political climate with a lot of very vitriolic language. And the feelings are very high at this point, with what’s going on in the United States. But we have it so good here. We really, really do. We can use what we have as the best parts of America, to influence and connect with people all over the world. And I think that’s why we use bluegrass music, and music in general, to show people what Americans are really like. I’ve been so blessed to be able to be in this band. To be able to visit places most people would never be able to visit.
JT: When you’re talking to an audience who doesn’t know bluegrass, especially young people and girls, why should they be interested in bluegrass music?
Woodsmith: One thing that bluegrass has to offer, is that it’s a smaller community… The musicians are more accessible. You can go talk to them after the show. You can get lessons with them. You can email them. You can get influenced by them in a way that I think is more personal than some other genres… It’s a traditional American music… This music was really born here, out of influences from so many different cultures and immigrants… I think that’s just fascinating. This is a real American music. And it’s telling stories about the working man…about hardship, about love… There’s a lot of worth to this music. A lot of beautiful voices. A lot of beautiful singing. And a lot of artistry.
JT: So what’s next for you and for Della Mae? There’s a tour going through the summer, then I know some of you are developing side projects and have announced a hiatus for next year. What are you working on during the break? And am I correct in my impression that it’s finite?
Woodsmith: In the last three or four [years], it’s been over two hundred days a year on the road. So it’s massive sacrifice. In terms of our families and our significant others. So we decided we wanted to finally take a break after this summer and work on some solo stuff. I know Jenni Lyn has a project in the works… Courtney [Hartman] has a solo album in the works. I’ll be releasing a solo album in 2017… [We want to] have different ideas, different influences…just use that as a springboard for more creativity [and] come back stronger… I’m proud to say that I think we’ve been a huge influence in the bluegrass world, hopefully for boys and girls who want to play. I hope that we’ve helped expand the genre. I hope that we’ve inspired women to form their own bands… Hopefully in the future, we’ll be right back in it… The solo album that I’m going to be working on will definitely be more electric… I would love to come back to…something like this with a different band and play… And then play a club in L.A., totally electric. It gives you freedom and creativity. I think as an artist, that’s generally what you want… And people who are willing to go there with you.
