Manchester, Band On The Wall, 24 May 2011

For over a decade Abigail Washburn has been a singer/songwriter and, more recently, clawhammer banjo player. In 2008, Washburn and three virtuosic comrades — cellist Ben Sollee, fiddler Casey Driessen and three-finger-style banjo player Bela Fleck — presented Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet, a set of seemingly boundless compositions sprouted from seeds of American and Chinese folk. The album extended an imaginative musical bridge between East and West. The world had never seen a chamber ensemble, stringband or bluegrass group quite like the Sparrows. 

Her latest album, City of Refuge, is something completely different, even for her: a marriage of old-time
and indie-pop. “This new project,” she says, “incorporates what would’ve in the beginning of my career seemed like an unexpected move, but now feels like a really natural progression of working with people that reach into other genres and other spaces musically.”

With the exception of old-time fiddler Rayna Gellert — Washburn’s former bandmate in the all-female stringband Uncle Earl — her cast of collaborators is entirely new. Among them are Turtle Island Quartet’s Jeremy Kittell, who arranged the strings and played a small orchestra’s worth of violin and viola parts; My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel (pedal steel and electric guitars); The Decemberists’ Chris Funk (bowed and plucked dulcimer and guitars); atmospheric jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; veteran Nashville studio percussionist Kenny Malone; Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor and Morgan Jahnig (backing vocals); Wu Fei, master of the guzheng (think of it as a Chinese zither); and the Mongolian stringband Hanggai, who managed to contribute ambient throat-singing from halfway around the world.

There are two particular new faces, though—one only new to Washburn’s orbit, the other new to the national music scene in general — who were with her every step of the way: producer Tucker Martine (The Decemberists, Tift Merritt, Mudhoney) and singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kai Welch, who she stumbled upon playing keyboards with the Nashville band Tommy and the Whale.

Martine framed the album in an expansive palette of supple, modern textures, some coaxed from acoustic sources, others from the sort you plug in, and all remarkably harmonious.  “I knew I wanted to go outside of the folk community that I was used to,” she explains. “He had worked extensively with people who do sort of go back and forth between the folkier elements and the more indie rock world.”

In Welch, Washburn found a co-writer and singing partner whose sensibilities, though they compliment hers, aren’t the slightest bit old-timey—which is precisely why she wanted to work with him; Smart AM pop is his native territory. “There were song ideas that I took to him that I thought I would have a handle on myself,” she says. “But I just thought I’d try it out with him and see if he thought of anything right away, and in so many instances he really would have an initial instinct that was extremely beautiful and applicable to the songs. He would think of chord structures that were different than things I would usually think of.”

Washburn relates, “I like the idea of City of Refuge, because it kind of feels like ‘Is this a place I can go?’ It makes the record into the city of refuge, in a way.” Delivering on the promise of its title, the album is rife with vignettes about people from all corners of the globe trying to find where they belong. The songs bear real hope; hope that’s in touch with reality and profoundly collective. “It really is so strongly about that, I mean, from the immigrant in “Dreams of Nectar,” to the rich girl trying to figure out how to be happy in “City of Refuge,” to “Last Train,” where a troubled soul is trying to figure things out, wondering if the last train will come and carry him home finally.”