(Photo | Courtesy of Sisters Folk Festival)
Kacy and Clayton will perform Wednesday, March 18 at The Belfry in Sisters, on the same evening that the 2020 Sisters Folk Festival poster art is unveiled. The show is at 7pm (doors open at 6pm), and tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door.
Get the first look at this year’s Sisters Folk Festival poster art by renowned Sisters artist Dennis McGregor. McGregor’s 20 years of iconic SFF poster images have brought a fun and creative aesthetic to Central Oregon (see Old Mill Murals), and his original poster artwork is much anticipated every year!
Kacy and Clayton, 2019 Folk Festival standouts, return to wow the Central Oregon audience again. “We were raised on cattle ranches where we learned how to play traditional country music because that’s what everyone wanted to hear,” the duo said. The music Kacy and Clayton make is inextricable from where they grew up. They sing about the kind of people you’d find in Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan (population very few). The hills, barns and remoteness of the area are in these songs, with a bittersweet acknowledgement that this music has taken them far from home.
Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum’s new album Carrying On follows the international acclaim for their previous records Strange Country (which Q magazine called, “A beautiful album that nudges a classic past into a brave future.”) and 2017’s The Siren’s Song (described by Uncut as “Ageless and beguiling. A classic record for this or any other time.”)
Their sound is equal parts homespun, coming from a family and community where playing music is an ever-present part of social gatherings, and the rare country, blues and English folk rock these second cousins obsess over and collect. For Carrying On, Clayton cites as influences: Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete, Hoyt Axton’s My Grif in Is Gone, Cajun fiddle music and the steel guitar of Ralph Mooney, who played on many of the records that defined the Bakersfield country music scene of the 1950s. Sixties psych has also woven its way into these new songs; Kacy enjoys telling people that they live 250 km from the mental hospital that coined the term ‘psychedelic.’
Having toured almost nonstop for the last two years, Carrying On was conceived and honed on the road and recorded immediately after a jaunt across Western Canada, mostly as live takes with the minimum of overdubs — the songs having been tried and tested before audiences each night. The album was produced once again by Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Uncle Tupelo fame, at his Loft studio in Chicago. The result is a sharpening of what Mojo magazine summed up as “A beautiful mix of Kacy’s crystalline vocals and Clayton’s inventive, deep-groove country guitar.” And a greater attention to detail in their songwriting; with narrative tales of loss, regret and yearning alongside vivid portraits of the Northern Great Plains and its isolated inhabitants.
Of Carrying On, producer Jeff Tweedy (Wilco front man) said “When I first heard Kacy and Clayton, I was struck by how much detail and nuance they had absorbed from what sounded like a large swath of my record collection. When I told them that they were as good as the artists they were drawing from, I’m not sure they believed me. On this record I don’t hear those influences as much as I hear them taking the things they love so intimately and telling their own story. I think they’re a truly great band.”
To purchase tickets, please visit eventbrite.com/e/sisters-folk-festival-presents-kacy-clayton-tickets.