This year’s Folk Alliance International (FAI) conference and awards show, which just happened in Kansas City last week, was especially meaningful for Rachel Maxann. It was on this, her third visit to the annual gathering of global folkies, that she was first featured as an artist in the conference’s Official Showcase. And that’s causing her to look back in wonder at the musical journey she’s been on since moving to Memphis.
“I think living in Memphis really helped me embrace the folksiness of my music in a way that I hadn’t before,” she reflects now. “Because, as a Black female, I’ve always written songs like this, but I hadn’t really thought of myself as a folk musician. I would just call it ‘indie singer songwriter’ because I hadn’t seen that representation before. Of course, I admired the greats like Tracy Chapman, who’s finally getting her flowers once again.” Indeed, Chapman just garnered a Lifetime Achievement Award at the FAI last week. Yet not long ago, learning of the many other uncategorizable artists beyond Chapman was an epiphany of sorts for Maxann.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Memphis that I heard people like Valerie June, or Amythyst Kiah, or Allison Russell, and all these other amazing like Black female folk artists,” she says. “I really started embracing that. And then of course, the community of Memphis and Music Export Memphis [MEM] were full of people that were like, ‘Yeah, you’re a folk musician!’ And I’m like, ‘You know, I am.’ It was Elizabeth [Cawein of MEM] who reached out to me about signing up for the FAI. Here we are a few years later.”
She’s been busy in that time, having followed up her 2019 debut, Fickle Hellcat, with last year’s Black Fae, and the sonic evolution between the two has been striking. Whereas her debut captured the sound of her band running through a set of her eclectic originals, Black Fae aims for more ambitious production and offers more surprises. It first reveals Maxann’s embrace of her inner folk artist, opening with only her voice and acoustic guitar on “Wait for Me.” But it ranges far and wide from there, often with her well-honed band, but sometimes beyond that. The sweeping synths of “Goddess,” for example, could be one of those ’90s tracks by Brian Eno and John Cale, if they’d had Annie Lennox singing. For Maxann, reaching in these ways is the point, and that’s especially true of her latest single, “The Tides,” slated to drop on March 4th.
“When I release the song, it will be a version with just me and my guitar, singing solo, but there’s also the band version. I’m going to be doing both the versions at Folk Alliance as well. And then there’s also a version with my trio [featuring Tamar Love on cello and Alice Hasen on violin]. There are so many versions of the song! I will also be releasing the trio version as a lyric video. So you know, whatever version of ‘The Tides’ you like the best, it’ll be out there. Choose your own adventure!” she laughs, then adds, “Those are my favorite types of books.”
In the meantime, not overly concerned with genre tags, Maxann will continue to go where her deepest feelings take her, always expressed through her powerful voice, steeped in soul but with the plainspokenness of folk. Some call it the latter, but don’t expect any political anthems: Maxann embraces more of the personal side of folk than the music’s more activist tradition.
“I just take whatever I’m feeling and transform it into a cathartic experience via music,” she explains. “I did an interview a while ago, and one of the questions was, ‘Do you feel the need to write about being Black, or being queer, or being a woman in folk?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, not necessarily. I feel that just by writing the songs that I do, singing my experience, that in itself is singing about being Black, female, queer, or whatever. I feel like I’d be forcing it if I tried to sit down and write a protest song. If it inspires me one day, if it comes to me like that, I totally will. I’m not against it. It just hasn’t ever really hit me like that.’”
Rachel Maxann will appear at Hernando’s Hide-a-way on Friday, March 8th, as part of a songwriters-in-the-round show, and on March 28th, opening for Dale Hollow.