In Conversation: S.G. Goodman
“The strangeness of time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realisation that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”
- Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire
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Time never feels more erratic than when you’re trying to navigate a way through grief. Hours can crawl past in slow stagnant motion but then all of a sudden a new moon rises, a new year ticks over, the gap between then and now shrinks and pulls and stretches, a malleable mass of things to be confronted. Specific days and dates take on new meanings, new power and new weight, and they act as a kind of black hole that pulls and pulls us towards it. We fight the urge to give in, until we don’t.
S.G. Goodman, the singer-songwriter from Hickman, Kentucky, who releases her third LP this week, lived one such dizzying life in the aftermath of two soul-shifting events. In her version of this much-trodden story, it was months spent on the road, away from home, until she was finally able to really sit with the grief she had been carrying, grief brought on by the loss of her dog, Howard, and then, just a couple of months later, her close friend, neighbour and mentor Mike Harmon.
“I was able to come off the road for a few days, just long enough to do my laundry,” Goodman tells me, looking back on that time. “By that point I was desperate to have some alone time, to fully allow myself to release and grieve those losses. I'm not big on psychedelics,” she continues, “but I remembered that Mike had grown some mushrooms and given them to me a long time ago. So I made a little tea and I sat on my back porch with a blanket. I turned off my phone and disconnected from the world and finally allowed myself to really just feel what I needed to feel.”
There were ripples in that moment, a kind of powerful reaction to things pulled from the earth, passed on through the nature of gifting. It stirred something deep within Goodman, and right then and there, on that same day and on that same porch, she wrote the frame for ‘Heaven Song’, the remarkable nine-minute closing track to her remarkable new album, Planting by the Signs. “I went inside and got a little pen and paper, and I was in an open enough place to finally allow myself to feel and to write,” Goodman reflects. “I wrote several verses and the chorus that day. I remember it starting to reveal itself to me, and I didn’t quite know what was going to become of the song, but I knew I had to allow myself to write as much as the song was telling me to.”
“I realised that I'm becoming, with every passing year, the storyteller.”
This idea of following the natural patterns that are set out for us is the thread that runs right through the earthy heart of Goodman’s truly beautiful new album. Its title, Planting By The Signs, is a reference to the ancient (and still used) practice of being guided by the stages of the moon and the seasons, nature's signs. Learning when the best time is to plant seeds, cut crops, turn the earth.
A farmer’s daughter, Goodman’s own life has followed this practice whether by design or desire, but the concept took on more meaning when she began to relate the arc of her own life to those same ideas. “Planting by the signs has always been talked about by people in my community, and there are different iterations of it in so many different cultures,” Goodman explains. “My own ancestors crossed Appalachia, and travelled through the southern United States. They had Scottish and Irish heritage and there are lots of examples of how they tuned to nature in order to live their life. The more I thought about my connection to it,” she adds, “the more I realised that my young family members – my nieces and nephews – would most likely not hear about this connection unless I was the one to tell them. It was a very big moment for me, where I realised that I'm becoming, with every passing year, the storyteller.”
Many of us know Goodman only as a storyteller, of course. Her previous two LPs – 2020’s Old Time Feeling and 2022’s Teeth Marks – were full of tender ballads and impassioned bursts of emotion. But also stories, always stories. Carried deep within that beautifully accented drawl, Goodman’s songs are worn and inflected with character and Planting By The Signs is no different, her gorgeous new album an extension of all that’s come before. It’s a commonly overused trick to proclaim an artist’s new work as their best yet but on these eleven new songs, Goodman really does seem to sing with a little more fire, delivering it all with a warmer surge of blood and guts than ever before. It stands to reason.
Aside from navigating those familial strands, her new work is also an ode to love and loss, and the album's beating heart is guided by the sticky fallout that surrounds both of those extremes. On one of the album’s lead singles, ‘Michael Told Me’, is an ode to both; a snapshot of the moment Goodman found out Mike had passed away suddenly in a tragic accident. In a minivan deep on tour, she pulls over to process the news alongside her bandmates. Here, in the fallout, the story ties into another of the album’s themes: reconciliation.
A few years previous, Goodman had lost touch with her very close friend and bandmate Matthew Rowan following stresses that tightened through those strange hours spent together on the road, an ever-shifting environment that tests most everyone who drives into it. ‘Michael Told Me’ began as a song about that fallout but would end up finding a different ending when it was completed a couple of years later. “Matthew and I had been friends for more than ten years, and he and Mike were mutual friends also, so Mike knew the situation and talked to both of us during that time,” Goodman tells me. “When Mike died, and I got the news of that on the road, Matt and I reached out to each other. I live in a very small town, and I think that community and friendship take on a different role within those places. I think Mike's death really put into perspective how precious we considered each other. I really wasn't expecting the verse that I started writing about Matt in 2021 would end in 2024 with Mike having died, and that then playing a very crucial role in Matt and I mending our friendship. One of Mike's final gifts to me was to create a very clear path back to a friendship that had gone awry.”
While attempting to find a balance within these moments of emotional turbulence, while finding her place within her family tree and the natural world, Planting By The Signs was fed and watered and gently brought to life. As with all of Goodman’s work, the playing throughout is textured and sublime, gentle country sways folded in alongside urgent flourishes of exhalation.
Another of its lead singles, ‘Snapping Turtle’, a patient and gorgeous drawing-out, feels like a distillation of the whole record. “I grew up hard on bottom land / where only crops should grow,” Goodman sings patiently, eyes drifting off into memory, “Watched people reap what the demons sowed / And I take it with me everywhere.” Detailing people and places with the care it takes to mend a flower, Goodman draws you in with these quiet reflections and holds your attention for more than six-minutes of pensive, confessional storytelling. “That small town is whеre my mind gets stuck,” she sings deeper in the same song; bruised memories held in days long departed.
This reckoning with herself, and her sense of place, is something Goodman deliberately makes an effort to spend time with. Again referencing the phases of the moon, she explains how she leans into those moments not only in terms of planting seeds, of knowing when to reap and sow, but also as a way of taking stock of her own life. She speaks of nature providing “useful time stamps” in one's life. How she takes time at every full moon to journal about the things she’d like to let go of in her life, and the new moon to speak of what it is she’s striving for. It’s hard not to compare and contrast these practices with a world that feels increasingly technological and fractured - and Goodman sees it as part of the same constant battle.
“I think it's undeniable that technology has both served humans well in many aspects, and that it's also been super detrimental to a lot of the things that make humans thrive,” Goodman states. “People are losing the art of communication. Verbal communication is only a small part of us being able to understand each other but we've chopped that off now. We're left with having to interpret someone's texting ability or even their desire to send a text. I do not like to text. I feel anxious when I receive a text. They leave you having to decipher what someone means - and I think that's really bad! Humans are herd animals and yet we’re going to public places and never looking at each other.”
Goodman is aware that her thoughts on this are skewed a little by growing up on a farm, but she says it’s not just cities where this splintering takes place. She’s also fully aware that her own life is ruled by technology; all of her work sits on a computer, the algorithms will dictate how many people her music will reach, she wiles away hours on a tour bus getting sucked into her phone screen as landscapes drift by the window.
The ideas explored on Planting By The Signs aren’t about that though, the album digs into something far deeper and more consequential. “There are huge implications from us not looking at nature,” Goodman says. “I think there's a direct correlation between our phone usage and people not believing that climate change is real. Instead of really spending time in nature, being aware enough to feel temperature changes, seeing the effects on wherever you live, we’re sitting on a phone reading someone's opinion on the matter. I also thought it was interesting how these concepts speak to human existence in general,” Goodman continues. “We're all trying to understand how to live a good life, and what we can do to make that easier and have better results. So on the album I put a lot of the images and beliefs about this concept into the very mundane, everyday life experiences. And that goes for loss. That goes for love…”
Those everyday experiences help to channel the wider themes of Planting By The Signs into simple and engrossing country-rock songs. In 2023 Goodman was named Emerging Artist of the Year at the Americana Awards. She’s opened for genre-giants like Tyler Childers and Jason Isbell. If those nods and recognitions set her up for a leap then here is where that encouragement comes good.
There is always a moment on an S.G. Goodman album that stops you in your tracks, but here those moments are plentiful and even more enrapturing. ‘Nature’s Child’, a duet with Bonnie Prince Billy, is a scorched strum, the pair’s voices folding into each other’s space like low heavy clouds into a simmering storm. There’s the aforementioned seven-minute closing track, its billowing and bruised outpouring shaping Goodman’s sounds into bold new shapes we’ve not really seen her create thus far.
Perhaps the stand-out, however, is ‘Solitaire’, the kind of torn-heart-on-torn-sleeve ballad that barely leaves you space to breathe. “You found me thumbing down the road / Between my head and my heart / In a three dollar suit with a worn out deck of cards,” Goodman sings, carrying the weight of it all in her solitary voice. “Solitaire’s the only game / Where you don’t need anybody’s help / Oh but lord, you’re bound to lose if you bet against yourself.” It’s an incredible moment, the kind of richly detailed song that nudges her up there alongside the greats. It’s notable also because it feels, initially, stand-alone, sitting outside the album’s overarching themes - but Goodman herself is keen to express that every song lives inside the same world, whether that's obvious or not.
“There's not one song that deals with the ‘planting by the signs’ concept directly,” she says, expanding on that idea. “The basic concept is that the moon affects water, therefore anything that consists of water will be pulled like the tides; there's an ebb and flow. I'm not saying that I think people are going to feel this when they listen to my music,” she adds, “but one belief I have about making this record is if someone was willing to be interested in it, they will find themselves thinking deeper about the effects of us not being in tune to our natural environment.”
“There are huge implications from us not looking at nature. I think there's a direct correlation between our phone usage and people not believing that climate change is real.”
On the aforementioned ‘Solitaire’, the character’s name is River. On ‘I’m In Love’ the protagonist cuts her hair when the moon is right. On ‘Mike Told Me’, her great friend passes away while cutting branches from a tree. A seasonal task he’d done his whole life and that someone else will be doing now. That same friend left Goodman’s world in the same area of land that she buried her dog just a couple of months earlier. Which is to say that there are always signs if you take the time to seek them out. A cycle completes itself, as cycles know only to do.
“There's a lot of grief processed within the natural seasons on Planting by the Signs, and the album really revolves around them.” Goodman says of her new work. “I found myself really diving deep into the different, but very natural seasons that we experience on Earth: death and rebirth, fruitful seasons and barren ones. Mike's passing, his friendship leading up to it, and also just his outlook on life was really instrumental to me being able to ponder all that.”
Such pondering comes to a head on ‘Heaven Song’, the album’s momentous farewell. For all of its grandeur, Goodman describes it simply as a 'road trip song'. Two characters, a man and a dog, sit side by side in an old Malibu car. “The song is about having a car packed full of human concepts; of love and faith and sin and death. I wanted it to be a part of this record because I am interested in how we construct our beliefs, and how we tell stories ourselves about what we're experiencing. The characters in that song are on a road trip with a car full of concepts. ‘Planting by the signs’ is just a concept, but the belief in it has been passed down through generations. Love and hope and faith and sin; all those things show up in every iteration of humans, and they always have.”
Across eleven songs and forty-something minutes of music, Goodman offers her own intricate version of that age-worn story. Some of it comes from the life she’s lived thus far, other pieces are pulled from the moon and the tides that stir the thoughts that live both inside her and out there in the grand night sky.
The time you begin listening to it will no longer exist when the last page turns, when that final note rings true, but what it offers and what you take from it will linger and remain. Or it won’t, and the season will turn and a new one will arrive to take its place as the world begins to bloom once more.
Such is the way of things, after all; time in all of its strangeness.
Planting by the Signs is released June 20th, via Slough Water Records / Thirty Tigers
You can buy it via Bandcamp here
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