HILLFOLK NOIR

5 QUESTIONS WITH HILLFOLK NOIR 1. Are you really “hillfolk”? We’re reasonably normal 21st-century urban dwellers with cell phones and city-people jobs. Yet our Idaho roots reach into shadowy corners of the state where the echoes of settlers still reverberate off the walls of the valleys. We sing happy and sad songs of our ancestors and happy and sad songs of our own — often they’re one and the same. It’s like Guy Clark says: Somedays the songs write you. 2. Are you a quintet? A quartet? A trio? A duo? A dude? All of the above; it depends on the day. (The possible mathematical combinations are too many to list here.) The one constant is our main man Travis Ward, Hillfolk’s lead singer, guitarist, chief songwriter and visionary. That said, our performance lineup usually but not always consists of: Travis Ward: National guitar, vocals, harmonica, kazoo, words Mike Waite: Stand-up bass Jared Goodpastor: Snare, washboard, tambourine, harmonies Alison Ward: Singing saw, washboard, banjo, harmonies Shaun King: Banjo 3. What the heck is Junkerdash? Junkerdash is a term we applied to our peculiar take on traditional acoustic mountain music, which is filtered through a half-century of folk, country and rock ‘n’ roll and fed by our affinity for medicine show culture and Depression-era string-band blues. If Junkerdash were in the dictionary, there would be multiple definitions up to and including “psychedelic swamp-shack rags.” However, if you’re looking for something neat and tidy to place in print or casual conversation, feel free to use current music-journalism parlance and call it “indie folk.” 4. What’s the Hillfolk Noir Radio Hour? The Hillfolk Noir Radio Hour is our new album (March 2012). The full-length studio recording is sequenced like an old-timey radio program straight out of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, complete with commercial breaks plugging a bunch of fake products we made up. The album is available in the uber-modern digital and CD forms, but we prefer the limited-edition 10-inch vinyl, packaged to resemble a 1920s-era 78 (but sounding much better). 5. Hillfolk has traversed the country north to south and east to west spreading the good Junkerdash word. Whose musical paths have you crossed? We’ve played with Built to Spill, James McMurtry, Neko Case, Justin Townes Earle, Deer Tick, Gourds, Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Gerald Collier, Heroes and Villains, Train, Jesse Dayton, The Dusty 45s, Neva Dinova and tons of other great acts that you may or may not have heard of. We’ve also performed on countless American street corners because we hold the busking tradition in high regard and, well, sometimes we need the gas money.