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Breakthrough Americana Artist S.G. Goodman on Exploring Southern Identify, Grief and Practical Astrology in Her Outstanding ‘Planting by the Signs’ Album

[Variety]

By Jewly Hight

Astrology has been going viral lately. From Ariana Grande, SZA and Kacey Musgraves’ Saturn-centric song lyrics to astrology influencers dispensing dishy dating advice and the meme-ification of traits associated with Zodiac signs, allusions to the positions of the sun, moon and planets function as vaguely mystical, with-it and worldly shorthand.

Western Kentucky indie rocker S.G. Goodman, on the other hand, takes pride in the fact that she’s “never had a viral moment.” But that could change, she deadpans, “when those kids get to TikTokin’ about planting by the signs.”

She’s referring to her musical explorations of rural rituals and practices that share a kinship with astrology. On her new album “Planting by the Signs,” she sings about people who come from where she’s from discerning the most auspicious moon phases to perform such practical tasks as pruning a tree, reshingling a roof and getting a haircut.

“It’s complicated to talk about,” Goodman says over a drink at an East Nashville dive bar, “because when people are thinking of your Saturn return and everything, that’s not really part of this.” Before hitting the road to promote her third full-length, she’s driven down for an interview, despite her old Prius reeking of mildew since she accidentally left its back hatch up in a recent rainstorm. There’s a crystal store just around the corner from us, and in the context of our conversation, it’s one more symbol of the divide between the new age-y trends that hold pop cultural currency and the downhome traditions she’s made her current subject matter. “I wanna make that distinction,” she emphasizes, “because of how I was raised and because my family, church, all those people, they believed yoga mats were not Christian.”

Goodman first began gaining national notice as a singer-songwriter at the vanguard of a new wave of critically lauded, Southern-accented indie rock with her 2020 debut “Old Time Feeling.” “Space and Time,” the R&B ballad of profound pining that opened that album, showcased her striking ability to elevate the earthy, inspired covers by the likes of Tyler Childers (who eventually enlisted Goodman to open for him at arenas) and Mereba (who recorded it for the film “Master Gardener”).

Goodman was acutely aware that she was addressing an outside world that often harbors condescending perceptions of Southerners and rural people. Her philosophical and literary leanings didn’t erase the fact that she was a product of the tiny, economically depressed, churchgoing, Delta farming community of Hickman, Ky., the type of place that gets pathologized as backward by city dwellers. “I know what you’re thinkin’ when you hear the way I talk,” she cautioned in a keen drawl during another standout track.

It’s not lost on Goodman that those who are unfamiliar might unfairly dismiss the notion of planting by the signs as primitive, handed-down superstition. She’s reflected on her first encounters with those folkways. “Essentially, I was taken off the tit by the moon,” she says, explaining that that was her grandmother’s childrearing counsel to her mother. But Goodman didn’t limit her inquiry to her own experience. For more than a year — culminating in a winter spent hibernating from the road and opting for coal lamps over electrical lighting at night — she pored over the classic Appalachian guide known as the Foxfire series and other books and articles, scoured archives and interviewed knowledgeable practitioners. Tossed-off ideas rarely satisfy her, so she had some digesting to do. “I researched to the point,” she says, “that when the songs could finally come, the images, the details would happen naturally instead of feeling forced.”

Out of that emerged the subtle but sturdy architecture of a quasi-concept album. It moves from shrewd bluesy and post-punk ruminations on the disruptive power that chronic online-ness, capitalism and unjust circumstances exert on people’s ability to define for themselves what living well means through prickly revelations to naturalistic reimaginings of flourishing. And Goodman plays freely with song form. She delivers anxiously magnetic hooks, unfurls writerly vignettes that lack choruses altogether and joins her voice, in countrified duet style, with singing partners including famed folk outsider Bonnie Prince Billy.

The six-and-a-half-minute epic “Snapping Turtle” is one of her more ambitious writing exercises to date. First she conjures a moment of spontaneous retribution from her youth, when she whipped kids just a few years younger than her for torturing one of the hook-beaked, freshwater creatures the song’s named for. “This is a culture shock for a lot of people, but I grew up getting my ass spanked — and not just by my own parents,” she tells me. “People in my town had permission. It was very much a ‘village raises everybody’ kinda thing.” In the vividly drawn final scenario, she contrasts the dreams of freedom she and a high school classmate once shared with the complex familial realities, including teen motherhood, that she saw taking the life out of that friend.

Goodman was raised on manual labor — farming was the family business and she and her brothers started their own lawncare hustle — but for her, none of that was antithetical to life of the mind. Her family attended a small, conservative Southern Baptist congregation, but she alone took the implications of church doctrine so seriously, and intellectualized them so thoroughly, that she shouldered an onerous burden. “It wasn’t imposed by my parents,” she explains. “It was imposed by myself. It’s really a bummer to believe yourself a Calvinist and also be wrestling with your sexuality.” (According to the theological worldview of Calvinism, God preordains everything, and anything but heterosexual partnering defies his will.) Her early songs were the expression of a kid laboring to live up to strict standards of righteousness. “I wrote this song about authenticity as a Christian from a very particular worldview,” she recalls. “Before we would go to a youth group thing, our pastor would have a talk with us and say, ‘Now they’re gonna have drums and guitars, but don’t you get carried away by the emotion.’”

For a while, she didn’t allow herself to listen to contemporary secular music, just pop and country oldies. And she points to the rawboned singing style she heard in church — likely descended from the a cappella Primitive Baptist tradition that shaped old-time icons like Ola Belle Reed, Ralph Stanley, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard — as a pivotal influence. Goodman’s own flair for scaling urgent high notes and cleaving to them with plaintive vibrato distantly echoes the way those voices strained towards heaven with searing life-and-death sincerity. “I mean, when you’re so indoctrinated that you literally think your voice is being heard by God almighty,” she chuckles wryly, “you’re going to put a little ass into it.”

Goodman was salutatorian of her county high school, but that didn’t fully prepare her for college in the slightly larger town of Murray, Ky. just an hour east. “I had a real hard time accepting that I’m a smart person, but the product of a subpar school,” she says. In her dorm and classes, she found herself surrounded by students who seemed cosmopolitan by comparison, and her self-consciousness came through in the emo-inflected pop she was making at the time under the moniker Otto Sharp, her grandfather’s name. She even sheared the edge off her accent. “It was all me,” she insists, “but I was also going through this phase where I was trying to not talk like a girl from Hickman, Kentucky.”

When Goodman was little, her dad advised her, “‘You’re never gonna be able to have a boss, so you might as well pick something where you’re your own boss.’” He never imagined that might turn out to be music. Money she’d saved from mowing lawns went towards self-funding an album. After a few gigs, she was booked to play a tiny festival in Delaware, fronting a band of musicians a decade older than her with a vintage keytar she’d acquired on eBay. “And I was like, ‘That’s it — I’m destined for stardom,’” she remembers. She left college, only to return a semester later with the realization that she was still a long way from making it, or finding her voice. “I like to write pop,” she says, “but I don’t feel like me performing it.”

Goodman told her family she was preparing for a sturdy, respectable career in law, but in truth, she’d gravitated to a more esoteric major — philosophy: “I wasn’t being completely honest with myself that I just really love the subject. I was just a nerd, and I love school.” She was also diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, which placed her youthful dedication to religion in perspective (“A lot of times, one of the big signs is that you become very obsessive with heaven and hell”). In her own time, she made her way towards class-conscious, progressive political awakenings and coming out as queer to her chosen family.

After the passing of a grandmother she was particularly close to, Goodman grew interested in exploring deeper dimensions of the people and place she came from under the band name Savage Radley. She set up her own little label, Slough Water, to put out an album called “Kudzu” whose spiky, personalized textures forecast where she was heading as an artist. “It’s all about home, my grandmother’s story, my grandfather’s, my dad and his brothers’ tragic Southern story of farming, that three brothers can’t get along,” she says. Goodman was very much still on the local circuit, and working other jobs, but she had the gumption to hit up Nashville producer Skylar Wilson, who’d been recording with indie country acts like Justin Townes Earle, to make the album she put out under the band name the Savage Radley. “I’ve always looked at it like you’re not ladder-climbing if you’re genuine,” Goodman offers with a sly half-grin. “And there wasn’t a part of me that wasn’t, because I didn’t know any better.”

Her naïve networking continued until she’d secured Kentucky psych-rock giant Jim James, of My Morning Jacket fame, to produce “Old Time Feeling,” her first album under her own name, along with the manager and publicist who would soon get behind the effort. She landed her record deal with Verve Forecast through an improvised showcase at her new manager’s house. Afterward, she mowed his lawn for gas money to get back to Kentucky. Launching her first national promotion campaign in 2020 in the midst of COVID lockdown meant a lot of gig cancellations, uncertainty and hampered momentum. But she made up for it as soon as restrictions lifted with a few straight years of touring by van and Prius, and her utmost effort to demonstrate to headliners like Madison Cunningham that she deserved the opening slot they’d extended. “On my first major tours, I was wound up tight,” Goodman admits. “A lot of it was me having a real imposter syndrome of a way that I thought everyone should conduct themselves when we’ve been given this opportunity.” Her working relationship, and friendship, with her longtime collaborator Matthew Rowan — a guitarist who summons an atmospheric symphony of post-punk noise from minimal gear — buckled under that pressure.

Buzz continued to build at a modest but consistent pace with Goodman’s second album, “Teeth Marks,” earning her the Emerging Artist of the Year trophy at the Americana Honors & Awards. Never the type to overshare on social media, what she’d been least prepared for about the spotlight was ceding partial control over how her story was extracted, interpreted and used. Some press coverage of the conflict between her rural, religious background and her queerness struck her as exploitative. “I decided a bit ago that if I was gonna talk about my sexuality in press,” she reflects, “then it would be with someone who I felt like wasn’t using it as trauma porn.” She’d prefer that her matter-of-factness about who she is and where she comes from serve as a reminder that there are all sorts of people, including all sorts of queer people, everywhere.

Goodman has also experienced the absurd side of having presumptions projected onto her. Since she performs under the initials “S.G.” and keeps it at that, there’s considerable curiosity about her name. On her Wikipedia page, someone claimed that she’s “Stacey Greene Goodman.” Goodman has no idea where that way-off notion came from, but it surfaced again during a recent visit to a New York media office. “You have to sign in at the front desk, and they print you out this little thing with your name on it,” she says. “Well, on mine, it came out ‘Stacey Goodman.’”

She no longer has to make trips to NYC for label meetings, since she left Verve Forecast to release “Planting by the Signs” through her own little label, Slough Water, in partnership with Thirty Tigers. “I don’t have a bad story there,” Goodman clarifies, “other than it was not the right model for a developing artist. Too much red tape. Now I’m CEO, back in the saddle.” She still wonders what tangible good she could be doing on behalf of working Southerners who lack resources if she’d become a lawyer, and “struggled with that in a real way” before focusing on what listeners might take from this song cycle. “With this album, something powerful that I feel like I’ve accepted is that I think some people need music and need artists to usher them into being able to grieve and feel things,” she concludes.

Goodman had weathered her own disorienting losses, first of her senior dog Howard, then an older pal named Mike Harmon, who’d hosted her band rehearsals, shared practical wisdom from his own rock ‘n’ roll past and generally looked out for her. When he died trying to salvage wood from a fallen tree, the grief of losing their mutual friend cut right through her estrangement from Rowan. All along, Harmon had nudged Goodman to take the long view and trust that her closeness with Rowan would endure their conflict.

Goodman marvels at how on-point those insights were in the song “Michael Told Me.” The track arrives midway through the album, and it’s a real pivot point. Over a circling guitar figure, Goodman’s low-slung melody depicts how she fumbled towards reconciliation in a painfully pruned friendship with only an elder’s advice to guide her. “Never on my bingo card would I have imagined that in the past year and a half, Matt and I would have reconciled to the point where we could be so mature about it,” she says. She checked with him before sharing the story, and he suggested boiling their rift down to a silly fabrication: “‘Just tell them I shit in your Caboodle and move on.’” (While excrement played no part, they do both use those plastic accessory cases, popular in the ‘90s, to carry instrumental cables.) Goodman’s and Rowan’s voices later intertwine in the title track, an austere, old-timey duet likening the cultivation of intimacy to sowing seeds in the right moon phase.

Goodman is probably the billionth songwriter to make poetic use of agrarian and cosmic imagery, but her desire to squeeze contemporary perspective from the old ways hits different right now. “I do feel like this album theme kinda calls into question your connectedness with people who came before you and what you’re gonna have after,” she reasons, “but also just the natural world, where we’re all finding ourselves in this situation where we’re getting further and further removed. Even in rural communities, you could still just look at your phone all day.”