WILL OLDHAM – who duets onPlanting By The Signs– on recording with SG

I F I have it right, I met SG face-toface first at Earthwave Studio in Shelbyville, Kentucky, just about a half mile from where I used to live and work at my brother Paul’s Rove Studio. My first impression likely involved her air of evident strength and gumption. She is no wallflower and trumpets her considered attention to detail in a way I greatly appreciate. She’s brilliant and driven, aggressively paring the BS out of her musical experiences. She doesn’t seem to want to make music like anyone but SG Goodman. Big power, big vulnerability and an awareness of the vital container a song inherently is, for exploration of emotion and humanity. Let’s take her song “If It Ain’t Me, Babe”: she implements restraint where she can often be effusive, if not explosive. But it’s not a predefined mood or vibration. She doesn’t hide her intelligence under a bushel, the way we can feel pressured to when bringing emotional material to light. How does she do this: emanate trustworthiness? By communicating brains, brawn and heart at once, or at least over the course of a single five-minute song. The big thing I took from recording “Nature’s Child” is that SG was inviting me to be a link in the chain the song represented to her, from [songwriter Tyler Ladd] and on, intensely, through SG then through me, then on and on. It felt good to be considered a worthy conduit. My memory of the session is that she was prepared to have us sing separately and I pushed for us to sing together, as that’s what I’m in this racket for, beneficent confrontation. She knows her voice well. It’s the ultimate communion when two voices go sniffing around each other, then come together with unified intention.