When grief comes to visit, it’s not the greatest house guest. It never calls ahead of time and often overstays its welcome. For the Americana band Turn Turn Turn (a trio comprised of guitarist Adam Levy, bassist Barb Brynstad, and guitarist Savannah Smith, who all share vocal duties), their sophomore album New Rays From an Old Sun doesn’t primarily center around grief, but the timing in which it was written and recorded became intertwined with it.
As the band felt around and tested the first few songs for the new album, Brynstad went into the studio with Levy during the winter months of the pandemic to record. She shared “Stranger in a Strange Land,” a track she had written about the death of her sister, without disclosing to the band the subject of the song. Brynstad’s sister died a couple of months prior to this recording session, and she was grateful for the forced quarantine to work through her grief.
“I was so close with my sister, and we looked so much alike. I was grateful I didn’t have to go to any Christmas parties and interact. I could do my grieving privately. It was a lot of deep, deep screaming and crying, which I’ve never experienced before,” Brynstad said. “As I was climbing out of that death, my other sister died. It’s a hard thing, because they were both younger than me. It’s always a joke in our family that I’m experiencing an existential crisis, because I’m aging, and my nuclear family is leaving. I’m not married, and I don’t have a partner, so it’s just me, although my parents are in their 80s and still alive. I’m doing the best, it’s a part of my life. Grief just changes you. You are not the same person after.”
As they settled into the recording sessions, Brynstad’s self-doubt crept into her mind and into her playing as she worked through “Dopamine Blues.”
“I’m more of a live player than a studio player, but I thought I was ready to do this after months of being by myself. I tend to be over prepared for things, which can be a bad thing as a musician. I came in and showed Adam my bass part, and he’s like, ‘Simpler,’ and I tried to dumb it down. We worked on it for an hour, and in the last takes before the hour was up, I didn’t know what was going on in my head. I kept saying to myself, ‘You can’t play bass. You can’t play bass. You shouldn’t be doing this. You suck.’ At the end, I just started bawling because the months of grief and isolation surfaced,” she said.
Levy was no stranger to grief himself. In the last few years, he lost his dad and mom within three months of each other, and about a decade ago, he lost his son, Daniel, to suicide—which he channeled into a solo album, Naubinway, named after a small strip of beach on the upper peninsula of Michigan and the last place Daniel’s mother remembers him smiling.
The formation of Turn Turn Turn was organic in the sense that the group came together through past connections that came to intersect again in the present. Levy had asked if Brynstad was interested in playing bass for a cover band he had put together for corporate and bar gigs. Levy’s daughter, Ava Levy, was an original member of the cover band, but she left the group after one gig to focus on different projects. Adam looked around for another vocalist, and recalled Savannah Smith, a student of his from when he taught songwriting at the since-closed Institute of Production and Recording (IPR).
The invite to join in a project that was heavy on three-part harmonies was a calling Smith felt compelled to answer, despite—after struggling and trying to make a musical space for herself in the Twin Cities—moving back to her hometown of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
“It took me a long time to figure out what I was doing as a solo artist, and I was getting really burnt out playing solo.” Smith said. “I wrote an album that was too close to home, and every time I would play the songs, it would be like reopening old wounds. When I write songs, that’s how I deal with stuff. Bad things happen, I write songs about them. With this band and with other writers, I can get out of my head; I get to play around a little bit more. With my solo stuff, it just felt so confined.”
That objectivity helped when translating emotions to music. Smith shared the secret she uses when writing about grief or something close to her heart: “I feel like when you’re dealing with emotions like that, people can sense it. To me, it can go one of two ways when you’re writing: you either have to oversimplify emotions or blow them way out of proportion and get really dramatic about it. Don’t live in the middle ground. You’ve got to zoom in or zoom out.”
Within the band, Levy holds the reins as far as musical arrangements and production go. Their first album, Can’t Go Back, was recorded in a weekend with all songs written by Levy. He had written the tracks with the intention of making another solo or Honeydogs record, but found he immensely enjoyed playing with Brynstad and Smith. New Rays was paused due to the pandemic, but it also allowed for more collaboration in the songwriting and allowing for Brynstad and Smith to contribute their own material. All of the tracks fall into the country-rock aesthetic that pulls from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Every song works flawlessly here, such as the catchy and wryly blunt title track, “New Rays From an Old Sun” and the cathartic realism of “7 Kids.”
After a self-deprecating recording session, Brynstad had a come-to-Jesus moment with Levy, telling him in the moment that was the best she would be able to give him musically. The recording process took more than a year, and Levy knew it was done when the year was up. The band had fallen into a rhythm and understanding of how to accept the discomfort of living in the grey areas of life.
“I’m still living with my grief,” Brynstad says. “My sister was terminally ill for a long time, and I would try on her death—”
“That’s a lyric right there,” Levy interjects.
Brynstad laughs and continues, “It doesn’t help to try it on, but, ‘Maybe let’s try it on. It’s inevitable, and maybe it’ll prepare me.’ There’s nothing that can prepare you for the actual loss itself. You never know. I thought maybe it would reduce the amount of sadness or pain. I think to myself, you’re either the last to leave the party or the first—or maybe you’re in the middle. But we all leave the party.”
Turn Turn Turn’s album release show is Friday, January 20, at the Dakota at 7 p.m. Tickets start at $20.