Tag Archives: music

On Nashville

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This week on the podcast I catch Chad up on the Nashville trip and the recoding process. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts

“Live in THIS moment.”

That’s what my fortune cookie said as I finished my takeout dinner in a hotel near downtown Nashville.

“Ok, cookie,” I said out loud to myself as I laid it on the desk next to my planner and pages of typed up lyrics scribbled with notes. These songs I’ve been writing and re-writing for the past eight years were all just stacked up there waiting for the next morning to go into the studio and come to life in the hands of some of the best players in the neighborhood.

The amazing session players and producer in OmniSound Studios downtown Nashville

If you would have asked the sixteen-year-old version of me what most intimidated me as a young woman pursuing some sort of music career, I would have told you it was this. This exact situation. Bringing songs I wrote on the floor of my bedroom in the middle of nowhere to sit before musicians who are truly professional and have seen it all. Surly my songs about the hard clay of home and hard people who live there wouldn’t resonate. Surly they would laugh me right on back to where I came from.

Me and Wanda, master of the dobro, fiddle, banjo, guitar and more!

I faced my fear of Nashville with my last original album in 2015. I was a grown woman by then and had done plenty of things that scared me, so I hopped a plane, figuring all I had to lose was the money. And though I had no real idea of what to expect, I was greeted by an experience in the studio that was so open and encouraging that it successfully rearranged my view of what it can mean to make music.

Nashville Songwriter Kirsti Manna and producer Bill Warner. Kirsti wrote Blake Shelton’s hit song “Austin” among others.

I’m sure you wont be surprised to hear it’s about the people. And in this business there is plenty of competitive drive and ambition that can make things ugly, but I had long stripped away any ideas of fame and fortune by the time I stepped into a Nashville studio for the first time. I just wanted to make the best songs I could possibly make and so did every person in that room with me. And that’s it. That’s all it’s about.

Listening to my rough tracks

This time I flew into Nasvhille on the tail end of a storm that was lighting and thunder and rain and the migration of Taylor Swift fans to music city for her concerts. As the rain and the superstar and the fans left music city, I made my way to a studio on music row and stood under the same roof she once had, and so did Janis Ian and Alison Krauss and Faith Hill and Miranda Lambert and on and on and on the famous names lined the walls and it wasn’t fancy but it was friendly and for the record I’m the only one name-dropping here

And in came the bass player and his big upright and the drummer who sits perfect in the pockets of songs and the sweetest guitar player and a woman named Wanda who can play every stringed instrument you can name and so began our day together, working through the notes of the twelve songs I brought from North Dakota prairie.

If you’re curious about the process, in short I hire a producer, who rents out a studio and hires session players. That producer charts the arrangements for the songs and gathers us all up for a day (or more) of laying the groundwork for each track. In both my experiences, we tracked the entire album, twelve songs in one ten-hour day. That means these musicians often only heard the rough-cut demo of each song once, which is typically five minutes before recording, and then they get to work. My role is to listen, sing my parts and make sure it all goes in the direction I had in my head. But every time, it goes above and beyond. The next day all those musicians were likely scheduled to work on entirely separate projects in different studios with different producers across town and I’ll stay for the rest of the week to work on tracking vocals.

And that’s the just the beginning. Over the course of the year I’ll schedule release dates and concerts and find my favorites and your favorites and make videos and tell stories like I always do, and see where it all goes. But for now as I write this, sipping coffee from a paper hotel cup, I’m just here facing those teenage fears and living in THIS moment.

Rosie’s Spring Song

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On this week’s podcast episode I have a short visit with Rosie before preschool about her new song and why spring is her favorite season. Listen here or wherever you get podcasts.


Rosie wrote a song about spring to sing at open mic at my mom’s coffee shop in town last week. Her first experience a few months ago singing her own song in front of a crowd gave her the confidence she needed to do it again. She’s only five, let me remind you, but no “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” for her. She insisted I get out my pen and my guitar and help set her idea to music. “Spring is the best time of the year. It’s so happy and full of cheer.”

Yes girl, yes it is. The snow banks are melting and the creek is rising and the mud on our boots is sticky and tracking into the house and everything is dirty and a combination of brown and blue and gold. And so these suddenly become our favorite colors when white has been our existence for all of these long cold months.

“Easter comes by and it’s so fun. Because there are Easter egg hunts,” she sang, her little legs dangling off the chair, the microphone in both hands held up close to her mouth so we could all hear her words.

Rosie’s my hero. It’s possible I’ve said this before, but in case I haven’t, I am saying it again. She has been since I met her. Her very existence was improbable given the fact that I struggled for so long to keep a pregnancy. We had our first daughter and thought that might be it for us, but we tried again anyway thinking it could possibly take another ten years. But Rosie was ready to be born and so she didn’t make us wait. She came to us quick and easy at the height of one of the most difficult times my family has endured, my dad clinging to life in a hospital bed in Minnesota and his future so unsure. We gave his name to her, Rosalee Gene, because the belief that he would ever meet her was nothing but a faint light. She was a sweet distraction, a quiet force for hope that can come even in the most desperate and dark moments. She made no fuss about it. She just breathed and sucked and pooped and lived and as she grew my dad grew stronger and here we are with both of them at the ranch waiting for the snow to melt off and the baby calves to be born. Spring is hope and renewal and so it reminds me of my second daughter, singing so confidently this song about her favorite season.

“Outside the window spring is here. Bunnies and chicks and baby deer.”

The elk take a stroll through our horse pasture

Lately there has been so much tragedy exploding from the news feed, and our small communities here in western North Dakota have not been immune to it. Renewal and hope aren’t easy words to sit with when loss and uncertainty sit heavy in your guts. But time continues to change the season. Time continues to move, eventually bringing with it a thaw. The water breaks free under the ice and rushes the draws.

In a week or so we will have baby calves on the ground, still wet out of the womb. In a few more the bravest flowers and buds will start to emerge at the coaxing of a warm sun. The pair of geese will return to the stock dam outside our house. The wild plum blossoms will dot the brush with vivid green and we will climb to the top of a hill to find a dry spot and lay down in it, knowing well that it could storm again the next day, burying the ground and the new buds and babies in the chill of a white blanket. But it will be hard to imagine it then with the warm spring sun on our bare arms. If you’ve forgotten what hope is, nature can remind you.

“A big blue sky and bumblebees. Tweet-ely birds and green green trees,” Rosie sings into the microphone to a small crowd of community members gathering for coffee. They tap their feet and hum the tune on their drive home…

Little moments to be brave

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Hear Rosie’s perspective on this week’s podcast where I interview her and she sings her song. Listen here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

For as long as my youngest, Rosie, could talk, she’s been asking me when she can have her own band and perform on the stage. My answer at first was to offer to accompany her, but Rosie wants her own band. And she wants to play her own guitar. And she wants to write her own music. And just this morning she informed me she wants to play drums too. So now I tell her she has to practice.

I’ve been working on writing some new songs these past few months as I prepare for a new album I’ll record this spring. This means the girls have been wandering in and out of my practice and writing sessions quite a bit lately. A few weeks ago I heard their four little feet march up the stairs and fling the door open and suddenly my lonesome little love song turned into a collaborative writing session with Rosie, who was determined to live out the promise I made to let her sing at open mic night at Gramma’s coffee shop in a few weeks.

She recently (as in, right that second) decided her song needed to be an original. Now I could skip over this part, but I don’t want you to get the impression that this was any kind of made-for-Hallmark movie-moment. Rosie’s first attempt at writing a song ended with six harmonica solo breaks, a speech about how this song is not just about her being a cowgirl, but about families working together and a stomp-off because, when her big sister wanted to try her own song, she was stealing all Rosie’s words. My husband called it their first “intellectual property dispute.” I call it the first of many dramas in the family band.

That’s where we left it, a little song unfinished on a scrap piece of paper and we all went outside to play (drama comes and goes quickly around here). Fast forward to my arrival home from my week away in Elko after taking the 17 hour drive in one shot, where I was greeted by hugs and a reminder about open mic.

Tomorrow.

She had been telling everyone at preschool, including her teachers. And they were coming to cheer her on. This was serious. I can sleep when I’m dead.

So the next morning, we finished her song and practiced it all day (I mean, are you really a rock star if you don’t cut it close?) and headed to the coffee shop to make her debut. But as the big moment grew closer, Rosie started to experience nerves, something her little five-year-old body wasn’t expecting. Her eyes were watering as she thought about not getting it right in front of a crowd. In the car, her big sister tried encouraging her and I followed with some pep talk, so completely aware of exactly how her little heart was beating. We walked in the back and practiced the song again before it was her turn. They called her name and I knelt down beside her with my guitar in the front of that tiny coffee shop filled with our smiling friends and family. It was her turn. Rosie buried her face in my arm as her cousins and big sister came up to offer hand-holding, sing-alongs, hugs, cookies or whatever it was going to take to make her brave. I whispered in her ear “come on now, you can do it!”

But little Rosie couldn’t do it. Not right then. It was all too overwhelming I think, the idea that in her head, she was a professional singer, but in real life she was still only five and she’d never done this before. Oh, I could relate. Just a few days before, getting ready to walk out to a theater full of hundreds of people so far away from home, I wondered if I truly belonged. If I was good enough. If I could pull it off. My stomach was in my throat, the same way my daughter’s was in our hometown that night. I so badly wanted her to do the thing she wanted to do, but I didn’t read the chapter in the parenting book on this.

So I told her we’d try again.

We went to the back and gathered ourselves. I wiped her little tears and told her she was brave. We practiced the song again, three or four more times. She said she wanted to try again in a little bit. So out we went to listen to the other performers and get a hug from her teachers, who promised her a pizza party if she gave it another go. Bless those two lovely women because that did it, the promise of pizza. I think that would probably do it for me too.

Her cousins and big sister at her side again, Rosie looked down, got a little teary, got it together, took a deep breath and sang.

“Daddy feeds the horses, sister cuts the twine, me and mom chase cattle, the dogs come for a ride…”

The small coffee shop crowd cheered and Rosie was so proud. She even got a tip, which she can’t get over. She didn’t know she was that good! But to everyone in that room that night, it was less about being good and so much more about being brave. That’s where it starts, at little open mics, little rodeos, little gymnastics meets, little dance recitals, little talent shows, little opportunities that we create in our little communities to help each other grow wings. I’m so thankful for the efforts of those who make things like this happen.

Anyway, if you’re wondering, Rosie’s big sister got wind of the tip and is working out her own song for next month as I type. So if you like drama, stay tuned for the saga of the sister band.

The music continues…

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This week my mind is on the music as I work on a new album and pack for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. I sits down with my husband to talk about what it means to still be recording and creating music at 39 and I answer a listener’s question about the songwriting process. Chad’s been busy building the addition, so he gives a little sheetrock-covered update too. 
PLUS, I shares a rough cut of the song I wrote about my Great Grandpa Eddie at the end of the podcast, so stay to have an exclusive listen. 

When I was a young teenager, like 13 or 14, every spare minute I had at home was spent trying to teach myself to play guitar on the pink carpet of my room. Leaned up against the frame of my waterbed (hey, it was the 90s) I pressed stop and play and stop and play on my CD player trying to figure out the chords to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” or Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” I found these songs in my parent’s album collections and there was something about them that spoke to me more than anything I was hearing on the two FM radio stations that came in at the ranch.

Maybe it was the fact that the first songs I ever heard were coming from my dad playing and singing around the house. I knew the lyrics to Emmylou Harris and John Prine songs before I even heard their original versions. And when I began to discover my own musical tastes, when I could buy my own albums and play them on repeat, I was surprised to find there was something lonesome about it. Because I couldn’t imagine a world beyond my nook of rural America where real people like this existed, playing guitars in coffee shops and clubs and forming and breaking up bands and writing and recording music.  Somehow, it made me feel even more isolated, more landlocked, more obscure in my community and so very far away from a world where people create music for a living. I suppose I felt that my only access to it was to learn to play it myself and to attempt to write my own.

MEDORA — AUG 5: Tour of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. (Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Center for Creative Photography/University of Arizona).

I was only fourteen or fifteen when I wrote some of the music for the first album I released my senior year of high school. If I knew then what I know now, I wonder if would I have put myself out there that way. That’s the thing about adolescence—the naiveté keeps you brave.

I’m thinking about this today because for the past month or so I’ve been knee deep in working on music for another album. There was a time I would have told the 39-year-old version of me that I’m too old for this now, that to be creative, to have something to say, you must be relevant, and 39 didn’t seem relevant to me when I was in my early 20s driving up and down the middle of the country trying to write songs about places and things I knew nothing about. There was also a time when I thought that in order to be successful you had to remove yourself from all the familiar things and build yourself back up again somewhere more important. Go to Nashville. Go to California. Go to New York City. Then you’ll be something. Then you’ll have something worth saying.

I grew out of that phase somewhere between South Dakota and Oklahoma in my Chevy Lumina with a caved-in trunk I couldn’t open because of a fender-bender I still hadn’t dealt with. The man I loved and the place I loved was hundreds of miles away, I just cracked the front of my tooth off on a granola bar and I was supposed to be playing in a Nebraska college town in two hours. Was it this I loved? Or was there something else to it?

Last weekend I spent countless hours on the carpet in my grown up room working and re-working songs that could only be written by the woman I am now, hollering down to my daughters to “shush for a minute” and “play walkie-talkie in the basement please!”

I pulled out my harmonicas and immediately I saw two sets of bare feet under my bedroom door. Soon my daughters were playing harmonica too, dancing, singing and requesting for assistance writing their own songs.

I couldn’t help but think about the smoky smell of my dad’s guitar case on the 1980s shag carpet and me sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening. And then another thing hit me: this is how it can start, yes, but this can also just be how it is. There doesn’t have to be more to any of it except that it brings you some sort of peace or some sort of release or some sort of joy. If my daughters ask, that’s what I’ll tell them. Not everything we do with passion has to come to a famous, star-studded, glamorous end. Sometimes the best part is in the learning, or the listening or the creating or the dancing along.

As it turns out, the teenage version of me was right. To write it continues to set me free. And so that’s what I’m doing here, leaned up against my bed frame on the carpet in my room.

Mr. Tanner and the Joy of Singing Along

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Dad in his high School band, Cherry Creek,

I’m excited to share this week’s column and podcast that hones in on the music and the stories and what makes them so significant and important in our lives. And so of course I sit down with my dad on the podcast and we hash out some of our favorite folk songs and the stories behind decades of making music together. You get to hear my dad in his element, reciting lyrics and talking about his favorite musicians and all his time spent performing in his 50+ career as a musician.

Enjoy and thank you for believing as much as I do in the power of the story of the every day characters, the fabric of our communities.

The joy of singing along

Listen to the podcast here, on Apple Podcast or Spotify

There’s a Harry Chapin song I grew up listening to on my dad’s tape player. Harry Chapin was a Grammy award winning musician in the 70s and one of the greatest folk songwriters of his time. He created characters in his three to five minute songs that took you along to fall in love or break a heart or, in the case of “Mr. Tanner,“ the owner of a dry cleaning store in a small town in Ohio who sang while he worked long hours in his shop, to follow the encouragement of his friends and neighbors and use all his savings to “try music out full time.”

In the performance and recording of the song, in the backdrop of the chorus among the instruments a deep and pure baritone voice emerges as Mr. Tanner himself, singing the chorus to “Oh Holy Night.”

It’s beautiful, the whole thing, and the song takes you to his performance at a concert hall in New York. And if you’re listening for the first time, you hope for the outcome of fame and accolades for Mr. Tanner and his beautiful voice because “they said that he should use his gift instead of cleaning coats.” 

But Harry Chapin doesn’t deliver that fairy tale. That’s what makes him one of the best. Mr. Tanner’s debut performance was met with cold reviews, “Full time consideration of another endeavor might be in order…” And so Mr. Tanner went back to Dayton, Ohio, and the song ends with him singing to himself late at night while sorting his clothes, against the haunting lines of the chorus …

But music was his life, it was not his livelihood
And it made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good
And he sang from his heart and he sang from his soul
He did not know how well he sang, it just made him whole

This song came back to me recently after a particularly challenging week where I was working to bring a renowned concert pianist to our small community and the logistics just weren’t falling into place the way I had hoped. I was anxious about his arrival and worried about getting the arrangements just right for him. The man has played for every president since Ronald Reagan and I wanted his time here in our little community to be up to a particular standard and I felt I was falling short. I was feeling flustered and tired and considering what it would take to retire early when the last song was played and the crowd emerged wowed and thankful for the opportunity. I watched as the pianist to the presidents signed autographs and chatted with the community and breathed the kind of sigh of relief you breathe when something challenging comes together in the end.

After the last guest headed for home and the pianist made his way to his hotel room, I stuck around the venue to gather our things and wrap up, always the last to leave. Then from the empty hallways of the big school I heard the trumpets, violins and high-pitched guitars of a mariachi band echo from small speakers and bounce off the concrete walls. Unexpectedly, a big, beautiful baritone voice joined in with the recorded singer, filling the dark school with life again and reminding me, in the best way, that at 10 p.m., the next shift had begun.

I stopped on my tired feet to listen from behind the wall for a moment, not wanting to disturb or embarrass that voice, not wanting him to stop. This man wasn’t singing for the crowd that had just dispersed. Or on a big stage, or for the president or on YouTube to be available for the masses. He was singing for himself, because “It made him feel so happy and it made him feel so good.”

And what I heard was filled with so much joy and exultation it turned my mood and immediately reminded me that at the core of it all, what really matters here. These gifts we’re given and how we use them, it’s up to us and us only.

I turned the corner and the man realized, like me, he wasn’t alone. He smiled and turned the music down. I told him he made my night and please, please ignore me now, and keep singing. And then I made my way home in the dark, with the music turned up, singing along.

On Marriage and Montana

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Dear Husband,

Listen to the podcast where Jessie sits down with Chad to visit about marriage in the thick of it and to hear the audio version of the column. Subscribe on Anchor, Spotify or Apple Podcast

Last weekend when we were heading across the North Dakota, Montana borderline. Looking out the windows as the landscape turned from badlands to plains, we admired the green grass and marveled at how the big Yellowstone and Missouri rivers were pushing their banks to the limits at every turn. It’s that season. The snow melt from the mountains and the rains reminding us that there are very few ways to tame the water when it needs to rage. It’s out of the river’s control really. So many outside forces at play…

The night before we packed up our pickup camper with my guitars and boots, bedding and snacks, lawn chairs and coolers, you worked until dark tearing down an old garage at a neighbor’s place.

With heavy equipment and your muscles, you wanted to leave a clean slate in that yard before we dropped or daughters at their grandparents’ place and you drove with me to sit in the audience while I played songs for a mountain town, who, just days before, was on the edge of disaster as their creek flooded and took houses and streets with it.

But you wouldn’t have known it that weekend on the main streets of this small mountain town. The restaurants were full, the shops were stocked and the doors to the bars and venues were swung open so that you could hear musicians like me strumming guitars and singing songs about hope and loss and family and these untamable rivers and love, of course.

I drank tequila after the shows and you talked about ranching with anyone who asked because your hat and the way you lean so self-assured with one shoulder against the wall in the back gave you away.

Dear Husband, you were there with me so I suppose I don’t have to tell you all this, but I guess I want to remember the way you’ve always let me know that my dream is your dream too. And so you carry my guitar and you sell my albums in the back and you grab the things I forgot, the cord and the picks and the lists and you tell me good job even if maybe it wasn’t my best job.

Husband, we haven’t been away together, just the two of us, in a while. The kids and the ranch and the chores and the work fill our days and nights like the melting snow from the mountains floods the river and so we think we have no choice but to keep rushing, keep pushing, keep flowing harder to keep on our feet, to keep between the banks.  

The last time we slept next to this unruly creek at the edge of this mountain town we were in your dad’s old Ford pickup with a broken AC and a 1970’s pop-up camper in the box and I had never really been in the mountains so you were taking me there.

We were just kids then and I remember hoping that it could be like this forever, you in the driver’s seat, me singing along to the radio and helping us find our way. 20 years later, on the very same route, you turned our pickup off the interstate and told me you missed me and I cried. I cried because I knew it. I missed you too, in the kind of way that you’re right there but I can’t get to you. I cried because didn’t we know better?

That weekend I sang a love song I wrote before the kids came, when we were younger and building a life, not knowing then that the tools will always be out on the kitchen table, we just need to remember to pick them up. And I don’t have many love songs, I’m not sure why. I’ve been in love with you much longer than I haven’t in this life. On that stage, I realized that’s probably why. Sometimes we admire the big oak we’ve grown, but don’t thank the strong branches for the leaves and the shade and for hanging on to help weather the storms.

So Husband, we may be that great big river right now, running and rushing and picking things up along the way, but along the banks of that creek that weekend I made a quiet promise to myself not to wait for disaster. And I promise you I’m not waiting any longer for the sun to dry off of the mountaintops and force us to slow down. Can we promise to be a different kind of river?  Let’s find a flat meadow and spread out and slow down and be grateful anytime we can, but maybe most importantly when we think we can’t.

Dear Husband, I have plenty more love songs to write.

Love,

Your wife  

The songs that we know

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The Songs that We Know
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There are songs that we know, tucked away in the back of our memories that come to in the form of a hum or a whistle while we’re doing dishes or laundry, pulling weeds or fixing on the tractor.

Maybe it was a song we learned in elementary music class, standing next to your best friend on the risers, singing at the top of our lungs without a care, the way only a 7-year-old can.

Or it might be our favorite church hymn, or the one you first learned to play on the guitar or the piano, or the verse your mother used to sing quietly while she helped you wash your hair in the bath.

These songs become a part of our DNA, just like the color of your eyes or the swirl of cowlicked hair on the back of your head, you seem to have always known the words to the first verse of “You Are My Sunshine” or “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” or that song that your dad used to sing loud and silly in the kitchen while he spun you around next to the refrigerator… “Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby… Be-bop-a-lula, I don’t mean maybe…”

You hear that now and you’re instantly 10 years old again in stocking feet on the linoleum floor…

I became a singer because my dad was a singer. People ask me why or how it came to be that I carried music with me my entire life, and that’s the answer. I always felt compelled to sing along.

As far back as the memories I can reach, my dad had a guitar or a song, picking or strumming or singing along, a comfort to him that became a comfort to me. A Harry Chapin song about an immigrant grandfather, a Guy Clark tune that sounded like a hot summer day, Lyle Lovett’s “Waltzing Fool,” Emmylou’s heartbreak and the stories and characters I fell in love with in three-minute vignettes made me want to do it too, to make music like that, and to keep them close, like old friends.

Now that I have young children of my own spinning and leaping in the living room while I play my guitar, I wonder which songs might stick in their lungs and emerge while they’re packing their bags or curling their hair. It’s been 30 years since I first stood next to my dad behind a microphone, probably at an Art in the Park in my hometown, singing Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime.” I didn’t know then that I would recount Rita and Eddy’s love story for years to come, around campfires, on flatbed trailers, at county fairs and coffee shops and colleges throughout the country — I would take them with me. A little piece of my childhood.

And while music can be timeless, our lives are not. Last fall as I was staring down my 36th year, with little wisps of gray in my hair, I suddenly felt a real urgency to somehow capture the music I grew up playing. I wanted to always be able to turn a dial and hear my dad’s voice on John Prine’s “Paradise,” to bottle up neighbor Kelly’s yodel on Night Rider’s “Lament” and capture Mike’s doboro, steele and guitar-picking the way he’s played for me on my favorite songs since I was a kid trying to be a singer.

And so a new album was born. I called it “Playing Favorites,” because that’s what we would be doing — playing our favorites, and maybe some of yours, too.

Little did I know that during the process of making the album that I would find myself struggling to breathe, finishing up the recording process while beginning an unpredictable cancer battle.

Little did I know how important this collection of songs would become to me.

And so while I’m happy to announce that, nearly a year since I knew something just wasn’t right, I am cancer-free, I’m also excited that the news coincided with the release of this album, our gift to you, available online at jessieveedermusic.com, some select local stores and anywhere you download music.

We hope you find a few familiar tunes to hum along to.

New Album Out!

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You’ve heard rumblings here and there in the midst of the crazy that has become 2020, but I want to officially announce it here. The new album, Playing Favorites, is officially OUT!

I’ve been working on this compilation that features some of the songs that influenced me and songs I grew up singing, for almost a year. It felt timely and urgent to me for some reason to put these songs down, with my dad and neighbor Kelly and guitar player Mike who has played with me since I was a teenager and with other musicians who have been there for me along the way. Little did I know I was recording the album with a cancerous tumor in my airway that was working to threaten my life.

Little did I know I would wrap it up in the middle of the COVID lockdown.

Little did I know about the detour my life would take.

But now its release it feels so much sweeter. Because we’re in the middle of a time when we all want to be reminded of something familiar and comforting, and these songs are just that for me, and hopefully to you too. I am so happy to be able to send them out into the world.

Purchase your signed copy today

or Download it or listen wherever you listen or buy music. 
Spotify or iTunes

Playing Favorites Album Art

This album is dedicated to my dad and his red guitar. It’s for the characters in the songs we sing and for the characters we’ve played for on flatbed trailers at county fairs, in Legion Clubs and churches, at backyard barbecues, barn dances and potluck picnics in small towns across the mid-west. When we pick up our guitars at a campfire or in the living rooms of family and friends after a good meal with good company, these are the first songs we reach for because they are familiar, safe and forgiving of our imperfections, just like old friends. On this album you will hear the voices and instruments of my dad and I, of course, but also of our friends who have so often, when we needed them most, pulled up a chair to play along. This album is for them. And it’s for my daughters, my nieces and my nephews, for my cousins and their kids and you and yours, so that you might find a familiar tune and a place to sing along.
With much love,
Jessie ❤️

New Album Sneak Peek

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Playing Favorites Album Art
Since October I’ve been working on an album that pays tribute to the folk music I grew up playing with my dad, neighbors and friends. It’s an eclectic mix of cowboy music, hymns, folk music, beautiful songwriters and it sound so much like us.

I wanted to record it locally so that we could bring in the musicians I’ve been playing with for years and so that we could capture what you might hear around a campfire, in the living room, on a flatbed trailer at a county fair or in the corner at the American Legion Club.

My plans were to be on the road with this album in May, but COVID and my tumor sidelined that plan, and so we’ve taken a little more time with it. (Also, can you believe I recorded an entire album with a giant tumor in my airway? Jeesh) Watch for its release mid-Summer and take a moment to check out this sneak peek, behind the scenes of making “Playing Favorites.”

Thank you for the love and thank you Makoche Studios for doing such a beautiful job telling the story.

To gather, and all the things that phrase means to a ranch woman

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Cows by the dam

To gather, and all the things that phrase means to a ranch woman

To gather. As a ranch woman, this phrase conjures up images of roundup season, sitting on top of my horse and moving our cattle together from all corners of our pastures.

It’s the throaty hum of the animals’ voices as they call to their calves or to one another or out into the world, seemingly saying, “I’m here, I’m coming. All right already.”

It’s the creak of the old cows’ bones as we let them slowly navigate themselves toward a well-worn path they know toward home. And it’s the “heya” and the “c’mon” we let out of our lungs as we follow the small sea of black backs, the quiet counting and calculations in our heads, our warm breath cooling down in the autumn air.

It’s the swing of our leg off the saddle and the swing of the gate when they’re all in and accounted for so we can take a deep breath, put our hands on our hips and say, “Well, all right then…” and move on to the sorting.

I recently participated in a different kind of gathering down in Elko, Nev. A gathering of cowboy poets, musicians, artists and fans from across the world in an event dedicated to the stories we tell about a way of life that I would say is more rough than it is romantic, except it’s the rough parts that make it so.

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The National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. That’s what they call it. And I like that they call it that, because that’s what it is.

It’s a gathering of people, ideas, stories, music, art and conversation in a small town in the dessert in the middle of winter when the cowboys and ranchers that create have time to take leave from the Plains or the mountains to connect with other artists and an audience eager to hear from them so that they might be a part of that life, too, if only for a few days under a felt hat.

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Mike, Dad and I with Cowboy poet Jake Riley

That is, if they have someone at home to feed the cattle and the kids. Which is where my husband falls in the story. Because everyone wants to be a cowboy until it’s actually time to do cowboy stuff, and so he got the less-glamorous gig of wiping toddler noses and rolling out hay bales while I was shaking hands and singing under the lights.

ARCHIVE: Read more of Jessie Veeder’s Coming Home columns

And I couldn’t help but look out into the audience of hundreds of anonymous silhouettes sitting still and quiet and ready to nod along and feel overwhelmingly grateful that somebody thought the world needed an event like this. Because in the 20-some years that I’ve been writing music and performing, I’ve never found a better muse than the rural community, rugged landscape and ranch life in which I was raised.

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An American Forrest , Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Corb Lund on stage in Elko

But in the miles I’ve traveled up and down the Midwest, I have questioned if it ever really resonates, if there is anyone else out there who thought the world needed a song with a rhythm based on hoof beats. I’ve spent a career slowly finding those people who do, and then, three airplanes later, I found myself in a land where they’ve all congregated for us, caffeinated, fed, inspired and ready to listen.

To gather.

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Shared the stage with Brigid & Johnny Reedy

Shared the stage with Brigid & Johnny Reedy
And Dylan Clough
This talented little ranch girl Marinna Mori
with film maker Clare McKay and songwriter Anna Rose Pozzi
Ran into Cowboy Poet, songster and podcaster Andy Hedges
And then randomly, one of my favorites, Colter Wall was in the greenroom
With the legendary Ramblin’ Jack Elliot
Dad
The morning gathering of entertainers at the Western Folklife Center

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This talented little ranch girl Marinna Mori

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With film maker Clare McKay and songwriter Anna Rose Pozzi

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Ran into Cowboy Poet, songster and podcaster Andy Hedges

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With the legendary Ramblin’ Jack Elliot

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And then randomly, one of my favorites, Colter Wall was in the greenroom

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Dad

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The morning gathering of entertainers at the Western Folklife Center

I kept saying it to myself as I looked out in this community the Western Folklife Center created in Elko for people like me and people nothing like me at all.

What happens when we gather? Those differences become less important than the way a song about loss reminds us both of similar struggle.

Or the way we collectively clapped and laughed, the whole auditorium full of us, as he yodeled and kicked up his leg.

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Backstage listening to the Munsick Boys

Or the silence none of us discussed but honored as an 85-year-old legend, with a voice worn from years of songs and stories, closed his eyes and worked through another one on a stage that afternoon.

And so I couldn’t help but feel a bit like our cattle that week down in Elko, surrounded by a sea of hats and smiles, reaching out to touch one another as we drew closer to say, “I’m here! I’m coming. All right already,” taking a familiar path toward a place that feels like home.

And I’m back at the ranch now, hands on hips, ready for the sorting…

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