For S.G. Goodman, raised in Hickman, Kentucky along the Mississippi River, her music and strong Southern identity are inseparable. In this Home Studio Session, she shares some of the back story for her debut album Old Time Feeling and talks about music as a stir for that slow country living.
Goodman became acquainted with her musicality at a young age. Her earliest encounters were exactly what you might expect from a tiny rivertown of three-thousand: old church hymns and community bluegrass performances.
“Your pastime in a rural place was music. Even just driving around and listening.”
To accompany her vocals, Goodman began teaching herself guitar at 15 and doing a bit of songwriting. A few years later, when she decided to break away and attend college in Murray, Kentucky, she was still developing her sound, working on a pop project and eager to start producing records.
Soon she began to meet other students and was quickly inducted into the bustling indie music scene through house-shows and performances at acclaimed record store Terrapin Station. She formed her first band The Savage Radley during those formative years, and although she never fully transitioned into a punk-rocker, the bond formed with her bandmates continues, and she describes them as her best friends and favorite music collaborators to this day.
“I wanted Kentucky to own this album and I wanted to represent it through the people I worked with and where I recorded it.”
Old Time Feeling is co-produced by Jim James, frontman of My Morning Jacket (and a Kentuckian with an eerily similar ghostly-tone). James favorably took to her project and advocated for Goodman’s voice to be the core sound, which Goodman noted seemed to occur naturally throughout her career.
“It’s not necessarily about singing loud, but more like singing with some conviction….if we could get a noisy bar in the middle of nowhere to be quiet for a couple minutes, we thought we’d accomplished something.”
Her jaded country-girl sensibilities reveal themselves when she sings “the southern state is a condition, its true,” and of “the sickness of the countryside”. Goodman examines her roots in their current circumstance and simultaneously lives outside of it through her album. This debut disc contains broad commentary, but S.G. Goodman has one sole proposition for us: harken to that high lonesome sound and get back to that old time feeling.
