These players are so good, and so deserving of notoriety.” “I don't ever have to go out of Austin to get what I need. “It's one of the things I love about recording here,” Gilkyson says. Others on the album include bassist Chris Maresh, keyboardist Bukka Allen, fiddler Warren Hood, mandolinist Kym Warner and more than a half-dozen women backing vocalists including Betty Soo and Jaimee Harris. “He's not one of those rocketshiplike lead players he's much more about texture and feel.” “I'd say that a lot of what I would identify as my sort of urban-folk sound really is because of Hardwick,” she says. RECORDED IN AUSTIN with her son producing (he’s done her last several records), “2020” features an ace cast of local players anchored by Hardwick, who plays a variety of guitars and has been integral to Gilkyson’s music over the past two decades. So much depends on it that I can barely stand the stress of it. I think we only have one shot at that before it all goes to hell, and that’s this election. “Perhaps unity would be possible if we had laws, regulations, government and leaders in place that supported and advocated the best parts of human nature and prevented/deterred the worst aspects. Later, she clarified her thoughts via email. I'm purposely trying not to be divisive right now.” So one of the things I did with this record is to keep promoting a sense of unified purpose. “I really think right now we need to be focusing on the things we have in common that we need to unite around. “I worry that the Democrats are so polarized, and I understand that the right is not going to shift,” she says. There’s no denying the political overtones of “2020,” but Gilkyson contends that the album’s theme and goal is to unify Americans in a time of turmoil. RELATED: Arlo Guthrie brings the family to the Paramount in Austin What connects 1950 (the year Gilkyson was born) to 2020 in the song is this key detail: The landlord Guthrie took to task was Fred Trump, father of Donald Trump. “My enemy is my landlord who won’t board them, ’cause he chose to live his sad life separately,” Guthrie writes. “Beach Haven” addresses 1950s racial segregation head-on, as Guthrie champions minorities who want to live in a New York apartment building. Most intriguing, though, is “Beach Haven,” which sets passages from a letter in Woody Guthrie’s archives to Gilkyson’s musical composition. Gilkyson knew early on that Bob Dylan’s fatalistic “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” would fit her vision for the record perfectly, and some minor tweaks to Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” helped bring that classic into the 21st century. “2020” balances seven freshly written tunes against three time-tested anchors from icons of 20th-century folk music. The November election looms as a crucial referendum on the state of our union, and Gilkyson - like most folk singers, a dyed-in-the-wool progressive - believed the times called for music that rose to the occasion. She’ll turn 70 in August, but perhaps more importantly, she saw this year as a turning point in American history. IT FOLLOWS, THEN, that Gilkyson set her eyes on 2020 as another milepost. RELATED: Review of Eliza Gilkyson’s 2018 album “Secularia” What followed were the two most productive decades of Gilkyson’s musical career, a stretch that included Grammy nominations for 2004’s “Land of Milk and Honey” and 2014’s “The Nocturne Diaries.” Everything stemmed from that epiphany 20 years ago: “I kind of woke up at age 50 and just thought, ‘If I don't do this now, I'm going to regret that I didn't try.’” “I was single, and I loved at night after a gig just climbing into the back of the van, lying there while Cisco and Mike would be up front listening to the radio. “It was a really fun time in my life,” she recalls.
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