Culture Cabinet

Margaret Glaspy’s latest release The Golden Heart Protector, began as a simple spontaneous weekend in Los Angeles. “I went to LA and was hanging out with Ryan Lerman, my friend and producer for this record. We were excited to hang out in his studio and make some kind of music. We didn’t really know what we were going to do,” she recalls in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “Then I just started to think about songs that I loved, and started playing them. He had the mics up. And then one thing kind of led to another.”

What emerged was a luminous collection of cover songs that feel both reverent and personal. “The songs were really just songs that were on my mind at that time,” Glaspy explains. “I’m a big fan of all these artists, Rufus Wainwright, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, Creedence Clearwater Revival, all of these are a lot of my favorite bands and artists, and I’ve loved these songs for a long time.”

Some of the tracks she’d played countless times in her life. Others she approached for the first time. “A lot of them I had never really played before,” she says. “But just had listened to a thousand times and could kind of reiterate them by ear in a certain way.” The result is a record that celebrates musical friendship and shared history as much as it honors songwriting craft. “It was really fun to make music with friends and remember that I have a really great musical community,” Glaspy says. “It was fun. It was the first for me to create reasons to be able to work with my friends and reach out.”

That spirit of collaboration threads through The Golden Heart Protector, from its duet with Norah Jones on Wilco’s “Jesus, Etc.” to appearances by Madison Cunningham, James Bay, Julian Lage, and Alam Khan. Yet, as Glaspy tells it, none of it was meticulously planned. “It happened pretty organically,” she says. “Some of it, we pre-recorded my part, and then we were able to have people record their parts remotely. A lot of them, luckily, we were able to do live with everyone in the room.”

I ask if matching the songs to their collaborators was intentional or spontaneous. She tells me many of the collaborations arrived through coincidence. “The song that I did with James Bay, the Jackson Browne song ‘These Days,’ he and I had played it together before at a show, and so that was really natural and easy. No-brainer to do together. He just happened to be in LA for 24 hours. He lives in London, so that was a really happy, great coincidence,” she says. “Maddie [Madison Cunningham] and I, we had a show that weekend, and I was covering a Magnetic Fields song, which ended up on the record. I knew that Maddie was in town, so I thought, ‘I’ll have her sit in on that.’ And then we ended up putting it on the record.”

Even her collaboration with Alam Khan came through family ties. “He’s kind of a newer friend, but an old friend of my husband’s actually. He plays the sarod on the Blake Mills song ‘Curable Disease.’ He lives in the Bay Area but happened to be in LA at that time. A lot of it was just kind of all these serendipitous intersections between all these people, and they just happened to be around,” Glaspy says. “The songs seemed to kind of gravitate to whoever wanted them.”

That same serendipity carried into the recording with Norah Jones. “We had a really wonderful piano player, Benny Bach, playing piano on that. And the way it turned out, sounded stylistically like Norah to me. And then I thought, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll have her sing on that.’ So the piano playing felt stylistically in her realm, and so it kind of made me think of her,” Glaspy says warmly. “It all just kind of morphed into what it is now pretty organically.”

Now, as Glaspy prepares to bring The Golden Heart Protector to the stage, including a solo performance at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge on October 16, she’s leaning into both reflection and renewal. “This show is going to be solo, and I’ll be playing around one microphone, which I’ve never done before, and I’m very excited about,” she says. “I’m also really excited because I’m gonna play through some songs that are on a new record that’s to come. Another record is going to come in April. So there’s a lot of new material that I’m excited to play and get off my chest. It’s been inside of me for a little while.”

Performing solo is an experiment in vulnerability and simplicity for Glaspy, who’s long thrived in a trio setup. “It’ll be a real interesting set list, for sure, kind of a first for me, in how these shows will be set up,” she says. “There’s a whole side of this tour that’s about playing songs on The Golden Heart Protector and other covers that I love. And then I’m also really excited to start to air some of those songs out and get to play them for the first time.”

Even as she moves forward, Glaspy says making The Golden Heart Protector changed how she approaches her craft. “It was cool to almost have my bluff called in a way, that I’m in the studio while I’m also writing this other record,” she says. “It reminded me of some of the eventualities to come. Like, okay, I’m going to be doing this with this record that I’m writing pretty soon also. So what do I really want to say, and what is the point?”

She credits the covers project with reawakening her creative instincts. “It’s a little bit more acoustic leaning, and it was cool to play without drums at times,” she says. “A lot of the music that I have made in the past is pretty drum heavy and kind of always grown out of a trio format. So it was cool to just try a totally different format, and it totally influenced the record to come. It’s really different than my past stuff. So yeah, it was really inspiring for me to make this record and be able to just play with music and not be on the hook for writing it, but getting to just revel in other people’s work. It’s fun singing really great songs.”

Glaspy also found herself rediscovering songs she thought she already knew. “There were a lot of lyrics and meaning that, even though I listened to them thousands of times, I didn’t really totally gather initially,” she says. “I find that every time I interpret other people’s songs, I learn a lot about the song, but I also just learn about my relationship to song in general. It’s fun to interpret them myself, because whatever they intended or not, I’m having my own experience, just like a listener is.”

For Glaspy, interpretation is its own kind of storytelling. “I think it’s like an art form in itself, and I’m excited to get better and better at it,” she reflects. “Interpretation and embodying someone else’s story kind of feels like acting in some way. It’s fun. It’s really, really fun.”

As she takes these songs on the road, Glaspy hopes audiences feel the same sense of connection that fueled the record’s creation. “I would be so happy if people feel a little more connected to each other,” she says. “I think music is really good at connecting dots between humans, and live music is especially great for that. It’s not every day that everybody’s getting along. It’s a hard time right now in the world. I feel like live music is a really beautiful format to sit next to people that you don’t know and enjoy something beautiful. I get excited at the thought that strangers can come to a show of mine and leave feeling better in some way, or leave feeling connected, a little more connected, either to one another, to themselves, or to art, but feeling a little less alone and a little more connected.”

You can get tickets to Margaret Glaspy’s show at Le Poisson Rouge here.