It’s the quiet awe of wild places that most animates Natalie Spears’ music. Outside her home in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, she listens to the language of birds, notices patterns of migration and sees the cosmos in the countryside, like how the cedar waxwings harvest crab apples every February. For Spears, the natural world offers a constant invitation to open the aperture of life to something wider, something wilder.
Her solo album, Hymn of Wild Things (released in 2023), chronicles an experience of wonder, loss and metamorphosis. This is a collection of songs about the intimate corners of humanity, threading opposites together: love with loss; tradition with innovation; and the human experience with a more-than-human world.
Spears grew up in a home brimming with music. Her dad would sit at the piano playing Chopin, singing rugby tunes, scatting Louis Armstrong ballads and reciting whimsical folk songs from his childhood days in Britain’s East Midlands. Spears started on piano and by fifth grade was lugging an upright bass to school, followed by saxophone and drums. When she moved to Colorado in her early twenties, Spears discovered clawhammer banjo from a co-worker while building straw-bale houses. She added the banjo to her quiver of instruments and started writing songs.
Spears is known for her work with fiddling singer Lizzy Plotkin. The duo’s album, “Just Over the Ridge,” was one of Folk Alliance’s top ten charting albums of the year and made number seven on Billboard’s bluegrass album chart. Spears has played the John Hartford Memorial Festival, Blackpot Festival, Palisade Roots Festival, Chautauqua Community House, Crested Butte Performing Arts Center and the Wheeler Opera House. When she’s not touring, Spears can be found writing songs with veterans, creating the space for them to tell their stories through music. Alongside teaching, working with veterans is one of the ways she practices reciprocity, sharing the gift of music that has given her so much.
Under the alias CASTANEA, Rising Appalachia’s own David Brown takes to the stage to remix and rework acoustic sounds with nods to the past and present tense prowess. As with bandmates Leah and Chloe, whose southern upbringing instilled love of both old-time music and hip-hop, Brown’s own musical journey had many legs, all of which come to the surface in CASTANEA. Along with the instruments for which he’s best known – the upright bass and baritone guitar – Brown’s skills cross over to turntables and beat making, through which a lush sound emerges that is both reminiscent of early trip hop classics but based in the soulful tones that arise from Appalachia. The name of the project, CASTANEA, like the music, has layers of depth and beauty. Derived from the name of the chestnut genus, it points to a tree that is slowly recovering from the brink of extinction in the eastern forests of North America (castanea dentata). Brown has dedicated proceeds from live sales of Remast towards replanting this tree, a step in ecological and cultural restoration work that gives literal roots to the name Rising Appalachia. The CASTANEA offshoot, with lush beats and a deep guiding vision, is laden with soulful fruit and entrancing potential.