The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, February 10, 2017 — 5

One of the things I’ve always 

liked about folk music is its 
capacity for energy. The vari-
ety of different instruments 
encourages a nuanced sound 
that always amazes me. It isn’t 
hard to see why people con-
nect with the sound so much, 
whether they’re hearing it 
through their headphones or in 
the moment at a live show.

Few 
modern 
folk 
bands 

exemplify this energy with 
quite the same fervor as Moun-
tain Heart. A bluegrass and 
soul-influenced 
band 
from 

Nashville, 
Mountain 
Heart 

doesn’t shy away from the con-
nectable energy that comes 
out of folk music. Depending 
on the song, the 
band 
will 
amp 

up the genre to 
a new level of 
intensity, dial it 
back to allow for 
heavier moments 
or maneuver it 
into creative and 
genre-bending 
new territory.

“Other genres can be com-

partmentalized, if that’s the 
right word,” said lead singer 
Josh Shilling in an interview 
with the Daily. “You have to 
be a certain age, look a certain 
way.” With folk and Ameri-
cana, 
though, 
“artists 
are 

allowed to be themselves.”

“Your fan base will age with 

you, and allow you to age,” 
Shilling said.

In this way Americana is 

resistant to the idea of a musi-
cal “shelf life,” finding its 
appeal more in a “grassroots 
following that doesn’t have 
anything to do with the radio 
… it’s not a pop culture thing, 
it’s a thing that people connect 
to for life.”

This 
type 
of 
flexibil-

ity allows for a lot of artistic 
exploration, 
and 
Mountain 

Heart takes full advantage 
of this, doing a good job of 
not pigeonholing itself into 
one genre. Shilling person-
ally sings “more soulful stuff,” 
even though he was “born into 
bluegrass” near the Blue Ridge 
Mountains area of Virginia. 
The other band members were 
“initially huge into bluegrass,” 
Shilling said. “Molly (Cherry-
holmes) … grew up in a band, 
basically lived on a tour bus, 
playing with her family band 
called 
The 
Cherryholmes. 

She’s kind of been around the 
bluegrass world her entire life, 
since birth … but loves soul 
music.”

Shilling went on to explain 

how Aaron Ramsey, a more tra-
ditional bluegrass singer, sang 
“Maggie’s Farm,” a Bob Dylan 
cover included on their new 

album.

“Jeff, our bass player, also 

sings incredibly well,” Shilling 
said, “and everybody onstage 
switches instruments, too. On 
our albums, literally, there will 
be banjo, and then there will 
be Hammond B-3 organ, and 
then there’s an accordion and 
piano, mixed with mandolin 
and fiddle. So it’s very eclectic 
and unusual in that regard.”

All in all, the musicians of 

Mountain Heart are influ-
enced by artists as diverse as 
Tony Rice, Ricky Skaggs, Ali-
son Krauss, Darryl Scott and 
The Allman Brothers.

“We really just try to do 

what we love,” Shilling said.

This variety in musical taste 

comes together as a fusion of 
something new in the band’s 
music, and it can also lead 
them into unexpected terri-

tory 
in 
terms 

of 
songwriting. 

Shilling recount-
ed a recent expe-
rience in which 
the entire band 
worked 
togeth-

er 
to 
write 
a 

song, which he 
describes 
as 
a 

“Crosby-Stills-Nash 
throw-

back.”

“You have to wade through 

four or five opinions, and four 
or five brains like mine that 
never stop,” Shilling said, but 
ultimately the band came up 
with a new song called “Rest-
less Wind.”

“I would’ve never gotten 

such a beautiful piece of music 
on my own,” Shilling said.

Their new 2016 album, Blue 

Skies, was written with the 
idea of playing it live in mind.

“We tried to record things 

that could be a set list,” Shilling 
said, referencing songs from 
the album like “Miss Me When 
I’m Gone,” “Have You Heard 
About the Old Hometown” and 
the titular track, “Blue Skies.” 
He hinted that the band will 
play many of these songs this 
weekend when they perform 
live at The Ark, on Saturday.

Just as the songs from Blue 

Skies lend themselves to live 
performances, so, in a way, 
does venue of The Ark. Shil-
ling is excited to get back to 
the notable folk venue, where 
Mountain Heart has played 
several 
times 
before, 
and 

where, he said, there is a “type 
of accessible energy” that isn’t 
often found outside of festival 
environments.

“The crowd is not just sub-

dued, they’re wide open,” Shil-
ling said. “It’s very exciting for 
us, to be in a venue where peo-
ple are so electric like that.”

Part of this might come from 

The Ark’s location far north of 
bluegrass’s origins.

“In 
the 
southeast, 
for 

instance,” Shilling said, “blue-
grass music, and folk music, 

and acoustic music, are every-
where, and it’s really, really 
saturated … but it’s a little 
different from when you’re in 
New York City, or when you’re 
in Minneapolis or when you’re 
in Ann Arbor. Those people 
just absolutely love it. It almost 
seems like they need it, you 
know, or maybe they don’t get 
that kind of music often. I real-
ly feel like the support we get is 
just amazing in that part of the 
country (the North).”

Mountain Heart also shares 

a unique tie with The Ark in 
that they recorded an entire 
live album there, The Road that 
Never Ends, in 2007.

“That process was amazing, 

because we played for like four 
hours,” Shilling said. “We’d 
play, you know, for thirty min-
utes, and then mess something 
up. So we’d stop the song and 
tell the audience what hap-
pened, and then start the song 
over, because we were record-
ing it!”

He explained how that 4 

hour-long show was edited to 
become The Road that Never 
Ends, and added: “We’d actu-
ally love to record again there.”

Knowing the band’s history 

with The Ark, it is no surprise 
that they are excited to come 
back this weekend.

“At The Ark, you see people 

who really, really get it, who 
really support it,” Shilling said. 
“We have friends who come 
from all over there … it’s just 
really special, it’s kind of like a 
family reunion.”

This 
will 
be 
Mountain 

Heart’s first time at The Ark 
“with the project in hand,” 
meaning their new album. 
They will be selling copies of 
Blue Skies, as well as newly 
designed Mountain Heart tee 
shirts. This show is “one of 
the highlights of (the band’s) 
year,” according to Shilling, 
and it will be followed by many 
more exciting venues: Later 
this year, they plan to perform 
in Roanoke, Virginia (near 
where Shilling grew up), and in 
Flagstaff, Arizona, as well as at 
the world-famous MerleFest in 
North Carolina.

If Blue Skies is any indica-

tion of what the audience can 
expect this Saturday, it will be 
a show full of layered emotion 
and energy. The connection 
that people feel with music 
through songwriting and live 
performances is “kind of the 
reason we all didn’t decide 
to put on a suit and tie and go 
get a desk job,” Shilling said. 
This commitment to the power 
of music is not unfamiliar to 
Mountain Heart, nor, it seems, 
to anyone who has seen them 
live in the past, whether at The 
Ark or elsewhere.

With the power of live 

music, “you get to make peo-
ple happy, even if it’s just for a 
short time,” Shilling said.

LAURA DZUBAY

Daily Arts Writer

Bluegrass band Mountain Heart 
to perform at The Ark Saturday

COMPASS RECORDS

Mountain Heart 

Saturday Feb. 11, 

8:00 p.m.

The Ark

$35

“The crowd is not just subdued, they’re wide open,” Shilling said. 
“It’s very exciting … to be in a venue where people are so electric.”

HBO

In season finale, ‘The Young Pope’ 
meditates as much as it vindicates 

“The Young Pope” makes it 

a point to leave you reeling. It’s 
obnoxious and inflammatory, 
but miraculous-
ly avoids being 
unseemly. For a 
show that finds 
pleasure in con-
stantly 
poking 

and prodding its 
viewers, its shelf 
life manages to 
surprise. Whether Lenny Belar-
do (Jude Law, “Spy”) is buried 
deep in his childhood melodra-
ma, or viciously — and laudably 
— politicking his way around 
Vatican City, the mask he dons as 
Pope Pius XIII never fails to con-
found, confuse, excite and ter-
rorize — oftentimes all at once.

In “The Young Pope,” cre-

ator, writer and director Paolo 
Sorrentino (“Youth”) crafts a 
thematic paradox. He manages 
to desecrate the tenets and tra-
ditions of the Catholic Church 
without impunity, while ear-
nestly glorifying its propriety 
and affection in the same breath. 
His thematic intentions with 
regards to the Church remain 
largely unclear, even as the dust 
settles around the finale — but 
ruminating over that is an exer-
cise in futility. While HBO can 
bill the show as pertaining to the 
Catholic Church all they want, 
Sorrentino makes it no mystery 
that the Church is but a carefully 
curated backdrop for a story far 
larger than the already portly 
institution. 
Sorrentino’s 
sto-

ries are grand, and his visions 
behoove and arrest — but most 
importantly, they’re befitting for 
the kind of narratives he so des-
perately seeks to operate on.

Pope Pius XIII introduces 

himself to us as a hawk who 
lurches from the shadows. He 
is a false promise sold by the 
Church to itself and, ultimately, 
a metaphor for the inevitable 
impropriety and shortsighted-
ness that centuries of killing 

time ushers in. His emotions and 
actions often recall to life the 
demeanor of Francis Ford Cop-
pola’s take on Michael Corleone 
(Al Pacino, “Misconduct”) — a 
kind of demeanor that led Cor-
leone to usurp his father and sib-
lings in regards to their cunning 

and penchant for 
grandeur (the Pope 
unfolding 
to 
his 

own 
“family” 
in 

much of the same 
manner). He reviles 
homosexuality, 
demonizes abortion 
and ham-handedly 

makes enemies and skeptics out 
of would-be peers — all while the 
Church was expecting an ear-
nest ambassador for their intend-
ed institutional liberalization. 
The world around him erupts in 
protest, and Sorrentino advanta-
geously channels that fervor into 
the kind of striking cinematogra-
phy that nurtures the program’s 
absurdity — an image of FEMEN 
protesters bloodily painted with 
the 
word 
“bastard” 
littered 

around the Papal Palace’s garden 
isn’t a scene to forget.

But 
Sorrentino 
carefully 

guides the program’s narrative 
in such a way as to highlight the 
nuances of time and progress. 
The Pope comes to us as a com-
plex man, in strong pursuit of a 
gripping and enigmatic legacy, 
and for a sense of long-craved 
familial affirmation. He first 
goes about fulfilling his desires 
in ways that stun and polarize 
his colleagues. Attempts to stain 
the Pope in scandal drip from 
the upper rungs of the Church, 
and St. Peter’s Square becomes a 
jarringly empty enclave. Drunk 
on power, Pius — in the name 
of his ego — becomes unknow-
ingly hell-bent on becoming 
the Church’s undoing. But the 
Pope’s self-orchestrated chaos 
transforms itself into a pertinent 
meditation, most evident in the 
finale.

Pius begins the program in 

the shadow of his more funda-
mental predecessors as a means 
to strike fear into the hearts of 
those around him, but those 

intentions slowly become more 
telling of a wounded man on a 
lifelong search for personal equi-
librium. As much as he casts his 
fists in violent deference, Pius is 
also man who suffers. He shields 
his face from public view to 
cloud himself in manufactured 
enigma, but one can’t help but 
ask if his unabashed, impulsive 
authority is just one grand cop-
ing mechanism for a man far 
more emotionally wrought than 
he’s proud to admit. His pro-
digious self-awareness finally 
becomes of use as he reconciles 
with the wounds of abandon-
ment that have marred him for so 
long — and with that reconcilia-
tion comes a leader and savior far 
more fit for the papal regalia than 
anyone could have expected.

The program relishes its last 

minutes, with the Pope finally 
revealing himself to a massive 
crowd in Venice’s St. Mark’s 
Square. After months of chas-
tising and berating the public 
from afar, Pius delivers a sober-
ing address that contradicts 
his otherwise taut predilec-
tion for authority and mystery. 
Drawing on the stories of the 
canonized (but, unfortunately, 
fictitious) Juana Fernandez — a 
Guatemalan teenager touted for 
her saintly love and affection 
— Pius addresses the crowd on 
the oft-misunderstood simplic-
ity of devotion. He implores the 
crowd to smile. In rare form, he 
smiles. And he cries. An address 
meant to be a prescient reminder 
for believers and nonbelievers 
alike becomes symbolic of a per-
sonal vindication that may have 
never been in the cards for Pius. 
The Pope collapses after a final 
earnest smile. Papal infallibil-
ity mightily held in one hand, 
personal tumult in the other, 
Pope Pius XIII’s frequent shifts 
between ruler and child shows 
that even in the glory of a mani-
cured image and regimented 
rule, the human soul wounds, 
nurtures and persists.

The season one finale of “The 

Young Pope” premieres Monday, 
Feb. 13.

ANAY KATYAL

Managing Arts Editor

“The Young Pope”

Series Finale 

HBO 

Monday at 10 p.m.

Italian director Paolo Sorrentino manages to behoove 
 

and enchant in season’s visually breath-taking final episode

INTERESTED IN WRITING FOR ARTS?

Email arts@michigdandaily.com for an application. 

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