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
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