Jami Lynn
Fall Is a Good Time to Die
2015 | Folk
— track 4: "God Out On the Plains”
Jami Lynn: We live on an acre. It’s an urban farm. We’re in town [Spearfish], but not legally in town, so we can do whatever we want. It is mostly greens, because I have, like, a quarter of an acre that I crop. One cat tunnel where I do, like, tomatoes and cucumbers, but I do a lot of winter growing in that tunnel of greens: kale and spinach and stuff. Yeah, and then I supply several local restaurants and two grocery stores. It’s actually mostly wholesale. That was kind of the hole in our market, so that’s where I plugged in. Last year with Covid I lost a few of the restaurants right in the beginning, but then they were back online pretty quickly. And then I started an online store, so I have some direct-to-customer sales too. Fretless Farm. My logo’s a banjo. Cheesy, right? I have really creative farm friends down the street, they’ve kind of been mentors of mine for the last, like, five years or so. Like, I’ve worked on their farm a lot. And when I finally told them, like, “Guess what guys? I’m doing it this year. I’m starting a farm,” they took out a musical dictionary and they presented me with an entire notebook sheet full of farm names based on musical terms [laughs].
I haven’t done a lot of playing or even writing in the last year or so because I’ve kind of refocused my energy onto other things and people. This last year of my life has been about babies and dogs.
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So growing up, my parents are both, like, they both have beautiful singing voices, but besides singing in church there wasn’t a whole lot of music going on in our household. Like, they listened to the radio, but we didn’t have CDs or records, or they didn’t have, like, favorite musicians that were playing. But my grandparents, both sets of my grandparents really appreciated music, and my dad’s parents used to bring me along to old-time country jamborees in northeastern South Dakota. So that was my first opportunity to perform. Even before that I was into it. You know, I had my crappy Hanson CDs, oh yeah, and was singing along and stuff. Yeah, so I was, like, 13 or 14 when I first got on stage. It wasn’t long after that when I got my first guitar. One of my best friends in high school played guitar, and she kind of helped me start, then it was off to the races. I was writing songs when I was, I think, in 6th grade. My friend and I would write songs and poems together, and that’s why I started to learn to play guitar. I did not have any inclination to play instruments aside from the fact that I liked to sing and I liked to write songs. So that’s kind of how that started. And that kind of plays into what’s happening now, because I’m finally caring about playing instruments, you know, a good fifteen years later [laughs].
I played, through high school, any talent show or anything that I had an opportunity to be a part of, but there wasn’t a ton. And I liked choir, and theater especially, so I was getting to perform some. There was a punk rock band somewhere in the middle, but I came right back to where I started. And then, when I was a freshman in college [at the University of South Dakota] I thought I was going to double major in environmental science and music. And that was fake, like, that wasn’t a possibility. I ended up registering with the music department first and there wasn’t room for other things my freshman year, which is just fine. So I studied classical voice while I was at USD, which, when I got there, I had no interest in it whatsoever, and while I was studying I thought it was dumb. Which is so not true. It’s just ironic how important those arduous vocal lessons were, that I just, like, thought, “This doesn’t apply to what I’m doing. Like, now I’m in a band and I’m doing this other stuff, this is what I really want to do.” I didn’t see how important it was. But, man, a year out of college, I realized how important it was. You know, when I had my first major vocal cord issues, like, breath problems, like, dealing with illness, all of it played back into my vocal lessons I had while in college. They are so important. They have gotten me where I am, and totally shaped how I sing, and how I am able to sing for, you know, four-hour evenings, which I haven't done in years, but they happened, and they only happened because I had proper breath control, and, you know. They shouldn’t have happened, I mean, I shouldn’t have done that. That’s like Wagnerian opera [laughs].
But yeah, so while I was in college I was not very much into the voice end of things, but I was also in the Honors Program, and through that I got to really dig into folk music and jazz, and I met other musicians who were playing that style of music while I was in college. The JAS Quintet from Sioux Falls that I still sing with, I met those guys while I was in college, and they just, like, my gosh, when I think of what they went through, like, just being patient with me as I learned how to follow a form and try to improvise, man, it was probably really rough, but they just provided a safe place for me to do that for a long time and I still get to play music with them. I’ve kept playing with them more and more until this last year with Covid, like, I played with them more often than I ever had before that.
On the folk music side of things, when I was a freshman I met Josh Rieck, an upright bassist who was a grad student then [Now owner of J. Rieck Music and instrument builder at J. Rieck Lutherie in Sioux Falls]. I think an awful lot of him, and he really was my first collaborator in anything. We started playing together in rehearsal rooms. He was playing with Snakebeard Jackson which was, if you’re not familiar, they were THE college town Friday and Saturday night bar band for every college town in South Dakota, which, you know, there are five. It was a different town every weekend night. It was a really fun time. So Josh was playing with Snakebeard Jackson and showed my music to the rest of them. Sean McFarland is the lead singer of that band. They are no more, but they all play music still in different forms. So [Josh] showed my music to Sean and then they started, you know, messing around on it, so then I started opening for them, with them as my back band. This was my freshman year. It was really bizarre for me. It’s funny because I spent so much time in bars, but I was not comfortable in that scene at all, which is funny, you’d think, “Oh yeah! The crazy times closing down the bars!” But it’s like, no, I was sleeping in the corner while they were finishing their set. And then, you know, tearing down at 2:00 and driving back to wherever. It was exhausting, but really exciting because I’d never had that experience of performing with other people.
And then through [Snakebeard Jackson], they funded my first album I recorded, it was called Dreamer [by Jami Lynn and the Aquila Band]. And that was, like, at a real studio with a real producer that had, like, great albums under his belt like the Dixie Chicks and stuff. It’s pretty ironic that that was my first recording experience because never again has that been anything of what the experience has been for me. That was in Mankato, Minnesota. It’s where [Snakebeard Jackson] liked to record their albums.
So we released that album and then right after that I did a college exchange program at USD so I went to [Tennessee State University] in Nashville for a semester — Right after we released that album. Which was, like, so silly because then I didn’t get to, like, tour or support that, but it was really cool because, you know, when I was in Nashville I realized, “Oh, I am able to do all the things that I am aspiring to do in South Dakota, but I wasn’t able to do any of them in Nashville.” Like, I couldn’t — Everything booked nine months out and they were all terrible, terrible opportunities for the most part. There were a few open mics that were maybe worth your time, but by the time I was there, it was a weird in-between time of some cool stuff happening there and then, like, the opportunities for singer/songwriters to be discovered, like, that time had passed. It was, you know, kind of washed up. The good stuff had moved to Austin, Texas already, and the underground scene that’s happening — or it’s not underground, it’s more like alt-country — like, cool stuff is happening now. I was there in 2008. But I was there when Barack Obama was elected and I was going to a black college, like, a Historically Black University. I was the only white girl in the music department. So that was the important part of my experience there. It was amazing. Amazing. And, I mean, a huge culture shock for somebody from South Dakota. Yeah, I had no idea that was going to be my experience. I didn’t know it was a Historically Black University until I got there. Isn’t that ridiculous? But it was fantastic. Great six months and I got to play music with really great people. It was a commercial music program so we were, like, in bands together and we had performance opportunities. Yeah, it was cool.
Then I came back, and I finally got to tour a bit with [the Aquila Band], and different versions of that band. And then my senior year I wrote my honors thesis, which was “Early American Folk Music of the Upper Midwest” and that seeded my [South Dakota Arts Council] “Artists in Schools & Communities” residencies. That’s basically what I teach in schools, like, my thesis. The research portion of it ended up being a lot more than I thought it would. I thought it would just be, like, piecing together other people’s research, and there just wasn’t anything on South Dakota, that’s what I was looking for. So it was like a real research project where I had to go to, like, museums and archives, and then individual historians and, like, collectors of stuff from this area. I think [the thesis] is even on the internet somewhere. In fact I know it is, because a friend at SDPB linked it to one of her stories recently and I followed it and looked in there and was like, “Oh no! There’s really bad typos, just ugh.”
I’ve been on the “Artists in Schools & Communities” roster for probably close to ten years now, like, right after I finished college. I did very few in the beginning, but then probably the last five years that’s been a winter occupation for me, but mostly at Sanford in Sioux Falls through their arts program. It was partially funded through the Cancer Center, so that’s primarily who we worked with. Long term patients who were there for weeks or people that were just in for treatment during the day. We kind of floated around. Sometimes we had regular meetings with them, or I would just float around in waiting rooms. Once a week we would spend time in the children’s hospital too. I was the only musician, so I could kind of do things that the visual artists couldn’t, which was really fun, and it was a really neat way to reach people. So it’s kind of almost like a regular, well yeah, it was a regular gig there. Like, I usually did anywhere between six and twelve weeks there a year, depending on what other things I had going on. Yeah, it was a great experience. I miss that a lot.
But that [thesis] ended up being a huge part of why I’ve been able to play music in this area professionally for the past ten years. That was it. It was niche. And I wrote some music based on my research kind of in that old-timey genre. I recorded [the album Sodbusters] right after I graduated and that was partially based on music that I found during my thesis research, and then stuff that I wrote kind of in that same vein. And that just opened up so many opportunities for me locally — which, you know, pays the bills — then even internationally because there are so many people in Europe that are just obsessed with the Old West. I got reviews from really weird, random places, like, I got a lot from the Netherlands.
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So I didn’t set out to write [Fall Is a Good Time to Die] with a concept in mind. Some of the songs were six years old, some of them were six months old, but they all kind of found each other, finally. I had this idea that I was building on over the course of other albums, like, songs that didn’t fit, but it turns out they kind of fit together with each other.
[Fall Is a Good Time to Die] has a different feel to it than maybe my more light-hearted gypsy jazz, or traditional folk music than on my [first] couple albums. They’re a little bit more on the morose side, but still very, very connected to the landscape and nature in South Dakota. That’s always been a huge theme in my songwriting, and I haven’t gotten away from it yet. There’s a lot of animal-themed songs on this album, which wasn’t maybe something I planned, it’s just what happened. I’ve got three songs about South Dakota predators. I’m calling it the “South Dakota predator trilogy.” And then, a couple songs that are, I guess, more emotional songs about things that didn’t happen to me, or things that did happen to me.
So when we recorded [Fall Is a Good Time to Die] I just thought it would be, like, a singer/songwritery thing with a few instruments. I didn’t see us adding so much to it. Dalton Coffey [producer and on dobro, mandolin, and guitar] and Andrew Reinartz [on upright bass] — I can’t say enough about their musicianship, their ear. It really was a band album, not a solo album. Yeah, I wrote all the songs, but — I actually recorded that album twice. I recorded it once at a little studio in Colorado, and it was, like, awful. I wish I still had those files. I don’t anymore. It was rough.
But Dalton just took it and ran with it, and started messing with it, and adding stuff, and then adding his friend, the mandolin player, Eddie [Faris], who was the guitarist for Ricky Skaggs, the bluegrass guy, for quite a while. [Eddie] was fantastic as well at engineering, and recording, and capturing — which is the story of that album for me: learning about how to capture an acoustic instrument, and not just digitally produce that sound. Because that’s what they do. You know, you can record an album with really crummy instruments and crummy capture and make it sound great, or you can mess, and mess, and mess with the engineering of the room, and the space, and the kind of mic, and where that mic is, and that’s what they excel at. It was really fun watching them do that, both Andrew and Dalton, and then eventually Eddie as well. That’s why The Telegraph [the UK newspaper] liked that album so much. Part of their [best albums of 2015] review was about the sound quality and the production quality, which was just, like, so gratifying for them to get that kudos. Anyways, that’s a long way of saying, when we made it I was just like, “Holy crap. I think this is fantastic. I am so proud of it, and so excited about it.”
So Grit PR was a really reputable company at that time and all these bands that I really liked all went through there. And I sent [Fall Is a Good Time to Die] to them and told them the release date, and they were like, “Yeah we would do it,” which I was shocked and excited about, but they didn’t have space, like, I’d have to push it off a year. Maybe that’s what I should have done, who knows? Anyway, they had a guy that had worked for them who was starting his own company and he had moved to the Pacific Northwest, and I was, like, one of his first clients out on his own, and he just killed it. That’s why The Telegraph got my music, that’s why anything happened with that album. That fantastic PR agent that was really motivated. So that was maybe more than you wanted to hear about PR, but that really is a huge story of that album.
I still I think it’s a great album. I’m so proud of it. I love how it turned out. It’s really representative, like, it is THE representative album of my sound. Unfortunately, it coincided with a huge round of burnout, which I’ve had a lot of times because of the travel. I’m a huge homebody. I really enjoy being home and having space. Like, I started a farm. I farm now. I’m tied to here. And that is kind of where my heart was going at that time, and I was just, like, gone all the time. You know, I didn’t do, like, huge tours, but they were just very regular and mixed in with artist residencies in the state, and I just wasn’t happy doing that. So right when [Fall Is a Good Time to Die] came out I was really sick of being on the road, and I had been with my husband for a couple years, like, we had dated for a couple years at that time and we were getting pretty serious.
So, I didn’t tour behind that album. Which is, like, ridiculous. All that fantastic PR, the great exposure, it was received really well, it should have been — That was the major decision moment, where I had to make the decision of, like, “Man, I gotta push this hard to make it up to the next level.” And the next level I considered, you know, just better venues, and better pairings, more festival opportunities. And I just decided I wasn’t going to tour behind it. I realized when I was making that decision that it was like, “Eh, I probably shouldn’t make this emotionally,” but I did. And I don’t regret it. This is what I wanted. I saw friends and fellow musicians that had made it to the next level, or were tirelessly working to make it to the next level, and they weren’t any happier than I was, you know? They kind of aged out of settling, I guess, or self-proclaimed aged out of settling. And that definitely wasn’t me. I definitely wanted stability and, I did want — When I was in college I was also getting really into ag, and local food, and was really passionate about that also. That’s the environmental sustainability degree which I never pursued. So that’s when I made that decision, and who knows what life is going to bring, you know? I just think about, like, what about when my kids are older? Am I going to have these moments where, “Oh, I wish I would have,” or, “I should have kept”? And I don’t think so. I’ve been so blessed. Like, South Dakota’s a really small state. What are we, like, 800,000 maybe? And the opportunities that I still get locally are just really fulfilling. I’m finally to the point where I don’t do many, if any, bar gigs, and I get to play in theaters, and I still really get to connect with people. In fact, those are much better gigs than anything I was doing on the road. I did get some pretty great festival opportunities after that, which I did do the summer or two after I released that album. But it was just a time in my life where I just didn’t want to be moving anymore. It was something that I had to realize about myself: That next level was still going to be a lot of touring. The level after that is still a lot of touring. You know? It just didn’t make me happy. It wasn’t what I wanted. And, I also started to realize, you know, the parts of music that did make me happy were, like, great venue experiences, collaborating with great musicians, and getting to play more jazz.
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So this break was a wonderful cure for burnout. I think anybody who has ever played music is just hungry to do it again. I’m so looking forward to performing with people again. I miss all of the bands that I’ve gotten to play with in the last couple of years. So, the summer previous to Covid, I had one big performance in Sioux Falls at the Levitt. They just built that fantastic — oh it’s so cool. So cool. And it was, like, one of those dreamy life experiences where I got to play the coolest venue in the town where I started, and with my dream band: JAS plus Dalton, like, everybody together. And a lot of it was new music, kind of like, I don’t know, alt-country with horn bands. Justin Townes Earle was kind of my model for that. He just passed away not too long ago. I just love the horn sound and everything that he does. Yeah it was the only time that we played a huge chunk of quote-unquote new music and none of it’s recorded. Yeah, there’s definitely an album waiting to be recorded. I think I will always record albums, somehow. I don’t know how that’s going to happen right now, but we’re going to make it happen because we really enjoyed putting that stuff together in a couple rehearsals before that performance, and then that performance was just, yeah it was one of those dreamy moments of life. It was so fun.
This is my third season with the farm, and last year because I had a baby, like, right at the beginning of the season, I had really great help and learned how to delegate and manage other individuals. So, I’m hoping that a lot more music is possible going forward, because, man, farming season’s gigging season too [laughs]. I’m ready for that. The first year of the farm it was all-encompassing because I was building all my infrastructure, and my pack shed, and my customer base, and like, learning how to do everything as I was doing it, and so there wasn’t room for much else in my life. And now I feel like there’s room.
JAMI LYNN'S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Paul Larson — Home (2013)
East of Westreville — Waitin’… (2006)
Burlap Wolf King — The Middle (2009)
SOURCES
Gehrke, Karl. “Dakota Midday: Jami Lynn.” SDPB Radio, 9 Dec. 2014, listen.sdpb.org/post/dakota-midday-jami-lynn.
Lynn, Jami. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 4 Mar. 2021.
Lynn, Jami. “Jami Lynn Talks about Her Latest Album.” YouTube, Nathan Edwards, 16 May 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTgHyGzLyY.
Lynn, Jami. “Sounds From Home: Jami Lynn.” YouTube, Spearfish United Methodist Church, 25 Sept. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcniQV4xu4s.
Snyder, Alana. “Meet the Artist: Jami Lynn.” 605 Magazine, 26 Apr. 2018, 605magazine.com/2018/03/31/meet-the-artist-jami-lynn/.
