Amy Helm: Keeping The Faith
photo: Ebru Yildiz
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Amy Helm was on hand for a pivotal moment in Phil Lesh’s second act.
In 2010, the Grateful Dead bassist performed with his sons Grahame and Brian at The Barn, the rustic studio and concert venue attached to her father Levon’s Woodstock, N.Y. home. While sitting in the kitchen—which functions as the venue’s green room—Phil and Levon got to talking and the Leshes eventually decided to replicate the homegrown, family-forward vibe they experienced on that impactful night. Less than two years later, Phil opened Terrapin Crossroads near his own home in Marin County, Calif., and began hosting regular jam sessions that mirrored Levon’s Midnight Rambles. He also started touring the country more regularly with a family band of his own.
“That older generation is leaving us,” Amy says, while discussing her fourth LP, Silver City, which was released on Sun Records in September. “They’re in their elder years now. I never really sat down and mapped out how to hold a legacy. It just happened and, it turns out, there is a lot of joy and opportunity in it—and sometimes there’s a lot of noise to it as well. There’s definitely blessings and curses. And this record talks about that in some ways, too.”
As she explains how her new, beautiful 10-track suite of songs is intertwined with her father’s journey and The Band in general, Amy is calling from Australia. Her boyfriend is currently Down Under working with an act for three months and the 53-year-old, self-described “singer, songwriter, Mom, retired whistler, part-time drummer and owner and producer of Levon Helm Studios” decided to tag along. She’s enjoying playing tourist in Australia for the first time and simply being a “groupie” for a few weeks, before returning home for another round of dates in support of Silver City and some holiday shows at The Barn. She also makes a point to mention Grahame, who has served as a consigliere to his father in recent years. It turns out to be fortuitous timing—the next day, Phil, passed away at the age of 84.
“There are a few people that are holding their legacies that are real inspirations to me,” she says. “I’m good friends with Grahame and—in terms of working with his dad, bringing in other people, being the MD of that band and holding it with such grace, humility and strength—he’s someone I really look up to.”
These days, Amy has been thinking a good deal about how the past, present and potential future collide in her work. Silver City has been described as a series of letters to many of the important female voices that have shaped Amy’s singular story, including reflections on the generations that came before her. However, it took an outside voice to truly see that hook.
“I didn’t realize that there was this theme running through it until I had just about completed all of the songs,” Amy says, crediting her friend and producer, Josh Kaufman, with highlighting the conceptual thread. “Josh said, ‘These are letters to women,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you’re right.’ Making an album is always such an incredible, mysterious process. In my experience, we go into it with all the best intentions and ideas of what we might want to try to convey and then it just reveals itself. Every album has its own muse. That is always exciting because you’re in the grip of something unseen and you can’t deny it. There’s this creative force that’s driving it. In a funny way, making records are practices of faith by default.”
As a producer and one-third of Bonny Light Horseman, Kaufman has grown into one of the most important architects of the indie-tinged Americana scene in recent years, adding his distinct touch to records by Cassandra Jenkins, Dawn Landes, Blind Pilot and Guster in the past year alone. He helped Amy sort through her ideas and saw how the puzzle pieces fit together.
“One afternoon, while working through songs at my home studio, Amy shared with me some old letters and stories from some of her Southern relatives—deeply moving stories,” Kaufman says, as Bonny Light Horseman prepare to play Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center and he rolls out his own solo album, What do the People in Your Head Say to Each Other? “And it occurred to us, in that moment, that a lot of those experiences should be, and in some cases already were, shadowed in her new batch of songs. ‘If I was King” and ‘A Love Supreme’ feel most closely tied to that conversation, but a lot of the album moves in and around women’s stories.”
Three men play key roles in those stories as well: Levon; Amy’s brother, the writer Ezra Titus, who took his own life in 2009 at the age of 43; and her ex-husband, Little Feat and Gregg Allman saxophonist Jay Collins, with whom she shares her teenage children, Lee and Hughie.
“There was a yearning to understand herself and place inside it all—and not all in a tragic way,” Kaufman adds. “It’s an incredibly honest and homemade album built with a lot of love—‘Hold the name your mother gave/ Love supreme at the end of the day.’”
Amy says that the initial song “muse” that served as a compass for the rest of the record was written for a fan named Katie. Amy knew her casually and later learned, via Instagram, that she had died of a fentanyl overdose during COVID.
“The first time I met Katie was at Mountain Jam years ago, and she was really in the thick of her addiction,” Amy says of their initial interaction at the Hunter, N.Y. festival. “She was deeply suffering at the hands of drugs and alcohol. The next time I met her was at The Barn and she came to an open house that we were doing there. I could tell across the room that she was just in the most serene, sober place—filled with serenity and proud of herself. We had a beautiful moment and took a picture together. She was sober and in a great place. There was something about meeting her—her youth, her pain, her beauty and her triumph of getting clean—and seeing that all within those two meetings. That really moved me, and I wrote a song for her. Once that song rushed in, all the rest seemed to follow.”
From there, Amy continued coming up with ideas, using her interactions with others as a way to reflect on her own life as well.
“A lot of the conversations were with younger versions of myself—looking at times that I’ve felt really lost,” she adds. “It doesn’t really matter your age—if you’re a young person in your 20s, you could turn to yourself when you were 15 and say something. But, I’m 53 now and there’s this notion of putting a hand on your own shoulder that’s very much a part of the record. I was also inspired by my great grandmother on my dad’s side. She was banished from her kids when they were very young. Her husband was a holy-roller preacher who decided he knew what God’s will was for her and sent her away.”
Amy conceived the idea for that story, captured on “If I Was King,” while sitting on the porch at Levon’s childhood home in Marvell, Ark. Given the singer/drummer’s contributions to American music, the old sharecroppers’ cabin has been relocated to the center of town and turned into a museum. Each year, Amy travels to Arkansas to play a set of music on the porch as part of the Levon Helm Down Home Jubilee and, during a recent visit, she felt a burst of inspiration.
“I was sitting on that porch and, while I was thrilled to celebrate my dad—who I was very close with—I kept thinking, ‘How did my grandmother get through the day? How did these women do this?’ They didn’t have running water, they didn’t have electricity, they were having babies, they were losing kids to diseases that today would be a quick trip to the pediatrician,” she admits. “While immersed in his legacy and his accomplishments, I was thinking about my grandmother and my great grandmother and the story of her being sent away from her kids—all of these stories that don’t really get passed down. I was thinking about the women who didn’t have a voice and didn’t have a lot of choices.”
When asked about the impact her mother, singer and songwriter Libby Titus, had on the album, Amy admits that it might take a “10-course meal to unpack” that. Libby—who worked with Martin Mull, Carly Simon, Burt Bacharach and Dr. John during her career and released music under her own name—died on October 13 at the age of 77. She had been married to Donald Fagen, a classmate from their days at Bard College, since 1993, and the Steely Dan singer/ keyboardist was a visible presence at Levon’s Midnight Rambles.
“That’s a complicated one for me,” Amy says. “My mom was complicated and navigating that relationship was complicated. I’m discovering that the gift that comes with the end of life and the experience of passing is the incredible grace and forgiveness that’s available. That relationship has been a gift of growth for me. Her shadow is all over the record. I’m sure, someday, we’ll write a record just about her to try and untangle it. But I would say that she was a great writer. She didn’t pursue it the way that she could have, yet she had a gift with words and with the truth. My brother did, too. Although people might not know her writing or my brother’s writing, I know that I’m in their shadow because of how gifted they were with words. Unconsciously or subconsciously, I’ve pulled a little bit of their gift into my ability to reach toward my own thing, knowing that they would encourage me to move forward as a writer.”
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Silver City is technically Amy’s fourth album, but she has released far more music than that during her decades-long career. Born in Woodstock, N.Y., but raised between that historic music town, Los Angeles and New York City, due to her parents’ professions, she started studying jazz at a young age. Throughout Amy’s teenage years, her dad toured with a reformed version of The Band, though Levon had yet to be rediscovered by her generation and would not receive the cultural recognition he deserved for years to come. Amy has said that, for much of her youth, she simply thought of him as the drummer in singer/bassist Rick Danko’s band.
In the late 1990s, she joined The Barn Burners, Levon’s primary project at the time, but really started making her mark with the alt-folk group Ollabelle. Amy co-founded the project in 2001, and the ensemble quickly made a name for themselves on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as that neighborhood itself was experiencing a 21st-century renaissance. The group—whose lineup features Glenn Patscha, Byron Isaacs, Fiona McBain and Tony Leone—released several acclaimed albums and toured for a solid decade.
Concurrently, Amy continued to support her father, who was diagnosed with throat cancer in the ‘90s and initially launched the Midnight Rambles, in part, to avoid foreclosure on his property. She appeared at those loose jam sessions, contributed to his comeback albums Dirt Farmer and Electric Dirt and joined the Midnight Ramble Band on the road when the project started receiving offers from promoters outside Woodstock. She also brought in her Ollabelle collaborators at various points, with Isaacs going on to join The Lumineers and Leone moving behind the kit in Little Feat.
Levon died in 2012 and, three years later, Amy dropped her solo debut, Didn’t It Rain, which features contributions from members of both Ollabelle and the Midnight Ramble Band, as well as John Medeski, Marco Benevento, Bill Payne and Catherine Russell, among others. The record also boasts what is billed as Levon’s final documented drum performance.
Kaufman first met Amy in 2017 when he served as the musical director for a Leonard Cohen tribute at Brooklyn, N.Y.’s Music Hall of Williamsburg. Amy sang a version of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” and Kaufman, who was first turned onto Ollabelle by his parents, says that she “wrecked” him with her vibe and singing, calling her “true blue” and “just a knockout musician and human.” The producer relocated to Kingston, N.Y., during the global pandemic and sat at the helm for Amy’s 2021 release, What the Flood Leaves Behind. By the time the two musicians started work on Silver City, Amy says that they had developed a natural shorthand.
“There’s this immediacy—we have the same instincts when we’re hunting something down, whether it’s a lyric or a melody,” she explains. “We did a lot of the writing together—finding these songs, shaping them and arranging them. He has a way of getting at what’s the truest way to say something—this gift. He does a beautiful job, as a producer, of holding the thing but allowing the artist the space to find what’s true for them. It’s effortless.”
“We had a shared vision and really wanted to incorporate ‘more Amy’—bring her experiences and ideas to the center of the writing and her playing more into the studio band,” Kaufman says. “So what you have here is more of Amy’s drumming, more of Amy’s tenor guitar playing and, on ‘Silver City,’ Amy leading the entire band on piano.”
Perhaps most important, the producer pushed Amy to finish the lyrics on her own, helping to make the tracks truly her story. “With some of the things that we co-wrote, he would come up with some chords, a riff or a little lick, and then I would write the melody,” Amy says. “I’d keep texting him and saying, ‘Maybe I should reach out to so-and-so to finish these lyrics,’ and he kept just gently pushing me. He’d say, ‘I really think you should dig deep, and don’t be afraid and just try and see what you come up with,’ And he just kept at it. Sure enough, I felt like I reached a different place in being able to convey the story.”
She pauses and then adds: “The funny thing about songwriting is that, even if what you write is not as good as another writer could say it, it becomes true because it’s yours. It’s such a great feeling to let yourself go there as an artist.”
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While Silver City is unquestionably Amy’s album, the multi-instrumentalist still recruited a number of familiar faces to help her f lesh out her ideas. That list includes Benevento, guitarist Daniel Littleton, Kaufman’s wife and noted bassist Annie Nero, drummers Charley Drayton and Tony Mason, horn players Stuart Bogie and Dave Nelson, bassist/ percussionist/vocalist Adam Minkoff, vocalists Russell, Elizabeth Mitchell and Zach Djanikian, and engineer D. James Goodwin. Drayton also co-produced “Mount Guardian.”
As sonic proof of their Venn diagram of collaborators, Amy and Kaufman both ended up participating in a few of the same Phil Lesh & Friends shows at Port Chester, N.Y.’s Capitol Theatre in 2021. Grahame was also part of the lineup, as was Joe Russo, who, of course, has been playing with Amy’s friend Benevento since middle school.
“I have my old pal Joe Russo to thank for thinking of me for those gigs—such a treat,” says Kaufman, who produced Bob Weir’s 2016 LP, Blue Mountain. “I’ve been reminiscing a lot about those shows recently, with Phil leaving us. It was tremendous. I mostly remember being extremely moved by the love that Phil so clearly had for Amy, being an old family friend of the Helms, and also the connection between Amy and Grahame. They are both people I admire deeply for being special musicians on their own and also for holding their respective legacies with such grace and skill. Performing ‘Attics of My life’ with them was really elevating and something I won’t ever forget. I’m not sure how they were all able to keep it together—I was barely holding on. It was so beautiful. There’s a magical gene pool up in there.”
“Phil Lesh was one of the kindest and most humble artists I have ever had the honor of knowing,” Amy says, a few weeks after the bassist’s passing. “He was a dear friend of my father’s, forging their friendship through a shared love of making music with their kids. When Phil and his sons Grahame and Brian first came to The Barn and performed at a Ramble with us, that was the beginning of a friendship and connection that opened up so many collaborations and channels of creativity between our families. Phil gave me the opportunity to step into the Grateful Dead songbook unapologetically, changing keys and finding new melodies and ways into the songs. As a woman trying sing that material, it was profoundly encouraging and open—as that music is and should be. Phil and Grahame gave me, and my oldest son Lee, so many opportunities to shine and grow in our music. His mentorship and inspiration is deep in my heart and I will cherish it forever.”
Amy admits that parenthood has reinforced the importance of her local community and helped her feel confident enough to fully tell her story. Likewise, she has stepped into a role as mentor to younger creatives as well.
“Being a mom, there’s something about telling our stories to the next generation or to younger people,” she says. “I love being around my teenage kids and their friends and I love meeting the young artists that I get to meet in our community. That’s something that really inspires me and gives me purpose—even speaking to young folks about my experience as a touring singer, as a woman, as a single mom who tries to tour and do music as a job. I want to tell stories about how I’ve grown up, and what I’ve come through, to a young heart. A young ear always clarifies things for me. It makes me feel brave to get to the heart of the matter and it makes my story become sharper and clearer.”
She notes that 16-year-old Lee has grown into a wonderful musician in his own right. He’s a drummer, singer and songwriter and has recently started playing piano. He often performs alongside Midnight Ramble drummer Leone during the monthly Rambles that Amy still hosts at The Barn. During a recent trip to Arkansas for the Levon Helm Down Home Jubilee, Leone was unable to make the pilgrimage, so Lee was behind the kit on his own for the first time. Lee also brought his Woodstock band down to join in the festivities, continuing the family legacy.
In addition to the Rambles, which continuously pull in an eclectic mix of musicians, Amy credits Kaufman and Benevento for helping engage a new generation of music fans who have rediscovered Woodstock recently.
“What I love about the community in Woodstock is that it keeps building,” she admits. “Because of COVID, we got a lot of incredible artists that made their way up there. That was one of the silver linings of that. It’s a community that is not competitive, it’s not elitist. It’s not a cool-kids club. It’s very rooted in community and passing things on. My dream and my vision for The Barn is for it to be rooted in education for young musicians. I want it to be a place where a player can have a good payday and someone who loves music can go have the most unpretentious, open experience of all time.”
Looking ahead, Amy will continue touring with her own band. She also recently regrouped with Ollabelle for a series of anniversary shows and is currently working on the ensemble’s first album since 2011. She hopes to release it next year.
“We wrote a record; it’s really strong. I’m excited about it,” she hints. “It’s pretty cool to get to be part of so many things and to always be surrounded by cool people, great musicians and great artists.”
And though her song for Katie, which laid the groundwork for much of Silver City, didn’t end up making the final release, Amy believes that it might serve as the inspiration for another project somewhere down the line.
“It ended up being similar in tone or tempo to another song that was stronger in conversation with the other songs,” she says. “But it’s also material that you can come back to and use to sculpt another record in the future.”
