Photo: Ebru Yildiz
In order to properly craft her latest full-length LP, I Am Both, Margaret Glaspy had to reclaim her self-described “creative practice.” And in order to reclaim that creative practice, the singer/guitarist had to step off the grid in the most 21st century way imaginable—she put down her phone.
“Making this album plugged me back into my own brain,” she says in August, shortly before dropping I Am Both, her fourth full-length LP, via ATO. “I started to sense that something was getting away from me and that it was my own consciousness, which is a red flag. Technology had taken over my life. There was the computer, my phone, social media, all the things.”
Deciding to strip her process back to the basics, she began writing long form on paper and then pulled out a typewriter to key in her nascent ideas.
“It was pretty bare bones—there’s something about working with your hands that suits me,” she says, admitting that she did eventually use her laptop to finalize some of her musings. “It was a little scary at first. I had to recenter my compass a little bit, and I think I found it. There are a lot of addictive behaviors around things on Instagram. And then I started to realize, ‘Wow, I don’t know if I have my own thoughts anymore.’”
Though Glaspy purchased a new typewriter specifically to help fine-tune the 11 fictional vignettes and personal reflections that eventually coalesced as I Am Both, this wasn’t the first time she had used this particular piece of analog equipment to write.
“I’ve always had typewriters, but I had gotten rid of them,” the 37-year-old, Sacramento, Calif.-born, Red Bluff, Calif-bred musician says, as she thinks back on her early years as a musician. “They’d break and when I was younger, I didn’t have the money to get them serviced. When I was 20 years old, I got a typewriter at a garage sale, and I would write it on it. It would break, and I’d be like, ‘OK, that’s that for now.’ So I had used them in the past, especially in my early 20s. Shoutout to Gramercy Typewriter Company, this wonderful shop downtown [in Manhattan]. They really service their machines well. So I went down and got my machine there, and I love it, and I work on it every day. I love that typewriter."
Throughout her career, which kicked into gear with a series of EPs and 7-inch releases in 2010s but fully launched with her proper ATO debut, 2016’s Emotions and Math, Glaspy has balanced the instrumental musicality she honed during her brief tenure at the Berklee College of Music with her interests in more lyrically driven pop-rock storytelling. With I Am Both, she simultaneously worked on her words and their accompanying musical beds during the same brainstorming sessions.
“I want to be economical about my time—I like to do it all at once, so that I don’t have to separate things out,” Glaspy says. “And then once I have ideas, I start to expand on them. Usually, I sit down for 15 minutes. That’s my thing—I know the song I’m about to play, even though I’ve never played it, and then I make it up in real time and polish those things down into the songs that you’ll hear. It’s like speed dating. I’ll spend 15 minutes on it and then go into the next thing.”
Glaspy says that, while she is always working on new music, she really started honing in on the batch of tunes that make up most of I Am Both about six months before she entered the studio with producer Joe Henry. She was particularly inspired by the different regions of the country she’d visit while on the road playing music.
“I’m a New York-area person,” says the New Jersey-based artist, who currently lives right outside the city with her husband, the guitarist Julian Lage. “But I was really struck by what it was like living in the country, being in the South or wherever the place you may be traveling to may be. It’s something I’d take in, especially now that I try not to use my phone as much. And to be honest with you, I realized that all my favorite musicians, especially ones from the 20th century, really talked about their surroundings a lot. Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and all of these songwriters were telling the history of America or painting this picture, the tapestry of America, in a certain way that I thought was really interesting, and I think that rubbed off on me.”
As she started thinking back to some of her musical heroes, Glaspy adopted the approach of her folk predecessors, who would “sing the news,” recounting current events without necessarily passing judgment on a particular situation.
“I think it’s my responsibility because I have an intimate relationship with it,” she says of her constant travels. “What I think is important for me to do as an artist is to keep my head up and keep my eyes open, look around, and say what I see. ‘Michigan,’ the first single released from the record, is this idea of being a city person out in another part of America. I started writing that one in 2024, but I really wrote most of it right before I released this record.”
She pauses and then launches into that track’s origin story. “I was on a tour that I didn’t really want to be on,” she admits. “I was living on a tour bus, and I was a little bit sour about it, and we passed through Michigan. But I had such a great experience this one time in Michigan, on a tour that I was really having a lot of fun on—it was a really sparkly experience in Northern Michigan. The light was beautiful on the land, and we were with friends, and there was good food, and it was just a nice time. And then I was in Michigan again, and the circumstances were really different, and I was thinking about that really good time. And then that song got written.”
In terms of the character-driven stories that populate her new album, Glaspy also points to the track as an unintentional stylistic compass.
“’Michigan’ felt very powerful in the suite of music, so maybe the picture was in there already—already going there,” she says. “‘James and Marie’ is another song on the record that, as always, struck me and is very character forward. ‘Sharp Knife’ has a lot of really interesting people in it and so does ‘I am Both,’ the title track of the record. She is a character that I wrote, and a person that I look up to—a woman that I look up to. So those were some that felt like they were steering the ship.”
As she detached from the confines of modern technology, the singer-songwriter also leaned into stories about those unique characters.
“What I’m seeing even more now is that the really fascinating, beautiful and inspiring thing about human beings is that their true nature always shines through,” she says. “I was on social media and still making interesting things, but I just suffered a lot more through it. There was a lot of unwanted suffering involved in that and I think it took me a lot longer to draw my own conclusions because there was a lot of traffic and things that I didn’t necessarily want but that I was asking for by using it. In this record, there’s a lot more characters, more stories and more people that I’ve become acquainted with and written about. They’ve interesting in terms of the character-driven element of it.”
This summer Glaspy had some first-hand experience seeing one of her storytelling heroes up close when Lage was drafted into Dylan’s band and joined The Bard, unannounced, for much of recent run.
“Julian had other tours that were on the books already, that were really non-cancellable, because it was a very quick, last-minute thing, so he went back and forth between the States and these European jazz tours, so there were these little chunks of dates,” she says. “I went to Philly and Phoenix, and I’m gonna be in Nashville, too.”
Looking ahead, Glaspy plans to recenter her own live show this fall, when she hits the road for an extended club outing that will stretch into November. Part of that decision was influenced by her heroes’ proven approach to shaking things up in the live setting.
“For this record, I’ve been very inspired to strip it way back,” she says. “So I’ll be playing this tour in the fall solo. I enjoy the tightrope walk of that experience, just with an acoustic guitar and some microphones—very simple but powerful. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that Bob Dylan was a huge inspiration. I grew up with all of his music. When I was younger, I would find artists and try and copy them. And now that I have a little age on me, the thing I am looking up to the most is their decisions. These artists, like Dylan, that move me or inspire me, I’m inspired by their instincts. And I think that was also something that made me want to plug my brain back into my body. I thought, ‘OK, Bob Dylan exists. The bar is up in the sky. It’s incredibly high, and I’ll never touch it. I’m sure as hell not gonna get anywhere close with my brain hooked into my phone. I’ve got to get off this shit and figure my shit out.’”
Dylan was also the original glue that connected Glaspy with Henry, who sat at the help for the new album. “Joe Henry, my brother, he’s such a great human being and such an amazing artist, an amazing producer,” she says. “He and I met at a Bob Dylan tribute show that was produced by T-Bone Burnett [in 2022]. It was celebrating Bob’s first performance at [New York’s] Town Hall. Julian, Bill Frisell and I played songs and were put into a pod. We were a band, and we played some of Bob’s songs and that was the first time I really met Joe. And it felt like we were all family really quickly. And then the rest was history. He started working on Julian’s records and I asked him to produce my record, and it was a really cool fit. His instincts are amazing. We think about records in a really similar way. And then he outfitted me with this band that, gosh, was a total breath of fresh air and blew my socks off.”
Settling down at New York’s Reservoir Studios for a three-day session with Glaspy and Henry, that ace backing combo included drummer/percussionist Jay Bellerose (Bonnie Raitt, Robert Plant, Alison Krauss), keyboardist Patrick Warren (Tracy Chapman, Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen) and bassist Ross Gallagher (Paula Cole, Grails). “Our chemistry together was unknown, and then it became known,” she says, noting that she has long considered herself more of a live photographer than a sculptor in the studio. “I feel so lucky. Pat Dillett was the engineer for it, and Chris Gehringer, the amazing engineer from Sterling Sound, mastered it. It was all kismet and wonderful.”
Glaspy then circles back to the spiritual practice currently guiding her creative decisions. “Making this record was a big lesson for me in knowing your strengths and learning about where my priorities lie,” she says. “I’m starting to see that, as a musician, I might have a responsibility to keep my brain as clean as I can.”
