THE FAMILY TRADE: ASHLEY HANSON + BRIAN LAIDLAW / Bird’s Eye Chisel

2021

Bird’s Eye Chisel is a collection of original songs written by Ashley Hanson and Brian Laidlaw of the folk band, The Family Trade during a year-long Granary Arts Fellowship in Sanpete Valley. It is a “folk” album in its musical aesthetic – acoustic instruments, simple harmonies, lyrical storytelling – but it’s also a “folk” album in the process of its construction.

During their time in Sanpete, Ashley and Brian met with local community members, scholars, musicians, parents, students, and artists to amass a shared library of images and insights about the area’s beautiful, complex history. In story circles, interviews and songwriting workshops, Ashley and Brian listened to the joys and anxieties of modern-day life in the area, heard celebrations and interrogations of Sanpete’s past, and documented all manner of hopes, dreams and fears for the future of the valley.

Header image: Change, 2021, tintype by Holly Hooper

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From this patchwork of quotations and observations, patterns started to emerge, touchstones would echo and rhyme and reverberate, through-lines would thread their way from one conversation to the next. The sheep, the rabbit-brush, the old houses, the new houses, the old-timers, the newcomers, the soil, the chisel and the stone. Those recurring images, which arise in fine variation across many voices, and which accrete new meanings through many generations, are the very substance of folk music itself: the collective vocabulary through which people – folk – articulate their sense of place.

The songs of Bird’s Eye Chisel are patchworks, collages, assembled and recorded in the pioneer cabin of CCA Christensen on Granary’s grounds. They try to do what good folksongs do: evoke a landscape, tell a story, offer a commentary. And although the compositions now exist on the record in fixed form, the artists consider these songs – and, indeed, all folksongs – to be living documents, reborn different at every performance, shifting forever to match shifting conditions, and belonging absolutely to anyone who chooses to sing them.

Blame the Shepherd, 3:20
Meek and Mild Mary, 2:55
Shape of a Sheild, 4:30
Leaves a Little Hole, 5:02
The Promised Land, 7:50

Inspired by research, interviews and story circles with local community members, these songs were written and recorded by Ashley Hanson and Brian Laidlaw during a Granary Arts Fellowship in Ephraim, Utah. Mixed by David Jacobs-Strain, bass by Philip Kuehn, harmonica by Bob Beach, tintypes by Holly Hooper.

Coming soon to Spotify and iTunes.

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To experience these songs in the Sanpete Valley landscape, download the Popwalk app!

About the Musicians

Ashley Hanson is a social practice and theater artist, community organizer, entrepreneur and advocate for arts in rural areas. She is the Founder and Director of the Department of Public Transformation, an artist-led organization that collaborates with local artists and civic leaders in rural areas to develop creative strategies for community connection and civic participation. She is also the Founder and Director of PlaceBase Productions, a theater company that creates original, site-specific musicals celebrating small town life. She was recently named a 2018 Obama Foundation Fellow and a 2019 Bush Foundation Fellow for her work with rural communities. She is also a musician who plays with the folk-ensemble The Family Trade, and her recent solo album, The Kirkbride Sessions - recorded during a Springboard for the Arts Hinge Arts Residency, explores the hidden narratives of ruralness. She holds a BA in Performance and Social Change from the University of Minnesota and an MA in Applied Theater from the University of Manchester (UK) with an emphasis on the role of arts in rural community development. She is a firm believer in the power of people, places, play and exclamation points! www.publictransformation.org  www.ashhanson.com  

Brian Laidlaw is an author and songwriter who, after many years as a full-time touring folksinger and a stint on the songwriting faculty at McNally Smith College of Music, has just completed a Ph.D. in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. His books include The Stuntman (Milkweed Editions, 2015) and The Mirrormaker (Milkweed Editions, 2018), each of which was released with a companion album of original music, as well as the forthcoming Summer Err: A John Muir Erasure (Mount Vision Press, 2020). He has had lyrics in American Songwriter Magazine and Songwriting Consultant credits on multiple Grammy-Award- winning and -nominated albums, most recently Winterland by the Okee Dokee Brothers. A lifelong student of folk music, Brian’s collaborative songwriting practice uses the timeless simplicity of traditional forms to talk -- and sing -- about our decidedly complex experience of community and landscape in the modern American West. www.brianlaidlaw.com 

Holly L. Hooper
tintypes, silver gelatin prints
2021

This collection of images tells a story of Sanpete Valley culture, the land, and relationships between agricultural heritage and modernization. Many of the photographs were created using a 19th-centuryphotography process called ferrotype, better known as the tintype. Additionally, there are silver gelatin prints made with simple pinhole cameras. These methods represent the past and present simultaneously. While speaking with Ashley and Brian to develop the album artwork for Bird’s Eye Chisel, phrases like old-timers, newcomers, soil, and sheep all resonated with me. As someone who grew up on a small farm here in the Sanpete Valley, I wanted to depict moments that speak to time and place, and are authentic to the diverse story of the valley. -Holly L. Hooper

Preserved
Tried and True
Tools of the Trade
Remnants
Oolite Quarry
Salt Dirt
The Family Trade
Sown
Juniper & Sheep
Sagebrush
Highway 89
Change
Pigeon Hollow
The Musicians
Death of the Family Farm