Becky Buller

Shares Her Own Story in Song Cycle “Jubilee”

Fans of the Becky Buller Band are accustomed to story songs—“John D. Champion,” “Calamity Jane” or “The Barber’s Fiddle.” In her latest album project Jubilee, this time the story is her own. She first pitched the idea for the title song to co-writer Aoife O’Donovan when they both appeared at the 2019 Newport Folk Festival in an all-female Saturday night headliner set curated by Brandi Carlile—Buller with the First Ladies of Bluegrass and O’Donovan with I’m With Her. The pair got together to write the song in early 2020.

According to Buller, “The song ‘Jubilee’ is about longing for physical, emotional and spiritual rest.” She said that at the time she mentioned the idea for the song, Aoife was ready to get on board. “How ironic,” Buller added, “We write this song, and then the world shuts down.”

With the release of this album, Buller opened up about her personal experiences with depression and anxiety that led to the project. She openly shares her own journey, noting that she started seeing a Christian counselor in 2015 when she started the band. 

“I’m a typical musician. I have a mercurial personality. I’d get down low, and then something exciting would come along—somebody would cut one of my songs or I’d get an opportunity to go play somewhere with people I’ve never played with before, and that would bring me back up. But as the years have gone on and I have gotten older, the highs have been higher, but the lows have been lower.”

Recognizing that some people enjoyed a time of creativity during the forced isolation, she said, “Instead of being a positive experience, for me the pandemic ended up being a very, very dark time. It threw me into the depression and anxiety that I had dealt with my entire life. It grew to a crescendo, and I’m so grateful to still be here. It’s made me very mindful, much more deliberate about how I spend my time and grateful for every moment of every day because I’m not promised the next.” 

Ned Luberecki, one of the band members who has played with Becky the longest, said other factors compounded the stress during COVID. Two members of the band left, and while both left under good terms and their departure was unrelated to the pandemic, he notes, “It was bad timing, losing two members with everything else going on—while the rest of the world was shutting down. That added a lot of stress, especially with a new album (Distance and Time) being released. All of that would be a lot for anybody.”

By the time she debuted on the Grand Ole Opry in September 2021, she felt “for the most part back to normal.” With her doctor’s help, she had found the right medication, and the chance to play the iconic stage brought positive validation as well. “I floated through that night,” said Buller, noting that the performance was filmed for Circle All Access TV.  “I’m so grateful they did, of course, but in that video, I say, ‘I just went through so much to be here’ and I’m in tears thinking about this path that I had been on coming out of this valley. Now folks know what I meant by that,” she said.

Buller said that as soon as she started feeling better in the fall of 2021, she wanted to help others. People around her encouraged her to be sure she was at an even keel first. “I want them to know that they’re not the only one, and if they need help, I want to encourage them to reach out,” she said. She also knows the pressure from naysayers. 

“A lot of people say, ‘It’s all in your head; you’re just making it up’ or ‘It’s a spiritual problem; you don’t have enough faith.’ But I have experienced clinical depression. Something popped in my brain. I remember exactly when and where it happened—when I just broke. It was a physical thing, but the injury was intangible. It’s not like a broken leg, but if you have heart problems, you get heart surgery. If something pops in your mind, you go see a psychiatrist, right? I’m here to say it’s a real thing. There is no shame in going and getting help or medication.”

Counseling, she said, also helped to work out “some of the knots in (her) thinking.” “Woman,” the second single from the album, was influenced by her preference for being in the background. She said, “I’m more comfortable writing a song for somebody else. I’m more comfortable being a side person in the band instead of the front person.” She wrote “Woman” on a Gold Tone cello banjo. “The color of that low banjo was so much fun. It made me want to write, so that led me to the song ‘Woman,’” she said. Building on an idea from the Wizard of Oz: “Don’t mind the man behind the curtain!” she sings, “Don’t mind the woman behind the words.”

When Buller was commissioned by FreshGrass for a through-composed performance piece for debut at their May 2023 festival in Bentonville, Arkansas, she chose to write a song cycle. Noting that she considers herself “more of a songwriter than a tunesmith,” she had to choose a theme for the project. 

Considering her life as “a touring mama,” she said, led her back to the song “Jubilee,” that had been lying fallow for a couple of years. O’Donovan had expressed an interest in recording the song, but Buller reached back out to her to discuss using the song as a seed for the cycle. O’Donovan not only agreed, but also sang harmony, the only guest on the album.

“I’m getting chill bumps talking about it,” said Buller. “She has such a beautiful, ethereal voice. Aoife is our only guest; otherwise, it’s my band playing with me and singing.” 

To get a sense of what a song cycle was, Buller listened to others, including Blue Heron Suites, which Sarah Jarosz wrote for an earlier FreshGrass commission, as well as Paul Simon’s 2023 Seven Psalms. While Simon’s recording is one 33-minute piece that goes through all the different songs, Buller chose to split Jubilee into different tracks for radio play. She notes that a song cycle is meant to be listened to in sequence in its entirety because it tells a story and paints a picture.

The album has some short instrumental pieces that echo parts of the melody of “Jubilee,” for which O’Donovan is also listed as co-writer. Buller says she wrote the rest of the song cycle on her own, but “it wouldn’t have come to life without my band, who helped me arrange it. I had fun getting together with them. I love working with Ned, Jacob, Daniel and Wes. I’m surrounded by fun, positive, talented people. I brought some initial ideas to the sessions as we were working on the tunes, and they had so many great ideas.”

Luberecki, who plays banjo for the band, said he has always been a fan of everything Becky does—“her singing, her playing, and especially her songwriting,” but of all her great songs, he calls this project “the most personal. . . the most soul searching.” He adds, “It could be a motion picture; it’s meant to be read as chapters in order, and if you follow that storyline, it’s quite touching.”

Luberecki said that as Buller explained the concept of the song cycle, the band began considering how best to present the songs. “She would show us the framework of the songs and have some ideas for arrangement, but she also opened the floor to everyone to say, ‘How can we do this? This is what I’m trying to convey. How can we make this point musically as well as lyrically?’” 

Describing the process of composing both the music and the lyrics, Buller noted, “Most of the time, I will get a phrase and then soon after that, I’ll kind of taste the rhythm of that phrase. Then I’ll put that to music, and it just crochets out from there.”

The album that resulted has the feel of a unified whole. The brief and tender “Prelude” that opens the cycle incorporates elements of the melody of “Jubilee,” before shifting to “Kismet,” a toe-tapping tune reminiscent of a state fair or barn dance. The fiddle opens the melody, alternating with banjo and guitar, before ending on a gentler note that leads to “Woman.” 

In that song, Buller refers to her songwriting as a process of “catch and release,” giving a metaphorical nod to “those who made the choice / to take them all in / and give these songs a voice.” Buller’s clear vocals carry the song with guitarist Jacob Groopman providing harmony on the chorus, adding a haunting echo to her melody in the song’s close.

Another brief interlude leads into “Jubilee,” the central piece of the cycle, a tender but hopeful allusion to the old Hebrew practice every fifty years of releasing debts, freeing bondsmen, and letting fields lie fallow—semi-centennial do-over. She sings:

Wish my mind would set me free

I need a year of jubilee

Bass player Daniel Hardin said the band members particularly enjoyed recording “Alone.”  He said, “It’s got the breakdown where everybody’s going nuts for a little bit, and if you listen closely about three-fourths of the way through the banjo solo, Ned—the Van Halen of banjo players—is just pounding it. Everyone behind him sensed that what he was doing was going to be a swell, a dynamic push, and everybody was there all together. It was freaking awesome.”

The lyrics of “Alone” weave in allusions to the Old Testament king Nebuchadnezzar, at his low point living in the wild and eating grass, to Judas Iscariot’s burial in a potter’s field, as well as incorporating lines from Hamlet, the Shakespearean poster child for depression, as she sings of “No rest in my waking, ‘to sleep, perchance to dream.’”

The brief instrumental “Descent” leads to the final single track, “Whale,” which draws images from the story of Jonah’s rescue after his descent into “that hell all those fathoms below.” In the lyrics, Buller describes her own resurrection and redemption as she sings, “I surrendered my attention / To that all-consuming Love.”

The Becky Buller Band recorded the album live in a day and a half at Studio Nine at the Porches, part of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) complex in North Adams, Massachusetts, where the fall FreshGrass Festival is held. Dave Sinko, who engineered the project, had worked in the Studio 9 space before.

“It’s a beautiful room,” Buller said, “that looks like an all-glass turtle shell.” The recording experience was new for the band, arranged so they were baffled but able to see other. “It was live, which means we had no net, so if someone screwed up and face-planted, we had to go back and start the track over,” she said. Although the band had been together in their current configuration with Jacob Groopman on guitar and Wes Lee on mandolin, this was the first album they had recorded together. 

They finished all but the harmony tracks, which they added when they were back home. Stephen Mougin produced and mixed the album, which was mastered by David Glasser. O’Donovan sent her harmony tracks from her studio in Florida.

Hardin called Mougin “the mastermind of all the vocal arrangements. He definitely makes you stretch your boundaries on what you think you can do, and he gets the best out of you, especially in a studio situation.”

Another special aspect of the album is the artwork created for the project by Nicholas Tankersley who runs the Lost Appalachia Trading Company in Fayetteville, West Virginia, and creates nature-inspired art.  When he agreed to work on the images for the album cover and the singles, Buller made suggestions. “He loves to draw critters,” she said, “so for ‘Whale,’ Nicholas created a happy, contented looking whale on the top of a bird bath with a bird sitting on top of the whale spout.” They considered a hedgehog but decided it was not the right vibe, “so he suggested a snake and I agreed that might be better—a snake in the garden—but a nice, friendly-looking snake.”

Considering the power of music for communicating her message, Buller observed, “Music is such a mystery. Where does it come from? I think it comes from God, of course, but I found this interesting: when we rehearsed on Ned’s back porch, we would be playing the song, and the birds would sing along with us. Then when we stopped, they’d stop. It was like they were jamming with us. I never noticed that before, but it just struck me. I thought, ‘Wow, God!’ That is so cool that what we’re doing speaks to them, that music transcends human communication.”

On the liner notes of Jubilee, Buller lists many of the resources she has discovered along the way and shares her message of encouragement as she uses the power of her music and her story to remind others, “You are not alone.”